It Could Happen Here - Abbot's Border Folly

Episode Date: April 20, 2022

We discuss Texas Governor Gregg Abbott's disruption of cross border trade and its implications for future leftist blockadesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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We did it. I love that. What show is this? This is It Could Happen Here, a show that is also currently in the middle of about 17,000 personnel disasters, but it's fine. Yeah, I am Christopher Wong, and with me is Garrison. Hello. Hi, good morning, or afternoon, or evening, depending on when you're listening. And also Sophie, hello. Hi, good morning or afternoon or evening, depending on when you're listening. And also Sophie. Hello.

Hi. So we are we're here to talk about something that is, I guess, technically over, but was extremely weird and did a lot of harm. And that is the very weird stuff that Texas General General. Jesus. Hopefully not. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who at this point was just like, The General of Texas, Greg Abbott. I mean, like, you're kind of not wrong, but I don't like that.

He wishes. He wishes he was the General of Texas. I mean, I feel like that's one of those things where it's like, that's when we know the coup started is when he just like converts himself the general takes over texas uh-huh so greg abbott is extremely mad and he's extremely mad because biden finally decided to end one of like the absolute worst trump era border policies which is called title 42 and it's so title 42 is like nominally an anti-pandemic measure it's like the the cdc that's so i don't know why it took me like five seconds to remember the name of the cdc

the central defense agency yeah yeah yeah that one yeah uh so it's normally supposed to be a thing where it's like okay you can you you cut off migrants from coming into the country because there's a risk of a pandemic now okay if if you have lived the last two years you know that the u.s just literally does not give a single shit about the pandemic at all like especially pretending yeah yeah this whole thing really has just been a justification to just boot out and just prevent every like asylum seeker and refugee and immigrant from getting into the country and you know and you can tell this because uh the the title 42 when it was originally invoked didn't cover people who

were like driving trucks across the border like it didn't cover economic activity of course not yeah so it's it's just a way for the u.s to like not have asylum seekers and biden let this go for like another fucking year while he was in office uh-huh and so you like like late last month he like he finally got rid of it and you know i this means that uh like immigrants and refugees now once again have their legal right under both american and international law to petition for asylum which again the u.s doesn't give a shit about because you know u.s doesn't care about laws unless they do bad things but this finally happens and greg abbott who is once again we must remind everyone that greg abbott is is running for election in november and it sure is

he's it's just literally running through the entire right wing like every single right wing scare we could possibly think of and And don't worry, Chris, don't worry, Chris Beto. We'll get them. I, I, I believe it.

I, I believe in Beto this time. It's going to lose by like 30 points. Landslide. You know, well, okay. So the thing that could stop him from this is Greg Abbott decides to do

like two PR stunts. And one of them is he's taking buses of, of immigrants and asylum seekers and just busing them to dc and i want to talk about this for a little like a second because like this is really shitty and that shouldn't be legal that shouldn't be allowed to basically traffic you're trafficking people across the country for a political stunt that's like that that shouldn't be allowed yeah and like i think like everyone's like oh this is like it is but like the thing with american political science is that real people get hurt constantly yeah and we're gonna come back to that theme more in a second as we talk about the second

stunt that he did which was so essentially what abbott did is there are an enormous number of trucks that cross the the the u.s mexican border into Texas like every day, right? I mean, there are individual bridges that are moving $60 to $70 billion of just produce like every day. And so that produce, when it comes into the U.S., it goes through a bunch of checks by the Border Patrol and stuff. And there's all these checks and this is this whole thing. by the border patrol and stuff and there's all these checks and this is this whole thing but uh abbott went on this incredibly bizarre rant about well i mean it's not bizarre i guess if you're right when we went on this rant about like the cartels and there's immigrants we need to stop them and so he very scary yeah yeah it's really weird okay okay so he's doing all this

weird fear-mongering and he's like okay we need to stop these people from getting across the border so we're gonna inspect all of these trucks which again like they're already being inspected by the feds like this is this is this is you know this is where like the horrible ice budget is going right so he he does this and he he calls in a bunch of just like the border patrol to just literally do all of the same checks again and this has an enormous economic impact um i'm gonna read a quote from the american statesman the delays have resulted in a 60 drop in commercial traffic at the border according to us customs and border protections the agency said the delays are a direct result of quote additional and unnecessary inspections being conducted at abbott's request i i do like

