It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 12

Episode Date: December 4, 2021

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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. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy

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now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. 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. What's? What's?

What's? I'm Robert Evans. This is It Could Happen Here, the show that asks what's? And also other questions, more meaningful questions than that, about, you know, things falling apart, fixing them, all that good stuff. With me today, as usual, Garrison and Chris, and as is currently unusual but will be more usual every preceding month after this one, our good friend St. Andrew.

St. Andrew, take a bow. Hey, what's up, man? Bow. It's not quite a bow, but it's fine. How are you doing today, Andrew? I'm good. I'm good. You know, it's rainy.

It's chill. It's better than the kind of hot weather we've been getting lately, so I'm good. Yeah, it's raining and chill here, but that's seven months of the year. I think there's slightly different climates in Portland, Oregon and Trinidad. Probably. I've been told. So we have had you on a couple of weeks back to talk about Solar Punk. And we're going to be bringing you back on about twice a month to talk about whatever the hell you want to talk about.

And so I'm going to now hand the episode over to you and trust like a little lamb that you'll lead me somewhere beautiful and filled with good forage. Ah, yes. Sunshine and rainbows, the promised land. Yeah. Okay. So I think we've all noticed uh the environmentalist movement kind of sucks like i've been jumping into it kind of sucks as in has not done the things that

has not accomplished has been around for like over half a century or actually really more than that and you know where are we now yeah you know um of course we do have to confront and acknowledge that like there's the issue where oil companies literally suppressed a whole bunch of information and you know co-opted like a lot of the earlier movements and stuff but we've kind of known for a while now and we are still here. So it's like, what gives? I think there's kind of an interesting phenomenon that I wanted to talk about today, known as soft climate change denial. So are you familiar with that, or what do you think it is based on first impressions? Yeah, I've heard the term.

um i mean yeah i've heard the term i would think it's sort of um i mean a number of different things including the idea that like uh well there's nothing we can do so nothing should be done you know yeah yeah what about you garson yeah most of my understanding of the term is like someone like saying they like know that climate change is a thing uh like they they recognize that but they are kind of more in denial of what solutions can be done to really change anything that's generally my understanding of the term when i see it like online or something yeah what about you chris yeah i usually see it online or something. Yeah. What about you, Chris? Yeah, I usually see it with... It's usually in the context of people

in the US. There's the whole... There's whole political factions whose entire thing is saying we believe in science and then they'll go talk about how much they believe in climate change and then two seconds later they turn around and are signing fracking authorizations.

Yeah. So that's my understanding of it. Right, yeah. Yeah, so, according to everyone's favorite source, Wikipedia, soft climate change denial is a state of mind acknowledging the existence

of global warming in the abstract while remaining to some extent impartial psychological or intellectual denialism about its reality or impact and something i've spoken about in my channel in my most recent video where i was talking about the different facets of solopunk you know what solopunk is what it needs um things that could probably potentially drag down the solopunk movement and things that people have been using to try to drag it down because solopunk is kind of building in popularity and with anything that builds in popularity there are attempts from

all sorts of angles to co-opt it and to repackage it and commodify it and all those things. So I've kind of noticed with the solopunk phenomenon that there's this effort by people who profess to care about the climate and stuff to try to push it away from more radical directions towards something more appealing and appeasing to the status quo and to the system. And I mean, according to the status quo and to the system um and i mean according to the wikipedia definition you know it's they call it a state of mind but i think it's also like an implicit philosophy that undergoes like entire groups and entire movements you know so like for example obviously you know it affects individuals where you know people will um miscalculate its risks and think that climate change is just extra storms or something. But then there are also people or really the movements

that would neglect its urgency with just these platitudes and these directionless actions that just serve this kind of middling reformism. Like they underestimate the extent of social change required to like mitigate climate change. So they basically don't seek to change the status quo, but just to sort of tweak it ever so slightly. So like capitalism with a carbon tax or something. And then of course there are

people who kind of straddle that that fence or maybe it's more of a spectrum between soft climate change denial and hard climate change denial where they might overestimate the extent of scientific uncertainty so they might think that oh well you, yeah, global warming is happening, but we don't exactly know how much it's going to change the climate or how much it's impacting our lives and that kind of thing. So they basically turn it into something that is still up for debate, you know? And that's why I say it kind of straddles that line between soft line and hard line because obviously the hard climate change nihilists, they're just like

oh well you know it doesn't exist or if it does exist humans don't cause it if humans do cause it there's nothing we can do that kind of thing have you all had like experiences with soft climate change denial like in your own personal organizing oh yeah yeah i i would say so i've encountered um i mean it's kind of a thing you encounter constantly in American politics because it's really like oftentimes your best option in terms of like it's that or the people who say that talking about climate change is socialism. Yeah. So I was in environmental studies major for most of college and then i

decided not to do it and then i got like a minor instead because like one class off long story but you know it was interesting seeing it there because like you know there were basically like two possible reactions to learning that. One was, like, people who, you know, okay, one was you get incredibly depressed, and that's what I did, or, and then the second one was people would, you know, and these people who, like, actually, you know, you know, I mean, these are environmental studies majors, right? Like, these people had spent a lot of time studying this stuff, and kind of like i don't know this is almost like like this kind of intellectual retreat where you you could see people basically just like convincing

themselves that like somehow this would be okay and they'd like i don't know people would just they get like completely obsessed with like electoral maps and you're like no no no no okay okay if we win exactly this number of seats in this year then like uh we can we can start doing carbon credits or like i don't know it was it was it was really interesting to watch because it was like it was it was i mean because i like i think i think there's there's like there's very there's bad faith versions of it and then i think there's also versions of it that are just sort of like people do not want to accept yeah like the the what's necessary to stop this and so they sort of like that or they can't even really like think about what's necessary yeah because because of how the education system works and trust me i could go on like long

rants for the education system yeah it really it really really um it really limits people's ability to think outside of like this very very strict box of possibilities because you know so much is left out of um for example history classes and so much is left out of um really all the subjects there's this very clear um ideology that you're expected to come out of the education system with and so even when you reach you know academia and higher education and stuff you're still stuck with that mode of thinking and even as you're presented with all this new information because your brain can't really like handle like the great extent of what climate change is you know it kind of retreats into this sort of simple kind of oh we just need to vote because voting is all i know voting is all i've been told to do

voting is politics and politics is voting that's the extent of it right yeah it's like this weird form of self-preservation that people need to do in order to kind of like Yeah, it's like this weird form of self-preservation that people need to do in order to kind of like keep their keep them from in their mind, you know, like spiraling out of control. This is the only thing that, you know, they have they need to focus on their own life right now and their own current problems. And if they think about this, this like large looming threat too much, it just freaks you out. Right. it just freaks you out, right? And you have, if in order to, in order to just keep going on with your life, a lot of people like segment off this type of thing in their own brain.

So that, you know, manifests in a lot of cases in this kind of soft denial so that you can just keep on going. Yeah, yeah. I see it with friends, I see it with family. You know, obviously there are the handful of people who still, at least in my experience, who still deny deny climate change but then there's like a bigger portion of people whose whole understanding of climate change is just this oh well we just need to recycle and

we just need to like switch to electric vehicles and yeah once we do that you know we'll be okay um we just tweak a couple things get some solar panels and yeah you know the understanding of it has been completely limited to like this very restricted conversation yeah that is like um basically cultivated by certain interest groups and certain lobbying groups and kind of thing you know yeah only a certain amount of change is allowed and that's what we're allowed to think so that's what we're like shown for examples of in like media and pop culture or whatever right so this is you know this is kind of what um you know like all of like the youtubers who got money from bill gates when bill gates

wrote his climate book right all of the things that they were talking about is like this kind of stuff. Because the only way for Bill Gates to keep his money while talking about climate change is to have these kind of half-assed solutions that actually deny the impending reality and deny that, no, the only way to actually fix it is by taking all of his money,

which he's not as big a fan of. Yeah, I mean, have you all seen the Kursk Sagt video on climate change? The what video on climate change? Kursk Sagt, in a nutshell. It's like this YouTube channel. Could you spell that so people can find it? Oh, gosh. No, but people will.

I think a lot of people know what it is, or you can just but people will, I think people, people know, I think a lot of people know what it is or you can just search in a nutshell on YouTube. In a nutshell. It's K-U-R, I'm going to try,

I'm going to try. K-U-R, no, it's K-U-R-G, was it K-U-R-Z? Yeah, I think it's K-U-R-Z-G-E-S. A-G-T. A-G-E-S A-G-T A-G-T, right.

It is a weird one. But are you talking about the Can You Fix Climate Change? Yeah. Where the whole thesis is basically vote with your ballot and vote with your wallet. Yeah, that's the only thing

that you're really allowed those are the options right yeah and i i believe this is one of the videos sponsored by they put this um yeah they did yeah it was and then they had this whole line about some people think we need to change like our system from climate change from from capitalism but we're not so sure about that we don't know the the answer. So they basically shrugged towards, oh, maybe it's a problem with the system, but they basically gave it no attention. But their channel is literally about going deep into research about things.

So it's very obvious that if they spent no time doing any kind of research into why people have the systemic critique, that obviously Bill Gates' hand is very deep in their pockets. Yeah. Because I believe that researchers actually kind of know that, that obviously Bill Gates' hand is very deep in their pockets. Yeah. You know? Because I believe the researchers actually kind of know that, but they're not, they just can't say. They're not allowed to.

Yeah. And I mean, like, it's- Yeah, I think they're making the bargain a lot of people make where they're like, okay, well, if we can push for, you know, the immediate necessary changes, we can worry about, you know, stuff like that later on. It's just important to get something done. And so we'll compromise and we'll not call for what we know

is actually necessary to deal with the problem. We'll just go with a half measure because at least it's something. We got to do something now, right? The thing that's always been very grim about that to me is like, look about how how that plays out right and it's always like well okay so our our half measure is gonna be uh we're gonna we're gonna just like put put put a monetary value on indigenous forests so that governments can like steal them and get paid for taking the land and it's never stuff like why don't we like make more marshes? Which is, you know, if you're going to talk about stuff that like could actually be done, right?

It's like, okay, well, do remarshing. Do we want like that? That stuff like is easy and doesn't need, you know, you don't literally have to overthrow capitalism to get people to like restore marshes. But it never happens because this that's, you know, the whole basis of the sort of soft denialism stuff is not actually you know it's not actually an attempt to solve climate change they just want to make money and it's extremely grim yeah yeah there's this video that uh the storyteller is this youtuber um he did recently on co-opting movements and he was explaining that um with the march in washington right during the civil rights movement um that was an organic movement that you know the people

had come up with right but obviously a mass movement the fbi isn't going to just sit back and let that happen right so they brought in these leaders um they're called the big six and um the storyteller was explaining that basically they were paid to co-opt the march to basically become its figureheads and its leaders they hadn't organized it themselves but they came on afterwards and became the leaders in the march and read the speeches that they were supposed to read and that kind of thing. And so that sort of mass movement was basically defound like that. civil rights act was passed but then you know after all that happened and mlk got disillusioned by the system as a whole and wanted to start pushing even harder against capitalism and whatnot that's when oh well coincidentally he got a bullet you know so i think it's

interesting that these movements they're able they're they's interesting that these movements, they're comfortable with these movements up to a certain point and comfortable with these leaders going in these certain directions up to a certain point. But then when you actually start posing a threat to the status quo, that's when you become a problem in a major way. Not to say that MLK wasn't a threat to the status quo but just to say that you know um there was they have certain limits that they don't want

people to cross yeah capitalism one of the things that's that makes it such a robust system in terms of its ability to, to not get overthrown or destroyed is that up to a certain point, it loves dissent. It loves anti-capitalism because you can market that very easily. Like there's a lot of money in, in, in anti-capitalism. There's a lot of money in being critical of the system. It's just when you hit a certain point,

then it, then it becomes, you know,ia or the fbi or some uh person who's been um convinced to shoot you's problem like it there's a there's a point at which uh that's no longer accepted but quite a bit of criticism and even like agitation to change or end the system can be accepted because it's monetizable. And speaking of that, you know what time it is? Time for an ad.

It sure is. It absolutely is. Oh boy. Time for an ad or, or that's the CIA at the door. We won't know until we come back from break. Ah, we're back. It wasn't the CIA this time.

Good news, guys. Thankfully. I mean, the fact that they flew all the way down just to meet me, I'm honored, honestly. Oh, I mean, they've gone to Trinidad for less. Oh, that's true. Yeah, yeah. they've gone to Trinidad for less oh that's true yeah but like we were saying right there's this whole issue of these movements

being able to go in a certain direction but only up to a certain point and I think it's something that Peter Galalus also talks about in how non-violence protects the state. In the sense of, you know, these people are able to, once they get a certain level of attention, all of a sudden, you know, you're invited to speak at these events and you're invited to go this place and that.

this place and that and you basically get consumed into the workshop machine the NGO machine the climate conference machine kind of thing so you end up with all these figures these organizers these activists who go from like genuinely trying to organize their communities and their spaces and then before you know it they're like at such and such conference because well they think it's an opportunity to like actually make like a bigger change but in reality you know they're just there to be defamed you know so like for example who immediately comes to mind is like Greta Thunberg I mean I haven't looked that deeply into her past or anything I know there are certain right-wingers who are very obsessed with her but um i know that she recently said that she's kind of done with politicians um because when you think of how she

basically came up you know right exactly anything about how she basically came up it was like she is talking at these events and you know people are inviting her to things because you know look at this cute little girl um yelling about climate change right and she basically becomes this spectacle you know and that spectacle is entertained up to a certain point and people make big event out of her you know like breaking down in front of these politicians and stuff and you know what they just go right back to normal um i think it was cop 26 was like last week or the week before yeah um and representatives from uh represent i think the prime minister of barbados was there and she had this you know big great speech about how the global

north needs to do more for you know these um countries in the global south because you know they have responsibility that kind of thing cool um but at the same time you know there's like developments going on barbados to you know basically bring in more tourists and to bring in more um and like you know resorts building and that kind of thing that basically add to the um emissions and add to the um negative impact on the environment you know same thing with like trinad's government you know like certain representatives went to cop 26 including the prime minister and you know they're all about things changing and you know the climate movement um and climate change being real and actions need to be taken and then like this didn't make it in

like like mainstream news of course but in local news basically right after um prime minister trinidad tobago dr keith rowley he went and met up with like shell yeah like representatives at shell to like basically bring the country and the company closer together you know know, because, you know, Trinidad is reliant on oil and that kind of thing. So obviously these sort of leaders and these sorts of movements, they only go up to a certain point. And even then so much of it is just this performance.

Yeah. And this act, basically. I'll be, I'm putting together a thing on cop 26 right now um because i think it actually it does demonstrate a lot of the soft denial stuff that you're talking about it's like the the biggest thing to come out of cop 26 in terms of like actual deals is just just progress on carbon markets and carbon offset credits. That's really the only thing we actually got.

And I say we, but not like us, but the people in charge. They got this. And the quote they gave was that being able to buy carbon offset credits, meaning that you don't actually make emissions differences. So instead, you buy pretend emissions differences from other countries that actually did make changes

so that you don't get penalized. So that's what buying the credits is for. But they said buying the credits can potentially unlock trillions of dollars for protecting trees, expanding renewable energy, and other projects to combat climate change. And that's just a thing, right? Tax the fuckers.

