Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Protest

Episode Date: May 16, 2017

Direct action saved the gardens in your host’s neighborhood, activist and author L.A.  Kauffman explains why it is once again time for more good old fashioned American Radicalism. Plus ToE’s Andrew Callaway maga-ups with the Alt-right on Mayday.  Find L.A. Kauffman’s Direct Action book here

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called Protest. We dressed up in business garb, so we looked like developers who were coming to bid on properties at the auction. And we had prepared these special envelopes. They just looked like padded mailing envelopes. But we had these little special mesh screens to allow ventilation. And each of us had 1,000 crickets in them. The auction was held in the auditorium at one police plaza and in the police headquarters. And we had gone down, a couple of us first,

to check and see if the exoskeleton showed up on the x-ray machine. We went down and we went through the security, and it was fine. It didn't show up on the x-ray machine. We went down and we went through the security and it was fine, you know, it didn't show up on the x-ray. But then on the train coming back, the crickets got out and they started crawling up my friend's arm while he was in the subway. Yeah, the crickets.

That's Leslie Kaufman, talking about what might be the most infamous protest action she took part in in the late 90s as a member of the Lower East Side Collective. New York City was auctioning off a community center in the Lower East Side called Charis. On their own, residents had painted, plastered, and deratted the decommissioned public school. But just as they started the official process of raising funds to purchase the site from the city, then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani decided it would go to developers, thus the auction. So Leslie and a few other members of the Lower East Side Collective showed up with crickets. And then at a pre-announced

signal, we dumped the bugs. And they were a little sleepy because it was hot. So they didn't leap around quite as much as we had hoped. But it was pretty hoppity. I don't know. I got out quickly. You know, we were, of course, all worried. And we like went home and we got, you know, we like got all evidence of the bugs and got rid of it. but no, they never came, and I have to assume the statute of limitations has expired. A few weeks ago, in search of hope, optimism, inspiration, I met up with Leslie on the Lower East Side to revisit some of her protest actions. I almost never come here. It's too sad. The loss of Charis was a really hard blow.

It was a really sad loss. It was really a tipping point in terms of this neighborhood. Giuliani not only sold off community assets like Charis, he was also set on auctioning off all of the Lower East Side's community gardens. Giuliani also has a special animus towards community gardens. And the reasons he hates them are exactly the reason I was attracted to them, which is that they're community controlled spaces. They're not controlled by the parks department.

They're controlled by the gardeners. They're, you know, these like little pockets of community-controlled public space, publicly owned open space in the middle of the city, which I think is really precious and special and very different in, you know, the heated real estate economy. Many of these community gardens had risen from the ashes of buildings that had gone up in flames in the 1970s, back when landlords torched their buildings for insurance money. By the 90s, though, real estate developers had transformed the Lower East Side into something they called the East Village. The gardens were once again hot properties,

and in an attempt to save them from developers, the Lower East Side Collective organized, protested, and disrupted. The first auction, there were like four gardens that were on the auction lot. So we went into the auction, and a number of us disrupted it by falsely bidding on properties, which of course, you know, in later years, this guy, Tim Christopher did some serious jail time for, but all that happened to us was we got kicked out. So I bid up one lot, you know, there was like, it was kind of great because, you know, there's all these real estate people in the room. And before they realized what we were doing, they got all excited because they thought like, oh, you know, the economy is so

hot, like, oh, these properties are really valuable. I bid up some lot for like a million dollars and you have to put down cash. So they come around with the clipboard that I was supposed to fill out and I like dig in my pocket and I pull out a quarter and I pull out a dime and a couple of pennies and a MetroCard. And when I put the MetroCard on, the woman in the show goes, disqualified and flings woman in the show goes, disqualified! And flings everything in the air. One of the gardens that got sold in this auction was the Chico

Mendez Mural Garden on 11th Street. The affordable housing that replaced it has not aged well. All of these things were these kind of bogus affordable housing schemes. After they lost the Chico Mendez garden, the Lower East Side Collective launched another protest, a retaliatory fax campaign aimed at developers and the city agency facilitating garden sales. This direct action got Leslie arrested, but it also landed her some amazing coverage, including a great piece in the New York Times. If you want to succeed at protesting, she told me, you have to be good at PR. All great protest movements understand this. For me personally, in a sense, I was trying out some of the things that I'd learned from closely studying activist movements,

particularly in the early 90s, ACT UP and the many movements that were influenced by it, Earth First as well. So for me, that was a very conscious attempt to say, you know, how do you pull these tactics into a completely different kind of campaign. Sadly, many of the Lower East Side Collective's battles ended in defeat. We visited another site of a former garden, the Esperanza on 7th Street. I got the call when the bulldozers were coming. Oh, you were here, so you remember coming. No, I was arrested. Oh, so you were here. I didn't camp out here. You know, I have various things I've done to be able to survive

being around activist circles for decades, and one of them is I have a no sleeping out with hippies rule. It's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm sorry. So this is one of my keys to longevity in activist circles. This was a big sleepout party here. So this was a campout. I guess I arrived at like, it was pre-dawn or very, very early morning, as I recall.

