It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 149

Episode Date: September 28, 2024

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file. Sources can be found in the descriptions of each individual episode. How Bread Bloc Feeds Unhoused People In San Diego Anarchism In Brazil, Pt. 1 feat. Andrew Anarchism In Brazil, Pt. 2 feat. Andrew Gig Economy Terror: What Israel's Pager Bomb Attack Means for You Wild Faith: A Conversation with Talia Lavin You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today! http://apple.co/coolerzone See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Hello, and welcome to It Could Happen Here. It's James today, and I'm joined by Luca and Sailor. They're both from Breadblock, which is a mutual aid group in San Diego. How are you doing today? We're doing great. Great. How are you? Wonderful. Yeah, I'm thriving. I've just received my 75th COVID booster, I think. So having a little miserable day, but that's okay. Not going to get novel coronavirus, which is always nice. So can you guys start out by maybe explaining what bread block does how long it's done it and why it does it yeah so we are a mutual aid group we mostly provide hot food that's like the core of our services um we feed about 100 people like uh like 80 to 100 people depending on the day weekly in east village in san diego we also provide clothing and harm reduction supplies and other things like tampons and

plan b when we can get our hands on it and we try to be we are there like at the same time every day i will not say the exact location but if you are interested in getting involved you can always reach out and that's like what we're doing right now and that happens weekly and say am i missing anything yeah so this form of what we're doing with bread blocklock in a more organized way. We've only been doing it a few months. However, initially, we started doing it in 2021 when I started getting into harm reduction stuff.

And I was working at a syringe exchange and realized a lot of people would be asking for food. And we weren't giving that out there. And so that's why the initial idea came about. And then we just had enough people who were willing to do it in a weekly manner. giving that out there. And so that's why the initial idea came about. And then we just had enough people who are willing to do it in a weekly manner. So that's how we chose that location and got started doing that. There's just a lot of people down there on those nights.

It's timed to happen at the same time that a harm reduction services happen, the needle exchange. So it's at a time when a lot of people are down there and the amount of time are like collective doing this specific thing has existed i believe since end of march early april is how long we've been like consistently providing services every week yeah that's great that's a long time still especially through like summer can be a difficult time if you don't have a house in san diego like it gets increasingly it gets very hot and particularly the streets themselves get hot and that becomes dangerous for people yeah exactly so i want to start with like at some point right

say that you were doing your syringe exchange and you were like these people need to be fed they are hungry and now we're here and you're feeding them every week right but you had to do a whole lot of things in between here and there and like i know this because listeners email me all the time so many people want to do that too and it might not exist where they are they might not know so like can you explain how you went about like seeing a need and then organizing to meet that need. Yeah. So I guess what came before that was we had already built relationships with each other around our leftist ideals and art and protesting and different stuff. So we already knew a lot of people who are,

who are interested in mutual aid in that capacity. Yeah. But I will say things like instagram have helped just meet more people who are looking to get involved in mutual aid yeah yeah like salis said we had like had spent some time building community with each other and getting a core group of people that trust each other that had gone to protest together that were maybe in like affinity groups already with each other and then there was just sort of like enough of us that were in community with each other at the time that when sayla was like the encampment band is like really making

things so much worse for people and communities and we really need to do something we were like all just like it just happened because we were all sitting in a room together one night after a like social event and say it was like we need to talk about this and we were like okay yeah we like need to do this and we had enough people where we could pull together a first distro and then a second and then gradually adding like more organizations so that we could continue doing it sustainably over time yeah yeah that's like i want to put a pin in the camping ban because the camping ban is is making things worse for people who are already having a hard time just surviving here and it fucking sucks and it's told gloria's fault

shouldn't vote for him yeah let's talk about though like I want to get into nuts and bolts right you're feeding 100 people right you need a giant ass pan you need loads of food you need a place where you can cook how did you identify all those things and how did you get to a place where you could regularly have those things so in 2021 when I had initially started this with kind of a different group of people but there was definitely overlap we just did it and like used my mom's kitchen and found some big pots and just made it happen and i feel like if you have the will to make it happen you're gonna figure it out and you know maybe in the beginning it was a lot more chaotic, which, you know, we are anarchists, so we're okay with the chaos. But it just, after doing it week after week, it just became more streamlined.

And, you know, we just buy a lot of essential bulk food and we have a few giant pots. We like to make soup a lot. Yeah. Currently, our kitchen is like... Our cooking equipment includes two large pots and a rice cooker that someone recently donated to us. And then we needed a fridge. So we got a free fridge off OfferUp and cleaned it up and put some cool stickers on it and then plugged it into a garage currently the kitchen that we use is like a couple of us just like live together and so we use our kitchen

and we have access to our garage and we just store the supplies in the garage we store the fridge in the garage and we make it work through donations we get on instagram so we knew some comrades that work with the community fridges there's like some community fridges in san diego and so they already had a relationship with a grocery store and so we were able to hop in on that and we get some donations from that we get some donations from what's sayla uh the the group oh porch light porch light yeah and there's so much food waste that i feel like if we were to find the right people we could be fully self-supporting on just things that would be thrown away alone yeah definitely yeah we just have to meet the right people in order to do that but we're getting

there yeah and i do want to say the kitchen is a small slash regular size kitchen so you don't have to have some big crazy warehouse type kitchen to make this happen yeah and then you're feeding people right like presumably you're doing it like in the afternoon or evening have you found there are things that you said you like soup but i know like we fed a lot of people at the border last winter, right? And we found out that like certain things work, certain things didn't work. And we always tried to keep it vegan because of people's religious needs or preferences, right?

Is there anything like that that you've found that works or doesn't work? We have done a lot of chili with our squad and I know that Luca has done a lot of curry. So there are certain things that luca has done a lot of curry so there are certain things that and they can both be easily made vegan yeah initially a lot of people when we would have vegan stuff would ask for me alternatives to which i understand people you know they don't always have access to protein so we try to have both options when we can nice yeah it varies what we have because our group kind of functions with four like autonomous squads like well semi-autonomous that take turns doing the distro so that you're only really responsible for it once a month which helps

reduce burnout yeah definitely how does that work explain how like you came up with that and how it how it's organized. Yeah, so this was kind of like something we've been talking about for a while. Some of us are like more into the theory than others, but we're just kind of talking about like, oh, well, like, how do we get more people involved? Because I think what happens oftentimes with these mutual aid groups is there's like a lot of people sitting in a group chat and there's like a small core of people who do end up doing the majority of the labor and that often results in burnout for those people

and building a resentment between like the people who are doing a lot and the other people because i think also like sometimes people feel left out and they don't feel like they can get involved and then they feel like the people who are doing the core of the labor are like in charge and they have to defer to them yeah um which creates a lot of problems which i'm not saying like we don't have any of those problems like we're still trying to work out the kinks but the squad's sort of like dynamic makes it so that groups of about like five to ten because a distro you need about like six people to make it happen so about five to ten people um take turns so you just rotate so you have you know when your day is it's once a month that you are responsible for the distro and you are responsible for choosing

the food that you're cooking making sure it gets cooked organizing with your other comrades getting the donations all of that stuff but you can always ask the larger group for help or extra hands if you need it yeah but it sort of shares that like responsibility because i think the most stressful part oftentimes is like oh the distro happening tonight is on me and i and if i don't do it it's not going to happen yeah and so it sort of spreads like that sort of labor. But we have members who like show up to every single distro because they want to. And that's totally fine.

Even if they're in like whatever designated squad they're in. Right. Yeah. Or some people who show up like once every few months because they have other stuff going on, you know, so it's very open and you don't have to be in a squad. You could just choose to join whenever you have the time with whoever's week it is so it's pretty loose yeah i would say but it does give a good sense of structure yeah that helps a lot i remember one day like last year last winter and i was out building shelters with an uzbek guy and a few kurish guys and uh we built these shelters and we built three of them

and afterwards I was sitting down with some of my friends who were also there as volunteers and they're all anarchists too we each asked each other what we did and then one of them said so what do we all learn what did you learn when you did that today right and I think that's a really valuable question that we should be asking ourselves in our organizing spaces so like from your first distro to now i want to ask what did you learn um i would say we've really learned how to trust each other we're working on you know how to get consensus models how to split the labor between different people how to work with different people and also yeah like i said in the beginning how to really how to trust each other which and also yeah like i said in the beginning how to really how to trust each other which you know we all want to see the revolution happen at some

point and so i feel like one of the most important and valuable things we can be doing is building relationships and communities with each other where we can actually rely on each other and so having a mutual task really helps with that yeah yeah and i think for me like we've like tried to do stuff in the past like this and i think the issue we've always run into was that like sometimes there's like a tendency to want too much structure right away and be like oh if we don't have everything planned out we don't know how everything's going to work, then we can't do it. And we need to figure everything out beforehand. And we learned a lot doing it.

And even if we didn't have everything figured out, we're still working on our consensus structure. We're still working on how we're going to make big decisions as a group and when the squads can make their own decisions and when the group can make their own decisions. And we don can make their own decisions and like,

we don't have everything figured out. Like it's very like loose, but we didn't need that. And we're, we've been able to do a distro for like months and we don't have everything figured out. We have something, we had enough to get us started and we're like working on like slowly adding

things as we need to without like overburdening ourselves. Cause I think sometimes like lots of layers and lots of complexities can really make it difficult to organize and adapt to what's happening on the ground. Definitely. I think, yeah, we can overcomplicate it and like be too anxious.

Talking of anxious, I'm anxious. So we have yet to pivot to advertisements. So let's do that. and then we'll come back and we're back okay so you spoke about like a lot about the logistics of cooking which is great but i know from experience of feeding hungry people can be a challenge, right? It's no one's fault, especially when people are hungry. We're not our best selves. There's a whole advertising campaign built around that.

So how do you organize your discharge such that everybody feels that they're being taken care of, everybody feels safe and knows that they're going to get enough to eat. Yeah. So that also goes back to something more we've learned is we try to have enough people at the distro so we can have different people doing different things. And sometimes that means one person is just walking around, talking to people,

deescalating a situation if need be. And then we also figured out that at the the end when we run out of food in order so that people who have been waiting in line don't get mad which it's understandable you know they've been waiting in line and there's no more food and they're hungry yeah of course we try to have like different snacks and like muffins or granola bars and water just to hand out at the end for those people who still need something and so sometimes we have music and we all just try to bring a good energy and so far nothing that we haven't been able to handle has happened yeah yeah that makes sense i know we uh we found the music was really helpful

when we were distributing food when really big groups at the border like play some music i have a friend who plays music play some music and then we'd always ask folks um from the group who we were feeding to volunteer to help us and that oh yeah it helped us overcome language barriers and stuff that's happened a couple times as well where people have just stepped up and wanted to help which has been great yeah it's nice and it gives us all like part of what we're doing with mutual aid isn't just meeting material needs it's also like the difference between solidarity and charity right like we're there because we care about you as people not just as like hunger mouths that we can take off a spreadsheet like and working together is an integral part of that and it's uh it's what distinguishes us from charity model. And thankfully most of the time we have enough people that if somebody needs

to step aside and have a one-on-one conversation with somebody, because that's what they need in that moment. And we can do that. Yeah. Having floaters is really important. Like we always have like two people, at least two people serving food. And then we have like a snack table,

water table usually. And then we have a section for harm reduction that usually gets served on like another table um and then we have like a section for clothes depending on what we have and people sort of like go down the assembly line kind of like going down grabbing the different things and we give people like plastic bags that we get from grocery stores so they can get their things but we also have like floaters usually so that like if someone's like having like a medical issue or someone's like upset or whatever is going on someone can like step aside and spend some time with them um like the other day we had a woman who was not feeling well because of the heat and she had been out and she needed to sit down so we like

grabbed one of our chairs and we sat her down and got her some water and just like talked to her and we had a couple people who could step aside and do that and then everyone else just could keep like feeding people without it kind of stopping things but she still got what she needed and during that heat wave at one of the distros i remember you ran across and thought somebody Gatorade because they really were needed electrolytes. So we're lucky that we have enough people that we get to be able to do stuff like that when we need to. Right.

And I imagine that regularity is really important. Like people know that you will be there and that they can come and you will feed them like that builds trust, right? Like, and everyone I think benefits from a little structure and being unhoused, be there and that they can come and you will feed them like that builds trust right like and uh everyone i think benefits from a little structure and being unhoused it can be really fucking hard to find structure yes exactly and and it's very hard to get like home-cooked food yeah this is

something i've encountered living in my car like it's hard to get healthy food the food you buy is shit it's more expensive and and it's less good for you and and like this these things compound over time to have health and psychological consequences yeah everything we cook we eat as well and you know if we're cooking or we're helping out with sister of course that's a mutual and mutual aid we can also eat it yeah yeah that uh it's definitely something else we learned that the border was so like especially if we're cooking something that's maybe not a cultural cuisine because we're meeting people from all over the world you know a lot of times it's like like you were saying chili and curry it's like hot wet food right like uh you

know that big semi-liquid pan of chili or whatever that we would cook and spaghetti and like folks being like what's that we're like oh do i'm gonna eat some do you want some yeah and like i honestly had some of the happiest moments of last year uh just like i remember one day i've been building yurts all day with an uzbek guy and then we sat down and had our beans and just like talked about our lives and it was really sweet and yeah i think that that is a moment of solidarity that yeah you don't get when you're you know i've seen ngos and the u.s military tossing mres at refugees and i think the same thing yeah yeah no there shouldn't be like a line between like you and the people that you're providing mutual aid to i mean like it

should you should never give someone food that you're not mutual aid to i mean like it should you should never give someone food that you're not willing to eat yourself and like if someone's hungry while we're cooking like they can totally eat the food that we're making too it's not like cordoned off um yeah like of course we like you know we wear our ppe and we like you know aren't getting our hands or whatever. But I mean, because a lot of the people who do provide mutual aid and work in mutual aid groups are also people who may face houselessness or have trouble paying for groceries or something.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, there's no separation between us and them at the end of the day. Yeah, I think that's super important. So I want to talk about the camping van. Maybe let's take another hour break. We'll talk about the camping van when we come back. We are back. We are now discussing the topic, which I love to talk about, which is evil things that Todd Gloria has done.

And today, it could be the whole podcast every day of the week for years, but we're going to talk about this camping van. For folks who didn't listen to our camping van episode, can you give me like a 60-second synopsis on the camping van? And then we can dive into what it's done. Yeah, so basically earlier this year, the Supreme Court overturned basically an ordinance that you don't have the ability to cite or arrest somebody

if there's not shelter available, but they overturned that. So now they can. And Gavin Newsom issued a sweeping order that the agencies have to clear encampments and ordered that cities and counties do the same. So now there's 14 plus cities in California that do have a camping ban in place. So that's criminalizing living outside. Yeah. The existence of unhoused people is now a crime.

Yeah. So what have you seen post enforcement yeah so i i also like work in the field of harm reduction and so you know i do this in my free time because i want to do it but i also do it for work which there's definitely sometimes i feel weird about like working for an organization and wish that i didn't have to but it's just one of those things and i've seen it's really hard and really sad because when people are in encampments a lot of times they build a sort of community and family and they learn how to take care of each other and constantly being being split up is destroying these communities and then they just have to

travel further and further away so that they're disconnected from not only their community, but also resources that they do have. And so it's just really hard. And sometimes we lose connections with people. We don't know where they went, you know, or they end up in jail or it's been really horrible. And we're just talking about how it just seems like people don't really care. And it's crazy that this is happening in our communities and people aren't talking about it and aren't outraged by it. Yeah. Yeah.

