It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 15

Episode Date: December 31, 2021

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

but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and occasionally also about what you can do about it. And today we're going completely full into a what you can do about it and today we're doing we're we're going we're going completely full into a what you can do about it episode and specifically we're going to be talking about unions union organizing the basics of what they are and also some of the history of it and to talk with us about this i i have brought i brought my good friend john hieronymus who is a nurse steward with National Nurses United in Chicago.

Hi, John. How are you doing? I'm doing good. Yesterday was my first full day back at work after being out on light duty from having COVID for this last year. And so I got home yesterday and was pretty tired because I haven't walked that much in a day. Oh, no. It's fine. But I mean, it was a good day. I't walked that much in a day. Oh no. It's fine. But, uh,

I mean, it was a good day. I got lots of hugs from my coworkers. I didn't, I didn't forget anyone's name, which I was terrified of. Um, and didn't fuck anything up.

Um, and then when I got, when I got home, I hopped on. After I got my kids from school, I hopped on a union organizing call with 20 nurses from a hospital in the south we're very excited about so um i was it was it was a big day that that rules oh yeah yeah i guess i should also do a do a very very brief long covid check-in

because this is another thing that i think people aren't talking about that is also like a huge labor issue which is that yeah like long covid fucking sucks and like i like i know like my like like one of my cousins had it and you know that they've been in bad shape for a long time like they still can't taste properly and like they i i think you got from what i remember like pretty bad like in terms of yeah sorry if you don't have to we don't want to but oh i don't care i mean i think people should like know that this is still going on like the pandemic is still happening um people are still getting sick and some are still dying which really sucks and the long covid thing is real um the my i didn't get sick in the sense of showing up having to be

in like a hospital or icu or anything like that my book i got sick and um the recovery like the year or the month or so after i got sick was when things actually got bad. Because something happened with my nerves and I had a neuromuscular variant of like the long COVID symptoms. And that led me to having all kinds of issues with basically just being exhausted from basic things, anything more than just getting up and walking around, I would have to like lay in bed afterwards. And it would add multiple episodes of the past year where I would cross some invisible line in terms of like endurance and then be stuck in bed for a week. And so it's been a long thing, but I've been slowly getting better. And people who fall into that neuromuscular thing do slowly get better.

I think that's the upshot. People with heart problems, those tend to be permanent and aren't getting better, which sucks. But yeah, I mean, it's just like, I think that a lot of people, it's a very weird, surreal thing to watch. I think that a lot of people, it's a very weird, surreal thing to watch what is effectively like a, like a, a, a global public health catastrophe, get politicized the way it has and treated the way it has been by everybody involved. So, um, anyway, I just, uh, I'm doing better with that and it's shaped me over the last year and it shaped union organizing. And I'm glad that I'll say this to people who are thinking about unions. I'm glad that I had the union kind of backing me up. Even when I had to pull them a little bit in the right direction, it's much better to have that kind of collective power behind you when you're uh dealing with those kind of problems so that's actually a good way into looking at just sort of in general what a union is because i think there's there's there's two things here there is what a union is legally and what a union actually is in terms of just the people in it and the sort of power behind it and so i was wondering if you could well one i mean just on an incredibly basic level explain

what a union is like legally like what is legally defined as doing because i feel like that's also something that is not as well understood as it should be yeah Yeah, for sure. So in the United States, there's a series of laws that kind of regulate, you know, the kind of collective bargaining and collective organization of workers at work. An important thing to understand is that those laws are mostly designed to constrain workers power to affect their um their you know working conditions um and so when you look at what a union legally is um unions are uh for the most part, they're legal organizations that kind of like operate on a dues basis. So if you're in a union, you're paying dues out of your paycheck. If you work at a unionized workplace, those dues will get subtracted out regardless of your membership or activity within the union.

regardless of your membership or activity within the union. One thing that people don't understand is that you can, if you don't want your dues to go to anything besides supporting organizing at your particular workplace, you can request, unions are legally required to offer you that as an option. And then those dues get taken out of your paycheck and they get used to do things like rent a union hall, pay staffers to help you with your organizing. They get taken to do lobbying, various types of political activity. And so for a lot of people, unions will feel like a professional association

that lobbies on their behalf rather than a collective expression of the will of workers in a particular workplace. Or it'll feel like patronage machine for Democratic Party, that sort of stuff. But that being said, unions all have bylaws. They all have mechanisms by which they're, you know, theoretically democratically accountable to the membership. And there are oftentimes campaigns by workers to change how unions operate.

And then also, when you're setting up a union, if you're in a place that doesn't have a union and you're looking to get a union because you're fed up with not having any kind of power over your workplace or you feel like people are getting discriminated against or bullied, you feel like you haven't gotten a raise, those sorts of things. You can pick the union that you decide if you want to get a collective bargaining agreement, which is a legal contract kind of like dictating how your workplace operates in a uniform way. You can pick the union that you want to organize with. And there are unions that are better to organize with, that are more democratic, more collectively accountable. There are unions that are more organized or more focused on actually building the union power and organizing new workplaces. And then there are unions that are kind of like they're, you know, and I'm going to say that kind of blur in the US, there's like a blurry line between rank and file unions and business unions, because even rank and file unions are kind of constrained by the same pressures that business unions operate under.

Can we explain the difference? Yeah. I'll tell you the difference in a second, but I just want to say that when you're getting a new union, it's really important for you to critically look at what your options are and who you're organizing with because unions have different cultures and different amounts of different kinds of politics. And you should be aware of that before you and your coworkers decide to commit to working with one union while you're getting a union organized. And then I can explain that next part if you want me to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right.

So, yeah. union history and deep into organizing and figuring out like what unions are and what they do and how they've worked kind of in the past, you'll find that there's different types of unions. So American unions started as like kind of like craft guilds where basically you would have a factory that might have like 20 different unions of each individual group of people um and each individual skill set would be underneath the union and it was used as a way to kind of control um who was able to do the work and who was getting hired in to do the work and a lot of times that would end up in the United States being segregated. And there would be these called union scabbing where you would go in and do work against people who are striking because your union was fine and you were cool with your boss.

And these other people, whatever their problem is, you're just going to keep doing the box. I'll offer you more money and you'll do the work. Right. So, and a lot of that has kind of carried into what we call trade unions, uh, in the U S a specific and trade unionism is particularly, um, uh, prominent in, uh, in construction. So you'll have carpenters and you'll have, you know, masons and you'll have, you know, pipe fitters and iron workers and all these different guys. And they all kind of come together and work as a crew for like a construction company. And oftentimes their union operates more like a contractor than like a collective, like, uh, of the the power of those workers so um then there

are more there are unions that are would be considered like industrial unions so industrial unions industrial unionism was invented by a union a hundred years ago called the industrial workers of the world and they were like what if we got took all the workers in an industry and got them into one big union right and then what if all those workers in those different industries were talking to each other and building their power and the goal would be that you would become so powerful that you could basically take over industries as workers and run them on a democratic basis so that you could basically take over industries as workers and run them on a democratic basis so that you wouldn't have you kind of liquidate uh capital and i i want to say this briefly also like yeah so the bosses did not like this i mean the iww like the iww was so feared that like like

there's something with the everett massacre where it's like it got to a point in the early 1900s where just a group of iww people showing up to a place was enough to get like the the the entire like an entire city police force and like rounding up literally every right winger they could do and deputizing them and then just opening fire like into the crowd because like the iww had showed up on a boat like this was yeah yeah these people were tired like people were terrified of them and i think the other thing i think is really interesting about the early iww history is that is the so you know part of the response to them is like they they are just mass and this is what the first red scare was basically was an anti-iww thing and also you know they shot people they arrested people they like they deported people. But they also – a lot of the things that make recommendations or like even down to you know we're

going to have our own internal like corporate unions like set up by the company but you know the corporate union gives you a workers council and the council can sort of control production but you know it's still run by the bosses like all of these things were stuff that like the Rockefellers set up or like even the early neoliberals would set this stuff up because they were

so scared of people like they were so scared of people like they were so scared of people just taking over stuff democratically just running it just literally through the union that they were like we will literally give you democracy in the workplace we will give you like we will give you like workers on corporate boards literally just so long as you don't like take everything over yeah, I think that it's hard for people to imagine how intense the struggle for getting any kind of rights in the workplace have been in the United States in particular.

I think a lot of people think that, maybe not so much anymore but when i was younger you know 20 years ago people would be like oh you know we're in america we've got you know like we've got all these things like we get you know an eight-hour work day and we've got like a weekend and also like and the thing is is that literally people were murdered to win those things right like if you like the reason why we have an eight-hour workday is because there was in chicago uh a famous uh a famous strike that um ended up with a massacre of of um it was like a police riot and then they rounded up a bunch of union organizers

socialists and anarchists who were like involved in the labor movement at that time. And then the state of Illinois hung them. And so the wife of one of the of one of those people who was murdered at the Haymarket or they call them the Haymarket murders. uh murdered at the haymarket uh or they call them the haymarket martyrs uh albert parsons was one of them uh her or his wife lucy parsons who was uh had a very a veritable kind of like not quite sure what her background was but we do know that she was probably a former slave uh albert parsons was a former confederate they got married in the south became southern republicans trying to like uh participate in radical reconstruction and then they basically had to flee because they were um with their lives to the north and uh but after that whole trial and

all that shook out uh lucy parsons became a labor agitator um across the united states fighting for the eight hour day and uh and they memorialized the haymarket martyrs and something that i think some of your listeners will know about maybe they won't but you know mayday mayday a lot of people like oh that's russian or some foreign sort of thing no that is a an american labor tradition that like started here and it was because of a specific like the the labor movement and the movement for the eight-hour day in the united states so um and that's kind of like once you go from the iww and industrial unions as an idea it got crushed in the 20s because it was so terrifying. There's a really good essay on all that called The Stopwatch and the Wooden Shoe by a guy named Mike Davis,

who kind of explains how it is that IWW is the first union to not only try and build workers organization, but to challenge workplace organization and to make those push back on how production was happening and fight something called the speed up, where I think a lot of people who've worked have experienced this time where a boss will come in and say, we're going to do things differently. And they'll either get rid of a worker and put all the extra work onto people who remain, or they'll change things so you're doing more with the same amount of time. They provoked a backlash.

There were spectacular general strikes. The first general strike in America in Seattle, there were IWW members who are key members of the Seattle Labor Council, which took craft unions and got their radicals together and coordinated a general strike, which is where there's a lot of tweets about general strikes. But general strikes require a lot of organization and coordination. And we can talk about that later if we want to. And we can talk about that later if we want to. But key thing is, is that IWW was always pushing for the organization necessary to pull off a general strike. And they did it.

Yep. And so amongst those different things, and there were mine wars in Colorado, mine wars in West Virginia. They were the first union that was explicitly uh anti-racist um they they weren't perfect but they were uh but they organized multi-racial unions in um philadelphia the docks and various other places they were one of the few unions that really took the first steps into organizing in the south in a way that um a lot of unions have kind of failed to since and because they were so effective and so frightening they got crushed yeah i mean also one other thing i want to say about them is that like like the iww fought in the mexican revolution because you know a lot of the iww members in

california in particular were like a lot a lot of indigenous people a lot of the iww members in california in particular were like a lot a lot of indigenous people a lot of sort of a lot of mexican immigrants so yeah they had these huge ties and like they they like they i think i think to this day this is still true uh outside of puerto rico like they are the only leftist movement that has ever like taken control of an american city like they took to lexico and mexicali and like a bunch of the sort of the border area yeah and that that's that that's you know part of why it just escalates to everyone starts shooting them because well and and they were truly an international union because they were they focused on like uh longshoremen and organizing and docs that sort of thing there were uh members of the iww organizing basically everywhere in the world and they were considered part of like what was like a a global

movement and we call them syndicalists which is kind of like a an italian term or french term um which is this the you know like like the latin version of union of syndicate or syndicate and um there were similar unions across the world up through the early 20th century until right about the time when the russians uh the russian revolution happened and then there were subsequent crackdowns and because of these people who i mean the iww was a mix of native american native-born americans and immigrants and they were painted as this foreign sort of force they were un-american that was like the whole nexus of un-Americanism as like an idea. And the U.S. state was able to mobilize after World War I to really put that down.

And so there's a lot of history there. But the idea of the industrial union didn't go away, right? The union, the IWWww was effectively dismembered and scattered but a lot of people who had experienced as iww members who had been in those strikes um didn't like just disappear they didn't all get deported or sent away um a lot of them kind of tucked their heads down and went back to work, you know, and in the 1930s, we saw the rise of another industrial, the next step towards industrial unionism. So it's called the CIO, which is the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Now, there were multiple, at that point, there was the Communist Party USA, the Socialist Party of America, and former members of the IWW, and various like anarchists who were participants in kind of the organization of the CIO. And the thing about CIO was, was that when they came together, it was in the Great Depression had really kind of kicked off. And they were able to organize, like really explosively across all these new industries. So they, like the UAW,

United Auto Workers, was like like part of the CIO. They pioneered forms of strikes called sit-down strike, which was basically a factory seizure. All the workers would just say, we're not going to walk out. We're going to lock ourselves in. And we're going to sit down and it's our factory now. And now you're going to have to negotiate with us. and it's our factory now and now you're going to have to negotiate with us and uh it became this thing where it was like millions of people were in like the iww at any one time was like hundreds of thousands of people and the cio became a thing where it

was millions of people and um and at least in the beginning when they had their uh when they had we're at the peak of their like power and militancy um they were able to mobilize workers to take over factories uh take over factories from some of the most powerful corporations on the earth on earth and you know and at the same time um while they're doing this the uh the police and uh company um company security and vigilantes which had never gone away from like the iww were doing the same sorts of things so they would regularly uh beat. So they would regularly, uh, beat strikers.

It regularly, there would be, you know, regular labor massacres. Yep. Um, disappearances of various, um, uh,

labor organizers or, uh, labor leaders, or even just random workers that they thought were like, Oh, you're a unionist. Um, you know,

get in the back of this, uh, get in the back of this uh get in the back of this uh truck and then they were never seen again yep um and then laws started to be enacted i believe out of fear that if this if this movement didn't get somehow put under brought in under control that there would be a revolution and so uh so that's when we started to see the enactment of laws like the national labor relations act which made having a union like that was the first time when being in a union was considered legal at the federal level and that uh the you know fdr the new deal democrats uh basically attempted to broker something called a labor peace where they would say we're no longer going to mobilize

the state against workers in the way that we have previously now local police would still side with bosses that sort of thing but uh and those sorts of massacres and that sort of stuff didn't really go away until like the 40s. But that was the beginning of, because what you see is unions get channeled into, once you have like a million people in a union, you have just enormous amounts of resources. All these dues coming in. You have the beginning of the labor bureaucracy, whereas before it would be, you know, there would be hired, you know, paid labor organizers, but they were always shifting around and they were brought up as communists or socialists and they had ideological commitments to building the power of the union and the power of workers that you know if you are just a you know and someone with some ambition and decided you want to become a like anyone at this point you know who wants to can become a paid union staffer if you're like you know uh if you care to and a a lot of people then being a union staffer was a different thing than it is now. It was, I think, I'm trying to remember the name of the president. I think it

was John Lewis. John Lewis, who was a Republican back in the day, said, you know, I think famously said at one point, it's like, if you want to to build a union or if you want to build a house you call a carpenter if you want to build a union you call communists and so uh and so they would literally would go to like the the the you know the communist party and say we need organizers and the communist party did a lot of work to training people to be organizers and they were militant they were ready to throw down because to them, they were looking at this as part of a class struggle against bosses and a way of overthrowing capital. uh world war ii and uh when world war ii hit that's when the soviet union which in many ways controlled what was happening with communist with cp usa basically said we need a labor peace because we need to support the war effort. And so that's when unions started signing contracts with no strike clauses. And they started agreeing that they would no longer strike. And they started

agreeing to things like speed ups. There used to be a time when these mass industrial unions, the stewards would walk around with a whistle on their neck, they'd have a whistle on a lanyard. And anytime that workers decided that this is like an example of how powerful these unions were, not just like as like an organization, but every day at your workplace. If you thought that something was not right or you were not being treated fairly or somehow the contract was in breach, you would go to your steward and your steward would pull out this whistle

and would blow the whistle. It was called a whistle stop strike. And everyone would set down their tools until management would come out and they would either agree to pay more or stop what was happening and fix it. And so there was a time when strikes would be, you would have intermittent work stoppages. So you wouldn't go out like indefinitely, you wouldn't go out on strike

for like three months, though that happened. You wouldn't just, and it wouldn't just be your factory. It would be, hey, we're getting on the phone and we're calling our friends down the street at the next, at your supplier. That's called secondary strike. So if you're working at like a steel mill and your steel mills dependent on Coke from the next factory over, you're calling up your friends in the same union down the way, say, stop sending Coke, stop sending Coke, stop sending materials,

brought these things to us. We're on strike. You guys, you all set your tools down, you go on strike and it would, and these strikes would like massively expand. So you would see things instead of seeing, you know,

we just went through striketober, right? Yeah. And we just, and so we saw like what we call a strike wave but in in some ways it was a strike wave but i think that we still don't i think it's so far away from living memory of what a real strike wave is where people would go on strike in one factory and then the next factory in the next factory the next area it literally would be a wave of people um going on. And this was all the result of all the organization that people had and the militant attitude that people had about how they were going to be treated at work.

1935 which is like the you know this is the beginning of labor peace like you know it's okay we'll give you the right to a union but you cannot do secondary strikes like like this is this is explicitly banned in this if i'm remembering this right is that there's a specific thing that says you can't do secondary strikes anymore and you know and this was this was you know the the the the the basis of this piece was that like yeah as you sort of said before it was like well okay so the the the state will put their guns down but the workers also essentially have to put their guns down and yeah and this this starts this whole process of you know once once you lose like that kind of consciousness and once you lose just the practical experience of doing this stuff it kind of it fades and over time you know yeah it atrophies and and the unions get weaker and weaker.

Because once you've set aside, you've decided that you're going to essentially... Okay, we're going to follow the laws, we're going to sit down, we're going to do this, we're going to negotiate in good faith, we're going to have all of this sort of... We're going to go through the National Labor Relations Board. And it's like, like well at that point people like people people's willingness to pick the weapons back up that they'd put down just sort of continues to diminish

well i think what happens is i mean and so there was like a 10-year period so first there was like the first five you know five ten years of cio was when we received like this really like intense militancy uh within these unions and halfway through like you know the the passage of that first law in the 1930s um that's when we started to see the erosion and we constantly see i think a thing that people don't understand is that our bosses are always trying to assert their control over work. And we'll see that like bosses will do all kinds of contortions as long as they get to stay in charge and that they're unquestioned. And I don't think we understand quite how long the long game is for management, for our bosses and for capital. And so, you know, it starts with the national labor

relations act and then it goes through uh it goes through world war ii and during world war ii that's when the cio goes from you know you know millions of people to like tens of millions and it becomes like a thing where like that's when you know like 50 of americans are in a union thing where like that's when you know like 50 of americans are in a union right um because i mean to the extent that uh that to the extent that um there were those compromises happened it didn't just compromise it wasn't just like a failure of like oh like we're just going to start capitulating it's like there were interests inside the union they're looking at like well this is a lot of resources and power that we have now but wait until like it's you know 50 of america is paying union dues and there were people inside the democratic party who were willing to trade um that uh labor piece for

you would start to see, you know, that's when politicians would show up to, to union halls to talk and try and get, you know, and that's when, you know, the democratic party, it would be, it wouldn't be unusual to hear a democratic politician say things about like labor that you would like that no politician would say today and now that doesn't mean that they were like on the side of the workers but you know you'd have literally um president eisenhower telling the president of u.s steel to get fucked over like a general like you're you're trying to shut down like you know this is like the the steel industry is the life

blood of backbone of the american economy um you know and you is like the steel industry is the lifeblood of the backbone of the American economy. You know, and you're trying to shut this down. You're trying to kill the golden goose, like get back to work, let the pay these people what they're asking. But, you know, so you would see the people who kind of floated to the top of those unions, trading their union trading away their workers power and their workers well-being for more and more money first off there'd be more money so you would you like they would start getting raises that were really substantial and it would boost up a a union steel worker or union auto worker into what we consider like the comfortable middle class where people could like buy a like a fishing cabin or something up on a lake send their kids to college all these sorts of things that were

just kind of like unobtainable sorts of things if you were the same in the same industry 20 years earlier yeah and um and that felt like wins you know people. And also in the 1940s, after World War II, they passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which basically meant that they forced unions. in a union. And so there are literally still unions that still have language in their, uh, in their membership cards where they're like, I declare I'm, I've never been a member of the communist party. I'm not an, uh, you know, an anarchist. Uh, I mean, like I've, I have friends who've pulled that out now. It doesn't have any effect now, but that was, they basically took all the people, you know, the people that, uh, that were, you know, the people that you would have called to build the union, uh, 20 years later or before we're getting thrown out of unions. And that didn't happen in every, like there were attempts to do that in all kinds of countries.

Uh, they tried to do it in the UK and the unions in the UK told, uh, basically told the government to go fuck themselves. And they, you know, it's like, but because the leadership of the, uh, of the CIO industrial unions began to see themselves more in alignment with our ruling class and our, you know, like the democratic party, they decided that they were big enough that they didn't have to have militants involved anymore. And that's when, you know, uh, people were literally would get fired out of, uh, did either, either militants and staff would get fired or, uh, they would get, uh, fired out of factories if you're like a rank and file worker. So, um, and that's when we begin to see the rise of what we call business unionism and that's where we would have union bureaucrats would and um would

you know would basically start making concessionary contracts and this started you know back in you know a lot of people are like oh you know back in the 50s unions were really powerful and they were powerful to get raises. But those raises came at the expense of control over the work process. They came at the expense of the speed up. And as unions, because the rank and file workers, like you're saying, rank and file workers, when they see these tools getting put down and they're more reluctant to pick them up,

first off, it's because of the amount of money that they're getting paid. And, but they did push back. They were like, this is, I mean, like, uh, there's a really great book called the next shift, um, by, uh, Gabriel Winant. It's all about the shift from steel, the steel industry as like the center of the u.s economy to health care um and how unions basically started to erode away their like throw it like hand over their power in exchange for money and then when they were told like there was um an attempt to get socialized medicine under the Truman administration. And when they were basically, they hit a speed bump in there and it got shot down. They decided that instead of trying to win those broad social reforms for everybody,

those uh those broad social reforms for everybody they're like well we can use our power to strike to uh get basically construct a private welfare state for our workers and so that's when you begin to see um things like uh the they call them like the gold-plated insurance plans for certain types of unionized workers and those would kind of um and those were kind of used as like a private welfare state for all those workers and it was built with the assumption that you're going to have low-cost uh workers uh basically doing all this care work um and oftentimes it'd be women of color and um and through that you start to see this real sharp decline from the 60s uh in like uh in union um militancy um and that's when factory when capital starts moving factories out of city centers where it's very easy to organize a factory when everyone

lives within walking distance of the factory and when they're done with their shift at the factory they're all at the bar outside the uh outside the factory gates you can just like if you want to have a union meeting if you want to organize even a wildcat strike all you have to do is show up at the right bar and that's where everyone is after they're done with their shift um they started moving and dispersing the industrial capacity of the united of you know the the u.s urban core out into suburbs so that's now where you'll drive through rural indiana and you'll pass like five factories and they're surrounded by nothing but cornfields it's because it's a lot harder to organize yeah uh auto workers when they all live 30 minute drive from each other and none of them

hang out at the same bar anymore uh and then you start to see um and all through that time the commitments to uh anti-racism are eroded so you'll see um jobs get start to get segregated out inside it's like steel mills and things like that but then you know there's also the rise of uh rank and file movements to push back so um all the while we're talking about this there's always workers who remember what these things were like and why and the power that they used to have and they would do the best that they could to get organized so um there's a really good um documentary you can find on youtube called finally got the news it's about the uh dodge revolutionary union movement in detroit which was a uh rank and file uh reform movement uh organized by, by black auto workers that got like a fair amount of

support from white, uh, auto workers, because they were basically there's, you know, uh, interviews with UAW bureaucrats. And they're just like, you know, we're getting people, these raises, why are they upset that they're like getting maimed in the factory? Right. Or why are they getting upset that you know you know black workers are constantly getting put into the shittiest jobs or the first to get laid off that sort of thing and that's a it's a really i suggest anyone has time and that came out of like the i think that was immediately after the was getting organized after the assassination of martin luther king and all the riots that were happening in the uh in the 60s at like that late 60s period

um in the 70s uh there was the teamster uh the teamster rank and file rebellion my grandpa was a trucker uh my grandma was a uh teamster she was a like a punch card operator but yeah sorry yeah yeah no i mean like teamster these unions got so big and they have all kinds that's how you end up with like there's uaw teaching assistants now right yeah um like how do you end up with these huge like uh unions and during teamster rebellion and my grandpa would tell these stories like we're going on there would be a wildcat strike and they call it out over the cb radios and the way they would enforce the picket line wasn't just like oh we're gonna like stand in the road or something they would hang coke bottles full of rocks over the overpasses just high enough

up to like that cars would pass underneath them but if you hit one and you were in a truck you'd fuck up your day um and that was like a really um like a really kind of like powerful pushback by rank and file workers against what they saw was the erosion of their power because i think that i think there's this sometimes amongst people who consider themselves to be left or whatever there's like this kind of doom and gloom like oh it's only like we're only losing right but and there's been a lot of as the 70s happened and capital is kind of reconfiguring itself in the middle of all the economic upheaval inflation um basically they got to the point where we can't maintain labor peace and maintain profits right so they could maintain labor peace and have something more like a socialist system

or they could maintain control over the work process and just do everything in their power to destroy the power of workers. And they decided to do that. So I think we were coming out of this kind of era where, you know, if you were in a union and working in a factory, there was a real threat that they're like, well, we're just going to shut this factory down. And, you know, NAFTA gets signed. Well, first it was the Petco strike, uh, with Reagan, Reagan gets elected and air, uh, air traffic controllers decided they're going to go on strike. And, um, and they, and Reagan decided he was going to break it and they, they brought in, they basically, there was this big recession. It was like this huge mess where people were really desperate for work. And, um, you know, they said, we're going to hire anyone to be an air traffic controller and we're going to break the strike. And that was the first real, the first, like that, the beginning of the end of that final, like that big moment era of industrial unionism in the United States. And we went from a place where, you know, UAW had millions, the United Auto Workers

had millions and millions of workers. And if you drove a car or a truck and it was made in America, it was made by union worker to this point where now the UAW is around 50,000 people. I was shocked when I heard that literally like two weeks ago. Um, you know, we just had the big UAW strike at John Deere. Um, and there's been,

and you know, all through this, while this is going on, um, there's various union corruption scandals. And that's again, the cause of like when you kick out all the people who have an ideological commitment to improving the lives of working

people and building the power of working people out of this organization that's only existence is to like build the power of working people um then you uh then you end up with people who are basically criminals. Like you end up like there would be, uh, I think Reagan scat, like Ronald Reagan was, uh, was a union member, but he was like the union member for like a corrupt, like there was like, there was like a battle between like the CIO controlled union in like Hollywood and like the corrupt, like mobbed up union and the mobbed up union. Like that was the side of I'm 90% sure that that was the side that Reagan picked. Yeah.

