Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 74

Episode Date: March 11, 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.

The Mantoar Caves I say the Lord works in mysterious ways A brand new immersive fiction podcast Well, he ain't got nothing on the devil Starring Westworlds Jonathan Tucker and Eddie Cthege from Twilight Every minute I remain in Mantoar County The thick of the fog gets Tune in to uncover what happened when three boys entered a Tennessee cave

But only one returned This is the exact spot where we found the potty's jewelry The Mantoar Caves M-A-N-T-A-W-A-U-K Listen to the Mantoar Caves now on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts I am Dr. Romany and I am back with season two of my podcast Navigating Narcissism

This season we dive deeper into highlighting red flags And spotting a narcissist before they spot you Each week you'll hear stories from survivors who have navigated through Toxic relationships, gaslighting, love bombing and their process of healing Listen to Navigating Narcissism on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts Or wherever you get your podcasts MySpace was the first major social media company They made the internet feel like a nightclub

And it was the first major social media company to collapse My name is Joanne McNeil On my new podcast, Main Accounts, the story of MySpace I'm revisiting the early days of social media Through the people who lived it Listen to Main Accounts, the story of MySpace On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts Or wherever you find your favorite shows

Hey everybody, Robert Evans here And I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode So every episode of the week that just happened Is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package For you to listen to in a long stretch if you want If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week There's going to be nothing new here for you But you can make your own decisions

Garrison started talking about crimes And so I was like, okay, I'm going to hold off I'm pressing the record I didn't mention crime at all Actually, that was James That's true, that's true James said the word crimes James is the one that brought up doing crimes

I would never talk about doing crimes Oh, welcome to Make It Happen Here Where we never talk about anything illegal With us today is myself, Garrison James is Stout and Mia Wong That's right, we are talking about crimes today actually But we're not doing any crimes crucially Because we never would

Yeah, like for example Actually, I don't know if it's technically illegal To talk about your nullification on air I don't think they can stop you from saying the words I think you don't have the rights to do it But you have the ability I think is a way a lawyer explained it to me But they also said I'm not your lawyer before that

So take that with a great assault Yeah, you probably shouldn't be describing How to do jury notification Or googling it if that's in your future Stay tuned for our upcoming episode How to nullify yourself from your jury Yeah, yeah How to nullify your jury

That will be our final episode So now we're not talking about jury duty today We are talking about crime The people doing the crime in this episode Shockingly are the cops So I want to start on October 28, 2016 Some of you can probably cast your mind back then The last week of the pre-Trump era

Yeah Actually, yeah So inside the captain's office At the sheriff's station in Rancho San Diego One of the most expensive zip codes in the country Captain Marco Garmo was making a deal Garmo, along with Giovanni Tillotta Who's a licensed San Diego gun dealer

Sold a Glock handgun An AR-15 style rifle And a Smith & Wesson handgun To a local defense attorney Because Bajaj Inside Garmo's office Garmo coordinated backdated paperwork To avoid the 10-day waiting period

Required by California law for handgun purchases And supplied Bajaj With misappropriated San Diego Sheriff Department Issued ammunition Oh, fun! Yeah, good times Yeah, so he's really thriving In his side hustle here, Marco Garmo

I've used the word misappropriated Because that's what the DOJ used I'm guessing the more vernacular term would be stolen Here, I think he's... So, what do you say issued? Is this ammo that was supposed to be given To a cop or is this stuff they had in impound? No, I think it's supposed to be given to a cop

I think... Hell yeah I think he's good I think he's gone into the armory And just grabbed a few boxes of ammo and stole them Your cops have just turned into the Afghan army It's amazing Yeah, yeah, yeah, the ANA

They've got the... That guy who had the night vision on backwards or something That was the Taliban guy Interestingly, what they have in the compound Mia, it's another story that maybe we should do another day I also PRA'd that Like the weapons that are impounded Jesus Christ, they have some shit

Like they have like a full auto shotgun A bunch of NFA items And they keep them all for like lab testing in theory Like so they can be like, oh, well this person was shot What does that wound look like? Well, let's get our armory out from the fucking... And shoot some ballistics gel and see if that helps us And it's like that scene from 2008's The Dark Knight

Where Christian Bale is Batman Fires a ridiculously loud gun in a sealed bunker Absolutely destroying both his and Alfred's hearing For the entire rest of the movie That's why they make so many bad choices Fascinating, yeah I didn't know there was a character called Alfred in Batman Yeah

They really welched him on the names Because like Batman is a cool name The Joker, cool name Fucking Alfred Do you not know who Alfred Pennyworth is? No He's the one British character in Batman He is your culture

When people think of British people They think of Alfred J. Pennyworth No, my culture is not a costume, Garrison Well, I have bad news Yeah, they've been disgusted That this is the point of reference Not one of our many wonderful modern British role models Alfred's great

I don't know what you're talking about Okay, yeah, no Okay He is a working-class hero He was a- He was a- Wait Our butlers are working-class, right?

Oh, gosh Let's cut this discourse off very quickly I would say petty bourgeois, but- Yeah, it's kind of complicated Because you're like working directly for a billionaire And you're living in the billionaire's house And you're living a very upper-class life But you still are working

It's kind of complicated What is your relationship to the means of production, though? Oh, that's- wow Well, it's all service-set Like, I don't know I feel like we have to do a divide here between- Like, I think- I think the gender division of labor between maid and butler is very important

I love how we're debating How- If Alfred is based or not So you can find Garrison on Twitter at- I write, okay? All right, so we made it to paragraph two, everyone In February of 2019, federal agents executed a search warrant on the Rancho San Diego Sheriff's Station

Later that year, they arrested Captain Marco Garmo In 2021, Garmo pleaded guilty to trafficking over 100 guns which were deemed unsafe for civilians His sentence- I shouldn't say civilians because cops are also civilians, right? But non-cops His sentencing, the judge said, Garmo was almost becoming a mob boss of sorts That's cool

What you want to strive for as a Sheriff's Captain Garmo admitted to engaging in straw purchases which is buying guns with the intent of transferring them to someone else He also acknowledged tipping off an illegal marijuana dispensary that was about to be searched in order to give- I'm based, based, come on Nothing this guy did is inherently wrong It's the fact that he only did it to certain people

And so that was his cousin who earned the marijuana dispensary He was also engaged in illegal consulting with other dispensaries Which I don't fully understand Yeah, I'm guessing his consulting emerged to being like Hey, the cops are on their way tomorrow Maybe stop being a dispensary by the time they arrive Yeah, that seems like a very classic The cops take a cut kind of arrangement that they're calling consultancy

Yeah, I guess so Yeah, a lot of the things in this DOJ thing are like really fantastically phrased So Garmo and his co-defendant, Waiil Will Anton also helped paying clients skip the waiting list for a difficult to obtain concealed carry permit As part of the scheme, Anton took a legal cash payment to a county clerk who ensured favorable treatment for his clients

Garmo might have flown a little too close to the sun with this one but it's not actually that unusual for gun laws to have carveouts for rich people And often those carveouts don't involve cops stealing ammo but it's pretty easy if you're wealthy enough to work your way around firearms legislation which is kind of what I want to get into today So while Garmo did go to jail for gun trafficking and multiple other crimes he was doing

the sale of so-called off-roster firearms by law enforcement officers in California is relatively common and there's not much that's been done to prevent it since Garmo was arrested So to understand this I think you have to understand California's incredibly complicated firearms laws which probably requires an undergraduate degree but to give a brief summary California introduced its gun roster in 2001

and like many of our laws it has its roots in entrenching systemic inequalities In this case legislators were trying to ban something called a Saturday night special and do people know what that is? No It's a small, concealable, affordable handgun and it's like these guns that came out in the 80s and 90s

that were super small, very cheap, very simple very concealable and Are they also shit? Well that's the thing, right? So this is really fascinating So in practice these were at least culturally associated with black communities You see them in sometimes like

certainly like there was a stigmatic reference to like it's these guns that is causing violence and we're not going to fucking look at inequality at all right we're just going to ban the guns Are they shit is an interesting question because California introduces legislation which said that handguns have to be drop safe so that means you can drop them and they can't go off

that is generally a desirable feature in a handgun able to fire 600 rounds without more than six malfunctions and have a manual safety device later on they added another thing that would make the gun only fire when it had a magazine inserted and they put all these rules in place and had said manufacturers had to submit guns for testing

all the guns they were going after passed the testing so I guess they're not as shit as one has suspected which is kind of like that is the intent they are laboring under that misabrehension but it seems like these guns which are very cheap actually pass the testing just fine so if you look at the California roster so once those guns have passed that testing right

they go on a roster and that roster like it's done by skew so like by the individual code that's given to the gun and you could look up the California roster it's online still and like there are hundreds of cheap small handguns that are on it and so they they failed in that regard but they created this kind of bizarre system

where most manufacturers had to make a California compliant model if they wanted to sell in California right because they had to have a this magazine disconnect which means that the gun won't fire without the magazine in it which is not a usual thing for semi-automatic handguns to have like if you are outside of California and you have like a normal like a Glock for instance it doesn't have that but you would need one that did in California

and so that means that these guns are going to have a much much smaller economy of scale right they're going to be more expensive manufacturers also have to pay for the testing and submit three models so what it de facto means is that fewer guns are available in California but it doesn't really become a big issue until 2013 when the DOJ in California add a micro stamping requirement

but they added it earlier actually but in 2013 they certified it was possible for micro stamping to happen Sorry can I ask you something but so is the roster the list of guns you're allowed to buy? Yes Okay And if it doesn't appear on the roster

we're going to get into that you can actually buy it but you can't buy it new from a store so you can buy it used and there are two ways that these used handguns can enter the state right one of them is if you move to the state so let's say Garrison moves to LA right and they bring with them Horrifying

Yeah just to enjoy Just like a Vulcan minigun Yeah they bring with them an M1 Abrams tank Yeah it's our balloon shooting gun Yeah everyone on the west coast has to have one now and so it's actually different for rifles sadly but they bring with them pistols and those pistols are not on the California roster

they can keep them and they can sell them right to a California resident the other way that these guns can enter and be sold is cops are exempt from the roster right so yeah Oh boy Yeah yeah yeah and when I say cops

I am speaking in the broadest possible turns because a variety of peace officers are exempt to include employees of the California state horse racing board So I'm just like park rangers can do this right? I think it depends what you are within the park ranger within the park ranger and it seems to be there is actually a list

though great that's in the legislation but it seems to be largely like at the discretion of the gun shop like in practice they could get in trouble but like I've heard of like firefighters and EMTs being able to purchase off roster guns which is fucking not in the legislation like it is also kind of funny

but like in theory it would depend on like what unit you're in or they could contact your like park ranger office and be like hey this girl is trying to buy a gun like does she use this at work because the idea is that they would they would have the most up-to-date weapons

to carry at work right or that they could buy themselves even though they get issued guns like if you need a gun as a cop you get issued a gun right and so what it means in practice is that there's a thriving market in offer us to firearms but there's also massive price premium right

they often sell for two or three times their MSRP even though they're used and I did a little digging into this and I looked at one particular item which was a P365 a Sig P365 which is a fairly like a popular pistol right but after 2013

California doesn't didn't allow any new guns to be added to the roster unless they micro stamp their bullets micro stamping is a little feature where the firing pin of the gun stamps the casing not the bullet with a little tiny little tiny stamp

which is unique to the gun right or it stamps it with the serial number of the gun so in theory this would allow you to pick up the casings at a murder scene and be like huh well they were fired from this gun and this gun is registered to this person therefore we got someone to talk to right so just pick up the casings

yeah right yeah absolutely no ways around this although I mean admittedly admittedly that the one thing I've learned over the years is that people are really lazy when they're doing crimes and so so true so true you could be slightly less lazy and get caught so you have really less it's that is that is that is my biggest my biggest advice to the illegalists

literally think five minutes before yes yeah yeah yeah also uh don't tweet your crimes ever ever a Korean statement yeah yeah it's one of our mottoes here you could also just use a revolver I guess and that wouldn't eject the casings but um the that because there are no guns don't in 2013 right the DOJ says

you are not allowed to add a gun to the roster unless it micro stamps and we we've decided the micro stamp because possible no firearms manufacturer will make a gun that micro stamps because other states will require all guns to micro stamp once that technology is available so they just don't build it

so they just don't do it yeah and it is and it's very funny it's like car companies just being like fucking you know what if we put airbags in that bad boy they're gonna make us put airbags in all the cars you know this is the thing that I've run into a lot I think is really interesting which is like okay the specific combination of regulatory

state and corporations being required to do a thing gives you a bunch of really really weird like outcomes that are like not what you would expect when you're writing the legislation which makes them ineffective like I mean like the most famous one is like the clean air act actually worsened air quality for a huge amount of time because

they put in this exception for like existing coal facilities under the assumption that people would just like you know build new coal facilities and thus be like and thus like have better like create that cleaner technology and no one just no one ever did they just left these old coal facilities running or the other one like everyone always talks about those like those fucking like why why the giant SUVs keep getting bigger and the reason for that is actually

I mean it kind of is sort of fascist psychosis but like the actual reason for that is that Obama era pollution controls on cars right had these fuel emission standards but the larger your car is like the worst fuel emission standards are so they keep so okay in order to get around the fuel emission things they just keep making bigger cars make it bigger amazing yeah and this shit just like I don't know this is this is I think a pretty good argument against

like against a sort of regulatory state being able to contain like capitalism doing horrifying shit is like every single time someone tries to make an air pollution thing it just makes it worse yeah they just create perverse incentives to do something which is like just stupid and polluting as opposed to yeah or they just don't comply like I was with the microsoft thing they're just like no like yeah he simply will not yeah the specific interaction of like people who elevate them so who make it to the california legislature on one hand

and gun companies on the other hand just leads to this complete intransigence where like anytime a law is written it is like someone has found that n-run or a loophole the before it comes into practice do you know what won't illegally smuggle oh legally smuggle guns into california install them for two to three times a retail price mere is it all the firms that are uh doing child trafficking and that's right the washington state highway patrol we're back uh and we're talking about

cops selling guns for a lot of money in southern california so big uh marco gama wasn't the only cop who shares a life of crime as it turns out um shockingly enough uh this practice is pretty common so a gardener police officer in 2021 was also convicted of making 41 illegal off roster sales in a year and at least six la officers have been found to be engaged in legal firearms transfers according to a 2021 la times investigation so that that's eight in a single year if you're keeping track and it's pretty common to see people like posting about this like

like uh if you go on to like this california guns forum where people will be like where they sell guns right where they don't you don't actually sell the guns on the internet because that's illegal but people will post it and then say meet me at this gun dealer and we'll do the background check uh and you'll see people being like oh like i'm leo i have a friend who's leo and like happened to be selling this gun new in package i bought it to carry it on patrol but i decided i didn't like it you know like that's the the theoretical canard here right oh god okay the thing this reminds me of specifically is is a very very weird use case of like people would measure the gathering tournaments where you're you're not legally allowed to both

draw and split the prize money so you have to say this incredibly complicated series of sentences where you're like i want to draw and then new conversation can we split the prize money it's like i have to i have to like say this exact series of words in order to make it clear but i'm not doing exactly what i'm doing and breaking the law yeah this is how the law works right like it always ends up being some kind of like totemistic magic incantation that you can say and then the thing that they're trying to fucking stop obviously no longer applies to you you can do what you want like it's incredibly asinine and so uh in mid 2021 i tried to i wanted to get a sense right and when i was doing this of how many of these off roster guns there are in california

to get a sense of like exactly how much of a farce the attempt to create this roster has been so i've been going after this for a while but in the middle of 2021 there was an assembly bill passed called assembly bill 2699 if you're interested and the bill required the department of justice to send a letter to owners of off off roster weapons which california officially calls unsafe handguns to remind the people who are in the mother laws surrounding them and to whom they could transfer them right uh i first became aware of this letter because someone started to post it online uh and that kind of gave me an opening where that because i can't p r a the names of the people who own the guns right or even where they live because obviously