that the same people who were shooting moms in portland in 2020 are now inspecting produce at the texas yeah it's it's pretty well i mean i think i think there's an important thing to note here right it's like okay so why why are these the people who are like doing both these things the answer is that like the those organizations like the thing that they're designed to do is to protect the interest of american capital and you know so the interest of american capital are we need to move capital across the we need to move goods across the border and uh we need to just like absolutely obliterate like a bunch of teenagers who don't like us so that is pretty much their bit um i mean yeah i know

we've talked in the past about us like customs and border and border protections and the weird the weird like agencies and weird kind of almost militias that they operate and how they get deployed into certain areas if they're you know x x miles away from the border um it would be worth talking about more in depth in the future because i know robert's done some historical background on them for bastards um but i think yeah that is something i would i would be down to talk more about yeah i think they are a very bizarre agency yeah they're very weird they're also really not like in this story they're basically just sitting there being mad because it's taking longer to get that is a lot of what they do yeah and and you know because it's because again like these these actual these

inspections are being run by like state troopers okay okay and you know because because abbott has more direct control over state yeah yeah because yeah abbott has direct power for them and this means that like it's okay so you have your right? Your truck has a bunch of produce in it. You're moving it across the border. This usually takes about two hours of, you know, being, like, sitting there in a truck while everyone's cargo gets inspected and stuff. Which I will say, the truckers don't even get paid for that when they're waiting two hours. Yeah. And, you know, what would make that worse? Oh, yeah.

Now it takes between 10 and 30 hours. you know what would make that worse oh yeah now it takes between 10 and 30 hours because i intentionally on purpose was like okay we're just we're gonna put 6 000 like people total to do this whole thing and so you know hundreds of millions of dollars of produce like things like onions and tomatoes and avocados are just sitting in these trucks rotting in the texas heat yep i mean hopefully the trucks are refrigerated mean, hopefully the trucks are refrigerated, but still. Well, the trucks are refrigerated, but like the people in them. I'm sure the cabins are not. Yeah, I'm sure it gets mighty. Well, you know, I do have some family who were truckers and some of the cabins can be nice.

But still, that's sitting for 30 hours without getting paid because you only get paid when you are moving, which is not a great way to run our entire economy. Yeah, I'm going to read a quote. I'm going to read a section from the paragraph from the Texas Tribune. Felix, a 60-year-old Mexican trucker who was transporting tomatoes, onions, and avocados, waited about 13 hours in line at the bridge. He has to be identified only by his first name for fear of retribution and targeted inspections from CPB officials. Hearing of the delays at the border, he packed water and food for a few days. But other truckers didn't come as prepared and were sitting in standstill traffic without anything to eat or drink. Felix said he was told by a CPB official that the agency would be putting portable bathrooms along the bridge for the gridlocked truckers, but he never saw them.

the gridlock truckers, but he never saw them. Once Felix made it to the state trooper's inspection point around 9 p.m., he said they didn't even peer into his truck, which had been sealed since Mexican authorities inspected it about 600 miles away in the state of Sinaloa. There's no possibility of bringing illegal immigrants in the merchandise or in the cabin, he said, referencing one of Abbott's explanations for the inspections. I can't bring any illegal immigrants here for money because I know inspectors are going to discover them it's not a thing here i don't know what the politicians ideas are i don't know what they're talking about so that seems not good that seems yeah it's it's really bad and like again like this is this whole thing is nonsense like there's nothing i didn't even i didn't even think about having to you know use the bathroom for 30 hours yeah

and like the thing the thing with this is like this, the backups are eight miles long. So like, if you want to go to the bathroom, you have to walk for like miles, depending on where you are in this backup. And, you know,

this is having like these just enormous, horrifying, like this, like these enormous, horrifying knock on effects. Because, you know, it's not just the truckers who are being affected by this there's a bunch of workers whose job it is you know just to process these goods right take them out of trucks put them onto american