And, and yeah, so it's like, you could kind of, and there was a lot of like media where they would be like, you know, the waterfront and various like movies and things talking about union corruption and i think that union corruption is real and it's a it's a

when it happens it's a huge problem it shouldn't like it's in other countries like in like in germany if they found out like a union union official like misappropriated like 2 000 euros it would be a nationwide scandal like um also in uh in like european countries like you pay union dues on a voluntary basis right in the u.s legally since we're a closed shop system like once you're at a union uh union workplace your dues get taken, whether, you know, whether you're happy with the union or not. Now there are people who say that's really important because unions need every penny they can to fight for what they have. But when unions have to fight for membership and make sure that their membership knows that they're getting like what they're paying for, you get a little bit more

responsiveness. So I think that's another thing that especially people are thinking about unions and thinking about joining a union or creating, getting into the workplace, just understand what a union is and how they work and where your money's going to. And if you're unhappy with that, the best thing to do is to get involved with your union to try and like get connected with your union to try and get connected with your co-workers who have similar complaints and change the union because there's a saying, it's like, any union

is better than no union. That's not always true, but it generally is. There's a very small chance that you're living in 1929 China and your union is like is controlled by like a combination of the knt and like literally the chinese heroin trade but you know that that

like yeah that like doesn't mean there are things where you'll have like there my dad worked at a factory and there was it was a Teamster organized factory. And like some of the stewards were bullies and literally like there were some people who were dealing drugs out of it and they gave the, the workers like tried to bring in another union and the, and the management decided to offer to also try and decertify the union at the same time and the workers voted to desert and the thing is is that now that factory shut down and gone um and i guess like the thing is is that you have to it's far better for workers to assert their

rights within their union where they have some modicum of democratic control over what's going on than it is to just throw up your hands and like there's and do nothing because if you do nothing the boss is always doing something yeah like that's the thing is like management is always organizing they're always coming up with ways to like to undermine uh the control of workers at work, to pit people against each other. We can get into it later, but like they want, they'll use racism and those sorts of things to dole out favors or curry favoritism and like,

you know, pit people against each other. So I think that it's important to just say that like the union is going to be your only effective way to push back. Well, the union or collective action, because I guess I also want to say that there are times when organizing union isn't the that is protected as, you know, as a labor organizing, but it's not done within a union. And so, and because America is a really messed up place and you have right to work States and places where like being in a union is like literally illegal. Sometimes putting the time you like, you can't get into a union and therefore you have to come up with other

solutions or sometimes because of the nature of a workplace like getting a union is like is very hard or like basically impossible that doesn't mean that you can't organize and i think that that's the thing that everyone needs to understand i think there's a lot of like boosterism of unions amongst younger workers because people just don't understand how they work or they haven't experienced them themselves. And I think that the main thing is, is that you've got to be very careful with your time and understanding like building a union can take like 10 years from the beginning of we're upset to now we have a collective bargaining agreement. upset to now we have a collective bargaining agreement, or now we have a collective bargaining agreement. It could be another five or 10 years before you actually get to the point where you're organized enough to go on strike. And people oftentimes think that that's like, they look back at the history of things and they're like, oh, it was so easy. But back then people were

taking all, I mean, it took them years to build the US labor movement into what it was at its peak. It took decades, right? And I think that we're kind of used to this instant gratification kind of stuff. We have to understand that it's like, if you're going to be in a workplace where you're there for enough time to build the trust and relationships and understanding of how the work workplace works and keep your job and be someone that people don't look at as like a shirk or whatever. Not that I don't think that people should, you know, people should work as hard as they can and not any more harder than that, but whatever. Um, uh, but I think that,

you know, I'm anti-work,work but you know that's a whole other thing unions are the best way to limit the amount of work that you have to do if you're gonna if you're going to you know work as a wage laborer but I'll just say that it's like I think that people don't that it's difficult sometimes to understand how much work goes into getting to the point of getting a union but it's always worth putting the time in to get there. And you may not win the first try, but if you are, if, if the conditions are right and things like, you know, we make our history, but not in conditions of our choosing, sometimes things don't work out, but not doing it is, I think, it's detrimental to you and your coworkers. And even times, like I've talked with people who've been involved in campaigns where they got fired, but then all of a sudden conditions improved afterwards. And they look at that as like, oh shit, we didn't get our union, but everyone got raises and they changed some things at work.

And that's actually a victory. So, you know, I think that think of each other as like collective building collective power and the amount of time it takes to do that is daunting, but I think it's the sort of thing that we need to do if we're serious about changing how we can actually like how our lives work and how much power we have outside of work because unions are also places where we do things that affect outside of our work as well. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora.

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

In the 2020 George Floyd uprising, in Minneapolis, there were nurses, union nurses, who walked out the door to support people who were basically having an insurrection against police violence in Minneapolis.

When the 2020 COVID pandemic hit off, 2020 was the year of everything going off. Nurses were going out and confronting, union nurses were going out and confronting, uh, union nurses were going out and confronting anti-mask protesters. Like I was literally getting screamed at by like some Looney Tunes doctor holding a banner that said nurses are dying. Go home with like 20 other union nurses. And we were the only people out there who are like together who are, uh, you know, immediately impacted by this stuff. And, and I think it made a difference. Like, I think it's important. And so I think that, and there's an idea called social unionism. So if you get to the point where you're building a union, and you're making progress, and you get

to that point where you have a union, always be advocating for it to the extent that you can, that your union is engaged in the kind of um like connecting with your community around your workplace figuring out the things that are impacting people's lives outside of unions because i think that's another thing that um for a long time unions just ignored or let atrophy because they didn't think it was their problem anymore was you know mutual aid helped build the labor movement yeah you know workers would get would literally like in west virginia and meituan uh they had uh company police throwing people out of their apartments um who are on strike and the there were

you know all of a sudden 2 000 of your fellow workers showing up and throwing the police out of town and putting people's uh you know belongings back in their house or you know and i believe we're getting back to that point where you know teachers went on strike in west virginia and the union and the teachers did everything they could to support their students while they were out because like i think there's this idea that a lot of union workers at this point are you know everyone is like you know the american workforce is so desperate and so and they've been just been pushed around so much that you know there was this idea for a time like in wisconsin

what was that 2014 or what was the scott walker wisconsin uprising 2011 wasn't it i think it was like right around occupy it was around there and like there was this idea that's like oh you're a nurse oh you're a teacher like you should just be happy that your job has some kind of meaning to it right and it was a lot of like weird discourse around in the media and about like how dare these people think that they deserve anything and the thing is is that how can you like as a nurse how can I take care of my patients safely when I'm constantly having more and more work put on me? And that immediately affects the people that I'm taking care of. So that when we went on strike in 2019, it was around our safe staffing. And I've seen management make decisions about staffing that kill people and I've seen management make decisions that lead to my coworkers getting injured.

I management made decisions that led to me getting COVID and messed me up for a year. And so when people in these kind of care worker roles, which I think has become a more prominent part of the u.s economy yeah um as people are getting older and they need more like care work home care workers nursing home workers uh hospital workers um parents don't can't rely on family the way they used to to help take care of kids school has become like this really important like uh has become like this really important like uh institution for you know working class survival um that you can't do those jobs as a worker if you don't have the resources so like our our children were at the chicago public schools and they're that you know the chicago teachers union which was taken over by the rank and file, I think in 2005 or 2006 by, you know, a group of Black women led by Karen Lewis. They set up a group called,

like a rank and file caucus called the Caucus of Rank and File Educators or Radical Educators, rank and file educators or radical educators core might be messing it up but it's called core they went out on strike in 2015 and as a you know as this is before my kids were old enough to be in those schools i was out there still taking them coffee and donuts right because i knew that they were in there because things sucked by the time my kids were old enough in 2019 for it to be a big thing the teachers went on strike in chicago it had gotten so it's so bad that chicago teachers are like chicago public schools have the the lowest number of staff to students of any school system in illinois it's not even like half right and um And it's funny because the state had been constantly trying to erode the power of the union.

They're making Chicago teachers pay for their own retirement, basically, in a way that no other workers have to. They were making it so that Chicago teachers could only go on strike if over 75% of the teacher voted to go on strike. So what that does is there's kind of like a little bit of a flip where, oh, we have to make 75% of people agree to go on strike. Well, let's organize so much that we get over 90% of people to agree to go on strike. And then how so much that we get 90 over 90 percent of people to agree to go on strike and then how powerful is our strike our strikes going to be we're literally like uh one of the things i do as a steward is i connect with all the different unions in at university of chicago where i work through a labor council we were going as you know university workers to

all the picket lines of the public schools around our neighborhood and we're bringing out coffee bringing out donuts talking to people hey i'm a nurse we were on strike like six or like two or three months ago what do you all need connecting with people and then and then like at one point when the teachers were like we're not getting what we want. And this is Lori Lightfoot is trash. Mayor. We helped organize this mass march where multiple marches of teachers and school workers. And we're all out in the streets dodging cop cars until we have this big convergence. And it was really beautiful.

Like we had like multiple people with like multiple banners and different columns each one saying we will win going through the streets of our neighborhood um and like messing up like the uh commercial traffic area in uh in our very bougie neighborhood um but that was happening all over the city and it's just like when you see that happen it's because we're literally and the support of the community for those strikes was so overwhelming because people knew that it's like, these people aren't, I mean, like, first off, it's a hard job. There's no reason why anyone doing that job shouldn't have like a materially comfortable life because how stressful it is and how much work they do. Awful. And I really like, I really need to emphasize this enough as people there's like this whole thing is like oh teachers don't

work over the summer like oh but no no like their job sucks they have to they have to deal with these kids all day and the other thing is like you know the part of it that you don't see is they have to do all the lesson plans they have to grade all the stuff they have to do all the stuff like after the school day ends they have to do all this yep honestly all the time this job is awful it is extremely hard and like they don't that yeah the conditions are extremely bad i'll never forget when i i'll never forget when i ran into my seventh grade science teacher on the summer uh she was waiting tables at a local restaurant you know i mean and so i think that there's this assumption that like uh that especially care workers get some sort of you can't you know you can't cash in fulfillment right or prestige

or whatever that doesn't pay the rent uh that doesn't put you know groceries on your table um that sort of thing and so you know i think we're beginning to see this thing resurgence and it started with teachers. And I know for, and teachers and nurses have been out fighting like hell for the past, like five years. Yeah. And it's beginning to kind of like spark other kinds of organizing outside of,

uh, outside of, uh, the care work areas. And a lot of this stuff was, it's funny how it was kind of like, uh, predicted by occupy and like revolt of the caringes. Someone who wrote a really cool book that just came out, David Graeber, who was talking about like, why is it that you're seeing all these people who are out in the streets, like during Occupy, who are like social workers and nurses and teachers and all this stuff.

and teachers and all this stuff there there's something going on here and i think that so you'll see places where organizing conditions are easier because the pressure on especially care workers right now is immense in a way that it isn't as immense other places but look at for those like when you're thinking about unions and whether to do build a union at your workplace or do some sort of collective organizing in your workplace do you have the dynamics where you guys are can the boss shut down your uh your your workplace and move it like 10 miles without completely destroying their like their business right and so you know we've seen strikes happen in grocery stores um in uh massachusetts uh there was a really like uh pretty well publicized grocery worker strike and apparently there was like internal documents got released to like shareholders

about how that was like one of the most like it It was for a month in the winter or three weeks. And they said they lost... 75% of customers refused to cross the picket line. Hell yeah. And I think we're thinking... Getting to the point where you can go on strike, it's a process and it takes a lot of work. And I think that people underestimate what that looks like.

Hence, we see hashtag general strike things all the time. But when you get there, I think that we're at a point now where people have a lot more sympathy for workers. And workers have become more visible in a way that they weren't before. The essential workers over the past year and a half have been the only workers that sometimes people will see, right? So you'll see things also like you have, you know, Amazonians United, which is a union that's organizing, but they're trying to organize something called a solidarity union. So they're not, you know, at least the ones here in Chicago, and I think some of them in New York, and this may be changing, things are always shifting around around but for a long for a while

through like pandemic they were organizing on a like in contrast to the bessemer uh amazon campaign sorry there was a a business union tried to organize a uh a union in alabama in bessemer alabama at an amazon warehouse and there was a lot of like media attention to that democratic politicians were paying attention to it you know joe biden said i support the right of workers to choose to have the choice to have a union yeah some really milk toast bullshit yeah and a lot of celebrities showing up and what wasn't happening was you weren't seeing a lot of evidence that the workers themselves were very excited about the union and it turned out that that campaign failed um whereas workers at amazonians united appear like in chicago and granted it's a very different

organizing environment in illinois than it is in alab Um, they haven't been focusing on getting contract. They've been focusing on getting work changes. Like they're like, we want to have water, like we need water breaks. And so they would, they have these standup meetings at the beginning of every shift and they had coordinated where you have, you know, 30 of your coworkers all say, we're not starting until we get water. And then management panics because they're not used to that kind of demand. They're used to, we're going to have a campaign, then we can, you know, mess with the votes and that sort of thing and make people afraid. Collective action overcomes fear, right? fear right yeah so when you have collective action even through a regular like a more regular conventional union campaign those collective actions are what lead to successful unions so like um so you know they'd say we aren't starting the shift until we get water and then all of a sudden a manager disappears and then comes back with pallets full of water right and all of

a sudden people are like i'm gonna have a drink water before i start like all together and then they go off and do their thing and it's like you know things like that build the power of the union to the point where they shut down that warehouse but then amazonians united popped up in the three new warehouses that they set up in chicago so it's like when you build that kind of collective power and people feel like this is how you get things, then it's hard to repress, right? It's one thing where you're like, oh, we lost an election. Why did we even bother? It's another thing where like, no, we won like all this, like this, that, and the other thing. Like we got, you know, like our regular schedules fixed. We got like water on our shifts. We got this, you know, that's what gets people into the mindset that they can change things. I think this is the thing that a lot of people don't get is it's like

the difficult part isn't getting people to agree that things are fucked up at your workplace. Most people understand that things are fucked up in their workplace. Difficult part isn't saying that like, well, this is a solution, solution right the difficult part is getting people to understand that collective action is the only way to solve the problems right even within unionized workplaces getting your co-workers to understand that if we don't do this as a collective we will fail and so like when there was a, but the first successful private hospital union drive in North Carolina popped off early 2020 throughout that campaign, there were constantly like demonstrations of collective power. We're going to do a vigil.

How many people are going to show up to the vigil? We're going to all walk around with stickers saying like, safe staffing saves lives or like, you know, um, care patients over profits, that sort of stuff. And building that kind of collective power together is what gets you, um, is what gets you a successful, like that's what builds a union. Fundamentally union is, um, there's the legal thing. And then there's the real thing. And the real thing is only as powerful as people are willing to fight for and build that kind of collective power together when nurses were on strike. And I talk a lot about nurses because I know a lot about nurses, but like, you know,

or like, you know, in, um, in Iowa, when the, uh, John Deere strike happened, people were out on those picket lines and people were ready to get hit by cars to like stop scabs from coming by crossing the picket line. And if you're not willing to do that kind of stuff, and I'm not saying that you need to put your body on the line for things, but you do need to be willing to draw outside the lines, right? There's the law. And then there's what you can get people to do and you will be surprised when people start moving they move fast and they get really riled up yeah like this fuck this this is what we're gonna do and sometimes unions try and like bottle that energy up um or you know if you're in a good union you use that energy to fix things so i think that's kind of where i land on all this stuff it's

like be aware of like the pitfalls of what organizing at work means you everyone has a right to organize at work everywhere in this country if you get fired for like uh for organizing you can fight that that sort of thing yeah it is it's federally protected like it's it this is this is a federal government thing. This is what we got in exchange for everything else. This is what we got in exchange for putting our guns down.

The actual feds will be like, no, you can't do this. I mean, and sometimes that's kind of like cold consolation, yeah that doesn't selectively but cold consolation yeah and it doesn't always work but and i guess this is the other thing is there are people who are like this is how we're gonna you know we're gonna win socialism as everyone's in a union and i guess like my take on it is is this is how we build all the networks and get the skills and all the necessary things to be prepared to do bigger stuff down the road.

So when we, when workers are talking to each other across, like, you know, at when Chicago, when Chicago teachers went on strike, they didn't just go on strike as the teachers. They also talked to the,

they lined up their strike to go out as same as education, like the school workers who are in SEIU. And they went out at the same time, um, in order to improve, improve the power of the strike because the more workers who are out less able, the bosses are to like, like to undermine the boss, either with people scabbing on each other or whatever and i think it's just like and like that's the point of our labor council is like when like the grad workers at university chicago go on strike we got teachers out or we got uh well there were teachers from ctu out on those picket lines there were nurses from nnu on those picket lines and we were doing everything we could to communicate to each other because like in my, it doesn't matter that I'm a nurse and you're a secretary. We have the same boss. We have the same problems a lot of the times.

And so I think people want to do the thing, which is to all have the glorious general strike that overthrows capitalism or whatever, or fixes all the problems at your work. right, that like overthrows capitalism or whatever, or fixes all the problems at your work. But you know, starting everyone forgets all the necessary intermediate steps to get to that point. And sometimes it means just get the union in the door in the first place. Because like, at a campaign I was a part of here in Chicago, where my university Chicago bought a non union hospital that was out in the community just getting in there they were able to expose like basically an entire hospital-wide scheme of like race uh racist like practices around raises and compensation and that is like that first step and then fixing that right because you don't want to have like white nurses making 20 more more than black nurses and black nurses making 20% more than like

immigrant nurses like Filipino or like Mexican nurses. Get everyone on the same page so that you're fighting together instead of fighting each other. And those are those first steps that you take. And then you start reaching out to people in other workplaces or other work areas and build that kind of militancy across unions so that you can support each other so like maybe a secondary strike is illegal right now but that doesn't mean that you don't have you know teamsters who won't cross the picket line right you know how do you go out and make it or you can build that solidarity so that like in Buffalo, when the CWA nurses went on strike and they won pretty impressive things around staffing ratios,

they literally had other unions going out and picketing board members of their hospitals businesses. Hell yeah. And like getting really, really like aggressive with that sort of stuff. So I think that people need to just big takeaway is it's the biggest barrier to any of this stuff is just getting people to believe that collective action is possible and they can get you wins and then

making sure that you take your time and be patient and understand that there's going to be losses, but in the grand scheme of things, don't, don't, don't mistake what looks like a setback when it's actually a victory for like a victory, like for a real, like a defeat and, um, and talk with people. Like that's what they hate. Like bosses hate it when we're talking with each other and talk to people you're not comfortable with that's the that's the other thing is that people are very nervous to talk to people like it's always funny when you run into

people who are rah-rah like unions rah-rah like socialism yada yada yada and they don't talk to their co-workers right and your co-workers are the people you're going to be around for maybe some years and that's where you spend a huge chunk of your time. And like, but you don't know what's going on. And you're like, oh, they're all hostile. They don't want to know anything. They don't want to do anything. Funny thing is, is that oftentimes the most people who seem very skeptical and anti-union can be flipped. Sometimes those people become the best, like the most dedicated people to the union. be flipped sometimes those people become the best like the most dedicated people to the union it also means that you're going to talk to people you disagree with like yeah there was a trump dude who was on like the bargaining committee for like our last strike he fucking loved that thing he was like we're going on strike but you know it's also a union full of black women and he shut the fuck up when you know it wasn't like you know being racist and shit but you know you're going to be with those people and part of the thing is is that it's about how we're all moving together rather than making sure

everyone is on the same page for every single thing. Because the biggest thing is the collective action and building that collective power. And hopefully the collective power is, hopefully the collective power outweighs it's, if you stand firm on principles like anti-racism yeah and fighting against discrimination and misogyny that sort of thing it actually builds the power of the union yep i think that's the other thing is that people are like oh i don't you know like you know working class people are all racist or reactionary or whatever so i'm gonna do that that's how i'm

gonna get that's my end and it's like i think there are a lot of people who like they really don't like you know they don't like being around loud racist assholes or people who you know say slurs like especially if it like i mean you can make the arguments like this is that's their way of dividing us our goal is to be together and historically speaking the one thing that's done the most to fight working class racism is union organizing. Yep. top of sort of just the division i mean you know even when it becomes stuff like transphobia right it's like you know if if you can convince people to fight like first like fight for the person next to them right you know i mean this is this is the thing that people like said a lot during the uh during the the bernie campaign but it was like you know if if people like yeah like if you can get someone to uh fight like fight for the person next to you in a concrete way in the workplace in a way that's actually real for something that doesn't directly affect them.

You know, a it's just like the amount of power that you've built there is incredible. And then be also. Okay, I forgot where I was going with that. Please cut that. Hold on. Hold on. I can kind of build on yeah let me just say this my personal experience is that queer women run the labor

movement yep and that like and that if you think that people who have been bullied from the day they like stepped into like a uh into a kindergarten aren't going to be the people who are most equipped to fight bullshit bullying from a boss or injustice or bullshit you're fucking like like just get the fuck out because you haven't been in a union and you don't know what you know i mean you like the like people unions are at their best when they incorporate, you know, all like when they are fighting for everybody, because what a boss can get away with, with the weakest person is what they'll do to all of us if they get the

chance. Yeah. And so I think that there's this idea that's like, Oh, we're going to set it. We're not going to, we're going to ignore this or that sort of thing. And it's like,

you know, that's when people like, you know, people will turn away from unions if they feel like they're not being listened to or taken seriously. You don't know what people's like identities are just because you see how they look. And so I think that it's real important for us to understand that if we're

going to fight these fights, we need to do so with the understanding that it's everybody. Yep. And that the working class is a giant multiracial conglomeration of every identity in this country and that the more marginal your identity is, the more useful having a union is to like solving your problems. Like I said, like racist, racist compensation practices. There was no way that was going to get fixed. Like it wasn't even uncovered. People didn't understand that it was happening until like the union got in.

It doesn't mean there aren't other ways to fix things, but it's one of the, one of the most powerful ways to fix things. I think that people just like, don't understand because they don't have experience because they don't have an experience. They end up with, they end up with misconceptions about what they're going to get into and then they get disappointed and i think the real i mean i think that the reality is not as bad as sometimes it seems but also you got to go into all this shit with open eyes

yeah and i think that there's and that's the other thing one of the fun things maybe this will make it in the podcast i don't know but um one of the fun things is always like hanging out with like if you like every workplace has like its lefties just about and like hanging out with the lefties who just can't get their brains wrapped around the shit that you need to have a union i think that there's like this idea that's like oh i'm gonna talk to my friend they're like they're like they say they're a communist and then that all those people do not always but they're don't they're sitting there it's like talking a bunch of shit about like uh the union they're a bunch of sellouts this or that and it's like literally it's the only thing you're gonna do to get your like to fix the problem and you're just like we're just trying to get this problem fixed can we just set aside what you think needs

to happen like that you guys talked about it you you're like Spartacus league meeting or whatever. Like, Oh, this isn't a real strike. Like we're not going out until like for like, you know, three months. And it's like,

you know, it's like the sort of thing where, um, sometimes or oftentimes. And I think it's because a lot of people kind of pick up their politics, almost like an aesthetic as opposed to like a thing that like is about like fixing the problems in their lives and and sometimes even i'm like you know like this is a problem that i face is like like shit is real like for a lot of

people and you can sit there and talk about this or that and like you're you know you think that things you know you've got this perfect ideal vision of what things or that and like you're you know you think that things you know you've got this perfect ideal vision of what things should be and then you've got this kind of imperfect thing in front of you that is even though it's imperfect it's basically what you've got and so it's like you've got to kind of you've got to work with what you have and fix it up and make it the best that you think it can be um but also understand because it's an organization full of people that it's not going to be perfect every time. And yeah, maybe your union is going to do some liberal shit, you know, and you're going to,

and that's going to annoy you. But you know, like those people are still going to show up on the picket line. If you're like, if you're organized and you're good and like, you know, that's, it's not the end of the world that your union isn't perfect um but you've got to do everything you can to do your best to make it better because if you don't then then liberals will do whatever they're going to do or conservatives will do whatever they're going to do and then they'll like fritter away this thing like you can destroy a union if you aren't engaged like a union can be destroyed by people who think that you know

they're just like i just want to get my raise and like go home and like you know if people's main concern is like their health care or like you know that hour of prep time before they start their shift or whatever you know start their school day or whatever um you know a union can like dissolve out from underneath you and people are like why is no one showing up to this thing it's because you didn't talk to people and find out what it is i think that's the other thing it's like listen like there's this idea that you're gonna get up and give a big speech and get everyone really excited about your about like being in a union but the main thing is listening to people yeah and listening to people who are critics you

know your co-workers who have complaints aren't like people that you should ignore those are people you need to listen to because those are people who they've got i mean everyone's got legitimate problems with how you know work is happening and like just because someone's like you know union is like you know trash like then find out why they think it's trash and then try and be like i want to try and fix that what can we do to fix it together that sort of thing i remember when i was working so i worked at uh like maintenance at a county facility uh for a while and you know so i i was like a like i was like i was like a summer hire basically and so we weren't in the union but like everyone we were working for was in the union and they all like you know these are old ex-construction worker guys and you know like they're in the union but like i remember that we hear these conversations that were like okay so we have a union meeting

this week does like do you want to be the person who tries to talk about raising wages and it was like everyone was just like no and you know people you know like these guys are like very right wing and they were just sort of like pissed off all the time but it was interesting because the thing they were pissed off all the time about was that like you know their union didn't do anything like their union like they they're like they were they were basically constantly annoyed that like the union didn't like the the union wasn't fighting for pay raises the union wasn't sort of fighting and and i i think that was you know an example of how this stuff sort of just fails if if people aren't like if people don't feel like they can actually do something

like in right even in itself i mean and they call it service unionism there's this idea that like um or like a like that a business union's job is to kind of serve you and you kind of like uh they do all the work like one of the complaints that some people who are not big fans of our union our hospital is that like oh well other other unions have lawyers negotiate the contract for you. And when we negotiate, we have a room full of nurses who are doing the negotiations. And the goal is to have it be as transparent as possible.

And the idea that you're going to hand over negotiations to a lawyer and somehow get a better deal than a room full of the actual the actual workers and it's funny because we have our bargaining team and then like we'll periodically do something called open bargaining because it's a thing that bosses hate it's like they want to make a deal like with the door shut right yeah yeah um but there's no reason why a union has to do that like you can invite whoever you want to your bargaining you can invite community members to your bargaining. If you feel like your man, it could be because

management behind closed doors will say all kinds of things. And they'll, you know, they'll, they'll trash talk everyone involved and they'll, you know, and they will make absurd demands about, you know, it's like, oh, you're all going to take a pay cut, you know, on this contract, that sort of thing. And they hate it. They absolutely hate it's like oh you're all gonna take a pay cut you know on this contract that sort of thing and they hate it they absolutely hate it when like workers actually show up to these things yep and so um i think that uh understanding that like i think there's this idea that like some people are big on like we have to be kind of like secretive to like get the best like deal. And like, we shouldn't be like, we shouldn't be transparent with everyone about what's going on because that's how like, because then they'll figure out some way to counter us. transparent your union is the more involved people get and the more able people are the more willing people are to put their time and energy into it because that's what comes down to is like people have to like everyone's working and busy and their life's life is hard and it sucks yeah and so like

do you have time to like dedicate to show up to like talk to like if you why would you go to a union meeting if when you raise the concern like we want higher wages and like the union like staffer doesn't care if you get higher wages because they're like well we're getting our union dues and like what do what the fuck do we care right that's like a huge problem and the part of the thing is that those problems don't get solved if they if they exist because, that definitely exists in some, in a lot of unions, more unions than,

than not. If the workers don't get organized together, like we just saw a, an election within the Teamsters International where the Hoffa, I don't know, Jimmy Hoffa Jr. One of the Hoffa, uh, Jimmy Hoffa jr. One of the Hoffa kids was like president of the union and was just like not doing a great job. And, um, and like there was a rank and file like push to get that guy, uh,

unelected, you know, and put it replaced with a rank and file worker who wants to put actual time and resources into organizing, you know, like there's nothing sadder than a, than like watching a union campaign fail because the union clearly is phoning it in. Like that's happened. I've seen it happen, not inside my union, but in other unions. And, uh, and I mean, like at my workplace, there's several unions and i've seen i've seen a failed campaign and it's like obvious like there's uh you know i'm not i don't co-sign everything that someone like jane mccavillary i think that's how you share mccavillary has to say

she wrote like no shortcuts um i don't sign off on everything she has to say but she has some really insightful things it's like if you're not organizing to win, like you'll fail and like, you have to take this so seriously. And that's where like, I'll say that like, if you've got a choice between I'm going to put time into a political campaign versus a union campaign, you are going to get way more bang for your buck. You're going to get so much more experience. You're going to get like a durable organization. That's going to be around for years if you put that time into a union campaign because like imagine uh winning an election right um except the politician you're running against is the incumbent and they can um

basically drag every one of their constituents into like a meeting and tell them how awful you are all the time and lie and say whatever they want. And then they can, you know, do all kinds of tricks to like basically dismantle your campaign. So I guess like the thing that I would say is that like, if you, if you do it the right way, and you actually win one of those campaigns, you're going to come out way ahead in terms of understanding, like you have to talk to people you have to be super organized you have to know what people's issues are in their different bargaining units um you have to find people like part of like i've been successful campaigns i've been part of literally going on a search to go find the like the the people that need to be like signing cards and stuff and you just have to be a very good listener

ready to talk and listen and hear what people have to say um and then turn that um information into knowledge knowledge and power um and um i think that uh if you pull it off you have done something substantially harder than say like winning a school board election or something like that i mean it's it's it really is it's like taking like those kind of skills that you would use to like win some sort of small municipal election and it's like exponentially more hard because the rules are just so tilted against you winning so i mean if you are serious about it if you're serious about changing the world if you can't like someone uh yeah i think murray bookchin once said that if

you can't run for a dog catcher you probably shouldn't be talking about revolution you know but i think that probably more you know more appropriate would be like if you can't win a union election you probably shouldn't be talking about revolution because even if you want to do all the things you need to have the ability, the skills, the ability to mediate conflict, getting everyone on board to do the collective action that like you would need to do to successfully kind of like carry out. Like, you know, it's one thing to have the grand insurrection.