Like, don't... Climate credits, it's like... It's the same as saying, like, Hail Marys, because you sinned and you went to your priest and confessed. It's like, ah, I've done bad things to the environment. Tell me, like, how many times I need to go through this ritual in order to cleanse myself of having pumped things to the environment. Tell me like how many times I need to go through this ritual in order to, in order to cleanse myself of having the atmosphere.

It's, you know, I think it's bleaker than that in a lot of ways. Like it's, it's, it's, it's, it's,

it's, it's really, it's the climate version of like the world wildlife fund having death squads. Okay. Now, Chris, you are very anti death squad. And I think we need to deal with that at some point

because hashtag not all death squads I will need to be able to account for my strong anti-death squad stance you say that now but you're going to get a death squad to fight the death squads and then where are you going to be? see? I don't Another death squad exception.

They get a death squad to fight your death squad and then it's like they cancel each other out. So then you have to get another death squad and then so you win. Ah, Marxist-Leninism.

Basically. It's a number of other things too to be fair to marxism another thing that might make you kind of question the integrity of cut 26 is that there were more uh delegates at cut 26 from fossil fuel companies than there were from any individual nation so it makes sense yeah yeah but then right that's like another thing right because you're talking about COP26 and where soft climate change denial

gets into that but I don't think I think soft climate change denial can only be applied so far when it comes to those sorts of big spectacles and those big major events

because even if they themselves really truly understand the depths of climate change and trust and believe like these oil barons and stuff they know like they have all the info yeah right present in front of them they've done they've already done their like cost benefit analyses and like risk assessments and kind of thing so they know exactly like what the impact is going to be they have the money to

have access to the scientists right but it's not soft climate change denial for them it's going to be they have the money to have access to the scientists right but it's not soft climate change denial for them it's i'm a capitalist i'm going to do what a capitalist does you know it's ultimately a fun way they're operating within a system you know so soft climate change denial um it is like sort of a psychological phenomenon but we also have to keep in mind that there's also like a structural component to it so that even if that a person does not face self-climbing change now isn't experiencing self-climbing denial that alone even if they like fully confront the issue that's just an individual you know and there's still like a whole structure around that individual that will still incentivize

certain behavior and then of course with the incentivesize certain behavior. And then of course with the incentives of certain behavior comes like the psychological justifications for that behavior. So it kind of almost becomes that they end up justifying themselves into self-climax denial.

You know what I mean? So it's kind of like, there's a lot of ebb and flow with that. It's like a feedback loop that reinforces its own existence. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that honestly, like the feedback loop model is where we have a lot of our problems with

climate change or they're all very much linked to the feedback loop model of things trying to justify their own existence. And then, you know, certain, and then on the reverse side of things when certain changes in the climate happen those create their own feedback loops which create more changes to happen everything is just one massive loop

yeah which kind of gets me to like the discourse around climate change and stuff is like halted and diverted and immobilized, you know, by soft climate change denial. You know, discussions of the very real, very current, very near future and very violent impacts of climate change are just basically softened. Like, you know when you try to throw a punch in a dream? Yeah. softened like like you know when you try to throw a punch in a dream yeah like you're trying to like push and then it's like you know it's like just kind of soft um or like you throw something in space i guess it's just you put all this effort into it and then you go in another direction that kind of thing um i don't know where i'm going with this

analogy so i'll just keep on going um basically that there's an issue with the conversation where the discourse has just been you know harmed by the psychological phenomenon but then of course there's the other side of psychological phenomenon of self-climbing denial not the hard kind of denial side but rather the i'm so on the opposite end of self-climbing denial that i'm like an inconsolable and like illogical and can't even imagine the possibility of anything happening kind of boom doomer yeah yeah the kind of the kind of extreme doomerism where you you recognize how you recognize that clampage is bad um but but then you see it as such a massive overwhelming thing that it basically shuts you down from being able to do

anything else and you just learn there's really no point to do anything if it's going to be this bad. It's such a hard capitalism and the systems that are working to keep it going are such a hard thing to overcome that it seems like the best thing to do is just sit down

and do nothing. And that's the thing, right? These that it seems like the best thing to do is just sit down and do nothing. Yeah. And that's the thing, right? These r slash collapse people, right? I mean, I appreciate that they don't shy away from the really difficult stuff. Yeah. But then they also stumble into this kind of hopeless doomers, this dramatic kind of, we are screwed.

We're all going to be fighting in this Mad Max style arena. Like that's not how, you know, climate change is going to play out. You know, it's not a movie. You know, like things are going to break down in certain places and other places are going to lock down in certain ways. But it's not going to be like this sudden global devolution into madness like that. You know, that's not really how social change, that's not really how collapses

have functioned in history. Of course, we live in a global civilization and previous collapses have been fairly localized. But still, climate change is both global and local. So there are certain changes that will only affect

certain localities. This is something that actually the book Desert addresses fairly well. That's what I'm drawing from. I find it really frustrating because especially on the online left, there's people who treat Desert like the gospel

or at least they say they do but they're actually extreme doomers who fetishize collapse um and they're like oh everything's hopeless re-desert yeah but then you but then you read desert but you read desert you're like no desert is like explicitly anti-collapse and saying collapse isn't going to happen collapse is a fantasy you tell yourself yeah to keep you going and for those kind of like the secular version who haven't heard of Desert, Desert is a book that's available for free online

about what's coming. It's titled Desert because of an old quote about how empires leave nothing but deserts in their wake, basically. Like that's, it's just like a thing that, I think the exact quote is like, empires make a desert and call it peace. Yeah.

And it's basically discussing the fact like not just literal desertification but like that that's more of a better picture of like our future under climate change than kind of these Mad Max dreams. This like slow dissolution of resources and environments and that that's kind of the yeah it's it's a good book you can read it yourself and it's it's quite influential online um but yeah as as garrison pointed out there are people who kind of take it in a direction that i don't believe the authors i mean clearly the authors didn't mean because they directly called out that kind of thinking yeah yeah it's kind of like some people treat like collapse and stuff as basically the secular version of like revelation in the bible yeah yeah or it's or it's like the non-marxist version of like the revolution it's like it's like

this this kind of mythical event to like prepare for and almost be excited for, but it's fake. It's a fantasy. It's something we tell ourselves to keep ourselves going as things are bad, but it's not real. Yeah, like any day now, the trumpets will sound in the heavens and the scrolls will be broken and the great beast will arise from the sea and all that vibe. I don't know what the solution is for that. I don't know how, both on the soft climate denial side of

how do you go about the only thing we can really do is the people we know, how do we go about and tell them that hey, things are probably going to be a bit worse than what you're preparing for, but how do we tell the people who are doom that, hey, things are probably going to be a bit worse than what you're preparing for, but how do we tell the people who are doomers, hey,

it's not going to be like this weird dystopian thing that you're thinking of either. It's interesting, because they're both veering off in two opposite directions, but it both kind of leads to the same point of kind of doing nothing what one version is one

version of nothing is basically you know voting for stuff that's not that's never gonna happen the other version is not just not doing anything in general um yeah and i i don't know how to how to reach those types of people very easily. Which kind of brings me to like my thoughts on like how we move past soft climate change now. I don't think it's just a matter of like trying to like push like campaigns on people. I think it's going to be like a very personal sort of journey that each person has to go through right because each person is different each person is like has different

worries and dealing things in a different way you know um so like you want to keep in mind like people's mental health and sort of fortifying your mental health and helping people fortify theirs because when it comes to mental health with regard to like climate change doing it in isolation in my experience has not really worked out i think what has worked best for me is when i am with i am connected with a group of people or even just one other person and when I'm feeling down about climate change because despite all my messages about Solarpunk and we can do this,

that's basically the message of my YouTube channel. I still experience those sort of thoughts and feelings. I'm just not public about it. But what I try to do is when I'm feeling those things, I try to be with people who are not currently feeling that you know so we're not feeding off of each other's next of energies yeah so like when i'm in a bad spot you know i have people around me who could lift me up and when they're about they're in a

bad spot and vice versa because it kind of comes in waves you know yeah absolutely no yeah it's it's it's silly to deny those thoughts exist because they they do. They're a very easy neutral state, at least for me to slip into. And the way to get around that is by doing chores at a farm and shoveling poop and taking care of animals and cooking for people. That's the way that I can get out of that kind of mindset. Not to be too hard on all of the kind of doomer nihilists, because there is a sect of doomer nihilists

who use the actual definition of nihilism, which is like, if things don't really matter, we should probably fuck some stuff up. and that's very useful right like if if you're if if you're on that train you're like yeah you should be tree spiking if if if you're okay with if you think nothing matters um and you are you want to be an actual nihilist then yeah you should make you should make destroy um just make sure it's focused on the people with actual power um because if you're willing to do that then great we need

as many people like that as possible but it's certainly easier to do that once you have friends and once you're not stuck in this super depressed state all the time. Yeah and I think there's a again we do take a look at like some of the criticisms people have of the show online and i know one that's come up a bunch is people will listen to like our when we'll talk about you know the severity of the problems and then we'll talk about things like you know mutual aid collectives and small guard seed bombings and all that stuff they'll be like well that's not

a solution and no of course that's not going to solve the global problem of carbon emissions from a civilization of 7 billion humans. What it does do, focusing on stuff like that, focusing on building soil, focusing on building community resistance, in addition to like having an immediate impact on the number of people, you know, in, in, in your community, it, it builds a sense of, um, a sense of power, uh, for the individual. It, it, it gives you something to do that isn't just thinking about how bad things are. And that puts you in a mind state that's more useful to actually potentially dealing with the, the bigger problems at some point. Um, you have to have a sense of your own agency that feels real if you're going to

actually change anything um and you can you can build it's a muscle right you can build it up by by doing things that are not bigger but are are part of the solution um and yeah exactly valuable to do that for your own for health. Because then maybe you, if your friend group, if your affinity group, whatever you want to call it, the people you are hanging out with, if some of them are always engaged in something productive, then when you're in a doom spiral, you can find someone who's working on something and vice versa. It doesn't just help your mental health, but it also contributes to the

prefigurative activities that we need to actually make a switch to a different system. You know, like revolution is something that happens overnight or in the far future. It's something that's supposed to be happening all now because as we build those systems, you know, we are building up power. You know, it's kind of like

how the black socialists in America describe dual power, you know. It's that we are building up power. It's kind of like how the black socialists in America describe dual power. We are building these systems and putting these things in place so that we can push towards a fundamental transformation of the system. And it's iterative, but as more people build on top of that, that's how the transformation happens. We all have something to contribute. but as more people build on top of that, that's how the transformation happens. We all have something to contribute. I mean, I think it's important to talk about this both to acknowledge it's a thing that happens and we all deal with,

we all have our moments of overwhelming despair over what's happening. And some moments of unrealistic optimism, too. Yeah. Every once in a while. And the unrealistic optimism needs to be encouraged, as long as it's not the kind of, well, we don't need to do anything, because someone's...

I guess there's toxic optimism and there's helpful. A toxic optimism would be like reading an article about some new carbon capture technology and being like, oh, cool, well, I don't need to worry. But most optimism I think is positive. And I think it's good to build a capacity for optimism by building your personal sense of agency and power by doing shit that helps. shit that helps um and i i think that accepting that you can do things that are meaningful um and that uh there are things to be done that can help the situation is a critical way of fighting against you know this uh uh soft climate change denial which which is a um a major threat because

there's i think honestly at this point more people who are subscribing to some form of soft climate change denial than there are people who are just denying climate change in its entirety. And that's, I think, where a lot of the effort has to go. So, yeah, I think this is a really important thing for people to understand and to be vigilant against. Absolutely. Alright. Well, Andrew, where can the audience find you outside of here right now?

You can find me on my YouTube channel, St. Andrewism, and you can find me on Twitter at underscore St. Drew. Excellent. Well, you can find us here, where you just found us. We'll be here tomorrow unless this is a Friday, in which case we'll be here on Monday.

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sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. All right, welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and also sometimes about how things have been falling apart for a while now. And today we're going to talk about how things were also bad in falling apart in the 2000s, which are a profoundly cursed time period. And specifically, we're going to talk about, I think, a part of the anti-war movement that

does not get much attention, which is the Port Militarization Resistance that happened sort of 2006, 2007. And with us today to talk about this is two people who were part of this movement. We have Julianne Neuhauser. Hello. Hello. And Brendan Maslowskis-Dunn. Yeah, both of whom were organizers and activists while this was going on. Yeah. Thank you both for being here. Yeah. Thanks for having us.

So yeah, as I was saying a bit in the intro, I think that this is a part of the anti-war movement that is not very well known. I think a lot of people know about the initial stuff that happened in 2003, and people might know about some of the stuff that was happening against the war in Afghanistan right when it started. But I don't think most people know that even after 2003 doesn't work 2003 sort of doesn't work that it continues and it continues sort of informs that are that are very interesting and so i guess i want you to to start out i want to ask how we sort of got from the early part of the anti-war movement into this and how you two got involved i would say that there's this narrative about the movement against the war in Iraq, that there is the largest protests in human history, at least at that point, I don't know if it's

still true, against the invasion. And then it didn't work. And everyone kind of went home and ended there. And to a certain extent, that's true. But like you said, the people that didn't go home went in interesting directions. And so at the time there were,

direct action was not as acceptable as it is now. The protest movement was largely dominated either by big liberal coalitions or PSL front groups that were basically indistinguishable in what they actually did, which was basically nothing. And in the best of cases, and in the worst of cases, counterinsurgency. Um, but then there were small groups of people that, that when we saw that it didn't work, and we saw that these giant peaceful marches from one part of town to another, um, or voting for John Kerry or whatever, it didn't work, that we started to look for other options. Yeah. And, you know, I got involved, you know, I'd say with the anti-war movement, that idea of how war is unjust was really taught to me from a very young age. I mean, my parents were, you know, children of the sixties and they had family

members fighting in Vietnam and, um, you know, friends dying in Vietnam, uh, and were against the protests back then. So I grew up hearing these stories and of course, stories from family members, particularly one of my grandfathers, both of them were veterans in world war two. One of them was a Marine in the Pacific theater and still into his 70s, 80s, and 90s until his final days was just dealing with horrific PTSD and had always taught me from a young age never to get involved.

So I, you know, and I remember when the, very clearly, you know, I'm sure it's on everyone's minds now and when the invasion of Afghanistan. And when the invasion of Afghanistan started, when the invasion of Iraq started, I was at that, that massive demonstration in Washington, DC that Juliana just mentioned. And, you know, I ended up, I'm from Utica, New York, I went to a rural high school, just outside of, of Utica, you know, Rust Belt, generally speaking, impoverished and also very conservative area of New York. And, you know, I had the recruiters bothering me, military recruiters in high school, recruiting my friends, and they were just

everywhere in the hallways. So it was very present with me. When I was younger, I moved out to Olympia, Washington in 2006. And that's when a new student activist group, Students for a Democratic Society, was launched. That's how Juliana and I first met. We were both in separate chapters of that new organization in the Pacific Northwest. separate chapters of that new organization in the pacific northwest and uh the port protests started just uh just a few months after i moved out there in in olympia in 2006 so wait to clarify this for a second because i've never quite been clear on this history so there was a second sd like students for democratized id that was like unrelated to the first one?