trucks to like sort through the vegetables and figure out like which ones are good and which ones are not and again like just enormous amounts of just produce that is like fresh and good to eat is just being intentionally destroyed because it's being forced to sit at the border for this long uh there's a bunch of these people whose job like who are contract workers whose job it is to like go through this stuff and they're all getting fired because there's no work for them to do um there's all of these people who like their their jobs or they run bodegos or they run like like they run restaurants did they run a bunch of stuff on the border for these truckers and they also don't have any work and those people

have to on a day by date like it's like it i think it's like 1500 per day to rent a terminal in in like god yeah and wow they're making nothing and it it's it's it's horrifying there's all there's this just enormous economic devastation that's been happening because of this. Well, you know what else reminds me of economic devastation? Ah. Oh, Gare. The fact that our paychecks are solely reliant on the products and services that support this podcast. It's true.

Yeah, we'll talk about the problems they're having in a second after this break. Yep, one second. Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. or wherever you get your podcast. fast forward if you press the 30 second button four times yes that'd be real speedy now this is having other problems because as we talked about the show literally ad nauseum our supply chains are really bad

and it turns out that does seem to be a recurring character on the pod is that supply chains not the most stable thing we've invented yeah and especially with fruit and vegetables. Well, okay, I mean, we'll be getting some of the other supply chains that are, like, fucked because of this, but, like, fruit and vegetables in particular, like, the way that

we do them, they're designed to be in motion for, like, a very specific amount of time so that when they show up to you, they're ripe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you know, you add a few hours onto that, everything falls apart. to you they're ripe yeah yeah yeah you know you add a few hours onto that everything falls apart and this like i'm not sure if it happens because i'm not in texas but there was there were a bunch of articles that were talking about like yeah like avocados in texas are going to cost five more dollars like like a single avocado's price is going to increase by like five dollars over the weekend because like because of just the enormous amount of produces that's that's being

destroyed here and you know there's there's a lot of other stuff going on here because american and mexican supply chains are enormously integrated from now i mean they've always been integrated to some extent but like yeah particularly post nafta there's a lot of like auto supply chains in particular that are that are tied to plants in mexico and you actually this occasionally has like interesting effects like mexico's has a lot of auto strikes and you get like you'll get these things where like interesting effects like mexico's has a lot of auto strikes and you get like you'll get these things where like people will like tuck messages into like auto parts and like send them to the u.s people will open these messages from like a worker in

mexico to yeah you need it's cool there's lots of there's interesting stuff there but this also means that like yeah so if those parts aren't moving across the border those just-in-time production schedules are uh even more omega screwed than they've been already and so yeah there's been a lot of sort of economic stuff on that's been happening here and you know the other people who are getting just completely screwed by this are the mexican truckers yeah and so yeah so this this starts on april 6th um on monday april 11th i the truckers are just like fuck this and they start just completely blockading the the the largest border crossing between like this is it's on this giant bridge they literally just blockade the bridge and prevent any goods from getting in and this has an enormous

impact because again it was going like yeah production was down by 60% but that still means that 40% of the goods are getting through and now by the 11th it's just nothing um I do hope the one good thing that can come out of the whole

canada covid isn't real protest um is that people have learned that uh blocking off supply chains is a really effective way to do protest yeah you can stop the import of thousands and millions and billions of dollars of trade um pretty easily actually and it would be cool if more people realize hey obviously the covid stuff they were talking about and the whole overthrowing the government part um to install a right-wing dictator that part's obviously bad but uh some of their tactics were actually pretty interesting yeah we're gonna get more into that uh like later good but yeah i mean i will say like i think that the thing with the u.s is that like i think there's been a lot of focus on the american left on ports

because yeah yeah there's a lot of reasons for that but like yeah you could use the border crossings too and the the the the the the mexican truckers blockade was really effective i mean okay so it that's it this has been a thing where it's it's it's kind of hard to get information from. I saw a few newspapers talking about cartel people attacking the blockade and lighting trucks on fire to try to force goods to go through again, which it's possible. I don't know. i don't know um but this you know once once there are like once the block like the border is completely blockaded this completely changes like the entire political situation because now like you know abbott's been running this thing sort of as a political stunt and as this game he's playing with you know he's supposed he's trying to play a game with biden right and he's

