Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 8

Episode Date: November 6, 2021

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

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Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if you want in-depth news coverage with reporters? Or what if you want to know exactly how each team got its name? Well, you're in luck because the NFL Podcast Network has a show for everybody. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's real talk, straight from the source. Listen to How Men Think on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Look for your children's eyes, and you will discover the true magic of a forest.

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. No. It's fine. It's fine, Garrison. I understand that you don't believe in health mandates. We have to respect each other's differences. No, I have magic to protect myself. That's right. So it's fine. You use chaos magic to protect yourself from COVID.

Garrison, what do you got for me? We're doing the first, it could happen here, daily book episode. Excellent. Sexy. Erotic. So we were looking for spooky content for Spooky Week around Halloween, and I wanted to find a book written by an unhinged Christian writer about what they think Halloween is. And I found one with very little browsing. It was very quick.

It took me like five minutes. It used to be, well, no, because you did grow up in the cold, but you were too young to remember this being a super mainstream thing. We had no Halloween. I was a kid. We couldn't go trick-or-treating. We had like a harvest party the church put on. But first time I went trick-or-treating was when I was like 12 and I moved to Portland. No, I was like 13. It was the first time I went trick-or-treating. Yeah. It used to be something that got more mainstream play, the anti-Halloween thing. It kind of tied in with the Satanic panic. I remember the early 90s.

That's what this book is going to be about. Angry about it. But man, it just is like, it almost feels like homey and comforting. I know. Thinking back to that as opposed to... This book has been oddly comforting because it just reminds me of a childhood. That's just all those same stuff. I want you to read the title and the author of this amazing book.

Okay, so this is, wow, the cover is honestly just looks like a normal jack-o-lantern. It looks like a regular Halloween cover. Like a bat into a jack-o-lantern, but it's got like spooky white smoke coming out of it. Yeah, very scary. The title is Halloween Satan's New Year by Dr. Billy Demily. It's not a real name. It is not a real name. Billy...

Billy. Like, I swear to God listeners, B-I-L-L-Y-E. That is not a name. And the last name was... That is certainly not Billy. That's Billy. No. But the last name was just as bad. Billy Demily?

Yeah, D-Y-M-A-L-L-Y. Dim Ally? I don't know. Dim Ally? Dimely? I don't know. Nonsense. Complete nonsense.

Whenever you find a Christian book written by someone with doctor in front of their first name, you know it's going to be good. You have to figure out what kind of doctor. Guess what kind of doctor. So, first of all, for the author... Divinity, maybe. So, Billy Demily, the author, earned a theological doctorate of ministry in the mid-80s at the Honolulu Hawaii extension of the Western conservative Baptist Theological Seminary, headquartered

in Portland, Oregon. So, that's fine. The Honolulu one, headquartered in Portland. The branch was in Honolulu, but the headquarters was apparently in Portland, Oregon in the 80s. That makes sense. Sure. I'm not sure if it's still here, but...

You know, Sister Cities, Portland and Honolulu. She wrote at least 15 original manuscripts of her word, manuscript, on a wide range of biblical doctrines and subjects. Billy is a lady? I believe so. I mean, it has to be her pronouns. All right. I got up.

I got up. Keep continuing. I'm going to look this up. So, yeah. Billy. So, the book that we're looking at is one of her 15 manuscripts, self-published by Infinity Publishing. Yeah, this was published in 2006.

That gives us a good... Yeah, that's a lady. And if that's her actual picture on the front, she just kind of looks like a white lady. Looks like a white lady. Yeah. So, one of my favorite parts of the book so far is, right when you open up to the title page, it says, you know, Halloween, Satan's Noir, the title of the book. And then as a brief description of what the book is, it says, a systematic compilation

and narrative of paraphrased Bible scriptures. Oh, whoa. No, that is not her on the cover, because she is not a white lady. Is she not? No, that's her. Oh, so she's like a black conservative Baptist. Yeah, yeah. She just looks like...

Got it. She looks like... Kind of like a judge, honestly. She does look a lot like a judge. She has a strong judge energy. Judge energy. Yeah. Okay.

Well, here you go. I do love the systematic compilation narrative of paraphrased Bible scriptures. Not actual Bible scriptures. Wow. Oh, God. Garrison. Uh-huh. You want to guess what she has as her place of employment on Facebook?

Well, let me think. I don't know. I'm going to read it verbatim. Okay. I'm going to add in, and this is all caps now, the service of God. All right. She works out in the service of God. She does work out in the service of God.

Yeah. Who doesn't work out in the service of God? Am I right? Oh, fucking incredible. Based on this book, I'm guessing she got real into QAnon, but that's just based on what I've read. I think she may have died. Oh, really?

Well, her last post is in February of 2020. Oh, well, I wonder what happened around February of 2022 now. Maybe she's just not super into Facebook, but she's posting quite a lot prior to that. I think there's a decent chance. Well, no, she's not. She's actually not super. There's a decent chance COVID got her. Yeah.

Maybe she just doesn't use a lot of social media. That's fine. Anyway. Okay. Continue, please. So, yeah, I do like that she describes the book as paraphrased Bible scriptures, not actual Bible scriptures, but paraphrased Bible scriptures on the doctrines of good and evil, including an expose on the practice of witchcraft, magic, occultism, divination,

Satan worship. So, that is how she describes the book. Now, the book is like almost, the book is 200 pages long, and it is mostly the same sentence rewritten in like 12 ways. It's all saying about how good Jesus is and how evil Satan is and how people using magic are servants of Satan. Basically, it's just that for 200 pages, and she includes like a lot of, again, paraphrased Bible scriptures about basically like really classic evangelical kind of conservative Baptist

Christianity type stuff. So that's almost the book is there's not much Halloween content in this Halloween book. That doesn't surprise me. That's often the case with these weird like, it's just, they've got some bizarre theological gripe that's only religiously related to the culture war issue. So they've got the stuff on like, they've like stuff on like Zionism and the Holy Spirit. Oh, hell yeah. I bet she's got great takes on Zionism.

Great books, baptism, like it's a whole bunch of whole bunch of just like regular kind of conservative Christian stuff, except there is one chapter that is pure gold. Oh, it is called the Witch of Endor. Oh my. Oh, wow. Yeah. This is the explicit on witchcraft and Halloween. I'm very excited.

It is it is the best part of the book and I'm hand it's it's like at least like 30 pages. I'm not going to like, we can't read the whole thing because honestly, again, it is mostly the same kind of sentences, but I have highlighted a few, a few key passages from the Witches of Endor to distill out to us. So the first thing that first thing for when, when a billy billy billy billy billy billy billy billy. So in the section called what is a which is a good question, he says, which is a sorcerer or which is a Satanist, which is worship ancient false gods and practice magic magic is the

divinely forbidden black art of bringing about the results beyond the human power by use of evil spirits and including the devil and his demons. Magic always brings Satan's diabolical power into play. So it's really good. She she goes on. She goes on to describe the practice of witchcraft using like occult formulations, incantations, magical mutterings, peeping and chirping. Now it says, it says chirping, parenthesis, criminal, hypnosis, parenthesis.

Oh, okay. That's good. Chirping. That's what chirping is. I'm glad she clarified. That's what makes a good writer. Yeah. Is when you, you, you anticipate the questions chirping.

Oh. Chirping. Criminal hypnosis. Ah, yeah. That explains. A great writer would have further explained, is that hypnosis that is itself criminal? It doesn't. Is that as hypnosis on a criminal?

No, no. Has it hypnosis that makes you criminal? No, no. It does not give you any indication. No, no. Real mystery. Yeah. So she, she basically rounds up all, all different types of, of kind of magic and occultism into

this, into this banner of witchcraft. She says, there's, there's no distinction to be made between witchcraft and sorcery. Despite the erroneous claims that sorcery is diabolical and witchcraft is creative art. Both are diabolical and devilish. Yeah. I mean, I, I guess I do agree with her that I don't feel like there's a meaningful distinction between witchcraft and sorcery in that they're both things from, from, from your, the books that you read as a kid, but, so the, the first thing she gets into in witchcraft, which

I think is, is, this is a weird intro, but I guess it makes sense from like her perspective is demon possession. So this is the first, this is the first like technique that she gets into demon, demon possession is a result of which is of witchcraft incantation in diabolical witchcraft. The witch voluntarily invites the devil and his, and his demon spirits who are sometimes referred to as the goddess or God of, or the host of a particular names of a particular deity for each society. However, there's a difference between demon possession through deliberate invocation

than demon possession by demonic internal attack upon helpless and often unsuspecting suspects. Possession is often a common aftermath of certain, of certain forms of certain illnesses such as strokes. So. Oh, okay. I think that the most, the, one of the easiest ways to figure out if you're possessed is if you have a stroke, also if you have, if you have epilepsy or coma, this is really

the best way. Yeah. You know, my, my, my grandpa was pretty hard into demonology there at the end. I, jeez, oh man. And what, one of the fun things about this book though is that she really tries to hammer down and all of like the biblical examples of witchcraft, which there is like a few. Yeah. Sure.

It's the Bible. There's lots of wacky magic and shit. So she really tries to convince like her Christian readers that witchcraft is a current problem to be worried with because she is, she's kind of upset that people view it as like a fake thing. She's like, no, it's real. It's in the Bible. You have to be scared of it.

The God's word authenticates the reality of witchcraft, therefore it's not mere superstition. So a lot of, a lot of this is her trying to, her trying to scare people into believing that witchcraft is actually, is, is, is, is an ongoing problem. Yeah. Um, she says that, uh, the familiar spirits of witches spoken of in the Bible are referred to in folk history as dwarves, fairies, trolls. I don't know what this one is. What's, what's this?

What's this? Cobolds. Cobolds. You don't know what a cobalt is? No, I don't. Well, they're usually like a CR one or less little monster, little bitty reptilian things often found in dungeons. If you get a low level party, you want to bring them up against, I mean, cobalt are one of

the things that you could have them go up against personally. I have not, I've not encountered them in my D&D games. I like to get a little weirder. Yeah. They're, they're little, little, little, little, uh, lizard type, type goblin things. Yeah. So those guys dwarves, fairies, trolls and other small spirits of northern folklore, they can be friendly, mischievous or malignant in folklore.

They were purported as nature spirits. This is the other thing she really hammers down on is that if you like nature, that means that you're actually a Satanist. Okay. That scans. Which is pretty good. That reminds me of my in explorer nature, hail Satan shirt, which is my favorite shirt. Yeah.

That is me. That is, you do, that is a very good shirt. It's pretty good. So she, she traces back the origin of magic to the fall of man at the beginning of human history, as, as said in the book of Genesis. Okay. Is that where we got magic? That's what she says.

Okay. Um, she says, so basically the way she explains it is that, you know, like magic, this is something I kind of agree with. But magic is the idea of like, that you are kind of on your way to become God in some way. Um, this is, this is, wait, you believe that we don't need to get it in terms of, like in terms of like, in terms of like chaos magic, it's like, you're trying to like increase your own ability to have power over like your own life.

And that's the idea. So what she says is that basically in the fall of Genesis, when Eve tried to eat the, try to eat the food, fruit of the knowledge of the, of God, Neville, this was her, attempt, she's like, this was her attempt to like gain God's like power. This God can see good and evil at the time, man could only see good. So when Eve ate the fruit, she was trying to become like God, right? She was taking agency over her existence, which is magic. And her fact of eating the fruit to gave her the magic power to see good and evil, right?

Which is what, which we have now. So this is how, this is how she tracks back the origin of magic. She's a biblical, she's obviously, because you know, she's a conservative Baptist. She is a biblical literalist. She reads the, the Garden of Eden as a literal historical tale, not as like a piece of poetry or art meant to like symbolize things in culture. Like it was obviously written as. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. I mean, yeah, that scans. There's a lot of, a lot of misogyny in this book. Not from Billy. Sorry. Not from Dr. Billy. Sorry.

There is a lot. She, she rails against feminism later on. And there's a lot of hatred because like Eve was the one that ate the fruit. So it's the woman's fault. Like the woman is like the tempter of man. It's always their fault and stuff. That's very well-tread evangelical ground, although it is extra fun when it's a woman who is hating on.

Yeah. And it's easier because this whole chapter is about witches and witches are typically feminine. Yeah. But she does say that there's like wizards and warlocks, but she just kind of ropes them all together. I searched a second ago and I couldn't find any evidence that she wrote books about Harry Potter.

Hmm. So that's. This was written in 2006. So. Yeah. I did. I have not seen Harry Potter mentioned in this. So far.

That's fascinating. His boy that pissed off a lot of people who are otherwise very similar. Yeah. It sure did. Yeah. So yeah. Let's see. She is.

She is very concerned that that Satanism and witchcraft is basically a reinvention of paganism. And she finds this to be incredibly disturbing and tying to a whole bunch of like all of like the woo woo spiritual stuff of the nineties. He's also very concerned about. She says millions are now involved in some manner of ancient magical practice and rites ranging from walking on hot coals with no ill effect, smoking knives through flesh without creating wounds to reading from blind eye sockets or from sighted eyes, which have been masks

to magically filling decayed teeth with gold, which I don't know. Is that is that just dentistry? What is she referring to? Yeah. That seems like just, um, because I fill in it. I have parents who have like gold fillings and stuff like that doesn't. That's witchcraft. I don't think dentistry is witchcraft.

Well, in a way that it, it makes money disappear, but also it's, I would, I would compare most dentistry to more like armed robbery, but I haven't had a great dentist experiences. Yeah. I mean, I'm not a big dentist. All dentists are bastards would be my contention. So yeah, she, she, she says that basically the sign of the, of the new uptick in magic around, this is around 2006, this is right up to the end of panic, the sign of the end times.

And that's because the colossal revolt against God who satanic purpose is to instill in fallen man the desire to be a God. Do I say cool? That sounds right. Yeah. I mean, that is, that's also the Mormon faith more or less. I'm sure she has opinions about more, we're going to get to her opinions on the Irish later.

Oh good. Oh good. Oh, fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. She has a lot of opinions. I bet she's real, real punchy towards the Papists. So she does break down the difference that she sees between black magic, white magic

and what she calls a neutral magic. She says that the term black magic refers to the direct league with Satan himself, often involving an actual blood pact of allegiance. So that she, she thinks that the black magic is when you directly involve Satan. And white magic is merely black magic in a, in a, in a mask, it may deceptively employ the names of Jesus Christ, God, the Father and the Holy Spirit magically along with other Bible phrases and the Christian terminology. But this facade is covering its demonic character.

So she thinks that even though they may use, so this is interesting because like she could, she complains here that white magic uses the names of God and Jesus and in its magic. But later on in the book, she complains that no magic uses God's name. So that's a fun thing that we'll talk about in a minute. And then, and then for neutral magic, um, she says the devil shrouds himself with nature. He is referred to, he is, oh boy, he's that, that's, that's her take on Wicca, huh? He is, he is revered as mother nature and worship and adored by witches under this deluding guys.

Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah. The delusion of. Okay. So in neutral magic, Satan just dresses up as leaves. Yeah. Yeah.

That makes sense. Yeah. Wicca only gets one mention in this actually. She's talking about. I mean, she talks about a lot of, like she uses these terms very loosely. She's got a lot of gradients. Yeah. Yeah.

A lot of gradients. Yeah. Uh, she has a small section on magical ceremonies and symbolism and kind of actually lays out kind of how magic works in terms of like using like a, like, like this is like symbolic objects and incantation and like calling upon powers, which is a more like traditional magic. Mm hmm. I find it more fun to call on fake characters because it's very silly, which is more of a

more of a chaos magic thing. Yeah. Because the more silly you get, I think the more fun it is. Then we, she does have a nice section on initiation rights and rituals, which gets into the really good satanic panic stuff. So she describes the, you know, a coven of witches coming together to have sex with the devil, um, usually maybe, uh, in like a symbolically with like a male leader of a cult or something. But then she says, when the initiation has been completed, the devil worshiper takes

part in a parody of the sacrament. Many times bringing in the bodies of children who whom whom they have murdered. Oh, good. Yeah. That's the good shit. That's the good shit. In America alone, there are over one million missing children at any given time. Many of these children who are never found or seen again are victims of satanically controlled

perverts who do the grossest forms of evil. Of course. But many more are the victims of witchcraft and incantations and other rights. Oh, that's great. These children who are being stolen at an astonishingly, at an astonishing rate each day, they be stolen from unbelievers homes or they may be children conceived by the witches themselves at regularly held sexual orgies. Yeah.

Which is that that's an old one that witches are having orgy babies and like not reporting them to the government. And then killing them. Exactly. Yeah. The children are often offered up as sacrifice to the devil and some ceremonies that witches may boil the children's bodies, mix them with lobes and substances, or they may consume the children's bodies in the blood ritual parody of the Lord's Supper.

So that's fun. And I do like that this idea never went anywhere and is not and is not an important part of the US's politics now. No, no, no. Of course not. Um, yeah. You love to hear it. That's pretty good.

That is that is that is fun. Yeah. She she does have a small section on a pagan music, magic, religion and sorcery are some of the means used by the devil for the purpose of luring men away from the Christian truth. The heavy metal, punk, hip hop and other such abusing confating the Western and European world. Okay. Yeah.

Nope. Nope. Yeah. I don't remember when punk destroyed Christianity actually gets quite more racist. I'm not. Oh, no. Go for it. I'm not.

I'm excited. It's counterpart of the hypnotic trance, inducing, inducing drum rhythms employed throughout the whole world by the African nations. Oh, yeah. Part of India. Oh boy. Through the millions of which the insidious and evil message of the devil and setting them to sexual lust and Satan worship.

It is incredible that in 2006 she's doing the black people music is the devil and she is also like black, which is very sad. Yeah. It's incredible. Yeah. That's unfortunate. Yeah. It's unfortunate would be a word for it.