It's the other thing to carry it forward and keep carrying it to the point where you're over the line you've completely changed the world right yeah so and i think that and so i just think that like um and i think that similar things go with like you know tenant organizing community organizing there's various types of organizing that use those similar skills that you get in like a union campaign um and it's just a very different type of um politics and organization and skills that you would get from you know showing up for your local justice dem and you know like knocking on the doors of strangers you'll never you may never speak to again you know when you're talking with your co-workers those are your

co-workers they're going to be there until you're you know you retire or you're talking with your coworkers, those are your coworkers. They're going to be there until you retire or you're fired or you quit. So anyway, I guess that's another good takeaway, I think, from all this. who are listening to this who work in non-union workplaces and want to try to start this and i wanted to know what would be your recommendations for them you know how how do you start this process what does this look like and what kinds of conversations uh should you be having with your co-workers yeah for sure so um i think one of the first things that i think a lot of people a lot of people don't understand is that there's an amount of risk and stuff to organizing and that you're like first off like you should be chill and like not like running around telling everyone you want a union because that's a great way to lose your job um i think the thing is is that you build relationships and find out what's happening like just like you know take from your experience and

figure out what's like in uh like man it really sucks like i got like i got screwed over on my vacation requests or like i you know man our raises were really shitty this year and i heard like you know boss talking about like how much, like, uh, like they made so much money, that sort of thing. Um, so I think that it comes down to, you have to be, it's kind of like a combination of like, like an investigative reporter and like someone who is just really good at like talking to people and just kind of like understanding what's making them tick and understanding also that maybe you're not the person who's going to get everyone on board but that finding other people who ever

like i think the big thing is like who's like the most respected person on like in your work area that sort of thing who like they know the the unit or they know the work area they've been there the longest they have like the most experience people look up to them they're the people who train other people that sort of thing those are the people who everyone looks to when it comes down to these sorts of things and you know just you don't have to be friends with everybody, but like doing it's, I think it's really good to just like, to be open to listening to everybody that you work with and finding out what it is that's really going on.

Yes. And so I've noticed like in a lot of places that I've worked, like the bosses often don't really know what's going on either. Like they, and I think that that's something I can give you. If you understand how the process works and who is doing what and what people like need, that gives you like a big advantage over the bosses who just have no idea

what's going on, which I think. Yeah. I think it's very it's very normal for bosses to really not know what's happening and there's always someone who does like figuring out the people who really know how things work are like those are like the those are the people who um you want to be talking with and figuring out like where they kind of stand on things. And, um, you know, I think like the first step is like just having good relationships and people trusting you. And, you know, you know, if, you know, like, I don't think everyone needs to be a superstar worker sort of thing to be a good union organizer, but like they always say, it's like people who have the most problems oftentimes are people that aren't,

don't make great organizers because people don't see them as people to follow. But, um, um, but I think that it's important to just like talk with your, to like, just figure out what's going on first. That's your first step. Figure out what's going on. What are the things? I mean, and you can come around together in, uh, you know, to like, just figure out what's going on first. That's your first step, figure out what's going on. What are the things? I mean, and you can come around together in, you know, and like, and how do you get people outside of the workplace? So you talk like, how do you like, do you have like a group chat or signal chat or like a WhatsApp chat or Facebook group? And where do you just like start kind of like, and you know, be very careful, be careful

about who's involved and just kind of like low key, just like start talking with folks and identifying the people who, who are outside of your work area, who know people. Like sometimes it's, you know, you'll talk to people and they're like, I don't want to talk about a union, but you can be like, do you know anyone who cares, who has said anything about unions before? has said anything about unions before. And so talking to people to find out who they know, like these are all this kind of like crucial first steps to like organizing. And I think the thing is, is that like, there have been times where you'll have a non-union workplace where if the people in a particular area of like a hospital or like a workplace, whatever, will do some collective thing that gets some sort of result so i think it's always like it's like let's get people to sign off on a petition about like you know like if 80 of your co-workers

are unhappy with like raises or something like that like the more people that are involved in those first steps, the more likely it is that it won't result in retaliation and like, you'll end up getting some sort of victory. Um, so I guess like the thing that I would say is just like, be, be ready for like people to look at greet you with skepticism because like it's it's hard it's a hard thing to do and um always just be finding out what is bothering people and then look at little things that you can do to kind of like flex power like to like collectively flex your power and um it can be as small as like everyone bringing up the same issue at like a work meeting, right? Like if you, and it could be like, hey, let's talk about this at this work meeting. This is, and if we all say something together, like we're going to be fine, right? I think it's the first like thing, like the first thing is know what's going on, build relationships, be a trustworthy person. Like you can't be like the unit gossip or the work area gossip that like knows that's in everyone's business or stirring up stuff and be successful at this. But if you are, you know, if you're someone that people like trust or look to, or, you know, like a person that people are like, they help solve our problems.

or look to, or, you know, like a person that people are like, they help solve our problems. Those are the people who, I mean, you're going to be well set to begin to kind of take the steps on that. And then, you know, as you kind of build those kinds of like build that organization step-by-step, no, no union, um, is going to, uh, invest the time in a union campaign. If it's just you and like two other people like you need like you need to get a room they're always say like well if you get a room full of people together i'm willing to talk to them and that's kind of the thing and you know zoom and stuff has actually made that a little bit easier um which in some ways can be a weakness because you end up with like it's a lot less commitment to show up to a zoom meeting than it is to,

um, to show up at like a bar or a place after work, um, or a church or wherever. It's like a good, like, uh, like neutral,

safe place that people feel like they can be honest with each other about what's going on. Um, but at the same time, just like, uh, being the more, you get on board with the thing, the more likely it is it'll succeed. You'll attract support from like an actual union that is able to help you if you decide that that's how you want to do it or if that makes sense in a legal context.

how you want to do it or if that makes sense in a legal context and so i just like always like start small figure out the small things be willing to do like collective action to get little small victories and that's a great way to get started i think and then like really do like sleuthing and research like figure out how things actually work um that's like you know uh that was a problem with the best market campaign down in uh down in down in Alabama with those Amazon workers is they didn't know how many people worked at that, uh, facility. And then all of a sudden they're like, oh yeah, we're going to include like an extra thousand people on this vote, you know, like six weeks out. And, you know, like, I don't want to, I don't want to take a dump on the people who did that. But like, if you don't know that there's like another thousand people, or you don't have like everyone on board, you're not going to succeed. So know everything you can, as you're going in, and do everything you can to find out things or make buddies with the friends or buddies of the people who are gonna, you know, know these things and, you you know and then support each other like it means showing up when like someone sometimes what we do during these campaigns is someone will will have the contact for someone who's interested and then your job is to go and find that person where they work and talk with them and then talk with them while they talk with their co-workers or back up them

while they're talking to their co-workers trust their their coworkers trust their coworker you know you're a random stranger you know and then like don't be afraid to say i don't know but i'll find out right there's like this there's this pressure i think to like have all the answers to like whatever people's questions are and i think that it's like um I think that it's like, I think that it's important to be honest when you don't understand, but then do the work of figuring out the answers for people. And I think people respect that. And, you know, a lot of people who are vocally against these sorts of things up front, it's because they don't know. And if you, you know know you're like no we've got a right to do this or like you know the hot the you know a management will say things like

our management will say things like oh you will um you know the union will get in between our relationship with you know with you and us right and the point is is it like well the union is us we're the we're the people doing it. Like everyone running, you can't run a union if you don't have a bunch of people involved from the workplace. And you're just like, and making sure that the people who are, um, those people who ended up being kind of like spokespersons for everyone else are people that folks trust and that have like a good,

like grasp of what everyone wants and yeah so yeah and then like you know don't get bogged down in the legal shit like you know collective action really is like your most powerful tool um all the other kind of like the grievances and that stuff it's important and you can't let it go but it's also like it's designed to kind of grind people down so um you know the more collective action you take like the more likely it is that you're going to be successful and keep people engaged and excited yeah going back to what you were saying earlier this might wind up being last episode depending on uh where this breaks down time wise but yeah But yeah, I think it's also, it's just, this is going to take time and a lot of work.

And I think it's important, A, to understand going in that this is a long and difficult process. It's not going to happen overnight. And B, that it's a lot of work. Like you have to, there's a lot of things that you have to do. There's a lot of sort of logistics. There's a lot of talking. There's a lot of work like you have to there's there's a lot of things that you have to do there's a lot of sort of logistics there's a lot of talking there's a lot of like negotiating there's a lot

of sort of i mean just just even i don't know before anything gets off the ground you have to spend enormous amounts of time and effort doing stuff and that's that's that's i guess just the reality of it so yeah there's there's no there's there's no there's there's there's no magic bullet like there's no sort of yeah there's there's no just like one thing you can do that like magically makes a union appear it's a bunch of people coming together and like fighting for it for a long time yeah i think that that's like the main thing is like you're it's it's a cliche that's like it's a marathon not a sprint um sometimes i hate when people say that shit but it's true like you you really do have like um you're in it for the long haul and a lot of times it's like you're you people are ready to do these things

when they're like this is like i don't want know, it's one thing to pop up in a place and be there for like, you know, six months, be like, I need a, we need a union, right? No one, you know, that works at that place, trust you. They don't know who you are. Yeah. Like they're not going to follow you to do anything or, you know, or take, or, you know, follow your lead. Um, it's the people who are like, I'm going to be here. This is my, this is where I want to be. And, you know, this is a, a I'm going to be here. This is my, this is where I want to be. And, you know, this is a, a, I want to be here for the next few years and think of it as like a long-term investment in the quality of your life and the quality of life at your

workplace. Um, because to win, you have to be sticking around, you know? And I think that's where it gets tough with people who are in like precarious types of employment or different types of, and that's where you have to start looking at alternate ways to organize because maybe you're a precarious worker who does, maybe you drive like, uh, for a ride share service, or maybe you like do delivery or like, you know, um, for an app or whatever you deliver for an app and i think the thing is is like that sort of thing because of how and you know these aren't like new forms of work

this is actually really old forms of work that are just like been like rebranded by tech bros who have like decided it's like they're like they're like they're great geniuses like rebranding the kind of like precarious work that was really like prominent like throughout the 19th century and it's like so then what do you do is you come up with ways to organize people regardless of like oh like i'm you know i work for this like i work for lyft or i work for uber and it kind of switches back and forth like the thing is it's like that's when you start talking with you know ride share drivers across different like apps or whatever. And then you come up with a way to work collectively to, to change sorts of things.

And sometimes that's, and it's going to be, it's going to be tough, you know? And that's when I kind of look at those, that sort of thing is like, this is where it's a learning experience and maybe I don't get everything I want, but I, you know, it's really important. I mean, it's like building these networks of people who care about like what their working conditions are like, and you can pull things off maybe unexpectedly that you didn't expect were going to be like the thing, you know, like you may start with something that looks like a union drive and then you end up with something that looks like very different. It could, you know, could go in all sorts of different directions. So, um, you know, there, and look outside of the U S you know, there are countries where like in, um,

uh, I think that there have been some pretty successful delivery app, um, organized organizing in London. Um, and you you know i think that to a certain extent like formal extant u.s unions have not been very successful in organizing those workers because it doesn't it's hard to do from the extant business union model. And so it's like, it's one of those things where, you know, it used to be, you know,

they would have like, you know, the fight would be instead of trying to get like workers or like a, a contract at a particular like work site, you'd set up a hiring hall, like the IWW would set up hiring halls um and like you know for lumberjacks and that sort of thing and those workers are always precarious right but they would go try and set up so that like people would only take jobs out of the hiring hall and

that's how they would control their like their work and i think that more unions need and part of this is like i would if there's any yeah union people out there who are in staff and that sort of thing is like we there needs to be a serious re-examination of how we do unions in this country and i think a lot of people inside unions understand that but no one has quite done it yet in a way that's effective and i think that we we really do need to kind of re-evaluate that sort of stuff so just you know as someone who's going into like a new sort of organizing campaign, just understand that like getting the union contract isn't necessarily the end goal. The end goal is to try and get your boss to do things differently so that you're not like miserable at work. And that might look like a contract or it might look like a one-day app strike or something like that.

You've got to figure out how it's going to work. In healthcare, there's this idea that there's the gold standard of the strike where you strike until we win and we're out for two or three months. gold standard of the strike where you strike until we win and we're out for like you know like two or three months well the problem is is that there's a industry of scab nurses and health care workers where at any point they can bring in people to replace enough of you that a hospital can maintain operations and unless you're super organized like they were up in um buffalo uh with cwa like and have a big network of people and you're ready to go to like, you know, like picket board members, houses and that sort of stuff. Um, those long-term strikes can end in defeat where you end up with, uh, you know, you're

all replaced with scabs and, and it sucks and it's happened. And then you gotta, I guess you gotta learn from it. You know, like we've, there was a famous strike in Minnesota with healthcare workers and they went out and they were out for months and months and there were people on, you know, going to the soup kitchen to feed their kids and stuff and they lost. Right. one day strikes, but instead of it just being at one hospital, we organize multiple hospitals across the country so that it soaks up all the scabs. And I think ideas like intermittent strikes were actually a really powerful tool back when it was the CIO and it was like, we're going to just stop working until you fix this problem. And that's why they made them illegal. And it takes a lot of work to pull them off. But if you can pull them off, that could be an effective way. And if you're not in a union, maybe getting people down for a one day, like work stoppage at your

work, or even, you know, maybe it's like, we're not starting our shift, right? I've been in the room, I've been in the room where it's like, no, we're not going out to take that assignment until like, we get our staff situation set up, like fixed. And, you know, sometimes it's just those collective actions are, you know, it's not the end. Like there's no end all be all one size fits all solution. Just be ready to kind of like explore what it means. Get all the resources you can there's groups like there's still like the industrial workers of the world which has really good organizing uh trainings ot 101 102 i'll pitch

that as a member of as a also a dual carding member of the iww um but there's also labor notes and other groups like essential workers organizing committee that's such a thing that like give you good like rundowns on how to do the organizing work so just be careful always be careful yeah be aware that people are afraid bosses use fear um to scare you guys to scare everybody and like the the the more people on board with the thing the less fear like it's amazing when you're running up into a strike and you're really firing on all cylinders and like everyone in your like work area it's like we're getting together to take a picture like get ready to go on strike and it's like literally i mean when we went on strike when our hospital went on strike it was the first time

where like there was like 1500 nurses all in one place is the first time when all of us were in one place ever. And it was this massive, like coming together thing experience. And it's really hard to describe when you, when, cause you know, we're always griping at each other about this or that thing. And it's like, but when you're actually all out there together on the same time, when you pull it off, it's really amazing. Um, it's hard, it's, it's hard to describe. Um, but when you do it, it's like, it's like the purest drug. And so I've, I've heard some people who are union skeptical be like, well, you just experienced like the good shit. And like, what about all the defeaters? Like, well, get the little hits,

get the little hits here and there. And then you'll get yourself to the point where you can do the big thing. You know, you, the whole thing is like getting people to do the thing is like the, is it's like the, the perennial, uh, you know, curse of the left.

Can you do it? Or a curse of, you know, like the, the, the organizer activist or, you know, whatever you want to call it,

you know, it's just, but you know, if you don't do anything, nothing happens. Yep. You can all sit and complain and nothing changes. So the only way to change things is take those complaints and turn them into collective action.

Yeah, I think that's a pretty good positive note to end on. Just go do things. Go do the thing now. Stop tweeting. Stop tweeting about it. Go do the thing now yep stop tweet stop tweeting stop tweeting about it go do the thing um yeah i think that's it i like i guess one last thing because i talked about social media and talk you know i talk smack i like i've been off twitter for some months now and it's it really cleared my brain but you know um being on finding the social media space where your work your co-workers are at is really important and that might mean setting up like a discord or you know whatsapp or a facebook

group you can set up secret facebook groups that no one could see and yeah like like facebook will periodically shut them down but like our hospital has like a like a facebook group with like 2000 nurses and we and that's where we got really amped up and it was a way for us to be talking with each other and talk each other through um the stress of setting up you know this thing and then also like you know people workers can't organize like like people will do organizing even if like they don't have like that full support so like some co-worker or not co-workers but members of my union went on strike at cook county this year and the whole thing was organized practically without like staff right because the staff were barred from being in meetings, like in-person meetings because of COVID and they couldn't go into the

hospital because of COVID. So people were very pissed about how things had been going and they were talking to each other and we organized that strike. They organized that strike on their own practically. You know, it lined up, they were off there, you know, they didn't have the no strikestrike clause operating at the time. And they pulled off a pretty significant victory from their one-day strike. And it really got them some big wins.

And they didn't need the union to do it for them. The union was kind of like a facilitation tool rather than like the thing that got it done i think that's the other thing that there are people who think that like it's all dependent on like having like this hero staffer sort of thing situation and at the end of the day like if it's not the workers doing it themselves nothing's going to happen yeah it's yeah the the the the power the power is with the working class itself and if the working class doesn't use it nothing will ever happen

but if it does use it I will trail off here sounds good so John is there any place that you want people to find things that you do like yeah you're off twitter

I used to be on twitter I periodically will show up to find things that you do? Like, yeah, you're off Twitter. I used to be off on Twitter. I periodically will show up on Varn Vlog, which is C. Derek Varn's vlog on YouTube. There's I recommend people

listen to there's a group of podcasts called the Emancipation Network. I really like their stuff, especially there's a, what's it called? General Intellect Unit, which talks about like cybernetics and the left. They have a lot of particularly cool stuff that's just come out recently about strategy that I think is really important for everyone to understand. Um, I was a founding member of the, uh, libertarian socialist caucus at DSA, but I'm no longer in DSA. Uh, there's a, but that group is still kind of kicking around and we're coming up with new things. Uh, then, then I guess like, um, the university of

Chicago labor council is, uh, a group that I spend a lot of time with. And, uh, there's also tenants United high park with lawn, which is a tenant union that you helped set up. This is true. Hell yeah. So, uh, you know, um, go out there and, you know, don't, don't listen to me or don't try and follow me. Go figure shit out in your own neighborhood and set up a million different labor councils and worker committees and tenant unions. Build power. That's why I think sometimes we are afraid of the term power. I think that power is at its best when it's everybody.

we are afraid of the term power i think that power is at its best when it's everybody and so i guess you might say it's like go out there and build community and worker power and um don't be afraid because fear is the one thing that they've got to wave over our heads and sometimes you just gotta take that jump and do the thing and uh, and that's how we're hopefully going to win one day. Yeah. Save the world. Yep. And you can do this. Just all of these things,

everything we've been talking about for the past, like two hours, these were all just done by ordinary people. Like there's, there's, it's all, it's all done by random people. And you know,

that random person can be you. You just have to go and do. Go do the thing. Yeah. So, yeah, this has been It Can Happen Here. You can find us on Twitter at HappenHerePod and also on Instagram there. And, yeah, there's other cool zone stuff. Oh, I guess, yeah, there's a new show called Megacorp that we have.

That's about how corporations are bad. And the first season is about Amazon. It's out now. Okay, maybe it just doesn't have a Twitter. But yeah, it's called Megacorp. You can find it wherever fine podcasts are distributed. Yes. Okay, Bye. Now, won't you join me at the fire and dare enter... Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum.

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

Welcome everybody to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about, I don't know, how things are kind of crumbling and how we can maybe put stuff back together. And today I am excited to talk with a senior, let's see, what is the actual term? Senior programs strategist. A senior programs strategist at Wikimedia, Alex Stinson. Hello, greetings. Hi, it's so good to be here. I'm very excited about our talk today because I mean, this should surprise nobody that I used to be a Wikipedia editor back in the day. Not shocking at all if you know me. But yeah, we're going to be talking about Wikipedia itself, and then also climate misinformation and disinformation,

and how we can maybe create a better understanding of climate change and its effects across the world and how digital information works. Those are all kind of topics we talk about often enough, but never within the actual context of Wikipedia as an entity. So I guess let's just start there with Wikipedia. And for those who don't, maybe people use a website, but they're not quite sure what it is, how do you actually describe what Wikipedia is? Because it is like an interesting kind of amorphous entity.

It's so many things. I think most people are used to thinking about Wikipedia as like the fact checking device. Like I have a bar argument with my friends and I pull out my phone and people throws this website at me, right? It's a lot of things. It's 300 language Wikipedias. Actually, it's not just one. Each of these communities has its own editorial community. Last I checked, it's like 60 million articles across the languages. It's really, it's a lot of different content. And a topic can be on

each of those Wikipedias, right? And this is important as we start talking about disinformation is like each Wikipedia, because it's edited by people in that language and it's written by that language community, you know, each article is different and it has different perspectives. 280,000 volunteers editing every month. So this is a lot of people, right? But the bulk of that's happening on English Wikipedia and some of the larger languages that are spoken across multiple cultural contexts. And then there's also a lot of other content sitting behind Wikipedia. So there's a media

repository, and there's a, called Wikimedia Commons, and there's a database called Wikidata, which kind of powers those little knowledge graphs on the right side of Google and a whole bunch of other parts of the internet. Wikidata shows up in Amazon, Alexa, and all kinds of other places, right? And so it's, we're not just like one website, it's many websites, lots of knowledge, lots of platforms, lots of context. And we'll come back to that a bit more as we talk. Yeah, one really interesting part of it is like, I don't know, my personal kind of social leanings. I generally kind of like things that are more decentralized in general. Other hosts on the podcast are generally kind of on the progressive

left libertarian spectrum. And one thing I do really appreciate about Wikipedia is it's more like it's not, I don't think it's open source, but the way it has decentralized editing and all

that kind of stuff is just a really interesting model of like, what if a lot more stuff worked this way? And I'm not sure like how much of like a decentralization focus is there like consciously at people at like the foundation and people who try to like actually like run it behind the scenes and stuff. Yeah, so Wikipedia grows out of the like open source movement and kind of early days of the internet right this idea that like knowledge wants to be free technology wants to be free software wants to be free um let's let's use the legal infrastructure to like create freedom right uh in that sense and then there's

also the free as in like anyone can edit and then the free to like do whatever you want out there in the world um there there's uh people are like free as in beer and free as in speech, right? And those things are also, they're always in tension and they're kind of working. And as you can imagine, especially when you get outside of kind of multicultural internet spaces,

like English Wikipedia, it can get challenging. Like if you're in Croatia and everyone is speaking Croatian, there's a very small bubble in which to create that Wikipedia, right? And so it's interesting in that sense. I think there's also another part of Wikipedia that a lot of people don't see, which is the movement behind it. So there's the editorial communities, people show up and make edits. But because there's this ideology that you're talking about, this like decentralized, like we need to share our knowledge or culture or language on the internet. There's also a whole social movement sitting behind the scenes. And there, there was a podcast recently.com, the Wikipedia story that kind of captured that,

the essence of, of that. And it's, it's a lot of people like myself. So I started editing in high school. Yeah. Yeah. Me too. Yeah. Yeah. One of those, like, Oh, I know how to click the edit button and I figure out how to use the internet and that kind of thing. But there's a lot of people that like the intuitiveness of clicking an edit button on a piece of open source software to create content is just not, it's not clear. Right. And so you have to organize and invite people in.

And so we have a whole movement that does that too. There's about 140, 150 organizations around the world that we organize events, work with libraries and museums and educational institutions. And so there's always this kind of interesting dynamic where our values, which is this like open software platform stuff, is also lived in our practice and our outreach, like creating change through society by sharing knowledge and education. And so I think, yeah, it's an interesting dynamic. Yeah, I think that does create a really oftentimes beautiful reflection.

It can have some dark sides every once in a while, but it is really nice to have the ideology driving it, being reflected in the actions of operating it and spreading it and that kind of thing. So this is something we kind of briefly touched on already, but I'd like to move on to kind of why – like how climate change and broader social issues are covered on Wikipedia. Because you already mentioned like it's – because there's not a Wikipedia, there's many based on different languages and places, it feels like to me whenever social issues kind of get covered on Wikipedia, it's going to be in some part like a local reflection of whatever is in that area. If there's like a white liberal writing articles in New York, it's going to be different than someone halfway across the world writing them in a much smaller country, let's say like Belarus, who's under like what I would call a dictatorship. let's say like Belarus, who's under like what I would call a dictatorship.

So that's going to change kind of the nature of what people are making because of that kind of divide. So how does that kind of crop up? And is there any like solutions to that? Or because of the decentralized thing, it's like, how much can we like impose? I'm not in Belarus, how much can I impose what I want their Wikipedia to look like? Yeah, there's kind of two or three dynamics you're touching on here. The first is because there's kind of an intention bias, like something comes up in the news and our Wikipedia community, like people are within minutes of breaking news stories are usually like editing the page, working to improve it. Right. So if things show up in the, you know, European American press, it's very likely, especially something like English Wikipedia will pick up on it and

immediately cover it. And because there are multiple perspectives in those press usually um kind of the ideological uh kind of multi-sided nice like works itself out because there's a lot of eyes and a lot of people who know how to edit there yeah right yeah um on in a kind of cultural linguistic geographic context where there's like one set of stories and there's not a lot of diversity um uh this this happens and i'm going to refer to croatian wikipedia because we we actually had an external researcher uh look at croatian wikipedia because part of it has been kind of caught by by folks with kind of very ideological leanings uh in a way that's excluding others and this is not good right it creates a very one-sided information environment

and it really reflects kind of the news dynamic going on there. So when like breaking news happens or when a topic like a social issue or not necessarily, like climate change is not a social issue, right? This is a global like life threatening issue. When something becomes politicizedized it's very easy

for especially in smaller language wikipedias for a few people to kind of swing the whole perspective uh on that um so yeah there's this breaking news issue and this is where our kind of organized communities are really important so uh the the example example I want to point out of this working well is in medicine. So our medical community during the Ebola outbreaks a few years back in West Africa were able to organize both on English and in languages that were accessible for local communities, high quality coverage of the medical content, because it's like has impact on people's lives. And so they recruited translators.

They thought about like, what's a simple way to communicate the story in that context? And like, what do the workers or the advocates or whoever on the ground who's working with that crisis, what knowledge do they need? Right. who's working with that crisis, what knowledge do they need? Right. And you see like other open technology movements do stuff like this, like humanitarian open street map has a similar kind of way of organizing. They're like, Hey, there's a crisis happening. Let's pull people together from different parts of the world who have the right knowledge or skills and like address the knowledge gap. So, so you can solve it. It's just, it's complicated. And, you know, we've been trying to address as a movement, what we call the gender gap. So there's both less women editors,

less women's content on many of the wikis. And like, it's taken years and it's very hard to organize. And even when there is investment in it, it's challenging to make substantial progress because there might be contextual issues around it, too. And so you can't just like drop in on a Central Asian language with a like Western perspective and expect to like change the culture of the wiki overnight. You have to engage with it consistently and be persistent and work on it over and over and over again. We are going to take a short break to hear a message from our lovely, lovely advertisers, unless it's ExxonMobil again. But we will be back shortly. but we will be back shortly. Okay, and we're back. One thing that we cover decently,

part of my job and Robert Evans' job is disinformation and misinformation and how that type of stuff spreads online. Yeah. Particularly, usually kind of linked to political extremism or conspiracy theories or in that general kind of bubble to like political extremism um or conspiracy theories or you know in in that general kind of bubble um and so what what type of kind of climate misinformation has really been festering on various you know wikipedia's across the world really because like we would just be talking about

like these topics and how and how and like why it happens like what are the main types of misinformation or disinformation that is much more like prevalent yeah um so the first is just kind of neglect of uh content uh that's happening across the various things related to climate um but we've identified on english wikipedia over 3 700 articles that are directly related to climate change. We don't have a very big editorial community in English on that topic. That's like fluent in the science and fluent in the other stuff. And then you go out to the other languages and like some of the languages have like 3,000 of them. Some of them have like 200. Right. And so there is both. uh some of them have like 200 right um and so there is both um and some of that content

was like translated several years ago right or five or ten years ago and yeah you know and like the climate rhetoric has really changed it's changed a lot and like numbers and statistics all that stuff gets updated every year and it's yeah that is that is there's a lot to keep up with and like reading the ipcc report or looking at any of the consensus science there's like a lot of change that you have to be influent in like science communication you have to understand like where to look for the information um and it's interesting my partner is a spanish language speaker and uh she was in a kind of workshop for journalists uh in argentina uh for climate communication and the the the workshop was like oh you should cite the guardian right so even as uh to to kind of understand this climate stuff so a lot of these local language

contexts there aren't even good sources and the sources they do have are often citing like the dominant narrative that's going on and like the Anglophone news cycle, right? Because there's not a lot of climate communication going on. And so there's just a lot of complexity involved in updating that much content all the time. And so the bulk of the stuff that kind of creeps in is like this neglect, right? It's like some dominant idea in the narrative just hasn't been updated. And like, we need someone to update it. And that's like an organizing problem, right?

