Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 84

Episode Date: May 20, 2023

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

Hi, I'm David Eagleman. I have a new podcast called Inner Cosmos on iHeart. I'm going to explore the relationship between our brains and our experiences by tackling unusual questions like, can we create new senses for humans? So join me weekly to uncover how your brain steers your behavior, your perception, and your reality. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Between April 1971 and September 1972, six young black girls were snatched off the streets in Washington D.C. This child was laying on the side of the road. The person said, I murdered your daughter. The killer believed that he may have been seen. I will admit the others when you catch

me if you can. Sign Freeway Phantom. Listen to Freeway Phantom on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Queen Charlotte, the official podcast, we're stepping behind the scenes and the drawing boards of this team to experience the life breathed into the Bridgerton prequel. Listen to the leaps executive producer and series director Tom Verica took to capture the feeling that puts that lump in your throat. And you've got to catch creator Shonda Rhimes. She's dropping gems, diamonds, and mics. You can listen to Queen Charlotte, the official podcast every Thursday on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here. And I wanted to let you know

this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. It's another mass shooting. I don't have a good way to start this episode. Yeah, but welcome to I Could Happen Here, a podcast that is also just about mass shootings now because, yeah, great world we live in. With me is Gare and Robert. Hello. Hello. Yeah. So a Nazi killed a whole bunch of people again. Yeah. In case there's been another one, we are talking about the specific mass shooting in

in Allen, Texas with the guy who was covered in swastika tattoos that certain people are claiming as a fed. Yeah, that happened on Sunday, May 7th. So I think Mia has some details about what actually happened to kind of put together. But for the majority of this, we're actually going to be talking about people's reaction to this, including some of the most influential people on the planet and the level of reality denial that is it has been bad before. It's just extra visible right now. And it's visible to a degree that is that is pretty worrying. And we felt it was it was worth talking about just because of, you know, whenever a reality fracture is big enough to to be like this this noticeable that is always always an interesting sign of where we are at as as a culture.

Yeah, I think so before we fully dive into that, there's something that I do want to talk about like briefly with this, which is that so like this is, you know, in the sort of mold of like white premises killings is like this is very, very targeted and on white people. So he shot one white guy who was a security guard. And then he shot like three Latino people and then four Asian people. And I don't know, I wanted to just sort of like remind people that anti Asian violence is still like a thing, because everyone seems to have forgotten about it. And, you know, this is like, I mean, I think if you if you exclude the if you exclude the three in California that were like also committed by Asian people, this is like the fourth mass shooting in two years that's been

at least half the victims of an Asian. It fucking sucks. I, you know, I mean, we've talked about anti Asian violence a decent amount on this show. None of the things we've ever talked about have gotten any better. I the only sort of actual instrumental results of any of this is that like violence against Asian people gets used as a rhetorical cudgel to justify killing black people, which is fucking abhorrent. And yeah, I just I just wanted to get this in because the media has collectively forgotten that that was the whole thing. And no one really talks about the shooting in that framing. And I think it's important to do so, at least for a little bit. I think the other thing to kind of just talk about at the top here, Latino whites pharmacists

and Latino Nazis are not they are not an uncommon thing. This is actually quite common. Two of the most famous fascists in the world right now, Nick Fuentes and Enrique Tario are not white. No, I mean, just like think about think about where I mean, think about the fact that prior to World War Two, Argentina spent a significant chunk of their defense budget bringing over Nazis to train their military, which is a big part of why so many Nazis escaped there via rat lines. You know, we just did a series of episodes on Alfredo Stressner, the fascist dictator of a Paraguay who put up and hid Joseph Mengele along with a bunch of other Nazis for a while. Mengele had citizenship in both Argentina and in Paraguay. Like this is it's not uncommon.

This is not like a new thing. We're not it's not like some sudden shift in the way that fascism works. Even the shooter himself like posted memes about being a Latino white supremacist. Like it is a subculture big enough that it has its own like meme of vortex. So and this shooter was actively engaged in in said like a memetic culture. No, and it's also worth noting that a lot of the same things that we talk about when we talk about Nazi mass shooter culture in the United States, the fact that a lot of shootings are kind of incited on eight Chan and four Chan and similar boards. This happens in Latin America. Brazil in particular has a website called de Gola Chan that spawned at least a couple of shootings. And the last

year they've had several more mass shootings that are political in nature that are kind of driven by online fascists. Like this is not the only place that this happens. Serbia just had a couple as well. But like what this guy's doing is very much just as the Christchurch shooting was very much something that occurred within the broader envelope of a transnational accelerationist fascist movement, you know, that the Alan shooting as far as we can tell what the information we have available seems to fit very well into that schema. Okay, we should talk about the shooter a bit. So there's a sort of, I don't know, there's like after every mass shooting, there's this sort of like identification cycle thing that happens where like a bunch of news agencies and organizations

are trying to figure out who the shooter was. So I think like the day after very, very like pretty soon after the shooting, the New York Times runs an article that reveals that the shooter has this like has an account on like a kind of weird Russian social media site. And from that information, Eric Toller, who's a researcher at Bellingcat like tracks down the site and he finds a bunch of wild stuff. He finds like, I mean, obviously the shooter is like, he finds that the shooter is a Nazi. He has like a swastika tattoo. He has also has an SS tattoo. From the shooting, he's wearing like a right wing death squad patch. It's like, it's just like a whole thing that the Proud Boys also do. It's like a patch that says like RWDS.

Yeah, they sell RWDS patches. I mean, I think a lot of it kind of comes out of of some of the discourse around Pinochet that goes back a few decades. But at this point, it's a much broader thing than that. I've got a bunch of photos of a Jeremy Bertarimo, I think is his name, who was one of the Proud Boys. I believe he's the guy who got stabbed prior to January 6th during one of the big riots in DC after the 2020 election, but with the big RWDS patch on his chest. And you can find like Tussetala Tosey, who is an inveterate rioter with a Patriot prayer up in Portland would wear them all the time. They're a common piece of fascism merch. Yeah. And you know, and this and also, you know, the other thing that's kind of important that gets

found on this like social media site, which, okay, we should mention, it's a kind of weird thing. Like he doesn't, I don't know, the social media site seems like he was basically using his like a journal. Like there's he doesn't like follow people or like have followers. So he's just sort of posting this stuff. He also finds a bunch of clips of like Tim Pool videos. And so this immediately sends the entire right into like, you know, full on defense mode, right? You know, it turns out it's not great for your brand with like the sort of general array of people if it's being associated with a guy who just did a mass shooting. So Tim Pool responds to the other thing is there's like a manifesto on it. And Tim Pool

responds to this by I think I think what actually like legitimately what happened is he read the manifesto and there's a thing in the manifesto like talking about the Nashville shooter being trans or like specifically about the Nashville shooter. And I think I think specifically he read that and was like, oh, shit, this is my out. I can go back and talking about the Nashville shooter. Sure. And so he starts, he starts this, there's this whole sort of train of like right wing stuff about how all of this is fake. So he starts arguing that like this isn't the guy's social media account. This this sort of very, very rapidly morphs into I mean, just like full on like Sandy Hook shit. What if his employees like tweets why is the corporate press so

threatened by people questioning the authenticity of a Mexican neo-Nazis Russian social media account uncovered by state funded media. And this because this immediately becomes the main line, right? State funded media thing is they're talking about Bellingcat, which they're and they're hopping on all the tanky conspiracy stuff and running with it because Twitter is a is a cultic milieu of conspiracy. And you can latch on to one talking point to make you feel okay about denying an entire like facet of reality. And then it becomes an easy out. Yeah. And we're going to we're going to circle back to like specifically the tank of people getting involved in this because they do what they're doing is a little bit of like an an

evolution from what what's what folks kind of in the debating Christians about evolution and shit called the Gish Gallup, where the the the original idea of the Gish Gallup was when you're arguing from a creationist perspective about stuff like, you know, the age of the world, you bring up so many different kind of topics, you know, from different very niche issues, you have a carbon dating to, you know, specific problems you have with like the way scientists are interpreting specific fossils. And it's just too much detail for somebody in like an ad hoc public argument to really like counter at once. And kind of the evolution of it is when you're dealing with something like this, rather than deal with the broader picture, which is there's

just a tremendous amount of evidence that this guy was a Nazi, that this guy was motivated, and and kind of brought into the community by a lot of content that guys like Tim pool make. Instead, you focus on you pull up one single thing that you can kind of like try to get people to latch on to. And if you can get them arguing about that thing, you can get them to ignore the bigger picture, like at least you can distract attention from it. And it works. It works for a lot of people. It's especially effective on social media. Yeah. And unfortunately, the social media platform that this is mainly happening on his Twitter, which Elon Musk owns and Elon Musk immediately like decides that he's just fully in on this shit. And he is I mean, he is like

like Elon Musk is like is just actively promoting the sort of weird conspiracy that basically what the sort of right wing story about this becomes is that like, okay, Bellingcat is is the CIA and they're being paid to create a like a false flag thing that they're being paid to create a false flag to make this guy look like a Nazi and a Tim pool fan to distract people from the Nashville shooting, which is just like absolute nonsense. But you know, you immediately get into like that that Tim pool employee again, like it starts doing this whole like, we are enshrined like with liberty to freely scrutinize every claim just as the sanctity of like every human being in America like has the right to question stuff. It's like this is like literally,

like literally word for word stuff Alex Jones was saying in the Sandy Hook trial. But we've gotten to the point where you just, you know, like the sort of mainstream of the right just does this about every time there's a right wing mass shooting and this this particular time it's been just everywhere. Yeah, we're gonna there's no no smooth way to break tads in an episode about a mass shooting. But that's what we're doing. We are back. I want to talk now a little bit more about the actual exchanges that Musk was involved in and how this narrative of like a Psyop and this whole narrative around the shooting being a Psyop, how that viewpoint got inflated on Twitter because Musk controls where all of the

interactions go for tweets. And actually like specifically get into how this specific conspiracy is is is a is a demonstration of how much of just a separation from reality that people like Musk are like actively actively working towards. One of the main accounts that Musk was kind of like riffing off of in this and who was like trying to like feed Musk this type of stuff was the redheaded libertarian who works for Tim Pool. She created a bunch of memes about this shooting talking about how how this the guy can't can't be a Nazi and he can because he's Latino. You know, why would someone use a Russian social media site? Even though it's actually very common for American Nazis to use Russian social media. We used to do an exercise at a

trainings that I did for Bellingcat where people would go through and use V contact which is a Russian like kind of Facebook clone. And you would kind of use geographical search to find groups of like KKK members and shit in the American South because it was really common with them because it didn't have any kind of content moderation. So yeah, so the types of like right wing content creators who are within Musk's Twitter orbit start pumping out all of this stuff, right? And this is where Musk gets all of his information from. So he he starts he starts like just questioning the validity of this story, but then also specifically targeting Bellingcat saying that didn't didn't didn't this story come from Bellingcat, which literally specializes

in psychological operations, which first of all is just a wild thing to say. What you're talking about is specifically like an open source journalism website, like it's the most it's the most honest way you could do journalism because it's giving people the tools to literally check all of the work themselves. Like it's yeah, I mean, this is kind of like a minor aside. But one of the things that happens here constantly with all these people is they're like absolutely astounded like how did Bellingcat possibly find this guy? It's like, well, it's not that hard. It's really easy. The thing is, right? So like I am not a journalist, right? I learned everything I know about this from Gare in like one night.

And like I have tracked down like mass shooter social media accounts and like before the police got them. Like it's not that hard. But the thing is, it requires you to even like just a tiny, tiny bit be a journalist and not a single one of these writing people has ever like done journalism ever. And so like just like the tiniest bit of journalism just like destroys their brains and they're like they're physically incapable of comprehending how someone could have done a journalism. And then they use this to sort of feed their base because their base also just doesn't understand how someone could do a journalism. And this this this this lets you do this like psychos like how could they possibly have found this they must have been given it by

the government. It's just like, no, all that really comes down to is who has who is on their computer at the right time when this thing happens. Whenever I find out or whenever I can ID people, it's always just a coincidence that the thing happens as I'm already at my computer. So now I can look into this thing. Right. It is it is who has access to the internet at the right time is the way that we figure out like who's going to end up IDing somebody. Yeah, it's it's a mix of that. And it's a mix of just who has the patience and the motivation to sit and comb through shit for hours and days, which is the same thing that like it's the same thing that anti fascist activists have been doing for years, you know, especially since Charlottesville, where you're just like,

I'm going to watch the same videos of the same event and find new ones. And I'm going to spend three years doing that. And eventually, I will catch a tattoo or a shirt with a logo. And that will let me ID somebody because, you know, of the of the different social media shit that I've been pulling up. Like it's it's it's not it doesn't take like spy satellites. It just takes motivation being in the right place at the right time and having nothing else to do. Yeah. So eventually, they started just kind of harping on this term Syop. So Syop obviously means psychological operation. But what what they mean when they say Syop is that they mean this was like a government. This is a false like a manufactured government

planned operation. That's what they actually mean, right? Like in in the conspiracy space, Syop is kind is is more like a loaded term. They don't actually refer to like actual Syops that get done like against like, you know, you can look at like Cointel Pro, right? You could look at you can look at various ways that the FBI of the Army has done Syops. But what they mean when they say Syop is this is like this is a government conspiracy theory and it's a false narrative that's been crafted to like change public opinion. So I guess I guess these people, Mia, you mentioned how they're making it sound like this was this was created to distract from the Nashville shooting or just just they have various like motivations for why they want to.

But it the the important part is that they could use this word to just easily deny reality. And that is that is kind of beyond like whatever motivations they have. It's just easy for them and their ideology to just block off this section of reality so that they don't have to like people who are like actually libertarians don't need to like confront what the extent of their ideology actually means, right? You know, there's a there's certainly people who are like okay with mass shootings happening or, you know, are totally fine with with with with like non white people getting killed in mass shootings. But there probably are certain libertarians who don't actually like mass shootings. They don't actually like when fascists go kill tons of people.

