It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 131

Episode Date: May 18, 2024

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That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. 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. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the podcast. It's me, James, and I'm joined today by Mo, who is an attorney, educator, and abolitionist.

They've been on the show before. We've very much enjoyed their contributions. We're here today to talk about the recent Supreme Court, not decision, right, but the Supreme Court declining to hear a case. It's been reported a little bit, perhaps. I think the importance of it may have been overstated and Mo's going to help us understand that. How are you doing today, Mo? I'm doing all right. How are you doing? I'm doing well. It's a nice day. Went for a run this morning, saw some flowers, picked some fennel. That was nice. That's very nice. Yeah, wild fennel. If you live in Southern California, now's the time.

Just a little tip from me. Don't get it at the height that dogs pee you want to go above that it's a pro tip you can't say that we don't fill this podcast with little easter eggs see talking talking of little easter eggs let's get into the things that are buried within this uh what happened was the supreme court declined to hear a case is that right that's right so the case that the supreme court declined to hear is mckesson v doe this is a case that they have declined to hear eight times and it keeps going back up and down from, I think, the Middle District of Louisiana to the Fifth Circuit, all the way up to the Supreme Court. And it's a case that involves the First Amendment. And I think, or at least the way that it has been received, particularly by communities of people who do engage in a lot of First Amendment protected activity, has been with a certain amount of panic that the Supreme Court saying we're not going to hear this case, we're going to kick it back down to the Fifth Circuit, we're going to kick it back down to the district court, is, you know, a harbinger of terrible things to come for the right to protest and for there is some truth to that. It is, I would say, often dangerous to engage in acts of dissent. But I think that there's some real misapprehension of

what's going on with this particular case. And so I thought it was worth having a conversation with you to try to clarify a little bit about what's going on here, what the risks are associated specifically with this case, and what the risks actually are on the ground with respect to protest, and also to talk to you about some of the resources that are available to protect yourself. Wonderful. Yeah. So I guess to give you a little roadmap, I think I'll start by talking to you about like,

what is actually the law on the ground at this point with respect to the First Amendment and rights to protest? Yes. Have those rights actually been meaningfully altered by this case or by the Supreme Court declining to hear this case? Has it actually become more dangerous to protest? Are there things that we should be worried about? What are they? And then what kinds of resources there are? I guess the first thing I'm going to do is give you a very brief primer on the First Amendment.

is give you a very brief primer on the First Amendment. So the First Amendment guarantees, as I like to say, the very First Amendment guarantees our rights to speech and assembly. The government can place limits on the time, place, and manner of your protest, but the government is not authorized to criminalize speech based on subject matter or viewpoint, speech based on subject matter or viewpoint, and it can't impose what's called a prior restraint on speech, which can include making it so risky to speak that people engage in self-censorship. But the First Amendment doesn't immunize you from prosecution or civil liability for otherwise unlawful conduct right so that's why true threats of violence are not protected by the first amendment right um and it doesn't protect you from being arrested for behavior just because that behavior is politically motivated, which is why breaking Starbucks windows and graffiti and assassination are not protected by the First Amendment.

Right. On the other hand, the fact that there are one or more people at a demonstration who are acting unlawfully does not strip the larger demonstration of First Amendment protection. Right. And that principle comes from a case called NAACP versus Claiborne Hardware. is Claiborne Hardware. And Claiborne, it was decided in 1982. And it was a case where the NAACP was sued civilly on the basis that they had organized a protest where some people in the crowd had caused some damage. I see. This is a very, very similar case to the underlying case in this situation where DeRay McKesson has been sued civilly, meaning he's being sued for money damages. He is not being criminally prosecuted. Right.

That's an important distinction. So you know what? Let's back up a little bit. So can you explain who is DeRay McKesson? Why is DeRay McKesson bouncing up and down between Louisiana and the Supreme Court? Yes. Okay.

So I'm going to back up even farther than that. The reason that we are here today that I am here with you talking about this case is that the way that this case is being reported on or received is that people are going, oh God, it's now illegal to protest and we're all going to go to prison for protesting. protest and we're all going to go to prison for protesting. Like, okay, I mean, first of all, police using mass arrest of protesters to chill and silence speech is already a time-honored American tradition. But that isn't what this case is about. This is a civil case, which means that somebody is being sued for money damages. And the person who's being sued is DeRay McKesson. DeRay McKesson was at one point, for anyone who can remember

a decade ago, was very high profile, very visible in the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson and in Baltimore, and then later in Louisiana. And he was somebody who was very visible in the media. He made a lot of public statements. He made a lot of public statements on behalf of Black Lives Matter, which I'm going to get into, is not a membership organization. But he made a bunch of statements as though he were the representative of a movement, which he referred to as Black Lives Matter. He organized a lot of protests. I think at one point, I have a memory that he ran for office. I think at one point I have a memory that he ran for a piece of concrete and he had organized the protest, he had control of the protest, and he had some responsibility for the fact that this other person had thrown a rock at him.

This theory requires a real failure to understand social movements and distributed networks, because what it presumes, and I think we've talked about this before on this show, is the inability of the police and the courts to understand that not every social movement operates with a clear hierarchy, like the police, right? Yeah. Or the military, because their social movement groups do imitate the military, they do imitate that hierarchy, they totally reproduce the military they do imitate that hierarchy they totally reproduce this sort of chain of command theory yeah so if you look at the clan right they are organized via they are incorporated they have a membership there is a clear hierarchy who is in charge who is giving orders who is following orders right yeah that is not the case proud boys patriot front like they're incapable of organizing without authority and conceiving of anyone doing so it would seem right and so i i think i've told you

before i've actually had to drop footnotes in federal court filings to explain that antifa is not a membership organization yeah this is a discussion that i have been privy to as a historian of the same organization yeah right originally it was ironically right like the kpd was but yeah when we referring it to that we're not talking about 1933 germany no so you know when someone says and this becomes relevant here because initially when this suit was filed, it was two different lawsuits. And it was a group of police officers who had been shot in different places in the country suing not only DeRay McKesson, but Black Lives Matter. Kesson, but Black Lives Matter. And I think in fact, one of the defendants who was named in one of the initial suits was hashtag Black Lives Matter. So I don't know how you serve a hashtag. Yeah. Fascinating. Totally fascinating. I mean, the legal theory underlying these cases was pretty bonkers. And then various other individuals who were part of different Black

Lives Matter groups, right? Okay. The initial suit that went after all these people and hashtags for the shootings were really just legally insufficient, right? The allegations that were made were Black Lives Matter, whatever that is, made statements about how policing is unjust and police shouldn't be surprised if there's, you know, if they encounter resistance. And then these other people kind of showed up and shot at cops. And the theory is that by sort of making these statements, Black Lives Matter encouraged or incited

and was responsible for these shootings. Yeah. This is not a valid legal theory. Right. I mean, it just is not. And that case was dismissed, you know, just entirely. And then the second case that was brought was this one where the guy who was hit in the head with a rock. And it's the same allegations, the same theory of liability. And everybody got dismissed out of that case. All of the defendants got dismissed out of that case, except for DeRay

McKesson. And part of the reason that everyone else was dismissed out of that case, or that the suit was dismissed with respect to those named defendants, is that Black Lives Matter was an unincorporated association. unincorporated association and an unincorporated association can't be sued so and this has been relevant in other cases i'm not trying to give anyone legal advice but i want people to think about the fact i think there's like a real impulse sometimes in social movement organizing that like we need to make everything a non-profit yeah yeah they. Or we need to have a bank account even. And the fact is, when you create an organization, even if it's an unincorporated association, that where the entity has what you would say is its personality is distinct from that of its members. Right. Right. Yeah, it's a distinct. It can be sued. You become susceptible to a lawsuit. Right. So, for example, when energy transfer partners tried to sue, there's currently a suit against Greenpeace.

Yes. The Standing Rock suit. Yeah. And we'll talk about that later. Right. It's a slap suit. It's a suit that endeavors to stifle speech that's in the public interest. Right. When that suit first started, they tried to sue Earth First. But Earth First is not an entity. Right. Yeah, yeah. You can't serve Earth First. There's no one to serve.

You know, there's nobody there. It's not, you know, it's like Antifa. It'd be like trying to sue Batman fans. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah exactly we'd love to see it right there's there may be people who identify in that way but there is not a coherent group right and there's certainly not a group that can take that can take responsibility for the behavior of its members right talking of taking responsibility mo we we unfortunately have to take responsibility for the fact that we now have to pivot to ads okay to ads um so yeah we were talking about like this the difference between like an incorporated organization which can be sued can you maybe

just even if we step it back uh like a little bit further and explain the difference between civil and criminal uh liability just in case people haven't got that criminal liability is like when you are criminally charged by the state by the government for violating a criminal law right right? And when you are criminally charged, what is on the table is that you might go to jail or you might go to prison. You can also be civilly sued. And what's happening there is if someone says, okay, you've, you know, you wrecked my car or your dog bit me or you punched me in the face and I lost a tooth, then you can be civilly sued by that person for money damages. Got it. Right? To compensate you for the loss.

So in this case, Mr. McKesson is being civilly sued, not arrested, not prosecuted, not subject. Like there is no possibility that if he loses this case, he'll go to jail. Yeah. So this civil case happens in Louisiana, right? Yeah. Let's talk about how it bounces around the Fifth Circuit. So I started to tell you that there were sort of these two cases. The first one is entirely dismissed.

The second one, they say, all right, Black Lives Matter is not an association that can be sued. These other individuals that you've named here as defendants were not present, made no statements about it. Well, first, they dismissed the whole thing, actually. Then the cop appealed to the circuit and the circuit said, yeah, mostly you're right, district court, all of these people can't be sued. But Mr. McKesson, we do think could be liable under a theory of negligence because he organized the protest and was present. because he organized the protest and was present. This officer sues McKesson and a bunch of other people. And the officer says that Mr. McKesson is liable because he organizes protests and knew or should have known that it could potentially turn violent. And so he says under Louisiana law,

he can sue on a theory of negligence, which doesn't require any kind of intent or certain knowledge. It's just being, you know, negligent. Initially, the court, the federal district court dismisses those claims, all of them based on NAACP v. based on NAACP v. Claiborne, which I talked about earlier, right? Which says if you're at a protest and one person gets violent, like the rest of the protest doesn't get, does not lose its First Amendment protected character just because other people are violent. Then the cop appeals and the Fifth Circuit in part affirms their rulings about all of the other people who

were sued, but reinstates the negligence claim against Mr. McKesson. Right. He then, it does, it never, by the way, has proceeded to trial. This case is still in a very preliminary phase. Oh, wow. Okay. It has been going on since 2017 and it's been bouncing up and down the courts. But the question is, can he even be sued under this theory? So we haven't gotten, he hasn't been found guilty. We haven't had a presentation of evidence. There's all kinds of stuff that has not yet happened in this case. The question is very, very narrow. It's can a person be sued under a theory of negligence when they organize a protest and somebody else at that protest causes some kind of harm. Right. So the Fifth Circuit says, go back district court and hear this claim of negligence.

McKesson then brings it to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court reverses the Fifth Circuit and says it overturns their decision and says you actually can't force the district court to proceed with this trial because you didn't check in with the Louisiana State Court to get their feedback about whether Louisiana state law actually allows for this kind of negligence claim. Okay, so like they missed procedurally, they fucked up. Yes. Then the Fifth Circuit says, okay, fine, Louisiana Supreme Court, what do you think? And the court says, yeah, we think you can proceed on this negligence claim. And then the Fifth Circuit affirms its previous ruling and says, okay, now district court, hear it again. And you can hear this negligence claim as to Mr. McKesson. They tried to distinguish it from Claiborne. I don't think they did a good job. One of the, there was a three judge panel that ruled on this. So it was a 2-1 ruling. Two of the judges tried to distinguish it from Claiborne. One of the judges says, no, you know, Claiborne is controlling. You can only hold somebody liable for their own behavior. And one of the things he says is that if you make protest organizers liable for someone else's violent behavior, all a counter protester has to do is show up and start throwing rocks in order to get the whole protest to, you know, to impute liability to the person who organized the protest.

Yeah. And that goes both ways, right? So I am sort of surprised that they, given that there are social movements that are probably more aligned with the values and beliefs of these federal judges in the Fifth Circuit. aligned with the values and beliefs of these federal judges in the Fifth Circuit. So the Fifth Circuit at this point says, no, go back to the district court and have the trial on the theory of negligence. Then the Supreme Court decided a case called Counterman v. Colorado. counterman de colorado is not a first amendment um political speech case it's a case about somebody making threats but that case relies very heavily on clayborne so in that case we have what's called a true threats analysis and they're trying to determine whether a person who's making threats needs to actually know that the threats they're making are going to

be perceived as real threats. And what they decided was they do need to know to some degree that these statements could be taken as true threats. But they talk a lot, Kagan authored this opinion, and she talks a lot about how careful we have to be even with speech that is traditionally not protected, like true threats, because it's very important not to chill protected speech. And what she says is that the court has always been really wary of chilling protected speech. And so sometimes it makes extra space for speech that isn't protected in order to make really sure it doesn't chill protected speech. Right. So she says, the court must consider the prospect of chilling non-threatening expression,

given the ordinary citizen's predictable tendency to steer wide of the unlawful zone. The speaker's fear of mistaking whether a statement is a threat, his fear of the legal system getting that judgment wrong, his fear in any event of incurring legal costs, all those may lead him to swallow words that are in fact not true threats. And so what they say is we need to make a standard that has enough, what they say is breathing room, to make sure that even if it means that some unprotected speech gets through, we have enough space for all of the protected speech to still exist and for nobody to feel uncertain about whether or not their speech is protected. Yeah, sure. They don't want to gradually have a creeping sort of boundary. So what she says is if we're going to ban any kind of speech, it has to be known and knowable to the speaker.

And there has to be sort of a requirement that the speaker is actually aware that this is not protected speech. And so in this case, in counterman with the guy who's making the bizarre threats, what they decide is you only need to be reckless about the speech. You don't have to be be a threat, if you could reasonably anticipate that it will be received as a threat, that's sufficient. Okay. Okay. And then she says this. Our incitement decisions, right? So Supreme Court decisions regarding incitement to violence demand more.

regarding incitement to violence, demand more. But the reason for that demand is not present here where we're talking about threats. When incitement is at issue, we have spoken in terms of specific intent, presumably equivalent to purpose or knowledge. In doing so, we recognized that incitement to disorder is commonly a hair's breadth away from political advocacy and particularly from strong protests against the government and prevailing order. Such protests gave rise to all the cases in which the court demanded a showing of intent and the court decided those cases against a resonant historical backdrop, the court's failure in an earlier era to protect mere advocacy of force or lawbreaking from legal sanction. A strong intent requirement was and remains one way to guarantee history was not repeated.

It was a way to ensure the efforts to prosecute incitement would not bleed over either directly or through a chilling effect to dissenting political speech at the First Amendment's core. Okay, so we have this case that's decided days after the Fifth Circuit makes its decision that directly speaks to this decision. Right? It reaffirms Claiborne. It reaffirms that political speech is protected. It reaffirms that you cannot have a negligence standard. You have to have a standard. You can't just say, well, somebody knew or should have known that organizing a protest might lead to violence. Right. They have to be specific. They have to be like, we're going to go out and we're going to do violence at this protest at

this time. Right. They have to be actually advocating for violence in order to be held responsible for violence. Right. So how does this not just lead to his case being dismissed? So then at the same time as that's happening, Mr. McKesson has asked the court again to weigh in on whether this case can proceed under a negligence theory, right? Meaning, should he have, can he be prosecuted because it's possible that a protest will turn violent? Right. And the court says, we're not going to hear this case. And somewhat unusually, Justice Sonia Sotomayor issues a statement along with the denial of hearing the case. Okay. And she says,

this court may deny what's called certiorari, right? Hearing the case, the court may deny certiorari for many reasons, including that the law is not in need of further clarification. Right. It's denial today expresses no view about the merits of McKesson's claim. Although the Fifth Circuit did not have the benefit of this court's recent decision in

counterman when it issued its opinion, the lower courts now do. I expect them to give full and fair consideration to arguments regarding counterman's impact in any future proceedings. Right. So I don't think that it's some like terrible thing that the court said, oh, no, we're not going to hear this case. I don't think they're saying in any way, oh, we're not going to hear this case because we think it ought to proceed further and go to trial down in Louisiana. I think what they're saying is

we already decided this issue. The law remains the same. Claiborne is still the controlling case here. Right. Yeah, it seems very clear that what they're saying is like we've already made clear where we stand on this. in Mr. McKesson's case is basically a submission that reiterates what Justice Sotomayor said. I'll just read you a little from this. It says, Sotomayor's statement explains that the court's decision expresses no view about the merits of the claim because the law is not in need of further clarification. So it suggests that the existing clear law comes from counterman. And the statement makes even clearer that the first amendment does not permit liability on the negligence theory advanced by the cop in this case. It doesn't say the cop in this case. So it makes very clear, you know, they have submitted, Mr. McKesson's counsel has submitted this statement to the judge. And I think there is every possibility that this case is just

going to die at this point. You know, remember the district court already dismissed it altogether at once and has only been carrying it forward because they were ordered to by the Fifth Circuit. Yeah. Yes. We'll just go back to the district. Yeah, exactly. In fact, there has been a lot of anxiety about, oh, the Supreme Court is signaling that the law has changed and that the Fifth Circuit can just criminalize protest. In fact, what I think has happened here is that the Supreme Court affirmed that the Fifth Circuit may not expose people to civil liability for organizing a protest. those people to civil liability for organizing a protest. That does not mean that the courts down there are not going to try to keep going forward with this. But I think if they did, and if Mr. McKesson was like, A, if they even allowed it to continue, it might just go right back up to the

Supreme Court. And the supreme court might at that point hear it because they've already said no we expect you to right yeah follow the law that we just re-articulated in this other case right um but again remember that we haven't had a trial yet he hasn't been found guilty he hasn't't, right? Like the question is, can we even proceed in this case? Let's take a second ad break here, and then we'll come back and discuss. This may have been over-exaggerated in terms of its importance of state repression and protest, but that doesn't mean that state repression and protest is not happening, right?

It is. So can you explain to us the mechanisms through which that happens and the considerations and resources available to people who may wish to exercise their First Amendment rights? Yes, absolutely. So has it become more dangerous to protest i mean i guess but not because of this case right right yeah i mean in general it has right the cops get bigger guns and more guns and tear gas things every year and then they love to use them yeah along with the legal consequences yes and are there things that we should be worried about yes um but i don't think

that this particular case on its own is the harbinger of the end of the first amendment it's one symptom of the larger underlying effort by the state and, you know, corporate capital and all of the forces of retrogression and repression to quell dissent. But it's just one of many, right? And we've seen so many examples of this, and they are by no means new or novel, right? They're just trying out new legal theories. And this was one of them. And I don't think it's going to go anywhere. But I think we need to remember there's always sort of multiple fronts on which we're fighting this battle, right?