These bans also have a really nasty ripple effect because when these people got pushed out of San Diego, then they go to other cities that don't have an encampment ban, like Chula Vista, National City, and now Chula Vista, National City, and other cities are advancing their own camping bans inciting an influx from san diego right so it's like creating this really awful like just progressive expansion of these bans yeah and one one more thing i'll add is that

some people are like oh well that's just gonna you know be good because some people are like, oh, well, that's just going to, you know, be good because some people are going to get into shelters or find alternative ways of getting help. But that's not what's happening because we have not had any more shelters. It's really hard to get into a shelter, actually. And, you know, since Newsom has been governor, we've had apparently so many billions of dollars, 24 spent tackling homelessness and it's like what is there to show for it right people still don't have a place to go and even if they do get into a shelter a lot of the times there's so many rules and regulations that if somebody has a high level of mental health needs and they're not going to be able to stay there and there's just no solution yeah it's giving the appearance of doing something to make homeowners

right people who they think matter happy it's really bleak yeah let's discuss a little bit then like this camping ban as you say has forced people to other cities like what do you think it does to the unhoused community like you talked a little bit about breaking up encampments like where do people end up right when their encampments get broken up when their community and like where do they end up and and how can people because this is something this is nationwide right yeah gavin newson is being a particularly odious turd about it but like other people other states are doing it too it It's something I've seen in San Diego, for instance,

people ending up in a river bed. So can you talk about like the risks there and then like the needs that it creates and how we can meet them? So you're right. Some of them are ending up in river beds. There's also like what they refer to as a Island kind of close to old town where a lot of people have been going, but you know, you have to get a raft to go there and it's not easy to get there they don't have a lot

of resources there there's a lot of crime that happens and it's not the best scenario and other than that they're making these safe sleeping sites which are not actually safe and they're kind of like concentration camps and they're from people i've talked to who actually live in them they're not good places to be at yeah at all and it's just kind of like pushing the problem out of view without actually doing anything or providing anything meaningful to people yeah which is the goal i think is to make poverty invisible like yeah yeah exactly and the other thing that happens is like i live in an area where there are a lot of encampments and there probably would be permanent encampments if it weren't for the ban and personally i would prefer

that because like what happens is these people get like moved like their their encampment will like crop up it'll be there for like maybe a week and then like it'll disappear and like i'll wake up one morning and they're gone and all of their stuff often gets thrown away they lose access to their things if they're not there to take it they basically can take only what they can carry on their backs if they're lucky if they happen to be there when their stuff is being thrown away they're they're sighted they could be arrested and then usually i see sometimes the same people come back but they just had to like go find somewhere else so they're basically being forced to be like migratory rather than like staying in one place which means that it often it also makes like the people who live in in

neighborhoods like because i can't form relationships with these people as much as i could before yeah like i can't know my neighbors as much because my neighbors are constantly getting moved around so like i'll like form a relationship with someone and i'll be like you know like i'll be like their beer guy and i'll like you know like there's people that i'll know that i'll like go buy a beer for go get water for if i see them and I know their name and that. But then when with the encampment ban, they might just disappear one day and I don't know if they got arrested. I don't know if they've just been displaced. And that's like not great for me, not great for them, not great for literally anyone around.

Because it's like people are safer if they're able to have like a stable place to be definitely yeah like everyone is safer yeah yeah if our stated goal is getting people off the streets like chasing them around the streets isn't doing that making it harder for people to find stability yeah and um you know i've talked to people also about the reason sometimes they don't like the term homeless is because they're like, yes, we may not have a house, but we make our homes. We make a community, we make a home. And losing that sense of security, any little bit of security they have, constantly having to move, not ever feeling comfortable or safe,

you know, that's traumatizing. Taking a bad situation and making it worse, which is what the state likes to do. I wonder, like, before we finish up, a lot of people, like I said, want to start a mutual aid thing. Do you have any advice for them? Things that you would do if you were starting over, things that you feel like you did well?

If you wanted to start Breadblock now, how would you go about it? Get signal. Start a group chat. Maybe make an Instagram where you can post about it and find people who are also interested in that go to local events what else luca having like a place where people can like congregate with each other like having a regular like community event to meet people um and get to know each other and trust each other i really wish that we had started like sooner because i think we had the

capacity to start sooner like way beforehand and i think it was like the incamit ban and like selah being like we need to do this like happening it like it just takes like one person being excited enough about something and then like their comrades being like yeah no you're right like we do need to do something and i think people are really afraid to be that person to like push for something to try to like wake other people up or like convince other people that you have the capacity to because i think the state can be really disempowering and they make you think that you need like a budget and you need like all of these things to like be able to provide people like aid or like like mutual aid to provide people anything and like we did it with like literally just like a couple of our members just like gave some money that we had and that we had like you

know like we had like a couple hundred dollars that we got from people and then money that was enough to start and like you could literally start with like 50 bucks and figure it out yeah yeah we did not come from a place of any of us having a lot of money. So we've basically just had to figure it out and anybody can figure it out. You know, I feel like our culture is so individualized, but we do have the capacity to come together and yeah, just take somebody being like,

all right, let's do this. And you'll, you'll meet enough people who are also interested in that because people do want community at the end of the day and people do want to help people. Yeah. Is there anything else you guys want to mention before we go? Yeah.

The only last thing I wanted to mention is that we do have a lot of future goals of expanding and doing more street medicine as well and expanding to different areas. We're also having mobile teams where we can go out and reach people who aren't in one location or who maybe have certain disabilities and can't walk and get there. So we have a lot of ideas for that. And that just takes meeting more people who are into this and getting more

funds and yeah. Yeah. So hopefully that's something we can do and i just wanted to briefly mention one of our members did some really great research on the way that hillcrest business association is using the encampment ban to further harm and using they're actually using like private security to push people out so people can enjoy their nightlife without having to deal with an objectionable minority that wants to live however it pleases um no for fuck's sake the quote from mr ben nicholas oh god of the hillcrest business association so

they have a initiative called hillcrest clean and Safe Program, where they displace people from Hillcrest for the benefit of the businesses. And they have, like, if you go on Voice of San Diego, you can hear some, like, just the way they talk about these people is really insane and really dehumanizing. And it kind of notes how businesses, how, like, capitalism in the state are working together hand in hand to displace our community members. So the business associations and the businesses themselves are being empowered by these encampment bans to further perpetuate violence on people. yeah and on that topic the way that people actually are addressing it here is making it so much worse like san diego has a hot team which is part of the police department it's called the homeless outreach team and they're supposedly supposed to help get people into shelters and stuff like that but anybody i've talked to who has tried to reach out for them and ask oh you know okay if you're going to move me like i need to get into a shelter one of them who i was talking to about this was in his 70s and very

medically vulnerable and instead of helping him find somewhere to go they just put his car which he was sleeping in because it was unregistered and so they're not actually helping at all it's just a cop and that's why you know just us regular people have to do something because the state's not going to yeah i, I think that's a great thing. That's the fucking dark about the Hillcrest Business Association. For people who aren't familiar with San Diego, San Diego's LGBTQIA neighborhood is called Hillcrest. One in three of our trans youth are unhoused.

And I guess they don't matter to the Hillcrest Business Association. Not surprising, but just fucked up. Where can people, if they want to support you, if they want to follow you, if they want to come out and do food distro, where can they find you on the internet? Yeah, they can find us on Instagram. Our Instagram is breadblock underscore distro.

If you want to provide like direct funds, bread underscore block is our Venmo. Block with a C, not a K. B-L-O-C. Oh yeah c oh yeah yeah b l o c like block yeah we are anarchist though most of us at least yeah and i also wanted to mention a couple comrades of ours are facing houselessness themselves and there's a mutual aid post on our Instagram and you can also find them at ruster.music. That's R-U-S-T-E-R music or their Venmo is also in a post on our page. They could really use some help because they are really big individuals who

like show up all the time and help us cook and are a big part of our group. And, you know, also could use some mutual aid yeah let's know yeah let's have people help them thank you so much for your time guys thank you for doing all that important work and thank you for sharing it with us if people have questions they can reach out to you right yes yes of course thank you so much for having us yeah thank you so much. It's much appreciated. Yeah. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series,

The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout?

Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run run high it's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all it's light-hearted pretty crazy and very fun listen to post run high on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts hey i'm jack these thomas the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Blacklit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our

culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose.

This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible Don't get me wrong though, I love technology I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough

so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hola mi gente, it's Honey German and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment

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

Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German,

where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez.

Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom.

At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Carapanjia. I'm Andrew Siege of the YouTube channel Andrism. Welcome to Carappan here. I'm Andrew Siege of the YouTube channel Andrewism. I'm joined by... Garrison Davis. Hello there. Once again, hello. And today, I regret to inform you that you must come to Brazil.

I've heard mixed things about Brazil currently, but I'm not against the idea. I have considered it before. Yes. Well, we're not going to the Brazil of present times. We'll actually be time traveling, continuing the somewhat informal series I've been doing on Latin American anarchism. We'll be dipping our toes into the sand and the sea, the farmlands and jungles, the mountains and deserts, the cities and villages that make up the land and ground of the potential liberty of the people of Brazil particularly the struggles for anarchism that they would have had in the late 19th and

early 20th century all this is of course thanks to the scholarship of people like Edgar Rodriguez Jesse Cohn, Felipe Correa, Rafael Viana, The Silver, Juan William dos Santos, Edilene Toledo, and Luigi Biondi. And without further ado, let's get into it. So, the Portuguese landed in the region that would become known as Brazil in 1500. Prior to their colonization, the land was home to ethnic groups linked to four main language groups. The Arawak, the Tupi-Guarani, the Jé home to ethnic groups linked to four main language groups, the Arawak, the Tupi-Guarani, the Zhe, and the Kalinago. Some of the specific ethnic groups

included the Potiguara, Trememembe, Tabahara, Cayete, and so on. After Pedro Alvarez Cabral landed, the following centuries were marked by colonization and enslavement as lands were dispossessed and cleared plantations were established roads were laid bridges were built and so on all by the auctioned and purchased efforts of whipped and exploited human muscle the oppressed enslaved africans in the society would sometimes flee into the jungles and form quilombos or fugitive slave slave settlements, including the famous Palmares, which survived for almost a century with a population of between 11,000 to 20,000. After Brazil gained its independence from Portugal in 1822, retaining its own monarchy,

it experienced numerous maroonages, reforms, and popular revolts, including the Setembrada and Novembrada revolts, the Orupreto uprising, the Sabinada and Bailada revolts, the Camarachim revolt, the Guerra dos Farapos revolt, the Liberal Revolution, the Praira Revolution, the extremely late abolition of slavery in 1888, and the proclamation of the first Brazilian Republic in 1889. It was in this tumultuous socio-political landscape that anarchism would take root. As in much of Latin America, anarchism would be brought by immigrants through port cities like Rio de Janeiro and Santos. But revolutionary ideas would also come to Brazil by way of Brazilians themselves. Some went to France and Portugal for their studies

and discovered anarchism there. Others would find the words of Kropotkin and Malatesta in the bookstores of their native cities. Dr. Fabio Luz, a Bahian hygienist and doctor, wrote two novels which sought to grapple with the social question of exploitation of man by man in Brazil. Dr. Luz also spent his time working alongside unions and helping to fight the yellow fever and smallpox epidemics that plagued his nation. Another novelist, Manuel de Mendonca, also published in this time, contributing to a slow-growing libertarian literary universe. These anarchist intellectuals, alongside others, would go on to launch a popular university. Other contributors

to the propagation of anarchism in Brazilian soil included Eliseo de Carvalho, J. Martins Fontes, Pedro do Couto, Rocha Pombo, João Gonçalves da Silva, Maximino Maciel, Benjamin Mota, Francisco Viotti, etc. Anarchism in Brazil was actually quite diverse as well, as it found immigrants from Italy, Manichism in Brazil was actually quite diverse as well, as it found immigrants from Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Ukraine, Russia, Germany, Canada, and England, alongside former black slaves and mestizos. It found children and it found women. Inovascos, Edgar Lewinroth, José Oitica, Maria Lacerda, Demura, and Maria Angelina Suarez all made key contributions to the development of anarchism in Brazil. Dozens of newspapers like Clichy, Afi, Pianchi, La Feneur, O Livretario, and O Despertar will also be published.

Hundreds of lectures will be hosted, alongside language classes and artistic activities at anarchist cultural centres, or ateniums, and schools like the Ilesio Reclus School and the Modern Schools in Sao Paulo, which also provided literacy courses and vocational training. Revolutionary plays will be put on in theatres by groups such as Grupo Arte Instructiao and Grupo Dramatico Jeremina, blending entertainment with syndicalist propaganda and fundraising efforts for the labour movement. Workers' festivals featuring poetry, song, dance and sport raised money for anarchist syndicalist organisations and reinforced a sense of solidarity. The anarchist workers, being so numerously immigrant, attempted to create a cosmopolitan counterculture centered

on working class values and priorities. So all these projects and institutions were the results of their efforts. Over a thousand foreign agitators would be deported from Brazil as a result of their radical efforts, and a few would even be killed. The first anarchist to be murdered by the state in Brazil was the Italian Polinice Mate, killed in Sao Paulo on the 20th of September 1898. Earlier that year, the first gathering of socialist-leading workers in Brazil would take place in Rio Grande do Sul, attended by delegates from various associations, anarchist groups, and a newspaper. As usual, the Italian immigrants were heavily represented. The anarchist immigrants

even managed to establish a settlement known as the Guadarrima anarchist colony, organized by Italian anarchist Arturo Campagnoli. But perhaps the most notable contribution to anarchism by the Italians in Brazil was the Sicilia colony, which deserves special attention. It bears mentioning, of course, that this project, as with everything taking place in Brazil in this time, took place on colonial land, which seemingly went unacknowledged by the anarchists themselves, but it was regrettably common in the colonial conditions of Brazil. In the southern state of Parana, in the rural municipality of Palmeira, a group of Italian anarchists led by Giovanni Rossi and Gigi Damiani founded the Sicilia colony in 1890. The land was originally granted to them by Emperor Pedro II, but after the proclamation

of the first Brazilian republic, the new government did not acknowledge that land grant and so the anarchists had to purchase it instead. The anarchists sought to experiment and create a society based on collective ownership and free love. They built a communal shed for shelter and began the process of constructing individual homes. The population of the colony quickly grew to almost 300 people, including the Rossi himself. But by the end of 1891, the colony was facing its first big challenge. They'd outgrown the infrastructure. With only 20 wooden houses and one community shed, the settlements simply couldn't sustain the influx of people. And to make matters worse, many of the settlers were industrial workers with

little or no agricultural experience. And this lack of farming knowledge made it difficult for them to produce enough food to feed themselves. They tried to organize tasks based on people's existing skills, artisans stuck to their trades, but the farmers struggled, especially with the differences between Italian and Brazilian soil. While they managed to plant crops like maize, the results weren't immediate. With the money they brought, they could buy groceries, tools, and seeds, the results weren't immediate. The money they brought, they could buy groceries, tools, and seeds, but it wasn't enough to sustain them until their crops started yielding results. So many settlers had to seek work elsewhere, with some even taking government jobs. The colony wasn't just about farming though. Over the years, they built roads, sheds, barns, a mill,

and even a fish tank. They planted a huge cornfield, dug wells, and set up a nursery for seedlings. They even tried out free love, with Rossi himself participating in a polyamorous relationship. Many such cases. Many such cases. But despite all these efforts, the cracks were starting to show. In 1892, seven families packed up and returned to Italy. By the end of the year, the colony's population had dwindled to just 20 people oh dang yeah yeah it's a very very rapid decline yeah the sustainability these types of projects is always like the big thing and especially when it comes to like food and farming like that is unfortunately the joke whenever people talk about these sorts of projects

now all these artisan craftsmen don't want to spend out time toiling away in the fields yeah yeah yeah it's a challenge that persists today so far it seems like there's like a decent mix of like labor organizing like social organizing like with like newspapers like theaters plays like that kind of like more like cultural engagement stuff with like unions and this little like anarchist society that they try they've they've kind of like like sped run through a whole bunch of like i don't want to say like social anarchism because that is a term that means something else but there is a lot of stuff that's kind of very similar to that at least like so far and i'm not hearing very much stuff that leads me to believe there's like you know a large degree of conflictuality towards the actual brazilian republic but was that also like

an aspect during this time period they would end up engaging in a lot more heavy like you're talking about like direct engagement with the state. Yeah. I think in this early period when they were still building up and spreading the word, it was sort of a honeymoon period for the movement. Okay.