that's protective information and it probably should be and i don't think that i can even imagine it's even actually stored by the state but i can p r a the letters they sent out all right so p r a is a public records act request right it's what people might know as a foyer uh and so i did that and it took me more than a year and it cost me more than a hundred bucks but eventually i managed to get the doj to uh to send me the information which showed that at least at the time i got it which is the middle of 2021 4510 firearms have been obtained uh by the subsection of the law that allows exemptions for police officers uh there are some other exemptions for like antique and collectible firearms as well so it's not clear that all of those were cops

they also noted that it had sent 213804 notices to the owners of off roster weapons uh which yeah suggests that like if we think of uh that the roster became a serious issue in in 2013 right so that suggested about 10 000 uh 10 000 weapons a year since the roster began in 2001 have entered the state that are off roster which kind of kind of makes the point that it's it's a rather farcical attempt at gun control right but it still is that the the roster which i don't think it like you're fine right you can you can buy a very effective gun in in california look as we have seen look they they're very effective at killing people but it does kind of make it a joke that if you have enough money or a friend who's a cop then this doesn't apply to you right

then you've over 200 000 of these guns which is supposed to be like banned in circulation as long as you're wealthy enough to buy them uh i tried also to p r a if any of these guns have been involved in crime or murder and they wouldn't tell me that and what uh it's always worth pointing out that like the cops themselves are issued guns which are illegal for civilians to purchase right oh it's not possible for them to purchase them new i should say they that offer us to guns are issued to the cops right so by definition some of these guns have been used in the accidental shooting of bystanders uh shooting of officers by themselves and shooting of officers by other officers that have occurred in california since the roster began and so the sort of by definition

offer us to gun to kill some people and so this isn't actually the only way that being wealthy can get you around gun laws and i want to go a little further east for my next example then i want to go in fact to a little town called lake artha in new mexico then if you guys are you guys familiar with this part of the world not well not that specific i i i i lived in new mexico very very briefly when i was a small child but not there so so i've been using google street view that's my uh my dive it appears to be the back arsehole of nowhere um and in lake artha they have one cop who it turns out was a volunteer and was being paid a dollar a year uh uh yeah so this is this is where the problem starts this guy is called william norwood and uh i'll i'll issue

a spoiler here that william norwood is no longer a cop nor does the department exist uh and that's because norwood was running a scam that took advantage of something called liosa uh liosa is the law enforcement officers safety act uh and what the law enforcement officers safety act does is allow cops from any state in the union to conceal carry a gun in every state in the union so this was a big deal yeah i think you might be able to see what this is going this was a big deal before the supreme court brewin decision right the brewin decision was the one that uh significantly reduced the uh impediments in between you and getting a concealed carry weapons permit i didn't totally remove them and it it didn't make it any less expensive and california

seems to be going about trying to make it even more expensive uh which is bullshit like everyone should have the same rights regardless of how wealthy they are uh but if you were covered by liosa right if you're a law enforcement officer you could conceal carry anywhere um so this is very desirable for some people and one of those people is robert mercer do you guys remember robert mercer no i do not okay so mercer is a big time donald trump appreciator oh yeah he's that like super rich guy yeah the the bright bar guy the cambridge analytical guy yeah uh oh okay yeah so this guy is rolling in it um and he yeah he was he actually hosted like a like success party soon after 2016 election this this guy is definitely pivotal to the whole trump scene right like like

his bank rolling a bright bar of cambridge analytical he as it turns out is also a cop in this little new mexico town which is kind of weird right especially when you consider that 150 other people are also cops in this new mexico town it's one of these scams yeah so that's uh that's one cop for every 2.9 residents jesus yeah and turns out they're probably not doing much copying uh but they are doing at least a certain amount of volunteering it's actually unclear how much so um and the uh the lake arthur treasurer was and bloomberg did some pr a's around this and it turns out that mercer was what's called an honoree member of the police department but there there are no records to indicate they actually did any policing uh but nonetheless he took

advantage of liosa right and and thus carried in all 50 states so these jurisdictions there are several of them uh another famous person who's taken advantage of this is a friend of the podcast steven sigal oh yeah yeah yeah steven sigal who apparently has been a volunteer cop for a very long time and uh like actually was doing some copying according to a reality tv show he made called steven sigal lawman you know the thing about that show right is it's like it are you gonna come out and defend the show are you are you pro the show really here's what i think on this show right like obviously sigal's doing stuff that's really messed up but it's also unclear but how much what he was doing is then the average cop like like probably what he's

doing is worse than the average cop but i don't think it's like like i don't i don't think it's as bad as like like a chicago special operations unit wow i can't believe you just came out in defense of steven sigal i'm being a cop specifically he has work to do to reach like the true upper echelon of like i don't know shitty cops he like this is a man who gave his time freely to volunteer for joe opio this level of apologism coming from you right now is is simply shocking i i don't know how to deal with this this is a golema sagalogism sagalogism yeah that is that is what i was working my way towards when i couldn't finish it yeah thank you for delivering the cootie grass me yeah me are coming out with

the some cops a bastard to take scab uh okay so what what is what is garrison garrison's deceased they've died okay so these badge factories like the ones in lec ather and generally trade influence cash or connections for a badge and the right to carry a gun nationwide mercer and his son in law george wells have supported the town generously and so with the most kind of the best investigated example of this right because bloomberg went after him and bloomberg a publication not bloomberg the dude uh he went down there personally to sort this one out yeah he formed an alliance with apparently uh at one point this this police department did do a raid on a meth house and i would love to see like bloomberg forming alliance with the meth dealers of lec ather to fucking

take on uh mercer so um if if bloomberg can take on 9 11 single-handedly surely he can bust up whatever whatever operations going down in new mexico 150 steven cigars would you rather fight one bloomberg size steven cigars and and yeah and don't don't bother me also do not bother messaging me i know he wasn't the mayor during 9 11 that was the joke don't bother messaging me i already know thank you no no no son it's it doesn't say i write okay yeah garrison twitter again i write a case he also famously dropped statin island fill bloomberg you guys don't know about statin island fill not at all okay statin island fill is a groundhog this this will be in a bastard episode as well so it's a second mention of statin island fill for some people statin island

fill is a groundhog uh similar to pucks a 20 fill uh yeah but uh he lives in statin island and unfortunately fill yeah well would we say that that's a second second pretty pretty disgusting take from me uh anti statin island this is this is my this is my mea gets canceled episode going back in time and getting rid of the yankees things of this nature yeah yeah unfortunately bill de blasio dropped the groundhog on his head and it died and uh yeah bill really bill de blasio blames the groundhog so it's reduced popularity everyone who's been the mayor of new york is such a weird piece of shit of unhinged yeah yeah yeah it's true it yeah like fucking the current mayor just went on like tv to tay and talked about how he has this magic smudge

that this is so that he can ring it yes so that he can absorb despair and ring the despair out what the fuck i'm so sick the only thing i saw out in new york was it was the whole like there shouldn't be any separation of church estate that is so much funnier he's doing a chamois for sadness in new york yeah it's wild oh what a place what a what a town all right so if you're wondering how much it costs for mercer and his son-in-law to carry down his everywhere um they paid at least 93 000 uh to set up this uh thing called the southeast new mexico police reserve foundation uh which you know is doing the valuable work of supporting reserve cops in southeast new mexico um because they are the thin blue line between us and uh people not being able to

bike until carry permits in all 50 states i guess uh under its bylaws of these half the foundations net jews were required to be paid to police departments uh whose reservists were members of the foundation the time of its founding all of the members were lake arthur reservists just a good public benefit probably just money going around in circles he also paid for lake arthur officers to get swat training in vegas again there is only one full-time cop and he's a volunteer so uh some of the lads went to vegas i guess and this was a donation that was probably tax deductible um the way that this came out is when uh a quote unquote firearms expert from north carolina got drunk and shot his brother-in-law in the leg and people were like why were you

carrying bro look you're a cop and uh yeah from there things began to unwind a lot of the other clients for this place are people like bodyguards um they they were a clients cops volunteer officers i should say uh they're people who do close protection for wealthy folks right and and carry guns as part of that work and i'm guessing it's their employers who are making these significant donations to lake arthur that probably allowed these people to be reserve officers which allowed them to carry in all 50 states which in turn allowed them to protect these wealthy people right so it's another and like it's important to understand that like new york for instance uh declined before this is before the broon decision a concealed carry permit

applicant from like an fbi informant who had taken down a biker gang they were like no you don't need to carry a gun like it was almost impossible for people even if they were like helping the cops to get concealed carry permits in in some parts united states and like in california was very hard lots of places before broon like i think was it nancy pelosi had a concealed carry permit or feinstein or someone this is the whole thing okay so i this was this was feinstein that one of the other scams for this is uh you can get deputized as a federal marshal there's like a bunch like like feinstein's rumored who have done there's like a bunch of like every like a bunch of sort of like california like congress people have done this that like they get they get deputized

as marshals and so they can do this shit yeah incredible stuff yeah so i guess what i want to come back to is like all of these laws right all of these gun control laws and are circumventable if you have enough money right so if you want a nice brand new gun that doesn't micristamp it doesn't have the uh it doesn't have the magazine disconnect and and like modern the modern carry guns especially are a lot nicer than they were in 2013 right they're smaller they have a higher capacity um you can put a little red dot site on them if you want to and if you want one of those things you can have it in california as long as you're rich and if you're if you're not then you can't and the same applies with this 50 state carry right if you want to carry a gun all around the

country and even now with broon and states are not required to recognize each other's concealed carry permits right so i have a concealed carry permit in california it's not recognized by any other states because california doesn't recognize any other states carry permits so i can apply for one in arizona that cost me more money and but if you want to carry in all 50 states you can just make this donation to the cops right and you can almost all of these things right these these aren't the only examples rick mea cited the uh the federal marshal thing another one is the nfa right the national firearms act yeah act um which like essentially it's not illegal to have a suppressor it's not illegal to have a short barreled rifle uh it's not illegal to have a machine gun actually

you just have to spend a shit ton of money to get one which are mercer has a collection of machine guns i guess so all of these things yeah it's great it's fine it's it's great that we live in a country with with two tiers of rights for people those are those those machine guns are totally going to be used for normal completely normal things like armory in 20 years yeah yeah a totally normal guy who will use them for normal stuff and just i'm sure like select make holes in paper with his friends and it's not problematic at all that like to be as rich as this guy is you have to be a problematic dude and maybe those are the people who shouldn't be having guns yeah but instead it's uh it's it's going to be poor people who you can't be having guns and i think

regardless of what you think it's perfectly reasonable to think that like there should be fewer guns in this country um it's it's perfectly reasonable to believe that and i think like it's perfectly reasonable to think what the fuck should we do about the fact that kids get shot in schools that that's not unreasonable starts at all but uh if the way around it is saying well only rich people get to shoot people then that that's not really a solution like it's just kind of the appearance of one and i don't think any of us certainly if we were on the left should really support that and yeah that's where we are in california which is great yay so that's about all we've got on this if people are interested in seeing more about uh either the mercer case or

the public records i have we'll probably we'll put them all up on our sources page you can find our sources page uh on the it could happen here website and we put all our sources up there for all our episodes so yeah go check that out uh anything else to finish off with guys the cops having guns bad cops being cops bad cops yeah oh well what about semen cigar then may this is a dramatic change of form from your earlier start i only ever i only ever argued that he was slightly more violent than than a normal cop that was the extent of my argument he is only slightly more violent than a regular cop she is flip-flopping on the some some cops about about its issue again you can send me your opinions on the police uh she's on twitter at i write okay

this case has all the markings of a ritualistic a cult murder the manawar caves well i say the lord works in mysterious ways a brand new immersive fiction podcast well he ain't got nothing on the devil part psychological thriller part supernatural horror the truth sometimes it's revealed in the intersection of facts sometimes it's hidden to the lore starring westworld's jonathan tucker and eddie kathage from twilight i wouldn't go digging around stirring up trouble if i was you tune in to uncover what happened when three boys entered a tenancy cave but only one returned this is the exact spot where we found the body's jewelry the manawar caves man ta w a u k a production of ire radio blumhouse television and psychopia pictures every minute i remain in manawar county

the thick of the fog gets listen to the manawar caves now on the i heart radio app ample podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts what's up y'all this is questlove and you know at qls i get to hang out with my friends sugar steve laia fontiglowe umpay bill and we you know at questlove supreme like the nerd out and do deep dives with musicians and actors and politicians and journalists we give you the stories behind all your favorite artists and creatives that you have never heard i'm talking about stories behind their life journeys and their works of art i love qls because of the qls team supreme they're like a second family to me your fan is deep diving into music everything all manacking

your musical history and learning things about hip hop artists and things you never thought then you're a lot like me but you're also a fan of questlove supreme one of the things i love the most about this show is that we get to learn from the masters i look at being on this show as my graduate program in music listen to questlove supreme on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast supreme what would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the united states told you hey let's start a coup back in the 1930s a marine named smeadly butler was all that stood between the us and fascism i'm ben boland and i'm alex french in our newest show we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous

deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century we've tracked down exclusive historical records we've interviewed the world's foremost experts we're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books i'm smeadly butler and i got a lot to say for one my personal history is raw inspiring and mind blowing and for another do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads from my heart podcast and school of humans this is let's start a coup listen to let's start a coup on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows hello and welcome to it crap in here once again who's sitting by myself aren't true as we talk about whatever today we have two special guests

sprouting sherry an from the black flower collective and they had to talk to us about the dichotomy between urban and rural political organizing i mean as we can all recognize in this day and age being politically active is incredibly important there are a lot of vulnerabilities that we are all facing under this intersection of systems and we are looking for ways to get out but it could be difficult to navigate especially when you don't know exactly where to begin that's part of the focus of my channel and it's also something that these folks are here to talk to us about but before we delve too deeply into the meat of that discussion let's begin with a quick introduction you know who is black flower collective how did you all begin and

what are some of your goals as a group hey this is sprout and we got started organizing with the black flower collective through previous organizing projects here in Aberdeen Washington such as the Chehalis River Mutual Aid Network that collective got started after the Black Lives Matter Rebellion in so-called Seattle and was started by feeding the movement out there in Capitol Hill and Chazz and then brought that organizing effort back to the community to start food not bombs here in town through those meetings and relationships that we formed we got to know the local homeless in town and started getting to know their needs as we tried to fill them with our mutual aid efforts and out of those conversations over meals we learned that one of the biggest

needs was some sort of home base where people like us trying to support the community could come together and cook meals together and serve them in a collective area yeah having a safe place to be able to just cook food and plan other types of organizations or collectives is imperative because we face a lot of backlash from the reactionary politics around our town being in the kind of the heart of Trumpland and the type of people that show up in the big city protest to mow people down with their trucks and whatnot right and how has that affected your outreach efforts what do you say thankfully not too harshly but we've definitely had some scary situations there was one time at the homeless camp we were told about by the campers there

where somebody had tried to like run down a tent that somebody was sleeping and they may just like jump out that like me you know before they got hit and they jumped out of the truck and was like waving of a like a police baton or some sort of like a stick or something around threatening people somebody got like a bigger stick which prompted them to get in their car and start waving a pull out a pistol and start waving that around before they end up driving off yeah sometimes when we get new volunteers there can be a bit of hesitance from people to like you know take food or supplies because there's a bit of a relationship that needs forming there of trust because of those actions of right wing actors in town so it's kind of like you know what

is why you're out here feeding so there's a bit of hesitance there but once they realize they're with our group we've established enough of a reputation that that you know that name drop is usually enough to to reestablish that trust right but it's good that you'll have some other established yourselves you know locally and built up a reputation would you say that that has been one of your major goals as a group to build that trust in in the community and where you'll see see that trust go in from where it is now I've always seen that personally as our only asset we don't have a lot of money obviously we're not funded by anyone so all we really have is our reputation in the in the community and in the wider community our reputation has led to some

