Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 97

Episode Date: August 26, 2023

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today! http://apple.co/coolerzone See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

911 what's your emergency? It's a nightmare we could never have imagined. In a killer, we were still on the loose. In the 1980s, we were in high school losing friends, teachers, and community members. We weren't safe anywhere. Would we be next? It was getting harder and harder to live in Mompine.

Listen to the Murder Years on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. The True Crime Podcast Sacred Scandal returns for a second season to investigate a led sexual abuse at Mexico's La Luz del Mundo Mega Church. Journalist Robert Garza explores survivor stories of pure evil experiences at the hands of a self-proclaimed apostle who is now behind bars. I remember as a little girl being groomed

to be his concubine, that's how I was raised. It is not wrong if you take your clothes off for the apostle. Listen to Sacred Scandal on the IHR radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This is I.C. Over the years, I've compiled thousands of inspiring and thought-provoking quotes. your podcasts. them in action in my life. Listen to I.C. Daily Game every weekday on the I.H.R. Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast and start your morning with me.

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 gonna be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. [♪ music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing West Palm, podcast. Maybe that could be a reddroid. Hi, Mia. How are you? We're doing a podcast. I've been...

Feede, the chess world has decided that my chess powers are too strong. And I'm now being discriminated against. It's a good time. Very excited. Having a great time with very excited. Yeah, you've had me having a great time with my biological advantage at chess. Yeah, that's right. Well, you know, you've got to reach those chess pieces somehow. And it's all to do with your hip angle. This is what I feel, I'm trying to investigate.

My wrists are too powerful. This allows me to write down my moves faster than my opponent, thus giving me an advantage on the clock. I can also reach the clock faster. It's incredible stuff happening in the world of chess. Not just chess, sadly, but the fact the turf have got their claws, I guess, into many sports, which is what we are talking about today. Specifically, I thought we could talk about how the turf's room in cycling, because that is the thing they have been trying to do for some time. It's a thing I've written about before, and hopefully a thing I'll be able to write about again, unless the cycling press just kind of gives itself

over to the turf, which doesn't seem to have done to be fair. Generally, generally the cycling press, I think, is fair to say, has lacked an intersection on analysis of anything. But they've been better on this than I had expected, especially the outlets which are not run by white cis-het dudes in Boulder, which to be fair is a minority. But yeah, strange that odd, how odd. But yeah, shout out in particular to outside for including a gear guide to the gear the cops used at the 2016 RNC, which could perhaps be included as the most toned deaf article ever written. A yeah.

Yeah, incredibly. And then to leave it up in 2020 to not like cover your tracks. You know, this is one of those. This is one of those like when the workers take boulder, like no biker will go hungry moments. Yeah, bolder color, it was a special place for bad things. I won't say bad things to happen because they had an awful mass shooting, but like social, yeah, intersectional analysis has not made it to Boulder, sadly. Great, great shame.

But we're not talking about Boulder. Today, we're starting out with a little discussion of cyclic rust. So, cyclic rust, are you familiar with cyclic rust? Mia? No. Okay, so it's a fundamentally silly sport with cyclocross, Mia? No. Okay, so it's a fundamentally silly sport in which I have competed, of course. It's when competitors race skinny-tired drop bar bikes on an off-road course.

Of course, yes. Yeah, I would please Google, perhaps, okay, I'm going to you one one cycle across video, it is iconic. For people who are at home, the video's called, is Joey okay, we can have me reacting live. The first picture that I saw when I googled this is two people not writing on there, two people carrying their bikes. Yes, so this is a thing.

Why? You get really good at cycling. You train your entire life and then in cyclic russier parts where you have to get off. Unless you're very talented, you can hop the barriers. I've tried that with mixed success. Or you can also, you can ride the stairs, but you do have to be a bit of a boss. So there are barriers and challenges which you have to get off. It's called field riding in Dutch, which is about riding.

Have you watched a video? We'll include a link in the notes for everyone else. I have it. It's, it can you watch it with the sound on? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, I'm sure to figure out how to describe this. Effectively what has happened is this guy, okay,

so these guys are going at full speed. And then while the bike is still moving, he's attempting to get off the bike before he gets to this barrier. And he like, he just goes, he does attempting to get off the bike before he gets to this barrier. And he like, he just goes, he does not get off in time. The bike's going too fast. And he like, he is, he's like sprawling, but in mid air, he's flying off his bike over this pericain thing. It is incredible. Yeah. All the time people shout and give name. And that's what you're supposed to do.

You're supposed to dismounts and just carry the speed. You kind of, you kind of swing your leg through, or swing your leg to the outside and then carry the speed and jump and then hop back on. It's a very strange sport, right? And a big part of cyclocross is heckling. So the crowd will heckle you, right? They will they'll do all kinds of things like often my crowd handling. So the crowd will heckle you, right? They will do all kinds of things, like often like crowd hand up. So a big thing in cycle across. So like I've been handed dollar bills. Yeah. What is happening in the sport? Oh yeah, it's very funny. The moment you're not competitive, you're just grabbing shit off the spectators. So like, I remember racing in Las Vegas at night. There was a race in Las Vegas at night and I ain't going to win, right?

Like, and so I'm just grabbing dollar bills and shoving them down my like, like, like, and it's like, people will hand you like drinks. I've had beer hand ups, donuts, bacon, one notable occasion, a cookie that was not just a normal cookie, which you should fucking disclose to someone before you get it done. Yeah, that was a bad day. I also had a pretty rough traumatic brain injury that day. Oh no. Yeah, I'd already sustained a brain injury, then ate the cookie. I thought my blood sugar was low. So I was like, yeah, I'm going to get that cookie. It's going to be great. It was not, it wasn't the blood sugar. It was, it was

affected my cognition. So cyclogross is fun and silly and and heckling is part of it. But like, heckling occurs within a certain certain, certain bounds, right? Like you're not supposed to be mean. It's just supposed to be funny. Like everyone's supposed to laugh. So I think in 2021, everyone was rather, and funny signs are part of it too, right? But in 2021, we saw some shit that was distinctly not funny when a group called Save Women's Sport posted up at the race. And held what were, as you can probably guess by the name, transphobic science throughout the race. So a lot of people were upset by this and by their own admission,

nobody wanted them there. One woman told the protesters your ship feminism isn't welcome here, which I think would be a great t-shirt. If she's listening, please let us, we'll license your t-shirt. And they were pretty rarely rejected by most of the community, which is great. But the bigotry they bought really wasn't a surprise to anyone who'd been paying attention to online discourse for a while, especially with respect to cycling. The harassment of trans cyclists has been escalating for years.

For at least five or six years now, the governing body USA cycling has known about this and chosen to done nothing to stop it. So this particular focus on cycling came about in 2018, when anti-trans cardra is began to focus on the sport because it's a success of a woman named Veronica Ivy. And that she wasn't called Veronica Ivy at the time. She had a different name then, but that's her name now.

So I'm going to use that name at the risk of her choice for that to be her name. She won a world championship in the women's 35 to 44 spring category. Now, like, I have no disrespect at all for Masters athletes. It's great. I'm glad people are at their exercising. Now, like, I have no disrespect at all for Masters athletes. It's great. I'm glad people are at their exercising. This is not the same as an Olympic gold medal. Right. Like, the big, I would, I mean, people may disagree.

The biggest determinant of your ability to win a Masters track cycling gold medal is the amount of free time you have to exercise and the amount of money you have to buy fast gear and get to the event, right? Wait, what is like the difference between like, is it's competitions for older people. So it's, it's, so in cycling, you have juniors and there are various, you know, obviously the eight year olds don't compete with 18 year olds, but up to 18 is juniors. Espoir's is 18 to 23. We use a French name because, you know know you don't want to be cool.

What is what? Espoir, Jesus Christ. Yeah, French name under 23, right? You can call it if you want it to be an angler file. And then from there you go into the elite competition. Elite competition is going to the elite competition, elite competition is, it's actually 18 and a total, like an 18-year-old could compete in an elite competition, so could a 50-year-old, right? But it's the highest level of competition. And then you get protected age categories again once you get to 35. So, so 35 to 44, 45 to 54, go and 10 year blocks, right? And that's for people who are only of that age. Now, the older you get the less competitive it gets just because more people will,

fewer people will be racing, right? But 35 plus masters, sometimes they call it baby masters is not, you don't have a significant decrease during endurance performance of 35. So like some of these people are still very good and that's what they call it, they've mastered, I guess. But like track cycling is not a big sport to give me.

Right. That's going around in circles on an indoor velodrome. Masters track cycling, it's a smaller sport. And the amount, I know some excellent masters track cyclists who just don't care to go to worlds, right? They've been professional cyclists of very high level amateur cyclists. And once you reach your mid 40s, some people don't care to travel and spend that money and do that competition, right? And San Diego has a really great track scene,

some people who I know very well have recently won multiple world championships and a track, like we have a very thriving scene, but not all of those people even care to go to L.A. to race worlds, like they're not a crappler across the world, right? So it doesn't necessarily truly mean the people who win masters are the best athletes in the world for that age group. And certainly, I wouldn't say there are lots of things that make this competition unfair. One of them is how much track bikes cost, how much track time costs, and how much travel costs to get to the event. But of course, I didn't matter to these people, right? What mattered is that a trans woman had won. And she became the center of the culture war. And this was really at least the first one that I was aware of,

sort of instance of someone, a trans person winning a very notable a notable event in cycling. And maybe trans people have been competing in elite races in cycling for 40 years. Like Wally Cameron was the first trans woman to race in a World Cup and Monies be racing for a while. And no one said shit, no one cared, right? But around 2018, the culture wore around trans people was becoming heightened, and so people got mad

about hurling their race. And since then, there's been this steady increase in transphobic sentiment towards bike races. It's really the sort of leading voice in this has been former pro bike racer, Inga Thompson. She's been joined by a few amateur women, in various fields, voicing their feelings about the participation of trans women.

And Thompson has made a lot of statements, some of which I'll, you know, she's not to share with you, you can Google them if you want, but most of them will be, like she mischanges people all the time, right? That's what you can find her on Twitter, misgendering people. And I think that that is kind of the give away that this isn't necessarily about sport, right?

And I think that it's really important that people regardless of where you stand on sport, understand that this is a wedge, and it's a wedge that's designed to push trans people out and away from femininity and a way from inclusion. Yeah, I think one of the reasons why it's important is it's a way of like focusing the discourse like on trans people on like really, really weird

interpretations of physical characteristics. Yeah. And this is something that you can use to sort of like, you know, this is the wedge that you can use to sort of like tear this sort of issue open. It's been really, really effective at this. And it's also been like, you know, it's something that's sort of like vaguely plausible

to not plausibly deniable. And it also plays on a really kind of effective branding strategy that these people had, which is that like, you know, if people remember what feminism was like in like the 2010s, it was almost entirely about, you know, I did not just in the 2010s, like you even sort of previous to this, right?

Like the notion that like women are weaker than men was something that was like broadly considered to be sexist. Like that was not a feminist thing. That was like, like, say that women are weaker than men. And then you know, when you're getting into people complaining about like trans women could be like being on jeopardy or like this shit that's happening in the chest that we're gonna talk about later.

It's like, okay, like, if you go back in time to before sort of transgender arrangement syndrome set in, like, and you told someone that in the future this person is going to be arguing that like, like, like, trans women have a biological advantage in jeopardy because men are smarter than women. They'd be like, what the fuck are you talking about? Like this person is like a neo-nazi.

Yeah, it's all that women are only defined by their ability to bear children, right? And that is your soul characteristic and value as a woman. Yeah, and this is, and this is something that, if you go back to like Simon Bev, before got a hate French, it's really a true, it's a truly terrible language.

I don't know if that is the official stance of this podcast. Anti-French action. Yeah, but like, you know, I mean, always has been. You know, like you actually read the second sex and like in the second sex is talking about, you know, I mean, literally when like her fan is lying, it's like no one is born a woman,

like woman is made, right? Because it's a social process, not a biological one. And then, you know, and because there was like a kind of cultural victory for feminism where it suddenly became really, really difficult to be a mainstream person and like call yourself, like call yourself an anti-feminist, like all of these people who believe all of the same shit

that like Phyllis Schlafly did, like have to relabel themselves feminists. And yeah, and sports is the sports to thing they picked to do that because sports is the like it's the area they can pick where they can like with some plausible deniability, start doing all of this like, oh women are inherently weaker than men and have to be protected from men like shit again. Yeah, yeah. And it's yes, it's very much like unreconstructive stuff that we would have seen as not feminists that 10 or 20 years ago. Now, sadly, it's being advanced by people they inclaimed to feminists, I guess. Yeah. So in the most recent psychogross nationals, trans athlete, Austin Kylips finished third at the event local John Brown, gun club members had attended to step in and protect trans

athletes where the sports governing body wouldn't. And it was actually a really, I mean, what you saw was a lot of discourse online about Austin quote unquote, blocking, and I cis woman athlete. And then you saw like a lot of people sort of saying that and like cis women had been I guess like you know the Austin's inherent biological advantage I'm using heavy scare quotes here had allowed her to come third she got beaten by two cis girls this is always the thing like there was one of these in skateboarding where this turf skateboarder was yelling about how she'd been beaten by a trans woman and you look at the result and she was getting scared by it.

She lost to an eight-year-old. She was outplayed by an eight-year-old. Shut the fuck up. It's like this bullshit. And a lot of the discourse about Austin quote quote unquote, blocking somewhat like, I don't know, but to me, it very clearly seemed to come for people who hadn't watched many other bicycle competitions, right? Like, that's what we do.

You push on each other, you lean on each other. Like if you didn't do that, people would fall over a whole lot more. I mean, it's a race. You're trying to get to the finish line first, but she didn't do anything that anyone else wouldn't have done. And at the time, TERFs kind of tried to make this a big deal, but we're unsuccessful. And it was not really until Austin won a race in New Mexico, a big race, Tour of the Healer, that it became, again, like it was in 2018, a very big deal, right?

came again, like it was in 2018, a very big deal. Right? And so one of the key leaders, as I said, is Inga Thompson. Inga is a very accomplished cyclist. There's no doubt about that, right? She's a biscayne Hall of Fame inductee, five time national champion, three time Olympic team member, a Tour de France firm and a podium finisher, a three time silver medalist at the UCI World Championships.

But I think she's arguably more famous now for her anti trans bigotry. And she's appeared, she tried to encourage cyclists to take a knee in protest at the UCI's transgender inclusion. Yeah, which like, Fox, Fox News finally find something that they're all with the previous statement you for. Yeah, they've finally, she was actually removed from her role on the board of a French-based American pro team for her statements there. I thought that their statements kind of interesting. They said, if shared in the absence of politics, her knowledge and experience would benefit many in advance cycling for everyone. However, she has decided to dedicate her time to excluding

people that otherwise currently eligible to compete in UCI events. She is also tempted to use our team as a platform for political activity. Which is a very neutral stance, but it's also like, it's fine. Our cycling team isn't here to hate trans people. If you're gonna use it for hating trans people, please go somewhere else. Like it does, you don't have to like, I do take a hugely radical stance to be like,

no, this isn't a hate platform for hate speech. Like, like, go away. Yeah. And they added, to be clear, Ms. Thompson is entitled to her opinions and advocacy, but her methods and personal attacks are inconsistent with Sinuska's mission to advance the opportunities for women. These methods, well documented on Ms Thompson's social media presence include dehumanization

of transgender people spreading misinformation, demagoguery and personal attacks on anyone who opposes her views. A special alert that includes me, she doesn't like me at all. I don't, don't be mean to trans people. I don't miss gender, my friends. So, I did think it was very funny. That, like, this team isn't like the, like, I don't know, like the work team for work people,

they're just trying to get along with helping women cycle and they can't do that if they're one of their board members is so consumed by hate. Yeah. No one wants to have anything to do with it. So, in the wake of this protest, the 2021 women's sport protest, flilleted, they're unofficial with USA Cycling,

published an open letter calling for the resignation of the organization CEO, and the say sport coordinator, Kelsi Erickson, who's responsible preventing hate speech and bullying. They gather 105 signatures from racers and other cyclists in support of their demands and a day after they sent a letter to Martini announced he was stepping down. So he has a bit of a failure of just like there's a statement he made in an interview where he said it would be different if our athletes were going to be affected when he was talking about bands for trans athletes in inter-scholastic sports. He said we don't believe they will be, which

like in technical and in technical sense because cyclists compete for clubs, not schools, they might not have done, but like if you think that a ban on trans kids playing at school isn't going to affect participation of trans athletes in all sports everywhere. Yeah, yeah. You just got either completely myopic or you're burying your bigotry. He claimed he was quoted out of context, but it was part of a pretty big block quote, like I don't see how that could be taken out of context. They did say at that time that there against any legislation, the limit to trans inclusion. It's worth pointing out that cycling has a body as to all Olympic sports that should prevent hate speech, bigotry, and bullying, right?

And that's called safe sport. Set up in 2017 and that was following what happened at USA Gymnastics, right, which was widespread sexual abuse of athletes. If people, people, which was widespread sexual abuse of athletes. If people, I'm sure we'll remember that. Safe sport, I feel fairly confident, saying, has completely failed in preventing abuse, preventing harassment, preventing bullying. What it has done is perhaps given a legal shield to governing bodies, so has prevented

them getting sued. But it's done nothing to prevent this kind of bullying, which is why athletes and the community have taken upon themselves to do that, right? Like, if there's one thing you should expect a governing body to do, it's to make sure everyone feels safe at races. But like, people will legitimately worried about racing in areas where they knew there were a lot of not just turf, but groups like the Proud Boys, who have hung their hat on Transphobia. I know people who didn't go to races in areas where they were worried about that. I know people who went out of, went to an effort every day to drive a different way back to their hotel at races because they were worried about like the people genuinely felt unsafe doing something that no one should feel unsafe doing,

which is a playing. And so, as I said, you know who won't make you feel unsafe? I, I, I'm going to say the products and services and then I'm going to save the products and services and then I'm going to they will wrap you up in a cocoon like blanket of gold and coins and and meal kits. How could you not feel so safe when you're surrounded by Reagan coins. No one fact check this. This is a fact check free zone. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, the following and and proceeding 30 seconds have not been fact checked. Please enjoy these adverts. And we are back and we're still talking about TERFs. So, say to women sports, which is this organization that put on the protest, presents itself as an organic reaction to the participation of trans women, who it repeatedly misgenders in women's categories. It claimed that several races in the cycle across national championships privately contacted the organization to express concerns, but

only one, either Edwards competed under the SWF team banner. SWS at the time was not a non-profit, so it was relatively hard to find out what exactly their financial ties to various other transphobic and right wing groups were. It's registered in Minnesota as a business, but it appears to be a soul at the time. Again, it was a soul prop run by someone called Best Stelzer. The both EV Edwards and SWS used the race to aggressively fund raise for their campaign. Stelser, for instance, at the time,

was making 385 bucks per month on Patreon by, quote, creating a whamness of males invading female spaces. Patron has been taken down since then. She turned too close to the sun. Uh, she also received donations on her Venmo page, which is very funny because I don't think she relies her Venmo page was public, checked it out in the contractual. Yeah, there was no distinction

made between advocacy spending and personal spending on that account, I will say. She was taking advocacy donations and making emoji purchases on her Venmo at the time. I think maybe since has made it private. Yeah. This is something that like if you ever want to just, like, I don't know, if someone just like appears in the news and they suck, like go try to find them on Venmo

because people just don't realize that stuff. And, you know, people recently caught, I think we talked about Clarence Thomas. I think it was Clarence Thomas. People are paying his staffers on Venmo. You can find a bunch of very funny stuff because people are bad at doing crime now. I cannot tell you how many people

literally had things on their Venmo like travel to DC and like on January 6th right? Venmo and each other. For like revolution tacos after they invaded the capital. Smart stuff and no, no, please keep doing that if you're planning transphobia or cues. So much of this awareness that, say, if we're in sports awareness, like I think if you're ever donating to someone who's promoting quite an awareness of anything, that should be a large red flag. It's an extremely nebulous concept that really does anything to help anyone. But much of this awareness needs to be tied to pretty standard right-wing anti-trans

talking points. And not the many dozens, maybe hundreds of instances were trans and cis women happily compete alongside each other have a nice time to exercise, go home, and don't engage in any bigotry. In the past, SWS has worked with far-right organizations at Heritage Foundation and the Family Research Council to prepare a guide to quote, help parents understand the transgender issue. Again, if you're framing the existence of other people as an issue, you know, that far from framing it as a question, are you? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm impressed to the self-awareness avoided the transgender question, but only by, you know, using the Thessauras to reframe it as an issue, I guess. The guide refers to the transgender trend, quite unquote,

and repeatedly calls trans women men. They, of course, also, Steltzer in particular, appears anti-abortion rallies, anti-marriage equality rallies, things like that, right? This is part of a wider space of hate and bigotry. It's not just about support. and things like that, right? This is part of a wider space of hate and bigotry. It's not just about support. Cyclists have taken it upon themselves

to protect trans riders. So access to solidarity of range for blocking SWS protestors and national championships announces refusing to allegedly refusing to mention racers on the SWS team. That's pretty funny. Yeah, it is pretty funny. Also, this money camera and has this organization called Ride, which is let Transkids ride.

And Molly makes his wristband, which is like a Transflag, a Transpride flag. And like one of my friends won the biggest race in the US. It's this guy with his Transpride wristband on, which is, you know, a little thing, but also like it's nice to see people show up. Yeah. It's nice to see. And like it's rare that you'll go to a race when people won't be, you won't see a few people wearing that like in pro men, pro women, you know, both like it.

There are overwhelmingly people don't give a fuck. We're just happy if you're enjoying riding bikes. It's not like it's a big sport. The real threat cycling is all of us getting killed by people in tests with us playing pong. Like it's not trans women. But unfortunately, the Solidarity hasn't extended to the governing body.

So two years after this initial protest, the UCI effectively banned all trans women from participating in elite level cycling. This happened just a few weeks before the World Championship. I have friends who had to cancel their flights. Yeah, it was the most bungled, fucked up pseudo science kind of half-assed, like it was just a mess. The whole thing was a fucking mess. They had an extraordinary meeting in August, just a few weeks for the World Championships. And like, people previously had to have a to have a submit blood numbers to show a testosterone level to compete, right? Which is a thing. Lots of governing bodies

have been doing for a while now. They had certified people like weeks before this, they'd be like, yeah, you're good to go for another year and then psych, no, you're not, you can't compete ever again. And like this is people's jobs, right? This is their livelihood. It's how they pay rents. It's also like being an elite cyclist is hard. It is most of your life, right? Like, you've got to sleep, but you've got to eat right, you've got to train all the fucking time. You can't go out. You're going to be resting when you're not training.

To take all that away from someone with a click of the fingers, and I don't really know consultation for them, it's incredibly cruel. UCI, I'll just read their statement because I think there's a couple of things in it we should pick apart. Obviously, can't help worrying for it being inherently trans-Hurby.

From now on, female transgender athletes who have transitioned after quote, male puberty, will be prohibited from participating women's events on the UCI international calendar in all categories in the various disciplines. Notably, they also said, it's also impossible to rule out the possibility that biomechanical factors, such as the shape and arrangement of the bones in their limbs

may constitute a lasting advantage for female transgender athletes. Yeah, there's a lot going on there, like they use female, where most people would use women. The barrier they set is to rule out any possibility in an advantage, right? Which is a very high barrier. That's like a kind of guilty and still proven innocent situation, right? Like, I also, like the arrangement of the bones

in my limbs changed significantly when I was racing bikes because I broke them all the fucking time. Like, such a strange category to choose. There's also this requirement that you transition before puberty, that's not the same as taking puberty blockers, right? They're requiring that you, you're taking hormones before puberty,

like 11 or 12. Yeah, which is just also now illegal in an enormous number of states. Yes. Like, yeah. And even most, from what I understand, most gender-affirming care takes the approach

of taking puberty blockers rather than... Yeah. Well, and this is sort of like... I mean, this is sort of the disaster that's been happening in the last four or five years on those switches that like taking puberty blockers was the compromise position? Yes. Like, that was the position that was taken because people thought it was too dangerous to like let kids do HRT, which it's not like it's completely fine. In fact, it's

actually like, you know, you're going to go through puberty anyways, right? You're like, like if you are in a human body, you are doing uncontrolled puberty. And that is less safe than doing a controlled puberty, which is what, you know, doing, like doing a churchy when you are a child is. Yeah, but the company, my position was like, oh, well, we're not gonna do this. We'll do puberty blockers and then, like, everyone went and saying about puberty blockers and now, like, even the compromise position has been sort of like, you know, I mean, like when we're doing that and it's like, okay, like, you know, and then like, and then, you know, like, now, and then having done this, right?