There's the legal front. Right. And then there's the sort of on the ground law enforcement front. Right. And then there's the sort of on the ground law enforcement front. One of the reasons that Mr. McKesson was targeted here is because he did make, and this is not to say this is his fault. It absolutely is not. But one of the things that made him more susceptible to targeting is that he did make a ton of public statements and he was extremely visible in a way that aligned with the government's and the right wing's understanding of social structures, right? Because if they understand that social movements are being directed from the top, which is not typically the case.

But if that's what it looks like to them, and there is a person that they can identify who they can even a little bit make out of even the most tenuous case is in charge, then, you know, that's the person they're going to go after. Yeah. So to the extent that we're doing organizing that where it is distributed, it is autonomous, you know, it is spontaneous and we aren aren't working in structures that are hierarchical, and we're not working in structures that are incorporated and have bank accounts and public meetings and membership structures. We're already very insulated from this kind of thing anyway. Right. kind of thing anyway. The dangers are what the dangers have always been, which are mass arrest, because the police neither know nor care what the law is, and they don't care about Claiborne, and they don't care that the fact that you did not personally throw a rock doesn't

constitute probable cause to arrest you, right? I am always more concerned about things on the ground, like mass arrests and police involved injuries, than I am about, frankly, about even long term legal consequences, because so often, and I guess I say this, because I have the privilege of practicing in New York, where there is a very strong history of public protest and everyone sort of understands what that is and no one feels all that threatened by it. Right. Which doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of police involved injuries and it doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of traumatic arrests, but it does mean that typically there are not devastating legal consequences of that. And what kinds of theories of criminal law they can use to sort of bootstrap absolutely garden variety protest behavior into really serious felony charges. Right.

So that's the kind of stuff that I would say, yeah, we should be worried about it. It is dangerous to protest. There's widespread surveillance. There's widespread public-private collaboration. There's widespread surveillance. There's widespread public-private collaboration. There's widespread agency cooperation. There's all kinds of non-state actors, corporate actors, political actors, random individuals and small groups that are engaged in all kinds of surveillance. There's counter groups, right? We have, like you mentioned before, the Proud Boys. We have all kinds of, well, look, Canary Mission is a really good example, right? We have all kinds of actors,

groups, individuals, corporations, government entities that have an interest in suppressing dissent. And they engage in all kinds of conduct, you know, ranging from intense surveillance to doxing to, you know, even more violent behavior, you know, targeted harassment, not just by law enforcement, but by individuals, by neighbors, by media outlets. Right. And those are the kinds of things that make it dangerous to protest, I guess. But since when do we let that stop us? I mean, the solution to these kinds of dangers is to be thoughtful, to remember that discretion is the better part of valor. Right. Meaning you don't need to be bragging about whatever you're doing on Twitter. You don't need to always be the public face of the movement, because even if you're not speaking directly to cops in an interrogation, anything you say publicly can and very much will be used against you. We're seeing a lot of employment and educational consequences, right? People are, what's happening right now as we speak at Columbia University, people are losing their student housing, they're getting suspended from school, they're getting arrested, they're getting, you know,

these student disciplinary proceedings. There's all kinds of risks to being a public dissident. But the solution to that kind of repression is not self-censorship. It's courage. There are other ways that we secure change, but showing up in the streets is always how you make history. And you have to be smart, but you also have to be brave. As we reach another election year, almost certainly there will be protest, whatever happens in the election, that will lead to people who are perhaps not so familiar with horizontal organizing, with anti-authoritarian or non-authoritarian organizing all these things entering a protest movement and people will inevitably have to learn uh like one way or the other uh you know like these basic things which they can do to make it as safe as possible to protest and it would be great if they could learn them from a podcast not from them or their friends getting hurt. Here's what I would say too. If it is at all possible, find a lawyer who is willing

to consult with you before you go out and do your action, just so that you can be prepared, right? For purposes of informed consent. Because I cannot tell you, you know, lawyers are not allowed to advise their clients to break the law, but it's very much our job to tell you, you know, lawyers are not allowed to advise their clients to break the law, but it's very much our job to tell you what the possible or likely consequences are of certain courses of action. And you are probably better off knowing what that is before you do the thing than after you do the thing. Yeah, that's a good idea. I will tell you that personally, I would rather spend many hours talking people through, you know, the various outcomes of different ideas than spending 10 minutes talking to them after they're already in a cell. Right.

You know, there are ways of protesting that are entirely lawful that can still help you to accomplish your political goals. And if you are going to go out and do something that you think is likely to involve arrest, I at least want you to know that it is likely to involve arrest. Yeah, you don't want to find out when you're being arrested. Exactly. to find out when you're being arrested. Exactly. And what your specific risks might be. And to have somebody lined up to take care of you, to represent you if that becomes necessary. Right. I really don't mean to say, oh, don't worry about McKesson v. Doe. It's no big deal. It is a big deal. It's a big deal because this whole judicial system and legal apparatus is working overtime to find every possible way to discourage protest. But it is not unique in that regard.

And I guess that's really what I'm trying to say. There are all kinds of ways in which we are at risk by being dissidents. I just don't think that this one is particularly special or particularly alarming. And again, what I just referred to as the law of the land is not the same thing as law enforcement practice. Right. Yeah. So I remember really want to make sure that everyone remembers a the law is not the same thing as justice and neither is the law the same thing or even necessarily related to uh what police are doing on the ground during a protest right yeah those are very different things. Where can people, I guess, people who are organizing,

people who are, you know, organizing autonomous, spontaneous, horizontal movements, are there good resources for them to find? Because they might be, what's legal in my state? What's, you know, what do I have to avoid? That kind of thing. Where would they find those? One resource, if you are contacted by federal law enforcement, is you can call the National

Lawyers Guild Federal Anti-Repression Hotline at 212-679-2811. A really good resource is the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Surveillance Self-Defense, which is at s as in surveillance, s as in self, d as in defense, dot e as in electronic, f as in frontier, f as in foundation, dot org. The National Lawyers Guild has various Know Your Rights guides that are available at nlg.org. We also have chapters all over the country. And if you look in our referral directory, you can find where those contacts for people all over the country. Find where those contacts for people all over the country. I think if you want a Know Your Rights training, you can reach out to the NLG. And there are a lot of other organizations that do Know Your Rights trainings. I know in New York, we have a really amazing organization called CUNY Clear. a really amazing organization called CUNY Clear. And I would highly recommend you follow them on Instagram because they often have a lot of resources that they're posting. Protect Your

People, a digital toolkit for organizations and employers. And it was developed to combat anti-LGBTQ plus harassment. But I think the principles remain the same no matter what it is that you're looking at. And I'll put the link to that. Again, it's called Protect Your People, and it's hosted by the Harvard Law LGBTQ Clinic. But I'll stick the link here in the chat for you, James, so that you can share it in the show notes. Mo, to finish up, you've mentioned the National Lawyers Guild and some other resources. Is there anywhere else where people can find you or where you think that they should be following along? Like we said, we're going into an election year. Stuff's probably becoming more relevant again. And there's a genocide happening right now that people are facing severe personal consequences for protesting.

Yeah, I mean, I don't want anyone to follow me on social media. Excellent. If that's what you're asking. I will always, every single time, plug landback.org. And if people... Yes, I can see that you have a land back flag behind you thank you yeah listeners won't be able to see that

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so you're getting this one. I'm your host, Mia Wong. This is the podcast where, actually, this is the part of the podcast where after things have fallen apart, you put them back together again and yeah the the thing that's being put back together here you know i really i really should plan this intro more but this is this is what happened this is what happens when we get night recordings but yeah the thing the thing we're putting together today is a union at a really interesting kind of uh very very interesting kind of coffee shop so with with me to talk about this is alex rocky and madeline from blue bottle independent

union and yeah thank you all for joining me yeah thank you so much for having us yeah i'm excited to talk with you all um and so So I guess the first thing that I want to start with is, can you talk a bit about what Blue Bottle is? Because this is a really weird story that I think kind of reveals a lot about the way, I don't know, in sort of lofty terms, it's like the direction that capital has been moving in the past like 10 years. absolutely yeah so blue bottle is a specialty coffee chain founded by james freeman in oakland california like 2002 like most specialty shops starts off as like this small little cart where you know one guy is doing all the parts of production roasting serving the coffee and all that and then throughout you know uh the early aughts 2010s uh they do lots of rounds of uh venture capital financing with like fidelity and other firms until 2017 when nestle purchased a 68 majority ownership in blue bottle at i think a 700 million dollar evaluation and since then um no no no the it was a 700 million dollar evaluation they paid 400 million dollars uh jim yeah i isn't this great um uh and since then they've expanded from, you know, the tiny little location in California to 70 stores in the U.S.

And then over 100 globally, including in China, Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea. And am I forgetting anywhere else? I think that's I think that's it. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's a fun time to be a coffee worker, I guess. Yeah. It's interesting to me the extent to which this it has. I mean, OK, so like 100 shops is like a lot of shops, but it's not 700 million dollars of shops. It's like it really seems like this company has like it really has like tech valuation, which is alarming. Yeah.

And I mean, it's not uncommon for specialty right now, which is also concerning. Like, as far as I understand, Intelligentsia and La Cologne are also owned in part by venture capital firms. And this is really confusing, especially because for anybody that knows anything about, like, the economics of coffee shops, the margins are terrible. Yeah. coffee shops um the margins are terrible yeah and really as far as i can tell the only value that blue bottle offers to nestle is brand and like the ability to eventually grow to the point where at some point in the future they'll be able to make a little bit of money off of it all which is a deeply weird business strategy yeah and so I guess I wanted to start here because it feels like a very different organizing terrain than a lot of the shops that we've talked to on this show, because it's like

the value of this company is only kind of tangentially, on a sort of macro level, the value of the company is kind of tenuously connected to your labor. But on the other hand, like at the individual shop level, you're still dealing with all of the same sort of like, you know, like hyper exploitation, trying to like wring every cent out of stuff. So I guess I wanted to start by kind of asking like, um i wanted to start by kind of asking like how how did that the weirdness of of what of what blue bottle is influenced like how this campaign started to be pretty frank about our campaign like there was a crop of organizers before gonzo myself um who i would say at this point are kind of the

longest running organizers on this campaign like there was a crop before us. So we joined, we did not start the campaign here at Blue Bottle. But I think, I mean, it was difficult in the very beginning, like, you know, Blue Bottle, it pays now, like, I think starting wage for baristas, like 18 an hour. You know, we just got to pay up in April. So it's like, I, you know, I do make more than minimum wage. It's, it can be a tough sell for people to be like, oh, but you know, it got to pay up in april so it's like i you know i do make more than minimum wage um it's it can be a tough sell for people to be like oh but you know it's like marginally better like oh i'm working at this like fancy coffee shop don't they treat us a little better like but when you look at like also the coffee industry has a hole on like on a global scale incredibly exploitative industry that like we are both we play into um as people like in the

u.s who make incredibly expensive specialty coffee but also like as workers who are exploited ourselves like this is something that i think we have to think about often um as like how i don't know how can our union affect this industry as a whole how can we affect you know nestle as this conglomerate as a whole, but also how can I afford my rent next month? And so, you know, having those kinds of discussions with workers, like putting our day-to-day labor into this kind of larger context, both of the company and of the industry. I mean, I think this campaign, you know, we didn't, we didn't start out independent. We had a little bit of

shopping around almost of different unions. I think we were also largely inspired here in Boston specifically. Like it is kind of a hotbed for coffee organizing. A lot of shops around here are organized. There've been some incredibly like militant shops out here. Like I think Gans and I first got introduced to the Blue Bottle campaign from the Starbucks 874 picket line and they were out there for like two months and I think that that you know those kinds of things have really influenced this campaign and really influenced our organizing as we go into this like really kind of corporate bougie coffee shop that is hard to reconcile with like, hey, I am also an exploited laborer. I, you know, I am forced to make coffee all day for customers who are frankly quite rude. And having to have this conversation with your coworkers of like, hey,

we deserve better. It might be marginally better than some other place. We still deserve better and we can fight for so much more. So I feel like I went on for a little bit there, but I hope that that answers that question. One thing to kind of add on to that is when organizing in the stores, part of the fact that we're owned by Nestle makes it actually much easier because people aren't like easily fooled. We understand that Nestle is putting a lot of money into this company with the hope of future returns, you know, in the short or medium term. And also people implicitly understand that the current model that the cafes operate on is kind of reckless, like because we're owned basically as a venture capital scheme this means that you know we're constantly trying to cut costs that shouldn't be cut

like even today uh madeline and i ran out of decaf coffee beans because they hadn't placed an order for them oh my god yeah uh and you know we've run out of you know milks fairly frequently um we've run out of things like cups and lids and very basic things that you need to run a coffee shop as far as i can tell only because uh they need to keep operating costs comically low so that way they can appease their Nestle overlords. Which is pretty funny because the math doesn't make any sense on that, right? Because it's like, okay,

you need to find a way to make like $400 million. Your solution to this is we're going to delay ordering more coffee beans. Is there anyone who like, no, this isn't even an accountant situation. This is a like, is there anyone here who understands what an order of magnitude is what are we doing here wait till you hear about the saffron latte oh god what a disaster oh yeah so they don't have enough money

to pay us a living wage but from january until april of this year we were serving a saffron vanilla latte with, and I kid you not, real saffron, both in a syrup and also in a powdered, yeah, no, no kidding. It tasted like Play-Doh. I kind of like that, but not everybody does, apparently. You know, this is the first time I've ever said this

in my entire life, but I sincerely hope that they were buying the fucking cheap fake stuff. Because, like, they were actually real saffron. Oh, God. Well, to be fair, to be fair, a lot of the stuff people think is real saffron probably is fake. So, maybe the scammers

were getting something out of this, but dear God. That doesn't make them look good, but yeah, no, real, somebody who's good with the economy helped help me out here. You know, $3,000 a week for saffron and $18 an hour for baristas. God, that's going to like haunt me in my dreams. Someone ordering an ass. How much did that cost?

$8.6 Jesus Christ oh no but not enough money to pay us a living wage no that's I don't know that is genuinely disgusting like how

you know when you think about it we can like buy a little over two of them every hour we work so like that's all we need yeah yeah that's also got to be like a kind of radicalizing moment of oh my god yeah it is our time is worth so little to these people this is actually one of the biggest conversations i would have with my coworkers that I had to stop having. So it would make them incredibly upset was I would break down the math with them. I'd be like, you can make a latte in about a minute, two minutes.

Like, and those lattes are $7. You make 17 an hour, make three lattes. And that's more than your hourly wage. And you're making what? A hundred of those an hour in a rush. Like people would get really upset when you're confronted with like the of those an hour in a rush like yeah people would get really upset when you're confronted with like that oh wow the money coming in and then the money that i'm receiving it'll drive you crazy yeah and i i think i don't know that's one of these

things where i think in a lot of industries it's kind of that kind of value thing is is abstracted because like i don't know like you're like i just talked about like an accountant earlier right like you're an accountant you have no idea how much of well i guess maybe an accountant would know exactly the amount of value like that example okay i don't know you work in like you you you you work in a factory that produces an auto part right like one thing that goes into an assembly of an auto parts. Like you have no, like there, there's no good way for you to like actually understand the sort of value

things. I mean, you can get kind of close, but I think it's less visceral than just, yeah, this is an item of food that I'm watching all of these people like consume that I'm making. And it's like,

yeah, sure. Obviously there's like, you know, like back down the value chain. There's also probably like Nestle doing like slave labor, like child slave labor to get chocolate or something. Right. But I don't know if there's something really kind of just viscerally horrifying about like I produced $800 of coffee and they're paying me $18. they're paying me $18.

Yeah. So speaking of $800 of coffee, this show, actually, I don't think we've ever gotten a coffee ad, which is sort of remarkable. You'd think at some point, I don't know.

I don't drink coffee. You know, if, if on the ad that we're about to go to, it's, you know, like the black rifle coffee company or some shit. Oh God. Wait,

no. I think, I think one of the, I think one of the insane it might have been the other one so there's like black rifle coffee which is the right wing coffee thing but then they they condemned kyle rittenhouse murdering all those people and so then there became a second even more anti-woke coffee shop that was even shittier i i think those people might legitimately have tried to sell an ad to our show at one point

we were like no what the fuck that's crazy what there's we had so many insane ads we had uh the famously the washington highway patrol put one on here so all right let's let's hope you have a reasonable ad instead of that. And we are back. Luckily, this is podcasting are not regulated like radio, so I could just fucking say shit. It's great. We love, we love, we love to be, we love to be in podcasting.

So yeah, this brings us in no particular by no particular rhyme or reason this brings us to another thing i wanted to sort of talk about which is about the decision to go independent and about independent unions versus sort of the traditional business unions that have been trying to run a lot of these campaigns so yeah i guess wherever you want to start in that whole sort of thicket of issues yeah the decision to go independent was maybe eight months into our campaign we did pivot to go independent um we were you know um kind of we had not affiliated with anyone. We, some weird stuff had happened with some previous business unions. And so we're kind of in a shopping around phase. Um, and I like good friend of the union and someone who has helped us incredibly throughout the campaign, um, said, Hey, can I pitch you guys on going independent? Like, and at that time,

I, I mean, I can't speak for the other folks like I did not know anything about independent unions um this campaign has also been an incredible like learning process for me and so you know we talked about a little bit of like hey unions everything that a union does workers can do um and really like trying to like instill this, like we can do it ourselves. Cause I think that like, for me, like the dream of independent unionism is like the having autonomy and control of our lives, both in the workplace and in our unions, like as workers. And so, you know, this idea of like, Oh yeah, this, the, the union just takes care of it. Oh,

you pay dues and the staffer does all these things for you. But when, you know, when we filed our petition, I filled that out. It's not that hard. There are so many things where it's like, oh yeah, the union will take care of it. Or, oh, this is what dues pay for. Like, oh, we can have a lawyer look at it. At no part of this process was there really anything that workers could not have done. Did we seek legal advice? Absolutely. Did we have people help us out who maybe knew more than I did? Yes. But that isn't to say that we were not learning the entire time. So to me, that's like the big ethos of independent unionism of like learning it, doing it, teaching others. I think it has been an incredible opportunity. I think also like we really are

committed to like rank and file democracy. And so having workers have a say in all major decisions, especially now that we have had our election, we're going to be moving into bargaining hopefully soon, being able to have workers submit proposals, have workers look and do open bargaining, have them look at the contract at every step of the way and things like this. Having people participate in their unions. I mean, I think that we are in a time of like the revitalization of the labor movement. And I don't want workers to get left behind in that. Like, I think that, you know, like we are the labor. And so being able to like control our unions and lead them in the ways that we want to as democratically as we can, to me, has been what it's all about. Did that mean that it was an easy campaign?

No, it was a lot of work. It was a lot of work that maybe a paid staffer would have done, but we did it ourselves. And it took longer and it took a lot of education as well of explaining to my coworkers of like, hey, we want to form a union. And it's not just this thing that kind of happens to you. Actually, you have to make it happen now if you want to do it.

