It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 14

Episode Date: December 18, 2021

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.2 Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you,

but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and how they came to be that way. I'm your host, Christopher Wong, and today we're doing part three of our series on neoliberalism. We're going to start today with one of the most famous episodes in the history of neoliberalism, the September 11th, 1973 coup against Salvador Allende. Allende was a democratic socialist of a type that has broadly ceased to exist today, a committed Marxist who believed that a classless society could be created by means of electoral democracy. He embarked on a campaign drastically more radical than any modern socialist politician has done more to dream of, mass nationalizations in an attempt to develop a technical system that would allow the government to democratically plan as much of the economy as humanly possible.

In part, his hand was forced by Chile's workers, who had embarked on their own unsanctioned campaign of takeovers of mines and factories, which Allende disapproved of and now sought to bring under the national planning scheme. To do this, he brought in British cybernetics theorist Stanford Beer, who embarked on an operation called Project Cybersyn to collect and coordinate information between various factories and allow democratic planning at the ground level in a way that would allow instantaneous reaction to crises and immediate changes in production levels and conditions inside the factories themselves to deal with them. bureaucratization of the USSR, and in particular, in the economic sphere, the way its planning systems were essentially unable to react to local changes quickly in a context where plans were only created every five years. Cybersyn would solve these problems by workers' participation at the factory level and constant updated data flows to the planning office. As the project went on,

Beer became progressively more radical. A strike by right-wing truck workers backed by capitalists in the CIA in 1972 threatened to grind the nation to a halt. In response, workers formed enormous coedones industriales, or industrial belts, to help self-organize production and bypass the striking right-wing workers. workers. In coordination with Allende's government and a new Cybersyn control room, they were able to outmaneuver the strike and maintain production and distribution at nearly full capacity by tracking where goods were going and where they needed to go along what routes. Beer rapidly became convinced that, quote, the basic answer of cybernetics to the question of how the system should be organized is that it ought to organize itself. In essence, that cyber sin should be used to eliminate the bureaucracy in the state entirely and allow workers to directly organize production themselves. Now, cyber sin, in theory, is what the neoliberalists claim, at least in public,

to want. It's an anti-bureaucratic system that uses decentralized control over the means of production to combat totalitarianism and ensure that the state respects individual rights and liberties. In fact, as Evangie Monaroz put it, Beer and Hayek knew each other, as Beer noted in his diary. Hayek even complimented him on his vision for the cybernetic factory after Beer presented it at a conference in 1960 in Illinois. So naturally, when the system was actually implemented, at least in part in Chile, the neoliberal position was that every single person involved in the entire economic experiment needed to be killed. Chile was put under economic blockade by the U.S. and multinational corporations with full neoliberal support, an ironic position given Milton Friedman, Hayek, and Ropke's pure and absolute opposition to economic blockades of South Africa or Rhodesia. To its eternal shame, the AFL-CIO's American Institute for Free Labor Development provided training and funds to the

right-wing unions that opposed the leftist government and others across Latin America. In Chile, working directly with the CIA, the AFL-CIO's organizations trained the right-wing truckers whose 1972 strike we've already discussed and whose 1973 strike would pave the way for Pinochet's coup. In many cases, organized labor, especially in the U.S. but also in places like Italy, spent the 70s battling their own left flank in defensive capital. Their reward for their services was capital turning around and gutting them like a fish in the 80s. Allende, too, fought a series of battles with his left flank, disarming the mass workers' assemblies that had formed in 1972 that could have saved him from the coup. The result was the other 9-11, on which day in 1973, the military overthrew Allende in a coup,

and Allende shot himself in the presidential palace. The man who would emerge on the top of the power struggle in the military at the end of the coup was one Augusto Pinochet. Now, Pinochet from the beginning had the end of the coup was one Augusto Pinochet. Now, Pinochet from the beginning had the support of Chile's own domestic neoliberals, of which there were a fairly large number. Upon taking power, he carried out what would become the standard neoliberal program, returning nationalized industries to the capitalists, eliminating price controls, and increasing interest rates. But full-scale neoliberalism didn't come immediately. controls, and increasing interest rates. But full-scale neoliberalism didn't come immediately. Inflation, which Pinochet had nominally in large part taken power to control, continued unabated,

and in 1974 Milton Friedman arrived in Chile to argue for neoliberal shock therapy. But it wasn't until Pinochet's desperation for money drove him to the IMF that he would fully embrace neoliberalism. Most of the world had refused to do business with the new dictatorial regime, with the exception of the US, and oddly enough Mao's China, which poured money into the regime and Pinochet's personal pockets. But that money was insufficient, and the IMF was the only remaining body who would actually lend money to Pinochet without any requirements on improving Chile's, at this point, abysmal human rights record. Much of the full neoliberal turn that hit Chile in 1975 came from demands from the IMF itself, who demanded draconian measures to control inflation. Here, Pinochet was aided by the support

of the neoliberals, whose legitimacy and academic standing allowed them to negotiate and secure favor from the IMF, which they had already begun to infiltrate. At this point, the infamous Chicago Boys, economists trained at the University of Chicago by Milton Friedman, were put in charge of the economy. University of Chicago trained economist Sergio de Castro, known as the Pinochet of the economy, was put in charge of the Ministry of Economics. De Castro privatized an enormous portion of the remaining profitable state industries, eliminated tariffs and implemented free trade policies, deregulated the finance sector, and eliminated any remaining price controls. Chicago boys would go on to do things like privatizing the entire Chilean pension system, with the exception of the military, which is as good an indication of any as to what the regime thought the actual effects of

privatization would be. In 1978, Pinochet declared something called the Seven Modernizations, with, quote, reforms in labor, education, health, regional decentralization, agriculture, and justice policy. The goal of these reforms was to introduce the market into literally every aspect of society. Now, in episode one, I very briefly mentioned the Virginia School as one of the major schools of neoliberalism. The Virginia School are the people behind public choice theory. Their thing is essentially taking the absolutely absurd set of beliefs Chicago School holds about people,

that humans are all-knowing, rational, calculating gods, optimizing their behavior to get the most out of every single interaction to maximize the utility, and then applying it to political science and then literally every other field. If you've ever heard someone say there's no rational reason to vote because if you're a rational, self-interested person, the cost of voting outweighs the benefit because your vote only matters if it's a deciding one, and therefore it's against your interest to vote, that's the Virginia School and their public choice theory bullshit at work. Pinochet's Seven Modernizations was an application of Virginia School doctrine to the entire Chilean state and as much as society as humanly possible with the goal of transforming it into a market. I'm going to read a section

from The Road to Mount Pellion describing Virginia Virginia School Titan James M. Buchanan's work. Quote, ineffectual consequences in the political marketplace were blamed solely on the fallacies of political decision-making. Quote, we can summarize public choice as a theory of government failure. End quote. Buchanan delivered a highly abstract paper titled Limited or Untitled Democracy to the Montpellier Society in Vina del Mar in Chile in 1981, which some constructed as a critique of the host country's mobilization for action history. Buchanan stated that if limited democracy was a polity predisposed to disable a political market that would otherwise promote the most efficient allocation of resources,

the only meaningful task of the government would be to deprive the polity of its ability to do so. Public choice theory thus sought to limit democracy and depoliticize the state in order to enable uncontrained market forces to guide human interaction. Since the Pinochet regime was committed to using its governmental powers in precisely this manner, Buchanan's paper provided theoretical support for the regime, even if it did not openly endorse the authoritarian rule. Buchanan, of course, would spend a bunch of time doing lectures in Chile throughout Pinochet's dictatorship, but he was not that regime's most vociferous neoliberal supporter. That award goes to Frederick Hayek. Here's Hayek when asked about Chile, which he'd been to in 1978 and had blessed with his approval. Quote,

A dictatorship can restrict itself, and a dictatorship which deliberately is restricting itself can be more liberal in its politics than a democratic assembly which has no limits. Chile's 1980 constitution was drafted in part by one of Hayek's friends. Here's Road to Mount Pellion again. The constitution was not only named after Hayek's book The Constitution of Liberty, but also incorporates significant elements of Hayek's thinking. Above all, the Constitution placed a strong emphasis on a neoliberal understanding of freedom. Guzman's version of freedom is intrinsically connected to private property, free enterprise, and individual rights. Individual freedom, in his interpretation, can only evolve in a radical market order. The

Constitution was dedicated to guarantee such an order without constraining any economic activities. In order to protect free market conditions and individual freedoms against totalitarian attacks or democratic interventions, the Constitution stipulated the necessity of a strong central state authority to guarantee the established rule of law and thus, above all else, is a Hayekian constitution, used to state to murder anyone who wants democracy or, God help them, wants to control the production they're forced to serve every day. Chile is neoliberalism's Voltron. By combining the power of all four major schools of neoliberalism, Chicago School of Monetary and Economic Policy, Austrian school constitutional order,

order liberal reliance on the international bureaucracy and legal institutions like the IMF in order to promote a market economy, and Virginia school public choice theory running the state, you get a neoliberal right-wing military dictatorship. Now, most conventional accounts of neoliberalism will move from Chile to Reagan and Thatcher. And next episode, we'll cover the neoliberal counter-revolution in the Anglosphere. But focusing on purely national events gives a skewed perception of how neoliberalism actually spreads. And in order to correct that, we're going to look at Venezuela. I'm going to be drawing heavily here from the work of the legendary Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando Coranil in his book The Magical State,

which I highly recommend as one of the best things ever written about oil and the Venezuelan state. Though, readers be warned, chapter one is an absolute slog that on the one hand is one of the most interesting explanations of what oil rents are I've ever encountered, but also features Coranil inventing a new tri-electic and then stubbornly refusing to explain what it is or literally anything about how it works. So read The Magical State, skip chapter one. Now, the guiding principles of the new mass capitalist democratic parties and post dictatorship Venezuela since the 1960s had been developing sovereignty by economic independence. The keystone of this project was an attempt to use the power of the state and new oil rents to develop an automotive industry.

The project had sort of stalled out from its origins in the 60s until the rise of the G77-OPEC alliance in 1973 and 1974 that we discussed last episode. In 1975, Venezuela's assembly passed a law that granted the president special powers to speed up the developments of the auto industry in Venezuela. Coraniel described it thus, The central goal was to have 90% of the vehicle's value, including the drivetrain, produced locally by 1985. Major components would be produced by enterprises having at least 51% of their capital from local private sources. Existing foreign companies would have to become mixed or national firms in accord with impact regulations if they wanted to benefit from the common market. Now, this plan is what's called industrial import substitution. Developing countries would attempt to develop industries, in this case auto manufacturers, inside of a country to produce

cars for internal consumption instead of importing them from other countries. The other key of this plan is the Andean Pact, an association of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Chile that was collaborating to develop a regional industrial economy that would use local resources to build a local industrial economy, producing industrial goods made entirely inside of the countries themselves from their resources. Now, Venezuela joins the pact in 1973, and Pinochet notably leaves in 1977. The key sticking point in this joint-end day and pact Venezuelan attempt to build an auto industry was that Venezuela needed technology held by multinational corporations in order to actually produce the vehicles. Multinational car companies were willing to go ahead with the project to build cars in Venezuela in the short term because they were hurting from the oil shock and thus were willing to help national plants develop cars as long as they could use the parts to build their own cars with parts sourced from around the world.

And this is where the neoliberal defense of intellectual property rights becomes extremely important because the companies who held the patents for the drivetrains essentially had a technological stranglehold over car development. Now, Venezuela conducted an extensive bidding process for companies to make cars in Venezuela, but the car companies essentially sabotaged it by submitting designs to failed specs. The result was a kind of political war inside Venezuela, and particularly inside the Venezuelan ruling class, between national development and international profits. The Venezuelan developmentalists needed a breakthrough. What they needed, in essence, was a new international economic order and its corporate regulations, debt relief, and technology transfers. Without them, even a third-world country like Venezuela,

flush with oil money, was incapable of developing an industrial economy. But the new international economic order never came. All the G7 had to do in order to stop it was stall the G77 out until commodity power faded. The G77 had to fundamentally change the structure of the economy in order to allow them to industrialize before the sword of Damocles hanging over all of their heads, the mounting Third World debt, fell and decapitated them. The G7's strategy to outlast the G77 was to pull the various factions of the G77 apart, in particular, pulling the moderate governments away from the radical wing of OPEC and the African socialists. wing of OPEC and the African socialists. They attacked OPEC by using Saudi Arabia to undermine its unity and attempted to peel the so-called less developed countries away from their alliance with OPEC, with the promise of aid to patch up the damage dealt by increased oil prices. Neither worked incredibly well, but when combined with the US essentially shutting the UN down by refusing to let any business get done or refusing to vote for or even vetoing routine matters, the stalling worked.

No new international economic order was forthcoming. Instead, the world would get neoliberalism. Neoliberalism arrived on the world stage in the form of the Volcker Shock. In 1979, Jimmy Carter appointed Paul Volcker as the chairman of the Federal Reserve with a broad mandate to do whatever he wanted to reduce inflation. Volcker had become a disciple of monetarism, a Friedmanite Chicago school belief about the role of the money supply in the economy considered to be absolutely crank, even by modern neoliberals. His solution, which became known as the Volcker Shock, was to increase interest rates to 20%. as the Volcker Shock, was to increase interest rates to 20%. This essentially blew a crater in the American economy and immediately sent it into recession, and we'll get to Volcker and Reagan's efforts to destroy American labor in the next episode, but the damage to the third world was

even worse. The G77 governments had, for decades, taken on adjustable rate loans pegged to something called the LIWR rate. When they took the loans out, interest rates were virtually negative, but when the Volcker shock hit, they skyrocketed. Now, as we talked about last episode, a major part of the crisis of the 70s was enormous piles of oil money, mostly from the Gulf states, floating around that nobody could actually get returns on because of declining manufacturing profit rates. This money wound up flowing back into the American finance system when capital controls were lifted in 1975, and the banks threw the money at loans in the third world. Now, some of that money had been put into industrial development that had yet to pay off.

Some of the money had simply been put directly into dictators' bank accounts. But the banks essentially didn't care for the loans they were making, had little to no chance of being repaid without some kind of structural reform, because in 1978, control of the IMF fell to an arch-neoliberal named Jacques de la Russie. I really don't know if that's how you pronounce his name, but he is evil, so... Neoliberals further took control of the World Bank in 1981. From the IMF and the World Bank, a secession of neoliberals enshrined the key principle of the new neoliberal order. Debtors must always pay back their debts.

Creditors would no longer assume risk for their loans. Instead, loans would be repaid at gunpoint. This was no mere rhetorical slogan. As the G77 imploded as a political body under the weight of hundreds of billions of dollars of debt, now with 20% interest, Thomas Sankara, the socialist president of Burkina Faso, attempted to rally its remains to collectively negotiate debt relief. Sankara was promptly shot by a former ally who accused him of threatening Burkina Faso's relationship with France. With all resistance slaughtered, entire nations were reduced to debt servicing machines as tax

dollars were directed from health, education, and social security programs into the coffers of international banks, which used the newly neoliberal-controlled International Monetary Fund as their enforcer. The anthropologist David Graeber described the consequence of one such IMF austerity program in debt the first 5,000 years. For almost two years, I had lived in the highlands of Madagascar. Shortly before I arrived, there had been an outbreak of malaria. It was a particularly virulent outbreak because malaria had been wiped out in highland Madagascar many years before, so that, after a couple of generations, most people had lost their immunity. The problem was, it took money to maintain those mosquito eradication

programs since there had to be periodic tests to make sure mosquitoes weren't starting to breed again and spraying campaigns if it was discovered that they were. Not a lot of money. But owing to IMF and post-austerity programs, the government had to cut the monitoring program. 10,000 people died. I met young mothers grieving for lost children. One might think it would be hard to make a case that the loss of 10,000 human lives is really justified in order to ensure that Citibank wouldn't have to cut its losses on one irresponsible loan that wasn't particularly important to its balance sheet anyways. Following the old older liberal dream of a legal framework to ensure neoliberal market economies, the new generation of neoliberals used the IMF, World Bank, and other bureaucratic

institutions to act as debt enforcers and impose neoliberal policies from above without anything so petty as democracy interfering with it. In fact, one of the first neoliberal structural adjustments, one of a bewildering new array of terms for IMF-enforced austerity programs, was implemented by the Jamaican socialist Michael Manley in 1977, which in a single year wiped out every gain in education and public health that Manly had spent his first term building up. Similar fates would befall health, education, and justice programs across the world. The death toll remains unknown. Venezuela would fall victim to a similar fate. Without the new international economic order, Venezuela's industrial policy imploded as post-Volkschok government debt skyrocketed.

In the 1980s, the government began to impose IMF structural adjustments. Carlos Andres Perez, the man who led the industrial push in the 1970s, was elected a second time in 1989, running a campaign that I've seen euphemistically described as, quote, described as, quote, against liberalization policy. It was somewhat more extreme than that, featuring lines such as calling the IMF, quote, a bomb that only kills people. But Perez was negotiating with the IMF behind the scenes and imposed even harsher IMF austerity measures upon winning the election, leading to a mass uprising in 1989 that was suppressed in a bath of blood, with hundreds killed by the army. But even more structural adjustments were imposed after Perez was deposed for corruption in 1992, implemented, ironically, by the founder of the movement towards socialism,

Teodoro Petkoff, the head of Venezuela's planning agency in 1996. All of Venezuela's economic crises from the 1980s until now stem from the failures of 1970s industrialization. Without any kind of industrial economy, even the socialists that took power in the 1999 on a national level were reduced to shuffling oil rents around. And with the market economy still in place, the economy simply imploded again when oil prices fell. This is how neoliberalism comes to most countries, not as policies implemented by anything even remotely resembling the will of the people, but enforced by the international economic system itself and the bureaucrats at the IMF, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. It is imposed by enormous states at gunpoint, constituted by the mass looting of the population in order to pay corporate debt masters. Neoliberals have effectively achieved their goal and transcended democratic politics entirely. From their perches in the international bureaucracy, they can dictate policy to even

hostile leaders. But tomorrow, we'll see what happens when they take power domestically as we conclude our neoliberalism series with a man rotting in hell with Paul Volcker. Ronald Reagan. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

I know you. Chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows. As part of My Cultura podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. show about things falling apart and is for one final time this week about why and how things have fallen apart in this specific way um i'm i'm i'm your host christopher and today with me i have garrison hello garrison hello how you doing i'm doing fine we're going to talk about something

that is not fine it's not fine at all is in fact extremely grim and bad which is uh part four of our series of neoliberalism i.e uh all of the bad things happen at once so in in in our last episode we talked about how throughout throughout most of the third world or you know what was at the time known as the third world neoliberalism is not really imposed by people voting for it it's mostly imposed by either external forces via coup or by just the imf going okay just we're running the country now um but this this yeah we're going to shift our focus a bit this episode to the people who were i don't know unfortunate enough uh misguided enough decided that they hated each other enough to actually choose neoliberalism for themselves

now one of the sort of stories we've been tracing here on sort of a very broad arc is the reaction by neoliberals to a kind of compromise that had been worked out between labor and capital particularly the u.s after sort of the open class been worked out between labor and capital, particularly in the U.S., after sort of the open-class warfare from the 1930s. And, you know, there's essentially, there's a kind of deal that's set up informally, which is, so the working class will stop literally constantly going on strike

and showing up to strikes with, like, enormous numbers of guns and shooting at people, and they will, you know, stop trying to overthrow to overthrow the government in exchange the state gives you welfare programs the state will give you a house this is this is particularly after world war ii the american state just you know does this massive homeowner show campaign and you know if you're if you're if you're you know a union worker particularly if you're a white man like this this you know working working working one of these union jobs will put you into the middle class you can take vacations you can have a house.