And it's like, oh, well, now you can set up all of these rules that are like, require you to have done a thing you've not made illegal. And it's like, this is great. So, yeah, exactly, right. You now have a rule that basically bans almost anyone from participation. Like, you'd have to begin transitioning at 11.

It's also very nebulous, like male puberty, like what does that mean? What point are you defining? You have been through male puberty, like are we gonna ask people to submit their fucking testosterone numbers from when they were eight? Like, what is sh-

Like, it's just a man, it's what it is, right? Like, it is you can't ever transition to satisfactory enough. Yeah, or like, for example, I don't know. So like, let's say you are on like, let's say you don't start hormones and tell you're like 24, but you rearrange the bones in your body. This allows you, you now have feminine bone arrangement. Does this not allow you to cycle? gender affirming orthopedic surgery?

You heard me, you heard me. Yeah, and like, and also this, and I want to get into this a little bit because it completely obfuscates or ignores I guess what we what we know to be true, that there is not a binary puberty process, because there is not, humans don't exist in a binary sex, nor do they agitated binary genders, right? So I think probably the best example of this would be Maria Jose Martín of Patinio, if people aren't familiar with her, obviously Google is right there for you. But she was dismissed from the Spanish Olympic team in 1986 for failing the gender test.

She's publicly shamed for being like a secret male. She loses her fiance. She loses her funding. She loses almost everything. She fought on one a successful court battle, in a fight in the fallacy of this binary gender approach. She's not a trans woman to be clear, she's an intersection woman who has

antigen sensitivity syndrome. But she was able to, they were using chromosome typing, right? Like, you'll often, this is a thing that you'll still see turf trotting out, right? Something that was outdated in 1986, that like XX or XY, that is, that is not a binary that fits the entirety

of the human species. Yeah, there's like a lot of people with a lot of other different kinds of mosaicism. Yeah. Like it's, again, like I get it, you're not a biologist, that's fine, it's okay to shut the fuck up if you don't understand something. Yeah, I mean, this is one of those things that sucks

because it's like, I wish these people had decided to like try to build airplanes based off of like pre-New Delhi or something like that. Cause there's no consequence for them for not understanding biology, but it's like, I don't know. Like if you're trying to argue that like general relativity doesn't exist,

like your satellite is gonna fall on you, but this is the one thing where you can just like, you can say shit that it's not even like, like people make a joke, it's like high school biologists, like it's not, it's just like elementary school biology. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's pretty school biology. Like, it's YouTube biology, isn't it? That's what it is.

Yeah, yeah. Yes, exactly, yeah, but unfortunately, the consequences are for people who are not them. And that's hugely unfortunate, right? Even we see LeCastas Emendia want to court case this month or last month, like allowing her to compete again. We've found time and again that this notion of a binary sex is as nonsensical as a notion of a binary gender. And yet yet we continue to try and force people into these different competitions. I just want to read a statement that Austin made. And like it's very hard not to see this as them specifically seeing Austin winning a big stage race in

New Mexico and going like, right, we can't fucking have that. Like as soon as trans women wind stuff, right, it's fine if they come and don't win but as soon as they win stuff. And again, if she had this inherent massive biological advantage she would have won everything which hasn't happened. She said, I'm devastated by the UCI decision to renege on the policy and framework. It previously set out for inclusion. My journey in professional racing has allowed me to see the world build lifelong friendships. And most importantly, if my absolute ought something I find deeply fulfilling, no one should be denied the opportunity to chase that same joy that I and others have found through racing. Which I think is great. I think it's important to like lift up her voice in this

and other trans-athlete voices. In theory, there is what's called an open category, which is the men's category. The problem is that there are no open races and that this category, like if you line up as a trans woman in the fucking open category, you're being very clearly othered, right? Yeah, you're being like, some of them also will have women's licenses. Like, it's not clear what men's category they can race in. But it more importantly, I think as Chris Mozier pointed out, people will be familiar as Chris is the first trans athlete to attend Olympic trials in the US.

The open category contradicts both international Olympic committee guidelines on fairness and inclusion and extensive research at state's transfer, which do not have an inherent advantage in sport. Chris is a good follow on Twitter, it's the Christmas year. But it contradicts even like the IOC again, not like on the bastions of wokeness people who sent the Olympics to the Nazis have a better policy than this and yet cycling has chosen to go above and beyond. And in large part, I can't not see that as because of the attention paid to this by people who do not give a

fuck about cycling because they found a wedge and because our community has generally been inclusive. Like even after this at the World Championships, there were people with trans flags, of course, when World Championships or which trans women could not compete. Advocating for inclusion, right? It was in Glasgow. As a rule, the sport I think has been accepting. I've never cycled, not known there, being trans people in cycling. like I've never cycled, not known there being trans people in cycling. And I've cycled a lot. But this has allowed trans people to thrive. And when trans people started thriving, these fucking bigots decided to make this a wedge issue. And that's why it's happening here.

But it's also fucking happening in chess. So do you want to, do you want to talk about chess, me? This is, this is insane. Okay, the weird part about the chess one is like, I don't know, I had, this is not something that anyone in chest was like talking about. Like, chest has like a lot of incredibly weird and bizarre political stuff going on, but like, they're, I had, I don't know,

I, maybe I just missed it, or maybe it was just like a part of the chest discourse, I wasn't following, but like I, I don't know, it really truly weirdly, just seemingly out of nowhere, I don't know what is going on with this, seemingly out of nowhere, Fede, which is like the International Chest Federation,

released the statement, released this like policy, that says that like, it has a lot of weird stuff. It effectively sets up Fide as like, what I can only describe as a gender council, where like if you wanna like change your gender, you have to like submit it to Fide, and then Fide gets to decide what gender you are.

So great, great things happening here. And then also for some reason, um, okay. So Chess has had this thing for a while where Chess has like, there are like women's sections for stuff. And there's a lot of some weird stuff going on here. So like, there's the regular title like grandmaster, there's also like a women's grandmaster thing which has different qualifications, it's slightly different. And this was set up basically because like the guys

who play chess are insane. Like I've talked about this some of the Bobby Fisher episodes, right? Like there, like most of the most famous chess players in history are like utterly deranged neo-nazis or like people who are even weirder than neo-nazis like like un-reconstructed like 1917 zarrists like people like that. Like just like people with like truly truly deeply weird political ideologies that are like

unbelievably right wing. And you know, and like part of what like happens here is that like just just in general is like unfathomably sexist. Like it's really, really bad. And you know, like the solution to this effectively was like to create this like kind of parallel like women's infrastructure, which kind of work and kind of that hasn't in a lot of ways. And you know, like part of what's going on is just like, okay, so a lot of girls, like young girls play chess, but there's this bottleneck that happens around when you're like 13 or 14. Well, this is like 12 to 13, so there's 14 where like the number of girls playing chess just like collapses.

Right. And the reason that happens is because boys are fucking dog shit. Like this is, this is like literally what's happening, right? Is like, you have a bunch of sex, like really sex as boys. And then the product of this is that because there's so many fewer like women who play chess and there are many play chess, like there's just like, there's like, there's there's way less like women who are like really high rated chess players. And that's because there's just like like the the barrier of institutional sexism to like become a woman who's really good at chess is so high. And then yeah, okay.

So this is the sort of background. So like there are these separate like women's like tournaments and stuff like that. And so Fidei, which is the test federation released this thing where okay. So they say a few things. Okay, so they say a few things. One is that, okay, the big one is that if you are a trans woman, you cannot play in official feed-a-events women until feed-a does something and it's not entirely clear what that is. So is it like a testosterone level you have to submit?

Literally, I'm just going to read this sentence because it's utterly unclear what is going on here. In the event that the gender was changed from male to female, the player has no right to participate in official feed-a events or women until feed-a's decision is made. Such decision should be based on further analysis and shall be taken by the feed-a council at the earliest possible time, but no longer than within a two-year period. So it's you can be out for two years. You can be out for two years. Yeah, wait, wait, wait, why? What the fuck, like, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what are they possibly, like, analyzing here, right?

Like, I, I, is it, is it like, like, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what is supposed to be the thing that differentiates? Like, the gender is that, like, let's you, that makes you not be able to beat in the women's category. Like, is it like, like, is it like, if you play too aggressively or some shit, like lets you, that makes you not be able to compete in the women's category, like, is it like, like, is it like if you play too aggressively or some shit? Like what, what, yeah, what, it's baffling. Yeah, that is a bizarre decision.

And like, yeah, like you say, it's just complete. It's not even, they're not, it's not an Olympic sport, right? It's not like, they have to conform to an EIOC guideline. It's just fucking sandy. Yeah, Fede is the chess cartel, right? It's not like they have to conform to any IOC guidelines. It's fucking sending it. Yeah, Fede is the chess cartel, right? Like they could do whatever they want. Yeah. I mean, like I know expecting Fede to do stuff that isn't insane is like, look, look, this is the organization that after I, I, that after Bobby Fisher went on the radio in the Philippines and said that he hopes that the government like rounds up all Jewish people and kills them.

Like they let him back into feeday after that. So like, you know, great organization run by amazing people here. Um, yeah, but this is, I don't know, it's incredibly deeply weird. The thing I keep thinking about is, I don't know, this is kind of a weird, kind of silly story in some ways, but like, so like the first trans person that I was like aware of, it was a trans starcraft two player named Scarlet. And she's great. She's awesome, Scarlet rules. She actually, she's one of three non-Korean players ever to win a tournament in Korea, which like, I don't know how to express how difficult it is to win a starcraft tournament

career. It would be like if a football team from Siberia showed up to the US, was somehow allowed to play in the NFL and then won the Super Bowl. That's about the level of difficulty it is to win a starcraft tournament in Korea. To make a Bob Say team moment. But it's one of those really wild things. One of the things I remember about that was like she was always as best I could tell like always allowed like soccer. I've also had a women's division because you know very very similar like pro even more intense sort of sex

Oh, yes, yeah sure I can see that being pretty toxic, you know like like yeah like it was actually is it you know over the arc of like the like the like over a Decade she's been playing like I you know like I've seen the scene get less transphobic the like over a decade she's been playing like, you know, like I've seen the scene get less transphobic. But like, as best I could tell, there was never like a thing in the women's tournaments that I was just like, yeah, sure, hey, look, a girl wants to play Starcraft like this ribs.

And yeah, yeah, that's one more of us. Like, yeah, yeah, like, you know, and she's also like, and she's like, again, really, really good at the game. But like, you know, like, this is the thing that like historically hasn't, I don't know, like, like, like, Jenny Wiley, like, in games like this that are like not, well, okay, Starcraft is enormously more athletic than chess. But like, yeah, like, you know,

like, this has been a thing where people, like, there's, if you're in one of these incredibly sexist environments, there's like a real, like really obvious, like both trans women and cis women, like we're all in this together thing because you get to look at like the fucking ravinning hordes of like absolutely deranged psychos in the Twitch chat and be like, oh god, they hate both of us. Yeah, yeah, which is also like, I think the other thing about this is like, it's unclear like who at Fidey like decided this, like this doc just like appeared. And so there's like a non-zero chance

this decision's being made by men, like pretty high, but this is just like a decision made by a bunch of men because fuck them. And they've just decided that like, you know, after just like literally not giving a shit about women's chest for like the entirety of its existence, they've finally decided to do something

and they do something is make me not be able to play women's tournaments. It's like, yeah, you didn't take action when Bobby Fisher went full Nazi, but you decided to. Yeah, it's like, okay, this is great, great, great things are happening. I don't know. Yeah, talking of Nazis, it was a, I think actually a, a, again, a non-buying, or like an intersex woman who competed for the Nazis in 1936 at the Olympics. Yeah, with, I'm not entirely sure of her, like external gender, external sex presentation, I guess, but later definitely served as a man in the German armed forces, but they could have been a forced social transition

But yeah, there's a long history of us trying to work out gender shift through sport and I Guess I just want to finish by like If you don't give a shit about sport you have to understand this is still important and yeah, because like Sports are always about La Cousin on a team and who's not right that's why we didn't let black people play baseball in this fucking country. It's why they took like Olympic medals away from indigenous people for violating stupid amateurism rules because they were designed to only let people of a certain class pay. It's why Colin Kaplanck doesn't have a job right yeah. It's why Colin Kaepernick doesn't have a job, right? Yeah. It's why people didn't want to go to the Nazi Olympics and went to one in Barcelona and

it was bigger. Like sports, not just about being the best to exercise. It's social tool to include or exclude people. And if you care about including people, then I think you have to care about sport right now, because that is a wedge that transforms using to exclude people. So yeah, that's what I have for you. I don't know. If you have money, you can give it to Molly, Molly Cameron. You can invite her online and she will help more trans kids ride or, yeah, no, Jenna, go go ride bike.

It's fun. And if you are one of the seven people in the world who still thinks that Colin Kaepernick doesn't have a job because he's not good to football, come find me in the Bears parking lot. I will force you to watch an entire season of Chicago Bears. Like watch every quarterback we've ever fucking had

in my lifetime and then I will beat you. You will be in a catatonic state after that. I just found proven right. Mollys website is ridegroup.org. If you want to check that out, oh, yeah, fine, fine, come on and cap and make on the internet. Watch videos. years.

Sacred Skando, one of the best new podcasts of 2022, is back with a closer look at the darkness surrounding mega-church La Luz del Mundo and its leader, Nasson Joaquin Garcia. They believe that he was Jesus Christ on Earth. It wasn't even so much that he liked sex. He wanted something to pray. It's the largest cult in the world that no one has ever heard of. For three generations, the Luz del Mundo had an incredible control on his community. That began in Mexico and then grew across the United States. Until one day. A day of reckoning for the man whose millions of followers call him the

Apostle. Their leader was arrested and survivors began to speak out about the sexual abuse, the murder and corruption. This is just a business and their product are people. They will kill you. Listen to all episodes now on the I-Hard Rainy Up, Apple Podcasts, or whatever you get your podcasts. 911, what's your emergency? You shot her! Oh my God! It's a nightmare we could never have imagined. And a killer who is still on the loose.

My small town rocked by murder. There are certain murders I'm scared to discuss. In the 1980s, we're in high school losing friends, teachers, and community members. One after another, after another, for a decade. We weren't safe anywhere. We're teenagers terrified to leave our own homes. Would we be next? Who is killing all the kids? And why?

In that moment, I saw rage. And why do you some want the town secrets to stay dead and buried forever? I'm not sure why you're digging up all this old stuff again, but I'd be careful. Don't say I didn't warn you, Nancy. Listen to the Murder Years on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. From the studio who brought you the number one podcast, the Piked in Massacre.

Breaking news out of Moscow, Idaho. It was an unimaginable crime. It's a massacre. There's no other way to say it. Officials found four people dead. The victims were attacked with a large knife. It's a blood death. It's a crime scene investigators nightmare. In the early morning of November 13, 2022,

four University of Idaho College students in the prime of their lives were found brutally stabbed to death in their home. We believe it was a targeted attack. Police investigating the mysterious murders of four Idaho college students now say the threat to the community may not be over. We believe it was a targeted attack. Who on earth would do something like this and why?

Listen to the Idaho Massacre on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, over-ever-you-get, your podcasts. Ah! Ah! Okay, that was slightly longer of an atonal streak now, as I was back in the... Robert has been coming after me for not doing atonal streaks to start the podcast enough. So that's how we're starting to set up.

So it could happen here. The podcast where we take into nowhere's victory lap, because yeah, so if you've been following the discourse about inflation over the past about two, two and a half years. And especially in the last, like, maybe year or so, some very interesting stuff has been happening. The stuff that we've talked about on this show, and then also stuff that's been sort of moving around in the sort of broader discourse and has now reached like the IMF. And the thing that's been happening is that the theory of inflation that we've been pushing

on this show and that also very importantly, that has been being developed by strange matters has been like incredibly vindicated to the point of everyone else adopting it and then claiming that they invented it. So yeah, where this is the inflation victory lab episode and to talk about the fact that these two people and their colleagues were right about inflation and a bunch of other stuff too is John Michael Kolan and Steve Mann who are both co-editors

of the magazine Strange Matters. And yeah, both of you two, welcome to the show. Thanks. Thanks so much for having us, Mia. Yeah, and I'm excited about this because I've been wanting to do this episode for ever since. So the IMF tweeted out a graph that was arguing that, I think it was like 50% of inflation

in the EU was based on corporate profits, which was then basically, and this is them and like all the mainstream economists are finally like having to admit that we were fucking right about inflation. Yeah, so I guess before we get into what we were, what YouTube were arguing and what your colleagues are arguing, we should talk a bit about like, I guess who you two are and also like talk about

strange matters again, because I think it's been a bit since y'all have been on Yeah, absolutely so strange matters is a this is our kind of boilerplate a magazine of new and unconventional thinking in economics politics and culture and we have a Political bent so we are broadly speaking all some flavor of Libertarian socialist is kind of the umbrella term that we've used for ourselves, but that varies depending on the individual kind of members of the team. So we've got people who are anarchists, we've got people who are inspired by like democratic capitalism, we've got like people who don't like a lot of those labels, but are really

until like direct democracy stuff. But like, direct democracy stuff, but the four of us basically converge on the direct democracy, socialism is putting people in charge of the decisions that affect the kind of school of things. So in terms of our economics pages, however, we've for the last couple years been really dedicated to publishing heterodox economists, economists who don't correspond to the usually quite right wing mainstream of the economics discipline, but challenge it in fundamental ways. And there's a bunch of different schools of heterodox economics. Like, you know, everyone knows about like Marxists, but there's also post-Kainsians and ecological economics, feminist economics, and a whole bunch of different schools.

We've been dedicated to publishing people from all those different schools and trying to kind of get them to write in a style that's more accessible for ordinary people so that some of those ideas actually start not just reaching the public, but actually reaching each other because they don't really talk to each other very much. This is one of the big problems is like, I mean, even just inside of Marxism, like if you get six Marxists in the same, we will have nine different positions and they'll all be like ready to murder each other over it. And that's just the Marxists.

And then you expand out to all the rest of the other heterodox economists people on there's a lot of weird and sort of pointless rivalries going on that prevents people from like fusing really useful theories together. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we try to be a platform for diverging opinions to actually be put into dialogue with each other. And we've definitely, I don't think there's been a single

piece that all of us have been in lockstep agreement on theoretically. And I think that's been a single piece that all of us have been in lockstep agreement on theoretically. And I think that's a real strength, actually. Yeah. And like there's quite a few pieces that at least one of us is like, I still don't really know about this thesis, but I've been, there have been times in which I've been down on a piece, but it does amazing. So let's go with it. And also, you know, part of the reasoning for that is not just a kind of like Lucy Goosey

let's all get along and sing around a campfire, but it's actually a very principled thing. Because part of the story that we're telling with the magazine is how we have these enormous problems, you know, climate change, the whole crisis that the democracies have been going through since the 2008 crisis, the whole, and since the rise of global fascism in the 2010s, what are we going to do about the internet and its future, what are we going to do about these horrible culture war type issues that people talk about it as the culture war, but actually it's these massive reconfigurations

that we have to do of our consciousness in order to think about gender, national identity, and ethnic identity, and all these other things in new ways that are actually freeing and emancipating and stuff. All of these problems are vast, and nobody actually knows what the answer is. And that includes leftists.

Like there's a lot of these problems that are either like too technical or too complex for any one person to have the solution. So there needs to be a space where we kind of come together, people who are kind of like a good faith and who like are trying to kind of do the whole democracy and egalitarianism thing. And we actually butt our heads together across lines of difference and are like, okay, what are we going to do about this? And what are our different perspectives? And what's the common ground? And what are some little bits and pieces of things that people have figured out that we can kind of stitch together into something that

will let us not just get steamrolled by the fascists? And that's the kind of space that we're trying to be. And that's why we try to accommodate these different perspectives. Even though we ourselves tend to come from rather strong perspectives, both individually and as a group. Yeah, and I think we can, this inflation argument that's been playing out the past few years, I think is a really good indication of how well this stuff can work if it's like, it's a really good indication of how well this stuff can work if it's like, you know,

like the fact that y'all have basically had the inflation theory that like a bunch of mainstream economists were going to stumble over in the last like eight months had effectively written, we're discussing and we're writing it like two years ago, is a sign that something is going right. Yeah, we feel really vindicated. Yeah, it's been very, very, very funny to watch.

So I guess we should move into a bit about what this theory actually is. And the very, very short version of it is that it's a supply chain theory of inflation. It's a theory of inflation that tracks, you know, tracks price increases based on like, like price movement based on stuff happening like backwards in the supply chain. And yeah, that turns out to have been a really useful both predictive thing and explanatory thing once the inflation actually started. Yeah, yeah, I just really wanted to highlight that it's Steve who wrote the initial essay where we first put those pieces together. It's it's it's Steve's supply chain theory inflation

for anybody else's. So I definitely I defer to you in terms of, you know, laying the groundwork for it. Well, I wrote a piece called notes toward a theory inflation and it was kind of born partly out of frustration over the fuzzy language in which economists will try to speak about inflation. And when I was a grad student, I would like encounter it, not just from any particular school, but from broadly speaking, most of the schools of economics. And like, it's been prior to this inflationary episode

and history, it has been almost 40 years since we've experienced anything like this. And, you know, in the last period of, like, runaway inflation in the 80s, people were having a similar reckoning, although they didn't quite coalesce around supply chain and cost-puss-related theories inflation like they are at this time.

But like the theory, like in a nutshell, the supply chain theory of inflation is essentially saying that along, there are groups of businesses called supply chains who buy inputs from each other in order to produce products and sell them to either the next person in the chain or to outside consumers like the end user. And over time, given stressful enough biophysical conditions that they all find themselves in, even if they don't want to raise prices and broadly speaking, we know from empirical studies that most businesses, most of the time, are very biased towards not raising prices. If the situation gets dire enough, and they've

run, they've exhausted all of their non-price-based mechanisms for dealing with a bottlenecks, what are called bottlenecks in the supply chain, like they just don't have enough of the inputs that they need in order to sell enough stuff at a certain, at their normal price in order to make enough revenue to socially reproduce themselves and their supply chain. Eventually, they will exhaust all options and there will be one person who's kind of like the progenitor price increaseor. And because like every single, like, what is inflation really? It's a general rise in prices. What are prices?

Prices are things that people themselves inside of firms. It's their job to set. And so any theory of inflation needs to start with a theory of price essentially. And like so these managers whose job it is to set prices, when they change prices, why did they do it? Well, we have answers going back many decades, almost a century, of surveys of economists who have gone out and actually conducted surveys, asking under what conditions would you raise prices? And at no time did anyone say, oh, I raised prices because I looked at monetary aggregates and I saw that there was too much money. So I raised prices. So like that was kind of a starting point for me. When I read those, these surveys conducted by Gardner Means who was in the con this and

doing this work in the 20s and 30s, long if at all, Burl. I got really excited because I'm like, oh, of course, it's inflation. There's so much mysticism about piles of money building up and then it's like demand pull and cost push. What does this all mean? At the bottom of it, it's what are pricing managers doing when they make that fateful decision to be the first guy to raise prices. Because there is one, it has to start with someone. And it's usually like I was saying, they've exhausted all of their other methods of dealing with this, such as rationing

inputs or economizing, like increasing their efficiency and their production or diversifying their product lines and all this stuff in order to maintain customer goodwill throughout a a period of biophysical stress to the supply chain and they're just gonna raise prices because they have to get certain amount of revenue in order to make it as a business. So that's essentially what the supply chain theory is. It's that when that happens, it propagates along supply chains first. And then because nowadays our economy is so extremely integrated, there, it's not just one supply line, it's an entire supply chain network nowadays, and it's global in scope. So even if it can, it's increasingly less constrained to just like one industry or even one country these days.