In a sense, a lot of the dramatic confrontations are very soon pending. Okay. Okay. So the cracks were starting to show. Families had packed up and returned to Italy. The colony had gone down to just 20 people.

And because a lot of the colonies made up of intellectuals, doctors, engineers, artisans, many of them left for nearby cities where they founded the Giuseppe Garibaldi Society, which I couldn't find much information on that particular society from that particular historical period in my research. But it seems to have been a mutual aid society.

I'm not 100% sure. I mean, that would make sense as it's within a bigger city. Yes, yes. And Garibaldi has a rather interesting history that I'm only recently learning about. I didn't even know he went all the way to South America and Scalavanton and stuff. But I learned very recently that he had married, I believe, an indigenous or a mestizo woman

while he was in South America. And they had this very romantic, dramatic life together, leading battlefields side by side, all that stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm not surprised that the Italian anarchists were perhaps inspired by Garibaldi, even if he himself was not an anarchist. Sure. So anyway, by 1893, new settlers had arrived, thankfully,

and the colony was trying to manufacture shoes and wine barrels so they could make some sort of an income. They eventually grew to 64 residents and they established two wells and a new access road. But even with those new developments, the colony was still struggling. They were dealing with material poverty, the neighboring Catholic communities were extremely hostile toward them, and they also had to do with very poor sanitation conditions and then in their fourth year they also had a crop epidemic that pretty much decimated the colony and of course as high-minded as the ideas may have been there were the internal struggles you know free love and communal living may have been central to the colony's philosophy

but not everyone adapted well to the ideals. In theory they embraced the values but in practice there was some insecurity and jealousy that other was out of that. Also many such cases. Many such cases. By the end of 1893

it was abundantly clear that the colony couldn't survive. Labour was in high demand in nearby cities, and despite efforts to attract new settlers through socialist propaganda in Europe, the colony just couldn't maintain its population. And in 1894, Celia Colony officially came to an end. There have been many plays and dramatizations of the story of Celia colony most of them as you would imagine are in brazilian portuguese so good luck uh finding them i'll try to find a dub somewhere maybe yeah yeah and it's a little in portuguese but anyway so the experiment had held on for four dramatic years,

defying pressure from the newly established Brazilian Republican government, heavy taxes, and even military incursions. But eventually material conditions, disease, and internal conflicts brought it on. And how are we entering into the 20th century? 1903 saw the founding of the first formal structure inspired by international syndicalism, the Federation of Class Associations. This organization would take part in the first Workers' Congress in 1906, which brought together 43 delegates, predominantly anarchists, from across Brazil

in over 12 sessions discussing 23 items of discussion. Giovanni Rossi, the guy behind the Sicilian colony, was among the attendees. The Congress sought to advocate for economic resistance societies and laid the foundation for the Brazilian Workers' Confederation, or COB, for short, in 1908, which united over 50 unions, primarily from Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, and Rio Grande do Sul. Between 1905 and 1908, the workers' movement witnessed a surge in strikes, notably among shoemakers, railwaymen, and other industrial sectors. Porto Alegre saw a degenerate strike in 190606 sao paulo was the scene of insurrectionary strikes in 1906 and 1907 as part of the campaign for the eight-hour workday in santos the strikes for the

eight-hour day only ended in 1921 meaning they spent well over a decade close to two decades fighting for the eight-hour day yeah the' movement also held several congresses in this time, including the first and second Sao Paulo state congresses, the first Masquerês State Labour Federation Congress, and the Paraná Labour Congress, which affirmed the movement's commitment to anarchist syndicalism. And as with other anarchist groups around the world, they organized a demonstration to commemorate the death of Francisco Ferrer, the modern school founder who inspired rational education efforts across Brazil.

They also supported the Russian workers in both 1905 and 1917, supported Mexican workers and peasants in 1910, and commemorated the Chicago martyrs on subsequent May Days. 1913 marked the second Brazilian Labourian labor congress much larger than the first where delegates from 117 bodies across eight states debated 24 items in 1914 anarchists in sao paulo organized a conference to select two delegates to represent brazil at the london anarchist congress which was eventually and unfortunately cancelled due to the outbreak of world war one this is such an interesting moment in like international anarchism that at least right now just like we have like the internet but that sucks like the style of like actual like like international like um anarchism

it's just something that is i've i've never really been able to experience before. But, Garrison, you're forgetting something. We have discourse. I'm sure they also had discourse, but they got to go to London to do their discourse, which sounds much better than doing it from my toilet on twitter.com. Sorry, x.com. My apologies. No, but that's true, though. I would much rather the discourse take place in

poosan over you know the discord servers and the twitter and reddit threads i mean like especially in that like international aspect like there's there's certainly like like anarchist gatherings and like conferences and convergences you know within within countries i've been to many in the United States. But yeah, this sort of like having anarchists in Brazil go to London to talk with anarchists from everywhere else in the world to compare their experiences and compare notes and talk about what their actual political goals are is something that I think just sadly doesn't really exist anymore. And that's really a vital component of international solidarity because that kind of solidarity, that kind

of fraternity is very difficult to find just through virtual interaction. There's something meaningful in shaking a person's hand and embracing them and laughing and crying together in person, sharing a meal, I think really makes a difference. I mean, yeah, especially when

you have, like, the spread of anarchism is so built on that internationalism. Like, you have anarchists from Portugal and Italy and Spain. Yeah, the immigrant influence is very, very profound. But although there was the outbreak of World War I, closer to

home, the anarchists were still involving themselves in that sort of regional discourse. They may have been flying to London, but they managed to meet with delegates from Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay at the International Peace Conference and the South American Anarchist Congress in October 1915, all in an aim to foster both regional and international anarchist cooperation. As the war raged on, in addition to their anti-war propaganda, Brazil's anarchists continued to rally against unemployment, rising living costs, scarcity of basic foodstuffs, while resisting the capitalists, the clergy and the state which sent young men to the slaughter on the battlefield. The government gave the go-ahead for direct sale by the producer to the consumer without taxes levied, easing the hunger crisis in the country.

So their struggles worked. This period, and particularly from 1912 to 1920, marked significant worker mobilization. was marked by significant strikes, including the Sao Paulo General Strike of 1917, which saw 70,000 workers participate, with sympathy strikes in Rio Grande do Sul and Parana, demanding better working conditions, wages, and aid to our workers. This period also witnessed an increase in unionization and the growth of the workers' press, which provided critical platforms for revolutionary ideas. In 1919, an uprising exploded in Rio de Janeiro, leading to the death of three workers and the imprisonment or deportation of nearly a hundred. The government deployed police, troops, and even naval warships to crush

the resistance of the workers. And they also attempted to exploit racial divisions. They would take Afro-Brazilians and use them as scabs, and then once the strike was over, once they broke up the strike, they would fire those same Black workers to reaffirm the privilege of white labor. Eventually, the government would concede and force capitalists to make some concessions where wages were concerned. But this came at a cost. Alongside the mass imprisonment and deportations, the state's efforts included infiltration of the unions, which eventually steered reformist unions into the leadership position of the working classes, supplanting the more revolutionary organizations.

Thus, anarchism arguably entered a new era in the 1920s. There were still anarchist-led labor congresses, including the 3rd Brazilian Labor Congress and the 2nd and 3rd Rio Grande do Sul Labor Congresses, the latter of which endorsed a declaration of principles from the IWA and established an international anarchist solidarity pact. organizations, two newspapers, six anarchist groups, Sao Paulo militants, and delegates from Uruguay, Paraguay, and Argentina, anarchist efforts in Brazil had to become much more clandestine. Following the deportations, the state intervention, the general repression of the successive Brazilian regimes, the anarchist movement had indeed weakened. And I took another blow with the establishment of the Brazilian Communist Party, the PCB, partially inspired by Bolshevism in 1922, which absorbed many former anarchists, including Edgar Luneroff, who co-authored its charter, and Astrid Guido Pereira, who served as its secretary general

for nearly a decade before he was expelled. The PCB competed for union leadership and worked with governments of Arturo Fernandez, Washington, Luis, and Getulio Vargas to suppress the libertarian movement and the free trade unions. The Fernandez government, by the way, sent thousands of political prisoners, including anarchists into the remote penal colony of Clevelandia.

Thousands. With the harsh conditions killed hundreds. Wow. And the Luis and Vargas governments, of course, were not any better. I was also wondering, where were these people deported to? It sounded like

they've been in Brazil for quite a while. When you were mentioning there was all those other people who were deported out of the country, where did they go? Yeah. There was a story I was reading about that. I didn't maintain it in my notes i'm only half

remembering it but one of my sources would have had it uh of the names i listed at the beginning but they had spoken about how there were these i believe portuguese people in brazil as i'm portuguese from portugal who had been living there and working there and whatever for years and years and years and because they had naturalized they were like subject to like this these heavy attacks and i believe some of them were deported as well and so i'm assuming whatever country of origin they could be traced to they would be deported there or they would be deported to a neighboring south american country but i didn't really find specific details on where they were sent. I assume it's mostly their home countries or neighboring countries. Between that and sending thousands of people to a penal colony with hundreds dying,

this is a massive wave of repression they're dealing with in the early 20s here. Indeed. Indeed. And unfortunately, their supposed allies weren't exactly a help in 1927 the anarchists antonio dominguez and damiao de silva were murdered by the communists who also wounded another 10 members of the printers union and attacked and stole the assets of the footwear workers union so that further weakened the anarchist struggle when they were already dealing with that government repression. And in a sense, anarchists are like roaches.

We just keep on struggling and surviving. And the persistence of anarchist resistance, in spite of all this repression, would trigger a further backlash by the bourgeoisie, which would also arise to challenge the survival of anarchism and the left in general in Brazil. From the very same Italy that brought many an anarchist, also came many a fascist. Which brings us to the Brazilian Integralist movement. But to find out what happened in the 1920s and 30s and onward, you'll have to wait for the next episode. I've been Andrew Sage. You can find me on youtube.com slash andrewism and patreon.com slash stdrew. And this has been It Could Happen Here.

All power to all the people. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the

thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me in a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts

dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that

shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola mi gente, it's Honey German and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing

their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite your podcast. at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better.

Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez.

Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian.

Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom.

At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Ches Piz, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Carapunhia. I'm Andrew Sage of YouTube channel Andrewism. Today we're continuing the Latin American anarchism series with our exploration of anarchism in Brazil.

I'm joined by... Garrissa Davis. Hello there. And once again, thanks to the scholarship of Edgar Rodriguez, Jesse Cohen, Felipe Correa, Rafael Viana de Silva, Juan William dos Santos, Edilene Toledo, and Luigi Biondi. When we last left off, anarchist labor resistance in Brazil had triggered a turning point and a reaction. Weakened by the splits caused by the Bolsheviks and the military repression of the government, another faction would step in to cripple the anarchist cause even further, the Integralists. In the 1920s and 1930s, Brazil saw the rise of the Brazilian Integralist Action, the AIB, a nationalist movement led by Plinio Salgado. During a trip to Europe, Salgado became enamored with Benito Mussolini's fascist movement in Italy. Upon his return to Brazil and at the height of Getulio Vargas' dictatorship, which was ushered in thanks to a cool-weather liberal alliance,

Salgado founded the Society of Political Studies, gathering intellectuals who were sympathetic to fascism. Then he issued the October Manifesto, laying out the groundwork for the Brazilian Integralist action. The movement closely mirrored Italian fascism, with its green-shirted paramilitary wing, regimented demonstrations, and militant rhetoric. Though Salgado publicly rejected racism, many members of his party adopted anti-Semitic views. Integralism was financed in part by the Italian embassy, with the Roman salute and the Tupi word Anaue, meaning you are my brother, as key symbols of their unity. Integralist action drew its support from lower middle class Italians

and Portuguese immigrants, alongside sections of the Brazilian military, particularly the navy. As the party grew, it became the dictator Vargas' primary right-wing base of support, especially after he began to crack down on the Communist Party. Integralists frequently engaged in street violence and terrorism aimed at leftist groups. In 1931, Vargas introduced labour regulations based on Mussolini's labor charter independent industrial unions were banned union membership had to be registered with the ministry of labor two-thirds of the union membership had to be native-born or naturalized brazilians oh no yeah and union officers were required to either be resident in brazil for 10 years if naturalized or 30 years if foreign born that's

pretty fucked up i would assume also just very damaging to the entire labor movement in the country a very intense series of restrictions yes that's a very immigrant empowered labor movement yeah that was definitely targeted definitely definitely targeted obviously like the class consciousness of the immigrant workers was such a threat that they had to root them out from any position of influence within the sanctioned unions salgado and the integralists of course welcomed these decrees and worked with the police to capture militant workers the communists also apparently welcomed the impositions the ministry of labor meanwhile anarchists and workers were weathering rightist violence one time integralists kicked down the doors of the

bakery workers union the construction workers leave the mill and warehouse operatives stone masons union and union of cafe employees destroyed their assets and extra judiciously hauled away the workers as prisoners so they just started like kidnapping people and doing like it's basically state sanctioned terrorism exactly another integralist gustavo barroso used his walking stick to break the arm of an anti-fascist 16 year old worker named naira colejo as she was making a speech against fascism. Time is a flat circle. Indeed it is. Instead of sticks this time they're using cars, but it's the same principle. And sticks. Oh yeah, people are still collecting sticks.