You can get pensions. Your unions are legal now, which is the thing that, like, you know, hadn't happened before. And this is essentially, you know, this is essentially a kind of insurgency tool. The goal of this is to stop people from, you know, doing the kinds of revolts that were happening in the 1930s. people from you know doing the kinds of revolts that were happening in the 1930s but by the 1970s it's becoming very clear that this sort of detente like can't it can't really be maintained because it's too expensive for sort of the capitalist states to maintain and trying to maintain both well you know the secondary thing here is is you know okay so this deal specifically goes out to white men right now in throughout the 60s and 70, you get a bunch of other people who are not white men attempting to enter the workplace, attempting to get the same bargain.

And they're in a lot of ways significantly more militant, and this causes enormous amounts of intentional strife. You get the US is murdering the Black Panthers. You get similar stuff in the UK. The US is murdering the Black Panthers. You get similar stuff in the UK. And the neoliberals basically are the people who just fully called this detente off and are essentially going to return to full-scale class war. And so now we are finally getting to Reagan and Thatcher.

And one day we will do a full episode about how Ronald Reagan and a weird shadowy cabal of Italian intelligence services rigged the 1980 election by planting fake stories about Jimmy Carter's brother in the press which is have you heard that story Garrison? No but it sounds like

regular media manipulation that happens all the time now yeah yeah it's yeah there's there's a whole through line there because you know a lot of those like same kind of intelligence tactics are going to be used to sell the Iraq War. And there's this whole sort of thing that, you know, there's also the specific Italian angle of, yeah, the Italian states being run by this rogue Masonic lodge led by a fascist. And it's a time. There's a whole lot going on there.

But that's, you know. a fascist and it's it's a time there's a whole lot going on there but that's you know i'm just i'm just thinking like hunter biden laptop and all of that yeah yeah stuff it's like oh so that's just the same playbook yeah it's the same thing except like they were like actual intelligence people running it instead of just sort of like whatever tucker carlson yeah tucker carlson and glenn greenwald trying to get people to like care about this thing that just nobody gives a single shit about yeah you know it was it was but the 80s version of it was significantly more effective and you know the product of this is that reagan sort of reagan finds like the secret sauce for right-wing politics which had kind of you know

in in in some ways nixon had been trying to develop it hadn't quite gotten right which is no yeah yeah yeah he figures out that you know if you want to do neoliberalism if you want to destroy the unions you want to destroy the welfare state the way you do it is basically a combination of sort of racist tax and welfare recipients and you mobilize new religious right and this is extremely effective and it's but i think it's also interesting and worth noting that you know if you go all the way back to episode one like this is this is rope keys like white nationalism like sort of german white nationalism thing is this is explicitly what rope keys sort of strategy for implementing neoliberalism was the problem is he

was german and catholic which meant that like it could never work in the u.s but you know you get reagan suddenly you get the american version of it that is you know white but american and then also works off of sort of off of the sort of mass protestantism in the u.s and this becomes a force that is responsible for like almost every bad thing that exists today in some form or another a lot of them yeah i mean not all of them but you know things go extremely badly and you know so so reagan wins this election and then almost at exactly the same time margaret thatcher wins this wins her election in in UK. And that, the combination of those two things, and also, as we talked about last episode,

the Volcker shock, where Volcker raises the interest rates, raises the Fed interest rates. So Volcker is installed, weirdly, not by Ronald Reagan, but by Jimmy Carter, but is given this sort of mandate to just do whatever, literally do whatever you have to to get inflation under control. The thing that he decides to do is just literally nuke the entire world economy. You know, we talked about the effects of this had on sort of the world in the last episode.

But in the US, this sets off a recession that lasts basically from like 1979 to like 1982. At the height of it, it's like it, I think we finally got more people unemployed during the pandemic, but I'm like 80, 90% sure that between world war two and the pandemic, that was the single largest number of people who've been unemployed in the U S which is, yeah, it was just a pockle,

just a pockle devastation. And you know, there's, there's, there's a whole thing here where the head of the AFL CIO is literally begging Volker, like, please don't do this. Like we can get inflation under control after, you know, after the economyL-CIO is literally begging Volker, like, please don't do this.

Like, we can get inflation under control after the economy recovers. And Volker's just like, no. The consequence of this is that you have an economy in which there's a number of people unemployed and the unions are weak. And both Reagan and Thatcher sort of see this. Now, the unions in the UK are in a significantly better position than the American unions. Reagan is able to sort of smash the American unions very quickly. There's the famous air traffic control strike where a bunch of American air traffic controllers go on strike, technically illegally. And Reagan just has literally every single one of them fired and replaces them with just like

like like people from flight school like people who just just like literally anyone he can just like pull off the street who sort of kind of knows how to land an aircraft like they put people from the military it's it's just like this absolutely wild sort of feat of strike breaking and then you know and when when that falls and that that strike fails you know air traffic controllers well okay funnily so the air traffic controllers had actually backed reagan they were like the only union that backed reagan in the election and they immediately just get you know they get gutted for it which like i have mixed feelings about because like on the one hand like yeah that's that that's what you

get but on the other hand this is basically what destroys this this is the consequence that this is basically what destroys like trade unions in the U.S. because at this at this point everyone realizes that the unions are weak and they just start you know there's you get to the point where employers are deliberately provoking strikes so that they can just fire all the unionized employees and is extremely effective in in britain the fight is a lot more intense um in in 1984 thatcher cuts coal like basically thatcher wants to provoke a fight with with the coal unions and so she basically wants to shut down a whole bunch of coal production and fire like 20 000 miners and the miners go on strike and they go on strike for over a year but thatcher had basically stockpiled enough coal to

save off the worst effects of the strike and then she makes these like incredibly elaborate network of deals with like she's like this whole scab driver like union like basically this whole network of scab drivers like make sure you can move the coal around while the strike's going on there's all of this stuff and you know and and she eventually is able to crush the coal strike and this also just just completely annihilates like the british trade union movement i mean union participation i think dream thatcher's term alone falls by 50 percent and it's gotten way worse since then so so with those two incidents the air traffic control and the coal we did did those just kind of make people be disillusioned or did that just like pave the way for similar tactics to be acceptable for every other union that tried to do

the same thing both and then the other thing was fear because you know so with the air traffic controllers right the air traffic controllers are controllers, these are the most highly skilled people. These are a bunch of people who are incredibly highly skilled, and they're in a logistic industry. In theory, these are the people who have the maximum amount of impact if they were to go on strike. When Reagan shows that you can literally just fire 24 000 people of like the most highly skilled sort of workers in the in the u.s you can fire them and just break the strike and nothing will happen and you know the result is total defeat and none of these people ever work again that basically spreads this massive wave of fear through the union movements because you know

if they can fire those guys they can fire fire anyone. And then the employers just start doing it. And the other thing that's been happening here is that for really since the end of the 40s, the unions have kind of – So we'll talk about this more in an interview that's going to come out probably next week about the history of the American Union movement. that's going to come out probably next week about sort of the history of american union movement but american unions basically so american like the union movement was built by radical organizers and in the 40s and sort of moving on from there all these people get expelled from the labor movement and labor fights this basically incredibly intense battle against its own left flank. And you have,

you know, like for example, in, in there's this thing called the, the, the, the Dodge revolutionary union movement, right.

Which is a bunch of mostly black workers in Detroit who are, you know, they're, they're, they're, they're forming unions and they're going on strike, but they're also fighting against the, the UAW because the UAW is cooperating too closely with the bosses,

et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And there's, there's these, you know, there's, there's basically this battle between, uh, against the the uaw because the uaw is cooperating too closely with the bosses etc etc etc and there's there's these you know there's there's basically that this battle between like not even just basically between the unions ranked and file and the radicals and the sort of business union management and in fighting that battle the unions had basically like massively weakened themselves and then you know and by by by the time you hit the 80s especially in the u.s the unions are just sort of a shell of their former selves and and reagan just sort of like smashes them aside and thatcher the british unions are much stronger

but you know i mean that thatcher's preparing to like like there's she has plans to like the army is going to come in and suppress the strike there's these and especially there's there's just i mean just an absolutely incredible amount of police violence um that's you know i mean this is this is something that had like happened before dream strikes but the the the the the level of intensity of it is just like massively increased and there there's also another thing that's happening basically at the same time with this, which is squeezing the units from the other side, which is there's this – I guess you could call it like an internal class war inside the ruling class between – well, specifically inside of the sort of corporate management between the sort of traditional like manager-CEO class and the sort of like i guess you could call them i don't know the the sort of wall street finance bank types and so so yeah so one of the other things that that happens at the end of you know basically after the war is the sort of class compromise was talking about like this this happens inside of the company too and people

start to see the corporation as like a social institution it has you know it's like well okay so there's this alliance between middle management and uh and the workers and you know it's like okay so we we both work with each other and you know the compromise is that you guys get to have unions but the unions won't sort of disrupt production we'll all work together we'll just make like i don't know we'll make really really good ballpoint pens together and so yeah you have this alliance between sort of middle managements and and these unions and you know and this this is embedded into the structure of the corporation because you know you're not you not only have the unions but you have corporations paying pensions what one of the the things that that reagan does

is that reagan starts you know reagan does this massive series of financial deregulations and the other part of this agreement basically had been that like the the the high level finance class had sort of stayed out of the way of management and so management i kind of like you know the the you you get this like this independent sort of ceo class that that's that's a distinct thing that you know that there are people who come up through the company who were managers and they worked away the top and this is a distinct thing from sort of the finance people who are like yeah they're not supposed to be allowed like you know to touch production yeah yeah but in in the 1980s the finance people start to look at this and go wait hold on why are

we not running things and the finance people have well because they have two things on their side one they have a sort of neoliberal ideology and the second thing they have is so michael milken he figures out that how to do this thing called a leverage buyout option it's it's it's a kind of complicated financial instrument the short and simple explanation of what it is is he figures out a way to basically go into a bunch of debt and he he gets he gets people basically go into a bunch of debt. And he gets people to give him a bunch of money in the form of these bonds. And then he uses it to just buy out entire companies. He buys 51% of the company.

And if you own 51% of the company, now you control it. You have a controlling interest. And so he goes in and he just raises the stock prices of all these companies. he goes in and he just, he just raises the stock prices of all these companies. And now, you know, but now he, he's gone into an enormous amount of debt,

right. In order to buy, in order to buy this company. And so, you know, in order to pay off that debt, he just starts strip money in the company. And so he starts,

you know, anything that can be sold for money that he can put in his pocket to pay off his debt starts getting sold. And, you know, every, every, anything the corporate,

the company is doing, it doesn't immediately make money. It doesn't immediately raise the stock price gets cut. And so and you know every anything the corporate the company is doing it doesn't immediately make money or doesn't immediately raise the stock price gets cut and so you know there there there there are two major things that a company has that don't immediately make money and don't raise the stock price and that is pensions and research and development and this this has you know this this this this becomes known as the the sort of this is the hostile takeover wave this is it gets rebranded as mergers and acquisitions in the 90s but it's this huge sort of wave that's these corporate squeeps corporate america and it turns the corporation from this kind of social body where it's like well everyone's cooperating and companies

sort of have this responsibility to like uh provide for their workers and provide sort of for like the social good into literally the only like the single entire purpose of any company is to raise the stock price. And this. Yeah. Yeah. This is really bad. Yeah. Yeah, and the part about it that's awful is that, okay, so literally all a corporate raider has to do in order to buy out one of these companies is be able to offer a price for the stock that's higher than the stock price of the company. Now, and this means even – so there's a very famous series of battles. They buy out – an enormous number of companies get bought out into strip mines like this.

And, you know, and again, these are very, very profitable companies, right? These are companies with large research and development budgets. These are companies that are making enormous amounts of money. And they're just completely destroyed in order to sort of just like satiate these just like absolute ghoul corporate like vulture raider people this is you know if you remember uh might be too young for this but mitt romney's campaign for so yeah one of the reasons why mitt romney loses is that like he he's one of these guys like he he's he's like he's the big bang capital guy and everyone kind of looks at him and goes like you are the reason we like got into this mess in the first place but the problem is

that these people will have enough money and they have enough power they're able to do this and in order to stop them so either there's a mass there's a massive fight a bunch of people try to take over a good year who you know they make the tires they have the blips and good year ceo is like fanatically opposed to all of this because, you know, he's, he's from the old CEO crop. Who's like,

well, okay, we're here to like make things instead of, you know, increase stock prices. But the problem is the only way he can save off the Raiders is by increasing his stock price. And the only way to increase stock prices is by doing the things the

corporate Raiders are already doing. So he starts slashing pensions. He starts slashing research development budgets. Yeah. And this, and this, this sort of cycles because now you have you know there's there there's it's it's you're not only having pressure from you know like the government that's that's anti-union the corporations themselves are being forced to become more anti-union because they're you know they now have this pressure on them from the top

down from from these sort of these sort of finance ghouls and the finance ghouls in a lot of ways just the perfect neoliberal subjects right because they they only see the world in money they see everything as a market they literally think that like they they are like these like shamans if there's a really good ethnography that i've plugged before on here called liquidated uh Ethnography of Wall Street, where an anthropologist goes onto Wall Street and works there for a while, and then he can talk to a bunch of interviews, does anthropological stuff. And the way they talk about the market,

they literally talk about it as if they're channeling it. It's like something, and they're like a shaman. These are one of the new gods of our world. Yeah, that's – I mean, that's not an uncommon turn of phrase to describe stuff like this.

Yeah, and what I think is interesting about it, though, is that, you know, that conception of the market of, like, every person is just, like, a pure, like, completely socially unbound, like, thing of capital that – oh, you oh well okay if you lose your job here you can just move to another firm right so this makes sense inside of the context of wall street because these people like like these wall street firms they have they have like like 30 turnover a year and so all these people are constantly being fired and shuffled onto the next job fired and shuffled onto the next job and so you know they so they they do they do this very common sort of fallacy thing where they assume that because this is the way that it works for them but this is the way it's going to work for everyone else and they genuinely a lot of these people genuinely believe this they're like well okay so the things we're gonna the things that we're about to do like you

know when we destroy these workers entire lives when we you know when we close their factories when we take their pensions when we literally destroyed like every community and every like thing that's ever just in their lives they're like oh they'll just pick themselves up and go to another place and they'll be fine because you know if you're if you're you know a wall street finance ghoul like yeah that's what happens when you get fired every three months and so these people these people basically take control of of the entire corporate sector. They do this very quickly. They start this in the early 80s. And Milliken, the guy who comes up with the junk bonds leverage buyout scheme, he goes to jail for, I think, securities fraud.

They get him for fraud, but it doesn't matter. A lot of those guys got caught in jail for securities fraud. All of these people are just doing crime like no yeah that's how this is how my dad's standards this is how uh this is how the action park guy got kicked out you got kicked out of wall street is doing all the same stuff and again i want to point this out like the stuff they're doing is so illegal that like even the reagan administration was like no we have to prosecute you like it's like this is the ronald reagan justice department and they're like it was it was so much crime yeah it's it's really bad and and you know the result of this is just basically the total evisceration of the working class just as a movement. And all of the left-wing parties are sort of reshaped by this. And we've been focusing on the US and the UK here, but this is not the only place this happens.

So this also starts happening in socialist states. and the UK here, but this is not the only place this happens. And, you know, so one of the, you know, like this, this happens, this, this also starts happening like in, in socialist states. Um, and we, we talked about this in more detail in our interview with our Nessa Kuzutra about Bosnia.

But, uh, one of the big things that Milosevic is doing in Yugoslavia in, when, when he takes power and he starts like actually being a real political force in 1980s is he starts doing basically all of the same stuff that that that reagan and thatcher are doing he starts he starts implementing shock doctrine he starts privatization he starts um like uh marketization he starts cutting

cutting price controls he starts sort of he starts doing i don't know if decollectivization is quite the right word because yugoslavia's economic system is complicated and weirder than the USSR's. But he does this, and this is one of the things that starts Yugoslavia's death spiral because you have this enormous economic devastation from the increase in oil prices from the oil shock. and oil prices from the oil shock. And then that gets paired with the economic devastation from everyone losing their benefits, people losing their pensions, these state-owned industries going under and getting privatized,

the sort of collective ownership structures imploding. And the product of this is that Milosevic looks at this and is like, okay, how can I stay in power? And his answer is just genocide on that it's just genocide on nationalism and this sort of collapse of sort of state and social life is you know and and the leaders at the top realizing that they can weaponize sort of nationalism is one of the things that leads directly to the moslemy genocide now towards the end of the 80s the whole soviet bloc starts coming apart um yeah you know the berlin wall falls and eventually you know the soviet union dissolves and the people who are trying to end the soviet union the things that they want basically are like

freedom of speech uh the ability to like leave the country and basically like scandinavian style social democracy and it was like reasonable requests coming from the soviet union yeah yeah i knew i mean these these people like you know this is these you know like they they they they wanted to live in scandinavia and instead they got uh hey welcome to the u.s but like even worse yeah that and so yeah that happens if you're not careful yeah yeah it's it's really bad and you know what they get said is just these this enormous wave of privatizations uh the welfare state just vanishes and you know this this causes basically like total societal collapse um like one of my one of my professors and this this happens basically across the whole soviet bloc one of my professors in and this happens basically across the whole Soviet bloc.