That was a beautiful explanation. That's probably the most concise that we've accomplished yet at boiling it down. Because this is the problem is that we could go on for like 30 minutes about this. Yeah, yeah. Just this. I guess I have a couple of things to add that are just like digging out a couple of nuances that I think are important for listeners to understand. What Steve said about inflation being about a continuous

general increase in prices is really really profound. I think the first person to articulate that that I'm aware of was John K. Galbraith in an essay that he wrote about that, but in the 50s, but that's honestly, not the way that we usually think of it, right? Like usually, we think that inflation is when the value of money goes down. Value, money buys you less than it usually does.

And that is not just because that's how we experience it in our pocket books, everything else just got more expensive. It also has to do with the kind of history of theories of inflation. Because back in the day, the first OG theory of inflation, which people still some of them believe in, is the quantity theory of money. And it basically envisions like the entire economic universe

as a bunch of like atomized individual agents. And by the way, there's no distinction between companies and households or anything like that here. Everyone's kind of like funny. It was an individual agent. And there's a bunch of stuff that already exists out there in the economy. How it was produced, I mean, you deal with that

in a production function. And other than that, like you don't talk about it. So there's a bunch of existing stuff out there in the economy. How it was produced, I mean, you deal with that in a production function. Other than that, you don't talk about it. So there's a bunch of existing stuff out there in the economy. And it's scarce, right? So, like, how is it going to be distributed? Well, we're trading. The stuff that we have for the stuff that we need. And when things are more scarce, they're more valuable. When things are more abundant, they're less valuable. And when we want them more, they're more valuable, we want them less, they're less valuable. So that's kind of like the very basic universe

that they're kind of like operating in. And money was just seen to be one good being traded like any other. It's just so happens to be the one that we trade and exchange for everything else. So rather than doing barter of everything, you know, this may check ins for this amount of haircut, you know, like instead, we choose one thing to be exchangeable for everything else.

But it still has a value, which is basically determined according to this theory by how much of it there is. So if you increase the money supply, money gets less valuable, which is why everything becomes more expensive. Prices go up. Whereas if the money supply shrinks, then the value of money is higher,

relative to the goods that it buys, so therefore prices will go down. This was a theory that was developed in the 16th and 1700s to try to explain a massive global inflation that happened then in the so-called price revolution of the 20th century knows that there's huge issues with this. So they start trying to evolve away from it, away from the quantity of Ethereum money, because it has no real empirical basis. I mean, some people tried to kind of like, you know, jute the stats to make it look like there was, but like really our best estimates of the money supply have no real good correspondence to prices in the economy. It's not, it doesn't really work that way. So, yeah, this is the sort of modern version of this is called monoturism, money supply have no real good correspondence to prices in the economy. It's not, it doesn't really work that way.

So yeah, this is the, the, the, the sort of modern version of this is called monitorism, which is like, that's right. Yeah. And this is like, this is maybe the only thing I have ever seen, even like most neoclassical economists drop because it's empirically wrong. Like it's stunning. Like do you do you know how wrong something has to be for new classical economists to go wait hold on? Maybe this isn't right? Like, it's incredible.

But the problem is that they retreated into theories that are not necessarily right either. Yeah, perhaps, perhaps groping their way clumsily towards the truth, but not really that right. So this is this is where all that pull and push stuff comes in. And it's it's a little too technical to get into Steve's essay has like the the full version of it, but basically they started evolving away from a theory where the absolute amount of money in the economy is what matters most.

And towards theories where for example, it's the amount of money relative to the goods that can be bought by it. So if you have a bunch of people spending money to buy stuff, but there's not enough stuff to meet that demand, then that'll basically mean that there's like scarcity and shortages and things like that and that'll cost prices to go up. Although, why they do, like the underlying micro economics of why prices go up when they're shortages and stuff, this theory doesn't really address, because it's a macro theory, and it'll kind of like

fall back on supply and demand stuff, or various kind of weird hydraulic metaphors about like, well, I can't. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's so beautiful. Hydraulic metaphors. Yeah, it's so beautiful. So it doesn't really like, like, you know, different people will have different versions of this that have totally different explanations of why it's happening. But they'll generally say, if you look at the economy as a whole, if the stuff that's

being made is less than the order is being put in for it, then that cost of inflation because you're just not producing enough stuff. And they call that demand pull because the pull of basically it's like demand pulling, you know, for stuff that isn't being produced. So it's like, okay, well, that that causes price rises. There was a parallel development where they're trying to get away from the QTM another way where some people were like, well, what's the most important single cost for businesses across the economy? And they say labor, obviously, right? Like everyone needs to pay somebody to do wages

to keep the business going. So they just said, okay, well, if the cost of labor goes up across the economy, then that will cost prices to go up. So that's called cost push, which, now theoretically, this could be true of any cost. And this is kind of like where you know Steve's theory comes in is because it actually like starts talking realistically about what the cost of businesses are. But originally

this was again a macro theory. So they picked the one cost that's common to all the things of the economy. And they said that basically inflation is the cost of workers agitating for higher wages, which leads way wages to go up, which causes cost push inflation, the cost go up so that pushes, puts pressure down the supply chain because it's a cost for everybody downstream of it, so then it causes it to the prices to go up. Now, the problem with these theories is that they're very rigid. It has one cause and it's also like,

and it's this one thing, and it has to operate across the entire economy, right? But that's not actually how our economy is put together because our economy is not this general equilibrium produced by the trading of individual agents who are buying cheap and selling deer to each other. That whole universe doesn't really exist. The universe that we actually live in

is one where businesses are not isolated. They're interdependent, right? Like the, you know, the people who collect sands, you know, from the earth and other minerals feed into the factories that turn it into glass, which feeds into the construction industry that puts those glass, well actually, no, sorry, I missed a step there. It feeds into the factories that turn that glass into windows, which then feeds into the construction industry, which puts them into buildings, that then feeds into real estate conglomerates that rent it, which then feeds into businesses and households that live there.

That's the entire supply chain. All those businesses depend on each other because they reach out to their customers. How much glass do they make in the glass factory? It depends on how many windows the window factory is that are all their customers order. That's what determines how much they're going to make. This whole picture of the world as supply chains is common sense to anybody who actually like works a job, especially if they're like in a management position where they have to maybe be dealing with some of the supplier relations stuff or customer relations stuff.

Economists just don't talk about it. It's not really in their models because their models are developed from the ground up from this kind of like everybody's just trading as individuals perspective. And that's a great deal of the reason why Steve's theory is so powerful. Now, a lot of the supply chain picture that I'm painting, besides coming from the real world,

it also came from a particular heterodox economist that I wrote a very long profile of called Frederick S. Lee. Before we get into Lee, we unfortunately do need to take an ad break because capitalism, but you know what, Fredric Lee would have hated, and it's this ad break that we're about to do. All right, and we're back to talk about Fredric Lee, who is very cool, and I'm very excited about it. Yeah, I'm, well, unfortunately, sorry, it's a point. We're not going to talk a ton about him. The only really important thing. So he was, he was a great guy. He was an anarcho-sendiglist. He was a lifelong member of the IWW. He actually helped recover Joe Hill's ashes from the federal

government and properly bury them. That's not in part one of my profile, which is published in Part 2, which is coming up. But in addition to that, he was also a great economic theorist. And part of what he did is that he put together the bits and pieces of this alternative picture of the economy, where, for example, prices are not this thing that allocates resources automatically through supply and demand, and their price changes are telling us how much to produce and how much to consume, which is the mainstream neoclassical picture. But rather, prices are a markup that businesses set themselves.

They're not receiving it from the market. They set a price markup over their total cost of production in order to get the money that they need to keep the lights on and stay in business. This all sounds very trivial, I know, but believe it or not, in economics, this is like a revolutionary idea. So then it's like, okay, well, if that's the way that an individual company is, how are the companies linked together? It basically comes to, he doesn't call it this, but to a supply chain view of the economy,

especially in his last textbook, which tries to create a model of the economy as a whole. And he says that the entire economy is basically just a circuit of supply chains. It's all the businesses sort of linked up together forming a closed circuit that loops back on itself. And that is the economy that we use to produce the goods and services that just keep society going day to day, week week to week year to year. So he basically had all of that and that was the main ingredient that that we used, but it was Steve who then took that framework and used it to create a new theory of inflation.

Because if you have a world of the supply chains, then it becomes very obvious that if prices are going to rise all across the economy, it's going to be because people's costs go up. So then the question becomes, why do people's costs go up? And the answer is almost always what Steve called his progenitor price increase. This first guy who chooses to raise his prices. If and only if that person is, if and only if that person is in a position of the supply chamber, a bunch of people are downstream of them. And that tends to happen when, for example, an input that goes into the entire economy like energy suddenly goes up in price or become scarce or it happens when a natural disaster causes disruptions in a couple of businesses that everybody

else depends upon or when there's an adverse shift in the balance of payments you know the the let's say that the the the peso you know starts becoming uh you know versus the dollar you know the dollar becomes much more expensive the dollar becomes much more expensive. So imports become much more expensive. So any business that depends upon imports, you know, will suddenly have their costs go up. These are the kinds of events that are like an external shock that leads to a rise in prices in key nodes in the supply chain, that because so many people are connected to them as customers, their costs become more expensive. And that's, these costs increase travel across

particular supply chain. So you have to actually know how all the businesses are linked together so that you can identify what the origin of the stress was and see which particular supply chains is traveling down. It's not this like, this thing that has to do with a single factor across the whole economy, or this, or much less, the amount of money that's being printed. The amount of money is almost like a relevant

in this situation, basically. I mean, it maybe has relevance in as much as like, you know, if people have the amount of money in their pockets that they have usually, they might start purchasing more things than can be produced at this moment. But that's usually, like, usually it balances out in normal situations. The only reason why that would be true is because there was some kind of disruption upstream

so that what's normally produced isn't being produced. And so you always have to look at the particular supply chains and the kinds of stress that they might have. Did I communicate that roughly right? Yeah. Yeah, that was a fantastic summary. I have a few small notes just to add to it. In the survey of existing theories of inflation

that I did in the paper of the James C. Very ably summaries for us. Like specifically for the cost push guys, they, I think they have a tendency to focus on like macro dynamic forces at work in the lens of cost push, like partly because it is like, it relies on high profile fights between labor unions and companies that the audience

already understands. It makes a lot of sense that you would go to union fights in particular since one of the big items that they typically fight over is cost of living adjustments built into their wage increases. That's like an obvious like, okay, if there was ever a time in which macrothemic forces would convene in to specifically to raise inflation, it would probably be fought over like the Kola adjustments, constantly adjustments.

And like that leaves so much of the story untold. Focusing on K cola adjustments in these union fights leaves so much of the story untold because it's putting like what's really this incredibly interdependent micro-based phenomenon onto the backs of like one union against one company fighting over one contract and the way they make it work in like a lot of the modern one company fighting over one contract.

And the way they make it work in like a lot of the modern interpretations of cost push in this macro dynamic sense, the way they square, the way they square how it gets from that fight to become a generalized inflationary episode, which is what people want to know about. Like they don't want to know about one, well, they want to know about politically about a union fight. But in terms of the economics, they want to know about the inflationary episode. The way they square that is that there's typically, like, and what they call an information, diffusional, um, component to this, where, and that's

a fancy way of saying people learn about the outcome of the fight and then replicate it. Monkey C Monkey do. Yeah, so one union fight or one or one company backlash against a union fight where it gets out, it spreads and it's all over the place. And that's really like when you look at the economic history of like the data of inflationary episodes, although there are union fights going on, inflation is not springing up specifically from those fights in the way that they're describing. Yeah, and I mean, one of the things you can tell this is obviously wrong is that they're

just like at no point in the US's history has there ever been enough percentage of the US population who are in unions for this to mix to this to actually work. Like at no point, even if you would be really generous to them and only look at union density and like steel production, union density and stuff that are like as important parts of the supply chain. Like it's just not enough people. Like it can, it literally cannot be true

that it is purely like a union cost-just thing because they're just not enough people. Yeah. So in these models, one of the important tasks that they've given themselves is to estimate the coefficient of information diffusion content from these union fights. And like so they will try to estimate that coefficient and thereby out build a model that outputs what price increase we can expect from like labor militancy if you're on the right wing or company price gouging if you're

on the left wing. Yeah and this is really just like a perfect example. I think the Steve couldn't have possibly put it better of the way that certain things that sound super sophisticated and intelligent, because you know, you can have like, you know, rather pink economists using this framework, right? Like, you know, social democratic ones. You know, but the thing is that like, it sounds really fancy to be talking about like the district, what was it? The informational informational communication, coefficient or whatever like that sounds, that sounds incredibly sophisticated, right? But actually what it is, is that it's this kind of nut-so-story about how the reason why price rises happen across the economy is because people are picking union fights.

When empirically labor economists often do this, the ones who work for unions and stuff. It's like, it is almost always the case that wages lag cost of living, you know, like significant. So cost of living goes up. And that's why people, at some point, usually years later, will try to, if they're organized, agitate for higher wages to catch up with cost of living. So like, the causality of it, of cost push, you know, probably is not labor action.

Like, that's a sort of macrobrain superstition. But, funnily enough, this is kind of like, like, the devil is in the details, because cost push as a general framework ought to probably be the basis for any reasonable theory of inflation, because the idea that it's costs going up, that then whatever prices of downstream of those costs also go up, that is probably true. It's just that you have to look at particular supply chains and their costs, and not just like their labor costs, but all the costs that they have, and what costs in particular went up that affects those particular supply chains.

Like, that's a different story, and it's a story that looks more like Steve's. And also a story that looks more like what's been going on in the world since 2020. Some of the critics, when my paper and subsequent papers that were on the same vein as this came out, is saying that, oh, we're just conflate. Like, how are you guys really different than the the cost push guys that you're critiquing for part of your paper? And it's really comes down to this kind of mechrobrain, mechro-dynamic interpretation based on just wages or just like one union fight and then some like people see it and just copy it or something. And it's just to leave so much of the story untold. Yeah, I mean, I think I think this is like the strength of looking at it.

It was a pleasure. It's like you can have it. It, you know, it has the what like for what for a normal person is a really simple idea, but for an economist is like unbelievably galaxy brain, absolutely impossible to comprehend idea that something can have multiple causes at the same time. And those multiple, like, those, those, you can't literally just reduce an entire like thing that's happening

to exactly one driver, which, you know, you would think would be a pretty like not that controversial thing, but then economists can't tell the difference between a theory in which you can have multiple different things that are working on a supply chain and a theory where you can have like anything. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so like in the COVID inflation that was that transpired just after the first of these pieces of ours came out. It wasn't into full swing anyway in terms of being a national phenomenon until just after. Yes, there's beginning of a labor and no latency, upsurge, happily. But some people tried to line the people who were predicting no inflation,

but then we started to see a little bit, it started to attribute it to this macrodynamic cost push story eventually. Well, either, but you can tell that they are kind of hedging because there will be there's like a bifurcation of interpretations of it like one is the Like it's really is just uh You can tell it's not that strong of a theory because there are two like diametrically opposed interpretations Saying that like oh yours is corporate price gouging or it's uh workers Uh that like, oh, yours is corporate price gouging, or it's workers causing inflation themselves, which like James said, saying there's a lag,

typically associated that workers are just trying to catch up with the prices that were being raised by firms in order to keep up with inflation they generate. Yeah, if actually if we could talk more, I was hoping that I could actually get into the COVID inflation and its costs a little bit if that's okay with folks, because not only because it's important itself, but because I think this was actually one of our first successes as a magazine. So we launched as a magazine in April, I think it was of 2022. But we had been working on the magazine from like 2020 on.

So like, it was March of 2020. The, that's right. But, but we'd been working on the magazine all through like 2020 and 2021. And, and 20 20 and the thing is that that Steve's piece was kind of like taking shape and you know we as editors but then also as people who were like helping with the research and talking things out internally and talking with other people outside the collective we're all kind of like sort of imbibing it and thinking about it when COVID hit, right?

And one of the things that was rather magical, and there is written evidence of this, funnily enough, not as an article because the magazine didn't exist yet, but as a Twitter thread that I made actually on March 3rd of 2021, and the reason being so specific about dates is because of what happened.

Where we, and I was just summarizing basically conversations that we had been having inside the magazine internally. You know, that was when some of the news stories were starting to come out about shortages that were being caused by COVID. So most famously, the chips shortage were semicondu, which take like a year to make, from the moment that the order is put in to the moment when the thing is actually shipped, it's like a year.

And if that process is disrupted, you have to start from the beginning. So the shutdowns in China shut down semiconductor production. And actually, I say China, but it's really China and Taiwan, because both of those places have major chips companies. That basically screwed up chips production for as long as the shutdown happened and then after that, at a lag of a year, at least. And then that in turn caused a bunch of other shortages, the fact that we were all inside

meant that there was a huge problem in food, both in agriculture itself and in food processing factories, where the raw products that we take out of the earth are turned into the packaged bits and bobs that go to restaurants or to food product factories and things like that. Like, you couldn't get people to work there. Or if they did, and you tried to pay the measure or whatever, they would get sick, so they would stop production. So there was a labor shortage in agriculture as well.

Then there was a container shortage, right? In shipping, where we weren't producing enough containers to actually ship stuff around the world. And if you can't do that, well, everything is made, everything that somebody needs to make something is often now made in another country, or at least in another part of a country, you know, that's connected by trucks. So if there's no containers, how do you get stuff from one place to the other? And the answer is that you don't. So they were just piling up like mountains in the in the docks of various countries including here on the west coast and the east coast. So all of these shortages caused by the pandemic basically were hitting key sectors of the economy right that everybody depends upon.

So transportation everybody needs it. You know, semiconductors, a whole bunch of manufacturing needs is so that's why cars suddenly got got super expensive because the chips in the machines that make the cars got more expensive and not just expensive, but scarce. You just couldn't get them. And then food, everybody depends on. And you know, like everybody buys groceries, restaurants need it, so restaurant prices went up. So you can see how specific sectors, having these problems,

traveled down specific supply chains to produce the cost increases that we all started seeing. But here's the thing, all that stuff was happening from 2020 on. I did this thread on March 3rd of 2021. But the thing is that at that point, there was not yet inflation. We predicted that there was going to be inflation. And there was a lot of people, like including left wingers,

including heterodox economists, who got really angry about this. Because for them, inflation, fear-mongering, you know, this was in the context of the government printing out all the Stimichex, right? So inflation, fear-mongering for them is kind of like something that a right-winger would do, by saying the government is printing too much money, so there's gonna be inflation, quantity theory of money, stuff, Milton Friedman stuff, the stuff that they experienced

in the turn to neoliberalism from the 70s to the 80s, right? I understand that fear, but the thing is, this wasn't fear-mongering. These shortages for very clear reasons that were clear if you had the supply chain theory of inflation framework, which unfortunately only we did because we hadn't published it yet. It was very clear that these shortages were going to cause cost increases in very well-linked together nodes within supply chains that were going to travel down those supply chains and basically be economy wide. So I said so because I had a hunch that it was going to be true

and that it would be a big deal if it was true for validating these discussions that we were having internally. So I said some predictions, one, there's going to be inflation in the next year to potentially lots, two, it will be caused in the next year to potentially lots, two, it will be caused by cost increases due to the chip shortage and COVID induced bottlenecks in the agriculture manufacturing. Three, they'll try to blame the STEMI checks and attempt to implement austerity. Now, at the time of that first tweet, inflation was at 2.6%, which is like within normal bounds, although slightly higher than it had been before. By the end of that year, even actually, I think just a few months later, it was at 4.7%

and in 2022, it would peak at 8.73%, which was like the most inflation that we've seen since the crisis of the 70s, 50 years ago. So the first success that we had is the magazine. Before we even came out as a magazine, is that we successfully predicted the biggest inflationary crisis since the crisis of the 70s. And not only predicted it, but predicted its specific causes, because as the thread was continually updated over the course of that next year, like, you know, people started looking digging in, and actually, like, a lot of journalism

was uncovering that precisely those bottlenecks were leading to cost increases. You know, the, the, and, and there were other ones that were kind of added to it. So on the Ukraine war started in 2022, that increased global inflation because Ukraine is the world's single biggest and by a lot supplier of wheat, which is a key staple in diets across the planet. So the shortages that were created by the Ukraine war, by Russia's blockades, and also just by bombing and the war disrupting the labor market over there and all these other kinds of things, that meant that there was less wheat being exported, which created bottlenecks in those supply chains,

which led to the global increase in the price of wheat, which led to the global increase, anything that uses wheat, bread, and other food products. So beer, actually. Well, I'm not wrong about that, right? Beer uses weed, I should actually know that. For many people.

For many people. Yeah, I think so. I had to do a double take there. So anyway, the point is that this was like a really big deal because like, there were a lot of people including like in the Biden administration who were denying that inflation was happening even as it was happening. And eventually, they kind of shifted to a story where it was

like, well, it'll be transitional. Because only demand pull inflation is real, right? This is clearly a cost-push thing created by these shortages. But demand pull is the real form of inflation, is when there's like too much money and people's pockets And that's not what's happening clearly, so we'll be fine. You just have to wait, right? Which is not actually the attitude that you have to take. Inflation is inflation and like, you know the the if the causes are these disruptions and supply chains you actually I mean this is like the really edgy take You actually have to spend more money in order to unplug these bottlenecks. You know, it's far from inflation being a product of there being too much money in the

economy. You might actually need to do government spending to, for example, hire people, you know, and take extra steps for precaution for their safety to unplug bottlenecks created by labor shortages. Or you might have to like, you know, rapidly invest, you know, on a large scale, almost as if you're in a war, in order to create a new industry to like, you know,

to replace something like containers that you would normally import, you know, or something like that. So like these are the kinds of actions that a more muscular approach to the inflation would have been, but instead they basically just waited for the supply chains to fix themselves. Even when multinational corporations and their boards of directors were begging the government to actually intervene more, which is insane with economic planning. You know, you would never expect to hear something like that,

but it was in the things like the pages of the financial times. Speaking of the financial times, we do need to take another ad break, unfortunately. Yeah, do you know what the financial times will not be doing? It's buying ads on this show, hasn't happened yet, could happen, would be very funny, but has not happened yet.

All right, we are now back for ads. Yeah, I endeavor to have better ad pivots, but you know, you get what you get. Speaking of like what they could have done differently, like there's a whole World War II playbook essentially that they just didn't chose, or ignorant of or chose to ignore, of like, a system of price controls, rationing, and rapid redeployment of resources to unstuck

the bottlenecks along and across supply chains. On the domestic side to support the war front, there's no war going on for us directly right now, but it could easily replicate it. Yeah, and that's something I think is really interesting because eventually, as the inflationary crisis sort of went on, you did see a little bit of people trying stuff like this. You saw Germany, if I remember right, Germany did these price controls on natural gas prices and stuff. But that gets into another interesting thing, which is that. So yeah, I think we should get into a bit of this sort of like the, I don't know how you describe it. The mainstream adoption of like a version of Y'all's theory that eventually started

happening that eventually started to push like some of this stuff, which yeah, I guess we should introduce another person who, I don't know, the relationship between exactly what of your stuff she read is sort of unclear, but one of the things that happens in this sort of period is this German economist named Isabel Aweber who wrote a like fine, like the mostly reasonable book about like the economists behind the like the reform period in the 80s in China, like started pushing,

well, actually this is the thing where I'm sort of unclear at the timeline. I started pushing the greed-flation thing, although she had a different name for it. But yeah, I was wondering if you were talking about that sort of whole thing because that was really interesting sort of like turn in the whole inflationary discourse. Inflation.

