It Could Happen Here - Antifascist Roundtable, Part 2

Episode Date: October 11, 2023

We conclude our conversation with Shane, Emily, Daryle, and Michael by talking about the current state of antifascism and what lessons can be learned from antifascist history.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You should probably keep your lights on for

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It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here. This is Garrison Davis. This episode is part two of a conversation that myself and James Stout had with some of the contributors to a book by AK Press titled No Pasaran. It's an anti-fascist anthology that talks about the modern anti-fascist movement and some of the writers' own experiences with anti-ifascism. So we'll pick up our conversation basically right where we left off, talking about the modern state of antifascism.

Antifascists and like, you know, the left, quote unquote, in general right now is kind of in a weird place. You know, like a lot of people were, you know, extremely kind of catalyzed after Charlottesville. And that led to a like massive resurgence of anti-racist action and anti-fascist action. And I think the quote unquote like Antifa movement of the 20 teens was probably one of the largest like politically radicalizing forces for people especially people my age people a little bit older um it's you know it's very influential in what the kind of the modern like anarchist or you know left you know scene is and there's like there's a lot of positive parts of that there's also you know there's some some drawbacks for that as well um kind of one one kind of recurring thing

is that like when your only tool is a hammer then everything is a nail and there's certain elements of of like and and this like antifa notion or like people who like grew up with with like anti-fascism being their primary kind of uh mode of praxis then it can be very easily turned horizontally. But, you know, it's after J6, after Biden's been inaugurated, we have had this very weird lull, but there's still been, you know, a lot of fascist mobilization,

but the sort of response to it that, you know, was very normalized in 2018 has definitely shifted. We've seen like, you know, the one thing that's been new is like you, like you mentioned regarding, you know, Charlottesville, there's a lot of like debate around if people should show up armed. We now have like the drag time story hour kind of defense, like armed defenses with John Brown gun clubs becoming more popular. But, you know, the one, one of the kind of recurring things that everyone's kind of been

talking about it, I've been, I've been been hearing like there's so many parallels for what we've been going through the past like five, 10 years to other kind of things in the past. Like all of the John Brown anti-Klan committee stuff. There's just a lot of cyclical notions. I mean, even I'm here in Atlanta right now. There's this RICO grand jury indictment. Everyone's thinking about like green scare stuff. Even John Brown anti-clang committee did grand jury resistance back in like the 80s. Like it's this, these things have happened before. And I think one thing that, you know,

the quote unquote laughter anti-fascists sometimes are kind of bad at is actually passing down the history. There's this tendency that when people get involved, we're kind of forced to reinvent the wheel every time, but it's like completely unnecessary. But we tend to just keep trying the same things over and over again. So there's even people younger than me who weren't even old enough to get involved in anti-fascist stuff in like 2017, 2018. And they're now kind of growing up. There's still this fascist mobilization. You know, liberals are kind of passive because they have their guy in the White House. And we're going to be reaching a really interesting tipping point in 2024. So for these types of people who are like, either wanting to get involved or who are like, just starting to realize that, hey,

maybe we should actually do something about all this stuff, especially as, you know, trans existence is one of the main things under attack right now. What is kind of some like lessons from the passage you would like to be passed down to people? A couple of things that come to mind. I was reminded because James is in San Diego about, you know, one of the things we haven't talked about at all is the border. And it's been a recurrent theme of the state, both in terms of building repressive apparatus. So going back to the early days of People Against Racist Terror, which is the group that I had in L.A. after John Brown Anti-Klan Committee left, one of the first actions we did was there was something called American Spring at the Mexican border, which was a neo-fascist element.

It kind of grew out of the previous Klan border watch that David Duke had done. And they were trying to build up a base of support for, you know, close the borders. And so we did bring people from L.A. and joined up with people in San Diego. And actually at one of those rallies, somebody drove a car at and nearly hit someone from the anti-fascist forces. So I think that's an important piece that we should be thinking about. The other thing in terms of killings and shootings, somebody from the Red Nation was just shot in Albuquerque. you know, somebody from the Red Nation was just shot in Albuquerque. And, you know, I think that,