And it's easier for them sometimes just to block off this section and and ignore it than actually confront what their ideology means. So some must kept saying as this is either the weirdest story ever or a very bad Psyop. The answer is neither. The story is not super weird. It's actually very very explainable if you understand the mechanisms that play here. And even even just not a bad Psyop. Yeah, I mean, it's not even like it's not on it's like on the whole. It's not a particularly complicated story. Like there are it is not an uncommon thing. I mean, the biggest most recent one before this was that that shooting in New York at the grocery store that was like a directly inspired Nazi attack. Like this kind

of shit happens constantly in the United States. It doesn't require nobody has to be secretly armed by the feds. There's an AR 15 behind every bush in this country. It's not hard for this kind of this kind of shit. It's not hard to see where this like originates from. Yeah, so it's I mean Musk Musk just kept kept replying to both Tim Poole employee tweets tweets from the very blatantly fascist account to end wokeness, which Musk has been replying to quite a quite often recently. So this and I think the reason why we wanted to just talk about this specifically is just because of like all of these Musk tweets are getting like millions and millions of views if the view counter is any is anything to go by at the very least he's in the top three accounts

with the highest engagement on Twitter. So these these types of conspiracy theories are getting inflated to extremely high degrees, at least online and the separation of reality online is inflated for these mass shootings in a way that I have not seen in quite a while. I have not seen this much just denial of like information regarding mass shootings in quite a long time. And it just the combination of the stuff like the stuff with Bellingcat coming from the tankies and how those conspiracies have now mashed with all of these like neo fascist shit. It's a combination of reality denial that is absolutely worrying for like future mass shootings as well. Well, it's a pivot in the kind of reality that's being denied, you know, not we have nothing to

do with these Nazis who are parroting some of the things that we say about immigration. It's this is fundamentally not the attack that you think it is this is our enemies creating an attack to try to make us look bad. Like the fact that that you've always seen bits and pieces of that the fact that it's being parroted by the wealthiest man on the planet using one of the biggest information fire hoses that exists is completely novel. Yeah, because I mean, a lot of these same conspiracy theories that specifically about like Eric Toller, we saw we saw leftists and tankies bringing up the same stuff during the during the stuff with the Nazi National Guardsmen a month ago. And so we have a lot of this stuff has kind of been riding on the back of that and

just continued and accelerating. Since then, it appeared there's a few outlets like Business Insider and Bellingcat themselves reporting that they are they are receiving basically shadow bands on Twitter right now with their with their with their account and their posts having a very limited reach. An interesting shadow band too because it's not like it appears at least from what I've seen that what they're doing is they're making it so that when people type Bellingcat into the search bar, nothing comes up as opposed to like throttling the reach of the actual posts themselves trying to make it deliberately difficult for people to actually look up information, which is interesting to me. Yeah. And I guess I guess it's worth saying that

the police in Texas have confirmed everything about about the shooter's political beliefs and his neo nazi ties in he has neo nazi shit in his apartment. Obviously, his body is covered with neo nazi tattoos. Like one of the things that some of the kind of right wing content creators were trying to do is they were trying to say that the specific pictures of the individual that Bellingcat found online that that these pictures were not this person. They in fact, they were saying they were saying that the shooter is just somebody else, which was also proven wrong. Yeah, they also they also they did another classic right wing thing, which is that they misidentified the shooter. Yes. I thought it was another guy with the same name. Because they're

constantly because they're dumb like they misidentified the shooter and they misidentified the non nazi tattoo that he had. Yes. Because he had he had weirdly enough like the city of Dallas's seal tattooed on his hands. Yeah, the Texas tattoo on his shoulder. Yeah, they they they like definitely like there were a lot of conspiracy theories about that and a lot of them related to the fact that like the first photos we got of the guy were like the kind of photos you get of a dead man at a mass shooting that someone takes through a window while sheltering. So it wasn't clear. So they would take a picture of like a social media picture of the tattoo on his hand and then a picture of him dead. And like the the tattoo

on his hand in the picture of him dead was like blurrier. And they were like, look, the lines aren't straight. They're straight in the picture on a social media. And it's like, well, yeah, because those were taken by very different cameras in very different situations. Like, you know how cameras work, you know how this this is one of one of the funnier ones that one of these content creators was doing was they were they were posting the the the photos of of the nazi tattoos that the shooter himself posted online being like, look how fresh these tattoos are. How can how how could if he had these tattoos for years, why do they look so fresh in these photos? Because the photos were from right after he got like you do when you get a

tattoo. Yeah. There's like I have tattoos pictures of me getting tattoos for like 15 years ago somewhere on my Facebook. Like you could do the same thing. Suspicious Robert. One of the interesting things is that like we see the same thing with all of like all of the worries around like deep faking stuff. Like all of all of the like weaponized unreality stuff, it doesn't need to actually be convincing. It doesn't need to be good. Like deep fakes don't need to be good quality. You can you can post a meme of like a picture of Biden's face and some text under it with with with a quotation mark, post it on Facebook and millions of people will believe that's just true. Like it doesn't need to be real or convincing in order for it to have it

like an effect. And it's also it's not just about I think it's it's thinking like it's not just about convincing people. It's not about making them believe it. This is like this is the thing that I tried to talk about years ago during the eight chance shooting. It's shitposting part of the goal is just to disrupt conversation. It's to make people engage with the fake stuff. It's to make people break kind of the the lines of reasoning that they are going in with. Like it's to make people distract people from the stuff that is really clear and obvious and just kind of fracture the conversation. Because the more that you do that, the weaker you make the response to what's happened. And the more kind of that you can distract people from the degree of complicity that that

the people in kind of the media sphere on the right have for all of this shit. Yeah. And I think that's why like specifically the going after the Bellencat stuff has been really effective with that. Because like, like there are like people who I am friends with in real life who like are convinced that Bellencat is a CIA siop. Like this is like a like like really not insignificant portions of the left believe this. Yep. And that means that it's, you know, unbelievably difficult to form any kind of coherent response when like half of the people who would normally be doing this stuff are like, oh, well, they are actually CIA. So like, yes, the the Netherlands based CIA unit. Yeah. I mean, like, at least in the time I was there,

the primary people funding us was the Dutch postcode lottery. Like it's, it's, it's, I don't know, like, like almost every news organization, they take grants where they can get them. Yeah. And like, I want to specifically talk about the NED a tiny bit because people, like, so the main conspiracy is about like they like at one point, they took, they took a grant for national talent from democracy. And like, yeah, those people do weird shit sometimes, but they also, for example, like, okay, so if you're going to have the line that every single person who's taking money from the NED is a CIA thing, like, you have to accept that, for example, like the pro Beijing electoral party in Hong Kong is a is a CIA up because they also got a

shit ton of NED money, right? Like they like NED just gives money to a shit ton of people. It's definitely worth emphasizing that, like, the initial groups that were pushing the Bellingcat conspiracies were all Grey Zone people that are specifically specifically paid by the Russian government, like, because Russia was mad at Bellingcat for exposing their war crimes. Yeah. And like, that's where all of this stuff starts. There's I don't know how much point there is in like laying into this specific thing too much. I would I would remind you at all times when you are like dealing with breaking news like this, and there's a bunch of different and there's a bunch of different kind of like conflicting arguments about what's actually

happening. Occam's razor isn't 100% of the time the way to go. But in a situation like this, you have two possibilities. One is that a Nazi went on a killing spree as happens constantly, as has been happening since the Nazis became a thing. The other possibility is that the federal government for unclear reasons convinced a man to cover his body in swastika tattoos and shoot random people at a mall for gun control that's not going to get passed in the state of Texas. Um, I don't know, like, which of those seems like to you? I did this thing, like, very deliberately to myself, like, about a year ago, where I was like, I was very deliberate, like, I'm going to like unconspiracy theory of my brain.

Because, you know, like, there is a lot of, like, the kind of reasoning you get in this stuff, which is like, hey, here's a thing that like, quote unquote, looks weird. So this whole thing must be suspect. So it must be an op is like a really, really kind of like it's a really common kind of reasoning now that just like a lot of people across the entire political spectrum have. And it's not actually a good way to understand the world. Like, it's it simply is not. We live in an increasingly absurd world where every single weird thing is more and more visible because of the internet. So we're more aware of how much weird shit happens all the time. And stuff that and stuff that may not necessarily be weird, because like everything,

there is an expert in every field who can who can explain to you why this thing actually makes perfect sense. And it's just people being exposed to things that they're not usually that they're not used to. I think one of the interesting one of the last things I think we should like mention about this is just the influx of how militant like neo-nazism or like visible neo-nazism has just been people have just been saying it's feds in an increasingly concerning way. Like I think like last month, there was this viral video of a whole bunch of Nazis dressed in red and black protesting something. I forget the exact circumstances at the moment. I would have to look it up. I think it was some drag related protest. But there was this group of Nazis dressed

in red and black doing Nazi shit. And when you looked at any of the videos on Twitter, you saw hundreds of replies from people with blue checkmarks just calling them feds saying, oh, wow, look at all these feds. Well, oh, I can't believe the feds are so busy today. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, it's it's it's like the 100 person MPC meme with them all wearing the blue checkmark on their forehead saying it's the feds just because it's it's once we get to the point where we have more Nazis doing mass shootings again, the same way like there was an influx between like 2017 to 2019. In 2020, there was kind of a dip because all all crime kind of had a dip as we're going to go into the next next election cycle as things are going to start looping again.

When more and more Nazis start doing shit, just how there's going to be a bigger swath of the population who just denies that's what's happening. And that is going to make make the problem of Nazis probably a bit harder to deal with. I mean, there's there there will still be anti fascists doing their work to like docs and ID people and in in all that stuff. But the amount of like visibility and the amount of traction that that this level of reality denial is getting around like militant neo Nazism and around Nazi killings will be a kind of a new thing to navigate or not a new thing, but like it's a the problem will be bigger than what it used to be. I wanted to kind of note one thing on a on the other side of the ideological spectrum and and

not to equate the two. But there has been something kind of concerning that I've been seeing crop up in liberal circles. You may have noticed kind of as a response to all of the mass shootings and the the generally consistent Republican line that there's nothing to do except for be shittier to marginalize people that that there's been kind of this like focus in a lot of mainstream liberal media on articles and the idea that you should spread pictures of victims of shootings and a focus on the amount of damage that like a weapon like an AR 15 does to a human body. People can have their own opinion on like whether or not this is a helpful idea, but I have noticed in sort of arguments I've been having with people a troubling trend,

which is when I talk about the importance of doing stuff like taking stop the bleed training, carrying things like tourniquets. I've gotten responses from a couple of people that are like AR 15s are so powerful, the wounds are not survivable. There's no point in doing this. That is not the case. I have I have known dozens of people who have been shot by AR 15s in some cases in AR style weapons in some cases multiple times and larger weapons and lived. It is always worthwhile to have stopped the bleed training and to carry equipment. If you hear anyone saying that please please correct them because whatever you think about gun control, it is very important for people to know how to deal with those kind of injuries.

And it is important in the immediate wake of an attack. One of the things that was really unsettling is in the immediate wake of the Allen attack after the shooter was down. There was a couple of people who ran in to try to provide life saving aid and a bunch more who took photos of the people who had been wounded and killed. And it's possible that if more of the people taking photos had gotten in an attempted to provide aid, some of the people who were injured might have survived. No way to know. But always worth having that training. That's just something I've noticed not to put it in the same moral universe as trying to pretend your calls for violence aren't calls for violence. But it is something that concerned me and that people

should maybe keep an eye on. Yeah, I mean, I that was like the case with the written house shootings. There was someone who basically had most of their arm. Yeah, blown blown off. Um, but they did not die. Yeah. So yeah, that is that is not not true. And I've watched a lot of the written house footage and yeah, it is it is it is nasty. Yeah. But no, that is that that is a good thing to note. Yeah. And also like on just a fundamental human level, like do do not let yourself be consumed by the algorithm so much that your first reaction to seeing someone get shot is to try to film them. Like yeah, we need to be better than this. Like we have watched people die because of this. Like this this is not a thing as a society that we can continue to be doing.

Like we simply cannot. We simply have to act and not like become part of a sort of like mass media spectacle instead of doing something. Yeah. The footage of things is not going to change it, especially with mass shootings. Footage of mass shootings usually actually makes the problem worse and is mostly used by people who want to be mass shooters. Yeah, I'm I that may be a conversation we should we should expand on at a later date. But you know, don't don't let the bastards grind you down. Take a stop the bleed course. You know, bring a tourniquet with you out in the world. These are these are action items that that that you can do that might in fact help. So that's going to be it for us today and it could happen here.

Until next time, you know, keep your head on the swivel. Hi, I'm David Eagleman. I have a new podcast called Inner Cosmos on iHeart. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford University. And I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads. On my new podcast, I'm going to explore the relationship between our brains and our experiences by tackling unusual questions so we can better understand our lives and our realities. Like, does time really run in slow motion when you're in a car accident? Or can we create new senses for humans? Or what does dreaming have to do with the rotation of the planet? So join me weekly to uncover how your brain steers your behavior, your perception and your

reality. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Last season, millions tuned into the Betrayal podcast to hear a shocking story of deception. I'm Andrea Gunning, and now we're sharing an all new story of Betrayal. Ashley Lytton was helping her husband set up a business Venmo account when she discovered a terrible secret. I scrolled down and that's when I saw a hidden folder and I opened it. What the hell did I just see? I was scared that he was coming home. What Ashley discovered that day was a secret so dark she feared for her life. She was like, oh my god, I gotta get out of the house. He's gonna find out that I've seen this, he's gonna come kill me.

Listen to Season 2 of Betrayal on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Between April 1971 and September 1972, six young black girls were snatched off the streets in Washington DC. It took four murders before the police finally realized that one person was responsible. I will admit the others when you catch me if you can. Signed freeway fan. This child was laying on the side of the road. It appeared that she was probably either dragged out of the car or thrown out of the car. The person said, I murdered your daughter. The killer believed that he may have been seen by the mother. That guy is, he's out of sync with even the worst people. I thought that they would catch him.

I thought it was just a matter of time. Is it possible that the killer is still alive? Listen to Freeway Phantom on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to another episode of It Could Happen Here with me, Andrew, of the YouTube channel, Andrew Assel. Today I'm joined by Mia and today we're going to be discussing another leading figure in the Black Radical tradition. If you've heard the episodes on Quasi Balagoon, you know exactly what's up. Today I've got the first part in a two-parter about Lorenzo Cambora Irvin and his vision for revolution. Irvin's life has been one of resistance, resilience, and radicalism. These contributions, the anarchist movement, especially his work on

Black anarchism, even to this day with his ongoing podcast, continues to inspire activists around the world, myself included. So Mia, what is your experience been with Lorenzo Cambora Irvin and his work? Yeah, so I've read Anarchism the Black Revolution, which I really enjoy. I've listened to not all of, but like a pretty good amount of the Black autonomy podcast that he runs, which is great. And so yeah, I'm excited to talk about him. Awesome. Yeah, he really is a fantastic and necessary figure in this, you know, broader movement, especially now. For those who don't know, Lorenzo Cambora Irvin was one of the earliest founders of the Black anarchist movement, which was a distinct tradition born out of the history of Black radical politics in the 1970s.