Yeah, I think the prior, so like prior to Weber's piece coming out in the earliest phases of COVID in 2020 and 2021 before there was any inflation, there was a group of left wing, like a fairly large swath of like left wing academics, progressives, and liberals, and also Biden, the Biden administration itself saying that inflation would be transitory, and that we should, it will, if anything, it would be moderates, but would come right right back down because like supply machines are so much more nimble now, then they were in like the 70s and 80s and like liquidity sources are so much more plentiful that they have so many like, I'm probably giving them too much credit actually. I think they literally just were like, Yeah, there was no because that I remember. Like that would be because actually I'm filling

the blanks for them as I go I think They were just saying it's going to be trans-tory because it hasn't happened And like when it obviously in late 2022 to to through the middle of 2023 when there was obvious evidence that that wasn't the case then they like really Didn't like they went like hard to starboard and said like, okay, the inflation that we see, it's because of corporate greed and it just reduces to that now. Yeah. And so it's like a purely our opportunistic thing between of the largest corporations and then

maybe later people saw that and did monkey-seeing monkey-do, but it's because of them. maybe later people saw that and did monkey scene, monkey do, but it's because of them. And to be fair, like, the tricky thing here is that, so I'll preface this by saying that, like, you know, and I think this is true, Steve, too. Like I really respect Isabella Vabers' work when it's good, you know, and which is often, you know, like I think that she's a very solid heterodox economist

who has some really important refutations of mainstream ideas. And as an example of the good stuff, for example, she actually, one of her, one of the underrated aspects of a paper that kind of pushes what is popularly known as the greed-flation thing, the better part of that paper is that it actually creates a map of the current to today's supply chains in the US. And identifies the key nodes. And she's this method called input output tables,

which Steve and I have written about, and we're gonna write about it more on the magazine. This is the main tool that you can use to do real economic planning. James, you've been sending me input output tables for like seven years now. Yeah, I just scream about it. Yeah, I should make it clear. It's like the IOTables stuff is amazing.

And I think people just latched on to kind of really not like hardly the most important part of your piece. Yeah, and that by the way, I don't know if she read Steve's piece or not, but it is a huge vindication of Steve's piece which came out like a year and a half before, because it's basically mapping the supply chains that Steve talks about using IOTables and saying, okay, these are the nodes. If prices go up here, everything downstream of them will go up. And that basically hits most sectors of the economy.

And knowing what those nodes are is super important, because then you can figure out how to protect them. That's actually one of the key things that one wishes that governments were doing. It would like one of the key things that you know one wishes that That that that governments were doing would be one of the few useful things that they could do in a situation like this, right? but Unfortunately, there's another aspect of her work, which is more And this also comes from heterodox theory, but it's just not good theory in my opinion and it's this whole deal with like okay inflation is prices going up. So why are the prices going up?

well a Lot of them is are going up because corporate management Sees that everybody's talking about inflation now. Maybe their costs. They're not in one of these sectors where Upstream their suppliers are raising prices. They're actually getting the same prices for their ingredients as always. But because everybody's talking about inflation, they're expecting prices to go up, right? So why not just raise prices? And so, that basically ended up being a theory of a lot of the price rises that are going up because of corporate greed. And corporations are always greedy, but a situation where people are talking about inflation

means that they can basically get away with a price rise that they wouldn't be able to get away with normally. Now there might be situations like this. I'm not even denying that that's the case. Like there are clearly, you know, based on a couple of journalistic exposés, some companies whose costs have not really gone up, but they're raising the prices opportunistically so that they can do higher payoffs for the shareholders and upper management. However, as a primary explanation for why the inflation happened, as an argument for the main cause of the inflation, and therefore for what the main solution should be, which is slapping on price controls and saying, no, you can't do this, I don't think that that's tenable because there are

clearly biophysical stressors in at least the places that are experiencing, though, that are traveling down supply chains where if you slap price controls down, that's not going to get you more chips. That, at least not buy itself and in itself. Price control should be part of the picture, but that's not, especially in situations where there is corporate greed sort of driven price rises But that's just not an explanation for everything and some of Weber's followers not not necessarily her But some of the people who are like promoting this perspective are doing so again partly in order to avoid

Conversation in my opinion about these kinds of Biophysical bottlenecks and how they might be undone. And it's a huge issue. One thing to conclude is that this whole thing that we've been saying about the supply chain, as disruptions to the supply chain as the cause of a progenitor increase by people in the affected sectors, which in turn through their connections to a bunch of customers leads to price rises across at least sectors of the economy. That whole story allowed us to kind of see all this, a lot of the inflation that's happened

in the world since 2020, we saw it coming and we and we sought specific causes coming. And now, no less a capitalist institution than the IMF, right? Has kind of been forced, reluctantly, I would say, in some ways, to admit that as Christine Lagarde said recently, you know, energy played a significant role, then food kicked in, and energy is now fading. Now, they still want to make it about wages, right? That's the thing that ends up happening in a crisis like this, is that they do want to blame wage increases, but it is quite clear that even the authorities have needed to admit that these specific measurable biophysical crises have been the source, the main source of the inflation, and then a great deal of

the battle has been over who's going to kind of like, who's going to have to narrow their ambitions for their goals as a result of it, capital or labor. And this is where I think labor is on firmer ground, not as an explanation for the inflation, but afterwards. And then on, after inflation is already kicked in, who ends up having to quote, unquote, foot the bill, right? Is there's now like less money coming in in these companies. So do you give it to workers

so that they can you know, since their money buys them less, you know, compared to rising cost of living, you give them a little bit more so that they can like kind of like balance it out, or do you give it to management? You know, now obviously, if it's management making the decision about what to do with the company surplus because we live in a capitalist economy that's a dictatorship of the big owners. Guess what they're going to say you know and now you have a therefore a class struggle the distribution conflict that some of the kind of traditional cost push theorist always talk about. Between capital labor over what to do with these rising markups in firms. Now, they would say that's why the inflation happened. I think I would say, and I think Stephen Peanak-Greo with this, that it's what happens after inflation.

An inflationary crisis kicks in, and then there's a battle between capital and labor over who gets screwed as a result. I think that that's the way that we should think about a lot of the labor struggles that have taken place since COVID. Yeah, I also like to add that there's kind of like a distinction that needs to be drawn between like companies typically small and medium-sized ones if within who exist within larger supply chains, who are sort of like doing what they must, versus large corporations, often multinational, who there's documented evidence that yes, there's some opportunistic price increases that they are administering at the same time.

So there's a mixture, I would say bias towards the former group, those who have to do what they have to do in order to socially provision themselves, but there's a mixture of them. And so you have to look at who are the price leaders and are they opportunistically raising prices and are people copying that? Yes, sometimes. But as far as the

progenitor price increase that we keep talking about in our pieces, that very often, and this is born out in the surveys, when they were asked for their reasoning as to why they raised prices. It was typically for reasons that are, quote unquote, socially acceptable at least, to say. And for the most part, they were just defending their margins. Like they were at risk of going under. Right. Yeah.

And so you have to weigh, there's a dynamic, there's an interplay between that group and then the opportunistic group. And so it really doesn't like reduce neatly into the grid-flation sort of like bastardization of favors. Otherwise, really excellent piece that goes through some interesting

end-up in open analysis. Yeah, and I think that like this is a really important thing for listeners because I think a lot of left-wing listeners, they, if they ask what's inflation and a left-wing economist tells them because of corporate greed, they'll be like, yeah, but and they might listen to us and be like, well, it looks like you're, it sounds like you're defending corporations. And I would argue, no, we're not. We're trying to understand the actual causes for things.

And we think that this can actually help you. Because for example, if a company, let's say that you're in a company that is part of this wave of unionizations where, you know, let's say you're a Starbucks worker and people wanna start up a Starbucks union. Maybe one of the ways that management is trying to kind of like screw over your union is to tell people who are on the fence, well, like the reason why there's so much inflation is because of these unions. Like, we have to all stick together and, you know, the companies got

your best interests at heart. So, you like, don't join this union that's going to be pushing for wages that are ultimately just going to get eaten up by inflation. Like let management figure out what's best because otherwise you will just end up screwing up the whole economy. And which is not unheard of, it might be something that they'll fall back on in negotiations or in their anti-union propaganda if you know that the actual cause of the inflation has to do with disrupted supply chains

and that really the question is who's going to be screwed over and who's not within the company you can go back and say hey wages are always chasing cost of living increases the cost of living increases happen before the big unionization wave kicked off and we can tell that it's specific causes in logistics, and it's specific causes in chips, and it's specific causes in agriculture that are causing the price of this, that, and the other thing. You can even map out your company's supply chain, and maybe point out certain cost increases that caused it. And you can say, okay, so we're going to have to raise our

prices, but where is that money going to go? Not all of it should go to management, some of it should go to us. So this is what a materialist understanding of how the actual causes of the thing worked out can help you in organizing your workplace, and in pushing back against the kinds of things that your boss might try to tell you. So that's what I would say to somebody who's like,

well, well, you're just defending corporations. No, I'm absolutely not. But I don't think that we can actually have power. We can actually kind of like take direct actions that really matter because they're actually gonna make life better for us and our friends and our loved ones. Like, I don't think that we can actually do that unless we understand how the world works.

And sometimes the world works in a way that doesn't necessarily look like we would most expect it to or most wish it to. But nevertheless, you have to kind of see how it works so that you can then figure out what's the best intervention that I can make into it given where I'm at, the institutions that I work through, the coalitions that I can put together, and that kind of thing. Yeah, and I think this is a kind of like left field like take on this too, but like there are lots of sort of, you know, if you go through like an economic price history

or like an economic history of like the social experience in China, right? Like you will find them having to deal with like basically exactly the same shit where they have these like massive inflationary spikes that have to do with like basically these, I mean, for them, it was less supply chain, like supply chain breakdowns is like, you know, they'd get these supply chain bottlenecks

and they just like didn't have a way through them. And like, people fucking that up, like, there was a, like, there was a decent argument that like, that's part of what caused the great leap forward was people not fucking understanding, like not quite understanding how to like deal with their supply chain stuff and seeing this kind of like inflation

like issue kicking in and being like, fuck it, we're gonna do something that's completely nuts. And you know, that went like about as badly as like any attempt, anyone has ever tried to do like to fix any problem has ever gone. And the larger the number of people who actually understand how this stuff works, even in sort of like, you know, even on a kind of like not enormous a grandier level,

the more likely you are to have someone who's in an, it has the ability to make a decision where this stuff matters. And, you know, it, and like yeah, you can be like, oh, well, the odds are wherever going to be in place with this matters is directly you're going to be the one making the decision is pretty low. But it's not zero. It's happened to people before.

And them not knowing about it was like a really apoccal disaster and we can avoid doing stuff like that by having a better understanding of how our supply chain function and what effect it has on sort of economic distribution and stuff like that. So yeah, that's one of my two pitches. And my other pitch on this is I don't know how it's hard to actually gauge the influence of discourse on policy makers, especially when they're as opaque as like

the chairman of the Federal Reserve, but it is worth noting that we didn't get a like vulcars style 15% interest rate increase. And I think there's a non-zero argument that the fact that there were other alternative explanations to inflation around, and then enough people were pushing them. Like is a reason why we didn't get one of these

like a vulcustile thing which would have pushed employment to like unemployment to like 25% destroy the entire global economy. And that, you know, like we can count that as a fucking W because as bad as things are right now, like the world, the world where Jerome Powell pulls the trigger and hits the like, Hey, I'm now a monitorist, like I'm going to, I'm going to decrease the money supply button and jacks the industry out of like 50% like that world is so much worse than this one. It is difficult to imagine.

Yeah, I think we dodged the bullet of like 12% federal funds rate this time. Yeah. Like we surpassed monstrosity to an extent anyway. They're still doing some quantitative tightening. Yeah. They, but I don't know, at least does like a mortgage industry professional. I'm kind of hoping he keeps under six For the fellow funds rate Yeah, I mean, we'll see what happens there But it hasn't been we haven't gotten the apocalyptic reaction that look very very easily could have

Like to the extent of like I I'm pretty sure if this had happened under Obama, we'd be in like a recession that would have made 2008 look like a joke right now. So, yeah. I think that there's a lot more to discuss about it because, and it seems like we're going to probably have a part two to this at some point. So we can probably get into it there because we have actually an essay that we published about interest rates, which had an even bigger influence than this, than these early essays that we're talking about. But, you know, like, at the end of the day, I think that what's important, what's most important about what we've discussed is this for me.

Like having this model, which we developed, you know, obviously like Steve developed it out of as an expansion of the logic of Fred Lee's work and Fred Lee was not actually particularly original. He just synthesized a whole bunch of stuff that existed previously, like these pricing studies by Gardner Means and the Thirties and pricing studies over the next 100 years from all sorts of different people. You know, into his post-cainesian price theory and stuff like that, the cost plus markup stuff. But like, like, having a theory that's developed by looking at the world and building your abstractions up out of things that you can see.

Particularly in a field like economics that's so complex that you have to kind of start with like observable relations between actual institutions that exist in the world. That empowered us. You know, that allowed us who really were just like four weirdos started in magazine, right? Like four anarchistish weirdos. But that allowed us to see earlier than like most people, including a lot of like credential professionals, what was gonna happen in the future? At least the near future, like, the next like, like two to five years

from that vantage point, which was like 2021. That is really incredible. And I'm not saying that, like, you know, the next like, like two to five years from that vantage point, which was like 2021. That is really incredible. And I'm not saying that to brag, like, although it is certainly something that I take a sick pleasure in, it's also informative. Because think about all the things about which we don't have that concrete material picture.

The question of how we're gonna get fossil fuels out of agricultural production without causing famines, right? The question of what do you do now that we have the internet? Like, how do you govern that? Because it's clearly not working under these giant vertically integrated media oligopolys with the platforms, but it's also not gonna work

if we put it under the government. So what the hell do we do about it? You know, it's like, like, there's all these key questions that we just don't have even like working models of like, of like what the world is even like right now, much less like, you know, what could plausibly be done with it, right, to make it a better place. And obviously, you know, some of this sounds like stuff that the government should do, but a lot of this is actually stuff that social movements need. If you think the rent is 2Dm high in your city and you organize a tenets union that has real political muscle and you actually like have the ability to do stoppages or other actions that can really like bully the local city government, okay, but what do you ask

for? What do you ask for? What do you demand? Or what do you try to put into place yourself using your own money? Like, what do you do? If the rent is too damn high, how do you get it lower? And it's like, oh well, there shouldn't be rent, we should abolish it.

Okay, how do you do that? You know, you need models of the world. And that's what we've been trying to, it's a kind of build in the magazine more than anything else, especially in our e-con coverage. So there's a lot more that happened after this. We'll probably have a part two, but I just to wrap up the story up to then. So we did launch the magazine. We did put out Steve's essay, but then a really remarkable thing happened, which is that we started getting like all magazines do, people who came in into the slush pile who were inspired by Steve's work and were like,

this makes the most sense of anything that I've heard and I want to build on it too. So we started publishing other essays that were kind of building on the research program that Steve kind of got us started on. And although our sort of influence was difficult to calculate in terms of like, you know, how much we influenced the discussion, you know, in these early stages before the magazine was even up and running, afterwards, after we kind of published the people that I'm talking about, some of those pieces have actually definitely influenced the conversation in really exciting ways. And I think that we can talk about some of that next time.

Yeah, so that will be at some points in the future. I don't know. I'll mark up with down a definitive date when it happens because, I don't know, the world is chaos and this, yeah. But however, comma, this story will continue in part two, dot, dot, dot dot dot dot dot. Yeah, so Steve Jamesy, yeah, thank you both so much for joining me and yeah, do you have a where where can people go to find the magazine and YouTube if they want to find you. Oh, you can go to strange matters dot COOP. That's our main website. If you want to subscribe, we have digital subscriptions starting at $5 and print monthly is $7.99. There are also annual subscriptions too. Yeah, and please do consider subscribing or donating. You can actually donate any amount of money to us. We're not a non-profits, it's not tax deductible, but it would be a really helpful donation because

any dollar that we get that doesn't go to our capitalist overlords, you know, for the services that we have to use to keep the magazine going, all of that goes right now to our writers. And we try to pay our writers above market rate for magazines of our size. And, you know, to do that is very difficult, you know, we need to, so if you want to support worker-controlled media production that's financially independent, we don't have any big foundations, telling us what to write or things like that. It's all basically small donations and subscriptions. If you want to keep that media live and keep this kind of economic analysis alive,

along with our cultural, philosophical, historical, anthropological, literary stuff, then please consider it because we could really use the support. Yeah, so go do that. Go read some of the work that you all have done on inflation because it's really good. Yeah, the sympathetic adapte here, you can find us in the usual places. And yes, go into the best new podcasts of 2022, is back with a closer look at the darkness surrounding mega-church La Luz del Mundo and its leader, Nasson Joaquin Garcia.

They believe that he was Jesus Christ on Earth. It wasn't even so much that he liked sex. He wanted something to pray. It's the largest cult in the world that no one has ever heard of. For three generations, the Luz del Mundo had an incredible control on his community that began in Mexico and then grew across the United States, until one day. A day of reckoning for the man whose millions of followers called him the Apostle. Their leader was arrested and survivors began to speak out about the sexual abuse, the murder, and corruption.

This is just a business and their product are people. They want to know that they will kill you. Listen to all episodes now on the iHeartReadyUp Apple Podcasts or whatever you get your podcasts. 911 what's your emergency? You shot her! Oh my God! It's a nightmare we could never have imagined. And a killer who is still on the loose.

My small town rocked by murder. There are certain murders I'm scared to discuss. In the 1980s, we're in high school losing friends, teachers, and community members. One after another, after another for a decade. We weren't safe anywhere. We're teenagers terrified to leave our own homes. Would we be next? Who is killing all the kids?

And why? In that moment, I saw rage. And why do you some want the town's secrets to stay dead and buried forever? I'm not sure why you're digging up all this old stuff again, but I'd be careful. Don't say I didn't warn you, Nancy. Listen to the Murder Years on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This is King Slime, the prosecution of Young Thug and YSL.

In May of 2022, the arrest of young thugs sent shockwaves through the hip-hop world in the city of Atlanta. Over the past decade, Jeffrey Williams, the rapper Young Thug, has become an internationally famous rap star. But police alleged that over those same ten years, Williams was building a criminal enterprise, a violent Atlanta street gang accused of committing a slew of crimes, including murder. All they say, at Williams' behest. He's the one that's keen slime.

I'm Christina Lee, a music journalist who has covered Atlanta's hip-hop scene for over a decade. And I'm George Cheating, a crime in politics reporter based in Atlanta, and will uncover secrets about the people at the center of this case. All of this before a single juror has been selected. Listen to King Slime on the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This summer has been a critical junction in the fight against Cobb City. The Vydlana Police Foundation's massive proposed training facility in Decap County, which is slated to begin construction later this very month.

The last week of action in March of 2023, drew in over 1,000 people against Cops City and saw hundreds of forced offenders attack in mass, the construction equipment and police infrastructure stored on the site in a pretty successful action. The police repression came down hard, but the militancy of the forced offenders left a pretty impressionable mark.

Later that month, DeCab County closed and barricaded in Trunchman Creek Park, citing public safety concerns and allegedly found booby traps. Police did an exhaustive sweep of the forest and established a relatively firm control of the territory. After a year and a half of there being a nearly continuous presence in the Wallani by forest defenders, now the police began a forest occupation of their own. During the month that followed, the Atlanta Police Foundation, or the APF, rushed to clear-cut around 90 acres of the Wallani forest, seemingly in a ploy to show investors and the city that

they are committed to the project and to crush the spirits of those who spent years opposing the facility and defending the forest. People then set their sights on the Atlanta City Council, who in early June was to vote on whether or not to provide taxpayer funding for the APF's project. Over 23 hours of public comment across multiple days, almost universally against Copsity, culminated at the June 5th City Council meeting which lasted into the early hours of the next morning. Despite the record-breaking turnout opposing the facility, in the early morning of Tuesday, June 6th,

the Landis City Council voted 11-4 in favor of the $67 million funding package to build a cop city. The next day, a group of community organizers announced a referendum campaign to collect tens of thousands of petition signatures from Atlanta voters to put the cop city land lease on the upcoming ballot. City Council approving public funds for cop city was certainly disappointing, but not quite unexpected, because another week of action to stop cop city was already planned for later that same month. This could happen here.

I'm Garrison Davis. In this three-part series, I'll be talking about what's been happening in Atlanta this summer to StopCop City. If you want to hear more about the background of this movement, in the month of May, we put out a five-part series on the week of action from that spring, along with the few other previous Defender Forest and StopCop City mini-series published over the course of the last year and a half. With much of the forest already destroyed and no easy access to entrenchment Creek Park, this week of action in June was set to be very unlike any that had come before.

The kickoff rally was to begin on Saturday, June 24th at Brownwood Park in East Atlanta. I made my way there and met up with Matt from the Atlantic Community Press Collective. My first feeling walking in is like it felt very society of the spectacle, in terms of like the ratio of cameras to participants was the most extreme that I've really ever seen for like, you know, a week of action. Like there was, there was a- Outside of like a press conference. Yeah. And like, it felt like there was so many

just cameras, looming around. And it's like, there's so many people trying to make a semi-lock from the movements to sell back to other people at this point in time. And like, there's just a very, like, that's just a very large pervasive feeling. And that combined with the more kind of, the more liberalization of certain aspects.

Again, compared to the last week of action, which felt there was a strong militant contingent. I didn't even, like, the liberal continued, was still changing into a building. If you build it, we will burn it. And that's not the vibe here. That's not the vibe. That's not the vibe here. There's definitely a big separation in terms of what types of people at what side of the park right now. There's a more like, more like forested section of the park with

a creek on this house side, which is where people are setting up. Some camping sites, head of a kitchen, that's where the welcome tent is. And then there's the other side of the park that has like the rec center and the playground, which seems more like family, family stuff. Yeah, there are kids there. There's the popcorn set up. There's more like bouncy house. So there's a bouncy house, which is great. Return, return to the bouncy house. They couldn't, they couldn't keep this moving down. Uh, I won't, I won't rest until

until it's about to house. And that is destroyed until the culture is way every bouncy cast is all in Atlanta. Till every bouncy cast is deflated. That is, that is me moving so good. In contrast to the last kickoff rally at Gresham Park, which felt very unified, this time there was a noticeable separation in terms of what types of people are on the two sides of the park.

People wearing camouflage and masks were more situated on the south side of the park, where tents were being set up, versus people by the playground, who were going around with the referendum sign-up sheet, and where all the food was being handed out. It's so separated. You can't even see. No. I feel like the two groups cannot see each other.

And even like people like tell. It's a metaphor there. And even like, there's a metaphor. Yeah. Turnout seemed to be a bit lower than some people expected. And it was definitely much lower compared to the previous few weeks of action. And overall, the rally was very muted and lacked a sense of energy or focus. Like the rally was just started 11.

It kind of kind of like nothing happened. Like it just, it felt very directionless. It felt like people did not quite know why they were there at this point in time. It was almost noon before anyone really spoke on the bullhorn and the music didn't start until noon. And then what was it like half hour ago? So like 12, 30 probably when the first speaker

said anything. From the faith coalition. I don't know. So far, the rally kind of feels like a microcosm of the entire movement. At this point, it's not quite sure where to direct the energy to. There's a feeling that people should do something, but they haven't decided how it should be directed yet. And so there's some people showing up, but it feels kind of stagnant.

And there's this need to evolve right now. And I don't know, I think maybe people got burnt out from the city council things. There's a lot of energy being pumped into that. Yeah. And then I guess some people, like three weeks of pushing energy. And that was, that was only like two weeks ago. Like that's still very recent. Like three weeks ago. It still feels, it still feels very recent. It still feels very raw. Walking down the pathway on the south side of Brownwood, you can see people setting up tents, carrying camping supplies and big jugs of water.

Other people were assembling a makeshift kitchen in the tree line. And all of that was physically reminiscent of the last week of action. But being four miles away from the forest in Brownwood Park instead of the Wallani, impacted the feeling on the ground. We're both so far away from the forest, but if there's that separation of space, it feels so distant and... Distant even more than the aggression part. Even more than the aggression.

If this were happening in the aggression part, I think that might even be a different feeling. Yeah. Because at least you're attached to the Wheelani. There was more determination on the south side of the park. You can feel like people want, at least people want to do something physically than they were, but it's even still unclear how it's going to get directed towards, like, what is this to bring to stockpopsity right now? That's the big thing is like people are trying to figure that out. And there's people here, but like, what are people actually going to be doing?