Yeah. Well, is it time for an ad break? I'm not looking at the clock. Yeah. It's probably about time for an ad break. Well, do you know what else? Speaking of. Yeah.

There we go. Oh, oh boy. Uh-huh. Yeah. Millions of missing children. Here's the ad. Yeah. Speaking of millions of missing children.

Yeah. Maybe some of them are in these ads. We're back. We're putting more children in the cauldron, oh, oh, we're recording. Sorry. Anyway, back to back to reading this magnificent 200 page book by Dr. Daimli. Did you read all of it, Garrison? I've read the first hundred pages because after that, that's about all you need.

It's just the same words rewritten again and again and again in different in different combinations. That's how a lot of these books are. It's just the same stuff. Yeah. So the next section is this is this is so I know again, I'm skipping over a lot of stuff. This is the most fun sections of her stuff on magic and which is what we need.

Now we have her section called Halloween, Satan's New Year. She starts by explaining which is celebrate eight major festivals or sobots each year. Halloween is the primary annual festival commemorating Satan's New Year. Yeah. He then goes on to explain that the sobot is a parody of the Holy Sabbath of God. Now this is actually really interesting kind of historical tidbit. So yes, the words sobot in terms of witches does come from does come from like the Sabbath. Yeah.

The Shabbos and all that bunch of words. This actually probably comes from the persecution of witches being heavily tied to antisemitism in the Middle Ages. Yeah. The skins. The first witch hunting book was called the Hammer of the Witches. And it is. Yeah.

The Malleus Maleficar. Yeah. And it is large port large portions of which are plagiarized from a previous book called Hammer of the Jews. Ah. There we go. In fact, entire sections are copied and pasted, but they just change the word Jews to witch. Man.

And you really had to put the effort into plagiarism back then because you're hand-in-hand doing that shit. You're not like copying or pasting anything. No. You're doing the whole thing yourself. Yeah. This is also where like a lot of like the pointy hat witch stuff, a lot of like the big nose with like a really big nose or a green oily skin, like all this stuff kind of comes from

antisemitic tropes because the persecution of Jews and antisemitism was heavily tied to the persecution of witches often are the same things. So when they would do Sabbath, they would they would say like they're doing like a sabbat. They're going to they're going to basically do like blood libel with children and with the devil, which is which is what a lot of witches are about like finding children and stuff because it actually is tied to all the stuff. Now I'm not saying we have to cancel witchcraft, which after is totally fine. You could do all this stuff.

It is really cool. But the or a lot of the origins of which hunting is tied to these antisemitic tropes. So anyway, she she goes to describe different like pagan like festivals throughout the years with like you like you will and all this kind of stuff midsummer, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the last one, the eighth one is October 31st or Halloween. She calls the the unholy satanic New Year. She says that the rights and ceremonies in which Halloween was originally observed had their origin among the druids.

In the course of time, there were added to them some of the rights particular to the Roman festival of Panama, which is which presided over their harvests. November 1st among the druids was the beginning of the year and the festival of the sun god. They lighted fires in honor of their false god. They believe that October 31st, the end of the old year, the Lord of Death, which she puts in a parenthesis, the devil. Oh, good. I'm really I'm really again very appreciative of how of how clear her writing is said the

Lord of Death gathered gather together all the souls of the dead who had been allowed to enter the body of another human being. The belief is that the root this belief is the root of the false belief in reincarnation. Now I did not fact check any of this. So I have no idea how how accurate these these claims are for what she views as the origin of Halloween. But I think they're pretty funny. I know like there is Halloween like Halloween kind of traditions are there is like stuff

around this time through a lot of like old pagan stuff. Like the modern notion of Halloween is really pretty modern. Like the whole like trick or treating thing and all like the way we modernly think of Halloween is pretty it's pretty new because I mean there was of course like all Hallows Day or like all Saints Day and the eve of which other people would do shenanigans, which is what we currently have as Halloween because the day before all Saints Day all Saints Day is November 1st. But like, you know, the modern notion of Halloween is not it's not super old.

So I'm not quite sure how tied these old harvest festivals really are to our modern Halloween. That's something I could look into later. But I just picked up this book and I'm reading right from it because that's easier. So yeah, so she views Halloween now as like as a pagan, the pagan holiday. This pagan festival Halloween is broadly celebrated throughout the Christian nations as a major holiday. In America, Halloween has become a kind of Saturnalia for children at night in which the rules are suspended and children venture out to demand streets and threaten reprisals

against the stingy. Yeah. Okay. I mean, that is a cooler way of looking at Halloween as a much cooler if it were literally the Saturnalia, children would actually take the role of the parents and make decisions for the family and demand. Yeah. I mean, parents would have to go to school.

Kids would have to go to work. That would be that would actually be an incredible holiday that would be that would be so many people would die in plane crashes, but it would be especially if you enforced it like you don't have a choice. You have to get on play. You're you are piloting the plane today and a bunch of other kids are getting on it to go on work. And all the kids on air traffic control, they don't know what they're doing either forcing

all of the soldiers out of the various countries we put them in and having like the children of special forces guys conduct raids in Namibia. Well, it is pretty easy for a kid to use an AK. So it is. It is. It is even easier. Yeah. It would be fine.

Yeah. A lot of people not going to have very successful heart surgeries that day, but it will be very funny in like a cosmic sense. Increasingly and alarmingly, this celebration is assuming dreadful expressions of evil and harmful acts are perpetuated against the children themselves in serious proportions. The treats are increasingly found to contain drugs, poisons, razor blades, needles, ground grass. Okay.

And many other harmful substances. Maybe she meant weed or something. Oh, yeah. I didn't. I didn't even think of that because that's like needles and grass. Yeah. I'm like, oh, oh, no, grass. So yeah.

She does seem really, really, really thrilled with this idea that the people are giving out free drugs, which man, what a dream. I wish. Halloween, like Christmas, is also highly commercialized and it's part of a major moneymaking event for the merchants. Okay. Raking in at the present time, second only to Christmas in that vein, Halloween is the satanic new year and is a celebration of the devil and as he is using the world today

to gain greater acceptance of the perversity as he continues to proclimate his doctrine of demons. So that, that is fun. And she has a very small section on old world Halloween traditions, which I'm not going to read tons of because again, I don't know how verified these things are, but I am going to read like, and she goes on to talk about like how like the laws against witchcraft and like the 1600s and other big fan stuff. She was, she was, but I do, I will read just the first sentence of the old world Halloween

traditions section. Irish traditions, devilish in origin. Yeah. Hear that. Irish. We're coming for you. Bring it on. Devilish in origin.

Various methods of finding the future in Halloween. We're accepted as tradition. So that's really all I'm going to say because I just love the line, Irish traditions, devilish in origin. Yeah. I mean, that's, I think every Irish person I know would agree with that. That's really all you got to say. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh man. It is, it is. Wow. What a book. It just keeps going on. She talks about like basically like the people's different, honestly, this section is not even tons about Halloween and more about different people's belief in witchcraft.

So like she goes through like all the laws against witchcraft in Britain. She goes against like, she goes, she talks around the witch trials in America, um, saying that there were witches, but she doesn't talk about all the, like, how many of them deserve to die. Yeah. Come on, you coward. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, it's, it's pretty, she has a little bit of, I, I, I'm actually going to read some of the stuff on, on, on, on America. Belief in witchcraft was common to the early settlers in America, the witches were charged with making Wexen images of their victims and causing their illnesses by sticking pins in the image or making it by sticking pins in the image or making them waste away by melting the images before the fire. This belief is held by the peoples of Africa as well as other pagan people in a, in a, in widely variety in, in widely varying civilizations and localities.

The early settlers do not initiate this belief in America, but found it already to be belief in the American Indians who populated this country. So that, that's her little section on that, which is a, I don't know, hashtag problematic. Yeah. I would, I would call that slightly problematic. I would call it slightly problematic. You know what's not problematic, Garrison? The, the, the products and services that are going to hopefully sell candy to the kids.

We guarantee that less than a third of them are responsible for the disappearance of a million children. Million? Million children? Yeah. That's the behind the bastards guarantee less than a third of our sponsors are responsible. Who knows how many are undocumented too? Well, yeah.

The witches are making themselves. Possibly much more. It's likely much more. But anyway, here's the ads. Here's the ads. Ah, we're back. We are. All right.

Bring it home, Garrison. Bring it home. So yeah, she does mention that the, the devil likes to withhold the fact of existence of witchcraft. She, the devil likes to hide it. So most people kind of live in the dark. Um, she says, although the imps which frolic on Halloween now are small children raping on doors and gleefully receiving treats, wrapping on doors, wrapping on doors, not, not raping

on doors. That's a very different, very different holiday. Well, who knows? That might be Canadian Thanksgiving. I don't know. That's Canadian Halloween. The night which was formally accepted as the time when witches met and demons in the form of ghosts and ghouls were likely to wander about has come to be regarded as a time of

merry making and frolic. The majority of people are so engaged and are unaware of the satanic consultation of the magic oracles and the Covens and groves on this night. Covens. Covens? Covens. Covens. I say Covens.

That's not how you say it. Well, that's how I say it. You just, you just got COVID on the brain. Coven. Coven is what you call a Coven that meets during COVID because they're not properly socially distancing. All right. All right.

There we go. But basically she thinks that basically these, all of the witches and magic doers are meeting all these ghouls in Halloween and people trick or treating her are unaware of this. The ghouls flooding the streets. Extremely concerned that children might like walk in on a ceremony and then get murdered. Very funny when you realize like how isolated these people are from the real world because they've never just like stepped outside during Halloween. Not really.

Like especially, I mean, Halloween in 2006, I was 18 then so maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think there was, wasn't a huge then like it's gotten kind of smaller every year. The biggest fear back then was like traffic accidents, cars and kids. Yeah, that's always the biggest. That's like the number one thing every year. I'm thinking back on it. My parents shouldn't have let me be a ninja as often as they did, but I made it through. Yeah.

So we're saying so many of the same words again because that's the most in the book is, but Halloween, Satan's New Year, Halloween has a long and dark history of devilish traditions which has survived both Christianity and the science for 2,000 years as to be considered the chief festival for the worship of the devil, which begins his new year. Halloween and witchcraft are the means by which the devil seeks to reintroduce the worship of old false gods by a synthesis of polytheism and feminism. Yeah. So that's what Halloween is.

Yeah. Polytheism and feminism. Yeah. Two sides of the same devil coin. I love to worship multiple gods and respect women. Just really, that's my way to spend the night with my ghoul friends. Yeah. Incredible.

There's also a real, here's a real, here's a real good quote. There is no question of the existence of modern witchcraft. It has been admitted, it has been admitted of by thousands upon thousands worldwide and growing rapidly in the Western countries, particularly America. The word of God makes it undeniably clear that witchcraft is real. It has existed at least 6,000 years and it still exists today. Oh good. Yeah, that's good.

6,000 years. Going good. Good for happy 6,000 witchcraft. I just like that. She had saw that it's been around for all these 6,000 years. Happy 6,000, 6,000 years witchcraft on, I'm guessing because it's the devil's new year, this is also the birthday of witchcraft. I mean, also just the birthday of the world, because if the world as we know it was born

when Eve ate the fruit and was in Adam and Eve, went into the greater world, if that's like the birth of Dawn, witchcraft has been here since the very beginning. Well since the beginning of like the fallen world, because you have to assume that they had 100 years or so beforehand. It's real unclear, it depends on what denomination you're in and what kind of theological viewpoint you have on whether there were people outside the garden. There is people who believe that, some people just don't. That is up for debate among different congregations.

The other thing that she's really concerned with is that witchcraft is making more people have sex. Because she thinks that most of witchcraft is practicing sexual orgies on quote every continent of the world and that's what black mass is to her. So she is very concerned. I mean, there's our sometimes in black mass is sexual elements to them that I hope so. That is that does sound much better, but she thinks that that's another one of the main catalysts of her being fearful of paganism and witchcraft is that is making more people

have sex. And again, she reiterates that this is just a new form of paganism saying that Satan's current day revival of paganism is a sure sign of Christ's second coming. And it's pretty good. And this is the section where she where she complains that magic doesn't use the Bible, even though previously she said that white magic does some magic, some which is drawn other false religions such as the Kabbalah, Sufism or various Eastern religions. But never the Holy Bible, the Word of God or is employed in their beliefs or practices

except in a paradoxical counterfeit imaginative magic rights and rituals performed in the in the Covens Covens in the initiation of the converts and their celebrations of Halloween and other satanic sabbaths. So that's that's that's what she thinks. I mean, but honestly, it might be Sabbath, but I pretty sure it's all like the Shabbos, it's the Sabbath. It's the Sabbath. I don't know.

I think it's fine. I've heard Coven and sabbat in the stuff that I've watched. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. Let's have let's have a debate.

Everyone, everyone at. No, don't don't do that. She also claims that this is this is this is very exciting. Only universities in America offer a bachelor's degree in magic, which I was unaware of. Oh, I would love a bachelor's degree in magic. I was unaware. Oh, wow. Man, because this will read this will this will make me consider going to college.

Now, a bachelor's degree. Is that a BA or is that a BS? I like, is that like, is it a bachelor of arts or of science? It really that's a that's a key question about how the school of magic is both an art and a science. So yeah, well, that's why I'm wondering if she doesn't say she doesn't say what university she claims does this. I mean, I've always wanted to open a witchcraft store.

So I may go back to college and get a BA in or a BS in witchcraft along with my MFA. I don't know my MFA. My, um, what's the business thing fill it in with the acronym for the business degree, whatever you get. I don't know. We I dropped out of college. Garrison hasn't gone. Yeah.

I went to film school. That doesn't count though. No, it doesn't. Yeah. And then in this last section, she really ties modern witchcraft to the rise of feminism, specifically starting in the 60s. She says the the preeminence of the goddess in witchcraft has made it attractive to some feminists in 1968, which the woman's international terrorist conspiracy from hell.

Oh, great. It was founded as a political acronym. Great acronym. Yeah. Amazing. And so the political proto script who pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur the pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur pur a whole bunch of weird stuff around how witches are using political feminism to inject cultural feminism to inject cultural witchcraft into the mainstream. This is all what the goal of feminism

is. So yeah, and she has this whole whole paragraph called feminist feminist witches. Feminist witchcraft is is at present the most rapidly growing segment in the witchcraft revival and it's from the spiritual score at the heart of the feminist movement that the political and philosophical women's rights tenants as a whole emerge to name one such tenant the right to abortion or more correctly phrased the right to murder children not yet born. This coincides with the which is present ritual practice of murdering children already born. So she thinks that abortion is just a way for witches to speed up the process. Just killing more babies to imminentize the eschaton. Just speed up the ritual process. Yeah, that is what that is her that's her main bomb at

the end. For sure. That sounds that sounds accurate. Yeah, she does just have a great section describing the different tools which is used and an an athlem a phallic penis symbol of the liberated unbridled unlawful sex represents the power of self will. It's pretty pretty good. That is good. Yeah. Sexual symbols are common in witchcraft and witches are unrepressed by God's mortal law in their sexuality. The use of sex symbols is rooted in paganism. So again, she's very scared that people are having sex and enjoying it specifically women. She's very scared that women are having sex and enjoying it. That sounds right. I mean, I hate it when the people pushing this line are themselves women, but it does. I mean,

that's a huge part of the evangelical propaganda movement. Yeah. See a bunch of shit Margaret Atwood wrote, you know. Now she gets to describe some of the coolest parts here. A typical witches Sabbath celebration will have a skyclad parenthesis nude parenthesis, which is gathered in an isolated place, a grove of trees, if possible, around an altar, which holds an icon or statuary of a false goddess and or gods and candles for fire, a chalice for water or wine, a container of salt, and a container for earth rather than the red and a sword or a wand, which sounds amazing to just have a whole bunch of naked witches in the forest around a ritual altar fire. This sounds like the best best time ever. It does sound like a good Saturday night. This does sound like a good

Saturday night. Maybe even a Friday. Who knows? We can we can we can get wild. So yeah, she she goes in to describe what she thinks magical rituals are and different things that she could do. Again, she is very concerned. Ritual sex is engaged in to intensify the magical power raised in the cone of power. Yeah. The combined wills of the coffin witches. The cone of power is symbolized for the cone shaped hats seen in typical pictures of witches in literature and paintings. Are you fucking kidding me? Are you fucking kidding me? It's right there. It's in the book because nobody wearing one of those hats has ever gotten fucked. I feel confident. Hey, I wore that hat. All right, let's let's move forward, Garrison. That's not fair. Allegedly. Let's move

forward. The cone of power. Yeah, the cone of power is is is incredible after raising and it is phallic. So it must be for fucking after the raising and release of the cone of power, a ritual coven communication with cakes and wine, which the priestess or priest has consecrated by dipping into the chalice and touching the cakes with other unholy tours are passed on from a kiss from the priestess to the priest. Basically, this just sounds like a fun time. Yeah, but I do love the cone of power, which I've not read in any other magic book. No, I've never heard of that. I've read a decent amount. It seems like pure her and I've never heard of the cone of power. Yeah, that feels like pure her. That feels like somebody who's deeply sexually frustrated

seeing a hat that's kind of shaped like a dick and being like, that's gotta be a penis. Oh, poor lady. I'm so sorry for her. Then she has a small section on Satanism, particularly like the iron rand version of Satanism. Sure. So I'm not even going to get into that. I find that boring and it doesn't matter. And she even says that these satanists don't believe in an actual devil. Okay, okay. Well, that's actually a little bit more nuanced than I expected for her. They just use Satan and Lucifer as a personification of evil. So I'm not even going to bother with this section because it's just talking about the dumb iron rand version of Satanism. And I don't care about that. Yeah. If you like it, I mean, whatever. It has anarchist stuff kind of, but it's also very randy

and it has a lot of like not great stuff either. I don't I it's fine. It all is more effort than I want to put into thinking about the universe. And then I think I think this could be I think this is our last our last paragraph. Here we go. This section is called titled The End of the Witches. Oh, no. Witches are children of the devil. The end of the witches. Sorry. The end of the witch's reverie before their idolatrous alters at their depraved sabots where they eat and drink and play their gross music and sing and dance naked and shameless and corrupt and defile themselves and desecrate God's holy Sabbath shall surely be accomplished by God who will put them to death and cut off their souls forever. Yeah. Among his children.

