It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 17

Episode Date: January 15, 2022

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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 today, there's a little bit of them getting put back together, but today's mostly them falling apart. I'm your host, Christopher Wong. With me, I have Lucy, who is a teacher in Chicago Public Schools and is part of the Teachers Union. And today, we're going to be talking about just the absolute shitshow that is being inflicted on teachers and students in Chicago Public Schools. And Lucy, how are you doing?

in child public schools and lucy how are you how are you doing um you know it's it's been kind of weird but all in all i'm in good spirits i think my sisters and brothers in ctu are in good spirits so we're gonna keep fighting the good fight hell yeah so before before we fully start to get into the teachers union and laurie lightfoot's fuckery I want to sort of get a bit of context for people who don't live in Chicago or just don't know much about only politics. Because if you read sort of like media accounts of this, like you may be sort of misled into thinking that there's like even some semblance of good faith going on here from laurie lightfoot and like i just i just want to like do a great like a laurie lightfoot greatest hits reel for a second so lightfoot like immediately after she got elected like the one like the first thing she does is she starts she literally she's like okay there's too much crime on the subway we're gonna put SWAT teams on them and so you know you just be on the red line there's a SWAT team and you

know because again this is what happens when you put a swat team on the fucking subway they immediately shot a dude in the back for nothing he was literally no reason they just shot him in the back um so that that was like that was like like the the first like few weeks of lightfoot and then during the uprising she like she she turned the rich part of chicago into like a medieval castle like she like like raised all the drawbridges into the middle of the city so that no one could get into the central part of the city it was like it was awful and then you know then as as he sort of like there's more and more sort of bad light foot stuff uh most recently so chicago got uh a bunch of aid money from the federal government and she spent 281 million

dollars of it paying the police not the schools yeah nope and cpd like these again i i i think i've talked about this before but like when when the cia was like our initial torturing program failed where do we go to like find people who know how to torture they brought in a chicago police detective like and you know and this is the cpt like like there's there's two halves of cpd right there's there's like the torture cpd and then related to them but not necessarily identical is the part of the cp that's just a cartel like there there was there was a thing in in uh at the beginning of the the 2010s were like it turned out that like the almost like the the huge parts of the CPD were

literally just a cartel. They were running drugs. They were just like doing shakedowns for, and, and like one person total, like got arrested by the FBI for it. Everyone else is just still there. It's great.

It's a, it's a time. So this is, this is who Lori Lightfoot is. She sucks. Like everyone hates her. Like her, the people who should be her political allies hate her like

chicago chicago got like a police reform bill and the reason it was like a very mild one but the reason it happened was just that like like the like the alderman passed it out of just pure spite because of how much they don't like lightfoot so this is this is the this has been my my christopher shouts at lauren lightfoot intro to this. But yeah, needless to say, Lightfoot not acting in good faith, just absolutely awful. She's a Batman villain. Yeah, it's incredible. No, actually, that's not fair because a lot of Batman

villains are kind of right. Yeah. She's right. Yeah, she's like the nightmare fusion of Batman and a Batman villain. What if's like the nightmare fusion of like batman and a batman villain like what if what if like the worst aspects of both and then made them the mayor it's it's a yeah i i've been kind of um so i i moved here uh almost a year ago from a smaller city and

i did not like the mayor in my city and he he really was a big fan of like the Lori Lightfoot playbook but um I guess people weren't as politically involved there and my first week working in Chicago public schools um somebody mentioned the mayor mentioned laurie and everybody kind of groaned and i i was like oh you don't like her you don't like your mayor and i mean i knew they didn't but i was just kind of testing the waters and this lady looks at me and goes we hate her i swear like if you mention her name yeah in this city people practically spit on the ground. It's amazing. You mentioned a demon. Chicago notoriously, we all hate

our politicians, but Lightfoot, you would find Rahm Emanuel supporters, right? I don't know a single outside of the schools, within the schools, everyone I know. Even the cops don't like her

she keeps funneling billions of dollars into them and they still don't like her it's incredible. How do you unite the teachers union and the police union on something? It's the only thing that they've ever agreed on is fuck Lori Lightfoot. It's really incredible so Lori Lightfoot. It's really incredible. So, Lori Lightfoot's latest scheme. Yeah, do you want to explain, I guess go back

a little bit into the history of sort of how Chicago and Chicago public schools have kind of been responding to COVID and then how they just did this stuff. And yeah, I guess like, yeah, give us some background,

like what's going on right now. Well, I'm going to preface with two things. One, I am fairly new here, so I don't know all of the details. And two, I really want to emphasize that I'm just here talking for myself. I don't represent CTU in any way. This is just, I wanted to talk about my feelings on things. So what I do know is they were doing remote learning. And when I arrived here in March, we were fully remote. And then in the fourth marking period, so like around like after spring break, we moved to a hybrid model.

So we had parents and kids could like choose if they wanted to stay online or if they wanted to be in person. I think like 60 percent or more, depending on what school, chose the online option. Like a lot of parents just were not comfortable putting their kids in. I know that there's been like a ton of talk about, you know, like the most economically disadvantaged families need the schools open. But it's kind of been the reverse. It's been the people who have more means are more interested in opening and people who are less well off are a little more resistant to it. I mean, that's not the same across the board. I don't want to generalize too much, but that's been what I've seen. I think if I had to guess it, there's a lot of history behind that. I mean, first of all, just can your family afford an illness like this and people living in multigenerational households?

is just how how much mistrust there is between government institutions public schools yeah and um people of color i mean for good reason you know they have been repeatedly just screwed over by these institutions and i can absolutely understand why they might not trust a school district that says hey we'll keep your kids. Cause they weren't doing it before the pandemic. Um, so we had, uh, I had like seven kids in one of my classes and like 10 in another, and then the rest of them were online. And I'm like sitting at a computer teaching to the kids online and to the kids in the room, all the kids in the room are on their computers too, so that we can like still be like one cohesive class. It was hard and it was like kind of like mentally fatiguing, like just going back and forth like that. But, you know, we made it work. I was kind of, I was really proud of us. Like we made it work. We made it happen. We stayed in contact with the families and the kids constantly. And like as

things moved on and as numbers started going down, more people started wanting their kids back. And then after spring break, they, well, so like after spring break, they let people come back. And then as we moved towards summer, more and more kids were coming back, which it was the school I was in was handling it very well. Our principal was really committed to keeping us safe. So there was testing. Once a week, somebody would come by and be like, yo, go get your COVID test. I don't know if kids were being tested,

but I know teachers were. Then summer happens. I ended up in a different school in the Austin neighborhood, which is a lot less advantaged than the one that i had been working in and we opened back up fully in person no remote option like at all like yikes um the only people who could get remote were kids that were deemed medically fragile but they had to one submit like tons of paperwork to prove that and two their siblings could not stay so at that point it's like why what's the point yeah

and if you were a teacher who had a medically fragile child in the schools your kid could be remote but you couldn't so then you know how is that going to work? Yeah. And I found in the school where I was, you know, this is the issue with Chicago and with, you know, most of the country is some schools have more resources than others. And the school, I didn't know where to get tested. Nobody, like, told me. I think there was some kind of testing program. Not sure. Definitely nothing for students. testing program. Not sure. Definitely nothing for students. I've since moved to a high school that has more resources, but still I have not been able to figure out where the heck to get testing,

which has been one of the biggest things that CTU is asking for is we want opt out testing instead of opt in testing. So you would automatically be registered to test. And if you didn't want to test, then you would have to opt out, which would end up with far more people getting tested and make it a lot easier. Because I mean, a big part of why people aren't signing up is it's really hard. Like, I don't know where to find it.

Everyone's like, it's in your email somewhere. I've searched my email. I don't know. Like we get like 800 emails a day like yeah and it's yeah like you know i think anyone anyone who remembers what being in a school is like those they have i mean just the absolute worst bureaucratic stuff like it's it's it's like honestly like it like my experiences with like academia and like even back in like high school like their tech stuff was like worse

than corporate tech stuff which is like astounding it's it's ridiculous do you want to jump into here into lightfoot's like okay lightfoot has like invented a new kind of covid denialism which is like like she she's now turned into a COVID test nihilist. It's weird. It's incredible. She went on this rant about how COVID testing is a, quote, quasi-medical procedure and how you're going to get lawsuits. It's bizarre.

So this journalist asked her about the testing, and I don't know which journalist that was, but I wanted to thank them them so much because they i've seen a lot of the reporters are actually out there trying to keep ctu's demands in the conversation as opposed to this like whole oh lazy teachers don't want to work like fuck off we we do want to be working um but so i i almost thought that she had like mixed up what this person said and thought that they were talking about vaccines, but even so like, stop it,

stop, just stop doing that. But who is having a reaction to a COVID test? It is literally a Q-tip. Like, like you just stick it. They don't even stick it that far up your nose anymore. They just do the little in your nostril or like a mouth smile.

Yeah. Like as someone who had like, I genuinely did have a kind of bad reaction because the guy jabbed it up really far. And like, I was like sneezing a lot afterwards, but it's like, what?

Oh no. You sneezed a little bit. Like what, what does it even mean? Like how not like i i feel like people are acting like this test is like this weird new technology it is it isn't like right before the pandemic like a couple months before i had the flu and i had exactly the same kind of test they stuck a thing up my nose it was hella uncomfortable um it took like two seconds. They stuck it on a little plastic thing on my bob and said, oh, looks like you have the flu.

Yeah. It's I don't know where this is coming from. I think it's just she is not a very charismatic person and she's not someone who does well under pressure. And right now she's backed into a corner and she's acting out and it's been kind of wild like I've seen she's she's also throwing other people around her under the bus yeah like she says something about Pedro Martinez like she says the teachers aren't in charge of this Pedro Martinez is in charge she's the CEO and I'm like okay so you're being this is setting him up to take the blame on this I saw I saw another thing that you tweeted about like it was uh she was like no no it's actually the mayor's and not the mayor's sorry it's actually the uh uh it's the principals who are responsible for this the principals were

like no yeah so CPS is kind of interesting. This can be really good or really bad depending on what school you're in. But the principals really have a lot of autonomy over their school. I've now been in two schools where that's worked out great. My principal rocks. If she ever hears this, I hope she knows that I said that. I think she's great. My principal rocks. If she ever hears this, I hope she knows that I said that. I think she's great. Also, the principal I worked at the beginning of the school year was awful. But when it comes to district-wide protocols, that's district-wide. And so CPS apparently had

a meeting with principals where I heard some rumors about this, too, but I also saw that letter that they had posted. The principals are, one, really frustrated because CPS isn't communicating stuff with them very effectively. And so parents will be calling, like, do we have school tomorrow? And they don't know. But CTU knows and is telling their members. know, but CTU knows and is telling their members. So the teachers all know the like more answers than the principals do, which is obviously really embarrassing if you're supposed to be in charge. And then they were told in this meeting with CPS, school's going to be closed on Friday. Okay, school's closed on Friday. Great. Sounds good. And then Lightfoot gets on the dang news and tells everybody that it will be done on a school by school basis at principal's discretion, depending on if they

have staff. So now all of these principals who had already told their students and families that we're closing look like they're the ones who closed it. It is rare for me to feel bad for a school principal because that's my boss. I don't like my boss, but I feel bad for them right now. Oh my God. You're just trying to make sure that people have the information they need in a timely manner and this lady is up here making you look like a monster. It's so unfair. Yeah. Should we talk about what's been happening in the run up to the past sort of winter break and then the stuff that's happening now because it's very grim and bad. Yeah. So a lot of schools have been having COVID cases. I'm not really sure what's going on with CPS's data. It kind of seems like they're not reporting it very faithfully or accurately. Like if you look at their tracker,

there'll be cases and then suddenly they'll be gone. We never really get a hard number ever. Like we'll be like, if you have a student in your class who has been quarantined and we all know what it is, but they don't say it. They'll be like, you know, Johnny will be out for the next X amount of time due to health reasons. Please let him join via Google Meet. And they never do. That's the other annoying thing is like the students, I think, because they are either close contact or they're sick um you know to them it's like a a break almost like they're not going to log in randomly like it's it's just with I think with kids like once it stops being consistent and it's like back and forth all the time it becomes very difficult for them to stay motivated because they're out of their routine. Like I sometimes hate it when people say this, but it is kind of true. Kids kind of thrive on routine.

So at this point now I have like a third of my class at any given moment will just not be there. And it will be a different third of the class every, you know, it kind of like rolls through. So all of my students are at like different points in the curriculum. It's hard to like know what to teach each day because I don't know who needs what. It's hard to reach out to the kids that are at home and make sure that they get what they need because I'm so busy trying to catch these kids up and move these kids on and all that stuff. Which I have seen some research. I'll see if I can find it after we're done.

