It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 105

Episode Date: November 4, 2023

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You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. 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. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast

for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. 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. 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. CallZone Media. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here. And I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own

decisions. Welcome to It Could Happen Here's Spooky Week special presentation. I'm Garrison Davis, and earlier this year, I, along with my friend Elaine, attended the 2023 Oregon Ghost Conference in Seaside, Oregon. The past few years, I've had a growing interest in the occult, both for testing the limits of manufacturing my own weird experiences, as well as looking at it as a vector of political extremism. Sometimes it's useful to not just look on from the outside, but actually hop into other people's reality tunnels to gain a more intimate understanding of how they interact with our world. This was my primary motivation in attending the Ghost Conference, to learn what metaphysical beliefs drive the attendees and how said beliefs intersect with politics and our broader culture. My experiences at the conference ranged from ghost hunting to being hypnotized to learning of the Galactic Federation of Angels

and abortion-hungry demons. So with that in mind, I hope you enjoy my report back on the 2023 Oregon Ghost Conference. The first challenge we faced was simply getting to the town of Seaside. The first day of the conference, Friday, March 24th, coincided with a massive snowstorm along Highway 26 from Portland to Seaside. As we were driving on the treacherous mountain roads, a whiteout completely engulfed our view. When we emerged from the snowstorm, it was as if we'd gone through a portal transporting us from the mountainous forest to the small coastal town of Seaside, Oregon, into a world of ghosts, spirits, specters, and overpriced convention food. Seaside, as the name suggests, is a beachfront town situated in northern Oregon. It was founded in the late 1800s after railroad baron Ben Holliday built his summer vacation quote-unquote seaside house on the plot of land which is now Seaside's golf course.

It's always been a sort of tourist resort town that people from Portland travel to for beachfront entertainment. The conference is put on by a friendly high school art teacher and Oregon City Commissioner Rocky Smith. Smith has been doing ghost tours in Oregon since the mid-90s and has been putting on the Oregon Ghost Conference since 2012. Originally, it was held in Smith's hometown of Oregon City, an extremely haunted town often cited as the end of the Oregon Trail.

extremely haunted town, often cited as the end of the Oregon Trail. In 2016, the conference outgrew its Oregon City venue and relocated to Seaside. It's now the largest paranormal convention in the Pacific Northwest. The conference features ghost tours, classes, guest speakers, vendors, tarot readings, seances, ghost hunting, and paranormal investigations. The first big event I marked on my schedule was a ghost tour to get acquainted with Seaside's most haunted places. The tour began right outside the convention center. Conference director Rocky Smith led this one himself.

He filled us in on some old ghost conference lore. The Seaside Convention Center went through some extensive renovations right before the pandemic, but the first year the conference took place in the convention center, they had a class for kids where a group of children explored around the old building to find what they thought were the most haunted places. There was one hallway on the west side of the building where people routinely reported strange experiences. Back in 2016, a child at the conference claimed they saw a ghost down this hallway when exiting the bathroom. First, they just saw something out of the corner of their eye, and then when they turned to the left, they saw a woman in an old dress staring at them. At first, they weren't sure if the dress was long or short because they were too

scared to look down, but then they noticed that the woman didn't have any legs and was just floating in the air. Because of the new renovations, that hallway is no longer accessible. Rocky Smith remarked that he didn't know if that was intentional or not, but said that a lot of times when they redo buildings, they'll change the part of a building that used to be kind of scary and uncomfortable. So that hallway is now used for storage. Although one of the convention staff members claimed that a vacuum cleaner now held in the hallway is possessed. So there's that. The convention center was originally built in the 70s and doesn't really have a lot of notable

history. But when looking into hauntings or reports of ghosts, typically people try to learn the history of the building or plot of land in question. For Seaside, that's kind of hard because in 1912, four blocks of downtown Seaside burned to the ground, destroying most of the town's early history. The first stop on the ghost tour after we left the convention center was one of the reportedly most active sites

of ghostly activity in Seaside, the Bridge Tender Tavern. It was built in 1914, so just a couple years after the big fire. It used to be called the Pastime Bar, and then suffered its own fire, and was later renamed the Bridge Tender. The previous owners of the bar claimed that in the early 20th century it was a brothel. This is unconfirmed, but it relates to the tavern's most frequent ghost, the madam. Staff and patrons of the Bridge Tender regularly address the madam. If customers are being rude, it's said that the madam will spill drinks on them, you know,

stuff like that. The story I like the most about the madam has to do with the tavern's old CD jukebox. If a specific song played on the jukebox, something would go haywire. CDs would shoot out of it, or other weird things would reportedly happen in the bar. Patrons would put the song on repeat just to see what would happen. Eventually, the owners took the CD

with the song in question out of the jukebox so that people would just stop playing the song. But people are persistent bastards, so now people just play the song on their phones or the new digital jukebox in the bridge tender. Now, the theory is, is that the madam just really hates this song, so she gets mad when it plays and then causes some commotion. The song is Dancing Queen by ABBA. So if you want to go test this yourself, you can travel to the British Tender and play Dancing Queen and see what happens. Another highlight from the ghost tour was learning about the old Seasider Hotel at the end of the

promenade. It was purportedly haunted by multiple spirits, and it was believed that when the hotel was torn down in the 80s, the ghosts followed the hotel staff who got new jobs at a restaurant in downtown called Girdle's. New employees are said to have recognized apparitions from the hotel. And the restaurant gained a haunted coffee pot that would either move on its own or even fly across the room depending on who you would ask. I think it's nice that the ghosts seem to have a pretty good job relocation program. Something that most of us do not so good for them. As the ghost tour approached the beachfront promenade that snowstorm from the nearby mountains seemed to have caught up with us, and a dreary mix of rain and snow began to descend upon Seaside, as if some otherworldly force was trying to keep us from further exploring the hauntings of the town. So, as even my trench coat began soaking through, we took refuge back indoors.

The very first class my friend Elaine and I took at the conference was titled Ghost Detectives. Now, despite the silly-sounding name, it was probably the most grounded class throughout the entire weekend, certainly the one with the least amount of spiritual dogma. The class was focused on best practices for conducting paranormal investigations, specifically to ensure that the process and findings mirror the evidentiary standards set by the justice system for law enforcement investigations. The instructor, Dr. Nelson, is a supervisor for a crisis hotline with degrees in mental health, metaphysics, and fine arts. He described his methodology for investigating paranormal activity as quote-unquote applied science.

the least ghost hunter-esque in terms of advocating for strict investigative procedures and not just assuming that every spooky noise was evidence of a ghost. Most of his class was spent explaining very basic police investigative procedure, proper ways to collect evidence, having a chain of evidence, and not simply jumping to conclusions. It's a little foolhardy to assume every single spike on an electromagnetic field or EMF meter is actually a ghost trying to communicate. The other unique thing about his class was the emphasis on, you know, before pulling out your special ghost detecting tools, perhaps one should conduct thorough interviews and collect witness statements of the people reporting the phenomenon. Try to figure out what's going on in their life, maybe even look into their own mental health background as much as you're able to,

if they've had any sudden losses, past trauma, or history of paranormal experiences. Asking thorough questions can give a much fuller look at what someone might be going through. Asking thorough questions can give a much fuller look at what someone might be going through. Some examples of things to ask or look into were, if the phenomenon is related to a house, who owns the house? Who lives there? Who has experienced the event? What led to a paranormal investigator being called? What precipitated the phenomenon when it occurred? How often has it occurred? When was it first noticed? Was there just one random strange experience? Or is someone going through an event in their life that has made an experience suddenly stick out as strange? Has the person sought help? And has the phenomenon

been verified by more than one person? In terms of haunted houses, figuring out if there's any issues in the house is a great first step, because if there's a carbon monoxide leak, that could explain a great many things. Or if someone claims ghost ectoplasm is leaking through the ceiling and walls, perhaps the roof and water pipes should be inspected. Elaine and I did a little debrief after the conference, and they reminded me of another good tip gleaned from the ghost detective class. Well, I mean, my favorite was when he was talking about, like,

if you're using an EMF detector and one wall just keeps setting the EMF detector off, you might actually just need to call an electrician. Yes. Yeah, no, he definitely was one of the more reasonable people we we we spoke with in terms of you know he seems he seems pretty close to like consensus reality like he also he also is like a part of like the portland like ghostbusters cosplay group like like he's he's someone who like makes stuff with his hands he's very like he feels very grounded and like and like consensus reality a lot in a lot of aspects and this like, a very fun hobby that combines his two favorite things. Well, two of his favorite things, which was, like, Ghostbusters cosplay

and then also, like, paranormal investigation stuff. I'm not actually sure if the instructor for the paranormal investigation class really believed in ghosts or if he just had an interest in researching paranormal experiences. I don't think I believe in ghosts the same way literally everyone else at the conference did, but almost half of Americans do believe in ghosts, and around one-fifth are unsure if they're believers or not. The rate of belief in ghosts is about the same as belief in demons. But the interesting thing about that is,

although Americans' belief in organized religion has been decreasing, especially Christianity, belief in ghosts has been and still is on the rise. In fact, it's gone up by nearly 400% since the 1970s. These last three years, for really the first time ever, Gallup polls show that less than 50% of Americans say they belong to a religious congregation. Alan Downey is a computer scientist and professor at the Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts. His research suggests that the internet is a major cause, not just a correlating factor, in the decrease of religious affiliation. not just a correlating factor in the decrease of religious affiliation. And with the rise of the internet and reality TV, ghost hunting has become a relatively popular niche hobby.

But as religious belief has declined, belief in the afterlife has remained the same, about 70% according to the General Social Survey. Gallup's polling suggests that currently about three in four Americans have some sort of paranormal belief. Thomas Moen, a sociologist who's been conducting a study on religion and paranormal belief at Bowling Green State University, said that he's finding that, quote, atheists tend to report higher belief in the paranormal than religious folk, unquote. As to why so many Americans believe in ghosts, Moen says, quote, people are looking to other things or non-traditional things to answer

life's big questions that don't necessarily include religion, unquote. Throughout the conference, the word ghost, spirit, and entity were often used interchangeably. Each of those words kind of act as an umbrella term for a broad swath of ontological concepts. Ontology is the branch of metaphysics that relates to the nature of being. Depending who you ask, a ghost or a spirit can be anything from a wayward soul of a deceased human, some otherworldly energy, an evil presence, or even some sort of temporal loop. Historically, these terms have never been very clear either. They've evolved with the times. So Elaine and I prepared a brief history of ghosts to help give context for the rest of this episode and the next. The idea of contacting spirits or interacting with some

sort of spirit world obviously isn't new. Worldwide, people have traditions of interacting with ancestors, the deceased, and a variety of non-material beings. Ancestor veneration in China goes back at least 6,000 years, while the word shaman, relating to someone who works with spirits and in the spirit realm for healing and divination, comes from the Tungusic language of Siberia and has practices that are at least two millennia old. The term necromancy stems from a Greek word meaning divination of the dead.

In the Odyssey, Homer writes of Odysseus learning necromantic rituals to summon the shade or underworld ghost of Tiresias. While clerical necromantic traditions through the medieval period made a clear distinction between the souls of dead humans from other random spirits, that separation was not as ubiquitous among folk beliefs of people who claimed to interact with the spirit world. not as ubiquitous among folk beliefs of people who claimed to interact with the spirit world. Emma Wilby describes in her book Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits how into the early modern period, many cunning folk, basically low-level magicians and conjurers, had ghosts, fairies, and animal

spirit companions, all of which seemed to interact very similarly. The European concept of ghosts being linked to evil or demonic forces is a relatively new idea. It came to be as a byproduct of the Reformation and rejection of the Catholic Church. The Catholic doctrine of purgatory and limbo was rejected by the new Protestants, which caused some cosmological problems when it came to people's own experiences with ghosts and spirits. Catholics held that ghosts were basically spirits of dead humans on vacation from purgatory. But with Protestants rejecting purgatory for its lack of biblical basis, they defined some other way to explain the apparently fairly common phenomenon of ghostly encounters. A Swiss theologian named Ludwig Lavater attempted to solve this cosmological

problem in his 1569 book, Despectrus. I just picked up my copy a few weeks ago and have been going through it and it's a lot of fun. The full English title was, quote, of ghosts and spirits walking by night and of strange noises, cracks, and sundry forewarnings, which commonly happen before the death of men, great slaughters, and the alteration of kingdoms. Pretty, pretty cool stuff. Two of my favorite consecutive chapter titles are, quote, What hath followed this doctrine of the papists concerning the appearing of men's souls?

Followed by, Testimonies out of the word of God that neither the souls of the faithful nor infidels do walketh upon the earth after they are once parted from their bodies. So that kind of gives you a look at the writing style of this entire book. Despectris became massively influential. It was widely translated. Shakespeare was reading this as he was writing Hamlet. More importantly, the text took off across many Protestant circles and became the backbone of the cultural conception of ghosts

in the soon-to-be United States through such Protestant sects. Instead of ghosts being wayward specters of dead humans who escaped from purgatory, Lavater proposed a great many explanations for spectral experiences, including many non-mystical causes. He lists illness, insomnia, psychoactive substances, sleep paralysis, and grief as being common causes of ghostly hallucinations, an opinion now shared by many psychologists and doctors. Definitely the closest thing I've ever seen to a ghost was during a sleep paralysis episode. Lavater writes, quote, mel also cites pranksters as another common cause of perceived spectral activity. But most interestingly, in an attempt to bash the Catholics, the Protestant Lavater also lists low-level clergy trained in exorcistic magic to

summon demonic spirits in a necromantic fashion as possibly producing some supernatural phenomenon interpreted as ghosts. Now, Lavater does believe in spirits, but his thesis is that genuine ghosts, spirits, bumps in the night, those strange cracks and noises, which we now might refer to as poltergeists, are almost always demons that are torturing people. He wrote that devils can, quote, appear in different shapes, not only of those which are alive, but also of dead men, as well as appear in the likeness of a black dog, a horse, an owl, and also are able to bring incredible things to pass, unquote. Lavater did admit that in the rarest of cases, God may send angels or the spirit of a dead person to Earth for a very specific task. angels, or the spirit of a dead person to earth for a very specific task. But due to demons' innate trickery, there's really no way to trust that a ghostly presence may be from God, so he recommends that one should always assume that a specter is demonic. God may even allow demonic spirits to

appear as a form of punishment and a sign that one should repent for wrongdoing. Lavater's theologic work on ghosts were part of a larger Protestant Christian campaign to literally demonize all spirits, right? The only thing you can really talk to is Jesus or God. Anything else is probably just a demon. This is the version of ghosts that I grew up with as a kid. The idea that basically if a ghost appears, it's probably a demon trying to scare or trick you. This concept that spirits and spirit contact were predominantly demonic changed the nature of many witch trials, since when cunning folk listed their familiar ghosts or fairies, they were basically admitting to trafficking with demons. The next evolution in ghost lore came in the form of Immanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish theologian and scientist. In fact, he was one of the first to postulate the existence of the neuron. As Christians in Europe were dealing with this messy assortment of spirits that you really

shouldn't try and interact with, but if you do, you better make sure they're angels. Swedenborg was about to shake up this whole entire cosmology. In the 1740s, he started having, quote, intense mystical experiences, dreams, and visions, unquote, which led him to believe he was in contact with a spirit world and entities that he described as angels, demons, as well as other spirits, including ones from extraterrestrial planets. This is like one of the first guys to do the spirits I'm talking to are actually aliens, which is pretty cool. In 1785, he published a book titled Heaven and Hell, based on his experiences of the afterlife. According to Swedenborg, once humans on Earth pass on to the spiritual world, they enter an intermediate realm in between heaven and hell,

and eventually either become beautified into angels or twisted into demons, and then respectively pass on into either heaven or hell proper. While his depiction of spirits were obviously influenced by his Christian beliefs, the variety and breadth of his spirit world was broader than just the undead. Swedenborg's writing was one of the early influences on spiritualism, core tenets of which are there being multiple levels of the afterlife, and that an individual's awareness persists after death and may be contacted by the living. Which is pretty similar to what most people now would probably describe as ghosts if you were to ask them what a ghost is. While Swedenborg actually recommended

against attempting to contact spirits, he had a lasting influence on American spiritualism for creating an explicitly Christian-based system where spiritual entities worked as mediators between humans and God. Coming out of upstate New York in the decade before the Civil War, spiritualism brought together aspects of the radical Quakers with Swedenborg's idea of spirit intermediaries who could bring messages to the living. The spiritualist movement formally began on March 31st, 1848, when the Fox Sisters made their fraudulent claim of contacting a spirit who could communicate through knocking noises. Starting initially in Quaker communities, mediumship and seances immediately took off across the United States, including the White House, as the Lincolns were grieving the loss

of their son. Showing that interest in ghosts and seances were not just a parlor trick for commoners, they were also a parlor trick for the president. The fact that the rise of spiritualism coincided with Civil War deaths and gruesome battlefield photography certainly helped fuel the drive to communicate and receive messages from the recently deceased. Due to its Quaker roots, the spiritualist movement was abolitionist, and its belief in an egalitarian afterlife prompted its members to advocate for social change here on Earth. Even the messages that mediums claimed to relay from the dead were often progressive. In 1852, the medium Isaac Post published a collection of messages he supposedly channeled

from such people as Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson, and other famous figures who urged the living to push for radical social change. The book entitled Voices from the Spirit World included a passage claiming that the ghost of George Washington became an abolitionist after death. And I don't know, the idea that the ghost of Jefferson and Washington suddenly became abolitionists after death, although I understand its utility at the time for trying to push people towards becoming an abolitionist, it does kind of read as a little bit gross considering how that was very much not their opinions when they were actually living humans. New to the spiritualist development of ghosts was not just the idea of regular spiritual contact, but evidence that the

spirit world could be shown to the physical scientific world. Basically, the precursor to modern ghost hunting emerged between the Civil War and World War I. In London, multiple ghost clubs and psychic or paranormal research groups were founded in the mid to late 1800s, aimed at scientifically investigating ghosts, hauntings, and the claims of spiritualists. Similar groups for investigation opened up in the United States. And around this time is also when we start to see the use of technology to assist in capturing alleged evidence of ghosts. In 1861, amateur photographer William Mumler was developing a self-portrait when a shattery apparition of a young girl appeared on his developing plate. Mumler knew this to be a simple mistake of

reusing an improperly scrubbed photography plate, what we now would call a double exposure. But upon showing this photo to a very excited spiritualist friend of his, he realized the lucrative opportunity that lay before him. Thus was born the business of spirit photography. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, of Sherlock Holmes fame, was a fan of spirit photography. He became a member of London's Society for Psychical Research and eventually became a spiritualist himself. The recent inventions of the phonograph and telephone were hoped to be utilized to create evidence of spirit contact. According to Ghosts of Future's Past, Spiritualism and Cultural Politics of 19th Century America by Molly McGarry, Thomas Watson, famed assistant to Alexander Graham Bell,