So that's that's the end of the witches, everybody. Yeah. We're going to be dancing naked shamelessly like having like an undeniably good time being able to dance naked. It sounds like a great time. Yeah. Listening to gross music and singing. What a time. Sounds like the ideal weekend. And then and then God will put us to death. And I mean that does sound a little bit like our last weekend, but it was very cold. So people were wearing lots of clothing. Yeah. I was very happy with the weather. That is that is that is most of that is most of the good parts of the book. Again, it gets 200 pages. Yeah. No, it's a nice breezy read. Grab it, you know, this weekend. It's only 10 bucks on Amazon. Wow. What a deal. What a steal. Yeah. And it is fun that she she

does. There is one there is one section where she like outlines what all she thinks like magic is like all like all of like the different groups. She puts them into a really nice little package, but I don't think I can find that because again, there's 200 pages and I did not mark off that section. But I think I think we decently got the gist of the the main main parts of this book. Again, most of it is just her talking about Jesus. Yeah, that sounds right. And the Christian soul. But the one which which is of indoor section is pretty good and honestly worth the read. So well, that is my first book report of her. It could happen here. All of you Satan's New Year beloved children enjoyed this this this book and are properly warned about the dangers of

witchcraft, which is coming to make your children have a pretty rad time. You're going to dance in the woods listening to gross music. So I hope everyone on this Halloween danced in the woods listening to gross music. I hope those of you who climatically could did so naked. I hope none of you got hit by cars while dressed as ninjas. And I I also hope that most of you weren't out trick or treating because I think the average age of our listeners is sometime in the mid 20s. Yeah, that would be a little bit odd, a little bit awkward, a little bit weird. But hey, whatever, it's your life. Do your thing. Hello, everyone. Garrison here. Just going to be adding in one quick correction for our Halloween Satan's New Year episode. So towards the end, we made some

assumptions about the the cone of power, which were apparently incorrect. So the cone of power does actually seem to be a thing inside. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you get to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like

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

is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus, it's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ritual magic. But particularly Wicca. So I'm not super familiar with Wicca.

This is not my system of choice. So I was unaware that this is actually a thing, but apparently it is. It is a method for centering or directing or like raising energy. It is less tied to the witch's hat though. So that part is more made up because I cannot find much tying the cone of power directly to like the cone shape witch's hats. This is mainly an invention of Dr. Billy from at least from what I can tell. But apologies for assuming that the cone of power was completely made up when in fact it is a part of Wicca. So sorry to the Wicca's and the more proper witches for that gross assumption on mine and Robert's part. Anyway, this wraps up our spooky week of content. I hope you had a good Halloween.

This episode should be releasing on Halloween itself. So I hope you are having or had a good time and hopefully you were able to celebrate Halloween Satan style just like it was designed to. So goodbye everybody. See you on the other side and hopefully we can do spooky week again next year. Goodbye! After 30 years, it's time to return to the halls of West Beverly High and hang out at the Peach Fit on the podcast 90210MG. Join Jenny Garth and Tori Spelling for a rewatch of the hit series Beverly Hills 90210 from the very beginning. We get to tell the fans all of the behind the scenes stories that actually happen. So they know what happened on camera obviously, but we can tell

them all the good stuff that happened off camera. Get all the juicy details of every episode that you've been wondering about for decades as 90210 super fan and radio host Sissony sits in with Jenny and Tori to reminisce, reflect and relive each moment from Brandon and Kelly's first kiss to shouting Donna Martin graduates. You have an amazing memory. You remember everything about the entire 10 years that we filmed that show and you remember absolutely nothing of the 10 years that we filmed that show. Listen to 90210MG on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I call the union hall, I say it's a matter of life and death. I think these people are planning to kill Dr. King. On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King was shot and killed

in Memphis. A petty criminal named James Earl Ray was arrested. He pled guilty to the crime and spent the rest of his life in prison. Case closed, right? James Earl Ray was a pawn for the official story. The authorities would parade over. We found a gun that James Earl Ray bought in Birmingham that killed Dr. King, except it wasn't the gun that killed Dr. King. One of the problems that came out when I got the Ray case was that some of the evidence, as far as I was concerned, did not match the circumstances. This is the MLK tapes. The first episodes are available now. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Colleen Witt. Join me, the host of Eating While Broke podcast. While I eat a meal created by

self-made entrepreneurs, influencers and celebrities over a meal they once ate when they were broke. Today I have the lovely AJ Crimson, the official princess of Compton, Asia, Kid Ink and Asya. This is the professor. We're here on Eating While Broke and today I'm going to break down my meal that got me through a time when I was broke. Listen to Eating While Broke on the iHeart Radio app on Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about, well mostly it's about how things are bad, but it is also sometimes about what you can do about it. And today we have two people who are in fact doing things about it. So with me we have Abraar and Jeanine who are part of the Common

Humanity Collective, which is a mutual aid group out of California. Hello Jeanine, hello Abraar. How are you? How are you doing today? Doing well, thank you. Doing pretty good, thank you. So yeah, we wanted to have you two on to talk about basically your mutual aid work and then also the sort of political aspect of that because I know that's something YouTube would be wanting to talk about that. I've read the media coverage of it and it does not ever make it into the interviews. So yeah, and I guess to start, so you two started doing mutual aid stuff with this group specifically around the beginning of the pandemic, as I understand it. Can you walk us through how it started and what you guys are up to?

Absolutely. And I think it's interesting to trace out the different stages of this work because it's very much been a kind of evolution. So let me go back to the very, very early days. And this is really the first day of lockdown in the Bay Area where we live. I'm a PhD student at UC Berkeley and as COVID was spreading from the East Coast to the West, we knew that things would quickly get shut down in California. And there was someone in my lab, a good friend named Yvonne, and she and I just quickly realized that this pandemic was going to hit, given the sort of crumbling public health infrastructure, the poorest among us, the elderly, the dispossessed, these people would be vulnerable. And as PPE just completely

disappeared from store shelves, these people, especially those living in cramped housing conditions, those with essential work, those in nursing homes just would not have access to the tools they needed to protect themselves from this disease. And in the very early days, when we thought that this stuff was transmitted via services, all of the attention was focused on hand washing, hand sanitizer. The problem was you couldn't even find hand sanitizer anywhere. So here we were in our labs and our fumes weren't being used and everyone was getting sent home. And we realized that we could pull ethanol from the scientific reagent supply chains and stir up some hand sanitizer ourselves in lab and distribute it just to homeless shelters,

to people who needed it in the city, et cetera. So this began as a very sort of low key quiet under the cover effort. And we didn't have a name. We didn't even know what mutual aid was. I think we were just following our basic instincts. And fast forward a week or two, and suddenly a whole lot of people got involved. We had this elaborate distribution infrastructure, which started sort of self-assembling. Lots of people came to find ways of getting the sanitizer to everyone who needed it. In the meantime, we realized that as the demand was enormous, we needed to come up with ways of procuring the supplies and mixing it at scales that we didn't have to turn anyone down. So we called upon lots of different labs on campus and asked them if

they could do this, if they could shift some of their discretionary funds towards getting these chemicals. And again, within a few weeks after that, we were mixing hundreds of gallons of hand sanitizer and delivering it to absolutely everyone who needed it. My phone was just getting called nonstop from the moment I woke up to when I went to sleep. I was forgetting to eat. I was barely sleeping, just responding to these cries for help from all over the Bay Area. And in that time, we met so many people and we figured out how to do this work efficiently and effectively. But also, as the attention shifted from surface transmission to aerosol transmission, everyone started realizing that, in fact, masks were probably the primary way in

which we protect ourselves from the coronavirus. And that's when a good friend of ours, Chris, who was a PhD student that he's now a postdoc, brilliant, creative guy, came up with ways of actually making submicron masks out of just supply chains that weren't getting tapped. So initially, these were shop towels and then he started looking at nanofiber material. And he found ways of for around 60 cents making a mask that was basically the quality of an N95 mask that could be made in just a few minutes at home. And so we suddenly just integrated that whole effort into our own and started just recruiting volunteers, sharing all of our resources and this large assembly network of these little pods situated all across the Bay Area. Each of

them with a team lead, with a little army, a battalion of assembly volunteers and dedicated drivers were just making thousands of these masks every week, which we were then distributing through the distribution infrastructure that we had sort of put together earlier on in the pandemic. And so we found ourselves, and this was still very much in a time when you couldn't even find cloth masks or surgical masks in shops, we found ourselves astonishingly being the primary source of this essential PPE for tens and tens of thousands of people in the Bay Area. And as we recovered in the early days by the Chronicle and the LA Times, loads of people started joining the volunteer network, we started getting donations. And that was the earlier stage of what we did.

And I'll pass it on to Janine to talk about what we did next. Yeah, so kind of as Common Humanity Collective was working on this project, Ubrar, myself and a couple other folks started adopting kind of a Democratic Socialist of America or East Bay DSA side of what was happening. And through this project, our intent was to have a little bit more political education and think really critically about how we could make this true mutual aid, which Ubrar and I have learned is really, really difficult to do, especially under capitalism. And so because we started this project around December, so kind of the height of the pandemic, we wanted to make it accessible for people who were

really COVID cautious. And so we would assemble kits of masks in a park with a couple folks outside. And then we would drive these kits to people's homes and get on Zoom. And we would have a breakout room for people to learn how to make masks. People, oftentimes people who had only come to the build a couple times, started teaching new folks how to build these masks. And in the other room, we were doing readings. We were reading, you know, Panna Cook and Jane McAlee side by side talking about trade unions and solidarity unionism. We were reading about tenant organizing. Ubrar, do you want to talk about Rosa Luxemburg a little bit? Yeah, I mean, it was an amazing thing. We were trying to sort of expand our own

political consciousness. And we did things like host a three part series, just discussing, examining, analyzing the political theory of Rosa Luxemburg. And we had huge participation. And this was at a time where in our DSA chapter, and many of the different committees, people were panicking because no one was showing up. And yet we found an enormous number of people joining our effort. And these discussions were so energetic and so enthusiastic. And, you know, this was a lonely time. It was a difficult time. And people seem to find something in what we were doing. What do you think about that, Janine? Yeah, and I think, you know, not only were people coming and participating, right? We had high school students, we had people who had dedicated the

pandemic to reading political theory, right? And so you have this huge breath of knowledge. We have more liberal people joining. We have, like, anarchists and communists, right? Like, all in this space that are actually talking together. And what was so empowering to me was everyone felt like they could speak. We had people that were really introverted, that in the beginning didn't talk at all, slowly start to open up. We had high schoolers asking really incredible questions, right? Like, is revolution even possible right now? And kind of getting into some of this. And I think one of the most impactful things was that we had these calls from seven to nine at night. And after that, we had what we call it late night, where folks would stay on

to, like, 12 at night and talk to each other. And in this time of, like, isolation and depression, I don't think anyone that I know at least was having a good time in December, January, February, right? People were coming together on Zoom and actually staying on Zoom after what we were doing to feel some type of camaraderie, to feel like they were part of a community. And we were able to actually create that space. And I think that that was something that, to me, was really incredible. And I think, you know, framing this also from the George Floyd protest that happened over the summer and thinking, you know, more about abolition, right? Thinking more about community building. I don't think you can truly, or I can't imagine a future without the prison industrial

complex that doesn't involve communities of care, that doesn't involve giving people both the resources and the love that they need to be able to not be pushed into situations where they have to commit crimes and also having accountability amongst each other. Not to mention, right? This work is really, really hard. People burn out. We're exhausted to be able to create a space where everyone cares for each other, where we're checking in with each other, where, you know, in the beginning of this virtual mask builds, I think, you know, a brar myself and a couple other folks were doing the majority of the work. And by the end, we were doing none of it. We had, like, been able to reallocate those tasks. We had been able to

develop leaders. And we had essentially organized ourselves out of a job, which to me is like the organizer's dream, right? Like, that's what you really want to see happen. And so that's kind of what was happening on the production side of the mask builds. On the distribution side, again, we're thinking, how can we actually make this true mutual aid? And so we started to partner with tank, tenant and neighborhood councils, which is one of the main tenant groups in the Bay Area, and working with them to go to food banks, right, places where people are generally low income, where they might not be able to have the resources to get masks. And we're distributing masks, asking them, are you having trouble with your rent or your landlord, right? The goal in this is to

give people the tools to organize around issues that are deeply pertinent and urgent to them, especially with an impending fiction moratorium, right? And so we learned a lot through this. We went to a lot of different food banks. We found, you know, some of them were places where people primarily spoke Cantonese and Mandarin. And so we, you know, used our networks, again, that we'd created through this project, these relationships of trust to find people that spoke Mandarin and were willing to come out and talk with folks. We found people that spoke Spanish that were willing to come out and talk with folks. And we started to develop relationships at these food banks, where we were able to distribute masks to people, talk to them,

understand what issues they were having, and invite them to come to meetings where they could actually get the resources to try and tackle some of these issues that they're facing. Abaraj, do you have more to add on the mask project? Yeah, I think it's worth saying that we're all very busy. I'm a PhD student while we were doing this work, you know, in DSA. I was teaching a class and I was doing a research and Janine is a extremely busy union organizer. And normally, you know, we'd come home after work and be absolutely exhausted. And this was very tiring, but we felt somehow energized. We felt driven to do this. And we found that lots of the other people who participated were also busy with their jobs

and yet would make time to do this. And in terms of our actual practice, in terms of trying to develop the political dimension of the distribution aspect of our mutual aid, there was a constant interplay between what we were reading and what we were practicing. So as we began working with this radical tenant organizing group tank that Janine mentioned, whose aim is to give tenants the tools to form tenant councils and tenant unions in order to use tools such as rent strikes to rebalance power between themselves and the landlords of real estate companies, etc. During that time, during our mask builds, we would then go and read articles and newspaper clippings from, you know, early 20th century when there were examples of, you know, 20 year old

factory girls in lower Manhattan organizing groups of apartment buildings to go on rent strike, you know, 10,000 families in one case to go on rent strike, these incredible, deeply inspiring stories where people suddenly became subjects of history and not merely objects. And I think part of what sustained our own work in this group was some similar feeling. And at the same time, when we were trying to imagine a future beyond capitalism, we were looking at moments when that future seemed within reach. And so we were studying, for example, Paris in 1968, which is a moment within many people's living memory, although not our own, and studying how it was that these protests began with the student movement and then spilled out into these massive strikes and all the sort of

self-activity that emerged from that. And there was such a wide, wide breadth of people who came to these builds. There were people as young as high schoolers. There were also much older people in their 70s and 80s. And when we were having this discussion, someone who lived through the 60s and witnessed these things, very up close, came to talk about Paris in 1968 and shared the wealth of his own experience. And again, all of this was driving what we were actually doing with our hands, what we were doing on the streets, what we were doing at these food bank lines. And so it was very critical that everything we were reading was somehow feeding into our practice. Yeah. And I think, you know, we had over 100 people participate in these mask builds and