Yeah, it was reborn briefly at the end of the Bush administration. That explains a lot of things that were otherwise very baffling. We're not that old. Yeah, we were definitely in the second, you know, the rebirth of it. So, you know, I think it took on some things in spirit, you know, but also was, I'd say, different in many ways. And it was very active. To me, at least, it was very exciting to be a member of the new SDS because they're over a dozen chapters in the Pacific Northwest. And it was a great way to connect with young activists all over the US. So SDS is emerging in this time period. One of the other things I was interested about is something you were talking about in the

early part of this, which has to do with the way that these giant, both the sort of Answer Coalition, PSL Frank Group, and I guess the ISO was still around back then, coalition's work versus how like anything else worked i'm interested so so what was was sds sort of like consciously set up and in opposition to those groups i don't think it was conscious but there was just like i mean these days i mean like there's a lot of controversy around psl with like anarchist versus tanky politics none of that mattered at that time like none of that mattered the only thing that mattered was the answer which was the psl front group was completely fucking useless like they completely indistinguishable from any peace police um liberal democratic front group there was literally no difference just in terms of their aesthetics maybe like is there a donkey or a

hammer and sickle on something that's the only difference we saw so i don't i don't think there was it wasn't there wasn't like a conscious like political opposition to it it was just like they're not doing anything and and so we had to look in another direction. Actually, you know, it's hard to keep track of the alphabet soup of authoritarian communist groups at times. But this was actually, answer for those who don't recall, it was a front group for the Workers' World Party, the WWP. Which, yeah, I mean, it's hard to keep track, right? Yeah, it's the same thing. yeah it's the same thing like i think so so okay so for people who are sort of unaware of this there's a network of connected but sometimes feuding like weird stalinist cults that kind of reinvent kind of like they hold on to like the set the 80s and 90s and they start sort of

rebuilding again around the anti-war movements in that period that that's the psl swp that's answer like and and i think there's like most like modern anti-war groups are also still these people which is incredibly depressing something i want to talk a bit about towards the end of this but yeah just for people who have not spent like the last half decade in the in the trenches of extremely weird anti-war politics. So, yeah. So I think we should get into how the sort of the first action starts in Olympia. Yeah.

So, and there were actually a couple actions that happened in the year preceding that, you know, before I moved out to Olympia in 2006. It was not yet under the banner of PMR, Port Militarization Resistance. That was a name that was officially coined in, you know, in May and June of 2006. And so just to give you an idea, Olympia, it's a college town, right? The Evergreen State College is there. It's also the capital of Washington State. So you have that going on. It's also a military town. It's a little over 20 miles south of what we called Fort Lewis. It's now called JBLM, JBLM, or Joint Base Lewis-McChord. It's an Army and Air Force base. Now it's one base.

So you had all these different kind of elements in tandem in that town. And the public port, the Port of Olympia, is one of about 70 or so public ports in the state of Washington, some of which are, I mean, they're used for all kinds of things, you know, for commercial private industry, but also the military and the US government. So, you know, I heard from someone, I don't even remember who, that the military was sending a ship to the port of Olympia in late May of 2006. And this happened for 10 or so days. And it was just kind of a natural instinct for a whole bunch of us to go down to the Port of Olympia. It was the war machine in our backyard. And the idea was to just block the vehicles. It started out with just like less than 10 people, a number

of folks getting arrested, and that very rapidly culminated into larger protests every single day, an act of blockades. People, those of us like Juliana, myself, and other folks using civil disobedience or what we prefer to call civil resistance to try and stop or at the very least slow down these striker vehicles. And to give folks an idea of what a striker vehicle is, you can look it up online, but it's kind of halfway between, you know, a tank and a Humvee. It doesn't have the slats, you know, that a tank would have. It's, you know, and they were being used in both Iraq and Afghanistan for raids of residential areas. They were really on the front lines of the war in both those countries. And

that's what we were trying to stop. I only got involved later because I wasn't living in Olympia at the time. I was in another SDS chapter, but my roommate was from Olympia and he had been involved in that first round of protests in Olympia before moving up to Bellingham so hearing his story has got me very excited

because finally someone's doing something they're not just like everything else was just so liberal whether it was marching from one place to another or writing to your

congress people or occupying their office it was like asking someone else to do something which you knew from the beginning they were never going to do and finally this was finally someone was like actually getting into it um i think the first one of the things that happened here was that um they started to avoid um that there's there's kind of a geographical thing that i think um for people who either

don't know washington or because they're normal people don't know like the port areas of these cities very well because it's like like unless you're a longshoreman like why are you would you go down to like the port of tacoma. There's nothing there. But they kept moving it around because Ompia is also not very big. And so it's

there's really only two roads into the port, which is very small. And so it was it's very easy to block it. And so then I think the's very easy to block it. And so then I think the first time that I got involved was in 2007

when they had moved it because they kept moving it around to try and switch things up. Wait, they're moving the ship around? Is that? No, it's like each time they had to make a military shipment they would

it's like once the ship was in the port they would just have to go through with it but then you know it's like every six months or so they had to make another military shipment and they would change the port usually each time

to try and let basically to avoid us it doesn't seem like this is like normal practice um the first time i had gone down was in um tacoma which is a much much much more industrialized port than olympia it's you know it's like a big port a more normal port guess. And that one was honestly pretty crazy because you're just trapped in this giant industrial maze basically at the mercy of the riot cops. The best success we had was definitely at the Port of Olympia. I think in 2007

in Olympia was definitely the glory moment, which was when people were able to on and off, like actually hold the port and control its entrances and exits. Yeah. And I want to, you know, just emphasize that, like the one, the military changing their approach to avoid us. So jumping from port to port with these different shipments, they actually went so far because we were so successful as a movement in the Pacific Northwest to ship striker vehicles by rail out of the Pacific Northwest and even going so far as to ports in Texas. But, you know, one thing that we did is that we built up contacts with other activists, with longshore workers all up and down the West Coast in California.

There are other activists we're connected with in Texas, Hawaii, New Jersey, and New York. There is a desire in the anti-war movement. Hawaii, New Jersey, and New York. There is a desire in the anti-war movement. And, you know, in some extent, maybe it's like it was small, but some folks in the labor movement, especially in Oakland, where the ILWU, the Longshore Workers Union, it's a lot more militant than, say, in a place like Olympia. But yeah, I mean, people wanted to replicate this model because, as Juliana said, we were successful in 2007. We shut down the port of Olympia for a total of, it was essentially two days. They were not, they're not shipping anything in or out. We set up blockades. We're willing to throw down with the police in the street. And one of the things that was cool about that blockade is that there's two entrances, like I said, and one was completely blockaded.

And then the other one, we had like a moving, I don't really know what it was, but something with wheels that we could move in and out to open it up. And so then we could allow like civilian cargo to move in and out. But then like we feel it back in place um to block military shipments so we were you able to actually like stop them from like what while in in that one into come we able to actually like stop them from moving this off altogether or do you eventually get cleared up by the police and they moved it we would eventually get cleared out by the police it's like we were never able to it's like we were we we held it for two days that those protests um took place over a series of two weeks or more or

less um we were only able to fully hold it for two days before eventually they would clear us out but one of the things is that it did create problems for the army because when you work with a port, you've got a certain time frame that you've contracted with the port to do whatever it is

you're going to do. And it's not too happy if you take longer than you said you would. Yeah. Yeah. And the other thing I want to add is, you know, I think the other really important element with this whole movement going on is the Pacific Northwest was specifically Western Washington, where the two of us were living. western Washington where the two of us were living it was it was uh you know the center and in a sense it was the heart of the anti-war movement in the country at that time one because

of this militant direct action that we were you know we were uh building up in the streets and trying to throw a wrench in the gears of the war machine to at the very least slow it down, which in some ways we did, but we were up against so much. But the other added element, of course, is the GI resistance and the soldiers who are resisting. Ivor, also known as Iraq Veterans Against the War, was very active there. They set up a GI coffee house across, you know, literally across the street, you know, the gates for one of the entrances for Fort Lewis. There are a whole bunch of soldiers that were going AWOL. We had friends who were active duty soldiers who had fought in, you know, Iraq and Afghanistan that were AWOL and they were hiding, you know, refusing to go back into the striker brigades that joined us in port militarization resistance.

There are a whole, you know, long list of soldiers that were very publicly saying, you know, I'm refusing to fight in Iraq or Afghanistan for, you know, various reasons. And so we are very much connected with this movement too and and i think the higher-ups in the military they're they're hyper aware of that they studied us very well um you know to the point of actually you know spying on us so that's like a whole other element of the story too so one of the things that i've heard from talking to other people who were involved in this was that, like, while, like, during these protests, like, the level of police militarization just, like, skyrocketed. And, like, I remember, I was talking about this, like, you know, if you go back and look at, like, old System of a Down videos, you know, they'll have these things, yeah, you'll see these, you see these riot police and like you look at them and it's like these people they look so much less armored than like the people that we have now and one of the things

that i thought was interesting about this was that like this is i think one of the points where you start getting the modern riot police showing up that are just like you know completely concased in like armor and yeah i want to talk about just like the police response to this because i think that's that's another thing i think i think there's there's a kind of a tendency to sort of project back what the police look like in 2021 just onto the whole history of police and i think it's like it's it's it's gotten worse even in the last 20 years yeah i mean so i live downtown in olympia and probably just like a six minute walk away from the port of Olympia. And also very conveniently, just a few blocks away

from the police station. So lucky us. So we actually saw, you know, we could see from the front of down on the road, down the sidewalk, from the front of our house uh some of the military shipments going by and we we did see that absolutely and at at times it was it was terrifying i mean i lived in an activist house we jokingly called hq because that's just you know where because of its proximity to the port that's where a number of us were having meetings, uh, you know, around these protests early on in 2006. And, um, yeah, I mean, we like, they look like RoboCop and it's something I had, I, you know, I hadn't like, I had been to like mass marches and demonstrations, like the RNC protests and DNC protests in Boston, New York, and like in Washington, DC. And so I would see these like riot cops, but they were, I mean, ubiquitous

in these port protests. It was like a whole army of them that was sent out. I mean, when Giuliana said that things got kind of crazy at the Port of Tacoma protests, I mean, there was like a police riot, you know, like the cops went absolutely nuts. They're shooting people with tear gas and pepper balls and brutalizing people. I had never before witnessed anything like that. And it got to the point in, you know, in Olympia where we kind of knew early on that we were being traced by the police. we kind of knew early on that we were being traced by the police to the extent where, you know, one friend of ours was followed from our house to the bus station to take a

bus to school by the police and then was stopped and essentially assaulted by them on the street. And we had another fellow activist and, you know, a roommate of mine who is going out to driving out with a few friends, a few fellow activists from Olympia to Aberdeen, about an hour's drive. So Aberdeen, there's a port of Grays Harbor there, pretty conservative, small town. It's where Kurt Cobain is from. Home of the famous Kurt Cobain themed McDonald's.

Cobain themed McDonald's. They served billions and billions served in that one McDonald's and Kurt Cobain's McDonald's. But yeah, I mean, they, you know, they, they were, they were following, they had orders, the Washington state patrol to you know, pull over a car full, full of known anarchists. There was a lurk gone out to all the police departments they pulled them they pulled them over they made him walk the line he was hadn't you know wasn't drinking had no drugs like nothing in his system but they he was

driving under like one mile per hour under the speed limit they arrested him for d uh dwi you know eventually fought the charges sued them them, and, you know, won a big settlement out of all that. But that's just one example of many of the lengths that the police would go to. It was pretty severe, even. There's a house of a bunch of anarchists, younger anarchists, called Pitch Pipe Info Shop in Tacoma. And that was also a big target. The police were swarming around them all the time. They had cameras set up specifically just outside the info shop. There weren't surveillance cameras there before, but then it was like, oh, we'll just conveniently

put them on this one specific street corner. Yeah, I think that was one of the things I was reading about this, is you have that stuff. And then also, I think one of the scariest parts of this is that like army intelligence gets involved. And yeah, do you want to talk about the man named quote unquote, John Jacob, who was in fact not that? Yeah. So, you know, I'm curious what what memories you have of our good dear friend, John Jacob Giuliano. I don't think I ever actually knew him in person, but he was the moderator of the listserv, wasn't he? Yes, he was one of the moderators of our

listserv. Now that I look back on it, I'm like, the Port Militization Resistance listserv was always just like this dramatic shitshow. And it's like, looking back on it, I was like, oh. It was moderated by a cop that did nothing did absolutely nothing to like establish order or huh i wonder if that was on purpose yeah so i think there's definitely some things that happen like you know looking back uh from our vantage point

today it's like okay things make a little more sense at the time, though. And we're in this movement, right? And so that means like meeting people where they're at. We find all kinds of people that would like want to join the movement. Like I said earlier, like active duty soldiers that were joining. So I met this guy named John Jacob, and he sent an email out to me. I was one of the contacts for the Olympia SDS group. And it's like, hey, you know, there's kind met up in public and he seemed like an all right guy. I mean, he was, you know, 40-ish, early 40s. He told me he had like, you know, been in the military for years

and he actually still worked at Fort Lewis. So he was always open about that, but it only went that far. He didn't ever tell us what he actually did there. And it wasn't abnormal for, you know, we have many folks that worked active duty, you know, on base and civilian roles or soldiers, as I mentioned, that were in port militarization resistance. So he gets involved and he gets really involved with port militarization resistance. He goes to protests. He gets pretty close with this group of anarchists I mentioned who lived in Tacoma. And he seemed like a really solid guy to most of us.

And, you know, things happen as we progress. And, you know, as the military responded to our, you know, how effective we were in the anti-war movement and the GI resistance movement by changing their tactics, we noticed that, okay, when we first started the protests, we had the ability to catch the police by surprise by setting up, you know, a blockade here or having a surprise action there at this time or this port, et cetera, et cetera. here or having a surprise action there at this time or this port, et cetera, et cetera. And as time progressed, we found out that, you know, we were having these, making these decisions for tactics in our strategy. We thought that we're in private.

And then for whatever reason, the police kind of knew about where we were going to be before we even showed up. And that, I remember that clearly happening In 2007 in the port of Olympia. Yeah. In Tacoma there was a lot of things like that. Like there was one time. When there were like some people. Who had a meeting in a closed room.

With like all their. They had taken like the batteries out of their cell phones. They had simply written. On the whiteboard. The time and place they were going to have their next meeting which is going to be in a diner near the port and so that way it's like if for any reason the room was bugged it wouldn't be caught up because it was just written on a board and then it was like a small meeting too so it's like there wouldn't and then when they got to that diner, there was like full of cops and like clearly waiting for them.

Like at that point, it's like, it was very clear there was some, some level of infiltration involved. Yeah. And I think we, from early on, like,

you know, we, we knew our history. I mean, you know, one of our fellow activists in PMR and a friend of ours, Peter Bomer is a professor at the Evergreen State College. He was in the original SDS back in the 60s. And, you know, he was essentially a political prisoner for a couple of years in both Massachusetts

and California. I mean, the feds essentially tried to assassinate him back in the 70s when he was active in the anti-war movement in San Diego. Like we knew, you know, former Black Panthers and we read our history. So we knew about the history of COINTELPRO, the counterintelligence program of the 60s and 70s, and the war on the anti-war and civil rights and Black Power, American Indian movements, etc. So we knew, you know, just intuitively early on. But there was one thing that happened in particular, which prompted some of us to file for a public records request with the city of Olympia. And another activist walking down the street in Olympia, I'm a member of the Wobblies Industrial Workers of the World Union. And we had

like one of those metal newspaper boxes downtown. And it was locked to a pole um you know with a bike lock and there are some city workers there with a pickup truck and they're cutting the lock to this newspaper box and they threw it in their pickup truck and so our you know this friend of ours was there was like what what the hell what are you doing what's going on and one of the workers just kind of shrugged and was like, I don't know, the police told us to do this. And they drove off, like they stole, you know, our essentially like our union property or whatever. So we had, you know, our lawyer friend, Larry Hildes and the National Lawyers Guild, you know, call and kind of threaten the city. And, and then a number of us got together like, hey, you know, let the police and like other agencies about anarchists, the IWW, Students for a Democratic Society. And their initial search

that the city clerk did yielded something like 30,000 responses. So she was like, okay, I got to narrow this down. And I don't know, I was working on the request at the time. And for some reason, like, I don't know, we're poor protests or near a military base communications between the army, not thinking anything. And so the initial responses, we actually got, you know, maybe 100, 130 or so different documents, just copies of emails, etc. That were little puzzle pieces for this massive puzzle. And it was just a few of them. And it was, you know, there was an email talking about our guy in the Navy going to a PMR meeting to get some intel. There's, you know, all kinds of things like that. There are a few emails in particular. And the email address was something like John, John J.