So I think that for us, the choice to go independent has like only reaped benefits so far. It's been this wonderful thing. I think that we are all much better for it and much closer, like as co-workers. I think that people are more excited about their union. But it certainly, you know, it took a lot of work. It took a lot of time. It took a lot of trust from our coworkers as well. when we were shopping around with business unions, Rocky and I had sat down with somebody from a fairly large one. And we're trying to ask all of these questions about, you know,

would we be able to have rank and file control of our own campaign? Would we be able to, you know, legitimately examine unconventional tactics for launching or sustaining our campaign? You know, unconventional tactics for launching or sustaining our campaign. You know, what is the actual process for requesting finances from the larger affiliate if we needed it? And more or less what we were told by the staffer was that none of this would be in the hands of RankinFile. And it would either be determined by what this particular staffer thought was best, or, you know, they would have to get approval from, you know, whoever was above them. Which, despite the fact that this person was within the reform caucus of their union, did not strike them as being anti-democratic at all.

Yeah. Yeah. And at that point, I mean, you know, we'd been talking to our coworkers for months at that point, you know, hanging out with them, building community. And it didn't seem like there was really anything that, you know, a larger business union would have had to offer to begin with. had to offer to begin with. In fact, in my own experience, the idea of affiliation has more or less come across as an implicit threat of how else are you going to

take on Nestle without all of the money and resources that we have but won't let you use anyways. Yeah, which is like not a thing. I don't know. If you've gotten to the point where your union is threatening you and this is something that happens more than you'd think like i you know i but listeners of this show may or may not have listened to some previous episodes talking to some of the reform nurses slates that we've we've had on the show where that's happened but if your union is

threatening you something has gone very badly wrong and you're probably you're in a you're in a position where you're probably going to be having to fight yourself out of a deep hole and one way you can avoid getting in there in the first place is by not digging the hole and building something yourself yeah exactly and i mean you know um one of the things that we heard a lot about at labor notes two weeks ago at this point was people within larger unions talking about how to fight off staffers or bureaucrats and i'm personally very glad that we are not in that fight ourselves because we have nestle to take care of now yeah yeah the the the sort of two-way fight between you, your boss, and then also your union staffers is not a thing that usually goes well for you.

It's a bad situation to be in. I would recommend avoiding it. Yeah. Yeah, so I guess the next thing that I'm sort of interested in is, you know, so you talked a bit about how sort of being an independent union like made the union closer. how sort of being an independent union like made the union closer how else did that influence how the campaign went and how is like how how has it been going in the past like i know i know you won your uh election if i'm remembering that right yeah it was it was an election sorry it has been this has been the most chaotic two weeks i've had in several years. So, I mean, it's just like Lennon said, there are years where you fuck around and weeks where you find out.

Sorry, I'm going to get so much shit for that comment now. Anyways. CoolZone Media does not endorse Lennon. He has maybe two good lines. I promise I only said it for the joke.

Yeah, our campaign started April 3rd. There are six stores in the greater Boston area with roughly 67, 65 workers across all of them. workers from five of those stores handed cards like union authorization cards to management announcing our campaign our union and asking for voluntary recognition by noon on april 8th management accepted the cards but then did not recognize the union voluntarily by noon april 8th and instead they put up a flyer in the back of house of all the cafes saying that they would respect the outcome of an election at which point no yeah they didn't even publicly acknowledge us so at that point uh across five of the six stores uh we had a walkout on the 8th and then that same day uh went downtown to file for an election with the nlrb which despite the fact that we called them a week in advance

to be like, is it okay if a lot of people show up kind of spontaneously to file for an election? And despite the fact that the person in the office said, yeah, it's fine. So long as like less than a hundred and you don't have like a soundstage or anything you got to set up. And if you do get a permit,

once we walked up to the office, at least four DHS cop cars like swung in front of us and they would only let rocky go into the office to file for our election while being escorted by a dhs agent the entire time you know sometimes you get just these this is something that's been happening so like i have no idea when this episode is going to go out this is being recorded in the middle of the protest like literally today 70 year old professors are getting dragged out of like protests by cops but and like this is one of these moments where when when when things actually happen you get these really visceral demonstrations of like what the society you

actually live in is and i i don't think there's like a more perfect demonstration of the National Labor Relations Board sometimes will help you, but also also is very clearly a bureaucratic mechanism of a police state. Then the cops show up and only one of you can go talk to the NLRB person escorted by police. That is wild. It was also the same day as the solar eclipse. Oh, my God. It was a very oh my god it was a very magic day it was a very magic day yeah nothing was more enchanting than the fact that uh we got to watch the eclipse uh when we otherwise would have had to have been at work that rules yeah yeah i guess i guess that's another way to get to get turnout for a walkout it's like hey look we're gonna do

a walkout and also you can go see the eclipse instead of serving rich people coffee. And it worked. It worked. Hell yeah. Yeah, but all that is to say is I think being independent lets us do fun and creative things. Yeah. Yeah, thank you for remembering what

the actual question was. We got it all together. Like, I think we're allowed to be a little silly with it um and we're allowed to have fun and we're allowed to come up with ideas that maybe other like haters would shoot down but when me and my coke are saying yeah that would be cool and fun we just get to do it um and i think that there's like joy and creativity in all of it. Yeah. Yeah, so I guess, you know,

do you have anything else that you want to make sure we get to before we sort of wrap things up? Yeah. So, I mean, as much as we talked about a lot of the benefits of independent unionism,

one of the downsides is that we have no money. And if people would be so gracious as to give us some of their money, you can go to linktr.ee slash bluebottleunion. So linktree slash bluebottleunion, where there will be a link to our GoFundMe. I'll also say that since our go fund me. Um, I'll also say that since we don't have staffers, our overhead is incredibly low. And this all, once again, allows us to,

um, you know, actually do cool and fun things. Like we were able to pay everybody that did the walkout because we were able to raise enough money, um, in the, in between from April 3rd to eighth,

which was incredible. I have like some personal stuff when it comes to like filing independent and talking with a lot of people that I know, I feel like it actually helped the fact that we were independent because, you know, there was none of that background. Oh, unions, you know, there's this big influence

when it comes to like unions and like big, scary unions taking all your money through union dues and yada, yada. But, you know, with filing independent, you know, we can just be like, actually, we don't have to worry about anything like that. We set union dues democratically. And like, and so it's just been like really helpful for when we were getting organized and everything, just relaying that idea to coworkers, to family, friends, and everyone just kind of like helps them be like, oh, that makes sense. Yeah. I mean the old, like, you know, anti-union talking point of like helps them be like, oh, that makes sense. Yeah. I mean, the old like, you know, anti-union talking point of like, you know,

there being an outside organization really falls flat with an independent union because it really is just you and all of your friends. And then on top of that, it also means that management hasn't known how to respond to us because in the week leading up to our election which we won 38 to 4 this past friday may 3rd yeah they they put out like three or four different flyers um one talking about business unions that have signed management's rights clauses in the most fucking like i'm not owned i'm not owned i'm still gonna get my mentions rights clause um like ever and then also another flyer about union dues and examples of business unions that you know to anybody that doesn't know anything about unionism would seem high yeah they also in a letter that they sent out to all of us the night before our election talked complained about us seeking external assistance and all of this just completely falls flat because, you know, it's literally we've done this mostly by like having potlucks together to talk about all of our issues at work and or like movie nights or some shit.

And it's much tougher to convince people to vote against the person that they're on the floor with eight hours a day. convince people to vote against the person that they're on the floor with eight hours a day. Yeah, the overall, like, way that these papers were received is, has been, like, met with kind of, like, a lot of skull emojis in group chats and, like, just kind of, like, generally making fun of the whole thing. And I think that, like, that's been really good for morale as well because like you know it's just not getting to us it's goofy and like just doesn't work so and also the way that they've been handing these flyers out i don't know about like other cafes but at mine specifically it's been kind of awkward like haha cover my eyes here's this flyer that i have to hand you kind of thing and it's just like okay yeah yeah it really seems like this is something you know okay never mind

i'm not i'm not i'm not i'm going to do my my tangent about the infiltration of political parties here. But yeah, I mean, really political cults within the greater Boston area continuously subvert and undermine union elections and not just elections, but campaigns as well. I won't name examples because these same cults are also incredibly vindictive and they will try to dox me. I won't name examples because these same cults are also incredibly vindictive and they will try to dox me. But this is also the implicit threat that, you know, like if, you know, they can't turn a union into their own stupid vanguard, then they will try and push through something that rank and file don't want and try and undermine or tank the campaign. Yeah. And that's that's something I think like to take a little step back. So one of the things that's very common in union, in sort of like local union spaces, is there will be like a local of a union or like maybe sometimes it's its own union that's just run by a cult. And these sort of like, I don't know, sometimes they're Stalinists, sometimes they're Trotskyites. Sometimes like the ideology changes to some extent.

know sometimes you're stalinist under trotskyite sometimes like it depends the ideology changes to some extent but because because of like the you know the because because you can run like a staff union with like five people right um this is this is a pretty good way for them to sort of like like you know gain something that looks like political power and like it's a way for them to bring other people who don't know what's going on into like the influence of their organization and they this can get really bad and really dangerous at least the stuff you're talking about where yeah they start trying to sabotage campaigns because they're not you know like these groups aren't actually in this for you know like they're not they're not in this for class struggles but despite whatever they will say about it. They're in this specifically to expand the influence of their own party. And, you know, when you try to, like, actually do your own thing, this stuff happens.

Yeah, 100 percent. It's also really telling that despite the fact that, you know, some of these groups are like known for undermining campaigns in this way, or for harassing staffers that, you know, don't play ball with them or whatever, that they continue to do the entryist thing. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, I don't have any good ideas for how to subvert that. Um, but I, I, I'm sure dear listeners will send me many of them. Yeah. I yeah I think also at some point we're going to do the

microsect episode the microsect episode to introduce people to the basics of like hey here are like the range of tiny political parties in the US that are actually cults that show up at protests all the time

so yeah maybe maybe that will help too because i think a lot of it is people just you know they're you run into like the world workers party and like you don't know that this party is a weird cult right they're just sort of talking about workers stuff yeah so i think education will help with it too but the bureaucratic maneuvering stuff is like the only thing they're good at because they're all these like weird micro party formations so i don't know yeah 100 i only way that i uh think might help is uh you know horizontalizing the structure somewhat but then you still run into like the issue of like social capital within that structure so if you know somebody is savvy enough they can still indoctrinate

people into silly cult yeah i mean i don't know that's that's just something that you're gonna have to i mean and we should also mention too like these thing these groups like they work with larger unions too sometimes like so one of the most famous examples of this is pride at work which is a really big afl-cio thing but it's also jointly run with the party for socialism liberation which is another one of these cults because of a bunch of like long-running actions even though like a bunch of their really senior staffers um unbelievably transphobic and you know there's there's a whole thing there yeah, this is something that is not just a problem with independent unions and not just a problem

with sort of like random locals. It can and does get into actual like national unions. On the other hand, one way to avoid this is to in fact organize your own union and don't let them in. This is actually

something that we've thought consciously about with our own union is that on the, we sent out a community support form for people that wanted to show up the day that we announced our campaign. And on the form specifically, we made people tick a box saying that they wouldn't endorse or try to fly or for, or otherwise promote any group that they might have affiliation

with including political parties uh or you know otherwise organizations that are not you know our specific union uh and so far that's worked hell yeah i would also say like in our constitution bylaws i i don't know if that if it's in the current ones we're revising them soon anyways but it's a conversation that we've had before also like people in like eboard positions um what yeah what kind of affiliations can they have to outside uh political parties like where where are we drawing the line on that like that's something that i think we also considered very early on as well for people in the union yeah and i think there's another aspect there too which is like the another thing that can happen to your union is that it gets eaten by the democratic party machine and that's happened to i mean like this is this is a lot of how like these giant business unions

became business unions as they became basically these like lobbying firms on behalf of like whatever random like local democratic machine is running like this happens in chicago like all the time you get these like just like the most abhorrent machine like candidates you've ever seen come out of the democratic party who are like guys who are like so comically corrupt that like you know they're like walking down the street and like like bundles of cash are falling out of the suitcases and they're getting endorsed by like the teamsters and it's like well you know okay i wonder i wonder what happened there legally legally legally conjecture but you know who's to say really yeah you know it just so happens that they have these large briefcases full of cash nobody can really say where the cash materialized yeah but, I was actually going to go on a different rant about political parties. So I'm going to circle back to there to close this out, which is one of the nice things

about independent unions is that, you know, it's something that all three of you were sort of getting at, which is that like employers have been fighting these sort of large corporate unions, large business unions for like a hundred years now right they know how they operate they know how their campaigns work they know what levers to push against them on the other hand they have not been fighting you specifically random listener of this show and you specifically random listener of this show and your co-workers can do things to surprise them and can do things in ways that they don't understand. And, you know, you have, we have a moment like right now, like in, in, in like five years, they'll probably have worked out a bunch of stuff about how to break independent unions.

But right now, like literally right now we have a, we have a massive strategic advantage because their playbook wasn't written to deal with people who are running these sort of like very low to the ground, very agile, very nimble running these sort of like very low to the ground very agile very nimble very sort of like you know these spontaneous and creative campaigns and you can use that to beat the crap out of your boss and get more money from them so this is this is the va endorsement of of doing doing fun things with unions that your bosses don't expect hell yeah yeah so I think unless there's anything else, where else can people find you? We'll have a link to your link tree in the description.

Is there anywhere else, like social media stuff, where people can find the union? Yeah, our social media for Twitter and Instagram is bbiunion, and then on TikTok, I believe it is bbiu16. Cool. We will have that in the description too. Yeah, and thank you all so much for coming on and yeah,

make Nestle bleed for us. Yeah, thanks so much for having us. We can't say how much we appreciate it. Yeah, thank you. Of course. And yeah, this has been Nick and Appet here. You can find us in the usual places. And yeah, you too can also go start your own union and make your bosses suffer. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs,

the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all.

It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI

to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real

people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hola mi gente, it's Honey German and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again. The podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture,

musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture

to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Robert Evans, and this is a podcast about things falling apart. This week, the thing falling apart was my bedroom. Allow me to explain.

Three years or so ago, I was finally able to buy a house, or at least, you know, get a mortgage. This allowed me to achieve a very stupid lifelong dream, which was to finally own a waterbed. I know you're wondering what all of this has to do with solar power, and I swear there will be an answer to that question. I also want to make it clear up front that this is not an ad. Some of the equipment I tested was provided for free as review units, some of it was purchased with my own money, and some with company money. I'll try to make it pretty clear at each point,

but I promise it doesn't matter, re my opinions on any specific product. No one paid us in any way for their inclusion in this episode. Anyway, back to my stupid waterbed. The first thing to know about waterbeds is that they are surprisingly cheap. They cost about as much as an equivalent-sized mattress new. So, not cheap, but the one I bought cost the same as any delivery mattress sold for, and cheaper than some of them. The reason that most people can't afford a waterbed isn't the actual cost of the bed itself,

it's that landlords are terrified of the things and so you can't get one if you don't own your own home. In case you're curious, my desire to own a waterbed is entirely the result of the fact that, as a small child, my aunt and uncle fell upon hard times and had to live with us for a while. Then, for another while, they lived elsewhere, but their stuff stayed with us. That stuff included a waterbed, and for a few glorious months, it was my waterbed. I have craved the insane high of waterbed ownership ever since. For three perfect years, then, I slept in wavy comfort until, about two days before I wrote this episode. My bed sprang a pinhole leak. I don't know how. You might guess a cat, but the actual bladder

that contains the water is inside and underneath a very thick padded frame that cat claws can't really puncture. I should also note that the bladder sits inside a vinyl sort of soft cage so that when it sprang a leak, it got some of my sheets wet, but it did not cause damage to my home. Anyway, because waterbeds are the kind of product that only an insane man-child would dare to own, fixing a hole in one is not the same as performing maintenance on your regular mattress, because the kinds of beds that reasonable people own don't spring leaks. To patch the leak, then, I had to purchase a patch kit, but you can't apply a patch kit to what is effectively a soft bladder filled with roughly a metric ton of water.

I did do the bare minimum of research here, and king-size waterbeds weigh around 2,000 pounds. Now, that's not all water weight, but it is basically all water weight. I bring this up because I'm proud of myself for guessing right. So, to apply the patch, we had to first drain the bed, which necessitated attaching a hose to one of the spigots through which we had originally filled the bed. Because of the layout of my home and the ground outside of the window where we intended to pour the water, we couldn't get the hose started without assistance. The kind of assistance that you would say, need to suck gasoline free of a stranger's truck, were you hard up for fuel money. Thankfully, my roommate had a wet vac, which we were able to hook up to

the hose. But how to power the wet vac? Well, we could have run an extra long extension cord, but mine were all in use for various insane projects around the farm, and instead I opted to wheel out the solar generator that I had filled with the beneficence of the sun god Ra just a couple of days earlier. The generator was one of two similar products I tested for this episode, a Jackery SG2000+, which had been sent to me by the good people at Jackery. In previous weeks, I'd tested it by powering my deep freeze and a refrigerator, and in case you're wondering, with the panels outside in the sun, I got a little over a day before things ran dry on my refrigerator. If I'd had the panels in a better position,

I could have had longer. And the deep freeze, it would have been able to power essentially indefinitely because deep freezes are actually insanely efficient machines. I also used it to run a heat gun for my friend's art project, which is about as intense a test of output as you can run a battery through short of powering your home. And it handles that. In terms of specs, this battery is part of a more modular system that you could wire in to power your home or off-grid setup. You can actually attach this to your breaker. It has a maximum output of 6,000 watts in parallel connection and 120 to 240 expandable voltage. For a rough idea of what that means, it can power most household electronics and even power tools for a while. You'd get about one and a half hours of running a home AC unit,

and more like two, two and a half, you know, with a portable unit or a window unit. You could charge this thing to full in two hours with good sunlight if you had six 200 watt panels attached in perfect sunlight, which is another $3,000 or so in panels. But that's not an insignificant thing to be able to do. Mind you, that would mean just running your AC most of the day and nothing else. Neither of these are cheap products. In Jackery's case, the battery itself runs about $2,000. I understand that's out of reach, perhaps wildly so for a lot of people.