again, the question of indigenous sovereignty and indigenous rights is a leading edge of struggle. A lot of the struggles around missing and murdered indigenous women have to do with the, you know, fossil fuel industry and in the back and other places where, you know, women have disappeared and been killed by, you killed by people in the fossil fuel industry, basically. And I think bringing all that to bear is really critical to have the breadth of consciousness and the understanding that there is a global struggle that's going on, and indigenous people in particular are part of that, about the survival of humanity and of the planet, in a sense. And to situate anti-fascist struggle in that context, I think is really, really important and relates to who are our allies,

who are our leadership, where is the struggle being led by. And so, you know, one of the things we uncovered here in LA is that the people involved in the militia movement started their operations by supporting Christian militias in Guatemala and the Philippines, attacking left forces in those countries and indigenous forces in those countries. And having that global perspective, and I think that's one of the really great strengths of the book, by the way, that I thought was really amazing is the coverage of anti-fascist movements all around the world and anti-fascist in India and so on. And having that sense that it's not just, you know, people of European descent or, you know, African Americans

in the United States who are opposed to fascism, but there's a very, very broad, you know, movement around the world and inside this country of people who are experiencing fascism literally all the time that, you know, gives a strength to anti-fascism. There is an exceptionalism that exists even in the left, an American exceptionalism that exists even in the American left when it comes to how bad things are, how good we are at organizing or whatever. And I think that a lot of the times, one of the things that we often forget is that we are not the only people going through this, both in time and space, right? There's movements that are going on elsewhere that are facing a

much deeper sort of repression than what we see in the United States. Um, and they are still finding ways to organize. I like to, you know, when we talk about like the attack on queer rights and, you know, things like, um, all of these hateful laws that are being passed, um, which will almost certainly be thrown out in the courts. And that's, you know, it's going to be a couple of years, but, but, you know, people are saying, well, this is going to make pride illegal. And this is, you know, this is the worst thing. This is like, you know, a step towards genocide and all of that stuff. And I think it's actually important for us to put things in perspective. Istanbul has a much stricter set of restrictions on

queer organizing, queer demonstrations. Pride happens every year. Pride is attacked by cops every year. They still continue to persist. What can we learn as Americans from that movement? I think that's a really important thing for the American anti-fascist scene to really start to think around and try to take this moment. As you mentioned, there's a lull that is happening now, both in the organizing and in the popular support. We need to take that moment to reflect on what is working, what is not, to regroup and to find new approaches, new tactics. This is something that I write about in the chapter I wrote

on transient de-fascism, right? We need to like, we need to absolutely bring in historical contexts and comparative analyses into our, into what we're doing. But that does not mean that we need to say that everything is literally the Holocaust. What we need to do is look at what are the factors, what are the causes, what are the root causes of the things that are happening, and how can we strategically organize to disrupt and to bypass those forces. So I think it's really important to have that multifaceted perspective. I think that Emily has touched on something that is really important

when we say that the police are being, are attacking pride events, pride marches and such. That suggests that somebody initiated something on our side. That speaks to what it is we have to do. We have to initiate certain actions. We cannot keep waiting for the fascists. We can't keep being reactive. We do have to go on the offense. I mean, that's one of the reasons why myself, me and others have been so successful is because we don't wait for the fascists to do something. We do something to them before they make a move. And we know when to do it because they basically send the signals out courtesy of their free speech that they want to do something. And we just take those cues and say, okay, here's how we are going to go forward. We're going to let people know about you. We're going to let people know how to keep you at bay. I mean, that's the kinds of things that we need to do. We need to just basically say, we are establishing this institution.

We are establishing the security around this institution, and you are not going to be able to breach this institution. The other thing that we do need to do in that while we build that is also make it clear to some of those that, for lack of a better term, are wishy-washy on the subject, are more mainstreamers and liberals and such who are quick to defend the fascists that they say they don't believe in before they defend us, we got to start telling them to chill and we got to start telling them to pick a side and stop getting in everybody's way. Stop being a bulwark because you're too cowardly to put up this fight or you're too interested in protecting your other interests

as opposed to being concerned about what's coming down the pike. The book starts off with a discussion about a three way fight. We definitely are in one. Do you want to explain what a three way fight is? Well, a three way fight is not only you're dealing with, you know, the obvious enemy, so to speak, but you're also dealing with those that are hesitant to do something about that enemy to the point that they will fight you more. To the point that they will fight you more. And frankly, it's frustrating. It is a frustrating thing, but it is there and it has been there throughout history.