That like pointed out that like remote learning isn't the worst thing that can happen. The worst thing that can happen is just flipping back and forth all the time and having huge numbers of kids absent from in-person learning. having huge numbers of kids absent from in-person learning um so we go on break and obviously we have omicron like sweeping through the country and we all knew that there were going to be spikes like we knew that and chicago had what was if illinois had some like astronomically high number of new covid cases, breaking records all over the place. CPS has had huge increases. Yesterday, we had 43,984 cases in Illinois.

Wow. That's a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah. So over break, like the last like the union had been trying has been trying forever to get CPS to come in and they reached a certain threshold. That agreement has expired and CPS has refused to come to the bargaining table and negotiate a new one. They're just like, no, we don't need it. We also have been trying to get them to do the opt-out testing and a surveillance testing program in school so we can kind of just have little bits of data to understand where are these cases?

CPS doesn't want to do this. They don't want a threshold for flipping a remote because then they would have to flip to remote and they don't want the surveillance testing because then they would have to flip to remote and they just don't want to flip to remote. Yeah. So finally over break, you know, it kind of came to a head,

like they were still refusing to negotiate. Like one of the union delegates in my building said something about um they've been meeting they go to these meetings like you know they're like twice a week they try to get these meetings to happen and the mayor never comes and the ceo never comes like they they will either send lawyers or they don't show up and it's like jude sounded so tired and demoralized when he said that I felt bad for him. But yeah, so we voted that we were going to go in on Monday and Tuesday, meet with our safety committees, get a feel for what's going on in school. And then we are going to have a vote on Tuesday night as to whether or not we will do a remote work

action on Wednesday. And I know a lot of people have been like trying to make it sound like this was very sudden, but it absolutely wasn't. Like we had a vote about whether or not we were interested in doing this. And then we had a vote on whether we were still interested on having a vote. And then we had the vote and the delegates voted on if they wanted to hold an official, like, should we do an action vote? We did. It was like 70% voted yes. There were some complaints

that some people didn't get their ballots, but they did wait till they had enough yes votes to reach that two-third majority that we needed so you know CTU has every step of the way really been making sure um this is actually what we want this isn't just like unilateral things like Lori keeps throwing that word unilateral around it wasn't unilateral it was like at least two-thirds of the teachers in this district said i don't feel safe at school there's not enough staff in the building right now to even teach half my kids a third of my kids are out this isn't working so yeah so we voted that we're going to stay home and work remotely

and then we got locked out yeah which again like i want to sort of focus on this for a second because like even a lot of people who are sympathetic to to the teachers unions on twitter you see this a lot they'll they'll be like the the ctu went on strike it's like no they didn't like the teachers and teachers are not on strike the teachers are attempting to work from home and the school district will not let them yeah Yeah, it's every morning I get up at 630 to make my coffee and I sit down and I try to log in. I know I won't be able to, but I do it anyway. Thankfully, I had thought to download as much of my materials as I could prior to this onto my personal device. So I am still able to create lesson plans and making some very

cool social studies slides. I'm so sure that my students are going to love lots of cool assignments for them to do too. But yeah, like this is a lockout and Lori keeps throwing this word like illegal work stoppage around. It's not a work stoppage we are actively working she has illegally it is in our contract that she can't lock us out and she did so yeah so yeah everyone's suing each other and saying illegal but i know which side is right yeah yeah you know like i i am not an enormous respecter of the law but like this is this is both there's one of the rare occasions where the thing that is happening is both illegal and also just wrong the reporting on this just has not gotten the actual fundamental thing which is happening here which is a lockout and it's enormously frustrating

in a lot of ways because you know and i'd say this okay so like local media reporting has been a lot better but any like any national coverage has just i've seen it's just been like yeah that's gonna be it for part one of this interview come back tomorrow for part two we will talk more about what's actually going on inside the schools and you know generally do the media's job for them because lord knows they're not actually getting it right. You can find us on HappenedHerePod on Twitter and Instagram, as usual. Or you can not find us. In fact, I encourage you not to find us because, good lord, the internet is bad.

Goodbye. 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. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things going badly and falling apart. And today we are back with part two of our interview with Lucy about how the Chicago public school system is falling apart under the relentless assault of cruelty, malice,

and incompetence by the Chicago public schools and by the mayor, Lori Lightfoot. Enjoy. There's another thing I want to talk about a bit, which is when you've been back, when you've been teaching in these really... What is it actually like to teach in these classrooms? How safe actually is it? I've been in a lot of different environments. When I was teaching middle schoolers I did not feel super COVID safe um they are I don't know if people know this about middle school age kids they love to touch each other especially boys they love to like wrestle they're always putting each other in headlocks I'm constantly having to just be like six feet six feet apart or three feet or whatever

CDC has said we are now um they don't put their masks on they put their masks in their mouths all the time like in their mouths um oh no there's they're constantly finding like weird little excuses to have their mask off like they'll just sit there with like like they're allowed to have water bottles because they can't use the water fountains they'll just sit there with like a straw on their mouth for like extended amounts of time and i'm like i need you to put your mask up take quick sips and put your mask up and they're like i'm drinking like i'm gonna be drinking at the end of this day like i know take a quick sip put your mask back up it's really really important for your safety um

and then i have other kids who are absolutely straight up like terrified of this because like they've lost parents they've lost grandparents um it's it's really scary um at the high school level it's been a little better high school kids are a little more rational um but i still have a few who are just like their masks are down around their chins all the time or under their nose and i'm i'll like several times the class period. I'm like, okay, time for everybody to do a mask check. Make sure your mask is covering your nose, your mouth, your chin. I'll remind them like I have a spouse at home who has an underlying condition.

And like, please don't have me bring home a deadly disease to him. Because that would really not be great. Most of them are pretty good but still they're getting sick like i think we had like 40 kids out of my building on monday and uh like 28 staff members or something like that were out and we had one sub which is the other that's the other issue is this isn't really a question of if we should go remote. It's a question of when will we be forced to go remote? And we can either do that now before everybody has gotten sick and wait for this to subside and get some better mitigation strategies in place.

Or we can do it after everybody is sick and then we're going to be scrambling to figure it out and also be sick at the same time. I don't really see how that makes any sense. Yeah. And that's the part of this that I've just been like, I just like, I don't get it. Like, I could just like fundamentally, there's just like a mental break where it's like, I don't understand why. Like, Lightfoot and CPS are so insistent about not going remote. like light foot and cps are so insistent about not going remote like i i get that like yeah it's it's hard on kids but it's like it's it's you know it it is the years 2020 2021 and 2022 like no matter what you do it's it's hard on the kids and it's like yeah it just i also i wonder how much of it

is the remote learning that's hard on them and how much of it is just the everything around them is crashing and falling and burning around their ears. Because the messaging that they've been getting is that they don't matter. They're not important. Their safety isn't important. Their families aren't important. And some of them like want to be remote. A lot lot of them a lot of their parents want them to be remote they're like you know it's not as good but at least i feel safe some of them even thrived in remote like actually did pretty well and i really wish that it was just an option for those students who actually did well with it that they could just like if we even ended up with like a third of our students choosing it it would mitigate this so much because that's a third of the people not there to spread it around um

so can i ask like how big how big your class sizes are um right now the building i'm in now i have like 25 to 30 in some my it was kind of similar at the last building like they're in that range 25 30 I have like always have like one or two that are like 20 or below that are usually um special education like inclusion classes where I have a co-teacher um but yeah it's you know some of them are pretty crowded and it really varies by school like there's definitely schools that have over 30 kids in a room um and don't have the staff because it's just that's the other thing is like they keep talking about you know i keep seeing people be like fire all the teachers and i'm like good luck like yeah yes is chronically understaffed. What are you going to do?

Yes. Like this. Yeah. I think, again, this job is really hard. Like it's being a teacher. Yeah. It's hard. It's exhausting.

It's very, very rewarding. Like when it's good, it's great. When it's bad, it is miserable. Yeah. So, yeah. And like what it looks like and i mean that's you know it depends it really depends on what school you're in um i think everybody can agree that it is difficult right now um so we we have like air purifiers going and masks on and i cannot understand what my kids are saying a lot of the time like I do not know

and they speak so quietly yeah like I need you to shout it say it like you mean whatever it is so but you know that's been challenging and frustrating and exhausting but um the worst thing ever is finding out that one of my students is sick. Like it, I hate when they're, I hate it when they hurt, like whenever that one of them is hurting, I feel bad. And knowing that their home's sick is it's, it's really upsetting. And just,

it's, you know, it's distressing for teachers to know that their kids are struggling in a way like that. So that's, you know, we want them to be safe. You know,

like these kids, it's like, and this is, this is true of the staff too. When you, when you're getting these kids it's like and this is true of the staff too when you're when you're getting sick it's like yeah like some of these people will be okay but enormous numbers of people are like some of these people are going to die so these people a lot of these people are going to get disabled um yeah i mean the the long-term long-term effects are really bad and we you know one of if people remember uh we we did an episode with one of our friends who's a nurse and like, yeah, like he had long COVID.

His long COVID was like, he couldn't do more than like getting out of bed or like just walking across a room would just put him in bed all day because there's, you know, there's an enormous range of sort of like, of long COVID side effects. And yeah, it's like, it's,

it's just like CPS is just child public schools. It's just in like, they're getting people killed. Yeah. And it's, and it's, you know, that's like the question,

like they keep talking about percentages and I'm like, these are human beings. Every one of those numbers is a human. So when you say like only, you know, point, whatever percent are going to be long term affected, like, okay, those are people. Can we stop like dehumanizing them with these data points? As for the issue with how kids are less affected by it or whatever, the fact is the more we allow this to spread around, the more variants we're going to see. And we don't know that the next variant isn't going to be the one that is really significantly harmful to children. And we are basically turning our schools into these Petri dishes where this thing can mutate and become stronger. And now we have vaccinated people who are in that mix and it's becoming resistant to the vaccine.

So I, you know, I'm, I'm a social studies teacher, not a science teacher, but this seems like a bad move to me. Yeah. Yeah. It's, I don't know.. It's just sort of heartbreaking in a lot of ways. I mean, it's just... They've just decided that... And again, I don't know why Lightfoot's doing this. Maybe it's just because she wants to sure up her base thing because she's trying to build a base among the just rich, weird Northsiders or something.

But it's... She's a small business person. That's always been her. he's a small business person that's always been people are the small business owners who don't want to close schools because then you know their workers won't come in and i you know i want to feel sorry for them but i know i don't know like i'm like fuck you because yeah there's also a lot of small business owners who have been very supportive of us. We had, uh, there was like a taco place offering free burritos to us. Like, I really appreciate that. So like the community who understand that, like the lives of our children

are so much more important than you missing two weeks of profit. Yeah. Like you will figure that out. And if you want to bail out businesses um we can figure that out but right now and also like is is saying like we have we aren't we refuse to do anything that might be inconvenient for business owners like what is that yeah and it's like it's like yeah so you know and also yeah but like business owners did get bailed out like they got they got they got zero percent loans most of those loans got written off and meanwhile yeah it's like well okay what did life do with the covet money she she gave it to the cops and oh hey guess guess who's also just a rampant spreader of covet oh yeah it's the cops yeah yeah who resisted vaccines the most the cops i mean actually there there is one funny thing

which i'm actually very excited about which is that the cops are doing, they're having their first, so they have a new class graduating, but from the police academies, which is really bad. And there's a whole, well, one of the like Lightfoot's things was that there was a huge campaign against building more police academies because, you know, everyone hates the Chicago Police Department. They're awful. more police academies because you know everyone hates the Chicago Police Department they're awful and if you have a hundred billion dollars for a new police academy why or a hundred million or whatever it was why can't you put some better ventilation in the schools yeah well it's good yeah it's because because like the CPD are like basically feudal lords they have knights they go out they can shoot you like they rob you they just like any any any large number of like black kids on the streets like if you just have like 15 kids walking around like eight quad cars

will show up and you know there was in lightfoot was like no no her like one of her campaign things big campaign things like no no we're gonna make sure we build these academies and but so they're having their first like round they've been having trouble recruiting because of covid which is good yeah and and they're they're about to have their first police academy exam and it's going to be in person and i am this is the only one of the few is this in jr bosonaro where it's like i am rooting for the virus here like please god save us from these cops but yeah i mean it's god but they're just gonna bring it home and spread it around yeah yeah that's the sad it's, it's, but they're just going to bring it home and spread it around. Yeah. Yeah. That's the sad thing.