Like Black anarchism is not just, oh, we're throwing on an adjective onto anarchism, there's a history behind it, and there's a distinct tradition that accompanies it. There were anarchists historically who were Black, who were not part of this Black anarchist tradition. And well, of course, Black anarchists who weren't part of those earlier movements. I think one of the most notable sort of go-to examples is Lucy Parsons was a very important anarchist figure in the sort of the peak of the movement, at least in the U.S. in the 20th century. But although she was Black, her contributions don't necessarily contribute to that sort of Black anarchist lineage. So let's get into Irvin, right? Born in 1947, by the time he was 12,

Lorenzo Cambora Irvin had joined the NAACP youth group and participated in sit-in protests that helped to end racial segregation in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He was later drafted during the Vietnam War and served in the Army for two years, where he eventually became an anti-war activist. At 1927, when he was 20 years old, after his involvement with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Lorenzo Cambora Irvin joined the Black Panther Party as a rank and file member. Two years later, he hijacked a plane and fled to Cuba while he was on the run for attempting to kill a Ku Klux Klan member. But instead of receiving support, as some Black radicals had received when fleeing to Cuba, Cuban authorities had jailed him, deported him to Czechoslovakia,

and eventually he escaped from Czechoslovakia to East Germany, before eventually being caught, tortured, and brought back to the United States. And then after being drugged during his trial, he was handed two life sentences by an all-white jury in a redneck town. Tough break, as you can imagine. Irvin had very quickly become disillusioned with the dictatorship he had experienced in Cuba and the socialist countries he visited. And during his time in prison, he reflected on his life and found an alternative method for Black revolution, distinct from the form he found in the Panther Party. Now Irvin wasn't the first person to criticize the Black Panther Party's style of organization. One of the splits between the East Coast and West Coast Panthers was on

what form of organization they would take. I discussed that a bit in the Kuwaiti Balaguna episodes. And then of course there were other figures who came out to the Black Panther Party with their own criticisms, including, if I remember correctly, Isata Shakur and also Donald Cox. While in prison, Irvin had begun receiving anarchist literature. And he also was starting to pick up what another Black anarchist, who he was briefly imprisoned with at the time, Martin Sostra, was putting down. Martin Sostra is what I believe one of the first major Black anarchist figures in that 1960s, 1970s period. And so him being imprisoned with Sostra at the same time sort of really helped Irvin to understand exactly what anarchism meant and how

it applied to specifically Black experience and Black context. Irvin was also inspired by Peter Kropotkin, everyone's favorite Russian former prince, and ultimately, Irvin adopted the ideology of anarchism. His case was soon taken up by the anarchist Black Cross and the helper prisoner opposed torture organizing committee, which led to an international campaign, the petition for his release. Irvin's writings on anarchism, the Black Revolution, which was written in prison, gained immense popularity. And so he was released in 1983 after serving nearly 15 years. In his book, he emphasized that anarchism is the most democratic, effective, and radical way to obtain freedom for the Black community. But the Black people must be free to design their movement without the

approval of North American anarchists. He believed that Black people and other people of color would be the backbone of the American anarchist movement of the future. The first edition of Anarchism of the Black Revolution was published quite a while ago. It's still the edition that is available in the Anarchist Library, you can check out. But it is, I would consider it to be a sort of a rough early edition. There are certainly some typos and editorial mistakes and stuff that were addressed in the most recent edition that was published in, I believe, 2021. And edited with some help from William C. Anderson, who also is another leading figure in the modern Black anarchist movement, having written works like Nation on No Map. Irvin took and still takes a

principle stance against capitalism, white supremacy, imperialism, colonial oppression, patriarchy, queerphobia, and the state, recognizing that government is one of the worst forms of modern oppression. His emphasis on intersectionality has played a crucial role in the shift away from class exclusive analysis in the American anarchist movement. And today he remains active, as I said, recording a podcast called Black Autonomy with his wife and fellow former Panther, Johnina. So today, he drawn from Irvin's book, Anarchism of the Black Revolution, to delve into his picture of revolution in North America and beyond. I think one of the strongest strategies for development of the Black Revolution would be a Black Labour Federation, as Irvin discusses in

his book. Black Labour has been a critical economic fact in America since the country's inception, and it was through the toil of Black Labour, beginning with slave labour in the old south and extending to sharecropping, farm labour and migration to the north for factory jobs, that the foundations of the American nation were built. However, as is obvious, Black workers have been routinely excluded from that share of the wealth of the American nation, and routinely excluded from the trade unions that struggled to regain some of that wealth, like for example the American Federation of Labour. The National Coloured Labour Union, the National Coloured Farmers Alliance, and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, as well as the League of Black Revolutionary

Workers and other unions and associations of Black workers, were then formed to represent these interests that were being left out and not at all brought to the table. Black workers were very much instrumental in the Congress of Industrial Organisations' campaign of strikes and sit-downs and other protests to organise unskilled industrial workers, but they didn't get to enjoy the benefits of their pivotal role. Most of the Black population is working class, and Black industrial and clerical workers still hold significant potential power in the struggle for Black liberation. A lot of these workers have already been organised to defend their rights at work and advocate for their interests, even if union leadership is conservative,

even if they weren't challenge management, even if they're not even unionised. We see as well in modern times, a lot of Black figures stepping up to organise these unions. The first union to be organised in Amazon was spearheaded by a Black worker, Chris Smalls, and workers across history have already been creating union caucuses and creating independent labour unions where necessary to push for their specific interests, because the unity of Black workers and the rest of the working class is essential to combat and overthrow capitalism, but there needs to be a recognition within that unity of distinctly Black interests and a distinctly Black history, which is why Black caucuses within unions are able to take up the

mantle of struggles that unions have turned a blind eye to, such as discriminatory hiring, firing and promotion practices and lack of equal treatment. I think these caucuses can even go further, as Irvin also argues, to democratise their unions, to eliminate some of these discriminatory practices and to really push for the radical fighting spirit that has been lost in some of these reformist union structures. The Black caucuses and also the workers more generally should be stepping up to demand democratic control of the union, to demand equal treatment, to demand affirmative action, to demand full employment, to demand shorter work weeks, to demand the right to strike, to demand social security and employment compensation,

to demand full liveable minimum wages. Of course, all of these accomplishments or demands are really sort of short term benefits that would still retain a capitalist structure, but they're necessary nonetheless, especially when unionisation is, I don't know, all the time low historically. One of the things that Irvin also advocates for, which I'll get into more in the future, is this idea of unions advocating for companies to put aside funds specifically for programs to rebuild inner-city communities and provide work for Black workers. And he also talks about workers' self-management of industry by factory committees and workers' councils and elections by workers themselves.

But the main idea that he's pushing for, at least in terms of the Black working class and Black labour, is, as I mentioned, a Black labour federation, both on a national level and on an international level. A National Black Workers Association would serve as both a revolutionary union movement for workplace organising and a mass social movement for community organising, combining tactics from both the labour and the Black liberation movements to multiply their numbers and build their strength and turn their unions into these militant class struggle instruments. An example that we can see in history during the late 1960s was the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, which was organising Black auto workers

out of the Dodge Revolutionary movement. Sorry, let me rephrase that. One example of that type of organisation could be found in the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, which organised Black auto workers during the late 1960s. The League had grown out of a major affiliate, the Dodge Revolutionary movement, and it was a Black labour federation that existed as an organised alternative to the United Auto Workers, which had been excluding Black workers. The League was also a very major force on the streets, as it was in addition to organising its workplaces, organising college campuses and Black inner-city areas. But its potential was stifled, unfortunately, by political faction fights among leadership. There was a division between those who wanted to take a

more Marxist-Leninist approach to the organisation, compared to those who wanted to take a more democratic approach to the organisation. There was a lack of a solid enough organised base in the factories. There was a significant company and United Auto Workers and state repression, of course, organised racism, a lack of cooperation among white workers, and other reasons that eventually led to the League split into mutually hostile factions that would die after less than five years of existence. Classic organised and history story. I don't think that we should look at these failures and use them as an opportunity to give up. I think we look at these failures and use them as learning opportunities, use them as opportunities to recognise, oh,

we can do something like this, but not exactly like this. Yeah, and make sure that Baba Venkyan is never involved at any point in the process. Exactly, exactly. I mean, we still need these sorts of labour organisations and associations and unions. We still need Black workers, spirit-heading these sort of organisations, to organise other Black workers in their communities to support the strikes in workplace organisations that would be necessary for significant changes. And of course, we need the groups to be established to avoid the pitfalls and ideological squabbles of Marxism lending this up. But beyond just the sort of American approach, because in case those of you

don't know, I'm not living in America, I'm not American, which is why Uvin also addresses and advocates for an international Black Labour Federation to wield the collective power of Black workers globally that have been universally oppressed and exploited. Around the world, as a racial group, Black workers have been oppressed as workers and as people. And this dual form of oppression is really what emphasises that need to organise for old rights and our own liberation. In African and Caribbean countries, including Toronto-Bago, there are labour federations and labour unions, but a lot of them are reformists, a lot of them are government control and there's a lack of militancy, there's a lot of collaboration with the government and with

companies they're supposed to be organising against. And so it's necessary to have an organisation with an international scope that is pushing for solidarity, that is pushing for radical change. And so I think that's the real strength of an international Black Labour Federation, that idea of increased solidarity across several countries, the idea of strengthening our collective bargaining power and the ability to organise the better working conditions. Of course, we'd also have the benefit of shared resources and the benefit of greater visibility to the issues that we are facing in the workplace and in society. And then of course, there would also be the ability to exert, using our credibility and resources and solidarity to exert greater political influence.

However, you know, an international Black Federation, we still struggle with political barriers, particularly in countries that are actually hostile to that sort of organising. And of course, the powers would be, would do everything in their power to keep such a struggle from being able to attain and maintain any kind of momentum or power. The constraints of time and energy and resources and engagement may also prevent such a federation from getting crowned, but I still think of all those issues that we should keep in mind. If well developed, I think that national, regional and international caucuses can do a lot to implement significant changes. In fact, one strategy that Irvin advocates for is something that I believe an

international Black Labour Federation or any kind of international Labour Federation would be necessary to help to organise. And that would be a general strike. Because the vast majority of the Black community consists of working class people in the US, because many of them are engaged in manufacturing and medical service and communications and food production and retail. A lot of blue collar work that really makes the country go around, it really makes them an essential component to the capitalist economy and of the American economy. I think it positions them as really, really key players in any sort of protest campaign that would involve forced racism and class oppression. And it could go even further into beyond just

stepping up and striking for demands in the workplace, control over the workplace. It could also go a step further in accomplishing even more revolutionary goals. And it would of course involve using tactics like industrial sabotage and factory occupations and sit-ins and slowdowns and wildcat strikes and other work stoppages that would help to reassert our collective power. Of course, as I'm always really careful to emphasise when I bring up general strikes, they're not easy to organise. A friend of mine, Alki, he has a video on his YouTube channel about general strikes and how they work and some of the history of some past general strikes. So I think that's required to read in to definitely check out. But yeah, general strikes are not

easy to organise. They're not something that you could just call for on Reddit or Twitter or Facebook or whatever. It takes serious community and workplace mobilisation, it takes significant planning, it takes strike committees and support committees because it even defends committees when employers may be trying to retaliate against strike and workers or blacklist or fire workers. Yeah, and I would also say something that I think people... Okay, there's not a delicate way to say this. Look, if you're going to be engaged in a long-term serious general strike, you're going to have to do things... You're going to have to start seizing stuff. You're going to have to start committing theft in order to make

sure that people can eat... Yeah, exactly....like you can have to start expropriating stuff. Yeah, exactly. It's not just standing around in a picket line, you know? Like a general strike is extremely involved and invested. You don't get... Usually, you don't get two chances to do a general strike, you know? You have that chance and after that, they usually... If you fail, you usually introduce legislation or put things in place to ensure that something like that never happens again. Yeah, or you get... There was a thing that used to happen back when... Back in the early 1900s when these happens a lot was you would get these general strikes, but they would be like two days long.

And there's this great Malatesta quote from 1924, I think, where he's talking about the factory occupations that started in Italy during the two red years. And he has this line that goes, General strikes a protest no longer upset anyone. Either those who take part in them nor those against whom they are directed. If only the police had the intelligence to avoid being provocative, they would pass off as any public holiday. One must seek something else. We put forward an idea, the takeover of factories. Exactly, exactly. Like you have to step beyond, oh, is this legal? Is this legal? And look into, oh, what can we make possible? I mean, I don't mean to be flippant. It's difficult. It takes so much organization and coordination

of a large group of people. There's always the issue of scabs. It could have significant consequences for workers who depend on their wages to survive and to support their families. They can have a lot of ripple effects. And it could also involve workers ended up going to jail or just losing their jobs. But still, it's a powerful tool that if we can recognize, if we start working towards, if when people were calling for strikes back in 2016 and 2017 and 2018 and 2019 and 2020 and 2021 and 2022, if all those years we spent calling for strikes, actual more effort was being put in to actually put the foundation in place for general strike to occur, then 2023, we would be prepared to support a general strike in a long term way.

In a way that would actually signify revolutionary change in our lifetimes. I mean, don't be disheartened, dear listener. They're still potential for such a thing to a coup. It just takes preparation and organization. And speaking of things to take preparation, organization, and the one of Irvin's tactics is a mass tax boycott. People should refuse to pay any form of taxes to the government, be it federal income, estate or state taxes, while they continue to be exploited. Because as he would argue, you know, the wealthy and the corporations pay next to no taxes, while the poor and workers pay the brunt of taxation and do not receive any benefits in return. You know, all these taxes on income and goods and services, but communities

are still suffering. And that money ends up going to fund the Pentagon and defense contractors and consultants who get to, you know, loot the government for their own gain. So part of a black radical movement, or the Black Revolution, as Irvin argues for, is a mass tax resistance movement to boycott taxes. Similar to the peace movement's war tax resistance, taking people, all the taxes that would have gone into personal property, all the taxes that would have been reaped from personal property and income tax and stocks and bonds, and funneling that towards community development, fighting that towards community projects and organizations. As with any early reaction, significant legal consequences would be involved in that, of course.