It is a frustrating thing, but it is there and it has been there throughout history. And I mean, even the I mean, I'm surprised I'm actually referencing a Mel Gibson movie, but even the movie Braveheart brought that up. Now, I don't I don't think that we need to smack people upside the head with a mace. But by the same token, we do have to let people know that we do have to be a little bit more, I should say, assertive in our efforts as we go forward and basically try to route this particular fascist element. And assertive means blowing past those that are supposed to be on our side. I mean, because I was thinking about the fact that this is now the 12th anniversary of Occupy, right? And Occupy was trying to do that. Occupy is still trying to do that in many respects, the folks that were in Occupy, but some of the folks, because what you also saw

at Occupy were a lot of folks who thought that they will be able to take advantage of the progress that we were making in in this effort and turned it into a more fascist thing. I mean, I was just looking at a lot of the characters that come out of Occupy that went to the went to the fascist side. of Occupy that went to the fascist side. And when you look at who they are, you realize that you had a whole bunch of opportunities that were within our ranks that were looking for something totally different than what the rest of us. We were looking out for each other. And Occupy, the true people that were dealing with Occupy Wall Street were looking out for each other in our communities. These guys just thought, hey, perfect opportunity to just say that we're one with them and drag them over here to the right. That's strasserism. That's straight up strasserism. But when you look at it even further, it's just a bunch of people that only cared about themselves ultimately. And we've seen it year after year after year in this

fight. So I think that it's going to be very important to build and protect our institutions and recognize what it is we are protecting them from. And it's not hard. We have shown over and over and over again that we are prepared to wage that kind of war. We just have to basically recognize it within ourselves when we have to do it. And that's just, and do not wait for people to die. I mean, Heather Heyer did not have to die. No one in January 6th, regardless of how I feel about any of them, had to die. That should not be the thing that we should respond to. We already know what to do. We just need to do it. Yeah, I think picking up on a lot of what everyone said, especially Michael, I think

part of what gets out here is having a place for like broad social movements where they're able to interact with one another and support one another. So anti-fascist movements as a defensive movement have often been essential to actually operating other kinds of organizing you know so like when i was working with houseless encampments and we were doing food not bombs and stuff you get attacked by far-right groups you had to have a defensive element there was no other choice same thing i've been at union offices that were attacked by the far right you have to have that defensive element and then on the same token we're talking about mass actions against

far-right demonstrations. It requires people that are coming probably from all kinds of political backgrounds, but they've gotten involved from different kinds of practices. We're having mutual aid networks that support people getting there, sustaining themselves there, medical care, all kinds of component pieces. So those things require that kind of back and forth. And I think that also begs to how do you get people in? There's like, we are talking about a lot of problems with people on like the moderate left, not kind of taking those next steps, those defensive steps that are necessary, but also how do we find a pathway for them in, you know, if we're talking about mass participation in something, if we're talking about like a revolutionary movement with huge masses of people, we have to figure out what those pathways for people are and giving them

access to them. And I think also moving past what we've thought of as the far right before, I mean, people have talked about this a little bit, you know, a lot of what we think of as recent anti-fascism was built around fighting the alt-right and other kind of recent short-term projects. And what we have now is just radically different, just like it will be in a few years. And so having a deep kind of intersectional understanding of how that works, because when you do that, you have that kind of natural understanding of where this is going to show up again, how it might interact with different communities and what role it places for you. How are you able to interact with it as this person coming into a social movement? Yeah. I mean, especially considering something I've been kind of watching and we're seeing a little bit of it with this, with this set of Republican primaries

is that we have an incoming new wave of kind of Gen Z and millennial Republicans who grew up in the alt-right era who are now bringing that that sort of alt-right street politics to electoralism. And how that's going to be opposed is going to be... I was just talking about before how we shouldn't just try to retread the same ground over and over again without learning the histories from the past. But for a lot of people who have just been doing street politics the past few years,

figuring out how they're going to oppose fascism in this much more electoral setting is's gonna be an interesting shift. Because yeah, you can like punch Richard Spencer, and no one really cares too much. But if you punch someone like, you know, DeSantis, that is going to be a different thing to kind of sort through. And so yeah, that is kind of one of these shifts that, you know, may be coming up here soon. And whatever kind of evolves on the anti-fascist side to kind of meet that is going to be interesting to watch and take part in. you might know me from my popular online series the running interview show where i run with celebrities athletes entrepreneurs and more after those runs the conversations keep going that's what my podcast post run high is all about it's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories their journeys and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement

together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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.