That's like, we need more people who are science literate, who speak the local language, who understand how to edit Wikipedia. And that's trainable. Like we can do that. Yeah. The reason that matters, the neglect matters matters is it stops people from making decisions about climate change because they don't have like an accurate sense of what we need to do. Right. Which is cut the fossil fuels, increase, increase resilience, do adaptation, like actual political change. Yeah. Right. And so, so that, that's just,

it's a problem. The other stuff's a bit more, it's a little bit more complicated. One of the things that happens is that, as you know, there's quite a manipulation of narrative that has happened around climate change. There's this really great podcast by Amy Westervelt

about how the fossil fuel industry got its message into schools in the last 30 years in the US. And that narrative is just so prevalent. And so one of the things about Wikipedia is that we try to do a balance of positions. If there are reputable sources kind of describing or analyzing a topic, and this is back to your polarization question too, if there are reputable sources describing a topic, we try to give them equal weight and balance across the article. The problem with climate is that some of the narratives that look like reputable sources are just pumped out of fossil fuel industry funded think tanks. Right. And these things are not truthful narratives. Right. And so the BBC ran an article two weeks ago on kind of climate denial in some of these smaller languages,

smaller language Wikipedias. And what they found was a lot of these narratives being given equal weight with the climate science. And I took a look, our community after that BBC article came out, started looking across all the language Wikipedia articles about just the main climate change page. And they found 31 Wikipedias that had some of that like equal weight of bad climate science. Interesting. Yeah. And, you know, the BBC article only found like five or 10,

right. We found another lot, a lot more. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so it's, it's like a,

it's a really like these narratives just seep in and you know again i'm going to go back to the croatian example like if your media environment has been locked down by a certain political rhetoric too those narratives might have traveled from like the anglosphere into these other spaces and then gotten stuck right and it's just like keeps getting recycled and so that causes delay um and i was listening to your podcast recently about uh soft climate denial like this is what's happening in other language environments, right? Is people are rehearsing this misinformation. It seems like a valid position because it's been rehearsed so many times by folks. Some people who are championing that position are like doing so unknowingly. And in the process, we're kind of disconnecting entirely

from the source of the information. And that is just, it's really bad. One interesting thing that I thought of when you were bringing up like sourcing, how sourcing itself can be an issue. In like in the States, there's kind of like a joke that like, when people use just Wikipedia as like as a source to be like

they they just they just link the article and but like that is the default for so many people when they begin a begin a research project is like okay what's this what's that what is what does wikipedia have on it what's the sources wikipedia uses um and kind of branch off from there it's a very common thing so i i'm not sure like, how different internet culture will be different in other countries. But if they do not, if they don't have, like, the base sourcing necessary to create, like, a decent homepage article, then just sourcing from Wikipedia in the first place becomes so much harder. Because, yeah, like, you were saying, like, just use the Guardian is, like, one of the things. Like, that's not horrible advice, but if it's only just from one thing, then that's going to change the entire nature of coverage and information on specific topics. Yeah. wikipedia's or like language wikipedia's will have will have like different sources so then

getting information from from the page is just going to be so different and like yeah like the whole like the whole like uh tiered of sourcing is just completely changed yeah and and i think like you know in medicine most medical practitioners expect most of the medical literature to be in a handful of languages like English and Chinese and that kind of stuff. Right. And like part of your professional work and part of like saving people's lives is being able to use those sources. into another language and you're distributing that to medical practitioners and they find the citation and it's in English and they can go follow the source. Like that's not such a big deal, but with it in a topic like climate where the vast majority of the people that have to make decisions on this information do not have access to other languages. Maybe their access to English is through like machine translation or something like that. Like having, not having sources in your local language,

or just having the sources that were translated from an English Wikipedia article, which happens a lot on these smaller language Wikipedias is kind of like not helpful for climate decision-making. Yeah. And this is where it's, and it's easy, for example, in a lot of these like Eastern European languages or Central Asian languages for like a politically spun news site opinion about something to kind of creep in at the same level of of kind of uh validity as as another uh as scientific research as the the you know consensus understanding of the climate crisis so how how might i know we talked about like like uh trainings for like journalists and people to start editing wikipedia's in their language but like how how do we kind of

improve climate communication overall with open access to information and you know creating more linguistic um diversity and stuff yeah well i i think there there's like a couple opportunities um in this and then i there's some other misinformation i also want to talk about too. But I think the sourcing one is a particularly challenging one. We need like more basic science-based climate communication and more languages. And I'm not saying like just the, like more languages, like the big UN languages or the ones that are kind of colonial across cultural languages, like Spanish, or French, or Arabic, or, you know, all these languages that have been used across cultures, we also need it in local languages. And we need it to be evidence

based, and we need it to be audience based, right? So if someone is like searching online in Swahili, If someone is like searching online in Swahili about how like drought is happening in Kenya, right. Or Tanzania or, or the, you know, they're suddenly flooding or like, I need to deal with X, Y, and Z adaptation to the climate crisis. Which is by the way, what all of the global South is doing right now, right? Like the, the global South is having to adapt to this crisis that polluting countries have made. Yeah, and we're not actually giving them the resources

to the problem that we've caused. Yeah, well, it's not even like giving the research. We're not even like the people who are like, we want to adapt our society. We're not resourcing the folks on the ground who have the agency, who have the understanding, who know how toourcing the folks on the ground who have the agency, who have the understanding, who know how to do the research in the context, who know how to do the communication in the context, right?

We're not even like bolstering their request for help, right? Like the UN Climate Conference kind of failed on this adaptation funding, right? And this is, you know, this is where like a platform like Wikipedia and like kind of failed on this adaptation funding right yeah and uh this is you know this is where like a platform like wikipedia and like kind of approaching this from a knowledge activist perspective where you're like there are people who need this knowledge to address like understand what's happening around them so they can make decisions that doesn't like, you know, yeah, we need this kinds of information. We need open source knowledge, not just Wikipedia, but one of the platforms. And, and, you know, the, you all do open source investigation and you're used to like open source software communities. And I

listened to a couple of your podcasts and you're kind of constantly speaking back to those open communities that that come out of like anglophone software spaces yeah um and like we need to acknowledge that like we we figured out how to do open knowledge but we haven't given all those tools we haven't transferred the knowledge on how to do it we haven't adapted those tools to other parts of the world and other languages. And so just like starting to look for these other communities, asking for the people, like who's ready to organize, like giving them money to go do it. Right. These things are like really practical. And I think we're not, we're not often not listening, or we're not looking for that solution. And reminder, like most of the people having to adapt are in the global south and speak other languages. Like we need to be there in that language if we want the climate

crisis to like, resolve itself without, you know, destroying people's lives. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's the thing we try to bring up, is that the people that's going to be initially worst affected are the people who are already kind of not in the greatest situation in the first place. That's like how

the areas that are going that are gonna experience the most flooding the most extreme weather events all this kind of stuff it's it's not it's not starting with something like new york city it's starting with areas that are already uh dealing with a lot of like local issues and now this is just something else on top and yeah fixing all of that is uh i mean fixing all of it's impossible. We can only take small adaptive steps to mitigate some of the worst effects. And yeah, I mean, that's stuff that comes up a bunch. But you mentioned you wanted to at least briefly mention

some other forms of disinformation. Yeah, so we've also witnessed a couple times where something will hit breaking news or become a political position in a context. And then like we will see bad actors show up on Wikipedia and try to manipulate it. I have two examples of this. The first is about a year ago. we found a group of accounts editing about some of the inter-Amazonian highways that the Bolsonaro presidency is building through the Amazon, where they were trying to remove the environmental and indigenous people's impact assessments from the wikipedia articles uh and so like basic human rights stuff basic you

know healthy environment things yeah that the government is like expected to follow through on we're being like manipulated out of the uh the articles uh for a more like pro-economic growth narrative um and so you know it's we can't like the the shift towards this like very extreme right like economic growth only version of reality yeah um does play out on the wiki now we were lucky that this was fairly trans like fairly easy to see once we found it, but we had to coordinate across English, Spanish, and Portuguese to address the problem. So we need multilingual communities who are kind of coordinating and talking to each other to address that.

The other thing we've seen is like, so did you, I don't know how well you follow the climate movement, but did you see when Disha Ravi got arrested in India by chance? I don't think so. So she, she's a youth climate activist that was part of Fridays for Future India, which is like a group kind of sister group of the group that formed in

Europe around Greta Thunberg. Right. And she, uh, um, her Gmail account got attached to a Google doc, uh, uh, just, uh, seen active on a Google doc that was about, uh, sharing social media about the India, the farmers protests in India, which have been like a real political sticking point issue. And I had written, so I'm both a volunteer and a professional who organizes the community. And in my volunteer time, I had written the biography of Nisha Ravi, like months before the Indian government kind of identified her with this social media toolkit. the Indian government kind of identified her with this social media toolkit.

And when she got arrested for something that's like just basic social organizing tactic with social media, the kind of Hindu nationalist social media environment, like zoomed in on her Wikipedia article and on all these other social media presences she had. And they tried to silence it. Be like, okay, we need to delete this article. And fortunately, like a group of us were watching the page and we caught it and we were able to stop that. But there's kind of the kind of flash mob situation that happens a lot now and social media where it's like, Oh,

this thing has been polarized. Now we need to go attack it. And so you can imagine like English Wikipedia has a healthy immune system for this kind of stuff. It like sees it. It has enough. It has enough people that it can do that. Yeah.

Yeah. But you can imagine on a smaller wiki that the narrative could shift and stay permanently shifted quite quickly. Yeah. Yeah. But you can imagine on a smaller wiki that the narrative could shift and stay permanently shifted quite quickly. Yeah. If that happened. And so that's another concern, right? So there's like the subtle, like a few accounts just like quietly removing things. And then like the active political kind of intervention that happens. In terms of like disinformation, do you see the Wikipedia as being kind of intervention that happens. In terms of disinformation, do you see Wikipedia as being kind of susceptible to intentional disinformation campaigns of people

slowly kind of editing the ideology of articles to push kind of some agenda? Whether that be individually and more of a crowd operation or even run by people with political power. How much of a risk do you see that with this open source idea

of intentional slow dissemination of disinformation on important articles and stuff? Well, so I think I might reframe your question a little bit. Sure. Like, all open source kind of knowledge spaces are susceptible to that right um the question is to like what degree and how harmful is it going to be right yeah um like is it is it like very open to this and will it cause a lot of problems um the bigger language wikipedia's have healthy immune systems but we we have a combination of problems. The bigger language Wikipedias have healthy immune systems.

We have a combination of kind of bots that are like AI generated that flag bag edits. And then we have a lot of community patrolling happening. And even in some of the smaller communities that have like medium-sized editor communities, like Swedish Wikipedia, it doesn't take a lot for that local language community to patrol the pages and like be like oh okay um these changes are kind of weird i can roll it back um like this doesn't seem like it fits our culture of wikipedia the problem is when a language wikipedia has very few editors and they're not active all the time um and and so this is where we need kind of more eyes on the content right because it's very easy for like a really small language community to kind of have a little bit of content but never see it maintained um and and this is where the like

where our communities are forming around these languages like a lot of the west african languages for example that our communities are kind of organizing and we we like invest in those communities existing and like figuring out the governance and training people how to edit and getting access to the kind of technical skills to do this um and know, we have kind of systems that we're hoping over the next few years, invest in that resilience, right? Like building a code of conduct, making it easier for communities to see this kind of stuff. But it is 300 languages, right? Yeah. And it is a volunteer built system. And you do need a healthy editorial community in order to keep a wiki from like drifting too much yeah um so a good example of this and get out a reference croatian because

it's the one we've done research on yeah like it was possible for a few people to push people who are more in consensus with the global position on various topics out of the wiki um and and that's just like we we have to find a balance between like local language uh and this is my personal opinion right we need to find a balance between kind of local language uh sovereignty on this stuff and also not like radicalizing uh a topical environment and we and we see this particularly on impactful topics right like ones that directly affect like politics or in the case climate crisis like people's livelihoods and ability to function in society right Right. Um, and we just like, we need to be cautious about that, but, but, you know, Wikipedia is a common resource. Uh, and I think this is really important. Like the, the way Wikipedia works is, you know, the Wikipedia foundation

provides the servers. We fund our communities, we support them, we help them work through governance issues, but like the, we, we need editorial communities to maintain it. That's what those 280,000 people, um, are doing as volunteers is they're building a editorial practice that makes the content work. Um, and, and we, we need that. Um, and so we need, you know, like-minded communities, like the people for your podcast who are like, oh, we need the internet to be reliable and have accurate information on it to show up. Um, cause if we don't do that, it's, it's really like, it's the common resource. We, we, we have a decent international listening base as well. Um, and I'm thinking like, what,

what would you like recommend people, you know, in different countries or even people inside kind of, like, you know, the States, America, Canada, the UK, who are, like, multilingual, would you at least encourage them to browse other language Wikipedias and maybe start making edits when they see this type of misinformation popping up? see this type of misinformation popping up? Yeah. So two kind of perspectives on this. One, look for a local organized community. So we have what's called Wikimedia affiliates. These are 130, 150 organizations around the world. They regularly run events, especially now that we're leaving COVID, increasingly more in-person events. They train folks, like look for them in your context. And if you need help finding, you know, find me on Twitter

and I can connect you with those communities. And the other part is small edits. So I think a lot of people look at Wikipedia and they think about like a traditional publishing platform, right? Like, oh, you know, I have to write the whole article. The whole article. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I have to be a master. And the secret sauce to all of this is like most people start with one citation, one comma, one typo fix. And they do a handful of those a month. And then they keep coming back. And as you do those small edits, you start reading the content

more carefully and fixing the things you can fix. And so I recommend going in to like add one citation. Like if you go and add one citation today, that like makes life better or you fix the communication on a sentence. The other part of it is, you know, I said there's these organized groups. For climate in particular, I run this campaign called Wiki for Human Rights, which is focused on, it's a theme that we kind of identified with the UN Human Rights on the right to a healthy environment, which is this new human right that has been acknowledged by the Human Rights Council. And we're organizing kind of writing contests and edit-a-thons and kind of trainings for communities to go and look for the human dimension of the climate crisis. So I think when we think about climate communication, a lot of people are like science, right? They're like, oh, this is, you

know, about how weather systems work and how the atmosphere forms and that kind of stuff. And the, the, the content that's more impactful is this like human inflected stuff. Like how does the climate crisis infect you as an individual and agriculture in the cities you live in, in the clothing you buy, in the manufactured goods, in the mine around the corner that's producing water pollution that's gonna harm your children for the next 30 years right um and and that is the the kind of stuff that we're encouraging communities to pay attention to is it is more the like justice and human rights oriented perspective uh on these topics and your cat is very cute yeah every once in a while, they love to take the camera.

And so, yeah, so if you follow me on Twitter, I can hook you up with that campaign as well. Yeah. Where can people find you online and to learn more information about, you know, the various kind of topics we've discussed today? So search, if you're interested in climate change stuff learn more information about, you know, the various kind of topics we've discussed today? So search, if you're interested in climate change stuff on Wikipedia, English Wikipedia has a wonderful wiki project climate change that has a little tab at the, so if you search wiki project

climate change on Google and you find there's a tab at the top that says get started with easy edits and that kind of can get you oriented to like, where can you affect English Wikipedia on this? And, you know, once you find a gap on English, it's easy to find it on other languages. For kind of learning about Wiki for Human Rights, you can search for that and or follow me on Twitter. S-A-D-A-D-S, SADADS on Twitter. Twitter, S-A-D-A-D-S, SADADS on Twitter. We also have a group called Wikimedians for Sustainable Development, who's kind of communicating on Twitter, which is the group that's really focused on sustainability topics more generally. And, you know, the other way to look is find something you've been reading about, about the climate crisis or sustainability issues in the news, look it up on Wikipedia, see if it's missing. If it's not, click the edit button,

add a sentence, right? A good example of this, I learned about a park in the center of Nairobi that's being protested by environmental activists because some of the big trees were being cut down. Uhuru Park, right? This came by on my Twitter handle, like I'm not connected to this at the moment, right? But because I had news sources, I had three or four news sources, I could say really simply in 2001, the park came under scrutiny for a renovation that included removing old trees. That's a climate action. Yeah. Right. Uh, and I think, you know, I am constantly overwhelmed by the climate crisis as, as is a lot of people. Yeah. Yeah. And, and like just being able to tell that little story, like, Hey, um, the decisions people are making are not productive here, right? Just gathering that story is important. And what's important is Wikipedia plays

institutional memory on this, right? I feel like, you know, a lot of activist work is very temporal. It's very like in that moment, right? and if it doesn't get documented on wikipedia the local news sources are going to get lost in the wind of time yeah totally right um and and so i think you know to do your little activist motion like a sentence describing what happened in a moment where resistance was happening is like a huge step forward, right? Because it connects the environmental crisis, climate crisis, human rights issues to like daily lives. Like people look up this park probably on Google because they want to go there, right?

Or they read about it because people are like, when was it created? What was that protest that happened there the other day? And if the source isn't there, then it doesn't really exist in their minds. Yeah, it doesn't exist in their minds. And I think that's like one of the big issues with climate crisis and, you know, amplified even worse in other languages. Right. Is that people aren't making that connection. They aren't seeing it around them and they're not you know kind of connecting action to how we address it that uh that is a really good that's a really good point and yeah i mean i will encourage

everybody to to start making small edits that's what's what i did for a long time before i moved into like open source um journalism and and reporting it's a great way to get started. And it's a great way to, yeah, just start, start disseminating small bits of information, because the only thing that we can really do as people is small steps. We can have like an adaptive goal in mind, but you need to take small steps to get there. And that is a really great way to start influencing the way people think about climate and our situation. Yeah. And I think too, you know, your podcast kind of appeals to folks who are interested in finding the truth and reality, right? And that investigation is what a Wikipedia article is. It is like 1, 10, hundred editors out there in the world trying

to go like, what the heck is this topic about? Right. How do I compile my notes in a way that helps other people? And I think in the face of the climate crisis, Dr. Ayanna Johnson says like, find the thing you're good at, find the thing you're passionate about and find the thing that like or that that makes you feel good and you're you you is rewarding and find the thing that actually like helps affect the climate crisis right and a small edit on wikipedia meets your kind of knowledge needs it's very satisfying because people will read it and it it is incremental change in the right direction right uh people will make decisions on it. Yeah, I mean, I guess I think that probably closes this up today unless you have anything else to add.

I guess one more plug for your Twitter so we can get more eyeballs on you and the work that you're doing. Yeah, so at S-A-D-A-D-S. It's my long-term handle on the internet. And you can find me all over the place. And I tweet about Wikipedia and the climate crisis. And we'll link the Wikipedia WikiProject Climate Change page

in the description for people to find. Thank you so much for taking time to talk to us all about these topics. I'm really, really great, really grateful to have this type of knowledge readily accessible to more people. Also, you know,

in, in the spirit of Wikipedia. Thank you. Thank you so much. You can follow us by subscribing to the feed and on Twitter and Instagram at HappenHerePod and CoolZoneMedia. See you on the other side, everybody. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter?

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

It could happen here. That's the podcast that this is. It's about things crumbling and how to maybe uncrumble some of the things that are crumbling. And today, when we think about the crumbles, when you start thinking about the hell world that, that we're all increasingly inhabiting the, the scary shit that is getting scarier day by day, number one on a lot of people's list is going to be the cops.

Um, real cause of anxiety for a significant chunk of people listening to this podcast right now, uh, including its hosts. Um, Alexander, you and i have chatted before on the air our guest today alexander williams um you were a police officer

in the past and you are not currently and you want to chat about um the the the topic kind of the way you pitched it to us is there's a lot of aspects of police training that are very similar to what cults do to indoctrinate people and you kind of wanted to speak on that yeah there's a lot of there's a lot of cross-sections um so i yeah i used to be a cop i was in law enforcement for just shy of 15 years uh until i woke up and got out luckily. And, uh, all the stuff that's been going on, uh, over the last couple of years and the craziness and really ingesting a lot of stuff around,

you know, cults. And I started going down that, the little checklist that you go down of like, are you in a high control group? And man, they all just look, just dinged in my head every single time of like,

Oh, this is exactly what it was like being a cop. oh, this is exactly what it was like being a cop. Oh, this is exactly what it was like being a cop. And I'm curious kind of before we get more into it, do you want to walk us through a little bit more kind of what was your process of, I don't know, deradicalization isn't exactly the right term, but I think you know what I'm getting at. It's in the neighborhood, sure. Yeah. Yeah. the right term but i think you know what i'm getting it's it's in the it's in the it's in the neighborhood sure yeah um mine so i was raised in a cop family uh my dad was a cop he went the whole nine yards retirement the whole thing and um when i got into it just shy of 22 years old which that's young to be making those kinds of choices looking back on it um we had talked on the last podcast uh of your season one um about when my brother got arrested and got beat by my

own team my my own crew in the jail that i worked with which is the jails is where i primarily spent most of my time and i think think that that was item number one, kind of on my shelf, like people call it. That's a big one that went right on the shelf. And during my training, I've always been an obstinate little bastard. And I've always had that kind of like authority defiance. And in training, they start telling you really early like hey you

know what you know we're your family uh we understand you we're gonna get you and then like the language even then kind of flared red flags wrong for me uh and whenever a group of people says we're your family and so right like it's what is like we're your family and you can talk to us anytime fine we're your family and i got your like, we're your family and you can talk to us anytime. Fine. We're your family and I got your back. Fine. We're your family and that's why you need to do this.

Right. Things have gone awry. It usually is, we're your family, comma, now. Yeah. Yeah. And. Yes. So that was like, literally day one.

It was, we're your family now. We're your, you know, they use all that language, the familial language. We're your brothers, your sisters. Yeah. And the one that kinked for me in my brain was they said within a year, you're not going to have any friends that aren't cops. Like all of your civilian friends are going to be gone because they're not going to understand you. And they're not going to be able to be around you and handle you. So within a year, you know, we're going to be everything you got.

And for me, that was like, that was a line in the sand. And like part of my brain was screaming like, nope, never letting that happen. I will not let myself not have any non-cop friends. Yeah, that's probably good. Because that's, I mean, you have like when it gets gets to it's the same thing that happens to anybody right like some people got like last year in portland an activist brain where there was this all the people were spending time with other people were out protesting and so we have this really intense bond and we also are kind of separated increasingly separated from the people around us because we just can't

communicate with anybody else. And that kind of going on for years and years because this is your career for 20-something years. And it's like, yeah, that would – you'd be – after a couple of years of that, you're inhabiting a different planet. You really are. And it's – how you said that, like, you know, this is usually 20 to 30 years because you want to get that sweet retirement at the end after you've abused your mind and your body for three decades um it was it keyed off something that you and garrison talked about in a previous episode of the hiring practices where the the washington state guys and they were they got busted because the therapist was showing tons of bias. And that brought up, for me, the hiring process.

Because those psych exams are the only time as a cop that you get a psych exam. That's the only time you ever talk to a therapist. Mandatorily. Yeah, that's not great. Yeah, it's a really bad move. And there's a joke in cop culture of like well yeah you got to pass it before you get hired because after you get hired you're never going to pass that test because you know being a cop is is micro dosing ptsd in your system the entire time see i i guess one thing i'm

wondering because you you were in it for 15 years so that's that's not an insignificant span of time has it gotten to be more that way because i knew about 15 something years ago when i was like 18 19 just like i lived in this shitty little apartment complex and like the dude who lived below above me and then like the dude who lived two doors down were both dallas cops um and i don't know like i you know i was not particularly political at that point but i didn't they didn't seem to have trouble relating like they would hang out and shit after work like the uh just like not like like we would be like barbecuing outside and they would drop by and stuff and it was never i never got the sense that they were living in a separate planet but this is like 15 years ago right and i'm wondering what to what extent do you think this is kind of increased in in recent memory like this the the kind of you don't really

socialize with people outside of of the the family so to speak it is kind of like that so yeah a lot of language you're using is perfect because so what you're describing and what i remember from being a kid in the 80s and the 90s and stuff was um community policing like it's a literal style of policing going back to more of like the professional uh police style before it went military and in areas where people actively live in their community and engage with their community there's a striking difference in the level of police violence that happens. But nowadays, it's not the same thing. Because a lot of, especially in bigger metropolitan areas,

you're a cop there. You can't afford to live there. You're definitely not getting paid enough to live most of the time in the cities that you're supposed to be a part of. And it's gotten to the point where they actually teach this like method, methodically in academies. They'll be like, hey, if you want to be a cop in a big town, you need to start shopping around in the smaller cities around it to find a place to live, maybe like an hour away. And then they also pitch it as a safety thing because it's all about, you know, the killology

grossman we're all under attack 24 7 so they'll teach people you know what it's it's safest to not live in the town where you're a cop now so it's become intentional and it's one of those things where because i don't want to breeze past this is not the episode where we'll talk about community policing there's very good criticisms of community policing, and there's a lot of things it doesn't solve. Oh, man. But I think it's, yeah, yeah, absolutely. We're not trying to say, like, the solution is just to get cops, you know, to be members of their communities. But it is worse when they're driving in from an hour out of town and see it as, like, I'm occupying almost this area.

It's exact. It does. Yeah. Yeah. That language fits perfectly especially with grossman and all that yeah yes and we've got a two-parter on david grossman behind the bastards if you want to check it out but he's kind of the one of the big one of the big individuals who's who's done the most to like really push um i don't even like it's usually

framed as militarized thinking but i don't know a lot of soldiers who have been – who were trained to think that way about shit. Like most of the people I know who we're getting shot at every day for years overseas were not thinking the way Grossman does. No, and that's probably because he never actually went and did anything. I think maybe we should probably, Alexander, have you go – going through this, this document you put together kind of walking through. And I wonder if you might start when you kind of started thinking about police training and the mindset inculcated inside police departments, from like a cultic perspective, when did that really start to come together for you? for you? It probably really started to come together. Actually, when I got involved, I used to be an instructor when I got behind that part of the curtain and I got involved in those things. And I started going to teaching and I started teaching other departments that would come to us. And it was a joke in my head at first was like, oh, we all speak the same language. And then that got my brain rolling on linguistics and how linguistics work and how that you know the words we use change how

we perceive reality and then i clicked and i was like oh we're like a we're a subculture we're like no matter where you go in the country we are a little subculture we are a little yeah group and uh that's what started to to kind of push me towards like it's like being in a cult because uh you know you grow up around central california and there's a lot of really religious people and you start seeing the intersectionality of it really fast yeah and that's interesting because we we've talked a few times on various shows i've done about how any good subculture any really good party has elements of like a cult, right? There's little bits of that.

There's bits of that in friendship and whatnot. The tribalism of it all, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's just a thing like cults are taking advantage like pulling a bunch of things that people do together in order to manipulate human beings. human beings. I'm wondering kind of where, where you think, where are some of the areas you think it kind of crosses the line with police from like, this is, you know, a degree of like, I'm sure firefighters have a degree of this, you know? These are people that like I hang around with all the time and we wind up in some intense situations together that causes, there are culty aspects that's always going to cause. I'm wondering kind of where are the first areas you started to realize this is crossing

that line? Probably the first area is in how much the department, and this was universal in lots of departments that I had contact with, is how much the department owns you. And I mean, they use that language. They'll tell you, we own you. Anything you do in your personal life, your first thought needs to be how does this affect my department and my sheriff, my chief, my whatever. Like every single thing you do is supposed to be potentially PR for the department. So they tell you flat out in the forefront of your mind, every waking moment, you're on duty.