like okay well yeah you got to do something about the border or whatever like you know he's trying to play a game with biden right and he's like okay well yeah you got to do something about the border or whatever like you know he's been challenging biden over like immigration bullshit but you know now now there's a there's a third party involved and that third party is the mexican truckers and now and now ab it's not just in the car it's like ab it's in a confrontation with the people that he needs to make the entire texan economy run yep and this starts going very badly for him and the other And this starts going very badly for him. And the other thing that starts going very badly for him is that I, it turns out if you shut down cross border trade, you really,

really piss off the bourgeoisie. Turns out, turns out that'll happen if you ain't careful. Yeah. Yeah. It's really interesting. And, and,

and I think I should mention, like stress this, like they're pissed off on both sides of the border. And, like, obviously, you could talk about the extent to which, like, yeah, they're the same class. But, like, capitalists on both sides of the border start exerting their political pressure because they're losing enormous amounts of money off of this. That's what they do. Yeah. You take away their ability to do capitalism as capitalists they're gonna be mad

yeah which again you'd think you would think that the abbot would like get this uh huh it seems to have not occurred to him that he was gonna piss off he thinks he didn't care enough and thought it wouldn't matter but like no it turns out

like you know one of the things that happens yeah it's amazing like he's you know like i mean i think this is this is you know i think this is this is sort of a symptom of like people lose like right-wing politicians losing sight of what their actual base is because like this is all this is all supposed to be like campaign trail feeding the anti-immigrant base but like you know you you you are a politician in the u.s your actual constituency is the capitalists and and like you have an actual job and that's to make the economy keep going and keep the people in power to have all the power like you're not just like that's one interesting thing that trump was kind of one of the first big um indicators for which is like a politician now is just the endless cycle of campaigning,

and they don't actually have a job. It's just always campaigning, and they're just always campaigning. And they're like, oh, I guess I should do my actual job that I was elected for, or I could just do more rallies. And that seems like it would be less work. Yeah, I think with Trump, it was like, there was a set to which the bureaucracy kept functioning and so you know like like he like trump got trump got the tax cut

right yeah and like he didn't really start getting in trouble with them until he started doing the anti-china stuff which was sort of a disaster because there was a lot of people who turned out like need those trade connections to make money and you saw like and like it was weird it was a very weird thing like you started to see so even some of his like like domestic like small business base started to get really mad at him because he's putting all these sanctions up and it's like oh hey look all these sanctions mean that uh all these people who are reliant on chinese supply chains have to pay this stuff and and abbott abbott has like done this in microcosm and like these these people like they start going to the press um i'm going to

read a quote from bloomberg uh some retailers particularly those in growth in in the grocery industry have experienced supply chain delays resulting from the extended wait times along the texas mexico border john mccord the executive director of texas retailers association wrote in an email so like you know these are like like the texas retail association is like this is like the most republican solidly institution in the country and and you can watch them over time like these people are getting really mad like one of i i was like like what what if abbott's like i forget the exact title like what one of abbott's like secretaries like they're like the secretary or. One of Abbott's secretaries, the secretary of one of the economic bureaus,

was like, yeah, man, Avocados are going to cost five more dollars. And, you know, this really hits me hard because everyone knows this about me. I care a lot about retail. Retail is one of my big core personality traits. And you know who else wants you to care about retail? Oh my goodness. Is it the Washington State Patrol?

That is right, Sophie. It's the Washington State Patrol. Our good friends. So here is some messages about how you can improve your retail decisions. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors I know you. Podcast Network. Available on the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts. Or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, I can't find this George Bush quote. So, that's fine.