It's, it's just, it's grotesque and yeah. Yeah. It's been this thing where I'm like watching, like the school system is just throwing their hands up and saying, we don't care. We're done. The health system, the healthcare system is like crashing and burning all around us nurses are quitting hospitals are like we don't have room for more patients like did you have a cancer treatment scheduled sorry did you have a surgery scheduled sorry i just saw somebody on twitter saying she um has a brain tumor and she's supposed to have a surgery for it and she can't now because of covid

because they have no beds there aren't any and you're telling me that the right move right now is to keep the schools open which has always been yep in every every pandemic that we've ever had schools and hospitals and prisons are like the place where the whatever diseases spreads and i know we've been claiming that like there's not been spread in schools but we've now seen the data that there in fact is a huge amount which i've been like screaming about this since we started that their contact tracing models are they're absurd they are like kaf Kafka-esque like basically um so we start from the assumption that everybody is six feet apart and wearing their mask at all times yeah which they're not it's not it's not even it's not even physically possible in a lot of classrooms for that to be happening and then two

we start with the assumption that those things work. And so you'll get a call from a contact tracer that's like, Hey, on, you know, like last Tuesday, Tuesday of last week, were you within six feet of any of your eighth graders for more than 15 minutes? The fuck if I know Tuesday of last week, was I near an eighth grader for 15 minutes? I don't know.

I have no idea yeah even if like even if I did know what difference does it make it is an aerosolized virus it is in the air and the more you sit in classrooms the more it accumulates like we have seen like studies about um this we've seen studies about how co2 accumulates in the air when there's crowds we know that stuff accumulates like that in classrooms very very quickly and you're going to tell me that as long as i wasn't within 15 or within six feet for more than 15 continuous minutes not even like um not even 15 minutes like added up throughout the day just 15 minutes continuously i'm not going to get a virus are you shitting me like yeah that makes no sense and so then if and if and if your

answer to those questions are no because whatever you were following the rules then they're like okay you got covid somewhere else it wasn't at school yeah no it doesn't yeah it's nonsense it's like i go to work and i go home i don't do anything else so i doesn't, yeah, it's nonsense. It's like, I go to work and I go home. I don't do anything else, so I don't know where else it's coming from. Yeah, like, and I also just, I want to do a brief digression about, like, okay, so, like, I went to, like, a pretty good,

like, a pretty well, like, a very well-funded, like, Chicago area sort of school, and, like, okay, those places, those places, ventilation sucks. Like, again, like, again, I went to a very well-funded school, like, we had those places ventilation sucks like again like again i went to a very well-funded school like we had a we had drowned dead rats falling out of the ceiling like wow it was it was incredibly it was one of my one of my my my great high school memories was my principal just like running full tilt pushing a trash can because dead trash can fell out of the ceiling. Oh my god. That's horrible.

But my school was wild. We had, oh man, it was a, we had a chemistry teacher let a kid set off a smoke bomb like that they'd made like in a classroom but it didn't work so it just like actually blew up. It was a time. But like yeah, like these schools.

Project based learning, okay? Yeah, you gotta light the school on fire but like like this is a this is like yeah like like these schools are not like they're not safe environments yeah the building i worked in at the beginning of the year was 100 years old it was built in 1920 and there was always this like sewage smell around the bathroom as the pipes were messed up it was weird like they couldn't fix it i think it was the i was the second or third time my building lit on fire like we there was a there was a whole thing of the building that was made of asbestos and they just had left it there because it was

like oh it wasn't exposed yeah yes we'll still have asbestos yeah all over like again like i i went to like a good well-funded one of these schools right like it's i don't i think there's there's like there's there's these two there's two things i think it like is interesting like there's when you like talk to like the people who want the schools to open back up right they'll they'll start talking about like oh no it's fine everyone wears masks everyone's vaccinated uh everyone's like no no they're not like this this is how it works in this like imaginary play world you've like created have you ever met a child yeah like have you met your own children like oh and that's the best it's like well i've been having my kids wear a mask like you have you're full of shit okay

because i told that kid to put their mask on like 15 times yesterday and i love them beautiful face i hope they get to show it off someday but right now yeah keep it covered up please I'm begging you and I'm like I'm not like that teacher who's really authoritarian like I've never been good at like writing kids up and getting on them for stuff because it's just like I don't know I hate doing that I hate being that person yeah so it's been like really it's like a struggle it's like am I going to be the person who nags them every five seconds? Or am I going to be the teacher that they like and want to learn from? Like, you know, this isn't sustainable.

So, but you're asking like the attitudes of people who want to open schools back up. And I, it's, it's hard because I, I have talked to parents who are worried, but they are also very upset because they see that their kids are struggling. And I really do feel for them on that. Like, I really, really do. It is hard to see a kid struggle, but it is harder, I think, to see a kid sick. That is really hard. And it's just this, like, there are ways that we can overcome the difficulties of remote learning. We can find ways to give them the emotional support. We can find better socializing outlets, socializing outlets but i don't know how we fix like you've become very ill and your body isn't going to recover in the way that you thought it would like i don't yeah i can't fix that so that's something i've heard from other teachers that like that preparing about learning stuff like

is harder and takes more work than yeah it does it's it's really rough i don't like doing it i want to be in the classroom but yeah and i just i just want to like once again yell at all the people who are like the teachers are lazy and it's like no people like they're like yeah like you know like you're you are advocating to do more work because that's that's the thing that will keep the kids safe. And it's. Yeah. I think a lot of people don't understand like the behind the scenes, how the sausage gets made of a classroom. But I think a lot of people have this idea that like,

we are given curriculum and plans and materials pre-made. And sometimes that's true. It depends on your subject. Mine is social studies is not a subject where that happens very much, which is part of why I like it because I like to be creative. So my week looks like there are a lot of hours after school where I am sitting down, I'm looking at the standards that I need to teach, the topics that I need to teach, topics that I need to teach and I'm researching it and learning it and finding a way to teach that to kids who don't have the same like baseline knowledge

that I have um and then I'm creating like an activity for them I'm creating um you're I'm finding like material like sources and like videos and stuff that they can watch that are going to help them or things to read I'm modifying those things for the kids who have um you know learning differences I'm translating some of those things into Spanish for kids who don't really read very well in English yet so like that's a ton of work on its own and then when we switch to remote we have to figure out how to do all of that on google classroom where now it has to all be typed like or yeah you know like how do i figure like how do i do a group project online how do i let them do something creative that isn't just sitting here answering questions on a worksheet that's hard and we've been really good at it and i've found all kinds of really cool

tools to to do that with but it's so much work and it's work that i'm willing to do because i care about my job i enjoy my work i love my students but um you know and i want them to be safe but like you know it is a ton of work i'm not just sitting here eating bonbons all day or drinking cocktails yeah and i think there's there's like a larger sort of like like americans have this like the sexist sort of like hatred of like or in disrespect to people who do both care work and in a lot and creative work yeah absolutely both and then simultaneously there's this sort of like you know the the there's there's there's a resentment to people who get to actually do something that helps people

and you know i think like right now we're seeing just the most toxic fusion of that which is that like yeah i know like these like you know instead of like you know recognizing the enormous amount of work that that's going into all like that's going into into teaching like the amount of sort of like the care and love that's going into the creativity that's going into it and just like like people people's willing that like you're willing list to make like enormous sacrifices to try to keep these kids safe they're just like no like the teachers are lazy they don't want to work they're going on strike like and it's yeah you know and it's like they're doing this and it's like yeah like you you are like they're

killing their own kids and it's just like it's it's this weird fusion of like we we occupy the space as this like combination of like feminized care labor emotional labor and um that sort of like like intelligentsia like professional um white collar intellectual kind of thing and then also we're teaching a um more introductory level of our subjects so we're seen as like discount intellectuals who are also women who do care work. So it's, it's very frustrating and I don't think a lot of people understand the amount of skill and expertise it takes to be a teacher and be effective at it. Like it's not just,

I need to know social studies to the level that a 12th grader would know it. It's I need to know social studies beyond that level and know how to communicate it to a high school student. And also I need to know a lot of stuff about like child development. It's really, it's something. And I find that to be fun and challenging, but I wish it was respected.

And then you're talking about like people are sacrificing their own kids. I want to point out a lot. Like, I think there's a racial component to this. Yeah. The people who are in wealthier schools and who are mostly white know that their kids are going to be fine. Like they are in schools that actually do have the resources to distance that have air filters that have good ventilation um they're vaccinated their kids are probably going to be fine the kids that aren't going to be fine are low-income students of color and it has always been this way it's always been this way with schools like when schools were desegregated, we started with private school vouchers and we started with all of these like state testing requirements and withholding funding from schools that don't meet those test standards. And all of these like this extra oversight on teachers like that stuff all comes back to white people don't want to have to worry about black people's

kids that's it and you know they will move their kids out to the north side or the suburbs or whatever notice that all of those suburb schools have flipped remote notice that laurie lightfoot's kids are in a charter school that is not remote well and more than that yeah like lightfoot lightfoot lightfoot won't eat like Lightfoot will not put herself in a room with the same number of people that a teacher has to go to every day. She won't do it. She was telling people at the press conferences they had to wear their masks.

Even though she wasn't wearing hers, which was very strange to me. That's the thing. When you get to the politician level, they know it's dangerous. They know it. You can tell. I'm in a print skirt. can tell me right now yeah like they won't do it but like no no they're they're perfectly willing to just send to send you off

to die to send all these kids off to die and it's just yeah sometimes i feel i get kind of doomer and i wonder if like if that's not the plan like is it that i mean i don't really believe that i think what it really is is this just like malicious neglect like if you're somebody who's a policymaker and someone comes to you and it's like i need you to care about this population here that doesn't have a lot of money and needs a lot of things and you the, the policymaker, are going to be like, oh, that sounds like so much work. And then somebody else is going to come to you and be like, I need these things over here. And I do have a lot of money.

And I do have a lot of influence. And I'm going to make your life difficult if you don't do what I want. They're going to do what that other side wants. And what that other side wants right now is for kids to get back into school so that they can have free daycare so that parents can go to work. And that's it. And teachers are standing here being like i didn't get a master's degree and do you know countless hours of professional development to be a babysitter you know and no not to knock babysitters i was a nanny for a long time that is hard work but um i didn't get a master's degree to be a babysitter i got a master's degree to be a babysitter. I got a master's degree to be a teacher.

And I'm in an environment right now where I can't really teach effectively. And all I'm doing is babysitting. They want to warehouse kids. That is what we're doing with the schools. That's why they want them open. And it's hard not to feel like they just are doing it because they hate us, even though I know it's not, it just, it does feel that way.

I, I wasn't like, I will say that like, so you're, so if, if you become elected as the mayor of Chicago, like your job is to break the teachers union. Like that's,

that's like, that's, that's, that's, that's like the role you're auditioning for. And they have been, they have been trying to do this for literally my entire lifetime. They've trying to do this like since before i was born like that's and it honestly like wouldn't surprise me if this was another part of this was just them once again

trying to break the teachers union oh absolutely like and if and not even just that like yeah you don't mean unlike like not just on the sort of political level like on the incredible cynical level of we'll just kill them and well it's it's a labor thing like it's not just a chicago teachers union or even a teachers union thing it is a labor movement across the board thing that um the largest i think the largest unionized workforce in the country is teachers and we on top of that are a union of workers who have the power to absolutely bring our economy to a grinding hole if we want to. We could all go on strike right now and nobody's going to do shit until we go back to work. They could if they, you know, they could try to like replace us with like people who are basically like hall monitors and give kids like canned curriculums.

But they wouldn't really be learning very well and parents wouldn't be happy with it. And they wouldn't be entering the workforce with the skills they need to make money for the economy to, you know, make money for the almighty Dow. So, um, the, it has been a project for decades in this country to try to break teachers unions because teacher unions occupy this space where they allow other unions to happen. We have, you know, enough influence on politicians that they can't just disband the labor board and make unions illegal, which they would absolutely fucking love to do. And if they could just get rid of these damn teachers unions, maybe they could do it. So, you know, and that's what you see with the education reform movement, where you have all

these people advocating for vouchers and charter schools. And it's, you know, they want to break labor. And I see a lot of, I mean, now I'm going to scold some of my comrades, but I see a lot of leftists who are really skeptical of teachers and don't want to support the teachers union. And I get it. Like, there are a lot of teachers who really suck. And there's a lot of teachers who are not radical. Like most teachers are not radical. A lot of them are pretty conservative. But at the same time, if you were to abolish schools immediately right now and break up the teachers unions and all that you're gonna end up with rich people go to school poor people don't if you're poor your kid goes to work probably won't be in a coal mine but you know they'll probably be like soldering my computer

chips or coding or something for like pennies an hour and i don't want that world and if you actually care about labor then you need to support teachers unions because um the public schools are central to all these communities that we want to be reaching and the unions are the only thing making sure that they stay public yeah so yeah it's like i was like again like two two two two ionic as comrades who are anti-school it's like yeah like okay i hate school i'm for it d d schooling is great but we need to do other things first yeah you have to and like again like the you you you need to like it's like support the workers not the institution like this is a it's like it's like saying the workers, not the institution. Like,

it's like, it's like saying I'm a vegan. So I'm going to go after McDonald's and please. Yeah. Well, can you do this? Like, like, so like I,

I, my high school was like, Oh, like all of this was much like incredibly conservative, but everyone was still in the union. That was like the one, that was the one thing that was like, well,

okay. There were, there, there, there, there, there were two countervailing forces. One was that the Christians didn't seem to understand what liberation theology was.