experimented with the telephone as an aid to spiritual communication. Decades later, Thomas Edison sought to develop a quote-unquote spirit phone, telling American Magazine in 1920, quote, I've been at work for some time building an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us, not by occult, mystifying, mysterious, or weird means, but by scientific methods, unquote. Edison's spirit phone never really turned out, and we have very little information about it. It seems Edison thought that elements of our personality or memories existed in a form of like almost particles that could be measured and

amplified by vibrational sensing equipment, but not much is recorded of his actual attempts to build this spirit phone. By the end of the 19th century, newspapers reported on ghosts and hauntings, along with other regular news. A 2018 New York Times article on the paper's own history of reporting on ghosts said, quote, Paulette D. Kilmer, a cultural historian and professor at the University of Toledo, scoured the paper's archives. Her research turned up nearly 300 ghost stories in the Times between the founding of the paper in 1851 and the early 20th century, unquote. While news coverage of hauntings dropped off during the 20th century, the ways in which people attempted to understand ghosts only got more complex. The mediumship of the spiritualists has combined

with the ever-growing field of paranormal research, new age beliefs, and pop culture fascination with poltergeist spirits and UFOs, along with the resurgence of evangelical Protestantism into an overlap of conflicting ghost cosmologies and what it means to contact the spirit world. To cap off our first night at the conference, we signed up for our very own ghost investigation at the Starry Night Inn, a quaint little house just a short walk

from the convention center. We got to the inn right before midnight on Friday evening. Before we ventured out on our hunt for ghosts, we were split into two groups of five, with one starting in the inn and the other in the outdoor bathhouse. We got acquainted with the ghost hunting tools we were going to be using. First, we were given a popular EMF meter, routinely used for ghost detection, called a K2 meter. It's supposed to measure electromagnetic fields and features colorful light-up LEDs. I'm going to read a quote from the lead investigator we were paired with. If a K2 meter spikes without reason, if it's not put next to anything powerfully electrical,

then we can consider that paranormal. Consider that a spirit. When our body dies, we leave behind our energies. Our energies is EMF, and this starts to pick it up, unquote. Among the paranormal skeptic community, the K2 meter is notorious for giving off false positives, with its unshielded sensors able to be set off by cell phones, radio waves, and even nearby batteries. The other device we were using is something called a REM pod. Essentially, it's a small, horrible-sounding junior theremin with some LEDs attached. An antenna creates an electromagnetic field. If something conductive gets close to the antenna, it forms a capacitor between the object and the antenna, and the pod will light up and make some noise. Or, if its electromagnetic field gets disrupted by something like, say, cellular or radio frequencies, it will

also make a horrible beeping noise and light up. I'm going to read another quote from our lead investigator, quote, when our energies are around, the pod will react to any energy field that comes close to its antenna. So as we invite spirits in, we can tell them how they can interact. And we can tell them, hey, if you walk over to that light over there and touch it, it'll light up, unquote. There is something funny to me about telling a ghost to walk over somewhere. Just a little, it's just a little amusing. My group of five intrepid investigators were sent out to the bathhouse, which we were told used to be a carriage house and horse stables that got damaged in the 1912 seaside fire. The lead investigator started by informing any possible spirits that we do not mean them, quote, harm or intrusion, and that we would just, quote, like to talk. or intrusion and that we would just, quote, like to talk. He then informed any ghosts in the vicinity that if they, quote unquote, walk up to any of the devices with LED lights and, quote

unquote, touch it, it will light up. Quote, go ahead, use your energy and touch all those lights for me. That way we know know you're here. Unquote. Potential specters were also informed that if they speak into an electronic recording device, us corporeal humans could hear their voice when we play back the audio. This is called EVP, or electronic voice phenomenon. More on that on the next episode. The lead investigator then asked any nearby ghosts what their favorite food is, which seems like a cruel question to ask a ghost because they can't eat anymore. Anyway, a barrage of questions then flooded out. Can you tell us your name? What are you wearing?

Who is the president? Not exactly all things I would ask a spectral anomaly if I was given the opportunity. But after a few minutes of silence, the REM pod started to light up very faintly. The lead investigator starts talking to the presumed ghost and suggests that they play a game to find out what the ghost's name is. This is how it works. Someone recites the alphabet, and if the REM pod lights up on any of the letters, that means the letter is in the ghost's name. We first got the letter N, and then the letters O and D. Then I started going through the alphabet, and it lit up on the letter I. Then it lit up on the letter I again, and then the letter R. At this point, the lead investigator decided that the ghost's name was Ronnie. As we were about to leave the bathhouse, someone who worked at the inn came in and told us

that there was a stable man with the last name Norris who died in the fire. So now the ghost's name became Norris. Next, we moved to the basement. One person in our group was a little spooked and elected to stay outside. None of the REM pods or anything lit up in the basement, but the person from the inn, the one who told us about Norris, joined us in the basement. When down there, they said they saw a ghost that they were familiar with named Cassandra. They then turned to me and said that Cassandra likes me. Cassandra was reportedly trying to give me a hug and said that she wishes me, quote, all the well-beings in the world, unquote. Now, Cassandra was also apparently trying to tell me about a Grandpa John, which I don't have. So if any of you have a Grandpa John who needs to tell me something,

just let me know. All right. Back inside the house part of the inn, and we're about to go to our upstairs. We just went down into the basement and just got out of there. Yeah. Once back inside the inn, we went into the upstairs bedrooms. People set up their EMF detectors.

But there was also some new equipment. One of the rooms had a security camera and a grid projector to record any irregular shadows. And I was given a spirit box. A spirit box is a handheld radio tuner that sweeps through AM or FM frequencies at a high rate. You mostly hear a sort of grating, staticky white noise, with small bits of words or music slipping through from radio stations. I guess it's sort of the modern incarnation of the spirit phone. The idea is that ghosts can somehow

manipulate the radio waves to speak complete words or sentences as the box is cycling between frequencies. Basically, spirit boxes are supposed to act as an electronic radio medium for spirits to communicate. The lead investigator thought that the spirit box was telling us to leave, but words weren't really clear in my opinion. For example, here is a clip in question. In the room, there was also some flickering lights and high EMF ratings, which mostly just got me concerned for this bedroom's electrical wiring. The second half of the investigation was pretty uneventful, and around 2am we called it a night, and I recorded a little debrief on our way back to the hotel. try to like the way they interpret electoral readings as you would a conversation and they

they assert their reality on it being like if this happens this means you say yes right so then so then the absence of the thing also becomes an answer it's it's it is a very interesting process of people like crafting their own reality as things are happening no it was definitely them crafting their own reality but but also I'm like, do I think that there's entities? Probably? Some of it's, like, interesting, but there's still a whole bunch of points where you, like, make a decision to be like,

this is the thing that I heard. Right? Because, like, even when they were doing the name game thing, a lot of times the light would light up and they would, like, still kind of keep moving on sometimes. Like, also, yeah, like, there was an F and an I that it totally went off for that i kept being like what about the f and the i yeah absolutely so there's a whole bunch of very very peculiar things that that have that like go into crafting what the idea of of reality is going to be like stop making a thing then making

a thing and then it starts again you're like no, you're not supposed to do that. And it's like, it's a very bizarre process to watch. When putting together these two episodes this last October, Elaine and I once again conversed to share our thoughts on our first ghost hunting experience.

Okay, now that it has been over six months since you and I were at the Orc and Ghost conference, I'm curious to see how our debrief now may kind of differ or be expanded upon from our debrief literally minutes after we left this investigation at the Starry Night Inn. And this day was interesting because we had the ghost detective class, like right before this investigation, we were able to have these two, these two kind of ideas of what a ghost investigation looks like kind of play off each other, which I think led to a pretty fun holistic experience in terms of the many kind of diversity of investigators that were at this event. I think just the most notable thing was they didn't do a single thing that the forensic ghost hunting class suggested. Just like literally, we could have gone down the list of every single thing that the forensic ghost hunting class suggested to do. And not one of those was done. Completely the opposite record keeping

of what phenomenon occurred did not happen logging any data yeah did not happen investigation of the structures yeah did not happen um doing a history of the structure didn't occur uh the only interviews we had with someone was the person who said they were a medium who lived there yeah even just like questions like how long have you seen things here didn't occur no it was super interesting just in terms of how like the ghost hunt at the end was was literally just the exact opposite of all of the sorts of uh like procedures that the ghost detective class was trying to lay out, which we attended just like literally hours prior? Well, I think one thing that you can really see between the how to do a ghost investigation class and then the ghost investigation itself is the how to do a

paranormal investigation class doesn't assume you know what you're investigating. And so it really is a lot about doing, you know, background talks with people, like talking to sources, what phenomena. It's not assuming that there was anything paranormal in the first place. And it's an investigation of whether or not something paranormal has occurred. And when you go to the ghost hunt, specifically the ghost hunt that we went to, everyone there was assuming that paranormal things were occurring, just as a baseline. They were interpreting readings from their specialized ghost hunting equipment as proof of communication with some kind of paranormal force. There's a lot of implicit assumptions made. First off, if you start talking to phenomenon,

you're assuming that there's phenomenon, you're assuming the phenomenon can hear you, you're assuming the phenomenon wants to interact with you. And if you say, if you can hear me touch the light, all of those are very implicit assumptions. It's not investigating what phenomenon there is, you've already framed what you expect the encounter to be, and how whatever you're encountering will interact with a whole mess of like ideas. Yeah, my favorite thing about that from the experience at the at the Starry Night Inn is like, we were basically with this like middle aged man who just kept yelling at any like prospective ghosts that were around the vicinity. And like, why would a ghost

want to follow the commands of like a middle aged man? I mean, I didn't want to follow the commands when he would say everyone needs to be quiet. I wanted to like start yelling or muttering just out of sheer obstinance because of the way that he was instructing things. I can't imagine a spiritual entity, if it was a ghost, even the way he's conceiving of it would somehow not. Yeah. I have this little exchange laid out here where he was addressing what I guess he assumed was a ghost, saying, quote,

make the lights stop. Back away, back away. Good, good. Now get closer. Thank you, thank you. One more time, get closer. Alright, now make the lights stop. Ah, I didn't tell you to get closer. Back away, back away. Back away. Good, okay, now make the light stop. I didn't tell you to get closer. Back away, back away, back away.

Okay, now get closer. Good, good. The only thing that was changing throughout that back and forth was that occasionally a little light would kind of go on. And that was it, right? it right like but he's able to weave this whole story in between this light going on by saying back up and then the light turns off and then saying okay now come closer you wait like 10 15 seconds the light turns on he's able it's it's crafting this whole like timeline of of this ghost like doing this thing when really this is just a flickering light like that but through the way that he has this like uh this like commanding, it's making it as if the ghost is like following these instructions and then being like rewarded for following these instructions by saying like, good, good, good, good.

Or if they don't follow instructions, then the ghost is like scolded. So it's it's just a lot of a lot of interactions like that. I mean, I've gone through the same narration when I stare at a candle flame, like a little bit high. But it doesn't mean that the candle is necessarily responding to me. Both activity on the REM pod and the lack of activity are taken as a sign of spirit communication. Questions will be framed as, if you want us to leave you alone, light up. So if nothing happens, that itself is taken as an actionable answer Whoever is leading the quote-unquote investigation gets to either intentionally or even unintentionally Craft the meaning of the experience based on how the questions are framed, when questions are asked

And how the group responds based on the activity, or lack thereof, of the EMF devices. The REM pods often go off erratically or in seemingly random intervals. But when their activity happens after someone just asked 20 questions, it's assumed to be related to whatever the most recent line of inquiry was. It all operates on correlation versus causation, with people mostly jumping on the latter. No matter when the pods light up,

the results can be turned into a meaningful sign if the investigator is talking frequently enough. These sorts of ghost hunts are primarily a form of entertainment. It's a novel experience you can have with your friends and family to have a fun time together over the course of a few hours and maybe get a little spooked. I wasn't expecting a rigorous scientific investigation at midnight in Seaside, Oregon, nor do I think that's even a useful way of getting at the heart of the phenomenon. Rather than viewing ghost hunts as objective inquiries into paranormal

activity, I think for most people they operate more as a way of inducing paranormal experiences, the same way occultism seeks to induce mystical experiences and religion strives for a connection with God. All of these are practices of constructing meaning and finding patterns, and that's not to discount them. They only are a problem when they become possessed by an evil spirit, and how abortions and the internet are opening up portals in our world to demonic forces.

See you on the other side. 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 that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. 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. Hey, I'm Jack Peace 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. Blacklit 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. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has 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 from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists

to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things

that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God, things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here's Spooky Week special presentation, Ghost in the Machine, a first-person account of the 2023 Oregon Ghost Conference. I'm Garrison Davis. In the last

episode, I introduced you to the hauntings of Seaside and the first day of the conference. But now descending into the subsequent two days, we're going to get into a lot more classes and events that started to reveal the cultural underpinnings of the Ghost Conference attendees. attendees. The cost of entry for the conference was pretty low, but every class or ghost hunt was an additional fee, with classes ranging from 15 to 25 bucks each, and the ghost investigations a lofty 35 dollars per ticket. So I had to pick and choose my classes carefully. There were a lot of classes with the word energy in the title, I mostly avoided those, but the class topics ranged from the afterlife to connecting with spirits, reiki, crystals, tarot, mediumship, and psychic abilities. There were a few classes on witchcraft and occult magic, but that was definitely not the general vibe of the conference or most attendees. In fact, there was a lot of hostility to ritual magic and esoteric practices throughout the conference,

from the more new-agey, energy-working speakers, mostly on the basis that witchcraft is linked to dark forces. Just because someone operates on a form of magical thinking does not mean that they take kindly to arcane practices, a case in point to the historical witch hunts led by the Christians. The love and light New Age psychics, along with the paranormal investigator types, made up the majority of both attendees and class instructors. On Saturday morning, while my friend Elaine was doing a hypnosis class, I took a really fun class on how to learn remote viewing. The instructor was a very jovial woman, and it was her opinion that remote viewing is just a skill that can be trained, not linked to any

innate psychic powers. With just a bit more practice, I'll be blowing up goats with my mind in no time. I snuck in towards the end of the hypnotism class, just in time for the group hypnosis session, where I ended up astral projecting into a Portland anarchist book fair. Taking classes offered an intimate look at each presenter's own unique view of reality. Almost everyone at the conference was operating on their own complete cosmology of how ghosts or paranormal entities work. There's two classes I want to focus on. Each had very different class descriptions, but ended up piggybacking off each other in some really interesting ways.

The first one was titled The Power of Entity Extraction. The instructor was a blonde white woman who referred to herself as a quote-unquote shamanic practitioner The class was about how, quote, unresolved trauma can be an invitation to etheric hitchhikers and how entities mimic signs of mental illness and change behavior, unquote The other class was titled The Warrior Angel Within You. It sought to help you find out if you secretly had the soul of a warrior angel, spoiler, everyone in the class did, and it promised to teach you how to activate your

connection between yourself and your angelic consciousness to unlock your own angel powers. self and your angelic consciousness to unlock your own angel powers. So while having many operational differences, the warrior angel class and the entity extraction class were both very set in their own unique ontologies, and in order for their respective operative metaphysics to work, they needed to be extremely dogmatic about their own ontology. Both instructors also had a very similar story of some past trauma leading to a mystical encounter, which then awakened some spiritual insight and hidden power. For the entity extraction class, it was, quote, I was a very sickly kid, I had all these things that were wrong with me, and then I realized I had dark entities attached to me, but I could learn how to extract and remove them myself. Versus the warrior angel class,

the person's backstory was, quote, when I was 19 years old, I got into a bad motorcycle accident. I was clinically dead for two minutes, received a brain injury, and then I started seeing angels, unquote. Both women's personal journeys seemed like they helped them deal with their own traumas. In the case of the shamanic practitioner woman, she regained her health and now has a seemingly successful life and business of removing entities and quote-unquote soul coaching. The warrior angel woman is a nurse and finds time to write a lot of books, all while murdering demons and expelling the forces of darkness. While only the entity extraction class billed itself as having to do with entity removal, both classes were incredibly focused on the idea that there are malevolent spirits or demons everywhere. In the entity class, these dark entities are out looking for people with quote-unquote soul fractures due to past trauma, and are just like waiting to leap onto people and dig themselves into their minds.

Similarly, according to the warrior angel class, demons are everywhere. Demons live around and inside people, but are only visible to those with angelic sight. The entity extraction class laid out two main types of beings, lost or benign entities that are just trapped in the third dimension, and as they're trying to pass on to quote-unquote the light, they end up attaching onto a human, versus the overtly dark or demonic entities which seek to feed off people's pain and suffering. We learned that benign entities can just be lost human souls. For instance, if someone is taking a lot of medication or is going through chemotherapy, when they die, their soul won't be able to cross over to the light and it'll become lost, according at least

to this shamanic practitioner. She claimed to be trained in a special technique to remove entities. It involves, quote, etherically locking your wrists to draw the entity into a double terminated crystal, at which point it can then be sent into the light, unquote. Since the shaman woman wasn't actually offering ways for other people to protect themselves from entities, the only thing she had to offer was her own worldview that leans towards a paranoia where dark spirits are waiting to latch on and cause mental illness.

She talked about how a man with mood fluctuations paid her money to remove a quote-unquote nine-foot minotaur that was attached to him. At least in the warrior angel system, you could eventually gain some form of agency when you merge with your warrior angel, but then you would spend the rest of your life recognizing demons in human form and working with the legion of light to banish them to the darkness. Whereas in the entity extraction class, the most you could do was just be proactive by quote-unquote learning ways to identify possible attachments and how your lifestyle could be an open invitation to host the unwanted.