I think one of the things that I really took away from this is, again, people were craving that community, they were craving relationships, and people came back because they felt that in this group. And that translated also as we transitioned, right? We had built a culture of friendship and of caring for each other that people wanted to continue working on this. They wanted to continue to be a part of this project as we transitioned to building air purifiers, right? As the, you know, you know, vaccines became more prevalent. Masks were still being worn, but to a lesser degree. And we started turning to fire season as these disasters, right, continued to strike, especially with climate change, only getting worse and worse. One of the things that I think is

really powerful about mutual aid and is really powerful about communities is that these disasters have been happening and continue to happen at a greater and greater frequency. And I think what I've learned from looking at, you know, the heat waves that recently took many lives across the Pacific Northwest, the really, really freezing temperatures that happened in Texas about a year ago, and especially COVID is that, you know, the government local or federal is not stepping in to help people. Billionaires are not really stepping in to help people. It's really only communities and networks of relationships that are keeping people alive. And the only way, you know, that we're going to get through this is through having those relationships, through understanding where

people need support. And we started to do this with the distribution of masks, right? As build relationships with community members in, you know, Fruitvale and Oakland, which is not a large, not a place that many people from DSA or from tank are living currently, right? And starting to build relationships with people that do need these resources in times of crisis, so that we know where we can plug in and also build relationships amongst our fellow organizers so that we can support each other through these disasters. And so as we transitioned to the air purifiers, we started, you know, thinking about everything we have learned from the mask project and kind of making that even bigger and better and how can we, you know, continue to take what we've

learned and change it and turn it into something really, really incredible. And we, you know, Chris, who Abrah mentioned before, who came up with the masks, came up with a really incredible way to make air purifiers that's like ridiculously efficient, is really, really useful, especially for wildfire smoke, but also for, you know, just people with asthma, there's a lot of environmental pollution in the Bay Area, right? These things can be used year round. And we began to build these air purifiers out of, you know, box fans and HEPA filters with a shroud, with weather stripping, right, to make the air like only go through the fan to make it extremely efficient and started to think about how can we make this like community aspect even bigger? At least this is

what I was thinking of because I had started to realize, right, I think the only thing that we can rely on is each other right now, especially. And so we started bringing in a bunch of different groups to come to these builds. So we have, you know, East Bay DSA, we started working really closely with Sunrise and developed a level of trust and reciprocity in that relationship that has, you know, continued to be really beneficial to us and really helpful. We met amazing people that came out, you know, they've helped fundraise for us as our funding has gotten really, really low because these air purifiers are not cheap, though they're much cheaper than commercially available. But we're, you know, giving them to folks for free because we want this to

be mutual aid. And so working with Sunrise, we're working with Asians for Black Lives, Berkeley Mutual Aid, Mask Oakland, who both came out to our builds, but also helped us distribute air purifiers to Reno and to places that had, you know, AQIs of 500, right? When fire season was so bad when the smoke there was just like unlivable. We were able to work with them to distribute these air purifiers where people really needed them most. We were able to, you know, continue to work with tank. Some folks from the IWW came out. We were able to distribute these air purifiers to the Segura Tay Land Trust, which is a land trust that is run by Indigenous women and is working on essentially giving Indigenous land back to Indigenous people. We

were able to distribute with critical resistance, an amazing abolitionist group started by Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis in Oakland. We were able to distribute to SRO a group that is working with low-income Chinese immigrants in San Francisco who are generally living in single family homes, right, with really bad air quality. And work with like all of these different groups, you know, Berkeley Mutual Aid. We're pulling in people from just countless networks to come and build air purifiers together. And we had, you know, an ex-Black Panther talking to someone from Sunrise from San Francisco, right? Like these just wild connections that are happening at these builds of people who are deeply political and people who are barely understanding, you know,

what socialism means, but are wanting to come out and do something for their community. And through these like relationships and networks, again, like we're able to hang out after the builds. People are able to like enjoy themselves. Everyone said they were having a really fun time, even though we were like literally doing work on a Saturday. People were still like, this is so fun. We had, you know, people baking bread and like fruit tarts and cheesecakes and bringing it. We had music. It was like a very fun atmosphere and environment. And despite the fact that, you know, it was physical labor and it was taxing. And a lot of times it was on hot days. People stayed for, you know, four hours to help do this and to do this work because they cared,

because they wanted to see, you know, what they could be able to do. And they also, I think, started to build relationships. I know, you know, countless people talked to Abra or and I and had no idea, you know, we've known each other for less than a year now. And they thought we'd known each other our whole lives. And I think that speaks. Right. I think that speaks so much to the relationships that we've been able to build through this. And, you know, I think Abra and I have met countless people and have developed like an incredible community through this work that definitely helps me keep going. I would definitely not be able to continue to do this work if I couldn't, you know, call Abra or at 9pm. And we talked for three hours and we complained,

but we also talked through like, what are we doing? And how can it be better? And how can we, you know, get through this roadblock? And I saw that in countless places as we moved to our own distribution. So we were partnering with these organizations, but we're also doing our own distribution, which I think is like a huge experiment in how to actually do mutual aid, which is something that, you know, when we talked to the organizers in our circles, we weren't finding answers to. And so we kind of realized like, we just have to kind of try and figure this out. But we would go out and do these distributions and afterwards, you know, have lunch with people and talk to each other like, what could we do better? What are we doing wrong? Is this mutual aid?

Like these are questions we're having, right? After we've been standing in the sun talking to people for three hours, like the dedication of the people involved in this. Like Abra said, most of us are working 40, 50, 60 hour weeks, and yet we're dedicating constant time during the week and at least one day every weekend to either distribution or a build is incredible. I feel like incredibly honored to be able to work with the people that we've been working with. But in our distribution, we started thinking about, you know, how can we invite some of these people to come to our builds? Maybe that's the reciprocity. I think true mutual aid is really about believing that the people that we're distributing to can also give back to us rather than seeing

them as like helpless. And so we continue to do some of our distributions with tank. And actually, we were able to do some of these distributions in a way that helped new buildings who were just starting to form tenant councils, you know, use the air purifiers as a way to open up conversation with some of these people and say, hey, your building is being organized. Remember how bad the fire season was last year, right? Like, this is something that you can use. And let's talk more about other tools that we can use coming together to really fight for changes that we can't necessarily make on our own. So that was happening. And then we also decided to look at data around where in Oakland are asthma rates really high, where in Oakland is air pollution really bad, and where

in Oakland is it primarily lower income folks, right? We want to be giving these air purifiers to people who can't that generally afford a $100 to $200 air purifier. And so East Oakland was one of those places. And again, through this network that we had built through the mask builds, we had a connection in East Oakland, someone that had that is part of East Bay DSA, right, that had done a lot of community organizing, and someone that was actually able to, you know, send out an email to her neighborhood and say, hey, we have air purifiers. And so we had people posting up at her house. So, you know, we were coming into a neighborhood that was not our own, which in some ways, you know, there's a lot of complications to that. But we were also able

to do it at someone's house that we knew. And our goal in this was to get people to come to our builds, to make air purifiers for themselves and for their family, their community, their friends, so that we then don't have to go into those neighborhoods, right, so that they can then start to own that distribution and own this project and like feel an autonomy over it. And so we also kind of door knocked around the neighborhood, talking to people about the air purifiers, about wildfire smoke, about coming out to a build, you know, about why this is really important, why we need people to engage in this project. And we distributed almost 100 air purifiers that day, I think, to folks in that community. And after that, that week, so we distributed on

Sunday, and then a week later on Saturday, we would have a build. So within that week, right, we're calling everyone that we distributed to saying, Hey, how is your air purifier working? Can you come out to a build? It's really, really valuable that you come out to a build so that you can make sure that your community has clean air to breathe, especially during fire season. And through these calls, right, I talked to someone who lived in East Oakland for an hour. And this person just started opening up and was so touched that we had done this and basically said, you know, no one has ever cared for my community like this. No one has ever even thought about us, right? And you see like, there are nonprofits, right? California was giving out

air purifiers to certain people, like it, there's a semblance of the structure. And yet, we were actually interfacing with these people who seem to have no idea that any of this was happening, right? They're saying, you know, no one else has been able to do this. And we're starting to form relationships and develop connections in these neighborhoods and make people feel cared for and follow up. And despite all of this work, right, no one shows up to our build that week. And I think Obrar and I both felt pretty defeated, right? Like, is mutually possible? What are we doing wrong? Clearly, like, class and racial barriers are really hard to overcome in this. And, you know, we're talking to our ex Black Panther friend that has continued to be a huge

part of this project. And he was like, you're, you know, you have to keep trying. You're doing the right things. And so we went to West Oakland, again, where we had a connection from our mask project that helped us set up in front of this corner next to a vegan cafe that serves trans POC for free, and has really wonderful food. We were able to talk with them, give them air purifiers they allowed us to kind of set up shop in front of their store. And there's also like a liquor store on this corner. It's like a very busy corner in West Oakland. And kind of did the same thing. We're handing out air purifiers, talking to people about the build, talking to people about, you know, why this is important. And we're also door knocking in the neighborhood talking to

folks at their homes, asking people, you know, who needs an air purifier, right? Like, these communities generally know each other really well. And we're able to talk to people who are like, oh my gosh, you know, like my aunt lives over there and her kid has asthma and like, you should go talk with her. And so we start to develop these connections and kind of map out the neighborhood. And, you know, again, we're following up, we're talking to these people on the phone, we're asking them to come out to the build. And we went out to this neighborhood again. So the second time we went out, I started to recognize people, right? And I started to be able to talk with people. And through I was kind of like door knocking, while people were posted

up by the liquor store in this vegan cafe. And there was like a church service going on. And I recognized one of the people there. And he recognized me and we're able to talk. And he was really grateful for the work that we were doing. And he started calling his friends over and be like, Hey, you know, do you all need an air purifier? Remember how bad fire season was last year? And also like, we should all go to this build next time. You know, we should actually be showing up and helping out. And word spreads so quickly, like communities are so deeply connected, at least from what I've like witnessed. And that week, again, right, we called everyone, we said, like, you know, we really think it's valuable for you all to come out to a build,

we want to give you like ownership and autonomy over this in a world where I think so often you feel so little autonomy and so little power when everything feels like it's crumbling, right? To have some semblance of ownership and autonomy to be able to do something that is immediately like visible and real feels really powerful, right? When sometimes, you know, talking to elected officials is moving too slowly because disasters are happening so quickly. There is a need to balance immediate need and system change, right? And I think you have to constantly hold both. But, you know, we're talking to these folks, we're asking them to come to the build. And we actually had a couple people come out to our build from our distribution,

people that had a really amazing time, people that, you know, said they enjoyed being there and took air purifiers back and gave them out to their friends and family. And we're able to say, you know, I made this, right? Like, this is something valuable. But also, I understand how it works. And I talked to one of these people, our next build is actually on his birthday. And he was like, I really want to come out on my birthday. I really want to come out and like help people and do this thing that has been enjoyable and is also like helping people. And that to me was that's so cool. Right. Like someone wants to come on their birthday to like build air purifiers on a Saturday when most of these people are, you know, working 40 to however many hours a week,

that they're willing to continue to even work on a Saturday, I think is a huge feat. And it's something that's definitely felt really, really powerful in this. Yeah, I think something that Jeanine brings out is really important, which is that at every stage, we've been sort of interrogating and examining the work we're doing and asking whether we are truly drawing out the full political potential of our work. So in the earlier days, when we were just stirring up bats and sanitizer and getting out these masks, you know, we did a lot. And, you know, this network of volunteers comprised well over 200 people. And it was sort of consuming all of our time. But eventually we realized that to a large degree, we were basically just acting as a stopgap measure

for government austerity for the big gaps left behind by this extremely problematic nonprofit industrial complex. And the work we were doing then we realized was sort of susceptible to cooptation. And it didn't necessarily represent too much of a threat to capitalist hegemony. And at that point, you know, we shifted into DSA, and we started bringing in a very sort of explicit political education component and started associating with an organization like tank, which has already been doing really incredible, radical organizing in the Bay Area, but eventually ran up against the limits of that as well. And, you know, DSA is an organization where a lot of us initially learned our politics, but, you know, in its current sort of stage,

it's characterized by a strong degree in our chapter of sort of democratic centralism. And most of the effort is being put toward electoral work and reform work. And everything that we were reading about seemed to point towards the extreme limits of that form of organizing and how these forms of organizing, in fact, represented sometimes the more reactionary elements of the left in earlier moments in history. And we wanted to go beyond that. And so we realized that we were spending a lot of time having to just sort of defend the work that we were doing. So eventually, we just decided to sort of reassert our autonomy. And as we shifted into the air purifier chapter of our work, that's what we were doing. And our inspirations are manifold. And as we were reading

about these earlier moments in history, something which had an extraordinary effect on me was studying the example of the Spanish Revolution in 1936. And suddenly I was reading about this moment in history that's been more or less erased from most of our textbooks or presented in a very kind of dishonest form. And what these workers and peasants had done in the midst of fascist takeover was create on an enormous scale, perhaps the most egalitarian society that I've ever read about, which truly represented a sort of liberatory, radical, early form of anti-authoritarian socialism that stands in tremendous contrast to the much uglier forms of so-called socialism that we've seen appear in the 20th century. And what I noticed was that this society in Spain in 1936

was absolutely replete with mutual aid. And these kind of anarchist tendencies had sort of penetrated the consciousness of many of the workers and peasants in Spain, you know, 60 years before the revolution, after Bakunin and the First International sent out an emissary to start spreading. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. These ideas and they took hold like wildfire and spread across the country. I think one of the most incredible things about that story is the guy they get sent from Italy, like as the representatives of the Indian. He doesn't speak Spanish, right? He only speaks Italian. He's such a sort of brilliant order and the power of the ideas that he has is so strong that it breaks through the language barrier. And it's this sort of, I think it's just this incredible moments that I think ties into a lot of what you two were running into with, you know, I mean, we still live in a place that's incredibly defined by language barriers.

And just the ability to break through that gives you this just incredible potential of power and organization. Chris, you don't know how much it means to me to hear someone who's as familiar with this as you. Yeah, it's the time when I talk about just total blank faces, even among my friends and comrades on the left, unfortunately. But yeah, I mean, reading about Finnelli, who didn't speak a word of Spanish, and he just went in with his wild gesticulations and his passionate rhetoric was able to basically inspire people with the radical politics that he came there to represent. And it somehow then took on a life of its own as kind of an extraordinary thing. And what I would do to take a time machine back and just see what this guy,

you know, who slept on trains and basically lived as a tramp as he went from village to village, spreading the word, what this looked like, what was he doing? And yet these ideas took hold in a profoundly deep way. And these notions of solidarity, mutual aid, cooperation, free association existed by the time of the Spanish Revolution in 1936. So these sort of dual power counter institutions were more or less in place. And these are the things which were the basis, the precondition for this sweeping egalitarian social revolution that then unfolded, which was unfortunately destroyed by force. But this was a sort of society that I imagined I might actually want to live in. And what you see is that there is a deep element to a sort of shared consciousness

that existed at that time. And it was quite an effort for people to bring that consciousness from sort of the countryside where it took hold more naturally into sort of the industrial centers, the metropolitan areas where people working in factories were, you know, found it a lot more difficult to sort of exercise these values because these things are effectively bled out of them as they work on the factory floor. And that brought a whole different meaning to the work that we were doing now. And we wondered, what can we do to inculcate, to nurture this kind of consciousness among the people with whom we're interacting as we do our mutual aid, as we do our distributions, as we hold these builds that, you know, even though

we had trouble getting initially a few of the people from our distributions to show up, there were still, you know, 60, 70 people showing up every other weekend. And now we finally started having the people that were distributing to show up, extraordinarily surprising and exciting. And yeah, this has been it could happen here. Join us tomorrow for part two of this interview, where we'll go more in depth on the political side of Common Humanity Collective's work. Meanwhile, you can find us on Twitter at happened here pod and also on Instagram, the same place. And you can find the rest of her work equals on media in the same places. What grows in the forest? Trees? Sure. Know what else grows in the forest? Our imagination,

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Time Out, a production of I Heart Podcasts and Hello Sunshine. We're uncovering why society makes it so hard for women to treat their time with the value it deserves. So take this Time Out with us. Listen to Time Out, a Fair Play podcast on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Robert Sex Reese, host of the Dr. Sex Reese Show. In every episode, I listen to people talk about their sex and intimacy issues. And yes, I despise every minute of it. I mean, she made mistakes too. That's true. She did kill everyone at her wedding. But hell is real. We're all trapped here. And there's nothing any of us can do about it. So join me, won't you? Listen to the Dr. Sex Reese Show every Tuesday on the I Heart

Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to I Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and about how we can put them back together in a way better than they originally were. And today, we're going to continue our interview with Janine and Aparar from the Common Humanity Collective. We've been talking about their work. We've been talking about the origin of the mutual aid products. We've been talking specifically about the political aspect of their work and how they're reading this sort of anarchist, the history of anarchist struggle in Spain, and particularly mutual aid during the Spanish Civil War helped impact and shape the politics and work that they've been doing.

One thing I wanted to sort of circle back all the way to you from the beginning was the stuff you were doing at the very beginning of the pandemic. Because I think this is, I've talked about this before on here, but the difference between a country like the US where 700, 750,000 people are dead and places where that didn't happen was the degree of community mobilization. I talked about this with the Chinese example. The reason that China, the pandemic, sort of got contained there, it wasn't because the state stepped in and was like, we're going to do this. It was because hundreds of thousands of ordinary people just took to the streets and were like, okay, we're doing a lockdown now. And it takes a

different form in China because there's a lot of different sort of things going on there. But that kind of mass community mobilization in the beginning of it just like it didn't happen that much in the US. And I think the world where we don't all die in the pandemic is the one where the things that you all were doing happen. I mean, one of the other things I remember, my sister is a bio grad student. And she was telling me about how, so one of the things, one of the bottlenecks began in the pandemic, and it's still kind of a bottleneck was about being able to do COVID tests. And bio grad students can do PCR tests, like it's easy, this is one of the first things they teach you. And that capacity just was never used.