So occasionally they'd accidentally hire a leftist because they were like, oh, you're a Christian. You're fine. You're from Latin America. I love that. We're not going to question you further. The second thing was that even everyone was in the union. And that was like, that was, that was literally the only, those are the only two left-wing like even like vaguely things i've gotten into so many teaching spaces by talking about how i like critical pedagogy and they don't understand that frary was a communist yeah

or being like oh i'm really really really into chicago history i especially love the history of like labor in chicago because it's it's huge people here care about it and they don't get that. Like I'm an anarchist, but you know, and, and a lot of the like, um, sort of like education reform language, I think it's very funny. It is 100 lifted from radical like sociologists and anthropologists and educators who are trying to find ways to um dismantle like authoritarian structures in schools and so they'll come up with these like um you know like restorative practices and all this stuff and then they kind of get they they make their way up to the ivory tower and then get repackaged in this it's it's like i don't know it's like a machine or something that like sucks up radical ideas brings them up to the academy repackages them to make them nice

for politicians and then spits them back out and it is exhausting and i hate it. It makes me so mad. I'll never forgive people for what they did to the term restorative justice. Yeah. Yeah. Do you have anything else that you want to make sure that people like understand about what's happening in the schools right now? I want people to understand that like, if this is a question of when and under what conditions are we going to be forced into a remote learning situation? This isn't like we want remote learning because we like it because it's fun. It's because it's going to happen if you like it or not. The schools are going to close if you like it or not, because the, unless you're okay with just like people are going to get sick and die or going going to work sick which i think most of us agree that's insane

it is there are you we're going to be in a situation where we don't have enough staff to keep buildings open so either we can try and mitigate that now and keep that from happening or we can just throw our hands up and say, fine, let the schools collapse. I don't want the schools to collapse. So if we could just go remote for two weeks and get some good testing in and have a vaccine requirement. And personally, I would like to advocate for remote as an option for parents who want it. I don't think that's on the table right now, but I think more parents out there should be demanding it. And I also would like to say to parents, you have a lot of power that you don't understand. The school districts

listen to the parents so much more than the teachers. One parent's voice is worth like 10 teacher voices. So if you see something going on in your schools that you're not comfortable with, if you have questions, contact your principals, contact the district, talk to people, talk to the other parents that you know, organize yourselves. If we had, you know, strong parent organizations on our side, we would be absolutely unstoppable and we could have the school system that we want and that our kids deserve. Yeah. And I think the right figured this out a long time ago that you can- Absolutely. Yeah. Look at what they're

doing to the school board meetings with CRT. We could have that for people who are actually good people who care. There's no there's no reason that all the other parents couldn't be going and saying i want my kids to learn about race and i want them to be wearing masks and i want everybody to be vaccinated yeah so i think i think i think that's a good note to end on we you know we can make this better we just have to you know work together yeah do you have anything that you want to plug? Like, do you have a way to support the teachers?

I think I'll send you a flyer that we have. It has some information for contacting aldermen, getting COVID tests and a petition to sign. If you could post that, I would really appreciate that. I would definitely can definitely do that. Awesome. Thank you.

Yeah. Thank you for coming on yeah good talking to you welcome i'm dan thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter nocturnal tales from the, presented by iHeart and Sonoro. 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. All right, Robert, do you want to open this up with something? I don't know. Nope, you're opening. The opening is that, is what you just did.

Okay, welcome. We're already opened. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the podcast about how things do be crumbling sometimes. Including our ability to introduce the podcast that pays our salaries. It's actually a very meta art piece about the, yeah, we started off very polished and slowly. This is a commentary on, I don't know, something. It's called. Figure it out.

Figure out what it's a commentary on it. It's called metamodernism. It's post postmodern. Anyway, we're going to be talking about disinformation and various bullshit today. various bullshit uh today so among the many disinformation vectors online joe rogan's podcast is obviously one of like the largest single single vectors um yeah i mean i've said this before but i'll say it again i don't think there's a cable news station as influential as joe rogan you know you could you could make like, oh, maybe they have a larger viewership in terms of like their actual ability

to influence large numbers of people. There's certainly no single cable news host that comes close to Joe. And I would argue probably no network that does. He's extremely influential by virtue of the fact that he's a meathead of people seem to find friendly and engaging. And he is very charismatic. He's good at what he does.

He's good at talking. Yeah. So multiple times during the past three weeks, Rogan has brought on two separate, quote-unquote, doctors who have started to peddle something called mass formation psychosis, which is kind of a new vector in the anti-vax kind of argument and like headspace so for like as for like the uh it could happen here portion of the episode this one's pretty simple uh could mass formation psychosis happen here no way not this

time we created it not this time no not this time it's totally made up pure fiction it's fiction it's fiction we made it up we made this one up it's a made-up tale it's a total fabrication nope not really it's fiction has it ever happened anywhere i might also argue no nope fiction we've done it we've solved the podcast this is not a thing total fabrication made up tale so yeah well but when whenever these like kook doctors bring up mass formation psychosis you can actually kind of watch them get close to understanding something real and but then they veer off into reactionary nonsense like most powerful nonsense there is an element of truth that it is spinning off of, you know? Yeah.

So let's start off with some of the more kind of deranged examples, while then eventually providing at least some background onto the whole mass formation psychokinesis idea. And then we'll kind of discuss some of the more slightly interesting aspects of this argument that Rogan seems fond of pushing right now. So the first thing i want to talk about is dr uh peter mccall which is not the not the guy that was trending on twitter last week or whatever this was this is someone else that rogan brought on a few weeks previously who actually

started talking about this first yeah um so background on mccall by most accounts he was like a top cardiologist for many years. I know he shares a similar story to other doctors who've become kind of COVID conspiracy celebrities. Former friends and co-workers say he was a pretty reasonable guy and a good doctor. And then he realized he could be worth millions of dollars. Yeah, COVID hit and he started to kind of go off the rails. And he initially began developing conspiracy theories in particular around hydroxychloroquine um and mccull was also in the news earlier this year due to or i guess in 2021 uh due to a legal dispute with his former employer baylor university health so uh according

to a lawsuit for nearly six months after mccull's uh employment had ended he continued to use his professional titles such as the vice chief of Internal Medicine at Baylor University, and misrepresented himself as a Baylor employee dozens, if not hundreds of times in media interviews in which he spread disinformation about the pandemic. So the type of misinformation that he talks about, you know, pretty basic stuff. Vaccines are neither safe nor effective. He was a very early hydroxychloroquine proponent. He claims that there's no asymptomatic COVID transmission at all, even if you're not

vaccinated. He claims that you cannot get COVID twice. Once you have it once, the post-infection natural immunity is 100% protective against all future COVID disease. Nothing works that way. nothing nothing works that way all of the things works that way yeah no everything i just said is not true

all of it can individually be disproved by the existence of jair bolsonaro every single one of these claims as you say that chris i'm looking over at my digital picture frame that is just loaded with like a dozen photos of Jair Bolsonaro in the hospital dying um yeah so I recommend everyone do that it improves every morning as soon as I walk up to my recording studio I see Jair Bolsonaro getting shit sucked out of his nose from a tube and I just feel ready to take on the day it beats coffee wow that's strong words um the other big thing and this is how this is how we're going to get into the mess uh psychosis bullshit is that he mccall also asserts that 50 000 americans have died from the vaccine shots this is not true um looking at like deaths possibly associated with

it it is like a maybe a thousand or two thousand, which sucks. Yeah. But like that's the highest amount. Because again, it's not even, a lot of these things are not necessarily directly causal. So it's hard to figure out what is what. But if there is a number, it's around the two-ish thousand range. Not 50,000. And McCull thinks that, or at least promotes that an idea, the idea that like the vaccine is a conspiracy theory to suppress

hydroxychloroquine and therapeutic treatment for COVID. And this conspiracy is organized at every level, uh, three different regions, corporations, big pharma, uh, Hollywood.

And, and this is, this is the mass formation psychosis is that we've believed that both COVID is like a big problem and that the vaccine is the solution. So I'm going to play a clip. Hopefully you guys can hear this, of McColl talking about mass formation psychosis. Dope. We've seen mass psychosis in history before.

The horrific group suicides that have happened with religious cults. We knew in Nazi Germany, where people, in a sense, offered their children up to eugenics programs in a progressive mass psychosis, and they themselves walked into gas chambers and went gas, they didn't kick, fight, go kicking and screaming. This type of, that's a mass psychosis. So what Desmond says is there must be four conditions met for a mass psychosis. The first is the population must be isolated. People must be isolated for a long period of time. Number two, we must have things taken away from us that we previously enjoyed. Number three, there must be constant free-floating anxiety.

Anxiety of more viruses, more disability, more death, more anxiety. And then the last one is the capper. Number four is there must be a single solution offered by an entity in authority, the vaccine. The only solution to the pandemic is the vaccine. We're in a mass psychosis. And what Desmond says is, with the vaccine, there is no limit to the absurdity

that we will see. No limit to the absurdity. So this idea of, here, take a vaccine. Take any vaccine. That's absurd. Vaccines are different. There must be a winner.

There must be a loser. There must be somebody. Why would it be any vaccine? It's the same with a mask with the mask wear a mask doesn't matter what kind of mask just put it over your face absurdity the absurdity of uh well i've already had covet the cdc says you can't get covet again maybe uh nope okay so listeners at home should know so that you understand what this video is that the entire he's talking, there is what appears to be the eviscerated corpse of a black woman lying underneath him. Like it's horrifying. It's like very unsettling. Like meat.

I think it's like one of the dolls that medical students learn how to do autopsies on. It's not a real person, but it does look like the corpse of an eviscerated woman as he's just chatting. But the face really does look like a person. It took me a flick. I thought it was like I couldn't figure out what was going on for like ages. It looks like a real person. The cadaver

dolls that they have for trading are quite good. I kind of want to get one for the next time I'm in Texas and want to use an HOV lane. But that's the story for another day. So yeah, that's pretty dumb, especially the notion that people were hypnotized into peacefully walking into gas chambers. Not only is that like – that is objectively untrue to the extent that I could provide anyone interested with thousands of pages of reading from people who survived concentration camps about how they worked and why people walked into them. And a lot of it just boils down to the fact that it was – they were making a very rational choice, which was I have no options here. I cannot get out of this, but I can at least make sure that my children are not panicking in the last seconds before we're killed. And a lot of the people, because a lot of the actual grunt work of loading humans into the gas chambers was done by other inmates who were also not going through psychosis.

They were given a chance to survive longer by helping to operate the camps. And those people, you can read, some of them did survive. And some of them wrote about their experiences, which is some of the most harrowing shit imaginable for a human being to possibly go through. It is all tremendously well-documented. And the most offensive thing I can imagine is saying that these people were somehow – number one, it's incredibly offensive to say that they were going through some sort of psychosis and that's why they walked into the chambers and not, this was the best option available to them given what was going on and what like the situation they had been forced into.

They did not have other options. It was that or get machine gunned to death. And maybe you think you would choose a different option. But if you're critiquing them or trying to claim that like the only reason they would do that, what they did was that they had lost their minds. I will hit you in the face with a brick. Fuck you. Like that. That's my answer to that. interested academically in why people did some of the things that they did at the death camps

and how that actually functioned psychologically. It's like a short book. It's This Way for the Gas, ladies and gentlemen. And it is a quasi-fictionalized book by a guy named Tadeusz Borowski, who was a survivor of the death camp. So it's based on his experiences at Auschwitz and Dachau. who was a survivor of the death camp so it's based on his experiences at auschwitz and dachau and he he describes the way in which the world of the camps worked and the psychology of the camps worked um and he's not an he's not a piece of shit grifter asshole he's a guy who lived through all of this so if you actually care about any of this just read that everything this guy says is wrong and if i had a chance to i would hit him in the face with a brick please continue garrison yeah it really sucks because

it's not just a combination of medical misinformation but also just the most shit sociology um and it creates this a really a really disgusting package of of really bad sociology medical misinformation um and like yeah he's doing this to like because he can make a profit off of it so he's saying these things so i i know um he mentioned a a name uh desmond desmond's the guy who kind of coined this term we'll talk we'll talk about more about him at the end uh But for now, let's go on an ad break, and we'll be back to talk about Dr. Robert Malone, the other guy who's been pushing this nonsense. So here's ads. Someone else who I probably will want to hit with a brick.