Though she identified herself as a shamanic practitioner, she didn't believe you could actually work with spirits. When people asked her about their own helper entities that they work with, she said that you can never know if a helper spirit is actually intending to assist you. That is, except if you ask an entity if it's of the light, it has to answer truthfully, as this was a quote-unquote universal law. That was the phrase she used. It's a quote-unquote universal law that if you ask an entity if it's of the light, it has to answer truthfully. law? Who enforces this universal law? If there's a universal police force making sure that the entities are following these rules, none of that was explained. But this is a universal law. So that is a tip for any of you listeners. If you ever meet an entity that you think might be a little bit sketchy, just ask if it's of the light. It has to answer truthfully. So despite this

universal law business, she still discouraged people from trying to work with entities in general. She said that if an entity is trying to help you, it's probably of the dark, and working with any spirits at all will make you more susceptible to entity attachment. Which is definitely weird, because she did very specifically try to claim some sort of shamanic lineage. And this blanket hostility to spirit really doesn't follow the way most shamanic practices work. So I did some digging and it turns out she got her training from a controversial quote-unquote shamanism school called The Four Winds. Which repackages New Age spirituality as quote-unquote neo-shamanism. So even though you shouldn't be in contact with really any spirits, according to the shamanic practitioner,

in the warrior angel class, we learned that if you have the soul of a warrior angel, you can quote-unquote communicate with ghosts, angels, God, the Galactic Federation Council, and the Council of Elders. Now, I know you're probably wondering what the Galactic Federation Council is, because I was too. We never found out. We never really got a clue. You had to buy the books for that one. The warrior angel instructor claimed to have her own angelic hierarchy

that wasn't based on any other system, just her own experiences. A warrior angel is a, quote, special kind of angel fully trained in the art of war by the Legion of Light, an elite team of demon slayers, unquote. And no, I don't think she has seen the anime. What makes the warrior angel special is that it can be incarnated in the physical form as a human, but only archangels can kill or banish demons back to the dark realm. The warrior angel can scare demons away with their angelic presence, but they can also act as spies to inform the Legion of Light as to demon whereabouts. Each warrior angel has special abilities, usually healing or manifesting,

as well as the ability to create infinity orbs, which can be used for protection or to trap a demon inside and send it back to the dark realm within the orb. Now, you're probably wondering, what's an infinity orb? We don't know either. We never got a good explanation for what an infinity orb is, how to make one, how they work. It was very vague. I guess that is also in the book, along with the Galactic Federation Council. There are apparently over 3 million warrior angels walking the earth today, most of which have been sent to earth in the past 200 years because, quote, the darkness has spread over the earth, and in the last 200 years, it's really gotten worse,

unquote. Now, thankfully, I, along with everyone else in the class, was informed that I'm actually one of these three million warrior angels. And I was told my angel name, Aramon, whose specialty is communication. Oh, fucking fuck. Okay. Okay. Apparently, things on Earth have gotten worse enough that, under the command of God, the Legion of Light has resorted to killing demons more often because more and more of them just keep coming back from the Dark Realm. The lady running the class told us that she wasn't just a warrior angel. She was actually the Archangel Ariel.

As the Angel Ariel, she said that she's killed 4,000 demons in the past six years. Something that's a little bit disturbing about this is that she also explained that in a past life, Ariel got in trouble with God because when she was out killing demons, she actually was also killing the human host of the demon. So the fact that this person whose job is a nurse is claimed to have killed 4,000 demons in the past six years is maybe a little bit concerning. Someone should look into that. The whole warrior angel cosmology was very rooted in Christian millenarianism, an apocalyptic end times theology where social and political crises accelerate, leading to a holy war between good and evil, resulting in the triumph of good and the establishing of a 1000 year kingdom of God on earth before the final judgment.

of a 1,000-year kingdom of God on earth before the final judgment. One of the darkest parts of the whole weekend for me was that there was this one woman who appeared to be in her 20s who was very obviously dealing with some sort of problem in her life. She talked with this warrior angel woman for four hours. It was a one-hour class. We then had a break. We went to another class and then attended the second class, which was also an hour. Throughout that entire time, this obviously depressed young woman who was dealing with something was talking with this person about the warrior angel thing. And that just felt extremely exploitative. And it was one of the things that actually just made me feel the most bad about the entire ghost conference.

The entity extraction class didn't have any information on how we can remove an entity, and aside from the second hour in which the instructor came and told us our angel names, the warrior angel class wasn't actually about how to connect with your angel. We never learned how to connect with your angel we never learned how to make infinity orbs instead both classes were just pitches for the books and services of the people teaching them and the class was a chance for them to weave the story of their particular worldview and sell it to the class attendees saturday night elaine and I signed up for another ghost investigation. With one already under our belt, we felt better prepared to yell at blinking lights and converse with the dead. I actually really liked this second investigation. It was led by a ghost hunting team from Astoria, Oregon, and this time it was to take place at the Old Masonic Temple in Seaside.

The setting was a big part of what upped the cool factor. The building had only been vacant since 2017, but the harsh coastal weather of northern Oregon had not been kind to the structure. All right, it is Saturday night, March 25th. We are inside the Old Masonic Lodge in Seaside, Oregon. Right now, I'm just walking into the big kind of ceremony ritual performance room. Once we got to the main room upstairs, people began setting up REM pods and what are essentially motion-activated light-up cat toys. The idea is if some energetic force is passing through, it would light up the little cat ball. As about 30 people from the ghost hunt crammed into the lodge, the REM pods started going off like crazy.

The investigators had to repeatedly remind the ghosts to only touch the lights when answering a question. There was a male medium present at this ghost hunt, and he remarked as to why there was seemingly so much activity. Quote, some spirits aren't happy about the women being here, unquote. At this point, some of the investigators got really combative with potential spirits after the woman line from the medium. One line was, quote, do you want to know why there are all these females here? If so, give us a green light, unquote. This is where the ghost hunt basically turned into a weird interrogation. Once again, it became a contest of injecting meaning during these little intervals of time in between when the lights flicker. I should ask the ghost if they, do you think trans people are valid?

And then if it lights up, that means it's yes. Breaking news from Seaside, Oregon. Ghosts do believe that trans people are valid, although they do not understand neo-pronouns. Look, I just report the news. At this point, we changed things up from the regular arguing with blinking lights. We did an experiment with the radio frequency sweeping spirit box using what's called the Estes method. It combines the spirit box with sensory deprivation to reduce the amount of external influence on the person listening to the spirit box. One personvation to reduce the amount of external influence on the person

listening to the spirit box. One person puts on a blindfold and noise-canceling headphones plugged into the spirit box so they can speak aloud any words coming through the box without hearing the questions or comments from other investigators. Obviously, the conversation doesn't always line up, but there are often moments where it does form a fun synchronicity. I volunteered to try out being the human speaker for the spirit box. Although I only did it for a few minutes, pretty quickly I was able to get into a sort of meditative trance state. blindfold and noise-canceling headphones pumping radio static directly into your ears, is that in the moment, you have no idea what's going on, as intended. You only have access to one side of the conversation, and if you get into a meditative state, it's hard to even remember

what you've been saying. So I only got to hear the full conversation by listening to my recording when putting together these episodes. Unfortunately, I can't play most of that recording because there's too many random people's voices, but I'll narrate a few brief exchanges. One of the first things that came through was the word cold. People replied, yeah, it's freezing in here. Can you feel cold? yeah, it's freezing in here. Can you feel cold? I then replied, I don't. Followed by, I exist. After this, apparently someone was leaving the room to go downstairs, and I said, don't go. I can't follow. Off station. People then asked the ghost if they knew what the building was used for. People then asked the ghost if they knew what the building was used for. I replied,

People then asked, I replied, A short time later, I heard, Stop following. You too. We've had a cut. I'll play the audio of the very final thing I said. I can't do anymore. Stop. You're welcome.

Do you want me to stop now? Yeah. So that's when I decided it would be a good time to take off the headphones. We had a few other exchanges when I was listening to the spirit box, but it's all kind of in that style. Apparently, when I was hooked up to the spirit box, the REM pods in the other room were going absolutely berserk. Both of these just have been going off. Like, now they're being quiet. They've just been doing that.

Interesting. For the entire time. Not entirely surprising, considering the amount of radio waves being pumped around the lodge. But after spending about an hour upstairs, the group made their way to the lower, more recreational floor of the temple. All right, we are going downstairs now after going through the entire upstairs, mainly this lodge room and then like the change rooms where they would store their robes and shit. To close off the night, the lead investigators pulled out an old Panasonic digital voice recorder to try and capture any electronic ghost voices that might be trying to communicate. A woman turned

on the voice-activated recording device and asked, quote, if any spirits want to communicate, please say a word or make a sound, unquote. And then, when the recording was played back, after the investigators spoke, a large growl was heard on the recording. She then asked if the spirit is male, and when played back, there was another growl seemingly in response.

and when played back, there was another growl seemingly in response. More people were starting to theorize that the ghosts of the Masonic Lodge were angry that there were women in the building. A guy then asked some questions into the voice recorder, and there was no response from any ghosts in the recording. A woman tried asking some of the same questions, quote, Is there an issue about money spirits? A woman tried asking some of the same questions, quote, The first query alluded no response, but after the second question, another growl was heard. At the time, this was by far the most interesting result of the two ghost investigations we went on. To everyone there, they captured evidence of a genuine ghost in that machine.

There is an interesting contrast between the progressive ghosts of the spiritualists and their egalitarian afterlife versus the misogynistic ghosts from the Freemason Lodge. It's unclear if whatever afterlife the Freemason ghosts are in is also home to the abolitionist George Washington. Besides the classes and ghost hunts, there were also free lectures on the main stage of the convention center. Going into the conference, the talk I was most excited about was titled AI Necronomics. This is a topic I've been pretty interested in the past few years. Deepfake learning algorithms have been steadily improving, and with the help of skilled VFX artists, Algorithms have been steadily improving, and with the help of skilled VFX artists,

AI is able to pretty accurately replicate the voice and facial movements of dead celebrities. But necromantic technology isn't limited to resurrecting someone's appearance. Some AIs are trained to replicate people's expressive thoughts. There's a website called The Infinite Conversation. The website plays a never-ending AI-generated conversation between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Zizek. in a wax museum, that what I saw was something occasionally hideous, but hollow, like horror wax figures. But yes, it did touch me. Every day, more of the conversation is generated by an AI language model trained on interviews and the writings of each respective speaker. Each time you load the website, it reminds you that everything you hear is just the hallucinations of a slab of

silicon. A couple months before the Ghost Conference, I was at the Consumer Electronics Showcase in Las Vegas. There was this booth in the US government-sponsored section of the event for a company called MindBank AI your digital twin will ask you questions about how you're feeling and what you're thinking about, and your answers will be used to make a more accurate digital copy of yourself. According to MindBank's website, your digital twin will, quote, learn to think like you by analyzing your answers, unquote. Their CEO claims that this process will eventually help him achieve immortality. The current model of this product is being billed as a therapy app, where the user talks to their digital twin as you would a therapist, and the app responds to your data inputs with quote-unquote valuable insight into each

answer to understand how your mind works using cutting-edge cognitive and psycholinguistic analysis. But MindBank's horizons are far beyond a fraught therapy app. The real goal is to make autonomous digital replicas of people to live on the internet. A future use case for this technology is what MindBank calls a knowledge transfer, marketed to businesses to create digital copies of their employees. Quote, scale your best employees, transfer years of expertise and company data that is locked inside your employee's mind through a guided personal digital twin, unquote. MindBank is only one of many companies trying to build this technology. At Amazon's AI and Emergent Technology Conference last year, they unveiled plans to add custom voices to Alexa Echo devices.

With an audio sample of less than a minute, AI is able to reconstruct the voice of dead relatives to talk through an Alexa machine. In the presentation, the head scientist of Alexa AI gave an example of a kid asking Alexa for his grandma, who recently died of COVID, to read him The Wizard of Oz. Amazon's head AI scientist said, quote, while AI can't eliminate that pain of loss, it can definitely make their memories last, unquote, and said that their necromantic AI feature, quote, enables lasting personal relationships, unquote, with deceased loved ones. To circle back to the ghost conference, I was really excited about this AI necromancy panel

for the reasons that I just all explained. But as the panel started, speaker a guy named Clyde Lewis sounded vaguely familiar and although I didn't initially recognize his name I soon realized that he was a right-wing conspiracy radio talk show host that I used to listen to as a kid and that the panel was not going to be about the very real necromantic AI technology that's being developed, but instead was going to be a conservative Christian screed by a discount Alex Jones about how due to the immense amount of evil in the world, demons are now taking up residence in the internet. Clyde did start by briefly talking about how the internet is, quote,

taking the souls of humans, unquote, because we are uploading information about ourselves and the internet can create autonomous living beings from that data. He also believed that AI language models like ChatGPT and Google's Lambda are living sentient beings trapped within a computer matrix. We're opening our minds to the spirit world. And through electronics, we may be able to break the veil. So we have the GPT that has life. We have the guy from Google that says that there's life in computers, that there may be a ghost in the machine. But we're looking at something that is unexplored and unpredictable. We have scientists discrediting and saying, well, you're not going to tell me that there are ghosts in your computer. You're not going to tell me that you're going to get a Skype call from a ghost.

Oh, I am telling you that. I'm telling you that it's possible. Clyde's main idea was that there are ghosts and demons that live in the internet. Demons have a way to enter the internet through some sort of portal and then exist in cyberspace. Clyde proposed that when AIs generate information, that can open up a space for outside entities to enter into the internet, while also claiming that AI itself is capable of generating unique entities that are being spawned on the internet and are essentially existing as an internet cryptid. What we see is the necromancy itself manifesting exponentially through electronics. He explained that when we are interacting with computer programs,

we are actually, quote, interacting with a spirit within that program, an electronic force taken from the collective spiritual makeup of humanity, unquote. We can use AI to conjure our various beasts, our monsters from the id, that's the inner demon. unquote. to conjure the dead. So it all works in a strange quantum entanglement sort of way. And we give up our souls willingly on the internet. We don't care because it's a tool that we use and we can't separate ourselves from it. But no one throws out a warning that conjuring can happen in the push of a button or the striking of a return key. Conjuring can happen in the push of a button or the striking of a return key. As a heads up for the next section up until the ad break, we'll be discussing self-harm and suicide.

So if you want to skip that, just skip to after the next ad break. To give an example of how a conjuring can happen via typing, Clyde misappropriated a story of a young girl who was suffering from depression and died last year. Recently, it was a 14-year-old British girl who died from an act of self-harm while suffering from the negative effects of online content. A coroner said in this case that basically it was showing a spotlight on what can happen when people are exposed to unknown negative information being broadcast on the internet. This young girl shared over 2,000 posts on Instagram related to suicide, self-harm, and depression during the six months before she died. Clyde grossly mischaracterized this tragic incident. He claimed that this girl was, quote, exposed to horrific content being sent to her by an

unknown source, and that they could not trace the emails and pictures being sent to her of murder, pictures being sent to her of people committing suicide, unquote. Now, graphic content was not mysteriously being sent to her email or phone. She was participating in grossly under-moderated communities on platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest that encourage self-harm. It wasn't a typical suicide. It was something that best priced her enough pictures and images that came over the internet from an unknown source that influenced her to commit suicide. Something from the other side, something from the internet murdered her.

Some spirit, some entity sending her information triggered something in her head to kill herself. Some paranormal event that happened where the girl was triggered. It's like a dark entity was on the other side programming her to commit suicide. That, I think, tells you a lot about what's on the other side in the Matrix. So the question is, did those images of death and harm manifest a demonic force or a dark archetype that wound up killing the young girl? Was it death by algorithm? Or are people just cruel and honestly sending terrifying images to a distressed young girl? But man, who would be cruel enough to do that?

Depressive and suicidal ideation-based content doesn't come out of thin air. There's entire subcultures and communities based around it, as well as groups that work online to push random young girls into self-harming. Not many people may know that. These groups are relatively small and don't get a lot of news coverage because we don't really want to amplify them and have people try to seek them out. So the idea of a reactionary conspiracy radio host attributing this to demons on the internet isn't super surprising. Recasting this unfortunate event as demons living on the internet perhaps makes it easier to understand or cope with. Meanwhile,

the girl's parents have been pressuring Instagram and other social media companies to employ more mental health moderation on their platforms. In my opinion, Clyde Lewis perhaps doesn't have the best internet literacy, because in the next portion of the talk, he framed the creepypasta project Lobe as evidence of one of these demonic ghosts living on the internet ai generated demons ai generated ghosts and corpses how many people have heard of lobe loab lobe good lobe is what they call an internet cryptid she shows up from time to time in programs because they let her loose on the Internet. She's a ghost.

And it was brought about because of negative prompts brought on by the Internet. L-O-A-B, Lobe. A corpse-like entity that appeared after AI received some negative prompts and it literally conjured a dead woman and put her on the screen. But see, that's the thing,

is that when you use negative prompt weights, it encourages artificial intelligence to put together the furthest opposite of a given starting point. So if you're messing with negative start points and negative prompts, you're going to get some negative stuff like Lobe. In actuality, Lobe was made in the AI image generation program Dolly Mini by instructing the AI to produce an image that was the opposite of Marlon Brando. After some tinkering, it generated an image of an old woman with swollen red cheeks. This image was then used as the basis for future images, with one resembling an album cover featuring the word Lobe. with one resembling an album cover featuring the word Lobe. The creator of Lobe then wrote a viral Twitter thread about this character of Lobe in the style of an internet creepypasta.

It became a short-lived trend. Other people started to make Lobe fan art. It seems Clyde misinterpreted a piece of fan art casting Lobe as one of the Na'vi from Avatar as a genuine still from the making of the film. She attempted to appear in an AI composite when they were making the film Avatar. That's Loeb as an Avatar.

Creepy or what? I think it's creepy. It's just really scary to think that that's on the internet right now. Yes, that's very, very scary. Just, just, it's keeping me up at night to think about this. And apparently, Loeb has this, for some reason, this ability to generate dead children around him. So we have to think that maybe she's the murderer of children, or she takes care of the dead,

or she's an entity that watches over dead children. Clyde also mistook the 2019 viral hoax dubbed the Momo Challenge, which scared parents across America that a creepy image of a grinning woman with bulging eyes was part of a game that is somehow pushing children to suicide. Clyde interpreted this as more evidence of dark phantoms existing autonomously on the internet. Mama was showing up on Yahoo. Mama was showing up on YouTube. But what it was, was like I said, Loeb was, and that is an internet cryptid.

Something like Bigfoot, something like a UFO, where if you're lucky enough to see it, or I'm lucky enough to see it, it terrifies you and keeps you up at night. And there are many reports of people who died because they were basically mesmerized by Momo. For the record, no one died because of Momo. It was an internet creepypasta that got turned into a mortal panic by confused parents. But to Clyde Lewis, it was proof that Mesopotamian child-killing demons

are active on the internet disguised as these online memes. Lamashtu is the demon that kills children. And there's another one like Lamashtu called Abhisuth, and Abhisuth is the demon that kills children in the womb. If the spirit that's been loosed on the internet, the phantom spirit, is either Lamashtu or the demon, the other demon, the Abisuth demon. The reason why I say this is because politically speaking, look at what the politics are today about the death of unborn children and that spirit is very

very very prevalent and ubiquitous now in the world and that's why I believe that this character including Momo, Logue, Momo, whoever they represent the murder and death of innocent children it's not just that the children in Ukraine were killed all the children that have been trafficked, all the things we hear about, about pedophilia and harm to children. It's all part of the spiritual realm of evil that is appearing right now in the spiritual matrix of the internet. Okay, so at this point, I was considering just disrupting the talk. If he said the word abortion or QAnon, I was going to interrupt the talk at risk of getting kicked out of the conference. But he straddled that line really, really, really close.

Clyde explained that demons feed off death, and these child-killing entities are taking form within the internet to push kids into depression and make themselves harm. Fueling this demonic migration to the internet is an increase in the number of quote-unquote dead babies, which is essentially summoning demons that then go on to torture children on the internet. So that's why I believe that maybe this demon is the demon of the unborn being killed or the demon of the kids being killed.