Towery, you know, army.us, whatever the email address was. So there's a crew of activists that got together, put their heads together, did some research quietly for a few months and eventually found out by publicly accessible information like voter registration records and also finding out something about like a motorcycle club called like the i don't know like the brown butte club or the brown butt club or something and and uh like found out that this john towry guy that was in this motorcycle club and had his you know was registered to vote outside of Tacoma in this town there, it was actually John Jacob. It was this guy that we thought was a fellow activist, an anarchist, and a friend. I thought he was a personal friend of mine. Turns out he was actually essentially an army intelligence officer working for something called a force protection unit at uh at joint face uh joint

base lewis mccord and also working with a whole list of different agencies and what turned out to be like a massive surveillance network that was national in scope this guy was sent by the army along with many others to infiltrate us to spy on us and to disrupt us it was huge yeah and that that's one of the things that i've always thought was really interesting about this is like so like i i learned about poor militarization resistance basically because i was like poking around the history of like informants and i ran into this and i was like what because and that was what i thought one of the things i thought was really interesting about this is that like like i think this chapter the anti-war movement is, even on the left, is, like, not very well known.

But, like, the seriousness with which the army seems to have taken it is really remarkable. Yeah, I'm wondering what you two think about that. One thing we have to emphasize is that we were not a large group of people. Yeah. We were not a large group of people. Yeah. Like, the number of people who are actively involved in port militarization resistance at its peak was... How many people do you think it was, Brandon?

Well, it depends. I mean, I'd say they're probably, like, at its peak, maybe probably 40 to 50 people that would, like, consistently show up to things. You know, maybe a slightly smaller, very core group, but we would have demonstrations with 400 people. That would be the max.

For the peaceful support actions, you would get a couple hundred people. Then for the stuff where it's like the first night that the entrance to the Port of Olympia was occupied,

it would be like 40 to 50 people. These were not very large groups of people. I feel like, and like I said, it's like one thing that we need to keep in mind was that the peace police were much stronger back then than they

are now. Nowadays, like as we saw last year, it's like people in the U.S. have learned to throw down, but that was not the case at the time. And so this is a very, very small group of people. And I think we accomplished a lot from with

how small it was um if it had been larger it would have accomplished way more um but even that small core of like 40 to 50 people with maybe expanding out to like a larger group of a couple hundred had them that scared that they went that far to try and disrupt it yeah and and this is one of the things i've been thinking about a lot recently of this seems to is a very consistent thing which is that like the the the the the two things that are guaranteed to like just have a hammer drop on you if you touch them is pipelines and ports and that was that was something you know we've talked a lot on here about pipeline protests um but i was interested in what you two think about because you know this this is like a very particular moment right now in which you're dealing with all these logistics chain failures and i was wondering if you do think there's anything that we can learn from how

your versions of the sort of of port demonstrations worked for potentially trying to leverage that in the future, especially with contract negotiations for port workers in Oakland coming up next year? Yeah, that's a great question. There's this old saying in the IWW, direct action gets the goods, right? And I think it really boils down to that. It's building up, you know, mass movements and social movements from below that rely on direct action, that rely on civil resistance, civil disobedience. Yeah, and the pipeline protests that have been ongoing

where Indigenous people have been on the front lines of that for many, many years now, I mean, the kind of repression and surveillance that we face really pales in comparison to the kinds of, you know, surveillance of repression that folks were facing at Standing Rock, for example. You know, I think, of course, one of the, well, one of the main differences is, is that it was primarily the military, you know, with us, right. That was, uh, surveilling us because this, this was very specifically, you know, a war issue and a military issue. Um, but yeah, I mean, I think, um, you know, like, I think there's a big questions like, do we have to do that's new? And to me, I say, for both that kind of militant action, but also for the labor movement, we don't record of getting the goods. And that is, you know, these more disruptive kind of actions and movements. And so one of them would be, you know, I guess my suggestion would be to like, go back to the basics. And even like, I would say now, you know, this, remember, this is

at a time when, like, Facebook was around, right. Like, but we weren't really using that for our organizing. We really relied on like face-to-face meetings, you know, phone calls and building up trust with people and building up our capacity to like take actions and make change. You know, I think I'm not saying throw out everything that, you know, at least some of the good that social media has to offer, but like, I think going beyond that and going back to these older tactics and then for the labor movement, like the big thing is, you know, and it's just like a bigger question for, for mainstream unions in particular. I mean, they're the whole idea of like union contracts is that workers also lose a lot. Yeah. They get some things, but business owners and bosses have rights carved out in,

in those contracts. And with the longshore workers, I mean, the difficult thing with that, of course, is like there would be some symbolic strikes that of course, like longshore workers have done and continue to do, you know, around like the war in Iraq, historically supporting Mumia Abu-Jamal, Mayday, et cetera, in Oakland. But they have some things for that written into their contracts.

And for all these other unions, it's like, well, we can't strike it all for the next two years or next three years, whatever the life of the contract is. I think it's a bigger question and challenge for the labor movement years or next three years, whatever the life of the contract is. I think it's a bigger question and challenge for the labor movement to move beyond that and not be putting this straitjacket of contracts like that. Yeah, I think that the no-strike clause part of contracts,

I think, is an interesting thing because it, I don't know, there's not, I i mean there are some unions that will actually do stuff around fighting it but mostly people just sort of don't care and i think you wind up in a situation where it seems like you kind of have to plan your tactics around when contract negotiations are happening because otherwise you can't actually get people to do anything more than like a one one day symbolic strike. Yeah. And or, you know, the challenge is like, you know, we have this great American tradition that's not unique to the US. It's universal, really. And it's one that resonates with me, breaking the law, right? And like, we're, you know, we're like civil disobedience. That is that what we are doing in the streets

and blocking the ports, we were breaking the law, law and we knew it and that's what the civil rights movement the black freedom movement did in in the 1960s uh but like we have recent examples of workers breaking the law in mass like the west virginia teacher strikes that happened a few years ago. Teachers in every single county in that state went on strike. They broke the law and they won something out of that. And I think that's what we really need to encourage people is this idea of breaking out of the norm and breaking the laws, which the laws that are in place, which are there to you know expand our freedom they're there to contract it yeah one of my friends had a joke about what was the exact line it was uh it's it's only illegal if you get caught and it only matters if you lose which i think is a good way of thinking

about uh both yeah absolutely and yeah and you know yeah i think it's also like it's worth mentioning that like the other sides the law doesn't matter to them at all like they just tear it up and like light it on fire constantly so don't don't bind yourself if you can if you can not get caught and not like go to prison for the rest of your life don't bind yourself by a bunch of like paper that the other side just doesn't care about yeah and that's an excellent point because that's the big thing you know with the army and law enforcement in general like surveillance of us they were in the police just their actions or brazen actions on the street, like the riot police, they were just breaking the law all the time. They absolutely have a deep visceral hatred of the Bill of Rights, of civil rights and

civil liberties. And so there were a number of court cases that sprung out of this movement. There was a case called Panagakis Vitauri, another Juliana Panagakis was another PMR member, co-plaintiff in that case. And, you know, it was a case against the army that, you know, we waged and brought up to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and, you know, eventually lost and could have brought it to the Supreme Court, but didn't. But, you know, like the other thing is like the violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. It was a whole other thing. We don't have to get so tied up into the legalistic thing.

But your point is valid. They don't care about the laws that are already there. They'll just intentionally break them, break their own laws that they have set up, and they'll just get a slap on the wrist because that's really all that happens to them. I think that's a good note to end on. Break the law. It's fake.

It's also bad. Do you two have anything you want to plug? Other than that, other than encouraging people to break the law. Do anarchism. Placate your local port. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I think it's, you know, I guess just encourage people to do as, you know, it sounds like what you're doing by having us on the show. And like, there are some in our very recent history um you know movements and wins that we all as activists today can still learn from and i think part of that um you know i don't want to call us elders because we're not that old but like one part of that is like making sure like our movements are still like multi-generational and like and we learn from each other. And also, as Juliana and I did, like I mentioned earlier,

we learned from the movements of the past, SDS, the Black Panthers, the Black Freedom Movement, etc. But there's a lot that these struggles, I think, have to offer us today. All right. Well, thank you both for coming on and talking with us. Thank you for having us.

Thank you. Well, this has been It Could Happen Here. Find us at HappenHerePod on Twitter and Instagram. And the rest of our stuff is at Koolzone Media at the same somewhat accursed social media places. I don't know why I'm saying somewhat they're just accursed yeah see you next time whenever that is welcome i'm dan thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora.

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I'm Robert Evans. This week, we have a special little episode for you. I'm going to sit down and talk with Lucas Herndon. Lucas, you live in New Mexico, at least, and you wanted to talk to me a bit about some stuff that's going on in your school boards. We just did a two-parter on fascist attempts to kind of take over and dominate school boards around the country. And you've got some personal experience with that. So I wanted to kind of just turn this over to you to start us off. Yeah. Thanks, Robert. Thanks for having me on the show. Yeah. My name is Lucas and I live in Las Cruces, New Mexico, which is in the southern part of the

state. We're close to the border for people that are interested um and yeah i like you know the my experience that happened last week is sort of the quintessential it could happen here yeah it did yeah it did exactly yeah las cruces um politically speaking is actually a very progressive little town yeah i yeah. I mean, in general, New Mexico has been for what, you know, however you consider that progressive or not is, has been blue for quite a while as in terms of like voting, like it's not, uh,

it's not like Texas politically at least. Right. That's yeah, exactly. Yeah. We voted for, we voted for Bush the first time, but have voted blue every election since 2004,

like federally. So yeah, in my little stretch of the, of the state, our congressional district has been red, but the city of Las Cruces, which is the, like, we're the biggest city in the Southern part of the state. We're the second biggest city in the state. Um, our city council has not only been democratic, but like progressively democratic. Um, we have, um, as of this recent election, you know, from the beginning of November, we now have an all-female city council. Um, there is, uh, at least we have, um, uh, one, one, if not two, trying to think, sorry. Currently there are two, um, folks on the city council who have immigrated

from mexico in their life um one will still be on one is now running for congress um we have um the school board that currently is sitting is generally progressive and the one we just elected we just elected our first um openly queer person onto that school board. Our little group of legislators that go up to Santa Fe every year is very progressive. So again, just to kind of reiterate, like Las Cruces, New Mexico, pretty progressive little place. And yet at the school board meeting last week, totally dominated by a public attendance of very far right extremists spouting all kinds of nonsense about all kinds of things. So yeah, it was pretty wild. Yeah. And this, I mean, this has happened, this happened in Portland, Oregon too, which is also famously, I don't know, I wouldn't call

Portland politics progressive, but solidly democratic. And then the school board meeting gets taken over by far right activists. This is a yeah so when did you kind of first become aware of this well so um it was it was a weird convergence of my personal and my and my private or i'm sorry my personal and my professional life where i um i work for an organization called progress now new mexico so it's like I do progressive politics for a living. But and a colleague who works for the ACLU here had asked if I would go and help lend support to this gender inclusion policy that the school board was going to be commenting on. They weren't voting on it that day. It was what's called a first reading. And she asked if I could go and if I could just speak know, just speak. And I was like, yeah, absolutely be happy to. So I was going to go and talk about this in a, I'm sorry, professional capacity. And then that day, as like, before I

went to that, my daughter, who's in middle school, texted me a picture, a bunch of kids had on Monday of last week, which was, um, like trans awareness week or trans visibility week, some kids had shown up wearing trans flags and pride flags on that Monday, the following day, that Tuesday, some kids showed up wearing, um, thin blue line flags in response, like indirect response. Um my daughter is aware enough to know what that means. So she texted me and was like, I can't believe this shit. And I was like, I know. So then I'm like, right. So then I'm like, okay, well, now I want to go speak about this gender inclusion bill or policy personally, right? Like now it like has impacted me. So I show up at about an hour before the meeting's supposed to start, because the third

thing that kind of happened was that I'm on a bunch of mailing lists because of my job. And sure enough, the local GOP, who is not very active, because again, they kind of lose all the time, they sent out a like, come show up at this thing, email. So I showed up early thinking, okay, well, I want to see if there's going to be something. And at first I was like, oh, like, I don't think they showed up. I don't think that they turned out. That's good. But it turns out they were all like hiding in their cars so that they could like swarm the building at once. And so then like about half an hour before the meeting, they all walked in at once. And like like about half an hour before the meeting they all walked in at once and like i was already sitting inside the room and they all came in at once and they

took over all the chairs there was standing room only um to the point where like the there was a bunch of ffa kids that were there that was supposed to be recognized for you know ffa something or other and like they had to kick some people out so that they weren't violating the fire code. That's how many, yeah. So anyway, that's kind of how it all, that's the setting for where this all happened. It turns out that at the same meeting, there was going to be a policy discussion on a different policy that had to do with New Mexico's revision of social studies standards. And of course that got everybody hot and bothered about so-called CRT, which isn't a thing, but so like they were there,

but I mean, but the folks that showed up to speak, I mean, they were all over the place. They were talking about critical race theory. They were talking about the gender inclusion bill and like trans violent, the myth of trans violence. um but then of course like like covid protocols and all kinds of i mean just again like way out there stuff um and actually kind of funny i was listening to knowledge fight this morning and uh jordan and dan really hit on it that like they have just figured out that these are places they can go and yell and like no, no one, you know, like school board people aren't going to like, they're all just, these are all just like teachers,

like retired teachers who are on these school boards. And they're like, they're not there to just, you know, have these like whatever discussions. So they're not going to, you know, they just like, let these people yell and they did. So anyways, it got, it got heated pretty quickly. Cause I mean, again, these people just like go off and they get, they rile themselves up and there's lots of applause. And anyway, that's kind of how it all started, I guess. That's what it was.