Even more so, honestly. Good. And we're back talking now about mass formation psychosis and the dumb people who are well or smart people who are using yeah i don't think they're dumb i think they're evil yeah they're they're evil not tough so yeah so after after mccall went on rogan's show it got that that show got pretty popular um one one big right-wing kind of trumpist media personality named melissa tate was permanently banned from twitter after posting about the podcast and making the following post to her half a million followers

global bombshell dr peter mccall on the joe rogan show says moderna made the code vaccine long before covet actually hit and that the pandemic was a premeditated and concerted scheme by government and medical entities to then force vaccinations as the solution so that's the type of narrative that they're trying to foster yeah because this the pandemic has been so good for biden's approval ratings it's really working out great for everybody uh u.s u.s senator ron johnson also promoted the interview saying rogan asks excellent questions and mccall provides the answers so yeah um so apparently the mass formation psychosis doctor guy was enough of a hit that rogan's team decided to very soon after uh bring on another lying conspiracy doctor uh dr robert malone so during the last week of 2021, Rogan invited Malone onto his show. Malone's a virologist and an immunization doctor who claims credit for inventing the mRNA vaccine in a pair of papers from the late 80s.

Spoilers, he did not. There was work on the vaccine before him and work continued after him yeah yeah um yeah in in 89 he published a paper um kind of positing maybe mrna can be binded uh with with other kind of uh proteins he did not really do any work on it besides just saying i wonder if this could maybe happen um and then knowledge fight guys dig into this dude a bit there were people asking similar questions and publishing papers at the same time the question and well and before and before yeah yeah so malone actually thought this was too hard and abandoned this project very soon and then went to work for like the military to develop other random like uh he thought the rna vaccines

were too hard so he went on to develop uh more stuff around dna vaccines and has been working with like the military and various like uh big pharma companies on vaccines for a while more accurately uh dr kariko and drew wiseman are two doctors that are widely agreed and acknowledged to have put the most development work and actual like like actually doing the science to make mrna vaccines a thing um and of course the development of them was due to you know work of hundreds of researchers um so it's it's not you know one person does not invent something like this it's a group of a lot of people but but it makes it for an easy title for your viral video yes and in fact actually um uh uh logically the uh that's a journalist website uh reached out to malone and uh for an article and malone replied back stating that he did not actually literally

invent the uh the the vaccine but instead developed a vaccine technology platform um then he presented logically copies with nine patents um none of which are the patents for uh functioning mrna vaccines of course um but he he claims to have patented mrna technology i mean he did it's technology that doesn't work uh and never has and never has worked and the patents are expired um anyway i need to patent some shit that just sounds like a real easy way to make a good grift yeah so you know as we've seen with my but because because malone has crafted this you know narrative that I'm the inventor of this thing, just like we've seen with my COVID grifting doctors episode of Behind the Bastards, just a little shred of medical claiming to be the former head scientist at Pfizer, neither of those have to actually be true to work because propaganda makes it true via, like, repetition.

So, you know. Yeah, it's the kind of thing where, like, dunking on these guys, like, it's important here to correct the record. It doesn't do anything. No, absolutely not. The fact that they're lying and nothing that they say is true does not matter when it comes to them having an influence in the community they have if you get on rogan that doesn't like like you've already done the thing that you need to do to be able to to profit from this it doesn't matter that you're

lying a few months ago malone went on to steve bannon's show to talk about how the vaccines make covid worse worse actually and you know this is this is a quote from steve bannon you're hearing it from the individual who invented the mrna vaccine great and has dedicated his life to vaccines he's the opposite of an anti-vaxxer right so it's that type of narrative that gets made so yeah starting around june of 2021 malone began to make the rounds you know bannon tucker glenn beck, and now Joe Rogan. So, you know, starting in June, he had like less than 5,000 Twitter followers. And just before his suspension at the end of December for spreading misinformation, he had like over half a million. So, yeah. So right after his Twitter suspension for lying about COVID and causing, you know, misinformation to run,

to run rampant around a health issue. That's when Rogan invited him on. It was right after he got suspended from Twitter. And there's been one particular clip from the interview that has really caught like the far right's attention. You know, the, the tweet that it's,

it's connected to is captioned on Joe Rogan. Dr. Robert Malone suggests we are living through a mass formation psychosis. He explains how and why this could happen and its effects. He draws analogy to the 1920s and 30s Germany. They had a highly educated population and they went barking mad. They did not. They made a series of logical...

The Nazis did not go mad. They were not crazy. They were not out of their mind. They were not crazy. They were not out of their mind. They were doing, they were a large part of what they were doing was saying things that they knew were, were nonsense and lies in order to get elected because it riled people up. And then a large chunk of their policy was figuring out,

well, if this is the shit that we've been saying, how do we, how do we translate that into policy? Again, reams have been written on this by credible researchers. The people who ran the camps were not insane, although they were often deeply depressed and suicidal because it's not good to run a death camp. They were all making rational decisions,

and the people who let it happen were letting it happen because it was dangerous and scary to interfere in any way. they were all making rational decisions there was no insanity responsible for the holocaust which is worse like and that's the everything yeah yeah yeah what they're like they're what they're doing is like they're they're they're trying to give people a way out right like you know this is this is sort of like oh it's like well the nazis went insane all the people who follow them went insane it's like no no they don't you don't get that way out. Like you, they chose to do this.

Yeah, the scariest and most meaningful lesson to take from the Holocaust is that you yourself could be a part of a Holocaust, even if you didn't support the killing, because it's extremely easy to not get involved and stop something like that once it reaches a certain level. And it's easy for the kind of political organizations

that can make things like that possible. To reach a point where they can carry that sort of shit out. Because again it's scary to fucking fight them. Let's watch the clips like a minute long. And I think it's worth watching to see both in the context of when Rogan decides to interject. And when he decides not to. Basically European intellectual inquiry into what the heck happened in Germany. I hate this guy already.

In the 20s and 30s, you know, very intelligent, highly educated population, and they went barking mad. And how did that happen? The answer is mass formation psychosis. When you have a society that has become decoupled from each other and has free-floating anxiety in a sense that things don't make sense. We can't understand it. And then their attention gets focused by a leader or a series of events on one small point, just like hypnosis. They literally become hypnotized and can be led anywhere. And one of the aspects of that phenomena is the people that they identify as their leaders, the ones typically that come in and say, you have this pain and I can solve it for you. I and I alone, okay, can fix this problem for you. Okay. Then they will lead,

they will follow that person through. It doesn't matter whether they lie to them or whatever. The data are irrelevant. And furthermore, anybody who questions that narrative is to be immediately attacked. They are the other. This is central to mass formation psychosis. And this is what has happened. We had all those conditions. If you remember back before 2019,

everybody was complaining, the world doesn't make sense, blah, blah, blah. And we're all isolated from each other. We're all on our little tools. We're not connected socially anymore, except through social media. And then this thing happened and everybody focused on it. That is how mass formation psychosis happens. And that is what's happened here. Horrible. Again, completely wrong in every single way. The Germans were not confused because nothing made sense. They were angry because of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. They were also angry because of what they saw as – because of a myth that had grown up about why they had lost the First World War, which was spread by people who were the equivalent in that time of Joe Rogan. They were scared of the left, of communism, of disorder, of riots in the streets. And when Hitler took power, most Germans did not like him. They did not blindly follow him. He gradually gained the support of the vast majority of Germany through a number of different

very logical things. One thing that he did that got him a lot of support was he took businesses and homes and money from Jewish people and from members of other groups that the Nazis were targeting, and he gave it to Aryans. There was a direct financial interest for a lot of people who got in line behind the Nazis, and he established a series of programs like the Strength Through Joy program that really did benefit in a way that they had not known before the German working class. And a lot of this was, again, subsidized through the appropriations of things that had been owned by people that the Nazis were targeting. People fell in line behind Hitler for logical reasons.

He did not reach the highest point of his support from the German populace until the taking of Paris, which obviously that was something that a lot of Germans supported. They had spent four years failing to take the city in World War I. Anyway, sorry, it's all nonsense. It's all lies. I think a reason why this is latching on so much to people on the right, like people on the right who don't consider themselves fascists, who think, who would say Nazis are bad, there's they still are latching on to this because it provides a way for them to not understand how fascism actually works right it provides an alternative explanation that makes them not have to actually think about what fascism is um and that's why they're latching on it. And it also is already, it's already a part of the conspiracies they have around vaccines

and power structures. So because, because it's the conspiratorial basis, instead of like thinking about power structures from like an anarchist or like, like hierarchy lens, it, it, it reinforces the worldviews they have and makes them not have to interrogate the ones that they don't want to. Um, it sucks uh malone's substack goes into more of this and it's it's it's pretty bad there's a this is a few quotes i think really kind of tied this together and then he has some horrible statistics um he says

as many of you know i've spent time researching and speaking about mass psychosis theory most of what i've learned has come from dr desmond dr desmond is like the guy who pointed this term um and uh malone writes desmond realized that this form of mass hypnosis the madness of crowds can account for the strange phenomenon of about 20 to 30 percent of the population in the western world becoming entrenched with the noble lies and dominant narrative concerning the safety and effectiveness of the genetic vaccines, and both propagated and enforced by politicians, science bureaucrats, pharmaceutical companies, and legacy media. Of course, the obvious examples of mass formation is Germany in the 30s and 40s.

How could the German people, who are highly educated, very liberal in the classic sense, Western thinking people, how could they go crazy and do what they did to the Jews? How could this happen? To a civilized people, a leader of a mass formation movement will use the platform to continue to pump the group of new information to focus on. In the case of COVID-19, I like to use the term fear porn. Leaders through mainstream media and government channels continuously feed the beast with more messaging that further hypnotize their adherence. Studies suggest that mass formation follows a general distribution. 30% of people are

brainwashed and hypnotized, fully indoctrinated in the group narrative. 40% in the middle are persuaded and may follow if no worthy alternatives perceived, and 30% will fight the narrative. Those who rebel and fight against the narrative become the enemy of the brainwashed and the primary target of aggression so that's the way he thinks that is

how which is really it's really something like in terms of how he's building a narrative in his head and specifically building a narrative for other people's heads to to view why do I feel distrustful of certain pieces of power but love other pieces of power? Yeah, and it's, again, like this idea that, like, well, Germany was liberal. Germany had an enormous right-wing movement. Like, it was a hugely conservative country in a lot of ways. It also had a lot of leftist organizing and a lot of leftists in it, especially after World War I.

But, like, the Freikorps and shit, there were these massive, million-strong, right-wing, armed street movements that existed for the entirety of the Weimar Republic. Like, it's, again, everything he says is wrong. Yeah, and again, it's like the notion that like 30% are fully brainwashed, 40% are in the middle and persuadable, and 30% fight the narrative. It's like these people who are obsessed, these specifically conservatives who are obsessed about thinking like i would have fought the nazis and because they don't understand how fascism works in power dynamics they don't

understand how how they're actually getting pulled into the same thing but they still view themselves as the rebel right they they're so everybody wants to be the rebel in america right yeah like they're so focused on being too yeah absolutely like they're so focused wants to be the rebel in america right yeah like they're so focused on being too yeah absolutely it's like they're so focused on being the rebel and like we're rebelling against the vaccine that that is just like rebelling against the nazis and you're like what um also also i just want to say about those numbers if if they're completely made up yeah yeah when people start throwing even number statistics at you like that it's because they're lying yeah yeah it's because they're full of shit yeah yeah 30 40 30 absolutely not yeah that's that's complete nonsense for one yeah it's so i get because now the other thing that happened around this interview because it did gain a lot of

traction among the right is that whenever these things gain traction they also develop conspiracy theories that people are trying to suppress it like look at the google algorithm when you type in certain keywords like i i know the the day this was trending it was like if you google dr malone the interview is only like the sixth result the first one is this youtube video debunking it and like i did this and like no the first result was the obviously viral video of him saying the thing like they just they can take one screenshot that maybe someone made or maybe because of one person's computer algorithm that's what gave them and use this as like evidence that this is the entire system of the internet suppressing the thing like no the internet wants things to go viral now there's certain things where they like try to shut down the

spread of dangerous stuff but this got very viral. This was not contained in any way. But because of this notion, like, they're trying to hide it, you know, it plays into them thinking that they are the rebels or something. No, and there's also a very practical reason why the people who particularly know that they're lying do this. particularly know that they're lying do this and it's because all of their success is based on a foundation of the way in which youtube and facebook and twitter algorithmically amplified them and their predecessors and they know that creating controversy over the fact that they're being suppressed um leads to more content that gins that basically algorithmically spreads their stuff more because more people are talking

about it because other people's channels start debating it because idiots on the left are like, well, we should at least have them on and platform them because we're anti-censorship too, so let's debate them. And all of this stupid shit feeds into spreading their stuff. It's a very intelligent strategy. I hate it. But just in terms of how ridiculous it is, I know a few days ago, a congressman, Troy Nels, said that, I submitted the transcript from the Joe Rogan Experience podcast episode

with Dr. Malone to the congressional record. Big tech wants to restrict your access to information, but they cannot censor the congressional record. Nonsense. Big tech is the entire reason why you know about these people yeah yeah entirely so if it were not for big tech joe rogan would be narrating videos of robots fighting so jack

sobiak got real into this because he loves anything that goes viral if it weren't for big tech jack posobiec would have died in a ditch of an oxycontin overdose so he got real into it he changed his like he changed his twitter name to jack mass formation psychosis psychosa becker some bullshit like that yeah some yeah uh-huh stupid and it was tweeting about it non-stop for a week and like like a kid learning about a new topic because of synchronicity he's he's gonna like project it onto everything he sees now he's like this is this new all-encompassing topic that makes you avoid what fascism actually is and then point out at the things you don't like so of course he's gonna apply to everything he made a tweet right before january 6th um as the anniversary

of the capital uh attempted coup thing regime media has launched a propaganda push against ashley babbitt today to psychologically prep their flock for the upcoming mass formation event planned for january 6th this week this this is called priming and it's a textbook mass formation theory tactic wait till you see what comes next and And it is the 6th today. Has anything happened? You know what happened? Not a goddamn thing? They got fucking Lin-Manuel Miranda to sing a song.