I have been hit by many a stick from a fascist at a street demo, especially as a teenager. Hmm, down. So with all this violence they're dealing with, in this time, the anarchist presses had to hunker down and prepare to face further attacks. In 1933, the Libertarian Anti-Fascist Committee sounded alarm on

the dire threat of integralism. As one anarchist press wrote, Like fascism, integralism means to enslave and fetter the people. Let us now defend our liberty like men, lest we be forced to weep like madmen hereafter. On December 24th, 1933, the tensions were at an all-time high. Following a humiliating defeat at the Salon Celso Garcia, Plenio Salgado's integralists, known as the Green Shirts,

planned a show of force to assert their dominance. Their target? Union leaders and leftists, particularly anarchists, who stood against their fascist vision for Brazil. According to reports from Nosovos on December 1st, the Integralists had organized 18 companies of Green Shirted marchers who would parade through the heart of Sao Paulo, prepared to crush any resistance that came their way. Reinforcements from Rio de Janeiro, led by Gustavo Barroso, bolstered their numbers, with 500 trained assault troops primed to attack. The police, of course, were openly supportive of the integralists, and had even stationed machine guns at key points throughout the city to ensure the march went smoothly. Colonel Arlindo de Oliveira had an additional 400 troops, made up of infantry, fire brigade units,

and cavalry, ready to intervene. Seems like Claire Overkill, but it was a show of force, so it is to be expected. By the time the marchers reached the Pracha de Cé, a huge crowd had gathered, some curious onlookers, others outright opponents of the fascist movement. As the integralists arrived at the cathedral, cries of death to the fascists and down with the green shirts echoed throughout the square. Suddenly, shots rang out. Some say the firing began accidentally, when a machine gun set up by the Civil Guard was nudged. Others claim it was the Communists lying in wait, ready to ambush the march. Regardless, chaos erupted before the anarchists had even initiated their planned attack. The scene quickly devolved into pandemonium.

People fled in terror, shots continued to fire, and several were mortally wounded. The planned pledge of loyalty to Plinio Salgado, the head of the Integralists, never took place that day. But by 1937, Salgado launched a presidential campaign, hoping to ride the wave of growing support for his movement and become a dictator in his own right. However, when Vargas cancelled the elections and established the authoritarian Estado Novo regime, he banned the Integralist Party along with all the others, sidelining Salgado. In response, Integralist militants launched two uprisings in 1938, both of which failed. Salgado was imprisoned

and later exiled to Portugal. After spending most of his life supporting the dictators of Brazil, his attempts to become one of his own utterly failed. There's a few interesting things in this moment here, particularly how the initial struggle against fascism, once again, kind of laid at the feet of anarchists and communists had like a degree of hesitancy to like to like jump in fully and then also like i find it interesting the way that these like this era of fascists in brazil particularly were targeting

unions but as almost as a way just to target like immigrants like it was like the easiest way for them to actually just do anti-immigrant violence um was like through the unions yeah anti-immigrant violence is almost always anti-worker violence as well yeah no no in the states at least right now we're just like seeing a another kind of uptick um in like anti-immigrant rhetoric and violence and yeah a lot of it is tied to like labor and like how immigrants are are taking jobs away from the lower classes that sort of thing as always remember that you know it could happen here and it's important to be constantly aware and on guard against even the ghost the shadow of fascism creeping up in their communities. It's easy to be treated by the media or by others as just, oh you're making a big deal about it, you're over exaggerating the threat, but no, these things snowball

very quickly. They need to be nipped in the bud. And it's largely thanks to anti-fascism on the front lines that the situation is not as bad as it could be right now. Yeah. Even though it is getting worse every day. For the already weakened anarchist and labour movements in Brazil, integralism had posed a dire threat. They were already splintered and in decline, struggling to maintain influence, and integralism's rapid rise, with its militarized structure and anti-leftist violence, fully suppressed their hopes. The communists weren't exactly a help either. The anarchists lost a significant stronghold of their struggle on the premises of the Anti-Clerical

League in Rio de Janeiro when communists sent to disrupt their meeting called the police on them, leading to the arrest of eight anarchists and the closure of the Anti-Clerical League center and its newspaper. With the help of the Integralists, Communists, and leaders of Cardinal Sebastão Leme's Brazilian Catholic Party, Getúlio Vargas faced little resistance in establishing his Estado Novo dictatorship. His authoritarian regime lasted from 1937 to 1945 and was marked by continuous crackdowns on labour autonomy and anarchism. But despite the common claims that the 1930s marked the end of anarchism in Brazil, anarchists remained active

in unions and cultural spaces despite repression. Anarchists published influential periodicals like A Plebe and A Chão Direita and aimed to create a national anarchist political organisation. a child de reta, and aimed to create a national anarchist political organization. Post-1945, in the era of re-democratization, anarchists converged in Sao Paulo for Brazilian anarchist congresses in 1948 and 1959, which brought together veterans and motivated the re-establishment of social centers. The anarchists resumed educational and cultural activities like founding the Centro de Cultura Social, which became a hub for anarchist intellectual life, hosting lectures, conferences, literary events, and even theatre performances. The anarchists were back.

The CCS had played a key role in building anarchist networks, even hosted anarchist exiles from Spain, and helped to establish similar cultural centers in the suburbs of São Paulo and other cities across Brazil. In Rio de Janeiro, a similar space emerged in 1958, the Centro de Estudos Professor José Oitica, or CEPJO. Like the CCS, the CEPJO hosted courses, lectures, and debates. In 1961, it helped establish an anarchist publishing house called Mundo Libre. In Sao Paulo, union activity surged, with 300,000 workers striking in 1953 and another 400,000 in 1957. This period of intense mobilization provided an opportunity for anarchists and independent socialists to come together and form the Syndicalist Orientation Movement, or MOS. Created in 1953, MOS aimed to fight for the autonomy and freedom of workers' unions, resisting state and corporate control. By 1957,

they had enough momentum to contest union leadership positions, especially within the graphic sector. Despite these strides, however, the anarchist movement faced considerable challenges. The redemocratization after 1945 offered some room for growth, but the labour landscape was dominated by corporatist forces, the Communist Party, and the Brazilian Labour Party. Anarchists found themselves battling for influence in a crowded political field. Their efforts to revitalize the movement were fully stifled by a lack of resources and militants, which limited their presence in social movements. The momentum gained in the 1950s came to a crashing halt with the military coup of 1964.

Once again, Brazil entered a period of authoritarian rule, placing anarchist activists in a precarious position. In May 1964, anarchists from Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo organized a secret meeting to strategize, focused on safeguarding anarchist resources. Many went underground, facing renewed repression and uncertainty about the future of their movement. They shifted focus to educational and cultural spaces to survive, with initiatives like the newspaper Ocrotesto and the publishing house Germinal. Anarchists, including young students new to the cause, formed the libertarian student movement, the MEL, in 1967,

with the intention of fixing opposition and fighting back, as well as having an active presence in class and ideological struggles, marking all directions more in accordance with Federalist principles which had governed the life of every class organization. But after one student, Edson Louise, was murdered by the military police, the MEL and other student initiatives faced heavy persecution after the 1968 Institutional Act No. 5, or the AI-5, which suspended most civil rights, including habeas corpus, allowed for the removal from office of opposition politicians, enabled federal interventions in municipalities and states, and enabled the institutionalization

of arbitrary detention, torture, and extrajudicial killing by the regime. This military dictatorship that gripped Brazil from 1964 to 1985 forced anarchist movements into survival mode. In Rio de Janeiro, the Centro de Estudos Professor José Coitica operated secretly, while in São Paulo, the Centro de Cultural Social kept the flame of anarchist thought alive through underground propaganda and secret meetings. These centers were vital in maintaining connections with international anarchist movements, ensuring that the ideology persisted despite the harsh political climate. You see the importance of international solidarity rearing its head yet again, and you see also the importance of having cultural centers social centers community centers where the movement can draw strength even when it's not directly engaging in labor organizing

or direct political struggle just that rejuvenation of community is enough to maintain the survival of that ideological struggle even all hope seems lost i mean this is something like you see a lot especially after or during like a movement that's faced incredible repression is that kind of it goes back to kind of its earlier forms at least in terms of like like like the social aspects like in some ways it feels like it's kind of regressing back to kind of where it like started back in the last episode with some of those underground newspapers, all this cultural engagement. As you said, kind of like

a way to keep the light alive during an intense military-style effort of repression. Yeah. It's really quite necessary. Unfortunately, in 1969, the headquarters of SEPCO was raided by Air Force agents. The invasion resulted in the arrest and prosecution of 18 members, including the anarchist Ariel Perez, who endured a month of imprisonment and torture. So between 1972 and 1977, anarchists were forced into even greater degrees of secrecy, meeting in very small, tightly knit groups. In terms of organizational strength,

this might have been the lowest point for anarchism in Brazil. This might have been the lowest point for anarchism in Brazil. But things began to shift in 1977, as the dictatorship started to lose its grip. That year, the anarchist periodical O Inimigo Loure, or The King's Enemy, was launched in Bahia, marking a significant moment for the movement. This newspaper brought together student and union militants from various parts of the country, Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Rio Grande do Sul, Paraiba, and Pará. Despite internal conflicts and ideological differences, the paper played a crucial role in reorganizing the anarchist movement. Under the influence of the counterculture, O Inimigrere tackled issues like revolutionary unionism, anarcho-syndicalism, the student movement, gender, sexuality, and political theory. The paper ran until 1982, and after hiatus, resumed briefly

between 1987 and 1988. During this same period, there was the first sign of notable anarchist engagement with the labour movement in years. Following a wave of strikes involving more than 40,000 workers, Anarchists began questioning the bureaucratic union structures. In Sao Paulo, the Colectivo Rebutario de Oposição Sindical, or COLOPS, was formed, closely aligned with the ideas of the Metalworkers opposition movement. COLOPS was officially established during the first national meeting of workers in opposition to the Trade Union Structure, or ENTOs, held in September 1980 in Niterói. This meeting brought together union opposition from 16 states across Brazil, further sparking

the revival of anarchist involvement in the labour movement. But one of the most significant developments to come out of this period was the rise of the Movimiento dos Trabajadores Rurales Sempera, the Landless Workers Movement, or MST. Emerging in 1984, just before the end of the military regime, the MST became a mass movement with distinctly anarchist-communist characteristics. It adopted a decentralized, non-hierarchical structure that prioritized autonomous, direct action, principles deeply aligned with anarchism. However, the MST has resisted being identified as explicitly anarchist, avoiding the label to maintain broader support and avoid the stigma attached to anarchist movements. Over time, while maintaining its independence, the MST has built

alliances with various political parties, including the Workers' Party, which would go on to form the government in 2002. By the 1980s, Brazilian anarchism began reflecting the broader new social movements that had emerged globally after the 1960s. Ecology, feminism, and new discourses on sexuality were now key components of anarchist thought. The 1980s saw the rise of pro-homosexual activists like Nestor Peronguer, an Argentinian-born intellectual who became a central figure in Brazilian anarchism. You know, some have considered me a pro-homosexual. Okay.

But no, this is a continued i i it is interesting to see this like starting with student movements and then getting back into kind of labor over time after they like rebuilt their movement through students and then continuing to like adopt more and more like modern social views and like cultural engagement have an image here of one of their newspapers that has what looks like two men having sex right right on the cover from the 70s which is which is quite something incredible must have been very scandalous at the time yeah so in the 1990s as as Brazil transitioned to the New Republic and embraced neoliberalism, anarchists became key players in shaping a wave of social movements. They actively helped to create and integrate into these movements, advocating their principles and strategies. One prominent example

was Brazil's involvement in the global anti-globalization movement, inspired by protests like the Seattle WTO demonstrations in 1999. In Brazil, this movement began in Santos on the same date, led by anarchists, ecologists, and libertarians. By 2000, a coalition of these groups emerged, particularly in Sao Paulo, and continued organizing actions against neoliberal policies until 2003. The protests targeted institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO, and introduced the Black Bloc tactic to Brazil.

Anakis also helped establish Brazil's Center for Independent Media, CMI, part of the Global Indie Media Network, which aimed to challenge mainstream media dominance. Active between 2001 and 2005, CMI was a key platform for independent journalism across 14 Brazilian cities. Beyond protests, anarchists were involved in broader social movements, contributing to housing struggles in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, as well as supporting feminist, indigenous, black, and LGBT causes. They played significant roles in movements like the National Movement of Collectors of Recyclable Material, MNCR, the previously mentioned Landless Workers Movement, or MST, and the Homeless Workers Movement, the MTST, reflecting their deep

involvement in Brazil's diverse social landscape. In the early 2000s, the Anarchist Popular Union, the UNIPA, helped form networks such as the Class and Compatitive Student Network, or the early 2000s, the Anarchist Popular Union, the UNIPA, helped form networks such as the Class and Compatitive Student Network, or the RECC, and the Federation of Revolutionary Syndicalist Organizations of Brazil, or the FOB, with this cementing anarchism's influence in student and worker struggles. Despite being considered part of a broader leftist current, anarchists specifically made a lasting impact on Brazil's social movement during this period. Today, Brazilian anarchism continues to evolve, shaped by the principles of Especifismo, a strategy where anarchists work alongside broader social movements while maintaining their own distinct ideology. Many anarchist

federations have found common cause with groups like the MST, supporting their struggles while promoting their own vision of a stateless, non-hierarchical society. The story of anarchism in Brazil is one of endurance, adaptability, and reinvention. Despite decades of repression, the movement has continued to shape Brazil's political landscape, from underground propaganda during dictatorship to the mass mobilization of landless workers and intellectuals alike. during their leadership to the mass mobilization of landless workers and intellectuals alike. Similar to what they were doing 90 years ago, we've also seen a resurgence of anarchist anti-fascism in Brazil. Indeed. Around the same time, we kind of saw this rise in the United States as well as in Europe with the emergence of these right-wing populist politicians between

Trump and Bolsonaro. You've been seeing more of the Black Bloc-style anarchism in Brazil, which often in this era went hand-in-hand with anti-fascist action and organizing. Indeed. So that's been the story. A very summarized

account. I would recommend that you check out, of course, the scholarship of the folks I mentioned at the beginning. There are resources all across the internet, particularly in the Anarchist Library, discussing Brazilian anarchism. This has been It Could Happen Here. I've been

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Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast in which every week I sit down with my friends, Mia and Garrison, and I walk them through a little backyard chemistry project. Now, today we are building a common, commonly used explosive in detonators. Oh, what's that, Harrison? We cannot give those instructions on there. Oh, oh, oh. Well, what about for RDX? Like hexogen safe.

We can make hexogen, right? I think you need a special tax stamp or permit to teach that. Sorry. All right. Well, what if we talk about how to make it in Roblox? Oh, yeah. No, that's fine. They haven't cracked Roblox yet. Yeah, they cracked Minecraft.

That's good. That's good. The feds don't know about that one. Okay. They don't know about that one yet. Well, in that case, I'm going to read this ingredient list for PETN that I found in a torrent of Taylor Swift songs. So this is, I'm certain, the best information available right now.

Anyway, we're talking this week about explosives. We're talking particularly about the fact that Israel just carried out an attack against Hezbollah, a militant organization in Lebanon, using PETN, which is one of the two ingredients in Simtex. It is commonly used as the detonator. It's a stable high explosive. So it's often used to basically trigger the larger explosive charge, which is generally like hexogen. You mix the two together with plastic agents, and that's where you get the traditional plastic explosives.