We will be talking about cheaper options at the end, but it is an unavoidable fact that unless you are a skilled electrician and scavenger, setting up substantial solar systems costs money. Period. Jackery actually represents one of the more affordable options for a plug-and-play home backup system that is also portable, i.e. can be taken camping or hauled away with your shit during an evacuation. I should note that you can connect the Jackery SG2000 Plus directly to your breaker and also connect the battery to other similar Jackery battery generators to get additional capacity and output from it. I tested another solar generator system for this episode, the Geniverse HomePower O2, which was provided to me by Geniverse. Both the Geniverse and Jackery systems are similar enough that they can use each other's solar panels

and operate in basically the same manner. Jackery's product is cheaper. Other reviews I have read suggest the Geniverse system might be more robust, lasting longer over time. It is certainly heavier and thus has a higher capacity, around 2,400 watt-hours as opposed to a little over 2,000 for the Jackery system. Both of these can be the basis of an off-grid or full backup power system for your home, and we'll be talking about home off-grid power in future episodes. I want to make clear up front that what I am advising you on today is the quality and utility of different solar generator battery products for emergency power. So let's talk about what emergency means. The primary emergency you might encounter that a battery solar setup would help with is a power outage at your home. In that

case, you have a couple of immediate and real needs. I will list these from most basic and easy cheapest to fill to most expensive and difficult to meet. Number one would be to keep your devices and stuff like flashlights that are chargeable topped off so you can keep in contact with your community and stay aware of breaking news on whatever emergency you happen to be in. Being able to entertain yourself with books and movies does, in my view, count as one purpose for these systems in an emergency, because morale ain't nothing. Number two is being able to run emergency cooling devices, starting with fans and terminating in stuff like window AC units or even portable camping AC units. Number three is being able to keep a fridge going so your food doesn't spoil. If you're prepping for disaster, you should have

storable food, anything from freeze-dried stuff to beans and rice, etc. But losing all of your shit in an outage is expensive and annoying, and it's nice to be able to avoid. The most achievable of these systems for a person of normal income is number one. And if you have disposable income at all, you can afford some sort of emergency solar setup to keep your phone or laptop and rechargeable lights going. There are a wide variety of battery

packs that have solar panels built into them. I have tried a lot of these over the years, and I have never once been happy with the quality, either of their ability to charge in the sun or to last over time. The system that I currently take with me on trips is made by a company called Goal Zero, who produce a variety of solar battery and charger products. I purchased for myself a Nomad 13 solar panel set, which folds into something that approximates the size of a trapper-keeper set you had as a kid in school. I've had this for years. I take it with me on every flight as my carry-on. I have it and two batteries, which are different incarnations of Goal Zero's Sherpa 100, on me wherever I go. The Sherpa 100 has a little three-prong outlet you

can charge basically any laptop on it. You could even do like emergency power for a computer, I think, with it. This and one battery would allow me to keep my phone going for emergency purposes indefinitely. Two batteries ensures I'm able to travel with roughly three or four working days of power for my laptop and phone wherever I go, and that's without me actually trying to recharge them using the panels. You can find various years of this battery model on Amazon or at other retailers from $200 on up. The latest model retails for $300 off Gold Zero's website. These batteries are TSA approved, as are the panels. I have never had an issue flying with them. Obviously, in different countries, your experience may vary, but I've taken these things to most parts of the world.

And again, I haven't had an issue. They have varying sizes, but the Nomad 100, which is 100 watt hours, runs about 300 bucks. So you're looking at $500 or $600 for this traveling setup, which is also great to keep in your home and just have less a bit, you know, if you find used versions on eBay or wherever, which is also great to keep in your home and just have less a bit, you know, if you find used versions on eBay or wherever, which is often possible. That's not an insignificant cost, but if you're building an emergency kit over time, most people are capable of bearing that cost again over time. You could just start with the battery, which is the most initially useful part of the kit, and then you could get a panel set six months or whatever a year later.

And this brings me to what I'm talking about, quantifiably, when I discuss a disaster and what you actually need when we're talking about emergency power in a disaster. It is uncommon for the average U.S. consumer to lose power for more than an hour or two at a time. In 2018, most consumers lost less than two hours of power per year without, quote, major events. With major events, that number leapt to six hours per person per year on average. In 2017, it was closer to eight. As we deal with more climate change, more natural disasters, all of these things are going to become inevitably more common. These are also all averages of huge numbers of people in huge areas of terrain. I will guess that the percentage of people listening to this who have, as adults,

lost power for a day or more at a time is very close to 100%. Now, given the averages, you might consider just purchasing battery power units without solar panels. Because in most instances, what you're trying to do is ensure that if your phone is dead and there's a bad storm and, you know, you run out of power by the time you get home, a two or three hour outage doesn't leave you unable to contact your people or emergency services. I have a fuckload of different portable batteries because I try to keep enough in my work bag wherever I go to function in my job for most of a week without power when I go on trips. This kind of preparation has stood me in good stead in places like Syria, Iraq,

and the desperate wilds of Seattle that one time. But if you're not going to such terrifying hellscapes, you can probably get a suitable battery that's reasonably tough for under $100. And we will continue talking about batteries and talking about, you know, next kind of home solutions and eventually cheap solutions. But you know, what's not cheap is the products and services that support this podcast.

Affordable, but not cheap. Anyway, here's these ads. We're back and we're talking about portable batteries, right? And my only note here is that if you're buying portable batteries, you know, stuff not necessarily to run on solar just to have some extra juice with you wherever you go to keep it home in an emergency, these fluctuate wildly in quality. It can be worth going with a brand that is a known quantity with a long record and a lot of testing done on their products, rather than whatever the Amazon algorithm spits out when you Google battery. The advantage of a small portable folding setup like the one I have from Goal Zero is that you can take it with you and have it on demand if shit happens when you're traveling or if you have to evacuate, and it's idiot-proof, right? if you have to evacuate, and it's idiot-proof, right?

A good option if you just want something in your home to keep your devices topped off is what I'd call a large, small battery generator. These are a couple of steps below products like the Jackery 2000 or the Geniverse that I tried, but above the handheld little batteries that many of you have already. The two examples of this product category that I have and have tested are the Yeti 400 from GoalZero

and the Anker Solix C800. The Yeti 400 is the product I purchased with my own money, and it's what I've taken with me for years into the mountains when I go shooting or hunting, usually with a set of folding panels. This ensures that if my car dies and I've been dumb enough to let my jumper box that I keep with me die, I have a backup that I can use to charge my jumper box. I also have a convenient way to top off my phone or my e-reader or my sat phone, both for normal use and in an emergency. It handles extreme cold and extreme heat well,

and that's not always something you can take for granted with batteries. Again, kind of top of the list is that I am an idiot, I don't know much about electricity, and these products are pretty idiot-proof. When it comes to my Yeti 400 or the C800 from Anker, I keep them both plugged into the wall at all times that I can grab either for an emergency. Now, the Solix C800 that I have was sent to me as a review unit by Solix, and by necessity, I have not been able to subject it to the years of rigorous real-life testing that my Goal Zero Yeti 400 has endured. I will note that it is well-reviewed, and from the exploration I have done on it, which does not include years of testing but does include a decent amount of reading and some testing, I think it's better constructed and more conveniently

laid out than the Goal Zero, and it also gets you about twice the storage, nearly 800 watt hours, as opposed to a bit over 400. Both products cost the same price, around $600, although older generations are often available cheaper online, new and used. Either is enough to keep a family of four's phones charged for a two- or three-day outage without severe rationing. You can get a lot more, obviously, on the Anker. And you might not want to have someone like gaming on an Alienware laptop or whatever with either, but you can charge your laptops and the like off of them. If you want to like watch a movie at the end of the night, you're all huddled together there in the dark, that's not going to be something you

have to stress out about too much. Again, the Anker Solix is going to give you a lot more juice to play around with, but either should be enough for an average outage if you just keep them plugged in. You can also use them to power a fan during the day. They will not run small AC units. These are worth considering as an intermediate option for the more casual prepper. What you're looking for here is not a full off-grid replacement, but something that can provide you with options for more than just basic gadget power. With these big small batteries, you can run a fan or fans, maybe not long enough for comfort, but in bursts throughout the day to get you through the hottest part of the day during a blackout during what we call a wet bulb event. This would be the life-saving health emergency that a basic solar setup would be most useful

in saving you from. For context, in case people aren't up to date, a wet bulb event is a weather situation in which the temperature reaches a critical level, above 88 degrees Fahrenheit, and does not drop below that point for an extended period of time. If people lack access to effective cooling during heating events like this, they will die. We saw one of these hit a couple of years ago where I live, in Portland, Oregon, which has been long famed for its mild temperatures, and thus most homes lack central air. During a three-day heat wave, temperatures rose to record highs and did not drop low enough at night to allow people any recovery time. More than 100 of them died. This kind of thing is possible anywhere.

If you have central air standard where you live, the grid can always go down, as we've seen happen in Texas over and over again. For someone with money, your best bet might be pairing a portable air conditioner like the Mydia Duo, which ranges from $500 to $600 on Amazon, with something like the Jackery SG2000+, which with panels and a good sunlight would allow you to run it during the day, at least in a single room. As an aside, this is actually a case in which someone with a window unit is at more of an advantage than someone with central air. You can connect your Jackery directly to the breaker, but without expansion batteries, it's not going to run a whole home long. So you'd want to unplug

everything and turn off the lights, running your AC in short bursts, and maintaining discipline with your doors and windows, ideally putting up foil or at least cardboard over the windows to maximize efficiency. If you're just being able to run a fan because you've got a smaller unit, you're probably looking at something like, you know, getting towels and rags wet, putting them over people's chests and faces, and kind of getting directly under the fan for the periods of time that you can afford to run it. Again, we are not talking about the most ideal comfort situations here. We are talking survival. The limitations I found for are generally twofold. One is that, even with good sunlight, folding panels like the ones Jackery and Genover ship me don't always hit their advertised wattage. This is because you've got to deal with a lot of other

factors. The movement of the sun throughout the day, where shadows fall on your home or property, your access to the roof, how clean the panels are, and under normal use conditions, it is surprisingly easy to get stuff on them. On a sunny spring day in Oregon, I found my 200-watt Jackery panels tended to get 120 to 150 watts during the most optimal parts of the day. I was able to plug the Jackery panels into the Geniverse generator and vice versa, and I found that Jackery's panels generally performed 10-15% better during real-life conditions. I looked it up, and on paper, the Geniverse has a solar cell efficiency, or EFF rating, of about 23.4%. Jackery beats them by 1% with an EFF rating of 24.3.

That is not enough of a difference to matter too much, although I should note that what I saw in real-life use was a notable difference. You may experience something different with these panels, with any panels that you get. I can't claim to have tested anything but the ones that they shipped me. The Jackery Explorer 200 Plus is capable of taking 1400 watts of input max, which would be seven sets of panels, although from what the manual says, it can take up to six Solar Saga 80 panels, which are their 200 watt panels under normal conditions. You can expand all this with added Explorer 2000s running in tandem and up to 12 Solar Saga 80s on a single generator, but doing that requires some wonky shit with cables, and at that point, we're talking about a system beyond what most people are likely to want or need.

When it comes to durability, I suspect that both the Jackery and Geneverse are probably close in functioning. Online reviews give both systems good user reliability ratings. In real-world conditions, I had the opportunity to do something that you never want to do in real life with a device you've paid for, which was work one of these systems to death. I chose the Geneverse, and the torture test I used basically involved keeping it outside, charging and providing power at a fairly low trickle for 12 days of intermittent rain and wind in the Pacific Northwest late winter. We got about two inches of rain during this time, and that was enough to eventually kill the generator. But it took close to two weeks

of downright irresponsible treatment. We are talking the kind of neglect you would not subject a product like this to without no other option. In subsequent tests with the Jackery, I have been able to keep it operating outdoors in bad weather without damage through taking minimal measures to shield the generator. The least I did was stick a plastic Home Depot crate lid above it, literally set it down on top of the unit to stop water from just hitting the ports on the sides and back directly. set it down on top of the unit to stop water from just hitting the ports on the sides and back directly. The most elaborate protective setup outdoors was a simple tarp cover and making sure it was elevated a bit above the ground. When it comes to which of these systems would be best for

you, the primary difference between the Geniverse and the Jackery is that the Geniverse is higher capacity. 2419 watt hours as opposed to a little over 2042 for the Jackery. This means that without input, you can run a normal fridge off the042 for the Jackery. This means that without input, you can run a normal fridge off the Geniverse for about six hours. In good sun, you can recharge it fully in eight hours with two Geniverse Solar Power 2 panels. The Jackery system will recharge in a similar time frame under optimal conditions and give you a bit less usable power. It has the benefit of being almost 20 pounds lighter and significantly friendlier in design. For reasons that elude explanation, the Geniverse lacks a telescoping handle or wheels to help you maneuver it into or out of position. This sucks because it's heavy, and if it's not

wired into your breaker and you're using this for an emergency, you might need to move it around so that you can have the panels in different positions to take advantage of the sun. This also makes the Geniverse less useful than the Jackery in normal daily life tasks. I started this episode with a rather ridiculous story about my waterbed, but I've actually found quite a few tasks at which having a wheelable battery capable of this kind of output is handy. Basically, any power tool that you're likely to own will run off of either of these systems, but only the Jackery is friendly enough to want to move around outdoors to take advantage of this fact. And this

kind of gets us to the crux of a question some of you have been asking this whole episode. How practical are any of these solutions? My answer is complicated, but I think fair. If you can't or aren't going to expend the energy to become competent with solar power to the extent that someone living off-grid would generally want to be, these are exceptional solutions, so long as you can afford them. In both cases, you're looking at around $3,000 for a setup that could power anything in your home and would handle all necessary tasks for longer than the length of an average blackout. The Jackery and Geniverse systems are also future-capable. You can expand both with added batteries over time and add in more panel capacity,

up to a point that makes them quite attractive if you can afford them. My personal recommendation would be for the Jackery over the Geniverse for most people for a couple of reasons. Please note that I received review units from both companies and money from neither, so I have no vested interest in picking one over the other. One reason that I chose the Jackery Explorer 2000 is that it is a bit cheaper—$1,900 for the base system and $479 for each set of 200-watt folding panels. Compare that to the Geneverse HomePower 2 Pro, which starts at $2,299 and $3,400 for the generator with two 200-watt panels.

The Jackery is also meaningfully easier to use in recreational situations, so it is a system that the average person will get more use out of. You can take it camping easily, you can use it for overlanding, and you can have it ready for an emergency. I will note that if you have a system like this, you will surprise yourself with how often it comes in handy for simple tasks. What I like about both systems is again, they're future compatible. You can start with the base system

and then add a couple of panels. And as you save more money, you can add an additional battery packs and panels to give you both more capacity and more input with the goal of eventually storing a day or a couple of days of power and being able to run your home minimally during extended emergencies. The shortcoming that you'll find with either

system is that if you have a normal home, it will cost as much as a nice used car to have a setup that could run your house for extended periods of time, let alone indefinitely. A typical home AC unit can burn something like 14,000 kilowatt hours per day, and that's just half of what an average home draws. Heating amounts to a comparable draw, so while these systems can be expanded significantly with additional batteries, if you're dealing with an outage that extends past several days, you will encounter severe limitations. This brings me to the most impressive, but least accessible piece of gear that I tested for these episodes. The Anker Solix F3800 Portable Power Station. This holds about 3,840 watt-hours

of electricity and can output 6,000 watts if necessary. You can charge your electric car or run a welding rig off of this thing. It can be expanded with additional battery storage, and if you had 30 or 40 grand to spend, you could wire this thing up to power your house for close to a week without sunlight. The F3800 itself costs $4,000, and you can run two of them in tandem with 12 battery packs each to power your home for about two weeks for just the cost of, at this point, a rather nice car. That is wildly out of reach for most people. But if you can afford it, the Onger is a really cool system. There's been a tremendous amount of thought put into everything from how the device is constructed and laid out to how you carry it. I particularly appreciate the fact that you can wheel it like a big suitcase

or lay it on its side where it has additional pop-out handles to enable you to carry it in multiple different ways. All of Anker's products feel premium, and the metal handles that I said pop out are like metal. They're very solid. Everything has a clean interface and what I would describe as an exceedingly livable industrial design. If you happen to be one of the people who can consider putting down $4,000 for an emergency battery, the Solix F3800 will see you through 99% of the power loss situations you are likely

to encounter and require minimal knowledge to set up and get working. It is easy to attach to your home breaker, and Anker's instructions for doing so are simple to follow. For folks who can afford the cost, then, and that cost is not inconsiderable, it is a great mix of might save your life and will definitely come in handy. I should also note that the Jackery system has a better pedigree than the Geniverse system in the industry, probably similar to Anker. They've got a long track record and are well regarded, not as an inexpensive solution, but as a reliable one with a good warranty and a lot of history to back them up. All of these systems are, in my experience, reliable and easy to use. All of them are, and I have to hit on this a few times because it matters, expensive. That presents a problem if you're someone who sees the value in these as potential emergency devices, but will realistically never

be able to throw down $3,000 for them. It would be irresponsible of me to give you some specific technical advice because I lack that knowledge, but I have some experience here. And we're going after this next set of ads. We're back, and we're talking about what you can do, at least a little bit of what you can do. Again, the furthest thing in the world from an expert here, but I wanted to at least provide some starting points from folks who are never going to be able to afford these more formal, easier-to-use, idiot-proof kind of situations.

Because while I'm not an expert on this, I have lived off-grid a bit, and I have known people who have done so in a wide variety of weird situations. At one point, my partner operated a solar-powered shack that they lived out of with batteries so comparatively primitive that she had to regularly refill them with water. That kind of maintenance is going to be second nature to people who know their shit with solar, and those people have a lot more options than the layman probably the most impressive and cash neutral setup i saw was in a place called east jesus in far southern california this was a totally off-grid power setup that kept around 12 to 18 people alive year-round and often intense

temperatures powering ac units and trailers and rs, fridges, fans, lights, the entertainment equipment they used, the wicks. Now, their setup was all scavenged or bought cheap at auction. The batteries they used, which took up an entire shipping container-sized space, were purchased cheap from a telecom company in the area, which retired its deep cycle batteries once they hit 80% of their original functioning capacity or something like that. Panels were likewise scavenged or bought cheap and used. Since they had a lot of space but little money, wiring a shitload of panels of varying efficiency together was a solution they could afford,

both in terms of the money that it cost and in terms of the space that was required. Most people lack the technical knowledge to set something like this up. I sure do. And even more of them lack the space. But it is an example of the sort of solutions that people with little to no cash like this up. I sure do. And even more of them lack the space. But it is an example of the sort of solutions that people with little to no cash can cook up if they're clever and knowledgeable about the fundamental technology.

It would be extremely irresponsible if I did not add here that solar setups are the sort of thing where it behooves you to be exceedingly fucking careful. The chief benefit of the system's goal zero, Anker, Geniverse, and Jack remake is that they are all as close to idiot-proof as they can be. Part of the cost comes from the fact that they use expensive but extremely stable lithium-iron-phosphate batteries. These have long lifespans.

Jackery rates theirs at 10 years and a cycle life of up to 2,000 cycles. They have a good standby time, too. Jackery rates theirs at up to 50% charge after two years in storage. A lot of the cheaper or scavenged options you find are lithium polymer batteries. These are rather infamous for igniting and burning down people's homes. There are solutions you can find online, and if you're interested in cheaper homebrew solar setups out there, one place I'd suggest starting is diysolarforum.com. The people there will have suggestions for minimizing risk. Since LiPo is one of the most dangerous battery chemistry types out

there, some people build what are called battery bunkers. One form I've seen this tape is basically a cube of bricks around and below the batteries with a ceramic flat sheet above them. Some people will suggest lacing sandbags above the bunker so that if the battery goes into thermal runway, it will melt the sandbag and pour sand into the battery to stop the fire. Again, I am not giving advice here, just providing you with an example of the kinds of concerns that you do have to think about when considering building setups like this for your own. It is unfortunate that the most financially accessible way to do this is by taking the research into your own hands and relying on the experience of hobbyists and lifestyle explorers who have been there before, but disasters aren't fair, and neither is life.