One of my professors in college, I think she was from Bulgaria. She told me about how during the 90s, when she was growing up, she and her family would just, the only thing they had to eat was raw millet. Because there's no food. There's literally no food anywhere. The entire economy is collapsed. Nobody has any money. anywhere the entire economy is collapsed nobody has any money and so you know it's like well okay everyone's just eating raw grain because you know that that's the that's that's the only thing you can you can you have to survive and you know it's this it's it's literally so bad that in russia it

causes the single largest life expectancy drop in post-world war europe it's like like it's the life expectancy decreases by like four years because so many people die from this. One of the ways this happens is that the way they're going to deal with the state-owned industry thing is they... I've never been able to figure out if it was like they actually took Murray Rothbard's plan for this, or if they just independently developed Murray Rothbard's plan for dissol or if they just independently developed murray rothbard's plan for for for dissolving state-owned industries which is give like everyone who worked in it a

share of the company and so they do this right and everyone has these shares but these shares are just like paper and you can't eat this paper so a bunch of sort of like organized crime guys and the people who've been you know like like the sort of the people who've been richer or like had been sort of connected party people who were just like i'm just going to cash out start you know just just going through cities and they're they'll you know they'll be like okay we'll give you a pair of jeans like we'll give you some food if you give us their share and you know everyone people just give up their shares and the result of this is that like just every industry in russia immediately falls under the control of just just like absolutely psychotic oligarchs and you know the the west is absolutely cheering us on that this this whole process is

engineered by just a bunch of just like pure neoliberal ghoul like harvard's like weird harvard grads who get sent into russia and who are like ah we're gonna we're gonna run the russian economy and we're gonna like fix everything and they just just absolutely destroy it and you know the west has a thing that they're you know they're they're cheering on this whole process they have this thing about how like ah everyone has to do belt tightening and you're gonna suffer for a bit and it'll all be worth it and meanwhile boris yeltsin is just completely drunk off his ass like shelling the parliament with tanks while like the u.s press is cheering and you know the the sort of like you know the tragedy of this is like it's not really like russia got like more free you know like they they still they still torture and

disappeared anarchists and secret prisons like you know they're still they still just like randomly assassinate political dissidents with through increasingly bizarre like poison bullshit yeah they sure do yeah but you know the the the the the big difference is that a bunch of harvard grads made an indescribable amount of money and now no one has any pensions um and there's there's there's this great like there's this great russian joke from this period that goes it's talking about the communists everything they ever told us about communism was a lie but everything they ever told us about capitalism was absolutely true yeah that seems to be that seems to be roughly accurate yeah it's basically true and you know and and the the the product is sort of neoliberalism coming to russia is that

by by the end of the 90s russia is just literally controlled by the mob and these monstrous oligarchs. And Putin's campaign is like, I'm better than the mob, and I will bring the mob and the oligarchs under control. And this is how Putin takes power. And he has failed to live up to that promise. To be fair, you are significantly less likely to just like randomly be kidnapped and ransomed not me no i have i have written for a website he does not like i cannot that's true that's true if you piss off if you piss off putin yeah if you piss off putin you might be held for ransom but it's like you know the number of random people who don't do

anything political who are just like randomly held for ransom did kind of go down a bit and like that's yeah i mean all right all right you gotta hand it to putin okay i give it yeah well okay the the the thing i'll hand to putin is that he restored the state's monopoly on violence now that's not a good thing it's now the monopoly on violence is but he did it yeah he well he did it and you know this this was the basis of sort of because his power and political support was that and sort of nationalism and this is like you know and and there's always this the sort of liberal line on on on putin he's like oh he's an skgb guy and like oh it's still communism again and it's like no yeah yeah like

no no and and this this brings me back to the single thing that i i need everyone to understand about neoliberalism which is that neoliberalism does not decrease the size of the state like there there are more there were more bureaucrats now in the russian state than there were under the soviet union no and it definitely in a different in order for it to operate it definitely extends drastically that like the hands of the state in terms of like like like military police law enforcement yeah like all those things in order to keep this weird market driven thing alive you need to have a lot of like enforcement on people who don't have but both people who like actually make money and then but mostly people who don't make very Both people who actually make money but mostly on people who don't make very much money. So it increases not only the bureaucratic state

but also the enforcement arm of the state. Yeah, and I think there's two interesting ways this happens. One is that... Well, okay, there's three ways this happens. One is that anytime someone says they're going to do deregulation, deregulation does not mean that they're going to decrease the number of regulations. What it means is that the regulations are bad for this company, and so they're going to add more regulations in a way that is good for this company. And the thing is, this net increases the size of the state, right?

They're not decreasing the number of laws or whatever. No. the size of the state right they're not like they're not like they're not decreasing the number of laws or whatever no they're you know they're they're they're they're writing like incredibly like in absolutely incomprehensible banking legislation that like lets banks charge like interest rates that previously only organized crime could do and then there's there's another aspect of this which is that you know so the the the welfare that remains right you know becomes means tested and you know that means that there's so you have the welfare that remains right you know becomes means tested and you know that means that there's so you have the bureaucracy right that like gives you things and then you have another bureaucracy on top of that that decides whether or not you should be allowed to do the thing and put you know there's this just this like process of abject humiliation that you have

to go to to receive anything yeah from the state and it's like and that sucks and then because that is so awful there's another layer of bureaucracy which is like social workers and stuff whose job it is in large part is to help you bypass the the second layer of bureaucracy so that creates another layer yeah there's there's there's so much yeah it is yeah and but but this is you know this this is one of the things in the liberals do which is okay so you know you you have you have you have your two doctrines, right? You have the thing they actually believe, which is enormous bureaucratic military state. And then you have the thing they claim to believe, which is, oh, the state needs to be smaller. And so whenever, whenever like the things that they do get too bad, they have this other thing they can turn to to go, oh yeah, the reason there's too much bureaucracy is because the state's getting involved too much. Elect us and we will get rid of the bureaucracy. And then you elect them and they make the state bigger and you get, you know, you get this sort of perpetual cycle. I think the reason people get confused by this is that when, when people, when most people think of the state right they think of the state as something

that provides services you know the quintessential thing a state does is build roads roads yeah and you know we you know when we can talk about how like the u.s building roads probably doomed the entire earth from climate change oh yeah no like the the way that we've done roads around cars and the type of things we make roads yeah it's horrible but yeah it's awful yeah but but there's there's another thing about roads which is interesting which is that roads are you know so the original reason why states built roads was so they can move armies around and and this comes back to the the core of what a state is right there is nothing in the actual core definition of a state which is basically it's a hierarchical localized monopoly on violence right there's nothing in that that has that

like says at all the state has to do anything for you right like if if you know if if if 200 guys with guns show up and seize a place right they can create a state they don't have to give you anything the state is the the fundamental core of the state is just a bunch of armed people who can order people around. And, you know, but people, people sort of can, people sort of confuse the two and the, the neoliberalism's entire thing is increasing the, increasing the military, you know, the part of the state that takes things from you at gunpoint and decreasing the part of the state that like gives you things and you know one one of the there's one of the other things that happens in this period is that labor increasingly stops being about making or doing anything and just becomes pure guard labor so you know the the the the the last big neoliberal project that doesn't really

get talked about as a neoliberal project ever is that mass incarceration is a neoliberal project it started under under nixon and under carter but you know so when when reagan takes office the american prison population is about 329,000. When he leaves office, he has basically doubled it to 627,000. We have now more than doubled it again. And it basically, whenever you get a large neoliberal administration,

they double it, right? It basically doubles again during the Clinton administration. And it keeps accelerating. And this is this is this is the other thing that that neoliberalism brings in which is that okay so neoliberalism produces this enormous population of people who don't have any jobs have no opportunities whatsoever are just screwed so what do you do with them and the answer is slavery

and basically everywhere that you stay you see neoliberalism you see massive increases into prison population especially the u.s is is is the by far the worst example of this but this happens you know this happens basically across the world and what what what you see is in place of you know this is this is one of the things that drives politics in in sort of in rural regions in the u.s which is that you have these places that used to sort of have industries used to particularly like coal mining things like that and it gets replaced by prisons because prisons you know having a prison in your sort of rural town is is the only way to sort of ensure that you have a large economic base and so you know like local local city councils are you know incredibly pro

prison because it's like oh well the prison would bring you jobs and you know this means that okay so some of the people a lot of people who are prison guards are just you know fascists but there's also people who are prison guards who normally would just be workers yeah no absolutely yeah who have just been sort of you know there's nothing left right and they're fighting, you know, Mike Davis talks about this, that they're fighting this just incredibly desperate, ferocious struggle to like stay in the places they love and stay with their families and stay with their friends and stay with their communities. just the neoliberal health state and you know they don't like it either but that's you know that's what neoliberalism is right is you no longer have a job the only job available to you is picking up a gun and pointing it at someone who is exactly the same as you except you know they've been thrown into the slavery part of the system instead of the people holding the

guns at the slavery part of the system and one the people holding the guns at the slavery part of the system. And one of the things that happens a lot, the people just really conflate about what neoliberalism is, is they confuse it with libertarianism. Yes. And they're not the same thing. This is a very

confusing problem because well, A, the term neoliberal doesn't get used in the US all that much. No, and when people use it it they usually use it to mean something bad and that's just about it yeah yeah and and you know and and also another part of the problem is that even if you go into like the montpelion society right which is you know this is this is this is the arch neoliberal institution it's just like basically like a think-tank generator. There are libertarians in there. There are anarcho-capitalists in the Montpelierian society.

And the Montpelierian society is fighting this sort of constant internal battle between the people who actually believe the things that they say publicly, like who actually believe you should have a small state, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and the people who understand that all the small state stuff is just like stuff you tell the masses in order to get them to like slash welfare things while you just hire more cops and probably the single biggest distinction between libertarians and and the neoliberals is about border control now if if you listen to neoliberals on twitter or you listen to or you listen to libertarians right uh capitalism is supposed to have open borders it's supposed to be free movement of people etc etc etc um if you

look at literally everything every neoliberal government has ever done it's exactly the opposite it's they don't like that yeah no yeah they hate it and you know the the this whole thing about like oh you need workers to uh uh yeah if you if you let workers from other countries go into into the u.s like oh they'll they'll decrease wages blah blah so the the period in which the u.s like had strong unions and strong wages and stuff was a period where there was like basically no militarization on the mexican border i mean there were some and you know there's there's there's a build-up sort of during the vietnam war and i there there'd sort of been one back around the Mexican Revolution era. But it's nothing.

It's literally nothing like it is today. Today, the U.S. border is this just absolute hellscape. I mean, just like there's this enormous perimeter of the U.S. border where just the Constitution doesn't apply, where the Bill of Rights just doesn't exist. If you're close enough to the border, it's all suspended. It's not entirely suspended, but basically the Border Patrol can just do whatever the fuck they want to you. And this is how the Border Patrol was able to be deployed in Portland, right? Because Portland's technically on the border, and so Border Patrol's increased power is there. And the actual goal is,

so people are always going to move, right? And what the neoliberals figured out was that, you know, these enormous migrant labor populations, the best way you can exploit them is if they're just absolutely terrorized by just this, you know, incredible sort of ferociously hostile, murderous, just border regime run by fascists.

And it works. They kill enormous numbers of people. They do horrible things. They put people in concentration camps. They sterilize people. They sexually assault children. They disappear people. They steal people's babies.

And this is what neoliberalism is. This is what it actually is in practice. This is the policy that is imposed by neoliberal states. And I think I want to end on that. And I want to end on a note about what the quintessential sort of figure of neoliberalism is, because I think, you know, in the neoliberal's mind, right, the quintessential neoliberal figure is like the small entrepreneur who's like, you know, turned their own creativity and like harnessed it it into the ability to create value. They're creating things for the world, and they're enriching themselves. And I think a lot of leftists think of it as like

the quintessential neoliberal is a Chicago School of Economics person. And I want to suggest that the single quintessential neoliberal figure is a riot cop. And specifically,

you know, everyone by now knows what a riot cop looks like, right? I want everyone to go back and even from like 2001, look at what a riot police officer looks like

in 2001 versus what they look like now and then go back to even like the 1960s and look look at look at what those guys look like yeah no looking at footage from the 60s of riot cops is like really depressing because you're like i could take these guys yeah they're they're just wearing t-shirts yeah they're just guys it's it's way more of a fair fight they have t-shirts and sticks we could have t-shirts. Yeah, they're just guys. It's way more of a fair fight. They have t-shirts and sticks. We can have t-shirts and sticks. That is a,

that's like a riot in the 60s, it sounds like. Now, they also, in some cases, will be much more willing just to murder tons of people. Now, there is that exception, but in like a big street brawl,

it is generally a bit of a fair fight. Yeah, I mean, I will say also uh 60s police love love dogs they love like sicking dogs on people which is really bad yeah um but yeah i'm looking at looking at the 2001 riot cops and yeah they are not nearly as robo copy nope i is what they are now during the ch Chilean uprising in 2019, I was talking to someone in Chile and they were talking about how, like, they were describing it as like

the cops were just like, like something out of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Like it was like fighting the shredder. Yeah. Even the LAPD riot cops for the 1992 riots, they're also still just wearing like yeah shirts like they just have they just have colored shirts on one stick uh yeah and now versus now they're wearing their whatever dumb armor they have yeah but you know this is this is you know this this is this is if

you want to trace the path of neoliberalism it's this it's a lot of the army surplus stuff that like the police have gotten a lot of it's really scary a lot of it also sucks like a lot of the army surplus stuff that like the police have gotten. A lot of it's really scary. A lot of it also sucks. Like a lot of those ATVs, every like everyone who's ever had the drive them hates them. But you know, like,

like my, my like absolutely tiny dinky town has a bear cat. That, that shouldn't, that shouldn't be. No, I know where it is too. I know where the bear cat is. It's like, there shouldn't be. No, it shouldn't. I know where it is, too. I know where the bearcat is.

It's like, there shouldn't be a bearcat. Yeah, that doesn't make sense. My town is a tax cutout. Like, it's literally a tax carve-out. Like, that's the only reason it exists, and it has a bearcat. And, like, you know, this is sort of the consequence

of what neoliberalism is. Vicky Oswald talked about this on the Occupy episode. The cops become more like the army, and the army becomes more like the cops. And the result is this sort of pedopticon surveillance state where if you and seven people stand on a sidewalk, 16 cops will show up. Yeah, they've really uh excelled in

making the capitalist realism doomer philosophy be almost like the base philosophy for anyone who takes two seconds to think about the world that they live in yep and you know and this has been really effective in a lot of ways but you know david graber point had pointed this out which is that the problem with doing this is that you know okay so like the the enormous amount of guard labor right the enormous amount of sort of prison guards like that's all unproductive labor right you know you you you make you make some of that money back off the companies make some of that money back off the slave labor right but like but that in general they're the guards aren't adding anything they're not yeah they're not they're not producing any yeah goods um and not really much service either no and and this is you know

this this is a problem right because because neoliberalism is profit driven and so you know what you have is is that the system has a choice between either it functioning or it making it appear as if it's the only system. And it chooses the latter basically every time. That's the thing. It's kind of profit-driven. But honestly, the more that you've been talking, I'm like, no, it's just about eliminating any alternative. So it's not even profit-driven. It's that it's forcing itself to be the only acceptable option.

And that's how it gets so much of its power. Yeah, but the problem with this is that all of that sort of ideological coercion only lasts as long as the police can hold the streets. Which is... Which is, they're good at it. They are, but sometimes they're decent you know one of the story i want to end on is so there's you know there has been in some

with more varying degrees of success there has actually been resistance to neoliberalism and there are places where people have won the people there are places where people have run the imf out those people there's places where people have you know defeated coups where they've like you know where they've where they've they've they've successfully sort of taken over the state there's places where you know i mean there's there's there's places like you know we're going to talk about a couple things in mexico but yeah i mean there's there's the zapatistas who have you know are constantly besieged but have carved out a territory in which they have totally defeated the Mexican – almost totally defeated the Mexican state. where there's an enormous sort of, a bunch of teachers are going on strike, and Oaxaca's

teachers' unions are enormously powerful, incredibly radical, and so one of the things they do is they go into the city, and they have these giant sort of protest tents that they set up, and they have these giant camps, and in 2006, the police attack them.

And so they start attacking, and the teachers fight back. This massive battle erupts um it just in the city and you know this is all the police attack at like three in the morning right but they can't they there's not enough of them they clear teachers out and the teachers hold and they hold and they hold and the the city of oaxaca wakes up to this just enormous battle in the streets between a bunch of just like teachers and the cops. And when Oaxaca wakes up, they are just like, what the fuck is this? And, you know, they join the teachers and they go fight the cops.

And they're largely successful in like they beat them. They drive the police from the city. And, you know, and for several months, the city is basically under the control of these, like, direct democratic councils. And, like, there are these things called, they call them mega marshes, where just a million people will do a march through the streets. And the police just can't stop them because you know there's a million people and yeah that's yeah that's the only way that i've seen it be successful whether it be you know just a sheer sheer mass of people driving cops out of a police station or you know an entire city rallying behind people like in in portland when the fence came it's like you need to have have everybody to show up. Because they can fight

200 twink anarchists pretty easily. Usually. But when you have all of the moms and dads and regular people come up, that is much more of a complicated fight on their end. Because yeah, we'll still have the teenage

frontliners throwing shit at the cops, but when you have like regular people behind them that creates the whole media narrative to be something totally different and it got the feds to back down in Portland when Trump really

wanted that to not happen and I think also the thing that was incredible about Oaxaca is it wasn't just people sort of like standing behind them like really like tens of thousands of people just joined the fight in in a way that you know it like if you know if there's like 50 000 people in a city throwing bricks at you like you you either have to start shooting into the crowd or try to hold them yeah you can't you you can't and even when he's shooting into the crowd yeah they tried it and it didn't work it was a disaster it made. It made it even worse.

The crowds grew larger. And like, you know, one of the things that happens is the revolutionaries try to like, you know, they go to the radio station or like, okay, will you broadcast this? The radio station says no. And so they start seizing radio stations all over the city. Incredibly big. Yeah. And they had these like bonfires at the edge of the city where everyone sort of meets. yeah yeah and they you know and they had they had these they had these like bonfires the edge of the city where everyone sort of meets and like they're they're they're sending they're they're they're

sending radio like messages like over over the radio stations they've taken over from like barricade to barricade and you know eventually the police and like the like the the mexican army shows up and at that point they're able to sort of retake the city and there's a couple of other things happening in mexico at this point that are sort of there's this giant sort of left-wing tide and the way that it gets stopped is that the mexican army basically fully kicks off the drug war and they kill i mean i i i've seen numbers up to like 800,000 people in 10 years. They just, they,

they basically, they basically genocides the indigenous population of, of, of Mexico. And, you know, I think, I think that's, that's,

that's sort of a place to leave it because. Wow. What a, what, what, what, you know, warming,

hopeful notes to end the show on. Yeah. But I mean, I think, I think it is, it is worth, it is, you know,

it's, it's, it's, it's worth thinking about is one. It is possible to end the show on yeah but i mean i think i think it is it is worth it is you know it's it's it's worth thinking about is one it is possible to beat the police two the ruling class will literally bathe the entire country in blood like they they will destroy their own country is different um the way i mean this gets discussed in season one what happened here but like the way the american military works I think they'll be less likely to do that. I want to put this out. The thing is, the army doesn't directly murder people. What they do is basically

they set off a bunch of fighting between the cartels and the cartels fucking murder enormous numbers of people. We will happily murder each other but yeah yeah well and also you know i mean it's it's also this is this you know this is the thing with the mexican state it's it's very very difficult to tell where the cartels stop

and where the mexican army begins because a lot of them are the same thing and like you know there's yeah but you know that's that's what neoliberalism is hopeful note to end on and yeah just but just to make the ending a bit better i do want want to say I'm no longer going to call anyone neoliberal. I made this joke in the group chat yesterday and nobody responded to it, so it was sad. So I'll say it now. I'm only going to call them Thomas Anderson liberals. That is what I'm calling them now. Liberals.