That's the question. That is going to be a way of answer at least today, I would say. The last week of action in March was very important in terms of setting the stage for what the next few months would look like. The direct action that happened on Sunday during the Music Festival was very important and successful, but also carried large ramifications for how the rest of the movement would be shaped in terms of the police repression and increased police presence in the forest. The weeks of action definitely have this ability to affect how the movement as a whole

evolves in the subsequent months. On Saturday, there were worries that if things were simply going to continue to be like this kickoff rally, that wouldn't be a positive direction and would be a bad sign. It's just so, I mean, it's hard not to compare this to the last week of action of kickoff rally at Gresham, which just felt so different. Like that, there was almost 10 times as many people, there was a feeling of motion, there was a feeling of like, we have to go do with thing and we're going to do it no matter what.

We don't know what to do, I side of the tunnel, but we're going there to do it anyway. We're gonna find out together. And there was a lot of determination. And there was a lot of like, there was like a pointedness, like they knew where they were going. And this does not, it lacks that pointedness. It feels like people aren't quite sure why they're here or what to do at this point in time.

And if the movement wants to be able to continue in its goals, it has to find some way to evolve in the next two months as construction is going to ramp up. And I guess this would speak will kind of... Will the bell weather... Well, either a bell weather or a learning experience? Like it... Yeah. It might not be any sort of death now, but it will have to be a learning experience, probably. Yeah, that's kind of most of my thoughts so far based on walking through both places. There's just not much else to talk about,

it's just not much that's happening. Soon enough, however, other things did start happening thanks to the Atlanta Police Department. But throughout that afternoon, things remained mostly low-key, and as the day went on, the gathering at Brownwood Park turned into a community barbeque, and people started to get a much more clear idea of what the expectations for that day were. As people settled into the park, there ceased to be any big anticipation for what everyone was going to be doing that first day.

There wasn't supposed to be a vigil for Tartegita in the park that evening, which was interrupted by Atlanta police officers who swept through the park, issuing a quote-unquote, friendly reminder that the park closed at 11 p.m. All right, it's around 8.30. How about 40 police officers just walked through Brownwood Park telling people that are gathered here that the park closes at 11. And everyone's basically anticipating that police are going to try to sweep the entirety of the park, including the sections where people are trying to camp out around 11 p.m.

The cops were walking south through the park as the grab was walking and chanting along the way as well. Cops left under the heels of like maybe 75 to 100 people who were chanting along this outside of brownwood. They've been staging a round brownwood park in Portland Avenue for the past like hour or so. They had like 20, 30 cars, around 40, 50 officers. People decided they did not wish to stand there ground and fight off a possible police raid at Brownwood Park.

So they spent the next few hours packing up all the supplies and equipment that they just spent all day setting up and then evacuated from the area. Okay, it is 11, 10 PM. It seems like the cops essentially just did what I'm referring to as advanced bluffing. So they walk through it on 830 warning people, hey park closes at 11, which very much indicating

that hey, we're going to sweep through and fuck with your shit if you're still here. So the next few hours people spend time packing up, breaking it in the tents of leaving, heading to other locations. And then at 11 we kind of just expected police to do a standard sweep through, you know, destroy anything they find if they find people, tell them to leave, or else get arrested, standard stuff. At this point, there's about seven or eight police cruisers to stage around the south side of the park, but they're not actually sweeping through because it's pretty clear that there's like no one actually in the park at this point. It's just very clearly like empty and quiet.

So I don't even I don't even think hops are gonna sweep through. It's it's been already like 10-15 minutes. We expected them to kind of sweep on the hour, but they just like don't need to. It's very clear that no one's in the park. So they just kind of like successfully bluffed themselves into getting everyone to leave. I mean, if there were people still here in a visible capacity, I'm sure police wouldn't sweep through, but there's really, there's no invisible in the park from any of like the parameters around, so they're not even going to bother sweeping through. But yeah, looks like this is the end of Brownwood day one and the very kind of low-key

kickoff rally. Still, the week definitely is lacking a sense of direction. There's been to Cab SWAT doing perimeter sweeps around the Wallani forest and the Round Gresham Park with some future events planned. We will see how that plays out in these next few days. It certainly seems like police wanted to make some show of force early on in the week to stifle the week of action. The threat of a raid the very first night was indeed disruptive to the logistics for the

week, but ultimately people were able to band together to keep each other safe and cared for. During this current general sense of directionlessness, there were a lot of questions on how the movement will change during this turning point, with little in the way of obvious answers or new paths of resistance. The following Sunday and Monday of the week continued to be mostly low-key, people used those days to facilitate workshops and discussions to work through the shift the movement was going through.

At the end of the week, I sat down with Matt in East Atlanta Village to talk about the week as a whole and compare notes. Here's a bit of our conversation talking about the discussions that started happening during those first few days. This was a week of discussions. Like, there was a lot of meetings. There was a lot of discussions happening. People figuring out what do we do? Like if we actually want to stop Cobb City and it's going to get it built in these next few months, like Now is the time to figure out what the fuck to do next? So people have been having those discussions this week and if anything the week of action has been useful in this in this sense that it's brought a lot of people together So they can have these generative conversations and there was a lot more conversations during this week than last week.

There was one on like what this team of the movement is now, especially with the referendum, taking up more visibility, how our like radicals gonna navigate this space, and this movement with a lot of things in flux. And I think that that was definitely my first read. Even on the cook-out frallie, I felt like there was a lot of people like not sure what to do. It was very directional as people were asking a lot of people not sure what to do. It was very directional as people were asking a lot of questions.

And more questions were being asked all throughout the week. There's a lot of discussions, a lot of meetings about what do we do now? If construction is going to start in the next two months, what is this movement going to do? People can chant if you build it, we will burn it, but chanting it and doing it's two different things. And the movement is going to go through a period of evolution in these next few months. And with all of those questions being asked, I feel like the answer to those questions is

gonna be the actions people do take in these next few months. In the aftermath of the clear-cutting, it felt like in some ways that the window of possibility for this movement was closing. As options seemed to be getting smaller, more people started pursuing the referendum as a potential means of stopping cops city. But those in the more militant anarchist wing of the movement were left questioning. After two years of employing a diversity of tactics largely led by direct action, if it's the right move to switch to an electoral strategy now when the situation is approaching its most to dire.

But since it is happening, whether they like it or not, anarchists were wondering what give people do so that the referendum doesn't completely dominate the narrative of the movement or disincentivize other evolutions of the struggle. Now obviously a group of people pursuing a referendum does not prohibit other people from engaging in direct action, but there still were worries that the referendum could become a sort of release mechanism for the movement. Both in terms of new people's involvement being pushed toward this more liberalized electoral strategy instead of radical action, or if the petition or even potential ballot vote fails, then that being used as an indicator that most people in the city

actually do want cop city. But through all this, what anarchists can do and what they typically do is to encourage radical autonomy and self-determination, regardless of electoral strategies or outcomes. Whether or not a petition gets 60-some thousand signatures, does not affect a burning construction vehicle. Just as these sort of discussions were happening, it's kind of fitting that on Monday, June 26th,

we saw the first Communicagan months claiming responsibility for equipment sabotage. After the last week of action in March, and subsequent police raids on the forest, increased security, the rapid clear-cutting, and big push for a city council public comment followed by the start of the referendum, throughout that series of events, there really hadn't been much in the way of nocturnal direct action sabotage happening in Atlanta or across the country in solidarity. Once a core component of this movement was seriously lacking in the months leading up

to this summer. And then suddenly, after the June week of actions, mostly uneventful start, a post went up on the SketchU website, Scenes.noblogs.org, claiming that a group of anonymous individuals snuck into a subcontractor's machine storage lot and poured hydrochloric acid into the oil tanks of three vehicles. The target was Brent Scurbarone Company, a Georgia-based subcontractor who was hired to clear-cut the Walloning Forest and was currently engaged be in the middle of the night. I was told that I was going to be

in the middle of the night. I was told that I was going to be in the middle of the night. I was told that I was going to be in the middle of the night. I was told that I was going to be in the middle of the night. I was told that I was going to be

in the middle of the night. I was told that I was going to be in the middle of the night. I was told that I was going to be in the middle of the night. I was told that I was going to be in the middle of the night. I was told that I was going to be

in the middle of the night. I was told that I was going to be in the middle of the night. I was told that I I've never seen that many machines doing active work. Yeah. Like all moving at the same time early Monday morning, the stop cop city referendum put out a strong statement of solidarity with quote all tactics on the road to collective liberation. Unquote and openly rejected the state's framing of quote unquote violent and non violent resistance. To briefly quote a few of the last sentences of the statement, quote, the CAHPS City Vote Referendum Campaign is grounded in the values of abolitionist organizing and racial and environmental justice. We also recognize our chosen tactic is a single intervention in a wide rainbow of fighting state repression. We seek to use the CAHPS City Refer referendum to leverage local power, educate and activate

our communities, and build networks that can strengthen our city and future mobilizations. The referendum is one piece of a vibrant, multifaceted movement, one that defies respectable categorization, as well as state violence and repression. The COMP City vote referendum coalition stands in solidarity and full support of the StopCop City Week of Action, the larger movement and abolitionist organizers and activists across the city. Unquote. Unintentionally, these two things coincided.

There was the release of the scenes, like the first sabotage in months, and then the referendum released that same day. The solidarity statement for all actions taken to stock cops city. They'll just think that the statement itself needs to be highlighted. I think it seems like they're going to stick to that. The solidarity statement was widely applauded and seen as a good sign regarding the referendum's place in the larger fight against cops, and how it was not intending

to take space away from other aspects of the movement. Tuesday morning there was a small protest outside the Dakab County Board of Commissioners building to call for the reopening of Entrenchment Creek Park. The park was a common gathering spot for the movement and where many people camped during previous weeks of action. An executive order from DeCab's CEO, Michael Thurmond, closed the park late last March as the police geared up to fortify Balani and speedrun all of the treefelling. So I sat in the board of commissioners meeting and it's different than a city council meeting where like anybody who signs up to do public comment can do public comment, they only get a lot 30 minutes of public comment. So that amounts to 10 speakers, and I think about six of them were actually there for

to talk about opening the park. And then the rally, I think, was something like 30 people, was a student organized rally, and they did a couple of speakers, and then that was it. Not much from the cab, like the cab only came out to make sure that they weren't blocking a pathway and it was kinda hands off. I did get a parking ticket. That was my fault.

You did? Yeah, I let my parking expire for 12 minutes. A legalist, Matt, it's got at the ACPC. Wow. Oh, and yeah, the minute I do something illegal, I get a traffic ticket. Previously in June, the Dakab CEO proposed a $1.8 million construction plan necessary to reopen the park, but no clear date on when that would happen. One county commissioner has been trying to fast track reopening the park, but their resolution has repeatedly been deferred by the county board. The soonest it will be

reconsidered is October 10th, meanwhile the park will remain indefinitely closed. Throughout the first few days of the week of action, there was something kind of looming over everyone's heads. There was a march planned from Gresham Park towards Belani, that was to take place on the evening of Wednesday, June 28th. The police response to this action was primed to be the most intense out of the week. The path to Intrenchment Creek Park

is a pretty closed-in bike path, with a tunnel going under an overpass where police have been staging to prevent people from entering the forest. No, I definitely felt like on Monday and Tuesday everyone was still thinking about what would happen on Wednesday. What would happen on the March from Gresham Park? That was the big unknown, that was the big danger. How, like, very palpable. Yeah. Concern about how that was going to play out. Yeah. That probably, I mean, all the way back to Saturday,

that was probably like playing through people's minds and causing some of that, like, yeah, uncertainty. Police were setting up predators around the forest in an increased capacity than the usual detail. Pretty early on in the day, there was a DeCab County SWAT mobile command center posted up in a school parking lot next to the tunnel and bike path, leading from Gresham to Wallani.

Kind of as expected, this entire section of South Atlanta was crawling with police. Before people even gathered at Gresham Park, the day began with an unfortunately rocky start and the first arrest of the week outside Caden's bank in Midtown. The protest was calling on the bank to cancel their $20 million construction loan given to the Atlanta Police Foundation. So, there was this action at Caden's bank that they specifically didn't want media. And so, none of us were there.

And that was early in the morning. I don't, I think we found it about it like afternoon or something. Yeah. So after I woke up. Yeah. I think it was like they said 30 people kind of like we saw the other day on Friday. Yeah. But as they were walking away, somebody gets well, multiple.

They try to arrest multiple people. Please start chasing people. Someone gets grabbed and arrested. Another person gets detained and then let go. Seemed like a pretty chaotic scene. That's not a great way to start off the day where you have your most stressful action planned for later. You wake up, you get chased by cops, you're expecting to go do a march in a few hours. Yeah. And then in the most heavily police area of Atlanta right now. The march was to take place on the same bike path from Gresham Park to Intrenchment Creek Park

that people took during the kickoff rally at the last week of action. But much has changed on the ground since them. As people started to gather at Gresham Park on Wednesday evening, the numbers were quite small. As the night progressed around 150 people, eventually amassed, but it was still a small fraction of the number of people at the previous Gershon Park March, and with a much greater police presence.

The exact plan for the night was heavily dependent on a lot of factors that it was impossible to explicitly know beforehand. Like, how many people would show up and what they would feel comfortable doing based on the police response. Alright, this is Wednesday, June 28th. Me and Matt from the Community Press Collective are gathered at Gresham Park. Overhead, you can hear the Decap Helicopter circling. Are favorite sound. Our favorite sound. Our favorite sound, yes.

There's about, I don't know, maybe 75. No, we're more. We might be a 100. Close to 100 people gathered here in Gresham Park, and people have plans to march towards Mulani or at least to the tunnel, and then what happens after that's kind of a big mystery. Definitely very different than the last time. or at least to the tunnel and then what happens after that's kind of a big mystery. Definitely very different than the last time. We were gathered in Gresham Park with a crowd of people. We're missing the music, we're missing the Diwali, like paint clouds, we're missing the kids, we're missing maybe the vibes just in general.

Another 800 people or so. But I mean people are studying out science and some banners. Police have a decent presence around the around like the tunnel or like the overpass over the tunnel and around Mulani right now. All around the Wielani Triangle. There's their APD and the cab county police just hanging out more than usual and at the fire station there was more cops than I've seen since March 5th. Since the last week of action. Yeah, earlier this morning I saw a decapt county SWAT mobile command unit at the school

next to the tunnel overpass but I do not know where that is now. It was not parked there last time we drove by about half an hour ago. So yeah, just that is the update as of 6.30. So I'm guessing this crowd will start moving the next 30 minutes to 40 minutes. Probably half hour. Yeah.

All right. Right as the crowd was about to set off, someone made an announcement that due to small numbers and large police presence, there was to be a change of plans. Instead of going all the way to Intrenchment Creek Park, or even the tunnel, they were going to march one-third of the way and stop on the bike path. Alright, it's around 7.20pm, about 150 people are leaving Gresham Park and they announce they're going to be going to hold a small vigil near one of the failed trees on the bike path.

For a little while the march was getting along fine. There was music and chanting. When suddenly police made an early appearance. Okay, so it's what? 747-50? 747-41. 741 on Wednesday, June 28th. We are walking on the bike path and staged.

25 minutes into the walk and here we come upon our first police presence of the day along our path. So two... Looks like Decap County? Yeah, Tudic cap county SUVs. Part side by side along the path, but they're not out of their vehicles. No, um, so.

I think the crests, the first order, they might try to give it a spursal order, because there's too many people. Yeah. I didn't think they were trying to fuck with it this soon. I thought they would wait till the tunnel. A small number of police were posted up right before the first bridge on the bike path, roughly about halfway to the tunnel.

If they wanted to, the crowd could have marched past the police, as they were not blocking the path. The two cop cars couldn't even follow behind, because there was big metal bulgurts preventing vehicles from going on the wooden bridge. But the visible police caused the group to pause. There was that one speech that we need to touch on from that night and that was the speaker said in order to win we have to let go of the idea of losing while looking good. Yeah. And that I think is going to inform whatever the direct action side of things are for the next this next phase of the movement.

While paused in front of the police cruisers, the crowd deliberated on what they wanted to do and what they thought they could accomplish. After a few minutes of discussion, they decided that they were not prepared to unnecessarily sacrifice themselves. that they were not prepared to unnecessarily sacrifice themselves. One of the people from the crowd spoke briefly, not only on this decision, but also how it fits into the difficult situation the movement has found itself in right now. I'm going to quote a little bit from this impromptu speech. Quote, we shouldn't come away from this feeling demoralized. We should feel clarity because we believe we set out to participate in a movement to obstruct the construction of a police militarization site. But that is not being allowed to happen. The people were fighting against believe we are a domestic insurgency. They are treating us

like an insurgency. The state is using militaristic language like denying anarchists operating space. is using militaristic language like denying anarchists operating space. And so we're going to great lengths to be safe, to play it safe, and to go slow and to proceed rationally and defend one another. But we're coming under constant attack. Everything we do we're under attack. Unquote. Just earlier that morning, people were attacked by the state and arrested as they stood on the sidewalk outside of a bank. Those who work to bail activists out of jail are attacked. People doing on the ground, jail supporter physically attacked and face police intimidation. Quote, we don't want to be engaged in a failing struggle. Our enemy is treating us like terrorists. That's what they're calling us. And that's what they believe we are. It's not just a rhetorical trick. That's how they're treating the movement. And so we have to

figure out how we're going to win because we intend to win, but you can't just only defend yourself. The safest thing for us to do is to never go to a protest about this movement again. If our top priority is safety, everyone who is not currently facing charges should move away, should not go to events or actions. But if we have a higher priority than safety alone, we're going to have to figure out what we're going to do to achieve that, which is going to require going on the offense when we're able and how we're able. This movement has been very creative and we're going to have to continue to be more and more creative.

And we're going to have to continue to deploy all available means in order to have this kind of offensive, victorious, and strong movement that we all deserve. When we fight, when we attack the enemy, when we have our offensive actions, we have to follow through with them. We have to go all the way with them. We have to be willing to believe in ourselves, to believe that we can win. And so I believe that we are going to win this movement. And I think you guys believe that we're going to win this movement. But that's going to require us to abandon the idea of looking good while losing. We can't look good losing. So are we going to look good losing? Or are we going to win? Unquote.

All right, it is 8 o'clock. The crowd sat in the middle of the trail behind the first bridge where two decapcomy vehicles were parked. They deliberated for a little bit. And then a few people spoke. And now the crowd has turned around at a marching back to Gresham Park. Marching back, no arrests.

We do have two helicopters now hanging up over us. That's my favorite thing in the world. And a lot of other decavoli ground and other parts of the bike path and the trails. Yeah, they would have walked directly into, looked like a full SWAT team above the bridge. So they made the right choice is what it seems like to me. Yeah, and they talked about their intentionality of the decision and how it's important to not just keep losing while trying to look cool and throw yourself at a line of police. Yeah, and that hopefully I mean what does that look like in practice?

I guess we'll see you over the next two months three days three days to two months. Yeah, three days to several months, but it does sound like there's some a 10th now at directionality that wasn't that I wasn't seeing until this is the exact same March people tried to do back in March and they did it and they are trying to do it here again in June and it doesn't work. It doesn't work the first time. It doesn't work the first time. It doesn't work the first time.

It doesn't wait a second time so now it's time to change something. On the walk back to Gresham Park, we got clear photos of the amount of riot police waiting for us at the tunnel and it was a great many. Oh yeah, there's a lot. Yeah, that's clear photos of the amount of riot police waiting for us at the tunnel and it was a great many. Oh yeah, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of , that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of

, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of , that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of, that's a lot of a lot of, that's a lot of, that's have sucked. That would not have been fun. No, that would have gone very poorly. Would have been tear gas, though.

And I do miss being tear gas. I can like spray pepper spray if you want. It's not the same as tear gas. I can spray right now if you want. Matt ultimately declined to be pepper sprayed. Tortigitas mother Belquistaran came to Gresham Park to also join the march. So what we had was 150 people in Belkiss Tron. And I think that that play is a role

in how this goes on. No, having Belkiss very like, visibly present, like walking up to everybody there and greeting them, just having her presence there affects what people like want to do. And it reminds you of what's actually like the actual stakes at hand So you're you're caring for everyone around you in a much more like conscious capacity

Belkies spoke a few other people spoke and then they turned around and headed back to aggression and that was the decision that was made and No, no one was hurt. No one was arrested, people got back to Gresham Park, some people had ice cream. Um. To people in particular had ice cream and they were very happy about it. They were excited.

They definitely wasn't, maybe it was us. Other people also had ice cream. Other people did have ice cream. I don't think they were quite as excited as we were. Like the overpriced ice cream. Throughout the week, you can tell that people were really wanting to be back in the forest and Wollani people's park. People made do gathering at Brownwood Park, but it wasn't the same.

There was an undeniable distance between where people were gathered this week of action and the site of all the previous battles in the Wollani. The fact that so much of the forest had already been destroyed, loomed heavily over the week. And that's something that people are still processing and are still comprehending. Another big aspect of the week, this is the first week of action where people haven't gone in the walani. Like, yeah, there's no action in the walani walani walani walani.

Well, in the triangle, because the walani forest is always like this. But the site, this is the first time that people haven't been in the triangle because the real money for us always goes through. But the site, this is the first time that people haven't been in the forest. And that's a new thing to navigate. That's a new feeling to navigate. There's a different sense. Multiple chance. There's multiple chance being like,

not one leap. Don't cut down the trees. And the trees are gone. The site's been cleared. And I think people are still catching up to that. And like, a real life, it's still something that people are processing. And they're going to have to process that

if they want to continue. They have to look at the situation being like, this is, we have to accept what has happened so that we can choose what to do. Because you can't act as- You can't deny what reality is. No, and you can't act as if the trees are still there because That's gonna change the type of the types of like actions you do like you can't treat it and in the trees

It's it's changing the actual actions people are going to take to try to stop cops in it Yeah, I think the Wednesday action almost needed to happen So many people still dream about what if we could reoccupy Wallani people are still caught in that headspace because they got so used to that over the course of almost two years. So inevitably there was going to be an attempt where a few hundred people try to re-enter Wallani people's park. They're almost needed to be an attempt just to see what would happen. And we saw what would happen. And now people can use that action as reference when making

future plans and decisions about actions. Because you can point back to this and demonstrate what the police response will be when people march to Mulani. Massive amounts of SWAT riot police waiting for you, SWAT mobile command centers, heavily armed police sustained on roads, overpasses, entrances, and all around the forest, specifically waiting for people to try to cross over or through the tunnel. So now people know what will happen if they try and do the same thing again. In some ways, it kind of needed to not just be theoretical speculation, but actually

happen so that people can now truly allow themselves to evolve so that you don't have this question in the back of your head. Because now the question has been answered, you would be throwing yourself at a wall of swat in right gear. And now everyone can let themselves evolve and start figuring out what new things can be fostered and imagined. We'll hear more about those evolutions and conclude my coverage of the week of action in the next episode.

See you on the other side. of 2022, he's back with a closer look at the darkness surrounding mega-church La Luz del Mundo and its leader, Nasson Joaquin Garcia. They believe that he was Jesus Christ on Earth. It wasn't even so much that he liked sex. He wanted something to pray. It's the largest cult in the world that no one has ever heard of. For three generations, La Luz del Mundo had an incredible control on this community that began in Mexico and then grew across the United States until one day.

A day of reckoning for the man whose millions of followers called him, the Apostle. Their leader was arrested and survivors began to speak out about the sexual abuse, the murder and corruption. This is just a business and their product are people. They're on the matat. They will kill you. Listen to all episodes now on the I Heart Ready Up, Apple Podcasts, or whatever you get your podcasts.

911, what's your emergency? You shot her! Oh my God! It's a nightmare we could never have imagined. And a killer who is still on the loose. Oh my God! It's a nightmare we could never have imagined. And a killer who is still on the loose. My small town rocked by murder. There are certain murders I'm scared to discuss.

In the 1980s, we're in high school losing friends, teachers, and community members. One after another, after another for a decade. We weren't safe anywhere. We're teenagers terrified to leave our own homes. Would we be next? Who is killing all the kids? And why?

In that moment, I saw rage. And why do you some want the town's secrets to stay dead and buried forever? I'm not sure why you're digging up all this old stuff again, but I'd be careful. Don't say I didn't warn you, Nancy. Listen to the murder years on the I Heart Radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This is King Slime, the prosecution of Young Thug and YSL.