And it's come out recently that the Mossad managed to sneak some of this stuff. Well, come out recently that the Mossad managed to sneak some of this stuff. Well, sneak's not even really the right word, but they managed to impregnate a batch of pagers and radios with PETN. Now, this was a pretty big story last week. I think a lot of people are focusing kind of on the wrong parts of it. But yeah, that's what we're going to be talking about today because there's an element of this story that hasn't gotten out, which is the degree to which what Israel did to Hezbollah here is something that anybody with roughly $30,000 could imitate, to a surprising degree of fidelity. Like, this is an attack that is deeply easy to carry out. And the fact that Israel has kind of made the decision to pull this up is a kind of the breaking of a seal in a way. And I think it portends some very frightening things for all of us and particularly for air travel. So that's what we're going to be talking about today. Do you think like the either like hijacking or infiltration of the supply chain is as replicable for a non-state agency?

Yes, that is the thing that is scariest about this attack to me. And that is going to be kind of the meat of what we're talking about. We should probably start by this sort of laying out the scale of the attack. I mean, I also have one main question. What's a pager? So Garrison, once upon a time, we kind of had the ability to broadcast signals over large areas,

but it was a real pain in the ass to like do that with a phone call or anything, but a couple of words at a time. Oh, so like a text message? Like a text message, except for you can't really respond to it. Oh, okay. But it looked pretty cool to clip on your belt

in the late 90s if you were like one of the doctors on the set of ER. Did you ever watch ER, Garrison? Were you too young for that? No. That's the George Clooney show, right? Cloontang, but yes. He looked great in it. Yeah, so that's where Pagers came from was the television show ER, written by Michael

Crichton, which means Pagers are related to dinosaurs. And yeah, so Israel managed to get, we'll talk a little bit later about how, but they managed to get explosives in an unknown number, but certainly hundreds of these walkie-talkies, particularly in the batteries. By the end of the first day of attacks, around a dozen people were dead and 2,700 had been wounded. Many people seriously,

there's like horrible videos of folks going flying off of bicycles and the like when this stuff detonates. It takes very little PETN to create a pretty significant explosion. And we're looking at about like 0.11 grams, I think, of explosive agent actually in each walkie-talkie, which was enough to kill and maim a shitload of people.

Some of these folks were members of Hezbollah. I think Hezbollah has confirmed that eight of their fighters were killed. At least four of the dead are children. And the second day of the attack, a bunch of radios went off as well. Another 20 people were killed and hundreds more wounded. So you're talking about a very sizable attack. Israel has not claimed credit for this, but the New York Times has done some pretty deep

reporting on this. And per that quote, 12 current and former defense and intelligence officials who were briefed on the attack say the Israelis were behind it. And it's just also obvious that this was Israel. Who else? Like, who else would do this? Now, one of the reasons I'm getting into this is that there were a lot like the first kind of concern that people had when this attack was carried out is like, oh, shit. Was this some sort of a hack? Did Israel exploit some sort of a glitch in how these products' batteries worked and basically like

hacked them to cause a runaway thermal escalation within the battery that led to it detonating? Is all of our electronics just one hack away from being turned into a bomb? No. away from being turned into a bomb. No. And I understand why people focused on that aspect of it, but it led to, I think, some articles that are, this is going to be one of those, we try to, I hope we usually manage to be the calm voices in the room, but this is one of those cases where really people need to be less calm. And I do want to highlight an article that I think went in the wrong direction on that front. It's a CNN business piece called, We Still Don't Know How the Lebanon Pager Attack Happened. Here's What We Do Know About Our Own Electronic Devices. And I'm going to read a quote from that. In short, your communications device is not at risk for

exploding unless it's heavily tampered with and laced with explosives, experts who spoke to CNN said. Justin Kapos, a cybersecurity professor at NYU, said that it's heavily tampered with and laced with explosives, experts who spoke to CNN said. Justin Kapos, a cybersecurity professor at NYU, said that it's possible to cause damage to a variety of batteries, most commonly lithium batteries. But he said it seems like the devices were intentionally designed to explode when triggered, not a pager that everyone else in the world is using. If you're a normal person with a lithium ion battery, I would not be over concerned about this, Kapos said. And I think that that is an error. And we're a normal person with a lithium ion battery, I would not be over concerned about this capo set. And I think that that is an error. And we're going to get into as to why, but let's

talk about how Israel did this first. And this is, again, all kind of per the New York Times reporting, how Israel built a modern day Trojan horse. They seem to be the first people who have kind of put all of this together to an extent that is probably pretty close to accurate. There are some debates as to like, did they actually have a detonator in here or did they cause a thermal? Because PETN, while it's very stable, can be set off by heat. So it's theoretically possible to get a battery hot enough that it can detonate PETN, but it's not going to be as reliable as using something like a bridge wire cap, like a traditional triggering device. And so it's a little bit unclear as to how this was made. But whatever the case, basically what Israel did is they made their own batteries for walkie-talkies

that were clones of an earlier kind of walkie-talkie made by a Taiwanese company that were no longer in production, right? So this Taiwanese company had made real walkie-talkies for a while. They stopped making them. Israel got their hands on some originals and manufactured copies. Now, that is the part of this that would be hard to replicate. But the copies of the walkie-talkies themselves were not the explosive agent. What actually where the explosives were was in the detachable battery. And Mossad crafted batteries themselves for these walkie-talkies and wove PETN into the battery. So if you haven't really looked at a lithium-ion battery, like one of the kinds of batteries that you're going to like,

I mean, it's similar to the ones in your phone, but it's just also like any kind of electronics battery. They are kind of these weird folded things. Like they look just like a little square packet, usually with like a cord coming off of it if you actually look at the battery. But the way they're assembled is they're like laminated into an aluminum foil pouch. And while you are kind of doing that laminating process, you can basically just

weave some PETN into like alongside the battery and it will cost you a small fraction of the batteries like life, like you won't get as much actual battery time out of it, but it's not going to detonate on its own. PETN is, they actually just conducted in 2020 a study to show that it can last for years. This is like the compound we use in the detonators on our nuclear devices. Once you get a bunch of walkie-talkies that are impregnated with this stuff out there, you could sit on them for years until you needed to actually use them. Now, the key thing about this, it seems like when you're talking about wrapping a battery that's got, you know, plastic explosives

in it, well, that's the kind of thing that only a state level actor can do. And this is going to bring me to the source that I really want to get to people for this episode, which is an article by a guy named Andrew Huang at Bunny Studios. Andrew is a computer scientist. He's got a doctorate in philosophy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And kind of critically for some personal projects that he had done recently, he has manufactured his own lithium ion batteries. And in doing so, he's figured out like how to actually build a personal production line to make batteries like this that you could customize to fit into basically any kind of electronic device you want. You can buy an entire pouch cell production line that will allow you to make your own custom lithium-ion batteries using Alibaba.com.

Yeah. Oh, boy. Yeah. Oh, boy. Yeah. So that's great, right? Or lithium, yeah, these are, yeah, lithium pouch batteries. And it cost about $15,000 in order to be able to make somewhere between like a few dozen and several hundred of these, right?

So 15 grand will provide you with all of the materials you need to, from the ground up, make at least, you know, probably a couple hundred pouch cell batteries, right? And it's the kind of thing where it's not just any idiot could do it, but any reasonably intelligent person with a degree of, like, experience in engineering can do it, right? Andrew is obviously a very smart guy with a lot of capabilities that, you know, a layperson might not have, but basically any kind of competent engineer could figure this out pretty much. And you're talking, again, a few thousand dollars to get potentially, you know, hundreds or even more of these made. Now, the other side of the

attack here is that the Israelis created a bunch of shell companies. You know, they started manufacturing copies of these walkie talkies so that they could put their own explosives, impregnated batteries in them. And then they built a bunch of shady ass companies in order to sell them. And this was effectively what they were doing was creating like an Amazon an Amazon shipping company, right? In the same way that anybody who wanted to can get a business license and get access to a bunch of electronics and sell them on Amazon. You could buy a consignment of a thousand walkie-talkies, make your own batteries for

them, and sell them on Amazon. Amazon does not do any really checking up on the people who choose to sell through their site. Yeah. And even if they were to do that, PETN is effectively impossible to find, right? There is a way to scan for it, but it takes like a half hour per package. And it's the kind of thing where even if you're taking this stuff apart, unless you have someone who is like doing chemical tests on what's in there, anyone who's even like even someone who is moderately trained is not going to be able to recognize a battery that's had some PET input into it from like a regular battery.

So I'm going to read another quote from that New York Times article about how the Mossad kind of structured the shell companies here that allowed them to pose as a company making pagers. By all appearances, BAC Consulting was a Hungary-based company that was under contract to produce the devices on behalf of a Taiwanese company, Gold Apollo. In fact, it was part of an Israeli front, according to three intelligence officers briefed on the operation. BAC did take on ordinary clients, for which it produced a range of ordinary pagers. But the only client that really mattered was Hezbollah, and its pagers were far from ordinary. Why were Hezbollah using pagers in the first place? Oh yeah, I can talk about that. Couldn't they afford an iPhone? Great question. Or something... Well, I think we'll let Mia talk about that a second but gary i will say an initial

response to that you know how like all of the activists in the united states after 2020 especially are saying like hey your phone isn't safe don't use your phone you know for for any kind of like actions the the state can listen on it in on it yeah yeah well hezbollah has been paranoid about that for a long time and the masad actually has spent a lot of effort spreading rumors within Hezbollah about how capable Israel's smartphone exploits are, like how strong their ability to, like, listen in on conversations. Yeah. And that played a significant role in changing, like, policy from the top in Hezbollahllah to like, we are going to use the lowest tech communication solutions possible. And we're going to talk some more about that. You know, it's not low tech. These products and services that support this very podcast. That's right.

High tech and absolutely no explosives in them, probably. But really, there would be no way to tell if there were. And we're back. Mia, you wanted to talk. Yeah, the only thing I want to mention about that is, so there's been a lot of focus in terms of the pager use on, like, on Hezbollah trying to build this communications grid that's, like, more difficult to, like, do. To compromise, yeah. Yeah, but to build this communications grid, that's more difficult to do. To compromise, yeah.

Yeah, but to compromise digitally, right? But the other thing that's kind of going on here that I think is getting a lot less attention is that... So Lebanon's economy has been an absolute shitshow for probably like eight, nine years now. There's a massive dollar crunch. Kind of the terminal heart attack moment was that barge exploding. But it had not been doing, it had been on the road down for a while.

I mean, there have been huge riots there over, so part of what's going on is like, there aren't dollars in the economy. And this has made everything unbelievably expensive. And one of the things that's unbelievably expensive is phone calls. And one of the things that's unbelievably expensive is phone calls. And so there are, I don't think there's been much coverage of this,

but it's like, there's also just regular people also use pagers for things in order to set up what a phone call is going to be. Because like, if you're, if you're going to have a phone call with someone, you have to make sure that both of you are like there. Yeah.

So it's, it's not purely just a military thing it's also just because of how unbelievably expensive like calling people has gotten and this sort of terminal crisis of the lebanese economy in the sense that like there aren't dollars to pay for things and so we've gotten gotten to this point where even sort of stuff that we consider like fairly basic and not that expensive, like phone service has just gotten unbelievably expensive for everyone. And this is sort of caused a lot of like regular people who have no affiliation with this whatsoever to sort of move down the technology chain because it's just expensive yeah and again it's this kind of perfect storm of like paranoia and economic sort of factors colliding here but the the sort of gist of it is israel definitely wanted to push hezbollah to adopting like they clearly had an understanding of like what they could do and wanted deliberately to kind of push for this because it's a lot easier to

get some a manufactured explosive and it would have been a lot harder to do this with like iPhones, right? Not that Israel hasn't done this with cell phones in the past. Sure. Very famously back, I think it was the 90s. There was this Palestinian man, Yaya Ayyash, who was, I think, generally credited as like kind of an architect of like car bombing attacks, who the Mossad killed with a cell phone that they had put explosives in. But in that case, it was a very labor intensive process with a single phone meant to target and blow the head off of like one guy. This is like a much more reckless and much more like civilian casualty

open operation. Again, I'm going to quote from that New York Times article. In Lebanon's Baka Valley in the village of Sarain, one young girl, Fatima Abdullah, had just come home from her first day of fourth grade when she heard her father's pager begin to beep. Her aunt said, she picked up the device to bring it to him and was holding it when it exploded, killing her. Fatima was nine. It's probably

worth noting here that while Hezbollah is a militant group, they are also effectively the state in a decent chunk of Lebanon. And a lot of the folks who would have these, because these pagers and radios were generally seen as part of like a defensive measure. Like if there is an attack, if we go to war again, these are our safe comm system, right? Like this is our like low tech comm system to allow us to like stay in touch. So a lot of these people would have been folks whose role was more on the social side of things rather than like actual armed militants. You have no way of knowing who you're blowing up. Everyone's just getting these devices. And it's interesting to me that the Mossad or that Netanyahu, because

I'm sure this order had to have come from the top, gave the order to carry out this attack now. They had had these in place for a while. Exactly when is a little bit unclear, but long enough that there was like a nickname for the attack itself that everyone knew they were going to carry out at some point. So it's a little bit like, I wonder why this was specifically targeted for this point in time. I kind of suspect it may have been due to the fact that Israel's actual ground forces are still tied up in Gaza. And so they were looking for a way to escalate with Lebanon, with Hezbollah, that didn't necessitate the deployment of forces that, you know, would still have a massive impact and be disruptive, which this certainly was.

But, you know, when it comes to kind of us and like why we're talking about this today, it's the fact that this is, I think, a Pandora's box style attack, right? Like you have, at this point, opened up the possibility to doing this to any actor that has the resources. And as we've noted, about 15 grand will get you the capacity to manufacture battery packs like this.

You can just go on Alibaba and buy things like radios or other, it doesn't have to be that. You could get, you know, like most, a lot of people now carry around battery devices, right? Like external batteries to charge their phones when they're out.

Sure. You can purchase those from Alibaba by the thousand. You can disassemble them, stick in your own batteries. And it's not the kind of thing where you have to be capable of doing this on the scale that the Mossad did. You could stick this and you could buy 2000 batteries. You could stick this in 200 of them, your own replacement explosive packs,, you could stick this and you could buy 2000 batteries. You could stick this in 200 of them, your own replacement explosive packs, and you could just send those out into the world, right? Especially one of the things that scares me is the idea of you get a bunch of these shipped,

you impregnate a few with explosives, but you have a bunch of batteries that you then have on shipping through the air, right? And trigger in the air, like while they're being shipped to a destination. Like it's the kind of thing you would eventually be able to unravel who had created the front companies and the like, but there really is nothing built into the system that would very effectively be able to tell that you'd done this, as long as you, there was a degree degree of care taken in the manufacturing process. And I want to turn back to Andrew Huang's article here. And this is him talking about the way in which you could hide the fact that you had impregnated these battery packs with explosives.