Instead of that, we will return to this. And, you know, one thing I think we should also mention is if you ran into this on twitter um you will see a lot of videos of people like democrats like standing at the border and pointing at the trucks and going uh this is Abbott attempting to

like make inflation to get worse by sabotaging the economy cringe cringe moments yeah to like make inflation to get worse by sabotaging the economy cringe and like cringe moments yeah like okay like I

cannot rule out that this was like a part of what he wanted to do but that's not really why he's doing this like this this is this is like mostly and I saw people talking about like oh this is like the the truckers blockades in chile and i'm like no no it's not at all like like yeah yeah yeah like yes chile has a bunch of right had a bunch of right-wing anti-communist truckers

unions that tried to shut down the government but like that's not what's happening here this is the state and abbott's trying to do this as like an immigration pr thing like this isn't like he he's not actually he's not actually trying to destroy the government because the the the only way you can get stuff like that is if like is is is if the capitalist class is like genuinely afraid that they're about to get like like wiped out by communists and uh it turns out that biden is not about to communize the entire u.s i don't think that's actually a looming threat at the moment no and so yeah it's like no it's like it's it's not it's not really about that like it's it's it's mostly about this sort

of this sort of like border game that the commies are coming for your avocados well i mean this is sort of this is the the interesting thing here because it's like you you have this really weird scenario where like it's it's it's the right-wing governor like shutting down the flow of commodities and like the liberals are like we must restore the flow of commodities and like the bush was here like we must restore the flow of commodities and like even the cartels of some extent are like come on like we all we all need the border open uh it really it it really does just showcase the entire bit yeah you know but i mean like we've been talking a lot about the human cost of this and the reason this stuff

works is because american politics is literally just a machine that turns human suffering into stories and then turns those stories into percentage points at the polls and that's abbott's entire wait am i getting him confused with no greg abbott's the governor i i momentarily got him confused with the uk guy tony abbott who is also bad in very similar ways yeah but i think i think we're allowed to have two bad habits. I thought there was one in Australia, too. Well, the bad habits are multiplying.

Someone has got to get on this. We need to deal with the Anglosphere before they produce a fourth one and we get the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. That would be funny if we just have four habits bring in the apocalypse. That would be funny if we just have four Abbots bring in the apocalypse. Yeah, but I think the thing that's important to understand about Abbott is

everything that Abbott does is just about inflicting suffering on people and trying to use that to do polls. He has genuine right-wing beliefs, but the timing of everything that he does is not this shit. Yeah, that's what all his anti-trans stuff is is that he could beat his primary challenger who was trying to campaign a little bit further to the right than abbott was yeah and

this is the thing where like politicians are allowed to play games with real people's lives like that that's their job right that's their entire elected but they're allowed to do this up until the exact moment at which those real people are the bourgeoisie and the moment this is the thing that abbott is learning is that you can do this kind of stunts all you want like you can you can like you can shoot every trans kid you can like i don't know like you can you can ban like every school from saying the word race, but you can't fuck with the bourgeoisie. And, you know, this is the problem that he has. By, like, the middle of last week, he has, like, the ruling class is turning on him, the truckers are blockading, the bridges are preventing all travel, and Abbott abbott is like basically scrambling to find a way out and the the thing that he does to do this is he like he goes to a bunch of mexican governors

who who are like the governors of border states and these governors have like sent him letters being like hey like what are you doing like we need we like we we need our economies to function. Can you actually do this? And, you know, so he starts doing these negotiations with them where he's like, well, okay, if you guys, like, inspect all of these trucks or whatever before and you ensure that there's no immigrants in them or whatever before they get here, like, we'll reopen the borders. And, you know, so they do this. And I think there's a couple interesting things about this one is that most of these i think there's one guy who's from the pri but like almost all of these governors are from the pan which is mexico's like far right wing party and like these guys these guys are also like hard right like war on drug hardliners who hate immigrants and and this this has been another

big part of how the sort of border regime works which is that like yeah on the one hand you have you have abbott you have like texas so you have just the u.s government like projecting its power like into mexico which is you know another big part of what this is but the other part of it is has been the u.s essentially outsourcing its border regime and border policy just in like to mexico and so you get a lot of, there's been a lot in the last, especially during the Trump administration. I mean, it goes back much further than that, but

like in the last like five years, there's been a lot of really egregious examples of just like border patrol shit, but by the Mexican police, because A, it turns out there's also a bunch of people in Mexico who fucking hate Central American refugees, and B, the police are the police literally everywhere and yeah and this this also for example like this this is how this is how a lot of the border regime stuff works in um in europe

uh frontex the european border like thing makes you to like makes like basically just negotiates with like literally every like i don't even know you call it like border state i guess in africa to like ensure that like refugees coming up to north africa like don't ever get to europe and like this is they make deals with gaddafi they made deals with the people who came after gaddafi um yeah there's the border system is horrible and this is sort of the border system like working as intended now the other thing that we should mention is that like