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podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack B. Thomas,

the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them.

Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, I think that, you know, part of the the ara analysis has always been that fascism is built from above and below and i think we really have to understand that that the fascism is not fascism is not only the factor of the street politics and the people who declare themselves to be fascist but that there are fascist elements in the structure of this society and there are fascist elements in power in this government right now and you there are fascist elements in power in this government right now and uh you know fascism has come to power in quite a number of you know in

italy this neo-fascist is the prime minister in in you know uh in the united states uh matt gates and and that element has a clear you know they're in power within the Republican Party. They control the House of Representatives in a way. And I think that that's a critical understanding, but also it speaks to the fact that fascist practices and elements exist in a lot of different places. And I think one of the things I've always tried to put out to people is that this is an aspect of the nature of imperialism, central colonialism, and I want to emphasize that because I think there's a fractal character to what we're dealing with

or holographic. In other words, any element of this society that you attempt to deal with, you're actually facing the entirety of imperialism and fascism there. So if you look at the labor movement right now, labor has a big resurgence, particularly here in Southern California. There'd just been, you know, the hotel workers and restaurant workers on strike, the screen actors on strike, the writers killed on strike.

And the fact that there, you know, that there is a fascist element to the employment structure and trying to organize it. And if you look what happened with the Amazon union or, or just the fact that again, going back in history you know, the Taft Hartley act was written to criminalize you know, communists and also solidarity with the labor boom, then outlaw you know, solidarity strikes and that's fascist. It is. You have to understand that.

And you know, one of the reasons that the Puerto Rican Independence Movement attacked Congress was that the US attempted to put the Taft-Hartley Act into practice against the labor movement in Puerto Rico. And the Nationalist Party said, no, we're going to counterattack. So I think that's a really critical understanding. We started out talking about the prisons and, you know, there's nothing more fascist has been prison. And one of the things they do in prison is they use privilege to try to divide the prisoners, you know, and we haven't talked much about privilege and how it operates in the society,

but, you know, it's a key factor in how people are organized by the system to collaborate, to get along by going along. But even inside the prisons we've seen here in California and elsewhere, Alabama, Georgia, elsewhere, prisoners are able to organize under conditions of fascism that exist in the prisons. They have ways to communicate with each other. They've built interracial solidarity in many cases. So I think those are examples of anti-fascism that we need to embrace and understand the same way that people, you know, if you're organizing a union, you're operating on a certain level clandestinely, because if you're open about it you're going to

get fired and they're going to retaliate and they're going to anybody you talk to is going to get fired so we need to have an understanding of ways to organize that are not always i'm not talking about armed struggle i'm saying that people have to organize below the radar when you're dealing with fascism especially when it's in power and fascism is in power in a lot of sectors of the society right now and people are dealing with it. As Emily said about, you know, Istanbul and pride marches, you know, so, you know, I think we need to make those connections into the labor movement, into the prison movement, into the, you know, formerly incarcerated people's movement, the solidarity with indigenous struggles that are going on against fascistic colonization of their lands and struggles. And I think that if we understand that that's an aspect of anti-fascism,

I think it actually strengthens what we're engaged in. Definitely. I think it's also important just to like, I guess if people are thinking about their organizing and it's always important to hear from those struggles as well as you know to to include them but to really include them in a sense of like listening and learning from rather than sort of telling and saying this is like a cis white guy uh it's definitely a thing that i've perceived in the movement in the last few years is a desire to, to, to speak a little more and listen a little less.

And one thing I enjoyed about your book is that when we talk about fascism and, and we'd already mentioned, Michael's mentioned the border as a sort of a location for fascist experiments within the United States, which I think it's very hard to argue against living on the border. Like if you protested in 2020 against police violence, you were surveilled using technology that has been used for years where I live and against migrants and citizens who live here.