And I mean, has there have you noticed kind of any sort of mobilization in the community now that this has happened? Because it seems like the first ones of these, at least, always take everybody by surprise. People are not used to still not really used to school board meetings being, shall I say interesting, certainly important, but like not a thing that you have to really be concerned about for the most part. And that's, that's changing. Have you seen the community kind of start to adapt to that? Yeah. You know, since, so, you know, I, I put some content out on my,

you know, local Twitter and, local Twitter and got some traction there. Thanks to sort of your retweet, I think. But then the biggest thing was that kind of going back to what had happened at my daughter's school, that progressed. That got worse, if you will. The following day, the Wednesday of last week, some kids showed up in an actual Confederate stars and bars flag, which is, yeah, that's nuts. Yes, famed Confederate state, New Mexico. But, you know, Mesilla, New Mexico, which is right down the road, was the capital of the Confederate territory. Yeah, but it wasn't a state at that point it was not a state i mean you do yeah and i'm not aware of were there battles in new mexico

and i know we had some in like further south texas than you would think but i was not aware of any there's a couple there was one famously up north called the battle of glorietta and then um and then there was one here where i live wasn't a battle it was a bunch of confederates got um stranded and super drunk and then uh couldn't cross the desert fast enough so they got stranded up in the mountains at a place called baylor canyon and the conf they get to the top and like the north was just sitting there like waiting for them and was like well you're captured now well see that's clearly that's some history worth celebrating right there oh yeah 100 yeah yeah i think that the biggest like one of the scariest but biggest

things is like and this goes towards the this is a slight tangent but like the social studies revision for instance in the state of new mexico uh there are two paragraphs in our history book about the Gadsden purchase. Like I live in the chunk that is the Gadsden purchase. And like the Gadsden purchase is like James Gadsden was a notorious racist who left the South and took all of his railroad money, went to California and Mexico lobbying hard using his influence and money to try to create a slave state in Baja, Mexico. Like, that's what he was trying to do. And, like, that part of the context of why the Gaston Purchase even happened is, like, totally left out of history books.

And, like, if anywhere it should be taught, it should be taught in the place that is called the Gaston Purchase when it comes to the United States. So anyway, just a little tangent there, why it's important to have context and history. So sorry, going back to my daughter's school and these kids wearing the stupid stars and bars. So that I, so like I went and spoke to the assistant principal and was like, so I understand that your answer to this was to ban all flags.

Yeah. And he was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because they're causing a disruption to education. And I was like, yeah, but, you know, I feel like you're giving the false equivalency to like, you know, gender and pride acknowledgement to and versus actual flag. Yeah, it's it's I mean, and versus actual flag. Yeah. It's, it's, I mean, it's this constant, this has happened in a couple of places,

including a town in Oregon where it's like, this is sort of the, the centrist and kind of the right wing solution to this is just that like, well, if, if kids can't wear rate racist hate flags, then gay kids can't wear a flag that says that their existence is valid. You know,

cause those are the same thing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's frustrating. It is frustrating. So that was not my favorite thing. And so then the culmination of that this week was that my daughter's social studies teacher, who had allowed the kids in her class to make little paper flags after the real flags were banned um was fired jesus christ and um because it's a personnel matter no one is willing to tell me more i've called the president of the school uh school board who'd actually in all fairness he doesn't actually probably have that much sway over these kinds of things i would imagine that happened at a level a level that was not his but yeah yeah but i mean but i but i have anyway so i did call him i also called the school and got very little information from them obviously so you know who knows but again like that's how it

was perceived from the kids in her class yeah um and that so like what we know happened is that we know that after the flags got banned she let kids make flags out of paper and hang them up. And by Friday, she was gone. So like not a great response. No, not ideal. Not ideal. Yeah. Yeah.

So anyway, that's kind of where we left that. But I guess maybe what maybe what I should say to get back to your original question, which is to like have we seen a mobilization that yeah like so i learned at the newspaper the reporter is who that teacher like a couple weeks ago had actually been in the newspaper because she had also like um she she spearheaded this like response like a poor like a girl who wore a hijab to school had been bullied and like when news got around in the school like the like the majority of the student body and this teacher like went up and above out of their way to make her feel welcome and like walk her to her class and like it got kind of viral on local tiktok so like this teacher got quoted in the newspaper so

i like called i called the report i tweeted the newspaper and i was like like you guys know that the teacher who was in like star lit in your article is fired for allowing kids to waste their thoughts about these flags things right yeah and they were like no we didn't know and i was like you should probably find more out so so i you know I don't know where we're going to be at now. The next reading for the gender inclusion policy is the 14th of December. So we've got a couple of weeks before that next school board meeting. I think that on my end, like there's going to be some local organizing to try to get some better, more inclusive voices to be a part of things. I don't, you know,

I don't know what the interim will hold. Cause it's like, you know, it's the holidays and there's a lot going on and Kyle Rittenhouse and Build Back Better. I mean, there's like, you know, there's always a million things happening. So it'll, you know, there will have to be some drum beating to like get people to show up to that. But on the other hand, I think with some of the momentum we have and I think people to show up to that. But on the other hand, I think with some of the momentum we have, and I think people will show up in mass

for the 14th in support, at least. This is the kind of community that in general, we have shown up and shown out to support, you know, these kinds of issues in the past. But I do think that up until now, people felt pretty asleep about it. Yeah, I mean, and hopefully you do see the kind of response you're expecting. Can you walk me through sort of how the kind of attempts – like you talked about getting the local media aware of what had happened to that teacher.

How are people – like what does the actual organizing effort look like on the ground? Like how are you and others trying to get the word out so that, you know, there's a response to this? Yeah. So I think that, um, the first thing is, is that there was, there was a problem with the way that the school board handled public comment that first time in an attempt to help limit their own sort of exposure to some of the toxic stuff they knew was coming their way. They had instituted a limit on public comment. You had to show up by a certain time and fill out these little pieces of paper saying that you were there to comment about something. And if you weren't there, then you couldn't sign up. And the problem was, was that all these like old white male retirees who are sitting around listening to Alex Jones all day,

they had nothing better to do than show up to this meeting at three o'clock in the afternoon. Whereas a bunch of, for instance, teachers, students, parents, they were busy because they were in school or like picking their kids up from school. Yeah. So I think one of the things that we're going to try to do is get public comment ahead of time. And we're going to try to like bombard the not bombard. That's a violent word. But we're going to try to like just make sure that voices from the community that hadn't been represented are represented and sent

to the school board ahead of time. I think we're going to try to go and save physical space ahead of time for those of us that can, right? For those of us that can, we'll go and we'll try to save physical space. And we did learn that even if they keep that policy for the little forms, we can actually give that time. We can fill out other people's names right so we're going to try to like make sure that we have better voices that was one of the things if

you listen to the recording of what i said at that meeting um i asked the school board president if it's possible for me to yield my time because it had literally been like a dozen white men out there spouting nonsense and then i get up there and I'm like, yeah, Hey, we've heard from enough white men. Can we have like a member of the trans community or one of the women of color who are here to talk about this, but couldn't get here in time. And their, their legal team was like, Oh no, like you didn't sign up in time or whatever. So, but it turns out we could have put their names down ahead of time.

So we're going to try to organize that thing so that people can show up and save physical space. And then I think the other thing, too, is to try to involve some other local elected officials from the county and city level. Because again, we have these really amazing progressive candidates who have come from all walks of life, including immigrants and members of the LGBTQA community. life, including immigrants and members of the LGBTQ community. So having them come and speak in their official capacity, I think will carry a lot of weight for the both for the school board, but also just for the public to hear from those voices. Yeah. Where are these like, have you have

you gotten any kind of research on where the people showing up are coming from? Are these like folks within your community? Or are these people coming from outlying areas to swarm these meetings? Is there an active research contingent? That's part of what I do. It's part of my job with Progress Now New Mexico. My title is Energy Policy Director. I usually spend most of my day talking about oil and gas stuff. However, I've been doing this job long enough that before I became that person, I was actively researching and tracking a lot of white supremacy activity in the state, especially along the border, some of the border militia stuff a couple of years back. Yeah. So in that regard, I knew a number of these folks.

A lot of them do live in the city. But so our county is considered rural by the census, even though we're a city of 100000 people. But we're a big county. So there's there's 200000 people here. So so there was you know, it's hard to tell how many people may or may not have lived in, for instance, the public school district. But what I can tell you, like, hands down is that of those dozen folks that spoke before I did, like, there's no way that at least, I mean, maybe one or two of them had kids that could have gone through the Las Cruces public school system. But like, the majority of them far and away, like, either aren't from here at all, or, you know, they've lived here for a long time, but they are, they are not active parents or even grandparents of kids that live and will go to school in this, in this district. They're just, they're just agitated right wingers.

Yeah. And it's, how does this all tie in? Because New Mexico's had, I think it's kind of been on the back burner in terms of like national attention, but y'all have had some really significant dustups, not just with, you know, the border militias for years there have been violent um acts and even murders as the result of that stuff going on but like during last year's the protest over george floyd's murder y'all had some really ugly uh shall we say dueling rallies where like right-wingers shot at people um and and some really some nasty situations. I'm wondering, are like those folks like are you seeing that kind of organization being brought into the school board meeting or is this just kind of bubbling up as part of the

same stew? It is. Yeah, it's loosely affiliated for sure. And the crossover, the crossover is hard to tell. I mean, what am I trying to say? There is crossover. It's hard to tell how on purpose it is or sort of the physical white supremacists who showed up last year at one of our BLM support, George Floyd related peaceful protests, who they showed up at a parking lot across the street, armed, long guns, tack vests, all that kind of stuff. you know, armed, long guns, tack vests, all that kind of stuff, who that those were the folks that when I, when I went and filmed them and, and put them on blast to, to try and sort of out them as best we possibly could, or at least identify them. They came back and doxed me as and then went after a number of my colleagues up up north in Albuquerque. That was about a week before there was a shooting of an anti-fascist protester in Albuquerque.

And it was during sort of all of that stuff that I was like trying to talk about all this out loud and got tied in to a few more other anti-fascist voices in the state. So since then, we've all been kind of working together. Um, we found each other on Twitter, thankfully. And, um, so, so what it seems like is, is that like the folks that showed up to the, uh, school board meeting were what I'll call usual suspects, like politically active old, you know, right wingers. That being said, in that room, there were a number of people that I've identified as showing up to anti-vax rallies, a number of the Trump train rallies that happened last year before the election. And at least one person who I recognized as being, I have never seen carry a firearm, but like has been at rallies where people were carrying firearms and that kind of thing in response to these, you know,

in response to like peaceful protests. So there is crossover for sure. Where do you see this going? Like, cause you've been kind of paying attention to this for a while, not just the school board stuff, but just kind of the general problem of right-wing, um, organizing in your area. Like, where do you, where do you see this heading within kind of the context of New Mexico? Well, I mean, so we haven't really talked about this, but like, so while, while here in Las Cruces, we did really well during the November election in terms of our

school board. We reelected a really good progressive school board president and two new good progressive candidates, including, like I said, the first, you know, queer, openly queer person. So that's amazing. However, up in Albuquerque, they lost seats to some of these far right wing candidates. And so the Albuquerque school board is not, not looking as good politically. So I mean, so on the like, I guess what I'd say is on the soft end, what I expect is more continued pressure in sort of the, the, the, the, the way these things are supposed to happen, which is to say like continued presence of the right wing folks at meetings, yelling, taking up space, um, slowing things down, running for office when the time comes, you know, those kinds of things I see. Um, I guess I wouldn't be surprised though, if, um, if I, if there were further escalation of things, um, in a, you know,

in, in the way we've seen other places in terms of some sort of a, you know, an armed response or somebody showing up, um, you know, New Mexico is an open carry state. And so people can walk around with guns all the time. Um, and, and, you know, I mean, that's the other thing too, is like, while I didn't see anybody with an open carried firearm at the school board meeting, there were guys wearing like, you know, vortex optics brand hats, thin blue line shirts, a guy with like a Remington shirt, you know, and, and like, I don't begrudge anybody from gun culture. I'm, you know, I'm a lefty with a gun. So it's like, I, I get gun culture, but like when you show up in those things and in those

spaces with that kind of. Yeah, you're making a point. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. You're you're you're not. Yeah, I get that. Have you is there some kind of have you seen like any kind of budding left wing armed response? Like is there do you guys have like an organized group of folks who have been showing up when there are armed protests in the area? I mean, I always have my gear with me. I mean, I've got, I've got a ceramic plate. I've got my, you know, rifle and pistol. I, I, I am a member of a number of different groups. I've been a member of the SRA. I've, I've worked with some of the armed groups up in Albuquerque. So down here, there hasn't been a ton, but I've got what I'll call a loose affiliation with a number of folks

that I would trust to be armed if need be. Thankfully, that hasn't happened yet. Thankfully, the one big, big protest that happened here in Las Cruces that I was sort of nervous about, and I did have my gear for, remained peaceful know, we took over some streets and blocked traffic for a couple hours. And there was never any violent response from anybody other than maybe like one car at one point trying to push through and car got banged on. And that was about it. But so to answer your question, like, yes, there are those of us that are left wing and armed, and there are those of us that have been able to show out if we needed to. Thankfully we haven't had to at this point.

Yeah. Well, all right. I think that's everything I had to ask. Is there anything else you wanted to, to get to, to make sure to talk about today? Well, I just, I mean, I would be, I mean, I would be not doing the best of my job if I didn't mention the fact that like one of the, so one of the talking points of the right wing here at our school board is that New Mexico's education system

is 51st in the country. And my assumption is that that has to do with DC's public schools being counted. So it's not a great, yeah, that's not a great record. Yeah. It's not, it's not a great record. And, and, and I, and I, you know, as a parent of a kid who's in the public schools, I, you know, I cannot ignore that. Right.

So that's a legitimate talking point. But the, but the thing that they want to bring it about is that you know they're you know it's because we're trying to be gender inclusive it's because we're trying to like you know teach kids about like actual history that happened whatever um and the reality is it's because our education system is unlike most places funded by the oil and gas industry and not by like our communities um and so like you know 18 months ago oil prices crashed right and yep the state of new mexico had to have an emergency special session for our legislature to figure out how we were going to like fund things like cops and schools and like whatever. And then like now, you know, oil and gas is like gangbusters and we're, you know, record prices and like the state of Mexico has this like surplus budget.

But the thing is, is that like that, that extra money that we're going to get this time doesn't make up for the like cyclical bad, you know, way that we fund our schools. So I just want to like tie in that, like, like all of these things tie in together, right? Like we can't talk about education in New Mexico without talking about the oil and gas funding. And so anyway, so like, because that's my, you know, that's part of the reason why I was going to go talk about this stuff at the, on my professional level is that like i get to talk about education as an as an energy expert in the state of new mexico because energy and education

are so intertwined here um and like when you have literal like coke brothers founded um and and um like monetarily supplied think tanks in the state of New Mexico who are pushing out this kind of propaganda and encouraging people. There's a group called the Rio Grande Foundation and another one called Power of the Future. Yeah, Power of the Future in New Mexico. Both of those organizations are tied to the Koch brothers because the Koch brothers because

the Koch brothers are tied to oil and they're pushing these right wing talking points. And it's all part and parcel of just like, you know, clouding the information space. That's what they want to do. They want to have, they want to have the new cycle dominated with things like CRT and gender

inclusion studies to, you know, to tie up things like school boards so that, so that the electorate is busy talking about these things while meanwhile, they're just raking in money, hand over fist, um, you know, stealing our oil. So anyway, I just, that's so important to me to like make those connections, um, especially in this state. And it's something that a lot of people don't consider and don't think about.