Because those are the images that show up when you delve deeper into Loeb. Especially when we know that entities like Loeb, Abisud and Lamashtu are on the internet and probably among us right now. In the hearts and minds of everybody because of the fact that we are politically bound by this topic of murdering children. It's weird. The internet is responding. I believe the internet is responding.

Immediately after this abortion demon tirade, he then very nonchalantly segued into talking about reports of receiving text messages from dead people. And then he finished the talk with this absolute banger of a line. Elon Musk had said that playing with AI is like opening the door to a demon. And maybe it is. So obviously this guy had an extremely flawed understanding of both emergent technology and how the internet operates in the first place, which isn't surprising. But the panel wasn't really about technology. It was ideological. This guy makes money hosting a conspiracy radio show.

There is a monetary aspect for him, but his stated beliefs and understanding of the internet is deeply ideological. He's sifting all of this techno-paranormal stuff through a very reactionary Christian far-right lens. A few years ago, he was kicked off FM radio and now just broadcasts his show on the internet and I think some AM radio station. About a month after the conference, Elaine showed me a news story about how some guy had a GPT-based chatbot convince him to kill himself. The way that the articles were talking about this incident was basically the same way Clyde was talking about how entities on the internet are murdering people. These GPT language models just say what you want them to say. This guy was giving it prompts, which in turn replied back to him. Now, the chatbot he was using has been tweaked to dissuade people from acting on suicidal thoughts, but it was a little disconcerting to see mainstream

news articles promote the idea that the internet itself as some kind of conscious force got this guy to kill himself. This guy was already incredibly depressed. He was typing into a GPT chatbot almost like you would talk to a therapist. But this chatbot isn't a mental health program. It's just a language model. So in practice, this guy was using this chatbot as a tool to self-harm,

which is easier to understand when it's framed like that, but that's not how it's being interpreted in mass media. I don't actually think that a lot of people are going to believe that Loeb is secretly a Sumerian child-killing deity that got summoned via negative prompts in an image generation program, but they might believe that chat GPT can convince someone to kill themselves. Throughout the whole conference, there was a link between the paranormal and technology. Gadgets were not just seen as a new way to record evidence of a ghostly presence, but the very nature of a ghost's existence was tied to electricity. For many ghost hunters,

the spirit world was very much not mystical, but a product of electromagnetism, and as such, it can be engaged with purely clinically. That is, as long as you have enough spare cash to buy all of the specialized equipment. The REM pod, which again is basically a junior theremin circuit attached to a tiny LED and a speaker, goes for nearly $200. From low-quality EMF meters to LED cat toys,

cheap electronics are often repackaged and sold as specialized ghost hunting devices at higher prices. All of these pale in comparison, however, to the Panasonic DR-60 voice-activated digital recorder. This was the device that recorded those ghostly growls during the investigation at the Masonic Temple. This is the only device that can routinely record electronic voice phenomenon. Originally released in 1998 for $100, it was one of the very first digital dictaphones. Now, due to its infamous ability to capture the screaming voices of ghosts, it retails used for $3,000 to $4,000, which is a ridiculous price, especially for something that is such a low-quality recording device. These things can record growls wherever. It doesn't need to be a haunted place. This is

just what the device does. A software error in the voice-activated file writing process produces compressed digital noise. Panasonic's NeXT did not have this issue, thus it doesn't record ghostly growls. Between the false positives of the low-quality EMF meters and devices like the DR-60, when remarketed as ghost detection tools, these machines' inherent problems actually become features. Going all the way back to spirit photography, faulty technology has been a necessary tool in the production of spectral evidence. To quote author Colin Dickey, who writes about paranormal subcultures, quote,

The best tools for tracking down spirits have always been the ones fallible enough to find something. Unquote. have always been the ones fallible enough to find something, unquote. The emphasis on technology as the primary means of interacting with the paranormal was most common among the overwhelmingly male investigators at the conference, although the group from Astoria, Oregon was more gender diverse. There were actually very few men in attendance at the conference. It was mostly women, and it was a lot of women over the age of 40. I was well below the average age of most of the attendees.

There are some apparently well-studied reasons for this. In general, as people age, their rate of metaphysical beliefs increase. A 2007 study from Oxford's gerontologist linked positive supernatural beliefs with decreasing feelings of helplessness and more successfully approaching the challenges of aging. They defined positive supernatural beliefs as those which, quote, develop an internalized personal relation with the sacred or transcendent, and promote the wellness and welfare of self and others, unquote. Such positive beliefs were found to be, quote, a source of strength, comfort, and hope in difficult times and bring about a sense of

community and belonging, unquote. So why are less older men apparently interested in contacting spirits? The gender gap at the conference was more pronounced among attendees than the speakers, but even between the speakers, there was a noticeable difference between the more male-leaning, scientifically-based ghost hunter or paranormal researcher compared to the more female-leaning psychic mediums with all of their feelings. While many ghost hunters might just be very excited about their scientific equipment, a big difference may lie in belief systems. A 2021 cross-cultural study in the PNAS journal found that among people who reported experiencing high, weird, or supernatural

experiences in their life, those who had viewed the world and themselves as more interconnected will relate more to concepts like spirit contact or telepathy, whereas people who have a more isolated or bounded sense of internal identity will create alternate explanations for unusual experiences. Numerous studies have shown that women report belief in the paranormal at a higher rate than men, and there's a quick jump to just claiming that this is because of some sort of womanly irrationality. However, in a 2020 study published in Cell Press, they noted that personality traits affected whether someone believed in paranormal phenomenon. Specifically, emotionality, which affects how you rate experiences as profound,

and openness to new experiences were good indicators that someone would be more into the supernatural. Another contributing factor was a term that they referred to as ontological confusion, which I think is kind of a nonsense term the way they use it, because to them, that means believing that thoughts have physical properties. Now, obviously, our thoughts and perceptions do impact our reality, especially our own bodies and sensory feelings. But my complaint about the term aside, the authors state that these three factors, ontological confusion, openness, and emotionality, may potentially be considered facets of a tendency in which individuals prefer stories, i.e., vivid and effectively appealing conceptions of the world. To quote part of the conclusion of the study, quote, a skeptical person may immediately reject a statement if it violates a rule, whereas open-minded emotional people,

I don't like, there's some negative connotations for the way they use emotional there, but whereas open-minded emotional people might be inspired to make sense of what seems odd at first glance. They may engage in associative, generic thought, rather than in a bureaucratic, meticulous examination of the given information. Fictions transcend and enhance experience with meaning, imagination, and emotion. In its essence, a good story widens our horizon. As such, storytelling is a virtue, not a deficit. Yet if story-seeking happens without reasoned review, the line between fiction and evidence-based knowledge becomes blurred. Unquote.

At the Ghost Conference, there were many different conceptions of how to relate to experiences that push the borders of reality. But not all of them fit into being what I, in these studies, consider positive supernatural beliefs. Some of these beliefs seemed to head into territory that veered more towards paranoia rather than creating metaphysical connections that enhance your own life. while other beliefs may simply lead people to take up yelling at blinking lights in abandoned buildings as a hobby. Most people I talked to at the conference who reported experiencing paranormal events

all had very similar stories of going through some sort of hardship or trauma, followed by the experience or perception of something strange or uncanny. For some, this led to a healthy interest in the unusual, but for others, it resulted in an all-consuming obsession, leading them to develop or adopt their own dogmatic cosmology of the paranormal to explain what happened to them and to make them feel comfortable in their own head again. what happened to them and to make them feel comfortable in their own head again. In terms of ghosts, that meant looking at all ghosts as ancestors or as people who were all murdered or demons in disguise. Depending whose company I was in at the conference, there would be a large desire for some sort of spirit contact or a great fear of spirit,

casting it as a source of evil darkness. Some people at the conference were just there to sell a story to an audience that they knew would be more likely to be receptive. Whether the goal was to get people to buy their books or their spiritual services, in effect they were preying on people's fears of mortality, grief, and trauma for their own profit. The ghost hunts at the convention were mostly lighthearted and fun, but people were never really engaging with the phenomenon on its own terms. When people apply a purely clinical approach to high strangeness phenomenon, something which is inherently personal and elusive in nature, something which is inherently personal and elusive in nature a distance is formed between yourself and the phenomenon however this distance often breaks down very quickly as engagement with the

phenomenon becomes a matter of investigators projecting their thoughts onto it and then having parts of themselves be reflected back. Throughout the ghost investigations, I would hear people explaining to potential ghosts that they had died, and trying to empathize with these ghosts through conversation. To me, it felt like people are doing this as some sort of self-regulatory therapy to feel and give out compassion,

but to things that can't actually ask for it or be part of any reciprocal relationship. Instead of actually helping another person, it's giving compassion to these specters that you create and then live within your own head. Just like for Clyde Lewis, it's easier to empathize with quote-unquote unborn children and people killed by demons on the internet than, say, an unemployed depressed person needing mental health care. In terms of how the internet manifests monstrous beings, Clyde is kind of right, but not how he thinks. A demon and a meme are functionally the same thing. They both just

represent ideas. It's a viral thought form. The internet is uniquely good at creating these specters. Momo haunted parents. Lobe now haunts Clyde. These are real specters. They aren't literal beings with their own agency, but at a certain point, thought forms can become semi-autonomous. They can, quote-unquote, take on a life of their own. Once enough of something has been reified,

it can be propelled on its own existence. If Amazon has its way, children will be haunted by their dead grandparents speaking through Alexa machines. Using AI to resurrect someone from the dead via deepfakes or digital twins obviously doesn't bring the person back alive, nor is it the actual person, but if the illusion is strong enough to trick a part of your brain, that still holds some kind of power. that still holds some kind of power. My takeaway from the 2023 Oregon Ghost Conference is when you go looking, you will find something, whether that's opening yourself up to strange experiences

or poking around the dark with an EMF meter. What is magic other than the manipulation of meaning? You can make certain things mean something if you want them to. You can be in conversation with the world around you. But ultimately, it's up to you to determine how you will interpret that information into something meaningful. Whether you're a skeptic, a believer, or you're just along for the cosmic joke that we call existence, maybe, just maybe, cosmic joke that we call existence, maybe, just maybe, I'll see you on the other side.

Happy Halloween. I did not quite expect it to go all the way to abortion demons, but here we are. Ooh! 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

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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,

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But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. 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 to Kadopan here. I'm Andrew of the YouTube channel Andruism. And I'm here with Garrison Davis is also here. Hello. I'm Andrew of the YouTube channel Andrewism, and I'm here with... Garrison Davis is also here. Hello.

Welcome, welcome. You know what I'm thinking about recently? Ooh. Cults. Oh, one of my favorite topics. Cults are fun. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the term cult is in some ways just another pejorative for you know a group that you don't like sure um you know a cult of personality could be used to describe a very passionate fan base um we use cult classic to talk about you know really well-known and renowned uh pieces of media yeah you know cult could also actually refer to high control groups that ruin people's lives you know so that's something to consider yeah yes i know that there's some

debate within sociology about oh should we use it should we not use it um but i don't think the occasional misapplications of the term should distract us from the very real cults that have existed or do exist out there. Cults, not just in the context of religion, but also in the context of politics. Absolutely. There's a, I can, I can think of many, many a political cult that rears its head whenever there's a popular uprising. Indeed, indeed. PSL. Recently, said whenever there's a popular uprising indeed indeed yeah psl um recently yes recently recently i picked up on the edge political cults left and right by dennis turish

and tim wilford and as i was going through it and going through all the different examples and stuff it really gave me a clearer sense of how political cults operate. And so today I'd like to take some time to discuss the nature of political cults. And perhaps in future episodes, we can dive into some specific examples and case studies, of which there are several, and many of them seem to be of the Trotskyist variety. Let me ask my Commander-in-Chief if i'm uh if i'm allowed to talk about this before i continue continue this episode revisionists revisionists everywhere uh uh no continue please yeah so first i guess we need to understand what cults are in general um typically cults are

defined as a relatively small group which is typically led by a charismatic and self-appointed leader who excessively controls its members requiring unwavering devotion to a set of religious spiritual or philosophical beliefs and practices or a particular person object or goal which is considered outside the norms of society. The American Family Foundation defined cults as a group or movement exhibiting great or excessive devotion or dedication to some person, idea, or thing, and employing unethical, manipulative, or coercive techniques of persuasion and control, for example, isolation from former friends and family, debilitation, use of special methods to heighten suggestibility and subservience, powerful group pressures, information management, suspension of individuality or critical judgment,

promotion of total dependence on the group and fear of leaving it, designed to advance the goals of the group's leaders to the actual or possible detriment of members, their families, or the community. We can also define cults as organizations that remold individuality to conform to the codes and needs of the cult, institute taboos that preclude doubt and criticism, and generate an elitist mentality whereby members see themselves as lone evangelists struggling to bring enlightenment to the hostile forces surrounding them. There is only one truth and that is the truth espoused by the cult. Competing explanations are not merely inaccurate but degenerate. Cults don't have opponents, they have enemies and frequently dream about their ultimate destruction.

Now, cults are usually associated with religion, particularly of the new age and self-help variety. Sometimes it even gets into the kind of multi-level marketing schemes of business training. Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, honestly, the lines between MLMs, permanent schemes, and cults is quite blurred at this point. Essential oils, all that stuff. Yeah, it's a very fluid dynamic. Because no, in practice, a lot of those,

if they're not cults themselves, they do pick up a lot of like cultish tactics, behavior, kind of modes of interaction interaction um honestly you could apply that to a lot of businesses these days i mean i've seen more than a handful of medium articles like this is why you should run your business like a cult here are seven cult tactics that you could apply to your business to generate more productivity kind of classic linkedin style stuff yeah so in 2000 which is when the book Political Cults Left and Right was published

it cited that as many as 4 million Americans may have been involved with cult groups and that there were around 500 cults active in Britain at the time and between 3 and 5 thousand in the United States. And honestly, that can be an understatement. Especially nowadays, even just with like how the internet has changed social interactions.

Yeah. Like it's a lot of aspects of American culture have either been or always have been kind of cultified, whether that includes stuff like the Marvel or Star Wars fan base or sports teams, or your little church who has this one pastor for like 50 years, who controls what everyone wears and what everyone's allowed to say, whatever one's allowed to watch and who, and who they're allowed to vote for. Right.

Like it's a lot of aspects of it kind of now sucked into kind of like what like the modern nuclear family kind of looks like. A lot of the dynamics that kind of churns that machine have a lot, a lot of cult aspects. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And honestly, that's where like, you know, sociologists would contend with the term, right? Because honestly, there are some definitions of a cult that literally would just apply to pretty much any religious group. Sure.

It's clear that although religious groups do have their issues, we're speaking about a very specific and concentrated approach to that type of organization. I mean, cults could be as small as two people, right? Where one person is controlling the other through claiming a position of privilege inside in fact a lot of cults start with just two people the leader and their first acolyte you know and larger cults can also have smaller subcults within them yeah as you know certain members branch out and pursue their own little fiefdoms cults weaponize people's emotions to bring them into the fold i mean you don't rationalize your way into a cult the people at heaven's gates weren't like huh yeah you know that that really makes sense i should probably investigate that according to all these uh studies

and calculations it really really all lines up you know and similarly most don't even rationalize their way out of a cult cult recruitment and cult disillusion are mostly involving constantly shifting emotional states which helps to lead to loss of subtlety and nuance in one's thoughts and feelings and on top of that cults are very good at making members feel special. You know, these minor insights are presented as profound revolutions, commonly held ideas are claimed as exclusive to the cult, boosting members' sense of intellectual superiority. Where apocalypse is concerned, cults operate under the assumption that they are the only ones who can avert imminent catastrophe,

fostering a belief in their infallibility. And then members are isolated from their pre-cult self and life, as their old beliefs are discarded and they're consumed by cult activities, embracing a new sense of self and riding high on the illusions and promises of a glorious future, with often destructive and violent means needed to reach that goal. of a glorious future with often destructive and violent means needed to reach that goal. That description can apply to both religious cults

and political cults. And political cults. No, I was definitely viewing that through even more so a political lens just because that's a lot of what we cover on the show. Yeah. That can even also, it can obviously describe,

we've kind of been alluding to these big like communist kind of cult groups that operate, particularly in North America. But honestly, that description can also like be applied to just like a really shitty like anarchist affinity group that's kind of being led by one asshole like it's certainly like this it certainly applies beyond you know the very you know like political systems that are more inherently authoritarian versus ones that aren't but you know if you look at like the libertarian party of the united states right and all of their little local chapters, they claim to be anti-authoritarian. But a lot of their internal politics are very authoritarian. But also, the specific local chapters, whenever they get new people in and they kind of have someone new

take charge of their chapter, it does have a little kind of cult dynamic running. And I don't think that's restricted just to have a little kind of cult dynamic running. And I don't think that's restricted just to those on the right of the political spectrum. I think there's definitely aspects where you even see this in anarchist kind of compositions, at least in the United States, in my observation. Yeah, definitely. I think people hear cults and they immediately think like the destructive cults of people of like the people's temple of Jim Jones, right? Sure. I mean, those members through deliberate action, abused, physically injured or killed other members of

their own group and other people, you know, and then of course the doomsday cult people think about like Heaven's Gate who believe in some kind of apocalypticism or millenarianism. But I want to talk about political cults, right? And not just political cults on the left, even though that's a very easy target to go after. Because, you know, we are involved in these spaces. But, you know, there are a lot of right-wing political cults as well you know that will get will get their due attention in due time in fact the first political cult that I do want to talk about in another episode is a cult that really

ran the gamut from left to right the leader of that cult the last name rhymes with la poach but you know we'll get to that in due time okay all right all right all right i will i will i will wait for the uh for the reveal do you know who else really loves cults who's that the products and services that pay both my bills and some of your bills. So here is a perfect, a perfect space for an ad break. Thanks Chevron. If you're advertising, pushing,

pushing forward the great American tradition of cultish behavior in the economic system. We are back. Have you ever read the book cultish? So I classify my engagement with literature in two broad camps, books I've read and books I've skimmed. That's a book I've skimmed. Okay.

All right. All right. It is, it is, it is definitely a fine book to skim. Um, no, it's definitely a good,

a good kind of, a good central, central piece of literature kind of on this topic, especially as it relates to, you know, getting out of just like Heaven's Gate or Scientology. There's very obvious cults. I was starting

to look at the general cultishness of this entire continent, and specifically the United States. It's definitely a fun read if anyone is interested in the topic. Yeah. I think it particularly focuses on cult language, right? How the language of cult is used to manipulate people.

Yeah. So political cults, right? I mean, in a world where established politics has failed us again and again, many have turned to radical politics, right and left. I mean, as someone who doesn't really consider myself left, but I do like relate to it in some way, you know, a typical anarchist. Yeah, I'm on the same, I'm in the same boat as you there.