In May of 2022, the arrest of young thug sent shockwaves through the hip hop world in the city of Atlanta. Over the past decade, Jeffrey Williams, the rapper Young Thug, has become an internationally famous rap star. But police alleged that over those same 10 years, Williams was building a criminal enterprise,

a violent Atlanta street gang accused of committing a slew of crimes, including murder. All they say, at Williams' behest. He's the one that's king slime. I'm Christina Lee, a music journalist who has covered Atlanta's hip-hop scene for over a decade. And I'm George Chidi, a crime and politics reporter based in Atlanta, and will uncover secrets about the people at the center of this case.

All of this before a single juror has been selected. Listen to King Slime on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, I'm Garrison Davis. This is part 2 of my miniseries about what's been happening this summer in Atlanta to stop Cops City. Last episode we left off with the attempted march from Gresham Park to Entrenchment Creek Park, which some might say was a disappointment, but it also gave everyone more clarity about the current state of these types of direct action marches in Atlanta and the necessity for evolution. The main event on Thursday, June 29th was a protest outside the Home Depot in the upscale retail district off of Ponze-Dilion Avenue.

Home Depot is one of the Atlanta Police Foundations financial backers. There had been a rumor that Home Depot was going to close earlier in the day. I got there at 430. It wasn't closed. So I didn't see any signage. So I went and parked my car and came back. And like I think I got there for 50 and people were starting to line up along the road. Like there's a star box. Then they were lining up along the road. Like, there's a Starbucks, then they were lining up along Ponds next to the Starbucks.

And, you know, I'm talking to them, watching this, they're chanting, they're pulling out banners and we get a call that they are arresting Lorraine Fontana. So Lorraine Fontana is a 76 year old activist in Atlanta and she's great. Like, she pops up everywhere. She's beloved by everyone.

And so we get this call that Lorraine Fontana is being arrested and I bolt. As far as my little legs will take me and then I have to stop and catch my breath. Like right before I get there, but Lorraine and one other person were arrested in the parking lot right outside the home depot. from which we're just as warning, telling them that how people cannot want their basis or them inside the school.

After protesters left the store, they stood by a corner in the parking lot holding signs where they were then approached by APD officers who then arrested two people without warning. It does kind of just show APD like basically doing exactly what they would with anyone except in this case it's a 76 year old woman who's like 5 or a 4 or 11 or something like that like yeah No, I mean it was a lot of people were like surprised at this happened Like how could the police do this? I think others were like not as surprised. I feel like no, it's the APD They like it was a good demonstration for people being like showing that they do not care. They don't care if you're a 77 year old woman or if you're a 19 year old

eco terrorist. They're going to treat you roughly to save. Yeah. After Lorraine's arrest, more and more people began showing up across the street from Home Depot, calling for their divestment from the Atlanta Police Foundation. It got up to like 30, maybe 40 people. Mostly just like chanting on the sidewalk. Mostly chanting on the sidewalk. But then they started to like walk back and forth when the crosswalk was like there. Yeah. And they were, they were pushing the limit like,

seeing, seeing what they could get. But there was also my favorite part was the APD officer who was sitting in his... I'm sorry. My favorite part was... Fuck, I got to do this without breaking down the middle. I did hear a little bit about this. Alright, take three. Take three. There was the APD officer that was sitting in his Ford Explorer on Ponce.

And at one point, he calls out on his loudspeaker, I'm not an idiot, I swear, I'm not an idiot. While he's backing up on Ponce with his lights on, just like, what are you doing? I'm not an idiot. Anyway, I'm not an idiot. Not a cop. Oh, I'm not an idiot.

People are asking a lot of questions. I might need to get shirts. Oh, it was great. So I caught like the briefest snippet of that audio, thankfully. That's funny. On Thursday night after the Home Depot rally, there was a jail vigil around 10 p.m. for Lorraine at the Rice Street Fulton County Jail. So there are two jails. There's a Atlanta City detention center and then there's Fulton County Jail,

which we just call Rice Street because it's off, off Rice Street. Okay. So when you get charged with criminal trespass, it's like a misdemeanor charge and typically you would go to Atlanta City detentionisteri detention center which still jail still terrible but relatively like better. Okay. Fulton County jail is you know atrocious. It is you know the Lashon Thompson of course, the guy who was eaten alive in his cell by bugs because of neglect. That is Rice Street jail. That's the Folk County jail That's the Folk County jail. So we get worried that Lorraine is at Folk County jail and not ACDC, which is pretty striking

So everybody goes down to do a jail vigil and noise demo For context last September Lashon Thompson a 35 year man, was found dead after spending three months in an infested Fulton County jail, like Yatric Cell. His body was covered in a thousand bug bites, and insects were found in his mouth, ears, nose, and all across his body. Such inhumane incidents are not in a regularity in Fulton County jail. Just earlier this month, a 35-year-old named Christopher Smith died in Fulton County jail. Just earlier this month, a 35-year-old named Christopher Smith died in Fulton County jail. He had been held in custody since October

6, 2019, without bond on several unspecified felony and misdemeanor charges according to the County Sheriff's Office. Last month, a 19-year-old girl died in Fulton County custody after being arrested on a minor misdemeanor charge. This past year alone, six people have died in the Fulton County jail system. People in Atlanta have been doing jail vigils and noise demos for years, and it's never really been a problem. Cops might tell people to move off to the side if their crowd gets to a certain size, but they have typically gone on without issue. But this time, Fulton County deputies came out and declared that people are not allowed to protest outside the jail and ordered everyone to completely leave the parking lot and go all the way to

the other side of this big hill off of Rice Street jail property in order to continue protesting, which no one was really keen on doing. So this kind of Dave of chicken began. They eventually, they pull in a bunch more, she have step utes and threaten arrests so people start making their way up the hill, linking arms and they get to the top of the hill and they're met with another group of protesters

who had tried to come down, but they were stopped by police at the top of the hill. So now the crowdsize, like essentially, double. And the energy just goes through the roof. Both sides are just going back and forth. This deputy is like completely overmatched, doesn't really, they didn't seem like Fulton County had a plan. You know, usually APD or theab, they have some sort of protest plan

and Fulton was flying by the sea to their pants. And so all of our cars were down at the bottom of the hill. They were back in the right street parking lot. And this becomes like an issue because some of the protesters' cars are there, all of the media cars are there, like down at the bottom of this hill, and they're not letting anyone go down. And this woman shows up to like put, I think money on her son's commissary car and they don't let her down. She's like, they're just shutting down a jail.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, So they finally, first they're like, we're gonna let you go down one by one. And everyone's like, hell no, like,

we are not trusting you. Yeah, sure, sure, sure, buddy. Let's go, let's isolate it. Move through this police fortress. In an isolated manner. Nothing could go wrong here. So then they're like, okay, you can go as a group. Yeah, okay. As long as you have your vehicles down okay, you can go as a group. Yeah, okay.

As long as you have your vehicles down there, you can go as a group. So they slowly start to make their way down. They do not proceed in the next five minutes. We wanna start doing what we have to do. Okay. They get all the way to the bottom hill. They're in the parking lot and just like on the edge

of where the cars are and they kind of stop moving. And the sheriff's deputies like, y'all gotta keep moving and so they start moving again and of stop moving. And the sheriff's deputies like, y'all gotta keep moving, and so they start moving again, and then stop again, and then the sheriff's deputies says, all right, get up. And so then the deputy start moving in to make a rest, and quickly, you know, this march kind of becomes this backward moving thing, yeah.

Can't see that I'm moving my hands to show gags, but it becomes this backward moving thing up Yeah, you can't see that I'm moving my hands to show gas. But it becomes this backward moving thing up up the hill. The crowd was able to leave before anyone was detained, but it was a quite tense situation. The sort of dynamic we saw at the jail vigil and Home Depot protest led directly into the next event on Friday morning, a previously announced second protest outside of Cadence Bank in Midtown, calling on Cadence Bank to cancel the Atlanta Police Foundation's $20 million construction loan.

Alright, people add a protest on Friday morning, a cadence bank in Midtown Atlanta. There's maybe like around a dozen people here, chanting outside of the building. Also, about a dozen APD officers walking down from up the street, preparing to meet the crowd. They're moving in closer. They're walking in.

Again, people still, I don't think anyone's even touch the class door. Most of the people are just standing here on the sidewalk. You know that? Game you play with your cats where they come at you with a stop when you're watching them? Yeah, that's the game we're playing right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

We turn away the cops advance, we look. It's're playing right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We turn away the cops advance. We look, this is also like half of like a Loonie Toon's gags. They're doing a Michelin frog. All right, and they're now on the Cain's Bank property. They're starting to advance. Police were yelling at people that they couldn't touch any of the steps leading up to the bank entrance and that you weren't allowed to lean against any handrails because the medal pole was bank

property. So once again, we got this little game of back and forth except one side has guns and the power to arrest you. There, that bullet is probably still. It's probably, you guys are. It's probably, you guys are. Oh, you got it! You got it! You get out of the pool! What's your order? I'm going to get out of the pool!

It's like the law that prevents us from being on steps, huh? Primal trust best. This cops said that the crowd's trying to inside a riot. It feels very much like what you saw, I guess, in Portland. Obviously, there's an object that becomes the sacred goal. And then you're battling over the thing because the thing is now being eliminated. You've given something, like,

actual physical presence, and that is the thing that you are now fighting for. It becomes a symbolic. In front of a building. It don't matter, but the police gave it significant. But because the police turn it into this symbolic thing and now means more than just being stepped. So there is this camera guy who kept kind of stepping up

and pushing the envelope. And eventually more activists put one foot on the steps being like, okay, if you're gonna come after us for putting a foot on the bank steps, fine. Come at us, call the bluff. Yeah, so there was like, people yelling at the cops face for like, 45 minutes, maybe longer.

Time always stretches during these sorts of things. It's hard to keep us. It's hard to keep a sense of like, temporal stability, even during week's action in general, it's always hard to keep a sense of temporal stability. That's the sense of time warps around, days blend into each other, a day feels like a week, a week feels like a day, it's very, it gets very fuzzy.

It gets incredibly trippy and you're like, yeah. And the exhaustion, right? Like just compounds all of that. There's a lot of things that feed into it. Despite about a dozen people putting their foot on the sacred steps, the police did not decide to arrest anyone at this protest. And after about an hour of disruption, the crowd departed. The week of action ended much like the last one with the final rally being the youth march

back at Brownwood Park. Lorraine just got out on bail and spoke about the jail conditions to the crowd of a hundred or so people gathered in the park on the morning of July 1st. And I don't want people to forget that our movement is connected with lots of other stuff. One of which is prison abolition. And the idea that our so-called criminal justice system is such that people get just shut behind bars. We don't want to see them, we don't care what happens to them. And even if they're not having gone to trial yet and they're in a jail awaiting hearing

or awaiting a trial, they're treated like they already are the people that are criminal. We don't have to care as much about them. They're kind of the other, the bad people. Lorraine said that she was in a crowded holding cell with 22 other women and just a few metal benches, nothing else. This is where nearly two dozen people had to sleep, had to eat, use the bathroom, all in one place for days on end.

Women were trying to sit or sleep on either the hard benches or the floor. Some were attempting to use menstrual pads in place of a mattress. If they were lucky enough to be asleep, they were woken up at 2am for breakfast, and then again at 4am for head counting. They were so full I didn't have room for the people that were eating or resting. So they were in this holding sale. Some of them been there three days. It was something like 18 feet by 60 to cross.

The last six feet were behind a divider that had a toy that's even toyed. So it was even less room. The prison system is every day doing these kind of union treatments to people that get arrested or not yet guilty of anything. Student organizers and parents also briefly spoke on why people are fighting against cop city. I don't want to live in a city.

I don't want to live in a country in a world that prioritizes the protection of private property through murder and state violence over the fundamental building blocks of life. Okay. I think we need to be focusing on giving people places to live, giving people food to eat, water to drink, not on giving the police playgrounds where they can blow up bombs and shoot their guns. And that's why all of us together here need to come together. Be as one here in beautiful community with children, with elders, everything in between, doing this amazing community building. I love being out here with y'all.

It's so much fun to just be working the popcorn machines and all that. And that's why we're all here together because we know that community is the key for us to stop cop city Stop cop city! Stop cop city! And so as we fight to stop cop city, we are fighting for investment in the things that make families throught in this city. We tell long-draight chickens, we tell them in a little police foundation that we demand that money be reinvested. Okay. And they're housing for the people.

Yeah. Child care for the people. Education for the people. Health care for the people. But those are the things that make our communities truly safe. And if they won't give it to us, we're going to build those networks of care

in our communities ourselves. Right. That is what makes days like today so beautiful. The fact that the people have the capacity to feed the people. The people have the capacity to make sure that people stay high-dream. People have the capacity to give each other medical care. And as we build out those networks of care, we make the government a relevance. We can try to tell the people to do all day long.

But if we continue to build people's power, well, they have to say, don't even matter. So are you continue to build people's power, well, that is a, don't even matter. So are you ready to build that kind of world? As people got ready to depart, the energy was noticeably higher than most other events that week. All right, it is Saturday morning on July 1st. This is the last day of the sixth week of action. The youth rally just left Brownwood Park and is now marching through East Atlanta Village.

Shortly before the youth rally, news started to circulate that early, early that morning, just after midnight. Several Atlanta police motorcycles and cop cars suffered mysterious damages, which possibly could have contributed to the more bolsterous energy among some of the radical attendees. People are driving by and honking in support as about 75 people, maybe a hundred, maybe a hundred. As about 75 or a hundred people are marching next to Metropolitan Avenue. I think a fire truck would pull their air horn. The fire trucks were kind of busy last night actually. I'm not sure.

The fire trucks were busy doing what, Harrison? Well, it seems like a lot of police motorcycles were found to be set on fire at the site of the old police training academy. Sounded like some police crewzers were wrecked somewhere else in the city, too. On Memorial Drive, Southeast, it sounded like three cop cars were also smashed up. Do you think there's something going around? Is it contagious? So, yeah, the fire crews were a little bit busy last night. It's

spontaneous vehicle vandalism. Yeah. That's certainly one way to end this week of action. This definitely feels like the most positive part of the week of action so far. Yeah. People have been marching for about 20 minutes now. The march is now turned down Glenwood and is heading back towards Brownwood Park. No police presence at all so far. There was, they're just complete. I've not seen a single cop car in this section of town.

There's also three less cop cars in Atlanta than there usually is. So that might have something to do with it. It was from this zone too. That the second one where the cop cars are, it was like a mile and a half away. Yeah, it's very close. But yeah, very different than what we saw on last Saturday. Yes.

Where I, like, even on my way in, I saw APD here every, you know, 20 feet. Yeah. And do not see a single, nope, APD vehicle is notable. The youth rally that closed the last week of action in March kind of felt like the end of an era. This one on July 1 felt very different, much more like a beginning of a new era. After a very scattered week, the movement finally started to feel like it had multiple directions to grow.

This week definitely started on, I would say, a muted note, and it's ended with a bit more directionality for the future and a bit more positivity, I think. I think people were able to think of ways that the movement can evolve and grow from here and recognize the necessity for that. And yeah, recognize the necessity for change and people are ready to continue and evolve as the situation on the ground is also changing. And I mean, adaptability was a part of the movement from the get-go. Yes, I think we got, the movement got very tied to certain modes of operation

that are not available anymore. Yep. Yeah, for the past like, few months, people have been, it felt like people have been playing on the police's like board, like they've been following that and both of the, both of the actual last night and the sort of talks that are happening throughout the city, I think that is probably going to change.

All right, we are about a block away from Brownwood Park on Portland, Devonue and Gresham Avenue. Where there is pizza and water waiting. That is, that is, I'm excited for water. I don't think I can have hot pizza right now. I think I would just faint. But cold water is certainly, certainly enticed there. Certainly the ideal.

Yeah. And there's music back here in Brownwood, tables set up, giving out literature, giving out food, water, lots of bubbles, earlier at the rally before the march. There was a water balloon fight, which was very dangerous. Oh yeah, I don't know why you stayed around the water balloon flight.

I took my laptop and left. There was a few very close moments there. But yeah, no, there's food, there's lots of signs, banners. What's a lot of little Caesar's pizza? There was much more energy here compared to the kickoff rally which happened in the very same park exactly a week beforehand, which felt sort of reversed from the previous week of action this past March. Which is interesting because like last week of action, the kickoff rally was the biggest point and the youth rally was kind of the more muted close and this has been reversed.

Which honestly, when you're looking at what has happened over the last few months, maybe beating out with a high note is yeah, is the idea I like that we're also ending with the bounty castle Which is very very important. Yeah, yeah For the full flip we have to end with the bounty castle We although we should move the bounty castle to 890 memorial drive southeast. Oh my god After the youth rally Matt and I got some coffee in East Atlanta Village, I talked about the broad strokes of the week and the general state of the movement. Like I said, I think this week started with a lot of questions being had and it's ended

with some of those questions being answered and people figuring out that to answer some of those other questions, the answer will take the form of actions that happen in these next few months. And I feel like there's, it's ended with a bit more directionality than what it began. Which is interesting for me to come action. Yeah. It was needed though. It was absolutely needed. Like 100%.

Like the first rally just felt so weird. The first day, the first day, the first few days felt just very, very, like, very scattered. It was unclear how what was happening was related to Stop and Coff City. And in some ways this week of action feels like the reverse of the last week of action. We're like the last week of action. It started with a point of directionality. We are going to retake Mulani, and they did. And then we are going to do an action to physically stop the construction of Copsidie,

and they did. It was doing all of these things. And I think that week ended with more questions than what it started with, because the police did the rate of the forest. There was more uncertainty by the end of the week because there was so much over-policing. There was a lot of changes throughout that week.

And I think this week started in like an inverse, is people started this week with a directionless sense and they had a lot of questions going into this week. And I feel like some people have started to kind of figure out how the movement will evolve in these next few months. And it feels like people have a better kind of figure out how the movement will evolve in these next few months and it feels like people have a better idea of where of like how they are going to move forward in these next three months, six months and like

the month and a half when construction is slated to begin in August. Slated to begin and you know this referendum is looking like it's doing pretty well so hopefully that that does delay. But, of course, we also ended with the Bouncy Castle. We can't do it without acknowledging the importance of Bouncy Castles to this movement or at least to Garrison and I. Yes. I think the other thing that makes it interesting in terms of this week being an inverse

of the last week is that, you know, on the last week, day two, there was this very fiery action with vehicles being smashed. And then on the second to last day, which is like late last night, either like late Friday night, or at least out of the morning, like 1 a.m. to a.m. There was three Atlanta police cars smashed by Reynolds town I believe. Yeah, just right like a mile and a half away from from Brownwood Park. Yep, and closer to the airport at the old police training academy. There was a it looks like a good fleet of Atlanta police motorcycles. Yeah, that's where the motorcycle like that's where the moto like headquarters.

Yeah, what is 180 south side. And those motorcycles are going to be no longer functioning. Yes. They are all turned to a crisp. With like incendiary devices found there. Yeah. One of the most noticeable differences about this week of action, compared to the previous one, was the turnout.

Out of state support did not show up in similar numbers as to the last week of action in March. There's a lot of potential reasons for this. This week may have simply happened too soon. It coincided with other events across the country. Its messaging may not have reflected an adequate level of planning. There was probably some demoralization from the 90 acres of trees cut down. And with Intrenchment Creek Park closed and under police occupation, trees cut down. And with Intrenchment Creek Park closed and under police occupation, lodging options in Atlanta was more of a mystery for those coming from outside the city.

More time away from the death of Tortugita is probably also a factor. People in Atlanta may have to reconcile that the movement may not have as much widespread national support and all the ground numbers as it did last March. more local. It did feel way more local. Once you go from like something so big as the last week of action to something more constrained, that is that sets a like a vibe shift that I think you've got to kind of come to terms with and it's one of those moments where you're like okay, we are in a different paradigm. Yeah. Fewer numbers is not necessarily a bad thing. A group of five to 10 people can sometimes be much more effective at doing certain things than a crowd of 200 or even 1000.

You just have to specifically prepare for the numbers that you know that you'll have. For such a long time, I felt like this movement was extremely effective in delay in construction. That was... You mean, extremely effective in a half? Deadlines kept getting pushed back every single thing. The occupation was very good at doing what it attempted to do. At a certain point, that became no longer viable and things are now changing gears. You have to allow yourself that evolution.

Like, it has to, the same way people started occupying the forest in October after the city council, stuff in September of 2021. Like, as the things change, you have to change your tactics with it. And as, I mean, as revolutionary strategy goes, that's just, that should be baseline. Yeah. It's adapting to what the situation is and not what the situation, what you want it to be. Yeah, and I think more people are talking about that this week and realizing that like maybe even another week of action does not make sense for this new paradigm

that we're existing in Atlanta. I've talked about the possibility of changing the week of action structure before in previous episodes. And I really only brought that up because that's what people were conveying to me at the time. And this has continued to be a topic of debate both during and since June. What do you do with the week of action format? And I know that we kind of talked about this during the last recap episode

where you brought up that might have been the last week of action, but it wasn't. It wasn't because as I was making this episode, this week of action wasn't announced. I've heard more people say that they don't think the week of action format is applicable anymore. I've heard more people say that than I did last week. What if Atlanta has kind of outgrown this format? This format proved to be very useful in these past few years. There's been very positive parts,

it's been very negative parts. And what if it's time for something like completely new? Something that the police don't know how to respond to. It's something that matches the new paradigm. Yeah, because that's the other thing. It's like people have been doing this for like two years now.

Like not only have people like gotten used to a pattern, but like police have gotten used to a pattern, but police have gotten used to a pattern. Police have gotten very good at repressing the week of action. They have had two years to practice. They know how to do this now. Why keep playing on their battlefield? Why keep doing what APD is expecting you to do? That's part of what's interesting about this resurgence of these nocturnal hit and runs avatages that are unannounced. Um that we we saw the ones earlier in this week with the with the

Brent Scarborough's machines, then we saw the APD vehicles get hit last night. So perhaps there will be more of that perhaps they'll be just new things that we can't even predict. Like there's so many other avenues that things could that things could go. Even during the use march, Matt and I were wondering

if this new spike in sabotage actions would break the spell and we'd see a return of this type of action happening more frequently. You know, it's the sort of direct action that has really been missing over the last several months. Yeah, and no, we've been talking about, we're a lot this past week, we're talking about how there's been a lack of these sorts of like, no,

eternal hit and run direct actions. And late last night, it seems like there was a resurgence. So. We'll see how that continues, you know, after the week of action, if it continues, or if it was a week of action inspired element but I have a feeling we'll see some of those continue to crop up. Absolutely.

And this did indeed turn out to be the case. Alright, I will do my best to go over a short list of the claimed attacks against contractors building Cops City and corporations that fund the Atlanta Police Foundation from after this week of action. building cop city and corporations that fund the Atlanta Police Foundation from after this week of action. On July 1st, over half a dozen Bank of America buildings in the Bay area were vandalized and a dozen or so ATMs were smashed. In late June to early July, a group of friends visited the home of cop city architect Anthony Kenney in North Cross, Georgia, while another group paid a visit to Ambrish

Basil Walla, a member of the Board of Trustees for the Atlanta Police Foundation. People painted messages around their homes and tires were slashed. On the night of July 2nd, Keith Johnson, the Eastern Regional President for Brassfield and Gory, the contracting firm who broadly oversaw the destruction of the forest and who has decided to physically build Copsidie, also received a mysterious visit. Late in the night, an unknown number of people evaded security guards and spread blood-red paint around his pool and left a message reading, "'Copsidie will never be built. Drop the contract, and you can't hide.

According to an online community, rotten fish and dirty motor oil were left hidden somewhere on the property. Part of the community addressed to Keith Reigns, quote, we know things haven't been feeling great in the office. You're losing money. Subcontractors are upset. There are fractures everywhere in the Copsity project, and all of that weight and precarity is on your fragile shoulders.