It was just sort of left and sat there and rotted. And it sat there and rotted because the actual pandemic response was run by a state that just didn't care and a bureaucracy that even when it did care was sort of didn't have this capacity to mobilize. It's entire existence is about making sure that sort of the capacity for autonomous mobilization never happens. And I think that was one of the most interesting and powerful parts of what y'all were doing was that you just did it. And it just kept spreading. Yeah, no, I think that's a really good and important point you're bringing up. And I should mention that before we started doing any of this stuff with PPE, I was actually, you know, as word,

as the fear of the pandemic started spreading. And we finally had a picture of what the US would soon look like. I remember going to a union meeting among my fellow grad student workers and talking to some people afterwards and saying like, Hey, I don't think that we have anywhere near the kind of testing infrastructure that we're going to need to prevent the spread of this stuff. Like, why don't we just, is there any way that we can just take PCR machines and set up these little gorilla operations and start testing people for free? And unfortunately, one of the things I noticed was that people, you know, we're just like very confused by this idea they had much more faith in the state's ability to assemble these infrastructures. And I just

realized that was not the way in which I was going to be able to help out. And so it's unfortunate, but a lot of people have, even though they have these instincts for sort of mutual aid and for this kind of autonomous organizing, this stuff lies just below the surface. Often they don't feel actually capable of it. And I think more than anything, what we've done with this project is we've created a context and atmosphere in which things which people typically feel like they cannot do, they suddenly realize they can do. Again, it's just to come back to that idea that most of us, you know, we live our lives, we sell our labor for wages, a few people who own the means of production, you know, accumulate profits and use them to manipulate the state for their

own purposes. And this has an effect on us. I mean, this has an effect on dulling our consciousness. And it's an extraordinary transformation in our social relations and our sense of our own individuality when we do realize in these moments that we can be subjects. And so unfortunately, my initial attempt to try to stimulate some of this activity around testing didn't work out. But yeah, it just presents this recurring problem, which is that people are not used to doing this kind of work. And Janine and I have found many, many times that, you know, people are willing to come and use their hands and build something for a few hours. But then what we try to do is get them involved. We say, come to the meetings, you have decision making power, you can determine

the trajectory of this work. And that's always a very, very difficult thing to be doing now, given the way that sort of people have been conditioned right now. And I think that's something which is concerning, because these traits of subservience and sort of submission, I think are incompatible. If there were a moment of revolutionary rupture, I'm not sure that that would necessarily lead to any better sort of society. So I think this stuff is deeply, deeply important to get people involved in this kind of work. I just want to go back to one of the things you said, like you mentioned the community aspect and like those relationships. And I think that I know I've said this so many times, both in like my organizing space, and even on this podcast

today, but I truly have felt like building community is one of the most powerful ways to organize. And I think so many people in leftist spaces right now see organizing as like a place where you just do work. And I actually think that that's a really terrible way to organize. I don't think that you're going to have people come back, right? Like, I don't think that anyone is going to feel empowered. And, you know, kind of through talking to a bra, I've started reading this book on the free women of Spain and like thinking more about this also, right? And thinking about how they're talking about community building and how they're talking about like community as believing in each other and like helping each other realize their full potential. And as a way

to actually find equity and equality through like horizontal structures, through allowing people to reach their full potential. And I think, you know, these are some of the politics that have informed what we're doing that have informed how we're trying to allow people to grow. And so many people have come to us and said, you know, these mass builds or these air purifier builds are like the highlight of my week or the highlight of my month. Or I'm thinking about these like the way that you're structuring your distributions and thinking about how I can implement that into the work that we're doing. And I think that those things are so powerful when you're able to create these spaces. Again, where people care for each other. And like you're

saying, that goes a long way towards being able to mobilize when there are disasters, to being able to mobilize around protests, to being able to mobilize around these ruptures, because you have solidarity that's built through relationships and that is allowing you to build power. One of the things that you two are both sort of getting at is that, you know, there's it's hard in a lot of ways, because yeah, I mean, the US has, I mean, baked into just to every single part of your life is there's going to be someone who is above you who can order you and tell you what to do. And that's, you know, that that's that that's the defining characteristic of life in the United States. And the second defining characteristic is if you don't do what they tell you, a person

with a gun shows up and either just beats you or holds you away and slaves you. And, you know, that that that has these enormous sort of psychological consequences that, you know, creates this culture where people, you know, and this goes along with this, there's this whole the scaling process that's been a sort of part of the broad arc of capitalism that you all are trying to reverse. But even even, yeah, you know, even the people who have the skills, just don't sort of, they don't believe in their own autonomy in a way. And that that becomes this incredibly powerful, you know, tool of keeping people in line. But when that breaks, and when people start to see it, it can take time. But yeah, you know, the the the kinds of power and the

depth of the sort of organization that you build isn't from that is incredible. And I think this is one of the other things about the Spanish example that people tend to forget, which is that, you know, okay, so the CNT, which is the sort of giant CNT FAI is the giant sort of anarchist union that's that's running a lot of this stuff. You know, they're almost completely destroyed at the end during the over the course of the Spanish Civil War, and they're, you know, to destroy the Stalinists or destroy the fascists. And at the end by the end of the war, you know, that the fascist controls Spain for about 40 years. But even that, you know, they kill hundreds of thousands of people, they like this massacres is, you know, it turns into literally a fascist

police state. But the moments that the moment the fascist dictatorship collapses, the CNT reappears. And they even even in, you know, in 70s Spain, in a place that is in a lot of ways industrialized, they still almost overthrow the government one more time. And, you know, I mean, they're still around the sort of in much reduced form to this day. But I mean, once you build that kind of power, right, even, you know, even 40 years of fascist dictatorship wasn't enough to completely destroy it. It was, you know, it was still there sort of waiting under grounds. And then the moment there was a rupture reappears. This is a really important thing that you're bringing up, Chris, because I think it has a lot to do with how we just measure and talk about

success on the left. Yeah. What you're describing, which, you know, Spain is typically by many people on the left described as kind of a failed experiment. Oh, it was nice, but it ultimately failed. So let's look at Russia, you know. But some people have argued, and I think very correctly, that you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Once something like this happens, it's there. Those energies are there. They are not forgotten. They are not lost. And there's, you know, a very vigorous sort of left wing radical anarchist movement that's resonant and very sort of consistent with the earlier movement during the 30s. And I think that's an extraordinarily important thing to think about. We tend to measure these projects in these very sort of linear sort

of status terms. And we discovered, especially when we were doing work in DSA, that a lot of people were trying to frame our own project in that way. You know, what are the demands that you're making? What are the, what pressure are you exerting on the state? And so there's these criteria that people use to evaluate kind of the efficacy or the success of projects like these. And the Spanish example tells you that the way that these things work is in fact much more complicated and much more interesting. And that by assembling these structures, these organizations, even if at some time or another they don't necessarily exist anymore, all of those people who participated in them are transformed. And the people that they interact with might then also

be transformed. And so something like the CNT, which is, you know, an extraordinary organization, the FAI is what, you know, really gave it the kind of anarcho-sympicalist content that defined the quality of that revolution. That never got lost. That never went away, even when it seems to have disappeared. And so I think we have to learn to think about success and failure, you know, as we very simplistically use these terms very, very differently. And this is something which informs our own work when we're asking, was this successful? Was this not successful? I think that's a much more difficult and complicated question than we often make it out to be. Yeah. And I think there's something very specific about, you know, we can go into sort of

DSA-factional politics for a little bit. But like, I think like in some ways, you see this shallowness of a lot of the approaches that was happening in the DSA where, you know, like, if you look at a lot of how the sort of Medicare for all stuff went, or a lot of how the sort of Bernie campaigning stuff went, right? It was, okay, you know, you have these, you have these organizations that are like a mile wide and an inch deep. And it's like, okay, they're capable of mobilizing people to vote one time. But, you know, then they lose the election. And then what? Right? So they don't, they don't, they don't have, you know, there's, there's supposed to be this whole thing of like Bernie being an organizer in chief, and this whole sort of plan to use the

sort of list he developed as an organization, it just never happened. And, you know, it didn't happen in a lot of ways because it was just sort of they, they treated the whole process of building power as essentially a bureaucratic exercise, right? How many people are on this list? How many people are showing up to the state? Like, you know, and like how many doors have we knocked on? And no relationships? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's just, you know, and that's the, and that's the everything you're talking about with the fact that organizing spaces have to be more than just another, just another place you go to work, right? Is if, you know, if, if all you're doing is just replicating these sort of bureaucratic things, you're going to watch them fail exactly the same

way the bureaucracies do, except, you know, you're not the American state, you're not Democratic Party, you don't have an infinite amount of money or the ability to sort of, you know, you don't have the ability to call an RB to enforce what you need to do, right? You don't have, you don't have the fallback of bad methods of organizing, which is violence. And when that happens, you know, and suddenly, and you can't confront your own failures because you're stuck in this, things just start to sort of implode and you start to lose people and you start to sort of, you know, you see this sort of stagnation and decline that I think, you know, talking about, yeah, without getting exactly too much into what's going on in Amis Bay, like that's, that's been everything I've seen out

of it. Yeah, and I think to go kind of off of what Abraar was talking about, to kind of put this into terms of the work that we've been doing, right, you know, through the mask builds, as they were winding down, we weren't quite sure what our next project was. And, you know, we talked a lot about like, how do we keep this energy going? Like we don't want to just lose this. And I also felt, you know, a certain amount of social obligation to, you know, keep this community together that had formed during the pandemic. And so we started a book group kind of in the interim reading how Europe underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney and, you know, had around 30 people show up to that. And I think as, you know, you're talking about the importance of once, you know, these relationships

are formed, once these ideologies start to percolate that they don't just go away, right, these people that we, you know, brought into DSA in a lot of ways, East Bay DSA, came to join this book group and later came to join the air purifier project, despite the fact that it was more outside of DSA, a lot of these people because of, you know, what we had built and what we had created continued to be such a huge part and take on incredible leadership roles and, you know, facilitate this project in a way that it would not at all look like what it does without, you know, these people dedicating so much of their time and energy to this project kind of throughout the process. Yeah. And Chris, going back to what you were saying earlier, I think

I've seen a very interesting kind of reflection come out of some of these organizations and you see these different splits and sort of wings developing. But yeah, I mean, I, Jeanine is a very sort of organic, radical and revolutionary who I've learned an enormous amount from. But I think my own trajectory was much more characteristic of what you described earlier, which is that, you know, I'd put all my eggs in this basket, I'd thought, okay, Bernie Sanders, like that is the beginning of how we undergo a sort of democratic socialist transformation. And then, you know, in a few snaps of the finger, even though I'd spent just like hundreds of hours just knocking doors and promising all

these things to people who might, you know, vote for him at their door and all this stuff that and just sort of regurgitating all these slogans and talking, you know, rapturously about these welfare programs. I saw all of that dissolve in a moment and I realized that I didn't leave anything behind. And there was, you know, in DSA and our chapter, you saw that there was a large group of people who just wanted to keep that flame burning and just say, we'll do better next time, you know, we'll do more work at the local level to elect representatives. But then there was another group of people, it was much more disillusioned and really started wondering, is this what we should be doing? Or at least is this all that we should be doing? And you see

the same thing coming out of a group like Sunrise, which whose primary sort of mandate is to just put pressure onto Congress to urge the necessity of a Green New Deal or whatever. And nevertheless, out of Sunrise, we've met people who, after the George Floyd protests, after the disillusion of the Bernie campaign, have been led down the same radical path as some of us found ourselves traveling in East Bay DSA. And they're the ones who've now come to help our project and, you know, using whatever autonomy they have at the sort of hub level in Sunrise, because even though it's an organization with sort of paid staff and something of this bureaucracy, right now in this moment, the individual little local hubs actually have a surprising amount of autonomy. I really hope

they're going to fight for that autonomy. So they've been able to use that autonomy to actually put a lot of effort toward raise money, thousands of dollars for our work at CHC, and come to our organizer meetings, become a part of the effort, and urge upon their own friends and co-organizers and people they know in Sunrise to shift the direction of their work, of their branches towards doing more work like this. So there are these kind of interesting, different splinterings that you see happening, which give me some hope that we're not just going to keep running the same tape over and over again. So one of the other interviews we did on this show was with a bunch of people who were working with, basically, this giant effort in Atlanta to stop

this, like, just atrocious sort of destruction of a bunch of forests to create this, like, weird teaching cops how to do counterterrorism, enormous academy thing that's being funded by a bunch of the local corporations in Atlanta. And they were describing, you know, they didn't talk about sort of the exact same process of dissolution, but, you know, you saw there were, like, you know, one of the people with their hair was from Sunrise, and they were also talking about how they'd pulled together this just, like, enormous coalition of bunch of community groups that was, you know, and, like, their initial goal was to sort of, they were trying to pressure the city council into stopping the, you know, to not approving it, and that doesn't work. But, you know,

you know, some of the other groups that were involved in this are talking about, like, okay, well, you know, their planning is, like, if this fails, we're going to go stop it ourselves. And I think that pivot, right, is one of the most crucial things that is happening right now because, you know, okay, if you, you know, if you pull out your, like, policy-based diagrams, right, like, it's the United States, the policy that's enacted is the one that is the policy decided by the 60th senator. And it's like, okay, so, you know, even if we're going to try to do an electoral thing, right, you need 60 votes in the Senate, there is one arguably socialist senator, and we've never elected another one. So, you know, and you start looking at this, right, and it's

like, okay, like, you know, we elect, like, two, maybe three socialists in the House every year. And if, you know, if you continue at the same rate, it'll be like, what, like, 200 years before you have a majority there. And it's like, yeah, you know, at a certain point, it's like, yeah, I mean, we're like, we're not going to be around because we'll be dead. But like, most of, most, most of the stuff on earth will also not be around because it will have been obliterated, like climate change there, you know, and at some point, you have to get to, we're going to have to do it ourselves, because no one, no one else is going to do it for us. And I think the work you two have been doing is just incredible. This is an incredible example

of how that can actually happen and what, what that looks like. Thank you. Yeah, I think that it is so important. And I think that that's one of the reasons that, to me, it was also so important to get all of these groups at these air purifier builds, because I think oftentimes organizing is so siloed. And it really frustrates me. And people seem very, like, loyal. At least I found this in East Bay DSA to, like, their particular organization, any other organization they don't even really want to talk about, or they don't even know still exist. Yep, yep. And to me, like, if we can give people the tools to organize, I don't care who they're organizing. Yeah, yeah. But if we can also, like, have these groups communicate with each

other, right? Like, different groups are doing exactly the same thing, right? We have the eco socialist group in DSA, right? You have sunrise, you have the IWW, and then you have the labor committee of DSA. And it's like, sometimes there is cross communication, right? But to me, it never feels like it's quite enough. It never feels like we're really all working on this, or we're really all in it together. And I think we really should be, because, like, you're saying, like, there's kind of a ticking clock. We only have a certain amount of time to actually make the changes that we want to see. And when we're not willing to actually work with each other and communicate with each other, things are not going to happen as quickly. And so being able to have, like,

you know, a table of people assembling purifiers from DSA sunrise tank, right? And they're all talking about the organizing work that they're doing and sharing stories and strategies so that we're not all constantly reinventing the wheel that actually working together on this, I think is so, so valuable. And this is something that we've seen, you know, one of our friends who is helping lead one of the tank locals has come to a number of our events and was telling us how he's actually tried to bring things that he's seen that we're doing into his own local. And we've heard this in other contexts as well. So things spread. And that's, I think, a really important thing that, you know, especially because of Janine's, you know, just, just

attempts to try to get all these groups together into one place to communicate, to build relationships. We're now seeing what we've built sort of emanating elsewhere. And we're also learning a lot from all these different people in groups who come to our builds and then become organizers in the effort. And, you know, to mention someone like, you know, Gerald Janine referred to earlier, who is this wonderful, cantankerous, ex-black panther, you know, who has such an enormous history of experience. For him to give us that historical perspective for everything that we're doing has been an enormous boost of, of confidence. And it's allowed us to focus and, you know, just to reiterate what she said earlier, we were really

depressed when we went out and we were talking to people in West Oakland and East Oakland and everyone was telling us, we're going to come. Yeah, we'll show up. We'll be there. And then, you know, while many other people showed up from sunrise, DSA, CHC elsewhere, none of those people showed up. And we said, Gerald, they're not coming. What's going on? And he said, you know, keep going. Keep trying. Keep doing it. Do not give up. Do not judge from that one experience. This is really hard work. And these people have had the door shut on them over and over and over again. And they're tired and it's the weekend, but you keep doing it and they will come. And then the next time they came, we may not have gone there again, had it not been for Gerald bringing in

this enormous breath of experience to share with us, you know, at the end of our previous bill. There's this, there's this quote that I remember from Africa was it was one of the, one of the people who'd been heavily involved in the Egyptian Revolution 2011 had this quote. She was talking about, you know, I mean, we've been doing this for decades, right? And she's like, yeah, because you have a protest. And if 100, if 800 people show up, you're happy. And if 100 people show up, you're depressed. And then one day 800,000 people show up and you kind of just forgot that could happen. And yeah, I mean, that is something that, you know, yeah, you're like, organizing is not easy. You're going to spend a lot of time, like not winning, you're going to spend a lot of time

feeling like you're barely treading water. There's going to be a lot of time where, you know, nothing works and everything seems to be falling apart. But, you know, if you keep pushing, 800,000 people show up. And, you know, and suddenly the regime is like taking air is like, you know, trying to catch planes out of the country. And yeah, and you know, and you get to that that CLR James line about how the ruling class is not defeated until it's really until it's running for its lives. But, you know, they do run for their lives. This is the thing that happens. Yeah. And, you know, if we do this together, we can get there. Totally. And I think, you know, whatever our saying is so true. And we also, you know, in doing these distributions, talk to people. And I literally

would say like, what will get people to show up, right? There's a lot of like honesty in these conversations of like, you know, this is what we're trying to do. Like, there's a reciprocal relationship here. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man

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people have some autonomy and like say and like, you know, they know this community better than we do, right? They know like how people are going to show up and how maybe they won't. But Chris, just to bring it back to what you were saying, I think describing the kind of nonlinear trajectory of popular movements in history is something that we try to keep always in our minds. Things may begin small, things may seem small, even when you study the examples in Spain of sort of the groups of people who formed sort of the early FAI, who were just sort of discussing these ideas around a fire before they tried to sort of infiltrate the CNT. And then this became the sort of predominant mood and sort of ideology that characterized the CNT,

which then spread out and sort of characterized the Spanish Revolution at large and massive numbers, millions of people. And just seeing what happened with the George Floyd protest and studying the examples of Paris in 1968, where it at first just seems like small groups of students. And then just a few days and weeks later, there's thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of workers who are out literally just pulling out cobblestones from the street up against the police. And the way that these things happen is very unpredictable. And I think that's also a very important thing to keep in mind as we're trying to evaluate what we're doing in a given moment. Yeah, I think that's a very good note to end on. The struggle we have

embarked in is an incredibly difficult one. And we're not going to know how it ends for a long, long time. But that doesn't necessarily means it ends badly. And the kind of resiliency we can build is incredibly deep and incredibly powerful. Okay, plugs time. Where do you two want people to go? What do you want people to know? And yeah, we can link stuff if you want to send it to us in the chat. We can link stuff in the description of this episode. This is why we have editors. Thank you, Tanel. Yeah, I think definitely like our social media. So Twitter and Instagram is see humanity, see for folks to be able to donate, to visit our website, to be able to plug in if they are in the Bay Area and want to get involved. They can find ways to

do that through those social media channels. You know, they can message us. And then our fundraiser abroad, I don't know if we should just send the link or what the best way to do that is. If you go to commonhumanicolectives.org, there's a donate button which leads to the fundraiser so you can find it. Also, if you go there, you can see how they you can see instructions about how to make the fans and they are so cool. They're awesome. It's sweet. So go do that too because it's sick and there's also instructions for how you can make them as well. And we hope people do this elsewhere. Please reach out to us. We want to not be the only ones doing this. And so this is why we've tried to just put everything online so that others can replicate this model. And this is why we're coming

on a show like this and going into so much detail into our history just that, you know, we don't have to keep reinventing the wheel. I think, you know, Abar and I have learned so much from this project. And a lot of it really did feel like reinventing the wheel, which is unfortunate because I know that, you know, mutual aid has been done elsewhere. But with the organizers that we were talking to a lot of the things that we were doing, we were having to kind of start from scratch. And at least my goal is like, we're both very accessible people, like, if there are questions, you know, to be able to reach out so that we can, you know, explain our experience to other folks and talk through, you know, our relationship with Sunrise started because they heard about the mutual

aid work that we were doing. And they said, we want to do that also. And we're like, great. And, you know, Abar, our co organizer, Joe and I, and this woman from Sunrise met in a park and ate dinner and just talked about mutual aid. And, you know, the pitfalls that had happened and what went well and how we could do it in the future. And then like this beautiful collaboration began like Abar was talking about. So I think, you know, we're really happy to talk about where things have gone awry and what we've learned from this project. And thankfully at this point, too, like what successes we've had. Yeah. So yeah, go, go, everyone, go, go, go, go find them, go out and do communities, go do this themselves. And yeah, go, go, go get us another Spanish