You're here. We own you. And that that was the first one that was just like, oh, man, like, no, I punch out at the end of my shift and I go home. This isn't like this isn't this is a job. It's not supposed to be a life. It's it's and that that was the first one that started going it. life uh it's it's and that that was the first one that started going it um probably the second one that i really noticed was that you can tell anyone's a cop because they'll tell you within about five seconds of meeting them that they're a cop if you're at a bar you're at a party you're at whatever they'll be like hi my name my name my name's alexander i work for the sheriff's department like it's it's gonna come out of their mouth in two seconds because it is – it's their identity.

It's their entire sense of self. Yeah, and I wonder because one of the things we've seen in the last couple of years in particular is aspects of that bleed out, like the thin blue line flags and stuff. And some of that's just signposts. Some of that's just – I know people who were in certain jobs where they transported things that were sketchy and had those flags. It's like, well, maybe the cop won't search me, you know. But like – and there's elements that are just, you know, I don't of kind of that sheepdog culture, as Grossman calls it, that are starting to bleed over into chunks of the civilian world. Yeah.

And I guess I'm wondering kind of like, yeah, what that looks like as someone on like the deep inside of that, as a police officer. Like what is it? I'm wondering like to what extent were you kind of conscious of that as a police officer? Like, what is it? I'm wondering, like, to what extent were you kind of conscious of that aspect of society, like filling out around you, like some of these, like the cult of the heroic police officer kind of spreading to be something new, which it really started doing from like 2018 up to the present moment is when a lot of that shift seems to have happened based

on kind of what i've saw you know no i that timeline fits perfectly because i remember when i first got hired the thin blue line it existed it was a thing but it was just a it was just a matte black with a blue line and that was it uh and i you didn't really even in cop culture like i didn't grow up seeing that thing in the 80s and the nineties, not much, not at all. And then when I was in the department in the, in the, in the two thousands, you kind of saw it every now and again,

someone might have a lapel pin, uh, like in the department, but out in public, nobody had that stuff. No, nobody, nobody had any of that rocking stuff.

And it didn't, it never really bothered me, uh, until it showed up on an american flag and then that was that was a big red flag of like oh this is bad i was like this is this is nationalism guys this isn't good and like my whole crew looked at me and go what's nationalism and i'm just like fuck is there this like sense that people are toadying or is it this sense that like this is kind of the silent

majority that backs us in doing whatever hard work we need to do uh i think it started out as toadying it really did and it's but it's now shifted into um this whole like you know you get those guys that are like oh if i see a cop getting in a fight i'm gonna get out of my car and i'm gonna jump in there and i'm gonna back him up because they're like they're playing tough they really want that authority or that whatever but for whatever reason they don't go do it um yeah but this has been a way of like kind of they get to see themselves as being like a posse kind of a thing like i'm in the i'm in the club i'm not in the club but like they're my buddies. And is there, I don't know, does that make being in the club cooler? The fact that there's these kind of posses forming around it,

this people kind of worshiping the culture associated with it? I mean, there probably is now, but honestly, when I was in there, it freaked me the hell out. It really, really creeped me out. I didn't like it at all. Yeah, I mean, you have to think about, if you're a reasonable person, how weird it would be to see your job turned into a cult. Like Garrison, you know that feeling.

Or you're going to learn when we make the cult. Ah, yes. Okay, so I wanted to, I guess, let's get back to this kind of list you put together, because you were sort of going through different hallmarks of what makes something a cult.

One of them is a, the group displays an excessively zealous and unquestioning commitment to its leader and whether he is alive or dead regards his belief system, ideology in practices as the truth as law. And I'll remind you, we were not talking about my podcast. We're talking about cults here. That's right.

Yeah. Stay quiet garrison they're just smiling silently staring at us through zoom i see you uh okay and you've written under this the law is the higher power they grant control of their actions blind faith in the system frees them from having to consider their role in the system it's my job to arrest and charge high let the court figure out the rest it sounds a lot like kill them all and let god sort them out in this case the criminal justice system is a direct replacement for god i i think think this is a really good point this is even yeah this is the thing even when i was

like a a dumb kid and thought cops were fine this was the one thing that even like just even still freaked me out about cops because every once in a while you would see a video of like a cop just dumb kid and thought cops were fine this was the one thing that even like just even still freaked me out about cops because every once in a while you would see a video of like a cop just randomly like assaulting somebody and then other cops nearby just mindlessly join in and i'm like whoa that's such a weird kind of group dynamic of they see someone doing something and they just don't question it at all and immediately back it up no matter what actually was happening. Because I always tried to think things through more logically. And that type of mindlessness really freaked me out. I think it was maybe one of the first things that was like, huh, maybe it was one of the first cracks and maybe cops actually aren't good.

I think this is a really great point in terms of how this ties into like yeah it's my job to it's my job to arrest and charge my i i don't sort out what happens afterwards so it doesn't actually matter like it's like i'm not i'm not actually hurting these people because if they did something wrong it's going to get figured out in the court system i'm just doing this like preliminary task it's it plays into a whole bunch of like weird psychological things that make you feel better about horrible actions you're doing because you have so much backing that's going to make sure what you do actually isn't bad. Yeah, this is like this arrest, which may be physical and ugly, even if they're innocent later, is just part of what you have to do to get to the point where you determine whether or not they're innocent. So I'm not doing anything bad. Yeah.

Yeah. And actually, Garrison, what you said is perfect, because in the bottom of the thing where I was just spewing notes to myself, I literally put down here, it's not a job to them. It's a central component of their sense of self. This is why they will do terrible things to validate their perceived reality and how they see things. Yeah. They,

it's, you might say like, imagine how, like think about how hard it is to get people to admit they're wrong about a political belief on Twitter, especially when their name is attached to their account. Now imagine you have like, imagine that's the thing being argued is like the central thing around which

you organize your life. And also you get to shoot people who make you angry. Oh, yeah. It's a rough situation to be in. It is. It's crazy. And the part that I wrote of it's my job to arrest and charge high. I think that's a part of the mentality of it.

It's like, I don't want to say it's like a game but it almost is like a game it's almost like they're trying to get points like score high yeah talk to me about talk to me a little when you say arrest and charge high kind of what is that what does that sort of look like on the ground before we get into kind of why people do that so when when you're using your your powers of arrest you're you're you're supposed to adhere to a penal code but there is code and i'm only speaking to california because that's where i got my training yeah um When you're using your powers of arrest, you're supposed to adhere to a penal code, but there is code. And I'm only speaking to California because that's where I got my training. They don't expect cops to remember every single element of every single PC code because that's ridiculous.

No one's going to be able to do that. So there's wiggle room. There's play where I know you did this thing, and i know it's what they call a wobbler like i can go felony you can go misdemeanor they'll teach you in the academy they're like if it's a wobbler you always charge felony every single time even if you don't think it's gonna work charge it felony kick it to the da and let the da see if they can make it stick and if they don't whatever who cares that's not part of our job anymore wow and yeah and that's one of those things where a lot of people i've had friends who got charged with felonies that got dropped but

like you're still living under you're you essentially have to live as like the diet version of a felon while that's hanging over your head you do um which is not fun no and it's a big part of the whole criminal justice i'm sure you guys are aware that DAs love to crack deals. They love to make their little backroom deals. And facilitating that is cops charging high. You're in the room, you're facing felony charges, and the DA is going to be like, oh, man, I can knock that down to a misdemeanor. But that's because he knows he doesn't have a case. Yeah. But he didn't get that opportunity without a cop charging the higher charge now you

know who isn't going to charge high because their prices are incredibly low so reasonable very reasonable very fair the products and services that support our podcast uh we're back so the next thing you've got got on here is kind of talking about cult characteristics. Questioning doubt and dissent are discouraged or even punished. And you've written, academies are commonly paramilitary. They are working to break down and build up cadets. As discussed last season on my show, the FTO program is where fresh cadets meet salty veterans and the cycle of abuse starts. The paramilitary environment is usually casual and unnoticeable until somebody questions orders or tradition. Questioning order gets the that's an order threat, while questioning

tradition and suggesting improvements gets that's how it's always been done. There is no forum for change or progress. Some places have these forums, but they're just for public relations. And this is the thing that I think people who are trying to engage with from a perspective of like reform or whatever, trying to change law enforcement as a lot of people were last year, where things get jammed up a lot is the, there's this attitude among civilians, so to speak, among most of us that like, well, anything the government does should be subject to like, well, we should watch out, we should look at it, we should see if it works. If it doesn't work, we should change it to make it work better. And that's how kind of everything should work. And that's what you're getting at here is interesting,

because it's the reticence to actual change among police is legendary. But I don't think there's a lot of discussion of the psychology behind it. Yeah, I mean, it's that it goes back to that whole, we'll do anything to reinforce our perception of reality thing. Like I said earlier, grew up in a cop family and it's specifically in the department that I worked at. So, you know, we were called like Blue Bloods or Legacy Kids. And no matter what was going on, like anything that you questioned, it was always, well, that's always it's that's the way it's always been done. That's the way it's always been done that's the way it's always been done and i grew to hate that answer like with a passion in my personal life everywhere i refused to give that as an answer when i became a sergeant

eventually um and yeah they'll do anything i mean mean, they will bend laws. They'll break laws because who's going to charge them? Yeah, because it's what they've always done. Always. My department famously had our union got all of our union dues embezzled by people in our brass. And they got caught dead to rights. But that case never went anywhere. Nobody would touch it with a 10-foot pole. not dead to rights,

but that case never went anywhere. Nobody would touch it with a 10 foot pole. And even if you go and Google it and you try to look at archives from the local newspaper, it's gone. It never happened. And yeah, that's interesting to me. Cause that's like cops getting screwed over by cops.

Why, how is that? How is that? How is it like, what, what is the impulse to defend that? Well, because,

so there's a division in, culture of ranks and occult. Once you get to what they call brass, you're a lieutenant, captain, or higher, they don't look at us the same way. They don't look at the grunts, the line workers, the guys doing the 12-hour shifts. All that family talk goes out the window. And it's like, well, we're mom and dad now. And they, they changed their role in that world. And again, to maintain that power and authority, they'll do whatever they have to do. Yeah, that's, um, I mean, it also kind of feeds into this, that, like, there used to be less restrictions.

There used to be, like, we used to really be able to, like, do this and do that. Like, a lot of violence get justified that way. But it also, it provides an opportunity, I think, for, like, police who are trying to engage with reformers to do some sneaky shit. Because often this, like, community policing is referred to, like, yeah, we need to go back to the old methods of policing. It was like, well, but there were prop. Do you remember the fire hoses being used on black people during the civil

rights movement? There were issues back before we got militarized. It's yeah. And I mean, and that was the stuff they were doing outside. The jail I worked in, because you bring up fire hoses, this is where i'm going um

they we had big cotton fire hoses up on the floors in this jail and it was actually built out of old parts of a texas prison and you know everyone talks about the good old days when we could really do stuff and the story that always went around was that when the inmates were getting rowdy they would just walk down the tier with the hoes and just nail them. And then just put it back. Because, again, who's going to tell on me? Who's going to believe these guys? And that was back in, like, 70s era. You know, it's the big fish story that guys used to always tell. But I'm like, I have no reason to not believe that story. It sounds very... I mean, worse stuff happens in prisons today.

Oh, man, yeah. So, yeah. I'm not surprised. All right, moving on down your list, this one's really interesting to me, and I'm curious from some detail on this because this is not something I ever really thought about. Mind-altering practices such as meditation, chanting, speaking in tongues, denunciation sessions, or debilitating work routines are used in excess and serve to suppress doubts about the group and its leaders. And you've written cop talk, briefings, evals are always negative, and the work routine is abusive. It is paired with hypervigilance. I'm extremely interested in that and kind of like how it sounds, like the kind of language that you're talking about people using among each other when they're doing this so i you

know almost i mean i'm not even almost in kind of a ptsd response i've blocked out like a lot of my memories from those years like but i'll talk that makes sense yeah yeah yeah i'll talk to ex-cops and they're like hey remember blah blah blah and i'm like no um So cop talk is mostly slang. It's like, it's the 10 code stuff, but it gets stuck in your head and you start, and it's, it's one of those things where they talk about how you're not going to have friends outside of work. Cause you're going to start talking in this language. You'll say, you know, what's your 20, you know, I'm code four.

If you see someone who's acting a certain way, like out of the ordinary, maybe a mentally ill person, you'll say like, oh, that's a jay cat like you'll use this jailhouse slang and it just it permeates your brain and like we said before your words manipulate how you perceive reality and you just start seeing everything that way um the the big one is the hyper vigiligilance cycle is the abusive part. That's the part that really got me thinking of cults, of how they'll deny you food, sleep, make you work crazy hours and do all these things. And that's the one that really keyed the whole cult aspect for me was the hypervigilance cycle, the studies that have gone into it. I learned about it from a book, this little guy right here, it's called Emotional Survival for Law Enforcement. It's by Kevin M. Gilmartin, PhD. He's an ex-cop who got a PhD in neuroscience and studied cops' brains and got to see how they function. And he's the one that kind of coined this whole hypervigilance cycle of

you're always edging at this parasympathetic fight, flight, or freeze response time when you're on duty. Yeah. Yeah. It just stays up there the entire time. I'm sure soldiers have had the same thing. Fuck.

I'm sure you had the same thing, Robert, when you were doing your war journalism stuff, man, or fuck just being in Portland last year. Yeah. Um, but yeah, you, it keeps you at stuff, man. Or fuck, just being in Portland last year. Yeah. But yeah, it keeps you at that edge, that cresting peak, and then you crash.

And you get back up, and boom, you peak up again, and then you crash. And it's almost like a drug. Your brain becomes addicted to that peaked-out feeling that you get from the hypervigilance because you do hear a little better. You see a little better, better.

Your brain's moving a little faster because there's that heightened amount of adrenaline just constantly dripping into your system. And then you crash. And when you crash is when you're not at work. So you start associating not being at work with feeling bad and being at work feels good. Jesus. Yeah. I mean, the same thing happened i i'm sure garrison it happened like during like the riots where you would feel shitty when you weren't out there um yes some days i would go out not even to just to cover it just to kind of just

stand there like a block away because there was nothing else to do like it was there's like i could sit at home and rest but i'll just be watching whatever's happening not doing anything else you just it it feel it would feel more relaxing just to stand on a street corner and watch people throw stuff over events yeah that that's just that's more relaxing than laying down it was like it's that a's a very weird disassociative feeling that, yeah, my brain is, it's accustomed

to this environment now, so this is the environment I'm going to be in. Right, and look how fast your brain got into that groove. Now, you know,

imagine doing it for 30 years. Yeah, instead of like six months or even, it started only after like two months, right? Or's it started only after like two months right and or even even in some cases like a month yeah yeah it sets in fast yeah um all right so i

wanted to get into the kind of the next thing here um the leadership dictates sometimes in great detail how members should think act and feel e.g members must get permission to date change change jobs, or marry, or leaders prescribe what to wear, where to live, whether to have children, how to discipline children, and so forth. Very classic cult shit, right? Like the nut, really, of what it is to be in a cult. Yeah, I had – we had all that stuff when I was a kid. Yeah. I would guess that like 99% of the time, if you ask someone for a quick definition of a cult, this is what they're going to say. Or this is the kind of shit they're going to highlight.

And I'm interested in, yeah, just talk, because you already chatted a bit about this, just the fact that like the way in which police policy works kind of restructures how you function off duty. Which I think is something that people, everyone understands elements of it, right? Like if you're a fucking dishwasher for a living, you will wash dishes differently forever, right? Like if you, if you, yeah, bag your like bag shit at a grocery store, like that's something that you'll always kind of know how to do like these bits and pieces of this, but it's not quite the same as what you're talking about. And I want to get kind of into why. Yeah, it's kind of like when you're, as an adult, you do something that you're like, oh, I used to do that at my first job when I was like 15. But yeah, it does stick with you. The muscle memory sticks in those neural pathways that your brain gets carved unless you get the right kinds of mushrooms to fix that.

Yeah. So. Then you just throw shit in the bag. Fuck it. Yeah. Smooth throw shit in the bag. Fuck it. Smooth out those curves. But yeah, the leadership really does dictate. Some of them you can FOIA and some of them

are public. You can pull up policies and procedures, standard operating procedures, and you can look at there's a ton of policies that literally dictate what you are and are not allowed to do in your personal life. Things you're allowed to post on social media, places you're allowed to go in uniform, and it all just starts like tinking away at your armor of that sense of identity, that sense of self. And that's how the job becomes your identity. Again, it permeates every corner of your life if you let it.

If you don't have the mental strength to resist that, it washes over you real fast. Because while that's all going on, especially as a young cop, you feel great. You're special now. You're in the magic club. You have the symbol on your chest and the gun on your hip. you feel great you're you're special now you're you're in this you're in the magic club you you have the the symbol on your chest and the gun on your hip and it's really easy to let that slip and just become everything about you um yeah member permissions like so permission to date and things like that might sound a little weird but there are times where like my wife and i don't dress like

the typical conservative central valley person uh and act out of work functions i would get i would get comments from people being like hey maybe yeah i mean your wife has a lot of really colorful hair like maybe she should tone that down and for again, that was another one where I'm like, what? No, that's my wife. She can do whatever she damn well wants. Yeah, I mean, that's the kind of talking that should get somebody slapped upside the head. Yeah, should.

Yeah. The next thing you have here is, the group is elitist claiming a special exalted status for itself, its leader and its members. The leader is, and I'm interested in kind of it because you,

you have, you have elements of this, right? With it, like the sheepdog thing, we're kind of like the cop is the center of the cult for people who are not cop, cults.

I don't know, like, does this exist? Like, I, I don't see like cult, a cult leader sort of within this, this thing. I think it's, it's almost more nebulous, like, does this exist? Like, I don't see like a cult leader sort of within this thing. I think it's almost more nebulous than that, where this idea of the agent of the law

is kind of the center of the cult, that the people who are agents of the law buy into as well as folks outside of it. You know, I don't know. This is probably, I'm interested in your thoughts on this. This probably deserves significantly more analysis than we're going to give it today. But I think it's a fascinating thing to think about. Right. It's kind of like what I put earlier, that the criminal justice system is the direct substitute for God. It is God. The law is God.

I mean, how many times have you gotten into a debate with someone where they'll be like, well, it's ethically fine because it's legal. And you're like, well, no, legality does not equal you know ethical or moral and there but there's these people in america who are just like no if it's legal it's legal that means it's okay yeah and the elitism yeah it's obvious i mean if you've met it's kind of a religious belief though that like yeah it's illegal so it's bad she there were criminals, so they deserved X. Yeah. Making a homebrewed cleric that believed in the law of her D&D was pretty easy to be like, yeah, this is a church. This is a religion.

Yeah, it is the sheepdog among sheep and it's us against the wolves and blah, blah, blah. And then we have a guy's name in here that I won't say for anonymity, but we had, we had a brass guy, a Lieutenant that would give us these prepared speeches whenever he thought someone's morale was getting low, uh, where he would talk about how, and he was wrong that the word sheriff comes from, uh, like Sanskrit or Arabic Sharif, which is not true. No, it comes from Sh like sanskrit or arabic sharif which is not true no it comes from shire reeve it's old english just squished because english is a hideous language um but he had i mean i i can't count how many times he told me that exact same speech to my face over and over again as if it was the first time i was hearing the story and to me that was another was another thing that clicked where I'm like, God, it's like talking, it's like a call and response when you're in church sometimes.

Yeah. Anytime you confront a religious person, they just, they have that dogmatic spew that regurgitates and just like, well, here's my opinion that I was told by someone who told me. Okay. So, Alexander, we've got more to say. You've got a lot more that you've written here. We've gone kind of a little over the time we had here, so I want to have you back on tomorrow

for part two of this. Before we roll out, do you have anything you'd like to plug? Maybe the Washington State Patrol. God, no. No, I don't really have anything to plug. I'm never say die where all the e's are threes because i'm that elder nerd from the 90s on twitter yeah and uh

saw hackers in the theater i it's claim to fame so yeah never say down twitter if you want to come see me how are your hips doing stuff i'm talking about that uh it's okay garrison's never seen wayne's world oh i know that's true that's true too young it's too i tried to show wayne's world to my brother who's still like five years older than garrison and uh did not take didn't take it's it's it's a time thing well my my oldest is about four years younger than garrison and they've seen wings world i'm just saying wow

okay uh welcome Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, where it's us, the podcast that we are. It could happen here. Behind the podcast. Bad stuff. It could happen here. Yeah.

It is. It could happen here. Okay. Yep. Well, part two of why police are a cult. It could happen here. It is? It could happen here? Okay. Part two of why police are a cult. Thanks, Garrison. Thanks for doing the job that is one of our jobs, certainly. But apparently not mine. Alexander Williams, back again.

Alexander, how are you feeling? Doing good. Is your life in a radically different place now than it was when we ended part one oh yeah like no well that's for the best because anything that would change in about the 30 seconds between these episodes probably would not have been a positive change oh man you're letting you're letting the magic out people are gonna know yeah they they should know already uh so the next thing you've got here in terms of cult characteristics that you you saw inside the police is the group has a polarized us versus them mentality which may cause conflict with the wider society um yeah and i i i think

this is the one that like yeah we've all we all kind of saw that one last year. Are you sure about that one? I'm not convinced. Yeah. It was a Eureka moment, right? Yeah. I do think it's probably worth a little bit of exploration about like what it means emotionally to be told,

like I, I want to defund or even abolish the police as a police officer like that's that's a um yeah yeah um i i remember the first time that i heard the concept of it uh when i was a cop i think i was about five years away from getting out um and it blew my mind it was it was like i'm like you don't know we we don't have enough funding. Like how, how in the world, but we can't do our job because in, you know, in our, in my head, we're, we're the thing holding society up. If we're not here, everything falls apart and crumbles.

So the idea of being told like we need to defund the police for cops, it's, it's an attack on your values and your role in the world it's also attack on like your personal life because because your life is police as well right and and and it's and it's like you're you've been talking a lot about how the job becomes such a central part of your identity that it's not even just attacking like your paycheck but it's attacking like your essence now as a person. It is. It's like if you've ever had a debate

with an extremely evangelical religious person, it's the same as trying to tell a cop, like, hey, you don't actually hold society up. You're not exactly as important as you think you are. And like I said, we don't get paid very much. Health insurance usually isn't that good. Our unions that we tote as being the best are usually pretty corrupt. And they don't really go to bat for us and get us the good health insurance and get us the good pay.

They get us just enough. And so when a cop hears like, hey, we defund the police, it's like. From our perspective, we think what we're hearing is we don't appreciate you. We already think you get paid too much. We think of it less about like the structure of law enforcement and we take it personally of like, Oh, you don't think my kids should have dinner. Yeah. And that's I mean, yeah, of course that has like, of course it ends the way that we saw it end, you know, or at least it continues the way we saw it continue last year. Right. And it's, I think it could help like people like us are on one side of

the line and you know, the other people are on the other side of the line still. And I think it could help people on our side of the, of the, of the barricades to understand just how willing these guys are to do things and things that they wouldn't normally do things that you would never consider doing on your own, but for the job and as an order, they'll do it because again, it's part of their identity and it's, it's there, you know, you're attacking me. You're also attacking my family. You're, you're,

it goes back to that Grossman thing of being told a lot of, no matter what you do, you go home tonight. So no matter what I do on my shift, I go home tonight. It's better to be judged by 12 than carried by six. Yeah. That one gets nailed into your brain. I'm thinking of the police, the riot line. And yeah, you can see them being like middle-aged conservative dudes. They're like, look at all these like fucking like gay queer teenagers throwing stuff at me, right?

It's like this specific thing. You're like, oh, you like I'm getting attacked by like the lowest of the low of society. I'm being attacked by like degenerates and like this weird kind of scum. I'm actually what society should be. The people that are fighting against me are like this weird antisocial thing. Right. That's, that's how it is from their perspective.

Um, when almost in actuality, I, I've been, I've been slowly kind of appropriating that type of language for when I see a cop do something horrible. I'm like, wow,

look at that like antisocial something horrible. I'm like, wow, look at that anti-social violent freak. Because you can look at that language because it flips the way we usually view aesthetics. Because when you see someone do something horribly violent but they're dressed in a uniform, it has the appearance of being proper. But no, that actually still is anti-social and extremely violent.

So I think I've been playing around with like flipping that language, but you can definitely see it on the cops faces when a whole bunch of like young queers fuck people are throwing water bottles at them. Oh yeah, you can. And the thing to remember about most cops is their ego is paper thin. Their skin, they cannot take a joke. They cannot take an insult. The number of cops that I would see,

and I would argue that I saw some of the worst behavior than on the streets, because inside the jail, you're in your own little world. You're inside these walls. The public can't see you unless you're on camera. And pre-body cameras, you know where all the cameras are.

And the amount of guys that like an inmate would call them like the the f slur uh or any other slur and the cop would just snap i mean just lose their mind and me and another couple other guys being the only kind of cops that would get in the guy's way and be like no and it was never we couldn't say no that's wrong don't do that it was always no it's not worth it or no you're gonna get in the guy's way and be like, no. And it was never, we couldn't say, no, that's wrong. Don't do that. It was always, no, it's not worth it. Or no, you're going to get in trouble or no, you know, if you do that, he wins man. Because if we said, don't do that, it's wrong. We may have, we may have stopped that bad thing from happening, but we have now marked ourselves as being, you know, potential apostates,ates uh against the cause um so yeah that's yeah

calling them names works dixon stones do break cops bones like oh boy it does work like in terms of if if the goal is make them extremely angry yes it does work it's not hard. Yeah. Obviously, the next one you've got is the leader is not accountable to any authorities, which the police regulate and investigate themselves. That's one of the most basic ones, but it does lead to this. the church of scientology handles uh misbehavior from its agents and the way that like a police department does because there's not a ton of daylight betwixt the two there's not listening to you the elrond episodes uh anyone who hasn't listened to them go back and listen to them they're fantastic one of my favorites um yeah listening to that and the way that their little internalized security system was structured was very, very analog to exactly what happens in law enforcement with their so-called

policing themselves BS because God, they don't. They'll do every little thing to manipulate the situation, to have the cop come out on top and not be in trouble because who's going to hold them responsible. My own guy at my own department's interviewing me i've known we've known each other since we were kids or i've known his dad or his dad's known me or his or he's you know related or whatever it never works when the you know the the watchmen are watching themselves it doesn't work i don't know how we don't, well,

I do know how, but I really wish there was, if we do have to still have law enforcement, civilian oversight with actual power, actual authority to do. Yeah. That's, that's the thing is that everywhere.

And a lot of the times where that's been a try to put into legislator, it doesn't, it's always like neutered. It's always like, and I've seen versions of it pop up in Portland, and it just never does anything. Yeah, and that's, I mean, obviously the whole, the question of is to what extent can increasing civilian oversight solve problems? To what extent is it like papering over them? Those are all things worth discussing. I think I want to kind of keep us focused on the mindset that that inculcates because that's the thing that I don't think people get in part because like most people who are part of these abolitionist movements, most people who are on the sides that we are on this, either probably don't know a police officer very well, and certainly almost most of them

have not been police officers. And I'm kind of wondering, what are you actually scared of doing as a police officer? Like, what are you actually scared of in terms of like the the the blowback, the fault? Like what what is it you actually get worried about if it's not pissing off everyone else in the city who isn't a cop, you know? So, yeah, what it comes down to is, you know, that the the church of law, the church of criminal justice and what they're scared of is so if i get a dirty cop who's not blatantly doing something bad like he just he hit a guy too hard or something it's something that hasn't hit the news yet um but i have to morally like ethically on paper i'm required to have an ia division investigate these people the reason that in my, when I was there and being interviewed for these things, it's because you have to hold up the infallibility of the law. It doesn't matter

what really happened. All that matters is what's in black and white on paper in our files. If we ever get audited by a federal body and we can say, look, a bad thing happened. Yes, we investigated it. Here's what, here were the results. And it's all about holding up the infallibility of the law, because if it really gets out and cops really get in trouble for stuff, like some of the stuff that's been happening where cops are actually being convicted finally for doing terrible things, it erodes the blind faith that the masses have in law enforcement. Because I've heard people here in Utah, which is a very conservative place, look at some of those shootings that have happened where the cops have actually been

found guilty. And they've actually been like, oh, wow, I never once thought a cop would do this. And it doesn't sound like much, but in head that's that's a seed that's setting in their consciousness and that's that's the whole point of the the blue wall of silence and keeping everything in house is if everybody realizes that we're just a little weird man behind a curtain you know the wizard of oz doesn't work anymore we have to maintain this false image that we are infallible. And we know, we know exactly what we're doing and we are taking care of you. You have to believe that.