But I really liked your perspective on looking at global fascisms because fascism is very easy to spend too much time defining fascism, especially as anti-fascist, right? Like it's very easy to spend too much time defining fascism especially as anti-fascist right like it's extremely easy to be like if it's not fascism unless it comes from the fascia region of italy kind of like this like cheese or champagne definition of fascism uh but they like they're focused on for instance fascism in india like if i go to the border i was at the border uh a couple of days ago right there are tons of punjabi sick people uh camped out in the desert right now because border patrol are holding them in an open

air concentration camp essentially because of what's happening in india that they turn up here right and as well as bringing sort of migrant um detention resistance and migrant mutual aid into anti-fascism i think it's important anti-fascist also like we can take concrete action to protect and uh like to care for victim survivors of fascism i guess people have fled fascism uh and like when i think about what my background in the study of spanish civil war right that's what my phd is about um the thing that radicalized young uh often jewish men growing up in the same part of new york that you did was often seeing people fleeing fascism coming to their communities and then being like we can't allow that not only to not happen here but the crucial step that like we can't allow that to only to not happen here, but the crucial step that like, we can't allow

that to happen anywhere. And that, that being what kind of motivated them to, um, to travel to Spain and many of, many of them died fighting in the Spanish civil war. Right. But I think we could do better to do that as well. Uh, like now, I know not all of us are living in the United States right now, but, uh uh sometimes like emily said american anti-fascism can be very exceptionalist or whatever but i think that we have so much to learn from anti-fascists in um you know my sort of formative experiences were in catalonia and spain but also in india uh also in russia right um and i wonder uh if if anyone could share like sort of i guess concrete ways that people listening uh can help to expand that solidarity into like an international

anti-fascism i think there's a an interesting example and it gets to what michael was stressing about fascism being kind of colonial rule brought back to homeland, you know, a lot of the methods that were used against kind of mid-century anti-fascist organizers, for example, the anti-Nazi League or later anti-fascist action in the UK were basically test run against Irish Republicans in Northern Ireland, right? So those uprisings, different kind of methods of crowd control, use of quote-unquote non-lethal weapons, different kinds of forms of incarceration, then used later against the Anti-Nazi League.

So there's sort of a step. They're taking this colonial rule back home. That's the testing ground and then using it domestically. And I think what that actually does is create a certain bridge between two communities that there's now a point of connection where they can relate it doesn't mean they're in the same situation right like it doesn't mean that like someone protesting in the United States is the same situation someone in the call my space but having that shared system that actually binds us

together in that sense of solidarity that's a new model of safety That's a new model of safety. That's a new model of community. So it's now seeing my strength in that alignment with someone else. So connecting with communities internationally, learning from what they're doing, but making real connections between the ones that have a real sense of weight between them, where someone's success in international social movement has real effect on your lives and back and forth i think committing to that is actually the kind of biggest thing we can do that creates an international movement and it makes everyone stronger everyone more effective yeah yeah i think one of the strengths of anti-racist action was that it was always an international organization it was us and canada and there were a lot of chapters in canada and that really helped break some of the U.S. exceptionalism understanding. But he also had corresponding organizations. It was Resistencia Redskin in Colombia, in Bogota, and a couple,

Cali, I think. And I think that that really is an important element. And again, what I said is that we need to understand that, similar to what Lenin said about the Russian Empire, that it's a prison house of nations, that there are captive nations inside the borders of the United States and that, you know, indigenous sovereignty and, you know, Puerto Rican independence and, you know, Hawaiian sovereignty and a lot of other issues. And I think those are things that the fascists try to exploit also. They present themselves, fascism presents itself in the third world as a strategy for national independence when the Japanese empire put itself forward. They presented themselves as being opposing British and US imperialS. imperialism in Asia, you know, and they were imposing their own imperialism. But, you know, that internationalist element, I think, is really critical. And I think the same thing in labor. I think that the labor movement, you know, needs in this country needs to think about, you know, prison struggles as part of the labor movement needs to think about the international solidarity with labor struggles elsewhere one of the things

i raised with uh in relation to the uh uh the screen actors guild and writers guild here is that you know they raised this whole thing about artificial intelligence and i don't know if people are aware but artificial intelligence depends on uh tens of thousands of people in the Philippines and elsewhere that are working, you know, as gig workers processing stuff to put it into artificial intelligence. And, you know, the same thing you're saying about the border, the technology of self-driving vehicles is based on the same technology they're using for motion detection on the border. And the reason they're doing that is also because the people driving self-driving vehicles is not just Google and Uber, but it's the U.S. Army Tank Division, which wants to have automated self-driving tanks the same way they have drones.