Revolution. We need another one. Yeah, thank you. Thank you to you so much for joining us. I so agree, Chris. This has been such a huge pleasure for me talking to you. We've been covered by a lot of places, but never quite like, just thank you so much for doing this. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, such an honor to be here and so much fun to talk with you both. Thank you so much for having us. Yeah. And yeah, so this has been a Could Happen Here pod. You can find us at Happen Here pod on Twitter, Instagram and at CoolZone for just the rest of the stuff that we do. All right, bye, everyone. Executive Producer Paris Hilton brings back the hit podcast,

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happen here with me tonight as often, but not always is is is Garrison Davis and our good friend, Christopher Wong. We're here to talk about a bunch of stuff. Largely, we're talking about the increasing and escalating attacks on school boards and attempts to take over and dominate school boards by far right activists. And a lot of this is centered around critical race theory, a lot of it centered around vaccine mandates, it all kind of blends together like a good gumbo, or like fascist syncretism. One of the things I would say that's that's kind of most relevant right now, as we're recording this, I don't think the race has been officially called, but it's become increasingly obvious that Terry McAuliffe has lost his reelection bid and the new governor of Virginia will be a Republican who, among other things, has like promised and based a huge amount of his campaign on banning critical race theory and specifically like banning books and shit from being taught in Virginia schools. And this is all the result of a pretty far reaching and complex and honestly pretty pretty scary campaign. And we're going to talk about that tonight. Garrison, do you want to do you want to take it from here? Yeah, yeah, I'll do a little bit. Then we can move over to Telegram. But yeah, you know, like the Getty Lee of this. So this is your drum solo time. Yeah, we decided we needed to do an episode on this sooner than later when a few weeks ago, a large number of anti-vax and anti-mask protesters took over a school board meeting in Portland.

And the reason why that is special in and of itself, because this has been happening across the country for a long time, but the fact that they were able to overwhelm and shut down an entire school board meeting with hundreds of people like invading this building and shutting this down with just the sheer amount of like power that the people had there was it's notable because it's like it's it's a liberal-ish city, right? That's generally how people view it as. And we're used to this happening, you know, more like southern states and states that are more like overwhelmingly conservative. But when like a Portland school board meeting is shut down, people were like, oh, wow, this is like extra important because this is showing that it's not this isn't isolated to like quote unquote red states, right? This can this can spread out everywhere. Now, with Portland, it was it was a mix of like hippie types who are like anti-vax, but there was a good deal of like actual proud boys there as well. Yes. And it was partly organized through an organization run by the Bundy's. Yes, there were some direct ties and they they helped to advertise it. So it's there's a lot of I mean, one of the things that was so unsettling is that a lot of these people were not Portland residents, but they were showing up and were able to effectively like take over and dominate a Portland school board meeting, in part because law enforcement is never ever willing to do anything against people. There's there's a there's a lot of a lot of points here. So like, yeah, one of it being is like these like these big mobs are definitely able to benefit from being, you know, white, mostly middle class, like parents and stuff, or maybe not maybe not even parents can just be white middle

class, which means they can like storm buildings and shut stuff down without any real consequence because police aren't police and security aren't really going to get involved that much. And the like the Libs are not going to like really be pushing back on this in any kind of meaning. No, they'll just make fun of these people if they misspell something on a sign. Yeah. So like basically the idea for this episode is we want to talk about why and how school boards become kind of the new front lines for pushing far right stuff into the cultural zeitgeist because they've really become the new the new the new like space that people on the right are able to push things that are that are more that are more extreme and push things that are going to, you know, hurt, you know, kids mostly. So looking for this we put together a decent amount of stuff from organizing chats for how basically the right is talking about these things and how they're trying to organize it. And one really interesting kind of thing of note will come up later in the telegram stuff is that in I think it was when was it. It was late September. The National School Board Association's like the National School Board Union put in a request for federal assistance to stop ongoing threats and acts of violence against school boards like meeting members and people present at school boards because this has been ramping up.

This this was happening in the last last school season as well, but really the past few months the, the prevalence and the number of these types of like mobs, overtaking these school boards has become so much more common that the school board union put in like a like a letter directly to the president saying, hey, we kind of need help here. So it's it's not just it's this is this is a problem that's recognized widely even among people like on school boards because yeah they're getting like harassed they're getting death threats. This is becoming like unsafe to hold school board meetings. And whether or not you like our modern school system or not the resulting effect of this is that it's going to be hurting like kids and like help like it's a good whether it be through like COVID whether it be through teaching them racist like curriculums or whether it be to you know making trans kids have make their lives a whole lot harder right now all of this kind of stuff is going to be worse by this happening so it is something definitely worth caring about. Yeah, it's worth caring about all like it's clearly an attempt in order to arrest the the kind of progressive tilt that that society has gone through all of this is is a reaction both to, I mean, the religious right was initially more than anything a reaction to desegregation and the women's liberation movement. And what we're seeing now is a reaction to primarily the gains that LGBT people have made in the last like 20 years including the legalization of gay marriage.

And so the ultimate goal of all of this is to stop progress towards way racial justice to roll back gay rights to enshrine white supremacy using violence and that's why that's why all of these different school board meetings like the threat of violence from these people is a constant factor. There's regular discussion of it there's like I mean that's why the Proud Boys are showing up is to be a death squad, you know a little precursor death squad they're not quite willing to start and start pulling triggers yet, but they want people to know that it's possible they want to scare people away from getting involved in local politics unless they adhere to a very specific far right political ideology. It's working because a lot of these school boards are getting these school board meetings are just getting shut down like they just can't have them in person or sometimes not at all because they'll just they'll like zoom bomb like it's not like they're just shutting down so they cannot take place or school by members are afraid to go out in public because these people are going to hurt them. And this is like a lot of people involved in this are maybe not themselves like Proud Boys like they're not super like they're individually are more kind of regular Republicans in these states but the reason why it gets so extreme and it accelerates so quickly is mostly because of how these organizing efforts take place and also because of stuff like Fox News and Newsmax and OAN like pushing people further right the past for years but like specifically the method of organizing on apps like Telegram and Facebook groups. This is the thing common on the internet but like it rewards accelerationism it rewards the most extreme takes those are ones get shared the most. So even if you know this is just some mom in her 40s who's

not a proud boy by any means she's she still poses a threat in this in this way because she's boosting this same rhetoric as part of these same organizing channels that are full of like actual fascists. There's a decent amount of very popular posts from very popular channels I pulled that talks about the Jews in the school boards and we'll get to that kind of stuff shortly. So there Robert do you want to start on the Telegram with the the whole the whole school board Telegram channel that is popped up by no means the most popular to Telegram channel for organizing but it is specifically dedicated to school boards because of how Telegram works this channel gets shared around a lot in other much bigger channels. Yeah and just so you know so the way Telegram works if you're a decent person and you don't live in a country where Telegram is a legitimately good choice for you there's some areas where it's perfectly normal social media network but for the most part in the United States it's used by fascists and weirdos. So if you're fortunate enough to not use Telegram the way it works is you have open groups and closed groups open groups are anyone can view them. You don't expose yourself by looking at them and people largely just kind of post images memes videos and then can comment on them and a lot of what's posted in any given telegram channel is shared from another telegram

channel. So for people like Garrison and I who research extremism one of the uses of Telegram is that by looking at what's being shared in one group from other groups you can actually start to build networks and see oh there's affinity between these two groups because this group may claim that they're just concerned conservatives but they're sharing all of this all of this content from this far right you know Pepe group that's also sharing a lot of neo Nazi content. And you can see there's a lot of affinity between the other thing that happens is that these channels that are getting big and being in are being used for this kind of like right wing organizing who present themselves as more just like regular conservative channels if you I've been in this channel for like years at this point and this channel used to be a like proud boy channel they just changed their name. Yeah, it's like that happens all the time where a lot of the big organizing channels used to be like openly violent organizing like for different mobs to go beat up people and now they've rebranded to make them appeal more to like just regular Trump voters. Yeah, that is the other thing that happens all the time and one of the main channels that we'll be talking about today is is one of these one of these channels that used to be a proud boy thing and is now just kind of right wing organizing in general. Yeah, and it's I don't know I'm just going to get into it so actually you know what I'm going to get into before I start talking about fascists on telegram trying to destroy the concept of democracy. You know what else is trying to destroy the concept of democracy that's right Chris products and services. That's right. Oh my God we are just having a great time here so let's talk about stand for students which is a the telegram channel that

Garrison pointed out to me and I spent more time than I really wanted to yeah that's never never never a good idea. So the stuff in here. This is number one on the surface a much more moderate group these people are not ranting about like Jews destroying civilization or the need to like execute black people or something like that. The stuff in here runs the gamut from like one of the first things I found was a clip from Jesse Ventura wrestler predator star and former governor once had a conspiracy TV show. There's a popular clip and anti vaccine circles from it where he's talking with Alex Jones about the Bilderberg group and stuff so I found that in there, which is like pretty garden variety like early 2000s conspiracy nonsense definitely like. Oh yeah these are like older people like I don't think quite mostly boomers but definitely Gen X and stuff like folks who are in like their 40s and 50s. This is the kind of shit that they would have been like exposed to in their late 20s and whatnot. One of the posters I found commenting on that video said quote aired on TV in 2009 about a plan for depopulation through a virus and injections too much of a coincidence. And another responded to this I was never a huge Alex Jones fan but he was right all along. My kids were born in the early 80s and I refused their vaxes way back then. Unfortunately one of them is now a late 30s CNN jab zombie and has infected my grandkids with this and spare experimental treatment. I'm done, which is silly, but it also keys you into like these are it's what you see a lot with QAnon right it's these folks that they're getting brought in on to telegraph.

It's terrible that this person this lady who has to be what in her 50s 60s yeah my parents age so boomer is on telegram which two years ago even was the only Americans who were fine were like extremely online Nazi weirdos. Yeah I remember doing like old trainings like yeah it was over over two years ago and telegram was nowhere near this prevalent for like regular organizing. And this is a result of of the D platforming of folks in the wake of the capital attack but anyway we don't need to get too much into that right now. So I want to talk a little bit more about some of the things folks are sharing in this in this channel which is again kind of like, I'm going to guess everyone here is kind of late 30s to maybe 60s 50s 60s. There's one local story that it was actually very popular among a lot of like lefty folks on Twitter of this like group of dads who showed up to stop there's like an epidemic of fighting in their school or something and they showed up to do like a community policing or community self defense sort of thing. It was celebrated by a lot of folks because it was like oh hey this is, you know, a way that communities can protect themselves without cops yada yada yada, which is a nice thing to see. It was also celebrated by these people by people in this channel. And specifically the clip of the news story covering this I found was from the Pepe lives matter channel, which is, you know, an outright channel like in it. Again, as we were talking about earlier, the Pepe lives isn't all like the way full Nazi piled stuff. But it shares a lot of stuff from channels that are straight up Nazis and so you can you can see already this like lady in her 60s who's probably was some pretty normal boomer three years ago is now two steps away from Adam Waffen type motherfuckers.

That's just the way telegram works. And they're all kind of bonding over. Again, this is not a bad story what these local dads did, but it very much ties into this idea of like, we got to get all these parents together and take action in the real world like you can see. And that's going to that's going to go towards taking action against the people you don't want showing up in your school meeting like black children and like, yes, yes, yes. Yeah, yeah, community self defense is great. But also, it really depends on what community is defending itself from what. So that's a, we'll probably have to talk about that more at some point in the future. But yeah, another thing I found on that channel was video this this I dug into a bit so there was this video that was claimed to be an ad it was in fact an ad that Comcast had refused to air and the video this at this unaired ad claim that it was about it was telling the story of a 13 year old girl Maddie DeGray, who was vaccinated she was part of a Pfizer trial and had she claims like a disastrously bad reaction. An ad about her situation was rejected by Comcast. And this girl like has done the whole right wing in her I'm guessing her parents are the drivers done the whole right wing media kind of circuit at this point. The fact that Comcast banned the ad is what the people in this telegram channel were yelling about. And I want to actually quote from the an article about why Comcast rejected it because it makes clear what's actually happening here.

Comcast is said to have told the ads buyer it was rejected because it needed substantiation and all graphic images needed to be removed documents reportedly submitted for substantiation included the girls complete medical records which are said to have outlined symptoms such as black blood pressure and pulse muscle spasms muscle tremors headaches brain fog mixing up words and the inability to walk and cough. So you've got this case where number one there's graphic images and number two there's documentation that this girl has symptoms but there's not documentation that they're tied in any way to the vaccine like it's just one of these. The Comcast is being careful to not spread unsubstantiated shit about vaccine reactions and stuff. Within the telegram channel the focus is entirely on like how this is evidence of this conspiracy. They're suppressing the information. Suppressing information. One response was why in heaven's name don't these parents do their research before having their kids vaccinated.

My heart goes out to the precious child and family what a lesson to learn for so many parents never too late to educate yourselves people. Also I want to point out just the spelling and the. There is an upsetting amount of emojis that is honestly I couldn't care less never never to with one oh late to educate your space selves. It's just again and now I'm doing the. You're doing the thing. I'm doing the thing. I tried not to I did try to give it a straight read through. It can be challenging when it is like a good.

Very funny. It's very funny. Yeah but I think you know this is this goes back to the whole point about how this medicalization works right which is you know you have. Especially with anti-vax stuff that has this sort of larger base from just like regular peer like heart rate Nazi stuff. You get to see people who you know otherwise probably would be a vaguely normal person very very quickly get all this stuff and very quickly just go off the deep end. They're not like yeah it's these it is it's hard to like say like these are all extremists because like they themselves aren't extremists. They're just surrounded by so much content that is made by extremists that it's making them do these things which is how which is how extremism works right. Yeah but it's challenging because like when you try to explain this to someone you're like no this is obviously just like a regular grandma or something right.

Yeah and it's hard to explain to them how fast this thing can move to the point where they're showing up at a school board with their grandkids children yelling at like teachers and stuff. Yeah and it's not that this lady is a Nazi it's that this lady can be through the process you just outlined convinced to stand up next to a Nazi and like defend his right to do violence to people. She has been convinced are present a threat to the lives of her grandchildren which is people may say like the whole like oh it's not worth parsing out that much if you're standing next to a Nazi or a Nazi. But like I would argue no what's actually the logistics of what is happening here are much more dangerous than a grandma got radicalized into national socialism. Anyway another meme I found it was a screen grab from fucking Shawshank Redemption with Morgan Freeman and whatever one of the white dudes in that movie in prison jumpsuits sitting next to each other and it's the text on it is what are you in for. I spoke up at a school board meeting which you see a lot of stuff like this idea that they're going to jail they're going to get rated by the FBI because they're like showing up at school boards to protest vaccine mandates and mask mandates. And then like in the middle of all this stuff mostly talking about like anti-vax shit there's also this post talking about how this post that's a video of a woman at a school board talking about how a book needed to be banned and she's reading it the book she's reading is a queer memoir. And I'll talk about I'll talk about this more at the end but you can definitely mention it here because it's a lot it's a it's a gay it's a gay coming of age story right and as a result there's a couple of.

Simigraphic scenes in it and she like gets up in front of the school board and reads this and argues that it's basically like pornography for children. They think it's child pornography yeah that's what their marketing is mistaking what child pornography is they're trying to they're trying to get all the people at the school board either killed or arrested over this that is their goal and I'll talk about this specific instance later because it keeps coming up with all of these channels. Yes. And it's one of the main things that links someone from like a son on red channel to a channel like this. Yeah during the summer of 2020 some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series alphabet boys as the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of alphabet boys we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his heart was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and on the gun badass way and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to alphabet boys on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called in sync. What you may not know is that when I was 23 I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there as you can imagine I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth his beloved country the Soviet Union is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science. The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole.

My youngest I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match. And when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. One of the main things they've been using the past few weeks like all else is like current.

This is like the past few weeks. This is this though has been going on for a while. You've seen a lot of in like the libertarian right wing a lot of like kill your local pedophile shirts because who's going to. And a lot most people don't think like who's going to defend a pedophile. They're not talking about actual pedophiles. Yeah. The proud boy at the Portland School Board who was standing and ready to fight the ready to fight the security guards and stuff. He was wearing a kill your local pedophile. Yeah.