of that backlash that Cherianne was talking about but within the actual unhoused community you know we have a reputation of doing whatever we can to help people and always showing up consistently and you know always being willing to go the extra mile when someone needs something in a crisis that's fantastic that's fantastic so having had some experience with um like you mentioned working in the various movements that were happening in 2020 what would you say uh so the major differences that you've noticed between organizing in major cities and in urban areas compared to rural physical organizing um well I'd say the majority of the issues we've noticed uh depend on the material conditions of the town that we're in being a small and rural area there's a lot more

poverty here and so those material conditions lead to a lot of differences between urban and rural areas I found before coming to the area I was involved with Occupy Oakland back in the day so I had a bit more of a running with the larger city what larger city's way of doing things uh what about you Cherianne well I've grown up here in this town my whole life and have a really left outside of it all too much um this type of organizing was always something I heard about more so through rumors than anything else versus actually seeing people on the ground and doing things once we got our Food Not Bombs chapter started during 2020 it opened kind of just a new world for not just myself but a lot of people around here right so one major difference that

we've noticed that is the dichotomy of electoral politics in the town uh most of the opposition that we've faced has not been from the city but from grassroots initiatives uh and so some of those people over the course of the last two years have taken positions on city council but the police that they control are still demonstrate an unwillingness to attack their own community in the way that far-right politicians would want them to yeah so take like uh the police that show up and like big city protests or whatnot they'll bring in all police stations from all surrounding areas people who aren't familiar with the community who you know it's just a job to them which helps sever that their

connection to that that area while here it's the same people dealing with the same people every day and in the minds of police it does create like a sense of community in their mind and that makes them a little more reluctant to use the type of violent force that we see in in the bigger cities and it's not to say that force isn't present and doesn't happen here but it definitely doesn't happen on the frequency if I could run back a second by the way this is Mia I'm also on this episode um yeah if I could if I could walk back a second ask for something when you say that most of the resistance uh to what you've been doing is from grassroots movements is that like like are you

talking about like sort of grassroots like right wing political movements are you talking about sort of NGOs opposing you or no like uh we have a local grassroots right wing initiative in town that's been the main brunt of our uh our little groups opposition and they have like I said they have run and won a few city council seats since then but it started as a grassroots you know clean up the trash sort of campaign yeah yeah you could still find their page on facebook it's a save our Aberdeen um oh god we save our Aberdeen please soap is and they got like little soap bubbles and whatnot and they're here to clean up the city streets and oh boy I I don't think they're talking about the trash not trash as we would define it yeah so sort of right so this this is a place

where sort of like right wing like anti-homeless stuff has been has been their sort of main way to build organization yeah it's a it's a huge I mean I don't really even know sherry and like what other talking points do they have other than the homeless everything centers around the homeless even stuff that has to do with like businesses in town and local economics uh that gets blamed on the homeless you know everything gets blamed on the homeless so it really all goes back to that yeah they are the scapegoat for every problem that the city council faces um or not just the city council but businesses you run a shitty business it it's it's the homeless's fault I don't have customers so it has nothing to do with the fact that I

haven't sold anything in years and this is just a hobby shop for me because I got a fat inheritance but yeah I'm talking about you all the glitters oh we call the names no so you speak you spoke about how this um this grassers right wing movement has picked up some steam and want some seats in the city council um but one thing I recognize about grassers movement is that they tend to have to sort of balance their goals with the uh trust they need to build with the broader public with the uh perception that the public has of them and how they're trying to shape that perception so how would you say that uh the public of Aberdeen views is the right-wing initiatives the soap movement as uh you're referencing and how do you think that

the of tentative view black flour collective well I think a lot of people um feel scared to voice their opinions if they're on the left in town but we do get a lot of support for the mutual aid that we do the uh the base of the other the right wing movement in town is pretty strong and you know I don't see them drawing in a whole lot of new people because of their extreme nature and their tendency towards conspiracies but they do have quite a substantial base that whatever they say they're gonna they're gonna agree with and they're gonna go along with take for example like here about a year or two ago um I think it was november of 2021 or august there was a big uh anti-trans rally outside of a star wars shop

here in town that uh yeah they had to bring in a bunch of proud boys from you know out of town and like fill their numbers from outside you know uh with outside uh help and whatnot while chanting about how antifa was coming from seattle to burn the shop down and kill the shop owner and all this and all this stuff they had the guy during the whole protest they gave him like a bulletproof vest that he's like walking around did they brought it brought matt wash the fucking town on it it was a mess wow yeah it's um really a classic example of pot meat cattle with a lot of their rhetoric in my experience I think the majority of the public though does care about that the issues that the homeless are facing and the fallout issues from that uh but they kind of

it's kind of this tug back and forth between us telling them what's really going on on the streets and the stories of people down at camp and this other more right-wing tendency to just blame things on the homeless and take the simple route of saying if we just get rid of these homeless people then our problems will be solved and local efforts to gentrify the area with the influx of terry emmer a right-wing capitalist who's bought up like 60 properties in town recently and as well as uh just the local media landscape in town has a right-wing tinge to it I mean where we're at everything has a right-wing tinge to it but so it's hard because there's not a lot of voices even though there is a lot of sentiment of caring about the homeless there's not a lot of

voices that are actually telling the truth of what's going on on the streets and so when you get all the lies and bullshit coming from the police and city hall and just being reported verbatim by the papers in town it leads to a lot of people forming conclusions based on faulty facts and so they might think oh the homeless did this the homeless did that and we go into the comment sections every time and push back and say you know actually this is what happened and it's actually a lot of times that we get people you know opening their eyes saying oh I didn't know that you know it's not always just the standard dig your heels in sort of thing that you see on social media because it is a sort of smaller town right everyone kind of knows everybody

yeah there's a bit more accountability in that sense if you're going to spout off online it's you know it's likely you have to face the police and then the grocery line after and stuff not only that but it makes like for organizing in general anonymity a lot different of a of a tactic in how you in how you use it because like say in the big city you're constantly surrounded by security cameras everywhere you go you're constantly being monitored watched or whatnot but it's a lot easier just disappear in the crowd just another face the you know they're like you can go out spray paint ditch not a big deal in place like here in Aberdeen for example they're like I could mask up and do everything you know I can but if I get known in any kind of

sense of the way if I go out and you know spray paint a wall it's like oh there goes sherry and you know spray painted walls again yeah and once once you are a docster identified it's really hard to undo that and just sort of reanonymize yourself so we've taken an anonymity in our our security in that aspect very seriously from the get go a couple people in our organization who didn't have face you know public harassment and stalking so yeah it is a big deal so you've managed to maintain a level of anonymity uh despite your outreach efforts in a small town yes well to a large degree to a large degree okay there's different people in our group uh you know it's not like our group has rules about it so some people use their real names some people

don't but those who are concerned about it have been able to although it's it's difficult and you know once that once that identification comes you know it's pretty much uh games up right it also kind of has affected our recruitment in the sense that uh people on the outside looking in may see what we're doing as more dangerous than it actually is because of those security concerns and they might be scared of retaliation and not want to participate because of that so we have taken to kind of reducing the fire in our online social medias for some of that mutual aid stuff so that we don't get as much of the backlash on those accounts and we found that it's helpful to have uh ancillary groups that can go and do more autonomous stuff if we need stuff done that

it or said that is uh we're gonna create more backlash right so I have sort of different layers of the organization I remember the Afrofuturist abolitionist the Americas uh one of the statements they had put out they were um they had used it to move like mycorrhizae in the sense of having sort of different levels of network uh in place you have like the above ground level of you know more visible uh public facing action whereas you have that sort of underground fungal network of anonymous and probably more risky action taking place yeah because we have to sort of maintain a certain level of goodwill in town for the mutual it for certain sides of our organizing like the police for example they're always down at camp and so having a amicable

relationship with them is advantageous in certain scenarios so yeah splitting apart roles I would say you know one role being the the public facing side of things and one role being the more private autonomous group and how would you say you're talking about your some semi amicable relationship with the police how has that uh been sort of sort of set up you know uh what's the basis of that well as we were mentioning the uh the the structure of policing is a little bit different since the police in an area small like this is going to hire locally as opposed to in large metropolis areas you generally see police departments in big cities hiring from the suburbs surrounding the area which leads to sort of like a foreign occupation feel

that's definitely the feeling that I got when I was doing stuff in Oakland was that the Oakland police department was not made up of anyone who lived in Oakland you know uh they were coming from the surrounding suburbs that were much more affluent and removed from the problems of Oakland and they were just there to occupy by force and so we get more like the Andy Griffith feel out here where it's like uh the cops are you know the good guys who's trying who's helping grandma across the road and you know will uh you know carry your groceries up the stairs for you and that kind of stuff at least that's more the at least that's more the public perception anyway right they also they also have a small tank and conduct all sorts of drug rates and stuff like

right there's there's that constant dichotomy like yeah we're helping you you know we're walking you down the road and carrying your groceries in your house for you within also but because of the small town aspects of it though um being able to like play on their um wanting you know for the ones who do want to help but are misguided because they're cops a cab um but for the ones who are trying to help who aren't like specifically going out trying to fuck over homeless people besides their jobs you know ones who occasionally like go out and buy stuff of their own money or whatever to like help so whatever they'll kind of like rely on us to deal with that side of the population so they don't have to waste their time dealing with the homeless is how and which allows us to deal

with more of the problems in the homeless community in-house versus having to get the police involved right because you know the police aren't really trained uh or capable of resolving those kind of issues for example like my father for for example um he was in and out of prison his whole life and after I was born and he got out of prison that last time um he had a moment where he's gonna get ready to have a relapse right he went to his dealer's house you know he's there he's he bought his eight ball he's sitting there you know getting ready to do his thing and there's a knock at the door and they open it up and it's police they're they got a warrant for the dealer they're raiding the house and this one cop you know pulls my dad aside because he knows if the other cop

sees him he's gonna send him straight to prison and he's like you know hey you know what are you doing here man and whatever possessed my dad to do it he's like I just want to go home he put the eight ball in that dude's hand and cops kind of looked at him was like just just get the fuck out of here just go because he knew if the other cop you know saw him he would have sent him to prison right then um and like and again a a cab but like this is you know the best story you're ever gonna hear it's the best story if a cop is a cop not being a cop pretty much yeah exactly yeah every time but you definitely get more of that here though that they're advantage to take over yeah and we have a certain uh people in our group that can liaise on better than others with the police and

so we've used that to our advantage as well uh they've largely ignored I want to say the police not the city the city wants to stop us uh it's like their undying wish apparently but the police have largely ignored or shown uh tacit support for our efforts because they're members of the community and they at least uh the older crop of officers have been working these streets and seeing the same homeless individuals for in some cases longer than I've been a lot so you know there are relationships there even if it's one mediated by that position of being a police officer um when you see someone struggling for that long you know it's it's hard not to be empathetic as a human and so we've been seeing a bit of a shift now that they are all those

officers are starting to retire and we're getting a new crop of younger more gung-ho police uh because who would who would want who would sign up to be a police officer in 2023 you know other than people who have something going on so we're seeing some very distinct politics for sure yeah but for a while there it was this you know that sort of old crop of police officers who had built relationships in the community and had that public image of being the helpful uh peace officer as it were which makes it hard to push back when you're when you're a group that's trying to advance you know abolitionist thinking and anti-cop sentiments when they are beating people with batons it's easy for your community to look at that and be like okay these guys are

clearly the enemy but when they're just you know helping grandma across the street it's a lot harder to make those arguments so that's been one aspect that has made things difficult for us and another dichotomy and the just the list of these in the mirror differences between the conditions around organizing in a small town rural area versus big urban cities such as say seattle yeah but despite all of their help helpful nature there they are enforcing local ordinances that criminalize the unhoused despite the ruling out of the ninth circuit court of martin v. Boise that says it's unconstitutional to do so so even with no alternative no alternative shelter available this year we have zero cold weather shelters in Aberdeen they're still out

there sweeping people and telling them hey you got to move along when the maps handed out by the city say specifically you can sleep here and you can camp here as long as you leave enough space for pedestrians to get by you can set up on the sidewalks and yet they move along every day yeah as we're talking about you know the different dichotomy is that you face between urban and rural political organizing I would imagine that population is certainly an issue the matter that you might have to face as you know an organization trying to make a change in a small space have you found it challenging to build your base and you know get connections and stuff going yeah for certain like as we said there's already the issues with the of

us having a more reactionary based politics in a lot of our population and that's scaring what allies that we do have here so it's definitely resulting in us having to do the best we can to network outside as much as possible yeah there's not a really wide base of radicals to pull from so we have to work with a bit wider ranging group of folks out here although it has always shocked me how many people are willing to get involved in radical organizing here in town you know I think the smaller group size has led to a need for more connection and more listening in our decision making processes which has been nice I think we've gotten really good at operating as a small tight make group which may be organizers in larger areas where groups are larger

have to deal with a little bit differently you know there's also the difference in terms of where we socialize in places like Aberdeen there's nothing to do in terms of social gatherings there's no center of social socialization in town the only thing that we did have was the mall which has been closed for a couple years now so there's not a lot to do in terms of activities and there's also just not a lot of space like physical space in which to gather as a community that's why we are currently serving our food not bomb meals under a bridge because the city has removed all covered areas in one of the most rainy areas in the country yeah like when I go to like Seattle for for example I could walk into any business any doorway just about any street pole and see

flyer after flyer after flyer for this event this concert this group's doing this this got this these classes are taking place etc they straight up have a law against putting anything on the poles in town versus let alone there actually being any events happening worth using the poles in the first place right right I would imagine that part of your aims as a collective would be to find ways to bring the community together through those sorts of social events in formal and formal for sure and that's definitely a big part of our goal with the black flower project is to create a sort of social center a place for the community to come for various reasons and you know experience whatever they might discover so it sounds like you'll have a good lay of the

land in terms of what is happening in the town and what sort of movements you want to be making in the next part of this episode you can join myself and Mia and Sherianne and Sprout as we discuss the actions that black flower collective plans on taking in their community and what sort of material conditions they've continued to have to navigate in this space until then I'm Andrew of the YouTube channel Andruism you can follow me on Twitter at underscore saint drew and support on patreon.com slash saint drew and you could also check out black flower collective and support their week yeah you can find us at linktree backslash black flower llc or black flower collective no blogs.org you can also find our content at at linktree backslash al 1312 where you can find

our podcast small talk now and a bunch of our other projects by cyber media. Thanks guys. This case has all the markings of a ritualistic occult murder. The Manawar Caves. Well I say the Lord works in mysterious ways. A brand new immersive fiction podcast. Well he ain't got nothing on the devil. Part psychological thriller. Part supernatural horror. The truth. Sometimes it's revealed in the intersection of facts. Sometimes it's hidden to the lore. Starring Westworld's Jonathan Tucker and Eddie Cthigge from Twilight. I wouldn't go digging around stirring up trouble if I was shooting. Tune in to uncover what happened when three boys entered a Tennessee cave but only one returned. This is the exact spot where we found the potty's jewelry. The Manawar Caves.

M-A-N-T-A-W-A-U-K. A production of I Heart Radio, Blumhouse Television and Psychopia Pictures. Every minute I remain in Manawar County the thicker the fall gets. Listen to the Manawar Caves now on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. What's up y'all this is Questlove and you know at QLS I get to hang out with my friends. Sugar Steve, Laia, Vontigolo, Unpaid Bill and we you know at Questlove Supreme like the nerd out and do deep dives with musicians and actors and politicians and journalists. We give you the stories behind all your favorite artists and creatives that you have never heard. I'm talking about stories behind their life journeys and their works of art. I love QLS because of the QLS Team Supreme.

They're like a second family to me. You're a fan of deep diving into music everything, all monacking your musical history and learning things about hip-hop artists and things you never thought then you're a lot like me but you're also a fan of Questlove Supreme. One of the things I love the most about this show is that we get to learn from the masters. I look at being on this show as my graduate program in music. Listen to Questlove Supreme on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you hey let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism.