And having that understanding that it is up against the global system and the fascists are a piece of that, but they're not the only piece of that, I think is really, really critical to understanding what we have to deal with. We talk about what would a fascist government look like if it was in control you know full control with no opposition i think there are plenty of examples of that there's a fascist war happening right now in ukraine um and i think that there's so much that we can learn um from what is going on there that oftentimes i think that as anti-fascists we find ourselves wanting to be with the left that we get into a political situation that gets muddled. I went to the border twice in Ukraine when the war broke out.

I would relive Unite the Right a hundred times before I had to go back to that again. go back to that again. We don't understand scales until you have seen it, until you've seen the hundred or the thousand yards there from hundreds of people, you know, pouring over the border. I'm sure, James, you're very familiar with this, with the border work that you're doing there. These things are so often distant and abstract to us that we, we lose sight that we think that we can influence things within our own spaces that will then have an impact on these bigger, bigger systems. And we can't, right. So I think that, you know, to go back to, you know, what would be the call of action? You know, what would I want the listener to take, take away from this?

I think that this is about, as somebody said earlier, listen more and speak less, right? Try to read, try to see what people elsewhere are doing, how they are organizing, what their needs are. You know, how do we do mutual aid in earthquake and flood-stricken areas? How do we do mutual aid in earthquake and flood stricken areas? How do we do mutual aid for refugees who are fleeing a war and things like that? There's just so, so much out there that we need to bring into perspective. And if you think that you can fix any of it, or even just a small part of it, simply through speaking up or, you know, awareness campaigns, I think that you're misled. or awareness campaigns, I think that you're misled. So I think my call to action is go out, read books, meet people, get off of Twitter. It's grass for me to say it, but the master's tools can't dismantle the master's house, right? We can't keep this pattern of outreach cycles up in order to move

the issue forward. We have to come up with something new. My challenge to people is to put your brains together and figure out what that new is going to look like. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together.

You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me as the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum. 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.

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writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Maybe that's where we could end actually is with each of you suggesting like something like Emily has just done, right? Something to read, something to do and an action to take that could concretely help us oppose and rebut and push back against fascism. I think it was pretty much going back to what I was saying earlier that it will begin when we take the bull by the horns. It will begin whenever we decide that we are going to establish this. I mean, it goes back, you know, I grew up with hip hop. I was in the punk scene. Both those genres, both those cultures were created by people who, by those who didn't see, say, the mainstream listening to them. So they said, you know what?

We don't need them. We need to just go ahead and do what we need to do so we can benefit what it is we want to do. And that's the attitude that we got to have. We got to have that hip hop attitude, got to have that punk attitude. And we just simply got to build the institutions that will address the situation. And I will say it again, that's what Occupy was about. I think we need to continue to learn the lessons from Occupy in order to go forward. And once we start doing that, first of all, when we do that, we're going to see, again, people trying to either co-op or take it down.

And we got to also protect ourselves from that as well. I mean, I know I'm repeating what I had said earlier, but I think that the solutions, and you know what I didn't say? I think the solutions are already being implemented. I think that we all have been working and doing this. Folks that aren't on this podcast, folks that would never be on any podcast are just basically putting their time in to make sure that things are done properly. I just saw on the news that they had, in Delaware, they just passed a law against, I guess, what they call panic killings in regards to the LGBTQ community, you know,

what they used to call back in the day the gay panic thing. Gay panic and trans panic defense. Yeah. Yeah. Delaware became the 17th state, I believe yesterday, to make that illegal. It should have been illegal in the first place. But

they basically, for those who don't know what that means, it generally means you cannot kill somebody because you're freaked out over someone being gay. I mean, that's just basically what it is. Concern for it happened after Jenny Jones, somebody expressed their feelings towards another man. And that person after the Jenny Jones show had murdered that person. And the killer, instead of getting first degree murder, got second degree murder because he used the gay panic defense. So people initially, that was where everything started. And everybody was saying that we got to do something about that. If it was not for us putting together the mechanisms and the institutions to basically voice our concerns, voice our issues, and say,