Yeah, I don't see radicalization towards the left as necessarily a bad thing i mean there are a lot of rabbit holes and pitfalls i think people fall into when they start progressing in that trajectory but you know people's frustrations with this failing system are real and it's good that they're seeking radical alternatives some of those alternatives are terrible and should be called out but the premise of needing revolutionary system change is not terrible which is why i disagree with the book's kind of centrist bent because it puts forward the idea that revolution is like this dramatic thing right like how how why would you be proposing that

unless you were called kind of vibe it also ends up drawing some equivalences between the radical left and the radical right. Sure. Although I will say as well, the book is primarily discussing Marxist-Leninists when it talks about political cults in the far left. And as we'll see, the way that Marxist-Leninists structure things, it is somewhat conducive to that particular formation. Not to slander all Marxist-Leninists,

but the ideology is, you know, in some ways compatible, in many ways compatible with cult organization. Yeah. And I do agree with the book's criticisms of the way that a lot of Marxist-Leninists specifically organize their movements and organizations. But yeah, preamble aside, the book defines political cults as environments where individuals are encouraged to envision a future society under their control. These members are often praised as visionary leaders, referred to as cadres, who will hold significant power in the new world order. At the same time, they are criticized for not fully grasping the ideals of the founders in the present. The slow progress toward realizing the cult's goals is attributed to their perceived lack of effort. The leader is credited with the cult's achievements, while any setbacks are blamed on the members' perceived laziness.

This combination of grandiose vision and an internal culture that suppresses dissent creates an environment where questioning any aspect of the group's ideology is met with intense fear and punishment. And political cults really do present a danger. Most of them are marginal, irrelevant, but they do cause harm to the people within them and the people outside of them. And if they manage to take state power, like in Cambodia,

it really has like extremely disastrous results and i would call uh paul potter cult leader i would go as far as to say that political cults have been mostly far right right there are some far-left cults in the mix um which in my opinion is even more depressing because it's like, you were so close and then there you go. So like a lot of my ire is targeted towards political cults on the left because it's like, wow, you know, almost there. And then now you're stuck planting the flag of the CCP in front of a university in the US or something.

Yeah. Many, many such cases. Many such cases. All sorts of political cults demand that their true believers be prepared to embrace the group's inflexible theology and strict organizational practices, much to the peril of society and honestly, the waste of the talents the talents energy and commitment to their members for as long as I can remember cults have been a bad thing

you know cults suck right cults of all types really suck generally yeah generally cults have kind of a bad rap usually I can't imagine why but then that lends itself to the question of why do people join them

now they're stupid how do they recruit and keep their members like what's going on there is it that they just didn't know is it that oh cult sign me up I want to take a very unorthodox approach and offer you, Garrison, personally, a guide to start your own cult. Oh, I thought a lot about this already.

But I am very happy to take notes here. Let me make a new Google Doc. Sure. All right. Sure. We're drawn from the work of social psychologists Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson. So just follow these steps, all right? All right.

Step one, create a distinct social reality. Cults isolate members from external sources of information, making them interact primarily with other cult members. This leads to a shift in vocabulary towards the cult's lingo, making it difficult for them to communicate with non-cult members, which leads to the uncritical acceptance of the cult's propaganda. The cult's belief system must be rigid and all-encompassing. Their analysis answers everything about the world, and there is nothing beyond it. Left-wing cults believe that their ideology is the only valid lens

through which to view the world. Historical materialism. While right-wing cults often center their beliefs around conspiracy theories, particularly related to race. And remember, the group's beliefs are beyond question or falsification. No tests or challenges are allowed that might lead to a re-evaluation of these beliefs. Any dissent or questioning is labeled as heresy or betrayal or you know better. Step two, create an in-group and an out-group. Cults emphasize differences between their in-group and perceived out-groups, fostering loyalty among members.

It really doesn't matter who the out-group is. You just need to have an out-group of some kind. So for far-right cults, it's like Jewish people, black people, gay people. Those are the necessary out-groups. That's like the bare minimum out-group for most right-wing groups, right? Yeah.

It's like checklist, you know, typical. I mean, of course, some go even further and they might say something like anybody who isn't a white anglo-saxon protestant is excluded from their groups but you know sorry became kind of irrelevant sorry catholics you're not yeah yeah r.i.p catholics r.i.p irish etc and then for far left cults in order to isolate the members further they can't just rely on like bourgeoisie as the out group because i mean the rest of the left already has the bourgeoisie as an opponent so these far left cults have to create other out groups to target their ire and

isolate their members from as well yeah it it becomes much more like seeped in ideology than like compared that becomes like the unquestionable thing that answers all of the truths and all of like the problems of the world, whether that's like an apocalyptic version where you're talking about like some like collapse or it's, you know, like a, or even like a utopic version, right? Where you're talking about

the Marxist-Leninist party is going to seize power through the vanguard and control swaths of territory and return power to the proletariat. Yes, and the true obstacles to that party are the revisionists, the ultra-leftists, etc., etc., etc. The post-leftists, the anarchists, yeah, the social democrats as always

the enemy to all sides truly the one the one that everyone everyone loves to hate yeah yeah truly a petty booze scum right next step step three build commitment through dissonance reduction. So cults manipulate cognitive dissonance by gradually escalating members' commitment to the group's beliefs and actions. This leads to a sense of consistency and eventually conversion. So you don't throw a newbie into the cool air right away. You start small and you build up from there. Maybe first you join a meeting, then maybe you start voting in the meetings, then you handed out flyers for the cult

at like a Black Lives Matter protest, for example, and then you're sipping the Kool-Aid. You know, it's like baby steps. You don't throw them into all the ting right away. Next, step four. Maintain a a rigid internal regime. Decision-making power is concentrated in the hands of a select elite within the group. Formal controls and democratic processes are either dismantled or ignored.

Even though the organization may claim to be democratic on paper. And this environment helps to foster uncertainty fear and confusion among members which actually helps to reinforce their commitment to the group believe it or not five step five establish the attractiveness and credibility of the leader oh all righty yeah yeah you know make makeover. This is why it's going to be all over as soon as they start making twink cults.

It's going to be whole swaths of the population just are going to immediately fall victim. Indeed, indeed. These grand or supreme leaders are legends. Extraordinary in their qualities.

Your twinkness. You age cults do this sorry new age cults do this with their sex fest leaders and stuff but oh my god i can't not mention the veneration that political cults place on their leaders right yeah yeah yeah i mean hitler fans just obsessed with the guy. I mean, that goes without saying. Yeah. This applies to people who are really into Hitler, people who are really into Stalin, people who are really into Mao. They become this almost messianic figure.

Yeah. I mean, even before I understood cults better, I could see very clearly early on, even before my readings readings theory and everything just being exposed to you know that space that there is a veritable cult of lenin of the kim family of mao of trotsky and of stalin and far be it from you to point out their flaws and mistakes either it's denied outright as outside propaganda or it's kept on the down low as much as possible specific to the north korea

situation right you often see its supporters saying things like yes there are problems with north korea and we do we do discuss our criticisms behind closed doors, but openly, you know, it's full-throated support, which I find very interesting. Yeah. Step six. Speaking of leaders, the leader needs privileges, naturally. Personal power, wealth accumulation, and often sexual favors as well. accumulation and often sexual favors as well. Activities that are usually deemed unacceptable for ordinary members are tolerated when applied to leaders. Why? Because step seven, you make sure to deify the leader. Leaders, whether historical or current, are elevated to a near defined status.

They're carrying on the legacy and defending it from revision, if the OG is already dead. You resolve the arguments by referencing the sayings of these leaders rather than through independent analysis. So it's not, well, you know, this is the case because we examined X, Y, and Z factor. It's, this is the case because person A said so. this is the case because Pusan Iisatsu in

19th century text number 376 or whatever it's 600 pages long it's yeah I mean do you even read Kapital like come on all 25 volumes I mean no shit it's a Kapital

I mean it's a good book. No, absolutely. If you want to read about German factory conditions, it is definitely 18th century German factory politics. It is an unparalleled book. Yeah, definitely. Step eight. You need to send members to proselytize members need to constantly promote the benefits of the cult to others because that reinforces their own beliefs

that self-generated persuasion strengthens their commitment and to be fair this applies even outside of cult right like if you're in the habit of sharing your particular ideology or religion or philosophy the process of sharing it often helps you to understand it and also lends itself lends to you being further persuaded by it but in the context of everything else in context of the cult it really becomes a feedback loop quote which is shown of all interference from the outside world and in which only the liturgy of the cult has any semblance of reality number nine step nine distract members from undesirable thoughts overworking members keep them busy and exhausted far too busy and exhausted to question the group's direction or beliefs. Social life, friendships, those all

revolve around the group. And of course, those friendships are entirely conditional on the maintenance of uncritical enthusiasm for the party line. The book uses the example of the Workers' Revolutionary Party in Britain, which has a chapter in the book all to itself. Despite never being able to muster more than 1% of the vote in any elections, somehow this small organization managed to put out a daily newspaper, keeping the members busy, busy, busy, busy, busy. Next, number 10. Fixate members on a promised land. Cults create an idealized vision of the future that contrasts with the current reality. That promised land may be an alien spaceship to the next dimension, a religious ethnostate, or a Marxist-Leninist utopia.

But in either case, the cult's members are driven to work tirelessly to achieve this vision, fairing missed opportunities. They're constantly either recruiting and fundraising and kept in a constant state of lewdness, reinforcing their commitment to the group's beliefs. Now, Garrison, if you follow these steps, you will have a fairly effective cult. But you know what? Just for you, I'm going to throw in a bonus package of commonly held contradictions. You could call it the double think package. Okay. All right. I'm all ears'm all ears I'm really desperate at this point because I've kind of sunk cost fallacy we've already been

learning for like 30 minutes I feel like I need to take away more information at the end because if I go and apply this now I feel like I'm only going to half-ass it. I need one final thing to kind of click into place here.

Absolutely. Check this out, right? Love of liberty and support for totalitarianism, right? These seem like two opposite things. How can both of these coexist? You can hold them in your brain simultaneously right check this right left-wing cults would idealize a very democratic soviet union of the past you know some trotskyist groups even depict an earlier period as democratic before being

corrupted by later leaders and then right-wing cults would claim to champion individual liberty but seek to curtail democratic rights for those who disagree with. So the democracy is upheld but it's theoretical. So it's like, yeah, democracy but also, come on, the material conditions.

You can't have democracy in that kind of situation. Ah, I see. So you're loving, yes, like, I'm a democracy advocate but also, like, democracy gets in the way sometimes.

We have to, like, get past it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. way. Sometimes we have to like get past it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we have like, we have the democracy of like me and like my three friends,

but not like, you know, everybody. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like democracy, but it's like centered around like a group,

like you call it like democratic centralism. What's my dad? Anyway, that's a great idea. That's a great idea. That's a great idea. Thank you. Next, we have belief in equality and privilege for leaders. That last one seems kind of important.

Yeah. So you're going to be advocating for equality, but then your leaders are going to have a bunch of privileges. Well, yeah, because we're spending all the time advocating. We need a little bit of something extra. Exactly. So the members, well, they get to go out there and spend time fundraising and stuff,

but they can't have a say in how the money is spent, right? Like we need that money, you know, for our personal projects and our extremely high standard of living check this out this is very common in religious cults but also very common in some political cults promotion of sexual morality and sexual exploitation huh well okay i'm not gonna i think i think i'll stop the playing along bit at this one actually yeah yeah yeah fair enough um yeah but yes this is it's terrible it's terrible it's truly terrible

this is a very common thing yeah yeah you know cultural impose very strict sexual rules particularly on members but but particularly on women. The leaders will still have a whole harem of female members that they exploit and stuff. This is even quite common with hardline evangelical cults

in the States, whether that's kind of quiverful related or just other kind of smaller evangelical sects that kind of form their own kind of church cult dynamic. But that is very, specifically very common among Christian cults because of how much that like sexual authoritarianism is normalized in a lot of Protestant and Catholic doctrine. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's frighteningly common.

And I've certainly heard that like, you know, like Stalinists or Maoists specifically have weird sex stuff going on, but I've never quite poked that on. But I've never quite poked that bear. But I have heard that there's specifically really weird sex stuff around Maoists.

And also really weird sex stuff around Mao, allegedly. I've heard more to Boris exploits. Yeah, moving along. Last one in this little bonus package. The rest you'll have to pay the Bought his exploits. Yeah. Moving along. Last one in this little bonus package. The rest you'll have to pay the 12 simple payments of $999 to get.

That's one payment every month. But each month I get more information about how to do it better. That sounds like a great deal. Oh yeah, for sure. You'll be swimming in cash by the time you die. Yeah, because now I can use these and I can pass down these steps to someone else. So I'll already get my money back.

And then that person can then go and pass it down and then you'll get kickbacks from that as well. That's great. It's almost like a multi-level scheme. It's like there's a triangle and there's different tiers of it. You're technically one above me, but I'm still pretty close to the top. If I keep bringing it down, then it gets wider and wider.

That sounds like a pretty good setup. And then I benefit, and then you benefit. The triangle is actually the strongest shape. Structurally. So check this out, right? Demand for free speech and suppression of dissent. So cults will vigorously defend their right to free speech, even resorting to legal action.

There's some very infamous court cases involving cults. Yes. And then they will criticize rival organizations for, you know, undemocratic practices. And yet, within the ranks of the group, dissent is actively suppressed, you know? Yeah, this is like the Scientology classic here. Yeah, exactly. And members will be told, like, yeah, you should absolutely criticize. But then if they do criticize, you know know they're going to be humiliated they could very easily be expelled

it's like a bait and switch it's like yeah we give you this platform to criticize so then we know who to target and to tear down very very common very very useful when you want to you know strengthen the integrity of your cult all right and one last quick game let's ask ourselves really you're just yeah you're just like yeah yeah yeah yeah only if you call right now. So let's ask ourselves, am I already in a political cult? Good question, actually. This is something people should ask themselves pretty frequently.

Yes, yes. And to figure that out, we have to look at the conditions that indicate the presence of ideological totalism. A term coined by American psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton to give a name to the mood of absolute convictions, which embeds ideas so deeply in people's heads that they grow inoculated against doubt. So what are the eight conditions he identifies as indicating the

presence of ideological totalism? Well, there's milieu control, mystical manipulation, the demand for purity, the cult of confession, the secret science, loading the language, doctrine over person, and the dispensing of existence. What do those mean? One at a time. Milieu control involves techniques that dominate a person's contact with the outside world and communication with themselves. Right to that idea of cults isolating people prevented them from testing the group's ideas against external alternatives mystical manipulation is where cults claim a sense of higher purpose and portray the ideology as the vanguard of social development that's all-encompassing this is the essential ideology for the future of the world demand for demand for purity is, of course,

where members are convicted of their superiority and purity in their beliefs. Their core ideas are essential, and anybody who is a non-member or is a critic is an accomplice in some kind of conspiracy against the cult's ideas. The cult of confession is where members are required to confess their inadequacies and failures in group meetings, which helps to break down individuality and helps to intimidate potential dissenters. The sacred science through the group's ideology is presented as a sacred moral vision, so you can't really question its basic assumptions.

The immortal science of Marxist-Leninist. The immortal science of marxist loneliness the immortal science indeed loading the language is what we were talking about earlier where cults use repetitive phrases and thought terminating cliches to prevent critical analysis and limit thinking and feeling doctrine over person is where historical myths are created or altered so aligned with the cult's ideology and the dispensing of existence is where only those who adhere to the group's ideology are fully human or good, while all others are seen as agents of evil or barriers to progress.

I hope that whole delivery has been useful for you in determining whether or not you are in a cult, as well as determining how you can create your own. Well, something that my boss has told me a lot is that there's very little difference between a cult and a really good party. So, but the biggest difference is that a party hopefully will be over, right? It should just be like one night it should so

a good party is is a cult that lasts like 12 hours tops so you can't apply a lot of these ideas to putting together a really fun house party as long as that it's a there's a mandatory dissolution of the party after everyone wakes up the next morning. Right now, I'm imagining a DJ like

DJ Mill You Control on the beat. We are putting Gex back on no no more no more ska back to gex exactly yeah the future lies right here in this beast exactly exactly yeah um but i mean in all seriousness political cults are really sad you know they pray on people's frustrations the desire for change they pray and what's worse is they they pray on their

desire for affiliation yeah one of our most deeply rooted desires to identify with social groups to develop an identity on a familiar local local, ethnic, or national scale. And it's really sad that people get lost in that source. You know, remember that no matter what, the group you choose to affiliate with should be able to handle dissent. I think that's a very good baseline upon which to affiliate or to determine your

affiliation. Healthy groups, organizations, and movements are not weakened by dissent. They need dissent, disagreement, and conflict to survive. Frequent and important disagreement makes movements and organizations stronger. It allows the individuals within them to maintain a level of independence and allows ideas to evolve through challenge rather than to exist purely due to the stifling atmosphere of conformity. Today we spoke about the techniques employed by both left-wing and right-wing cults to maintain high levels of conformity, activism, and intolerance among their members. I want to emphasize that our discussion doesn't imply that movements striving for societal change are inherently bound to become obscure cults,

although that a critical examination of modern society is not warranted. But it's important to remember that while our world's challenges require political analysis and action, the organizations that we form to address these challenges must try to genuinely seek understanding and transformation while preserving the freedom and individuality

of its members. I still have a lot to say. Create a real community, not a cult. That's all until next time. I've been Andrew of the YouTube channel Andrewism. And next we'll be discussing the one and only, the loathsome Lyndon Lerch. Peace. Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora.

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Welcome to Could It Happen Here? I'm Andrew of YouTube channel Anturism. And last time I was on here discussing political cults generally. Today, I'm here once again with... Oh, Garrison. Yes. Hello. I am also here to talk about cults because Andrew told me to. Yes. Yes. And I'm the leader in this dynamic. In many ways, this Zoom call is kind of a mini cult where you are the leader.