And it's just really important to me that people understand that. So, yeah. All right. Well, thank you so much, Lucas. This has been, I'm not going to say fun, but certainly enlightening and I think valuable. A good dispatch from, you know, a fight that we continue to see is important here and that everybody should be paying attention to both wherever it happens including in las cruces and around the country um because they ain't giving up um and they can't be ignored um yeah and that's yeah and you've

mentioned this many times over the years but like that's the kind of thing is like, we have to show up. Um, yeah, we can't just let them have these spaces. And, um, and I think that this, this past school board meeting was a great example of why. Um, and, and I'm, I'm really counting on a lot of my, my, my friends and close, you know, the, the, the folks that I have come to love and support in this community, um, to show up and show out out for that because that's, you know, we've been there, right. We've, like I said, you know, and if you look up Las Cruces politics over the years on the news cycle, like you'll see stories about our, you know, progressive city council and passing a living wage and, you know, banning plastic bags. I mean, like all these, like, you know, we've,

we've tried, we've, we've tried to be that kind of little community. And, and, and yet, you know, these folks are still there and they're still loud. And if we give them the space, they will take those spaces over. So. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So thanks for having me on. Let me talk about this. It really means a lot. Thank you for stepping up. Cause it is,

this is the thing that's a giant pain in the butt is that everybody's got a lot going on. Life is complicated. There's all sorts of shit to do in the old world. But every time these fascists and their affiliates decide they're going to try to take over something, you know, as busy as people are, as exhausting as it is, you do have to like – they can't just be allowed to do it. Like that's how they win is they have they have unlimited energy for this shit and um if they're not like the thing that causes them to lose energy is actually um being outnumbered and shown to be like like like being kind of pushed out by communities um you can do it it takes it but it requires people showing up yes that's exactly right. So I appreciate the

signal boost means a lot to me. And this is great local orgs that people can support. So big shout out to a group called cafe here in, in Las Cruces that works on all kinds of border issues, immigrant rights, but also like workers rights and immigrant, like student rights, but also like workers' rights and immigrant, like student rights, migrant student rights. They've been very active in this for a long time. And so, yeah, definitely shout out CAFE here in, I mean, all of New Mexico, but specifically in Southern New Mexico, they're doing a lot of work. And then Dreams in Action, which is part of a national network for dreamers.

But again, here in New Mexico, I've done, part of a national network for dreamers. But, um, again, here in New Mexico, I've done a lot of good work. Okay. Yeah. Thank you very much, Lucas.

All right. Um, and that is going to do it for us here at it could happen here. Um, until next time go, uh, I don't know. Uh,

hang out at a school board meeting, go take up space from fascists. Yeah. Go take up space from fascists. Yeah, go take up space from fascists in general. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal. Tales from the Shadowsadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

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You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, the podcast about, you know, the problems and stuff that are happening and how to maybe make them better. And speaking of the problems that are happening and how to make them better, Garrison Davis. Hi.

Hello. Hey, Chris. That's a weird segue. I wanted to introduce this video by telling you guys that I just watched a movie that you should watch because it's pretty rad. And it ties into all the things we talk about. It's called The Pizzagate Massacre. Oh, no.

It is a micro-budget hundred thousand dollars film that looks great they did a really good job with the budget they had about um a an alex jones employee type person and a mass shooter who go looking for uh uh to try to solve the pizzagate thing thing. Oh, boy. It is an actually very nuanced and I think deeply knowledgeable commentary on specifically the Texan conspiracy scene. Okay. They're Alex Jones' character who's played by a woman in this.

They film in the original studio that he recorded in back in the day. That's funny. The filmmaker who did this gets the culture in the original studio that he recorded in back at the, that's funny. Like the, the filmmaker who did this gets like the culture in the area and kind of the relationship between the people who get radicalized and do shit and the people who just profit from it. It's a very good,

um, it's, it is by the way, a grindhouse horror movie, like whatever you're expecting. It's not that it is like a, it is a, an incredibly gory grindhouse movie.

Um, but it's, it's pretty, it's's pretty fun what does that have to do with cop 26 nothing at all but it has a lot to do with it could happen here because okay all right it's in my head go watch it anyway um this is it could happen here a show about how things are kind of falling apart and how we can maybe slow that down or prepare for an uncertain future. You want to do an episode about cops, right? I mean, fuck them. We are planning an episode on Washington State Patrol.

But no, this episode is about a different kind of cop, about just as useful. So, in the first five episodes of the Daily Show, or Season 2, which if you haven't listened to, you should definitely listen to those as they kind of act as our show's manifesto of sorts. But nevertheless, the first five episodes of the scripted Daily Show

put forth a more realistic, non-sugar-coated look at what climate change will bring if we continue on our current course. But not just looking at the obvious environmental and extreme weather effects, but also the socio-political effects. So when I was helping Robert out with the research for those episodes, some of the best indicators of the mainstream conception of the scientific, environmental, and political status of climate change was at the United Nations past IPCC reports, which is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the COP conferences. So during the first few weeks of this past November, November 2021, the 26th annual COP conference took place in Glasgow. And yeah, the name of the conference is kind of a decent indication on how useful these things actually

are. But COP stands for Conference of the Parties. And for almost three decades, they've been like the main international stage for for uh for countries and companies to discuss climate related information and like their alleged like goals um so yeah they're a good indicator not unlike sometimes they do present actual good science and like decent predictions but they're often just like a good indication of what kind of the mainstream people think about what climate change is and you you know, what the people in power, how they are viewing it and how urgent they think it's worth addressing versus how much money they want to spend on it. So the most notable COP in recent memory was the 2015 one in Paris, COP 21. This is kind of where the Paris Climate Accords were born.

The commitment was to aim for 1.5 degrees of warming, and it was signed on by nearly all major countries. Of course, the U.S. signed on, left, then re-signed on. But anyway, under the Paris Agreement, countries committed to bring forth national plans, figuring out how they would reduce their emissions. But they would do it like by themselves, and they would be called NDCs, or nationally determined contributions. And the idea was for every five years, countries would gather up and present their current plans on the national stage.

This was what COP26 was going to be. Now, it was delayed a year because of the pandemic, but COP26 was the time for countries to present their NDCs for their updated versions on their plans to reduce emissions. So most of the NDCs got submitted before the conference and kind of led the discussion of the conference. By like mid-October, I think about 70% of the countries or states that signed on to the Paris Agreement submitted their version of the NDCs. And those countries, about 140 of them, are responsible for the majority of global emissions. So that was what kind of led up to COP26 from happening. The overarching aim of the conference, according to COP26 president, I'm going to try to pronounce this name, Alok Sharma,

name, Alok Sharma. He said that the idea for the conference was to keep alive the 2015 Paris Agreement's target to keep global temperatures from rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius, above pre-industrial levels. So that was the goal of the conference going into it was to kind of keep this idea of the Paris Climate Accords of still being achievable. And that's not what happened at COP26. Now, it's important to kind of point out that the commitments laid out in the Paris Accords don't come close to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees, as it is said in the Accords. Like, they acknowledge that, which is what the kind of NDCs are for. But even still, those are just non-binding agreements. But anyway, so the Accords and the restrictions and goals, well, there's no restrictions, it's just goals. The goals in them don't come close to limiting to 1.5 degrees. And we've already most likely shot way past the point of that being in any way achievable.

But, you know, we can still limit things from being mega bad, like 4 degrees, but we are already on a certain path. So in asking nations to set tougher targets by next year for cutting climate warming emissions, the new agreement at Glasgow acknowledged that the commitments that were in place are inadequate. And if rigorously followed, the new national pledges, so the stuff including the Paris Accords and the new Glasgow Pact, and all of the individual NDCs, if all of those are followed, the world is now on track for 2.1 to 2.4 degrees Celsius of warming by the end of the century, and that is the lower estimate. As we'll see later on, higher estimates were also shown at the Glasgow conference. So the idea was to hopefully keep it to 1.5, and already we're pushing that back by almost a whole degree

if we're going to 2.4. So that's like one of the main impacts there is just totally kissing 1.5 goodbye. No one even is going to view that as a possibility at this point huh so i i don't know how many people were still looking at that as a really a goal apparently some of the planners of cup 26 apparently were um but i mean i know for us we've we've been aware of that and i'm not sure how you, really what mainstream liberals were thinking before this. But hopefully, at the very least, maybe COP26 made them realize that maybe it's this kind of, it's maybe worse than what you were thinking.

But other things did happen at Glasgow that are worth looking into. So other things did happen at Glasgow that are worth looking into. So the main, quote-unquote, achievements of the Glasgow deal, besides revisiting the emissions-cutting plans to try to keep stuff down, which, of course, were not met and shot way past, but we also had the first-ever inclusion of a commitment to limit coal use. Now, the way phrasing is going to work here is going to be really interesting because the reason why this deal got passed is because some very specific shifts in their phrasing around coal use. The other thing that COP26 tried to do was increase financial help for so-called developing countries and provide funds and assistance for climate disasters.

So when extreme weather events happen, have a set of funds set aside to help countries in these disasters. Now, that is a good idea, but as we'll see later, the way COP26 actually did it is not actually doing it. It's like they're postponing this kind of goal, but they're just making it a prospect. But back to coal. So the Glasgow Climate Pact was the first ever climate deal to explicitly plan to reduce coal, which was one of the worst fossil fuels for for greenhouse gases. And coal really can be phased out.

Coal can be phased out by electric power really easily. It is the easiest one. It's way easier to phase out coal than it is natural gas or other... Sorry, what's the... The other main one. There's three. There's, uh, coal, natural gas. What's, what's the last one? Regular gas. I guess so. Yeah. Yeah. Petroleum based stuff. Um, yeah. So the coals, because coal is mostly used for heat, um, electrically generated heat is way, is way easier than is way easier than those other two. So

coal really should be phased out as soon as possible. But the commitment to phase out coal that was introduced in earlier negotiations led to some fighting, specifically among India and China, who were in strong opposition to the phrasing and the actual constraints of the deal. And a lot of this is like the argument that like, if these countries are still developing, it's not fair to them to remove this resource when other developed nations had it. So we see that argument a lot around climate change stuff as like, oh, you're just going to stop other countries from developing because you

got to get to this certain point of being a successful, wealthy nation and with all this industrial development on the back of fossil fuels and stuff. But now you're going to remove that opportunity for other countries. Now, there is

a lot of stuff around degrowth frameworks that address this issue and specifically try to get fossil fuel savings, like a decrease in emissions, and be able to use some of those gains to assist countries in getting stuff set up to a decent standard of living. But that is going to be addressed on a whole nother scale around like capitalism and and how countries intervene in other countries that's part of like a bigger political question but anyway um india and china did not like that did not like the coal deal um so in the end the countries did agree to uh phase down coal rather than phase out coal. So that is the phrase that they ended up using, is phase down. People weren't super happy about this. The COP26 president, Alok Sharma, said that he was deeply sorry for how these events unfolded. And like, focus on coal is good. It's responsible for about 40% of annual CO2 emissions.

But also, just focusing on coal leaves a really big lack of discussion on oil and gas. Those are also very bad. And arguably, we should be focusing on those a lot. Those are the main ones. We should get rid of coal, yes. But if we just focus on that, then there's a lot of other stuff going on. So that is, that is a lot of coal talk. Uh, you know, who also uses coal,

our sponsors. Yeah. We're entirely sponsored by Joe mansion. Um, big friend of the pod. Uh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for always having our back, Joe.

Anyway, here's some ads. And we are back talking about COP26. And there is a decent... Stuff did happen. So I know it is going to be more of a science-y and numbers episode. But it is worth actually figuring out what happened there because everyone just kind of had the perception like, oh, COP26 was a failure, because yeah, it was. But it is good to know what actually is going on at things like this

because if we're going to get some kind of liberal change, this is where it's going to happen. So it is good to keep an eye on what these types of people are thinking. So we left off on talking about how their plans to phase down coal, and there was like a general lack of focus on oil and gas. And it is interesting. If you so there was a group of activists led by this, I think it's an NGO called Global Witness assessed the participant list published by the UN at the start of the meeting. And they found that there was 503 people with links to fossil fuel interests who were accredited members of the climate summit. And they were like accredited members of the climate summit and so and they were like delegates so cop 26 delegates associated with fossil fuels outnumbered national delegate numbers for every

other country so there were more people representing fossil fuel interests than there were representing any individual country at cop 26 so you you're thinking, huh, maybe, I wonder why this stuff's not going too good. Oh, it's because it's being run mostly by fossil fuel companies? Yep. Huh. That's an interesting little thing there.

Yeah. So the other kind of notable thing about COP26 is it led to a quote-unquote breakthrough in the rules for government-led carbon markets. because it's a way to make more money kind of off of removing carbon and just to create a lot of red tape and bureaucracy around this idea of lowering emissions. So I guess one of the ways to describe carbon markets, if you're kind of unfamiliar with this idea, is that countries that do not meet their emission reduction targets in their national climate pledges are like, uh, penalized for this. Um, so, so countries that, countries that don't meet their emission targets

or, or want to just pursue like less, less, uh, expansive emission cuts. What, what, what this deal set out to do is that instead of actually lowering emissions, they can purchase like emissions reduction tokens and credits from other nations that have cut their emissions more than the amount that they pledged. So like by, you know, moving to low carbon energy and various stuff. So the turn of phrase that people were using to discuss this, to how you can purchase credits to represent emissions that you didn't cut but wanted to, is that this can potentially unlock trillions of dollars for protecting forests, expanding renewable energy, and other projects to combat climate change. um so the idea here is that the money used to purchase these credits is going to get put into other things that will help fight climate change but all of this is non-binding and speculative and it just furthers this whole carbon market concept which i'm not thrilled about um yeah we should we should do like a full episode on carbon markets, but

the thing, so this is the thing I studied academically in college, and it is incredibly important for everyone to understand that carbon markets are fake and do not work at all, ever. No one's ever gotten one to work, no one's ever gotten a national one to work, no one's ever gotten an international

one to work. Implementation of carbon markets, like China had a big thing. They're going to implement a carbon market. It was fake. It didn't work. Their carbon emissions still increase. Very, very important. Like how fucking carbon markets can be. So you get carbon credits if you're a business like Tesla that makes no emission electronic vehicles. And Tesla, for a lot of its earlier history made a significant chunk of its profits selling carbon credits to polluting industries and basically saying you guys keep polluting we got your back like the the fact that we're putting electric cars out onto the street means you guys can keep emitting at the same level like that's that's like literally

how how kind of the the business can work it, it's not the best way to fix the problem. Yeah. So there was a lot of, a lot of talk was around carbon markets, um, because that's of course with the neoliberal establishment, neoliberal establishment is, is,

is, is going to focus on because it, it still is within their kind of worldview. Um, how do we monetize the rot? Yeah. How do we, how do we make money off of the world ending? Which I guess we're going to see a lot more of that in the next few decades.

The other thing that they decided on is next year, there's going to be, again, so they decided to procrastinate, which is just a general theme of COP conferences. I mean, it's what we've been doing. It's what everyone's been doing about climate change since forever. So, yeah, the main thing they do is decide to procrastinate. So next year, there's going to be a U.N. committee to report on progress towards delivering $100 billion per year in promised climate funding.

This was after rich nations failed to deliver on the 2020 deadline for said funds. And then financing is going to be discussed again in 2024 and 2026 at those conferences. But this deal left a lot of more vulnerable nations who were going to rely on this promised funding kind of just, they just left them with nothing. So the whole idea was that like, yeah, we need this funding to help people in these disasters and different like losses and damages and to help, you know, start making more renewable energy technology in lieu of doing tons of coal mining. And that's where this money was going to get used for.

And it's not happening. So this promise was initially made at a UN conference on climate change in 1992. And we're still pushing it back year by year. This pledge is older than I am. Yeah, it sure is. Another pledge made in 2009 to provide $100 billion to emerging economies was supposed to be made in 2020. That also was missed.