I'm Ben Bullock and I'm Alex French. In our newest show we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind-blowing. And for another do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you find your

favorite shows. Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here. Joining me again for this second part of a two-parter are Sherianne and Sprout from the Black Flower Collective in Aberdeen, Washington as they've joined us to discuss the dichotomy between urban and rural political organizing. Last we spoke they gave us some background on exactly how the Black Flower Collective began and what sort of motivating factors they have been in their development as an organization as well as some of the dichotomy as a day of experience between urban and rural political organizing. Now we're going to take a moment to explore some of the material, some of the other material conditions that they have faced in their city or rather in their small town. Sherianne?

As we were talking about in the last episode there's a huge difference between the modes of socialization in big cities and then versus small towns like our own. You know, here we socialize more like in our houses. You meet friends at the homes of other friends' houses where in the bigger cities it's more so that you went to a club, you went to an event, concert, class, what have you. These are definitely things that have evolved and developed based on the just different material conditions. There's not as many classes around here in events and stuff like that because people just don't have the money to go to them and B, nobody has the money to really put them on or any of that startup capital. There's not enough money coming through

the town. That's why the far right are always trying to push this homeless narrative because they're trying to turn this town into like a tourist town or something which makes no goddamn sense to me. There's nothing in this town to come here for. The only reason you're coming to this town is because you're driving through here to go to the ocean. That's it. Like the highway dumps out here and then it's the old highways back to the rest of the ocean. Sounds pretty isolated. It can be pretty isolating out here, but it doesn't disconnect us from the overall struggle. Throughout our organizing, we've discovered that there's a lot of things that we can do for urban comrades through our mutual aid. For example, rural people can do anything

that is virtual, such as graphic design or web support. We can also offer up rural spaces for rest and recuperation for frontline activists in urban areas. While we might not be present in the heat of battle, we can make our isolation a strength as often people abused directly by the system require peace and solitude to recover from such trauma. We can also use our local networks to identify enemies and report this to the wider radical community. Out here and in the Pacific Northwest in general, there's a huge number of white supremacists and neo-nazi militias and organizations. They generally organize in small towns like Aberdeen. You see a lot of that here. People living in those towns bear the responsibility, we think, of reporting on the

activities of those groups to the wider community. A lot of times what you see is like the police coming in from the suburbs. The extremists often come in from the outlying rural areas, either in protest scenarios or usually in protest scenarios. We saw a couple instances in which our local right-wing neo-nazi group went out to Chaz and was filming videos out there and collecting information for their organizing back here. We can also be doing the same throughout the interim and collecting information on those groups for our comrades in urban areas. Right. That sounds like some really viable and Putin we used to build that sense of urban rural solidarity. Yeah, because there's definitely a lot of people out here that need

some notes taken on them. For example, during the height of the 2020 protests, there was a small solidarity protest that was essentially just five women holding a couple signs, which resulted in a line of reactionaries and their assault rifles, the harassing and threatening this very small group of women. It's just saying how Antifa was coming to the town and they were going to burn the town down and all this stuff. You got people like in Walla Walla, for example. You have Henry Contrera who utilizes what connections and what not that he has out there to call other white supremacists around the nation. It would essentially be like, hey, you know, move here, we'll get you a job, we'll get you a house, we'll get you all set up,

just come here and organize with us. And we kind of have our own version of that here in Aberdeen with Cash McCullum, the leader of the Pacific Northwest Wolfpack, our local neo-Nazi group. And people like that, I think it's not just them, it's a whole group that there are a whole social setting that follows them. And us being in rural communities are going to have the best opportunity to keep tabs on that kind of stuff and war in the wider community. Right. Yeah. That's absolutely vital. And one of my questions I had prepared in coming to meet with you, I was going to ask actually, how can we avoid the sort of idea that a lot of people having their heads or radicals having their heads, the sort of the distant commune trap, you know,

this idea that, you know, radicals, they move out to the country, they set up their happy little commune, it either falls apart, turn into a cult, or just like pulls away from the broader struggle. But it seems like in some ways, you'll have been able to utilize that distance as a sort of a strength. And you've spoken quite a bit about how rural communities, different ways they've been able to help urban communities in the broader struggle. But now I just want to turn the tables a bit and ask what sort of ways urban radicals can support the struggles within rural communities. Well, one way that we've seen a lot of solidarity from urban comrades has been in the topic of harm reduction. It's really hard to access services out here where we're at.

There's really only one player in town, and they are highly bureaucratic, and the line to get any sort of social service from them is a mile long. So fun notes. That cash McCollum person I talked about earlier is on the board for that social service as well, as long as as well as other people who are part of the SOAP group. Yeah. So we've seen a large show of solidarity from urban comrades sending us harm reduction supplies, such as Narcan, which has literally saved dozens of lives since we started that program. Healthcare in general is a is a tough issue for rural areas, transportation, distances, lack of providers, lack of services, all of those things compound to make it really difficult to get appropriate healthcare. And so anytime anyone has any actual

injury in town, they just send them to Seattle anyway. Our hospitals out here are really terrible. And so training I think would be a really vital need that we could benefit from a lot out here. If we could get these sort of medical collectives and the harm reduction collectives that exist in these more urban areas to conduct rural training workshops, I think that that would be a huge benefit to not only just Aberdeen, but any rural area that that was to take place in because that would allow those communities to start employing harm reduction and general first aid in their communities and prevent transportation out to these more metro areas. Yeah. The more we could do skill shares, the more we could do workshops, the more we could do

radical classes or anything under the idea of kind of unschooling that we could do for rural communities is imperative because the outside of high school, unless you're going to college for something specific, there's just not much for learning out here. What about the next generation? What about that site of struggle in education? Well, I believe Sprout could probably delve into this a bit more, but it definitely would say that our ideas for education was in the next generation as much as everything kind of goes under this. I forget the name of it, but it's this idea of the seven years generation in our planning and what would this look like for the next seven generations. Right. Seven generations, sustainability or seven generations, stewardship

is another team used. I think education is central to a community. It's really the same sort of, you're going to get the same answer with all of these healthcare addiction poverty. They're all interrelated out here. Because education is so crucial, we have focused the Black Flower Collective's initiatives on a lot of educational programs. We're trying to get this space set up so that we can start having some revolutionary coursework that we can offer there. We would really like to develop it into a real campus for learning, both for youth programs and for like continuing education, GED and college level kind of stuff. We think that the unschooling method is pretty cool, where people can kind of just pace their own learning and decide

what it is they want to learn. That's the method that we would go with. We think that that allows for a lot more diversity in the styles of learning that are employed. Through that, you can kind of learn new ways of learning, I guess, which helps add resilience to any community. I think that a lot of those skills offered at a place like that, like Sherry was saying, skill shares, I think a lot of that will need to come from urban communities, because we don't have a lot of that out here. When we get our space set up, we can host all manner of gatherings and start bridging that divide between the rural and the urban. I've been learning more about your space, did a bit of research on it prior to the episode

when we first started talking. Very inspiring stuff, very much in the vein of something that I plan on doing locally here in Trinidad and Tobago. Let's pretend that this is a revolutionary version of shock tack. Let's just pretend this is an anarchist shock tack. Give me your elevator pitch for this space. What is the plan there? Okay, our plan is twofold. The property would be divided into two separate sections. The public facing section would be dedicated to the social center we've been speaking of, and the rest of the property would be what we're calling an eco village where residents would live. The social center will be where we centralize community resources and the self-governed eco village would have immediate access to those shared resources.

The plan is to run the social center as a bit of a small business incubator for various community initiatives that we've been talking about, and as well for the residents of the eco village to start their own small personal businesses. Because in our discussions with people on the streets, everyone has an idea of how to make money, and it's just always some small barrier like paperwork or permits that gets in the way of them starting to have their own income and that sense of independence. So we want to be able to help with that. It would also obviously be a central hub for preparing and serving food, which has been the basis of all of our organizing so far is the coming together and sharing of meals. We want to have an internet

cafeteria and a community kitchen there. We would also hold space for the mutual aid network to store supplies and conduct its work both on and off site. We want to have enough space to have a meeting hall for potential unions and start pushing on the unionization locally with the IWDM All of these spaces would be rentable to the public. So the union hall, for example, would be a great venue for an event that someone wanted to throw or perhaps a wedding even. And so that could be one source of revenue for the social center, as well as the back end bookkeeping services that we're going to have as part of the business incubator and the permaculture design services that we're going to have as part of the eco village.

It really sounds like a lot of the different ideas that I've had converge on my channel for some time now. You know, this idea of a sort of a library economy, you know, this idea of the eco villages, the sort of permaculture spaces and moods and centers of community outreach and education. I'd be lying if I didn't say that we're a huge fan of your channel, actually. Appreciate that. Appreciate that. And honestly, in turn, this project is something that really inspires me as well. Yeah, I'd like to say that none of this is from us. We've taken so much inspiration from other projects to cobble together this plan that, yeah, it's been a real joy to just go through all of everyone else's different content and

kind of see like, oh, this could fit with that and this could fit with that and come up with a plan that we really think could start to solve some of these issues that we're seeing in town. Right. I think that's the real one of the few beauties of the internet these days, you know, the fact that it's still able to connect people and ideas from all over the place. Yeah, for sure. I wanted to ask, as we mentioned, these sort of eco villages and that whole idea, having spaces for housing and benefiting the people in that community, developing that sort of sense of interdependence, I wanted to, you know, you can't really talk about urban and rural and urban without bringing up the fact that urbanization, you know, seems to ever crawl into the rural

space, you know, like, there's always this sense of the encroachment of the city on the surrounding rural regions. What is your take on that? Yeah, it does seem to be a one-way street. I think the model that we're trying to push is one of degrowth, where you would see sort of a reversal of that trend of gentrification or urbanization, and you would see more of, like, a ruralizing of urban spaces to start having more green spaces, more growing of their own food, and more production of agricultural products right there in the urban centers. Right. You know, which is kind of what we want to do with the eco village is provide a bit of a model for how a community organizing, of how a community could organize itself around ecological

principles. Pre-figurative politics and action. Exactly. Another note that I guess I want to bring up before we start to come to the clues is, you know, again, we've been speaking a lot about the urban and the rural, but one element, except in a, you know, sort of a passing sense of our discussion of the police, one element that's kind of been lost in that, and that I know people might be asking about is, what about the suburbs? You know, like, do you see a space for organizing there? Where does that fit into that urban rural dichotomy? What sort of focuses do you think suburban organizations might want to tackle? Well, I think suburban comrades are probably going to have a bit of both worlds, as it were, because they're not in the downtown core of a city where

most protests or sites of struggle happen, but they're also not out in the boonies in a rural environment. So, you know, they might have police that are a bit more preoccupied with the actual community and actually from the community, and so they might need to take some lessons from the rural center or from the rural areas in that regard and try to diversify their group into multiple different roles, multiple different channels, so that they are having continuous backlash against a group that's just trying to feed the homeless. But at the same time, you know, they have a lot of resources that rural people don't have access to, and so they could be coming into rural areas and providing those same sort of trainings and workshops that urban comrades

could, and they could also be going into urban centers and learning and providing workshops and skill shares in those scenarios. I think they're kind of a, maybe play a bit of a buffer zone between the two. So, what does the future look like for Black Floor Collective? You know, what projects are you planning on tackling in the year now, a couple months from now, a few years down the line, and how can folks support? Well, right now, we are definitely focused on securing funding. The housing market is horrible. Property prices are going up, and when there is a good deal on something, it's gone usually within a day, within hours. So, we are definitely full focus on fund raising right now. We need to have the money on hand to be able to jump on a piece of property

when it comes up, because we need a good deal, and we need a good amount of land to make sure that we have the room to grow and build various projects in the future. Yeah. So, the projects that we're focusing on right now immediately is the permaculture design services. And so, if anyone wants to have us design their farm or garden or house or balcony, they can go to blackflowerpermiculture.noblogs.org and get started through that process there. Hopefully, once we get land, as you were saying, in the next five years, the permaculture design services can grow into a permaculture design course that we could actually start offering people to come and do like a two-week intensive study on the building techniques that we're using on site in the Eco Village and on how to

apply those back at home. Another project that we're currently working on is the bookkeeping. This is sort of the bedrock of the business admin side of things that we're going to be folding into the business incubator once we get that going. And we are looking into a couple different grants for that, but as Sherian said, right now, we're focused on the fundraising. So, we do have a couple different platforms that we're collecting donations from, and we are starting to plan a few benefit shows here locally in Aberdeen. So, if anyone is in a band and wants to roll through and play a show for us, that would be much appreciated. They can just get a hold of us through our website. So, our role in Blackflower is trying to spread awareness, help with this

fundraising, give them kind of free advertisement in order to help their growth. Meansprout and our podcast Molotov now are from the Sabo Media Collective, which, once things are going good with Blackflower, we're hoping to be housed by them to help grow our media efforts. But if another good way to help in supporting Blackflower is to go to our website at sabobotmedia.noblogs.org. And you can share our podcast, Molotov Now, check us out on social media on whatever social media you are on from Collectiva Mastodon to Facebook at Aberdeen Local 1312. We have articles that we write on the Harbor Rat Report and a whole host of other content for people to check out and share with donation links that all go to Blackflower's efforts. That's fantastic. And I would encourage

folks to check out what they're doing and all these different platforms. And well, that's been it for It Could Happen Here. It's been great to have you both from Blackflower Collective. I've been your host for today, Andrew, of the YouTube channel, Andrewism. You can follow youtube.com slash Andrewism on Twitter at underscore St. Drew and on patreon.com slash St. Drew. All power to all the people. Glad to have you. Thanks for having us. Thanks for being on. Thank you guys. It's a great recording with you. This case has all the markings of a ritualistic, occult murder. The Manowar Caves. Well, I say the Lord works in mysterious ways. A brand new immersive fiction podcast. Well, he ain't got

nothing on the devil. Part psychological thriller. Part supernatural horror. The truth. Sometimes it's revealed in the intersection of facts. Sometimes it's hidden to the Lord. Starring Westworld's Jonathan Tucker and Eddie Gathagy from Twilight. I wouldn't go digging around, stirring up trouble if I was you. Tune in to uncover what happened when three boys entered a Tennessee cave. But only one returned. This is the exact spot where we found the bodies, Julie. The Manowar Caves. M-A-N-T-A-W-A-U-K. A production of I Heart Radio, Blumhouse Television, and Psychopia Pictures. Every minute I remain in Manowar County, the thick of the fog gets. Listen to The Manowar Caves now on the I Heart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. What's up, y'all? This is Questlove and, you know, at QLS, I get to hang out with my friends. Sugar Steve, Laia, Vontigolo, Unpaid Bill, and we, you know, at Questlove Supreme, like the nerd out and do deep dives with musicians and actors and politicians and journalists. We give you the stories behind all your favorite artists and creatives that you have never heard. I'm talking about stories behind their life journeys and their works of art. I love QLS because of the QLS team supreme. They're like a second family to me. If you're a fan of deep diving into music, everything, all monacking your musical history,

and learning things about hip hop artists and things you never thought, then you're a lot like me. But you're also a fan of Questlove Supreme. One of the things I love the most about this show is that we get to learn from the masters. I look at being on this show as my graduate program in music. Listen to Questlove Supreme on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, Hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock,

and I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic, and occasionally ridiculous, deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup.

Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Ah, that's my getting absolutely screwed over by the medical establishment voice. People thought it was another sheep podcast. They were briefly extremely excited. Nope. The sheep podcast, well, I make no promises about the sheep podcast. Were we going to tell them about the lost sheep episode? No. Yeah, okay. We'll just leave that one.