Another exploratory option I'd suggest is googling questions like how to run small room AC off solar or how to run 12-volt fridge indefinitely, comma, solar, and then add Reddit as a search term. You'll find threads of people in off-grid, solar, or overlanding subreddits who have explored these problems for themselves, and their journeys can at least act as a basis for your own. I'd like to thank, at the end of this, the reps at Jackery, Geniverse, and Anker who sent products for me to review.

It was incredibly nice of them all, and from an aesthetic point of view, they all make great gear that is a genuine pleasure to use. Goal Zero didn't send me anything, but I've paid for their stuff for years and I've never had anything fail in the field. So, I figure I owe them a shout out here too. And that's going to do it for us at It Could Happen Here for the day. So, you know,

check in tomorrow or, you know, Monday, depending on when you hear this, whenever it drops. And, yeah. Goodbye. whenever it drops and yeah, goodbye. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, the running interview show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High,

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and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis. And once again, it has been happening here as protest encampments have sprung up in at least 80 college campuses all across the country

as Israel continues its genocide of the Palestinian people and is now currently bombing multiple sides of Rafah. Last month, students at American universities began protesting their university's ties to Israel and weapons manufacturers, calling for divestment as well as urging their institutions to join in calls for ceasefire. After a militarized police raid at the Humboldt protest utilizing a prison SWAT team, police departments around the country began cracking down more harshly on the protest encampments. The day after the Humboldt one, NYPD raided Columbia University and fired a gun inside Hamilton Hall while trying to use their handgun as a flashlight. The Portland Police Bureau quickly followed suit and cracked down

at the encampment at Portland State University and have since barricaded that library. As of time of recording, around 2,500 arrests have taken place at college protests all around the country. Police have displayed incredible violence, sending people to the hospital with broken ankles and concussions. In many cities, there has been heavy use of pepper spray, pepper balls, as well as tasers. The protests have also faced violence from a mix of far-right agitators, Zionist counter-protesters, and racist frats that have targeted the protest encampments with physical violence, especially at UCLA. We here at It Could Happen Here are lucky enough to have correspondents kind of based all around the country,

so I'm joined today by Mia Wong, James Stout, and Molly Conger to discuss our experiences as people who have been present at some of these encampments all across the country. I'm going to start by talking about Emory University here in Atlanta, Georgia. This is a weird one, and I think I'll actually go into more depth in a future episode, but this episode is going to kind of focus on discussions, and we're going to kind of compare our experiences. So oddly enough, I think Emory was the first one to actually face significant police repression. The tense went up on the Emory Quad on April 15th, and that morning there was a heavy police response from Emory PD, APD, and Georgia

State Patrol. They fired tasers, there was rubber bullets, pepper balls, and over two dozen arrests. They fired tasers, there was rubber bullets, pepper balls, and over two dozen arrests. Students and others began to rally later that afternoon to retake the quad. A few hundred people did so, and a small occupation began inside the Candler School of Theology building. MRIPD was pinned up against this building, GSP arrived as reinforcements, and people started to flee as, you know, you see GSP kind of swarm this area, but people were able to calm some of those other students down and regroup and actually hold that position for a little while longer. Police began attacking students.

A small clash began. There was pepper balls. People continued to kind of hold that ground in front of the building. There was students also inside. As people would try to, you know, render aid to those who have been pepperballed, and while maintaining this position in front of the building, more and more police arrive, like a ridiculous number. And the crowd eventually starts to slowly disperse as police just flood campus. Police from all around the greater Atlanta area just flood this very small section of

Decatur, which is a small suburb to the northeast of Atlanta, or to the east of Atlanta, I guess. Emory president Greg Femmes said the Thursday protest was concocted by outside entities, which is why Emory PD, APD, and GSP violently disrupted the protest because it was caused by outside agitators, a line that New York Mayor Eric Adams would then reiterate to justify the massive crackdown at Columbia. So the next day, we had 500 people march around campus. And then this little kind of committee of Emory faculty and staff called the Emory Open Expression Committee began to negotiate with the protest. And they, quote unquote, allowed the protest to march around campus. And this small subset of the group began to occupy

the Cox Hall Food Court. And police were ordered to stay out of sight this whole day and a few of the days after, unless the Open Expression Committee specifically called them in. And what was able to happen is that this Open Exp expression committee was able to wield the threat of police as a deterrent from people taking kind of more militant action or to actually set up things that would hold down an encampment. Like if tents were set up, this would result in this open expression committee to call in the police. So this was a very, a very successfully wielded threat. So as the night goes on, the open expression committee does threaten to call police on the Cox Food Hall protest, which scares a whole bunch of these,

you know, young teens, early 20s, out of the building. A smaller group of around 100 people remain on the quad till midnight. Police arrive and then everyone disperses. The next day kind of follows a similar pattern. Open expression and some student organizers over the course of the next few days

actually start directing police to detain and criminally trespass people wearing keffiyahs on suspicion of them having been engaged in like doing graffiti. And really it just, it just allows police to target specific people that the open expression committee kind of just don't want on campus, uh, based on either how they dress, how they're kind of walking, acting, behaving, that sort of thing. And this pattern followed basically up until the present people would try to take buildings, based on either how they dress, how they're kind of walking, acting, behaving, that sort of thing. And this pattern followed basically up until the present. People would try to take buildings, do smaller protests. Police would either be called or there would be threats that they would be called. It would kind of calm the crowd down. Everyone would disperse. If tents got set up, that was seen as like a major sign of escalation,

which would result in police being called. And it's kind of the small back and forth. And eventually this just kind of led to the situation at Emory slowly dissolving, slowly fizzling out as the people who were wanting to do stuff kind of got pushed more to the side, got pushed out more and more people began getting criminally trespassed. And the group of students at Emory just did not want to risk a further engagement with police after the first day. And that's kind of led to things slowly dissolving. And that's basically what the

situation currently, things have mostly kind of tapered off, school's ending. I'm sure this will be a similar thing across the country as the school season is ending and these protest encampments will slowly also just dissolve away as police repression continues. Let's see, who should we move on to the next little report? James, James Stout from, you went to UC San Diego? That's right, I did, both as a graduate student and then again as an adjunct professor, and then again as a journalist last week, which is what we're going to talk about this time. So UC San Diego had, it was interesting, the encampment began on the 1st of May, but SJP

had posted this thing about their big rally was going to be on the 3rd of May, on the Friday, right? SJP is? Students for Justice in Palestine. It's one of the groups that's organized a lot of these protests across um it depends you know where you're at you might have the council on american islamic relations you might have the muslim student association you might have both you yeah yeah you've jewish for peace yeah yeah very often they're collaborating which is great

we love to see collaboration so what they did was they posted that they were going to have a big rally on friday and that that as it turned out was like a fake out and they actually started their encampment on wednesday so they they distracted admin uh with that instagram post which is pretty clever pretty funny and they began this encampment on wednesday uh on library walk which is kind of right in the middle of ucsd uh if people have seen you know people will be familiar with the uSD Geisel Library from the film Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, which played an important role.

Yeah, I can see the look of recognition on my colleagues' faces. But yeah, that's the only thing that's ever cool that's happened at UCSD. So they set up this encampment. It wasn't huge, but it was certainly a serious presence, right? And they didn't barricade it or sort of make it defensible.

That was a conscious choice, right? And they did set up a security system whereby they had student security people controlling who entered and, I guess, left the encampment um if you really wanted to you could the cops got in right like it was a waist-high vinyl fence but but in theory these people were controlling who went in and who went out and sometimes these people were like asking people to sign up on a sheet i think i hope they stopped doing that because obviously that you're sort of helping the cops make their prosecution case there over the next five days the encampment was extremely peaceful right there there was a focus among this group on not giving any provocation to police or to admin to any reason to evict them so they had some lectures some speeches they had some live music they had some lectures, some speeches, they had some live music, they did some dancing, all stuff that's like in no way provocation or violent.

On the 5th of May, a large counter protest was organized. Mostly it brought kind of like get off my lawn boomer types. But then also like some right wing streamers, Oreo Express, or I guess the surviving half of Oreo Express, Josh Fulfa was there. I think the guy who was first responders, media host way or Joe Felix was also there. These are right wing streamers. Sadly, like if you live where I live, you have to be familiar with where they do a lot of border harassment, too. They were obviously trying to film and identify students, I guess um this was on the evening of the 5th uh that evening the chancellor costler sent around an email basically saying that what students were doing was prohibited

that tents were not included in freedom of speech uh and asking them to disband peacefully the next morning at about five or six in the morning literally hundreds of cops from several agencies right um the UCPD does not have the footprint that we saw there was California Highway Patrol San Diego Sheriff's Department and UCPD all in full right gear um lined up opposite the encampment. They say that they asked students to leave and that those who didn't were arrested, right? And when they're arrested, obviously, like violence was used by the police as always is. The encampment was destroyed. Everything that was there was tossed into a dumpster. Some stuff was then recovered. I guess there's now a lost and

found for people to recover their things like laptops right like expensive personal items that were swept up at that point people were arrested and then detained in the price center at UCSD the price center if you've not been on campus is like a large shopping mall uh that also has some lecture facilities but like it's where the panda express is uh on campus like it's not trapped in with the panda express which is a dangerous situation yeah yeah and the panda express is not operational sadly more is a shame but like it's where they have those their dining hall and it's like the center of like corporate operations on campus it's a very bleak place so they're trapped in in the price center the students around campus those who are not in the encampment then rallied to protect these

students and tried to block the police from loading them on buses and then block the buses from leaving and that's when we saw the sheriff's department using massive amounts of violence right our sheriff's department still carry just like big wooden sticks they're not like the black nightsticks you know with like like the right angled grip. It's just a giant. It's just a big wooden baton. Yeah, it's the aesthetic of the Sheriff's Department's riot gear is consciously or unconsciously something that I associate with the civil rights era and the repression of the civil rights movement.

Perhaps that's a choice. I don't know. But that was when the Sheriff's Department started to become violent. That's when they brutalized and arrested both journalists and students. In total, 65 people were arrested. Protesters then moved down to the two jails. We have a different facility. There's a men's jail and a women's jail. They tend to incarcerate trans people with the gender they're assigned at birth. I've heard about lots of things that happened in those jails that were pretty bad, but I haven't been able to confirm them enough that I think I'd be comfortable airing them.

So people are released. Lots of them are charged with several misdemeanors, trespassing, encroachment, being at the scene of a riot, resisting arrest, things like that, right? Two members of faculty were also arrested um 40 people were students and the last time i checked they hadn't confirmed the status of the other 20 ish people so that happened on the 6th yesterday which was of course the 8th there was a big march about a thousand students it looked like kind of both calling for the uc to divest and calling for the uc to drop charges and and and drop academic sanctions so right now all the people who are arrested are facing interim

suspension they're facing eviction from their student housing which san diego as we've spoken about a bazillion times has an incredibly expensive housing market and it's almost impossible to access affordable housing here and in some cases you know that they're facing serious academic sanctions that could affect the rest of their academic careers student workers who are arrested also now not being allowed to work on campus so 183 faculty signed a letter asking the university to not do that that came out last night and that's kind of where we're at in terms of what's happened to these people i think it's probably worth noting that the uc riverside settled right that they

they negotiated a settlement that's in so riverside is north and slightly east of here east of los angeles county uc riverside is is i don't know in terms of student numbers, how big it is, but they settled, I think, on the Wednesday. So that'd be May the Friday, May the 3rd. I was at the UCSD encampment that day and I heard them announce it. The Riverside settlement, I'm just going to say it didn't achieve some of the more radical goals of the student organizing movement, notably divestment, notably an academic academic boycott they did get the university to publish its investments which which are linked to israel at least uh which is a step i guess and uh they got a task force the university is going to be very willing to grant you task forces and panels and things which

can turn your radical aims into a bureaucratic mess, right? And they got the university to look into removing Sabra hummus from its menus as well. Which, like, yeah. The biggest concession was the hummus, which isn't great. Wait, that wasn't a joke? I thought you were joking. No, no, I'm not joking. No.

No, no, no, no. Sabra hummus was called out by name. They didn't... Snack divestment. Yeah, no, no, they're not divesting. Sabra Hummus was called out by name. They didn't... I'm not saying... Snack divestment. Yeah, no, no. They're not divesting from Sabra Hummus, Molly. They're looking into doing that

in conjunction with their acquisitions procedure. Yeah, so, you know, it's a huge dub. I don't want to undermine what these people have done. It's scary when the cops come to get you. Totally. I understand. But these are concessions the university is going to give you. You might get a snack task force

and you might get their already publicly available investments listed in one place on their website. At UCSD, the administration claims that the students were unwilling to negotiate. I wasn't able to ascertain if what system they had right like i was trying to ask if they had delegates or representatives who were going to those being different things right who were going to negotiate uh i wasn't able to get a clear answer on that um they did very clearly publish their demands right and the university

doesn't seem to have acceded to any of them so So that more or less is where we're at in San Diego. There are ongoing panels and press conferences. I'm going to attend one. So it's going to be one by faculty tomorrow on the 9th. The faculty have also been organizing, right, in a group called Faculty for Justice in Palestine. And they've been organizing. I think it was very impressive that they accepted student leadership

and didn't try and come in and take a vanguard role or tell everybody what to do but but they're mostly to facilitate the student protest and protect it um so they're having a press conference tomorrow so things are definitely ongoing here but that's kind of where we're at as of today which is the the 9th of may we will be back and hear about the happenings in Chicago and I believe Richmond. Charlottesville. After this ad break. Yeah, for Sabra. I hope, probably not.

Chocolate hummus. The chocolate hummus is a travesty. Crime against humanity, yeah. all right we are back i have a big bowl of non-sobriety chocolate hummus actually so fuck all of you yeah in the break garrison got out their chickpeas in a blender it was a really beautiful thing let's hear from mia about what's been happening in Chicago, where there's been multiple, multiple of these protest occupations. Yeah, so there's been four occupations so far in Chicago that it's it's possible. I don't know. I'm actually kind of surprised like the University of Illinois hasn't like there have been a few campuses that I thought would go up that haven't.

Yeah. So we're going to talk about three of them because the other one I didn't get to. haven't yeah so we're gonna talk about three of them because the other one i didn't get to well well we'll we'll explain why i wasn't at the the school the art institute one because that's a shit show 68 arrests yeah disaster um we will get to that so the first one i was at was at northwestern um and i i think the other thing that's important about these encampments is that they're really really geographically spread out across the city. So Northwestern is not in Chicago. It is in,

is it a, a like, is it a suburb called Evanston is a very rich suburb. Okay. The other thing we should probably get across is these, the Chicago encampments all started kind of late into this process. They're not, there's reasons for this that I can't get into, but they're all kind of late comers. On April 25th, Northwestern 1 starts, and it's a really chill occupation for the most part.

So there's like a police raid on night one, but then the kids just come back and put all the tents up again. And then after that, like the Evanston Police Department is a joke, right? Like they're not, I mean, they've probably done terrible things, but like they're not like the police departments in the rest of the city who are like the guys who teach the CIA how to torture people, right? Like they're not, I mean, they've probably done terrible things, but like they're, they're not, they're not like the police departments in the rest of the city who are like the guys who teach the CIA how to torture people. Right. Yeah. And so, yeah, I wanted to talk a bit about kind of the vibes of it because it was, it's a very like early occupation kind of vibe, right? It's, I mean, like I walk in there, there's, it's, it's a bunch of kids like sitting on tents, doing homework. Yeah. People are sleeping. There's like, people kids like sitting on tents doing homework yeah people are sleeping there's like people are like eating meals everyone's really happy very similar to people just hanging out

in the quad at emory and i'm sure many other places around the country yeah i think i think and everything that that should be mentioned is you know so like obviously these are these are protests these are camps in solidarity with palestine right so you're you're expecting an internationalist bent this one like i walked in there and there was a woman on the stage in the encampment, well, I say stage, and there was a woman using their sound equipment, which made you quieter, but was talking about the Zapatistas. And this is the thing you see over and over and over again, right? It's like, yeah, these are about, the encampments that I'm at are, you know, obviously they're about Palestine, but there's this real,

there's a very kind of, there's a deep internationalism there that's very tangible and powerful. I mean, like, you know, I was walking through the town and I was like, you know, there are kids like reading on the lawn and I'm like, I'm like pointing out like,

oh, hey, this is, that's the copy of the rest of the earth that I have from college. Like, you know, it's all stuff like that. It was all very chill. It like rained on us. So we spent we spent much time like waterproofing tents i think the interesting things about this is that there's a there's a really kind of wild mix of people there it's it's this it's this thing you only really get in social movements that are like going somewhere where you know i mean i was running into people from groups like old school

like like i ran into someone from students for a democratic society like i didn't even know the group still existed like i thought i did not know that still existed either well so there was there was a second round of them in the 2000s i thought they died after that but apparently not you know so you have these mix of people from like groups that everyone thought was dead right like you know there's a lot of sort of very experienced like student organizers there's also a lot of grad students which is a dynamic i don't think it's talked about very much because it's not it's not just like 18 year olds there are a lot of people in these camps who have been doing this for a very long time and you know so you have those people but you also have people who just i mean like i talked to people who this was literally

their first protest right it's like the first thing that ever came out to. And, you know, there was this very kind of there's this very sort of camaraderie vibe. What there wasn't was a functional democracy. And that's that's a very that's the other thing about this encampment that was very different than the Chicago one, which I'll be getting to in a second is like they there was this sort of there was this group that was negotiating with with the administration and no one could really tell what they were doing like every once in a while a representative would come back from them and you'd hear something but in the meantime everyone is sort of running around based on rumors trying to figure out what these people are negotiating and it turns out what they're negotiating is an end to the protests. And basically, the students, like, okay, so there's a complicated set of demands. What actually happens is that all of the entire occupation is taken down after a week. It's completely gone now.

There's nothing there. What they get from it was the university is re-establishing an advisory committee on investment responsibilities they got like question this was supposed to answer questions about holding some stakeholders which may be disclosure may not be um and they got some stuff that like is real from for like visiting like Palestinian faculty. But basically, they didn't get any of the goals of the encampment, right? There's no divestment. There's, you know, a committee that can make recommendations about the investment. And we'll see if that even happens because that's supposed to be spun up back in the fall.