Yeah. This is this is the thing. This is the thing the right wing figured out. And if they figured this out a long time ago, which is that. Okay. If you want to get a bunch of people who are vaguely normal to do like absolutely horrible violence, the way you do it is to tell them that they're threatening kids. Yep. And it doesn't matter. That's why you and I work so well.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, and this once and what once you've convinced, you know, like this is this is just a very I think a very important thing about media messaging in general is that the literally the instant someone says think of the children. You need to stop. And you need to disregard everything they're about to say after that. I really hit them in the head with a stick.

Yeah. Like 99.9% of the time that person is like about to try to convince you that like you need to like we need to murder the gaze or something like that. Yeah. Like that's that that's the thing that follows from. I feel confident saying no one has ever advocated thinking of the children and meant anything, but I want to kill this specific group of people. Just like I that's not even really hyperbole. It's it's a tried and true organizing tactic for these people and it's part of the reason why like the the famous white nationalist catchphrase is focused around we need to secure a future for white children. Right.

Like that's what they're always talking about with all of this shit and it's it's about being able to demonize a group in a way that they can't be defended. It's about ending any sort of debate or conversation and it's about justifying thoughtless violence because it's your protecting children. You know who else protects children, Robert? Definitely not the advertisers of this show because we are sponsored by Raytheon brand school bus seeking missiles. The only missiles that only seek school buses. You cannot shoot them at a tank at a technical at a terrorist training camp. They go right through school buses, no matter where you aim them. So in that way, they're a fire and forget kind of weapon as long as you're willing to forget anything but hitting a child's school bus with a with a missile.

So here's here's some ads. Check it out. All right. We're back. Still talking about this last segment for this episode as we as we as I was talking about this. There's a post that and the post is a video of a woman from a different school board meeting reading out a graphic graphic ish sex scene from this queer memoir and ranting about how it's it's child pornography. Comments include fucking monsters running these schools satanic and disgusting and elementary school unreal. Why aren't charges brought against the school for distributing pornography to minors?

It's not even reading. It's just a book that's available from some other library. It's like because you can request a lot of books at libraries in all caps. Where's the sheriffs? Where are the city, county, state and federal task forces? And yeah, it's it's talk about this more in the next episode tied to just the overarching anti anti queer anti trans anti gay school board. Yeah. Side of things.

And of course, other things I found there's like video of them celebrating capital rioters celebrating Josh Hawley for defending capital rioters. I went into some other channels that were adjacent that I saw shared, you know, in this channel. One of them was a Oscars midnight writer patriot post channel, which actually is thousands and thousands of followers average post would get two to 3000 views. Here's one. I'm considered a domestic terrorist if I tell a school board that I don't want my eight year old daughter watching sex videos in her third grade classroom. And that post was right above this post. The Constitution actually says you can legally overthrow your government if they are tyrannical. And that post was right above this post, which was a screen, which was a screen grab from a Twitter account for a guy who calls himself Murray Rothbard 1776.

The FBI didn't raid Epstein Island or protect hundreds of young female gymnasts from being sexually assaulted for years, but they'll raid your PTA meetings when you question the curriculum and unscientific mask mandates in their indoctrination camps. I mean public schools. And of course, this from a Twitter user named Emerald Robinson. And again, this is all shared in that channel. It's like a screen grab from Twitter. When the FBI starts arresting parents at school board meetings, just remember the GOP senators who made it happen by confirming Merrick Gardland as attorney general. And then it's a list of Republican. Also, Emerald Robinson is the White House correspondent for Newsmax.

Oh, right. Oh my God. Yep, you're right. Uh huh. Yep. Great. I don't know. That's probably all I should get into.

Well, no, there's a. No, we can go for one more thing. Yeah. So Oscar's midnight writer, which was shared in that, that school board channel took me to the Western chauvinist school board channel, which took me to a post with a video with a link to a video. The text with the video was woman at school board meeting calls out Jewish power by name. And it's a woman ranting about how the Jews are behind all of the critical race theory in schools. So again, not hard to get to this kind of shit. Another post was, it was in the Western chauvinist telegram.

It was sharing a post from the murder, the media telegram, who were part of the Capitol riot. That post from murder, the media was national school board association apology letter for calling you domestic terrorist. We'll talk about this later. But the comment in the Western chauvinist was like, we don't apologize for being like, for being domestic terrorists. Like, yeah, yeah, we think it's rad that they called us domestic terrorists because. Western chauvinist channel, by the way, has over 50,000 subscribers and used to be a proud boy channel, which is now just a general kind of farther right wing organizing channel. And it's probably it's one of the most shared telegram channels in this whole network. And they are really good at creating propaganda that appeals to Trump voters while slipping in a lot of acceleration is talking points to slowly lead people on that breadcrumb trail to make them be OK with mass violence.

There was a comment in there forwarded from another from the telegram account of a guy named Eric Stryker. And this was a post Stryker made commenting on a video of a father being dragged out of a quote woke school board meeting for complaining about complaining about this kind of shit. The post from Eric Stryker, I think is worth reading and I'm going to read it now. For now, all we can do is impotently watch injustices like this unfold. This is really upsetting. We must build our political organization to the point where we can rapidly mobilize to defend this man, including physical demonstrations, sent him free legal support and make people realize that the time of fucking with whites is over. We need our own media, civil society groups and activists. We need money and volunteers. It's not the Republican Party or anything in the conservative movement. It never will be. We need to build it from scratch. We are well underway. National Justice Party. We must quietly and patiently build.

Eventually, we will have the capacity to come on the scene when they least expect it and we will be too powerful to stop. And that's probably where we should end for today. Yep. That's a good... Part one, motherfuckers. Good sad intro into the current problem of schoolboy meetings. We'll get into a lot more like accelerating rhetoric in the next bit and then talk about kind of where this stuff originated from. And the other other side of things beyond just like the CRT and and mask stuff because it branches out into a lot of other kind of adjacent culture war bullshit issues. Anyway, yeah, we'll do that tomorrow. You can follow the show on Twitter and Instagram. It happened here, pod and cool zone media. If you want to be on those apps, which I don't know why you would.

Yeah, don't be on those apps. Get, you know, I just found out they'll deliver skinned Gators to your door. Get into cooking Gators. That's what I plan to do. Getting off Twitter and I'm Gator is the new social network. So Gator. From Cavalry Audio comes the new true crime podcast, The Shadow Girls. I always wanted to know what it felt like to kill somebody. He started laughing. Prosecutors described him as a serial killer survived picking up these girls, getting him in a position of vulnerability when he got over their neck. That was it. I'm Carolyn Osorio, a journalist and lifelong resident of the Pacific Northwest. I grew up near the banks of the Green River and in the shadow of the killer that bears its name. How many times did you bring the camera? One time.

Just one time. He started fantasizing about having sex with his mother and he fantasized about killing her. But this podcast isn't only about tracking down the killer. It's about the victims. We stayed in the woods. He always liked to go in the woods. He was just to all of us kind of strange. Do you know how he feels about prostitutes? Listen to The Shadow Girls on the iHeart Radio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Of course, there is something else you could do if you got something to say.

You could, I don't know, start a podcast with Spreaker from iHeart and unleash your creative freedom and spend all day researching and talking about stuff you love. And maybe even earn enough money to one day tell your irritating boss as you quit and walk off into the sunset. Hey, I'm no settler. I'm an explorer. Spreaker.com. That's a S-B-R-E-A-K-E-R. Hustle on over today. What's second my part of this episode on right wing attempts to attack and dominate school board meetings in order to further their ability to do violence on marginalized groups and also erode democratic institutions from the ground up. Catchy title. Yeah, yeah, that'll click well. I'm so glad we don't have to worry about clicking in titles.

That took up a lot of my mind back in the day, Garrison, back when the internet was different. Now we don't have to worry about that anymore. But what we do have to worry about are mobs of fascists attacking school board meetings. Yeah, it happens every week, keeps happening more often. School boards are calling for assistance. They seem pretty not thrilled. Yeah, they seem not psyched about all that. So when we left off, I was talking about some things I found on the gram telegram.

Garrison, what's next? I'll go into my preliminary research on telegram and particularly respond. It's basically I looked through every single telegram post and all of the main fascist channels I lurk on that mentioned school boards from like the past two weeks. So like, yeah, this is like current current stuff on ongoing. I got to a lot of the channels I was already familiar with, like, you know, the Western Chauvinist channel, which has 50,000 subs. The stand for students channel, which is a one I was less familiar with, specifically dedicated to this school board issue. One of the posts we have on there is says, your enemy isn't some far off shithole country. Your enemy is just down the street at your local school board meeting, teaching your kids to hate their ancestors, you and themselves.

So like, again, that is a very much white supremacist dog whistle just right there. Talking about producing Hollywood movies. Not even really a dog whistle. No, it's basically just a whistle. So yeah, the same post talks about, you know, masks and shutting down businesses and the vaccines and stuff and saying the fight is here and the fight is now. In terms of like, yeah, they're really wanting to hype people up for doing this thing at school boards. They're trying to really hammer down the school board points. So like, I found this, I found this post.

This is a post from the stand for students channel. And I saw this one reshared in a lot of different channels. And one of the other first ones that I saw pop off was from Ron Watkins channel, Code Monkey Z. He is one of the one of the architects or one of the people who really pushed QAnon stuff into mainstream discourse. He's the guy who ran like the physical infrastructure of 8chan and 8kun for years. Yeah. And he's trying to pivot into being like having his just his face be like a kind of alternative right wing figure right now. He's going to running for office in Arizona, I believe. Anyway, he has a very popular Telegram channel and he made this post that had over a thousand comments on it, which is a lot for Telegram.

A thousand comments on Telegram posts, especially Telegram posts of Code Monkey Z's size. I'm going to see how many subs. So Ron, just to his context, Ron Watkins has 432,000 subscribers on his on his Telegram channel. So yep. Anyway, CRT is being rebranded as S-E-L, a social emotional learning. If you are attending school board meetings, as you should be, do what you can to make sure you stop both S-E-L and CRT and keep them and make sure that they are banned in your school districts. So again, just direct calls to action for getting people to show up to these school boards. And also social emotional learning is not CRT.

And of course, CRT is not even taught in schools. I think everyone who listens to this podcast knows that CRT actually criticalized theory isn't taught in schools. This isn't an actual thing. It is like a legal theory. We'll get into more of how this got like pushed towards the end. I think Chris has some stuff prepared on that. Yeah. None of these things are actually real. It's a complex legal theory.

What they're really mad about is that people are teaching that racism is like an issue that's built into a lot of American institutions. And it's an ongoing thing. It's not a thing of the past. That's what they're actually mad about. And they just call that CRT. Some of the comments from the Ron Hopkins post stuff like these snowflakes are so annoying. I'm about to start cutting power to any school in my community that teaches this. Great.

So yeah, more again, that's just a direct threat of doing terrorism. I mean, less of a threat and more of a promise. Yeah. Does that make it better? No, it sure doesn't. All right. Well, I don't understand things the same way you Zoomers do. Please continue.

Yeah. A lot of a lot of posts being a shit around from channel to channel, including just full Nazi channels were like trying to trying to, of course, like a lot of Nazis are actually, you know, thought it was pretty funny that the school board union put in a call to assistance to the federal government to deal with this issue. They, of course, they thought that was funny, but they're going to use this to like spread into networks to be like, Hey, the government wants to stop you. They're calling you a terrorist. You like regular folk are being called terrorists because you're showing up with school boards. Right. That's the kind of message that they're going to shoot out. So they, a lot of Nazi channels crafted a lot of posts like that, that got shared around a lot.

Yeah. Yeah. In trying to basically all time critical race theory. And if you protest against critical race theory, they're calling you a domestic terrorist, that that type of thing. And this got this got shared in like the school boards channel and a whole bunch, whole bunch of other stuff being, being talking about how if you, if you stand up, you're going to be a domestic terrorist. You have to be brave and do this. A few days after the school board, not a few days. This was, this was in like in October.

The school board association retracted some of the, some of the words that they used in their letter because of this backlash that was created. And this was also shared in, shared in lots of fascist channels. The main one it was shared in that I saw was the Honk Pilt channel, which is just another type of Pepe meme. Yeah. One of the other, one of the other big, big kind of groups active in this, in this whole sphere. And this, this has been a group going on for a while that we haven't talked about on the pod, but we probably should do something eventually is this group called white rose. So this is a white rose is a COVID conspiracy group that has been very successful in creating on the ground organizers who are regular people and they do a lot of like sticker bombs and lots of neighborhoods. If you have, if you ever seen anti like COVID or COVID conspiracy stickers in your neighborhood, it was probably a white rose sticker.

These are all over the States and basically every. And as a, as a quick heads up, the original white rose was a student protest organization that existed in Nazi Germany. Yeah. And protested illegally and its organizers were executed by the Nazis and I think it was the mid 40, I mean, would like 43, maybe, maybe 44. Maybe Scholl was the, the person most associated with them. So they, they're, they're, they've taken the names of these, these heroes in order to, it's just disgusting. It's very gross. There's, there's a decent amount of, decent amount of researchers in this field thinks that there's like actual bad people behind white rose.

Of course they're like bad people because they're spending COVID stuff, but like, like, wait, like, like more like bad actors use basically astroturfing this thing. But white rose deserves its own piece later. But because they have such a big following on telegram, they are of course using using this to using the school board thing to gain more support. They have about 50,000 subscribers to their specific telegram channel. They should have posted a few weeks ago saying thank you to all the brave parents going out to their school boards and standing up for the children. They try to, you know, get people to do sticker bombs and stuff, but the fact that there's like specifically calling out people in school boards is like an extra step of like beyond just putting stickers up in your neighborhood. Another, another, another white, white rose post, they shared a shared a video that was captioned as concerned parent absolutely destroys school board with facts. The school boards are the battlefield of our time.

This is how it's done. And just the increasing rhetoric around like battlefields. This is where like the fight is at all that kind of stuff. There was another, the white, white chauvinist channel shared a video from Fox News. And they, they, the Western chauvinist channel, which is again, it's one of the most shared ones in this whole network. They captioned this saying parents in Virginia are trying to fight back against the school board that is anti white. Every, every school district in America needs to have an anti mandate pro right parents running for the school board. So that's just the, it's this type of stuff all over.

And this, this, this post was got, it has like 11, 11,000, 11,000 views. So these things are spreading to a lot of, a lot of these specific networks. And I mean, I have so many of this kind of stuff. I'm not going to go through every single one in detail. There's ones that are way more like openly anti-Semitic, you know, saying, you know, the Jews that run, you know, ex school board are trying to force vaccinations on every student over 12. Other, another, there's this fake, there's this fake Clint Eastwood channel on Telegram. That's pretty popular. Someone who's pretending to be Clint Eastwood.

Yeah, that makes sense. All right, stuff. He had a post that was shared a lot that started by saying, start taking over school boards, start taking over city councils, start taking over city boards, start to start being poll watchers, start being poll workers, start taking over sheriff's departments. It's not enough just to vote. So this, this is the other thing that we're going to see a lot more of is rhetoric around voting isn't enough. You need to start doing more things. There is one of it.

Yeah, here, here's, here's one. This is going to, this is referencing some of like the trans stuff I'll discuss in a bit. I just want to tie it in now, a post from the Western Chauvinist channel saying there is no political solution, which is a direct Nazi, a direct Nazi line. I mean, that, that's what a, I did an article early this year on Riley Williams, the Nazi who stole Pelosi's laptop during the Capitol riot. And then like the video that we were able to identify her as a sig-hiling Nazi. And that's how she opened her quote. There is no political solution. It's a very common catchphrase among like the, the fasc right.

Yeah. So there's been a lot of stuff around harassing like specific school board members, harassing specific teachers. There was this teacher in, I think in California that was trying to like introduced like, like anti-fascist type rhetoric and talking about how fascism is a modern thing. They got absolutely bashed and like doxxed. And they got it, I think fired because there was like hundreds of parents organizing on apps like Telegram to harass this one teacher at school board. It's like, you know, they took over massive school board meetings and just talked about this one teacher endlessly. And it was interesting because like all the parents were like, yeah, I got worried because my student actually really liked the teacher and said that they were doing like giving really interesting points about like systemic issues. And the parents were like, and they like brought their kids to the school board meetings and there's the kids are just standing in the back as their parents are ranting about this and talking about how the kids actually like thought they were learning things about systemic issues.

And then that got people mad. So, you know what else gets people mad? This is advertisements. Yeah. And we're back. We're going to touch on the specifics like all the stuff we've been talking about most of the modern, most of like the current organizing is a lot of it's around like mask mandates and vaccine mandates. Like all of this like all like, you know, the this the school board channel, all of this kind of stuff is usually around vaccine vaccines and mask stuff. Of course, there's critical race theory was the way more popular thing a few months ago right now is a vaccine thing.

The other kind of like ever present thing is being upset that trans kids exist and being very fearful that that there are trans kids around your kids. This is a thing that's been, you know, a thing for years that people have been fighting against. And since the school board thing is becoming more popular, people are starting to bring basically do these kind of flash mobs specifically around trans issues. One of like the more like asher turf type things was people getting mad that there were like two specific books available in certain high school and some middle school libraries. One of it was like a one of it was the memoir that Robert mentioned the other one was like a graphic novel. And I remember about someone realizing their gender queer. So these are books that are not in curriculums. These are just books that are available at the library. And basically there was people who just who found these out and got turned it into like like a meme on telegram essentially like people like sharing information about this. Then you like look it up see if it's in your library.