Indeed, indeed. There is nothing except this call. There is no outside world. There is no cat on your desk. It is just this. The cat is a revisionist. So last episode, we discussed how cults operate, essentially. The rollercoaster emotional ride that individuals experience during cult recruitment, where their feelings and ideas are manipulated and they're drawn into an exclusive and isolating group. We explored the rigid belief system that's created the immunity to falsification, the authoritarianism, arbitrary leadership, deification of leaders, intense activism, and the use of loaded language we spoke about the contradictions within political cults uh and the conditions of ideological

totalism and today as promised we're going to look at one political cult leader in particular whose influence spanned left to right oh A self-described Platonist, a presidential candidate, a conspiracy theorist, the alleged target of an assassination from Queen Elizabeth, a once Trotskyist, the one and only, the infamous,

the loathsome, Lyndon LaRouche. As soon as you said Platonist, I knew we were in for just a horrible time. Just the worst. The only people who self-describe as Platonists are the

worst. Actually, the last person I knew who self-described as a Platonist was the target of an assassination. Because it was the daughter of Alexander Dugan was the the daughter of alexander dugan was a was a anyway what an interesting cast of characters indeed indeed and speaking of cast of characters by the way i should note that tim wolforth one of the co-authors of the book that this research was

based on the book being on the edge particular cults left and right uh tim warforth the other author's tenant is dennis turish was a trotskyist cult leader at one point or like cult underling okay or whatever um but he was kicked out and then he needs a-authored this book to call out some of their cultish tendencies. If you need that

sort of backstory to take some of this with a grain of salt, so be it. Because as far as I can tell, Tim Warforth and Lennon LaRouche

actually crossed paths at one point. So as always, let's start from the beginning and get an early portrait of this guy. LaRouche was born in Rochester, New Hampshire in 1922, then moved to Lynn, Massachusetts. He was the oldest of three children in a Quaker home,

though eventually his father would be expelled from the local Quaker community for his alleged misuse of funds. He then briefly attended Northeastern University in Boston and left in 1942, at least partly because he believed his teachers, quote, lacked the competence to teach him on conditions he was willing to tolerate. Sure, sure. I'll take him for his word on that one. Yeah, yeah. At first, he was a conscientious objector to enlistment in world

war ii because you know quicker uh and instead he joined a civilian public service camp in what is what you know which is what conscientious objectors did at the time but eventually he would enlist with the u.s army and served with the medical corps in india Burma, which is now Myanmar. In 1946, aboard the SS General Bradley, Don Morrill met the young soldier, Lenin LaRouche, and got into it with him about politics, and particularly the political optimism of the post-World War II era. What a time. The revolutionary spirit of the Indian subcontinent,

and socialist ideas more broadly. Now, LaRouche was already sympathetic towards Marx and Trotsky at this point. In fact, even in his preteens, he was a voracious reader of philosophy, particularly of the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnizbutt, but ultimately, by the time they returned to America, LaRouche was a Trotskyist. In brief, for those unaware, a Trotskyist is someone who adheres to the principles and politics of Leon Trotsky, who was a prominent figure in the early Soviet Union and a key figure in the, what I would call, co-optation of the Russian revolution of 1917. Trotskyism is

distinct from mainstream Leninist and particularly Stalinist thought, most famously for their rejection of socialism in one country and their advocacy of permanent revolution. By the time LaRouche had returned home in 1947, he joined his lynn massachusetts chapter of the socialist workers party swp which was the main american trotskyist group interestingly he took on a party name which really reminds me of how religious missionaries would give those they converted quote unquote christian names upon baptism yeah so So his party name was Lynn Marcus. You could just see it as a pseudonym for political work, of course.

I mean, the CIA and the FBI were very active in infiltrating these sorts of groups. So I understand having like a pseudonym, but I mean, considering we're talking about cult tendencies and political movements, I couldn't pass up on that observation, you know. Don Morrill, who was also from Lynn, Massachusetts, was also part of the SWP and very active in their union organizing activities.

LaRouche, though, not so much. He was very intellectually oriented. He wasn't very into the union scene. And he eventually left Massachusetts in 1952 and settled down in New York City. He got married, he had a son, and he was focused on his career. As an economic consultant in the shoe industry, with a nice, nice apartment in Central Park West, he didn't really have any ties to the working class efforts of the SWP. So, what now? Well, eventually, he and his wife separated and he moved in with a fellow SWP member

known sometimes as Carl White, sometimes as Carl Schnitzer, and sometimes as Carl Larrabee. And then he decided that the SWP leadership had the wrong idea. Why are they so obsessed with union organizing? Perhaps he should be the one calling the shots. You have to understand something about LaRouche. You see, with little

involvement or connection to actual working class struggle and disconnection, you see, with little involvement or connection to actual working class struggle and disconnection from the party's activity, he had already begun making a rightward shift, even while still bearing the banner of leftism. As an intellectual, he loved his books, including Marx's Capital, Rosa Luxemburg's The Accumulation of Capital, and Hegel's Logic, and his intellectualism naturally fed into elitism. Drawwn from Lenin's What Is To Be Done, LaRouche believes that a select intellectual group, which he was clearly a part of, these professional revolutionaries, held a pivotal role in transforming society,

with their task being to gain dominance over the less intellectually developed masses. He also borrowed from Gramsci's idea of hegemony. He saw himself in competition with other intellectuals on the left for leadership over the hearts and minds of the dummy masses to undermine the capitalists' hold on the working class. But unlike Gramsci, he didn't believe the working class was capable of developing its own leaders. He was that leader. And he also borrowed from George Lucas' concept of class consciousness and the importance of thinkers.

LaRouche wasn't just a thinker. He saw himself as the thinker. The one who would take power and lead the masses to freedom. thinker the one who would take power and lead the masses to freedom so he was fed up with the swp limiting his clearly elite intellect and ability and so in 1965 he left and joined a small trotskyist group called the american committee for the fourth international yes associated with george healy who was another left-wing cult leader. A lot of left-wing cults came out of the Fourth International, some of which are very cool,

some of which are not very cool. Indeed, indeed. But guess what? He didn't like the Fourth International. He only stayed there for six months, and apparently Healy did not even like him. I mean, I wonder why, right? No, he seems like a very agreeable fellow.

And not only that, I mean, when have you ever heard of cult leaders getting along? You know, cult leaders tend to view other cult leaders as threats to their total control, you know? It would be funny if there was just like a conference for cult leaders to like share like tactics and they all have like dinner together yeah so larouche bust out to that party and he joined the spartacist league which was another trot party and again he didn't stay for too long he decided he was going to put all those factions and leaders behind him and declared himself the pioneer of the fifth international so for those unaware the first workers international from 1864 to 1876

was a coalition of labor and socialist groups seeking to promote workers rights and international solidarity it split because of the irreconcilable differences and divisions between the statists and the anarchists. Then in 1889, and from then until 1916, the Second Internationale was born. That was an organization of socialist and labor parties. This time, no anarchists allowed, and it was aimed at fostering cooperation among socialists globally until it dissolved due to the divisions related to World War I. And then, in 1919, the Soviet Union founded the Third International, or the Comintern, to promote worldwide communist revolution and aid communist parties. But then it dissolved during World War II due to the Soviet-German tensions, among other things. And then, in 1938, Trotsky, who was marginalized and persecuted by Stalin, founded the Fourth

International, as an oppositional alternative to the Stalin-dominated Comintern. Technically, the Fourth International is still active today, but it's always been fairly irrelevant beyond small bickering sects and ever-splintering splinter groups and more than one political cult. So for a Trotskyist like LaRouche to declare a Fifth International is like, you know, here we go again. How is he going to manage to do this? 1968. Picture this. A room with about 30 students sitting on the floor, all eyes fixed on Lyndon LaRouche. After playing a major role in the student strike at Columbia University, these students were totally invested in this man's every word. They were part of the National Caucus of Labor Committees, NCLCc which was affiliated with the students for democratic

society sds larouche held this meeting for a whole seven hours that's longer than a church service and he blended discussions of tactics with educational presentations the sds had a lot of spirit and action but larouche believed that they were a bit short on theory, so he was there to fill that void, and a bit more. The gathering marked the early stages of what would later become a political cult centered around LaRouche, where he served as an intellectual and political guru, training his followers as devoted disciples. He had a particular knack for making his disciples feel like they were part of an elite club. They believed they were the only ones who truly

understood the era they were in and had all the answers to fix society's problems. In 1970, LaRouche wrote that you should start with recruiting and educating a revolutionary intelligentsia, mainly young intellectuals like these student radicals, rather than the working class, because, again, LaRouche thought the working class was stupid. He wanted these elite recruits to commit to intensive study and activism, particularly of his interpretation of ideas, so they'd lead the charge. And remember, at this point, LaRouche was pushing a right-wing form of Trotskyism. Like Marx, he believed that capitalism had to keep growing to stay alive.

Once it hit its limits, it would grow into crisis mode and eventually collapse. He also shared Marx's idea that human activity should be all about progress, particularly the growth of the world's productive forces. Do you know who's organizing the next international actually? Right now, right now. It is in fact the products and services that sponsor this podcast. So they're making the great shift. The same way anarchism was expunged from the second international,

now communism is going to be expunged from this next upcoming international and it's just going to be capitalists. So here are the sponsors organizing the next international. Marx thought capitalism was just a phase in human society, as crises would pave the way for a working-class revolution, which would lead to socialism. Under socialism, the productive forces would flourish without those pesky capitalist constraints.

LaRouche came up with something he called the theory of re-industrialization. He claimed that capitalism, in its third stage of imperialism, needed fresh opportunities for capital investment. He even predicted that if world leaders did not follow his advice, the system was on the brink of collapse. Only he and his trained followers under his lead could prevent this catastrophe. By the late 60s and early 70s, members were giving up their jobs and devoting themselves wholly to the cause and leadership of LaRouche. They were convinced that the world had all the resources needed for an incredible economic transformation

but they saw a big problem they thought the nation's leaders were clueless and of course they didn't think too highly of the masses so their solution was getting lyndon larouche jr into power oh by the way he's a junior uh but their solution was getting lenin larouche jr into power as soon as possible and then he would lead the trade unions to take over america he expected their support and if they were slacking in their activism he would call them out borrowing from the confrontational therapy of the new age psychology cults, LaRouche began holding ego stripping sessions. Anyone who failed in a political task was subjected to pure psychological terror as everyone attacked them and tore apart their past and personal life in front of the whole group.

And because cults and sex are an inevitable combination like madness and badness, LaRouche also launched a campaign against the sexual impotence of his membership. Because cults and sex are an inevitable combination like madness and badness, LaRouche also launched a campaign against the sexual impotence of his membership. Apparently, Carol left him for a disciple of the movement. Interesting. His name was Christopher White. And they went to England to set up a chapter of the NCLC. So that's probably why he got a little bit unhinged. But that's not the worst of it.

I can't not mention Operation Mop-Up. In 1973, LaRouche fully shifted the group's political stance from being far left to far right. Armed with bats, chains, and martial arts scale, his supporters physically attacked members of the Socialist Workers' Party and the Communist Party, for he declared that he intended to wipe these rival parties off the map, going as far as to threaten their families as well. But it didn't stop there. He extended his attacks to groups like the Revolutionary Communist Party,

the October League, and the Progressive Labour Party. Essentially, LaRouche wanted to establish dominance through these physical confrontations. There were at least 60 reported assaults during this time, and the whole operation only ended when the police stepped in and arrested some of LaRouche's followers. Interestingly though, there weren't any convictions, and LaRouche's followers. Interestingly though, there weren't any convictions. And LaRouche insisted that his people were only acting in self-defense. But here's where it gets a little bit murkier. Journalist and LaRouche biographer Dennis King suggested that the FBI may have played a role

in stirring up trouble among these groups. They may have used tactics like sending anonymous mail-ins to keep these groups at each other's throats. So, you know, plot thickens. That was very typical kind of COINTELPRO stuff that was happening around this time period.

That would not surprise me. Yeah. It's safe to say, though, in this period of LaRouche's life all the folks on the left were wondering if he was really

still one of their own back to 1973 Carol and Christopher like I said they were going to the UK to set up

their own version of the NCLC but then LaRouche called them back to the UK to set up their own version of the NCLC but then LaRouche called them back to the US for a national conference and during the flight Christopher lost it he started yelling that the CIA

had plans to off Larrabee and LaRouche Carol Larrabee and LaRouche. Carol, Larabee, and LaRouche. The plane was in utter chaos. So Carol reached out to LaRouche and they decided to work together to deprogram Christopher.

What do you mean deprogram Christopher? I'm glad you asked. I think we have mentioned cult deprogramming before, kind of in passing, but never too much on it, I think.

Yes. What I mean in this instance, though, is not that they were trying to inculcate him into the cult or deprogram him from mainstream ideology. You see, in his rantings and ravings on the plane, Christopher claimed he was a Manchurian candidate who had been tortured by the CIA and British intelligence in a London basement. He then said he was programmed to do some stuff like

offing his wife and setting up LaRouche for a watery demise by Cuban exile frogmen. So that's the kind of deprogramming they intended to carry out. Hmm. I have some notes, but I

suppose I'll just let them do their thing. Yeah, yeah. So Christopher was saying that he was a Manchurian candidate. And so then the whole group was in a frenzy. LaRouche and his disciples were releasing statements left and right, training their members on how to spot other Manchurian candidates and how to handle CIA torture. And here's where it gets really crazy one of the members

Alice Weitzman she made a critical mistake in a political cult she doubted she didn't believe the whole CIA story that Christopher was pushing and LaRouche didn't like that she didn't believe and so LaRouche was like oh you don't believe that the CIA is infiltrating us right now then you must be a CIA agent so he sends a squad of six members of his cult to Weitzman's apartment and they held her hostage and cranked up Beethoven music to deafening levels. Why? Because LaRouche believed that Beethoven's tunes could somehow deprogram Manchurian candidates. Weitzman managed to toss out a note through the window and a passerby picked it up and alerted the police, so she was rescued, but then she chose not to press charges against her captives.

LaRouche had turned this party, at this point with 1,000 members in 37 offices in North America and 26 in Europe and Latin America into an extreme right anti-Semitic organization despite the presence of Jewish members in fact Carol herself was Jewish and she stuck around Dennis King the biographer I spoke about earlier found a deep connection between LaRouche and fascist and unitary groups in the early 80s LaRouche and fascist and neo-Nazi groups. In the early 80s, LaRouche used the Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars, to bring together far-right forces from Europe and America. He was even promoting revanchism and defending Nazi war criminals. And he was known for blending his usual conspiracy theories with anti-semitism particularly towards the british he blamed the rothschilds for running great britain and he was a typical holocaust

denier yeah i really i genuinely wonder why carol left him but i also wonder why she stuck around in the group anyway. The Anti-Defamation League labeled the Roosh's NCLC as the closest thing to an American fascist party. And, well, that begs the question, what was life like in that party? Yeah. I mean, I remember you, Garrison, describing a good party as a cult. Well, see, I think part of part of the problem is when, you know, a house party turns into a political party and then... That turns into a fascist party.

Yeah. That never ends. Yeah. So LaRouche was using these really sneaky tactics to drive a wedge between LaRouche members and their families, partners, and spouses. There were members of LaRouche members and their families, partners, and spouses. There were members of LaRouche's elite who convinced one person that their own dad was laundering money secretly for the drug trade. This organization was telling their members

where they could live, what car to buy, when to quit their jobs, what they should read, what they should watch, how to scam their parents out of money, how and when to quit their jobs what they should read what they should watch how to scam their parents out of money how and when to break up with their partners yeah that's a close yeah and then while all this is going on the russian movement is also swapping out the red flags of trotskyism for good old red white and blue members were soon educated with the ideas of alexander hamilton right oh god hamilton's economic policies were basically the american version of what marx represented in europe according to larouche and forget about marx they're not reading marx anymore now they're reading plato and d Dante in 1980 they even told the members

to vote for Reagan yeah cool stuff cool stuff noted platonist philosopher Ronald Reagan yeah they basically dropped any veneer of left leaning in their recruitment tactics

and then they started doing things like soliciting people at airports and bus terminals and these members they were caught in this whirlwind they didn't have time to read to think to get a decent night's sleep they were working 12 hour shifts and getting paid peanuts like a hundred dollars 125 a week and sometimes they didn't get paid at all they were in a constant state of mobilization, living in adrenaline, ready for anything. And finally, in 1981, around 300 to 600 people decided they had had enough and left the organization.

Some of them were former leftists, but not all. And those who stuck around were the diehard cult members, completely under LaRouche's control. Would it surprise you, Garrison, to learn that LaRouche was a scammer? Oh, you're saying that the person involved in running the cult was also a prolific grifter? Someone who tried to scam other people? Really? Really? Yeah, a lot of people don't know this, but cult leaders and scammers actually go hand in hand.

Ah. Yeah, yeah. LaRouche was a master of operating through a network of front organizations. He created the Fusion Energy Foundation, getting support from nuclear and aerospace industries. He planned to run a private intelligence service focusing on terrorists and drug cartels.

Get this, he even met with top officials from the National Security Council and the CIA in the 80s despite his paranoia about the CIA. And he somehow managed to get White House access. What? Yeah.

What? Why? How? Yeah. what yeah what why how yeah he eventually infiltrated the democratic party and ran for president several times oh god and he launched the proposition 64 initiative in california in the 80s aiming to impose strict public health policies for aids which public health officials rejected but basically he was instrumental in spreading a lot of unnecessary fear about AIDS. In fact, he was advocating for lynch mobs to deal with the AIDS crisis.

Oh, so he wasn't like spreading good health information when everyone was ignoring the problem. He was being like, we should just kill everybody. Yeah, pretty much. Okay. But, you know, every scammer has their day. And one of his scams got him in the pen.

You see, LaRouche had a knack for recruiting the offspring of the wealthy and separating them from their money, to put it euphemistically. One of his most famous recruits was Louis Duis dupont smith a dupont heir that dupont who gave a whopping 212 000 to larouche he even moved close to larouche but eventually the dupont family intervened had him declared mentally ill and put him on a monthly stipend still larouche was making a royal bank his empire was growing he had a 172 acre estate in virginia serving as his center of operations which had phone banks offices a printing plant guarded 24 7 by armed individuals but the empire ofRouche eventually went into decline. His lust

for publicity caught the attention of the public and federal officials. And his phone bank operators started making unauthorized credit card withdrawals. I mean, he was like going to the White House. How did he try to

stay under the federal radar he was literally in the in the one spot the one place exactly it's baffling but Dennis King has a book all about it

so you can check it out in 1987 he faced a trial on credit card fraud and conspiracy to obstruct justice which ended in a mistrial then a subsequent trial convicted him on various charges and he ended up in a federal penitentiary in 1989 and what do all great cult leaders or what do many great cult leaders do when they're in jail some of them write books yeah right precisely all right all right i'm i'm back on now okay so larouche decides to write a book called in defense of common sense it's a mix of obscure geometric illustrations, a passionate defense of Platonism, a tribute to the 17th century astronomer Johannes Kepler,

and some heavy denunciations of philosophers like Kant and most philosophers post-Plato. In fact, as far as LaRouche was concerned, every philosopher after Plato sucked. That's so funny. That's really funny. Incredibly. But at its core, his book in in defense of common sense was larouche restating his modernist somehow marx-inspired worldview

he argued that scientific and technological progress set humanity apart from all other creatures and it naturally leads to increased population density. In LaRouche's eyes there's no room for any entropic view that suggests a limit to human technology and population growth He even coined the term negentropic to advocate for ongoing industrial and population

expansion no matter what Alright buddy So then, if you didn't Okay, maybe you listen to this and you're like none of this is all dramatic and wild or whatever

here's where it gets even wilder this is where we get to the intersection of Lenin LaRouche and Elon Musk LaRouche proposes oh no

that we colonize Mars well I mean honestly the whole his other what was the term you just said like neurotropic

yeah that is pretty similar to Musk's ideology as well though pretty much yeah and so LaRue says let's go, let's colonize Mars and once that's done in about 40 years

according to his estimation, then his philosophical standpoint will clearly rule all of humanity for all of time. But while LaRouche is deep in thought behind bars, his followers, they're not twiddling their thumbs. They join forces with other anti-war demonstrators to oppose the Gulf War in 1990 and 1991.