So, you know, they take down the encampment. They get nothing. They get no leverage and nothing is, you know and all of the sort of student negotiators and these are negotiators tend they you know and okay so there are also like political splits in the camp right it's kind of hard to get a sense of them just from looking at it but you know if you talk to enough people you can sort of get get the sense of like what the splits are right and northwestern was sort of split between uh like the the sort of liberal student negotiators who are from a lot like some of the the sort of more liberal student organizations and the people who want to

like you know they're sort of like maximalist radicals and the maximalist radicals get out because there's just not enough of them and so they take the encampment down and the people who were doing the negotiations had this whole line by we're building power this is just the beginning and there's nothing there's been nothing else they're screwed they lost everything their negotiating power is gone they got nothing so in the wake of this the university of chicago encampment starts up um the university of chicago complete other side of the city i like northwestern is in like the like the fucking bougiest like richest whitest of the like of like the north side of chicago which is like where the rich white people are except i mean they're not even in chicago right they're they're they're literally like they are they are a uh they're a suburb the university of chicago on the other hand is

smack dab in the middle of the south side of Chicago. There's the university bubble, and then around the university, this is like the heart of black Chicago, right? Very, very different vibe. The other thing that's important about this is, so the University of Chicago occupation starts in the context of the massive raids in Columbia, the raid in Humboldt, and importantly the raids in ucla and both both the sort of brutal police raid and the like absolute horror like mass fascist attack on the barricades where you know you have people getting beat up with metal pipes they're shooting they're shooting like fourth of july ass fireworks like directly into into the people on the barricades

they are trying to kill the protesters. They beat a bunch of student journalists half to death. And so University of Chicago camp, when I get there, is right in the middle of transforming from a kind of Northwestern style, everyone's getting along, singing Kumbaya camp,

to an actual fighting camp. Because I get there at like nine, right? Three hours from because i get there and like that day i get there at like nine right three hours from when i get there they were scheduled to be a giant rally of like right-wing frats that is going to go come and attack the encampment so the vibe is extremely different it is a fighting camp everyone is preparing to like you know fight for their lives everyone knows what happens at ucla and also everyone knows what happened at ucla and also everyone knows what happened at northwestern and people are fucking pissed people are like i mean unbelievably angry that you know then their view is the northwestern camp sold everyone out

sure and so you know i mean in in the other thing about you chicago that was different from northwestern is that you chicagoago has functional general assemblies. So there are functional democratic meetings where everyone in the camp goes, okay, we're going to figure out what we're going to do. And these meetings are – people are not happy with – they're not happy with what happened at Northwestern. they're not happy with what happened at the northwestern they're also like really pissed off at the third occupation which was well i mean i guess i think depaul happened in the middle of there but the third occupation was the occupation at the school of the art institute on the school of the art institute is literally right in the heart of downtown chicago like it is across like it is like across the street from millennium park it is like across the street from Millennium Park. It is like across the street from like the Art Institute of Chicago.

It is in like the corporate center of Chicago. Sure. So they they they do they do an occupation. Right. And inside of like like I think I think they got seven hours in before SWAT teams showed up. They arrested people. It is a brutal raid. They're like the cops are beating people with metal bars.

Like it is it is it is fucking terrible. It is it is a bunch of SWAT they're like the cops are beating people with metal bars like it is it is it is fucking terrible it is it is a bunch of SWAT teams beating up art students very special and harsh to make sure it doesn't become like a continued thing yeah yeah because because and this is the thing about about both you chicago and depaul to less to extent too but uh you chicago and northwestern are on basically like opposite extremes of the city right they're not they're not in the middle of the city of the downtown area that like the political elite care about it's on the north side and south side yeah yeah let's go the other side like this is literally the middle of chicago and so they like it's very clear orders are coming down from above

that this encampment can't be allowed to stay and so they get the shit beaten out of them and this is important for a few reasons one it kind of like it kind of heightens the fear of police oppression but but the thing that it does that's important is that this goes fucking this like completely backfires on brandon johnson and you know sort of the the mayor of the political administration because this is you know it turns out people are very very angry that a bunch of SWAT teams just beat up a bunch of art students with metal bars, right? And the consequence of this is that Brandon Johnson, like, refuses to, or at least openly what he's saying is that he won't use the Chicago Police Department on the University of Chicago campus. The University of Chicago has its own police force. It has about 150 officers.

It's sort of vaunted as like the largest police force in in like the largest private one of the largest private police forces in the world you know they also shot a fucking kid while i was at school there so you know i have a like deep hatred of them but what what kind of ends up happening is so there's there's that big the day i'm there there's this big like confrontation between protesters and kind of protesters and you know the kids form a shield from protesters and counter protesters yeah yeah so so like the the frat show up there's like a huge right-wing media circus but the kids have a shield wall and the shield wall fucking holds and the the kind of protesters can't break it

they eventually back off they're separated by the cops and from there things get weird the encampment gets cleared by a raid that probably could have been stopped you know it has they have one of these 5 a.m raids you can't stop the police well okay so the thing i say about this though this is this isn't cpt this is ucpt they have like 40 total like the number of people they can amass at one time is about 40 so like this was this was the only occupation that like maybe like plausibly could have actually beaten off the beaten off the police attack because you know if they only have 40 people and you have 600 like that that that that's about the point at which it's like plausible unusual for cops to engage if they don't have the numerical advantage that's's odd. Yeah.

Yeah. But what happens is that the, basically the protesters through, through, through like, there's a very convoluted process of this, but the protesters decide not to defend the camp. So everyone,

it gets raided and they all, and like no one ends up getting arrested, but they destroy the entire camp. Oh, and okay. I guess there's one thing that I, I probably should have fit this in better somewhere else, but something that's very interesting about both of these encampments. And this has been true of both of the encampments that I've,

I've seen is, is who is like the, the racial and gender composition of who's there, because these are, you know, and you could see this, like when you're, when the,

when the counter protesters are facing off against the, the protesters, the counter protesters, they're like exclusively white like most of them are white frat bros white cis dudes usually yeah yeah and then in in the camps it is basically like it is like non it's non-white people of all genders and like non-cis dude people of all races yeah i mean very very very very prominently and this this is something that i think is is a sign of how the sort of like american political alignment has changed and the kind of kinds of political alliances that are kind of so normal now that

we don't even really think about them but if you step back for a second and look at what's actually happening this is this is the this is the actual political composition of of these protests it's queer people and non-white people um and obviously like people like me who are both and i i think that's an important thing because you know it's it's a dynamic of these camps it doesn't get talked about enough but is is the core thing that's happening like politically yeah i agree that was the same that was the same demographic balance at Emory. Let's take another break and we'll come back and hear from Molly and then kind of have a bit more of an open discussion to close things out. Comparing the similarities and differences from our experiences at these these four different protest encampments or different cities, I guess. All right, we are back. Molly, you saw some pretty bad police violence at the

camp in Charlottesville, I believe, right? Yes. The encampment at the University of Virginia was cleared on May 4th by Virginia State Police. It was not a pretty sight. So the students at the University of Virginia set up an encampment on April 30th, on the afternoon of the 30th. They had announced ahead of time that there would be programming during the day on May Day. So this sudden setup the day prior was I think a surprise to the university. When the students first put their stuff down, they put up some tents. The police chief of the university police force,

Timothy Longo, showed up immediately and said, no tents, tents are the red line, take the tents down. So that first night they took the tents down and so for three nights they slept outside unsheltered because it was clear from the university that the tents are going to be the problem. That's the, that's the only issue that we have is the tents. You can be here. You just can't put up the tents and you can't use amplified sound. You can't be too noisy. The place where they'd set up was this patch of grass. That's so if you're familiar with the university of Virginia,

there's the lawn it's, it's called the lawn. It's not the only grass, but it is the special grass. It's the grass between the lawn rooms and the rotunda. It's like a long, narrow, they weren't on the lawn. I think that would have been a much bigger problem for the university just because of the optics of it and because students live in the lawn rooms. So they were actually on the other side of the rotunda in this shady grassy area between the rotunda and the chapel. So within kind of spitting distance of that statue of Thomas Jefferson that the Nazis famously surrounded in 2017. So that same sort of area of the university. So for three nights, they were out there unsheltered. It was pretty quiet. It was, you know, a few dozen students most of the time. Classes had just ended, so they were preparing for finals. They were writing papers. I think

some afternoons they had TAs come out and help people with their papers, help them study. You know, it was chill. They were just kind of out there vibing. And then on the evening of the third, they held a vigil for the dead in Palestine. There was great turnout for that. A lot of people came out, students, families, you know, there were babies there, dogs, like it was, it was a safe place, right? It was a place where people felt safe letting their toddlers kick a ball around. Like it was not a violent or embattled environment. There were babies there and they held the vigil. And after the vigil, they had Shabbat dinner. But as the sun was going down, it was starting to rain. So they put up a pop-up tent to cover the Shabbat dinner, the food that had been set out. And it was at that point that they began setting up the camping tents. And they'd been told all along by the police chief, you can't put tents up,

you can't put tents up. It's against the rules. That's when we're going to have to intervene if you put the tents up. But every UVva school policy is available on the school's website they have a policy database where you can you know search by keyword you can you know you can see every official school policy and the official school policy is that tents are allowed it's on the website you can have a tent and so, you know, the university is saying that this discrepancy as well, you know, that actually isn't a policy. It was a sort of, it's guidance on the policy, but it is in the policy database on the policy website where they keep the policies and it says guideline on it and a guideline.

It's a synonym for a policy. I think the lesson to take away here, you know, I'm not going to Monday morning quarterback the student organizers. I was not privy to internal discussions. I don't think that's my role. I think the takeaway here though, is that they're always going to move the goalposts. The only protest the administration will ever approve of is one that happened at least 30 years ago, right? You have to be decades removed from progress to see it as positive. They never like progress while it's happening. They never like protest while it is happening. There's nothing you can do that will be allowed, right?

Because the entire time, those first three days when the police were keeping their distance, they were always there. There was always this sort of like needling back and forth. Well, you know, can you just, can you adjust this? Can you change this kind of behavior?

Like, you know, you're not breaking the rules yet, but just, you know, we're watching, be careful, this constant needling. And so in the end, on the 4th, when the Virginia State Police showed up, you know, up until that point, the idea was, well, the provocation was the tents. The problem was the tents. The police had to become because of the tents, you know, that the policy on the school's website changed Saturday morning. become because of the tents you know that the policy on the school's website changed saturday morning like we have the you know the cash on the website you can see when the pdf was altered it was that morning so it's like is it about the tents did you change this policy as pretext for the police raid because now in the aftermath since they were caught out changing that policy immediately before the police raid of the camp they're saying well no actually actually it wasn't

about the tents that's not really what this is about this it's because they're saying now that you know four men in essentially black block right so four men in black carrying backpacks with helmets were seen in the area they're known to law enforcement and yeah i'll be honest with you i did not see these individuals but at the same time who care who care who care it's public property right this is a public university uh you know this outside agitator narrative you know we had to beat and pepper spray these students because of these mysterious men but at the same time you know the entire time that the students were in the encampment, they had faculty liaisons from Faculty for Justice in Palestine. And the faculty liaison were not negotiating because students were clear that there was no negotiation. They're not negotiating on their demands, but that all communication between admin and the police into the encampment came through these faculty liaisons.

And they were in constant open communication. came through these faculty liaisons and they were in constant open communication and the faculty liaisons are saying well if there was someone dangerous here if the police had identified like a you know an actual danger in this space they never communicated that to us right that before this raid happened no one ever said to the faculty liaison someone here is dangerous there's a known criminal here there's you know this is why this has to that was never communicated so i'm not i'm not sure these you know four mysterious individuals exist i don't know i think that is a manufactured you know sort of after the fact pretext but in any case on saturday morning um the the anniversary of the kent state massacre um state police showed up um a lot of them all at once. And there was, you know, the local police set up a perimeter around the encampment. And again, so it had been raining all night. It was soaking wet. Like I showed up Saturday morning to take some wet blankets home to wash them because things day before. It was very calm. And so I thought, well, I'll wash their wet blankets and socks and bring them back. And then we can, you know,

they can regroup and move forward. And while I was at home washing wet socks, I heard that the raid was starting. And again, so, you know, because it had been raining and it was a pretty small protest to begin with, people are doing their finals. There were maybe a few dozen people there, like a few dozen at most. But once the riot cops showed up, people start pouring out of the libraries. Hundreds and hundreds of students come to see what all the noise is about, right? They come to see what the disturbance is about. The university used the emergency alert system that texts students. It sends texts and emails for emergencies, you know, things like a fire or a tornado or a mass shooting,

right? A lot of these students have recent memory of a very serious shooting here that they got these texts for. These texts are for real emergencies, but they used the emergency alert system to tell students to avoid the area. So of course they poured into the area to see what was happening. And so they set up a perimeter around the camp so the people inside could not get out and the people who came to see what was happening could not get in. And a line of riot cops marched into the camp and just bludgeoned and pepper sprayed at like point blank range, pepper spraying them directly into their mouth, nose, and eyes. I think one student was wearing goggles and they removed her goggles so they could spray her directly in the eyes while she was already prone on the ground. One woman was having a seizure, but they didn't stop arresting

her to let her seize in peace. And they were just sort of dragging her limp body away. It was very nasty. And then once they made their, I believe, 26 arrests, they turned on the crowd that had gathered to watch. And they started pushing this massive crowd of students out into the street. They didn't close the street. Like there was a dean on scene who was watching this happen and sort of making frantic phone calls to try and close the street that the students were being pushed into because it was an open street with traffic. And then the frat boys showed up, right? So, you know, students are coming out to see, some of them are joining the protest, some of them are just curious. And all of a sudden now there's an entire hillside covered

in frat boys. Some of them have Israeli flags, some of them have American flags. And there were times as the, you know, the police were, you know, I'm very short, I'm about five feet tall. So there were times as the police were pushing towards us, I can't actually see that because the person in front of me is taller than me. And I would know the police were starting to advance again because the frat boys would cheer. They would cheering and you know at one point i'm standing next to this older professor you know i don't want to call anybody elderly right but this was a sort of a grandmotherly professor um who'd been pepper sprayed and was you know shoulder to shoulder with students and she looked over at those frat boys and she said i don't know how

we're supposed to teach them yeah like it i mean i i expect a cop to be a cop i've been pushed around by a cop before i'll survive but i've never seen a cheering section for police violence before and like i have a few times and it's one of the most disturbing feelings i've ever had is when you have police attacking people and there's a group of like 20 to 50 to 100 people on the other side of the police cheering them on it's it's it's one of the most like like death worshiping moments in my life that i've like felt like it's it's very ugly it's very ugly yeah it reminds me of how like in it's not the same but like uh like in the napoleonic era uh for certain battles it became a thing to go and spectate and people would sit on hills and watch the like formations move

and literally have a picnic right and have their servants in israel like they do in the west yeah yeah they did it in turkey in the battle of kabbani too like people they called it media hill uh until the turkish police take us the bbc guys who were there do you know how do you know uh around numbers for arrests or anything like that i believe there were 26 arrests the majority of them students one was a professor um one was a reporter but a lot of students and grad students. And again, like, I think it's important to talk about this idea of the outside agitator, right? Because I don't want to get bombed down and like, oh, you know, a third of the arrests were not affiliated with the university. That doesn't mean anything, right? Like Charlottesville

is a college town. Charlottesville is UVA. UVA is Charlottesville. It is the largest employer in the region. It is sort of the iconic focal point of the region. It's a public school. People attend sporting events there. They attend concerts. Our largest local concert venue is a UVA property. I did attend UVA and I sometimes speak at classes at UVA. So I have some sort of tangential affiliation with the university, but I don't have to justify my presence there right that i mean that's like saying you can't protest elbit or boeing unless you purchase bomb systems or work there right right yeah it's ridiculous what this enormous institution does with its billions of my tax dollars actually is my business it is my business and if you're going to beat teenagers in my backyard that is

my business right yeah and like this is yeah the university is part of the community they spend their entire like 364 days a year that that is their messaging and then as soon as the community shows up for the university they change that let's maybe have like a brief discussion about some of this i think one thing i was definitely hearing from from you molly is like like the presence of tents is seen as like a massive like sign of like escalation like this this is this is there for some reason that's where they decided to draw the line it's like when tents are going up and that's what needs to be cracked down on which makes no sense because like i said they've been sleeping there for three days sure i'm not wanting to be very symbolic yeah it's it's very symbolic like i think they'd been sleeping there for three days sure i'm not wanting to be very

symbolic yeah it's it's very symbolic like i think especially if you look at like the images from the columbia quad like it's a very symbolic thing of like tense is like we are we are like staking territory like literally putting down stakes yeah i think like that that is has been a massive thing um i think it's interesting the universities that have and haven't had barricades set up like there was there was no barricades at emory there was no really attempt to put barricades up and you have like you know pretty pretty big barricades in portland of course and then like humboldt being really the one that was like no like you can like hold down a space for like a while if you have like lots of barricades we see

that we see that uh in uh la and yeah i know the difference between the barricades going up and the barricades not and how that that does kind of slow that does slow a police raid that does slow some police response and i think one of the one of the one of the dynamics we have there is like at least here at emory right we had the first day people faced you know a pretty sizable amount of police violence you know there was like 20 28 arrests a lot of people were assaulted by police and for many people this this was their first protest a lot a lot of these people were too young to participate in 2020 which is kind of you know odd um looking back on it but yeah a lot of these people were quite young and this is their first

experience of like police brutality in person and like what a what a first protest though i mean like i'm trying to think back to like you know usually your first protest doesn't end like this sorry my dogs are going crazy right now but i you know i was i was thinking about this i was it's just i think it's a radicalizing and traumatizing first protest experience for a lot of young people. I was talking to a young student, I'm not going to give too much information about her, but she was quite young, right? It was, you know, one of her first protest experiences. And she said when the cop approached her with something in his hand, she didn't know what it was. And she couldn't understand what he was doing or what he wanted from her.