You know, I think such a tactic needs some serious mass support and backing behind it to succeed. And even then, I don't believe it should be the backbone of any movement. I think it's more so like an accessory and event of a major rupture, a single tool in a broader arsenal. Like, I don't think the entire movement should be built off of tax avoidance. You're just going to get a bunch of people thrown into prison. There has to be a lot more to it than that. I look at the sort of cost to benefit analysis, like, yeah, it'll get a lot of federal attention. But if it's not properly implemented, I don't really see many immediate benefits for the long term goals of the movement. I mean, I could be wrong. But it's not a tactic that I personally feel unless such a struggle is

already in existence and in its later stages. Another type of boycott that's even references is, of course, the regular conventional, unconventional sort of boycotts used during the civil rights movement. A lot of black consumers with boycott, particular merchants, public services, refusing to treat with merchants who would allow for racial discrimination and use that loss of revenue to force them to make concessions. Today, black consumers in the US spend hundreds of billions a year in the capitalist economy. Of course, not all of those consumers are workers. And all those workers are able to boycott. But I think boycotts are still a potential tool in the arsenal, again, to wage, you know, warfare, economic warfare against corporate

structures. I mean, it could be expanded from anything. It can be expanded to cover everything from specific products to entire industries, right? Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. himself recognized the potential of a national black boycott. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. himself recognized the potential of a national black boycott of America's major corporations. Shortly after he was assassinated, he established such an initiative called Operation Bread Basket, which aimed among other things to force corporations to pull money into national black community development projects for poor communities. I think, you know, boycotts have a way to put economic pressure. But they, I also believe are a little bit less effective in our modern,

globalized world due to the fact that a lot of these companies are owned by the same like three corporations. They usually have ways to mitigate economic losses in one market by targeting other alternative markets. Or even if they experience a dip in demand in one sector, they may still enjoy demand in another sector in another part of the world. And on top of that, companies can also use it as an opportunity to sort of get people off the movement. If, for example, a boycott is taking place, they could say, oh, you're trying to boycott, well, we just put a sale out 50% off, 60% off while stocks last. And then you have people sort of, you know, breaking off of the movement. And I mean, of course, not everybody will do that.

Some people are principled, but that is still a tactic that you see some companies using when they're starting to experience that sort of economic pressure. They try to fragment the movement. Quote unquote, voting with your wallet, even mass coordinated, in my opinion, is limited in its ability to challenge the root causes of oppression and equality. I would think it brings us any closer to anarchist world. I think it only weakens the current world. And so I think it's another tactic that really cannot act alone. And then we've got another tool in your snow because you call it a rent boycott called rent strike. It's a way to achieve certain legislative changes and also we achieve

certain more radical changes if you get into sort of occupation and squatting and that kind of thing. In Harlem in New York City, rent boycotts were so successful that it led to the creation of rent control legislation, which prevented evictions, unjustified price increases, and required reasonable upkeep by property owners and management companies. There is a track record of rent strikes providing some benefits, you know, allowing tenants to negotiate with landlords and to bring certain issues to light. And it could also bring about, of course, certain policy changes and push for or highlight further the need for affordable and accessible housing. But again, rent strikes are legally risky. They can also be difficult to coordinate, especially for those

who are really kind of risk eviction. I mean, nobody can really risk eviction, right? But that's where the risk sort of comes in. And then if there's a lack of support, if the landlord has significant resources behind them, there are also ways that it could go wrong. I don't want to mislead. I want people to be aware of the reality of how difficult this sort of organizing effort is. All these organizing efforts are. It's not a walk in the park. It's not, you know, like, act the end of Act 3 in some roughly starting movie where the good guys are able to win with the power of friendship and that kind of thing. It's tough work. And we have to be aware of the risks even as we engage in such actions.

We even also advocate for, you know, squatting in tandem with rent strikes. So in addition to withholding rent payments from exploits of landlords and banks, also movements to engage in urban squatting to seize housing, to seize empty plots of land, to seize unoccupied and abandoned buildings, and to redirect payments that would have gone towards rent towards necessary repairs to improve living conditions and to claim our cities for ourselves. But again, while squatting does provide an immediate housing solution for those in need, while it draws attention to the issue of housing inequality, while it creates a sense of collective ownership and while it can help to improve all these neglected areas and urban environments, it's also illegal

to get involved in eviction and the rest. A lot of squatting conditions can be fairly unsafe or unsanitary, particularly if a property is not up to a particular standard. And then of course, squatting is also sort of temporary as a solution. It doesn't really address the root causes of housing. It is really a precarious position to keep people in. And it's another case where without mass defense and support, without a mass movement backing it up, it's going to be very easy to dislodge any gains that might be made in the short term. Finally, even also argues for the establishment of the commune as a staging ground for black revolutionary struggle. The concept of the commune is basically like a dual power structure.

An institution meant to compete with government power and to preserve as a counter to government power in order to assert collective community power. Forming and unifying various organizations of struggle, taking control of existing communities and institutions, and working to fight against economic and political and cultural discrimination, exploitation and servitude in this capitalist society. And he goes in to talk about inner city communes as centers of black counter power and social revolutionary culture to serve as sort of a living example of what revolution could look like. I think this is a case where at the time he didn't have the word for it, but we do know and that would be prefigurative politics, the idea of establishing these sort

of institutions in the here and now that would be able to prefigure the world that we want to see in the future. Another component of these sort of communes is to provide a counter narrative to sort of black capitalism and responsibility politics that gets pushed out as a dominant narrative within black communities in the US. The commune, the black commune specifically, could serve as a place for a new society and a new culture to emerge that rejects the internalization of oppression under this system. And so when you want to get into sort of how the sort of commune would be established, even talks about establishing community councils that would govern and even talks about establishing community councils that would allow for collective governance and

be composed of workers from various industries and neighborhoods and delegates to organize communities on a block by block basis. He also emphasizes the need to reject black politicians, bureaucrats and mayors from sort of co-opting these efforts and ensuring that the community on the ground actually retains control over the institutions that they establish and develop and take control over to ensure that the communities needs and desires are met. One example that he uses is in the case of schools, right, where the community would organize parents, students, teachers and communities like to cooperatively administer the schools. I think we see a lot of efforts by right-wing parents right

now, organizing to sort of run things in a lot of public schools, but that doesn't mean that similar efforts can't be undertaken by radicals to push for the same. Of course, it wouldn't be as easy because they aim to retain the status quo whereas we aim to change things. I think it is sort of important to note too that it's not like this sort of right-wing school stuff came out of nowhere. Part of the reason this was happening was that there had been movements from teachers and from inside the education system trying to sort of do things like teach black history. These are things that people really tend to ignore and really tend to sort of not think about the significance of, but it's not like these

sort of right-wing versions of this came out of nowhere. They were reaction to people doing a sort of more moderate version of the strategy. Yeah, that's true. That is true. And so now we have to push even harder to counter their counter efforts and really assume that sort of transformation in the education space. And beyond just the education space, what Yvonne talks about is ensuring that these councils encompass a variety of organizations, not just block-in-neighbourhood communities, but also labour unions, student groups, social access groups, and even specialist youth, single-issue campaigns and issues. The idea is of course to continuously promote self-rule, to continuously

develop people's powers and drives and consciousness toward liberation, and to continuously offer an alternative to this pervasive sense that all this is, is all there can ever be. It's necessary to sort of incubate this sort of embryo of a revolutionary society. This microcosm of a new lifestyle. And to highlight the necessity of struggle against these systems. And when I speak of consciousness, I'm also speaking of specifically black consciousness. Speaking of consciousness-reason sessions to ensure that black history, black culture, is accessible and available and understood by the black community. To ensure that newly-liberated and social ideas and values are distributed within the community.

To ensure that counselling and therapy are available, rooted in of course a black revolutionary perspective. To help people to realize that there's this unity, and distrust, and violence, and oppression, that occurs due to this legacy under this system, does not have to continue to be so. But that's it for me and for Uvin, for now. You can join us for part two, where we can dive in to the day-to-day aspects of these five programs that Uvin describes, to build black resilience in the here and now. If you're looking for me on the internet, you can find me on youtube.com slash anteriso, and you can support on patreon.com slash thesaintdrew. Peace.

And I've spent my career exploring the three-pound universe in our heads. On my new podcast, I'm going to explore the relationship between our brains and our experiences by tackling unusual questions so we can better understand our lives and our realities. Like, does time really run in slow motion when you're in a car accident? Or, can we create new senses for humans? Or, what does dreaming have to do with the rotation of the planet? So, join me weekly to uncover how your brain steers your behavior, your perception, and your reality. Listen to Intercosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Last season, millions tuned into the Betrayal Podcast to hear a shocking story of

deception. I'm Andrea Gunning, and now we're sharing an all-new story of Betrayal. Ashley Lytton was helping her husband set up a business Venmo account when she discovered a terrible secret. I scrolled down, and that's when I saw a hidden folder, and I opened it. What the hell did I just see? I was scared that he was coming home. What Ashley discovered that day was a secret so dark, she feared for her life. She was like, oh my god, I gotta get out of the house. He's gonna find out that I've seen this, he's gonna come kill me. Listen to season two of Betrayal on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Between April 1971 and September 1972, six young black girls were snatched off the streets in Washington, D.C. It took four murders before the police finally realized that one person was responsible. I will admit the others, when you catch me, if you can, sign Freeway Phantom. This child was laying on the side of the road. It appeared that she was probably either dragged out of the car or thrown out of the car. The person said, I murdered your daughter. The killer believed that he may have been seen by the mother. That guy is, he's out of sync with even the worst people.

I thought that they would catch him. I thought it was just a matter of time. Is it possible that the killer is still alive? Listen to Freeway Phantom on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome back to another episode of It Could Happen Here with myself, Andrew, of the YouTube channel, Andrewism. If you're joining us from the previous episode, we touched on the life of Lorenzo Kumbua-Uvin, who he was as a leading figure in the Black Anarchist movement, how he ended up in that position, sort of his life story, and how he ended up writing anarchism of the Black Revolution and sort of breaking down that vision of a Black

Revolution, including tactics like communes, squats, French strikes, tax strikes, boycotts, general strikes, and of course a Black Labour Federation. But that's not all that Uvin has explored in his work, and today we're going to dive into his vision for survival programs, things to agitate for and actions the Black community can take to survive under the current system. Now historically, Black communities have been subjected to economic exploitation, with businesses and financial institutions often taking profits out of the community without investing in its growth and development. And this of course has led to disinvestment, poverty, lack of resources for community members, and of course persistent relative deprivation,

to the demand for community control of businesses and financial institutions that Uvin outlines is something that seeks to shift power and resources back into the hands of the community. By placing control in the hands of community members, it provides an opportunity to build economic power and to ensure that businesses and financial institutions work for communities rather than vice versa, because such institutions and businesses would be under the control of the workers themselves. So in a cooperative model, members work together to achieve common goals and share the benefits and risks of a business equally. The governance structure of a cooperative typically involves board of directors who might

be elected by members to make strategic decisions on behalf of the cooperative, but there are of course other ways of organizing, including horizontal consensus. All members of a cooperative have an equal say in these decisions, with each member typically having one food, and the board of directors is meant to just be accountable to members and act in the best interest of the cooperative. Now cooperatives already exist, they operate in various industries, and they can operate in various industries, including agriculture, retail, finance, housing, healthcare, and more. For example, in a cooperative agriculture model, farmers can pool resources to purchase seeds, fertilizers, and equipment at a lower cost,

and then sell their crops collectively to increase bargaining power and reduce costs. In a retail cooperative, members can buy products at a discount and have a say in the type of products offered, while in a financial cooperative, members can access bank of services and share in the profits they're generated by the cooperative. Cooperatives also often provide mutual aid and support to their members with surplus profits from the businesses reinvested either in the businesses or distributed as dividends to members, which ensures that the benefits of the business are shared equitably and members have a stake in the success of a cooperative. Like I mentioned, cooperatives already exist, which means they're

capable of operating within capitalism, but within a broader program of social revolution, they're meant to build our alternative power in a dual power struggle to eventually enable us to assert our independence from this system, as it were. But even here and now, it is necessary to survive under this system, and I think cooperatives offer a more humane and more empowering model. Another example of that sort of cooperative structure could be found in mutual aid bank in societies, again owned and controlled by the members, and are created specifically to provide access to financial services and support to individuals and communities that have been traditionally excluded or marginalized from a lot of traditional banking systems.

So they function to provide low interest loans to members for various purposes, including starting businesses, purchasing homes, covering unexpected expenses, and members are required to put in a certain amount each month to fund these sorts of loans. And in addition to providing financial services, these sort of societies can also provide education and support, help with financial planning, help with budgeting, help with financial literacy to enable members to better survive within their current financial situation under capitalism. So that's one aspect of the survival program, right, and emphasis on survival. It exists now in this system. So that's one aspect of pushing for community-controlled businesses and financial

institutions and creating community cooperatives and mutual aid banking societies. Another aspect of that survival program that even outlines is achieving community-controlled housing to help address issues of gentrification, displacement, and lack of affordable housing. Through legal and legal means, such as rent strikes and demonstrations, arms actions, open squatting, to drive landlords out and take over the property, those are more precarious approaches, right, and they're also the above-the-board methods. I spoke about those approaches, some of those approaches in the first part. The quote-unquote above-the-board methods would be establishing things like community land trusts or CLTs. A CLT is essentially a non-profit organization that owns and manages land for the

benefit of a community. The CLT can acquire land and then lease it to developers or residents who agree to use the land for affordable housing, which allows them to retain control of the land and ensure that it's being used for their good rather than being solo of the private developers for the sake of profit. In a situation under a CLT where a homeowner wants to sell, wants to move, they can only sell the building that they occupy. They can't sell the land itself because the community land trust retains control of the land. The community land trust also retains the right of first refusal to purchase the buildings, which basically means before you can try and sell the building to anyone else, you have to give the community land trust, the community itself,

an opportunity to buy the building back. That would enable them to also make sure that people aren't coming in to just profit off of such affordable housing and they're also doing it so that the housing stays affordable so they can ensure that they can resell the building to somebody who's also seeking that affordable housing. By providing that sort of housing, community land trusts can stabilize communities and prevent displacement in the long term. They can help to revitalize distressed neighborhoods and they can also invest into things like community facilities like pools and laundromats and gyms and that sort of thing. In terms of how you actually create a CLT,

laws of course vary from place to place but essentially you form a non-profit organization, obtain tax exam status, acquire the land either through purchase or donation and then begin developing affordable housing or community facilities on the land. In addition to that, a community land trust would need certain guidelines in place for leasing the land to homeowners and to maintain the affordability of the land over time and of course community land trust requires a system of governance and decision making to engage in that sort of ongoing effort of involving the residents themselves and ensuring that they are educated in how community land trusts work and how this model can be expanded to other communities.