That is what I'm calling them now. And I'll make everyone wait two seconds to understand what's going on. And then sigh. And then motion to get me out of the room. So thank you, Chris, for talking about neoliberalism. And thank you all for joining us. This has been It Could Happen Here. You can find us on Instagram and Twitter if you so desire

if you want people to know that you follow us and create a whole network of surveillance based so everyone knows what you're watching and what you're listening to to create a better picture of who you are online so you can get better advertisements, yeah, follow us online yeah, join the Panopticon throw bricks at it

it is pretty funny how they tricked everyone into carrying around gps's wherever they go it's it's pretty funny yeah it's it's amazing it's like oh it's like oh everyone everyone everyone in my town is like oh we can't get the vaccine uh they have microchips and it's like you have a phone it's hilarious how they tricked us into carrying around speakers cameras and gps's everywhere we go it is really funny it's amazing all right well bye everybody goodbye welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters, to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Sh as part of my cultura podcast network available on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the show that is normally introduced by me shouting atonally, but today I did like a professional. Because today, myself and my colleagues Garrison and Christopher are talking to someone I'm very excited to chat with, Mr. Corey Doctorow. Corey, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much. It is my pleasure to be on it. It's great to meet you all and to be talking to you today. Corey, you do a lot of writing about kind of technology and surveillance and cultural issues around those. You're also an author. You've written some great fiction. I think today we'll probably talk most around books like Attack Service and Walk Away, but you've written a lot of wonderful stuff. And you've also worked with the EFF for years and years. So you're coming at what I love about, I mean, we're going to be talking today broadly about surveillance and kind of the future of the internet. We'll probably talk about some metaverse-y stuff.

What I love about the way in which you think and write about the future is that you're kind of coming about it from a number of angles, both as like a tech industry journalist, as a fiction writer imagining the future, and as somebody who's kind of weighted in as an activist to this. Where do you see the greatest potential for actual change? Is it in lobbying and engaging as an activist, or is it in sort of imagining as a fiction writer what might be? So I see them as adjuncts, diversity of tactics and all that stuff. The thing is that tech policy arguments are often very abstract, uh, and they, um, are only visceral for the people who would provide the kind of political will to do something about them. Usually that, that comes when it's too late, right? right people people care about tech monopolies once the web is turned into five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four but not when yahoo is on a buying spree of tech companies and we're saying oh that's how tech companies grow and all tech companies will grow in the future by buying all their nascent competitors and rolling them up into a big vertically

integrated monopoly which is kind of how we got facebook and google and the rest of it and um you need to be able to make policy arguments to policy people but you also need to be able to put uh some some sinew and muscle on the bone of that highly abstract kind of argument and and that's where fiction comes in it's kind of a like um uh a fly through of like an emotional architect's rendering of what things might look like if we get it wrong or if we change it it preserves the sense of possibility you know i think one of the great enemies of change is the um inevitabilism of capitalist realism and the idea that there is no alternative so if you can make people believe in an alternative then they might work

for one and certainly the opposite is true If people don't believe there is any alternative possible, they won't work for one. Why would you? And so all of that together, I think, is part of how you mobilize people to care about stuff. Yeah. I mean, that makes total sense. And it's difficult, I think, because I first came into technology as a journalist, and it's very difficult to get people to care about stuff. And I think in particular privacy, which there was, it has been one of the most interesting cases of like the kind of thought leaders in an industry freaking out over something and people not really having an issue with it, because we kind of all agreed to hand over all of our data to a number of big sites not all but i don't know i'm interested in your thoughts on that i understand the idea that like fiction is um is a

much better way to try to get people to care about these things because it makes them feel as opposed to kind of reporting on i think people can get kind of lost in the weeds of acquisitions and like, uh, uh, pivots and, you know, tech companies acquiring each other and whatnot. Sure. Well, look, I think that the part of the problem with privacy, the reason that we were late to wake up and do something about it is because it was obfuscated. You know, if you've ever seen the maps of like how an ad tech stack works, the flow diagrams, there are some things that are complicated because they're – or some things that are hard to understand because they're complicated. And then there are some things that are made complicated so they will be hard to understand. And I think in the case of the surveillance industry, the latter is true.

And it wasn't just that they were trying to play us for suckers they were also playing their customers for suckers right one of the reasons that the ad tech stack is such a snarled hairball is so that the people who buy ads and the publishers who run ads can't tell how badly they're being ripped off by their intermediaries but this also has the side effect of making it very hard for us to know as the kind of inputs to that system, how our own dignity and private lives and safety and integrity are being put to risk by these systems as well. And, you know, it may be that people, if they had been well-informed about what was going on, they might have been indifferent as well. But I think that when most people were very poorly informed, right, when all there was was this kind of that privacy discourse was just like stuff is being your personal information is being siphoned up, but no kind of specifics on how that was being used and how that was being done and how it might bring you to harm,

it's not clear that you can say that the reason they were indifferent is because they were fully informed and didn't care if you know that they weren't fully informed, if you know that they were barely informed. I mean, yeah, I think you're absolutely right. Because when the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, which was, I think, one of the first times that there was a really huge international story that made it clear some of the consequences of all this, like it did provoke a lot of anger. Because people got tricked or however you want to frame it and it's gone, the kind of financialization of people's private data, of people's personal information, because that has gone so far, there's a risk that people are just kind of inured to it. Yeah. Well, I mean that kind of gets to my theory of change here, which is that there is always going to be a a point of maximum indifference peak indifference you know if you think about something like being a smoker the the likelihood that you care about cancer goes up the longer you smoke and the more health effects you feel and certainly there will come a point in your life

when you will only ever grow more worried about the effects of smoking on your life but there's also a point of no return right if the point at which you your your concern reaches the point where you're actually going to do something about smoking is the day you get diagnosed with stage four lung cancer then that denialism can slide into nihilism you can say why bother right it's too late it's like if if we spend years arguing about the crashing population of rhinos and then finally there's only one left and you say you're right there was a problem you might as well say like why don't we eat him and find out what he tastes like it's not like the rhinos are ever going to come back right and so for me so much of the work is about shifting the point of peak indifference

to the left of the point of no return on the timeline so that people actually start to care earlier because it's it's it if you have a genuine problem, like the overcollection of our private data, the mishandling of it, the abuse of it, that genuine problem will eventually produce tangible effects that are undeniable. Our ability to ignore it just goes monotonically down. It's the thing about the climate emergency.

Even if Shell or even if shell had not or exxon had not hidden the data it had on the role that its products were playing in climate change in the 70s it would have been hard to muster a sense of urgency in the 70s right because the story is that in 50 years something bad's going to happen but here we are 50 years on something bad is really happening and a lot of people are caring about it they still don't seem to care about it enough or maybe they've slid into nihilism there's certainly i think on the part of the elites a kind of nihilistic sense that maybe they can all retreat to like mountaintops and build fortresses and breed their children by harrier jet you know and uh and and know, that nihilism I think is,

is what you get when the point of no return is passed before peak denial. Uh, and the privacy, um, catastrophe that is looming in our future that we haven't quite reached yet. I mean, we've just had the first kind of trickles of the dam breaking that's in our future. It hasn't been enough yet to shift people away from it, but we might be getting there, right? We might eventually be able to do something about it. And one of the things that will hasten that moment is restoring competition to those industries. One of the reasons that the industry that spies on us is able to foster denial and indifference is because it is a monopolized industry. Two companies control

80% of the ad market, Google and Facebook. And as monopolists, they're able to extract huge monopoly rents. They're among the most profitable companies in the history of the world. And some of those monopoly rents, rather than being returned to shareholders, can be mobilized to distort policy, to make us think that there's nothing wrong with the way that they collect data and use it, to forestall regulation, to pay Nick Clegg $4 million a year to go around Europe and the world and say, as the former Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, I'm here to tell you that Facebook is the friend of the democratic regimes of the world. And if the anti-monopoly movement, which is a thing I've become very involved with, is able to go from strength to strength. It's surging now. One of the things that we might do

is destroy the ammunition that's being used by these large monopolistic firms to distort our policy and harm us in these ways with impunity. And then maybe we can actually take the nascent and natural alarm that people do feel about the invasions of their privacy and,

and actually turn that into privacy policy that is meaningful in respect to these big companies that actually reigns them in. Yeah. And I, I think I like that you frame it as a privacy catastrophe. Cause I think, I mean, what i just exhibited earlier in this episode is this this tendency that i certainly see in myself and i see in other people to get kind of beaten down by the continued um excesses of this industry and the continued kind of failure of anything to be done to curb it and i think you're right it has to be viewed as um as a calamity and i and nothing i think makes that clearer than some – watching some of the stuff Facebook in particular has put out about their plans for the metaverse and kind of thinking back from all of these sensors they want to store in your house, all of the ways in which they want to map everything around you. They never – they kind of advertise this like you'll be able to play basketball with somebody who's in a different state.

be able to play basketball with somebody who's in a different state. But really what it is, is you're giving Facebook access to every measurement of your body and the pulse of the beat of your heart and all this stuff that maybe we don't quite know what it would be useful for from a financialization standpoint, but it's unsettling to think that they'll have to find a way because they'll have it. I don't know what is to be done about that other than as you say kind of breaking up these monopolies well and and i mean breaking up is like one of the things we can do to monopolies and and it takes a long time you know um at&t the first enforcement action against it uh happened 69 years before it was broken up in 1982 i don't think we can wait that long, but there's a lot of intermediate steps, right?

Like we can force them to do interoperability. We can block them from, from, uh, predatory acquisitions. We can force them to divest of, of companies and engage in structural separation.

We can do all kinds of things. It actually looks like the United Kingdom is going to stop them from buying Giphy, which might seem trivial after all, it's just like animated GIFs. But, um but um what it actually is is surveillance beacons in every social media application right because if you're hosting a gif from giphy in your message to someone else facebook has telemetry about that message um And so the, not the ICO, the Competition and Markets Authority in the UK was like,

yeah, this is just going to strengthen your market power. That's why you're buying this company. You have too much market power already. We're not going to let you do it. It was almost the case that the Fitbit merger was blocked. Google's Fitbit merger. I think it's still not too late to roll it back. And Lena Kahn, who's the new fire breathing dragon in charge of the ftc who is an astonishing person

who was a law student three years ago uh she has said oh yeah this this like 1.3 trillion dollars worth of mergers and acquisitions that you're doing right now to get in under the wire before we start enforcing guess what we're gonna unwind those fucking mergers if it looks like they were anti-competitive and not only are you going to lose all the money you spent on the m&a due diligence and the paperwork and the corporate stuff but all that integration you're going to do between now and then you're going to have to de-integrate those companies when we tell you that yeah you don't have uh uh you don't have merger approval and you're on notice you can't come and complain later right like you can either get in line and wait for us to tell you whether or not your merger is legal

or you can roll the dice but i tell you what if you come up snake eyes you are fucked and that is amazing right that is a powerful change in american industrial policy that really makes a difference. Yeah. I mean, and that is a beautiful thing to think of being in place and actually hitting as hard as it could. Obviously the concern is that like, who will be, you know, picking the head of the FTC in three years and change and like how, how, how much influence is Peter Thiel going to have there and the like, um, yeah. Well and peter teal of course loves monopolies he says competition is for losers so you're right i mean obviously elections have consequences uh but you know one of the ways that you win elections is by making material differences in people's lives and so you know if people are policy then uh one of the most important policies Biden has set so far is hiring Lena Kahn and her colleagues Cantor at the DOJ and Tim Wu in the White House.

Yeah, I mean I would love nothing more than to see particularly like Facebook reigned in at this point because I'm one of the casualties of the ad market like started in 2016, 17, it feels like the odds of them being able to, I don't know, we've got three years where we know theoretically these policies will be in place. And I don't know, I'm hopeful. Because the Republicans are talking a lot about regulating social media too, about even breaking up these companies.

But they often tend to be talking about it in a very different way and with a very different kind of end goal in mind. And I guess obviously they know that, right? And Facebook, they are well aware that this might be a wait out the clock situation for them and they have some arrows in that quiver. I mean that may be so. But also remember that 80% of Facebook's users are outside of the u.s yeah and that even a change in administration here won't won't um put margaret vestager who's the the competition commissioner in the eu back in the bottle and she's another fire breather great right she's another amazing person and so you know i i wouldn't be too quick to write that off i mean facebook uh needs its

foreign markets yes its u.s customers are worth more to anyone else because we have the most primitive privacy frameworks so it can extract a lot more data for like we're the we're the richest people with the worst privacy yeah so that's that's um you know it's a real home court advantage for facebook but it needs that other 80 of its users it wouldn't be what it is without them. And that makes it subject to their jurisdiction. And, you know, one of the things about ad-driven firms like Facebook is that they really need sales offices in country. So, you know, even before we had the proliferation of national firewalls, which don't get me wrong, I don't think is a good thing. walls which don't get me wrong i don't think is a good thing um these large global firms that operated um sales offices in country in every territory they worked in were vulnerable to regulation because if you have staff in a country then you have someone that can be arrested

right and so it's not like they can just be like, I don't know, like the Tor project, which just, you know, it has people who sit in hack on Tor who are close to lawyers who can defend people who sit on hack on Tor. You know, if the Tor project had to have staff full time in Turkey and China and Russia and Syria in order to operate. It would be a very different project. But, you know, Facebook and Twitter and Google, they all have staff in those countries and it makes them vulnerable to regulation. And so, you know, China's really interesting because Xi Jinping, for his own reasons, which are not my reasons and distinct from the Democrats and the Republicans

reasons, is doing stuff to rein in big tech in China. And it's actually quite interesting because the argument that Nick Clegg makes when he says why we shouldn't break up Facebook is he says, China is coming for your IP and for your industrial competitiveness with its big tech giants that it treats as national champions that project soft power around the world. Meanwhile, China is like, these tech giants? We hate these tech giants. They present a countervailing force to the hegemony of the Communist Party and the executive branch that Xi Jinping sets at the top of. We're going to neuter them and we're going to disappear their

founders like Jack Ma into fucking gulags right like they're like we don't want national champions because the nation that you know webo and alibaba is the champion for is webo and alibaba and tencent they're not they're not champions for china by any stretch of the imagination they don't give a shit about china and so you you know, all of these companies are going to face regulatory pressure, anti-monopoly regulatory pressure all over the world. And you're so much more optimistic, I guess, about the potential for that to bite than a lot of people I talk to, and I think more knowledgeable as well. And I kind of wonder, because there's this very strong, obviously influenced by decades of cyberpunk attitude that like we're in this age of mega corporations whose power is, you know, there's nothing that can stop Amazon from doing

what Amazon wants to do, right? Facebook's going to keep doing whatever they want to do forever. You clearly don't believe that. And I, you know you you clearly know your stuff i'm wondering what why you think that that image is still persist so persistent that like attitude in our heads of uh these these these are kind of monolithic forces in our society that um just have to be endured so i think it's a belief in the great forces of history, right? And the great man theory, you know, that these rich people are driving history. Yeah. These powerful figures are driving history. They're in charge.

They're in the driver's seat. I mean, that's kind of what's behind Trump derangement syndrome right the idea that trump is uniquely powerful and and talented demagogue as opposed to just like a demagogue shaped uh puzzle piece that fit in the demagogue shaped hole that was left by the collapse of credibility of capitalism uh and you know a man who is clearly too stupid to be a cause of anything and will only ever be the effect of something and uh you know the the for me the theory of of history and how it goes was really uh transformed by an exercise that my friend ada palmer does so ada is a science fiction novelist she's she's just published the fourth book of her terra ignota series her debut series it's an incredible series of books, but she's a real like kind of multi-talented, multi-threat. So she's a librettist and singer who's produced

album-length operas based on the Norse mythos. She's also a tenured history of, a tenured professor of Renaissance history in Florence at the University of Chicago, where she studies heterodox information, pornography, homosexuality, witchcraft, and so on during the Inquisitions. And every year with her undergrads, she reenacts, through a four-week-long live-action role-playing game, the election of the Medici's pope. And each of her students takes on the role of a cardinal from a great family in the actual election of the i forget what year it

was uh 15 14 90 or something maybe 15 10 i forget but uh they each take on the uh the the this role and they have a character sheet and it has motivation it's like a dinner party murder mystery but for four weeks they make alliances alliances, stab each other in the back, stage surprise reversals. And at the end of the four weeks, there's this faux Gothic cathedral on campus. And they dress up in costume. Ada has a Google alert for theater companies that are getting rid of their costumes so she clothes them in the garb of of the medici's cardinals and they gather and they go into a room and then a puff of smoke emerges and you get the new pope and every year four of the final candidates uh there are four final candidates rather and two of them are always the same because the great forces of history bear down on that moment to say those people will absolutely be in the running for the for the papacy and two of them have never once been the same because human action still has space to alter

the outcomes that are prefigured by the great forces of history. And so for me, the idea of being an optimist or a pessimist has always felt very fatalistic. It's this either way, this idea that the great forces of history have determined the outcome and human action has no bearing on it. And I think that rather than optimism or pessimism, we can be hopeful. And that's the word you used before. Hope is the idea, not that you can see a path from here's the word you used before hope is the idea not that you can see a path from here to the place you want to get to but rather that you haven't run out of things that you can do to advance your your goal right because if you can take a step to advance your goal if you can ascend the gradient towards the peak that you are trying to reach

then you will attain a new vantage point. And from that vantage point, you may have revealed to you courses of action that you didn't suspect before you took that step. So, so long as a step is available, there's always another step lurking in the wings that you can't see from where you are. And the reason I'm hopeful about this is I can think of like 50 things that could improve the monopoly picture that we're living in now. And it's up from 30 things last year. And so even though I don't know how we get from here to a better future, and even though I absolutely see the blockers you're talking about,

I'll Trump landslide, uh, losing Congress because they let Joe mansion and, and Christmas cinema neuter the, the, the bill back better bill. Um, you know, all of those things that can happen i have hope you know which is not the same as optimism or a belief that things will

be great or even even like a sense a lack of a sense of foreboding i have that in spades but uh i have hope that when the next phase of the fight begins that we will have many vulnerable spots we can strike at and that we can capitalize on whichever victories we attain to find more vulnerabilities and move on. I think that's so important. And I think it goes in line with, to bring up climate change again, the idea that like one of the most toxic things you can think are e-climate change is that there's nothing to do. We're already past every point of no return and there's no there's no positive action because it just leads you to doing the same thing as the people who deny it. And it's yeah, I think it's it's very important to recognize that, like, not only are there things you can do, but when you do those things, you start taking those steps. Other steps reveal themselves.

Yeah. can do but when you do those things you start taking those steps other steps reveal themselves yeah um yeah and you know what if you're feeling nihilistic about uh about climate um i'm nearly through saul griffith's book electrify uh saul's an old friend of mine he's macarthur winner he's electrical engineer and he's just done the he's it's a popular engineering book it's one of my favorite genres they're like popular science, except instead of telling you about how science works, they tell you about how engineering works. And he's basically like, here is why all the estimates of how much renewables we need are hugely overestimated. And it's basically that like keeping fossil fuel power online requires a lot of fossil fuel. Right.