Once folded into the core of the battery, it is sealed in an aluminum pouch. If the manufacturing process carefully isolates the folding line from the laminating line and or rinses the outside of the pouch with acetone to dissolve away any PETN residue prior to marking, no explosive residue can escape the pouch, thus defeating swabs that look for chemical residue. It may also well evade methods such as x-ray fluorescence because the elements that compose the battery separator and PETN are too similar and too light to be detected. And through case methods like SORS, spatially offset Raman spectroscopy, would likely be defeated by the multi-layer

copper laminate structure of the battery itself, blocking light from probing inner layers. Thus, I would posit that a lithium battery constructed with a PETN layer inside is largely undetectable. And this is from like folks I have talked to who have a degree of expertise in the matter, I think very accurate. And I think, you know, even if you're not striking air travel here,

number one, it would be easy to get stuff like this on planes. And people, there was in December, somebody attempted to, and just kind of their detonation method failed, which is kind of with explosives when people don't die and explosive attacks, what always saves them is it's kind of with explosives when people don't die and explosive attacks, what always saves them is it's kind of tricky to get the detonators right. But I'm very worried that the Mossad has effectively provided people with a perfect plan of attack to fuck with air travel or to fuck with the supply lines. Imagine just like a couple hundred people over the space of a week or so have battery packs or other electronics detonate on their person, like, or a couple of dozen people. What that does both to the economy, to the supply lines, like the extent to which that would be disruptive in society is like the potential is enormous. And the potential for like runaway terror is enormous. and the potential for runaway terror is enormous.

Yeah. That was one of the first things that we talked about once news of this dropped. Beyond the actual physical injuries and death caused by this attack, this is primarily an infrastructure attack. In this case, it completely destroys the communications infrastructure of Hezbollah, but in the strategy behind this attack,

it can be used just to target various types of infrastructure, whether that be like supply chains, travel, it puts distrust in your own equipment. And certainly its application on like airlines is obviously very worrying. Well, it's very worrying. And one of the things that I keep thinking about is the degree to which the way Amazon has restructured the economy, and particularly the way that digital commerce works, has created an opportunity for a malicious actor to carry out an attack like this with excellent security. Because you don't even have to be the one shipping these out, right? No.

You can get, I mean, you have to ship them at some point, but you can ship them to a third party that is the actual company that deals with Amazon. If you have enough kind of resources and ingenuity behind it, basically set up a drop shipping scam where you are having someone else send explosives to Amazon, which provides a lot of opportunity for you to both get away and a lot of opportunity to you could seed with a couple of different manufacturers different devices it's like terrorism in the era of the gig economy yeah and that was one of the reasons i liked uh fincher's recent movie the killer yeah just in terms of how much of the gig economy was like worked into these like traditional like industries whether that be like terrorism uh because like hitmen aren't really real but uh certainly terrorism is and i think there's a lot of ways that these things can be applied in this kind of bizarre uber amazon yeah world that we've created where the economy is just so fractured in all these little ways there's also i think the the sort of production angle too which is that because

the way that manufacturing is happening has become so decentralized and because it's become based on these it's kind of less so now but a lot of like chinese manufacturing had worked like this where you'd get these sort of like smaller pop-up things and each of these sort of like fairly small like production facilities is like shipping stuff to like a larger one who's doing assembly or whatever. But that means that, yeah, as you're seeing with Alibaba, it's like all of this stuff is just available to purchase because

it's designed to be sold to these people who are starting their sort of small-scale production line. There's no quality control. There's no intense vetting. It's all extremely accessible. It's very easy to infiltrate this process. Yeah, here's another line from that Andrew Huang article at Bunny Studios, B-U-N-N-I-E

Studios, which is his blog. You don't even have to go so far as offering anyone a bribe or being a state-level agency to get tampered batteries into a supply chain. Anyone can buy a bunch of items from Amazon, swap out batteries restore the packaging and seals and return the goods to the warehouse and yes there is already a whole industry devoted to copying packaging and security seals for the purpose of warranty fraud the perpetrator will be long gone by the time the device is resold yeah and and the other the other worrying part about that too is that you know okay so getting the explosives to work is kind of difficult, right?

Like, bomb making is not easy. You have to have a degree of competence, yes. But the actual cost, $15,000, like, that's not even, like, you're looking at, like, a millionaire. Like, that's something your local dentist can afford to pull off. afford to pull off you could carry out an attack like this in terms of cash expenditure for the cost of like a reasonably nice car which is not prohibitive to a large scale international terrorist organization or even just like a rich guy yeah not not even that rich guy can pull this off yep which is i guess the kind of the main inhibiting factor is we still don't quite know how Israel got these two detonate. Yes.

Whether that is some sort of hack that that overheated the battery, whether it was like a message that was sent out that like triggered something within the device. It seems to have been a message that made the explosive detonate because they did send a message immediately before. So it seemed to have been tied to some extent with a message. Andrew Huang kind of looked into and came to the conclusion that you could very well do a thermal runaway to set this off. But obviously, the Mossad doesn't have any trouble getting a hold of military detonators. Huang also walked through how you could build a circuit into the actual battery itself, like a trigger circuit. You know what?

I'm just going to go ahead and talk about this a little bit when we come back. But let's do our second ad break now before we tell everyone how to detonate plastic explosives. This is going to be the one that gets all arrested. Yeah. And we're back. Here's a quote from Andrew on how these might have been detonated. Detonating the PETN is a bit more tricky. Without a detonator, PETN may conflagrate, burn fast, instead of detonating and creating a much more damaging shockwave. However, the Wikipedia page

notes that an electric spark with an energy in the range of 10 to 60 millijoules is sufficient to initiate detonation. Based on available descriptions of the devices getting hot prior to detonation, one might suppose that detonation is initiated by a trigger circuit shorting out the battery pack, causing the internal polymer spacers to melt and eventually the cathode-anode pairs coming into contact, creating a spark. Such a spark may furthermore be guaranteed across the PETN sheet by introducing a small defect, such as a slight dimple in the surrounding cathode-anoid layers. Once the pack gets to the melting point of the spacers, the dimpled region is likely to connect,

leading to a spark that then detonates the PETN layer sandwiched between the cathode and anode layers. But where do you hide this trigger circuit? It turns out that almost every lithium polymer pack has a small circuit board embedded in it called the PCM, or protection circuit module. It contains a microcontroller, often in a TSSOP8 package, and at least one or more large transistors capable of handling the current capacity of the battery. basically that's where you put it oops oops um and again yeah i did talk to someone with expertise in explosives who said that they thought it was likelier that there was a conventional detonator not because it would have been impossible to do with a thermal runway or the way that andrew set up but because this is the massad they have access to detonators and a detonator guarantees that you get the proper kind of explosion. But again, even if you're using

kind of the less Gucci method here that would be available to a non-state actor, if only 50 out of the 300 devices you impregnate with explosives do a proper explosion and the rest just kind of conflagrate, well, that's still a very successful attack. You can do a tremendous amount of damage to people's sense of well-being and to the economy, to supply lines, by carrying out an attack like that. This is so terroristic in nature, and like, if any other group did this, like, if Hezbollah did this attack, if Hamas did this attack. Oh my god, we would be bombing them right now, yeah. If some just random accelerationist network somehow pulled this off,

we would be pulling our hair out. We would go to war over something like this. And the fact that it's like this type of attack is only okay when this one military does it is just, I don't know what to do anymore. They have endangered everyone, right?

Like every single person listening to this is less safe because Israel carried out this attack. What is airport screening going to look like if this keeps happening? Most importantly, am I going to be able to take all of my batteries on the plane so that I can play video games on a 14-hour flight garrison, you know?

Yeah. The plugs in the seats don't always work. Well, I mean, and even like, what if you're able to do this to like the electronics of like the pilot geez and then you just you just like take out an entire airplane yeah yeah it's like it's such a fucked up pandora's box that it feels like there's gonna be no real consequences for which is just kind of yeah how things have been this past year i guess yeah and the other the other issue with it is that like the only way to fix this would be an actual like you would you would have to change how our supply chains work and it's like well no one's gonna do that no one there is no

number of people that you know maybe if they literally killed the president of the united states maybe you could get enough political capital together to try to do something about it but like there's no way no No, and there's no way. And like the way the state will respond to this is by making air travel vastly worse, right? Yeah. It's probably not the only thing that they will do, but that is like, because there's just not an actual,

it's not really with present technology, there's not an easy way to actually find these things. Like within kind of the context of like air travel or the way in which like digital merchandising works right which is again why the masad probably shouldn't have done this many reasons one of many reasons the dead kids being another yeah um i i did i do want to conclude i've quoted a lot from uh andrew wonderful article, Turning Everyday Gadgets into Bombs is a Bad Idea. But I want to quote from his conclusion here. Not all things that could exist should exist, and some ideas are better left unimplemented.

Technology alone has no ethics. The difference between a patch and an exploit is the method in which a technology is disclosed. Exploding batteries have probably been conceived of and tested by spy agencies around the world, but never deployed en masse because while it may achieve a tactical win, it is too easy for weaker adversaries to copy the idea and justify its redeployment

in an asymmetric and devastating retaliation. However, now that I've seen it executed, I am left with the terrifying realization that not only is it feasible, it's relatively easy for any modestly funded entity to implement. Not just our allies can do this. A wide cast of adversaries have this capability in their reach, from nation states to cartels and gangs to shady copycat battery factories just looking for a big payday. If chemical suppliers can moonlight and elicit drugs, what stops battery factories from dealing in

bespoke munitions? The bottom line is we should approach the public policy debate around this assuming that someday we could be victims of exploding batteries too turning everyday objects into fragmentation grenades should be a crime as it blurs the line between civilian and military technologies and that should be something everyone can agree on yeah Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think so. Jesus Christ. It just is an acting terrorism through like the gig economy ecosystem. Yeah. And Oh boy,

what a fun time we've, we've built for ourselves. What a great fresh hell for us all. Yeah. Very excited for us to have our first drop shipping terrorist attack. It's going to be great. It's going to be, it's going to be great.

Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, folks, maybe drive next trip. You got to take probably should note before we come out here, the obvious question, and there's not a long answer to this for obvious reasons. Like, well, could a non-state actor get their hands on PETN or RDX, you know, these kinds of explosive compounds that you can make into plastic explosives. And the short answer is yes. Any moderately competent chemist with the right ingredients could make this stuff, and they're not super hard to find. But also, a lot of people in commercial spaces particularly have access to PETN.

It's a kind of thing that, like, is— It's common in, like, demolition, right? Yeah, it's common in demolition. It's also something artists use a good amount. There is a specific formulation of PETN where they make it in a thin sheet that you can use to suddenly weld metals together explosively. And there are a couple of specific famous artists who use PETN in order to make bas-relief sort of artworks. So it's, again, not something that is, like, impossible for people who are not the Mossad to gain access to.

You need a chemist, an engineer, and someone who knows how to set up businesses, and between the three of them, they're going to have enough money to do this, which is not great. Yeah. Not great. Anyway, everybody, have a good night.

Enjoy your next plane flight. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and

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

Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network,

available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome back to It Could Happen Here, your daily dose of the horrors that are in fact already happening all around us. I'm your occasional host, Molly Conger, and I am delighted to be joined today by the critically acclaimed author of Culture Warlords, journalist, researcher, sword enthusiast, sandwich expert, and my friend, Talia Levin. Hello! Yeah, I once introduced myself at an event as a sandwich historian, which I think was the pinnacle of my public speaking career. But this is the second pinnacle. Hey, Molly, what's up? Thank you so much for coming on today to talk with me about your new book,

Wild Faith. It is coming out in just a few weeks, October 15th, right? Yeah, Wild Faith, How the Christian Right is Taking Over America. Not the terrible B-movie entitled Wild Faith. The SEO is scrambled on that one. But the book, however, is very good. I mean, first of all, I just want to say, like, so I've been reading the galley copy that you sent me, which honestly made me feel very fancy. I've never received a galley copy of a book that's not out yet before. So I felt kind of a broadcasting professional with my special book. It's an exclusive club. You're one of like five people that's read it. Oh my God, that is very exclusive. Yeah. Well, it's about to become a lot less exclusive,

so feel special while you can. Right. But I realized while I was reading it, I have my little sticky tabs because I'm reading a lot more books lately. Regrettably, not a big time book guy. I read a lot of court documents, but I'm reading a lot of books right now for research for my show. And it's like I'm a little sticky tabs. And as I'm reading it, I realize I'm not marking passages that I think would be useful for us to talk about in this interview. I'm just putting my little tabs on passages that just like punched me in the gut, you know? Sorry for punching you.

No, but I mean, with the power of your words, because like a lot of what I'm reading sucks. Like a lot of what I'm reading sucks. It's just like I spent all day yesterday reading like 25 year old issues of Resistance, which was the quarterly magazine for a white power music label. So this I mean, it's a real departure. So, you know, really just reveling in the richness of the prose and the fact that it, you know, didn't want to kill me. Yeah. richness of the prose and the fact that it, you know, didn't want to kill me. Yeah, no, I also have experienced neo-Nazi research fatigue and also just like the sort of relentless grimness of plowing through these like fundamentally hostile texts and also like academic texts, which are difficult in their own way. I try to write excessively or just like excitingly. I find that a lot of, especially nonfiction sort of journalism-y books tend to be a little dry.

And I'm like, let's not be dry. Let's be like spicy and, you know, like form and function. Like you're more likely to be moved by a message if you find the writing compelling you know it's just you have such a way with words i mean you know this you're a professional writer i don't want to embarrass you on the show so if you like twirling my hair like yes but i do write for a living if you'll indulge me if it's legal if the publisher will allow this i just want to read this passage from the introduction that I think is a good jumping off point. And it was one of the first things I marked because I was just like, oh, hell yeah, we're getting into this. There's good words in here. Okay. half a century to be precise, during which it has steadily gained power.

It started in schoolrooms, continued in courtrooms, and perseveres with the aid of people who are perfectly willing to call in bomb threats to hospitals and attempt to overturn elections. It features self-proclaimed prophets with a distinct interest in politics, newly minted apostles with very definite ideas about spiritual battle and its earthly components,

and pastors eager to usher in the end of the world. Its adherents have hymns and devotionals and speak in tongues on occasion, and the showiest among them are known to march their cities blowing ram's horns in an effort to topple, as Joshua once did, the wicked cities of the world. They have their own insular world, their own media apparatus. They have legislators who give fire and brimstone speeches from the badly carpeted rooms where laws are made. They have too and in case the lawyers fail there's always the promise of congregations that might coalesce into mobs or arsonists whose burning holy zeal coalesces into the tiny pinpoint of a molotov cocktail and i knew from from the intro that we were in for a ride yeah it's like

cast of characters the worst people ever but like let's write about it in an exciting way i i think that one of the themes of the book is really how these extra legal extremist movements like the anti-abortion terror movement and the legal framework of a movement work together i actually initially heard about this from a friend who was talking about how like during the gay rights movement you had sort of the act up well demonstrations the dyans and then you had the sort of like more respectably coded like gay people who you know were talking to the government and trying to get elected and you know really trying to influence research and that every movement needs sort of a radical outside and then a respectable inside and i'm like oh this works in like theocratic movements too

where you have like this you know fringe that's burning down clinics and then people steadily working for 50 years to like ban abortion and they have the same dna and they have the same goals they just go about it differently but complement each other and i think that's like a running theme in the book is that like you have lawyers and you have legislators and then you have mobs and they're sort of all working towards the same goals. And that's really what we're seeing, I think, on the Christian right after decades of building power. Yeah, one of the notes that I wrote down in that vein while I was reading was that, you know, the Christian right drives its power across a spectrum, right? From the clinic bomber to the senator. But it's not, you know, you might say it's two sides of the same coin. But to me, it looks like this isn't two different spheres of power or two sort of separate but coexisting or comorbid ideologies. They're just different

numbers on the same dial, right? It's turning up and turning down. Yeah, it's like the hand that lights the torch and the hand that puts it to the, you know, pyre. They perform different functions, but they have really the same goals. And if, like me, you view stripping half the populace of its bodily autonomy, imposing a theocracy hounding queer people out of public life slash into death as fundamentally violent goals yeah i don't think there's like a respectable iteration necessarily there's just cosplaying respectability right you

can say it with a tie on on the senate floor but it's it's the same message yeah and i think so much of our media apparatus and governmental apparatus is really sort of views like again that's like form and function right like if you are if you say something politely um it doesn't really matter what you're saying like if you say something with a suit on in the register of like you know in a calm sort of mike pensian rush limbaugh and decaf as he called himself boy jesus did he say that yeah that's what he called himself when he read did a like evangelical radio show yeah no no matter what you say as long as you are like white and you say it politely like this is fundamentally sort of fine and then

if you look at it from you know a step or two back and you're like no actually no matter how politely you say it this is like a violent deeply unpopular theocratic agenda that like fundamentally is incompatible with multiracial democracy i also think and i keep running into this like well-meaning liberals being like but isn't there a separation of church and state i'm like i don't know do you fucking think there is in alabama do you think there is in Arkansas and all of these, you know, in Texas, like all of these figures are like, we're Christians, we're making laws for Jesus. And we have covenant marriages and we want you to too. Yeah. Like we're going to outlaw divorce because of God. And like, you know, women dying of sepsis in hospital parking lots is what Jesus wants. And like,

and I experienced this i think you probably have too when you like report on you know zealots and extremists and people inevitably wind up like measuring other people's wheat by their own bushel in other words they're like they can't really believe this stuff and it's like no they like, they can't really believe this stuff. And it's like, no, they really do. They can't really have these goals. First of all, they do, but also does it matter? Right. I mean, the question of like impact versus intent.