Of course establishing such a thing requires significant resources. Another approach to community controlled housing that also takes some resources is through limited equity housing cooperatives. So in this model residents own and manage the housing development. They each have a same decision making process to run democratically. They each have a share in the cooperative which gives them the right to occupy a unit in development. The share price however is set at a fixed rate which means the unit can only be sold back to the cooperative at the same price which again helps to make sure that the housing remains affordable in the long term. So unlike with the community land trust

where you own the building but you don't own the land in an LEHC or limited equity housing cooperative you don't own the building or the land. You own a share and the cooperative owns the property itself. You're also required of course to contribute a down payment and to pay monthly fees which helps to maintain and manage the property. It's difficult to organize things as anyone with some experience organizing can tell you and something as high investment as housing is no different. It's a challenge. It's a challenge in fund reasons. It's a challenge in organizing people. It's a challenge in ensuring that such efforts are defended and able to establish themselves in the long term. But it's still a promising model

I believe for survival because of its priority on community ownership and control. It really relieves that one major stress in a lot of people's lives in terms of affordable housing. Of course in the long term housing should be decommodified entirely but that is the future. The survival program is for the here now. Now that aspect of the survival program that even talks about is food autonomy. The establishment of black community controlled food systems to establish self-sufficiency to control the production distribution of food to ensure basic needs are met to ensure that black communities are no longer at the mercy of food deserts and other systemic barriers to accessing healthy affordable food. By creating trucking networks and warehouses

and communal farms, farms cooperatives, food cooperatives, agricultural unions and other collective associations, black communities can ensure that healthy and essential foods are readily available. Rather than just treating the symptom, such institutions would treat the root cause of food insecurity which is a lack of control over our food chains and food networks. So for example a trucking network would be used to transport food from communal farms to warehouses which could serve as collectively owned distribution centers for the food in a sort of a library economy setting. The warehouses could also serve as storage facilities for other non-perishable food items to bank seeds to distribute those seeds and items and tools to

community gardens and food cooperatives and such community gardens could be established on vacant lots on rooftops and unused spaces within the city particularly in areas where access to fresh produce is limited and all these efforts would involve members of the community who would be responsible for each step in the process and ensuring that such things are accessible equitably. Food cooperatives within communities could for example be organized through sort of a share structure where each household or each individual has a share in the cooperative that entitles them to sit down to food each week or you could have in a sort of a library structure a lot of different ways that you can organize it. You could even have as well our cultural unions provide support

and training and education on sustainable farming practices access to tools and equipment financial assistance for farmers in need. All these efforts would establish the foundation necessary for food autonomy under this sort of survival program that Uvin has developed and as I mentioned in the previous episode Uvin also talks about under the survival programs developing autonomous education ensuring the community has control over every aspect of the educational system from the curriculum and textbooks to the hiring and training of teachers administrators. And as I spoke about in the previous episode you know the same way the reactionaries fight and advocate for control of education is the same way that we can do the same. It won't be as easy but we have to counter their efforts because they have

already been countering ours. The minimal gains we've made in for example ensuring that an accurate account of history is told in schools is already being fought against so we need to go even further. Community controlled schools would not only reflect community values culture and history not only would they be designed to meet the specific needs of the children within them not only would they provide a safe and a neutral environment to encourage creativity critical thinking and problem solving skills but they would also provide a space an additional space for the development of people's powers and drives and consciousness towards liberation at any age. I mean in addition to primary and secondary education Uvin also talks about free higher

education programs remedial training programs reading programs trade programs all these things to help develop people's skills and education knowledge that would help to equip them to address social political economic issues. Uvin also calls for a system of community based self-defense to defend ourselves against various forms of violence including police brutality, hate crimes and vigilante attacks without relying on government or law enforcement agencies to defend ourselves. There are several components to this of course it would involve organizing and mobilizing community members to participate in self-defense training programs it would involve weapons training it would involve tactics for de-escalation

it would involve a network that can coordinate responses to incidents of violence establishing community channels to quickly disseminate information enabling restorative and transformative justice practices to be included to keep the state out of resolving the conflicts between people in communities and then of course unlike a lot of these law enforcement systems and structures a community based self-defense program or system would also be involved in the prevention of such incidents of violence and harm and conflict from occurring it would be involved in continuously evaluating and adapting to changing circumstances to analyzing the patterns of violence and gaps that are taking place in

training or in resources and to continuously refine tactics and strategies and approaches to see to the long-term healing of the communities and the interruption of cycles of violence and generational trauma in the long-term. Now the component of these survival programs would involve medical training large-scale medical training programs in black communities providing individuals with the knowledge and skills needed to understand and address health issues black communities especially those from low income backgrounds in the u.s. often face significant barriers to accessing quality health care. This due to systemic racism and oppression this is due to inaccessibility and affordability of health care just generally and also the quality

and resources available within certain communities specifically and also the ways that health outcomes are worse if you are black black mothers or rather the black maternal death rate is one particularly heavy example of these sorts of disparities and so that's why we need community based medical clinics and training programs and workshops and seminars led by black medical professionals public health experts public health experts and community organizers who are boosted in the social determinants of health and impacts of systemic racism on health outcomes and invested in seeing that changed. Such a program would involve medical including dental training that would empower individuals to provide basic health care services and support their

communities it would involve training first aid it would involve health care screenings health education because under representation in health matters lack of education in one's own personal health matters and too many people losing their lives as a result of that racial blind spot and as a result of that inequality and so a survival program in the here and now needs to account for that. Given also calls for the release of black political prisoners as part of a broader abolitionist struggle rooted in the recognition that the criminal justice system in the US has been used as a tool for political repression against black people and the marginalized communities. You speak in here from experience of course he wrote this when he was in prison mass incarceration

of black people has been deliberate and systemic effort to silence in dissent to silence dissent and maintain the status quo of white supremacy and white supremacist capitalism. Here are now survival programs should be involved in the release of black political prisoners especially to investigate review the cases of those who have been unjustly imprisoned to address the use of co-ist confessions force fight evidence and other forms of prosecutorial misconduct has led to wrongful convictions that has led to people rossing away in jail cells for decades with no sort of justice. I mean these people are often some of the most committed and dedicated revolutionaries and their continued imprisonment has been

a grave injustice some of them unfortunately passed before they even released if they had released at all and by demanding their release by fighting for their freedom by writing to them and supporting them even now by showing solidarity with those who have sacrificed so much in the struggle for liberation and ensuring that their voices are heard not only can we aid in their survival we can also aid in our own. Lastly Joven calls for the ever contentious big payback reparations Joven challenges us to build a mass movement in our communities to compel the government and the rich to provide the means for communities redevelopment at the centuries of slavery and of abuse and of robbery and of discrimination demanding those reparations

in the form of community development funds to be placed in credit unions cooperatives and other mutual aid institutions in the black community so we can start to obtain some measure of economic self-sufficiency but of course from the question of who pays to how we force them to pay to how we determine how much they pay how that pay is distributed or implemented if the pay is even in cash you know there's a lot of tension surrounding that topic and pro reparations not just for black america but for the entire diaspora uh i mean i've seen the us made sure to get reparations for itself and its allies after world war two the victims of various atrocities have received reparations for their injustices but as soon as black people demand their due demand their due

everybody you know they want us to forget about it yeah but yeah everybody knows and i think part of that is because everybody knows that they can't actually afford it you know if we were paid exactly what we would do they would not have the wealth they have um and so my stance has always been i don't think reparations will come by ballot i don't want it to come by ballot um i don't want to receive some check in the mail it says okay now be happy get over it um but let me not get myself in any more trouble i believe it at that i don't think it will come by ballot um i don't think that's reasonable yeah i've already said so much in these past two episodes um i mean there are a lot of arms to this survival program and bring things to a close a bit

there are a lot of areas of struggle that we can pick up um a lot of things that could be applied of course most of these things i think could be applied beyond the black community but there's a reason that the black community specifically was Irvin's focus um because of his life experience because of the need to address black community specifically in uh in an anarchist text uh something that was really lacking prior to the resurgence of you know the black radical tradition the black anarchist specific tradition in the 70s so it's necessary um um but i just hope you know people who understand who on that black didn't just you know click off that i still hear that these ideas and stuff these programs are applicable more broadly um

i hope that i can see and contribute to these changes in my lifetime and as i consistently borrow from Ashanti Alston another black anarchist figure who i actually hope at some point we could bring on all power to all the people peace hi i'm david eagleman i have a new podcast called inner cosmos on i heart i'm a neuroscientist and an author at stanford university and i've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads on my new podcast i'm going to explore the relationship between our brains and our experiences by tackling unusual questions so we can better understand our lives and our realities like does time really run in slow motion when you're in a car accident or can we create new

senses for humans or what does dreaming have to do with the rotation of the planet so join me weekly to uncover how your brain steers your behavior your perception and your reality listen to inner cosmos with david eagleman on the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts last season millions tuned into the betrayal podcast to hear a shocking story of deception i'm andrea gunning and now we're sharing an all-new story of betrayal ashley linton was helping her husband set up a business fenmo account when she discovered a terrible secret i scrolled down and that's when i saw a hidden folder and i opened it what the hell did i just see i was scared that he was coming home what ashley discovered that day

was a secret so dark she feared for her life she was like oh my god i gotta get out of the house he's gonna find out that i've seen this he's gonna come kill me listen to season two of betrayal on the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts between april 1971 and september 1972 six young black girls were snatched off the streets in washington dc it took four murders before the police finally realized that one person was responsible i will admit the others when you catch me if you can sign freeway fans this child was laying on the side of the road it appeared that she was probably either dragged out of the car it's thrown out of the car the person said i murdered your daughter

the killer believed that he may have been seen by the mother that guy is he's at a sink with even the worst people i thought that they would catch him i thought it was just a matter of time is it possible that the killer is still alive listen to freeway phantom on the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts hello podcast fans and welcome to it could happen here a podcast that today is hosted by me jamestown and mia wong hi me hello hi uh so we're going to talk about today is situation on the border we're working on a scripted episode which will take a while because they always do and uh you know we want that to be nice and and sort of polished for you but i did want to update

everyone because i think that what's happening it has a sense of urgency to it and certainly like some of the mutual aid requests have a real sense of urgency to them and folks who follow me on on twitter.com um kind of notice like in between the ship posts and i've been down at the us Mexico border for most of the tail end of last week and the start of this week sort of depicting what's going on there along with my friend jo jo arayama who's who's a freelancer who we're going to be working with on the scripted series and people can find jo at jo or oh i e photo on twitter jo's got some really good photos if you if you want to see kind of what's going on and but along in the short of it is that title 42 ended on well to begin with exactly the moment

that it ended was a subject of some contention right we we knew it was going to end on the 11th of may um title 42 if folks don't remember is a emergency public health measure it's part of the united states public health uh law i think it's united states code public health something something that allows border patrol to expel people from the united states without giving them their due process their asylum hearing uh so basically they they bounce them straight back to mexico right and this has been in place since march of 2020 uh we now know that the trump administration pressured the cdc so in theory it was it came through the cdc right the center for disease control under pressure from trump administration direct pressure from from um pence and uh

steven miller was yeah this is a this is this was a steven miller like yeah it's a primary c special yeah bobblehead looking racist motherfucker um has once again uh done something terrible uh not that some of his policies as i will get on to this in the scripted episode the biden administration has like copy pasted some steve some straight up steven miller stuff in its tran in its transit bands and is absolutely liable for i don't want to use the word chaos at our border because that that plays into this fox news narrative there is a a very concerted plan to make people suffer more than is necessary at our border and it would have been very easy to avoid this so title 42 basically there are no consequences for crossing but it's also very

hard to get asylum the the cbp officer can like spontaneously decide to to give you your rights basically if you're like come on bro i'm gonna get killed if i go home then then that person can kind of decide to allow you to be processed for asylum um which is what a lot of the ukrainian folks got um surprise surprise yeah i feel like we should we should also mention that under your like multiple legal frameworks you have the right to request asylum this is in this is something that supposedly is inviolable you like you you you have the right as a human being to request asylum in a country yes and it doesn't matter where you've been before and it doesn't matter how you got there and you don't have to do it at a port of entry you know it doesn't matter

how you entered the country or where you entered the country uh yes yeah and yeah under multiple different international frameworks you have the right to do this uh but the usa has been denying that to people for three and a bit years now right three years and something like that and you know i mean i also could just want to briefly mention this because i feel like there's this way in which people people people people will talk about like one border regime and then never connect the dots between this one of the other ones but like for example like this is something that happens all over the world um yes i mean like part part of like part of this sort of like crisis that's going on in sudan right now is about like a shit ton of money but the and this actually happened

in libya too is the the italian government paying the libyan and sort of sudinese parabilitaries a shit ton of money to like keep refugees like basically like trap to some extent enslave them in camps to keep them from like getting to idli to try to request asylum so this is a yeah like fredex does this like border patrol does this this is sort of like a global like yeah the regime the border like industrial complex um is every bit as bad if not worse than the defense industrial complex so we're more familiar with like border policing is something that really came post 9 11 right with the creation of dhs in the united states but we have exported that shit everywhere and like our border patrol agents where cbp has an office in lots of embassies or like they train

dominican border agents on the border with hati for instance are trained by our cbp people cbp agents were deployed in iraq afghanistan like yeah this is a global thing yeah and like where i i guess where i am now where i've been for a while is the place where that all began right and where we continue to see cbp innovating new and exciting ways to fucking take some of the most desperate people in the world and make them suffer and spend a shit ton of money and preventing them from accessing their legal right to asylum and or detaining them while they do it and so what has happened is title 42 was supposed to end on the 11th of may right that was when the federal covert emergency ended so there was no reason for it to exist anymore but there wasn't a reason for

it to exist to begin with but yeah and you know i like don't don't don't think too hard about the fact that like that was the last that was basically the last covid policy that was still in place yeah like they were not vaccine mandates for the people meeting the migrants at the fucking border yeah right like this this was this wasn't this was never about public health like no absolutely not i mean in in in so far as you can extricate sort of like the the sort of imperialist states public health measures from social cleansing stuff which has been happening for generations and generations but yeah like this was this was not about that like this yeah this was just an immigration ban yeah and it became a sort of albatross sort of by administration who didn't want to be hit on

border stuff right they didn't want to they didn't want to drop it before the midterms they initially planned to drop it in december 2022 which is obviously right after the midterms they didn't we're here we are in may there's a complicated legal challenge which there always is and it doesn't matter because here we are right and on it's supposed to drop on the 11th of may so we're all thinking right midnight on the 10th of may we'll be out there we'll see what goes down they announced the day before that it is dropping on midnight on the 11th so they're going to ring every minute out of it and so in the days before a number of migrants have told me that they understood that they basically had to get across before the end of title 42

because it was their understanding that if they crossed under title eight they would be ejected and they wouldn't be allowed to return for five years and they would face felony charges if they did um this i don't quite know often these this information spreads via like whatsapp in camps right or sort of like like a game of telephone in camps so i don't quite know where this information came from but it closely parallels something that my orcas is a secretary of home now security said in a press conference and where he mischaracterized international immigration law and he's done this multiple times right he himself someone who is a migrant to this country his family family left cuba when he was one year old uh has just some of the most dog shit statements on the record um

and i've depicted some of those in the scripted episode folks can look up my piece i wrote for mbc a couple of years ago about the by administrations policy towards Haiti if they um they want to see more of the dog shit stuff that he and biden have said and so in the days before the end of title 42 a lot of folks started to try to cross right because of this information that they had they ended up at least where i am which is in southern california right it's sort of extreme southwestern border united states literally the end of the wall folks were crossing like around the end of the wall right low tide and turning themselves in to border patrol asking to make their case for their right to asylum and and i think sometimes when we think about migrants