So something like 40 40 of that estimate is just it's the energy that we need to make the energy and it's not present in electrical models here's how we can manufacture it here's how we can distribute it here is basically how if we can figure out the financing uh americans can uh spend less money every year than they do now to get more stuff that they love every year, that we can do this without hair shirts. It's a spectacular book. And, you know, I don't agree with everything Saul says all the time, but he is very careful about his technical facts. There aren't technical errors in this. There might be assumptions that we disagree with, but as a technical matter, he's basically written a piece of design fiction in which over the next 15 years using clever finance and, and solid engineering, we really actually do avert the climate emergency. And yeah, as always kind of the main barriers to doing the best version of the thing is the the

political realities on the ground you know you have to but i think that's the that's the value of at least trying to make it clear that there are options i wanted to shift for a moment um i was thinking recently about i think probably the earliest back book of yours that i've read pirate cinema which is heavily involved i think i'm gonna you know if if you're one of the folks like me uh who was on the internet back when you know file sharing sites when that was a huge topic of discussion when the riaa was going after people when like copyright uh was kind of a of a much more prevalent part of kind of the online discourse. It deals a lot in that and these kind of – I think, the attempts of these giant multinational entertainment corporations to shut down the free trading of ideas, remixing and all that stuff.

And then kind of thinking about the difference between the focus of that and the focus of books like Attack Surface, where you're really delving more into, you know, the fictional versions of real life companies like Tiger Swan thatwan that do surveillance on protesters all around the world and that are kind of using tactics that were pioneered by other contractors in like Iraq and Afghanistan years earlier. I guess kind of the things that I find interesting about that is I can remember when I was first on the internet, the big social kind of crusades online with the people that that i paid attention to at least was all around copyright it was about not just you know the attempts to stop people from remixing and sharing copyrighted work but about um attempts to like buy up copyrights and like into these these ever kind of larger agglomerations. And that's kind of hit,

it seems to have hit like a terminal point with movies like Ready Player One and kind of a lot of the stuff we're seeing in Marvel where everything's showing up everywhere. Space Jam 2. Space Jam 2. I guess the part of it that feels less dystopian today is attempts to crack down on file sharing,

which I don't think went kind of in the worst case scenario. I'm interested actually in your thoughts on that because I can remember when the RIA would be threatening people with years in jail and whatnot over sharing stuff on Kazaa. We seem to be – I don't know. Is it just that it gets less – I'm interested in your thoughts on that. Is it just that it's less publicized when they crack down on people or has kind of the nature of their response to that really changed well i think that what's happened with uh the the kind of steady state of the copyright wars has been the introduction of um brittleness and fragility into our speech platforms like twitter uh and and facebook and youtube where it's very easy to get material removed by making copyright

claims. And, you know, we see that with the sleazier side of the reputation management industry, where they use bogus copyright claims to take down criticisms. You know, there was a group of leftists who were really celebrating the idea that if you if nazis were marching in your town you could stop them from uploading their videos by playing copyrighted music in the background and i was like you have no idea what a terrible fucking idea that is and you know i within a couple of years cops in beverly hills were doing it whenever people tried to film the police or they would just turn on some taylor swift to try and stop uploading. The thing about the copyright wars is that real action turned out to be in

wage theft through monopolization. The neutering and destruction of label-independent music distribution platforms like Kazaa or Grokster or Napster and the Supreme Court decision the Grokster decision that supported that meant that the only way that you could launch a service like that was in cooperation with the big labels and the the you know most successful one is Spotify. Spotify is actually partially owned by the labels, and the labels use that ownership stake to negotiate a kind of formalized wage theft where they allowed for a lower per stream rate because when they get royalties for a stream, part of that money goes to their musicians. And that meant that the firm Spotify retained more profits, which it returned to it in the form of higher dividends.

And dividends go just straight to their shareholders. There's no claim that musicians can make on this. And because they set the benchmark rate, it meant that everyone, irrespective of whether you were assigned to one of the big three labels, ended up getting the same per stream rate as Universal's artists. So they were able to structure the whole market. In the meantime, in the industrial side, copyright laws, notably Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which is a law passed in 1998 that makes it a felony to remove DRM, to bypass a technical protection measure. to remove DRM, to bypass a technical protection measure. That has become the go-to system for blocking repair, interoperability,

and to prevent third parties from creating services or add-ons that accomplish positive ends like improved accessibility, improved security, ad blocking and privacy and so on they just say well you know we we put a a one molecule thick layer of drm around say youtube and when you make a youtube downloader for archival purposes or whatever um you uh you just create a um a uh you you bypass our technical protection measure and so you're committing a felony, and you can go to prison for five years and pay a $500,000 fine. And so you have this relentless monotonic expansion of DRM into automotive, tractors. Medtronic uses it to block people from fixing ventilators. You know, this assault on the ability to reconfigure a technology that is ever more accessibility but the the rule that is being used to block interoperability is a copyright law

it's what printer companies use to stop you from buying third-party ink it's what apple uses to stop you from installing a third-party app store and you know the absence of a third-party app store is why when apple removed all the working vpns in china chinese users couldn't just switch to another app store that had working vpns in it and so you know that this um end game of the copyright wars is i think a lot more dystopian than uh merely suing college kids yeah uh it's it's actually really screwed us in ways that are that are hard to fathom yeah it's a fascinating example of kind of dystopic creep because at least kind of from my more more ignorant position when i was 19 i was like worried that all of these these people

remixing music and movies that i liked like we're going to get cracked down on or have their stuff pulled. And the kind of thing that I didn't – I don't think a lot of people saw coming until it hit. I certainly didn't was what you were just talking about, the fact that kind of the logic of how these entertainment companies were looking at like an album or a movie and cutting up pieces of that. They've applied to like a tractor and now you can't like repair your john deere or modify your john deere so it works better and then you know you you get situations like we just kind of averted with the john deere strike where there was a very real possibility that we wouldn't be able to get a large chunk of a harvest because there wouldn't be parts and you can't put your own in and that's to think that that the thought process that led us there started with like trying to protect metallica in some ways is kind of funny. who work there because the same force that has allowed John Deere to cram down its workforce for 40 years is the force that allows it to take away the agency and economic liberties you know, if John Deere were a smaller, weaker firm,

it would be less able to resist both the claims of its workforce and the claims of its customers. Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. And it is like, I like that idea of, because it's not just kind of solidarity between John Deere purchasers and the people who work in the factories. It's also – there's kind of solidarity between a wide – like anyone concerned with copyright, it's a much broader base of solidarity than just people who are worried about what's happening to fiction or like what Disney is doing to like copyrights around Mickey Mouse or whatever. You can draw in concerns from right to repair to a bunch of other things, which potentially means there's a greater body of people available for action if you can make them see kind of converging interests there, which I think is an interesting idea. Well, I think you're getting at something really important. And this is, um, uh, this comes from James Boyle, who's a copyright scholar at Duke university and was really involved in founding

creative commons and in those early copyright fights. And, and Jamie makes an analogy to the coining of the term ecology. And he says that before the term ecology came along, you know, some of us cared about owls and some of us cared about the ozone layer, but it wasn really clear that we were on the same side you know it's not clear if you're a martian looking through a telescope you might be hard pressed to explain why you know the destiny of charismatic charismatic nocturnal birds and the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere were the same issue right and the term ecology let all these people who cared about different things find a single point to rally around. It turned a thousand issues into one movement. And I think that in the course of resisting corporate power, which is to say resisting monopoly, we have the potential to weld together people from very diverse fields.

You know, farmers and people who make tractors, sure. and people who make tractors, sure. But, you know, if you grew up watching professional wrestling and now you're aghast that the wrestlers that you loved are begging on GoFundMe for pennies to die with dignity, you know, once someone explains to you the reason that that's happening is that 30 wrestling leagues became one wrestling league that was able to practice worker misclassification, turn those performers into contractors, take away their health insurance and leave them to die, then suddenly you're on the same side of the people who are worried about big tech and big tractor. And the people are worried about the fact that there's only one manufacturer of cheerleading uniforms and two manufacturers of athletic shoes and two manufacturers of spirits and two manufacturers of beer and one manufacturer of eyewear that also owns all the eyewear stores and the eyewear insurer you know that duff beer thing from the early simpsons where there's like duff beer raspberry yeah yeah yeah it's all coming out of one thing dolce and gabbana oliver people's bausch and lohm uh versace every eyewear brand you've ever heard of is one company coach all of them and they also own sunglass hut and uh target optical and sears optical and lens crafters and spec savers and every other eyewear

story you've ever heard of and they bought all the labs that make the lenses so more than half the lenses in the world come from them a division called essalor and they bought imed which is the company that bought all the insurance companies that insure eyewear and so they're also the company that's insuring your glasses your your eyes one company and eyewear costs a thousand percent more than it did a decade ago they stole our fucking eyes right so people who care about that have common cause with people who care about wrestlers and people who care about beer and big tech and the fact that there's four shipping companies and they have no competitive pressure and so they just keep building bigger ships that get stuck in the fucking Suez Canal. We're all on the same side. And I like the idea that – I like hoping that that kind of inherent solidarity, if you can point it out to people, is potentially an antidote to – or at least a partial antidote to the level of the layer of politicization that's fallen down over everything. That stops people from actually considering matters but instead considering like, I don't know, is this owning the libs, right?

like I don't know is this owning the libs right like if you if they if you can get them to see that like yeah their favorite wrestler is like dying because he couldn't afford insulin and that like that's tied to the issue of like the reason his dad can't get tractor parts this year or whatever and that that's tied to other issues

that are maybe championed by people he would reflexively dismiss but like yeah I I find that really inspiring. It's still a significant, there's a significant challenge for people who are trying to make those connections for folks

who are trying to like inform them of that state. I mean, yeah, that's true. And you know, like Steve Bannon will tell you that the reason to do culture war bullshit is because politics are downstream from culture. And there's probably an element of truth to that. But I also think the reason to do culture world culture culture war bullshit is because politics are down downstream from culture and there's probably an element of truth to that but i also think the

reason that people find culture war bullshit so uh attractive is because they got nothing else yeah right i think we we talk about that a lot within the context of conservative for politics i grew up very conservative and i do remember how the tenor of things I was hearing through the Bush years changed from advocation of policies to just all culture war all the time, all striking the dims all the time. And it was the kind of – and that's not the only place it's happened. You see it on the left too, absolutely. Like it's endemic now. It's a poison in kind of the discourse. But I think that there's a lot that needs to be – I think there's a lot to be discovered still for like how to break people out of that. I'm kind of bullish when we talk about these issues like you were bringing up with sort of the monopolization of these industries you wouldn't expect would be monopolized.

I'm hopeful about the future that stuff like 3D printing presents for that we have an organization in Portland that does kind of 3D printing glasses frames and stuff and is helping people with that sort of stuff and I'm in conversations with like the Four Thieves Vinegar Collective

I think it's called some of the folks doing like trying to do working on pharmaceutical hacking making at the moment like lower cost kind of home scratch brewed versions of like different AIDS medications. And the holy grail is doing that with insulin effectively. think one of the things that's exciting about that is because the way in which the way in which collaboration on 3d printing works and the way in which actually spreading like the ability to do stuff works i think it synergizes nicely with the ability of people to kind of reach other folks through writing or other forms of content because they can both spread through the same you can have

a video or a story and you can have like kind of embedded guides on how to do that um i i i don't know that i've i've read into a lot of your writings on kind of the potential of 3d printing in this space but i'm interested in like to what do you do are you looking at that as kind of an area of hope or do you see that still as kind of too too niche and labor focused to really actually take off in the way that it would need to, to crack some of these nuts. This is where I do my, my Woody Allen, you know,

nothing of my work shtick because I had this novel maker makers in 2009. I haven't read makers yet. 2008. It's, it's why Brie Pettis went out and founded maker bought. And it's, you know, credited with like kickstarting the homebrew 3D printed revolution,

blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it was a very bullish novel about 3D printing. I, you know, the reality hasn't lived up to the hype yet. It may just be that we're in the long trough of despair as the Gartner hype cycle model has it. But, you know, I think the problem with 3D printing was that the patents had been concentrated into the hands of two large firms that had bought all their competitors, including MakerBot. And when those patents finally expired, the big one was the laser centering of powder

patent expired. There just wasn't a big bang. And I think it's because the supply chain for it still had a lot of proprietary elements. And so producing the, the powder and producing the components that allowed for that powder printing remained a very high bar. And so we just didn't see the kind of new industry emerged that we would have hoped for. And,

you know, it's like seven years since those patents expired or five years since those patent expired now we're seeing a few more of those powder printers you get a lot more like uv cured epoxy printers because those came off patent earlier and they have a less complicated supply chain um but still i mean mostly when we talk about printers we're talking talking about filament. And just filament's just not a great technology. It's been pushed in ways that you wouldn't even believe. And people have figured out how to do absolutely incredible things with it. But it's not something that you would make aerospace components for.

No. It's something that you make um uh novelty dungeons and dragons dice out of yeah which is an important industry to disrupt don't get me wrong but i'm i'm with you i'm with you i can remember paying 30 bucks for a set of dice as a kid and thinking somebody's gotta fix this scam i can i can print you some for christmas robert thank you garrison and you know now i i own a uh i bought a Comic-Con a couple of years ago, I bought a tiny little D20 made out of meteoric ore. Oh, I have a sky metal D20. Oh, now that's, yeah, that's, that's classy. I'm curious, we've got a little bit of time left. And I wanted to

ask in your novel attack surface, I know was released 2020, right? October, if I'm not mistaken. And obviously a lot of that deals with, again, these kind of like corporations that have been contractors for the DOD doing like fucked up surveillance shit in Iraq and Afghanistan, bringing that technology to crack down on like US sort of dissident left-wing political movements. left-wing political movements it comes out the year that we have a nationwide kind of uprising that a lot of fucked up surveillance shit that had been kind of demoed stateside around it like standing rock and whatnot gets gets really put into its own how much of that was written before shit went down and i and i'm assuming like i don't know exactly how your process works but i'm wondering like i assume you started the project before everything went the way it did last summer. How much did kind of what happened last summer affect the way you imagined that technology and those tactics functioning in that book? Yeah, the timeline goes the other direction. I wrote that book before the summer uprising, long, long, long, long before that.

And I wrote it about things like the surveillance technology we saw in Belarus and Kiev and also at Occupy and Standing Rock and at other Black Lives Matter demonstrations and uprisings in America. Ferguson, I'm assuming yeah and if you you know also the monotonic expansion of surveillance leaks right where you know first we learned about mc catchers and then we learned about dirt boxes which are mc catchers on airplanes and you know like we just all of that stuff leaked like crazy because you know these surveillance giants are are not good at what they do right which isn't a reason we should be hopeful no a company that's bad at what it's it does is is in some ways even worse because one of the ways that their incompetence expresses itself is that they often gather a bunch of data on innocent people and then leak it yeah right not not maliciously just through incompetence

um and so you know the the this expansion of surveillance has like been on my mind for a long time yeah i've been writing about it well at least since little brother right so 2006 i wrote that novel and and i've had my finger in that yeah so i've had my finger in that for all that time and and working with eff it was impossible to miss sure was there a degree to which um i don't know i guess were you surprised by anything that happened last summer or did it just kind of comprehensively feel like these are everything slotting into place that i knew was heading in this direction because yeah i mean you're right i did i like there was like everything was kind of presaged years before. Yeah. I I'm wondering if if there was anything that kind of surprised you or was it was it all just sort of what you'd been braced for? Yeah, I don't feel

like there were any kind of surveillance surprises. I mean, the reverse the the the use of reverse warrants i think we all kind of uh assumed was going on there had been hints of it in google's warrant canaries beforehand but uh you know those geofence warrants which again if you're like sitting there going oh geofence warrants are awesome because they're catching the uh one six rioters like yeah dude you are going to be so disappointed yeah holy shit that's not where they're going to keep using those yeah um so you know learning more about those reverse warrants i think was was interesting um but i don't feel like i don't well off the top of my head i can't say that there was any new technical stuff that emerged you know i i um kick-started the audiobook for attack surface

uh and i i offered as like the top tier you could commission short stories in the little brother universe and there were three of those and i just finished the first of them and it's about um future pipeline protests and uh you know i i spent a lot of time in my research looking at the surveillance that was done on the pipeline protest. And a lot of it was provocateurs and undercovers who were just terrible at their jobs. Yeah. Right. Like they intercepts long publication of, you know, long documents about how those operators worked.

We just like showed up in military haircuts and combat boots. And then we're like, hey, I'm portland and i'm here because we're gonna fuck up some bad guys let's go do it let's go do violence and save indian country and like everyone was like you and like does anyone want to buy drugs and and the actual protesters were like you you're a provocateur like go away you know like they could tell i mean i guess you know they're a lot more effective in the UK in infiltrating the climate movement. You know, they impregnated several protesters. So, you know, and had long-term relationships with them and raised kids with them.

So there is that. Those are fun stories. Yeah. Here it was not. We just didn't see that incredible efficacy. Yeah. And I do think that that's, I think kind of the message I took out of it. Cause I, I was, I started reporting on like dirt boxes back during standing rock,

just having them like it explained to me by people who were on the ground when I showed up that like, yeah, there's this, you're like phones don't work the same out here. And like, we're trying to figure out what's going on, but like everything is, is, and it's not just that we're out in the sticks or anything. And I think the only surprise surprise the big surprise for me last year was how i think how little the technology accomplished for them and how much it just it just wound up back down to violence like that was kind of the for all of the the toys they had the toys that actually made the most difference was gassing and beating people. And violence and like old fashioned informants. That was,

that was the stuff. Yeah. And just having a dude there. Yeah. They, they really relied on. And the fact that you, that you,

Corey weren't super surprised by anything last year, I think kind of just more shows kind of the strength of your work in terms of how you're very good at seeing the trends that are already happening, but taking them to their next logical place. And it's a really great way to kind of get a sense of what is something, what will something maybe look like in the next decade or so, because it's all based on already existing stuff, just in different kind of original ways.

So that's why I think it's so useful to look at your books as an activist, specifically around surveillance and stuff, because it's really good for keeping an eye on what's keeping an eye on you and all that kind of stuff. This was a really lovely conversation. It was a lovely last thing to do in my home office in 2021 because i leave tomorrow and won't be back until the next year and then i'm actually going to be offline for a month after a joint replacement so it was uh it was really lovely to meet you all and to chat thank you so much for chatting with us today cory my pleasure Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter

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We talk about how things are falling apart and occasionally, when we're feeling good, how to maybe put them back together a little bit. Today, we're more talking about the growing consensus that things in the U.S. culture wars are heating up to an unacceptable level. And maybe people are going to start doing some non-culture type wars here in the near future, like a civil type war here in the near future. Those of you who know me, which why would you be listening to this podcast if you don't know like the earlier seasons of this exact show, know that I talk a lot about the potential of a mass civil conflict in the United States. I've been kind of trying to warn about it for a while. And today, we're going to do an episode about some of the more mainstream sources that have started to kind of accept this as a possibility and get concerned about it. Garrison, you've presented

us with three articles, uh, one from NBC news, one from, uh, the independent and one from the Brookings Institute, uh, all kind of fiddling around this idea that certain unnamed journalists have spent years, uh, discussing. So yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna get into it, Garrison. Yeah. So it is the past, the past few months we have well i've been watching to see how how this uh idea has been slowly kind of gaining in popularity of course there was like a spike in this around like january 6th but then stuff kind of settled down and now we're kind of seeing it come back up again so we had these these three pieces all published within

like a month of each other, all kind of on this topic. And specifically, like the pieces themselves are definitely coming at this from a more like liberal perspective. But the thing that made them interesting is that they did have a decent number of polls and surveys in them based on like what types of people

are thinking about this and think it's more of a possibility. One survey published on November 1st, 2021, said 18% of Americans believe that quote-unquote patriots might have to resort to violence to

quote, save the country. And that included 30% of Republicans, but 18% of Americans in general, 30% of Republicans. So using that very specific turn of phrase is definitely notable. And then another poll from earlier in the year found that 46 percent of people thought the country was somewhat or very likely to have another type of civil war and that's the plurality of the people polled in that because only like 43 percent said unlikely so the majority of people or not the majority of people polled but like the most common reaction was leaned on yes it is yeah i think maybe we're gonna have us a war yeah which is not great the one that uh nbc published included in their article had about like 33

percent of people saying no it's it's probably not going to happen 20 kind of on the maybe and and 47 leaning on yeah this may this is this is probably going to happen at some point soon yep i mean a lot of a lot a lot of what these articles are talking about is just, like, kind of the increased threats against, like, elected officials and then increased almost, like, militancy or performative militancy of elected officials. Yeah.