And it was designed to help nations adapt to climate effects and make the transition to clean energy. adapt to climate effects and make the transition to clean energy um and uh the the uh cops 26 president said that around 500 billion will be mobilized by 2025 so cool uh thanks for saying those numbers which mean nothing it's fun it's fun how you can just talk and say things and it doesn't actually matter it's it's one of the things that's so frustrating about this is trying to get a handle on like how a lot of these solutions are supposed to work. So like one of the articles, if you're trying to actually, if you're not just taking our word for it,

which you never should and trying to research like carbon credits and carbon markets and like how they might work or might help. Like one of the articles you're going to come across is an article in nature.org called making carbon markets work for faster climate action. And this is very much obvious, this is from 2021. So it's pretty, it's pretty recent. And it's not at all a climate

denial piece. It's just kind of laying out a case for how carbon markets could be very effective at reducing emissions. But you have to grapple the whole time you're looking at this with the fact that like, they haven't, that global emissions are still, and they provide a number of options for how this could work. And it's one of those things where I'm not going to say it's impossible. I'm certainly not an expert on this. And you can read through the article if you want, but it's certainly the and you can read through the article if you want. But it's certainly the thing you can say right now is that carbon markets have not led to a global decrease in emissions because we have not had emissions decrease other than that little dip we had when COVID did its sweet little dance. Yeah, that one month where we could actually see the sky again.

Yeah, that was pretty rad. But yeah, there's, I mean, you can check that article out for kind of the pro-carbon markets case. It all seems, I mean, one of the things that's frustrating to me about it is it's all like, yeah, here's how it might work if everybody got on board the Paris Climate Agreement and also all of this worked ideally. But there just doesn't seem to be a lot of – I just don't see any evidence that they've shown that this is actually likely to be helpful.

It's more just like, yeah, this could work if we do these other things, which is frustrating. That's like all of the kind of shit that you get at COP26, where it's like, yeah, I guess theoretically, if you were to do that, or if that were to work the way you're saying, or if that were to work with the assumption that like all these other factors don't grow over this period of time, then this might help. But we also know what's happened with emissions and global attempts to reduce climate change um which is not to say that like like emissions in the united states like there have been there's been a lot that's been done to curb emissions from the united states now the thing that's often left out of like the discussion of these different things and how

they impacted our emissions is like well a lot of those emissions got pushed off to other countries that are now making the things that we were making for iron yes like that's the big thing when people argue against degrowth and they're like no you can you can still keep growing your economy while lowering emissions like yeah one country can but we still want the stuff so we're just moving it to other countries to produce so like we're not actually lowering it on a global level. You can lower it on an individual country level, but not totally globally, because we still want to consume the thing. One of the single most frustrating things about talking to people about climate change is that,

okay, if you talk to the sort of neoliberal carbon market people, right? If you talk about literally anything else, right? The only thing they ever talk about is how the entire world is interconnected how the entire economy is interconnected how we're more interconnected than ever and then the moment you start talking about climate change they go oh well it's all the individual country individual country individual country the economy is not connected at all it's all about the individual policy yeah country it's like no it's not the it's it's about like all all of the like the the the the emissions are foreign direct investment driven right it's about it's about it's about where investment money is going and you cannot and you know this this is this is

why cop in some ways like this is why it doesn't work and even though it's the only frame rate that could work right you have to have an international response it has to be coordinated it has to be working across national lines because again that's how the economic system works but it doesn't because a states individual states can't and will not ever solve this and then b cop is like okay so here's here's our international framework but also we're just going to have you know the actual the the actual international framework is going to be just essentially hammered up by a bunch of fossil fuel companies. And so it's just, you know, it includes the idea that like, um, you can companies that,

that emit, emit less and don't use up their carbon budget can like sell carbon credits. And you can do this across international lines. And like, if we hold, if we hold companies to different like emissions standards internationally based on things like the Paris climate agreement, then that will cause the carbon credit system to work better. There's that acknowledgement that it is an international problem. But again, I just don't, I don't see, I don't see evidence that it's working. And they, like none of the evidence that I've read makes it seem like there's a very good case that this is going to, at the very least, that this is going to provide the kind of emissions reductions that are necessary to forestall the worst case scenarios that are coming. And if we're going to be, again, to be

completely intellectually honest here, we can talk about degrowth all day long. I have a similar problem with that, that I do to a lot of these, the different kind of targets that COP26 introduced stuff like carbon markets where it's like, I don't see that solving the problem either. It's like a theoretical. Yeah, if we were to get people to, if we've gotten people on board with degrowth, then you've already fundamentally shifted the very nature of global society and also the way in which Americans and people in other Western nations like conceive of economics at a fundamental level. And so it's one thing to say that like, yeah, if people accepted that and got on board with a lifestyle that is not based on this kind of capitalist notion of endless growth, of

ever increasing extraction from the world in order to create value, then we could actually stop emitting at the kind of levels that are going to lead to these horrible consequences. The question is, I think you can argue that degrowth is more realistic in that yes that would absolutely work as opposed to carbon credits and other things which like well theoretically it might work if they do all this other stuff yeah it does it does revolve to it it does revolve on the cultural notion of america and the west completely changing um it's a big it's a big ask you know yeah and i mean like there is there is smaller steps,

like totally reorganizing how cities work so we do not use cars, like redoing a public transportation sector, making solar panels and renewable energy a required part of city infrastructure. There's a lot of ways to push us towards that thing, but there's not one thing we can do, right? Because it is in large parts a cultural change. Stuff will help with emissions. Like if we redesign cities around public transportation

and make it so stuff is not as far apart, then yeah, that's going to help lower emissions. If we require all these other types of renewable energy projects to be built into buildings and added on to our current cities. And yeah, that is going to help lower emissions. But, you know, there's not one big step that we can all do at the same time. And I think that that's, I don't know, I have two minds about it.

One part of me says that's absolutely the most intelligent way to go about it is focusing on things like reducing the use of like, like, like really all ending car culture in cities. Yeah. Because it's not even a reduction thing. It has to be like that, that has to die. But we're a lot closer to that than ending the idea of like capitalism. Yes. Yes. Because there, and number one, because there are capitalists, very capitalist countries that have, that do not have a car culture that like stopped that.

And that actually like had one at one point and then reworked there. So that's, that's, and that would, yeah, that is a significant, that's probably go, that would probably lead to larger emissions reductions than any kind of

carbon credit system could ever lead to. I also, and so, yeah, I think that that's on an objective level. Yeah. That's, it's smart to focus on stuff like that, where you're all, you are arguing for reducing growth, but you're also arguing it for like, Hey, your life will be more pleasant if you live in a city where you can walk everywhere and you're not at risk of getting run down by, you know, two ton trucks anytime you cross the street. And like you're not dealing with smog and pollution and horrible like hour and a half long communes on these crowded nightmare highways. But it's also it's still incrementalist, you know. Absolutely. We are we are talking here.

We are kind of like walking through here all of the best incremental solutions and what is the most realistic of those. And I think that's fine. I think that's kind of where we have to be because that is what's most likely to actually happen to make the problem better. But we have to acknowledge it is incremental.

Like we're not, we're not solving the, I mean, it would be very arrogant to say like, here's how we solve this problem once and for all. You know, I just want to, I think sometimes when you talk about stuff like degrowth, you can get into this, you can kind of, it can come across as if you're trying to like simplify, like, and if we do this, like it'll be perfect.

It's like, no, this would be the hardest thing we've ever had to do as people. That's like saying we have to fix it by all doing a revolution. It's like, it's not, okay, cool. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that would fix it. Anyway, we have to do some ads and then we'll be back to finish up

their closing expectations on COP26 and the other things happening in the periphery. Here's ads. Okay, we are back and we're talking about kind of what happened towards the end of COP26. So we already kind of discussed how the deal was made, what was in the deal, what things were talked about. Now we're kind of going to talk about, you know, the other kind of closing thoughts around it. In the lead up to COP26,

the United States Special Presidential Climate Envoy, John Kerry, he's supposed to be our climate guy. He also said the goal of the summit was to hope that we can limit stuff to 1.5 degrees. He called this the last best hope for the world to get its act together. But by the time COP 26 came to the end his language and attitude had kind of changed after after two weeks of debate and negotiation his his final remarks reflected the kind of the points we've been talking about how um and and and said like uh like the government energy policy is

currently in place around the world are projected to result in about 2.7 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels. And government pledges to cut climate emissions with limit warming to 2.4 if they are met. So again, we're just launching way past this, like, mythical fantasy of 1.5 degrees. And the other scary thing is that we're getting a lot closer to large-scale feedback loops. Feedback loops are things like, once we have reached a certain degree of warming, environmental effects will be triggered that will cascade and produce exponential growth in warming. and produce exponential growth in warming. It's not purely theoretical, but it is mostly stuff that we still probably can't prevent,

and we really need to get on it ASAP, because once these things start happening, they are very hard to reverse. One of the biggest ones that are already being affected is photosynthesis by plants on land, and how that is decreasing its ability to suck up carbon. About 30% of our annual carbon emissions are removed by the air, by photosynthesis, and the rest of which are dissolved in the ocean, causing ocean acidification, or that you just hang around in the atmosphere, which causes a bigger thermal blanket.

So photosynthesis has a thermal maximum maximum beyond which carbon can only be taken so much of it in. And then the process which by plants give off carbon and water actually increases. And we are already at that point in a lot of places. And we achieve the warming required to get to that point a few times throughout the past decade. So land-based carbon uptake is projected to decline by nearly 50% as early as 2040. And these effects have not been included in any of the published pathways leading to lower degrees of warming. And again, this isn't just speculative. The biggest example of this that we can point to is the Amazon rainforest, how that is now a net emitter, because it is no longer sucking up enough carbon to offset the amount of carbon it actually shoots out.

So we need to stop deforestation and keep planting more trees, essentially, because that sucks, and also just as a of indicator of the cascading effects that are happening. And we are still on the path for kind of large-scale disasters in a lot of places around the world. It's around 19% of the Earth's land area is in pretty dire risk on our current emission pathway, the Marshall Islands, the Maldives,

Vietnam, Southeast Asia, Middle East, parts of North Africa, and Central America, overall around one-third of the land humans occupied are predicted to either drown by sea level rise or become too hot for human life just by the end of this century alone. So that'll cause migration, panics, and wars, and a whole bunch

of bad things that we can't limit that. That is something that we need to limit now, and if we don't, it's still happening. So these are the other kind of things talked about at the end. So that was kind of COP26 as a whole.

The one last thing I want to mention is just how evil Facebook is. So kind of an aside, but Facebook's vice president of global affairs talked about Facebook's efforts to combat climate misinformation as the Glasgow summit began. But as this was happening, conservative media outlets like Newsmax were running ads on Facebook calling global warming a hoax, gaining hundreds of thousands of views. Stuff like, you know, Candace Owens and Daily Wire were spreading climate misinformation. But, you know, as Facebook was bragging about its ability to combat misinformation around climate change. The UK-based think tank InfluenceMap, which identified misleading Facebook ads from several media outlets around COP26, also found that fossil fuel companies and lobbying groups spent half a million dollars on political and social issue Facebook ads during the summit, half a million dollars on political and social issue facebook ads during the summit resulting in over 22 million impressions including content that promoted uh environmental effects under what

we would call like greenwashing uh stuff like you know uh the american petroleum institute putting up putting an ad out over like a natural landscape as it like touts its efforts to tackle climate change um so all all of that kind of stuff so i just think it's really dumb because facebook brags about its ability to combat climate misinformation as it's running ads saying climate change is a hoax and then doing general like greenwashing is more common but still it's frustrating um and yeah just as a note like we talk about this in the Facebook episodes of Astrid's that dropped recently,

but like the number one spreader right now of climate disinformation on Facebook is Breitbart, which a lot of the Facebook papers have gone on to like the extreme lengths Facebook executives went to keep Breitbart as one of their like trusted news partners and continue putting their stuff out to a huge audience because it goes very viral. It was good for engagement on the platform. And that's the decision Facebook's like, whatever they say,

this is like when we when we're talking about carbon credits, we're talking about like the different proposed solutions. I'll do a bit of waffling because I don't want to come across as too certain about what the right way to go forward is when it comes to how Facebook has handled climate disinformation. it's very black and white. They enabled it for direct profit and they talked about it. And people within the company were like, hey, we're deliberately enabling climate change misinformation in order to make more money. It's a it's a it's a very easy case to make.

Yeah. So that wraps up my my report back on COP26. I know a lot of a lot of stuff was like, there's a lot of headlines before the summit even ended, before the deal was even finalized, that was like, COP26 is a failure,

which is like, yes, but I think it is worth actually relearning what happens at these things, because I think we have this idea that they're some mythic secret gathering of people to discuss plans, and it's like, no, you can actually see everything they're talking about.

Like it's, it's all out in the open. Like you can actually see what, what the plans are. It doesn't need to be all shrouded in, it doesn't need to be like shrouded in mystery. So I just wanted to give people like a rundown on what the actual people in power,

how they're discussing climate change and what their expectations are and how, you know, expectations have, you know, the past five years have risen by basically a degree, right? Because like in 2015, we were like, we can do 1.5 and now we're like, we can do 2.5. Yeah. So that is what we've done in five years. That's what's happened.

And I think that's what justifies the kind of blanket pessimism about anything coming from COP26, about anything being suggested by like a state actor or an international organization, which is that like, we've all watched the last 20 years. Like they've said a lot of great stuff about what could work. It's like that nature article about like, okay, well, like you've got a bunch of math here arguing about how it might work, but we've got the last 20 years of policies to say, but it probably won't, right? But it's almost certainly not going to work, right? So we can say, like, yeah, theoretically

this might be helpful, but, like, realistically, nothing, everything you guys have argued about in the same way has been a miserable failure, pretty much. Well, that wraps it up for us. You can follow the show on twitter and apparently instagram um at happen here pod yeah and uh cool zone media uh we got a new cool zone media show dropping soon

uh uh megacorp that's pretty exciting yeah check it out it's about how we love amazon and you should pay the money i don't think that's what it's about, but anyway. It's the opposite of that. Yeah, so. I'm going to buy some carbon offsets from Amazon. And with that, we're closing the show. 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. 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.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother, trying to reach Florida from Cuba. One day in 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian.

Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami.

Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jacqueline 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. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture

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a show about how things are falling apart, or at least generally a show about how things are falling apart and how to, you know, maybe not fall apart that much. But we have a little bit of a different episode for you today. A friend of a friend of mine reached out to me recently in the wake of a pair of episodes we did for Behind the Bastards on sexual abuse within the Boy Scouts of America, which was, if you're not aware, an endemic problem with more than 100,000 victims having come forward in the last year alone.

And this is a case that kind of ties into that. It's the case of a young man who committed murder and a young man who was also a victim of a terrible series of crimes. So I wanted to kind of shine a little bit of light on the case of Heath Stocks today. And to help me do that is Mr. Michael Kaiser. Michael, welcome to the show Stocks today. And to help me do that is Mr. Michael Kaiser. Michael, welcome to the show. Good afternoon. Thanks for having me. Michael, would you like to introduce kind of your affiliation with this case before we go over the broad strokes of it? Sure. Again, my name is Michael Kaiser. I'm a criminal defense attorney with the Lassiter and Cassinelli firm in Little Rock, Arkansas. This case started in the

90s, and I was, I'm 32, so I was not practicing then. I came into this case in the last two years after Heath has already been sentenced to three life sentences, and I assisted him in filing a petition for a commutation asking for the governor of Arkansas to reduce those sentences to a term of years and giving him a chance of parole while he is still alive. And can we – let's go over kind of what happened in this case, the basics, because this is a really sad story. And it's one of those things where there's not a lot of, I think, easy answers. But yeah, let's talk about sort of the broad strokes of what happened, and then we can drill into what you're trying to achieve here. Sure.