we got to do something about this today, would that have happened? It should not be 17 states, by the way. It should be all 50. But that's the kind of things that we need to do these are the things that it's all going to depend on us and how we react to things that um is going to make all the difference in the world so when everybody's ready let's rock and roll i i think i'm really interested in getting people connected to social movements for their entire lives and seeing things through being really connected communities. And I think that's about looking about where people fit in, where they feel comfortable building those relationships, because it happens both at the kind of local and national international scale. So finding, I think, a piece of pathway for folks. I think, a piece of the pathway for folks. I mean, right now, I think, considering what we're dealing with with climate and economic collapse, mutual aid networks are an absolute essential

piece of that. So it's the labor movement. And going where the far right is having their front lines, making our defensive front lines. So for example, in defense of trans healthcare, against anti-trans legislation, in defense of queer events like Drag Queen Story Hour, that's absolutely important and we have those relationships now so it's about sort of finding a place to be able to reproduce those social movements and grow them and again like daryl said people are doing that and i think like as there are shifts people have to kind of redefine that a little bit but having that adaptability is what we've kind of learned over this rapidly changing environment

the last few years yeah i'll second that again to give people we've kind of learned over this rapidly changing environment the last few years. Yeah, I'll second that. Again, to give people a little bit of a sense of the longer view, I think that the rise of the Christian right in this country has a lot to do with the destruction of the labor movement. And the collapse of organized labor was that vacuum was filled by, you know, the Christian right. that vacuum was filled by, you know, the Christian right, because the labor movement at one point did touch people throughout their lives and their culture. And it was not just in your workplace, but it was a community organization. And I think that we have to rebuild that, you know, from the bottom up.

And it is happening. There's a lot of, you know, young people involved in labor organizing. I think that again, what I said earlier about the fractal nature of the system, I think one of the things people often say is anything they're trying to do, they have an enemy. It's not just a problem that they're trying to face. There is an enemy out there that is trying to enforce the system that we have as it collapses. And I think that that's critical. So yes, the mutual aid and the kind of things Emily was talking about, I think are critical. I think people working on people's assemblies, I was at this dual power gathering in the Midwest, and there was just one up in Portland recently. system possesses is actually stolen from the people that it oppresses and exploits and that it's our power and it's our power to take it back we have the creative power i think that's critical and that their power is is exploitive and and power over an hour is the power uh you know to

create i think that understanding and and and that concept of solidarity and i do think that you know again stephen biko part of the black consciousness movement in South Africa said the, you know, the greatest weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the minds of the oppressed. And I think to the extent that we can wage a struggle for a different consciousness that is not based on privilege and it's not based on getting along by going along. It's not based on individualism, you know, but it's based on collective solidarity.

And that actually disempowers the people that we're dealing with and threatens them in ways that, you know, they're, they're, they're freaked out. They understand better than we do the, the, the tenuous nature of their power. And, you know, the reason for fascism, the turn to fascism is that they want to try to intimidate people and, you know, you know, break people, people's solidarity up. And I think that, that, you know,

we need to understand there's a dialectic there and to the extent that we can create those connections between people, it actually disempowers them, the fascists and the state. I have a different perspective on the three-way fight. I think the three-way fight is versus the fascists, the self-declared fascists, and against the state and the capitalist, the bourgeoisie. They're not identical.

They have contradictions with each other. We can exploit those and drive wedges of our own. I think we have to find wedge issues that peel people off from their identification with the oppressor, with white supremacy and with imperialism. And, you know, pull people together and then who've been, you know, separated from that identification with the state and with white power. separated from that identification with the state and with white power and bring them into solidarity with you know the global majority of people who are struggling for you know survival and a better world does anyone have anything to plug besides the book yeah oh explicitly plug the books i don't think we did like uh like what where can you buy it what What's it called? Yeah, I can plug in and do the self-promotion. So the book is No Passe Ron,