That's what they did. They got Lin-Manuel Miranda to sing a song. Wait, wait, wait. Did you see that that wasn't... He might have said something in the beginning that was due, but the performance has been played before on other things. And I am... You know what if

we're trying to reach across the aisle i am willing to to admit that the popularity of lin-manuel miranda might be a mass formation psychosis absolutely yes the popularity of hamilton is a mass formation psychosis absolutely we're just being assholes but like like seriously like it again but it doesn't it does the fuck is what when it when it comes to again like the fact that he said there's gonna be this whatever uh psych mass formation psychosis event on the anniversary of january 6th and it's going to be huge watch for it nothing happens doesn't matter never matters will never matter um because again like it's i think one of the issues that we have here is the degree to which brain brainwashing and hypnosis and stuff are talked about within kind of discussions of a cultic milieu when they're not really a factor not a factor in cults not not nearly as

much as you think yeah not in the way that think. There's things that like you could call brainwashing, but the, and you could even maybe call hypnosis, although that's a lot murkier. And that is a very technical thing. Yeah. Yeah. logical and rational if you can just inhabit the mental space of the people who are in those communities because of what they're primed to believe first and because of what is happening socially, because of the degree to which they isolate themselves from people who are outside of that bubble. That's why it's so hard to get them out. It's not that magically their brains have been taken over. It's that they have pretty methodically been put into a position

where rejecting what is being told to them within this context is immensely more painful than just continuing to believe things that are not true. And there are more consequences for it. You lose a support network. You lose a great deal of your own opinion of yourself and your self-worth if you start to reject this stuff. And once you can trap people in that, it's the same way that Scientology works. Once you can trap people in that, the evidence of their eyes and the fact that they're obviously being lied to and the things that they're being told about don't come to pass. obviously being lied to and the things that they're being told about don't come to pass it's this it's the reason why you have a bunch of apocalyptic cults who say the days the world's going to end on this day and time that day and time comes the world doesn't end and the cult goes on you know yeah it's pretty it's pretty ridiculous this this whole thing was started by this uh

professor of clinical psychology at a university in belgium uh matthias desmet he seems to have a pretty bad understanding of history and actual like power structures and does not know the least bit about fascism um and has tried to craft this thing to fill in the gaps in his own knowledge and applies it to everything and i've read some of his stuff it's it's nonsense um again just like the doctors who talked about it they're like yeah he's using this also as a way to explain how covid's not real and how the vaccine is a is a ploy to do x bad thing it's it's all ridiculous it's irresponsible um and they're using it as a tactic and and hopefully it's just going to blow over, but I'm sure it'll pop up every once in a while again,

just like it popped up a few weeks ago. But that's really all I want to get into it. I could say more, but I think we have said enough. I think we've said enough. All right, well... Fuck it., fuck it. Yep. That's it.

That's all I've got. Read This Way for the Gas, ladies and gentlemen, by Thaddeus Borowski. It will have a major impact on the way you see the entire world if you actually read it. There's some incredible pieces in there. One of the things that Thaddeus points out is that like people only ever have like one kind of language for talking about like the things that they feel, whether it's something they kind of vaguely care about or something they care about enough to murder over. they kind of vaguely care about or something they care about enough to murder over.

And so when people engage in acts of like horrific violence on a mass scale, they often do it looking and acting like they would if they were irritated at somebody in traffic. And it's the most unsettling thing about being the victim of a genocide that you don't see the kind of hate and the kind of rage and the kind of like what you would expect someone would need to be amped up to. It's more of like, you see more like kind of boredom and irritation and all that stuff. Like it's not,

anyway, read Thaddeus Borowski. I desperately wish Joe Rogan would just sit and narrate this book on his show because it would do actually a service to the world. Anyway, that's the episode. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me as the fire and dare enter? Dendrel, 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.

Could it happen here? It may be. Robert Evans, host of this podcast, to introduce today's episode, which is not my episode. It's Andrew's episode. Hello. How are you doing, Andrew? I'm good. How do you feel about that introduction? I'm good.

I think it's, could use some work, but, you know, workshop it. Yeah, we never workshop anything. We just roll right ahead. Yeah, abolish work and all that. Abolish introductions.

You know, start in the middle. Why don't we just do that now? In Media Res Podcast. Yeah, we'll make every podcast like Finnegan's Wake, where the opening of the podcast is like halfway through a paragraph that the end of the episode starts. Everything will be a circle. Let's just...

Sophie, I think that's the new plan. Okay. Okay. Andrew, what do you got for us today? Right. So today I want to talk about bioregions and bioregionalism. It's a philosophy slash movement slash way of viewing things. It's a lot.

So today we'll be exploring what it is, where it came from, and the role I see it playing in our strides towards anarchy. But first, of course, we should really get some context. Bioregionalism. Have any of you heard of it, by the way? I have heard the term in relation. Bioregions. Yeah. Right, right.

So it's actually pretty recent, all things considered. It was coined as a term by a guy named Alan Van Newkirk, founder of the Institute for Biregional Research in 1975. And as a movement, it really gained a lot of popularity in the late 1970s in the Ozarks, Appalachia, Hudson River, and San Francisco Bay Area regions. They had a conference in a prairie, interestingly enough, near Kansas City in 1984. And they've also had conferences in the Squamish Bay region of British Columbia, as well as the Gulf of Maine Bay region on the Atlantic.

And of course, with all these different people coming together, sharing all their different people coming together, sharing all their different ideas, talking about cool nature stuff, they developed a sort of a platform which they outline in papers on subjects ranging from agriculture to forestry to art to economics to community. So while it was a very north american focused um movement and philosophy at first it has also expanded to europe and australia and these groups there are hundreds of them all over um they get involved with local ecological work like preservation and restoration permaculture all that and they also form networks so they would link on specific issues like water conservation or organic farming or tree planting and of course bi-regional groups also get involved in attempts

to make communities more self-sufficient by mapping and utilizing local assets and well as you'll come to see um bi-regionalism and maps kind of go hand in hand in a way because it really is about that sort of big picture looking at the earth and the environment and our place in it. So what is bioregionalism exactly? In essence, it's a philosophy based around the organization of political, cultural, and economic systems around naturally defined areas called bioregions. So what are bioregions? They are areas defined through physical and environmental features including watershed boundaries, soil and terrain characteristics, flora, fauna, and climate. Bioregionalism also stresses the determination of a bioregion is a cultural

phenomenon and emphasizes local populations, local knowledge, and local solutions. Because humans are actually, surprisingly, part of nature. Our cultures, our settlements, they arise from nature. They arise from the characteristics of the bioregions that we inhabit. So, I mean, that to me is a clear bridge between bioregionalism and Land Back. And it also points to me the fact that while bioregionalism may be a fairly recent philosophy slash movement, its roots and the ideas it presents are nothing new. You know, I mean, bioregionalism posits that, you know, human societies must learn to honor our bioregions and the connections between them if we are to be ecologically sound. And this perspective is really old news, you know, for the indigenous peoples who have maintained these lands and been stewards of these lands for thousands of years. I think that thinking in a bi-regional scale allows us to establish regenerative and

circular economies, effectively restore local ecosystems, restructure our systems using ecological design principles, and of course deepen our cultural connections to the land we inhabit so that to me really stresses the importance of bioregionalism in our approach to environmental issues before i continue i just wanted to say that for those who want to like visualize because i know this is a podcast you can only hear my voice um one earth has a pretty decent map of bioregions on their website so you could just google bioregions 2020 and it should come up they basically have like 185 bioregions on their map. And well, according to that map, Trinidad is part of bioregion NT21E, NT standing for

Neotropic and E standing for East. And Trinidad is grouped with South America and particularly the Venezuela-Gayana region, for obvious reasons, being that the Orinoco and other rivers that come from the Amazon flow out to Trinidad's shores, really. So, clunky segue, there are a couple different concepts that one might want to keep in mind when approaching or attempting to curate a bi-regional understanding of the world of course perspective and a bi-regional perspective is important, and it's basically one that seeks to ensure that political boundaries match ecological boundaries, highlighting the unique ecology of the bioregion, encouraging the consumption of local foods where possible, encouraging the use of local materials where possible, and encouraging the cultivation of native plants in the region i will point out like from now that from what i've read about bi-regionalism and the talks that i've seen there are definitely some you know liberal sensibilities some capitalist realism

um in the way that some bi-regionalists talk about you know things like organizing our politics and our states and stuff around bi-regions um obviously you know they are pushing things pretty far because they do talk about you know going and really orienting our economy around you know bioregions and thinking in terms of that but then at the same time there's still like an almost passive acceptance in some of the readings that i've seen of capitalism you know i think that's pretty common in a lot of what i like to call almost radical um ideas and philosophies and stuff of course when i approach these ideas and these philosophies and stuff i always try to you know keep that anarchist analytical framework in my head understanding that you know

these ideas uh are still being filtered through an ultimately capitalist society and capitalist world. And so you're going to want to try to navigate that and sift that out and really get the nuggets of gold within these ideas. I don't see states, and I think you all would agree with me, being the path out of you know, out of climate catastrophe for those who have been reading like

you know, Against the Green and you know, Graeber's work, we would know that states have been pretty equal side of from their very inception so I think that if power regionalism would be effective i think it would be best if it stared away from that sort of statist um conception they do emphasize

localism um as the you know political localism but it's always within the context of but it's always within the context of was often within the context of like the relationship between the local and the state and that sort of thing almost like a kind of i don't know if i'm using this term correctly but like minarchism does that make sense was there some kind of was it some kind of like municipalism or something like that but yeah yeah we should probably talk a little bit about like what what minarchism and municipalism are um just so people don't get kind of caught up on the terms um and particularly i think that like within uh a context of like the United States, municipalism is kind of an easier way to sell folks who may be more conservative on certain anarchist principles. It's basically the idea of strong community sort of control and autonomy as opposed to strong overarching kind of federal or state control over over uh you know different communities yeah yeah because a minarchism is kind of like a weird grab bag thing that's like yeah it's it's

sort of like okay so you want to be an anarcho-capitalist but you can't because you're just smart enough to realize that you can't have property rights without a state so either the minarchist state is the only thing it does is enforce property rights. And yeah, I think that's a slightly terrifying vision. But I think, you know, it's... It's a bit more self-aware than the average anarcho-capitalist. Yeah, but you know, this is... Yeah, and I think municipalism is less of a focus specifically on property rights and more based out of an understanding that strong hierarchical federal or even state-level control generally winds up creating a significant amount of regional – what's the word I'm looking for?

regional, what's the word I'm looking for, inequalities, and is responsible for a lot of ecological devastation and whatnot, this idea that you can have, like one of the things that you would have with an actual municipalist system is you wouldn't be allowed to operate a company like Koch Industries that's able to be based out of, I think, Kentucky, but operate a series of refineries in the Gulf Coast that render large sections of that area uninhabitable because you would leave kind of control over what can be actually done in that area to the people who live there rather than being able to have a corporation buy land there and have its right to pollute enforced by the state, right? That's kind of like one little example um there's

municipalist the system in northeast syria and rojava is is sort of a municipalist system and one of the specifically libertarian municipalists yeah i mean there's a distinction between like municipalism more generally and libertarian municipalism yeah we're getting into the weeds a little bit here but these are these are like that's kind of the basics of what those terms mean just so that people don't get lost when you when you bring them up because i think a lot of folks um you know uh don't uh have necessarily that kind of those definitions don't just pop up in their head when you use that word right right yeah fair enough um i also mentioned that states um have been ecocidal from their inception, so I feel like I should probably try and find that as well.