Types of, like, you know, performatively bringing your gun into Congress and that type of thing. And it lays out, like, of threats or stuff enacted against governors, congressmen, all that kind of stuff in the past year mainly. Yeah, one of the things I really disagree about, the Brookings, because Brookings is the one who kind of is analyzing that big poll and talking about – it has a list of reasons why we might have a civil war and a list of reasons why it's unlikely. And one of the reasons why it's unlikely is, quote, most of the organizations talking about civil war are private, not public entities.

And note that when southern states seceded in 1860, they had police forces, military organizations, and state-sponsored militias. The right has most of that now yeah yeah like i really disagree with that there's a ton of signal posting from guys like jim jordan uh madison cawthorne um gates bobert um a ton of signal posting uh gosar um from elected republican leaders from governors from state-level elected officials um and like regular street cops yeah and like regular street cops that are like civil war adjacent um if not directly advocating for internet scene violence so i think that that i don't think brookings uh i don't think their analysis is spot on with this i agree and i think there's just one other thing that's interesting about that which is i think it was

one of those articles were arguing that it was like well the pentagon's not particularly civil like well the pentagon doesn't want a civil war they're not going to happen to do it but but i think it is also important to note that if you remember what happened last summer, there's a lot of feds who are just like, you know, like when, like, yeah, so the army kind of doesn't want Trump to like send the army against protesters. But like, you know, like Bortak, for example,

like 100% was just like absolutely hyped up to just like absolutely just go disappear a bunch of people and they were very excited about that yeah yeah they love they love this stuff and it's like i don't know yeah the notion that it's less likely because it doesn't have like formal police backing is really silly because if you spend any time monitoring these type of militia groups, you know that a good portion of them are also members of some type of law enforcement or have like family connections to members of law enforcement. Guard. There have been a bunch of cases of weapons being stolen,

stolen from forts, um, particularly in like the West coast right now. Like, yeah, there's a ton of connections to the, and a ton of like members in common. It's like at the Capitol riot.

There were like 30 something active duty police officers involved to say that there's not direct connections with law enforcement is nonsense. And it's true that like our military leadership remains pretty much apolitical and very like committed to being apolitical in the sense that like in the within the like U.S. partisan context, right? Like they don't come in to prop up the Democrats or the Republicans. And I don't think that's immediately likely. But police forces in the United States are extremely politicized and have more than enough power to carry out a counterinsurgency campaign nationwide. And as long as the U.S. military didn't step in, and why would they? Like, the cops are willing and able to do the civil warring for the government. Why do you think they have all those tanks, you know?

So, yeah, like, there is a lot of backing, at least performatively, among certain types of, like, right-wing politicians and, of course, police. But I think a lot of what the politicians are trying to do is more encourage regular folks or people in civilian militias to just start doing violence against other elected leaders. That seems to be kind of like... Like, Bobbert and those types aren't...

They're not telling police to go do this. They're speaking to regular people. And I think one decent point the NBC piece actually puts out, it says all this kind of divisive and more violent rhetoric and behavior displayed by and towards some of our elected officials does not necessarily mean another civil war in terms of a military contest between states, it does not mean that it's inevitable or even probable. A more likely scenario is a turbulent era of civil disturbances, armed confrontations, standoffs, threats, assassination attempts, and other acts of political violence.

In other words, one that's a lot like the last 200 years of American history, which I feel like, yeah, in terms of the likelihood of there being a more formally declared kind of conflict versus just... With tanks and shit, yeah. Versus just increasingly normalizing extreme violence against, you know, quote-unquote fellow countrymen, I think is, yeah, we are going to be more likely to be just

moving in that direction slowly. And at the point when there's frequent enough exchanges of fire, that's when we say, yeah, we're basically in a civil war. We're just not calling it that. Which is, that's the points that you, Robert, have made a lot in the past. a lot in the past. Yeah, I mean, and there's, I think a lot of this is just a failure of kind of imagination and ability to accept from a group like Brookings, who I know has paid some attention

to the Syrian civil war, that like civil conflicts in the United States or in the 21st century often don't, like there's no clear regional split. Like you look at a lot of what was happening in Syria, you had cities divided up by neighborhoods between like who was in charge. You know, that's very much what we see here.

And you do see like clear regional split between urban and rural divides. And it's not like they say within specific states, but like I would say it's very specific in limited states that don't have huge urban rural divides yeah um like that's that is the norm everywhere in this country that i've been um maybe it's different in fucking vermont or new hampshire but i don't trust those places um yeah and i i guess i i think they're overly optimistic based on kind of a fundamental misunderstanding of how these sorts of conflicts occur. be looking at in terms of whether or not a civil war is likely is the number of people who respond in polls with things like yes i think we need to use violence to restore the nation or whatever

um that it's not just enough like i it's not just enough to think that a civil war is likely because a lot of that's just based on people who don't want one but are paying attention to the same media as everybody else and are watching the same stuff we're watching and are like, well, this seems sketchy. I think the main indicator is the number of people who respond, yeah, I think it would be awesome to use violence as a – like in order to make America more like what I want it to be. And again, that doesn't mean we'll creep over the point. There's a number of interesting things that have happened on kind of the, we're headed towards the Civil War side. The number one thing that I've seen recently is the use of paramilitary organizations to kind of choke local civil institutions like school boards. I see that as very concerning and as kind of prelude to the sort of armed mobilizations

that you would see at localized areas in any kind of civil conflict. It's the precursors to death squads. So that's the thing that I see on the ground that worries me most in terms of the thing that I'm less certain about. Honestly, like one of the things they note in here in the Brookings article that like the sheer number of guns in the United States is a reason why we might have a civil war. And I agree with that entirely when you have 400 million weapons in private hands, it increases the odds that they'll be used in some sort of scale. We've also seen historic numbers of non-white people, of folks who are from marginalized communities, not just buying up

weapons at unprecedented rates, but organizing with them. And I'm not really sure how to think of that. There's certainly a way, it could certainly be a very negative development, but it could also be, I think a big part of what I've seen from the right lately is the sense of impunity. And I think the feeling of being matched in arms is an end to impunity, potentially. Then the big question is like, well, what about the police? And like, well, if the police side with the right against, you know, there's still a number of questions there, and we don't have any clean answers. But I don't know that I, I think that on the whole, I'm more worried than I was two years ago, when I wrote it could happen here. But it's not clean. And I think in some, to some i'm i'm a little more worried about

something like the years of lead in italy than i am about syria right now if that makes sense i will say one thing about the years of lead which a lot of people talk about the years of lead so the years of lead are this kind of roughly 10 year period in Italy of I don't know mass terrorism maybe escalating political violence with yeah and body counts in a way that stood out from the years around it yeah and I mean you know the years of lead has a little bit also there's

there's much of intelligence agencies involved there's a lot of foreign countries yeah false flag yeah false flag bombings like hundreds of people are being killed in bombings and I think there's one absolutely crucial difference between now and the years of well okay so partially it's that unlike italy we don't have 17 000 intelligence agencies operating in the u.s and like trying to kidnap and kill the foreign prime minister but the other thing that's very important is that unlike unlike the italian left and you know really unlike the whole global left of the 70s and 80s there is no american like left wing like left wing i guess you could call like there's no there's no left-wing terrorist

tradition right like the like the left doesn't do suicide bombings the left doesn't kidnap people like the modern american left just doesn't do that. And a big part of what was happening during the years of lead was that sometimes the left was doing this. A lot of times it was the state like the the the left is not in a place where everyone is going we need to do armed urban guerrilla movements and yeah so that makes it harder to sort of pin things like pin actual urban guerrilla movement stuff on the left because there's just none of yeah but i i don't think and i i agree Years of left is kind of like a broad strokes comparison because what I see is more likely is what we're already witnessing on the ground with these right-wing militant groups increases and they move to the point of kidnapping and executing and potentially in concert with law enforcement like doing stuff like in states that have issued harsh laws, you know, banning certain books. You have in a town local law enforcement and militias like go after and grab individual leftists and either kill or imprison them and conflicts over that. And you have the left increasingly organize an arm as a defense against that. And then a number of armed conflicts as a result of that, which maybe then proceed to bombings and stuff that's terrorism or proceed to just more kind of skirmishes that the feds have a minimal response to and local in Italy, but of course, we're a different country.

But that's kind of the kind of brush fire conflict I could see cropping up in the very near future in this country. You know what else will start a series of armed gunfights between left and right in American towns. The products and services. The products and services that sponsor the podcast. They're working on it. Every day, the products and services that support this podcast urge violence on the streets of the United States. That's the Behind the Bastards guarantee, Sophie.

We're not doing Behind the Bastards. What show are we? Who are we? Anyway, here's ads. All right. Oh, my gosh. Great ad, right? We're back.

Yeah, what a great ad. I really nailed that transition. Just absolutely bang so the next thing that i want to talk about um something that i think has some some backing behind it and something that i think is kind of more silly is that one of one of the reasons that this uh nbc piece by what's his name uh brian b, Brian Michael Jenkins, uh, made. Is, uh, he says one of,

one of the reasons that we're kind of getting more okay with, you know, uh, killing or hurting, uh, our neighbors essentially is, um, quote,

Americans do fewer things together. Church attendance is declining. Membership in civic organizations and lodges have been decreasing for decades. PTA membership has dropped by nearly half from what it was in the 1960s. Bowling leagues have almost disappeared, and a shared national experience of military service

disintegrated with the abolition of conscription in 1973. Meanwhile, self-proclaimed citizen militias driven mainly by far-right conspiracy theories have surged since 2008, especially in the past five years. So, he

is wrong, but he's, yes, militias have risen, but is that due to bowling leagues? Yeah, I don't think it's due to a drop in bowling leagues. I think it's due to a drop in bowling leaks. I think it's due to the fact that all these guys are terminally online now.

And we're watching Fox News for 20 years before that. That is the thing. I don't think this guy, Brian Michael Jenkins, understands how the internet intersects with extremism. Because he's doing this from a very, like he's he's acting like we're still in the 70s and he like like that's not how the world works and how like people spend their time no people aren't doing bowling leagues but yeah a whole bunch of young men are spending and and you know middle-aged men are spending time online whether that be discord in a terrorist group chat or that be a facebook group that's for a militia.

And that's where that socialization is happening. And because the internet rewards extremism and the hottest take, it's moving in that direction even with people who would ordinarily just have historically in the past joined bowling leagues, I guess. Yeah, it's correlation doesn't equal causation shit. Yeah, it's correlation doesn't equal causation shit. It's, wow, less people are in bowling leagues and going to church, and militias have grown wildly. One must cause the other. And it's like, well, no, both of those things may have some causes in common. There may be similar factors that are driving both of those things, but they are not caused. Like, one don't necessarily,

one doesn't necessarily cause the other. And if you, like, again, the smart person version of this would be to say, hey, people are doing less things together out in the world. People are reporting, because you can find statistic backup for this, people seem to be lonelier than ever, people are more depressed than ever, suicide rates have risen. And while this is happening, militias and extremist groups have grown. Perhaps there's something about these organizations that makes them particularly attractive when folks are vulnerable due to these things. And like, let's look at, you know, the failure of our political system to confront these issues further feeds into the desire among some chunk of the populace for some sort of nihilistic cleansing violence. And again, all the pieces of this article could be reassembled into something with some insight, but I don't think Brian Michael Jenkins has much.

I think there's also an interesting thing to note here about – so the last thing he talks about that's, oh, this is the thing that formed the common sort of national identity was shared universal military service. And it's like, okay, the reason shared universal military service went away was that everyone kept literally just blowing their officers up in Vietnam. like incredibly high levels of political polarization and like mass violence between americans i mean the army basically fighting a civil war against itself in vietnam is you know an enormously important part of this and then simultaneously the sort of right-wing vets returning home and you know yeah going louis beam and stuff like that that you know it he he's relying on this kind of mythos of of this oh there was a time when america you know it he's relying on this kind of mythos of this,

oh, there was a time when America, you know, it's basically make America great again, but sort of like liberal. Yeah, that's the thing. This type of rhetoric is actually very similar to like the return to tradition stuff,

being like the solution to our extremism is we need to be going to church again, being part of civil organizations, joining bowling leagues, and conscripted military service. That's, like, that is just the same. That is very similar to, like, the Make America Great Again, Return to Tradition sect. Because those are also their goals, except that they're just willing to use violence to achieve those goals, whereas this guy just wants people to start doing that again, I guess.

violence to achieve those goals whereas this guy just wants people to start doing that again i guess um i don't know yeah like in terms of like military service not leading to extremism i mean like oklahoma city bombing i i don't i don't really there is other stuff going on there but like in terms of terms of that being like an example it is it is very silly because a lot of a lot of uh a lot of the guys even inside you know our our current like three percenters and stuff a lot of them have former military service so that i mean but like yeah citizen militias in terms of gaining popularity but specifically due to um kind of overall distrust of the federal government and the type of socialization that being uh online too much uh results in is has yes grown grown grown the militia movement a lot um and and i just don't

see how uh bowling is going to solve that issue in terms of in terms of uh how do we i mean i can think of some ways to solve that solve that issue, Garrison, but you've never watched The Big Lebowski, so you wouldn't understand. I've not watched The Big Lebowski. So I'm kind of done with the NBC piece. I know there was some others. Fuck you, Brian Michael Jenkins.

The other thing on the Brookings thing that I have a decent issue with is that they're – one of the reasons they give for – and this is actually something that Brian Michael Jenkins also brings up in the NBC piece – is that one of the reasons why they believe the Civil War is not as inevitable is because there is no clear regional split, like a north-south divide. And they, for some some reason think this means that there is less likely to be civil conflict um they yeah they recognize there is an urban rule divide in most states but because there is no large kind of obvious north-south divide they think this is going to make a civil war less likely and well the map would really be a pain in the ass so it probably won't happen. Right. Like, that's the thing they're thinking is like, oh, if I was going to map this out,

it's going to be too complicated. When I read that, I had flashbacks to my first trip to a war zone in Ukraine where we were like taking Google Maps up to a certain point. And then we had to use like hand-drawn notes because he was like, well, the different like the different chunks of this air next like 20 acres that are owned by the separatists as opposed to the government are like you can't use google it'll send you into enemy territories because it's not a clean break because you had literally suburbs of cities fighting each other and you still do yeah like this is a this is you know i think partially this this this is a sort of

peak america brain thing because you know art there's been like five ever civil wars that are broken like this and the problem is that there's the american civil war and then we also fought in both vietnam and north korea but like well yeah yeah well we just those weren't really civil wars yeah yeah yeah that's it there was fighting between two halves of the country but it was a proxy for two other several other countries yeah and that's that's the yeah yeah and that's and that's the thing that like it's the the combination of the american civil war was a very unique civil war and then the other major things that we think of as like quote-unquote civil wars were you know were basically cold war stuff and i mean you know like there are a couple other like

I mean there have been other examples of like secessionist stuff like that I mean in any civil war yeah there's a lot of other countries that get involved in the US civil war there was a significant amount of that sort of yeah and even even in the US civil war like there are just like towns

in the middle of Confederate territory that are like, no, fuck this, we're not going over. But people have this incredibly myopic view of what a civil war is, and it's like every other civil war that's been fought in the last 50 years has been just 7,000

factions, neighborhoods fighting each other. I don't know. It's just incredibly frustrating to watch these people not understand this. It's very America-brained, and it's very sad because I'm going to read a quote that's going to make us want to purge our ears.

There are urban-rural differences within specific states, with progressives dominating the cities while conservatives reside in rural communities. But that is a far different geographic divide than when one region could wage war on another. The lack of a distinctive or uniform geographic division limits the ability to confront other areas, organize supply chains, and mobilize the population. There can be local skirmishes between different forces, but not a situation where one state or region attacks another which is complete nonsense and that's

not how like it's like they don't understand that guerrilla fighting exists and they don't understand how the whole the whole the whole part about uh organizing supply chains and mobilizing population like that is just another way to fight a war is by exploiting that specific thing like the fact that cities are so isolated um and lack and and lack a whole bunch of resources and the fact that rural areas are isolated in a different way and lack separate resources that is not something that makes a civil war less likely that just makes it more complicated yeah that makes it more of a pain in the ass fighting over amazon fulfillment centers and the like. Yeah, like it's ridiculous saying that it's far different from a geographic divide that one region could wage war on another.

It's like, no, you're just saying something that is just completely wrong. And like you have not studied any type of like urban conflict whatsoever yeah and i think there's an important thing to understand here which is that regions in a civil war mostly it's not that regions wage war on each other yeah it's not regions don't do the fighting yeah like regions aren't the things that are fighting it's the people in areas and people can move around and people can block off access to areas. And like, it's a weird, it's a super weird way to think about things. And it's the fact that if this is something that like the Brookings Institution is, if this is what they think on this topic, that's a pretty sad indicator for what a lot of people how they how like a lot of mainstream liberals are going to view the possibility of any type of civil conflict and i don't know maybe they feel very secure in their cities um which which is a weird thing i've not

felt that in years yeah and i think the other thing that's very weird about this is that because so a lot of people writing about this are x are um like are like kind of the people writing about this are kind of terrorism people, right? And the kind of terrorism, kind of insurgency doctrine was you know some variation on the like Maoists fish in the sea like surround the cities with rural areas etc etc and like and you even see

versions of this you know in things that aren't quite civil wars but are kind of like what happened like the the water and gas wars in Bolivia in the early 2000s where like you know what yeah you have kind of an urban rural divide although they have allies in the cities but the sort of you know

the you have a bunch of rural indigenous groups that literally just you know they blockade every road in the country and then starve the cities out right I mean this is this is this is a thing that happened in like 2005 2006 and that's gonna happen it's just like American city yeah that is, 2006. And that's going to happen to an American city. Yeah, that is like – that is going to happen sooner than later.