And it was interesting to note that the NCLC was not the only voice from the right among those left-wing demonstrators. Pat Buchanan, the Populist Party, the Liberty Lobby, and other ultra-right and neo-isolationist groups formed a sort of united front with elements of the left in terms of that opposition to the Gulf War. And LaRouche was eventually released on parole in 1994. And by 1998, during the economic crisis, LaRouche was demanding that Bill Clinton appoint him immediately as an economic advisor. Sounds like a good idea. Yeah, no, he seems well qualified. And I quote,

it was now time to abandon crisis management and shilly-shallying. In other words, democracy. LaRouche believed in the inherent tendency of popular opinion toward mediocrity. The very tendency to rely upon collective decisions rather than decisions based upon validation of principle is itself a wellspring of mediocrity. He further explained, it's a proposed assemble of virtual rabble of decision makers, usually featuring those parties who are still advocates of the policies which have caused and advocated the crisis, is scarcely a noble enterprise, nor a fruitful one. Some relatively few in the position

to influence directives must preempt the situation. Just in case there should be any question as to LaRouche's concept of governance, he declared China to be probably one of the best governments in the world today in terms of quality of leadership the kind of leadership required to get through crisis larouche like mussolini and hitler before him borrowed from marx and then changed his theories completely yeah yeah marx's internationalist outlook was abandoned in favor of the nation-state marx's goal of abolishing capitalism was replaced by a model of a totalitarian state that is still primarily in the hands of private corporations and their owners who by the way would have to take orders from larouche now hitler called his national social his schema national socialism uh-huh. Interesting.

Curious. LaRouche was a fan, but he was like, you know, let's add a little spice. Let's give it some American Brandon. So LaRouche called his system and ideology, the American system.

It's a little bit less catchy. I got to say. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's the story of Lyndon LaRouche he died obviously most people do

there's only a few that have not died Enoch and I think one or two others most people do in fact die yeah he was really quite the guy he died in 2019 by the way oh no that's that recent

yeah yeah he lived a really long time he only lived for 100 years for crying out loud did did not realize he was still uh kick kicking around so so recently yeah gone too soon am i right uh yeah yeah absolutely at least at least now he's in heaven with ruth bader ginsburg that's that's yeah yeah i mean why do the why do the good die young you know oh he was just a kid um all right so as we conclude our journey into the enigmatic world of Lyndon LaRouche, I think we're left with more questions and answers. How did a man on the fringe of radical politics end up in the White House? Yeah, that is one question I actually still am thinking about is what were the conditions to his White House visit? thinking about his what what were the conditions to his white house visit and what led to his transformation from a committed leftist to a fascist i mean i think we could see the signs

of that right yes yeah in the 60s larouche displayed egotism and hints of instability but he was also an intelligent individual who attracted serious intellectuals. His ideas, while sometimes peculiar, were generally rational. But it was the adulation of student-students that allowed him to gather a following around his ideas and personality. The collapse of student radicalism in the 70s set the stage for a shift from left to right, and the unwavering loyalty of his followers likely reinforced his increasingly psychotic worldview and perception of his role in it. LaRouche was convinced that he deserved worship, that he was an intellect, he was fueled by his ideology of catastrophism, and that he, as the elite, would play a significant role as savior of humanity. would play a significant role as savior of humanity

the practices of his organization resembled many of the extreme religious thought control groups the practice of ideological totalism is very clear, the authoritarian structure is very clear, the paranoia fostered to create a clear boundary between the group

and the outside world don't be like Lyndon LaRouche please please and watch out for his group in the outside world don't be like Lennon and LaRouche please please and watch out for his wannabes I feel like Caleb Maupin is the LaRouche of this generation

I mean yeah I don't see Maupin getting invited to the White House anytime soon nor other characters like Chairman Bob see Moppen getting invited to the White House anytime soon. Nor other characters like Chairman Bob. Yeah, I don't know. We live

in a different time, I think, because of how the internet works. There's much more cult leaders just dispersed everywhere all the time. It's almost the democratization of cult leadership. Yeah, but it's also made them more or less isolated to the time. Yes, it's almost the democratization of cult leadership. Yeah, but it's also made them more or less

isolated to the internet with occasional flare-ups in the real world, which kind of limits their engagement with normal people, so to speak. Yeah, I mean, that's typical for cults, right? They're so isolated, they can't even communicate

with people outside of them anymore. Yeah, and I, that's typical for cults, right? They're so isolated, they can't even communicate with people outside of them anymore. of their bubble, which is common with a lot of cults. The ones that we only really know about or hear about are the ones that ended up doing some big horrific thing at some point that generated

a lot of eyeballs on them. But for every Heaven's Gate, there's a dozen New Age cults that just fly right under the radar that are still like horror horribly abusive they just not going on to this day yeah they just they they just might not be tied to like a horrific act of like mass murder or mass suicide that's a scary thought you know um how many cults have not yet broken containment as it were. Yeah, it's

a fun time to be alive. Indeed. So, yeah, I mean, I hope that the audience has enjoyed this cautionary tale, a reminder of the profound and sometimes dangerous paths

that ideology can take individuals and groups down. Once again, I'm Andrew of Andrewism. This is Garson of Garson. Of myself, yes. And this has been Inca Daphnia. Peace. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill

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in the closing minutes of teachers in Portland not being on strike. So yeah, this is a podcast that is often about strikes. And here to talk with me about this is Brittany Doris, who's a fifth grade teacher in Portland Public Schools, who's the union captain for her school and the strike captain also for her school. Brittany, welcome to the show. Hi, glad to be here. I'm really glad to talk to you.

So, all right, we are in- Zero hour. Yeah, we're in the zero hour of the strike by the time this comes out like i guess you'll have been on strike for like two days yeah um assuming this comes out friday yeah so all right i i think the the place we should start probably for people who are not in portland or people who haven't been following this um i guess we should start with what what are the sort of conditions that have led to this? I have heard some absolutely wild things about what's happening in Portland schools right now. How did we get here?

Yeah. We've been negotiating or bargaining this contract for over a year and pushing for circumstances that are just better suited for our students. Some of our classrooms that we're dealing with situations like rodents and mold and still some buildings dealing with lead in their water um extreme temperatures like class sizes are huge but different depending on where you're at in the city like we've just been overcompensating with less since pandemic times and we're we're fed up we're not able to do it anymore and yeah we're strike ready yeah and i mean this is, this is something, this is, this is, this is, I think a pretty interesting set of circumstances because my understanding and okay. So don't quote me on this.

I, I'm pretty sure that the last time that Portland teachers went on strike was in the, like actually ended up striking and not just doing the strike authorization vote was the, was in, was during the eighties. So it has been, it has been a really long time. It's possible. A literal lifetime. Yeah. It's like, I was not, I was like two of my lifetimes effectively. Like I was not alive for this. So. Yeah. I think we're seeing that shift happen nationwide that education has been continuously, public education has been continuously chipped away at and eroded over the last few decades. And more and more responsibility

has been put on the backs of teachers. And we are not able to function under this workload, to function under this workload, under these conditions, and without increased support for the educators as well. So I think this is the culmination of kind of years and years of disinvestment in public education nationwide. And so you're seeing a lot more educational strikes coming up throughout the country, and particularly for Portland's history. Like you said, it's if Portland public schools have have striked in the past, it's been literal decades, not in my lifetime, not in your lifetime. And just the continued frustration of decades of struggle. Yeah, and I mean, as from from what i've heard from from people in the city so the

line that i got was that janitors were being told that the the the standard they were supposed to clean schools to was quote moderately dingy so things seem not good yeah it's it's rough there's there's rodents everywhere um our custodial workers are already worked to the limit and understaffed. And so our buildings show. I mean, the school that I work in is over 110 years old. And you can tell it's not being upkept. And students are suffering. The conditions are, like you said, dingy. A moderate level of approved dinginess supposedly and that's gross yeah and i mean so i've heard that complaint a lot i mean i like when i was in school we only had one we had well i mean there might have been more there probably were more rats we didn't see we had one drowned rat fall out of a ceiling but that was it it was it was we were limited to one rat for four years and i feel i feel like that's the maximum number of rats that you should encounter is maybe one because it's kind of funny, but yeah. Yeah. And these are class pets. Like these aren't the mice and rats that you're using in a science class or keeping as the class pet in the corner. Like, Ooh.

as the class pet in the corner like oh yeah um and i do i guess the next thing that i wanted to talk about is class sizes because i know i mean this is a very people have been like talking about this for ages and and it's it's something that's really i feel like it's weird negotiating wise because and this is something i see all the time the school districts will be like well like the the admin will be oh well yeah of course you want like smaller class sizes. And then they just won't do it. So, yeah. Could you talk about. Yeah.

Here's something that's really burning my biscuit. Our district management continues to tell our community and the press that our average class size is 23 students at the elementary level. And the problem with that statistic is that they are doing a ratio based on the adults in the building. So, for example, we have a learning coach. We have a learning coach who works with children in small groups throughout the building, but she herself is not a rostered classroom teacher. But she is put into that equation so that it looks like our classes on

average are 23 when the reality is very different the music teacher doesn't count the learning coach doesn't count but in the math that the district is like that math ain't mathin my class is 34 kids you're telling the public the average is 23 and it's just not true because you're including adults in the building who aren't the host classroom teacher yeah which is that which is that's just that's just absurd like i mean you have to know that you're lying in order to create that statistic like that's a oh yeah and i you know it is true that there are some classes around the district that are small i had a miracle of a class last year that was 22 kids that cohort was just small that you know they weren't having as

many babies 11 years ago i don't know yeah but this year this year i have 34 and the year prior um so not last year but the 2022 year i had 32 and 34 kids is unsustainable, especially because I have the 22 to compare it to. I am very aware of how little capacity I have for meeting their needs, for teaching the wide range of levels that are in the class, even for checking in with kids. I can look out at my room at midday and think, looking at a kid, I don't know if I've talked to you like it's possible to go so under the radar when there are that many children to care for yeah and I mean that's a difference of like it's like what like a 40 class size increase right yeah a year which is nuts and I can feel and it's having a significant impact on just my own well-being and mental

health this year because I know what it looks like to teach well. And I know that I cannot currently do it with this many. And it's hard. Last year, I wasn't feeling any symptoms of burnout at all. I was feeling really good, loving my job still. And this year, I'm like, oh, my gosh, I cannot keep up with this many kids. Especially with, you know, we've gotten even so as class sizes have increased, so have the needs of our students, right? We're dealing with a lot more mental health issues.

We're dealing with a wide range of neurodiversity that comes with different needs. And so it's, that's the 34 now is exponentially different than 34 when we were young. It's intense and it's unsustainable and I'm living it every day. Yeah. And like, you know, I think on an abstract level, like the district knows like that this sucks, right? But they just, they don't fucking do anything about it. It's just, it's real.

Yeah. And even to the level that we're able to bargain it uh there are things such as like permissive topics that we can or cannot bargain and things that we can bargain and even in the strike that we are about to have they continue to push back on the class cap request saying that it is a permissive topic and that it's class caps may only be applicable to what are called title one schools so schools where the population is more impacted by poverty and so they're trying like even trying to get small class sizes or smaller class sizes knowing that it's a district-wide issue may still only be successful for some parts of our district. Yeah. And that's, that ain't right. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. That's absurd. Yeah. Like I, my classroom is incredibly diverse. We are not a title one school. We are known for supposedly being in one of the more affluent areas, but even our neighborhood school that those demographics have continued to

change. And we have many students that are experiencing poverty and experiencing some of the cultural pieces that go with that, the systemic impacts of that. Our students are living through trauma. Our students are experiencing adversity. Our students are experiencing racism and sexism and homophobia, and they are jam-packed sardines in an overheated room with no supports. I'm the only adult in the room to support them. I have students with disabilities who aren't getting support from our SPED team because our SPED team is, SPED stands for special education. Our special educators are working with some younger grade students with even bigger needs. So my fifth graders with disabilities are getting completely left in the lurch.

And it is my single body with all 34. And we're floundering. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, that's another sort of aspect of this thatstaffing class sizes that are too large right and it's especially painful i've been teaching now for 10 years and i am looking at this class right now i have a student in my class who is a little black boy with a disability and i'm looking at him knowing that i am not able to give him what he needs and he is like the statistic that school districts want to put on their website like we got

you know our our marginalized populations we've helped them we fit and like here is a student that is the statistic that you supposedly are fighting for and he is absolutely left out to dry and I am trying to do what i can for him and he comes to my i picture him as i'll be out there on that picket line like i am out there for that kid as well as his 33 other classmates but just like quintessential picture of who i'm fighting for and who is getting left behind yeah which which which i don't know like there there's there's i think there's something really grim in the way and this is this is a you know this this goes back to what you were talking about with the way that they're just straight up lying about the average the average

class size where it's it really seems like these things have you know the the actual process of education is being degraded into just this sort of metric chasing game. And, you know, as long as you have metrics that look good, you know, like the district is like, well, okay, it's fine that like our students aren't getting the quality of education they need. It's fine that they're in these buildings that are literally falling apart. It's fine that, you know, kids aren't getting what they need they need as long as the metrics look good. Right. Something that gets me when we talk about those metrics, knowing our superintendent gets a bonus if academically marginalized populations,

like our black and brown students, if they increase their performance on standardized tests, he gets a bonus. Now, what I have a problem with is that those standardized tests that we take every spring there are some students that are so impacted by the school system that they they may have attendance issues they may not be there consistently in the spring to take those tests so something i'm picturing a couple of my students who were impacted by poverty were kids of color and were significantly absent due to the circumstances of their life. Those students were not able to take that test in the spring. That means those students, those black and brown students, that data wasn't in those metrics.

So even the metrics that are being used to measure whether or not we are successfully supporting our students of color are inaccurate because our most impacted students aren't able to take that assessment like his data our superintendent's data is going to look better when some of the students who might tank that data because they are unsupported by the school system aren't there to be in the data because they're unsupported by the school system it It falls apart. And this is one of these things where it's like the only way to change this is through union actions. Because the school district's not going to do it. Their metrics look fine.

And the government's not going to do it because they don't want to spend more money. So this is the only way to actually. Yeah. And I think we finally, finally i think have made a point we are i mean our union actions already have been building up a visible presence we have massive community support from our not only our parent communities but the greater portland area businesses coming out in support people joining us at like we had a massive march this saturday where we took over the burnside bridge and as our union actions build we know that we are out there. We are not alone and that we are feeling the support from the community and we are becoming a more visible presence.

And especially in Portland, we are a massive union. Other unions around the state are looking at us and watching how this goes. And we can tell that the district management is scared. They are starting to send out emails to families that are meant to intimidate and panic and cause chaos. And we're seeing these defensive moves that are a reaction. Do you know who else is a hack and a fraud who didn't figure out a way to do an ad pivot here? It's the products and services that support this podcast yeah speaking of businesses that support us and we're back yeah so you know okay so that that those are those are two other dynamics that i i

sort of i wanted to get into i guess first i want to talk about what the what the community support has looked like what fourth mother support has looked like, what Fort Mother Unions has looked like, and how you've been engaging with parents. Because I mean, that's been a big thing. So I'm from Chicago. And so we have like a, I mean, not that long, but like for the last about decade, the Chicago Teachers Union has been on strike a bunch of times. And it's like, it really, and the support of that and the engagement of that really

is one of the few things that's been making Chicago a better place. So I wanted to ask what that's looked like in Portland, because this is basically the first time for y'all. Right. And I know historically in Oregon, we felt the support from our community, such as the Red for Ed movement a few years ago, when we were really pushing for statewide reform and change in education policy. And here in Portland, ever since the seeds of our uprising were being planted, knowing that we are on a collision course towards a strike based on how poorly the district management is bargaining with us. And so we started to build in that communication and enlist the support of our parent communities pretty early on by having info sessions, by talking about, you know, the community's wants and desires for their students, connecting with our schools, PTAs,

connecting with local businesses, especially as in the last month or so that we felt, okay, this is happening. We are about to strike. We need to connect with our communities in our school areas and see who's out there and if they have our back. And it's been really profound in grassroots organizing between the parents and the PTAs in tandem with our unions and from businesses around our school areas. We attended an event called Strike School to prepare. And one of our missions was to check in with businesses and neighbors in the areas of our schools where we plan to be picketing and seeing, you know, where can we go to use the bathroom? Where can we go to use a parking lot? And just making those

connections, some of which already existed, even though Portland hasn't had to strike we've been very connected to our communities because the educators live in these communities this is my community unlike some of the big wigs in the big pink building of management like they are coming in and out in a few years we're from here we are here to stay we are here to make those connections. So it was very easy to call upon those connections because we are the community. You know, we have a lot of union members that are parents. We have a lot of union members that are married to business owners in the area. Um, we've, yeah, it's been, it's been obvious who lives here, who's fighting for these kids, because this is our community.

Yeah. And, you know, I mean, Portland's been a place where I think kind of beneath the notice of a lot of the national press, it's been one of the places where the most union organizing is happening and where the most strikes have been happening. strikes have been happening. And yeah, I was wondering, I mean, to what extent have y'all been influenced by, I mean, both the sort of the just profusion of like local strikes and then also the kind of the bigger national strikes. Something really beautiful about living in Portland is that there is quite a bit of cross union solidarity. And like in the educational realm, we have a coalition of all of our unions that come together. The certified teachers like my union, PAT, as well as SEIU, the union that represents our custodial staff, as well as PFSP, our paraeducators, our nutritional staff, the bus drivers union, like all of those unions come together and support each other. And in fact,

in the educational realm of Portland, multiple unions are on the verge of striking in that they are having unsuccessful bargaining attempts. But then also with like the UPS workers, with Kaiser Pharmacies and the medical field, like there is labor action all around Portland. And there's definitely a built-in solidarity network from union to union. Our union siblings are with us. We have been with them throughout the years. I think we do a really good job as a major city of wrapping around each other's unions and supporting big actions. And, you know, Portland, when we do get national press it is for how rambunctious our little city can be um and this is some of that good trouble that that john lewis would want us to get in yeah and i mean this is something that you can i mean so i was in portland for like three

weeks uh pretty like recently and i mean you would just run like i was i was at a hospital for long long story about that but i was at a hospital for long long story about that but i was at a hospital and like the first person we talked to is like as a receptionist was like the union rep from the receptionist union and like we're talking to the nurses and the nurses are like oh yeah we just won our we just won our thing without having to go on strike because management caved it's a really sort of incredible place to be in terms of like just just the the energy and just like the amount of stuff that's happening there so it's really it's really sort of incredible very active i guess the the other side of this is that this we've also seen a lot of sort of management retaliation and crackdown attempts. And yeah, I was wondering if you could talk about

what management's been doing because... Yeah. Yeah. It's really ramped up in the last week or so as it is clear that we are on our way to strike, especially when 99% of the membership voted yes to a strike authorization. That sent a pretty clear message,

and I think it made district management panic a little little and we've received numerous emails to the parent community um they have for example they are training tomorrow uh thursday the day of our strike beginning or when on wednesday the day that the strike begins they are training our paraprofessionals and EAs in how to deliver virtual phonics instruction. One of their moves was to cause panic in the families by sending emails home that say, your student, based on their test scores, is a struggling reader. Here's the plan, should there be a school closure, that we're going to provide virtual learning opportunities. So immediately, you've got parents in a panic, emailing their teacher like,

my student is struggling, why didn't I know? And in many cases that was inaccurate. A second grade teacher at my school, every parent in her class got that email. And sure, she has some struggling readers, but it is not every student. Why did every student's family get that email? To cause panic, to cause fear, to cause intimidation. And so they also sent out a

big email trying that the technology team was coming into the buildings to collect all the Chromebooks. Our students are one-to-one with Chromebooks. They're pretty integral to our curriculum delivery and our instruction. And they started pulling them out in the middle of the work day, in the middle of the teaching day from some of our youngest students which was a visible thing in front of students they're coming to collect them it was unplanned we had no warning um that again seemed to be kind of a panic move we are trying to sow fear and intimidation and we're taking your chromebooks and we're putting kids back in COVID times. That's just a terrible,

also just like a terrible thing to do to a bunch of kids. Right. Like, what? Yeah. Like, yeah, you're just coming into their room and just taking their stuff in front of everyone. Like, what? Right? Especially those younger grades with no warning and like,

oh, we were supposed to have our tech time on Friday. Like, we had our routine and, oh, this guy's coming in and taking all the chromebooks sorry kids yeah it's one of these things not really having a ready answer yeah it's like it's one of these things where it's like you can you can really tell like who actually cares about the kids here because it's like yeah and you know management is trying to put out the message that teachers don't care about your kids. That's why they're willing to stop school and put your kids back at home again. It's bad. Like the pandemic time, those nasty teachers want your kids out of school.