okay so they're stopping and like supposedly searching all of these trucks and they find literally nothing the entire time because like there's you know there's never anything there but you get all these press conferences that were like well yeah of course there was nothing it's because the

cartels were tipped off of the raid because we did press conferences about it and that's why they didn't we announced we announced the thing that we were going to do so it gave them a chance to outsmart us wow whoa yeah um so that that that's been fun um and the last thing i want to talk about yeah this is part of a bit we were talking about earlier which is that like yeah this is the second time this year that we've seen right-wingers like block block off a border for political reasons and i think there's a few interesting things here um one is that this is the kind of stuff that from like basically from the start of occupy and even before then until like the bernie campaign this was like the core of like what marxists were thinking about in the u.s and also anarchists to some extent like if you go and read anything from that period like

it's all about logistics and counter logistics and how you can like disrupt them and whether or not we should try to take control of logistics and you know and i think you see here like like attacking logistics is a very powerful political tool, but it's a tool that has like limited, um, like it, it, it has limited utility for the right. Because, you know, the right depends on the backing of capitalists for the politics to work. They, they, they, they really, really need buy-in from capitalists and those capitalists need cross-border trade. And, you know, and the other thing, like they, like they also need they also need migrant workers to make their money and if you cut that stuff off your political base starts to collapse and the second part of it that's interesting is you get to see how powerful this is as a weapon for you know like the working class because of just like how instantaneously

uh add it back down when the trucking blockade starts. Because this is all over. Last Friday, I think the... What date is that? That was... Good Friday. I mean... The 15th.

The 15th. The 15th. The 15th. The 15th. The 15th. The 15th. The 15th. The 15th.

The 15th. The 15th. Yeah, the 15th. Abbott was like, oh, oh oh it's all over uh we secured the border yeah everything's secured the border sure buddy okay yeah but you know and you but you like that's the thing like you you can see like yeah you you gotta see you gotta see a rare moment of like mexican workers and also like the sort of international capitalist class working on the same side you gotta see how fast they just like clobbered their politicians because yeah

like yeah like the state is the state is a powerful force but it turns out it's it's class politics all the way down and i think i don't know between this and canada i i think there's a couple of interesting things one is which okay yeah you're like if you're on the left like already automatically you're going to be fighting the capitalist business owners are just always mad at you yeah that's less of a concern you will face more suppression immediately obviously this is yeah this is this is how the game is played yeah you'll face more suppression immediately but it's also like that that's not like a your base turning on you like that problem doesn't stem from capitalists

not making money the problem you have with your base turning on you is about problem doesn't stem from capitalists not making money the problem you have with your base turning on you is about being being able to provision supplies to people and i think this is you know you know more about this than i do but i will finish this sentence and then stop talking which is that like like yeah if you look at canada it was like part of the reason their occupations failed was that like yeah like just like a bunch of ordinary people got really, really mad at them because their whole their cities were being locked down. Yeah, yeah. They started impacting not just the economic drivers, but the people who live in those areas regularly and need them to operate. And that gave politicians enough of enough of incentive to be like, see, it's actually hurting real people. It's not just hurting the economy, but it's hurting your grandma who could be living in Ottawa or something, right? So when you use these tactics, it's about balancing the propaganda of not severely impacting the people who actually live in these places very

much, but targeting the economics policies and the corporate elite or whatever kind of framing you want to use. Because as soon as you start doing tactics that just hurt regular people, that is such an immediate propaganda L, as the kids would say. Because, yeah, you're just giving them the tools to easily fight you back. And yes, they're going to try to to to to stop you no matter what like they're gonna they're gonna they're gonna try to do something via propaganda lens but there's some propaganda is way easier and uh much harder than others so i think a big part of these types of things when you're starting to like block off you know routes to cities block off supply chains as you need to be cognizant of making sure that the people who you're like immediately next to