Whether that be caused by accident by some type of climate natural disaster or on purpose by a militia, like that is – it's just a matter of time until we have to deal with this massive problem. Yeah. them yeah um and it's like i've been reading recently about um uruguay and what happened with them in like the 70s when their dictatorship took over and they had a left-wing group that was like very much engaged in kind of a lot of acts of poetic terrorism like you know robbing banks to steal paperwork that they would then hand over to like somebody to reveal malfeasance within a company or like stealing uh trucks of food going to like some big wealthy Christmas party and redistributing it in poor neighborhoods. Pretty rad stuff. And one of the ways in which the new incoming dictatorial regime cracked down on them is they deputized like 10,000 chuds and gave them guns and sent them in with the

army. And I was like yeah i could absolutely see shit like that happening absolutely see that happening yeah like if there was some sort of uprising in a in a liberal city there's rural areas around them filled with chuds um and there and there is precedent there is precedent for police doing that um they have done it within your our eye shot garrison like on small scales yeah um so i think we'll have one more break and come back and talk about a uh talk about a hedge fund oh fuck i love hedge funds let me get let me get my hedge fund shirt out the shirt that i wear when talking about hedge funds all right i have my hedge fund shirt on um as you can all see it's a picture of ringo

star filleting himself i don't know why that's my hedge fund shirt i'm sorry garrison i don't know either but i love the beach boys um anyway so thank you perfect nailed it uh what should we talk about this hedge fund guy yes i do want to talk with this hedge fund guy because this is when someone with this much money is talking about this one just for fun right he's doing this just for shits for funsies yeah he's doing it for shits and giggles and he wrote a book kind of on this topic and he proposed one one solution he he He came up with one thing that'll prevent us from entering a civil war, which shows how smart these hedge fund people are.

But first, Chris would love to, I would love for you to explain who this dude is. Okay, so Ray Dalio is a hedge fund manager and he is, so he runsio is a hedge fund manager. And he is... So he runs Bridgewater Associates, which is one of the world's... Allegedly the world's largest hedge fund firm. Yeah, it depends how you define it.

But yeah, it's a very large hedge fund. And this guy is weird by venture capital standards. So Bridgewater's whole thing is that everyone in the company is constantly surveilled at all times and anyone else within the company can look at what anyone else is doing it's supposed to be like oh it's like total transparency and what it actually means again is that like you can you can look at like fucking what any of your colleagues like also working at this place is doing just fucking at their day job you can see all their records

you can see everything they're looking at. The other thing that he's known for is that he doesn't trust anyone else to run the hedge fund after he retires or dies. He's trying to build a cybernetic version of his brain to keep running the hedge fund. Other hedge fund weirdos think this guy is fucking wild.

He's a time and he runs one of the world's largest hedge funds. It's great. It's amazing and good we give these people this much money to control. I will say, when it comes to his actual analysis of whether or not it's likely, I don't particularly disagree with anything. Yes. It's broadly reasonable. He's just doing this because he thinks it's fun. He has enough money. He's going reasonable. Yeah. His looking. Yeah. For what?

He's just doing this because he because he thinks it's fun. He has enough money. He's going to survive whatever. But yeah, his. Well, he's also I mean, part of why this is fairly credible is he's I mean, if you're if you're good at this, it means that you have one actual talent, which is is judging risk. And I think he's probably pretty good at judging risk. Yeah.

So he said that he believes there's like a high likelihood that a civil war or something resembling it will break out within the decade. 30% is the number he gives. It's the number he gives. And then he – yeah, wait. Let's see. Yeah. He said there's also – he gave a quote that he says it's – we're in a high-risk position right now. Yeah.

And, yeah, he talks about the different kind of reasons why he believes so in this book, most of which are, like, pretty reasonable in terms of, like, looking at a population and how much – like, you know, the various, like, polarization between politics and culture and all this kind of stuff. But the solution that he gives to this is that we should make a formal judgment for, quote-unquote, close elections and have the losers respect the outcomes. And then once that happens, the order is going to be like restored and respected and then we will avert a civil war so he he thinks that a civil war will probably be like enacted by some type of election dispute which that is actually very reasonable uh in terms of what happened in our last election if there's like a big if there's a big election dispute that could absolutely spark some type of conflict but the idea that we can avert a civil war by just having an organization to judge close elections is like – but that's not going to solve that problem.

Have you been to America, bro? If you do that, that's not going to solve the close election problem. Even if you do it, that won't be a solution. Even if you do it, that won't be a solution. You know, I will say, like, yeah, here's something. Credit where minor credit is due. Ray Dalio is, in fact, right that the difference between 2000, which is when the last time someone actually literally stole an election, happened. Where, yeah, Bush openly rigs the election.

It's incredibly obvious. There's like six ways he does this everyone knows it's happening and the reaction is everyone just kind of shrugs because they're like oh this room court's legitimate compared to both 2016 and 2020 which yeah that's you know that's that's that's there there's been an actual break there it's just that i don't know maybe i think it's almost just like a lib brain thing where it's like you think that if you have an institution that sets down rules this this will make everything okay because everyone will obey it and that's just not where we are anymore yeah i mean there was just a a poll that came out recently that showed like americans trust in the military has fallen to its lowest level ever

registered and like that was kind of the one thing left that most people felt positively about. Not to say that's even a good thing, but just like the there is such a complete fucking lack of faith in institutions across the spectrum in the United States. But it's like how unless you're hiring, I don't um fucking no i would say tom hanks but tom hanks has even gotten politicized even he believes in viruses so yeah there's no one they could pick to get do this job that people would feel good about if they yeah i mean i'm sure if they brought mr rogers back from the dead half the country would call him a cuck so i don't i don't know what to what i don't know who dalio thinks is going to like get everybody on board so maybe yeah maybe uh maybe um danny devito danny devito might be able to do it well i think if if we put all of our hope in danny

devito that is a better solution than what any of these articles have put out. It beats the Supreme Court. It beats every other quote-unquote solution that these articles have posited. Bob Odenkirk brought Twitter together that one week. Maybe we can try him. With respect to the Supreme Court,

if you just picked 12 random people off the street and were like, I would feel fine about 12 random people off the street and we're like I would feel fine about 12 random people off the street. That's the thing. I am all for the term isn't a democracy I forget the other term. Sortition? Yes.

I forget exactly but it's when a government is not composed of elected leaders. It's composed of a random selection of people and they make decisions and then their decision's over and then we get a new selection of people, and they make decisions, and then the decision's over, then we get a new selection. I'm all for that model of government over almost any other.

It sounds way better than what we have. Yeah. So, that is the three pieces I want to talk about. The independent piece, the hedge fund, Brookings Institution on the Civil War, and then Brian, no, not Brian.

Yes. Brian Michael Jenkins, senior advisor to the president of RAND. Brime-I-J. Brimage, as we call it. Who wrote the thing for NBC. So, yeah, that is just in terms, people in institutions talking about this topic more generally and sometimes decent ways, oftentimes not decent ways. That is, that is the stuff from like the, just the past, between the past week to month of people with big salaries talking about the civil war. Yeah.

Or in terms of the, in terms of the hedge fund guy, not a salary, just billions of dollars. Yeah, just billions of dollars and thinking it's neat. I don't know. Every time one of these comes out, I get tagged by a bunch of people saying like, Robert, it's the thing you were talking about. Other people are talking about it. about it. And, um,

I don't know. I don't like that. This is the thing other people are talking about that I've been talking about as opposed to mass Zeppelin transit or something more fun. Yeah. These people could dedicate the resources to something more manageable for them. And because they don't have a good grasp, especially the Brian Michael Jenkins guy has,

has no grasp on how extremism works. Um, and it would be better if they dedicate their resources to something else, but this is the world we live in. It would be better if perhaps Brian Michael Jenkins dedicated his, his efforts and his platform at NBC to looking into Mr. Dario and whatever the fuck he's been up to. Um,

that might, that might do more. Terrifying, man. He just get Panama. He would absolutely. He'd just get Panama'd. He would absolutely. Brian Michael Jenkins would get Panama'd so fucking quick. He'd be the Panamanianist motherfucker in journalism.

Just not even downtime before that car gets bombed. As he's talking on air. Okay, Brian Michael Jenkins is 79 years old. Oh, it wouldn't be hard to stop him, yeah. Oh, no. Dario, that's like a 10-minute job. I'm just thinking, like, Brian Michael Jenkins, he's a, quote-unquote, an American expert on terrorism

and transportation security with four decades of analysis. This is why he doesn't understand modern extremism. It's because, yeah, he's still thinking in the 70s mode. I'm sure 90% of his thoughts on terrorism are just him rehashing opinions about Hezbollah in the 80s. Yeah, all of his stuff is super dated. So I said that previously, that he he still views terrorism as like as i was in the 70s and yeah this is this is why um so that's great guy that's that's him um anyway that wraps up our show um yeah uh watch out for i think the one the one brian michael

jenkins prediction i do think will happen is that there's a decent chance we might be back in assassination territory. It has been a long time since that has happened. It has been a hot minute. And definite decrease in bowling leagues. It keeps happening in the UK. Yeah, I was meaning specifically in America.

That's what I'm saying. We're not that far away from them in terms of things happening. I'm kind of surprised it hasn't happened. I think it's probably just because maybe American legislators are all much more concerned about assassination because guns. So people like our elected leaders take more precautions than British ones did. I don't know. Maybe.

I don't know either. Well, speaking of assassinations, you can follow us on Twitter and Instagram at HappenHerePod and CoolZoneMedia. If we go missing, it was Ray Dalio. If we go missing, it was Ray Dalio. Goodbye, everybody. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter?

Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast. Yep, I can say it. A podcast, that's what we're doing. And it's about how things are kind of falling apart sometimes, or at least it feels like it. And I don't know, maybe we can do some things to help make it better. Like what happened recently in terms of, uh, forests. So, hey, a good news episode. Whoa, rare, rare, rare episode dropped for us. Uh, we got some good news. So I'm going to be talking with, uh, Sam, who was on a previous episode discussing a forest defense, about an update on all of the things that we were talking about a few weeks ago. So yeah, I think we can pretty much get into it, and then we'll talk about some other stuff around forests in general. So hello, Sam,

thank you for joining me again to talk about trees, one of our favorite topics. Hello, my pleasure. Always. So I think it was like a day or two after we dropped the episode or something, or I think it was maybe even right before we got some extra news about fire logging, um, near the Brightbush watershed. Um, yeah. What happened there? Yeah. Yeah. It was pretty wild. Actually. Uh, it was really serendipitous timing too. Um, we, as I think we mentioned in the last podcast, we were awaiting the first hearing for the court case. Um, essentially, you know, we believed that the plan to log in that area for myriad reasons was not only unethical, but also illegal. And so it was going to court,

and we were awaiting a hearing that happened on December 3rd of Friday. And typically, the judge does not rule from the bench in these sorts of hearings. And so we did not expect a decision on that day. But sure enough, the judge felt strongly enough about this case and sure enough about her decision that she did rule from the bench and ruled in our favor. And so, yay, victories. Now we have a preliminary injunction in place, meaning that no logging can happen there, at least until this timber sale has its real day in court or until the Forest Service just drops this shenanigan entirely, which hopefully they will do. But we'll see.

Yeah, so they blocked the post-fire logging and basically starting to clear-cut these areas without actual public input and without actually going through the process. As flawed as the process may be, they were just skipping it entirely. So that was blocked by this legal case. What was the reaction like in the room and in the various signal chats when this happened? Yeah, in the ether spheres.

The reaction was super awesome. I mean, so many people love this place. And that was kind of the whole point of what we were trying to do when we did the direct action out there a number of weeks ago. trying to do when we did the direct action out there a number of weeks ago was just demonstrate how many people love this place and how the forest service wasn't going to get away with what they were planning to do. Because people, as we promised, would be back if they tried to log it and move forward with that logging, which as you pointed out, and as we said last time, was super sketchy, not only because it was a terrible plan that they were planning to do in this beloved forest, but also because it was behind locked gates that they were planning to do in this beloved forest,

but also because it was behind locked gates that the public wasn't allowed into. And so it was just this, you know, travesty that was about to happen. And when we found out, and when we heard the judges incredibly strong ruling, we, you know, were absolutely overjoyed. The news spread, you know, like wildfire, excuse the news spread you know like wildfire excuse the pun and just you know all the signal threads were popping people were putting it on twitter people were reposting the sexy photos of the blockade with the giant slash pile and the fire truck and the band on top of the fire truck and i just wish that we all could have hung out again and had another dance party because it was the best. That does sound incredibly rad.

Was like your – this is something I don't actually know. But was like the documentation that was taking place by going to these places and showing, hey, this is where they're cutting. Was that brought up in the court case in terms of like, hey, this is, we actually went and saw what's actually happening. So was that type of evidence used and did it, in your mind, like kind of be a small part of like the result of the ruling? Yeah, it definitely was. And that is such an important point. And I really hope that everyone who's listening can just like put that in their minds for later how important it is for people to be field surveying or sometimes we call it ground truthing these places and actually collecting documentation, photographic evidence. and collect some site-specific kind of like community science sort of stuff. But all of that was used in court and it was super awesome. I actually was one of the standing declarants.

So I got to submit a lot of evidence from my many years of traveling that place. And all of that was referenced in court. So, so, so important. Even when the Forest Service is essentially trying to kick everyone out and keep everyone out of these places, really important to go and see them anyways. Obviously, you know, everyone needs to consider how they do that and their own security and safety. And it's becoming difficult. But certainly putting eyes on threatened places is one of the best tools we have to save them yeah i just think that's really

important to really focus on that as like a thing because like yeah stuff that people did actually had an impact on this not happening right now um and yeah like by going out there and documenting and then talking about it um it has like an actual like causal relation, which is very hard to, it's hard to get direct causal stuff to happen in like the general umbrella of activism. And it's, I think it's just really exciting that this happened. Yeah, that's so true. It does feel in the general umbrella of activism really hard to point to things that we do that are actually making an effect. And this is totally one of them. I mean, when, if and when this case does have its day in court, you know, outside of the

preliminary injunction itself, I am sure that so much of that evidence from all the folks who've been traveling there and documenting it will be used. We documented, you know, so many green living trees and places the Forest Service said were dead. You know, so many like unused roads and places the Forest Service said they needed to log alongside these roads because they're so trafficked and they are posing a safety hazard. And so it's basically like, you know, the best way to expose their gaslighting and lies is to just go document what's there. Yeah, because a big part of their ability to do this is utilizing deception in terms of like, and utilizing like non-information, like they're just not talking about the stuff that's actually happening, or they're doing like white lies to

make it sound better. So they're lying about the type of sales that they're doing with these trees and how they're classifying the trees that they're logging to get it past all of the loopholes. But that's not actually reality. They're just changing the terms to make it fit what they want. So as soon as you start looking into this stuff it gets all good it gets very sketchy because it is they're just lying about a lot of

this stuff so like if you're like listening and be like oh you know these people just love trees like yes we do love trees but like the actual thing that's going on is like they're lying about the types of damage that's being done they're lying about what areas this is happening in all to just rack up more timber sales. Like that is what's actually happening. And that's so, so important to say like loudly and clearly because the Forest Service and other management agencies are experts in making the public feel dumb and wrong and misinformed. And right now, even we sound a little wingnutty being like, yeah, absolutely. You know, like, let us be clear. A federal judge agrees with us. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, like we're not the ones who are wrong here. And I think you're totally right. You know, they're using a mixture of blatant lies, but also euphemisms like we no one's they don't they don't use the word clear cut anymore they're using all of these euphemisms you know regeneration harvest i shit you not it's a real term a lot of and a lot of the stuff that they're deciding to do is like not open to the public you need to do like FOIA requests to to actually learn what they're doing because they don't talk about it like it is it is all extremely sketchy. And yeah, like, the fact that, like, a federal judge agreed with, like, green activists is not a sentence you hear often. So, like, it's like, yeah, this is actually a thing.

And it's important to remember, like, you are not immune to propaganda. Like, a lot of this stuff is, has people who want a lot of money are vested in making people believe things about force management and all this kind of stuff yeah I know it may sound crazy when we're talking about the secret Illuminati of the force service but like

no it is a governmental organization all governmental organizations are kind of sketchy especially when their sole purpose is to, well, one of their purposes is to make money or assist in like sales of something. Like, yeah, it's going to have some sketchy stuff. Absolutely. a hilarious response piece came out from the timber industry, an organization called Federal Forest Resource Coalition, which is just a coalition of loggers, put out this hilarious little mini video responding directly to the line that we've been using in forest events,

which is worth more standing. Our forests are worth more standing. And they put out a hilarious response that is essentially pushing this timber sale, this logging propaganda saying, well, actually, our forests aren't worth anything standing after they've been burned and they're contributing to the climate crisis and they're destructive, you know, and all these things. And so totally, I mean, even people who see it with their eyes can be convinced by these voices that they're wrong because they're so good so good at making us feel just like we're the wrong ones but we're not we got this yeah in terms of like this the secret of kind of decision making and stuff behind the scenes in terms of like uh the types of like terms they're using to to you know do like restoration thinning um and all this stuff around around trying to like basically just take as many trees from the bright british watershed as they can i know the the judge said that uh she was

quote disappointed in the agency uh for for all of their silly behind the scenes trench coat meet in the dark alleyway to pass off information type of thing um which is yeah like so what what is what is some of the other kind of um stuff that the forest service and the related organizations were trying to we're trying to hide like what like what what what was the stuff that like came out um via this legal process that was like yeah what was it what's a few of the actual things that they were that they were trying legal process that was like, yeah, what's a few of the actual things that they were trying to do that eventually came to light? The major thing is that they were trying to get away with changing the logging contracts

without doing any additional environmental analysis or public engagement process. And so there were before the 2020 fires, there were, there was a plan to do what they, what we had fought them so hard to get them to agree to do, which was not log a bunch of these, this older stands protect tree. They had a diameter limit on trees that they were going to log. So we basically like slapped their hands off of all of these trees. And finally we're like, okay, we won't sue you if you move forward with the plan as stated. And it had very strong sideboards and, you know, even local folks were like, okay, go do this. And then the fires came through. And so what they were trying to do was just change the plans. They turned it all into clear cuts in the forest that we slapped their hands off of. And they were trying to argue that

they didn't need to do any additional analysis and they didn't need to engage the public. And even in court, you know, that's what they were arguing. They were doing some stupid magic math and, you know, somersaults to try and explain how they had already done an analysis that accounted somehow for the fires that no one could have ever predicted. That was before it actually happened. Yeah. No, yeah. So the judge was like, just, you know, she was just roundly like, y'all couldn't have predicted. I like to give her, you know, Southern accent. Y'all couldn't have predicted. Judge Aiken, Stone the South, no. You couldn't have predicted, you know, that the fires were going to burn through. And so there's no way you could have done analysis for fire that you didn't know was

going to happen here. You silly little beasts. But she did talk to them, you know, as if they were just naughty little children, which I loved to hear, you know, the disappointed in the forest service was a major move. And I think the other one that came up is just, you know, the Forest Service was arguing that they needed, quote, need to do this logging for restoration, for economic recovery, and to prevent future wildfires from severely burning in the area. All of that to BS, like one thing that the judge said that was super strong, was that she sees, and obviously, I'm paraphrasing here, but she sees that the community loves this place. It's obvious that this is like a beloved place.