And yeah, people were all throughout the garden. People were locked down to all kinds of things. There was one woman who was in a chair that was chained to the fence. And then there were a bunch of us who were there and who were arrested. And it was one of those heartbreaking situations where, you know, you're down in the tombs and you see a TV set and there's the footage of the bulldozers that had come after we left and had bulldozed the garden. There are times when you lose and it's just a loss.

But losing in the short term, you're actually laying the groundwork for winning something important and meaningful over the longer term. But the Esperanza was one of the last gardens Rudy Giuliani bulldozed. Here is how it ended. The city scheduled a mother-of-all auctions to unload all the gardens at once. The Lower East Side Collective was able to channel both community outrage over the gardens that had already been bulldozed and fear that protesters would respond with the mother-of-all direct actions. We had made-up leaflets calling on people to disrupt the auction in a week, which, of course, they were worried what was

what you know we disrupted the last two what were we going to do this time so we put it in these leaflets that were for handing out for the crowd but we were really trying to get in the hands of the police we really wanted them to know what we were telling people to do um which ranged from like showing up in really wild drag and being you know just distracting and obstructive um to taking ipecac syrup and vomiting in the auction which was pretty hardcore and a bunch of people were really going to do and so uh so the eve of the auction, the night before, they cut a deal with the Trust for Public Land and the New York Restoration Project, with Bette Midler and the Trust for Public Land, for those two entities to buy up all the gardens. The auction is canceled and we won.

Every one of those gardens is permanently preserved. But hold on. Let's go back to this loss thing. Sometimes a loss is actually just a loss. You see, the window in my kitchen, it overlooks what would have been the Esperanza Garden. I took Leslie inside and showed her my view now. There was something really violent when they knocked down this beautiful garden

and they made yet another set of overpriced condos. In fact, they're so overpriced that that's not even a bedroom, that's a kitchen. So these two girls' roommates, they've basically, in order to afford this rent, have turned the kitchen area into an extra bedroom. Oh, God. I just put this expensive pot rack up because the woman there just, like,

orders, like, a new outfit every day on Amazon. It's just like watching her standing nude in front of her window, trying on clothes. I really feel that loss, even though I wasn't here at that time. Perhaps to make me feel better, Leslie presented me with a few mementos. Ephemera from The Garden Struggle. Oh, wow. It says, making life miserable for landlords and developers since 1997, the Lower East Side Collective.

So we handed this out. We called for people to be part of a phone and fax jam. And then the back, shut it down. If the administration has not removed the gardens from the auction list by May 13th, we'll have to use any nonviolent means necessary to shut the auction down. Wow. So this was very effective. I mean, it's like you imagine the cops sitting around in their conference room being like, we've got to shut this down. I mean, that's the story we like to tell ourselves. But that's part of the mystery

of direct action. We'll never know. Had public pressure grown to such a point that they were getting ready to cut that deal anyway? Or was the threat that the auction was going to be an incredible shitshow enough to motivate them to cut the deal before the auction? I like to think the latter, but we'll never know. How do we know when protest works? This is one of the big questions for Leslie Kaufman. It's a question she asks again and again in her new book, Direct Action. And I am so thrilled I get to introduce her to you as an activist, someone who spent time on the front lines and in handcuffs. Because while her book is awesome, she totally cuts out her own personal story. None of this garden stuff is in the book, nor is the fact that she was one of the leaders of the largest demonstrations in world history,

the anti-war protest of 2003. I was very centrally involved in those protests. I was the mobilizing coordinator for the New York protests, including the February 15, 2003. So I was responsible for overseeing and coordinating the whole grassroots mobilizing effort. In her book, Leslie credits this protest with laying some essential groundwork. She draws connections to Black Lives Matter and the Dakota Pipeline protests. But at the same time, she's aware that it is impossible to call that march a success. It was the most extraordinary and depressing sense of whiplash to be part of something that was simultaneously so large.