First of all, I think it's perfectly possible to be both a grifter and a true believer at the same time. That's just synergy, baby. Yeah. maybe yeah and and also fundamentally this is a world premised on grievance where it's this idea that like the world has got one over on you and so in a sense grift is just like well you know the world's corrupt and i'm fighting a righteous cause so what does it matter the ethics that i sort of skimp on along the way i mean once you've amped the stakes up to we are fighting the literal devil and everyone who's getting in my way is animated by actual demons from hell i mean the stakes couldn't be higher so you do what you have to do exactly and it's this theory of power and so then people sort of standing outside of that paradigm who are not keyed into this idea of like we're in an epical

spiritual battle like and we must create like a kingdom of christ on earth in america to win against the devil and then people outside being like you're hypocrites and it's like it's not a valid criticism to them because they're like first of all you're not like a christian if you're a liberal but also like you're not on our level like we're fighting lucifer, you're not, like, a Christian if you're a liberal, but also, like, you're not on our level. Like, we're fighting Lucifer, and you're probably on his team if you oppose us. So, you know, a multitude of apparent hypocrisies can be excused by the idea that, like, this is a holy war,

and in war, there's, like, all kinds of apparent behavior that's okay. Yeah, they're doing holy war. And in, in war, there's like all kinds of a bear behavior. That's okay. They're doing holy war crimes. Yeah, exactly. I mean, this is why, for example,

you see a lot of like prominent female figures from Phyllis Schlafly, you know, in the seventies and eighties to like the trad wives now. And it's like, how does this fit in with your, your overall sort of idea that women should be chaste and submissive and meek and silent? I mean, first of all, trad wife stuff is often fetish. That's fetish content.

But yeah, Phyllis Schlafly made a living professionally saying that women shouldn't make a living professionally. But that contradiction doesn't matter. Yeah, I mean, I think I call them valkyries for feminine submission uh in the book yeah i mean at the end of the day like if you believe that this is your your calling your mission you know your mission field in the service of the lord to undo the demonic sort of influence of feminism like of course you're going to speak you've been moved by god to do so yeah and and of course like female leaders within the evangelical community like sort of minority republicans can be like knocked off their pedestal quicker and easier but like they they still can come out and exist and

and testify and schlafly throughout her very long prolific and lucrative career you know was like i'm a housewife with six kids and that was her that was how she defined herself even while being this incredibly prominent figure and um one of the sort of key architects of the current christian right coalition of like right-wing catholics she and paul lerick and leonard leo and some other right-wing Catholics, she and Paul Weyrich and Leonard Leo and some other right-wing Catholics brought these Catholic values of being all about abortion to the evangelical right, which prior to the 70s was like, that's a weird Catholic thing. We don't really care. I wanted to talk about that. So I'm not sure how sort of common knowledge this is, but the Protestant Christian community in the United States

did not care about abortion until the 70s. It was not an issue in their communities. They were generally pro-abortion. They were, you know, the Baptists were in favor of Roe v. Wade. Yeah, the fucking Southern Baptist Convention came out in like 74, I think it was, and was like, yeah, we approve Roe v. Wade. So it's not like, you know, opposition to abortion is baked into Christianity. It is baked into the American evangelical Christianity of post-1975 or so because of this sort of conscious, cynical, political decision. And that, I think, is so interesting because, you know, when you get into this conversation of, well, what are their deeply held beliefs and do they really believe it and does that matter? But we can pin down the moment they started believing this and we know why.

And it's segregation. Yeah. I mean, first of all, I would say like people can still like this is like several generations later of like constant barrages of extremely violent propaganda against abortion so right so this is the belief is sincere today but you could look at it where it was born yeah exactly you could it should have been aborted you're right yeah no it definitely should not have been carried to term but like it's it's crazy and in addition to moi's book, Randall Bomer does some really good coverage of this. So the sort of general arc is like pre sort of 1970s. You had this like generally conservative population of Southern Baptists who were like on board with McCarthyism, hated the godless reds, but kind of viewed politics as like worldly and not really their sphere.

And we're not particularly politically engaged. And then Brown versus Board of Education passes. Immediately, the white Christian populace just disinvests from the public schools, leaving multiple counties in the South without functionally any public education at all. And this mushroom after rain kind of like patches of parochial schools with church or Christian in the name start popping up, and they're all white schools. They're segregation academies is the sort of term of art for these. And they're explicitly under a Christian aegis, they're religious schools, they're tax exempt as a result. And then in like the late 60s and 70s, the government was like,

um, you can't be tax exempt and like considered a charitable organization if you are segregated and don't have any black students or minority students and that is what woke the sleeping dragon of the christian right really like you know get your filthy government hands off our tax exemptions like they just went you know. They were really mobilized, you know, like these are the people who are like throwing tomatoes at Ruby bridges. Like, you know, they're really politically motivated for the first time because they're experiencing like a consequence for segregation.

And so this is when like Jerry Falwell and Ralph Reed and, you know, James Dobson start sort of coming forward and being more prominent. And then by the sort of mid seventies to eighties, you had these like savvier political operators coming out and saying, Hey guys, segregation now, segregation tomorrow,

segregation forever is like, it's great that it really fired y'all up, but it has sort of a limited appeal. And they shot George Wallace, it's over. Yeah, like there's gonna be a ceiling on that. And a lot of people think you suck. So why don't you get in on the ground on this new civil rights struggle, abortion,

where you can fight for the unborn who conveniently will never disagree with you right their voices don't have to be centered here we can speak for them i mean they're the most convenient political constituency in history right because they're so innocent and you can't milkshake duck a fetus he's not even here yeah he can't talk like he's not even here. Yeah, he can't talk. He's not going to say shit. So, I mean, that's like the very capsule history. And then, of course, it becomes this idea of like the moral majority.

And we're the guardians of America's soul. And we're gonna get really weird about sex also it's just like if you strip it all the way down to the studs like the core of this is women are bleeding to death in hospital parking lots because jerry falwell didn't want to pay his taxes or stop being racist yeah i mean that's not fair no people sometimes like are a little skeptical when i'm like all of the hatreds are interconnected but then you look at like concrete historical examples of like this world historical wave of misogyny i mean it's not that this population wasn't like weird about sex or weird about women like to start with i mean maybe they would have gotten here a different way but that's how we got here yeah we got here by just like no we will pay taxes on our segregation academies bob jones university's interracial dating ban is perfectly great and we're gonna mobilize about it and so what you have then now is just like 50 years of political lockstep.

And you see this in like other religious communities. I mean, like I know it's sort of notorious how much corruption slides by in New York because like the Hasidic communities vote as a bloc. Like it is very useful to have a congregation that all votes the same way. It's politically useful. I mean, what other populations can you get together once a week as a captive audience and speak to with authority? If you can mobilize those people, and that's what Jerry Falwell saw, is this is a great way to get a lot of people to vote the way I want them to vote. Yeah. And the church has always been like a really

prominent institution in American civil society, especially as the rest of sort of civil society has fallen away and degraded. Like churches are some of the only social outlets that Americans have. And what's interesting when you talk to evangelicals and ex-evangelicals is just like being a Republican is like part of their religious identity in a major way it's like this is how you vote and this is you know how you dress and this is how you go to church and and and so on but like the idea of being a democrat is like not only you know a little bit out of step with your community it's heretical i mean that's how the demons get in yeah yeah demon crats icrats. I mean, I'm like, yeah, it's stupid, but it's also like

half of the people saying demoncrats literally mean Democrats are aligned with Lucifer. And I think that's a point that I don't want to get lost on the listener. This idea that people literally have demons in them, that demons are active in the world, that demons are motivating the actions of their enemies, is real for them. And I'm not saying that to be derisive or, you know, it's real. It's real. It is an animating factor for a lot of these people. And that's hard to wrap your mind around. I mean, I struggle with the idea that that is real for them, but like that's how you get things like satanic panic and we see echoes of satanic panic in this idea of you know groomers

in kids schools they really have this fundamental like foundational belief in this you know whether or not they're calling it demons that the existence of some sort of ontological evil that is coming for their children and what like once you arrive at the place where like where you understand that that's real for them their actions make more sense like they're not behaving irrationally if you if you truly believed that these things were happening you'd act crazy too yeah i mean it's really hard to get people to step outside their own worldviews and in both directions right like i don't believe that demons are, you know, abroad in the world and motivating, like,

every element of political action to someone who... I'm starting to see them some places, but generally, no. To someone who does, my viewpoint is incomprehensible and vice versa. So I think part of... I mean, not that I'm, like, one of those people that's like, polarization is the big problem. Like, you know, as opposed to anything with like concrete policy like you know where it's like the big problem is we all don't like each other enough and i'm like no the big problem is like people are espousing policies that will cause deaths and like also that people like believe

their political enemies are like literally agents of satan i would say is like a bigger problem than polarization and the the abstract but yeah i mean this this doctrine of sort of spiritual warfare enemies are like literally agents of satan i would say is like a bigger problem than polarization and the the abstract but yeah i mean this this doctrine of sort of spiritual warfare which if you like google it it's just like oh this is the mindset and it's like you the listener to it could happen here like you've been drafted into the spirit war from like birth congratulations private you're probably on the side of the devil so good job i mean i don't know like a lot of americans believe in angels and demons and that's fine but it's like when that starts impinging on the political sphere in a very serious way it's like how far would you go

if you believed your opponent was under the thrall of like Satan, you would go pretty damn far. That's, I mean, that's why, you know, clinic bombings were, and I guess are on the rise again, right? Like these arsons of clinics, it's not like other kinds of crime in my mind, right? It's not a crime of passion or an interpersonal dispute. It is people who have been motivated by this belief that this is a place where a genocide is happening that there's a holocaust going on in there that people are ripping you know actual living babies limb from limb and if you really did believe that their actions make sense and that's why it happens so often right because these people are motivated by this belief that

god commands them to take this action yeah i mean there's a dual element to that i mean first of all absolutely yes like i've read some anti- element to that i mean first of all absolutely yes like i've read some anti-abortion terror manuals speaking of extremely unpleasant research and it's just really like these people are murderers it's mass murderers like you're like killing hitler right and wouldn't you wouldn't you kill baby hitler exactly hypothetical about about baby hitler in like a countrywide scale. And when specific abortion doctors have been mentioned in right-wing media, those guys end up dead, and that's not a coincidence. So there's that element of it, which is the majority of it. It's

huge. But there's also this idea of demonic geography where like demons can possess sort of places like abortion clinics or institutions like Planned Parenthood or even the Democratic Party, which, you know, I read a lot of demonology books and like taxonomies of demons. Pigs in the Parlor was this really big hit in the 70s and it's been like reissued and reissued and millions of copies and it's just like on one level it's really compelling because it's like are you tired are you sad are you feeling clumsy do you have like persistent stomach aches it's demons and here's how you deal with that and like in a country with shitty health care i can totally see why someone who's like really depressed um might go to like an exorcist or a deliverance minister which is the protestant if you'll try anything and this guy's gonna do it

for free i watched so many videos of deliverance ministers doing their thing and it's like crazy it's like people you know are just like sitting there and they're like people praying over them and screaming in their face. Like, and, and they wind up vomiting and crying and it's all very like intense. And, you know,

if you think about it from a placebo effect perspective for like one second, you're like, obviously this person would feel a weight lifted from them. They've had this ecstatic experience. And this isn't the majority of America. This is about 14% of america identifies this as white evangelical so many protestants it's still so many people because people keep asking me like how many people really believe shit like this and i'm like well about 80 to 90 percent of like people

who identify as white evangelical protestants espouse most of these beliefs so that's like third that's like 30 million people yeah yeah and then you add in the catholic right which is getting weirder every day yeah jd vance i hate women women exist to reproduce breed you filthy sow but like even beyond the adult catholic convert style weirdness like right-wing catholics are an integral part of the christian right like amy coney barrett you know antonin scolia that kind of thing um that's another bunch of millions so this reactionary force has like numerically significant constituency on the other hand it definitely punches way above its weight in terms of... Right, they have an outsized influence of both, you know, on the legislative floor and when it comes to, you know, who's racking up the most bodies.

Yeah, and also even like the culture wars, right? Like the sort of loudest culture warriors tend to at least come from like a background of I'm speaking for God or Christ is king or whatever it is. Like how many times have you and I encountered that in extremist context, but also like the sort of more mainstream me, what the fuck the mainstream is. I don't know. It's full of piss, but like the more mainstream me, like Christian grifter, right. They come from this, this I'm speaking from my faith. are my religious principles but like it is worth noting again and just to just to rewind in our conversation but like a full concept of religious liberty and religious freedom absolutely was like an ad slogan coined in the 70s around segregation right religious freedom

to do what i mean it's like states rights states rights to do what right yeah like answer the question yeah it's it's religious freedom to have segregated schools is the answer to that and you still see echoes of that with either still religious schools that um can't accept federal grant money because they don't let students be gay right like it's not racial segregation anymore but they are you know refusing to admit gay students and that is a violation of of federal civil rights law yeah but that's where i mean that's where that slogan started and then it's blossomed to include basically like a gay person came into my shop except they didn't right

i know there's no standing right like that whole case was built on a lie whatever that's yeah it's like like and the standing in the supreme court is so ridiculous this i mean in many ways this supreme court is the culmination and embodiment and apotheosis of like christian right theocracy because you have these like absolutely batshit religious zealots i mean amy coney barrettrett is from a cult. And in this unaccountable body, they're passing unpopular theocratic principles that the majority of the American public disagrees with.