And she essentially understands that the forest is worth more standing. She said that she wanted, she thinks that the forest needs an opportunity to recover from the fires. And so basically just called the BS on the Forest Service for their hilarious justifications for logging all the we're going to save the forest by logging it is just not it's not right, not accurate. And the judge agrees.

Yeah, I mean, I'm very, very excited about about this ruling and what it means for the future. And at least at least at least postponing this until if if if the if the lawsuit is going to go through or if or if they're just going to drop this, which they also very well may be. They might decide to focus on another part that they just don't tell anybody about and start doing it there. And then, you know, we'll start this again. But for this particular area, that is very exciting. And, yeah, it is rare for a federal judge to agree with uh people on this topic um now i want to talk about a few other kind of stuff around like forests um and how and how these kind of types of things work i i did get an interesting comment which i totally agree with

in terms of like how propaganda works in this department um and how like uh how like logging towns operate or how like towns became logging towns operate, or how, like, towns became logging towns, how, like, they're basically able to convince local populations that logging is, like, good, because, like, yeah, like, they're gonna move into this town, they're gonna restore the town, because

they're gonna bring in new money through, like, a logging industry, and, yeah, this is a very, like, very, like, a typical move, whether it be for, like, you know, coal mining, whether that be for pipelines, in terms of, like, big companies going into small towns to be like, hey, we can promise you economic growth if you can, like, assist in this, you know, extractive process. And they'll be able to convince them with, you know, misleading statistics on, you know, all that kind of stuff. In terms of logging industry is getting really good at radicalizing rural populations

to have them believe that it's not economically destructive to take down trees. They might even say it's good. And all that kind of stuff. Has there been any outreach in terms of addressing people in small towns who maybe used to rely on logging or something? And how does that work? Because I know they'll be like, oh, but you people come from the city,

and now you're coming out here into the woods where I live, and I think this is good that they're chopping down these trees, right? There's that kind of disconnection because, again, no one's immune to propaganda you can you just you just have to find the specific one um so yeah i'm just curious about like in terms of in terms of like forced defense how often this comes up and how and how you kind of kind of i don't know what's what steps to make to be like to tell people hey maybe you you believe these things because timber industries told you them? How do you start that conversation with people? Yeah, this is actually the heart of the forest defense work ahead, what you're talking about right now, the heart of our work ahead. And I

would also say, you know, there's certainly a dichotomy that the media especially likes to present between the rural logging communities and, you know, Portland or city based environmentalists and the hippie environmentalists to like come in and yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And everyone's familiar with that. And there's, of course, some truth to that. But I want to say like super clearly, essentially we're always connecting with folks on the ground in literally the backyards of these logging proposals. And many of them are super uninterested in having their backyards clear cut. And so we push directly against that mythology that it's just environmentalists coming in from Portland because we work directly with people, including for Brighton Bush,

but with every single thing that we work on, directly with people who are literally on the front lines of that logging. That said, there is absolutely a huge poll. Oregon specifically is famous for logging. Like we talked about last time, there's a logger on top of the Capitol. The mayor of Portland is for logging money. It's in Oregon's Oregonians blood. Portland is for logging money. It's in Oregonians' blood. It is baked in heavily. Yeah. And for rural Oregonians, there are economic realities where in some cases,

some counties benefit from logging in their- Totally. From the logging industry. Schools are tied to logging money. And there's, you know, in a lot of ways, a narrative that is not really accurate anymore, but has like an element of nostalgia to it, like, you know, logging towns and this old story about how things used to work with small, small family logging. logging, that's not how it is anymore. But that narrative, that like nostalgic narrative carries on into a lot of communities. And so the way that I like to cut through that for people is by making it really clear that there is a difference between small, you know, family loggers of lore and, you know, of, you know, people's what people are attached to. And the kinds of what we're seeing today is we're looking at Wall Street logging, we're looking at Wall Street, invested, invested, huge, you know, corporate industries, who owned, who can who still own, like, you know, huge percentages of

our drinking watersheds of our communities, some some of the communities on the coast are owned primarily by private industrial Wall Street funded logging corporations. And that's, you know, those aren't mom and pop. They're not living in the community. They're living often not even on the Pacific Northwest. These are rich ass assholes who are destroying our bio region. And, you know, I think that making it clear that those folks are not like us, you know, those are not like rural Oregonians. Those are not your friends. Those are not, you know, your pals or your neighbors. And just cutting through that narrative that like, oh, you know, logging communities, you know, loggers are your friendly neighbor. Actually, oh, logging communities, loggers are your friendly neighbor. Actually, no, loggers are Wall Street investment corporations, rich money people who are doing this destruction and just kind of like

breaking that, I guess like that attachment that people have to this idea that's just not a reality anymore. The reality is that people who are for logging in rural communities are, they have a lot more common with those of us who are fighting logging than the actual people doing the logging, if that makes sense. Like there's a lack of understanding of what the logging industry actually is. It's like back to that nostalgia, like people who are against logging in rural communities, you know, often genuinely do not realize that this is Wall Street and like who's doing this logging. They're still thinking it's their neighbor or their friend. And, you know, these stories. But, you know, the reality is that, you know, this is corporate timber owners who are maximizing their financial gain by buying out small landowners all over the place, ensuring that they aren't taxed by lobbying heavily in the government. So

they don't, you know, have any sort of taxation that then goes back to benefit our communities. Don't even get me started about how many taxes the timber industry skips out on that could actually benefit our communities and our schools and our libraries and our fire departments, but aren't. And then they're adopting exploitative labor practices. Basically, you know, the contracted workers who are in the logging industry right now who are doing the logging and hauling and reforestation, so-called reforestation planting of monocrop plantations, they are experiencing flat wages and declining work quality conditions. Meanwhile, while the corporate timber forums are

expanding their profits and, you know, getting more wealthy investors. So that is the reality of the timber industry. These are not, you know, your friendly neighborhood loggers anymore. So a few other points I wanted to bring up kind of on force itself. Someone said something about how we talked about like old growth and I guess they think that we said that all forests in this area is old growth and that's not something we actually said old growth is a specific term that means a specific thing

and yeah regardless of it being old growth or not they still shouldn't be cut down I don't, so I'm not sure why this point was really raised because we didn down i don't so i'm not sure why this point was really raised because we didn't i i did i don't think we did uh say that every that every tree in there is is old growth um a lot of them were planted in the past few hundred years um but that that doesn't mean like they're like much less important it's like just because they're not old growth

doesn't mean we shouldn't be preserving this particular watershed in this particular environment and not be clear cutting all of it. Yeah, old growth is like a fetish. Like the term old growth is just like become fetishized to mean this like this thing that, you know, this also let's be clear, there's not an agreement on whatoff that the federal government uses to define old growth. But obviously, if you walk into a forest stand, there's a healthy, you know, a healthy old growth stand is complex in terms of age diversity, there's going to be old growth, individual trees is going to be a lot of younger trees is going to be horizontal and vertical diversification, like old growth is complicated, it's messy. But the whole point is, you're right. It doesn't actually matter if it's, quote, in the small, narrow category of what the Forest Service would define as old growth. If it's a forest that's been around for 100 years, or even, I

would argue, if it's a forest that's over 70 or 80 years old, what are we doing cutting that down? Especially now. Yeah. Especially now. That's storing so much carbon safely in the ground. And also by that age, it's had the opportunity, you know, to to become more diverse than these like monocrop plantations that we're seeing younger forests. So I would argue any forest that's not a monocrop plantation, a young monocrop plantation should absolutely not be clear cut. It's just an inappropriate activity to do in and i find this to be a really weird comment to make um i don't i don't quite understand this this kind of idea because yes of course if you cut down a forest you are creating a new environment but that's not where that environment should be nor is it where it is it's like if you if you erect a whole bunch of concrete skyscrapers where a forest used to be, yeah, you're also making a new environment. But I would

say we probably shouldn't do that, though. That's not a good thing. Same thing with the people obsessed with putting solar panels in the desert. The desert's an actual environment. There is reasons for why deserts need to exist and that have its whole

environment and a whole um i forget the word but like it has an entire system of living things that exist there that should um we we don't need to terraform everything i don't think that's like i don't we shouldn't i think preserving the environment in general preserving the environments that are existing and who are creating like ecosystems is a good thing. I think generally the less terraforming probably the better, at least right now when we're dealing with a massive like looming climate crisis that's caused by us terraforming the earth. Maybe we should not do that as much.

Yeah, we could call that a general rule. Like, no more terraforming, y'all. Just leave it. Let's just pause. Let's pause for a bit. We just address some other things. But for real, though, whoever wrote that comment, I mean, that is a timber industry talking point that I hear all the time. And whether they meant it or not, this is how the timber industry gets us. They're real good at this. This is their, you know, nice sounding talking points that we rebut all the time. You know, not just in media, but also in court. And the talking point is clear cuts mimic natural disasters like severe fires by replacing, you know, and it's part of the process. They totally don't.

They don't. So go look at a clear cut, go look at a fire. It's a completely different experience. And I could go down that rabbit hole all day on fire ecology another time maybe, but suffice it to say, you know, what they're arguing is that they're creating young forest or quote early seral habitat by clear cutting an old forest. But what they're actually doing is deforestation. They're replacing an old forest with something that's not a forest. A young monocrop plantation is a crop. It is not a forest. And so they are deforesting and it is ecosystem.

It is ecocide. And yeah, it is. It is ecocide. And I think, is it is it is ecocide and i think yeah the the insistence that like it's good because it will allow some species to exist in this new environment like yeah but there's other environments where they can't exist and we don't we don't need to be destroying the ones that are already kind of important and doing good stuff to make room for other ones that aren't already there they argue that the deer and the butterflies love the clear cuts and so just

call that out as bullshit next time y'all hear that. Spread the word. That is some timber industry BS. They're tricksy, but don't let them get you. The last thing I wanted to mention is why blocking off access to these areas is bad. Someone said something like

because 95% of fires are human-ca caused, closing off public lands can be good because then fires won't get started in those areas. And this really misunderstands why fires get started and also is just a bad thing to do anyway. Because like fire, if you look at like the map of where wildfires start, almost all of them are on the path of highways, specifically in California. When the fires were really bad in 2020, there was this firefighter who made a great video about why the fire line was all next to the highway. And there was conspiracy theories of – Antifa's driving down highways and setting the forest on fire, which was an actual popular talking point because we live in the hell world. But, like, no, he's explaining, like, the reason why, like, they are, like, human-caused, but they're not, like,

a lot of them aren't intentionally caused. It's because that's where power lines run. And this is where a lot of sparks can ignite stuff on the edges of highways that will then take out a part of the forest. Now, every once in a while, there's a gender reveal party that goes horribly wrong and does ignite it. That is true. And I think the solution to that is not closing down the forest.

It's not having gender reveal parties. Yeah, how about we don't do that either? We stop selling on Amazon. I'm all for Tannerite as an idea, but how about let's stop selling blue and pink Tannerite packets to people who don't know how to use explosives. To rich assholes who genuinely don't know about fire.

Because yeah, they're not actually using Tannerite for what it's meant for, and they're not using it to do training. They're using it to say that they're having a baby, and this has caused a lot of wildfire death, so how about we just stop selling the gender reveal

party bombs and i think that'd be a better solution than closing down massive swaths of public land and how about our power line companies get their shit together and stop yeah do actually have a plan for planned power shutoffs and And actually, you know, we know now actually Pacific Corp is in court right now because they started the Santiam fires, their power lines started the Santiam fires and the Archie Creek fires and probably more. And so, yeah, how about the power line companies get their shit together. But I feel like the other huge thing here is that, you know, the suggestion that we should close off these forests to the public to me is just like more, you know, it's, you know, blatantly it's racist. And it's, you know, I think it's wrong because these lands, these belong to indigenous people. We should be giving

these lands back to indigenous people. And, you know, when we're talking about like rural communities too, in a just transition, like rural community members should actually have more say in what happens in their backyard forest, should be able to be more engaged in, you know, the forests that literally provide them with their drinking water and, you know, all of the things that they need to survive. So we should not be, you know, locking off these lands and keeping humans out. Humans have a place in these lands, always had a place and a role in these lands. And if we take leadership from the right folks, then we could totally live in a much more reasonable way than the gender reveal party path. It's like, it is great to be surrounded by giant trees. It makes you feel awesome. Last thing I want to talk about is, you mentioned before, like getting people who live in these rural areas who used to rely on logging, getting them more involved and doing a just transition.

Because this is a topic that comes up on climate change like everywhere in terms of like, you know, like countries that are still developing, not being able to have access to the same amount of fossil fuels that countries like the states had when they were developing. And how is that fair? This is a very common thing in terms of countries that are better off

will have kind of like a duty to assist countries that are trying to develop and trying to get better standards of living because we profited off of fossil fuels and now they won't have the same opportunity if we're trying to get to a carbon neutral world.

So in terms of like a just transition, this is something like COP26, there was supposed to be funding for adaptation efforts in developing countries. Now that failed because of course it did because it's COP26, there was supposed to be funding for adaptation efforts in developing countries. Now that failed because, of course, it did because it's COP26. But in terms of like this idea of a just transition, how do you see this like locally in the rural environment within the states for like these types of areas? Because like, yeah, it's similar to like coal mining, the towns, similar to, you know, logging towns. How do you see this working?

Yeah, this is something I think about so much. And we actually put out a platform called A Green New Deal for Our Forests in the Pacific Northwest that talks all about what a just transition could look like for communities. But I mean, this is a dream. And I think it's a really inspiring path forward because what it means is that we're not saying to end logging and we're not saying that rural communities basically need to like stop existing and getting funding from logging. What we're saying is that rural community members, that nostalgic dream that people are clinging to, we actually want to have something in that regard. We would like people to, you know, engage with and interact with their local forests. Now, that shouldn't look like clear-cutting them because that's irresponsible and that doesn't benefit local communities or, you know, benefit a future. But that could look like restoring these

young monocrop plantations into complex, healthy forests. It could look like bringing fire back onto the landscape with prescribed fire and cultural burning, taking lessons from indigenous folks who are doing that work. It could look like education and recreation and so many things of like, you know, hands-on engagement with backyard forests that surround us. And you know, that could look like basically firing the Freddys and taking this land and giving it to local communities with, you know, the, with, with conservation goals, but also goals to economically support all of those ways, you know, jobs, but also jobs and recreation, economically support local communities. So basically giving the land back to the local communities who rely on them and giving them power and control to care for them in ways that make sense. Because right now, Wall Street's caring for our forests,

and really it should be us. And I think one other thing on this topic for how well propaganda works, when I was at the Stop Line 3 purchase camps last summer, in terms of how do corporations get towns to start supporting these ideas and how do they like foster this hatred of environmentalism um despite you know these areas often being the worst impact one of the worst impacted ones by these like effort efforts right uh you know you're chopping down forests near where this town is pipeline is going next to the town if it leaks it's gonna cause all this problem to like their water supply and stuff but like how they do it's like the day of the direct action

to block off the pipeline enbridge was sponsoring like a town fair in like the little downtown area and it's like this super surreal moment of being like oh this is like i've read this happen in like comics before like this this is like this is read this happen in like comics before like this this is like this is like one of lex luther's favorite things to do is he'll like he'll like go into this like small town who's gonna start like this evil you know evil like uh like lab at and he'll like fund like this small town event thing and like i've like seen this before in so many superhero comics like i've seen this trope and now i'm just like living it you're just like watching it happen you're like driving past

the town to go uh block a pipeline and then you see like enbridge with like a little stage and like a little like fair and like everyone in the town's like dancing and they're giving out like free drinks i'm like oh no like this is hearts and minds baby yeah like you're you're like living the thing so like you know a lot of it's about like this idea of like re like reinvigorating like like you know like the the like the the spirit of the town and injecting injecting new life into it so like you know this this is like a new one for like they're putting a pipeline down but like you know it's the same thing for like you know old like old coal towns old logging towns so these corporations will come in you know make the old coal towns old logging towns so these corporations

will come in you know make the town more active again start putting on events make it feel like more of a place and then that that gets so the company gets associated with positive changes right so then people who live in the town's like oh yeah and we're just doing all these good things for my town that must mean they actually you know are gonna care about us here and then help and help us out meanwhile these people from all around the country are driving through and trying to block the pipeline and the police are driving everywhere now it's all this chaos right these stupid environmentalists they don't understand how this is gonna you know it's we're creating so many jobs here which they actually didn't embridge outsourced most of the jobs out of state but they lied about

the type of job creation you know all all all this type of stuff and this is a very a very common thing totally and like timber unity is like delivering uh wood to people when the when the snowstorm happened and everyone was cold and didn't have power and they were you know going door to door with mutual aid support um but that is why you know a remember how everyone should remember how, how tricksy and how dishonest these folks are, but also be why, um, those of us who want to see a different way need to be doing mutual aid too. Like we actually need to be out there in our communities and making friends and building trust and not just showing up to fuck shit up when it's time to fuck shit up.

And I think that kind of like circles back to the point we talked about earlier, which is like building relationships with people on the front lines looks like so much more than just like the defense of a bad thing in their backyards. It looks like, you know, mutual aid because the industry is doing it and they're, they're good at it and we need to be better. I think that wraps it up for us today.

I guess one thing I want to mention is like, what, what is going to happen going forward now after this legal victory? Just so people know, what is the next steps that are going to be taken on the legal process that will determine what happens with direct actions and going to see the forest in the future? to see the forest in the future? Yeah. Well, basically, we're waiting for a date for this court case. And so that will hopefully be scheduled if it ends up having to go through, which it might not. Obviously, there's going to be an effort made on behalf of lawyers to try and get the Forest Service to just stop, to just drop this shenanigan and walk away while they're where they're at. Because we do think we have a really strong case that will win in court if it goes to court. So that's kind of like the legal avenue. Same story as what I said the last time we talked, you know, if

logging is going to move forward in that area, whether that be because it happens in the future or because somehow this legal case is lost, direct action will happen. People will be out there in the way of logging. There's no way people are going to let that go down in the Brighton Bush community. So right now we're kind of in a waiting game. We're watching and waiting. But, you know, I hope the Forest Service knows now that they can't just get away with stuff like this. People are watching. People are going to file public records requests for documenting this. And hopefully, you know, we won't be seeing more of this. But because we live in the real world, the real sad world, we will be seeing more of this. And so, you know, we'll be out there again when the next forest is on the chopping block, which is probably going to be, you know, today, tomorrow. Yeah, it's kind of always the thing. Well, thank you so much for coming on to talk about this and the rare, rare

good news episode of, hey, something good happened. Thank you. Any other sources people can kind of follow along on the fight that people can find online? Yeah, make sure to follow Cascadia Forest

Defenders and Portland Rising Tide, who will be definitely tracking and posting. You can also follow Cascadia Wildlands, who was the lead nonprofit on the lawsuit, and they've been posting about it too. Great. All right. Thanks, everybody, for listening. Go see a tree. Touch tree. Touch tree. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here as a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources.

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