Each time you think of us or see the reminders we left you, remember this is your own doing. You can make all of this stop by dropping the Copsity contract." On July 4 in lieu of fireworks, people claimed to have set two Brent Scarborough machines on fire in broad daylight due to the lack of security during daytime. Scarborough is the subcontractor who physically leveled the 90-some acres of forest in the Wallani. The same day in Michigan, Chase Bank ATMs were sabotaged with glue and the bank was vandalized with messages of resistance. Chase Bank's head of regional investment banking serves on the board of the Atlanta Police Foundation. And on July 8th, a bank

of America in Berkeley was vandalized with stop-cups at East Logan's and three ATMs were smashed. During the start of this little wave of actions, the mayor's office and APD were none too happy. So on July 5, Mayor Andre Dickens and Atlanta Police Chief Darren Sheerbaum put on a press conference with the ATS, Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and FBI to discuss the recent surge of direct actions. Our public safety facilities and property were the target of an extremely violent and dangerous attack on Saturday, July 1st.

And there were several other destructive acts of extreme vandalism on public and private property that occurred that we have reason to believe are related to the construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center in Decav County. The current Atlanta Police Training Center at 180 South Side Industrial Parkway was set ablaze in the early morning hours of Saturday, July 1st. The targeted attack utilized extremely dangerous homemade incendiary devices to set a fire to the building and completely destroyed eight motor cycles. As shocking as this is, this was not

an isolated incident of violence. This group actually took credit for these incidents and they stayed it as I quote, we are vengeful wingnuts with nothing left to lose. Prior to that, about one hour prior to the event at one of the Southside industrial, we had another precinct that was targeted in the city. This is our path force precinct, Memorial Drive, the 800 block of Memorial. These officers patrol the belt line which many of you all visit frequently. At that location, we had multiple windows broken on police vehicles. We believe the intent was to set those vehicles on fire as well.

As a paragraph and fire of the red fuselage on the ground, that has been used by this group in the past to set police vehicles on fire. That was dropped when a citizen observed the criminal acts and progress and actually interrupted the crimes that were occurring there. So we believe that the fire attack that was planned on the Memorial Drive was thwarted by an observant citizen. For short time later about an hour we had the fire at our facility on Southside industrial. Our training center is housed there. We read most recently and then our special operations precinct is there.

The intent was for all 40 to be destroyed. And had all those 40 vehicles caught on fire, that police facility would have been gravely damaged if not destroyed in the fire. And we are thankful for a police officer that saw this unfolding and likely interrupted that plan for being able to play out as this fold is. There's indications that this was likely committed

by the exact same individuals. We will let them out as this full of us. There's indications that this was likely committed by the exact same interventions. We will let see where the facts take us. According to Chief Shearbom and Mayor Dickens, the actions against Atlanta police on July 1st over the course of just a few hours, equaled over $300,000 and they want you outfitted a little bit more so do that times eight. That's going to put you in the ballpark. Yeah, and that's not even including the rest of the smoking damage and other things. And the broken windows on the police car, etc. So the group that struck this weekend is a dedicated group of professional anarchists. And I know that may seem a contradiction in terms. So this is a group of individuals that don't play by any rules and will go to any links they need to to carry out. And

this is their words. We will wage a campaign of violence and destruction. And so what we saw this weekend was part of that campaign. It's always funny when police make anarchists sound very cool and scary, but Chiefs year bomb also pretty clearly explained the reasoned methodology behind the pressure campaigns targeting contractors and APF financial sponsors. We know from the postings of this group their intent to stop the Public Safety Training Center has left the democratic process of the city council and is now moving to intimidate and force out contractors that are committed to building the public safety

training center. This weekend during the week of action, three different locations, private residences were targeted. Tires were flattened on a contractor's home, a home of an executive for breast delivery was significantly vandalized in another jurisdiction. And then we had another location where graffiti was used to intimidate. And then yesterday morning, slightly after 7 o'clock in the morning, a location at 418, McDonnell Boulevard, belonging to Brent Scarborough's company, which is a key provider of work on his training centers

was also targeted and attacked, and equipment was set on fire at that location. These acts are of a small determined group. These are small individuals from across the country that are using violence and fear and intimidation to stop a public safety training center. And this group cannot hide behind the dark of night or the home address and feel that they are not

going to be held accountable. I have standing at this podium with me today representing some of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the ATF, and we are also representing from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the ATF, and we are also partnered with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. These agencies are working together to determine where federal laws violated this weekend and ensure that the full expertise

of American law enforcement is present right here in Atlanta to stop this group, stop this group across the region, stop the ability to impact this for the public safety network of Atlanta and hold them accountable. Despite continued threats from law enforcement, the only arrests that have happened so far in relation to this movement are from daytime protests, forest raids, and bail fund organizers. We've yet to see anyone arrested in Atlanta for doing like a specific one of these nocturnal like night sabotage actions that is that has not happened yeah I

mean this scary indictments everyone's expecting are gonna come in these next few years after you give the FBI two three four years to investigate after you interview more people who've been arrested see if anyone snitches if anyone turns state's witness but so far it's been safer to do nocturnal sabotage actions than it has been to attend a public protest. And that is an interesting paradigm as well is that no one's actually got arrested for lighting for lighting like cop cars and fire in the middle of the night. No one's been arrested for sabotaging equipment in the middle of the night. All of all of the

arrests that are you know are being tied to violent crime are from daytime protests, which is an interesting factor about this movement. Direct action in the most surveilled city in America can be tricky and even just managing cell phones and internet search data is a huge factor. But as much real security there is out in the world, the amount of security theater is arguably a stronger aspect in getting people to not go out and do direct action.

The implicit threat of the Panopticon is often enough to stifle people's potential action. But these things are beatable. Guides for how to do it exist either at your local anarchist book fair or online as long as the computer is running tour browser and irreparable VPN. The internet, the internet's a fun place. That's, that's, there is a lot of no blogs and sites and the zines that tell you how to do that. I don't know, I mean, they people always make mistakes, people get caught sometimes. People do make mistakes. It's risky and there are cameras everywhere in the city. You have to, yeah.

Some of them don't work, but it's like, do you really want to play Russian roulette? No, we got, that's a part of, that's a part of when people like plan these mock-turn elections. It's like, just because it's nighttime, doesn't mean you're not- You're safe.

Getting watched, you're not, you're like, it's, there's a lot of things that go into that. There's a lot of ways to get caught. Whether you're like buying supplies and you keep a receipt. And people please find a receipt, they track back, they find security camera view of you purchasing things, and then they're like, oh, this bottle is bought at this place because you have this receipt in your house

and blah, blah, blah, blah. There's lots of ways that stuff happens. So I'm not gonna give a guide on how to do it right now. But this anarchist have been doing this for a long time. After you do that crime, you've never done that crime. Like it's not something that you do as a person. Like you cease to become a person, you become like, you are that action. Your identity is assumed into the action and then, once you're an actionist,

you never talk about it ever again. It's gone. Or else you end up going to prison. Yeah. And risking, like, not just your safety, the safety of- Everyone's safety. Just by remembering that you did it. No, you- no, like, these become standards

in anarchist communities, like, you never brag about something. You never allude to anything. Like, it's not a game. Like, you're- It's not a game. It's not a game. It is your life and other people's lives on the line when you're doing stuff like this. And it's, yeah, you never do it to be cool.

You never do it to brag about it. That's just not how this works. Which is why there's a much more insular culture around some anarchists, especially anarchists to identify as like illegalists or the types of green nihilists or green anarchists that pioneered the militancy of this movement. Both, even slightly before, they have first city council vote and then definitely after the first city council vote, where we saw a massive explosion, no pun intended, in the number of nighttime sabotages happening in the Wallani forest.

Yeah. Which I think drew a lot of anarchists, due to come to Atlantic, because it was like, oh, this is- Oh, they're doing the thing that- They're doing a thing that- That has been missing since the end of the green scare. Yeah, no, this is like the thing that I believe in, that this is like, this is my politics,

now there's a spot where I can do my politics and still no one's been caught for that. And I think that that was a big part of why Atlanta got so big last year was that people had the ability to like live free in the forest and then do crazy shit at night. Like you can, you live in this like autonomous zone during the day, you're able, whether you have housing instability,

whether you just want an escape from like, horrible police state living, like, in whatever city you're in, you can go live in the Wallani forest, you can live in a tent, you can have friends, you can defend this forest during the day, and then you can do crazy shit at night, and that drew a lot of people to Atlanta.

And now with the force not being there, that also changes the type of people who want to come to the city because that was a big draw for people and now that's no longer an option. You can't really sleep in the whole army force as easily anymore. Yeah. That changes the types of people who want to come to Atlanta and who are going to do crazy shit because that's just how... And further on safety, they're not here. Yeah, absolutely. the types of people who want to come to Atlanta and who are going to do crazy shit. As the referendum is hoping to stop Cops City by having Atlanta residents vote on whether to cancel the land lease, others in the diverse movement have continued their efforts to

pressure contractors and funders to drop out of the COPSITY project. This tactic has already demonstrated its ability to succeed, with Reeves Young construction dropping under the project in April of 2022, and some material suppliers have since cut ties with COPSITY. This is something that APD Chief Darren Sheerbaum certainly seems worried about. This effort of fear is not going to succeed and the coalition of law enforcement from the GBI to the FBI to the ATF to the Lena Police Department and a slew of regional agencies is going to stop that campaign so it doesn't happen and individuals do not leave the project.

On July 2, protesters in Minnesota visited the homes of Atlas Technical Consultants' employees. During daylight, people marched around in the neighborhoods with instruments and banners, knocked on doors, talked with neighbors, and left a letter of demands to drop the contract and cut ties with the Atlanta Police Foundation. The project manager for Atlas Technical Consultants engaged with protesters in the street and told them that Atlas had indeed already dropped out of the project due to mounting pressure. We stop doing that shit. Why? Because you guys are fucking nightmares and you broke all our fucking windows. So thank you. Oh yeah.

I don't care what you want to say. Don't test what. So you know my show. I told my fucking house. Knock on my door and do this shit. Why company is not involved in this. So get the fuck away from me. That's great. I'm glad we'll leave you alone. Yeah, get the fuck out of here. A few days later, Atlas and Long-Aginering released an official statement saying that they

would no longer be working on the Cops City project. Enarchists and those on the left in general seem to have a hard time calling wins, but I'm not sure if it gets any more definitive than that audio clip in showing that this type of direct action can absolutely work in getting businesses to leave the project. In the next episode we'll talk more about the referendum, the city's attempts to divide the movement, and the growing PR battle over the fate of Cops City. See you on the other side.

Sacred Skando, one of the best new podcasts of 2022, is back with a closer look at the darkness surrounding mega-church La Luz del Mundo and its leader, Nasson Joaquin Garcia. They believe that he was Jesus Christ on Earth. It wasn't even so much that he liked sex. He wanted something to pray. It's the largest cult in the world that no one has ever heard of.

For three generations, the Luz del Mundo had an incredible control on his community that began in Mexico and then grew across the United States until one day. A day of reckoning for the man whose millions of followers call him the Apostle. Their leader was arrested and survivors began to speak out about the sexual abuse, the murder and corruption. This is just a business and their product are people. They want to know that they will kill you.

Listen to all episodes now on the I Heart Ready Up Ready Up, Apple Podcasts, or whatever you get your podcasts. 911, what's your emergency? You shot her! Oh my God! It's a nightmare we could never have imagined. And a killer who is still on the loose. My small town rocked by murder. There are certain murders I'm scared to discuss.

In the 1980s, we're in high school losing friends, teachers, and community members, one after another, after another for a decade. We weren't safe anywhere. We're teenagers terrified to leave our own homes. Would we be next? Who is killing all the kids? And why?

In that moment, I saw rage. And why do you some want the town secrets to stay dead and buried forever? I'm not sure why you're digging up all this old stuff again, but I'd be careful. Don't say I didn't warn you, Nancy. Listen to the murder years on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And I talked to friends about their worst moments of bombing and all sorts of ways. Bombing on stage, bombing in public, bombing in life. Like the time I stole a girl's phone during a set and she dumped on stage and threw a big

A-maker punch to my nose. I want to know what's the worst way they ever bombed or performed way too drunk or high. There was there every time where they thought they were going to crush and they stunk it up. Subscribe to my podcast bombing with Eric Andre to hear more crazy stories from me and my friends. And they stunk it up. Network on the IAR Radio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to Ike Good Happen here. I'm Garrison Davis and this is the last episode in my trilogy covering what's been happening this summer in Atlanta to stop Cops City. Last episode

we covered the end of the week of action, the resurgence of nighttime sabotage, and atlas long engineering dropping out of the Cops City project. A relatively new, big aspect of the movement that I've really only mentioned peripherally is the Cops City vote referendum. The goal of the referendum is to let the people of Atlanta vote on whether to repeal an ordinance authorizing the land lease of 381 acres of forest into Cab County that was given to the Atlanta Police Foundation in 2021 to use the land for the construction of Copsity. In order to get the referendum on an upcoming ballot, the petition had together 60,000 signatures in 60 days. Every signature must be from an Atlanta resident who was registered

to vote in 2021, and initially those who gathered signatures had to also be Atlanta residents. 60,000 signatures in 60 days was a lofty goal, but volunteers around the city were being increasingly mobilized during and after the week of action. For the first few weeks of the referendum, the city stayed mostly quiet, but then on the July 5th APD press conference, Mayor Andre Dickens addressed the referendum. May your some of the Contestors and the Opposes of the 20 Cent or have bigger collecting signatures in the hope of having a referendum Putting the November banter what's your reaction to them? What's your comment on that? Will you allow them to do what they're doing right now and possibly have this in the referendum?

Yeah, absolutely the referendum process is one that's legally documented It's in the city code and anybody can attempt to get the petition going and get the necessary signatures. We ask that they do so with honesty and truth. Collect the signatures from real people with sharing the truth about what they are looking to do. And so I don't personally believe they're going to be successful. I believe that based on what we know about the citizens of Atlanta, they are supportive of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. We know that this is going to be unsuccessful. If it's done, honestly, I mean, so we're making sure that we continue to monitor the process.

This statement by the Democrat mayor of Atlanta, I don't think has been highlighted enough. The mayor is trying to frame a successful referendum as a fraudulent one. Dickens is priming propaganda channels and testing the waters for blatant election frauds-style messaging in the future by very clearly insinuating that if you win this, that means you're cheating. The referendum kept popping up throughout the week of action. Yeah, without it wasn't hazing up space. It was never the focus. It was, throughout the week of action. Yeah. Without, it wasn't, it was up space. It was like, it was never the focus. It was always just like on the sideline.

Yeah. But it was everywhere. Yeah. I think every event, the referendum, was in some way shape or form, you know, there, like, the Home Depot rally, and people walking by, that they were talking about the referendum and talking about the week of action, collecting signatures.

It did not feel like it was taking space away from any of the other aspects of the movement. I'm trying to be, I think something, something that we're definitely worried about that. Like, people worried that the referendum might act as like a release valve for both the movement and like, the people who are like outside the movement and still like looking at cop city, being like, how can you get involved in this thing? And you see this like very like, above board electoral strategy of signing stuff signing stuff like what if people's efforts just get funneled into that and they missed it on the other much more

expansive aspects of the movement. One of the few more referendum-focused events during the week of action was a community town hall discussion put on by the hip-hop caucus at the gathering spot on the evening of Friday, June 30. Before the panel discussion, myself and Matt from the Atlantic Community Press Collective talked with two members of the hip-hop caucus about the event and their hopes for the referendum. This is Brandy Williams, an organizer with the hip-hop caucus. So the hip-hop caucus is a national nonpartisan, non-profit organization that uses hip hip hop culture to connect people to the civic and political process.

And essentially we do that in four areas. We do that with I think 100% climate and environmental justice work. We were founded as a voting and democracy organization out of the voter die movement. So we still do that work under respect my vote platform. We also have our good trouble, civil and human rights work. It's our multi-issue platform and we look at it as the Justice Department for Hip Hop. So we do it. We work on everything from police work form to education and health care and then our justice paid in for which is our economic justice platform. So how do we achieve economic justice? We actually started our activation

like on the groundwork in LA last week during BET Weekend. So we did a similar event in LA. We're doing this one here and we are planning to be here in Atlanta and through the referendum and through the election. We also talked with Yonacha Haal, lone wolf, an Atlanta resident and national community organizer. Recently, she had been working

to spread awareness across the country about what's been going on in Atlanta. Myself, hip hop caucus movement for Black Lives until freedom, community movement builders. We all came up with this idea to create this photo shoot campaign similar to Voter Die, or anything, with these have a nice shirt or a sticker and you're taking it, and just being there in solidarity.

So we did it during L.A.B.C Awards Weekend last weekend. We had a nice turnout of folks that came. I was in L.A. for the Hollywood Climate Summit. I spoke on the panel with Jane Fonda. So there was a lot of people from Hollywood that came and said, oh my God, that's what's happening in Georgia. We have to be, we cannot sign for on the referendum, but we, we stand with you all because what we are also educating people at is that if cop city is built, they already have in contracts with police nationally to come here. This will be the largest police training facility in the United States. I went to Universal Studios Hollywood. Universal Studios rollercoaster is just huge, just nice.

It's 400 acres. That's 50 acres less will be cop city. And I'm like, that's an amusement park of nothing but real gunfire, real bombs, real real everything. It's not going to be fake. It's not amusement park in that way. But this is their call of duty in real life. And it's in the middle of a residential neighborhood. They're not here to protect and serve.

They're here to shoot to kill. And so police from all across this nation will be coming here to Georgia for this militarized police training. And that's a problem for me. And the turnout in California showed that that's a problem for them too. So we had a lot of people that came for that and today we're doing the same thing

and we're having a community town hall discussion. Because I think there's a lot of people that don't understand why is cop city? Because the mayor, I want to meet the mayor's publicist. Because the way that this whole thing has been spent on his side, that no, it would be great for the EMT and the firefighters. And they're pushing EMT firefighters more than the police part.

But the police part is a huge part. I think these type of conversations need to be talked about. And so that's what this community town hall is all about as well. For those that are kind of wavering, neutral, maybe don't know, maybe they know it a lot, you know? Because the number one thing that we've been seeing, I was on V 103 yesterday on the radio station and I also have been doing a couple of other media

and call ins and a lot of people don't understand. Like a lot of people don't understand like why is this a bad thing? You know, you can move it somewhere else, they say. But even if it's moved somewhere else, I'm still gonna fight against cop city, just because this hits home for me. Too many of my friends and family have been murdered

by the hands of radical, power hungry, gun-happy, trigger-happy police officers. And I feel that there is, and then also another thing too, I, there is answers, you know, in regards to, we don't need more police, we need resources. They shut down our hospital. We, they shut down the shelters. It's not like they don't know, right?

Like, we tell them, we need more jobs, not just any job, good quality jobs. We need pristine healthcare, not just affordable healthcare. And then most importantly, I just are unsheltered friends to see that they put bulldozers. This administration, this city continues to ignore. Ignore the people. We have the hugest, the biggest wealth gap in the nation. They, and they call it Wakanda, the blackest city. But this is how you treat us? Our people, our people need resources.

That's where this $67 million should be going. It should not be going towards a more police. We don't need more police because when you go to Cobb County, when you go over to Alpharetta, they don't have a lot of police. They don't have a lot of what would they mean a lot of police because they already got the resources. On top of the community town hall discussion, there were a few other things to do at the event that Yuna Shaha talked about. StopCop City Photo Campaign, so everyone, you come and take your photo and just showing that you stand in solidarity. And then most importantly, is to get some signatures as well. Throughout the referendum process, it's been interesting how many people, even in Atlanta, are just now learning about COP City. When did you first hear about cop city?

Honestly, earlier this year, and like a lot of the people that I am talking to now, I was also kind of confused about the issue. I wasn't really sure why, you know, they were so opposed. Until I started learning a little more about what actually was going to happen at this training facility. So the idea of building a mini city with the helicopter landing pad with a shooting range

or a firing range, military grade, in a community. So this is not on the outskirts. This is in a community and in a community of color. And you're bringing police from around the country and to learn military tactics, tactics that we use in foreign countries to protect citizens. We should not be thinking about our citizens, our residents, as people who need to be protected from themselves, if I'm making sense.

You know what I mean? So sort of like enemy combatants in your own. And you're all back yard, but you're training them up in a black community, so I can only imagine that some of that many cities going to spill over into the communities. Then you're bringing police officers from around the country here so they're taking that back. The specific community where the Atlanta Police Foundation is trying to build a cop city has already been traumatized by the violence of the

state for hundreds of years now. This whole area was violently stolen from Muscogee Creek. Then it became a slave plantation, and then part of it was sold to the city of Atlanta, and then became a prison farm. Since then, the land has been home to two landfills and three detention facilities. This is the history of just this neighborhood for the last few hundred years.

Now the carceral violence inflicted on this land, it's attempting to be exported as police will soon come from around the country and even the world to train at cop city. No one wants it in their community, but you're going to continue to burden this particular community with the same thing over and over and over again, the people of that community for generations have experienced all kinds of harm at the hands of the people that they supposedly are electing to represent and protect them

from these types of things, and they're actually the ones doing it to them. You were elected by people to represent them, and they've told you for two years we don't want this, and you are ignoring their voice. On the day of the Hip Hop Caucus panel, an air quality alert was issued due to incoming smoke from wildfires up north. In Atlanta, the AQI reached 150.

The ocean, these fish, these birds, they're screaming at us right now. What we are doing to mother earth right now is we are from from cutting down the trees, fossil fuels, everything. This is, this is, and especially this being the lungs of Atlanta. Today, I'm wearing my mask because all my weather advisory it said the air quality is not good today for sensitive people. And that is just with the trees. And they keep on cutting down these trees. I moved here because of the trees. I'm from Arizona, so I needed trees. That was not them, but desert.

But I moved here because of these trees, because I love the life force that trees give us even when we see a tree. The earth is talking back to us, saying, stop doing what you're doing. The dolphins, the orcas, the wells, they all migrate. They're like, the ocean is hot right now. So they are yelling at us and we're not listening.

And and as a native in my native way, our elders, our chiefs have said that we planned for seven generations from now. I am a mother of two sons and what this administration is doing and what these corporations are doing, they're not looking at seven generations from now. They're not looking at how this is going to affect us on the long run. And I love the fact of everyone that is standing firm and saying, stop cop city because we see division. We know what this Uchi Marca, this mother earth is going to look like, seven generations

from now. And we're fighting to our death because of the fact that we want to make sure that our children's children's children could still live here and be in a peaceful safe place in environment to live. Since being elected as the progressive candidate in 2021, there's been an ever-growing animosity towards Mayor Dickens from all of his unfulfilled promises. When talking with Yonashaha, she expressed that she felt disappointed that herself and this big block of people helped Andre get elected, and now Mayor Dickens is fully committed to the Copsity project and is even having conversations

with other black leaders in the city to bring them on board and prevent them from opposing cop city. The mayor is in his position because of the blood, sweat, and tears. The arrest and beat ups that we got during Freedom Summer 2020. He used the social justice, the civil rights, organizations, and activists and voices to get him in the position that he used them and say, y'all help me. I'm gonna be there for you all and it's all a slap in the face. So I don't like hypocrisy and I see hypocrites all through

out this and on this administration side, from the governor all the way down. Even when we try to help our unsheltered friends, in December, when it was so cold out here, I went on social media, I raised $5,000 in two hours. I went and me and my friends went and got them all tense, tense, sleeping bags, everything. The mayor called my comrade,

mayor Andre called my comrade, and was all like, why are you saying that they don't have no heating stations? And I set up a heating station, not everyone wants to go there. Because so is there, where is your mental health services? What is the transitioning team that you should have on the ground to help transition them?

Don't just open up a temporary heating shelter. Where's the transition team to go and talk to the people and say, hey, let me walk you in to go get heated. There was none of that. You're just expecting people to just go in there. Or they knew where it was at. So we went to the cab. We went to the cab and we also went down to Atlanta.

We gave them tents. The police went down there. The Atlanta PD went down there and put holes all in their tents. They used a knife and put and sliced their tents open. So they couldn't even stay in it. While it was still below freezing. Yes, while it was still below freezing.

This is all under the administration of Mayor Andre. So no, we can't trust them. Do you feel betrayed by Andre? Yes, because I voted for him. I voted for him. I voted for him because I think I voted for him like every other person voted for, vote for someone is that their care is matted.