So the broad strokes are back in 1997, when Heath was a young man, just 20 years old. He was arrested and charged with killing his entire immediate family, both his mother, father, and his younger sister. He was quickly identified as the primary suspect, questioned, confessed, arrested, charged, and within, I believe, six months had pleaded guilty to all three capital murders and received a sentence of life without parole for each one of those for a total of three life sentences. Shortly after he was convicted, it came to light that his longtime Boy Scout scoutmaster, Jack Walls,

had been molesting Heath since he was around age 9 or 10, that it was a serial sort of abuse, that Heath was not the only one, that it was particularly brutal, and that his abuse didn't just involve sexual acts. It was kind of a long-term, I hate to use the term brainwashing, but a lot of people have about what he did to those boys. Heath's is not the only life that was ruined. Heath's family is not the only family's lives who were ruined. But Heath's is unfortunately the most extreme case where he ultimately committed a crime against his family. We'll get into the circumstances in a second. I just wanted to add a little bit of clarification. The Scoutmaster, we're looking at between 100 and 150 victims, kind of conservatively based on what I've been reading.

Yes. Yeah, and it's some of, I mean, so this guy, some of it's the stuff that you heard in a lot of these other cases. Some of it is very unique to this guy, but he would basically, he would have people over – kids over camping on his land. He would take them shooting. He worked for an ammunition company. He would molest them.

He would also like purchase prostitutes for them. And it was this – I mean a lot of really – some of the worst abuse that I've read about in connection to any of these Boy Scout sexual abuse cases. It's pretty harrowing stuff when you read the stories of other kids who were kind of in the same position that Heath was. Yeah, unfortunately, you're correct. It's, you know, every time you think this can't get worse or this case is so extreme that you find some other element that's more offensive more appalling more victims more more families ruined down the line even um today 30 40 years 50 years later yeah so how does the the because i mean one of the things about this is this is a pretty the initial initial crime here is pretty horrific. And I think it's one of those things where it is hard to have a lot of sympathy for Heath until you kind of learn about what this guy – like his role in the crime.

Because it was not just a case of a kid committing murder. It was a case of a kid being very deliberately pushed into committing murder. And potentially, I think the allegations being made are that he directly helped with it as well. Yes. So, you know, at first glance, yeah, it looks really bad for Heath. But over the years, what we have learned is that what really happened is that Heath had been serially abused sexually, physically, emotionally, and otherwise by Jack for a period of 10 plus years. His mother discovers the abuse and discusses it with her pastor, another religious counselor. Heath informs Jack that, you know, his mother is aware,

and Jack instructs Heath to do as he's been taught and to kill the problem. Jack was never convicted with anything associated with the death of the Stocks family. However, his first set of life sentences for the many assaults that he was convicted of, when they were reversed, it was because the judge in that sentencing hearing said, you know, the death of the Stocks family is also on your hands. And because he hadn't been formally convicted of that, he actually had his original life sentences reversed. At resentencing, he got essentially the same sentence, multiple life sentences and additional years. But yes, there is a connection. It wasn't known

at the time, or at least it wasn't publicized. And if it had been, I think the results of Heath's case would be very different. I don't think you and I would be speaking right now. think you and i would be speaking right now yeah and it's i mean obviously like this is this is this is a thoroughly horrible situation um and when somebody commits three murders i think even people who are very critical of the criminal justice system should agree that like something needs to be done but i it just seems so unfair to lock this kid up for his entire life without kind of and and and acting as if this was just a thing he did on his own rather than kind of the result of a pretty horrific i mean one of the most one of the most horrific patterns of of abuse and exploitation of a of a child that i can imagine um and i i don't And I don't know what would actually help

other than getting him into a situation where he's not spending the rest of his life in a prison cell. I don't know what the long term for him looks like in terms of rebuilding this guy's potential to have a life, but it certainly starts with him not spending the rest of that life in a jail cell. The problem we've encountered with Heath's case is the parole board and many just, even just people that encounter the case wonder why would he attack and kill, you know, his immediate family rather than his abuser. And in the 25 plus years, or in the 25 years or so since this happened, I mean,

juvenile, our understanding of the juvenile brain, neuropsychology in general, has come leaps and bounds. And so we know that a serially abused child has brain damage from really about the time that that starts happening. And so in Heath's crazy world, and we do have this in our clemency application, we've had abuse specialists evaluate Heath and see how his actions conform to our current understanding. within the crazy world that he lived in, he actually was making, dare I say, the reasonable decision. So Jack had demonstrated numerous times over the years he has physical, sexual, and even control over Heath's life. He can end it at any time.

He explicitly and implicitly threatens the boys all the time. He's got weapons everywhere. He's a Vietnam veteran. He brings them out to his property, shows them how to shoot, shows them what he will do to those who go against him. So within Heath's world, he actually made a somewhat reasonable decision. He, the bigger threat was Jack. He can't kill Jack, so he has to do the thing to appease Jack to avoid the more severe abuse. That's oversimplifying it, but that's something that I don't think we would have been able to conceptualize back in the 90s. You add the element of it's male-on-male, and we're talking

about a very small rural community in central Arkansas, and that element cannot be overlooked at all as well. That was a huge thing that Jack was counting on to keep these boys silent. He explicitly told them, if you tell what happened to you, they're going to think that you are homosexual and a liar. So there's just so many horrible things in this case. Jack had decades of experience doing this, and unfortunately because of his position in the community, the son of a prominent judge, the longtime scoutmaster,

the community's man of the year multiple times, he had access to dozens and dozens of boys, in fact entire generations of these boys in Lono County. Heath's case is just one of many. Unfortunately, it's the most extreme case, and it kind of tests the bounds of our mercy. But the kid that discovered Jack, while he's a hero, ultimately he killed himself, and he's not the only one. he killed himself and he's not the only one so unfortunately the stocks family are not the only people who lost their lives and not the only people whose lives just like he's were completely destroyed by jack walls yeah and this is this is an important thing to understand because when

we're talking about kind of the the lingering impacts of childhood sexual abuse it can take a wide variety of forms. And when we, like, but it is important to understand that the damage it can do goes so much further beyond, like, the physical damage done by the abuse. Like, these are, your brain is still forming and growing when you're that young. And Heath, this is one manifestation of kind of what can happen at the more extreme end, admittedly, as the result of – like this is why it's such a heinous crime to abuse a child in this way. And it's just – I don't know. Like you're right. It tests the limit of people's capacity for – I don't know.

Forgiveness seems like the wrong word, but like clemency. This, again, is a pretty heinous crime. But at the same time, I can't bring myself to think that what he endured leading up to this shouldn't have an impact on what happens to him afterwards, right? Like it does reduce his complicity in this. And I just feel, it feels so wrong to say that like well he should spend the rest of his life uh behind bars like that's just not i can't imagine anything could help like i can't imagine that could help in any way um just writing this this person off uh forever i don't know it just is it's it's fucked what are the next steps for y'all, for your for the defense team?

So at this point, we've already filed a petition with the Arkansas governor requesting a commutation. That's not a pardon. That's not something saying say that Heath is innocent. We're asking the governor to modify his sentences to a term of years, 40 years in each case to be served concurrently. to a term of years, 40 years in each case to be served concurrently. So in effect, one single sentence of 40 years. So we do another 15, yeah. Well, in Arkansas, you're actually, at the time he was convicted, he'd be parole eligible at 70%. So that's 28 years.

That's not a guarantee of parole. That is just what it means, parole eligibility. So that's what we've asked for. We think his institutional record speaks for itself. And if and when he is a candidate for parole, he hopefully will make parole. He's done everything within his power to do so. If this fails, it's right now, in Arkansas, it first goes to the parole board, who makes a non-binding recommendation to the governor.

They have recommended that the governor deny it, which is unfortunate. But again, it's not binding. The governor now has, I believe, until February or March of 2022 to issue his decision. He has not yet. We have requested a sit-down with the governor. I don't know if we'll actually sit down with Governor Asa Hutchinson. We will sit down with his criminal justice coordinator. We're thankful and lucky to have the support of all of the remaining victims' family members. So both sides of Heath's family, you know, we have extensive support. Heath's family, you know, we have extensive support. It wasn't, they, a lot of them had to work to get to this point.

A lot of them had to understand the true impact of the abuse. But at this point, we have extensive support from both sides of his family. As far as we know, there are no objections to his commutation application from victims' family members. The only ones that there have been are from the sentencing judge or from the sentencing court. It's actually not the same judge and the sentencing or the prosecutor from that county. Again, a different person, but they felt the need to object. Should this fail, we will seek additional post-conviction remedies um in arkansas we have something called a petition for writ of ericorum nobis um you can file it you have to ask the supreme court hey is it okay if i file a petition back in the trial court asking them to consider

something that if we had known back in 1997 and 98 would have affected the outcome of the litigation. In this case, we would point to the, we've had Heath evaluated, and we'll point to that neuropsychological evaluation as new evidence. We couldn't fully make a connection at the time between his abuse and the offense. To answer that question, why he killed his family rather than his abuser, we now can. And so that's what we're going to allege is that new evidence. Whether the court will find that it is remains to be seen. When Heath tried this on his own about five years ago, the court denied it. He alleged the new evidence was the fact of the long-term sexual abuse of him by Jack Walls. And the court, in an opinion that really does not,

you know, shows the lack of understanding of long-term juvenile sexual abuse, found that, well, no, you personally were aware of all of that in your own mind because it had happened to you so that was not new evidence and i mean we know that the average uh male who makes this sort of disclosure it occurs deep into adulthood so yeah it's just at every level of the system even today we're still feeling the effects of kind of that old school mentality about about this and it's unfortunate we could talk about kind of the the carceral state and this idea that like penalty is the way to respond to any kind of crime but even if you believe that even if you believe that like you have to punish people with incarceration when they commit crimes he's done 25 years like that's no no one is discussing the possibility of heath not being punished for the murder you know because

it's he has been not just with time behind bars but with the fact that his family's gone the idea that the state could do anything that's worse to him than than the scout master did to be honest is kind of absurd in my head but um where is there anything that like i don't know i i'm trying to determine like what can be done to help in this situation is there any way people can actually help outside of like you and the team that's that's working to try and sit down with the governor? Yeah. I mean, public support is wonderful. The more people that are pointing out the problems in Heath's case and with his sentences and that are reaching out to the governor,

the better we think our chances are. I apologize. I don't have the email address on me, but the governor has several publicly accessible accounts, as does his criminal justice coordinator. Even just getting on Facebook and bringing it up. There's a Facebook account managed by one of Heath's friends in Florida called at Hope for Heath Stocks. It's there's also a Web site. I think it's Hope for Heathstocks. There's also a website. I think it's hopeforheatstocks.info. It's probably the most extensive trove of resources in this case. It has almost all

original documents. It's where I still go to access things when I need them, even though, you know, I am his attorney. So there's a lot out there. There's a lot of ways to support the cause, There's a lot out there. There's a lot of ways to support the cause, even just telling other people about it. We do have a documentary in the works. I actually don't think it has a producer at this point, but we're hopeful to have something out in early 2022 to make Keith, to make Jack, to make this case more of a household name. The hopes that, you know, if any sort of, you know, if there's more support out there, more pressure on the governor, it'll increase the odds that he'll do the right thing here. Yeah, I mean, this shouldn't be a political issue.

This shouldn't be a left or a right thing. Like, everyone should be able to see this is the result of abuse and that should have an impact on what we actually – what's actually – what our society actually does to this kid in the wake of the crime. Perhaps it's like foolish to hope for some sort of rationality in 2021 as regards a case like this but i would hope that we could be rational about this and everyone agree yes this kid deserves something more than what he's gotten um i don't know it's it's it's a bleak one though that's putting it lightly new york recent recently passed a law that kind of acknowledged kind of where you're at with it for victims of domestic or sexual abuse who then committed crimes that weren't necessarily during the course of that specific abuse. for resentencing if they met certain statutory qualifications, for things that mitigated their crime, didn't justify it,

but that didn't come out originally. Unfortunately, in Arkansas, we don't have a similar process. The only thing we have available is this clemency commutation process. And unfortunately, as you said, it should be apolitical, but it's not. It's explicitly political. The parole board are all appointees by our governor. The governor is an elected official. There's a reason we filed it in the last year of his last term in Arkansas.

He is term limited. So we're trying to get him at a point where he's as free from the politics to do what he actually thinks is correct, but to think that politics will be removed is – I mean it never is. No. This is the United States in the 2020s. Politics is a factor here. And this is a deeply divisive case in the state and especially in Lono County. Well, it's hard.

I can imagine it being hard to talk with people about just because, again, the nature of the crime is horrific. hard to talk with people about just because again the nature of the crime is is horrific and so if you talk about like well we we think this guy should have another chance at life and you're like well but he killed three people he killed his sister and yes that is the case but that's not the only thing going down here and you just have to i think if you're if you're at all even if you're not coming at this from kind of politically where I am in regarding the carceral state, you have to acknowledge that like this does not erase Heath's crimes. But Heath's crimes were also the result of not just the Scoutmaster's abuse but of a number of failures on a wide level in our society that allowed that abuse to occur. society that allowed that abuse to occur. And so, I don't know, I feel like there's a lot of reasons why it behooves us to give this kid another chance. I don't know, that doesn't make it easier to convince anyone else, but yeah. Well, how would this case play out if it

happened today versus in 1997, even in a more rural part of Arkansas. I think our understanding of several of the issues here has come so far that my hope is Heath would have received a term of years rather than being charged with capital murder. They originally were seeking the death penalty and he made a deal for multiple life sentences, both as someone under 21 and as a victim of long-term sexual abuse. I would like to think that if this happened today, even in that county, what we're asking for is something close to what would happen. You would hope, yeah. I would hope. So that's why, again, we didn't ask for a pardon. We didn't ask, let him out today. We said, let him earn it. Let him still feel the weight of what he has done,

but give him that light at the end of the tunnel because there is no one in the Arkansas Department of Correction, even with the – there's just not a victim like him there, and there's not someone who could be an advocate for victims like him were he to be released. Well, all right, Michael. Is there anything else you wanted to get into with this, or any other ways people might be able to help? Check out the website, again. Post on social media.

The one thing I think we didn't focus on here is Heath himself. Heath is a deeply spiritual individual. He's someone who lives with this on his conscious almost every moment of the day. This is not someone who feels he's skated by by avoiding the death penalty. This is someone who has had to learn about trauma mostly on his own because with those life sentences, he is ineligible for so many of the scant programs and resources that we have in the Department of Correction because they don't give it to people who don't have parole dates. So he's had to do a lot of this on his own. He's come a remarkable way. He's still someone that needs probably extensive treatment and therapy to deal with

his own trauma as well as to deal with the effects of what he did on himself. But he's a remarkable individual. He's a great self-advocate. I wish you could speak with him as well. He's someone I'm proud to represent, not just that I do because I get paid, this is why I got into the practice of law, is this type of case. He is not innocent, but he is not, he should not be bearing the full weight of what occurred while, you know, Jack is serving a life sentence. I think he should have one or two or three more for his role in this. I mean, Heath's youth and Heath's brain damage because of that sexual abuse should have and now should be considered.

And we just hope the governor will. Yeah, yeah, hopefully so. And again, if you want to learn more, there's heathstocks.info. There's a lot of good about Jack Walls on there as well. And you can, there's a link to make a donation to Heath's Defense. All right, well, Michael,

thank you so much for coming on today. And I hope you have a good rest of your week. Y'all as well. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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