Ecocide and ecocidalism is basically this idea that came out of the environmentalist movement, meant to point to the severe harm to nature the mass damage and destruction of ecosystems that's you know caused over decades by you know these companies and really by the system as a whole so it's often viewed through like a legal lens as in you know these companies should be tried for their crimes um and as like for committing ecocide and that kind of thing because it's often viewed like as like a legal like law should be put in place to classify ecocide as a crime and that sort of thing um only a few countries have done that like actually codified ecocide but it is something that um so environmentalists push to you know really raise awareness of as a crime against humanity and the planet yeah i think it's also kind of important to understand with ecocide is that like there's a lot

of focus i think in like left like environmental movements just purely on corporations and even if you go back to the like 100 companies meme just like 100 companies destroying the planet it's like well yeah like half like half of them are state-owned yeah and so you know yeah there's something like like with ecocide it's like yeah it's like it's not just corporations that do this it's you know it's it's the state as a structure it's the state as an institution it's the state as exactly yeah it's their agencies it's their sort of and that's that's what i try to like what i realize is is kind of important now and i guess this is kind of like slowly like shifting away from bi-regionalism but that's fine um what i will say that i've tried to like consciously um sort of put into practice is emphasizing that like capitalism

is not the only issue you know um like yeah i notice people like try to separate capitalism on the state as if they could ever truly be separated even people who understand that you know anarcho-capitalists are misguided and that you know the state is necessary to maintain capitalism there's some sort of like disconnect where there's like a whole ton of you know organization and memeing and all that about capitalism and you know oftentimes these sort of efforts are like particularly with reformist types and unions and stuff they tried to mediate with capitalism through the state you know through the government local local government or federal government whatever the case may be and what i really

tried to emphasize is that it's not enough to have like a theory of capitalism i think it's even more important to have a theory of hierarchy because i think it avoids it helps you to avoid getting into these sort of traps of like um well class reductionism for one but also like recreating certain structures within your organizations and in your efforts to change things recreating the very you know circumstances you're fighting against you can't like condense everything into one problem because try as we might it's not that everything is one problem it's an interconnected mesh that binds all of our problems together and you can focus on you know really big extensions of that mesh but it still is kind of just a mesh and the mesh isn't the thing but it connects to the edges

of all of the things and yeah that type of ecology can be useful in even even relating to bioregions in terms of how they also connect with other territories and entities i think it also you know this is one of the sort of problems that you have if you know it's like okay so your plan is to take sort of sovereign state power it's like well you do it right but i mean the thing is if you if if you know it's like okay so your plan is to take sort of sovereign state power it's like well you do it right but i mean the thing is if you if you you know you seize control of power of a state right your borders are essentially just like where the state's war machine ran out of steam and you know and this this becomes a enormous problem because like i mean if you look at the bioregional maps right it's like there's there's literally no way you could ever have states with these borders because yeah it's not like this it's impossible like you just you you cannot do it and you know

what that means is that states are sort of necessarily going well they're either going to be like a small fraction of a bioregion or they have multiple in them and that's another sort of that becomes a sort of logistical problem because you know like if you want to look at like a lot of the worst sort of ecological sort of like human disasters it's when you get states attempting to apply like states you know logic to environmental issues yeah yeah it is more specifically like it it's it's you know they have something that like sort of works in one test environment and then they broadly apply it across you know an enormous sort of variety of yeah areas and regions that have their own biospheres and have their own and that stuff that's like that's like the fastest way to kill an enormous number of people yeah i just like it's like forcing a jigsaw piece that obviously doesn't

fit into a spot where you want it to but you're just breaking the pieces i don't say as well that like that sort of i mean at least the states are testing it right um i remember i can't remember the exact name of like the the sort of like ideology or whatever i think it was like this early soviet union probably one of your old name this early soviet union practice related to to farming that they just applied over a vast, vast region and end up with a huge decrease in food production. I can't remember the name of it. Lysenko.

He just had this theory and he was just pushing it and it led to some serious issues. If we're going to talk about what's important about sort of bioregionalism it's you have to have if you're going to implement anything right you you know especially when you're trying to sort of manipulate biospheres you're trying to preserve biospheres you have to have local knowledge from

the people who have been living in these biospheres for you know enormous amounts of time and that's something that states are really bad at and you know tend to actively suppress and it's something you know and i will say this there's there's there's a kind of like there's like a kind of neoliberal version of this stuff where it's like oh we'll do no we'll have like local knowledge blah blah and then they're like well we'll have local knowledge uh uh but they that this will help them create market solutions and things it's like that also doesn't work and it's basically just like yeah but because that really like sits that doesn't sit well with me you know like yeah these sort of like you see like and you see a lot of liberals like doing

it a lot these days where they'd be like doing the whole land acknowledgements thing and they'd be doing the um that thing where they would just like say that oh this is from so-and-so culture and whatever and then just like boom as 1999 yeah carry on with business as usual I learned this technique from so and so tribe let me work as a consultant for your company and it sucks it's commodifying

the thing and that both produces a warped replication and then it also kind of makes the original thing seem like used in a weird way as well like it wasn't designed yeah yeah yeah i'm also reminded a bit of alienation and how we are just sort of separated from you know aspects of our actual humanity because of the structures we live under right so instead of relating with the environment or relating with our culture or relating with other

people we're just relating through like these commodities and these products and these you know just bastardized versions of things and um i think that is also something that sort of plagues like some environmentalists in terms of this there's it's almost like this subtle alienation from the nature that um many of them seek to preserve, right? Where on the one hand, yes, you're trying to preserve it and protect it, and that's commendable. But on the other hand, the way you're going about it is basically like antithetical to those goals because you don't have that connection with

the nature that you're trying to help you know what i see like a lot of people not recognizing is that you know humans are a part of nature right and this is another bi-regional concept right this thing called bi-regional re-inhabitation in it in being that um meaning that we must come home to the geographical and biophysical terrain we inhabit understand its ecological uniqueness and familiarize ourselves with the stories woven into the fabric of said land its history its peoples, it's peoples, it's cultures, it's flora, it's fauna. It's only once we come home to our bioregions and to our ecosystems, to our places

that we can really work together to see its potential, to see how we fit into it, how we can facilitate its healing bioregion by bioregion. Yeah, that

definitely mirrors stuff I've been working on relating to that type of cognitive dissonance that you're talking about, and that alienation, not just from human to human, but human to place. Because yeah, we have developed

this commodified othered version of nature that isn't actually what nature is um it's it's we've formed this thing that is separate from us which is not how we need to think about it because it should be we are all part of the same of of that same system we are not separate from it and we're not isolated from it or its effects we are just another part of it so it. So it's about getting a sense of ecology with both your bioregion and then the biosphere as a whole, and getting that ecology, which will break down this notion of nature being an other. And I think because of the idea of nature being an other, that really kind of fosters our extraction

that's led to our current problems because we don't view the problems affecting us. We view them as affecting the territory. And if we're not the territory, then we can be safe. But that's not the case. Exactly. Sorry, go on. I think I may have talked about this on the show before

but you know there's another aspect here which is that viewing humans is sort of like separate from like this abstract nature is how you get a lot of really bad like racist environmentalism like i if you haven't read the trouble with wilderness by yeah croning the trouble with wilderness is one of the things that like if you study yeah if you do environmental studies at all like this is one of the first things they hand you and the reason they hand it to you is because it you know so like the the image of wilderness that we have is this sort of like oh it's this like completely untapped thing and it's like well yeah okay so the reason the reason we have this image of like a wilderness with nothing in it is because there used to be people there

and we killed them all. Yep. Or fortunately deported them. Yeah, like when the Europeans pulled up and stuff in North America. Yeah, yeah. And it's specifically like- It's like an untouched wilderness. Well, and the-

Yeah. Those forests were literally planted and cultivated. Those forests were, I think even more pointedly, it should be stated, those forests were a work of engineering that's on par with the pyramids at Giza, if not like massively in excess of it. They are a work of engineering that's every bit as impressive as any city ever built. And every bit is like intense and required as much knowledge and scientific understanding. knowledge and scientific understanding people just all we had all of those people had died by the time white folks got there because of the spread of disease or just because of act like yeah

like i think that's true especially in the east coast but with the west coast i think it's even grimmer because the west coast you and this this happened you still see this we're like a lot of like the american national parks were literally like like people would go in and ethnically cleanse the population that was there yeah and then be like oh hey look it's now wilderness this is now and this this is like the origin of of the environmental movement it's all of these like just like the most racist people you've ever seen in your life like yeah people literal fascists yeah well and even even even before them like in you know like like early 1800s like 90s or late 1800s people like those guys the late 1800s yeah yeah it's like when when those guys are

talking about like the purity of the wild like they're everything they think about the wilderness is also just about the purity of the white race and it's it's awful and and if if when when you start making that this like that's the separation between humans and nature, that's how you get these ethnic cleansing genocide forests. I've been reading this very good book. It just started last night, and I think we're going to have the author on the show soon, Chris Begley. He's an underwater archaeologist, and he wrote a book called The Next Apocalypse that's about collapses throughout history and how they actually differ from the popular conceptions of them. And he actually talks about a lot of the stuff we talk about in this show. And one of the points he makes is that this idea of like lost cities in dark jungles and whatnot is based entirely on misconceptions,

first of all, about like what jungles are. And then second on like these very Eurocentric ideas towards what lost means. Like he points out that every time there's been a lost city or civilization discovered, it's because archaeologists just like ask the people living there where the ruins were. And they're like, oh yeah, it's like right over there. Like we've known about this since forever. It was never lost. We just stopped living in that specific area. And the other thing he points out is that like this idea of a jungle as like a difficult and primeval place is ridiculous if you had to pick anywhere to be stranded in the world of in terms of bioregions you would pick a jungle like the amazon because it's pretty easy to survive there that's why people live there for so long

yeah there's a ton of amazon the amazon was of the Amazon, the Amazon was, you know, as we've discovered, you know, there were cities and stuff happening in the Amazon. You know, it was like a planted, cultivated place. Yeah, there's food jungle, like food forests and whatnot is the term people use within the jungle. Like people set the jungle in the Amazon up to provide them with food in a way that isn't exactly, isn't the same as like what we consider to be agriculture, but it's absolutely a kind of agriculture. And because people don't see it as agriculture, it's like, oh, that's just, you know, they were just running around in the forest before we arrived, you know, it's like, hoo-hoo. Yeah.

No, they had essentially built themselves a big smart house in the middle of the woods that provided them with everything they needed um with upkeep that we would consider minimal based on like what a lot of our european ancestors certainly like did in terms of labor to keep farms going like if you compare i mean you could also talk about how like peasants in the medieval period probably worked less than a lot of people in the united states due to yeah like everyone works less than we do now but it's a lot harder to keep like a monoculture farm going than it is to to keep a food forest going yeah because i mean once it's established it literally maintains itself what was the name of the book that you were talking about just now it's called

the next apocalypse and it's it's very good so far um chris begley is the author. I think we're going to have him on next week. But yeah, I've found it so far about a third of the way in. Very good. Awesome. I'll check that out. Okay. Who wants to say we're back? You just did it.

That's the intro now. I know. That intro just brought us back, baby. That's the exit ad pivot. You're welcome. Here we are. Awesome. baby turn that's the exit and pivot you're welcome here we are awesome so yeah once we have like embraced our understanding that you know we belong to the land and not vice versa and was

therefore pattern ourselves and our society's base and its needs um you know that's when we get to that place of bi-regional regeneration which is another key concept of bioregionalism and lastly there's the concept of bioregional sensibility which was developed by mitchell thomas show and it's about developing the observational skills to observe the bioregional history to develop the conceptual skills to juxtapose you know the scale of you know the community and the region and the ecosystem the bioregion all these different levels ability to like think in terms of all of them to develop the imaginative faculties to really i would say play with multiple landscapes and to develop the compassion to empathize with and work with both local and global neighbors, not just local and global human neighbors, but also, you know, the flora and fauna living next door. There are a lot of different bi-regional practices happening all over the

world um i did note that it started in north america but i noticed a lot of the big projects are happening in like south america you know in brazil sinaldo vale uh in costa rica regenerativa cindy and colombia regenerativa and the annapurna Pluriversity in the Himalayas as well, and many others. They're basically engaging in efforts involving applied education, regenerative agriculture, systems mapping, green belt restoration. There's the, you know, the Green Belt Project in Africa as well. And these are all efforts to really understand and work with the bioregions that these people inhabit. So just a few tips that I wanted to end this off with, you know, before we end things off. I always try to link the things I talk about in some way to what people and the groups they're part of,

the organizations they're part of, the communities they're part of can do, you know, as an action to strengthen their resilience or to develop, you know, autonomy, right? In this case, it is to strengthen resilience and also to develop the vitality of the bioregion you inhabit. So first of all, I think it's important that we learn as much as we can about our areas and learn especially through action, whether it be through cleanups, you know, observing the space around you, whether it be through cleanups, you know, observing the space around you, whether it be through observing weather patterns, whether it be through looking at the,

going on hikes and looking at the way that the temperature changes and the texture of the soil changes as you go up and down in altitude. I think it's also important to try to get involved with actions to restore natural features and to understand the place that those natural features have in the broader fire region.