This is it could happen here, the podcast where you would think that the medical issue was a trans thing, and it's absolutely not, and it's amazing, and I love it. Yeah, it's a podcast where I complain about medical issues and talk about other stuff. With me is James. Yeah, I'm a person who complains about medical issues and sometimes goes to Mexico to buy drugs. The legal drugs, medical drugs, while we're being recorded. The thing is, is making me think of this. I was in, oh god, I don't remember where Mexico I was. I was not very old, but we took a ferry, and I got so seasick. It was like the most seasick

I've ever been, so we had to go back. My Spanish is not great. At this time, my Spanish was much worse than it is now, and we go to this drug store, and we're trying to find something that's like an anti-seasickness drug, and we buy this drug called vomicin, and we're looking through the thing, and we find the part where it says side effects, and I remember, and I look at this, and I read it, and it says, hallucinacionis, and I'm like, oh no, and it's like, oh god, and it wound up, actually, it was completely fine. I did not vomit over the rails again on the ferry ride back. I have a good inadvertent medicine, hallucinogen story, and then we can

actually do the podcast. When I was a bit younger, I was climbing a mountain in Morocco, and became extremely altitude sick. My fucking nose was just unleashing my blood, like it was a real moment. Yeah, I bet it looked great, and so I tried to get some medicine. We went somewhere, and I speak French, but most of people spoke Berber, and I wasn't a language that I speak at all. Anyway, I received some medicine, which I took in the form of, I think, like a powder that I mixed with honey, and I was like, okay, this is unique and different, whatever. Fuck me, did I have some incredible dreams? I just kept taking it, because I was like, well, it was definitely opium. The thing I was taking was, I bought it down, and was like,

this stuff just really helps out my altitude sickness. One of the adults I was with was like, yeah, don't do drugs, kids. Speaking of not doing drugs, okay, so we are here today to talk about democracy. The opium of the masses. Yeah, so this script was originally written in a period where I had spent an enormous amount of time being forced to watch documentaries about what democracy was, and my conclusion from all of this is that the history of democracy begins with a mistranslation. Okay. So, okay, what does that mean? The answer is that, okay, whatever someone starts talking about democracy, the first thing they do is they go like, I'm gonna start by translating the word democracy. Now, the most common translation, you'll see this like,

everywhere from like, Ashra Taylor's like, documentary, what is democracy to just like, the thing that's on Wikipedia, holds that democracy is derived from two Greek words, right? You have demos, meaning the people, and kratos, meaning rule. So you put these two together, you get demos, kratos, you get democracy, I might Greek, I can't pronounce Greek very well, it's fine, whatever, it's an ancient Greek. Yeah, but you know, this means rule by the people. So, okay, this translation has several advantages, right? Foremost among them, it is simple enough to be taught to school children, and catchy enough, there's a nonzero chance that like, the most pedantic of them will remember it after like, the day after the test,

which presumably is the explanation for why this is the translation of democracy, it opens every single fucking thing people write about democracy. Unfortunately, unfortunately for a beleaguered grade school teachers and sort of the broader populace as a whole, this translation is so blatantly wrong that I have been forced to start a thing about democracy and also about rioting, yelling about ancient Greek. So, great. Okay, so what is the actual issue here? The actual problem is the mistranslation of kratos in particular is incredibly important both conceptually and ideologically, and the actual sort of proper translation and the implications of this are worth examining in some detail. So, the anthropologist David Graeber,

as we have mentioned a lot on this show, wrote in his regrettably very poorly read essay, There Never Was a West, he describes kratos thus, quote, in this, this in turn might help explain the term democracy itself, which appears to have been coined as something of a slur by its elitist opponents. It literally means the force or even violence of the people. Kratos, not Arcos, the ancient Greek word for ruler, also the root of anarchism, but without Arcos. Yeah, so what he's saying there, wasn't kratos a dude, like he's a dude, I've undersold him, an immortal dude. Yeah, he's also, he's the main character of the God of War games. Okay, that is the thing I did not know. And hilariously, that is like him being the main

character of the God of War games, that is actually a better way to understand what kratos is than the rule by thing that everyone usually translates as this app, because like, ancient Greek has a perfectly good word for like rule by, right? It's Arcos, it's the root of anarchism, it's like an anarcho, it's the word, it's like the normal thing when you have a Greek derived word, where you want to say rule by is that is Arcos, right? Yeah, but democracy is not that, right? Yeah, like all garkas like that, but like democracy is specifically kratos. And this is because what democracy literally means is rule by the violence of the people. Haste. Yeah, well, and this, you know, okay, so like this, this, this like, this sounds like I am

essentially pearl clutching about translations, but the context here is actually important, right? As grammar points out, the sort of, you know, Athens, which is the exemplar society against which the original anti-democratic philosophers rail, by the way, this is like Plato, et cetera, hates democracy. Most of the people who you read from sort of classical Greek, like philosophy despised democracy, even though they live in them, huge, you know, not to like whitewash Athenian society, but like, these people are like Sparta apologists, and it's like, yeah. We haven't really, it's funny that people have definitely, I don't know if they've actually recovered Plato or red Plato, or they just get mad when Donald Trump doesn't win elections, but like,

this whole like, this whole like benevolent philosopher king shit has definitely, definitely made a comeback in recent years, and it's troubling. Yeah, and I think, I think part of this, this is, this is another complaint that I've had about sort of like the way that like, the sort of like great authors thing is taught in universities is they deliberately, like, there was like, in what, in what specific readings they assigned, there was like an incredible intellectual effort that goes into making sure you never see the absolutely deranged shit that these people believe, like, Plato, Plato literally worships angular momentum, like that is, his god is angular momentum, like, he, he, he, he,

he hates democracy, he loves like, spartan, like oligarchy basically, like, all of this stuff is like, that's like something like, you don't read, when you get assigned Plato, it's like, yeah. There's a huge like, as someone who's taught like a ton of universities, there's this huge fucking impediment to you assigning that stuff, like, I've specifically tried to assign different stuff in these like writing courses, which, which ended up being like great white dudes of history, right, like, like, if you can assign different things, but like, the cost of, of assigning those and that that cost isn't borne by you or the university, right, it's borne by your students, it is massive, like, even if like, for a while there, like, we would just like a lot of text,

you know, if you take the time as a professor to label out the text, you can take it to a print shop, get them to photocopy it. And it almost never should be, you need to find someone who's willing to kind of play fast and lose with copyright. But still, it will end up costing your students so much more than the text which are in the book that you can fucking auto generate the quizzes because the book also has a website and you still get paid like you're doing a job when you're not. So, yeah. Yeah, and bad. Yeah. And this stuff has had, you know, like, this has had sort of profound ideological influences, it's had, you know, it's had sort of profound, it's had profound influences on like the, I mean, just sort of the way that like ancient

Greece and Rome are like conceptualized. And, and I think this also really has, you know, it has an, it makes it very hard to see what was sort of actually going on in a place like Athens. And, you know, a great grammar sort of points this out, right? Like Athens is a sort of like exemplar, like, you know, sort of, it's a sort of an exemplar like it is literally like the place for which like, like most descriptions of sort of democracy are sort of originally about. And Athens, you know, we are trained to think of Athens as like, oh, it's like, well, Athens, this is like the first democracy or whatever, this is like, this is actually like a very normal sort of society. And it's not, this is a, this is an extremely weird society. And what Graeber sort

of points out about this, right, is, you know, the thing that, that is, you know, okay, so like, there have been lots of societies over sort of the course of human, like, you know, hundreds of thousands of years of the sort of like course of human history, right, that I've had collaborative decision making systems. What is very, very weird and almost unique about Athens is it has two things put together. It has a decision making apparatus where people have equal say, and it also has a violent enforcement mechanism to impose the will of the people on other people. And as, you know, as we'll get to in a second, also impose the will of those people on other people. Most society, yeah, that, that, that turns out to be a very important part of sort of

the Athenian Empire, etc, etc. And like who the people are. Yeah, this is, this is not all the people. Yeah, well, we'll get to that in a second too. Nice. But so, so most societies, Graeber argues, either have one or the other of, you know, having a, having like a decision making apparatus for people of equal say, and a violent enforcement mechanism, right. You have a lot of societies with collective decision making apparatuses that involve the entire community. But the thing is, these, these processes invariably sort of like develop some kind of consensus process as a sort of expedient to keep the community from just tearing itself apart through constant conflict, right. Because like, okay, like if you can't actually without the

threat of force, right, you can't actually have society where you constantly have really, really controversial decisions being made by like 51 49 splits, where both sides absolutely hate each other and one side is the opposite of the other, right. In order to sort of like keep your like, you know, your like city or your state together, right, you have to actually create political solutions that, that, you know, people, people, not, not that they necessarily like fully agree with, but that they're willing to live with. And then, you know, this generates sort of like various, so increasingly elaborate, sometimes not very elaborate, but you know, various sort of forms of consensus processes. On the other hand, you have societies with extremely violent enforcement

mechanisms, but these societies are almost always incredibly hierarchical, and they're ruled either by sort of monarchs or oligarchs, who just simply do not care about the notion that, like, people should rule themselves, or that, you know, other like other people who are not like the king, or the body of oligarchs should have like anything even remotely to do with making decisions. And that that's what makes Athens really weird, right. Is Athens has both of these things. It has a sort of, it has like a violent, it has a way of like imposing decisions on people through violence, and also it has this principle that like people should be able to make decisions for themselves collectively by, you know, like through through a sort of process that doesn't involve them all

being ruled by just like some guy. And, you know, what makes Athens and the others and the other sort of Greek democracies, because there are other democracies in Greece over the sort of period that this goes on, what makes them unique is that like the people quote unquote is composed largely of soldiers, as Graeber puts it, in other words, if a man is armed, then one pretty much has to take his opinion into account. One can see how this works at its darkest and Xenophon's anabasis. I have been, I have now been told by several dictionary sites that this is in fact how you pronounce it. I don't know, anabasis sounds terrible to me, but such as the will of, I don't know, dictionaries, which tells the story of a Greek army of mercenaries who suddenly find themselves

leaderless and lost in the middle of Persia. They elect new officers and then hold a collective vote to decide what to do next. In a case like this, even if the vote was actually 6040, everyone could see the balance of forces and what would happen if things actually came to blows. Every vote was, in a real sense, a conquest. So what we're dealing with here, right in this, this is, this is sort of what democracy is, and it is very rawist form is you're dealing with a group of very heavily armed men who need to find a way to convince slightly more than half of the group to agree to help them impose their rule on everyone else. Do you know what I will get you? Do you know who will fail to pay your mercenary contract leaving you stranded in the middle of a Persian

civil war which you have backed the wrong side? Vladimir Putin. Yeah, don't take mercenary contracts on Vladimir Putin. And we're back. So you know, as I was sort of saying, we're dealing with here, right? We have a group of very heavily armed men and they need to find a way to make, you know, they need to find a way to make like half of, like slightly more than half of the group agree with them to impose their sort of rule on everyone else. So it's slightly more technical terms, right? Athenian, you know, Athenian democracy or democracy in the Athenian sense is composed of two co-determining elements fused together. There is a decision-making apparatus and an enforcement mechanism. The two are co-determining because the structure of the enforcement mechanism

which is 51 blokes with sticks beating 49 blokes with sticks over the head also determines the structure of the decision-making apparatus, which no longer needs to concern itself with the opinion of everyone in the group as they would in a society without the ability to sort of employ violence to enforce decisions as long as they have enough people to sort of militarily defeat a minority of the group, right? You know, and you could see how the structure, how the enforcement mechanism is the thing that is structuring what the decision-making process has to look like, right? It's the thing that sort of sets its limits. And this something that it turns out is very, very sort of important in what a democracy is. The enforcement mechanism too is

also determined by the sort of decision-making apparatus because the people here are armed soldiers. So the 51% that becomes the sort of like basis of the democratic majority rule, you know, it literally composes the enforcement mechanism itself. And this sort of double co-determination is the origin of majority rule democracy, right? The institution that, you know, in various forms, and we will get into this, like this has gotten increasingly less and less quote unquote democratic over time. But this specific form is the thing that has come to sort of define what democracy is. If we look at what democracy is as a political project though, right? What we see is that the essence of democracy itself is to transform the majority

from a simple count of military strength into a signal of morality, right? The citizens of democracies and even a lot of people who are either not citizens of a democracy and live in it, or who don't live in a democracy simply believe that is the moral right for a majority of people to be able to impose a will on a minority. This is what forms a kind of democratic common sense, right? It is the thing that everyone believes that is sort of the basis of everything about how a democracy functions, right? And, you know, democracy is almost never framed this way explicitly, except by, you know, every once in a while you'll get someone who makes this argument who is like, I don't know, they're a billionaire, or they're like, you know, what's his name? Yeah, Hayek

will like, like if you press him, or like Milton Friedman to also will like, if you pressed him, we'll make this argument, right? Which is like, no one actually wants to live in a democracy because, you know, like if you, you know, if we actually live in a democracy, everyone will just like increase our tax rate, or like marginalised groups will like. These are critics made of the United States as well, and this is like earliest inception, right? Yeah, you know, what's his name? I think it was, I think it was John Adams. So some of the early founders, like very explicitly, this was their argument against, like various was anti-democratic arguments against giving anyone who didn't have property to vote, which was like, I think the exact line was if you give people the vote,

the first thing they will do is erase the debts and redistribute the land. Yeah, there was a whole last rebellion about this, right? Yeah, yeah, I wish it would have been based, a good programme usually, kind of kind of messed up in the US where you have to ask where that land comes from, but, you know, yeah, but like, this is an argument you really only ever hear from people who have, like the only minority that makes this argument are people who have a shit ton of property, who are like, oh God, and you know, and their thing here is, well, okay, we need to make the system less democratic so that people can't take our property away. Yeah, we'll give property rights. Yeah, yeah, but on the other hand, the reason for sort of pointing out that this is what

democracy is in theory is really sort of cynical and like reactionary, but the thing that the reason this argument works, well, quote unquote, works with sort of like, you know, with sort of libertarians is that this equation of sort of numerical superiority with the more right to exercise power is like the key underlying assumption of democracy. It is the idea without which democracy simply ceases to function, right? But this is something that, you know, people don't talk about democracy like this, right? The sort of trick of the democratic system is to push the enforcement mechanism into the background, right? When you talk about democracy with like regular people, the thing that they walk and normally they think about voting, right? But,

you know, any kind of thing that is like a collective like decision making process, right? A regular person is going to call democracy. And, you know, that's kind of true. But, you know, if you want to sort of get like technical about it, it's not. And there's an incredibly large ideological apparatus that specifically built up around making sure that people don't look at the way that the enforcement mechanism is as much, if not more so, a sort of key element of what of what democracy is, then the part we, you know, where everyone comes together and makes a decision that everyone talks about all the time. I was watching an interview with Grave the other day. It's such a good thing I do in my free time. And he was talking about like democratic confederalism

in northeast Syria, right? And he talked about it as like democracy without the state, which I think is interesting. It's him using that vernacular kind of definition. So, okay, so I'm taking a lot of the arguments from self-graver rope, but he backs away from the implications of his own argument. Right, yeah, and goes back to, albeit like caveating. And I guess it's worth noting that they're a ton of like hugely divergent, like we're not like prisoners of etymology, right? Like, like, the meaning, like, I think it's Rosa Luxemburg who said government is politics in the people's interest or something. It's kind of bullshit, tanky interpretation of what most people would see it as. There are these broad definitions.