And, you know, our point being that our students haven't been getting the learning that they deserve because of the current conditions. Yeah. That we've been underserving them already. We are walking out not because we don't care, but because we care so passionately that we aren't willing to stand for these subpar conditions any longer. And this is the thing I don't like, I've seen a lot of teacher strikes in, in my city. I've seen a lot of teacher strikes nationally. I don't think I've ever seen, and you know, and this isn't to say to say that i like i don't think it would be justified for teachers to go on strike like just because they're underpaid like like everyone had everyone like has the right and possibly the

obligation to go on strike for better conditions but like that's not ever ever i have never at any point ever seen a teacher's union go on strike for reasons that weren't mostly about like mostly about improving things for their kids and it's it's wow because you see this every like they do this in chicago too it's like every single time there's a strike it's like ah the teachers like they hate they hate your kids is that they're like these like privileged overpaid people who are like and it's like you guys like you should you should like look at the admin salary sometime like yes yeah yeah it's it's clear that there's a disconnect and as soon as there's a change in the weather teachers go from being the hero to being the villain and the fact that we

are willing to go out on the streets and fight for our kids in the rain and the cold of Oregon winter. No, we're the villains. We are putting them all back in their COVID boxes. Like, yeah, that ain't it. Yeah, that really sucks. Like, I don't know. Thankfully, the negative kind of vitriol that we see um mostly online where the trolls live um it does seem to be like a loud minority as with any form of trolling or or counter you know

we we do hear from community members that have more legitimate concerns but they are i'm really supportive i'm a little worried about this one aspect but i'm with you guys you know and that's valid i told my students as we were getting ready to go home for the long weekend, quote unquote, you know, that it is okay to feel a variety of emotions. Like I'm sad. I'm going to miss you guys. I don't know when I'll get to see you again. And that makes me anxious. And I'm excited to go fight for you guys to get us what we deserve like so even letting the children know this is totally normal and that's my same message to the adults like it's totally okay if you've got some mixed emotions yeah and we're gonna be out there fighting for the kids i hope you're not mad

at me for very long but i'm gonna do it anyway yeah and that's another thing that's kind of like weird about this is like the the the way the, the way the negotiations have gone, it's like, this is happening. Like a lot of strikes happen at the beginning of the school year. Right. And so it pushes back the, but this is,

but this is like, okay. So like you've gotten in, you've met the kids, you're like teaching them to developing your relationship. And then management is just like, no, this is the moment where we're going to force everyone to.

Yeah. And that just sucks, no, this is the moment where we're going to force everyone to. Yeah. And that just sucks. Yeah. And I don't think there's ever a great time to strike, but we definitely hope to be the least impactful. You know, we want to make sure that our families have what they need. We want to make sure that our staff have what they need. We didn't want to go too long. We don't want to be striking in the middle of winter or during a break when students are already out.

Yeah, it's there's never a great time. And I feel I feel really confident that our bargaining unit has really worked to make this the least detrimental to our students as possible. Yeah. While still maintaining the validity of a strike of a big collective action. I mean, I think this is, this is something that care workers struggle with a lot, right? It's like one of,

one of the reasons that it's, it's hard for teachers to strike that it's hard for healthcare workers to strike is because like, yeah, like you don't do this job unless you care about the people that you're like, it's your job to care for. Like you don't,

you wouldn't know, like no one will put up with these conditions if they didn't care right and you know and and that's i think there's this really grim way in which this becomes a sort of trap of like this is it becomes this you see this like this is the thing i've been i've been talking to uh like people who like abortion workers and they talk about this too where it's like there's just this kind of trap you get in because it's like you know that you are the only person providing the service that these people really need and your bosses use that to underpay you use it to you know have just unacceptable conditions and yeah it it sucks that it's like you know the

the foundational elements of an actual any kind of society that's actually good. Like the fact that people care and love, like love each other and care for each other is being used as a weapon to like coerce people into like really shitty conditions. That's weaponizing our passion and our care for our kids. And that's also something that tells you that it's serious if if teachers who know that our students rely on us we love our students so deeply if we are at the point where we're finally striking it's been bad for a while yeah yeah and you were kind of mentioning this earlier but teachers are so many things to our students like i I am their teacher. I am in some cases,

I'm a care provider. In some cases, I'm a therapist. In some cases, I'm their nutrition expert. Like they are coming to us for everything in some cases. And so to be willing to say, I have to leave now to get us what we deserve.

You're, I'm going to make sure you're okay. It's so hard. It's so hard to say goodbye to these kids and it's so necessary yeah and that's that tells you that we that it is also that important that we have gotten to this point where we need to yeah and the students do seem pretty and i mean i have the benefit of being at fifth grade but the students do seem to understand pretty well some of them are incredibly activated little unionists little union fighters as well we've had um some of the fifth graders sent letters to the the oregonian and to the to the school board and to the superintendent and they're very eloquent they

i mean they've been living the conditions they are the voice and it is they are trying to shout loudly and you know we're trying to amplify that like i am striking for them i will benefit but this is for them to have a better outcome you know what other services are provided by a bunch of workers who are not getting paid enough and are probably understaffed uh legally i don't know if i'm allowed to say that but they they haven't done the crackdown on us yet so i can say whatever i want damn it it's it's it's the products and services that support this podcast and we are back um so there was a there's a thing i've been noticing so i've been interviewing a lot of interviewing a lot of service workers in the last god like, I guess like two years now.

Geez, I've been doing this for a long time now. But one of the things that I've been noticing is a lot of people, and this comes back to something that you were talking about, which is that a lot of service workers, I mean, people who are just baristas, people who are just doing effectively random service jobs are being pushed more and more into having to care for people because the rest of the sort of whatever social increases in poverty and stagnating wages and police violence and our completely dysfunctional mental health care system. The first people this was pushed on was y'all. Yeah, we're that first line of defense for the public good. And when you are gutting education, you are gutting the first safety net of the public good. And, you know, the students will tell you that they are our future and we are the net that's supposed to catch them.

And we've been underfunded and under supported and under resourced and in many ways like privatized, where some of what will be the future populace are getting what they need and everyone else is left behind and you can see it in retrospect you can see how public education has been deteriorating or forcibly deteriorated by some of those interests that are trying to privatize or have privatization yep in their mission and the ultimate outcome of that is a deteriorated united states like the populace is is suffering because of it like i wonder why democracy is starting to fall apart when yeah follow the dominoes backwards

public education has been underfunded and undersourced for decades now so our generation of workers are trying to repair the damage we witnessed and experienced and stop it from getting worse as it gets worse around us yeah and this is one of those things where this is kind of like there's been this kind of unholy alliance between like i guess i call it like the the sort of the charter school private school alliance between the sort of like obama arnie duncan uh oh my god paul vallis like like technically liberal like neoliberal reformers who were you know trying to destroy teachers' unions, trying to, like, try to force everyone into

charter schools, trying to sort of, like, and it's just blasting holes in the education system of every single city they end up in. But it's just interesting, too, where, like, you have these people on the one hand, and they're the sort of, like, vaguely liberal wing of it, and then

simultaneously you have this sort of like absolutely ferocious, like frothing right wing, like evangelical shoe shape. Yeah. It's like someone, I, I saw a, well,

they were going the other direction, but I saw, I saw a funny depiction of that. They called it like fishhook theory where like you have the stuff in the middle and then the far right people sort of bend back around into the middle because like they found this one thing they agree on which is that they hate teachers right and you know the public enemy yeah well and i think it's it's interesting too that like schools are specifically the place that when when the right tried wanted to do their

pushback against racial justice it was like they went to schools and they did they've been they've been doing this with like lgbtq stuff too is you know this is like the rights whole game i mean since like desegregation has been trying to push people into private schools and privatizing the education system. And I don't know, it strikes me as interesting that, you know, there's been for a really long time. And I think y'all like y'all the like Chicago teachers unions has this has really been sort of the forefront of the fight against that of like, it seems it seems like we're finally in a period where these people who have run this country into the ground for the past like 50 years are finally starting to sort of like face the consequences and like have to deal with the people that they've been

just destroying for so long yeah we are seeing it from the inside as it happens like i am experiencing as an elder millennial growing up in the 90s in the public education system, knowing now as an adult what I was not being taught or what was being left out or censored just due to systemic patterns that now we teach in a different way to make sure that that doesn't continue. And then we're seeing legislation in places like Florida and Tennessee that are like, stop doing that. Stop fixing the problem. And you can't put it back in the box. Like we see from the inside as things are falling apart and people are being left out. And so we're inside public education screaming, knock it off. You did bad by us. We won't let you do bad by the next generation and the next generation yeah and i think like the the other aspect of that like is is the way that like school boards are being used to sort of like to take control of districts and like push all of this sort of just horrific like anti-queer politics stuff and i don't know like that's a personal one for me because like my school like

i mean i guess we technically had stuff but like i don't know like the resources available to all the queer kids that like those like me and like everyone i grew up with were like just terrible and you know i got to see the consequences of that right bare minimum if any yeah and like you know like in in a in a really really like frothing right wing like really just conservative environment and like I don't know it it's it it really seems like it's for a lot of people it's gotten way better and all of these you know like one of the assaults that we're seeing is like people just want to bring this stuff back right to the quote-unquote good old days before all of us queer folks were coming out and yeah like put everybody back in the closet hide all of the racism that you've

unraveled and exposed put it all back in the box put a bow back on the box we want america to look the way it used to yeah right and that's that's a lie and that benefited very specific populations and we won't continue to play that game and i think that's another reason like you said that you're seeing the gutting of public education is that it's scary public education is about truth and teaching critical thinking. And that is not good for people in power when their power has been achieved on the backs of marginalized groups and by historically underserving people and pushing people into the dirt. Yeah, it's like it turns out that when your entire state is based on doing a rolling genocide across the entire continent you probably don't want to tell people that that's like it's a

bad idea yeah cats out of the bag america yeah yeah i wanted to ask you sort of what role has i guess just 2020 in general and i mean the pandemic too but like i i don't know like i i i want to i guess like get a sense of what impact like the uprising has had on all of this because it is like i do think it is notable that, you know, it's like three years after the uprising, we have the first strike in so long. I think as a result of living through pandemic times, people really had an opportunity to reflect on what their lives were like, what they were living through that was unjust. what they were living through that was unjust. I think a lot of inequities were revealed through having to shift our entire worlds and things that had previously gone hidden or unnoticed or unexposed came to light.

And people said, no more. We have learned to do things a different way. We will not go back to the broken ways. And so it makes sense to me that we are at this boiling point do things a different way we will not go back to the broken ways and so it makes sense to me that we are at this boiling point in repairing and trying to rebuild and reform after a global change and you see it in the kids too i mean they say about my generation as a millennial that we we've lived through numerous large-scale traumas um and the kids

of today have now as well like the students i am currently teaching were second graders when the pandemic hits and they are forever changed they were seeing you know the black lives matter movement come alive on their television screens and in their cities they grew up in civic action and global turmoil and they are active even if i wasn't teaching current events in the way that i do the students are bringing it to the room like the conversations are happening yeah which is it's such an interesting like that generation i think it's gonna be really interesting because I don't know. I mean, I'm from this, I'm, I'm, I'm on exactly the borderline with everyone trying to figure out whether I'm a millennial or a zoomer, but like my, like my first memory is nine 11.

Yeah. And so like, you know, it's, I feel like I got a kind of millennial experience, which is I got nine 11, 2008, 26, well, 2008, then, the 2013 uprisings, which I guess was a bit off. But I got, like, the 2011-2013 uprisings, and then, like, I get out of college, or I get into college, and it's 2016. And it's just, like,

Yeah. Hot mess. Yeah, it's just, it's just, Hot mess. It's just real, like, I, I, I, I, like, I became conscious the moments that history returned to the world like i'm not yeah but i don't know like i i think it's an interesting thing with like with these kids who've grown up who are you know i mean like yeah like their first memories are going to be like the pandemic and like 2020 that i don't know like i i i don't know i'm interested in where these

people are going to go but also i think this is you know this this all of this ties back into just the the importance of what you and all of your co-workers do which is that you're the people who are you know like it you're you're the people who are producing like the kids who are gonna who are i mean hopefully they won't have to be fighting the same fights that that we are right now statistically they probably will but yeah like and you're the people who are sort of mediating their understanding of like what is happening in this world around them that's you know increasingly terrifying and complex right trying not to give 10 year olds an existential crisis but yeah coming into like

they are at that developmental age where they are starting to have that existential crisis of wow our our planet is out of luck our educational system is rotten our democracy is falling apart like they are witnessing turmoil in every country like that it is you know they say that the youth's humor is very nihilistic and and dark and it's just getting darker like thankfully they give me so much hope and light in you know a world where sometimes I don't even want to be a part of the future because the future looks grim. They are a light, even in all of that darkness. And I think they're really resilient. I wish they didn't have to be.

I have my own big existential dread. And the kids are angry. The kids are upset. But the kids are angry. The kids are, are upset, but the kids are all right. Maybe if we can continue to support them. And I think this is something that goes for everyone is like it. And so,

and so far as we have obligations to anyone on earth, like the thing, the thing that we owe these kids is to try to make sure they don't have to go through the same shit that we did because like that stuff sucked yeah i one of my teaching philosophies is the be who you needed when you were younger and i didn't even know some of the things i needed but looking back like now as a queer adult living in a major city who grew up in a small town in Montana in the 90s, I'm very, yeah, very aware of some of the things that I should have had as a young person and that I am glad to be there for my students in that way. Even the difference working with some people who've been teaching for longer, you see the difference in educational philosophy from one generation to the next and the be who you needed when you were younger. I'm

very open to being neuro affirming, supporting our students that are on the spectrum or students with ADHD or students with anxiety disorders in a way that even the teachers of our generation, when I was a child, aren't necessarily on the same like yeah we're getting better we're making education less damaging too i think that's one of the reasons sometimes we lose public opinion is people have negative memories of school school has been harmful and we're like no support us like i promise it's different now yeah but but i mean but i i think this is one of those things too, where like the teachers union in general, if you're looking at what is the, what is the single like group of people in the United States who actually wants to make school suck less like the most, it's probably like slightly above that is students. But the thing is like students aren't organized enough to like, and you know, and as much really and you know this isn't to

write off like the incredible amount of student activism that i mean has been happening forever but they don't have the kind of power that did like teachers unions right teachers unions are the other social voice yeah well and also just the ability to like like the ability to withdraw your labor and suddenly actually have a massive effect on the entire sort of like state economy yeah yeah we are united for our students like the might we are called a teacher's union but we are united for our students because they don't yet have the ability or the access or the social capital to be heard in the way that they deserve. Yeah. I don't know. I think, I think that's a, that's a pretty good note to end on, unless you have anything else that you want to say first.

I'm satisfied. I mean, I'm not satisfied. I'm striking, but like, Yeah. Yeah. So how, how can people will a, how can people in Portland support the strike? And then B, how can people who are not in Portland who want to support the strike help? Yeah, Portlanders are able to help support the strike. We have a strike fund set up for purchasing and some of the things that we've needed on our strike lines like megaphones like ponchos. All of that strike fund is being used to help strike captains such as myself around the city organize our pickets and our actions and so donating to that strike fund is one way to make sure that every teacher in portland is getting some support and then if you live in portland

finding out the schools that are closest to you in your area um reaching out to those schools specifically uh probably through social media, since we will not be in our buildings, like using a school email wouldn't work, but reaching out to the strike in your area. If you drive by and you see them, like giving them a honk and a hooray and finding out where they need supplies to get directed to. People outside of Portland, same thing. That strike fund is very visible, Sharing on social media, things on our behalf, really making sure that your own legislatures know how important public education is to you.

Hopefully things in your state or area are going positively for educators, but chances are they're not. So I bet no matter where you live as a listener, public educators in your area could probably use your support, talking to school boards, talking to legislators, and making change in education, making sure that kids are getting what they need. That fight is guaranteed to be happening everywhere.

Yeah, and we will have links to, well, definitely the Strike Fund, probably also we'll have links to social media stuff in the description. So yeah, go do that. have links to social media stuff in the description so yeah go go do that and also yeah do you yeah i do you want i mean i'm assuming you also if people could show up to picket lines yeah yeah anyone in portland uh driving in any of our neighborhoods will find a school will find a picket and you are welcome to join us um i know i'm in the the southwest region of portland we'll be picketing in major areas as well as right outside our schools so pretty much anywhere you see a sea of blue give us a honk and hop out and join us for a little while and we'll see you in some big visible spaces to be determined as we do some larger actions yeah so yeah stay tuned this is a this

is the thing i will say from from experience is that like the okay so the more people there are the better picketing is and where there's a bunch of people on a picket it rules so go go to a picket it's a good time you're you're joining us yeah you're fighting you're fighting for a good cause you are fighting for your class and yeah yeah yay well thank you so much for having me and thank you to your listeners for giving us an ear and thank you thank you for talking to me um it's been it's been great and yeah go go go listeners all of you go support the strike make sure they win and yeah go out go out into your communities and do the same.

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