kind of thinks that you're also cool because that can give you so much more legs i mean we saw this in the red house in portland there was a there was a lot of effort um to make the immediate neighbors not hate the occupation there to stop the family from being evicted um and there was a lot of debate around like how much graffiti should be allowed in the surrounding area because uh you know you don't want to piss off the neighbors too much now this can obviously stem in bad directions in terms of like there was then like self-appointed security guards like beating up and shooting people with paintballs who were doing graffiti which is obviously like not yeah and not not how you do good anarchism um but then there was other

stuff being like no we should just trash this area anyway it's all in the process of being gentrified which mean it is but you're like yes i understand that emotional impulse um and you may be right in a lot of senses like like more correct morally, but to play the propaganda game to actually stop a Black family from being evicted, maybe we can actually look at this at a more tactical level. strikes west virginia in 2017 worked was that the striking teachers in west virginia were very very careful about making sure that they did things like you know like making making sure that kids got like the meals that the school would have been yeah yeah like providing like like you know like this is why this is why mutual aid is extremely important because it lets you, it lets you provision services, not just when they collapse because of like, you know,

Oh, Hey, the government's doing weird stuff or like there's a plague. It lets you do, it lets you shut down logistics lines yourself and still have community support and still be able to provide people to think that provide people things that they need. And this is like,

you know, if you carry this all the way to like the macro macro level,'s like yeah okay so like why did why did the russian revolution not work and you know like like why did the paris commune fail and it's like well yeah it's because instead of like giving peasants things they went into the countryside and shopped them into attempting to get those things and it's like yeah like you you have to whatever the thing that you're doing is in your sort of like base area, right? Whatever you're like, you're doing a strike, you're shutting down a bridge, you're like, you know, you're blocking a border, shutting down a port, right? You have to make sure you're constantly expanding and building out support outside of that action and making sure you're able to provision the people who are affected by it.

And if you don't do this, you end up like Abbott and it's like, yeah, you know, Abbott had like the entire power of the American state behind him and he was able to keep this up for like less than two weeks. Yeah. Before he had to just pull out. So yeah, we can

do this better and for things that are good and in ways that don't hurt people or at least hurt people significantly less or you know don't not hurt the wrong people instead try to try to hurt the right people just like an incredible lack of like thinking that's my that's my summary is yeah better do you think like yeah and i think also like again like abbott abbott's politics like is entirely about like inflicting cruelty on people right and ours like shouldn't be and shouldn't yep it should not be and the fact that we actually care about people makes our politics more effective or i guess i should in theory in theory they should um and any time we may take a misstep from that i think is of

is a big loss yeah uh there's there's one more strike thing that i just remembered that i was going to talk about which is i so these also trains a lot there's a type of strikers name i'm forgetting because i'm a hack and a fraud where like the people the people the people will just like take over a train and they'll run it, but they just won't take fares. That is incredibly based. Yeah, and that's level one of it. And then level two of the strike is instead of just we're on strike, but we're running the service and not taking

any money, it's we now control this train. And that has happened on several occasions. Well, you heard that. It's cool. You heard it here first. Take over your local train. It could happen here. We, do that. It's cool. You heard it here first. Take over your local train. It could happen here. We can do it. Yep, anarchism can make the trains run on time.

Oh, I am not sure about that, Chris. Punk time is an unstoppable force. Okay, but here's the thing. Punk time, like... Okay, so you don't have the punks running the trains. You have the train nerds running the train you have people who should spend all of their time playing train simulator running the trains okay the trains will run great all right that is that is completely fair um where can people find you and or the show on the internet uh You can find me at it, me,

CHR three on Twitter. If you want to do that for some reason, you can find us at happened here, pod on Twitter, Instagram. There's also the cool zone. We have media. Yeah, we have a,

we have a new podcast that is coming. Sophie, do you want to do this? We actually got, we got two new ones for you coming soon. We have a ghost church by jamie loftus episode one is out april 25th and then we have cool people who did cool stuff hosted by margaret killjoy trailer is out next week and episode one is out on May 2nd. Check both of them out. So many pods in the pipe, as we say.

That is a technical term. Pods in the pipe. These are genuinely, legitimately very good shows, and you should listen to them, and I'm really excited. So, yeah. All right. Well, thank you for listening, and go take over a train. All right. Well, thank you for listening and go take over a train. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources.

Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.