I mean, February 15th, 2003 is still the single largest day of protest ever in world history. And so inconsequential in terms of its aims in deterring George Bush from going to war. I still sometimes wonder if the outpouring had been maybe smaller in numbers and stronger in character, would it have made a difference? The Trump regime has already inspired a number of giant marches, and more are scheduled for the near future. But after reading Leslie's book and spending some time with her, I'm hoping we'll soon see other forms of protest as well. The kind of protests that get results. Direct action.

Oftentimes, the way that campaigns are won are more through the persistence of a smaller group of people who are willing to take larger and larger risks over time, as part of a sustained and growing and escalating campaign of resistance. That's the kind of direct action campaign that often yields concrete results first visit to New York since the inauguration. His motorcade bypassed Manhattan. Here's what he missed. Eight more years! Eight more years! The president is Trump. Hillary, Neera, Ira, Neera, Ira, Ira can be the president of United States. You are loser. We are winner. President Trump. President Trump will come home.

That sound was recorded by Andrew Calloway. Andrew also went out to protest on May Day. Since the election, I've been going to a lot of protests. And it's been fun. But recently, it's harder for me to get excited about going out, doing the same chants, marching with the same people along a police-approved route, just to end up in a gated-off protest area. It feels so futile. I mean, Trump has already dropped the mother of all bombs.

Where could he go from there? Every time I see North Korea pop into the headlines, I think nuclear apocalypse is right around the corner. Trump is terrible about so many things that it's easy to forget about war. But he only needs to push one button, and all those other things become irrelevant. Because we're all dead. I found a Facebook event called Peace and Solidarity with Syria on May Day. Perhaps there was a way to use this march to get Trump's attention. All I really needed to do was show up with the right people. And by that I mean alt-right people.

Imagine this, an anti-Trump protest full of people in pussy hats marching side by side with Make America Great Again hats. I know it sounds crazy, but a lot of the alt-right has been getting pissed at him for all of his contradictions. And anti-Trump protests full of liberals are business as usual at this point. So imagine Trump sitting down to watch Fox News just to see that there has been a ceasefire in the social justice war and that his base has united with their worst enemies to turn against him. A sea of red and pink. That would get his attention. He would probably even tweet about it. I heard that Trump supporters were planning a May Day counter-protest in Union Square so I arrived early that afternoon. Right away I found a guy dressed up in military gear. You look ready for battle.

We've heard bad things about other riots. I have a friend who was at Berkeley, and he said it was really bad. I think he got hurt. He insisted that he wasn't here for a fight. We're not violent. I have no weapons on me. Just a first aid kit. The most dangerous thing he had on him was a big green flag,

which represented the fictional nation of Kekistan. Kekistan was invented by Pepe the Frog worshipping 4chan users back before they knew Trump was going to win, and that they wouldn't need a fictional nation. It got a lot of attention from people walking by, partially because it has four Ks on it. What's the extra K for? It's not a K-K-K flag.

No, why would it be? We're not fascists. I'm not a Nazi. We're not Nazis. I know Nazis. They hate me. I'm a degenerate. They don't like me.

So you're friends, you're Nazi adjacent? All right, look, we're willing to work with them, but we are not nationalist socialists. I could understand why people thought he was a Nazi. Oh, you know what? I almost forgot. My armband. I made a different mistake. When I asked for his name, she told me it was Emily. It's just like, I know I don't look like a girl right now.

And I don't sound like one either. It's like, who gives a shit? Did you say you were born a woman? I was born a man. And as a trap, I can personally talk about trans issues. As a trap? Well, it's like a glorified cross-dresser, but my name's legally a female name, and I've been on hormones for two years, so I can think about trans issues and talk about them and not be retarded about it.

I had to know how Emily, a transgendered woman, was able to work side by side with a Nazi. It's like he knows I'm a faggot and he's like, he'll be like, look, alright, so once we get rid of everyone else that we hate, then we'll gas the degenerates. I'm like, alright, thanks. I was literally like, just gas me after we win. Get the fuck out of here, go back to Europe.

Alright, we're probably going to head over to the McDonald's now. Everybody was at the McDonald's. Oh, I'm so excited. My dick is hard. There were Proud Boys. Proud of your fucking boy, you son of a bitch. There's only two genders, MAGA. Latinos for Trump. Latinos for Trump. Chinese for Trump.