And it wasn't until he raised the object above his head that she had this realization that he can hit me. Not only can he hit me, but he is going to hit me. To have that realization in real time that you are not safe in your body, that the state will carry out violence against you, to not have known that before and to find it out as it is happening, I think is, is truly horrifying. Well, yeah. And so we have all these people who've experienced it now for the first time. And when they, you know, return to, to the campus the next day, they don't want to go through that traumatic event again. Like they, they don't want to. And, and so after we,

we, we saw this in a few cities, but we saw this even in Columbia, but like after the, the first police response, how people behave afterwards on campus can be quite different because they really don't want that. And,

and now admin is able to kind of use the threat of police. It's a very effective deterrent to be like, Hey, if you keep things kind of chill, no tense, nothing crazy, but if you just hang out on the quad and that's it, like that's fine. But if you keep things kind of chill, no tense, nothing crazy, but if you just hang out on the quad, that's it. Like, that's fine. But if you do anything else, we're going to call in those

guys again, and they're going to fuck you up even worse. And like, that is very effective in scaring people away from doing anything. And I think a big thing to navigate here is like, how can you get students to feel like empowered once again to like actually be able to do stuff there was this there's there was this one moment at at emory where some like some other like like more like you know more militant i don't know their exact affiliation to the university i don't care but some more some more like militantly more anarchist people because it's atlanta we're like kind of like like shaming some of the students for not like doing more stuff like they got on the microphone and were like shaming to be like hey this this isn't a protest you're just

you're just hanging out and like i i get it but also like what is that going to accomplish i think i think shaming people for being scared of police is not effective you need to you need to help them to feel empowered and that that's a very different thing to navigate. And you can't expect their first protest action to be all out militant, nor should you want it to be. I think one of the things to remember is that what does success look like? Most of these university encampments aren't going to win divestment, right? They all have really similar demands and they include divestment of university funds. And most of them aren't going to get that. But I think you can still envision success as, you know, these are young people. They are learning to organize together. They're learning to create that space together. They are coming together to talk about

this issue. And I think that can be success. I don't think you have to bleed to have succeeded. No, totally. Absolutely. I think just this being a learning experience for people. And now you have a lot of both professors and students whose view of police will forever be different, which, you know, in the long run, it's probably, I would view that as a, it's like a quote unquote good thing, even though it is, you know, it's short-term trauma and possibly long-term trauma, but like you have a much more accurate view of how the world works now especially for a lot of these like ivy league kids who've never never thought of police as a threat before police was always like a helper right a lot of these are like you know good kids

quote exactly yeah right and and and learning that like you there doesn't need to be provocation to entice a police response that is yeah that is not a that's not a real dynamic i mean especially at uva right like this wasn't one of those encampments where there had been prior clashes or real escalation or any sort of hardening of barricades no they were they were lying in their tents when the cops showed up i mean right the lesson is that nothing you can do is acceptable so you might as well do what you want yeah and like keep your eyes the other thing i wanted to mention was like victory looks like a number of different things in these protests but like you should focus on whatever that is and like something i saw among faculty colleagues

sometimes like was just like should we get arrested like sure um should should we choose to get arrested like and like no no you should not choose to get arrested? No, you should not choose to get arrested. Always avoid it if you can. Yeah, avoid it. It is not an end in and of itself. It's not a good strategic goal to get arrested on purpose. Yeah. I mean, this isn't DC where you get a ticket and they let you go home.

Yeah, no, this will fuck up as well. I mean, look, you're a tenured faculty. It will fuck up your life a lot less than people in other social and economic circumstances, right? But even in the most privileged possible circumstance, like, it fucking sucks. Yeah, you might be denied access to your medication. You might be confined in a cell with people who do not identify with the same gender as you, right? The cops are going to be fucking mean to you. That's what they do.

They do violence to protect capital. That's why we have cops. A lot of people are getting permanent nerve damage from being left in flexi cuffs. Like even if your charges get dropped, like you could suffer forever from this. Yeah, and there's, you have no, you know, it doesn't matter how good your dad's lawyer is or whatever, they're the cops.

They're going to get away with it. But yeah, like when I think about the young people, I was talking to people and like, when I think about 2020, when I was talking to young people, I'm older, I'm 37 like i think about my own like uh you know growing up as a little kid like there was the like uh the the anti-sweatshop movement which morphed into the g8 movement uh which morphed into like zapatista

solidarity which morphed into the free palestine movement the movement against the british national party and we got to like step up until we were fighting nazis right because folks young people who are protesting now who didn't participate in 2020 didn't get like this was just like a baptism of fire like the people in 2020 got to go out in 2016 for donald trump right in 2017 and wear the little pink hats and and walk around in the pink hats you know and they got introduced to the cops and the fact that they are just going to fuck you up because they want to slowly but these people didn't and i don't think we should blame them for being like none of us are to be clear but like folks i've seen it too much on the internet like don't do that shit uh like teach people to be stronger than the state

don't shame them for not already being there that's something that happened like i literally watched this like happen at at the chicago encampment was people like getting ready to have to fight off like these rap bros and you know like that experience and you know and this is something i think is interesting about these protests too was like from ucla like ucla was like a pretty explicit attempt to try to use these right-wing paramilitary people to knock out an encampment. And they couldn't do it. They hurt a lot of people. 200 people, I think, went to the hospital

or at least were treated by medics after it. They hurt a lot of people. It was really scary. But they couldn't break the barricades. And that happened at UChicago, too. It was like they couldn't... In UChicago, they're on... they couldn't break the barricades and that happened at UChicago too. It was like, they couldn't like it was in the UChicago. Like those, those like they're on,

but at nine o'clock in the morning on the day of that encampment, there were no fucking barricades. It was just a bunch of tents on a lawn. Right. And in like three hours, they set up a thing that, you know, still,

I mean, they weren't still weren't really barricades, but like, you got to watch these kids and, you know, the people who were there like you know like realize that a group of them can stand and fight and hold these people and they and they did it they fucking stood there they stood their ground they held them they fought and at the end of the

day the fucking trap rose ran away and it wasn't really until and then this i think it's been a really interesting element of this is that like these these paramilitary groups have been just staggeringly unable to actually like beat a bunch of protesters like in in you know in in in in the sort of military sense of like who holds the field at the end of the fight they can't do it and only the cops have been able to and the other thing about that is like you had you have a a more legitimate way to fight off these like non-state actors yeah yeah right whenever you they're because of the nature of the state's monopoly on legitimate violence fighting off

the police can be a lot more tricky than fighting off these like frat boy groups um yeah like that that is that is a very different dynamic that was a process that like unfolded there was like a lot of people who were like yeah we don't want to escalate and it was like well okay so like several hundred people are going to show up we all saw what happened to ucla like it has to right like you know i mean like like you can't just keep doing your sort of like we're not going to engage with counter protesters thing when there's 200 of these people who are going to try to beat the shit out of you. Right. I mean, there's choosing not to engage with someone who just wants attention.

And then there is self-defense. I think those are two different things. Yeah, definitely. Like, you don't, you know, you don't give someone their viral video that they can put on YouTube or whatever. But if someone's going to beat you with a stick. Yeah. And it's like, like, I'm not saying either of them are, like, right or wrong. Someone's going to beat you with a stick.

Yeah. And it's like, like I'm not saying either of them are like right or wrong. It's just that like, yeah, like you can't, you, you can't use the same tactics and being forced to defend yourself, like had this real sort of like impact on people.

And like, I don't know. It was like, like I got to see people just like understanding what you can do with the physical mass of a group of people. And I don't know. It was, it was like, it know, it was a really emotional experience for a lot of the people there, and it was really cool.

So yeah, I think it would be wrong just to criticize these students specifically for dropping the ball in various ways. I think the thing that we can completely criticize and point to as a massive failure is everyone who has not been participating, how they have been viewing what's going on. And this will be the last thing I talk about, especially even just on the media side and just general discussion. There's been such a singular focus on the campus encampment itself of like why the protests are happening in the first place what's going on in gaza and just instead just focusing on like yeah the actual the actual thing on campus but net but but not caring about why these protests are even happening willfully

ignoring why it's happening framing all literally all of the campus protests as inherently anti-Semitic, as if that is the main driver, and ignoring the many instances where people who have expressed anti-Semitic things have been removed and pushed out of campus, which has happened in many places. But it's just so lazy to totally reject the reasoning for why these protests are happening. The framing of trespassing as a form of violence, calling these encampments violent, as if being on campus is violent. And meanwhile, never once mentioning the actual violence on display, which is almost solely at the hands of police and these other far-right groups.

Friend of the pod, Cody Johnston had a had a very very good tweet quote these people who i despise and never agree with should protest the way i prefer unquote right don't don't debate tactics with people who don't share your goals yeah yeah and again like these people who who disagree who have like an ideological opposition to every single thing these protesters stand for bush admin people doing this like guys who were in the actual bush administration just a wild fucking mental gymnastics to be like it is illegal for you to have your tents here that is trespassed therefore we can violently displace you also i stand with israel like exactly what the fuck is happening in your head to remind people of too is you know you know they're saying like well technically they broke the rules okay well technically if

you're going 20 over the speed limit the cop can book you into jail would it be a bizarre escalation of force for him to do that do they normally do it no they don't right so just because just because the police can intervene in certain ways doesn't mean it makes sense for them to do so technically you're not supposed to bomb 40 000 civilians right so i think that's that's really the weapons are illegal under the under under the lahey act and it doesn't matter for shit like because the rules you know the police are only only powerful to punish you the the fact that there's more moral outrage across the country for students protesting a genocide than there is for 40 000 civilians being murdered is just looking at a deep hole at the at the conscience of this country yeah although the thing i will

say about that is if you look at the polling numbers on this like yeah there's like like 47 ish percent support for like banning like protesters on campus however when you actually look at the numbers like especially especially if you look at the numbers of my colleges we look at the numbers of people in general who now like who now support like ceasing like ceasing sending arms to israel it's been interesting so like they have been working totally it's just that the people who control this country is a different demographic than all the young people who are protesting on campus right which is what we're looking at and i think it's also important to reminder that almost every single campus protest historically has been completely vindicated over time because they're obviously

correct and if you deny that who are you fool Anyway, I think this episode's already pretty long, but I was happy to hear a collection of our four different accounts from four different places. Oh, I do just want to say really quick before we wrap this up, to everyone who says these students are too young to know what they are protesting, they couldn't possibly understand

what they are talking about. Fred Hampton was 21. People forget how young MLK was when he started doing stuff and they're young enough for fucking israel to kill them right absolutely there are no universities in gaza anymore like it's just it's ridiculous they're also young enough to join the idf or any other military and go and kill people it's a ridiculous argument like you don't have to go out there and go out there and talk to these students they know exactly what they're protesting they know exactly what they're talking about a lot of them are

actually fairly well versed on the the minutiae of what divestment means and what that looks like and what the fiduciary duties are like they're not stupid they know what they're talking about all these dumb college educated youngsters all these idiots at columbia anyway this fucking nerds you chicago itago. It's like... We don't talk about Palestine enough in classes. Like I teach a lot of world history classes. It's certainly not on the little boxes you have to tick. And some people came to the encampments to learn.

And that's fucking great too. And some people taught people. And that's great too. Like it's a place where a lot of learning happened and people became more informed over time. Absolutely. You don't need to have a phd or masters in an area to understand that bombing children is bad and want it to stop like we had a

world war about this like genocides are bad so this will be a topic we continue to cover on the show uh over the course of summer we'll be having i'm planning a deep dive about what happened at emory margaret has an upcoming episode about how people who were engaged in campus protests can stay involved over the summer. And of course, we will continue to talk about

what's been happening in Gaza. Thanks for listening. Solidarity to everyone who's out there. Flush your eyes with water. Flush your eyes with water. Yeah, no milk.

We finally learned. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together.

You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real inspiring stories from the people, you know, follow and admire join me every week for post run high. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to post run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars,

from actors and artists to musicians and creators sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything

from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast,

and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people.

I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hello and welcome back to It Could Happen Here. I am once again your occasional host, Molly Conger. Joining me today for a very special episode are my friends and yours, Shireen and Mia. So Shireen, Mia, we're here today to honor and reflect upon a very somber and important holiday.

It is May 15th as we are recording this today, and today is actually recognized the world over as Nakba Day, a day to remember the first Nakba, the founding of the State of Israel and the forced displacement of the Palestinian people. And this year, as a new Nakba continues, as the genocide is being committed against the Palestinian people, it's more important than ever to remember that these atrocities did not start last year. But that isn't the Memorial Day I invited you here to talk about.

Here in the United States, the holiday officially on the books today is not Nakba Day. It is National Peace Officers Memorial Day. In 1962, President Kennedy signed a proclamation establishing May 15th as National Peace Officers Memorial Day and the week it falls within as National Police Week. It's an entire week to honor and commemorate the brave boys in blue who've lost their lives in the line of duty. And I can't think of a better way to spend this afternoon with both of you than to talk about how this holiday is celebrated and to share some of these incredible stories of courage and sacrifice. So one of the most frequently cited sources during police week and year round when you're talking about the mortality rate of police

officers is a website called the Officer Down Memorial page. Highly encourage you to visit it, make an account, browse the pages. The website is run by a non-profit organization by the same name and has had tax exempt status since 2000. According to their IRS Form 990s, the tax form that tax-exempt nonprofits have to file annually, they're pulling in around $750,000 a year, a third of which goes directly toward executive compensation. And why shouldn't someone make a quarter of a million dollars annually to do such important work? Public records show the website's founder, Chris Cosgriff, is a police officer himself in Fairfax County, Virginia. Available salary data from 2018 shows him making a policeman salary of about $69,000.

According to his LinkedIn page, Cosgriff still works for the Fairfax County Police Department as a recruiting supervisor. The officer down Memorial Page tax documents show he paid himself a paltry $24,500 in 2023 as the executive director of the non-profit, though they list key employee compensation at an expense of $250,000 that year, with no indication of who is being paid that remaining $225,000 or what that person's position is. When the organization received a $30,000 PPP loan in 2020, they indicated on their loan documents that there were five employees at the organization. I'm not an accountant, so I won't hazard any kind of guesses here, but I am having trouble making sense of that 2020 Form 990, which lists five company officers by

name, and only Cosgriff is drawing a salary. He paid himself $50,000 that year. So that same document from 2020 shows that the organization had expenses of $200,000 for compensation of officers, but it doesn't say where that remaining $150,000 went. Hmm. I wonder. Maybe they have a secret employee

that they're not counting. His son, his wife, his other wife. The website indicates that donations to the nonprofit go towards maintaining the website, making posts on their Facebook, maintaining the site's companion mobile app, and historic research, claiming that their staff, again, those five people, have uncovered records of over 2,000 fallen officers that otherwise would have been forgotten to time. The site has memorial pages for officers who died as far back as 1776.

So it's as old as America. Wow. That's not real. It's not. We didn't actually really have what is considered modern policing back then, so they're really kind of stretching definitions are they including like uh people that went after slaves like you know what i mean yeah tax collectors like yes all of you stretching yes a lot i don't know if you want to go that

far back but i mean do you donations also help fund their No Parole for Cop Killers program, which tracks the cases of the people they call convicted cop killers and flood local parole boards with letters advocating against release. The donation page claims to have sent out over 10,000 such letters in the last six months alone. They also have a merch page where you can buy a lovely trio of thin blue line Christmas ornaments in a gift box for the low reasonable price of sixty dollars jesus christ out of all the things i thought you were going to say i did not think you were going to say christmas ornaments

oh yeah beautiful beautiful memorial ornaments you can get them customized wow the site lists information about american law enforcement officers prison employees and police dogs who have lost their lives in the line of duty. Kind of. See, while the website is the source cited in every local news puff piece when May 15th rolls around every year, putting their version of the numbers in the headlines, the organization's stats don't match those in the FBI's annual report on the subject, an official annual report called the Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted, or LEOCA, report. The data used by the FBI is collected as part of the Uniform Crime Reporting System. If you take just a minute to look at the officer down Memorial Page's annual data, the reason for this mismatch is immediately clear.

They're padding their numbers by including deaths by natural causes, on-duty deaths due to accidents or incidents unrelated to the officer's duties, and they're including law enforcement adjacent personnel that the FBI does not consider to be law enforcement deaths in their reporting. The FBI's Leoka report has really clear criteria for inclusion. To be considered a law enforcement line of duty death, the deceased must have been a duly sworn law enforcement officer acting in their official capacity at the time of their death. So they have to be a real cop, somebody who carries a badge and a gun and has full arrest powers. And the FBI specifically excludes death by natural causes like heart attacks or COVID, deaths that occurred on duty, but quote, attributed to their own personal situation, such as domestic violence,

their own personal situation, such as domestic violence, neighbor conflict, etc. Which, like, they have to list that by name. If you died doing a domestic violence in uniform, that doesn't count. How often is that happening? Yeah, I hope people who killed him are getting parole. Like, good God. Right, like if your wife kills you while you're beating her, but you're on the clock, the FBI says no dice.

They also specifically note that they do not include corrections officers, Bureau of Prisons officers, bailiffs, judges, probation and parole officers, or U.S. attorneys and assistant U.S. attorneys. So just cops, not the people who sort of work in the industry around them, but are not cops. Not people that basically are cops, like actual cops. You know what I mean? Actual cops. Yeah. And the FBI is really aware, clearly, that the numbers on the ODMP get cited more often than their own because the FBI's Crime Data Explorer page offers this weaselly little caveat. Quote, the FBI's LEOCA program is one of a number of entities that report information concerning line of duty deaths and or assaults of law enforcement officers in the United States. Each organization has its own purpose and may use different methods to collect and report information or focus on somewhat

different aspects of these important topics. Therefore, care should be taken not to compare Leoka data to data provided by other entities, such as the officer down memorial page. So they're specifically saying, we know these numbers don't match. We know these numbers don't match because a few years ago, we gave them a few hundred thousand dollars in grant money to make numbers that are fake. Wow. Incredible. Wow. So the ODMP is padding out their numbers with off-duty accidents, prison guards, parking lot heart attacks, and COVID deaths. The database includes nearly 900 COVID deaths, causing massive statistical anomalies in their 2020, 2021, and 2022 data. They include officers who died of

natural causes years after sustaining minor on-the-job injuries, which, you know, if you're involved in a civil lawsuit after the death of a loved one, you could maybe argue that this was sort of a, you know, a downhill kind of thing. If you're trying to get a settlement from the state, maybe you could say that the injury sustained contributed to the death. But you can't tell me that slipping in the parking lot and then dying six years later is an experience unique to the dangers of law enforcement. A district attorney who flipped his car after hitting a log that fell off a truck on the highway on a Friday night is not a law enforcement line of duty death because that not only was that not a cop, it was a single car accident. And when DeSoto County search and rescue director Deputy William Nichols went on a beach vacation and took his family into the ocean despite red flag riptide hazard condition warnings, he lost his life trying to rescue his son. And that's very sad. But drowning on vacation

is not a line of duty death. When Indiana Department of Natural Resources Sergeant Ed Bowman and his friend drowned in the middle of a frozen lake while ice fishing, that wasn't a line of duty death. It's just a sad accident while dudes were hanging out these people they really they really should have a bad time around water this is a consistent don't float there is a shocking number of drowning deaths where the cop just like the second his feet got wet he just disappeared don't get them wet it's not a gremlin situation we have to include swimming in the cop test right i don't know i mean these people barely know how to point their guns like expecting them to be able to swim is the standards are that that's a bit too high of a standard for

them well to be fair most of these deaths are single car accidents uh one guy died after t-boning a school bus. The children were fine. The children were fine. Oh, thank God. Okay. Thank God. And so rather than a detailed statistical analysis relying on uniformly reported official data, the ODMP relies on user-submitted content. So people are submitting things and then- This is like Wikipedia. Yeah. Wikipedia for bootlickers. No, no thanks. But when National Police Week rolls around,

it's their inflated numbers in every infographic, not the FBI's methodologically consistent data. And if I'm being generous, you know, you could write that off on the ease of access to the data on ODMP. It's very user-friendly. It shows you a little picture and a bio of each officer. It's very easy to use. You can search by year, agency, cause of death, state, or an officer's name.