So they'll do anything to maintain the lie. Wow. Yeah. And that makes sense. It's bleak, but it makes sense. Yeah, it is.

Yeah. It felt bleak being in there. This ties into kind of the role of like lying, right? And the kind of occult thing you're tying this into is that like cults will often talk about how the things the cult is doing are so important that you can do terrible things to achieve them, right? You see this in the Church of Scientology,

their dirty tricks program. Synanon had its version of this. And you've written here, we are taught to lie to get what we need. It's only true if it's on tape or written down. As long as it looks good, it is good. And I mean, it made me think, among other things, of a guy I used to know who became a local prosecutor and eventually quit because he kept being assured by police officers that like something that they had put in like the charging document was true and then being unable to prove it in court. And it pissed him off after a period of time. court um and it it pissed him off after a period of time um and i'm interested like in the uh

i'm sure like obviously some fraction of people doing it are just like just literally don't give a shit but how does someone who actually does have a moral compass and believe in the the the law how does someone who really believes justify lying to screw somebody over? So as the guy who was there who had morals, which is why I'm not there anymore, I couldn't. And I actually got in trouble on a couple of instances of everybody was going one way on a story and I was going the opposite direction. And without using blatant terms, they use all the, like the little, you know, legal, legal fuckery terms to not say what they're trying to say,

but implying and getting it across to you of like, you need to get on the same page. You need to toe the line. You need to, you need to get in here. And I could, I could never do it. I just, I don't know. My moral fiber won't let me do that kind of thing. I once was told by a lieutenant that my moral fiber was too high. He literally told me, he goes, you can't expect everyone else to live up to your moral standards. And I'm like we're we're supposed to be like a little bit above the typical moral standard we're supposed to be the example of of how you know our civilians our citizens are supposed to act uh but it wasn't the truth yeah i mean my first i think kind of radicalizing thing

very early on was just like the fake drug scandal in Dallas was realizing that like on a significant scale, local police had been planting shit on people in order to charge them. People had gone to prison, which happens other places, too. But like, yeah. And I'm sure the bulk of the work making something like that happen isn't the people who are planting the fake drugs. It's the people who realize that the department will look bad if it gets out and then dedicate themselves to stopping it from getting out even beyond – because you have X number of people are willing to plant fake drugs on a guy, but a much larger number of people are willing to try to cover that up so it's not a problem. are willing to try to cover that up so it's not a problem. That's the thing I really appreciate about, Alex, your framing of this in terms of like their main or one of their main motivations is not, you know, actually doing the job itself. It's about making sure that their reality and by extension what they want everyone else's

reality to be to stay the same. Like they all of the effort into whether that be lying for supposedly in in their view like moral reasons and all this kind of work it's it's it's to maintain the specific version of reality it's not it's not actually for like like it's it's not for like actually promoting what is like the law and the books by any means it's it's it's it's the it's the thing like in hot fuzz it's for the greater good that's that's what that is that is what they're trying to it's what they're trying to do so even if they like as long as their reality is maintained then you know we have some

semblance of like order in the world whether that be you know this nostalgic semi like proto militaristic nationalist version of order, but that's the thing that wants to be maintained. So every task, everything that they're doing isn't just a simple task. It's all in the overall effort of maintaining this perception. And that's a much more, I think, interesting way to think about police. Yeah, it really is. These guys in like in pill talk, these guys would take the blue pill in a heartbeat and then they'd arrest Morpheus for trying to deal drugs.

Like that's how dedicated these guys are to staying inside this version of their reality. Now, I kind of let's move on next to um the the next kind of cult aspect the leadership induces feelings of shame and or guilt in order to influence and control members and you're talking you've written down here toxic masculinity and the warrior mindset yeah um do you have any kind of like case examples of how that that actually looks of like kind of using shame or guilt to people who aren't kind of in the, this quote unquote warrior mindset? Uh, yeah, I mean, it happened a lot. Um, there was a lot of Monday night quarterbacking that would happen, especially with the advent of like cameras and things becoming more popular. Uh, I loved my body camera. That was my little best friend, but, um, we would go, you know, you'd go back and you'd watch videos of incidents and things. And if somebody wasn't like engaging fast enough,

they would get roasted hard, like hazed and, you know, made fun of and mocked. And when you're in this, you know, we're a family mindset and you're, you know, we're, we got each other's backs and we only understand each other and then all of a sudden you're on the outside because you dared to have even a remotely moderate to liberal position on anything or you didn't jump in on the you know the ass beating on some dude fast enough they turn on you fast like the only thing i could compare it to is like you know every 80s and like 90eties military movie or, or, you know, nerds movie where people just haze the shit out of each other. And it's that, that dude, bro, everyone's got a barbed wire sun tattoo on their bicep just rampant

everywhere. I mean, it permeated the whole place. It drove me. That was one of the things that really drove me nuts. Cause I've never been that kind of guy. I've always been a, uh a more of a de-escalation person and a book reader and that i think it helps explain a lot why you see some of these videos where it's just like why did they go to zero to ten from zero to ten so fast well because somebody's gonna make fun of them and call them names if they don't go hard enough fast enough on somebody when they do certain things like. And yeah, the zero to 100 thing also ties into that whole that whole hypervigilance thing

that always being a compressed spring. And then it ties back into that warrior mindset of like they tell you flat out, like if anyone ever attacks you, they're trying to kill you. It's it's there's

there's no ifs, ands or buts. You need to act like they're trying to kill you because it goes back to the whole I there's no if, ands or buts. You need to act like they're trying to kill you because it goes back to the whole, I'm going home at the end of the shift kind of thing. And once, once that's ingrained itself into like your muscle memory and that becomes the reflex, that becomes the thought that passes in front of your mind when a critical incident happens,

then that's how you're going to act and you're going to do, and you're going to go from zero to a hundred because you're going to assume that any little furtive movement movement, which God, there's that language furtive movement. Um, any little movement that someone makes like that's, that's a green light. That's an excuse that I can end whatever interaction I'm having with this person with violence. Cause they flinched enough where I think, okay, I got this. violence because they flinched enough where I think, okay, I got this. Yeah. Jesus.

Now, one of the next ones you have here is talking about recruitment, which obviously cults do, but also like it's a job and jobs do this constantly recruiting. I'm kind of wondering, because you've listed here things like Explorer programs, which are like ROTC or the Boy Scouts, kind of these different, one of which Kyle Rittenhouse did, like ways in which kind of people get onboarded. I'm wondering sort of what, how you see, how you see police recruitment as kind of different in a fundamentally cultier way than, you know, every job has to bring in new people, right? Like, yeah. Right. It didn't used to be this way, but I think in the, in the two thousands, especially when numbers, staffing numbers really started to drop because it's, I don't know if

they've just realized it wasn't worth it or they found somewhere better to get paid, but employment's gone down for law enforcement. And so recruitment goes up in response, but now they have a more active role. Most places where it's almost on par with the military, they'll go to job fairs they go to high school career days um they didn't used to do that stuff and when they do they'll they'll find someone to like pull stuff out of the pop culture zeitgeist what we know what cool yeah yeah yeah yeah that makes sense that what can we what can we cash in on uh to try and draw these kids in? Because just like the military, cops are looking to pull in disenfranchised kids who probably aren't going to go to college, don't think it's an option. And here's this job.

All you need is a high school diploma. Here's the health insurance. Here's the retirement package, which is trash. But you're 17. You don't know that. You don't know how to read all this. But it looks real cool yeah yeah um yeah the explorer stuff i mean you're familiar with that so but yeah they get little

kids to go out and you know be little baby cops and it's i mean it's it's one of those things like some of this is so much deeper than even the the individual departments or any choice made by the police because like as a kid some of the first toys i had were cop toys right like every same every boy i think like yeah yeah some of the first what you're gonna get a badge a gun you're gonna play detective you're gonna be watching cop shows you're gonna be watching movies where cops are the and that's i mean that that's a bigger subject than today, but like, yeah. No, that is like one of the most prevalent forms of media that's instilled in young boys, I guess, yeah. You know what else is instilled in young boys? The love of capitalism and products and services.

And specifically products and services. Find a child and whisper the names of our sponsor into their ears. Preferably a child that's yours, hopefully. No, any child. Any child. Throw something so their parents look away and then lean down and whisper, better help. It only counts if you get caught. We're back.

And your next point was the group is preoccupied with making money, which is a huge thing for cults. Not all of them. There are some, like, you know, there are some cults that were, shall we say, pure, but they're nearly all about getting rich. Like, hey, man, Manson, it was all about the music and the murders. Heaven's Gate was a pure cult.

Yeah, yeah, Heaven's Gate was pretty... It certainly wasn't just the money for Heaven's Gate was a pure cult. Yeah, yeah, Heaven's Gate was pretty cool. It certainly wasn't just the money for Heaven's Gate. Right, no. But, yes. It wasn't the moonies. Cops have civil asset forfeiture, which they just took $100,000 from someone in Dallas, and the person did not get charged with anything.

Which is usually the case, yeah. Yeah. Oh, man. But, I mean, yeah like you have written here that like the main the main way is just increasing their budget as much as possible which yeah most police departments right now have the biggest budget they've ever had um specifically in like main cities we have they're they're the most funded department um in in for the whole city there's this great gag

in the opening episode of a show called Ugly Americans that's about trying to refinancialize the city's budget and they have like a social spending and a cop budget and they take like all of social spending and move it over and leave this one tiny sliver and they're like oh there that's better

that'll solve all the problems it is a better sketch than what i i explaining it just like this it sounds not funny but the sketch is actually pretty good you're not far off but yes and it is and it is relatively accurate in terms of just moving all the funding from social programs over into uh law enforcement yeah so there's uh you know there's the everyone gets their financing different ways there's county there know, there's the, everyone gets their financing different ways. There's county, there's state, there's city. But a common thing that would happen was law enforcement agencies would try to take anything that they could under the umbrella of law enforcement. So if it was like, hey, we want to have more, you know, security equipment

at the high school and the cops will be like, no, no no you give us that money we'll give you another uh another officer on campus or they want to hire something for the part you know it's we will install lights the city park to increase security no no no no no you just give us that money we'll make sure our guys patrol it more so they actively try to just like poach money from everybody else yeah i mean and you you can see this in a lot of towns where like the number one use of public funds is the police i mean it's it's all over the country at this point um yeah that makes sense uh so members are expected to devote inordinate amounts of time to the group and group related activities. Yeah.

Cause you have written here four years with no days off, but scored a satisfactory. I was told to put in more time outside of work. Yeah. So like I said, our evals were always, that sounds so much like MLM shit. It is. It is.

They, they, every time you go in for an eval, they neg you like no matter what our, our scoring system was one to ten um nobody ever got higher than a six maybe i think i saw like one or two sevens in my entire time there and when i became a supervisor i asked the the brass i'm like hey i want to give this guy this this upper grade of like an eight or a nine and he told me flatly because no we don't do that like

no one's allowed to get higher than a seven and And if you want a seven, you're going to have to like, write a novel about how great this person is to get them this rating. It was just, yeah, it was, it was consistently just pinning you down. The four years, no days off. So yeah, I did a four years straight without calling in sick once. Like I took vacations, but when I went in for my eval and he slides me a thing that says it says attendance satisfactory. And I was like, what are you talking about? I was like, I haven't taken a sick day in four years. You know, I have three kids. How do you think I manage that? Like I've sacrificed to be here that much. And his response was, well, like, yeah, but I never see you at barbecues. I never see you at the union meetings. I never see you at the fundraisers for the sheriff's reelection, even though it's blatantly against policy and illegal to do. And I told him that and his response was, what are you going to do? Tell on me? Who are you going to tell?

Jesus. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, who are you going to tell? Who are you going to go to? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, who are you going to tell? Who are you going to go to? Yeah. And it is, it's also just like it, this, it isolates you from other people.

It stops you from knowing folks that aren't cops. And it's, again, it's a lot like what your upline is going to tell you if you're selling Mary Kay. I mean, that, that, that ties into the, that ties into the next point. Members are encouraged to, or required to live and or socialize only with other group members um and you say this is like part of the hyper vigilance isolation cycle but i also see this in terms of like something i uh get into for fun is i join like a wife of cops um facebook groups just because it's fascinating just to have all of just to have all of these like

cop spouses in a facebook group and it's super yeah like it's it's fascinating. Just to have all of these cop spouses in a Facebook group. And it's super, yeah, it's a really interesting culture of just associating with other people on the job. There's cop barbecues, like you mentioned, and all this kind of stuff where it's like, we're the only ones that can understand you. So we're going to build this force field around all of us. And we can be

together as a family and keep out everyone else because we're the ones that really know what's up. Yeah, it seems, I mean, for some people who are really into it, I guess that is, you know, that's how humans socialize in some ways. So like, you know, for people who think being cops are good and, and quote unquote, enjoy it. I'm sure they have a decent time hanging out with their cop buddies. Right.

Um, and I'm sure the cop spouse, Facebook groups, I'm sure they have a good time laughing about whatever viral video there is of someone using too much force, you know, who, who knows what,

like how, how they actually think about those types of very isolated environments because it's almost like it's extending out into fandom rules where you're associating with other people the same way fandoms work, which is very similar to how cults work. So, yeah.

Yeah, it's an armed militant fandom. And your last point here, the most loyal members, the true believers feel there can be no life outside the context of the group. They believe there is no other way to be and often fear reprisals to themselves or others if they leave or even consider leaving the group. Yeah. So I put in the note of just self-explanatory but yeah um it's me quitting was weird uh i knew i needed to do it but i i had a massive existential crisis of identity and uh of

of logistical things but a lot of it was it was tied to my identity and it was, it was letting go of something that was like a core pillar of my personality. And it really freaked me out. And I, and I think that if I was more inside the group and I was more like one of the guys, a golden boy or something, like I probably would have never left. If I was, if I was getting that constant reinforcement of the good boy feelings, I don't think I would have quit. Um, but after I did quit that actually, uh, kicked off a cascade of people around my same age and within my same seniority level in looking at their job and

looking at what it was doing to them psychologically and physically and with their families and thinking to themselves, Oh, I can leave. That is how cult, that is how leaving cults work. Yeah. Yeah.

And so once I left a bunch of other guys were like, Oh, I don't have to do this until I'm 55. I can, I can go start another career somewhere else. I can go start another retirement plan at a different place. And it felt great to see other people tear away and do that. But at the same time, I know for some of them, it hurt really bad to leave that behind.

Because once you are out, you are kind of out. Even if you leave amicably like hey i just want to go do something else with my life you're no longer in those people's minds anymore because you're not part of the team you're not in the club you're not in the family anymore you're that guy that used to be here and uh i guess kind of at the conclusion of this and this is you know when you when the question is like, how do you do radicalize, get people out of cults?

How do you like, no one has a good answer to that. So I don't think we should expect you to suddenly have like, here's how to, here's how to convince everybody to stop doing this because we can't do that for fucking QAnon. Like de-radicalization, 80% of the people who say they're involved in it are fucking grifting.

Like it's, it's, it's a big mess a big mess of a fucking field in the first place. But I am wondering, do you have some insights into, like, yeah, how the fuck do we deradicalize these people? I don't think there is, like, I don't think there is a cookie cutter answer for, like, pulling people out. You know, we can't bag them in a white van and take them to a hotel uh the only thing i can think of that would actually change the culture is a huge shift in our national culture around like mental health and toxic masculinity and you know wrapping your identity into into your job because it's not just cops that do this there's lots of it's it's it's like that is that is america now it is that is like hustle culture that is what the idea of a career is yeah hi my name is phil in the blank and i am a blank like that's how

everyone career comes from the word that means like careening like you are going full force into this thing that is that is what you are doing now that is your existence is your career you're going at it um that is that is what this whole country is built on uh so getting out of that for a lot of people for just regular jobs is difficult now adding on the idea that you are the thing that holds society together that is that that has a whole other level of complexity like psychologically for the person inside it um because i'm sure like telemarketers if you can get really into it and make money sure that can be a career but you know you're not holding society together and like that's not a that's

not a that's not a delusion that you have and nobody outside shares that nobody has like no one there's there's no yeah sticker on the back of their car there is there is no thin telemarketing line um supporting you so it is it is different for like police specifically even more so than like firefighters or like emts um this particular fandom that's developed around police and and and like the the incredible self-importance that they is that is cultivated um to yeah like the idea of i'm doing this to maintain reality is like a very like big thing to tell yourself and get getting out of that seems, uh, challenging.

Yeah, it really is. It's like, it's all, it's almost worse than most like churches in a sense, because in this version, it's so, it's so materialized.

It's, it's, it's, yeah, it's, it's, it's right in front of you. I can reach out and touch it because I'm part of society, but if I'm not here and we're not here,

you know, anarchy, the, the bad guy, the way people think the word means here you know anarchy the the bad guy the way people think the word means yeah everything's going to catch fire and and the only reason people are good to each other is because the law makes them be that way and all that kind of toxic bs yeah yeah so the only thing i could think of to be like to help de-radicalize people is it's almost like treating someone in your family that listens to too much QAnon is to, you know,

if you know a cop or you have a friend that used to be a cop and he ever like reaches out to you, maybe with like kid gloves, kind of be like, Hey, how you doing? Just small things because that could maybe lead to him putting them, putting something on their shelf. Just like when people get out of religions and things, they'll often reach out to people and be like, Hey,

this is such a fucking, it kind of means something if he's going outside of the group. And so, yeah, maybe recognize that like you have an opportunity. Yeah. If a cop reaches out to you, it's just like someone in a religious institution,

they're reaching out to you because they, they feel safe talking to you because you're not going to turn them in. You're, it's not going to have any, uh, immediate impact on their life right now. Yeah, that makes sense. Um, all right. Well, Alexander, anything else you wanted to get into? I mean, I could talk about this kind of stuff for days and days and hours and hours, the whole hypervigilance cycle. And like I said, I've read a bunch of books on it. I really tried to get training on just the hypervigilance cycle. Like if you ask most cops about hypervigilance, they would just look at you and be like, I don't even know what that means. What are you talking about? Which is why I used to I this book, The Emotional Survival Guide for Law Enforcement, I gave it to new hires. And some of those new hires didn't come back. And I'm fine with that.

Yeah, that's good. That is the best case scenario. Yeah. Some of them looked at it and were like, no, I'm not signing up for this. Because you really don't know what you're signing up for, the real stuff that you're signing up for this because you, you really don't know what you're signing up for the real stuff that you're signing up for until you're in it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, also like a cult. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, all right. Alexander, thank you so much for coming on and for sharing this with us. I think it's a useful look behind the curtain that, that folks need. And this has been,

it could happen here. You can find Garrison on the internet. Go, go, go track down Garrison's fake Facebook account. You know what? Go do that. You can,

you can. I, I have, I have made it possible specifically for this reason. Join a cop wife group with garrison yes join me and vanessa so we could discuss uh our husband's careers hey for all you know you may cause the de-radicalization of a cop yeah either that or garrison just gets really weirdly into role-playing as the wife of a career police officer. Okay, all right. Episode is over.

We are done. I am pulling the plug. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Garrison, start the episode. I don't trust Robert today. Me? You want me to start the episode? Yeah, I don't trust Robert today. It's time, Garrison. It's time for you to learn. Wow.

My advice is atonal shrieking. I am not doing that. Everyone's going to be like, oh, Garrison's just copying Robert's tone and cadence. You mean they're making sounds with my mouth? Yeah, that's

how communication works. Start the episode with that and trigger everybody. Like me, you use a microphone. It's very real cringe. You thief. We're recording. Let's a microphone. It's very real cringe. Yeah, you thief. We're recording. Let's do this. Hey, it's time for stories.

We love stories here at Etiquette Happen Here pod, the podcast about how things are kind of falling apart and maybe some ways to put them back together. I'm Garrison. I'm starting this episode today. I'm not sure why. Robert's here. Because I'm real hungover.'m starting this episode today. I'm not sure why. Because I'm real hungover. Robert is real hungover. Because I didn't trust Robert to do his job today,

but I trust you, Garrison. You should generally not trust me to do my job. I know. That's how I live. We also have Christopher here. Yay! I trust Christopher to do his job, though. And we have a have writer Rebecca Campbell. Hello.

Hey. And why don't you briefly explain who you are and what's going on today? Okay. Well, I'm a Canadian writer, and sometimes I'm a teacher, but mostly I just write really sad stories about climate change and ghosts and AIs and near future stuff like that um this story I'm reading is called thank you for your patience it came out in reckoning for I guess last year and uh it's based on my partner's time when he was working in a call center and uh the kind of nightmarish stories that I heard from him every time he came home from work. But it's also about me being on the other side of the country

from the part of the world that I love the most, which is the Pacific Northwest. And, you know, watching Fukushima a few years ago and watching wildfires a few weeks ago and being separated from the things that are important to you as they're all falling apart. Well, I'm just excited that this podcast is now two-fifths Canadian. So that's the main thing I'm excited about. Oh, no. Oh, my God. A Tim Hortons cup just appeared next to me.

It's one of those terrible donut holes. I do have a Tim Hortons cup in my kitchen. You do, Garrison. Of course you do. Anyway, let's start this reading. Let's eat this popsicle stand. As they say. Wait, that's not a thing.

Please continue, Rebecca. Let's eat this. Okay. Thank you for your patience. Okay. Thank you for your patience. I'm lucky because they replaced a bunch of chairs last month and I got a new one. A good chair is important when you spend 10 hours a day in a cubicle talking to strangers about their problems. I've been here three years and worked on most of Western Morgan's services, which means I can, with no thought, help grandma set up her Wi-Fi or troubleshoot banking software,

or set up your cell phone plan, or help you with some app designed to find your soulmate that nevertheless fills you with hopelessness. I can't help you with the hopelessness. It's non-standard, but I'm Western Morgan's floater, and Geordie or Kirstie just drop me where the calls are heavy or turnover is high. On Twitter, I can answer questions within five seconds of some asshole in Toronto saying, what the fuck, my TV doesn't see the house network. And I respond, I'm sorry to hear that Toronto asshole. Let's see if I can help.

I'm impossible to rile because I've heard everything, every possible stupid question, every strange request regarding lapsed policies and missed payments, every paranoid rant, every sort of impotent rage. The management is shitty and the customers are irritable, but there's beauty in problem solving. The really bad stuff started at the end of last month when I had to do a one-on-one majority team lead for the floor. I'd been fielding a bunch of questions regarding a recent patch that had broken everything. I had this rhythm hitting my 30-second AHT and typing without thinking, Mark here, how can I help you? But one-on-one is mandated interruption, so I listened to Jordi brainstorm about improving

morale. They stopped having barbecues because it was too expensive, even when the burgers were sawdust and soy. Also, no one wanted to be outside because Detroit was still burning and the PPM up to something like Beijing. Listen to this. Western Morgan Idol, Jordi told me. We judge three of the top-ranked calls and we have a thing and someone walks away with a Timmy's gift card, like 50 bucks. Jordi said that like it was a good thing.

What about a key fob, I asked. We can't get out without one after hours, but only management can hold. Or the winner gets to wear jeans or keep their phone for a shift. That didn't write an answer. The most frustrating thing about Western Morgan is that team leads have to hold your phone like you're an untrusty teenager who's been grounded. I feel like I'm lost in a cave or a space station. When I do a lot of overtime, I arrive when it's dark and I leave when it's dark. And while sometimes I go around the corner for coffee or McNuggets, it always feels like I'm just visiting the world. I don't know what's happened, if a government's fallen or if an

ice shelf has collapsed, if Detroit is burning again, or maybe California, or the Great Lakes are dying at a slightly faster rate than they were before I left for work. Never knowing what's going on outside, I sit in my good chair and say, that sounds frustrating to everyone, no matter who's talking or what they want. Let me see if I understand your problem. You could judge, Jordy said, still talking about morale. You're impartial. You hate everyone. I don't hate everyone, Jordy, I said reflexively, though to be fair, I hate a lot of people here. After my mandated 15 minutes with Jordy, I saw that Misty had a problem with my documentation, which has been rough since they changed policy on me. She's in the Philippines, where most of the real work happens.

Upper management is all in India. They only have us because they need Canadian accents on the phones, and they get tax breaks bringing jobs to one of the more desolate parts of the country. Downwind from Detroit, rampant West Nile, and 90% of the province's heavy metals processed at the plant out by the mall. 70% of the babies born here are girls, something to do with residual BPA. Misty is on the other side of the Pacific, in Legazpi. But you'd think she was right here, considering how aggressively she organizes us.

You're shit at filling out forms, Mark. The write-up is going to kill your rank. We're stack-ranked every shift. It gets you points you can redeem, which honestly is worth it for the grocery store gift cards. Just tell me what I did wrong, Legazpi. We were in the middle of a rough month. The flu hit everywhere at once, and no one could afford to lose the work,

so we had a bunch of people come in sick. Coughs and juicy sneezes all over the floor and half the time you got in the elevator and everyone was gray-faced and weaving i came in over the weekend to cover mobile because they lost half their staff so i'd been on for eight days by monday when jordy was manic trying to call people in so he wouldn't have to go on the phones. He always says when we're smoking outside and he's pointedly not looking at the place where the GM building used to be, it's not the extra 50 cents an hour, it's the fact I don't have to deal with people. He hated taking calls. He offered me overtime so I started coming in at six and leaving at ten and I didn't even notice the weekend.

I do remember going home those nights and thinking how hollow my room felt with my roommates playing Call of Duty in the living room and how my body seemed to vibrate. Caffeine, maybe, or pseudoephedrine. I heard phantom time warnings and chimes, and when I closed my eyes, I could see the screen and call after call flooding the queue. By Saturday, Western Morgan was a haunted house,

but I still wasn't sick. That sounds frustrating. Let me see if I can help. I was dealing with this woman on Vancouver Island who couldn't generate invoices. We'd been at it for two hours and I could feel her getting upset when I told her to wipe the whole system and start again. I could help her with that, but she was like, no, we'll lose two weeks of work. There's nothing I can say to that. So we keep troubleshooting, even though it's pointless. Okay, I said, you can go back to your root invoice and try. Oh, she said, what? And that was it. I didn't hear anything but the line itself, which just went dead, that kind of absence you get when someone hangs up on you. Are you there, ma'am? I called back,

but I got a reorder tone, not voicemail or an old-fashioned busy signal, but the one that means the whole system is busy or blocked or down. I dropped out of the queue then, which you're not supposed to do, obviously, and went looking for Jordy, who was chatting with Kirstie about Western Morgan Idol. I asked if they knew anything, but of course they didn't, and when I asked if I could at least grab my phone to see what was happening, Kirstie did a kind of elementary school teacher sigh. Documentation for 3-9-9-0-1-8-0, you're overdue, Mark. Caller dropped.

Saw that explanation? Happening across the board looks like the problem's at their end. I didn't find out until Mo came back from break streaked wet in the way you are if you run out into that rain blowing in from Detroit because you don't want it to touch your skin saying earthquake on the west coast you know anyone out there I thought about the woman trying to get the invoice together for a tiny order of sea salt from some equally tiny place on vancouver island her

business so minuscule it still fit into our cheapest subscription in my unsubmitted documentation for misty i had written that her voice sounded like a hopeful but slightly overwhelmed great aunt trying to make the remote control work no one how bad like 9.6. The worst since forever. Like for hundreds of years. Jesus, I said. Jesus. Jesus. I've had similar moments on calls when the shooting happened in Montreal, not Vieux-Montréal, but the one where the kids ran downtown from McGill and the photographer caught the girl as the bullet tore out her right kneecap. I was on the line with this dickwad in a co-working place on Maison Neuve, who was asking to talk to my supervisor. Then, mid-wine, he stopped talking, like he suddenly

didn't care about my attitude. I could hear his phone pinging. Sir, are you there? Can you hear that? It's happening on the street. I can see a faint popping, voices raised and doors slammed. Then he cut the call. I kept in the queue. I helped someone update. I did a subscription renewal. The next person, though, needed a backup. And that took forever.

So we chatted about hockey until she said, did you hear about Montreal? No, ma'am, I said, thinking about the sound I maybe heard before his phone cut. Firecrackers, backfires. Some guy shot up the whole downtown. I think it was terrorists. Who knows? FLQ. Or Muslims, maybe.