They talk an amazing game and on top of it, my friends that were close with him thought for him. My friends in the movement, activists, people that I look up to as mentorship. They said, man, Andre, he's gonna, he's going to fund a lot of the things that we're doing. You know, Jaha spoke about how mayor Dickens worked to build mutually beneficial relationships between the city and non-governmental, quote, unquote, progressive organizations. So well, some NGOs have received money from the city, now many of these big quote unquote civil rights orgs are scared of jeopardizing potential funding and are currently refusing to speak out against cops.

Yeah, when I talk to the same people that have spoken to Andre, are the same people I'm like, why aren't you involved, you know? And they're just like, I think it's gonna be built and at least I'm at the table. A lot of them think that way. They was like, I was there at the beginning fighting, I had to sit down with the mayor, I believe this is gonna be built. So since this is gonna be built,

let me figure out at least I'm at the table in the community and there's community engagement. At least there's some type of bridging happening. That's their angle. Anyone that said Black Lives Matter was on the front line with us in 2020 that was horrified by the videos that they saw. And we are at prime time.

This is the epicenter of police terrorism being built. This is it. This is this is this is it. This is not each individual. We're trying to prevent more families because if they build this, it's going to be a lot more families. That's going to be crying and saying they killed my baby. But so without the epicenter of a cop city and you're a silent? You're silent? But you was there for these families? You was there posting Black Lives Matter? You was there saying stop police terrorism? But they're building a, they're building terrorists headquarters. And you don't have nothing to say. You're a hypocrite. You're a hypocrite.

Period point blank. Brandy also talked about the hypocrisy of pushing forward CUP City after the George Floyd uprising in 2020. You know, three years ago, just in May, all these companies were sending out these emails saying that Black Lives Matter after George Floyd, they were pouring money into the community

to show their support for Black Lives, but some of those same communities, Home Depot, Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, Waffle House. You guys are, I'm sure, sent those emails out, and now you're putting money into something that does not respect Black Lives. So I think there's just this huge contradiction in who these companies say they are, how they're showing up. Parked of the growing propaganda battle over Cubsidie

is an attempt to frame this state of the arched militarized police training facility as a quote unquote public safety training center embodying the call for police reform that liberals protested for in 2020. Not only does this erase the abolitionist core of the 2020 uprising, but it also obfuscates the fact that Cobb City is indeed a direct response to 2020, not in terms of police reform, but in the aftermath of the neoliberal police state being under genuine threat, corporate America and police have made this pact to maintain each other's legitimacy, as one cannot survive without the other.

Cop City is to ensure that what happened in 2020 will never happen again. After the clear cutting of around 80 acres in the Wallani forest, there's been more of a focus on the stop cop city wing of the movement than defend the forest. Sure, there are still 300 acres to defend and 80 acres to restore, but as construction is getting more imminent, the specific cop city focus has taken center stage in messaging. When it was initially talked about, it was all about the environment. They're tearing down the forest. And as marginalized poor people, if I am hearing that, I'm not seeing it as important. I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to pay my rent, how I'm going to feed my kids, how I'm going to pay my bills, how I'm getting to and from work. And so those things, I think, made it difficult to break into the household of people who really need to be paying attention.

And I would dare to say even the people in the community, I watched some of the testimony from the City Council meeting several weeks ago and the state representative that spoke first talked about how the church right next door to the facility didn't even know what was happening next door to them. So for the city of Atlanta to say, oh, we've done outreach people in the community. No, that's not true, right? But part of that is the way that the narrative has started. And I think they

were like, okay, then they got none to do with me. And then also the fact that the faces that they saw on TV, they're thinking this is a white lead, white organist, white problems, not our problem. So they haven't engaged. So I think those are all things that we have to consider and let people know this is a diverse problem. It impacts everybody. It's going to impact people of color and poor and marginalized communities more than anybody else just because of the nature of how policing is done in America. And so in the problems that we still have with that. So our program is from Red Dogs to Cops City,

the dirty South's history of over-policing Atlanta. So helping them understand how this is just a new iteration of what's been happening. So the red dog unit was at some color the gang within Atlanta PD for many years. It was disbanded in 2011, but they were terrorizing low-pore communities of color. And so, cop city, in the way that they're thinking

about training, these officers would be just a new iteration of that. So, helping them understand that just because we have come far with the civil rights, with our civil rights, and I'm not even talking specifically about the 60s movement, but civil rights for people of color women, LGBTQIA plus communities, just because we've come far doesn't mean it can't go back. Atlanta's red dogs inspired the scorpion unit in Memphis that killed Tyree Nichols this

past January. And the current iteration of the Red Dogs in Atlanta is the Apex unit, who have been very active in suppressing stop-cop city protests. I'm going to play three brief clips from the panel discussion. The first is from Mariah Parker, a local activist and former Georgia County Commissioner. This is a war of the uprising of 2020. Okay. This is in the aftermath of the largest uprising in North America, the Lennon Police Foundation, who is the main driver and the big funder, and actually the owner of Rossini, I keep forgetting

the fact that this is not actually the L way up, let's see. The little police foundation trying to reassert their control over black communities. At a time when people are starting to understand that communities are made safe by affordable housing and health care and childcare and education. And where they're supremacy in the public safety apparatus has been challenged. Their dominance has been challenged. And so in response to that uprising, they seized hold of a narrative

that more police training, more diversity in our officers would be the magic key to heal all the wounds in our communities and to actually deliver a style of policing that serves to people. And so with that, they were able to make arguments that top city would be the answer to, right, allegedly, rising crime rates, heal these divides, et cetera, et cetera. And in the day, they, it's a form of counter insurgency. The people rose up until this is the police rising up in response to reassert their dominance. Next is KJ Henson, an Atlanta local and organizer with Black Men Build and Black Male Initiative

Georgia. We're clear that the police are not our protectors. We suffer at the hands of the system on an daily basis, right? The system was built on our backs literally. So we see that we've been discarded, we've been abused by the system and that's the point. It's not that we're disengaged because we don't care, we're disengaged because we do care. Right? Every election cycle, it's black voters to the rescue. We're the folks that are most impacted by the decisions of the same elected officials that beg us to put them in position.

We suffer because these people come to us and beg for votes, for tanters, for money, and they turn around and they sell us out the first things they give. So it's, it's, we're disengaged of a matter of, I can't get what I mean from these people that say that they're for me, right? The very means of the people are at risk. Copsity threatens are very right to protest, right? Copsity threatens the right for us to stand in the street and use our voice as a means of building collective power as a vehicle for making societal change.

You will come into mess to tear it. You get jailed without bed, without bath, you won't have a court day. I've been there myself. Not for just a terrorist, but just with a courted. So we're seeing the rise of fascism in a very real way. Like in the realist of ways. Cop City, like you said, is around the zero

for what become a very popular trend, not just in America, but across the world. So it's on us to make sure that we do everything that's in our power to make sure that this thing is stopped. Top City is giving police the training and ability to have urban warfare and suppression tactics at their will to be used against the people. Urban war parents suppression, not like oppression, not like things, not like what we see in other countries,

in other cities with organized resistance everywhere. Lastly, we have Reverend Keanu Jones, member of the Faith Coalition to Stop Cop City, whom we've heard from on this show before. I want every black headlamps to think about what you don't have. If you don't have affordable housing, it's because they put the money in a cop's seat. show before. Initiatives in your community says they give in the mind if I say if you fell into that POPPLE on POSILIAN, it's because they give in the money to POPPSE. If you can't walk out of your door and briefly air it is because they rather get into POPPSE. So Andre Dickens does not care about black people.

I'm a dual kind of a waste right now. But I'm saying I'm a doin' kinda gay waste right man. But I'm sayin' I'm a ridiculous, don't appear. I'm a black people and I'm tradicciggin' ain't no different than nobody else. And some of those other counsel people out there who have no so-called legacy names ain't noin' nothin' for black people. So once again, what is I'm tradicciggin'

doin' for you? If he is willing to take police and remincture there, they got slot takes to roll around him. They walk around in the ARs in your neighborhood. Your children walking at the house, to hearing gunshots constantly. What do Andre think it's care about you? Does his children hear that?

Yeah. OK. Don't lie. Don't lie. Don't lie. Don't lie. It is important to mention the venue that this was, that this pound took place in because this is like a very much like a, it feels like a black excellence type of like space.

It is. That is the space that it is, it is a private club. It holds like an amount of like respect there. Cultural significance. And on this panel at the gathering spot, the panelists were talking about how why is the mayor who many of these people helped get elected because he had promises about helping out the community giving millions of dollars to affordable housing. Why is he using now like 60, 70 million dollars that could go to affordable housing that

could go towards supporting black people in the Atlanta. This is funneling all of that money into the police and into not even like the police department, a private police foundation like funding funding the APF's project not a city project. I think it was Kiana who said that Andredickins does not care about black people. Yeah. And having that be said at the gathering spot, I think actually is very important, and it's worth talking about. As the referendum was progressing and people from across all sides of the movement were working in a conjunction,

just spread awareness of Cobb City and engage in action, the mayor was making attempts to divide the movement. Criminals are hiding in the middle of peaceful protests, and sometimes they are doing their own separate acts of violence. Some of them are career arsonists and vandals from across the nation. Local activists have been alerted to this numerous times. These are the actions of blatantly outrageous, dangerous, and violent criminals. How are arsonists, vandals, violent actors

able to be alongside peaceful protesters? You have individuals that will burn up construction equipment, either a fire to police vehicles, and then have a bouncy house party the next day with you know peaceful protesters at a park. So they will go to a park by day and then by night they're burning up police equipment or setting fires or trying to destroy construction equipment. So these individuals are trying to use the guise of peaceful protests

that maybe some local Atlantis may actually be engaged in a desired conversation about their views on public safety. But these individuals have different views than those folks. These individuals are anarchists. They want to destroy it. So these individuals are alongside these arsonists, these criminals are alongside these arsonists, these criminals are alongside peaceful protesters and sometimes the peaceful protesters are aware of it and sometimes they are not. We have

made it clear to local activists that we know and individuals that tend to be peaceful. We're letting them know that we are aware that there are individuals that are in our city that have committed crimes across the nation and that they are on your Social media or in your network saying they're coming to your event to do the same Mayor Dickens went further and essentially threatened that if you are a so-called activist and you don't snitch Then the APD will treat you the same as a violent criminal So when we give you that heads up as a local organizer, you should take that heads up and also see something, say something as we're asking any other citizens to do.

When peaceful protestors, when organizers are not utilizing their best judgment, then bad things can happen with them being alongside them. And it makes it real tough for APD to know who was the one with the dirty hands, so to speak. And so that's what the message that we want to get out to the public is that these individuals mean harm and you don't want to be around them or associated with them. When you are, it makes it difficult to tell who's who. The city wants the various wings of the fight to stop Cobb City to turn on each other, to

resent each other, to so distrust and undermine any collective power. That's why the referendum's statement of solidarity explicitly rejecting respectability politics and the framing of violent and nonviolent resistance was so important. An online communique claiming responsibility for torching police motorcycles on the last day of the week of action addressed this dynamic. Quote, we took action after non-combative demonstrations at Cadence Bank in Home Depot. The police attacked those demonstrations with no cause as they do wherever and however the movement gathers. There can be no separation of time and space for tactics when police have turned society into a war zone. Despite this, we dispersed our activity as much as possible across their area of control.

We encourage those who are pursuing a strategy of referendum to continue supporting all methods to stop cop city." If you defy the state's unilateral authority in any way, you will be seen as a valid target. As demonstrated throughout the history of this movement, including during this last week of action, police will treat you like a violent criminal, whether you're holding a sign in a parking lot, bailing activists out of jail, or smashing a cop car. On July 6th, a group of activists in unincorporated Decap County, near the potential site of Cops City, filed a lawsuit against the City of Atlanta and the state of Georgia claiming

the requirement that signature gatherers must themselves be Atlanta residents, violated their first amendment right to free speech and petition the government. Due to the potential constitutional violation, the lawsuit also requested the court reset the 60-day clock for gathering signatures while still counting the signatures that were already gathered. In mid-July, the city of Atlanta filed a reply in federal court, arguing that the cop city referendum was wholly invalid since it seeks to revoke a land lease that has already been signed.

The filing reads in part to quote, Repile of a year's old ordinance cannot retroactively revoke authorization to do something that has already been done. But if the referendum could claim to result in a revocation or cancellation of the lease, it would still be invalid because it would amount to an impermissible impairment of that contract." The city also argued that, if the court does deem the Atlanta residency requirement for gathering signatures unconstitutional,

then the entire referendum should be deemed unlawful. A rebuttal by the plaintiffs said that the city did not provide factual or legal evidence for its claims and misread the cited precedence. According to the plaintiffs, the land lease contract is ongoing, not an irreversible, quote-unquote, one-time event. And since the city authorized and issued the petition form, they skipped their chance to argue that the referendum is somehow invalid by already approving the language of the petition and letting the referendum process begin.

Near the end of July, U.S. District Court Judge Mark Cohen ruled in favor of the cop city referendum, allowing non-Atlanta residents to collect signatures and reset the 60-day clock to collect the roughly 60,000 signatures needed to put the land lease on the ballot. In his ruling, Judge Mark Cohen said, quote, requiring signature gatherers to be residents of the city imposes a severe burden on core political speech and does little to protect the city's interest in self-governance, unquote.

Mary Hux, the tactical lead of the referendum coalition, reacted to the ruling saying, quote, we are thrilled by Judge Cohen's ruling and the expansion of democracy to include our to cabinet neighbors and level the playing field for our coalition. Unquote. The city quickly filed for an appeal, which was subsequently denied on August 14th, with

the judge stating, quote, the city's real concern may be that now that non-residents have the ability to gather signatures on the petition for the entire time that they would have implemented to do so had their initial request been granted. There is an increased possibility that a sufficient number of held signatures could be obtained. Unquote. As liberals cheered on the Fulton County District Attorney in Atlanta for inditing Trump and co-conspirators for election tampering under Rico charges, the same exact sort of charges that this office

has used against young black rappers and have been wielded against the StopCop City movement, the city of Atlanta's own election interference by repressing their ferndom has been largely ignored. Fulton County Court set Trump's bond for $200,000 for attempting to overthrow a federal election. The same court set bond at $355,000 each for multiple protesters arrested for being merely present at a protest after Georgia State Patrol killed forced defender Tortugita in January of this year. During all of the glowing press for District Attorney Fanny Willis and the

City of Atlanta, it was revealed that on August 11, the Atlanta Police Department killed a 62-year-old unarmed black man named Johnny Holman while responding to a minor traffic accident. Both Holman and the unnamed second driver called 911 after the accident. Holman told 911 operators, quote, somebody ran into my truck, unquote. After waiting for over an hour for police to arrive, 23-year-old officer Kieran Kimbrough responded to the scene. Kimbrough joined APD in March of 2021,

and currently has an open complaint for, quote, sexual misconduct non-criminal, unquote. Johnny Holman, who served as a deacon in his church, called his kids to listen to how the officer was escalating the situation. And then, an unknown witness helped this APD officer wrestle 62-year-old Johnny Holman to the ground and put him in handcuffs as the officer used his

taser. To quote the Atlantic Community Pres collective, quote, the children listened for 17 minutes as they drove to the scene of the accident, hearing their father call for help after officer Kimbrough tased him. When they arrived on scene, they found officers giving chest compressions to their father, unquote. Johnny Holman was then pronounced dead at Grady Hospital. A week after APD killed Holman, another person incarcerated at Fulton County Jail died while being held on $5,000 bond after being denied signature bond for shoplifting less than $500 of goods.

The City of Atlanta's own alleged voter suppression has continued. Initially, the Cop City Vote referendum hoped to not have to use the extra day is granted by the judge and submit the collected signatures on August 21st, with the intention of getting them verified in time to put the Cop city vote on the upcoming November ballot. Come Monday, August 21st, the referendum put out a statement that despite collecting over 100,000 signatures that they are delaying submitting the petition due to concerns that the city was going to employ voter suppression tactics during the validation process.

The statement reads in part to quote, in recent days, we began to hear from reporters and sources inside City Hall that the city of Atlanta is planning to argue for a higher than previously reported legal minimum signature count for ballot access. More concerning were reports that they also plan to utilize signature match in their verification process. And Archaic can widely abandoned tool of voter suppression that has been widely condemned across the political spectrum, including by the Republican control to Georgia State legislator. Unquote.

Signature matching is a subjective form of a vote validation, which uses election workers to visually match signatures on a ballot, or in this case a petition, to a previous signature on their driver's license or voter registration card. Hours after the referendum's statement, the city of Atlanta officially announced their intention to use signature matching for the COP city vote referendum.

Back in 2018, a federal judge in Georgia ruled that signature matching did not serve any legitimate interest and disenfranchised black and brown voters disproportionately. For years, the ACLU has advocated against and won multiple court cases against discriminatory signature matching processes. Fair fight action, a Georgia-based voting rights organization founded by Stacey Abrams responded to the news Atlanta would be using signature matching with a statement saying, quote, signature matching is a tool of voter suppression that litigated extensively in Georgia and

removed for the mail-in ballot process because of its harm to voters resulting in mass disenfranchisement. Using the discredited process of signature matching is unacceptable and risks unfairly rejecting thousands of valid petitions. Signature verification is notoriously subjective, disproportionately impacts voters of color, and is biased against disabled and elderly voters. There is extensive precedent in Georgia showing the harms of this process. It must be relegated to the past. Fairfights calls on the city of Atlanta to rescind their intent to use this process and to enact steps that fairly evaluate these petitions." Facing the city of Atlanta's quote, open and ongoing hostility to the CAHPS City vote

referendum, the coalition has decided to use the time extension granted by federal judge Mark Cohen to continue collecting signatures to, quote, leave no doubt as to the will of Atlanta voters, unquote. They now plan to submit petition signatures on September 23. The City Council will then have 50 days to validate the signatures, which means that, if successful and assuming the city doesn't further interfere, the referendum would get put on the ballot during the March primary election in 2024. The vote being pushed into March adds a few complications.

Turnout may skew more Republican as it's unlikely there'll be a Democratic presidential primary, and the vote being seven months away disrupts the momentum that the campaign has been gaining over the past couple of months. People who sign the petition back in June would have to wait almost a whole year to vote on the ballot. The few extra months does give more time to educate the public about Copsidie during a lead-up to the election, but that goes both ways, which means that after two years of this movement mostly taking form as a ground war over territory, now for the time being, much of the fight to stop Copsidie will change into a PR war in the public sphere.

This shift from a physical offense to a metaphysical offense was something that I already felt coming back during the week of action. In terms of like cameras and spectacle, the other, the big feeling I had on set, on the set of the kickoff rally was like, this just feels like society of the spectacle. Like there's such a performance. It was very performative, but it was like almost like, with all of the cameras looking at everything all the time, it was like, are people trying to make a facsimile of this movement for the cameras?

Like is that, that has become almost more important or like it felt that way? This is a conversation that people have. Like, is it worth creating moments where we expect the police to lash out violently? Like, is that effective as a propaganda tactic? Yeah. And that, I- I- Comes with losing while looking good.

It does, yeah. That is like, that is losing while looking good, but also, I don't think that's nearly as effective as people think it is. I think after 2020, I think people are kind of desensitized to a lot of police violence at protests. I, the visual, the visuals of police hurting protesters, I don't think is nearly as impactful as it was even three years ago.

Yeah. So I think people are also realizing that and realizing that, hey, the sacrifice inherent in setting up actions where you know that you're probably going to get fucked up by police, that's not worth it. That one, it treats people as like tools, it treats people as disposable, which is, you know, that's not great. If you want to build a long lasting movement, and it's not even very effective. As the public relations battle over the fate of Cops City intensifies in the lead-up to the vote,

with the City of Atlanta undoubtedly ready to run a full election propaganda campaign, strategies of resistance cannot overlook the fiscal construction of the facility. Pre-construction has been active and ongoing for a few months now, mostly in the form of tree clearing and land grading. Just a few days ago, the Atlanta Police Foundation updated their construction timeline, saying that they had just began installing a stone base for the main roadway, that irrigation and sight lighting is now underway, and full-on construction is set to, quote, begin in the next week or so, unquote. That now may be out of date, but based on the progress being made on the site, it's clear that construction is now imminent. And with the threat of the

referendum, the APF will try to get as much built as quickly as possible to help with the pro-cop city side of election messaging. One of the original goals of the referendum was to try to place an injunction on further construction until the ballot vote, but it's unknown if or when that would happen. In the meantime, activists may take a cue from Earth first, and instead of trying to occupy the site, instead they might find creative ways to make the construction site hard to work on. Also, with the increased element of spectacle placing a lot of extra eyes on pre-announced public demonstrations, more secretive actions may start becoming more common.

There's other actions that can happen more covertly, like if you're doing sabotage, where you don't need to invite a camera crew to film you do crimes. Why is move not the fight against? Why is move when you do crimes? But no, also like as a rule. Like why, and this other thing is like so many of these events during these weeks of action are pre-planned, that not only gives media heads up on like we're gonna film this and this is also gonna

that's gonna change the actions that happen while this is happening because everyone knows they're being watched and also like it's police heads up to to to to shut down the past your intreachment career. Yeah so that I think that comes with the week of action format because if people coming in from out of town they they don't know where to go if they're not already tied in with the movement they don't't know what exactly to do. So that's another thing that I think could change during future actions. That may not be part of the week of action

is more covert, less pre-planned, pre-announced actions that are maybe a little bit more mischievous. In their recent statement on voter suppression, the referendum also announced, quote, the coalition will consider using upcoming opportunities for nonviolent direct actions to direct the people's frustration with the city council's obstruction of the democratic process. Unquote. Kamau Franklin of Community Movement Builders added, quote, if the city needs to see a demonstration

of the people's commitment to the issue, we're happy to provide one. Unquote. of the people's commitment to the issue, we're happy to provide one." Police intentionally denying anarchist operating space by occupying the Wollani themselves may shift the more liberal side of the movement to now focus on rallies and events around the construction site, which could also inadvertently draw eyeballs away and open up other territory across the city that might be more vulnerable to attack by small groups. To quote the direct action-communicate claiming responsibility for torching the police motorcade

on July 1st, quote, while signatures are collected, the police are still killing. We cannot wait. If the referendum fails, actions like ours and boulder will be the only means available." With construction imminent, subcontractor tensions increasing, and the city of Atlanta gambling with voter suppression, right now the movement really cannot afford to alienate the green anarchists that pioneered the early legitimacy of this movement with bold direct action. The Atlanta Police Foundation is trying to snatch a victory from the jaws of defeat. What happens in the next few months may push Atlanta to a dangerous tipping point.

No matter the end point of this particular struggle, victory or defeat cannot be imagined as the end. The fight against Copsity is one large battle in an ongoing war, a war of police militarization, racism, environmental justice, and against the incestuous neoliberal police state in its Leviathan-like formation. Based on what happens here in Atlanta, similar police project proposals will be recalibrated. As the south goes, so goes the nation. Capitalist realism deposits that history is over, that it's a literal thing of the past. But it turns out you're living through it right now.

So what will you do to create it? You can read more about the fight to stop copsity City at ATLPressCollective.com and donate to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund at ATL Solidarity.org. See you on the other side. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here as a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website CoolZoneMedia.com or check us

out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here, updated monthly at CoolZoneMedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. 911, what's your emergency? It's a nightmare we could never have imagined. And a killer? We were still on the loops.

In the 1980s, we were in high school losing friends, teachers, and community members. We weren't safe anywhere. Would we be next? It was getting harder and harder to live in Mompine. Listen to the murder years on the iHe Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. The True Crime Podcast sacred scandal returns for a second season to investigate alleged sexual

abuse at Mexico's La Luz del Mundo Mega Church. Journalist Robert Garza explores survivor stories of pure evil experiences at the hands of a self-proclaimed apostle who is now behind bars. I remember as a little girl being groomed to be his concubine, that's how I was raised. It is not wrong if you take your clothes off for the apostle. Listen to Sacred Scandal on the IHR radio compiled thousands of inspiring and thought-provoking quotes. And now, I'm passing that knowledge onto you and my new daily podcast. ICT's Daily Game. In less than five minutes, I'll break down why these words matter and reveal personal stories that show them in action in my life.

Listen to ICT's Daily Game every weekday on the I.Hard Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast and start your morning with me.