It's not a wall of small text with little data tables and links to zip files of more data tables. The FBI's report is ugly and it's uncompelling and it's sort of overwhelming to navigate if that's not something you are interested in doing. So don't be too hard on the 22-year-old news anchor scrambling to put something on the screen at 6 o'clock. The Officer Down memorial page makes it a matter of a few easy clicks for your local news anchor to find a handful of local interest stories to run on May 15th. But the people who run the website know exactly what they're doing. And it's an intentional ideological project to perpetuate the myth of the courageous, noble policeman doing America's most dangerous and thankless job, a job that is uniquely and outlandishly perilous, standing apart from any other profession. And that that's not true. That's not true.

And for this, I take you to another government agency's annual reports, the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Oh, I love this report. This is the best one. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has consistently reported, I'm talking, you know, for the last 30 years, consistently since the 90s, a fatal workplace injury rate for police officers of around 14 per 100,000 full-time equivalent employees. You know, it varies year to year,

but it's consistently a little under 14 per 100,000. And of course, yes, that is higher than the national average for all labor categories. So for all workers in the US, the workplace fatality rate is about 3.7 per 100,000. So the cops are dying at a rate of four times higher than the average worker. And of course, it's more dangerous if your job requires driving all day. Most of these cops die in car accidents. Or if your job involves mishandling a firearm every day. Of course, it's more dangerous to do that than it is to do data entry or be a cashier. I mean, obviously, we do not have a high mortality rate for the average desk job. But while it is more

dangerous than being a receptionist, policing doesn't even crack the top 10 for most dangerous professions. Loggers are seven times more likely to die on the job. Roofers are more than four times more likely than a cop to die due to a workplace incident. Being a fisherman is more than three and a half times more dangerous than being a cop. General construction work is more than three times more dangerous than police work. Delivery drivers are more than twice as likely to die at work than a cop. It is more dangerous to be a day laborer on a farm picking fruit or to drive a garbage truck. Being a cop has a similar level of risk of death by workplace incident as being a groundskeeper. So it is about as safe as being the guy that cuts the grass at the park.

Yeah. And I think there's a real issue with labor reporting for the category of farm worker, because whenever you see data that says farm worker, that can either mean someone who's actually a farm worker, or it can mean a guy who sits in an air-conditioned office every day. And even the bureau labor statistics is not very good at actually sifting those out because there's been a sustained effort by like farm owners to to make to make sure this data is like as non-transparent as possible so i am i will say i am fairly confident i cannot say this is nazi fact i am fairly confident that farming is actually significantly more dangerous than the real labor statistics says. So like it is so much more dangerous to like pick your food than it is to be a cop.

only industries where they are incentivized to over report accidents right so the data is i mean even for as skewed as the data may be at the point of entry it's still a lot safer to be a cop than it is to drive a truck and this is with the numbers of them like falling into a puddle right well so i think the the bureau of labor statistics is probably using something closer to the fbi numbers okay which is still i mean you know on the other hand cops are the biggest babies about this in the entire world because they get paid leave if every time you had a boo-boo at work you could just go home for a week you'd do it too yeah but also i mean just like in the media it's like these people never shut up about how dangerous their job is. And it's like your job is more safe than like most of the actual hard jobs people work. Like, please shut up.

Oh, my God. And the one thing that all those jobs have in common, aside from requiring you to be braver, smarter and stronger than a cop. braver, smarter, and stronger than a cop. They don't typically come with platinum-level health care, paid leave for minor boo-boos, state-subsidized life insurance, a pension, a discount at the coffee shop, and a license to kill. Do you know what else has a license to kill? Okay, I was going to say, before we get into really honoring our boys on this special day, I think we should take a quick ad break that is hopefully not an ad for the Washington State Patrol. Okay, and with all that background out of the way, would you care to join me in commemorating some of the officers our nation is honoring this National Police Week?

This is what I came here for. So excited. Now, before we get into the handful I picked out for us today, I want to be really clear for the boys over at the Officer Down Memorial page, because their website specifically prohibits the use of their content for commercial purposes. prohibits the use of their content for commercial purposes. So I will say, I found these names on their website, but I don't trust their methodology enough to take their content at face value, so I wouldn't use it as a source anyway, even if I were allowed to do that. So for each of these vignettes, I pulled original contemporaneous local reporting on the incidents and in some cases, actual court records. So you can't get me. In 2010, St. Joseph, Missouri, police

officer Dan Decry was participating in a training exercise. During a break, he and another officer put down the training weapons they'd been using, which were loaded with something called sim munition. So simulated ammunition. It's not real bullets. It's a plastic non-lethal object that goes in the gun. Before leaving the training facility, which was a recently closed elementary school, to walk to a nearby convenience store to get a soda, the officers put down their training weapons and holstered their duty weapons. So to walk down the street to get to the 7-Eleven, they needed their real guns. So they put their real guns back on in case they encountered any emergency situations. Yeah. In case, you know, in case they saw it, we'll get to a dog.

So they holstered their duty weapons. Upon returning after their break, drinks in hand, Officer Decry asked his colleague, Officer Jason Strong, to shoot him with a simunition round because he wanted to know what it would feel like. Oh, my gosh. That's just a beautiful desire. Just curious. He's just curious, you know? Yeah, who would it be? Having a good day?

Who would it be curious? And so Officer Strong drew his weapon and shot Officer D'Cry in the back. I guess they both forgot that they put their real guns back on and not their training weapon so i don't know if you ever you probably know this but the if it's not a real gun if it has fake bullets in it if it is a training object it has an orange tip i was gonna ask that i was gonna ask it can't look identical to a real gun they're easily

visually distinguishable for an important reason and i guess he didn't look so he pulled it out and shot him in the back and officer decry died later that day wow wow wow wow later reporting on the incident indicates the department um did say they were going to revise some of their policies regarding standard procedure for checking weapons in and out at training exercises so you have to check your weapon in when you get your toy gun, and then you check it back out. They did not do that previously, but they revised those procedures and declined to comment further. The officer who killed Dan Ducry was not charged and remained with the department. Officer Ducry's family received a settlement of $376,000 from the city of St. Joseph.

Again, settlement money does not come from police departments. It comes from the municipality. It comes from just the taxpayers. It does not affect the police's budget to do this. That enrages me. You know, to give credit to that guy, though, actually hitting your cop, hitting their target on the first shot is pretty remarkable that that is a shooting the guy in the back on the first try is a pretty remarkable feat of cop marksmanship so he might have been aiming for his knee though you know that's true we don't know he

was aiming for the back yeah it's just remarkable i just want to know what it would feel like i wonder how close he was too he must have been pretty close yeah i imagine they were sort of at conversational distance that's insane that is just i cannot oh wow wow wow wow our next story of a cop who should not have gotten wet it's not actually even about a cop in 2007 david polling drowned in the ohio river polling who's at the time, had previously been employed as a police officer with the Gallipolis Police Department and at a different time as a sheriff's deputy with the Gallia County Sheriff's Office. So by 32, he's been both a police officer and a sheriff's deputy, but he has neither of those things anymore. In 2007, he was working as a parole officer. In 2007, he was working as a parole officer.

In the reporting from the time, it's not actually clear why he was present, but he was nearby when a police officer stopped a pedestrian on the sidewalk and frisked him because he suspected this man may have just come out of a house where he believed drug deals were being conducted. So he's doing a stop and frisk on a guy minding his business. The man was not charged with a drug offense when this was all over. So I guess they didn't find drugs. But during the encounter, the man bolted. And Poling, who again, not a cop, just a guy who's nearby, chased after him. The man jumped into the Ohio River and Poling jumped in after him.

The suspect, Joseph Harris, made it quickly to a small island in the middle of the river but polling immediately after hitting the water sank and disappeared it took hours for divers to recover his body when you said they didn't float that wasn't a joke no he just disappeared like the second he hit the water, he was just gone. I could, that is just comical. I can't believe that's real. Like, did he not, did he know he couldn't swim? Did he know he couldn't float? Like, why are you sucked out to the bottom?

It's, it's so good, too, because it's like, you know, you could attribute this to just purely, like, the first story of a drowning where it's like, like okay the cop clearly went into a situation he shouldn't have been in because he's a cop and doesn't think about oh wait the waves are gonna kill me but like no clearly this river was swimmable the other guy made it the other guy was fine well the other guy was fine until they charged him with manslaughter and he did

four years in jail but wait this is the guy that didn't have wasn't charged with drugs but was charged with manslaughterlaughter kind of with manslaughter because the other guy jumped in wait he for manslaughter for the cop that sunk yeah yeah wow but like some guy who's not even a cop is just chasing you that's kind of on him yeah he was convicted of manslaughter that is i hate that but also can you just imagine just this cop like mario jumping into like a river and just completely just like like the video game sound and he's at the bottom and you do have to wonder how he had worked for two different police agencies and then didn't work for either of any more

by the age of 32. I did a little looking. I couldn't find anything about that, but it's an unusual career trajectory. Yeah. Yeah, it's like he's getting bounced down to lower leagues every time. It's like, how do you that?

You're a cop. How do you screw that up? Right, it would seem that he wasn't a cop anymore because he wasn't allowed to be a cop anymore. Yeah. And now this third one is the one that I had in mind when I first started writing this episode. And it's really just on its surface, kind of the perfect encapsulation of this foolish project, right? It's got a guy getting shot in the crotch. It's got a cop trying to kill a dog. It's got a dirty cop. It's got a cop staying on the force after a string of expensive mishaps. This is just

policing. But when I started looking for primary sources about this incident, actually just kept getting weirder. And now I'm kind of down a new rabbit hole. I've got some requests out for more documents. I'm going to figure this out. Something happened here. But before I tell you about Officer Henry McAleenan Jr., we'll take another quick ad break. All right. I hope you used that ad break time not only to think about products and services, but to reflect on the sacrifice of the parole officer who drowned in the Ohio River. On August 21st, 2000, Miami-Dade police officers Henry McAleenan Jr. and his partner, Itala Elias, responded to a request from a home alarm company to check out what turned out to be a false alarm at a residential home in southwest Miami. Arriving on the scene, they found no sign of a break-in, nothing unusual,

and no one answered the front door. Normally, a cop would probably just leave. They don't really like working. They don't really like doing their jobs. It's hard and it's boring, and they have Candy Crush to play. Molly, it's dangerous. It's dangerous. It was a weekday afternoon in a nice neighborhood in Miami, but the home belonged to a retired Miami police detective. So they took, you know, they did the extra mile. So after determining there was no sign of them breaking out front, no one answered the door, they went around the back of the house and entered the backyard where two Rottweilers, quote, came running at them, according to a South Florida Sun article that week.

running at them, according to a South Florida Sun article that week. McElhinney pulled out his expandable baton and began beating the dogs. They were really just doing their job in their own backyard. Yeah. Yeah, like, that's the normal thing that happens when you walk towards a dog, is it runs towards... You're invading its territory. You shouldn't be there. You gotta figure, a guy who has a home alarm system and two

rottweilers like that is that dog's job yeah yeah yeah i keep thinking about that uh who was it that that picture of of mike bloomberg when he was running in 2020 the word like he just grabs the dog's face oh yeah where it's like there's just something on like a, on a fundamental level, like we co-evolved with this animal. And like, if you like cannot do the basic, this is a dog. And your response is like, I'm going to grab his face.

Or your response is I am going to beat this dog up with a baton. Like you, you have somehow fundamentally failed at like the process of being human. And also like, if the dogs are immediately reacting to your presence in the yard and they were not previously reacting to anything maybe you could assume there was no break-in maybe you could assume the dogs have it covered and you maybe don't break into the yard but our boy henry he's beating these dogs with a stick and i guess maybe

he was struggling so his partner officer el, drew her service weapon and attempted to shoot the dogs as he is beating them. Wow. Now, we talked before about some problems with aiming, right? Cops don't have great marksmanship. When you're talking about a little complicated physical situation, right? They're sort of entangled. The dogs are small. The man is big.

She shot him in the dick so he's beating these dogs she shoots him in the groin it doesn't say what happened to the dogs but it doesn't indicate she fired her service weapon multiple times so maybe she just shot him and then put it up he was airlifted to the hospital to undergo emergency groin surgery, and he did survive. Officer McAleenan continued to serve at the Miami-Dade Police Department for another 16 years, and he was still with the department when he passed away in 2016 at the age of 66. His own obituary does not list a cause of death, only that his wife was at his bedside for 36 days before he passed the first mention of mackleman's passing being a line of duty death is in a national police week local news piece the following year which lists his cause of death as accidental

gunfire a year later in 2018 a police week story indicates that he was, quote, killed by gunfire on the date that he died in 2016. It's not until years later that you start to see claims that his cause of death was due to complications from the 16-year-old wound. So it's not clear where that claim even originated, but he did die 16 years after being shot. And during those intervening 16 years, he was well enough to continue to serve on the force. I mean, do you know if the family went with that lie? Maybe they got money out of it. I don't know.

I guess it's possible. I mean, there was no- What other motive is there other than, I don't know. I see no indication that there was a wrongful death lawsuit after he died. He did file a civil lawsuit in 2004 against the homeowner, retired Miami detective Jesus Caramez, but that was dismissed and he didn't even recover attorney's fees. He didn't get anything out of that. Wait, so he tried to hold up. So he started beating two dogs with a baton and his partner shot him in the balls, tried to hit the dog.

And he tried to sue the guy whose house he broke into. I mean, this is incredible. If the homeowner hadn't been a retired, potentially dirty cop. I found some articles in the 80s alleging that this. So not alleging in the 80s, this officer, Jesus Karamaz, um in the so in the 80s this um officer jesus caramez who is deceased now but was suspended briefly during an investigation into a ring of miami officers who were trafficking cocaine of course i don't know how that turned out well i mean probably went fine like well yeah he didn't get fired because he was still in the

force in 1997 when he shot a guy during a traffic stop wow jesus christ but no his his lawsuit against the homeowner the alarm company and the woman who shot him oh my god did not did not succeed did not succeed i mean at least there's that he he loved being a cop so much getting his or did i say crotch or cop he loved being a cop so much his crotch was shot off and that didn't stop him that didn't stop him i do have a request into the court clerk in miami to see if i can so the the documents are so old that they're not all uploaded on the court website but um i would like to see the original civil complaint because maybe it goes into more detail about sort of the severity of his injuries and the ways in which that he he truly suffered from this maybe that'll give us some more insight into how it

killed him 16 years later so hopefully hopefully the clerk in miami gets back to me with that because i do want to know what happened to the dogs oh yeah that's all i really care about there now the officer who shot macalina in the crotch itala elias had been on the force for about five years at the time of the incident. In that time, she had wrecked her patrol car six times,

injured her hand, slamming it in a car door, and racked up $50,000 in workman's comp and medical expense reimbursement after falling off a bicycle during a training exercise.

Oh my God. As of 2022, Itala Elias is still an officer with the Miami-Dade Police Department, earning $108,000 a year. Wow. That's just, I mean, I wonder how many more car accidents she's been in. If that was her record in five years. Wow, that's just i mean i wonder how many more car accidents she's she's been in if that was her record in five years wow that's uh impressive like i i am trying to think of another job that you could keep after crashing your car six times on the job and shooting someone in the dick yeah john cops well cops cops have the kind of job security that was previously reserved for like workers in state-owned industries in maoist china like no one else has ever had this kind of job

security before and so i will end our stories here because sophie will put one of us in the pit if the episodes keep coming out over an hour long. But there are an unbelievable number of stories of cops getting hurt doing shit they were not supposed to be doing. A cop who died because he didn't know which antibiotics he was allergic to when he went to the hospital because he was messing around with an injured feral cat and got scratched. A prison guard who tripped in the wreck yard and hit his head a shocking number of accidents at the shooting range or during training exercises they just want to know what it felt like they just want to know what it felt like including one very weird one where they were role-playing a scenario and so these were these were cops in the the gaming commission so casino

cops but during a training exercises during a training exercise they were role-playing a scenario where one of the cops was being attacked by an assailant and he was supposed to you know role play it out right they're pretending this is pretend they're in a conference room but he got scared and drew his real gun and really shot and really killed the director of the Mississippi Gaming Commission. Holy shit! Almost every cop death was completely preventable. They're careless and they're reckless and they're doing shit they should not be doing. They're counting normal wear and tear like knee injuries and heart attacks as though these are noble deaths of martyrs.

And it's all part of this ideological project of myth-making around American policing, right? Because you have to believe that this is a uniquely dangerous and frightening job that only the bravest boys can do because they're under so much risk. They have to react the way that they do. They have to react with extreme violence. They have to shoot first and ask questions later because their job is just so dangerous, right?

And I think it's interesting, as we draw to a close, job is just so dangerous, right? And I think it's interesting as we draw to a close to draw a comparison here, right? Because they react with great violence against us because of their fear of imaginary violence that they might face. So the FBI prepares this meticulous report every year with rigorous and mandatory data collection processes. So we have a comprehensive set of data about not just every cop who dies, but every cop who is assaulted on the job. The Leoka report includes on-the-job assaults and injuries. So we have a very clear idea of how much violence and how many accidents cops are exposed to, mostly in the form of single car accidents. But we have the

data. There is no equivalent data for the kinds of violence police perpetrate on others. The FBI only started collecting information for the National Use of Force Database in 2019, and participation in that data collection process remains optional. That's so late. 2019? That was like three years ago. Four or five well i wouldn't know what year it is that was voluntary it's voluntary so police departments do not have to tell anyone they do not have to tell the federal government when they kill someone they don't have to report that so comprehensive data on police killings is something that only exists when newsrooms and non-profits scrape the information together on their own. The Washington Post has a very thorough police shooting database

and non-profit websites like Mapping Police Violence do their best to document each case, but even they admit they aren't capturing every fatal encounter with police. So while the FBI reports literally just a few dozen officers a year fall into the feloniously killed category in the Leoka report, so not the car accident one, so there's a few dozen actual killings of officers a year, we can only hope to know the names of the average of over 1,200 people who are killed each year by a cop. And that does kind of send a message about whose lives matter. So as you celebrate National Police Week this week,

I guess you'll be hearing this on Friday if you listen to it the day it comes out, just take a moment to remember our brave boys like Lonnie Burton, who tripped on a curb outside of the Wayland Baptist University police station and later died of complications. Or brave officers like Trooper Jack Holland, who died because he was allergic to yellow jackets. Or officers like Deputy Sheriff Joseph Baca, who was trying to tackle a suspect to the ground and fell into a bee's nest.

It turns out he was allergic to bees. It's beautiful. I should have asked you both your hometown so I could get you a local boy because one of my favorites is patrolman Billy Toot. Billy Toot. He was a jailer in Richmond who died when two inmates were trying to escape after they obtained

pistols that were smuggled into the jail inside of a baked turkey that just sounds like a cartoon hell yeah that worked for them yeah it was in 1934 i don't think you could put guns inside of a turkey anymore i just have a whole turkey. A security detector or something. But yes, I hope you're all having a safe and healthy police week and that you celebrate that by not encountering any policemen. 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 Until the heat death of the universe. 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 in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. 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 to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking musica, los premios, el chisme,

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