So then we have all of these like coordinated attacks on school boards by these mobs of people all about these same two books. And the goal is to not only just get the books like banned, but they're also trying to like fire or arrest the teachers and school board members for allowing these books to happen. There has been school school by members who have like stepped down because of just how much harassment is about these things quote from the western chauvinist channel. Jesus Christ straight up pedophile books in our children's schools. Once again, the Jewish school board member gets mad and tries to shut them down. How can you not connect the dots here? There's no political solution voting will not remove these people. There was the mayor of Houston. So in the mayor of Houston, Ohio heard about this and he went to a school board meeting and instructed all of them all of the board members to resign quoting the quoting the proud boy right wing organizing channel western chauvinist.

This comes after some of the degenerate parasites in the system called educators instructed kids to describe a sex scene that they wouldn't show their mom. Of course, this didn't happen. This is this is the these these things are not are not these books are not used in any kind of curriculum anyway. So even even if they were that that's not even we're not even in that reality. So the mayor of this town basically got these instructed these instructed all these people to resign earlier. I think in March, no, in August of this year, Pride Flags were banned at a at a school school district inside Southwest Oregon. I think around I think around Newburgh, the Newburgh School District banned the banned Pride Flags. So all this kind of stuff and then of course that is in a lot of states. But again, the fact that it's in like Oregon, a blue state as people got made like, you know, there's like, you know, NBC articles about it, because it's it's Oregon.

It's not it's not it's not it's not a red state. So it's all big. It's all Portland. It's all Antifa, right? Yeah. Yeah. So again, this stuff is not not not like contained to one thing. And like, yeah, if you Google the stuff around these books, if you Google like genderqueer book school boards, you'll find this in so many school districts. You'll see just mobs of people lined up yelling and screaming and like like printing out giant like giant cardboard prints of this comic book showing like like with like, you know, there's like a dick on it. Like there's like a drawn a drawn dick because that's what human bodies look like. Like you can look at like a lot of like, yeah, like what are you gonna ban the statue of David because he has his dick out to like, like, come on. And what these are the same people who talk about like, oh, they're, you know, banning books, burning books.

You know, right? There was that there was that tweet from like James Woods about like, these are the books that people want banned. That means they're the most important ones. But these people love these people love like burning books. These people love banning books. They love canceling culture. The cultists that I was that I was in as a kid, they would have like massive like book and like CD and DVD burnings for like, unlike unholy and sinful media that you would like bring in and like throw like your sinful music onto this giant fire. Like these people love love burning books. They love they love banning stuff. They love cancel culture. But they just lie about it. Yeah. So that was that was most of my stuff around the kind of the ongoing queer and trans stuff. Of course, you know, this ties into like bathroom stuff as well, the people showing up to school bar meetings to scream about, you know, kids going shit in the bathroom that they want to and feel comfortable in.

You know, and again, like, it doesn't it's not going to stop with trans people either, right? As soon as they ban trans people, the next thing is going to be gay students, right? This is never it's never stops. It always keeps going. And it's just an ever present problem that is going to require a lot more a lot more dealing with. And again, with all of these flash mobs, like no one no one's going to stop them because they're like the people in power. They're the people that have all of the privilege. There's no really effective counter organizing for these school board meetings right now. The cops aren't going to do shit. Security guards aren't going to do shit. And regular libs and regular regular people aren't going to do shit either.

And it's hard to figure out how to actually combat this because there's a lot of times that the people in school boards will be like, No, we don't want this to turn into a giant like fist fights. Like don't don't come in mass to start fist fighting them, but there needs to be something to combat, whether that be, you know, running running for school boards, just showing up outside school boards, having just more people there in having more presence there. So that it's not as overwhelmed by like a mob of 200 anti mask people showing up, right? There needs to be some type of thing happening because no one else needs to be countered. And yeah, you know what? They might need to get the shit kicked out of them. I'm sorry, but like I don't like I don't think that would actually help in this instance, probably, but like, they needs to be fucking something. Like they they are the level of boldness that they have is evidence that they they feel they they are confident that there is no counter to what there is going to be done. And perhaps if they were being met by a wall of people in the community who were willing if they tried to force their way into fucking throw down, you know, to say you're not entering this building without a goddamn mask, you're not shutting down this meeting.

I don't know, maybe that would do something. I don't actually know what would do something. I think if it was like if it was people just as regular people, I think that would be yeah, it's certainly not going to help if it's antifa for the love of God, don't show up and fucking black block at a school board meeting. Like what would work is a bunch of other middle aged parents showing up and being willing to confront these people if physically. And like everything that is worth mentioning is that a lot of the people at these protests like are not parents at all. Like they're not they're not even from the same school district. They're just sort of like this. This is just how the this is just how the sort of right wing outrage machine has worked. And this is where they're drawing people. Yeah, I mean, I mean, again, like it's a lot of the people in there, there's going to be big dudes who want to fight. But a lot of the people like screaming are are like, you know, middle aged women, the people who are like really like leading the charge on this, because they're able to use their privilege.

And because like no one's going to stop them. Right. So that's like, when they're leading the charge of 200 people who are going to like scream and harass and chase out black security guards chase out chase out the all this all the Skulper members. No one's there. They're very effective at using their privilege to gain political ground by just like doing stuff on the ground. It's like, you know, this is like, this is like the January 6th thing. It's like the January 6th thing. This is the new future of political action is just showing up in mass two places where no one's going to stop you. Because you're like, you're the, you know, the good relatable, you know, every day. Yeah. Anyway, that's that's the stuff I had. We'll probably have an ad break and then talk about maybe some of how this stuff started. Speaking of using your privilege, you know what is the greatest privilege? Being able to purchase the products that yeah, that's exactly right.

There's no privilege higher than being able to engage with these consumables. Yeah. And we're back. All right. Chris, you want to close this out? Yeah. So the last thing I want to talk about that is interesting about this whole thing is we've mostly been focusing on the very furthest right elements of this. But a lot of the school board stuff is tied to, I mean, just straight up Republican Party operatives and people who work in this sort of, you know, I mean, there's there's literally a bunch of people who work for the Republican Party as we'll get into that. There's also this sort of network of Republican think tanks or Republicans sort of dark money dumps that a lot of a lot of Ash or turf groups and that kind of stuff. Yeah. And so I want to talk about a few of these people because I think they're interesting. I think we can start with Nicole Nellie, who's an interesting person.

She's so she she most recently founded parents defending education who are they're one of the big groups to sort of like spread this this sort of attack on school board stuff over the country. They have chapters that organize people and they also, you know, they do this thing where they collect coat incident reports from from school districts that they, you know, just distribute to all these people and they put it online. They have all of these. They have a lot of stuff they do. They do a lot of anti mask mandate stuff so they have these like template letters like template like fake yeah for my letter things that you can send to schools that if you don't wear a mask. That is the state that's a staple of this type of organizing now. Yeah, and the interesting thing about Nicole Nellie is that so this is not like her first org like three years in 2018 back in the Halcyon days of I. You know, I'm not going to say it was before the mask fully came off, but it was while the mask was like a little bit more on she she previously founded a speech first. Yeah, you might remember.

Yes, they're back when free speech was the big talking point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so she ran that for a while now she's, you know, organizing with the whole bunch of people who just want to. Yeah, they just move on. They move on to the new things. It was it was free speech, it was correct race theory right now it's anti mask stuff. Next up is going to be trans stuff going real hard. Just today we had the fucking the person who BBC platformed the fucking like.

Yeah, Lily Cade, the rapist Lily Cade. Yeah. Manifesto where she details which specific trans women she wants to personally kill. Yeah, I used to know Lily. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Real dark turned. I don't know, I guess it's not super surprising. She was definitely I interviewed her for a documentary and it was she was a bit off putting didn't realize this was going on.

I mean, yeah, there's just a lot of a lot of reports of people in like the sex work industry of talking about her like raping people in bathrooms. Yeah. But again, it's like, yeah, the people that's always considering about, oh no, trans women are in bathrooms, yet the people the person screaming about this is an actual rapist. Yeah, like when we say rapist you're like she she she raped so many people that like on Twitter, like I was scrolling through my feet and I saw multiple people who were like, oh, I know this person she assaulted me. Yeah, it's real bad. The people who the Turks are like pushing. Yeah, this is like the BBC was platformer. So like, yeah, like trans stuff is as soon as as soon as the anti mask anti back stuff like dies down in the next five months or whatever.

I foresee a massive pivot towards specifically anti anti trans anti queer anti gay stuff, because that's going to be the new thing. Yep. And I think it's worth bearing in mind that this stuff. Yeah. And you know, with the Colinelli specifically. So she she worked she like worked at the Cato Institute, which is like Mary Rothbard and Charles Cokes. Now it's, yeah, it's basically it's basically this is a slide over application, but it's basically one of the Cokes sort of like money laundering like money operation things. She also worked at Freedom Works, who.

Oh, great. Yeah. Yeah, this is great. So this is this is one of the fun parts of this, which is that so Freedom Works is another one of the Cokes sort of dark money laundering machine things and Freedom Works are basically the people who created the tea party. Like the people who turn the tea party from like a bunch of weird guy just like like six weirdos into like, you know, the basically the the the the entirety of the pre Trump conservative political machine who like built a Republican Party after it was like completely discredited in the 2000s. Yeah. And this is true of a lot of the people who are in charge of these big orgs have connections like this.

They're founded no left turn, which is no left turn. Yeah, no turn education. They're another one of these big sort of anti school board things. I mean, they they're the people they're one of the people who like they have a list of books on the website that they want banned. Wow. Yeah, it's great. Cool. And their founder writes for the Heritage foundations like magazine.

So there's all of this stuff. And I think maybe the most diplomatic one is this guy is Mark Rufo who. Yeah, fucking Rufo. Yeah. So so he's he's the guy who just created the whole critical race theory thing out of nothing. He like threw together a bunch of like, just like these incredibly tenuous connections. Like, there's a bunch of sort of old cultural Marxism conspiracy stuff in there. Yeah, it's a lot of like Frankfurt school type shit.

Yeah. Yeah. And but what I think is interesting about him is less his ideas, which are just pseudo-intellectual. Yeah, he doesn't he's not actually super smart in what he says. There's a lot of videos of him talking to actual philosophers getting schooled about what critical race theory is. Like he's actually not that intelligent in this in this side of things. But but you know, the thing is that there's nothing more dangerous than an idiot with a trick up his sleeve. Exactly.

And you know, and then the trick basically is Fox News. And you know, the reason the reason this whole thing exists is that this was, you know, Mark Rufo, he's very, very explicit about this. This this this was his solution to the the the George Floyd uprising. Yeah. Was that, oh, we need to we need to find this thing to stop the momentum of this uprising. And this is this is who Tucker Carlson brings on and starts bringing on 2020. And this blows up and he immediately gets hired by the Manhattan Institute, which is a very not that old, but they're from the 80s. But a very sort of an old, extremely powerful conservative think tank that I don't think I think is less known than things like the Heritage Foundation or the Cato Institute.

Yeah, I would say so. Yeah. But he gets they hire him like immediately because, you know, the sort of main line of the Republican Party very quickly is like, this is the thing that we can use as like a hammer. Right. And so the Manhattan Institute publishes this in good work for them now. I can't. I'm not actually sure if you I don't know if he specifically wrote this or if he was just involved in it. It's the byline is just a Manhattan Institute, but it had they have this incredibly detailed toolkit explaining how, you know, both explaining what the sort of.

Right wing, like, line on critical race theory is they have like a bunch of explainers have like lists of terms if you've ever seen massive. Yeah, yeah, it's actually yeah, if you've ever seen like lists of terms that people want banned like it's all just pulled from this document right so this will add stuff. But the interesting part about this is the other things this is an organizing manual, right? It's a specific thing that tells you how to go and how to find other people like other other people, you know, if you're like an incensed right wing like Freak and one of these school districts is like, OK, well, here's here's how you like talk to other people in your district. Here's here's a list of options of like things you can do going public. And then there's a very interesting thing part of this that that I think is really disturbing and outliers like really what's going on here, which is there's this whole like freak out thing about this thing called minority rule where like, oh, the left has this like have this like militant minority that will compel the majority to follow them by because they keep on showing up.

They keep on doing things. And if this minority like keeps keep keeps, you know, being more intransigent than everyone else, then they will inevitably win. And this the three quarters of this section is this like weird fear mongering thing about it. But then the last part of it is a bunch is the thing that's saying, oh, we do this ourselves, right? This is how we win. We win by being more intransigent. We win by showing up more often. Yeah, of course. Yeah. And, you know, and this is this is the other thing is this is from like last year, I think.

This is like the tool kit is this summer. Oh, yeah. OK. That's sorry. This is this is really this year. But it's interesting because it's like this is the sort of, you know, this is this is the Republican Party. Essentially, I mean, that institutes very, very mainstream public party. Yeah, this is this is how they do a spective in person organizing. We talked about this a bit in our episodes about the like in the aftermath of the abortion ruling in Texas and how and how like the religious right wing organizing has worked in local districts. Yeah, this is how they're able to get things done, which is why there's been so many school members who either get fired, who've had to step down, who have been harassed off the job. And are now there's people, you know, a lot of a lot of like people I would describe as people holding very extreme views are now running and taking these spots.

Because if you can do if you can do this type of like again, it's not grassroots, but it's it is it is like astroturbe. So like it appears grassroots. But if you can do this type of like faux grassroots organizing, you can gain a lot of power over specific areas and make a lot of people's lives a lot more miserable. And that's that that's what the goal is, right? The goal is to make trans kids lives miserable. The goal is to get people to not wear masks and die of COVID. Like that those are the results of these actions. Well, I think I think there's an interesting interplay here, though, because I think because so freedom works like even even a lot of the specific protests that are happening. And this is especially true of the very earlier earliest ones.

I think like when like the very first school board protests that were happening. Yeah, like like a lot of these summer to fall 2020 was when they sort of start up. Yeah. And those a lot of those were directly organized by by people who work for freedom works. OK. And and this is this is a lot of the CRT ones. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The CRT ones are very specifically freedom works. And this is what I think is interesting about this is that, you know, OK, freedom works. So what is freedom works out of this freedom works wants a tea party again, right? Because, you know, this is this is what freedom works does, right?

They're basically the group that comes in when the when the Republicans start losing election cycles. They're like, OK, well, now we need to get the balance of power back. We need to bring the Democrats out. So they're they're largely trying to build a sort of electoral base. And again, like this, this looks familiar to people who remember 2010 because it's the same thing except. And this is the thing that I this is the part where I genuinely can't tell whether the freedom works people, whether the coax, whether that whether this sort of dark media network. Either I don't I can't tell whether they understand what they're doing and like it or they're just incredibly naive. But, you know, this is not 2010, right?

You can't when when you start mobilizing people like mobilizing people on the right wing to go to a place, they don't just like sit there and hold signs anymore. No, you cannot. You cannot contain them at this point. Yeah. You cannot control the spread. Like you have once you've you've opened this can and there's no way of putting them back in because as soon as they start organizing on apps like telegram, they're one step away from skull masks. And then they're being OK with cheering along people that are going to go beat up that are going to go beat up people in these meetings. Yeah. And this is this is this is really the thing that I think is it's not just January 6th. I mean, we live in the shadow January 6th, but it's also about, you know, if you look at how the anti lockdown protests went in 2020, right? You have one people showing up with guns, the capitals. Yeah.

And that stuff was extremely effective. And that and the combination between that and January 6th has, you know, it's open to floodgates. And now that was that was what led to January 6th being possible is the more and more protests around capitals with people showing up in mass to overwhelm anyone. And because they're all white and because they're all like middle class conservatives, no one's going to stop them. Yeah. And you know, and this is the thing, right? You know, the the the Cokes, I genuinely don't know what the Cokes want out of this. My guess is that the thing that they want is a new base Republican voters. But that's not what they're creating.

The thing that they're creating is a new core of fascist street fighters. And, you know, it at some point it doesn't it literally doesn't matter whether or not this is what the Cokes are trying to do. Like not trying to do because they're in the end, it's just pushing people towards thinking there's no political solution. It's totally it's only only violence and overwhelming people in mass is the only way to get the change that they want. The change they want is to have trans kids not exist. And yeah, just more and more like fascistic policies, whether that be, you know, banning books that mention gay people existing or what it's like to be a gay person. Whether that be teaching people that racism is still an actual thing that exists or that be putting a mask on so you don't kill your grandma. Or whatever.

Yep. Well, and, you know, I think I think one last thing, right, you know, we saw what happened last time they were in power. Right. And it was, you know, like, you can you can talk about how a lot of the worst stuff is still happening was like, yeah, they put a bunch of people in concentration camps. Right. And if they if they take back power again, and there's a good chance that they're going to because, you know, the Democrats are being. They basically, you know, the Democrats never want to be in power. The thing they want to be is minority opposition so they can do fundraising.

Right. And if, you know, when when these people if these people take power again, it's going to be even worse than it was last time. Yeah. Looking at looking at the Virginia election, the night of recording is a great example of that. Yep. In terms of, yeah, it turns out when Democrats just do nothing and just sit around an office, you don't convince young people to want to vote for them because they're not actually doing anything. So then they just sit out. Then the Republicans actually do vote in people.

Then we get a anti CRT person elected to be the governor of Virginia. And that's the episode. Good times. Well, I hope everybody's optimistic, feeling nice. Well, we'll be back with something else. Research your school boards who's in it and protests around it and maybe show up with some of your. I don't know, buddies with your lattes and stand in front of the building and be like, no, we don't want you. We don't want you to shut stuff down because no one else is going to stop them.

It has to be just like regular people. You can't going to be the cops. It's not going to be any elected Democrat. And honestly, like you can't rely on teens and black block to do this. That's this isn't this isn't what they need to be doing. It should be like, yeah, it'd be like millennials and Gen X need to be like, hey, no, we're not going to we're not going to have you doing this. Well, that's the end of the episode. That's the episode.

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 podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. The art world, it is essentially a money laundering business. The best fakes are still hanging on people's walls. You know, they don't even know or suspect that they're fakes.

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