You know, and I think this is something that like like Asher Taylor's documentary, right? Like, you know, the part about that's good, right? It's like, there's, I forget who says this. There's this like kind of famous political line that's like, I, if there is a thing that everyone agrees is good, no one will agree on what it is, right? Like, you know, this is something that like, you know, like, I think, I think it speaks to the power, I think it speaks specifically to the power of the sort of like, like the idea that more people be like agreeing with something, like gives gives legitimacy to that thing, which is that like every, like, like even societies that are like, not even like really remotely democratic, right, will pretend that they're

still democracies, right? Like the bathists have elections every sort of like cycle, right? Yeah. I mean, like, you know, this is the thing I think isn't very well understood, but like, like this, this was also a thing like, for example, China has this like, okay, sorry, I, I, I, as, as, as I'm preparing to explain this, I'm realizing that the China want like the Chinese government experts are going to get mad at me because I think, I think I'm about to confuse the United, the United front with the United front works department. But so China, China, like technically speaking is, there are like other parties, technically, that are kind of remnants from like, you know, for example, like the left faction of the KMT, which

is like the Chinese Nationalist Party, right? There's just like, technically a faction of them that's part of this thing called like the United front, there's like technically other parties and they have like this like, consultative role. It's, it's, it's an incredibly convoluted and elaborate system. But you know, like that whole thing, and you can, you can find, you know, like the Chinese system is like not, it's not democratic in the sense of like, you can like vote for someone or like, okay, like, it's not democratic in the sense of you can make a vote that will make a thing happen, right? You know, and to be fair, the US is also not democratic in the sense of you can cast a vote and make a thing happen, right? But this is sort of like, you know,

okay, like it is, it is a society that is less democratic than the US, which is sort of astounding, considering the US like doesn't even have one person, one vote, right? We'll get into like republics a bit in a second. But like, you know, like Chinese, like quote unquote, democracy is like not, it has very little to do with like the principle of like the moat, like 51% of the population votes for a thing and it happens, right? But, but you know, like if you look, if you look at the sort of rhetoric that you see from, or in the internal justification of like, like, you know, you sort of like read Chinese bureaucratic documents or you read sort of like their PR stuff, like they constantly talk about like, yeah, we're going to make a more democratic

society, because like that legitimacy, like the idea of democracy is really incredibly powerful and enduring. And it's something that like, even like, you know, like, I mean, like, I don't know, like the Saudis don't pretend to be a democracy really, but like, like most of the other like Gulf monarchies have like, election-y things, right? Like, it's an idea that is enduring and powerful enough that even people who don't agree with it are forced to sort of like, do this pageantry of it. And I think that's really interesting. And I think it explains a lot of the kind of, I mean, especially around occupy, but I think it explains a lot of the kind of political movements that we've been seeing over the last about 15 years, which is I think this is

also an explanation for why why we see so many riots as as a form of sort as as a form of politics, and why you get these demands that are sort of like, I don't know, you like in the 2011 revolutions, and you sort of also see this now, you get a lot of sort of very abstract calls for democracy while also doing things that like, are quote unquote, not legitimate in a democratic society. Like, for example, like rioting is not supposed to be sort of like a legitimate political action in a society because, you know, like this is whole like a because there's a system under which violence is supposed to be administered, administered, right? Like you have a state, the state is the thing that's supposed to do violence. If anyone else does it outside of that,

they're like, you know, they're an illegitimate extremist. But okay, if we go back to our sort of base definition of what democracy is, right, democracy is a collective decision making apparatus and an enforcement mechanism as like, well, what is a riot, right? A riot is both of those things happening at the same time. There were a bunch of people collectively making a decision and then imposing that decision immediately. Yeah. It's EP Thompson who called the lead out collective bargaining by riot. Quite possibly. Yeah. It's, it's often like reference now and other stuff like, like people talk about like, you know, like you're here, you're here, they're used all the time. I think they're the origin of this. Or is it Eric Hobsbawm could be Hobsbawm?

Anyway, yeah, famously the lead outs were called collective bargaining by riot. But yeah, I think, well, I think there is something sort of interesting there about collective bargaining by sort of physical force. You know, it's like the decision making apparatus is happening outside of the sort of normal bounds in which decision making apparatus is supposed to happen. And I think, I think there's, there's a sort of, this isn't, there's another, I forget exactly which Graber thing this is from, but you know, there's Graber, this might actually, this might actually be from his essay about Batman, which is pretty funny. What's his, what's his take on Alfred's class status? I don't think he, unfortunately, I think that's,

I think that's the one thing he doesn't mention. I'm pretty, I'm pretty sure there's no Alfred discourse in it. There's lots of other discourse he calls, is it Bayne, no, he calls the Joker, he calls one of the Batman villains as Zerzanite, which I think is very funny. Yeah, but you know, okay, he has this argument about sort of like, okay, how do you, you know, so the other part of democracy is, is the part about the people, right? And this is always the thing that's very much in contention. Like, how do you determine what the people quote unquote are? And, you know, the structure of Athenian society is very much determined by who isn't, isn't included in the people, right? Like, you know, women can't vote,

if you're a slave, you also can't vote. There are lots of people who are directly under Athenian rule who can't vote and are, you know, not part of the people and therefore sort of like, and this, this is in some sense the origin of like, the sort of the trajectory democracy goes on, right, which is that it, the trajectory it goes through is republicanism, because, you know, like the founders of the US, right, if you look at the sort of that style of 50, 50 plus one style majority democracy, right? Those guys, you know, as we talked about, like, they didn't want a democracy because they thought in a democracy, people would vote against their sort of like, aristocratic interests. Yeah. And so what does that on? And yeah, they're like,

yeah, it's like, okay, well, all these people own slaves, all these people own a bunch of land, all these people like, I don't know, like bankers and shit, they're like, okay, so it's gonna be a bad idea if we let people like decide what to do with our stuff. So instead, you know, they, they go to this republican structure and the republican structure is I think very interesting because it, it takes the 50 plus one structure, right? But you know, it abstracts it to the point where like the like, your vote, for the most part, basically simply does not matter. Like, every once in a while, like a local election, they can do something. But you know, like what's actually happening, right, is, is you are like, you are selecting who is going to rule you.

And, you know, the other part of this is that the enforcement mechanism becomes autonomous from the people itself. Because you know, unlike, unlike an Athenian thing where like, everyone's either like, on a ship, because they're like a, you know, they're part of the Navy, or they like, you know, they can go strap on their fucking shield and like plates and grab your big ass spear, right? And you know, like, well, this, this is the state, right? The state is like, fucking Jerry and his and his friend, like Patrick, or whatever the fuck, you know, like, forming a shield wall with like the shields they have at home. You know, but, but, you know, and that's like, in, in, in, in, in sort of like warrior democracies of that style, like there are, there are, there are,

there's like the Cassattria Republic, I think that's the name of it. There are these sort of, like, they're like, you know, like, there are republics like this, or quote unquote republics like this, that, that exist in various places in the world. You have these sort of like military like military classes that, you know, like do 50 plus one. But those people, right, the, the enforcement mechanism is very, is very, very direct. In a republic, the enforcement mechanism becomes autonomous and also the decision making apparatus becomes both, both of them become autonomous from like the people quote unquote, who are supposed to be making the decisions. And suddenly you have the situation where, you know, okay, if you live in the US, right,

it is very, very clear that there are lots of things that everyone supports that simply like are not, is not like, like, is not happening, right? Like, you know, I mean, you could look at sort of like universal health care, like, I mean, for example, like another example that we could take, that's, I think for poignant right now is like, there was a pretty recent study on like, what percentage of the population in the US supports trans people getting like friends affirming health care and it was like 70%. And then, you know, you look at it on a fucking state-by-state basis, right? And it's like, well, we'll be talking about this more sort of later. But you know, on a state-by-state basis, like, well, that's not fucking happening,

right? People are just making it illegal. And it's very easy to look at this and go like, well, okay, so the principle of 50 plus one is being violated, right? Like this is not a democracy, something else has happened. One sort of solution to this is to go back to, you know, is to very literally go back and ask the question, who is the people? And this is, this is, you know, a lot of what Occupy is doing, right? Like Occupy's answer to this is like, we are the 99%, right? It's, okay, so like, there is a thing that is claiming to be the, like the demos in democracy, which is, you know, Congress, right? But like, okay, Congress trivially is not the people, right? It's at best a section of them. It is definitely not

in any, in any sort, yeah, right? You know, and okay, so you have lots of versions of this, like the American one tends to be a lot of people sitting in a square, you know, but like, like, like can actually convening a, something that's kind of like a democracy, but even, but that's the other thing about it, like is Occupy democracy, right? Like, they don't have violence as like a political tool, really. I mean, this isn't to say that, like, there wasn't some weird shady shit that happens. But like, you know, like, they don't have the ability to sort of like coerce people into accepting like a 51% decision that, that genuine, they can't live this, right? So, so they don't, they don't really like, they, they, they, in some,

in some sense, in challenging democracy, they create something that isn't really a democracy, right? They, they create a sort of like a labor consensus process. And this is, you know, like, if, if the Kratos part is, I'm trying to think of a way, I've been trying to think for like 10 minutes about a way to phrase this, but like, if the, if the strength and power is like, is the people and is evenly distributed among the people, as opposed to it's the state. And like, if some of this theoretical abstraction of the will of the majority of the people, then that, that leads to a consensus almost by definition, right? Like, like if, yeah, well, I mean, I think, I think the, the sort of breaking principle here is if you think that it is legitimate to use for a group

of people to use violence to enforce something, and at that point everyone is still armed, then, then you, you, you get a 50 plus one structure, right? Right. But if, if you don't think it's legitimate to use violence to coerce people into sort of like doing whatever the thing is you want to enforce, then by definition, you get some kind of consensus process. But, you know, we, we have a system that every, everyone like thinks that what's happening, like, you know, in some sense, like the ideological principle is that like, you know, everyone thinks that what's happening is, is you have a 50 plus one system, and that's where the, like the legitimacy of the system comes from, because like, you know, we voted for these people. But also it's so clearly not, and

also like the police are so clearly just this sort of like roaming like bandit force that is like not even like remotely, like, they technically draw legitimacy from the people, but like, you know, okay, like what, what, what, what happens if you try to convene an assembly of the people in the US? The answer is they beat the shit out of you with sticks and then tear gas you and then like start shooting you. Yeah. So, you know, this is sort of, you know, like, like, this, this would occupy proof, right? Which is like, if you challenge the sort of the claim of the government to represent the people, right? Because like, who, who, who the fuck are these assholes to like, to be like a halo? No, like we, we are the people, we are sort of like the legitimate

manifestation of people. If you want to do anything, like, you have to go through us. Well, it's like, okay, so like, how, how did, how did they get that? How did they get that authority? Right? And the answer is they did it, they did it by staging an armed revolution. And that, that, that's what their, that's what their actual legitimacy derives from, right? Is they, they want, they won the armed revolution. Yeah. And violently dispossessed people of them before they did that, like piggybacking off colonialism to do an armed revolution. Yeah. And so like, okay, but like, you know, their, their legitimacy is incredibly tenuous, right? Like, this gives you this question of how do you determine what, what, you know,

how does a democracy determine what the people are? And one, one way that you can make a sort of counterclaim against a democracy is by a, like physically assembling a shit ton of people in a place and going like, we are like physically we are the people and we are going to make decisions. And, you know, that, that can, that can look like Occupy with like a seven hour meeting about whether, where we want to put plants, right? Or it can look, and this is, you know, you get this a bit in Occupy, but like, or it can look like, you know, here are a hundred thousand people, like they are going to fight there once you just like throw shit at the police until the police run away. And, you know, that, that is, that, that, that is a, that is a thing that like we

have seen in this country, this, this will be like another episode, but this, this, this was the thing that happens in Mexico in 2006 in Oaxaca, where people basically ran out the police by literally hundreds of thousands of people, like waking up to a bunch of police, like a bunch of police just beating the shit out of like a bunch of striking teachers and then like picking up a brick and throwing it. You see it a little bit, not really, but like in, in like Podemos in Spain, if you're familiar with that. Yeah. Like they kind of their attempt to have people determine their policy platform, not largely a successful one, but like, yeah. Well, I mean, interesting. Obama did that too. Oh, really? Yeah. This was the thing. Obama had

this job, like one of Obama's initial pitches was like, he was going to have, there's going to be this like online thing where people could vote and like decide on policy things. And he immediately amended it. And Podemos also immediately, like this is, this is one of the things that like, this is, this is like one of the ways you try to like capture this kind of like, yeah, because what you're really like, when riot police are like fighting like a bunch of people in the street, right? Like what you're watching is two kinds of democracy fighting with each other, right? You're watching a sort of like, like you're watching the crowd, which is an, you know, a very, very immediate, like for like, you know, literal form of democracy,

right? Where, you know, the crowd makes a decision and people do things fighting the police who are like a very, you know, the police are technically like a part of a democratic system, right? But the police are just purely the sort of like, you know, they are the violence by which the people rule. And you are watching, you're watching these two things sort of like clash with each other. And, you know, I mean, I think one of the sort of like products of the way that Republicanism like specifically developed or like Republicanism in the sense of like, this is a republic, not a democracy, etc. etc. in terms of like, yeah, small like, yeah, small r, but also in the sense of like,

okay, so instead of you voting on things directly, like, you know, you vote for some asshole who yeah, like represents democracy. Yeah, whatever. Yeah, right. Like that, that sort of like unmooring of the means of violence from the people, which was, you know, which is the essence of democracy, good or bad, right? And I would also say, like, you know, that can go like, that sort of like having having violence and democracy, like, you know, violence and decision making being paired together, like, that's not always a good thing that can go really, really badly, right? Like, you know, because like, like, for example, like a race riot, right? Like, like a clan march, right? Is technically like, is technically an expression of democracy, right? It is, you know, it is a

group of people convening themselves as the people and then doing an action. And, you know, and like, this has been something I've been sort of been forced to think about a lot with the anti-trans laws, which is that like, trans people are like, you know, the most optimistic estimate you could like have is like, maybe two and a half percent of the population, if you assume most of the people who are trans and don't know that they're trans, right? Like, you know, and if you were two and a half percent of the population in a 50 plus one system, it is very easy for 51. Like, there is no physical way that you can have, like, if 50 plus one percent of the population decides to kill you while there's nothing you can do, right? Like, there's no amount of like voting that you can do

that will make you not die, because that that's the sort of like, yeah, the tyranny of the majority or whatever, like, or like, yeah, yeah. Have you familiar with like the argument against utilitarianism that like, the greatest good for the greatest number or the greatest happiness for the greatest number, if you're looking to serve the greatest happiness for greatest number, if like, 10 people get two units of happiness from beating one person to death with sticks, then like, she can't experience as much sadness as they experience happiness, like the democratic impulse in action. Yeah, and you know, like, this is the thing that is, again, what we're talking about, like, is normally brought up by like, incredibly corrupt, corrupt, and sort of venal elites who want to

protect their sadness. But like, it is also, you know, and like, this is part of the reason why, for example, the US just fucking puts, like, immigrants at camps, right? Because they can't fucking vote, right? Like, they're not part of like, quote unquote, the people, right? Like, there are large sections of the population who are just, you know, like, booted from this entire process, right? This is an argument that William C. Anderson and Zoe Samudzi make in the book as Black is Resistance, which is that like, yeah, like, black people, like, fucking are not part of the shit, right? Like, they're not like a constitutive, like, part of the people TM, right? Yeah. And, you know, this, they call this, they call this the anarchism of blackness,

which is this sort of like, it's a position of being like, removed as like a legitimate sort of, like, subject in the state who can, you know, exercise your like, democratic rights or whatever the fuck. It's like, yeah, okay, like, lots of people have never had this. And you know, this, this, even, even in this sort of like, you know, relatively egalitarian, like, you know, like, there have been like, parts of the US, like, especially the early US, right? You have, you're like, sort of like New England Town Council, right? And it's like, well, what is, what is your New England Town Council vote to do? It's like, well, a vote to send out at the fucking militia to kill indigenous people, right? Like, you know, even, you can, you even,

even when the US has functioned as something that is closer to like a, like democracy TM, where like the means of violence and the means of sort of decision making are actually placed in direct directly in people's hands, right? Like, that doesn't always go well. But, you know, but like, you know, we have now developed a, like, we developed a system that has like the worst of every single parts of every single aspect of this, right? We're like, okay, so we have 50 plus one as the sort of like legitimating factor, but also 50% of the population plus one does not actually vote for a thing. It is possible for like, more than half of the population, it's possible for a majority of the population to vote for a presidential candidate, you get a different

one, right? Like, it's possible. Like, we've seen this, like, there's so many fucking elections have had this now, like two in my lifetime, like, and, and also, also, we have, we have the other part of it, which is that we also have like the we have the other democratic principle of like, you should be able to enforce a political opinion by violence. Yeah, we got that in space. Yep. You know, I guess, guess, guess, guess, guess, guess, guess, guess who fucking gets to make that decision. It's not 50 plus one of you. Like, no, it's a bunch of assholes in suits and like six cops. I think a good way to view the US is like a bunch of landowners made a system where land votes and people don't. Yeah. Well, and then, you know, and then they went about making sure

that like, even if the land does vote for a thing, if it's not court subsidies, it doesn't happen. There's 75 weird dudes in between your vote and I think actually happening. Yeah. Which is how you get like this kind of constitutional magic that the Trumpists are always trying to do because like, it's not actually like that far from reality, right? There are like 17 magic incantations that have to get set up. You put your ballot in the box and then an old white dude's in charge again. Yeah. But you know, I think like, you know, the US system is like, it's stunningly bad. Like, it's like a, it's a really dog shit, like terribly written democratic system. Like, it is, it is designed not to function. Like that, that, that was actually the

point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's like, there's a king, a thing that like, you shouldn't have, like, the president is supposed to be a king, right? Like, I think like, if you go back and read, like what the balance of powers was supposed to be, it was like, they're doing the Roman thing of like, you need like, you need to combine a king and oligarchy and a democracy and it's like, well, okay, so we have like a fucking king who could just like kill people. It's great. It's great. It's great. But you know, you know, okay, so I think, I think the, the, the, the broad total argument that I want to make here is that what we have been seeing over the last about 15 years, right, with the sort of movement of the squares, with the series of uprisings that we saw,