yeah we maybe think about people from south america or central america um every single continent of maybe not any like australians um but like just in a day at one camp i spoke to someone from angola i spoke to someone from congo i spoke to someone from sudan uh i spoke to a Kurdish guy i spoke to people certainly from all over south america uh russians tagic people um Jamaican people and like for instance just to give you a sense of like how global this is i spoke to a Jamaican lady who was caring for a 16 and 17 year old pair of tagic siblings who didn't speak any of the relevant languages for communication with border patrol with other people in the camp so she would use her phone to call their mother who spoke some english give information to the

mother who were translated back to these two young children and all of these people had presented like there were a lot of afghan people too if i'd probably should have mentioned that up top but like these are the people who we fucking abandoned once and now we're we're trapping um trapping them in between little fences and it's hot in the day right like i slept out in the desert last night and it was above 100 it's it's not that hot in san diego but in hokumbo where they're also holding people it's absolutely getting into triple digits every day and it's cold at night and uh it's a really inhospitable environment for people and so folks were held there you know up to a week in some cases and are now i think being processed by border patrol there was a

a ruling by a florida judge and i'm not exactly clear on when because i was down at the border and i found it worked very well um but at some point right before title 42 dropped that they couldn't be released on humanitarian parole which means in theory they have to be released with a court date right with a court date to appear for their asylum hearing which will slow down the process of of releasing them right um and so i've heard of court dates i've heard of folks being released already uh kind with court dates in 2027 which this whole thing has just been like a disaster in terms of the federal response right like and in just the cruelest possible way it was because everyone could see this coming right that there will be more people trying to cross

there are 16 000 people give or take in tijuana alone right so it's just across from where i live waiting to come to the united states because they've been denied that right for three years because they need somewhere safe to go and because they're not safe there um and the best estimate we got for how many they could process from border patrol was 200 a day um at the tijuana port of entry or santi sidra port of entry really um but we don't know there's no clear i don't know how many people they're processing every day right but these people who do come in now have to have a hearing date before they can be released when if they get through so i spoke to a young man uh and his son who i've spoken to at the border um and uh he had been released into

united states where a charity in san diego will provide him with two nights what like one two nights of accommodation right um and then i can't quite work out what then like is he out on his own um you know like i guess we'll find out tonight um but he has to find a sponsor um i don't quite understand how he was released without a sponsor but it seems like the system is kind of bungling things up and and these folks have to fund their own flights to wherever it is the sponsor is right so they have family or community they're having to work out how to get to that family and community so and be that a greyhound or a plane or a train so it's all in all a giant clusterfuck with very human consequences like i can't stress enough how like every possible demographic

is represented old people little tiny children right like i was talking to a little afghan girl not really talking to we don't share any languages but i was more just like making funny faces for a while um and sort of pointing at things and uh like it just breaks my heart that there are little children who like especially uh you know she's a little girl she's from afghanistan we told a shit ton of lies about afghan women to justify 20 years of killing people and of certain people making money from killing people and like this was supposedly the the like kanad was that this was for afghan girls and women right and here's an afghan girl sleeping in the fucking dirt um like 20 20 minutes from where i live and i can't even give this kid like a hot meal

because i can't fit it through the bars of the fence like everything that goes across to these people has to go through the bars of the fence right so someone uh worked out that pizza pizza could fit through because it's flat right so people have been getting pizza but other than that they're getting you know bottles of water granola bars uh you know things that fit fit through a fence beef jerky um and they've been there for days in some cases and that's a camp that's relatively accessible right you i can pull off the interstate drive down a dirt road and be there in like i say 20 minutes um the camps are less accessible we've heard the conditions are much worse a couple of jamaican guys told me that there was another camp that we weren't we tried to get

access to it weren't able to get access to um that was further west from where we were where people were hungry they're getting this is all just from that source i i have reached out to border patrol but as of today they haven't got back to me um saying that they were getting a bottle of water and a granola bar every day um and that like some of these other folks had taken it upon themselves to like walk over there to try and get them food right people who are already not in the great situation themselves and they kept asking why couldn't we go there why couldn't we help them like it was very admirable right to see folks who are in a pretty bad way be like hey these people need need help more than we do um so yeah that's a situation i think we should

take a break for advertising then sorry yeah yeah yeah uh hopefully not for a drone or some shit all right we're back and this is another happy and exciting episode in which i tell you things that will brighten your day um so something i wanted to talk about because i think it's important is the mutual aid response to this and and it's been really really impressive uh you know i live in a place where the democrats are absolute dog shit uh well we'll do it's america right but um like just particularly cringe like carceral liberalism of san diego democrats it is like as always on display right i saw one of them tweeting today about how cb uh dhs and cbp are doing a great job in keeping us safe and like my like i don't know it makes me uh want to say

things i shouldn't say on the podcast i guess but what that means is that like our government isn't going to do shit right like it is entirely on us to look after each other and people have done that um the groups like um american friend service committee which is a great organization which does really good stuff on the board i have been down there every single day right like there have been days when i've left at one a.m there's still someone there um they've been giving people water giving people food a huge need that people have is to charge their phones and the way that migrants interact with cbp at least in theory the way you get an asylum appointment is booking it through an app called cbp one uh we've talked about this on the podcast before but cbp one is

terrible it is a terrible app that doesn't work and that's for people who have phones and wi-fi right if you are stuck in between two fences and a dusty piece of ground how the hell are you supposed to charge your phone you don't have wi-fi right you may not have a data plan that works in that area so a huge unmet need was charging um charging phones so uh we were able to like get some donations from the team and buy a big charger other folk turned up with charges uh even all the news orcs i see to include like like fox national weren't there which is a good thing uh but like um we could talk about that actually as well migrants will specifically ask which news network you're with which i think is that i think that's good i think it's good

they tell fox news to fuck off because yeah you someone who participates in your dehumanization doesn't also deserve to make money from your trauma and so every news network that was there right or the local folks from san diego were just constantly shuttling back and forth to their vans charging phones constantly constantly constantly and it became a bit of a cluster because obviously there's literally just hundreds of people in this small area dozens of hands reaching for defense charge my phone can i have my phone back charge my phone and in the english and spanish and french and and kumanji and and vietnamese and all these other languages right so it was very hard to organize that so folks came down folks from san diego from different

sort of mutual aid groups came down and they organized the system right they got painters tape wrote the names of the people on the back of the phone uh we had this u-jash battery that we were able to get um and that they were able to charge people's phones get them their phones back to them and that is a crucial thing right in that in that scenario not only is it your only way to communicate with border patrol it's your only way to communicate with your family right like um one guy had lost his phone and so i just bought him a burner phone or you know one of those war smartphones um so that he could call his family uh because his family didn't know where he was right last i'd heard he was in mexico or maybe even further south and uh so the the phones are

super important other mutual aid groups have been getting blankets right um i saw an afghan family turn up and had they had crayons for the the afghan kids who were there and like coloring books and things for children to do because it's probably boring being a kid and it's probably scary being a kid where like every day men with guns and camouflaged gear turn up and they speak a language you don't understand and then you don't know what they say and then you stay there yeah and i want to kind of just there are lots of things that could get called camps that are like not camps right like this is like this is this is not a camp in the sense of like there are buildings that you go into or even like there are tents it's just like oh yeah no yeah

i think that's a very good i think that i haven't mentioned thank you uh yes this is people lying on the dirt occasionally they have a mylar space blanket occasionally they have a tarp um if they want to make any form of shelter they have to use the only thing they have to use is the wall itself right so up against the wall people have made like a lean to kind of situation with a tarp right um but no this is by no means suitable shelter literally people are lying on the dirt like it's just a fucking cage like in a desert yeah like it's yeah it's it's it's it's it's the kind of thing that like like you it's the kind of thing you would put it in an apocalypse move and people will be like oh no one would ever do that shit it's like no no like this is just sort of

i don't know this yeah this is what u.s border policy is it's these like just these open air cages yeah it's you wouldn't like you know i go to the zoo in san diego and the animals have much better conditions than that um there's no running water there was one port portaloo toilet for 500 people um yeah it's terrible it it is awful it's little it's people wrapping their babies in my love blankets and trying to get them to sleep at night you know and that's the same at several places up and down the border right they're starting to clear them out now um so sort of tuesday monday um so you know some people got there a week ago i think and they've been staying there for a long time uh and yeah like it's at no point does there seem to have been any consideration like for even

giving people shade or shelter or like yeah the very basics and like i should reinforce it in 2018 when trump blocked a large group of migrants from entering the united states the government of mexico did considerably better than this it was by no means a good situation for those children at all but they did better than this which is of an obitly extremely low bar to clear but we have failed to clear it completely as a country and that's kind of to our eternal shame i think yeah and i think in everything i'm sort of with that first emphasizing about this is that it hasn't always been like this there's there's this sort of image that's being instructed that this this is always what the u.s border has been and it's like no i mean it's not like it's not like american border

policy has always been like good but i mean like in my lifetime it wasn't like yeah in the mid 90s there were 4 000 border patrol agents yeah it's increased by a factor of 10 and its budget probably by more than that yeah and you know the the consequences of this is just it basically in order to appease a bunch of just sort of like fucking like turbo racist baked dipshits like who live in the suburbs and you know have never have never experienced a single hardship in their entire lives like fucking like untold numbers of people are put through just in inhuman suffering and for fucking nothing just just like for for nothing for like just dog shit electoral pandering yeah by people who have never seen what goes on at the border they've never experienced

where these people come from and yeah it's they're just numbers to people in dc right and and i would really urge people to not read immigration coverage or watch immigration coverage or listen to immigration coverage that isn't written by people at the border because this isn't a fucking issue about numbers every single one of those numbers is a person who has people they love and things that they've done and choices that they've made that got them there and every single one of them is someone who deserves compassion and empathy and it's not just another you know like a number in an excel chart which is how it's treated and yeah it hasn't always been this way this is a very recent innovation and it's i mean we've talked about this before as well

but right this is the proving ground for state surveillance state violence fascism all these things right the reason that you got surveilled by a drone if you went to a george floyd protest in minneapolis is because the border patrol already had one the reason that cops listened into your phone if you went to some protest in 2020 is because of border patrol technology right they they have these stingray towers all up and down the border and robber and i have seen him in mexico sorry in texas even yeah and i mean you know even even even stuff like this this is sort of recent laws in places like florida and texas that are you know let the state steal trans kids right like that that's also stuff that was sort of like yeah like the prototype of that came from the but i

mean all like it came from the border there's there's it all it's also something that came from sort of like like anti-black bullshit that like is sort of deeply rooted in like american family planning bullshit but like yeah like that that that's also another one of the places where like that stuff was tested and with indigenous folks like we've ripped indigenous children for their families for decades yeah but yeah we it's a deeply baked white supremacist system that that always does it's experimenting on marginalized people are very often at the border and but yeah if you if you're worried about the government intercepting your communications with an abortion care provider that has happened because at some point they've been allowed to do stuff to migrants

that was equally bad if not worse and and like this will hurt you even if you are like kathy the liberal in minnesota like when we let the state have these powers they don't just use them benevolently and that they weren't using them benevolently in the first place right like these are innocent people who've done nothing wrong yeah i mean like that's that's the thing about state powers and any any power the state has inevitably they will one day use it on you and so you can't let them take shit like this because you know they will they they will turn your entire society into a sort of hell garrison state yeah and it's just i don't know the inhumanity that your taxes pay for if you're listening to this in america is abhorrent it's disgusting and

yeah you should do everything you can to stop it and like this probably is one of the instances where like you may be able to do something of some value by writing to a politician it's certainly one of the instances where if you live near the border you can show up and make a very meaningful difference to someone's whole experience right like um myself and and joe were down there when when this this guy had lost his phone and like you know it wasn't that expensive to buy this guy a phone uh other like and people will remember mandy and people will remember alex who had two guests i've had on different san diego episode that they've both been down there i know alex gave his epi pen to someone who needed an epi pen like we acutely needed an epi pen um like things like

that you can maybe save someone's life maybe just make someone's day a little bit less shit you know maybe you can let a kid kick a football you'd have to deflate the football to get it through the fence early um but like you know you can give a doll to a little kid so they can play with it or something just something that will for a moment take them out of the utterly miserable place um that we force them into and if folks want to support that i know i'd posted mandy's uh cash app and venmo and i think some people very generously did contribute which is great if you're not at the border look at border kindness um uh which is a group out of san diego who i know are doing aid runs to hukumba um i think the hukumba hotel hukumba for those not familiar j a c u m b a um the hukumba

hotel was housing folks and and providing a huge amount of water and shelter to people uh this morning uh people can look at the american friend service committee that i wrote about and i know that uh jo and myself have shared some amazon wish lists that people have and that kind of thing but it's it's a massive task but it's not one that's like insurmountable the amount of people i've seen show up to include like and i you know i'm not a religious person and i'm not a person who particularly cares for organized religion either but it does make me happy when i see like old church ladies in high heels with perms coming out like and like giving water to children charging phones and and seeing i think it's like certainly i've lived on the border for 15 years it's been a fundamentally

radicalizing experience for me like i think you're supposed to grow old and grow out of your anarchist politics or whatever but i don't know how anyone could live here and think that like police state good it's and i think anybody who can get down here should it's good for you too like and i always think about how oscar wild has this thing about like how seeing people living on the streets like not only undermines their humanity but also his humanity because like seeing someone else suffering should make us feel bad and so like he benefits when he helps someone and like you know we're all lifted up right like i i guess one of the things i struggle with most of the journalist is that like that like feeling of living in comfort what other people

can't especially when it's such like it's one thing if i um if i go somewhere right if i'm in Myanmar and i'm aware that things are difficult and scary and then i get on a plane and it takes two days and i come back but um just from a like a personal like mental health perspective seeing a little child sleep in the dirt right or someone asks me for a fucking bin bag so they can keep their baby out of the rain like a trash bag or a kid without shoes you know um and then going home to my relatively comfortable existence is really hard and i think we should all have to face up to that because it's what it's what our government is responsible for and supposedly we got the best fucking option in 2020 right this is the this is this is the good choice of the two

but it doesn't make any meaningful difference whether you choose trump or biden to these people really because yeah i mean they both treat them like shit yeah it's like the kids are still in cages and yes you know until until until the entire system that that enables the shit is destroyed and it can be right like and this isn't even this this isn't even on the on the level of sort of like you know of sort of anarchist politics right like this none of this shit existed 20 years ago right like this is this is like wow okay i guess it's 20 or 30 25 years ago none of this shit existed even within like the framework of the nation state right like this is not a thing that you that we have to do we simply do not have to do this you could share politics with