But specifically what they are trying to enact and what they are enacting is this theocratic agenda where the government is in your bedroom, the government is in your bedroom the government is in your doctor's office like the government is sniffing your panties and it's it's gross and it's upsetting and fundamentally like theocracies are just very famously all up in your junk like they're obsessed with like controlling and censoring sexuality of all kinds, but particularly female sexuality and queer sexuality. Snuff those out. And so that's part of the reason why so many abortion arguments...

First of all, you're murdering this cluster of cells, which is a full human baby. Do you remember that article in The Guardian a couple of years that like showed the actual size of like fetuses at various stages of development and it was like they were just like so little like these little like little fingernails yeah and it doesn't look like a tiny baby doll that's just very small yeah exactly it's not like a mini baby like in like tides of gore it's like literally like a tiny cluster of of cells so anti-abortion propaganda like you are not immune to propaganda it has like wormed its way into the popular consciousness just by virtue of its ubiquity and constant repetition being the key to successful propaganda but so many of these arguments in addition to this this abortion is murder stuff

is also just like you should have kept your legs closed. Right. This is a consequence. God did this to you. Yeah. Like sex is a mortal sin and sex should be punished. They must be doing it wrong. I'm like, why do you want sex to have consequences and be punished? The intensity of the misogyny around purity culture was so intense i wanted to ask you you know about the experience of writing the book right so you know your first book culturelords, was traumatizing for you to craft, right? Because you had to spend so much

time in these digital spaces, in some cases, physical spaces with, you know, neo-Nazis, 4chan guys, you know, aspiring terrorists. And so that's traumatic to experience, you know, but largely that experience was alone, like at your computer screen, sort of consuming this content that was eroding your soul. But the second half of this book is about child abuse, right? And you interviewed people who grew up in this movement about their lives, about their husbands raping them and their parents beating them as children. about their husbands raping them and their parents beating them as children and like how do those experiences compare and like what was that how i mean how did you prepare to do that i don't even know how to begin to do that with care i mean i think my goal going in is like

i'm not gonna betray you like that was my guiding ethos of just like, I view like your trust in me as a sacred thing, not like sacred in any formal religious sense, but just like, you know, I view your trust in me as something that I hold very dearly. It's very important. I'm going to treat your pain with as much gentleness and respect as I can. I'm going to treat your pain with as much gentleness and respect as I can. And I interviewed over 100 people, largely about their experiences with experiencing child abuse in an evangelical milieu, as is laid out with painstaking instructions and all of these parenting manuals. Actually, I think reading the parenting manuals was even more disturbing than talking to people

because people were like this fucked me up and it was wrong and then these books are like no you must beat your toddler because jesus says so and like here's exactly how to beat your toddler and here's what you should use to beat your toddler and here's the like supremely fucked up like weird ritual that we prescribe and then like reading those in tandem with like like the accounts of people who were like this specific thing like fucked me up for life and really messed up my ability to have like intimacy or self-confidence or whatever all of that stuff i mean it was tough i definitely took more time like i wrote culture warlords in nine months so

i was like totally immersed constantly you just, didn't come up for air. Yeah, I don't. And this one, I was like, I need a little more time guys. Like, um,

I wrote it over, you know, almost three years. I also pretentiously started calling this philosophy, guarding your heart. Cause I really got lost in the sauce with culture warlords. Like I was in a dark place while I was writing it. And afterwards I was also like the like it

came out in mid-covid so that didn't help either but uh it was a real really rough experience with this i was like i'm gonna keep writing i'm gonna write about sandwiches all the way through i'm gonna like make sure i have friendships and stuff that's grounding me i think consciously having that at the forefront of my mind really helped. That being said, what was really encouraging was all of these people who had experienced this sort of child abuse industrial complex in the evangelical community were like, we really value that someone wants to hear what we have to say. And also that it's someone from outside the community is like

paying attention and thinks this is important which is not to denigrate like ex-evangelical voices but more to say that like i guess there's a certain validation when someone who's like not didn't grow up in your corner of religiosity dark corner and sort of bringing it to an outside audience to think a lot of ex-evangelicals their their audiences largely their fellow ex-evangelicals exactly and i'm someone who like i grew up as a jew and i'm like i yeah this sucked this this is terrible i'm like appalled reading like to train up a child by the pearls or or the strong-willed child by james dobson which like to be clear the strong-willed child is a bad thing. It's a bad thing to have a child with a... You have to

beat it out of them, sure. Literally. And I ran into this in the wild recently. I don't know if you have come across this guy online. Do you know the 90s movie, The Little Rascals? Oh my god, Alf from The Little Rascals turns out to be... Alfalfa! The guy who played Alfalfa, his name is Bug Hall.

He, like, really like really like i don't know got into a sort of main character situation over some posts about how he beats his infants he beats infants because that's i guess a good way to raise a baby yeah also i think he's a surf oh he's in a voluntary serfdom arrangement oh my god okay well he sounds like a big rascal yeah he's a big he's continued that trajectory of rascaldom but don't be your kids i mean i will also say the reason why this book focuses so much on child abuse at which like i encountered some some haters and losers and doubters along the way who were like, why are you focused so much on child abuse? And I was like, there are a lot of different theories

about how authoritarianism develops. But one of the big ones is focusing on the pedagogy in authoritarian societies, like societies that become authoritarian, evolve from democracy to authoritarianism and beating the shit out of people from when they're in infancy and particularly when they display disobedience or ask why or you know just deviate from expectation that's a great way to make an obedient brown shirt yeah exactly like this is a recipe for future authoritarians like the people i spoke to had

sort of broken away largely from this culture but many of the sort of most obedient soldiers in the armies army of god like are that way because again i can't overemphasize how much these parenting manuals which spanned from like 1970 to 2015 these texts um you know the dates that they were published emphasize having an obedient child what you want is not like a child who's kind or curious or thoughtful or smart it's obedient instantly obedient Don't make me count to three is the title of one of the books. And like, what you're creating is a culture of people who, A, like, empathize with the aggressor at all times. So hence this admiration for strength and even admiration for cruelty. People who are trained to obey and obey without question. And people who

are very acclimated to uh the use of violence i mean you're doing fascism in the home right so the the author like alice miller the um the author of the book for your own good lays out a pretty she was also a holocaust survivor she lays out a pretty strong case for like you know early 20th century germany having this poisonous pedagogy that also involved beating the shit out of your kids until it was like illegal to love your children yeah to obey you uh and how basically this is how you make a torture and the book is called for your own good and yeah i mean i i really think it is like under valued in politics,

like how much this culture of corporal punishment, which is, yeah, Americans have like moved away from universal approval of corporal punishment. We're still like a lot higher than other Western democracies in that regard. And like on a national level, we're the only country in the world that hasn't ratified the un conventions on the rights of a child which include like having a name and like not being

beaten and not being thrown into like juvie solitary oh well that's why america can't touch that we need to incarcerate the children yeah the children yearn for the cells um but it's also just like a lot of it actually was like worries that like evangelicals like would sort of object to the the interference in their it's an infringement on their religious freedom to beat the shit out of babies yeah and and their parental rights which is another buzzword of this this movement parental parental rights is a red flag for me oh yeah no i hear parental rights and i think you want to beat the shit out of your kids you don't want your children to learn science yeah you want to homeschool and under educate your kids or

miseducate you want to cause a measles outbreak exactly but that's like for us because we're weirdos we're like obsessively clued into this stuff if you're not like parental rights is like religious freedom is like it sounds good yeah it's an effective marketing slogan but like what it means is like we're gonna show up at the school board and yell about how i mean and trump has like bought into this obviously because he knows where his bread is buttered. He has savvy. Like he's like, you guys do the policy,

but like his current parental rights based his biggest like policy that he's advocating is like denying federal funding to any school with any vaccine mandate, which is basically just like make measles great again, like bring back diphtheria. I think like, yes, the maga movement is sort of the the efflorescence the apotheosis of this steadily building power but like there's also just like 50 years of of power building behind it and like even if trump was defeated at the

federal level which like i profoundly hope he is sorry to come out as like a you know partisan a voter like a hashtag a voter um but like i think it would be just a nauseatingly it's a horrifying thought that that he i mean first of all he would absolutely enact every item in this theocratic agenda starting with a national abortion ban like that would happen in the first hundred days, I think, which would just functionally plunge American women into like a very, very dark septicemic nightmare. Yeah, the dark place that we're going is a coffin. Yeah, yeah. But even should he lose, which, you know, hope,

there's still 22 states where abortion is outlawed or severely restricted. And these places are becoming care deserts. Like medical residents, my extremely sexy partner is a medical resident. So I know more about the state of medicine than I otherwise would. But like residents don't want to do their residencies in

states with abortion restrictions they're like right given a choice gynecological providers just aren't practicing there anymore like even if you know even if your primary focus is not abortions or even if your primary focus is not you know pregnancy care they just don't they just don't work there well it's also first it's also, first of all, that, but second of all, it's like, if you're in the ER, you're going to experience pregnancy loss because it happens in one in five pregnancies. Right. So they're choosing to work in states where they're not going to go to jail for doing medicine. Yeah. They don't want to incur the moral injury of not being able to apply the standard of care to patients in extremely common

situations, such as incomplete miscarriage and, you know, pregnancy loss, whether, you know, self-induced or just like miscarriage is super common and nobody talks about it. It's more common than we've... And ectopic pregnancy is so much more common than people realize. Like there are so many things that your body could do

to betray you that you need a doctor's help with. Just ordinary pregnancy. When then after the baby's's born then your lustrous hair all falls out yeah like ordinary pregnancy is so fraught with like weird body horror like but anyway that's besides the point whatever the point is someone presents with abdominal pain in the er and it turns out to be an ectopic pregnancy and like you can't do standard of care like dilation and curetage procedures without checking with the hospital lawyer like that is a really bad position for a care provider to be in so when you have these fundamentally unscientific laws right that are produced by people who don't know anything about pregnancy and are

like very intentionally ambiguous so that cautious institutions will sort of interpret them maximally interpret them like the life of the mother how dead does she have to be first yeah she has to be almost dead right and then sometimes she winds up dying because almost dead is tough to judge. Like it's just winds up this grotesque sort of farce of medicine. And very directly, like residents don't want to train. Doctors don't want to practice in these places. And so, you know.

Right, so this ends up killing more people than just the ones hemorrhaging in the parking lot. There are people who have completely unrelated problems who are now unable to access unrelated kinds of care because the doctors just aren't there yeah or people who have ordinary wanted pregnancies who can't access neonatal care who have to drive hours and hours and hours to like get checkups like you know i mean human reproduction is like a pretty major part of like life. And a lot of people are doing it.

Yeah. Like it's sort of how, you know, it's just people do it all the time. And like not being able to access medical care around like the entire spectrum of like reproduction is pretty catastrophic. But yeah, it also impacts all the people not engaging in in reproduction at this moment in time like doctors who are just like fuck this i'm not working out in er in tennessee you know because i want to be able to treat patients without a lawyer in the room yeah yeah exactly i mean and then there are doctors who are bigots and and doctors who are happily

on board with with abortion bans but like do you want that to be the only doctor in your county? I don't think so. You know, it's just, it's, it's a really grim situation. And I just like, I'm such an absolutist about bodily autonomy. It's like, if you don't own your body, you're not a full citizen, period. End of story. Like if, if a major organ in your body is, is treated as a controlled substance, like you are not a full and equal citizen with rights which i would like to be i aspire to it yeah so i wanted to ask you one one more question about your book and i will let you go i told you that i wouldn't keep you very long and i lied but it's like it's just because i like talking to you so it's i think i've done the majority of the topics you can't you can't be like oh it's about

your book which you should buy listeners you pre-order it now wherever you buy your books and if you like the dulcet tones of my voice which are i should have gotten you to narrate my audiobooks you crushed that passage i'm a professional talker now yeah yeah well I narrated the audiobook and then was like why did I write such complicated sentences afterwards so now that I read my own writing like on a regular basis out loud which is new for me right so I you know I have my podcast and I'm writing my little scripts and then I'm reading them into a little microphone now that I struggle with that I noticed while I was reading your book that oh I wouldn't be able to read this out loud where would I breathe I know it was because I write like that

too and it's something I'm like really grappling with right now she's like call me 10 clubs Talia I'm like oh fuck this sentence is this paragraph this sentence is a paragraph stop it like I really really lost really lost momentum on that one yeah i know but like i managed to get through it and if you if you enjoy the dulcet sounds of my voice you can hear it for like i don't know eight hours or whatever i feel weird being like listen to my voice but you know invite me into your mind yeah but i do think it's nice as an author to read your audiobook because i can like get mad and like, you know, emphasize stuff that I think is important. And, and, and also I'm a theater kid.

Like, like I don't have many opportunities to perform and, um, it is a performance and it's, it's fun, but yeah. And that comes out the same time as the physical book? Yes. Uh, it comes out audio ebook, physical book with a cool snake on it. Oh, yeah. Oh, I guess this is an audio medium. The listener can't see that I'm showing the cool cover. Yeah, it's got a cool snake, a red and black snake on the cover. I've named him Rocco.

He has a cross for a tongue. If you're looking for a book to give to the metalhead in your life. Oh yeah. It's pretty metal. Metalheads, atheists, degenerates. Uh,

everyone is going to love this book. It's perfect for everyone. And if you're light on cashflow, one tip for supporting indie authors is ask your library to stock it or your local bookstore because library orders are really important and you can just like put in a request in your library to stock it or your local bookstore because library orders are really important and you can just like put in a request in your library system and that is super helpful oh yeah everybody go to your library's website right now and request that they purchase a copy of wild faith by talia laven yeah tell me where else can people find you online

so i have a newsletter. It's on button down. I left sub stack because they were like, we're never going to censor Nazis, but we will censor porn. And I was like, I don't like your priorities. So I left for button down.

So it's button down.com slash the sword in the sandwich. Or if you just Google the sword in the sandwich comes up most Tuesdays. I read about like the horrific state of politics etc and then fridays i write an essay about a different sandwich on wikipedia's list of notable sandwiches and so far i'm i've written 111 sandwiches the sandwich content alone is worth the price of admission you need to find out about these sandwiches i mean it just and i get really deep into like the history and the provenance and like like ah the shifting of peoples led to this sandwich um but i get really deep into it and then um you can also find me on

blue sky where i most of the time now because twitter is just like robots and nazis and nazi robots where i'm at swords jew i'm still on vishy twitter as moby dick energy and um you know if you want to say hi or invite me to speak at your synagogue or bookstore i'm at talia levin writes at gmail.com um or church if you're like cool yeah if it's like a cool church yeah you show up and they pass you a snake yeah exactly oh god i didn't do enough speaking in tongues for this book well talia thank you so much for coming on today again the book is wild faith by talia laven and you can pre-order it now wherever books are sold, and you should request it from your library. Yeah, we stand

civic services, and I'm a huge fan of public libraries, and also of Molly Conger, so thanks for having me on, and take care! Bye! Bye! Hey, we'll be back Monday with more

episodes every week from now, until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to post run high on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

you get your podcasts from. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. Those were some callers from my call in podcast Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take phone calls from anonymous strangers as a fake gecko therapist and try to learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's very interesting. Check it out for yourself by searching for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight-up comedia, and that's a song that only Nuestra Gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.