I mean, you know, in 2020, the US, but also like all over the world from about 2018 to, I mean, like some of them are still going, like now, right? You know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's been a reaction to sort of this, right? It's, it's, it's, it's been a reaction to democracy as a legitimating principle, not matching like, you know, even, even, even, even, even what the principle is supposed to be. And then people going out into the streets and doing democracy and the sort of clash between like democracy and theory and democracy and action mostly has resulted in democracy and action winning because it turns out the thing about republics is that they're really, really, really good at creating like military apparatuses that

are very hard to defeat by just purely fighting them. Yeah. Sadly. Yeah. But however, comma, sometimes they lose. And, you know, and as, as, as, as the, as the old IRA thing goes, that they have to get lucky every time we only have to get lucky once. So, you know, keep collectively bargaining by riot. Yeah. What the fuck else are you going to do? You know, like, uh, vote, like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, your life depends on it, kids. You can vote if you want to,

right? Like, there are instances in which it might meaningfully reduce the cruelty of the state a little bit in some places sometimes. But yeah, it's not going to, it's not going to, like, take away the central fucking canard of the whole thing. Yeah. Yeah. So I do, do, do, do, do democracy by rioting. That is our official legal position. This is legally, I'm legally non-actionable, but also legally actionable at the same time. This is called dialectics. And yeah, this has been taken up here. Find us in the places. Uh, don't find us in the places. Read David Graber. Yeah, do that. Read the Never Was a West. It's great. Nobody reads it. It's, it's really good. People have been asking for Graber book

because we keep talking about him. So yeah, read, read The Never Was a West. Read Towards An Anarchist Anthropology. Bullshit jobs is a good start. Yeah. If you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you want to be the real grave head and read something that fucking no one has read, go read, uh, Towards An Anthropological Theory of Value. I read into one of my colleagues at the supermarket the other day and we were talking about that. Say, good book. No one has ever read it. Read more Graber. This case has all the markings of a ritualistic, a cult murder. The Manowar Caves. Well, I say the Lord works in mysterious ways.

A brand new immersive fiction podcast. Well, he ain't got nothing on the devil. Part psychological thriller. Part supernatural horror. The truth. Sometimes it's revealed in the intersection of facts. Sometimes it's hidden to the lore. Starring Westworld's Jonathan Tucker and Eddie Cthigge from Twilight. I wouldn't go digging around, stirring up trouble if I was you. Tune in to uncover what happened when three boys entered a Tennessee cave, but only one returned. This is the exact spot where we found the bodies, Julie. The Manowar Caves. M-A-N-T-A-W-A-U-K. A production of I Heart Radio, Blumhouse Television, and Psychopia Pictures. Every minute I remain in Manowar County, the thicker the fog gets. Listen to the Manowar Caves now on the I Heart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. What's up, y'all? This is Questlove and, you know, at QLS, I get to hang out with my friends. Sugar Steve, Laia Fontigolo, Unpaid Bill, and we, you know, at Questlove Supreme, like the nerd out and do deep dives with musicians and actors and politicians and journalists. We give you the stories behind all your favorite artists and creatives that you have never heard. I'm talking about stories behind their life journeys and their works of art. I love QLS because of the QLS team supreme. They're like a second family to me. If you're a fan of deep diving into music, everything, almanacking your musical history,

and learning things about hip-hop artists and things you never thought, then you're a lot like me, but you're also a fan of Questlove Supreme. One of the things I love the most about this show is that we get to learn from the masters. I look at being on this show as my graduate program in music. Listen to Questlove Supreme on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Supreme! What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt and I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly

a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From I Heart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Yeah, it could happen here. That's the podcast that you're listening to. It's a news podcast about shit falling apart. That's the only intro you're going to get because

Garrison is right now in the city of Atlanta, Georgia, reporting on the continuing stop-cop city protests. Garrison's done a number of scripted episodes covering these in detail over the last year in change. They're in the thick of it right now, so I'm just going to bring them and a friend on to talk about what has been happening this week. Yes. That's your cue. This week is a special week because this is the fifth week of action that has happened here in Atlanta as a part of the stop-cop city and in the Atlanta Forest Movement. This episode is going to be a midweek update because this week of action is still very much ongoing. There's still many, many days that things can happen, but a lot has already happened in these first few days anyway. So we're going

to do a quick little update and then a more comprehensive piece will be later down the line. But with me here to help talk about what's gone down so far is someone from the Atlantic Community Press Collective, Clark. Hello. Welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me on. Thanks for being on. Yeah. We've been kind of teamed up the past few days here as many things, both silly and serious, have taken place across Atlanta. Yeah. Safety in numbers. Safety in numbers. Yeah. That'd be great. It's always nice to have friends when you're watching jackbooted thugs go fucking apeshit with all of their new toys. And I mean, I think that is part

of the week of action idea is getting as many people here as possible and hopefully some of that makes some people more safe. That's something that we'll probably talk more in detail later when we have kind of hindsight. But I guess today, let's just start on what's kind of happened so far chronologically. I guess starting on Saturday. I met you Saturday for a rally at Gresham Park. I think it's where we first met up this week. Yes. We met at the rally at Gresham Park, which had about, I would say, an hour's worth of speeches before they kicked off a march down the bike path from Gresham Park to what the activists call We Lonnie People's Park, which is the site of the protest beforehand. So the forest around it had been unoccupied since

the raid in January that saw the killing of Tortiguita. So this was the first sort of permanent return to the forest. So we took a, I don't know, 40 minute march down the path and then landed in We Lonnie People's Park. They had one more little round of chance with a promise to defend the forest. And then they broke off and everything was a nice, really relaxing day. Yeah, it was a pretty positive start to the week of action. People essentially retook We Lonnie People's Park and started to go into the forest once again. Camp got set up in the forest. Lots of people from both in town and folks from out of town started to camp in the woods again. And then in the hours after this small march, people started to prepare for the music festival,

which was planned a few hundred feet away from We Lonnie People's Park, I guess, inside a more open field area. And music festival went off without a hitch the first day. It was pretty rad. Yeah, I think there was about 500 people for 500 people that first night of the music festival. The vibes were great. Everyone was having a fun time. I think it went on until about 1 a.m. And I don't think the first day could have gone better. I think it went on till about 4 a.m. Okay, well, I went to bed at 1 a.m. I did not go to bed at 1 a.m. I was at the music festival quite, quite a bit longer. I'm quite a bit older. And I think that was the reason I had to leave. So, yeah. Gerson doesn't understand things like needing sleep yet.

So, give her another year or two before they hit that sweet, sweet wall. So, so true. Then I'll have to find another teenager to go to journalism. Every four or five years, you just find a new one. Yeah, just keep reupping like Leo DiCaprio. Perfect. So, the first day was pretty good. There was no no substantial police response that I saw. Police kind of left people alone in the forest. The march from Gresham Park was fine. And people got to spend a night in the woods again, which, you know, had not had that many people in the woods in like months. And this is, this is, it should be said, like camping in a music festival, but it's like relatively high

risk because people have gotten significant charges just for camping in the woods in the past. Yes. And the very recent past. Some of the warrants that have been issued that justify the charges like domestic terrorism have included things such as sleeping in a hammock with someone else in the forest. And that's the reason why they're getting charged as a domestic terrorist. So, yeah, it is a music festival. People are camping. It's kind of chill. But also, there's absolutely this kind of this just like this like ever present kind of fear that despite what is being done being pretty pretty kind of like normal and not not not not in and of itself militant or radical. Still, the consequences from the state are kind of always always looming,

which kind of leads us to Sunday. Which picks up exactly where we left off. Yes. So I got there around noon on Sunday, I think. And the first thing we see is a bouncy castle. Large bouncy castle in front of the music festival. It has a big stop cop city banner, massive multicolored bouncy castle. People are having a pretty pretty good time. Yeah. As soon as they finished setting up the bouncy castle, it was it was filled. And everyone, I think there were about seventy five hundred people just set up on blankets around the stage. Initially, I think in the next few hours that definitely grew to there being hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people returning to the music festival for the second day.

I mean, I think the the the the March on Saturday was anywhere between like I saw estimates of anywhere between five hundred to a thousand people. Music festival seems to be like over five hundred people. And then on the second day of the festival, it slowly grew in size to again being hundreds and hundreds of people. And it's yeah, it started off just kind of continuing on with the music, continuing on with people, people having having nice times in the woods. I I walked around the campsites and got had conversations with people talking about all sorts of anarchy related things. And then they're slowly throughout the day. I think this this was posted on social media as well. There was a plan for a rally at five p.m. to meet on part

of part of the field that the music festival was also happening on. By the time that happened, people people met up the group that that kind of converged was in a mix of black block, camo block. So like people like covered head to toe in various various camo print. And they set off from from the RC field where the music festival was at. So they left what they went down Boulder Crest Road to the section of the woods called the power line cut. So to understand what is going on here, you kind of have to understand some of the geography of the Wallani forest. So we have like the Wallani People's Park parking lot and that immediate kind of kind of campsite. This is this is like the the eastern most part. And then there's the RC

field, which is just like right right next to that to the west. And then even west of that is Entrenchment Creek. And Entrenchment Creek kind of divides up this this this this section of the forest. And then everything everything west of Entrenchment Creek is generally referred to as like the as the old Atlanta prison farm area. And the power line cut is is pretty close to to to the creek. And to that that is kind of where this this this prison farm section is. And this is this is an area of the woods that cops have been more rigorous about policing, more rigorous about surveilling, more rigorous about having kind of constant surveillance and people on the ground. It's estimated that they're spending over $40,000 a day running security on this part on on the

on this part of the woods. Yeah. Yeah. So see, for that amount of money, they could hire like more people than are on the police force if they just used Fiverr. That's really that's really the tactic they ought to be embracing. And I think if they had used Fiverr, they might have had enough people to counter the protesters, but the overblooded police salaries, they only had like 20 people. Yeah, they did not have any. So this group set down Boulder Crest, they they marched up the power line cut. They laid out like tire tire barricades industry. And then upon them marching marching on the power line cut. After after they arrived near the near the near the police surveillance set up that we that we that we just mentioned, some of some of the equipment

and somehow burst into flames. People have blamed like shoddy construction. People have said that, you know, sometimes equipment just does that. But yes, no, so people people set set a whole bunch of police infrastructure on fire, set some construction equipment on fire that is being used to to destroy sections of the forest where they wanted to build a cop city. Police were repelled with stuff like rocks and fireworks. The the cops that were stationed there very quickly retreated. I think lots lots of stuff was set on fire. There was the the surveillance tower was set on fire. A bulldozer was set on fire. Well, I mean, it's it's winter. People need fires to camp comfort. I understand that. A UTV was some kind of like like a big like a big like

trailer like storage unit thing was set on fire. Yes. And the cops were very worried about that. They didn't know if there was flammable material inside that you you wouldn't store flammable materials in an easily accessible area. We shut down an entire interstate because we did that a few years ago. So we wouldn't in Atlanta. Atlanta would all of Atlanta collectively. So so this happened. A thermal chopper from a thermal police helicopter was was watching all of this. And honestly, the footage is pretty interesting. It is it is it is worth it is it is worth discussing how this type of house how this type of surveillance works. Almost the same thermal cameras that are on the Bayraktar drones that Turkey makes, by the way.

It's it's it's pretty it's pretty foocose boomerang. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. No, it's it's it's pretty it's pretty frightening with their ability to track into to track individual people. I also think it's worth because there's video of the cops being pelted with stuff, including fireworks. I think it's worth noting that like, while it is unpleasant to be pelted with the kind of stuff the cops were pelted with, you and I have both been pelted with numerous fireworks of similar size. And it is not a serious threat to life and limb. No, no, they're we survive. But it's it's modestly unpleasant. But the cops that were there, we're not very happy about it. They put out calls for officer in need of support and for

all available units in the greater Atlanta area to converge on the forest. People who were who who marched to to this to the section of the power line cut started to disperse throughout the woods. And I was back by the road watching this from hundreds and hundreds of feet away. Because I did not need to go up there that would not have been helpful in any way. But as this as this was happening, a whole bunch of police cars zoomed by. So I started following those cars. I went back to the music festival. I met up with with some with some other other media people that I was that I was communicating with. And then I got a text message saying that a cop showed up in the parking lot of the Wallani People's Park with an AR 15.

I started making my way over. And then as as I'm running across the music festival, I see a whole bunch of police at the parking lot for the music festival itself at the at the RC field. So I don't I don't make my way over to the Wallani People's Park parking lot where there's the air 15 because instead I see way way more police closer closer to where I am. So I I stage there. Minutes later, police start running into into the music festival. They start tackling seemingly anyone who's like by themselves and that they could like get their hands on it didn't it didn't seem incredibly targeted. It's this is something that will kind of I'll I'll probably like discuss in more detail once we have slightly more hindsight.