bill clinton and still ronald reagan was better on the fucking border than any than any president who has been alive in my fucking lifetime right yeah fucking reagan dwight eisenhower would have had serious concerns about the industrial complex we're building at the border yeah like this is not like this this this isn't this isn't like a particularly radical political thing right it's just that we've we've become sort of a nerd to this death state that's been built up around us and you know doesn't it doesn't keep anyone safe it just fucking inflicts untold human misery so fucking greg abbott can win an election yeah yeah and it costs us a lot of money right like your universal health care is is an unmanned drone flying over some children trying to cross a

desert in arizona right now your free university education is a border patrol smart camera in the desert that goes off every time a fucking deer walks past or it rains like it this stuff is expensive and like if you're in the u.s you are paying for it yeah i think the most sort of soft of liberals can see that this is and they did see that this shit was wrong in the trump administration and they do see this is wrong when they come right like um i've some of the best mutual aid groups i've worked with are like middle-aged folks from churches who have time and the means to help and just didn't realize that it was like no one was coming and we had to do it ourselves and when they did that they were very effective and so i would encourage folks who are in the

border communities near the border um near the border means a different thing if you're border patrol because their jurisdiction applies a hundred miles from the border that's the other thing right the border will come to you yeah like two thirds like statistically odds are the you are the border already has come to you yes that's yeah yeah two thirds of people in the united states are in the border patrol enforcement zone yeah like i'm in it and i'm in like fucking chicago right like yeah like yeah i think yes people who would not think of themselves as border dwellers the border affects you and if you go to other communities in your city you might realize border patrol are around there isa around there so yeah um it's it's it's pretty bleak we're working on some

scripted stuff but i want to get into a bit of the history of border patrol and rereading border patrol nation which is a great book if people haven't read it and and i want the other thing i should say about border reporting is if people don't center migrants and they're reporting about migration then you shouldn't be reading that reporting like sometimes it can be hard one other thing i guess i do want to say is you'll see in my photos and you'll see in joe's photos you're not going to see many faces um and that's because people have legitimate fears for their well-being that's why they are fucking here yeah and not obtaining consent before taking photographs is making a terrible situation worse and like that's something that we can work on as

as a media right like so the guy will continue to call out when i see it uh but if you don't speak the language find someone who does or just don't take the goddamn photo and you'll see some faces of mine like i'd like to pass my camera through defense and give it to like teenage kids so they can run around and take photos and have fun uh and like so when they take like goofy selfies i'll post those they get consent from them or their parents or the parents around and uh that's fine but yeah when you're looking at border coverage always understand that these are people and if we don't center those people and their stories then we're doing it wrong if you can physically get to these places like you should like the the this is this is one of the

like the situations where like the amount of good that like a very small number of people could do is enormous and the cost is not that high and no and i but for instance i saw some of my friends had just gone to Costco right and just loaded up one of those big Costco trolleys and like that that makes a meaningful difference to hundreds of people yeah and so you should there'll probably be mutual aid networks on the ground almost every border area by now reach out to them see if they need your money if you can get there and help organize that's better if you have skills right if you have language skills yours like there are people i met a guy who spoke kumanji like the Kurdish dialect of north and east Syria right met a uh people who speak Vietnamese um almost every

language you can conceive of right those people really struggle to get information and they just can't talk to anyone because there's no one else to talk to and then their phone you know the phone charges is a precious commodity and it's cost a lot of money to dial internationally so those people could just be lonely so if you have those language skills go someone broke their finger in San Diego getting crushed up against the fence if you know there was a medic there to help them if there hadn't been there could have been worse for them and sometimes ambulance can come in and take people out but there are valuable meaningful things that you could do if you have the time if not if you have the money there are really important places to donate there's just a couple of them we'll

highlight a couple more as we go forward and oh one more thing i did want to plug is miles for migrants um where if you have if you don't have money but you do have airline miles like i was speaking to this guy today who got across he has two days and he has to get himself to New York where he has family uh i don't have the means to buy four airline tickets or i would but if you have air miles you want to donate them you can yeah and this is a thing like you know like i have family who for example like work at Hong Kong right and they have like you know and they're like there are people like that who are like you know not radicals but are sort of you know like you you like like there are people in this world who have a shit ton of miles like built up because

you know for like work or some shit right that's just sitting there and that that's something that you know like you can you can like you you may not have it you might know people who do yeah yeah you might know someone who does a weird credit card flipping thing you know where they like get air miles and and like make it their whole like personality to to get air miles but like whatever if those people can help yeah you don't need to turn them into like macnovists overnight like like nobody wants to see a little baby sleep in the dirt and anybody who could be there physically would be appalled by it and i think if you can convey to those folks at now at the time when something that costs them nothing materially yeah right like i know tons of people have more miles

that they can use because they fly all the time for work you don't want to fly when you're done flying you want to stay at home so that's another way that people can help uh and yeah just i guess it's it's a crisis that will continue unabated because the cruelty is the point and it's for once like you know we can't stop all the climate change and all this bad shit um but this is something that is within our power to a bet we can't we can't make it go away yet but like we spoke to the people who are doing water drops on the border there are meaningful things that every every single one of us can do to help yeah go go go into the world do not let the violence done in our name be who we are yeah sure people you're better than this i guess

hi i'm david eagleman i have a new podcast called inner cosmos on eye heart i'm a neuroscientist and an author at stanford university and i've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads on my new podcast i'm going to explore the relationship between our brains and our experiences by tackling unusual questions so we can better understand our lives and our realities like does time really run in slow motion when you're in a car accident or can we create new senses for humans or what does dreaming have to do with the rotation of the planet so join me weekly to uncover how your brain steers your behavior your perception and your reality listen to inner cosmos with david eagleman on the eye heart radio app apple podcasts or

wherever you get your podcasts last season millions tuned into the betrayal podcast to hear a shocking story of deception i'm andrea gunning and now we're sharing an all-new story of betrayal ashley linton was helping her husband set up a business venmo account when she discovered a terrible secret i scrolled down and that's when i saw a hidden folder and i opened it what the hell did i just see i was scared that he was coming home what ashley discovered that day was a secret so dark she feared for her life she was like oh my god i got to get out of the house he's going to find out that i've seen this he's going to come kill me listen to season two of betrayal on the eye heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your

podcasts between april 1971 and september 1972 six young black girls were snatched off the streets in washington dc it took four murders before the police finally realized that one person was responsible i will admit the others when you catch me if you can sign freeway phantom this child was laying on the side of the road it appeared that she was probably either dragged out of the car it's thrown out of the car the person said i murdered your daughter the killer believed that he may have been seen by the mother that guy is he's out of sync with even the worst people i thought that they would catch him i thought it was just a matter of time is it possible that the killer is still alive listen to freeway phantom on the eye heart radio app apple podcasts

or wherever you get your podcasts hey everyone robert here before we get into it i want to note my internet was terrible during this call we tried to have the guest record locally but there was kind of a technical glitch there and zoom glitched a little on the audio in order to make it listenable there are going to be like three or four points here where i pop in and just say what what he was trying to say or what he said and the internet then garbled up so that you can understand what's actually being said in the conversation so when my voice pops in and i read a line it's me reading something that he said that got kind of distorted i do apologize ah welcome to it could happen here a podcast about things falling apart and occasionally

about the quest to build a better world today we've got an episode that is in the latter category about the struggle to make the united kingdom less i don't know in the thrall of a monarchy and an aristocratic class and to build a more equitable society and our guest today is somebody who is attempting to further that cause uh and did so last year by attempting to hug several eggs at the current king of england uh charles the i forget the number patrick well how are you doing today hi ro yeah i'm good thanks yeah it it was uh five eggs five eggs and he's the third king the third king third king we've had far more than three unfortunately yeah you guys have had a few um um is it was was one of the ones y'all killed charles yeah yeah that was the last one that was

the last one well yeah but i won't say so let's start by talking about this is in a 20 about a year ago um at a uh he he was doing a they called it a walkabout which i guess is when the king shows up in a city i in the video i watched the video of this and like there's a bunch of people dressed in all sorts of fun costumes and some ladies got a massive sword like a sword a sword of the size that i know for a fact that man cannot lift above his head like yeah it's funny he comes out of his little car and all the little trumpets go and everyone starts you know waving their flags on cue and i go like look there he is there he is it's um pretty unhinged to be honest it's it's it's quite embarrassing but yeah i uh there's like the um the american chauvinist in me that

like wants to wants to laugh more about the monarchy but i'm just finished reading an article about uh uh diane feinstein where the journalist interviewing her was like so you've missed a bunch of votes over the last three months and she's like no i haven't i've been working the whole time so i guess uh we're all kind of enthralled to the corpses of uh of of our past it's hierarchy hierarchy everywhere yeah is the problem so you decide to show up when do you kind of find out that the king is is going to be showing up here and and what kind of lead you to decide i'm gonna i'm gonna throw some eggs in my pocket and and take my shot so so i actually only found out that he was coming to york about three days with a megaphone and you know shout some she calls

obviously uh the queen had died uh about a month or so before uh and and during the funeral processions there was you know several people were arrested for uh someone shouted uh you know prince andrew you know in scotland's they were like oh you're a sick old man and they did and that was probably my my inspiration but then on the morning um when he came to york my my megaphone was just like busted so i was just like oh okay i'm gonna i'm gonna go get some eggs then and why eggs what uh what what kind of led to that decision man everyone asked that um yeah i guess like i was under the assumption that we all just knew that you throw eggs at people you don't like maybe it's a british thing um i think it may just be that in the us because of the gun stuff people

are like a lot more hesitant to huck stuff just for fun right if you're throwing stuff at somebody it's serious yeah although someone someone threw a beer at um tag cruise yeah they sure did that was good that was good yeah um i think you know i i actually had a lot of time to think about before my trial about um why eggs and stuff and i think they're just funny you know like there's a lot of egg puns that came out of it uh that that you know not to get too philosophic about it but they're kind of you know they're they're really harmless you know um but but inherently humiliating as well like yeah yeah yeah it's hard to argue attempted murder from an egg but at the same time getting yeah well exactly and i think there's there's something to be said for contrasting

the violence of the state yeah with what's obviously like very low level violence um and yeah i'm the one standing trial for it um yeah i mean it is it is like the the language that got used by the state kind of in the proceedings against you was was amusing like i know that it was a a pain in the ass who had to go through but like the the kind of the the framing that they they put with it to make it seem like this was this was such a like serious uh offense against public order was was was quite funny and i i think i it's beyond me to know what was going on in the now king's head at the time but i you got quite close um you can see right after it hit there's there's goop on the ground directly in front of his foot and his shoulders slump a little and he looks down

and i wonder if it made him feel bad i hope it did um you know i can't get inside the man's head maybe he he's not capable of that but i wonder so yeah i mean i threw five and i will say for the record that one of them did bounce off his arm but he does have a force field so it's not my fault that it didn't didn't get the full impact but yeah i honestly think he didn't have a clue what's going on he's pretty pretty seen out to be honest um i yeah but but you know monarchists were like so we're like wow look at how stoic he is he just doesn't even care he just shrugged it off he's such a badass and it's like he's just being guided through this series of bizarre public opinions where he's got to pretend that he's you know smiles and waves at normal people and he

doesn't think that we're all plebs but yeah yeah and it was the um the the the the crowd reaction around you was pretty intense from what i understand i mean like people came after you when they realized what had happened yeah and i think in some ways that spoke more more itself than like anything that i could have done you know the reaction to to the video you know people immediately just start like pulling my hair out in chunks and just like screaming like you know like just kill him like stick his head on a spy kick him to death and you know and it really um i think maybe maybe that kind of rhetoric is perhaps more like you know that the overt violence is more prevalent in american politics but yeah you know it exposed that you know these people are essentially fascists

you know and and that they yeah they're very very violent people um yeah and i think this is something people have are starting to to recognize a little bit more about kind of politics in the uk i mean we're looking right now uh the public order act of 2023 is kind of the most recent law that's gone through parliament um that effectively like expands the ability of the police to crack down on protests some people will argue and i think this seems based on what i've read pretty credible that it basically makes it possible for the police to arrest anyone for almost any kind of activism um and that kind of was uh was exhibited during the coronation when a group of kind of anti monarchist protesters who are more on the liberal side of things and you're

kind of approaching this um as an anarchist um but a a fairly large group of protesters with signs that were saying stuff like not my king um attempted to rally doing so i believe their their goal from what i can tell was to comply with the law as they understood it um and that did not protect them from the police no so so um you know the context is in the wake of the police there was a police officer you know last year who murdered a woman sarah everard yeah and in the wake of that they passed uh the police court's uh sentencing and crime bill and that that bill was really like you know the most overt crackdown and protest it banned um it allowed the police to arrest the discretion of an officer any process that was deemed potentially uh annoying like that's

the specific languages any any any action that could be loud or annoying so you know there was there was a lot of protests against that at the time that obviously came to nothing and they they passed the bill anyway and then and then so the public order bill just goes that step further by allowing them to preemptively arrest anyone who might be about to do something that's loud or annoying uh and including um this new uh thing called a serious disruption prevention order which is something that they can apply to someone who's considered an aggravated activist he's saying which is someone who has been arrested more than twice for protest related offenses essentially it bans you know use of the internet to communicate about your ideas

basically stop you from attending protests in the first place and arrest you at the train station um and we saw yeah we saw that in in play with with the republic that this organization that had been extensively liaising with the police and you know it just seemed quite like Pikachu face when suddenly they were all just rounded up and yeah but for literally you know no pretext it was they had they had um like 12 000 pounds worth of signs in a van um and they were they were all wrapped up in um yeah just like rope rope and um the the pretext for the arrest was that the rope was a lock-on device that could be used to you know I don't know like jump in front of the the procession uh and tie yourself with rope to the road I really don't know like yeah