Red Power. 50 dead, but it was going up every single time I refreshed the page. She kept going on like this while we did a backup, and then I made sure everything worked, and it had been like three hours at that point, and I kept thinking of the guy and his silence, and what was going on in the streets while we talked about his login and how unprofessional I was. I don't have any friends in Montreal. I went there once to drink when I was 18 but that's it. I just had that guy and the thump of footsteps fleeing the co-working space. When I took my break the rain was falling again,

the faintly gray kind that runs down the sidewalks and the gutters, and when it builds up enough, you can see it's a little milky because it's full of ash. If you think too hard about what's running into your eyes as you stand outside smoking until your pack is empty, you go eat a 24 box of Timbits or six Big Macs, or you stop for one beer on the way home and only leave when they push you out the door. Jordy was outside. I gave him a cigarette, even though he doesn't smoke either, and he said, it doesn't seem to be getting cleaner. Wasn't it supposed to get cleaner? He grew up in Detroit, though he was already over here when it burned last year. Maybe it's safer. The hum is worse. I thought the hum was supposed to go away when they sent in the cleanup crews. We watched the warm ash-colored water run down the gutters

until it was ankle deep. This city is a wetland, and there isn't far for water to go, so it ends up in people's basements. All that ashy, bony water running through foundations and drains, a constant trickle in the background, sort of like the faint pop you might hear while you're on the phone with a guy from Montreal who wants to talk to your manager. Does it feel, Jordy said and lit another cigarette. What, Jordy? I hate how often he doesn't finish his sentences. Does it feel like it's happening more now, this sort of thing? I dropped my smoke into the rainwater and I shrugged. Then I said,

I wish I knew what to tell you, which wasn't a real answer. And I used my tech support voice when I said it because I didn't want to have that conversation. On my first break after the earthquake, I smoked and watched the rain and videos on my phone, someone live streaming the moment it hit. Bored talk about food or weather. Then a strange look on their face. Their eyes dart upward. Then the phone falls. Overhead footage from helicopters of downtown Vancouver. All those green towers swaying and falling and the bridge swinging until the cables snap like rubber bands. The worst in recorded history. Worse probably than the last megathrust in 1700. I just kept thinking of that woman and the sort of quiet shock in her voice, her, oh, is that? And then nothing. And I was standing out in

the rain, still warm, when it occurred to me that I might have heard her last words. I kept thinking about the texture of the silence after the call dropped, and what had happened the moment after that, if that had been the worst of it, the shock of the whole world rumbling, or if it had been worse for her after that, or right now, or tomorrow. I only had 10 minutes because call volume was increasing. My throat started to tickle, and the world just suddenly, out of nowhere, started to look glassy, the light thick from the ceiling squares, and my skin prickled when I ran my hands over my arms, which were covered with goosebumps. The floor was nearly empty except for Geordie running around supervising and not taking calls, and the queue was packed. My first call was from way north along the coast, Prince Rupert, a woman calling about a password reset. I want Mark, she said. He

helped me before. Can I talk to Mark? While I was documenting, I thought, fuck it. I'm going to tell Misty what the old woman told me while we were waiting for the password reset email about how when you're that far north, you don't notice time passing and you feel good in an unimaginable way in summer, luminous and hopeful, and how in winter, all you want to do is die and drink yourself into a coma so you know it balances out. After that, I reopened 3-9-9-0-1-8-0. An elderly woman, I wrote, on a phone, trying to print invoices for locally produced sea salt, looks over at the rack of glass jars in which she keeps her stock because she hears a rattle, then another, then she says, oh, is that? And nothing else, because at that moment, the force of 25,000 Hiroshima's lit the Cascadia subduction zone, on which Vancouver Island rests like a cork in a bottle.

Centuries of continental tension released. I typed that, then I hit send, then I added a secondary note on her file. At 8.32 PST, a 9.8 hit the Cascadia subduction zone. And Misty was right there on Chat Hive, not telling me it was inappropriate. She wrote, rest their souls. And I was comforted by those temporary words, which surprised me. My grandparents were on Mindanao in the 1976 earthquake. You got anyone there? No. I heard the hum from Detroit. It was somehow a relief to know that across the world, Misty was in a similar room among people evaluating documentation for apps and ISPs and accounting software. People saying, that must be frustrating. Let's see if I can help.

Something occurred to me. You hear anything about tsunamis? No word so far. Do you have your phone so you can get the alerts? They'll let us know. We're so bad I'm taking calls, so I won't be fixing your dock until tomorrow. I wondered if Kirstie would let us know or if she would dither about it until all we could do was climb to the top floor of the building and watch a wave consume what was left of Detroit before it swamped us, too. Five more calls and I refilled my water bottle, the one with the slogan on it,

fueling small business with the tools to succeed, that some now lost Western Morgan contract brought in. And I was looking at my skin reflected in the sink, which was the color of those pale, lumpy smokers you see outside the entrance, the color of a raw filet-o-fish. I felt adrenalized, entrance, the color of a raw filet-o-fish. I felt adrenalized, like a moment before I'd been terrified, but I could not remember how or why. I wondered what it was doing to me inside all those cells now remade into virus factories, turning to goo and mush and sloughing off while the virus proliferated through my system and I left traces of it on everything I touched. The water ran over the top of the bottle, clear. So far the ash hasn't worked its way in through the city's water system, or maybe it has and it was invisible, like the

microplastics in the lake. So you gonna judge? It was Jordi. We're gonna do it next week. I was thinking we'd set a time limit like five minutes. You and me and Kirstie judge it. I'll grab a 50 for the Timmy's card too. Man, I said. Jordie just stared at me. You getting sick? You know what you need to do? He went on about echinacea and flu effects and I thought about the tsunami that was or was not traveling across the Pacific. Or just hammer your system with antioxidants and take a double dose of NyQuil. Without thinking, I pulled my phone out of my pocket. You know you can't have that anywhere on the floor. I was already Googling Pacific Tsunami Alert, and it was rolling rainbows, and I stared at it so hard that it seemed to take over the whole world.

And then I shivered, but Jordi was still talking. Don't make me write you up. I don't want to deal with it. Okay, I said. It's about privacy for our users. They need to know that they can trust our integrity, our word, and our system. The poster on the far side of the break room said, it's about privacy for our users. They need to know that they can trust our integrity, our word, and our system. The poster on the far side of the break room said integrity, word, and system. I saw that the alert had been issued for Japan. That's when he took my phone. You fuck the dog. I have to write you up. I don't want to write you up. Japan in six hours, 8 p.m. I'd still

be on then. While very far away, a wave crested on the seacoast filling the river basins and the car parks. I know you don't have to surrender your phone, even if they can require you to leave it at home. I know they're not supposed to lock you in, either, or let you smoke within three meters of the door, even when the ash is falling. They're not supposed to lock you in either or let you smoke within three meters of the door even when the ash is falling. They're not supposed to pay you in points you can then exchange for grocery store gift cards, which you need because the new minimum wage wasn't even covering rent. But I needed a job. The next call I got was farther south, closer to the epicenter. The first thing I did was ask about the earthquake. Oh, we felt it, and there's a tsunami warning, but we're far enough inland, it shouldn't be tsunami warning. So when I go try to log in, tsunami? I keep getting

the same error. It says my account's frozen. What does that mean? I need to do some invoices. And yeah, I just got the text like half an hour ago. Landfall is like an hour. The account was frozen due to mispayments. So I pointed that out. And the guy insisted, no, he set up an automated transfer, and he kept me on the line while he chatted with the bank's tech support on another line to sort out the direct deposit, and then I reactivated his account. All this time, the tsunami traveling toward the coast, while the shallower bottom would raise the wave's height by narrowing its length, because the last time I'd been outside, I'd looked at a GIF on Wikipedia that demonstrated how tsunamis crest as they travel through shallow waters. The last thing he said wasn't thanks. It was, there it is, the tide's going way out. I hope everyone's out of downtown. Then he was gone,

and I could imagine it, the water running away from the shore like a huge exhalation and then collecting into a rising wave that would destroy them all. The tsunami warning? I wrote in Chathive, hoping Misty was there. Kirstie responded instantly. That is not appropriate. Chathive is for important work stuff. We haven't heard anything, but we were swamped, so who knows what's going on outside. Chathive channel will only be used for appropriate business-related business. Maybe you should get out. Chathive channel will only be used for appropriate business-related business. I'd been there for 16 hours, and I couldn't remember the last time I slept a full night at home when I hadn't been buzzed on cold pills and exhaustion and the sound of Call of Duty from the living room. That week when I did sleep, I kept saying, this is Mark from MagnaCore,

or this is Mark from wherever I am right now, and heard explosions and the way voices carry over for the river from Detroit, the screams and the crowds and the gunshots. Or maybe I was never actually asleep. Maybe I was just off my head. I shouldn't have washed the pills down with beer. But there's that thing that happens when you stop in for a beer after work and the inertia of the whole thing, the job, the shitty beer, and the fact that a person brings you food, even if you can't afford it, it sticks you to your seat. It was bad last summer when we couldn't afford to run the AC, but the bar on the way home could, and it was full of familiar guys, broke and lonely, and trying to avoid looking at what

was left of the Detroit skyline, or the gray-green clouds boiling to the north, and the hail, and the lightning storms every afternoon like clockwork. The summers are definitely hotter and the mosquitoes are definitely worse and the last summer I noticed that the birds don't sing anymore. All their whistles sound like video game lasers. I stepped outside for another cigarette and realized the door had been locked and I don't have a fob because I don't rate a fob. Jordy was there too, setting up his stupid Western Morgan idol, piles of bright pink and green and blue post-it notes all over his desk. I need to go out. The doors are locked for the night. I need to go out. We lost another girl from online. You'll have to take over social media if we lose anyone else.

Take your break here. I just kind of stared at him and my skin prickled like all the pseudo ephedrine I'd taken had rushed to the surface and was blasting every single nerve ending in my body. I need to go outside. You can't, like you physically can't. I kind of stood there and I'm ashamed to say I wanted to cry, like a little kid who isn't allowed to use the bathroom, who just wants to sit with his dad but keeps getting dragged away by unfamiliar relatives. The kind of crying you see on the bus at rush hour when some little kid coming back from the mall loses it and lies in the aisle wailing, cramming road salt in his mouth, and you just think, you and me both. I didn't actually cry. I hate myself because I just said, begging, can I please have my phone back, please?

hate myself because I just said, begging, can I please have my phone back, please? Geordie looked at me like I was an idiot, him in the middle of all the post-it notes that read congratulations and you're a winner and Western Morgan Idol. I didn't say anything. I left. At first, I just sat in the lunchroom, shivering and nauseated, staring at the plastic solo cup leftover from the barbecues they used to give before the ash. There will be worse moments in my life, no doubt, more pain, more sadness, but I can't imagine anything so wide-ranging in its desolation as that moment. The only thing I could focus on was telling Misty to get her phone back and watch the horizon and be ready to escape. A girl from online staggered through, sweaty and pale, and I knew that Jordi would be there in a

minute to ask for another eight hours overnight answering strangers questions so perfectly that they treat me like a shitty customer service AI built to serve. There aren't a lot of choices in life are there? You can choose to have kids or not, to leave your hometown or not, or to stay in a terrible job you are for some reason very good at. But other than that what is there? Just a lot of compliance and non-compliance. This moment didn't feel like a choice. I said to the girl, we need to get out of here, and she nodded. Then we headed down to the lobby, the doors were locked, and no one carrying a key was in the building, and the girl just looked bad. But when I went to the fire escape, she still said, no, no, and the girl just looked bad. But when I went to the fire escape, she still said, no, no,

we're not supposed to. We need to get out. They'll fire us. And I could hear the fear in her voice. And I wondered how badly she needed this job, that she was here in the middle of the night, so sick she could hardly stand. Tell them I did it, I said, and hit the bar. Only it didn't move because the fire escape was locked too. The next thing I did was stupid, but I don't know what else I could have done. I walked back to the lobby and picked up a garbage can and began slamming it into the glass door. Behind me, she was coughing and coughing and said, maybe stop, stop, but so faintly I could ignore it. Then we were out and she was staggering toward the emergency room on Ouellette and I was alone in the rainwater, the same temperature as my blood. Then I went looking for a payphone, because the only way to sort this out was to call in. But I couldn't remember which of Western Morgan's departments

Misty was assigned to, so when I finally found the city's last payphone in the bus depot, I called them all, all the sad voices of men and women here and on the other side of the world. them all, all the sad voices of men and women here and on the other side of the world. Welcome to Kyphos Business Systems. Jane speaking. Can I help you? Welcome to Tesla Mobility. Can I help you? Welcome to Roscommon Account Services. Welcome to Lighthouse Mobility. I'm looking for Misty. She helped me before. I'm sure I can help you. What's your user number? Misty, Misty knows, I said, my voice queerless and elderly. Put on Misty. I could hear the exhaustion in his silence, then the compliance. One moment, I'll transfer you. Hey, Misty, I said. Misty, Misty, you need to get to high ground. What? Who is this? Just promise, okay? There's no tsunami

warning. It's on its way. It's passing Japan and Hawaii. It hit the Aleutians, California. I hope she didn't mistake me for what I felt like right then. A crazy old man, mad with loneliness, longing to hear a voice in the void, even if it was only to harangue them for the weakness of their service and the terrible nature of their product. for the weakness of their service and the terrible nature of their product. Mark? Another six hours to landfall. I know you'll still be on shift.

Promise. I waited for her to disconnect, which was okay, because at least I told her. Then I think maybe she said, Thank you, Mark. Or maybe it was just the noise in my head. I held the line another moment, then hung up. I felt okay, because I got through, because I wasn't in a cubicle anymore, because I could walk home and enjoy the silence before Call of Duty marathons in the living room, enjoy the ashy rain falling across my slowly cooking skin.

I walked home, Misty... I walked home, hoping Misty said, Thank you, Mark. It felt like I was slipping through a gap in the world between noises, a kind of silent passage. The way kids slip along the abandoned rail easements in town below grade. The corridors of grass and rats and squirrels and birds. Between the noise of the phones and call of duty. Between heartbeats.

Between cresting waves, the silence you hang on to for just a moment when someone hangs up before you go on to the next call because there is temporarily a respite from the tyranny of the queue. The silence after a bullet connects or a wave hits on the other side of the world. I just hoped harder and harder and harder that Misty would insist they unlock the doors and break the windows and they would escape before the wave arrived to wash the rest of us away. I don't know how to add a clapping sound effect without it just sounding horrible in the audio. Yeah, let's just do a... Air horns. You know what? Danil.

Yeah, Danil, air horn it. 40 straight seconds of air horns. Or not. I think the air horns. Or not. I think the air horns are good. That was beautiful. Yeah, that was wonderful. Yeah. It was really incredible.

Thank you so much. And particularly relevant now. Yeah. Yeah. Unfortunately, yeah. Yeah, that is extra relevant what happened the past week yeah

yeah that is it sucks if people want to find more of your work or if there's anything you would like to plug now is the time okay um i have a website it's called where is here.ca um and i have uh geez links to a bunch

of my different short stories there i have a novella coming out next year. A few years ago, I published a novel. But if you're interested in the climate change stuff, there's probably one I'd recommend called An Important Failure that was in Clarksworld. It's available to read online. It's been translated into Polish. It's in a couple of different collections. And if I'm allowed to brag which yes please do it won the the um the uh sturgeon award last year which is a science fiction award handed out by uh um an academic organization in the u.s so and it's about it's about climate change it's all set on vancouver island in vancouver It's all set on Vancouver Island in Vancouver. Congratulations. I've heard you also have stories about ghosts.

Yes, I have a genre I'm trying to establish that I call obstetrical horror that I started writing when I was pregnant. Oh, shit. Yeah, giving birth is just such body horror. So ghosts, childbirth, all that stuff. Yeah, I write a lot about ghosts as well. You can find, like I say, abirth all that stuff uh yeah i read a lot about ghosts as well you can find like i say a lot of that stuff's on my website and links to anything that's available for free online so yeah where is here.ca and i'm on twitter at um at canadianist but i i

don't really use it that much so i i am excited for the combination of climate change fiction with horror fiction. And by excited, it's like half actually excited, half dreading, because a lot of it's going to probably be horrible in terms of people being like, you know what's scary? Climate change! And you're like, okay. Yeah, but... Oh, sorry, go on. I don't know, but I think there definitely is a good way to combine the existential elements of both of those things into something that actually is really impactful, that plays on human fears and emotions and how we can get over those fears and move towards something useful.

horror going back for well however long you want to we've been telling stories has given us a series of structures to kind of process that um and i think that's really valuable that there are patterns we can use to work through and i mean writing climate change fiction for me i just finished another novella um that's specifically about like near future stuff and about the wildfires a lot um but you know having a story to tell about it as a way of processing all the research I was doing was really valuable. It's super useful. Yeah. And just, I mean, you can call it therapeutic if you want, but I don't think it's that.

I think it's organizing information in your head that is just simply too large for you to actually grasp. I mean, I can't actually grasp this stuff, but... No, you can't. It's too big. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Oh, yeah.

Trying to... Yeah, horror does that probably better than almost any other genre. Oh, yeah. And I mean, look what horror does with adolescent anxieties or all sorts of different... The fear of dying, the fear of aging,

the fear of illness and stuff like that. So yeah, I think we have structures in place with horror fiction and with sort of science fiction horror that kind of are going to let us start to process things that are otherwise just too intellectual. Or not intellectual, but too abstract. It's too, yeah, abstract is I think is the right term. Because I mean, like, it's too it's too yeah abstract as i think is the right term because i mean like my guess my fear of that is that like climate change fiction is just gonna resort to like the disaster story and it has very like glamorized weird versions of like apocalypses and disasters and like collapse in very like big ways that impact everything around you when in actuality the effects they have are very localized and small and are still horrifying but the way that they're framed

is always frustrating in films you'd look at like you know a typical you know like apocalypse themed movie i think is i i'm afraid that the bigger you know if you're turning if talking about like big movies how it's going to frame in that way instead of these more kind of personal stories of like the horror of being trapped inside a warehouse as a tornado comes and you're not allowed to leave which is way more horrifying than oh look all of new york city is crumbling because of this tsunami which is so big and like possible i guess but like that's so big, you can't feel that. And what's more likely to happen is people getting trapped in buildings

and not being allowed to leave. And that's actual horror. Yeah, and it's intimate too, right? It's not a distant idea. It's intimate. It's the particular consequence of something for a community, for an individual, for relationships. And if I can go on on this, there's an entire genre of apocalyptic fiction that kind of comes out of the early Cold War. And there are always these weirdly cozy apocalypses where one white guy survives. And in the new world, he builds this kind of feudal fantasy. So I've actually, there's one called The Last Babylon where a character says, of these two spinster ladies that were miserable before the nuclear war, after the nuclear war, they're really happy because their lives have meaning now. And those are the apocalyptic stories that we've had.

We need a new kind of story, a new kind of horror that I think that does exactly what you're talking about, that doesn't default to that weird heroism and one guy surviving kind of thing. There's a wonderful Cory Doctorow short story that I think pivots off that idea nicely in his book. Unauthorized toast, I think, or unauthorized toast i think or unauthorized bread no unauthorized bread is one of the stories in it but the the book is has a different it's a collection of his short stories but there's um a post-apocalyptic story that kind of follows a bunch of tech bros trying to do the traditional like survive the the apocalypse makes everything you know better for me i get to be a cool warlord thing it's good um yes it doesn't end well for them um yeah i i think the i think the thing that is important to do is like focus on the horror of the little things like the little

things on like a global scale like like the thing that is so frightening about climate change is that all of these, the, the terrible things it's bringing are going to hit the same way mass shootings do where it is a calamity for a community and people 50 miles away, uh, try to pretend it didn't happen and get to doing like their, their daily stuff. Like that's, what's, that's what's so scary about it. It's not, like you said, it's not the buildings in New York collapsing from a tidal wave. It's the birds stop

singing and you still have to go to work. I'm writing a script right now for probably this show about how climate change is hard to think about because of how big it is. And one of the models that I'm trying to draw a comparison from is like, it's almost like climate change is like a type of Cthulhu in terms of the way it affects you, but you'll probably get by. It can affect your neighbors and you can watch it and you can watch it affect other people. But it doesn't mean that your life is going to end this way, because it's so big and uncaring. It can attack so many places at once,

but you don't know how big those effects are and what the scale of them will be on your local area. So it's this thing that is way more existential than anything else, because it does not care. It has no morality. It's not out to get you specifically. It's this weird thing that's just getting imposed upon us now. I want to explore in my next few years of writing. And I'm excited to read other people's work who kind of cover that similar side of horror and combining with like climate change and the small ways it's going to start affecting us and places around the world. I think that what you said,

and isn't, isn't there someone who talks about the Cthulhu scene? I don't know. Yeah. That's Donna Haraay donna harroway that's it yeah um but but also just how weak some of our previous narratives like you can't you can't bring in you know judeo-christian apocalypses to this kind of thing because we can't there's not you can't we can't have that kind of moralizing in it yeah um that we need and that's honestly Cthulhu is really handy for that uh cosmic horror yeah because it forces you to as you say face something on an existential level um that how you feel and who you are and your individual experience does not matter

so Frank a lot of people like you know us we're watching what's happening in Kansas right now. I'm like, I'm not in Kansas. I don't know anyone in Kansas. I'm looking at this calamity, and it's so distant from me. But yet, it's also very close. And that's a weird feeling to deal with. And I can see, oh, yeah, corporations are contributing to this. Specifically, climate change in in general but like like amazon trapping people inside inside inside these warehouses it's like i can there's ways to fight

extensions of this but you can't fight it you can only fight its extensions and that's and yeah it's it's a super it's a super interesting thing that i'm gonna i think we are gonna see you know this this idea get dealt with more and more as these things start happening more and more um and yeah I mean climate change cosmic horror is maybe maybe the way to go yeah yeah I think that's I think that's a good line to end on or at least a good thought to end on. Well, thank you so much, Rebecca, for coming on and sharing your story. Would you mind plugging your website one last time since we've talked an extra 15 minutes? Oh, sorry about that.

No, no, no, no. No, it's not. That's the reason. That's good. I just want you to – people may not have noted it last time before the conversation. We should give them another chance. Okay. So the website is whereishere.ca. So W-H-E-R-I-S-H-E-R-E.ca.

Excellent. All right. Well, thank you very much, Rebecca. Until next time, everybody lose your mind with the cosmic horror of something, something, anything, any kind of cosmic horror that causes you to, to,

to your, your mind to scramble and you to begin worshiping in the dark corners of the world. Any, anything that does that is, is good. So. Well,

thank you so much for having me. It's an absolute pleasure. Very, very happy to have you. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum.

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

It could happen here to welcome thee. Evans Robert. Podcast. End of the world. Beginning of new. Yeah. I think we did it right. I think we did it right.

Evans Robert, who's here with us. That would be Killjoy Margaret. And Lichterman Sophie. I like this. Let's keep it. Lichterman comma Sophie Killjoy comma Margaret Margaret

I could also attorneys general you Killjoy's Margaret one of my hobbies is anytime I pluralize something attorneys generally it Margaret how are you doing on this beautiful december day i'm good i just got my booster shot and the negative effects haven't kicked in yet

that's good um how does it feel to have like has your internet sped up now that i have the boost yeah i'm making the same everything is clearer that everybody makes, because it's easier than thinking about the fact that Omicron looks like it's going to be a real nightmare and the world's never going to go back to... You know, it's not going back to normal, I miss. It's being able to walk into a bar and not worry that I was going to catch a new variant of a plague. Yeah. Yeah, that's a... Yeah. Yeah.

I don't know. How are you doing with the plague? I live completely alone and isolated, so... Yeah, well... Which I, you know, I'm not sure this is how I would have built my life if I hadn't done it during a plague. Yeah, I mean... I miss people. I dream about interacting with humans.

Yeah, just like hugging a person that you don't know all that well and it not being like involving both of you, risking your life. Yeah, it's like a blood pact to hug someone. Yeah, it's like we're going to hug. Yeah. And if we wind up in hell,

we'll scream at Satan together. Come what may, we will hug. Yeah. And if we wind up in hell, we'll scream at Satan together. Come what may, we will hug. You have written another story. I mean, you wrote this a while ago, as you did with the last one. But we're doing, we decided we, one of the things we wanted to do to close this year out was a little bit more fiction. Fiction, I think, plays an underappreciated role in revolutionary praxis in kind of every aspect of being someone who envisions a different world. So we've always – I mean, it could happen here from the beginning. There was always a strong kind of focus on fiction, and I'm really happy to be presenting another one of your stories today. Thanks.

You want to introduce this piece? Sure. This piece is called The Freeworks of Cascadia. It was first published in Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is the name of a magazine. And this one was also really important to me because Fantasy and Science Fiction, FNSF, was one of the magazines that my dad had a subscription to. Yeah, they go back a while.

Yeah, this was a very important piece for me that it got published there. Yeah, that's awesome. Well, let's let's let's take a hop in a publicly funded bus and roll down to Storytown.

Speaking of taking one's life in one's hands. Mm-hmm. The story's called The Free Orcs of Cascadia. You all know the first part of the story. The song ended in blood. It was two years ago in the summer. the story, the song ended in blood. It was two years ago, in the summer, Rick Green, the singer of Goblin Forest, crooned in his Osborne-esque voice to 15,000 Goblin Metal fans. A short man wearing green body paint and brown leather stepped out from backstage, drew a sword, and cut the

singer down from behind. The last lyrics Green ever sang were, take me back, take me back, take me back to the misty mountains. The man with the sword, of course, was Gulfenbull, the rhythm guitarist for Krimpatool, the opening act. He and his bandmates escaped in the ensuing chaos and remain at large to this day. Neither band has released a song or played a show since. The rest of Goblin Forest decided to call it quits without Green and Krimpatool. No one knew what happened to crimpetool. Fans deserted the genre in droves, and overnight Goblin Metal went from stadium rock fad to a niche interest of the obscure Canadian orc cults where it originated. It was no longer hip to be green. If Golf and Bowl had been trying to take the Goblin Metal throne, as it were,

he failed spectacularly. Rumors have flown about motives and locations, but there have been no arrests and no public statement from the band. All we've had to work with were rumors. Until now. Earlier this month, orc folk act Alcerith listed Golf and Bowl as the harpist in their liner notes of the single The Gray Fog of a Ruined Forest. Alcerith was as obscure as Krimpatool was infamous. The band had never done an interview, not even a photo shoot. Like everyone else these days in countercultural music, their videos featured only masked performers.

I've been casually obsessed with post-civilization culture ever since the communique from the junkyard rats of the Rust Belt, and I've been covering music of pretty much every secessionist movement and subculture I could sink my teeth into since. After I saw those liner notes, I put out feelers to friends and friends of friends, and I waited, and last week I was invited to go to an orc village hidden away in the burned forests of Cascadia. I was invited to be the first person to tell Golf and Bull's story, a Hellfire Harriet exclusive. Usually, I post full interviews for everyone, but reserve my travel diary for the patrons of my blog. This time, though, I'm foregoing that. This story is too important, so I've interspersed to the two below.

All I knew before I went was what everyone else knew. Three years ago, a bunch of metalheads and hippies and burners and nerds all decided to dress up like orcs and goblins, and some of them took it too far and decided to distance themselves from the rest of society. They got really famous one summer, then that fame died in a single bloody act, and who knows what kind of weird shit they're up to now. Before you get worried, no, I will never offer a platform to a fascist. Fascist, fascism as it turns out, is the furthest thing from Golf and Ball's mind. What he's into is a lot weirder than that. Still, it's sort of lucky that I survived to write this story. So, you killed a guy. Yeah, I killed a guy. We stared in silence at one another for a while. He wore rawhide and fur and not much of either.

He wasn't painted up, but his skin was sort of natural olive. His lower teeth were filed down to fangs like any serious orcs. There was still something unassuming about him that I have a hard time describing. You're waiting for me to tell you about it, aren't you? The interview was not off to a good start. Are you worried about how your words will sound in court? I killed Rick Green on stage with a sword in front of thousands of witnesses. Talking to the media isn't going to make anything worse for me at this point,

and I don't respect the authority of the U.S. government to hold me accountable for my actions. I will not go to court. So why'd you do it? The old world is dying. My world, the free orcs of Cascadia. We're not going to replace the old world, but we will be part of its replacement. In order to do that, we have to take ourselves seriously. An element of that struggle is the struggle to create meaning, to create a new sacred. I killed Rick Green because he was defiling something meant to be sacred. How so? We share an aesthetic, but he didn't understand what it meant to be sacred. How so?