Anti-Fascist Dispatches from a World in Crisis. So we all have chapters in it. I edited it. It's with AK Press, who listeners are probably familiar with. So you can get it at AK Press. I always recommend folks go to AK Press and buy it directly if they can,

but you can get it pretty much anywhere. And it's a hefty read. It's about 500 pages, about 25 chapters, and it really covers the gamut. Some of the stuff we talked about, some stuff we didn't get to. So it's a really good overview of some of the different conversations

happening in the anti-fascist movement and hopefully where it goes in the future. Yeah, I'll second that. I think the chapter in anti-fascism and the black middle scene was really fascinating hopefully where it goes in the future yeah I'll second that I think the chapter in anti-fascism of the black middle scene was really fascinating and you know worth the price of the book all by itself honestly the stuff about India I I I do want to plug two other books I've been involved in one is called the blue agave Revolution it's a self-published myself and uh uh also Blanco

indigenous political prisoner contact anti-racistactionsantiracist.org or email me antiracist underscore late yahoo.com. I was also involved with, although I did not edit or anything, but I contributed a lot of material to We Go Where They Go, which is from PM Press. It's the history of ARA. And it's chock full of incredible material about specificity. One of the things we didn't talk about in the areas involved in was Copwatch.

But, you know, just a lot of, you know, cultural material and other stuff there that's well worth reading. Well, I guess I'll chime in and say I have a lot of stuff out there right now. One of the things that you can look for with me is a documentary that was put out in 2018 called Alt-Right Age of Rage. It's somewhere online. I believe it's on Tubi right now. It was on Netflix. I found out that the reason why it's not on Netflix anymore is because Netflix has deemed it too political. But you can still find it out there. It's a really good primer on basically what it is we're fighting in this current time. We Don't Walk in Fear is the is the latest documentary that I've been involved with some students in Villanova University

wanted to do a documentary about me. And it's not exactly available to the public. What I've been you can probably find it at film festivals and things like that. But what I've been doing is showing it at various events that I've been invited to, whether it's some sort of speaking engagement or what have you. So it's only a half hour long. But if anybody is in a university or in a bookstore or whatever and would like me to come out and show the documentary to folks and talk about it later, please feel free to give me, hit me up over at our website, onepeoplesproject.com. We also have a news line that's idavox.com. Both are on threads and on IG. We also have also the last thing that I would like to hype is also in 2018, there was the movie Skin, where Mike Coulter, who played Luke Cage, and it's in the TV show Evil. He plays me. It's about a neo-Nazi, someone from the Vinlander Social Club, one of the Nazis and forces who got out thanks to myself and others.

And it's a beautiful story and it's been out since 2018. The short film is a different story. I'm not going to say too much about it because I you need to watch it. You can find it on YouTube or you can find a feature feature skin on Amazon Prime. But you can find the the final short film on YouTube. It actually won an Oscar in 2019. And I'm listed as a consulting producer. So I guess I have an Oscar. producer so i guess i have an oscar uh and that's about it i mean if if you want me to speak come to your uh colleges or whatever to um speak or show the documentary we don't walk in fear feel free to give me a ring i'll be happy to see you i love traveling like i mentioned one other thing actually i did we talked earlier i'm the intern general manager of kpfk 90.7 FM in Los Angeles. It's one of the

Pacifica radio stations. So it's kpfk.org. We have Stop LAPD Spying on the radio. It's Going Down on the radio. We have Society of Native Nations and American Indian Airwaves on the radio. We have La Raza radio. A lot of others. Very worthwhile.

It's kpfk.org. We're in a current membership drive for October. Anyone wants to join the station, they don't have to live in LA. And antiracist.org has about 35 years of turning the tide and a bunch of stuff actually from earlier. I put some of the stuff from Brother Reform, from being in sexism, but I worked on the 70s up there, including a letter from Michelle McGee, who was just recently released finally after, I think, 48 years in prison, a survivor of the Marin Courthouse Rebellion. I don't have anything to plug. I have a book that I'm working on getting representation for, but that's still a little

bit too early for me to plug. So I'll just maybe plug a little bit of what is continuing to happen in Charlottesville before we end. So some of you may not be aware that criminal cases are still being brought against the neo-Nazis who marched with the tiki torches. We have sort of successfully convinced the local prosecutor to do something about these fascists who have obviously terrorized the community and continue to do it in their other communities and whether or not you agree with that approach the community in Charlottesville and Alpemarle still needs that support and that witnessing as this all heads to trial this winter. We're expecting some renewed fascist attention.

So I'll just give a shout out for the community and ask for your awareness. Great. Well, thank you very much for your time, everyone. I think that was really instructive and interesting. And yeah, everyone should read the book. I read much of it before we started today it's great it's very interesting yeah thank you very much it could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for it visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio 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. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trejo, 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. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.

From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from.