I from from what I could tell just from the coverage I've read if their protest had gone the way they planned it it would have been like a show a visible show that there were people who didn't like the monarchy but it would not have caused it like it they would not have this these people were not planning to like burn down any public buildings or you know smash car windows or stop a road not that I'm specifically condemning that behavior but I'm just stating this this was not the state cracking down on people because they were afraid of a riot this was the state cracking down on people because they didn't want the display of any kind of dissent to exist yeah and and you know that's that's where we're at in this country and

to be honest um the arrest of those organizers was the best thing that could have happened for the movement um because you know what it really did was just shine a light that it was impossible to ignore and in some ways kind of overshadowed shadowed the coronation really was uh far more than any speech that that Graham Smith you know was planning to give um you know just so overtly that there is no acceptable form of dissent now yeah the very concept is is so distasteful to yeah our aristocracy that it's banned and I I really appreciate your ability to kind of see the the upside the tactical upside in that because I think it is true I doubt I would have heard about that protest if it had gone as the organizers planned right because it would have just been yeah

there's some people who don't like the monarchy in the UK that doesn't that doesn't surprise me at all but seeing it it was like everywhere all over my social media I got sent it by multiple friends by a family member because the state decided to go after these people and I I do think I think it's also from um just a standpoint when you when you're talking about a struggle with as long odds as kind of struggling against the uh the the monarchy in the United Kingdom which is you are talking about like the most entrenched power structure outside of the Vatican right basically yeah um when you're talking about that it is so important to be able to look at moments like this and see the upside in them rather than just rather than just kind of feel the boot all the time um otherwise you're

you're not going to have the endurance to keep fighting you know for me with specifically with the eggs um I was I've been conscious the whole time that the backlash uh and the you know disproportionate state reaction would speak more than my own actions so so for example one of the reasons why I think you know it went pretty viral when I when I threw the eggs in the first place um uh I was a bit surprised by by how it went kind of quite internationally yeah um but but but you know so the fact so my bail conditions were um between between my arrest and my trial were that I wasn't allowed to carry eggs in public um yeah I know and so that is in itself like so absurd that it's like right I gotta know is there like a provision for if you're going home from the store or are you just

are you just eggless so so so the copper who was literally just like making this up at the station says like okay so your bail condition is you're not allowed within 500 meters of the king you're not allowed to carry eggs in public and then he goes like oh actually like what was if he wants to buy some eggs and then okay so they changed it so it's like you're allowed to carry eggs as long as you're going home from the shops and you've got the receipt um it's and I think that one viral than me actually doing it you know I mean like people were like you know that's that's that's Britain for you have you got a license for those eggs you know I'm imagining you like sliding down an alleyway with like a like a like a 1940s style shoulder holster but with just like

eggs under each year yeah and so and so you know um when I so so I had my trial um you know which was for yeah threatening behavior um that that made someone fear imminent violence um in the wake of that like I was convicted uh I narrowly avoided six months in prison which is the sentence that I thought I was gonna get um yeah yeah and and so so you know in my trial you know I had the option to either downplay what I did is being like oh it's not really violence it's just an egg but then of course you know legally it was a you know that just counts as a soul but then I chose to instead to say okay yeah it was violence but it was uh legitimate violence because it was necessary to resist the far greater violence of the British state um you know citing the historic impact of

colonialism he's saying current foreign policy like the king personally negotiating weapons deals with Saudi Arabia and then also you know climate breakdown and the way in which by continuing to invest in fossil fuels global south like intentionally um and so therefore you know I was basically defending right of you know acting in defense of others with violence like I'm glad I did it and I'd have done much worse so in the end I got a hundred I got a hundred dollars of community service um which was extreme you know getting away with it essentially so yeah did you get a I wonder was it just a situation did you just get lucky with a judge you're like um because that that's that's surprising I'm surprised that like that that worked as well as it did in a positive

way I think yeah yeah me too yeah I mean I had a big bag with me with all my like undies in because I thought I was going down you know um and uh I think it was partly yes getting lucky with the judge partly I think they were in a really difficult position and this is what I wanted to put them in essentially which is that following all of that the you know in the lead up to the coronation there was a lot of negative press around around the king and the monarchy and they had a choice between either sending me to prison and looking extremely authoritarian and blowing out proportion or letting me get away with it and and you know I think they chose to minimize the negative press you know I mean obviously supposedly there's an independent

judiciary and there would there would be no conversations with the palace uh and the police sure about the charging procedures but that's that's a little rubbish but you know yeah and so but I think I wanted to put them in that difficult position because I knew that like I said their backlash would look worse than what I did and so so when I chose to go to the coronation following following my conviction you know I had to tell my probation officer look I'm going to the coronation I am going I'm going to peacefully protest I'm just going to be there deal with it you know and uh basically he told me that the counter-terrorism department uh had was seeking an injunction from the courts to stop me attending um but then the court had ruled that no I was

allowed to attend I'd already been given my punishment and he wasn't going to put any further conditions on me not be allowing allowed to go so so but I knew that if I went to the coronation they would arrest me anyway and it would make them look bad you know and then they they did you know I was as well as well as all of the organizers um I was there you know just not my king blah blah blah and then and then I and then I look up and there's a little watch tower that they directed in the center of Trafalgar Square and um I just saw that it was about seven police officers just all like staring at me and and filming me um from you know like 200 meters away and I was like oh okay they're gonna arrest me now so yeah I gave my phone and my wallet

wallet to my brother and then smart and then within seconds within seconds they were just dragging me out like you know in handcuffs um from the center of a of a crowd of about you know 20 000 people um and and it honestly couldn't have looked like more like overtly fascist if they tried and and that was kind of the point really yeah man I uh it's such a wild story um but I'm glad you did what you did I'm impressed by the amount of thought that kind of went into the optics of it um because it's it's really the only way to turn an egg into an effective weapon right is by uh very careful planning um I'm I'm kind of curious where do you see what do you see is the route forward for both not just kind of opposing the monarchy um in in your country but sort of

opposing the overreach by the police this is a problem in more places than the United Kingdom but y'all are kind of on one of the cutting edges of sort of global attempts uh by law enforcement and its its supporters in the state to effectively make dissent impossible ahead of what everyone knows is going to be kind of a heightening period of climate-based activism yeah and so and so with the climate activist movement in the UK you know we've seen extinction rebellion um active since like 2018 and I and I've been you know arrested multiple times with them at different actions uh you know the the part of their strategy was the mass arrests you know uh blocking roads nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience would force the government to take action and

and I think really we're seeing that strategy like having run its course and and and I think for a while now that's been evident that it wasn't working because they've just banned the types of protest that we were doing and also it was essentially quite naive to believe that yeah oh you know if we cause enough disruption they're just gonna put aside all of the you know lobbying interests and their literal role in upholding capitalism to just go oh no okay fair enough they're blocked some roads we we are going to like radically transform society to deal with climate breakdown um that was never going to work you know realistically and so so even though you know we've seen every time they pass these these new legislation

there are there's a there's a backlash there's some marches there's some protests that fizzle out and the state just keep consolidating more and more power um and and people keep getting more and more disillusioned with he says with what an effective strategy of resistance looks like and so for me personally it's something I've been thinking about for a while now but recently have is that you know we have to stop asking politicians through direct democracy at the local level and essentially you know using like democratic confederalism you know as they're doing rejava to to look at creating a national uh network of people's assemblies that builds dual power outside of the state because because because I think a lot of the problem with these direct

action movements is that they don't have the legitimacy of a democratic mandate so that even whilst the tactics might be like in some way effective um you know extinction rebellion has always said our message is to say that climate change is a serious threat but we cannot propose the solutions because we don't have a democratic mandate but the way to you know work around that is to build a democratic mandate through holding people's assemblies creating forums where people can create their own vision and then direct action can then be used in service of those aims rather than putting the cart before the horse if that makes sense no yeah I think that that that's certainly like one of the more pragmatic ways forward that I think I've seen you know we're

we're we're always talking about an uphill battle here and I think kind of the inherent difficulty of of fixing any of these bigger problems um particularly fixing the the and what we mean is dismantling the systems that are causing climate destruction like that is such a lopsided battle that I think whenever whenever you have you present an option to people because it sounds hard there's this there's this tendency to just be like well you know we have to go by the thing that uh that we know which is just kind of like trying to vote in better people if we can take a lesson out of the last 30 years it's that the standard electoral methods cannot provide the solution to climate change like they they simply aren't going to do it and I think the police in a lot of

kind I mean in the United States right here in one of my old hometowns Austin Texas they just voted on a police accountability bill that the police have basically said we're not going to abide by like this is and you can find stories like that all over the United States and other parts of the world like the the kind of the hope that you can just sort of like put in your however long it takes you to do voting in your country or city or whatever and uh and that that's the method forward um it it's it seems more realistic because it's more familiar but the I think the vision you're putting forward I did not to say that it's as simple that simple but like it's effortful and I think that whenever someone's positing something like that that requires that kind of like effort

from a large enough segment of the population I I see that as inherently more realistic than hoping that we can just all kind of keep putting our 20 20 minutes of voting a year towards solving the problem and expect it to get better yeah and it's like one of those things with you know like the idea that imagining prison abolition you have to imagine a world where that's possible and that requires changing everything right um and I think that applies to to tackling climate change and and implementing direct democracy so you know if you're talking about a system where people can turn up to a forum in a local community center or you know church or whatever uh once a week then people say well that's not going to be accessible you know because so it's like well you're

right we'll probably have to set up a system of mutual aid that uh supports you know working class people to be able to attend those kind of events and you know yeah it's like how are you going to pay for it and it's like well you're right we're probably going to have to you know set up a solidarity economy where you know uh if we if we decide for example that we want free public transport uh then and and bus drivers to be paid a fair wage you know then you're gonna have to look at a whole system whereby people are made potentially getting free housing in return for being a bus driver free food that comes from the local food cooperative um and and you're like I say building dual power rather than attacking the system head on because in a battle in a

pitched street battle in this country at least between us and the police we're going to lose and I think that you know we need to think smarter because at this point they haven't yet made organizing public meetings illegal but you know they probably will at some point and then it's like uh it's a the only way we'll be able to resist that is if we've had some public meetings to decide how we're going to do it because at the moment we haven't even had the meeting to decide what our collective strategy is because there is so much uh atomization between between these different like you know uh left-wing like social movements and civil society organizations um and so much sometimes it just depresses me to think about how many people are working for

environmental charities or whatever where all of their work and their research is going towards creating uh policy proposals for politicians to ignore and it's like if you were putting that amount of energy and your enthusiasm uh in service of the vision that's been created democratically by by the people then we don't need to petition anyone to make the changes we we need because we'll have organized effectively enough to uh do the things that will really challenge state power for example like a mass rent strike and a general strike yeah or if if those efforts that are currently going towards putting policy papers on desks where there'll be ignored or neutered was going towards uh putting forth policy that is then being backed by a movement

that is carrying out rent strikes that is putting out together work stoppages that is blocking roads that's able to actually throttle some of the life support system of the state um well then suddenly you're not looking at a recommendation a white paper that's going to wind up on some bloodless bureaucrats desk or that's that's gonna wind up getting cut to pieces in in parliament you're you you have something that that has teeth behind it right the kind of force that might be able to to to make change i don't know again the when you talk about this kind of stuff you have to contrast it with what we've been trying so far which is nothing yeah and you know diversity of tactics is huge and so you know a lot of these direct action groups

in the uk like just stop oil that have been blocking motorways and stuff uh have received like you know huge criticism especially from people who you know really ought to be allies and at least recognize the the the this action is coming out of a place of desperation because people cannot see a better way yeah um and and and you know there was a there's someone from just stop oil who just got three years in prison for blocking a motorway um and and that's that's insane you know and and you know on some level that person is is a martyr and and you've got to like hold your take your hat off and say what that has done is shine a spotlight again on state authority in a way that you know if if they have these laws on the books but they never have to use

them then it's easy to forget that they exist yeah they have that power um do you want to talk a little bit about cooperation uk yeah yeah so so you know for me i'm a democratic confederalist you know i'm i'm in aura like you know the rejavan project um using direct democracy but also confederating that up to it to sort of replace the state with a form of governance that's democratic um and you know i'm i also i'm a big believer in uh cosmocracy right which is the proper name for global democracy he says essentially you know i wrote about this while i was doing my masters and that is how potentially if we were implementing this system world we can use the internet to to confederate to a global level you know and really start to tackle the issues that we collectively

face as humanity which is like the fact that our separation from nature and and the rise of fascism is is threatening us with extinction and so yeah i'm a citizen of earth and i'm and you know that that's what motivates a lot of my actions um but you know in some ways i've been kind of stewing on the these ideas alone uh and so recently i met a group called cooperation uk who are you know connecting i can often get bogged down in abstract theory about like how you know changing the whole world and never actually doing anything practical that's my downfall but you know you need to start a movement like that locally uh and and and so they're copying um cooperation jackson you know who have been incredibly effective uh you know setting up people's assemblies mutual aid economy

in jackson um and also like a community land trust you know they own like like 50 different buildings you know that are used collectively by the community and this group are planning to set that up in whole which is just a city in the northeast that's incredibly deprived it's got like the lowest voter turnout in the uk but it also has a thriving network of food banks and you know cooperatives and mutual aid groups and and i think that the next step for me is when those those groups send delegates to meet together and decide on collective strategy right like like because there are so many people doing so much good work but there's almost like no faith in our own vision which is that if we're the people you know who are say uh a union for

nurses then you know we should be deciding the conditions that exist in health care you know because who who better besides patients and uh like staff is there to decide the conditions that they that they operate in and and so yeah cooperation uk um there there's a group of us that are moving to whole i'm moving i'm moving next week i'm really excited about it um and yeah we're planning to set up lots of local neighborhood assemblies with the intention of within a year holding a a city-wide people's assembly that can create a shared vision um and then and then potentially you know uh standing candidates for local council but whose only policy is we will enact we will give power to the people's assemblies and then they can use the you know financial um

power of existing institutions to support the transition to a new model uh and whilst they're doing that in whole you know the work that i hope to be doing is uh document in that process um the learning you know so people can learn from the mistakes and the you know and hopefully we can set them up in in every city well across the uk um because there are already people who think very similarly and that we're out of time now where that's coalescing into the you know people are recognizing the need for this new movement with a new strategy that's based around democracy rather than just uh activism and yeah it's really exciting yeah i mean that's uh i i think that's a worthwhile idea i think it's uh it's it's uh bold and something that uh i'm i'm i'm glad to see

being attempted um well it's been really great talking with you today did you have anywhere you wanted to direct listeners uh in order to help if they're interested in what cooperation uk is doing yeah definitely uh so there's there's um a crowd funder that uh i think there'll be i believe there'll be i believe there'll be a link uh that you guys can access he says and we'll be using that money to set up the people's assembly and mutual aid networks but also to create resources that anyone anywhere can use in their local community and my hope is that you know as these groups proliferate you know we're going to start reaching out to each other forming a an international solidarity network that is capable of providing like the mutual aid that we that we need to support each other

you know for example you know if we're talking about Palestine or Iran um to provide the real meaningful solidarity these you know liberation groups will require more organization than just like thoughts and prayers really and yeah yeah um well thank you so much patrick uh it has been great talking with you uh good luck as you uh continue to moving forward and uh yeah yeah thanks very much yeah i guess i should also say i'm on i'm bizarrely i'm on tiktok that's the medium i'm using at the moment i wish it wasn't uh i'll probably want to start making more youtube videos discussing these ideas so maybe i'll send you a link that you can put in there the citizen of earth show it's my youtube channel excellent well uh patrick tell well citizen of earth youtube channel

and uh we'll we'll have your tiktok in the description thanks again for coming on the show uh everybody um go out and uh you know acquire eggs hey we'll be back monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe it could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources thanks for listening hi i'm david eagleman i have a new podcast called inner cosmos on i heart i'm going to explore the relationship between our brains

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