But a lot a lot of the arrests did not seem specifically targeted in the bail hearings from just yesterday as of time of recording. They said they were going after people who had mud on their clothing and like it it it rained a day before the music festival incredible detective work only only a true terrorist would have mud. I think a month and a half ago what Ryan Mills app tore up the parking lot so it rained the day before and anyone who walked through that parking lot or the trail system had to walk through mud you're walking through but also people are just sitting on the dirt at the music festival like so yes I mean this might also include like useful advice for people in the future because if the movie predator was telling me the

truth and it's never lied to me yet coding yourself entirely in mud makes thermal vision no longer function uh-huh uh-huh yeah um so police police started tackling people it was it definitely they were going after people who were like by themselves um and yeah people with mud the police alleged in their in their in their warrants that were read out at the bail hearing that they were going after people who had metal shields and they said that almost almost everyone they arrested was arrested carrying a metal shield now here's a few funny notes about that there was not a single metal shield present at all there were a few small plastic shields not a single metal one and in in looking through all of the footage of arrests the footage that I have that's been sent to NLG

footage other people have had no one was arrested carrying a shield let alone a metal one um so a whole bunch of the the reasoning for these arrests is incredibly suspect uh police so raided once tackled arrested like five people carried them out they raided again and this is where they started launching tear gas into the forest um I got gassed decently bad uh it was not was not very fun the first time I've gotten tear gassed in years uh old old old memories um and during this time it's like a kiss from a dear friend so that was exactly what I was thinking and I did not I I brought gas masks to Atlanta but I didn't bring them on the Sunday because it was a music festival because usually you don't bring gas masks to a music festival yeah I mean

the thing about gas the thing about tear gas and and gas masks is that like when you're used to getting tear gassed it's really easy to have them handy and get them on when like you're not used to being tear gassed you're probably not gonna bring it with you yeah so uh people got people some people in the forest got gassed pretty bad I mean the the whole point was to so confusion make it so that people could not hide out in the woods it was it was to make people scatter runaways so that they could be tackled and arrested um one person that was a national lawyer skilled legal observer was arrested um they're also a lawyer at the southern poverty law center uh this this this person was the only person arrested that I'm aware of that was released

on bail um everybody else is being held everyone everyone else is being held indefinitely that actually includes there was a second legal observer who was not wearing the hat uh so during the bail hearings yesterday their lord uh said that they were a legal observer but because they weren't wearing the hat and because they were not local they were not given bail it was reported there was like around like 35 arrests the night of yes uh apd released a press release that said there were 35 detainees which at the time they released it was a very interesting term because we thought 35 people had just been arrested and and were on their way to jail yeah but just uh about 45 minutes after that 12 of those 35 were released so this was very curious um there is a lot of theories

going on for what has happened um I'm gonna I'm just going to relay what I heard when I was listening to the bail hearings yesterday so a defense lawyer for some of the people arrested said yesterday during the bail hearing that um to his understanding the 12 people that were detained but not arrested were people from Atlanta and the 23 people who got arrested and charged were not from Atlanta and part of so what police could be doing here is basically if you're from Atlanta well we will ID you but we're not gonna actually arrest and charge you but we will arrest and charge you if you're from out of state so this so they can continue this outside agitator narrative so they can say every single person arrested after this protest was from out of state um

the the cops in the media have done a lot of weird collusion regarding the events of Sunday night um they've conflated the location of the arrests a lot police want to make this seem like they arrested people at a crime scene that like they they arrested people as they were like torching construction equipment which just isn't true they arrested people almost seemingly at random at a music festival that was like hundreds and hundreds of feet away like it was it is it is not an it is not an easy walk from from the power line cut to the music festival because not only do you have to go through some like pretty pretty harsh brush some woods um and like jump over a pretty large creek of the alternatively you have to like walk down a road which nobody did so the

police have done a police and and and like local media like large like large corporate local media have have tried to make it seem like that this that this music festival thing was just like a red herring that it's it's not it's not important but a lot of the people that that were that were that were arrested seem seem to be people that were just enjoying this music festival so 23 of them um have been charged with domestic terrorism uh most of those people are being held indefinitely for now uh they're the the bail hearing is going to get appealed to the to the superior court we'll we'll see if that changes anything the judge said that they were not presented with any evidence that these people did anything wrong but they still decided to not give them

bail um the judge the the reasoning for that was that the judge thought that people who did not have any local ties to the community could be a flight risk and some people who did have local ties to the community they said still were a threat to the community somehow despite many of them not having any prior convictions not not having any prior arrests it's it seemed it seemed pretty suspect during during during the during the bail hearing but that was that was most of sunday night eventually police kind of surrounded and kettled the group of people that that was still still at the music festival hours after these arrests happened they gave like a five minute dispersal warning and then they gave a 10 minute dispersal warning eventually cops let most of the people

who like gather who were gathered right in front of the stage leave that was probably like 50 people at that point because people throughout the night were trying to leave um as as police were you know like raiding the forest some people were able to some people were just like let go and like we're able to leave others were detained almost arbitrarily it's it's it's it's hard to say so that that was the first two days of the week of action and it felt like a week week what happened the next day so yeah the nonviolent uh direct actions and then the monday monday the events oh no monday yeah because that was only that was only the second day no monday is the city council meeting that we were in for eight hours yes yes so monday there was uh there was

an interfaith coalition of clergy that uh that had held a press conference outside of city hall um basically like endorsing the stop cop city movement or like clark how how would you describe what what what happened so there were a couple of elements to the clergy um we'll just call it an action uh the first thing was they presented a letter with over 200 uh other clergy members who had signed that uh denouncing cop city calling for an independent investigation into the killing of tortugita and calling for an independent investigation into the use of domestic terrorism charges to chill free speech uh and then during that press conference uh mico shaban uh called for land back and called for land back of in the willow knee forest uh

uh to the muskogee people to stored in um coordination with the legacy black residents of the area yeah so they they were both like uh talking about the need to stop cop city but also providing a plan on how this land could be used this this land that is that is leased by the city it is on de cab county after this press conference some of these people from the coalition uh gave public comment during the city council and that was most of the events on monday that i can recall oh there was the there was the poem in the forest that night and that was that was very enjoyable that was kind of the first time people like tried to go back into the forest since since the sunday night raid um and i think that started to slowly boost morale again yeah and i

think we should talk about also after the raid there were a few um really unique things that happened there were a lot of people who didn't have housing and they were housed by local activists there was the bus network was set up to transport people from the site where everyone was getting arrested to somewhere safe they moved breakfast offsite to a different location so there was a lot of work done and in continuing the week of action and providing some sort of infrastructure for all of these people who had come into town and didn't have anywhere else to go yeah once again the resiliency on display was impressive and people's ability to adapt to the ever-evolving situation was was tested and people adapted pretty well um tuesday there was there was

starting to be like typical nonviolent direct actions happening throughout downtown a whole bunch of banner drops happened around highways and interstates around atlanta people were uh uh detained for three people were briefly detained at the site of of of a banner drop um but throughout throughout the day there was people handing out letters to people to folks like the uh the ceo of norfolk southern norfolk southern uh alan shaw and then similar similar types of like nonviolent direct action were happening uh a small a small march was led from woodruff park to atn t and george pacific um there was like maybe maybe 50 i think 50 is an accurate number 50 people gathered to march well there were 50 marchers gathered and then

like 120 police officers in the in the uh in the surrounding area massive massive police presence police caused a huge a huge disruption to to downtown um that that's something we've seen kind of ever since the sunday raid the police have been incredibly heavy handed in their response to every single thing whether that be people handing out flyers or whether that be you know uh you know people at people at at a music festival um a whole a whole bunch of police were mobilized to stay night near the forest like a hunt again like 120 cops at least three or four different agencies uh bear cats uh helicopters uh i think there it's it's unclear what they were doing um this is something that we might we might speculate further on once we have hindsight when i when

i put together my my kind of my kind of a more more intense deep dive and then uh then today the the thing that me and clark just got back from uh how do you want to explain today's today's events so today was a lot of leaflet handing out and marching for it was a smaller group than the uh march yesterday i would say there was like 20 25 people yeah like it started off being like only only about like a dozen um and it slowly grew to like maybe like two or three dozen but yeah small small small group of people yeah small group of people and when they met at noon they they met and they broke into three different groups yeah and so the group that we followed was just uh they walked a little northward and started passing out flyers at the petri center

martis station they went to all three entrances and each uh group warranted its own police uh surveillance unit massive police surveillance unit it was following everybody around there was there was a swat vehicle parked right right outside uh where these people were handing out flyers um it was there was there was like 50 to 100 cops flanking people on like from from like from like different sides uh eventually all the all of the smaller groups that kind of branched off converged again and police then gave a dispersal warning to people who were on the sidewalk on a sidewalk outside of a hard rock cafe who were handing out flyers okay well i mean look in that case they may have been protecting people because you want you want to get folks as far away from the

hard rock cafe as possible garrison really want to go there and that's a real dangerous i was i was campaigning for all of the press gathered to meet afterwards at the hard rock cafe it was between the hard rocker guys on that one so garrison i watched you at the rainforest cafe you barely made it through that dessert that was different that was different i i did i did get food poisoning from that rainforest cafe i will i will continue to claim and i woke up with a headache for another an inexplicable reason not because you were carrying around a bottle of bourbon throat or a milkshake or whatever yeah yeah so so cops gave a dispersal warning to people who were not not in fact blocking a sidewalk we're simply handing out flyers you people were still

walking everywhere um so they basically moved to a different section of the of the sidewalk and cops kind of left them alone um nearby a group of indigenous activists from the indian collective i believe is what it's uh it's actually muskogee nation the muskogee nation uh went went to a a meeting that the mayor of atlanta andre dickens was having nearby uh clark i think you know slightly more about what happened here than i do yes so several of the indigenous activists entered so where he was having this meeting uh is is a mall in true atlanta fashion and um so they entered the mall and they they found where he was in the building and uh so micho kernel shabon delivered a letter essentially evicting the city of atlanta from

the wilani forest uh so they got in without the police noticing um and then the moment they got out a large squad of swarming mobilized they were they were not happy how close people got to the mayor so at this point we don't know what the full reaction of that's going to be uh we do know that the mayor ran away from accepting the letter and then one of i believe they handed it to one of the mayor's a mayor running there there are few few more beautiful sites than a mayor running away no more mayors need to spend time fleeing from their peoples so i think this this episode comes out i think like like late thursday night friday morning um thursday afternoon there so like we are we are recording this wednesday there's plans for thursday there's gonna be there's gonna

be a large march at six p.m i believe there's gonna be a youth rally at saturday and then on on sunday morning um manual toran torte gita's family is holding a memorial for tort in the wilani forest where i i've been told that uh they're going to spread towards ashes inside the woods and that is kind of the last thing that's going to happen um and so those are the things that have have not not not yet took place um so this but we've explained in in pretty in pretty in pretty excruciating detail some of some of what's happened so far so yeah that that's kind of the current current state of on the ground at the week of action um i guess robert do you do you have any questions for uh clark as someone who's kind of been on the ground in atlanta for years covering

stuff up city yeah i mean i'm curious what over the last few weeks like you've you've had some direct clashes with the police that have ended in a variety of ways broadly speaking is there anything that you're you're kind of leaning towards this doesn't work and is there anything you're kind of leaning towards this seems to work really well so there is something to be said for the more aggressive actions and i i think they serve their purpose and there's what's definitely something to be said for the forest occupation um it continued the movement until till there was a groundswell of support uh so at this point i think the the actions have sort of switched gear into more nonviolent direct actions as we're seeing this week and i think that those

actions will will continue i'm i'm sure the anarchist contingent will continue to do uh some other more aggressive shall we say direct actions yeah and and and all of these work uh we we have a large swath of different uh avenues of of engagement that the movement is has developed and each of them has their place and if they're used in the proper place they are used to great effect i think one kind of change that has happened we've seen a we've seen a bit of a decrease in the types of like nighttime sabotage like the the sort of like attack and disappear tactics that was was really popular in like the early days of the occupation uh of like of of like the forest occupation of people living and living and camping out in in the woods um and you know the

because like the last two much more like militant actions were done during the daytime during like large rallies there was there was the protest on saturday after tortugita was killed where a cop car was torched then there was this then there was this protest on on sunday night um that people that people marched people marched to the to the power line cut and then the police started doing repression at the music festival um but like those things were happening like during like before the sun was setting um so i think that that that's one interesting change i feel like some people are definitely thinking about this especially because there's been 23 people arrested during this week of action and they're being held in jail uh and we have no idea when they're

when they're going to be able to have the option of getting out so i think this is something this is something that people are thinking about in terms of how they are how they are doing direct action and how how their involvement in direct action will affect people who did not participate like with people at people at the music festival who two were not who were not present at the power line cut uh direct action and how some of those people are undoubtedly now facing like punishment from from the state um so i feel like that there is definitely going to be some discussion about that i've i've i've i've seen discussion about this in in the city um but i mean the week of action is still is still ongoing it is it is only wednesday it feels like it's been a month um

but it's only been like three or four days uh but i mean it's people people are in this for the long haul um we're starting to see more solidarity from from groups that are less militant like with the interfaith coalition right like you're not i don't think any of like the priests the priests or the clergy were there throwing maltoff cocktails um at the at the surveillance tower yet the very next day they're standing outside of city hall and demanding the same things that the people throwing maltoffs are are demanding and it should be noted that they didn't denounce no that it is it is solidarity across the movement absolutely they talked about how them as clergy you know and uh the in in the history of abrahamic religions how many how many people

associated and are the figureheads of such religions have been killed by the state and how often often these religions have been in opposition to the state during during their formative years um and they they i don't know i just i just can't think of any prominent uh christian figures or or jewish figures who were who were murdered by the state that's just not nothing's coming up right none zero yeah no i i grew up christian and i can't really remember anyone so um yeah that is that is that is the week of action so far uh there will there will certainly be be be a more uh a more detailed deep dive with like analysis and like you know a narrative through line in the coming weeks as we're actually able to like look back on what

has happened of course um interviews with more people who are who are like actually involved interviews with like organizers protesters forest defenders um but people despite the massive amount of repression that we've seen on sunday the the increasingly like heavy handed response police have had to both direct action that includes property destruction and nonviolent direct action uh despite all that people are still continuing to be in the woods they are not letting it scare them away uh the woods are still a place that the people are able to like exist in uh they they're still able to to live live together in the woods stay in the woods the cops don't like being in the woods no there's a real fear the that's why you're trying to tear

them down yes the cops are the cops are still very much scared of the woods um and and uh people have have have not have not let the the violence shown by police scare them away from from wanting to stay in the forest so that is that is something that continued every day there's been like guided tours throughout the forest showing off the different different types of plants the different sections of the woods different different old campsites that people have slept at um yeah it's uh it's been it's been pretty nice to see with the with just the incredible level of resilience well i know that that i i am and i'm sure many people are kind of watching this from a distance and uh very uh very happy to see that folks are continuing to adapt

and endure uh and and take punches it's unfortunate that the punches keep coming but the ability of the community to take those hits and continue iterating and adapting um remains tremendously impressive um i think kind of the note that makes most sense to end on is to say that this is still a winnable fight absolutely and that is a sentiment that literally everyone on the ground shares like we are at a point where like people keep saying like at this point they have to win like like there there is no other option than winning um and people have the ability to win this this is a winnable fight um and that is that is something that people continue continue to talk about and that that is why people are fighting so hard that's why people are are are

risking getting these ridiculous charges because they know that this fight is both worth it and they know this fight is winnable like these these are these the actions and the risks that people are the actions and the risks that people are taking are not for nothing like they they know that it is impactful and there is a very good chance that this this will lead to victory and will lead to the forest being preserved to being protected and being able to continue continue to grow it does have a feeling of inevitability that they will win that that we're we will win i don't know what the appropriate yeah way to say that is as a journalist but the the feeling is that that cop city will not be built and that is something that's shared i think by all of the

activists in in this city and i guess that the last thing i'll i'll say is uh atlanta solidarity fund you should if you've if you've been listening to any of our coverage you should already know what it is you can find the solidarity fund at atlsolidarity.org you can donate there to help the forest defenders and you know and anyone who was who was arrested in relation to this with with legal expenses lawyers that sort of thing um yeah well um that's gonna do it for this episode uh and we'll have more from you uh garrison and more from atlanta soon uh until next time everybody uh keep an eye on shit hey we'll be back monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe it could happen here

is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the i heart 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 the manawal caves i say the lord works in mysterious ways a brand new immersive fiction podcast well he ain't got nothing on the devil starring westworld's jonathan tucker and eddie gathagy from twilight every minute i remain in manawal county the thick of the fall gets tune in to uncover what happened when three boys entered a tennessee cave but only one returned this is the exact spot where we found the bodies julian the manawal caves manawal caves listen to

the manawal caves now on the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts i'm dr romany and i am back with season two of my podcast navigating narcissism this season we dive deeper into highlighting red flags and spotting a narcissist before they spot you each week you'll hear stories from survivors who have navigated through toxic relationships gaslighting love bombing and their process of healing listen to navigating narcissism on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts my space was the first major social media company they made the internet feel like a nightclub and it was the first major social media company to collapse my name is joanne mcneill on my new podcast main accounts the story of my space i'm

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