I don't want to talk to fake news. No, no. If I talk to fake news, I become fake. And Jews for Trump. I'm Jewish, so if they hit me, it's a hate crime. MAGA up. MAGA up. MAGA up was their cue to put on the red hats,

go live on Facebook, and start their march into the park. I love it. Look at this. They all hate us. It was kind of amazing how quickly we were surrounded. You all get the fuck out of here. It felt like a crazy mosh pit.

Give me my flag back you fucking cunt! People kept trying to steal Emily's Kekistani flag. 1776 on Amazon, get your fucking house! These MAGA guys, they really know how to get a reaction out of people. These MAGA guys, they really know how to get a reaction out of people. These MAGA guys, they really know how to get a reaction out of people. These MAGA guys, they really know how to get a reaction out of people. These MAGA guys, they really know how to get a reaction out of people.

Go to hell you fucking Nazis! Go to hell you fucking Nazis! Go to hell, you fucking Nazis! If I could somehow shepherd them into the anti-war movement. I got the fucking hit one. I got one. Self-defense. Self-defense. It was going to be a challenge.

I think I love that. We went to fucking war over this fucking flag, man. Holy shit. Daddy Trump! Daddy Trump! Daddy Trump! The police came and broke it up, and the MAGA people were moved across the street and enclosed on a little pen,

like a sideshow attraction. Emily was telling me about her job at Walmart and how she looks and sounds completely different than she does now. We were really starting to bond. You're such a nice dude, though. sounds completely different than she does now. We were really starting to bond. You're such a nice dude, though. I really think, like, I didn't know there were, like,

good Sanders supporters that I could actually talk to. I know one, but he's kind of a cuck. Maybe she was my way into the whole group. But were they really anti-war? You think we should bomb North Korea? It's just a meme, dude. Like, I'm just fucking around. It's anti-war, except for the meme war. We won that shit.

Meme war aside, a lot of them were anti-American aggression. I don't want the wars. I don't want the suffering. Lots of them were more anti-war than some of the liberals who came by to argue. War takes care of a massive part of American industry. Yeah, but it makes it worse. And you need to sell your product. And it takes care of a lot of jobs is what it does. Some of them were so anti-war, they were jumping off the Trump train.

Yeah, I got off when he bombed Syria. For Emily and her friends, the Syrian missile strike was a deal breaker. Do not go to Syria. Obama made the biggest mistake you did, and he did that. He gave in to the neocons and the globalists and everything that we fought against. I bought like four of his hats. I'm like, I was the biggest fan. I wanted him to win so bad.

And then he betrayed us. If you guys are against war with Syria, I'm with you. Absolutely. We're about protecting national interests. We're also about nationalism, but we are strictly no violence. We want to pull out of every other country

and focus on our own people. America first. America first. So if right after this there was a hands-off Syria rally. Hands-off Syria rally, yeah. Would you join me? Absolutely. Fuck yeah.

Because there is one. They would probably like zuck me out of there too. Like look at me. I look like a Nazi. Kind of. I'm sorry. Unless everybody else was going to it, I don't know about that. I do want to unite with these commie pieces of shit and red pill the fuck out of them,

but they won't give me the opportunity to. I'm not holding Trump accountable until they hold Obama accountable. A lot of them were open to the idea in theory. Actually yeah, I would. I would. As long as I could wear my MAGA gear and the leftist one attacking, I would go. There's actually one tonight! Is that the one in Foley Square or something?

That's the one in, yeah, Hogle. I guess we'll be there. Maybe, maybe. We're going to grab a drink after this too, so... Yeah, we'll grab a little drink first. I ended up going to the Syria rally by myself. It was a small group, just three people on a street corner a few blocks away from a bigger protest. What group are you guys with? As of now, Syria Solidarity New York City. We're part of Syria Solidarity International.

I was glad that I didn't bring any of my new alt-right friends. Because for these protesters, the Syrian missile strike was the best thing that Trump has ever done. He had the fortitude, you know, to send the Tomahawks in. I think it was the right thing to do to tell Russia. Well, the people on the ground were glad he did it. They were overjoyed. Some guy named a falafel stand after Trump.

I mean, he was hero for a day. By now, Trump has to have figured out that the only time his haters love him is when he blows shit up. Perhaps our only hope is that he hates his haters so much he will do the opposite of whatever it is they want. Perhaps it's time to march for war. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker Theory of Everything. This installment is called Protest. This episode was produced by me, Benjamin Walker, and Andrew Calloway.

Thanks to Leslie Kaufman and to all the folks Andrew met on May Day. You can find more information, including a link to Leslie's book, at toe.prx.org.