We share an aesthetic, but he didn't understand what it meant to be an orc. You killed him because he was a poser. I guess you could put it like that. So the lesson here is don't be a poser. Don't be a poser. You heard it here first, kids. Don't be a poser, or Golf and Ball will literally murder you. They picked me up in the parking lot of Grocery Outlet in Northeast Portland. That's a mundane detail, I suppose, but perhaps the single most remarkable thing about my trip was the ever

present contrast between mundanity and the bizarre. I bought a case of coconut water while we waited. Orcs might like coconut water. Who doesn't like coconut water? They showed up in a mid-teens Honda Civic sedan, and I'd been hoping for something out of Mad Max. The two women who got out, one cis, one trans, both white, were dressed in clean gray tank tops and leggings like half the women who live in Portland. To be honest, I only noticed them in the parking lot at all

because the trans woman was cute. Hellfire? the cis woman asked. She was tall and severe, with the fierce but almost trustworthy look of a loan shark. Or, as it turned out, an orcish enforcer. That's me, I said. Fenric, the cis woman offered her name, but no handshake, fist bump, or hug. I nodded. Norinda, the trans woman said.

Like a lot of trans women these days, she didn't bother to feminize her voice. Her name sounded familiar, but I couldn't place it. How is this going to work, I asked. We're going to drive around back where no one can see us, Fenric said. We're going to take your phone and laptop and any electronics and put them in a car. Then we're going to put you in the trunk and drive out to the forest. We'll provide you with a recorder and notebook when we arrive. You'll get your stuff back when we leave. I nodded. I'd pretty much expected this. Do you need to use the bathroom, Norinda asked. Have any medical conditions we should know about? No and no, I said. Either of you want a coconut water? Goblin Forest sang in English, but Crimpetool's lyrics were all in Tolkien's black speech.

Dark speech. Our lyrics were in dark speech. Tolkien referred to the language as black speech. Tolkien meant well, but he was about the most influential, unconsciously racist author of the 20th century. All his villains were either green or Middle Eastern. When you engage with the work of historical authors, especially when you make derivative works a century later, you have to adapt to one's own social context. Calling the language black speech today is, at best, wildly misleading. Its name is a translation anyway. It's possible that dark speech is just as accurate. Besides, Tolkien didn't write the language. He only wrote like like, 16 words or something.

We wrote the rest. Most of us prefer to translate the name of it as dark speech. Since when are murderers PC? My status as a person who has ended the life of another person carries no implications about my personal ethics other than that I clearly believe there are circumstances under which it's okay to kill someone. Imagine being at the Renaissance Fair when the apocalypse hits, and you're stuck trying to recreate society surrounded by swords and minstrels and these and thous. You know how

that sounds like either heaven or hell depending on who you are and also who you're stuck there with? That was my first impression of the village of Grey Morrow. The fires out west have burned forest after forest and small town after small town, and no one tries to deny that pretty much every bioregion on the planet is going through a transformation right now. It's in the worst spots, these dead ecologies, that the post-civilization movement has found its roots, like wildflowers growing up between paving stones, or rats hiding in the walls, I guess, depending on who you ask. Gray Morrow sits in the scorched graveyard of a Douglas fir forest halfway up a mountain occupying the remains of an evacuated town. Slab foundations are all that remain of the original structures.

A seasonal creek runs through what was recently a riverbed at the edge of the village, and long-abandoned train tracks skirt the ridge above town. Even armed with all of that information, you'd still have at least 70 or 80 possible spots to search. Satellite imagery would help, of course. I can't imagine that the Big Six techs or the U.S. government don't know where Gray Morrow is. The residents of Gray Morrow, in general, and Golf and Bowl in particular, had an awful lot to lose by letting me write this report. Norinda let me out of the trunk, and she smiled when she saw me.

Her bottom teeth were filed. That should have been unnerving, but I've always been a sucker for face tattoos or anything that really shows someone is going for broke. Fenric just stared at me, severe. Being severe was pretty much her thing, as far as I could tell. She took a sip from her coconut water. Three other cars filled a makeshift parking lot. The village itself was surrounded by a wall built from blackened logs,

set upright and buried in the ruins of the road. My escorts had changed clothes en route. Fenric looked like a bandit out of Skyrim, complete with iron pauldron on one shoulder and a hand axe strapped to her belt. I won't lie, it was a good look. I'm no fashion reporter, but I figure half the magazines in New York would love to get someone out here and take pictures of orcs like her. Narendra wore a simple, modest dress of undyed wool. Imagine a Viking kindergarten teacher who also wears a rather large dagger horizontally on her belt at the small of her back.

My crush on her intensified. She handed me a spiral notebook and an old-fashioned digital recorder, and we walked into the village. A lot of people say that you killed Rick Green because you were jealous of Goblin Forest's success, that the Orcish Code insisted that if you wanted the throne,

you had to kill the reigning monarch. Golf and Bull stopped fidgeting and stared directly at me, his dark brown eyes boring into me. That's bullshit. I'm sorry? It's like three layers deep of bullshit. He was still staring at me. I was starting to regret this line of questioning.

Okay, to start, there are pretty much two ways to interpret the Orcish Code of Honor. It's not written down anywhere, but there's some strong central themes, like an interdependence between individual sovereignty and collective identity. We value strength, but the idea is that everyone develops their own strengths, whatever they may be, for the benefit of all. One should be as self-reliant as one is able to be, both for one's own sake and, again, for the community's sake. I care deeply about this. That same basic idea, though, can be interpreted two different ways. So there's a split in the orc community?

Damn right there's a split. The free orcs are matriarchal, and the orcine are patriarchal. Golfinbull produced a cigarette from God knows where, considering how little he was wearing, and lit it with a lighter from the same mysterious origin. It wasn't tobacco. It wasn't weed. Maybe mugwort? The matriarchal way of interpreting those tenets is roughly anarchist. It's anti-authoritarian and anti-nationalist, at the very least. We respect the wisdom of elders, children, and women, self-identifying women. But the hierarchy is anything but rigid, and the guidelines are anything but laws. Most importantly, our sense of community or tribe is fluid. Gray Morrow is a free orc village. Go 15 miles southeast, and you'll

find a larger village, Lonely Mountain. There or seen. The patriarchal way of interpreting orcish tenets is roughly fascistic. Authority is absolute, rank within the hierarchy affects every aspect of one's own life. It's not racialized, but it's nationalistic. There are very specific considerations of who is and isn't a part of any given social grouping. And definitions of strength tend to skew toward boring shit like physical size and power. So you'd tell any doubters that you weren't trying to claim the goblin throne because your faction of orcs doesn't work that way? No orcish culture works that way. Even those fascistic shits don't work that way. Among the orcine, if you kill your superior, people aren't going to just suddenly start kissing your

ass. They will literally flay you and turn your skin into a battle flag. You advance in rank by demonstrating your capacity to lead. This isn't some fucking Hollywood bullshit. Evil is a lot more banal than that. I didn't have the heart, or maybe the courage, to tell him that, to me, to pretty much any outsider, Hollywood bullshit is exactly what the whole place looked like. When you say battle flag, what do you mean? Who do they do battle with? Us. The free orcs.

Are you at war? For the very soul of our culture how'd that start when i cut down rick green the mountain king you killed him because he was the leader of a rival faction then not because he was a poser they weren't a rival faction until i killed him but sure he was a poser though all fascists are posers did you go on tour with Goblin Forest specifically to murder him? Yeah, probably. What do you mean, probably? That was a very specific question about a very specific intention. I mean, I guess. I'd been thinking about killing him for a while. It was premeditated, and it wasn't, you know? No, I don't know, because I've never killed anyone.

So it's like, I've known Rick Green almost five years. He and I, and maybe 30 other people, we started this whole thing. Goblin Metal, the orcs, all of that. Rick Green's always been a fucking bastard. I figured I'd probably kill him one day for being kind of a Nazi or whatever. Then we go on tour together, and I tell myself, hey, if this goes badly, I can always just kill him on stage. You've got to understand, orcist culture wasn't even a year old at that point.

We weren't split into the Free Orcs and the Orcine yet. There were only maybe five villages total. We were just starting to explore what it meant to be ourselves, what kind of culture we could build. Then, while we were on tour, I hear he's got himself crowned the Mountain King. And this isn't a game. I don't know how to get that through to you or your readers. This is our life.

It's one thing to put on a silly hat and pretend to tell people what to do in some LARP somewhere, but Rick Green had gotten himself coronated, for real, dictator, over actual people. So I killed him. The Free Orcs split off, the Orcine closed ranks, and we've been at war ever since. Am I safe here? He didn't answer me. At least he didn't stare me down again. The Free Orcs split off, the Orcine closed ranks, and we've been at war ever since. Am I safe here? He didn't answer me. At least he didn't stare me down again. He just looked off into the distance, maybe towards Lonely Mountain.

I've been to LARPs before where, when you show up, they make you put on garb. That is to say, they make you wear period-appropriate clothes, or whatever weird interpretation of period-appropriate that particular group of LARPers had come up with. As I met the denizens of the village, they all came out to the parking lot to introduce themselves. I realized they didn't insist on anything like that, because they weren't LARPing. Pretty much every one of them was dressed like either a Viking reenactor or a fantasy game villain, but it wasn't an act. About 30 adults and 8 kids lived there, running the age gamut from 6 months to 78 years. They told me their names and pronouns, about a third told me she, a third he, and a third they. Many of them were white or past as such, but a significant minority were black. Narendra told me later there are orc villages with

substantially higher proportions of people of color. That might be true, but I got the impression she said it to convince herself, or me, that the free orcs aren't a specifically white phenomenon. No one, no one decent, likes looking around their community or scene and seeing only white faces smiling back. After everyone introduced themselves, I immediately forgot all their names. There are only so many fantasy names like Lazari and Damolin that you can hear before they all just sound the same. Norinda and Fenric flanked me as we walked through a gate and a wall into the village. It's strange to say village in America. We don't really have villages here. But in some ways, Graymarrow isn't the United States.

And to be certain, it was a village. Maybe ten or fifteen houses crowded together along either side of a single potholed street. Two architectural styles reigned, junkyard shacks built out of railroad cars and regular cars, and traditional American log cabins. Many of them were adorned with solar panels. At the end of the street, near the Black Palisade, the beginnings of a stone tower stood 15 feet high. I wasn't sure if I was impressed or not. On one hand, the village couldn't have been around longer than three or four years, and they had already done so much. On the other hand, it was filthy. Everyone was filthy. I'm kind of obsessed with the post-civilization movement, so I wish I could tell you everyone looked well-fed and happy. They didn't. People looked

proud, and they didn't look miserable, but there was an intensity in everyone's eyes you simply could not mistake for happiness. A trash pile needed tending near the front gate, and some of the animal hides stretched for tanning had begun to rot. Everything looked like it was about to fall apart, both physically and metaphorically. What now, I asked, when we reached the central square, a stone-cobbled chunk of what had been once an intersection now decorated with poorly tended gardens and rustic benches of dubious quality. You're here to interview Golfenbo, are you not? Fenric asked. I am. Golfenbo doesn't live here. I waited for her to elaborate. Golfenbo lives in the forest with the rest of his band. He's on his way. You'll meet him a bit outside of town. I'll take you to him when he gets there. Someone near the gate shouted, and both of my escorts flinched bodily and turned to look.

It was just a kid chasing another kid with a wooden sword. Fenric and Norinda were on edge. Something was about to happen. Tell me about your new band, Ulcerith. What does the name mean? Ulcerith is the dark speech word for the phase of the moon on the last night before the new moon, the last sliver of light. Alcereth is a holy day, a day of self-reflection.

Our band's music attempts to capture that spirit of self-reflection. On Alcereth, we listen to our naysayer and think about ourselves and our community. Your naysayer? Free Orcish villages don't have leaders. We have naysayers. Two years ago, we tried rotating leadership. It was ineffectual. We didn't need leaders.

We stuck with it anyway because we felt like we had to, because those were the rules we had come up with. Then one person said, basically, this is bullshit. We don't need someone to tell us what to do. We need someone to tell us what to stop doing. We need someone to tell us what to do. We need someone to tell us what to stop doing. We need someone to tell us what we're doing wrong. Every new moon, every village picks a new naysayer. That person spends the month picking apart group structures,

observing what's happening, being critical. On Alcereth, we fast and listen to the naysayer. They don't offer solutions necessarily, but instead bring our problems to light. Does that work? Surprisingly well, except about a third of the naysayers end up leaving after their month. Some go to other villages, some go to live in the forest, like Norinda, Alcerith's singer, did. But most leave the woods, as we put it. Most go back to civilization. That's why Norinda's name sounded familiar when she introduced herself. To be honest, I saw your name listed in the liner notes and didn't pay much attention to the rest

That's an argument for me to take my name off our next release, if there is one Why did you put it there in the first place? Why did you agree to this interview? And what do you mean, if there is one? I told you, we're at war Yeah? We're losing that war. He took a deep breath, trying to keep himself calm.

He didn't strike me as a man who was afraid to cry, but he was clearly trying to keep his composure. There's no way that Grey Morrow would have let you talk to me here if any of us thought that Grey Morrow had a future. There's no way I would have talked to you at all if I thought I was going to be alive to see another Alcereth. Why are you losing? Why are you going to die? It's not a question of military efficacy or of bravery or strength or any of that shit. It's just a question of numbers. We're seeing society as a military society. Every member fights. As far as we can tell, they've got 1,500 warriors. As far as we can tell, they've got 1,500 warriors. We've got 500. So use guerrilla tactics.

Golf and Bull shook his head. Striking Rick Green down from behind was a cowardly action. I can justify it, almost, by the fact that Green had declared himself my monarch. But the Orsine warriors are my peers. They would not stalk me in the night. I will not stalk them. That sounds... I know how it sounds. So this interview?

I want to be remembered. I want the free orcs of Cascadia to be remembered. I put my name on the liner note so that someone like you, an anti-fascist music blogger, would talk to me. I leveraged my own infamy to draw attention to what we're doing, what we've done. I fucking hate the tragic utopian trope. What?

Like, seriously, like, fuck you, okay? I know I'm here as a journalist, but I'm not going to write your fucking obituary. I don't think I've ever turned on an interview subject like that before. I get it, hopeless causes are beautiful, but as I understand it, the whole goddamn point of holding on to your honor more firmly than your life is because the world is a better place for everyone if more people did that, right? Okay. The world isn't a goddamn better place if you let your subculture, and I'm sorry, I know it's very serious and I'm not trying to downplay it, but that's what this is, a musical subculture. Be taken over by fucking Nazis. And I respect that you're going to fight

them for it. That's cool. But if you considered buying some guns? Maybe a few drones? They'll come in here with spears, right? And you'll fight them off with other spears? It's 2025, man. There are fucking Nazis everywhere. If you don't give a shit about going to jail or dying, then fucking shoot the Nazis who are trying to kill you. You don't understand. You're fucking right. I don't. right, I don't. If I'm being honest, most of the time I was waiting, I spent flirting with Norinda and avoiding talking to Fenric. Norinda asked me to keep our conversation off the record. We didn't talk about Grey Mara or the orc thing much anyway. Everything I learned about the village and its culture I learned by observation only. An elderly man came by and offered us cold tea in wooden mugs. Steeped blackberry leaves sweetened with juice from the berries, he said. No caffeine, no other particularly strong medicinal effects.

The three of us took cups from his platter and he continued down the street, passing out drinks. No one else approached us. I watched people go about their lives, though the tension in the air was thick. I saw a few people look at cell phones and spent a not inconsiderable amount of time trying to decide if that was hypocritical and or bad opsec. Eventually, I gave up because frankly, it wasn't my business, and one of the most interesting things about all the post-civilization groups is all the bits and pieces they choose to carry over from mainstream culture. Finally, after an hour, Fenric stood up.

Come with me. I followed her to the other side of town and through a smaller gate. On the other side, a box truck that had seen better days sat on a road that had two. We skirted around the truck and up into the black forest. The scorched hills looked more like meadows than forests, with green grass and undergrowth broken only by black spikes of burned trees. We followed the path this way and that, and soon I was lost. Soon after,

fog set in. I was further through the looking glass than I had realized. I imagined us lost, a mile from a town full of people who give a double meaning to the word stranger and probably at least an hour's drive from civilization. My guard hadn't shown me much in the way of kindness, and I was on my way to meet someone I knew to be a murderer. It's the kind of shit I live for, if I'm being honest. I love my stupid fucking weird job and the stupid fucking weird world we live in. Thank you, my readers, for making that possible for me. Be sure to check out my Patreon page if this is the first thing you've read by me. Lots of members-only content over there, including a few snippets of Orc Song from Norinda. The only thing I saw in the distance was a single black spire thicker than the dead snags around me. As we approached, it came into focus as a boulder, jutting up into the sky like an angry finger.

Sitting at the base of it was a short man with a sword across his lap. Golf and bowl. I'll leave you two to it, Fenric said. She left me alone with an armed murderer. I sat down across from him, took out the notebook and recorder, and asked him questions. All right, convince me. We can't fight them dishonorably, because you can't protect an idea by defiling that idea. We don't want them to destroy our way of life, but we don't want to destroy our way of life ourselves, either. The basic problem with the Orcine is that they're

interpreting your code of honor to mean might makes right, yeah? Yes. By facing them in open battle and nobly dying or whatever your goddamn plan is, you're just letting them make might right. You're letting their superior numbers dictate what your culture has to look like. It's like majority voting, but even dumber because more people die. I expected him to double down on his position. Most men would. What do you suggest instead? Fuck, I don't know.

Don't be here when they attack. Go somewhere else. Stay on the move. Build your strength. Oh shit, that's what Rick Green was doing, wasn't it? Huh? Goblin Forest, singing in English, a stupid name like Rick Green.

All that shit was designed to make Goblin Metal more palatable to the masses. To get fans. To get recruits. For his stupid fucking fashy goals. Yup. Do that. I mean, don't become fascist or change your name or make your music worse. Everyone knows Goblin Forest enough shit on Krimpatul.

Just don't be obscure for the sake of being obscure. Fucking advertise. You have a decent thing going here. People are abandoning mainstream society left and right. No political pun intended. Make it easier for them to get here. Make it so that when you fight the Fash in your epic swords and spears Viking death match, you win. Better yet, make it so they don't even want to fuck with you because they know they'll lose.

I don't know whether that would work. Yeah, but dying doesn't work either. The orc way of life isn't meant to be some revolution. It's not meant to supplant the mainstream. It will never appeal to the mainstream, not without losing its soul. Would you live like this? Would you want to? You're right. I'm obsessed with you weird subcultures, but I wouldn't want to live like you. We both stared at each other in silence. It wasn't an uncomfortable silence. We were both just thinking. Okay, scrap that. You're never going to get big numbers. You don't need big numbers. You don't want big numbers. You don't need recruits.

You need allies. What would that look like? God damn, do all orcish men not actually listen to women's ideas? I'm used to guys just talking over me or shutting down completely if I get mad. Free orcish men, I would hope, know how to listen. Guns break the spell. And the spell you're casting here, it's powerful. It's good. So no guns. Other people have guns, though. Let those people stand guard, or make their armed presence note outside Orcine camps. Other people have access to say, doxing. How many recruits are the Orsine going to get if every time some wannabe forest Nazi dude joins, someone tells his mother what they're about? Or access to the media. How many recruits are going to join if everyone knows the Orsine are posers, putting out substandard watered-down goblin metal just to try and lure in impressionable military-aged men to fight their holy war?

You'll write those stories? I'm not going to write you any propaganda, but sure, I'll tell the truth. How do we get allies? Put out another single, maybe a full-length. The gray fog of a ruined forest was the best shit I've heard in years. You're redefining folk music just like you redefine metal. Put out shit like that and I'll cover it. Talk to more press.

Maybe someone other than you. Not everyone's going to be sympathetic to what you did. Even if that fucking guy was a fucking tree Nazi. A hunting horn cut through the fog and threw our conversation, and my subject's face fell into despair for a half second before determination took over. What's that? Interview's over. I thought there would be more time.

Another day, at least. We have to get you out of here.'" Turns out, Fenric had taken us on a purposefully circuitous route into the woods. It wasn't a quarter of a mile straight downhill before Golf and Bull and I reached the box truck at the back entrance to Gray Morrow. Norinda and Fenric stood there talking with a kid, maybe fifteen, who was out of breath. She was dressed in scraps of fur and leather and cloth, like you might imagine a medieval beggar. It wasn't until I noticed all the twigs and sticks and moss tangled up in the fabrics I recognized it as camouflage. I saw about thirty, the scout, for that's what she was, said.

About? Fenric asked. Exactly thirty. Ten with pikes, ten with tower shields and swords, five archers, two scouts, two command, one non-combatant, I'd guess a surgeon, but I couldn't promise. How far away, I asked. Fenric glared at me for interrupting. Five miles, Norinda said. Probably three and a half by now. Downhill. We have time to get you out with the children and the elders. The scout had just run five miles, uphill, because she was too stubborn to use a walkie-talkie or a cell phone. We should evacuate everyone, Golf and Bull said. What? Fenric asked.

We've got walls and almost even numbers. Fuck them. This is our home. I wanted to shout at her. I wanted to shake her, to tell her this wasn't a fucking game, that it wasn't the 12th century, and that killing people or dying over some squatted chunk of nowhere was somewhere between stupid and reprehensible. I didn't, though. I'm a good journalist. This isn't the place for us to debate, this Narenda said, and all four of them walked through the gate and left me standing by the truck. That was why the gardens were untended and the trash was piled up and the hides were left

to rot. They were expecting this. They'd lost their will to pretend like their lives were going to continue to progress forward. I'm not the first to suggest that nihilism is the dominant affect of society today. With climate change destroying communities and bioregions all over the map, with the economic crisis deepening and the wealth gap widening, I think all of us are guilty of forgetting to tend our gardens. All of us have a hard time figuring out why it matters whether or not we deal with our trash. All of us have proverbial or literal Nazis marching on us. The Nazis the free orcs at Cascadia are dealing with are the literal variety. Some cosplaying fascist was about to stick a sword between Norinda's ribs. Bile rose in my throat. I don't know I believe in love at first sight or any of that shit, but I just

couldn't handle the idea. I fucking hate honor. I will never be an orc. I got lost running through solutions to the problem of hypothetical arrows and swords that were going to interfere with Narendra's continued existence. Most of those solutions involved assault rifles, which I didn't have access to. Cars, though, were available. What's thirty warriors of medieval armor versus one station wagon driven by an angry woman with a lead foot? I put the odds in my favor. I wasn't going to do it, though. Instead, I waited to evacuate. I don't think that speaks well of me. Individually and in groups, people came out through the gate and loaded bags and baskets onto the back of the truck. Narendra returned with a simple backpack sewn from rawhide. Most of her belongings were probably

wherever she and Golf and Bull and the rest of Alcerith lived. She handed me my phone. I didn't have service. I wondered whether or not she and Golf and Bull were dating. It wasn't relevant to the present moment exactly, but my mind always has a way of thinking about bullshit to avoid thinking about impending doom. Another important affect of our generation. Distract ourselves with disaster, with petty things like love and jealousy. I don't know what you said to golf and bull, Narendra said, but whatever it was worked. He just convinced everyone to evacuate. Everyone? I asked, shocked. Everyone except him and Fenric and Gorn. Which one's Gorn? The man who brought us tea.

Do you remember him? He's old as shit, though, I said. Because I have no fucking manners or common sense. Yeah, he's old as shit. He's a linguist by training. His main hobby is writing morbid poetry and dark speech. And when he can't figure out how to say something, he just makes up new words. He developed about a third of the language.

Did all that shit before our orc culture was even around. He's also a widower three times over. He doesn't give a shit about dying. His last chapbook was called Soon I Will Return to the Earth. Oh. Gorn is going to die today. Golfinbol and Fenric, they're going to hold the wall as long as they can and then fall back to the woods. And you, I asked?

I'm driving us out of here, to another village. Then I'll take you home. After that? I don't know, girl. I don't know if I signed up for this. I might leave the woods, go back to being a vet tech. I just nodded. I was too biased to offer objective life advice.

Oh, and Golf and Ball said to give you this. He said it's in case he dies. He says you're right. You shouldn't have to write his obituary. So he wrote his own. She handed me a piece of paper. I piled into the back of the box truck with 40 other people, many of them in tears, many of them in shock, and we drove away from Gray Morrow. None of the three free orcs survived the battle. Gorn died, impaled on a spear while holding the

gate. Fenric was killed by an arrow that struck her in the back of the neck as she and Golfenbull ran. Golfenbull, Fenric's lover, turned and stood his ground over her body. I didn't know any of that yet. I found out when Norinda found out, two days later. Maybe all three of them would have survived if I hadn't interfered, and they'd all fought with equal numbers. Maybe more of them would have died. Maybe I can forgive myself. Maybe there's nothing to forgive. In the back of the truck, by the light coming in through a crack in the steel wall, I read Golf and Bull's note. All my life I didn't give a shit about anything. I liked weed and metal and whatever counterculture trend was big in a given year. But my heart wasn't in it. I just went through the motions. Until I became went through the motions until I became an orc.

Saying I'm an orc and meaning it isn't like a trans man saying he's a man and meaning it. Gender is a social construct that goes back, as far as I understand, to the beginning of humanity. There has always been gender, and there have always been people who transgress the roles assigned to them at birth. An orc is a social construct that we just fucking made up. I mean, I guess the orc is an archetype too, but it's a fantasy archetype. We know it's make-believe. Make-believe is what gave my life meaning. I promise you that for me, the day we decided we were orcs was the first day that the sun shone benevolence upon the world.

It was the first day that color radiated from everything I saw. It was the first day that the rain on my roof tapped out codes of meaning. It was the first day of my life. My real life. My first ulcereth, I fell in love with the world. Everyone finds meaning in different ways. I found meaning by believing in some shit we made up and letting that be real.

I was born Jason Sanchez. I died golfing bull. I'm not sorry. That was great. That was so fun.. I'm not sorry. That was great. That was so fun. I mean, not my narration, the story. The story, not my narration. No, that's so good.

No, your narration was perfect. Mm-hmm. The second we finished, we all just got that little smirk on our face, like, ooh, that was delightful. Yeah. Margaret, you're the best. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. I mean, if I were going to be an orc there would be rifles but problems yeah this is absolutely this is like a really good example of what i mean that when i write utopian fiction or like fiction about other societies i'm not saying hey everyone go do this or like this is what people should do no i, I mean, I liked that. I like that. I've had that experience in other cultures, you know, places like Slab City and different kind of encampments and whatnot that I've spent a lot of time in as a journalist where it's like, I'm fascinated by and I respect aspects of this, but like, I also think some of these things that you're doing are dumb, or I don't understand why you do it, or this isn't like, you know.

But your notes don't matter. You know, that's not your job. Yeah. Although actually having an impact in that way is kind of, yeah. I don't know. Somebody go make an work village. Yeah. Yeah. Do it. I'll go out there. I'll report on it. We'll go make an Orc Village. Yeah. Yeah.

Do it. I'll go out there. I'll report on it. We'll go. It'll be fun. Don't take the band name Allsworth, though. I already stole that band called Allsworth. There's a number of dope band names in here.

Aw. All right. People should make Orc Folk. I'd be really excited to hear it. Make Orc Folk. Abandon civilization to live as fantasy creatures. Fight fascists.

All that good stuff. Margaret, is there anything you'd like to plug? Well, I do have a new book out or a reprint of an older book called A Country of Ghosts that is a more directly utopian book. It's out from AK Press, came out last month. And I think that's it. That's main thing. Oh, you can support me on Patreon, although it's no longer supporting me on Patreon. It's supporting a publishing thing that I'm starting back up with people called Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. starting back up with people called strangers in the tangled wilderness and it will publish fiction and memoir and like the kind of like more culture side of radical politics and less the like theory and stuff what's the patreon uh patreon.com strangers in the tangled wilderness because why

would i pick short names for things yeah don't do that yeah and uh we have we have a live show coming up, right, Robert? That doesn't sound like us. It's a virtual live show for Behind the Bastards with our friend Prop that's on Thursday, February 17th. Allegedly. momenthouse.com slash behindthebastards. I can't confirm or deny that. Okay. Yeah, we've got to get a lawyer on here before he can deny that. Okay. Yeah, we gotta get a lawyer on here before he can... Sure.

Okay. Yeah, let's get Moira on the horn. Yeah, Moira, come on the horn and tell us if we're actually doing this thing. Are we doing a live show? Yeah, are we? Also, are we alive? That's another question. Oh, I text her that most days.

All right, well, thank you, Margaret. And thank you all for tuning in in the first year of the rest of the next year. Yay. Yay. 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 find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow Broth. Thanks for listening. terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.