Of course, there are lots of sustainable projects happening all over the world. If they aren't in your area, be the change you want to see. Start one, make it happen. And really also, I would say, find ways to link projects for environmental sustainability and restoration with projects for human emancipation. Find ways to support access to basic human needs within your locality to find ways to sort of because when we speak of bi-regions and you know living within our bi-regions and so on so forth that's all well and good but if for example, your region has to import a whole bunch of food all the time to support the population, I think there needs to be ways to decrease that sort of import and to find ways to live sustainably within the area. the area raise awareness of course as well um about bi-regional thinking systems thinking social ecological thinking and yeah just get to work anti-work work prefiguring the structures of a more horizontal bi-regional ethical and sustainable way of life and of course disrupt the projects that get in the way of those goals and

i say that as tentatively as i can to avoid legal trouble that's it take care everyone and be kind to everything peace Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. 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. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is remarkably today not really so much about things falling apart and is mostly about things in fact getting better and how we can do that. I'm your host, Christopher. Mostly about things, in fact, getting better and how we can do that.

I'm your host, Christopher. With me today is Garrison. And we're also joined by Nick and Max, who are two members of the artist collective SolarPunk Surf Club, who have released a very, very interesting new game that we are here in part to talk about called SolarPunk Futures. Hello, Nick. I'm Max. How are you two doing? Hey, doing well. Thanks. Yeah, doing great. Thanks for having us on us on yeah excited to have you two on so i guess my first question is how did you two get into game design and sort of first have the idea to do a sort of like political gaming project

like this it's a good question so we're. So we're definitely not game designers by profession or trade. We're members of the artist collective Solar Punk Surf Club. And we're particularly interested in creating artwork and social practice that prefigures these kinds of egalitarian futures that we'd like to see in the world and so this game was something that we've been kind of a project that we've been thinking about and sitting on for a little while and was kind of something that made us excited got us excited and we think there's a whole bunch of other reasons that we think it's a really cool project to work on an important project and yeah so we kind of took a took a deep dive headfirst into the world of game design and

learning how to how to do that over the past year or so. Okay, so how about we, I guess, also start with, I guess, explaining what Solarpunk Futures is and sort of how it works, and then we can get into the sort of political aspect of the sort of game design project. So Solarpunk Futures is a storytelling game where players imagine pathways to a desirable future by collaboratively overcoming real-world challenges.

The object of the game is to collectively remember one of the stories that grew into our utopia. utopia. The idea is that through backcasting, where you assume within the context of the game that players are already in utopia, and merely remembering back to their ancestors' struggle, that players can transcend the idea that what currently exists must necessarily exist, which social theorist Murray Bookchin described as the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking. So we wanted to make a system to facilitate collaborative performance, sort of a, we call it a collaborative performance of memory, but one that combines sincerity with laughter and speculative storytelling. The game also combines a lot of different elements that we saw in other games, collaborative, you know, collaborative storytelling, cooperative gameplay,

collaborative, you know, collaborative storytelling, cooperative gameplay, some elements of role playing, and different kind of mechanics that we thought would build out that kind of, like I said earlier, those prefigurations of those egalitarian worlds. So we were trying to, you know, we're trying to make a game that had the fiction and the idea of utopia built in, game that had the fiction and the idea of utopia built in, in terms of the goals of the game, but it was also, we wanted to build it into some of the mechanics of how the game is actually played too. My question from here is sort of, well, I mean, I guess, firstly, is I think, what sort of specifically drew you to solar punk as sort of an aesthetic for this this like i know there's been a lot of sort of like the kind of social ecology solar punk fusions but i'm interested in what you use specifically to it so we see solar punk as a visionary utopian politics and aesthetic that critically engages

the reality of capitalist catastrophe while maintaining a radical optimism about humanity's hopes for a communal ecological future. Nick was just speaking to this. We see it as a restorative justice process on a planetary scale among people between humans and non-human nature so that means reclaiming pieces of the past pre-capitalist culture that means material accountability for old practices and it also means radical adaptability towards new ones. I think it provided a useful way of synthesizing several currents that we had already been thinking about and involved in between new media and social practice. Thinking not just about images and objects in space, but also the set of social relations that those things produce. Yeah, we're also, we're like partisans within solar punk.

I don't think there's, I don't think there's too many pro-capitalists within solar punk. But I think there are some people who are maybe drawn to the aesthetic, but don't necessarily have a politics. but don't necessarily have a politics. But we do think that there's a kind of a latent horizontalism, a latent anarchistic politics in a lot of the aesthetics around solar punk. And so as a collaborative, as an aesthetic that is being defined collaboratively by people online and elsewhere, you know, we wanted to kind of stake out a position about what we thought a really realistic utopian world might look and feel like

yeah and i think there's something else i know youtube i'm very passionate about um is about specifically using games as a medium to do this and sort of and this as like this kind of storytelling remembrance as a specifically political intervention so could you talk a bit more about you know like a yeah you know the questions like okay so why this and not on you know on the sort of less like like why this and not guerrilla gardening why this and not some other kind of organizing, et cetera, et cetera. Um, yeah, I'm interested to hear you too say about that. Yeah. Well, I'm not going to hate on gorilla gardening. I definitely think it's a situation. Yeah. Um, it's also in the game. Yeah, that's true. It's, it's one of the cards,

one of the tools that you get to use as an ancestor. Yeah, I think, you know, there's a lot of different things that we were thinking about when we were thinking about why a game that I got a little bit into earlier, but, you know, for one, I think it helps reach a broad and often depoliticized audience with a fun way to kind of engage in some thorny political questions. I think that games as a participatory medium were especially interesting for people who are interested in sort of anarchistic modes of teaching and education, like education through doing uh modes of teaching and education like education through doing rather than lecture although you know we also read a lot of good political theories so i'm not i'm not opposed

to that um and then i i think uh you know games are also fun and there's a lot of there's a lot of uh political organizing and activism work that happens out there that feels that's hard and that is necessary to do but just because a lot of the important work to be done is hard doesn't mean everything that's hard is important and everything that's fun is you know trifling or not going to help us get where we're going and and overthrow capitalism and build a new world so um yeah those are those are some of the reasons yeah i think that's especially sort of an interesting point because I think a lot of what happens in leftist spaces, you get a bunch of people doing stuff

and they burn out really fast because you're doing an enormous amount of work. It's all miserable. A lot of the times you're getting physically assaulted. And I think that's one of the things that're getting physically assaulted and like i think that's one of the things that's interesting to me about this is you need other forms of sort of community building and sort of like you need other forms of organizing that do not involve you being repeatedly traumatized over and over again and that yeah and especially just working

on something like this and then i don't know just playing with your friends and having things that are like collaborative and joyful and community building is i think very important as a way to just you know even just this is not a very basic logistical level but prevent people from burning out yeah and and i definitely think that there's a role there to prevent people from burning out yeah and and i definitely think that there's a role there to prevent people from burning out and and inspiring people with some of the fun ideas the ideas that they come up with when they're not looking at a google doc meeting notes but instead they're playing a card game and maybe drinking a couple beers and they're like, oh, how would I combine guerrilla gardening and, um, you know, performance art to bring about, you know, to solve a specific challenge of

capitalism, like deforestation, or, or these are some of the cards in the game. Um, and so I think it can be inspiring. It, you know, it's also, um, it can be educational. I played with some family. I think the first time I played when we got the physical copy that wasn't a play test was with some family. And they don't necessarily identify as leftists of any kind. But we had a really fun game where we explored ideas of deconstructing borders and you know they were it wasn't like I was guiding them in this direction it was just kind of the assumption of the game that there was utopia got beyond this ingrained capitalist realism that there just isn't that there isn't an alternative and they're like okay well the game says we're already in utopia so that means

there's no private property and i was like whoa that's a that's a jump i didn't expect from my uh from my family one thing i'm interested in in terms of how it functions as a game is like balancing the actual more i don't know fun based like role-playing game elements with like its kind of structure as a thought exercise and like a world building game like how how how do you approach trying to get a balance of fun role-playing as well as this type of reverse world-building? I was still a little bit on the why a game in the first place question, but I'm also intrigued by the balancing fun and politics question. If you don't mind, I wanted to go back to the why a game for just a second um because i think maybe it will lead into this yeah yeah games are you know an ancient

form of art i know i said we work in new media before but games are actually an ancient form of art and i would argue social practice. There's a game called Senate. There's a game called The Royal Game of Ur, which both date to 5,000 years ago in ancient Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia, respectively. In making the game, we did a bunch of research on the history of games. There's a 15th century game called the Game of the Goose from present with the intention of breaking through traditional thought patterns and unleashing the potentials of the unconscious.

They also wanted to subvert academic modes of inquiry. inquiry. And then today, you know, some of our most popular tabletop games, you know, I think Nick was mentioning this earlier, how they can sometimes inscribe oppressive logics. So, you know, rather than a game where you're competing against other players to drive them into poverty, or a game where you're trying to colonize other players' land, you know, for the purpose of world domination. We wanted to make a game that actually practices the cooperation, interdependence, care, consent, these things that will be needed, you know, for it actually to transcend the social and ecological crises of our day.

And kind of to that point, you know, I would say that games always reflect the beliefs and norms of their historical context. So with Solar Punk Futures, we wanted to kind of flip the script and project using, modalities of speculative fiction, collaborative performance, as I mentioned, the values and mores of a desirable future. So games are a very human thing, an ancient human thing. And why do people play games? As I mentioned, education is part of it. But also building social bonds is another important piece. And that always is a company.

It's a very academic way of talking about it, maybe. But it is fun. It has to be fun. That's why people do it. In terms of the, to get a little deeper into the balancing question, every game is a balance between a bunch of different competing factors there's a lot of people who would talk about the balance between randomness and planning in in games and the balance um between structure and free form

and it's definitely something if there's any game designers out there thinking about making you know games like this play testing it will help you so much because you know the the game in a rough form existed in the spring of last year but play testing really helped us refine a lot of those questions and find that kind of balance between structure and freeformness. We wanted it to be accessible to people who aren't D&D players, but we've also played with people who play a lot of D&D and GM and all this stuff. And they took it in a lot of fun and wild directions that we didn't expect that helped inform kind of new ways that we could, you know, we added some optional rules in there for people who want to take it in a different direction or,

or add more complexity or, or even, or for other people who need a little bit like a handhold and want to flip a coin to decide something rather than, um, you know, come up with it totally on their own. So I think,

um, yeah, it's a hard, it's a hard thing to balance, you know, all the different factors that go into a game, but I definitely think play testing and all the people who played with us in those early games really helped, helped us figure out the right balance. And to your earlier point about burnout, balance and to your earlier point about burnout like activist burnout um some people who we've invited to play the game maybe have have expressed this idea of like well um i i'd love to but i don't have time and maybe uh maybe they they think of of gaming and and I know I've certainly been guilty of this too, of feeling like guilt over things that feel like an indulgence, like you should be doing the real work all the time. hold that in the perspective of the tradition of, of feminism, civil rights advocates,

others on the left that have talked about the importance of joy that needs to be integral to our struggles. There's the famous Emma Goldman quip. If I can't dance, it's not my revolution. So perhaps, you know, these ideas of like guilt and shame or martyrdom or whatever are kind of toxic parts of the old world that we need to let go of.

So I guess this is kind of coming back to say that there's, as Nick was saying, there is an ethical prefigurative case of how games how games can allow people to um express themselves through play but there's also a tactical one and that games can be a structured way of thinking about how do we create a liberated society one other thing i think is sort of interesting about well like i guess this is somewhat less true of tabletop games as a medium because tabletop games are a lot of sort of cloud storytelling ish stuff but like i know like like so like i i play a lot of the structure of what gaming is is sort of like it basically just turns into like another job that you have and it's interesting yeah it's like i mean you know and you get you like you get you get the same you even get like boo like crossover between the terminology of

like, you know, I think like grinding is like... You have to grind. I think that came from gaming first and then moved over into the weird grind set stuff, but like... I think you're right, yeah. Yeah. And gamification, right? That's another way that

like gaming is being almost like weaponized by capitalism to get squeezed just a little bit more out of everyone yeah there's a really interesting article whose name i am forgetting because i am yeah um but vicky ostowal wrote it like a while ago that was about how like games are like it's you know it's it's you sort of mechanically doing the same thing over and over and over again but it's it's a problem because it's like it's it's labor that's like too perfect like it doesn't create anything there's no sort of like uh like there's there's no sort of aspect that produces value that could be extracted.

You're just doing the thing over and over again. And it's like, and that becomes a problem for capital in some sense, is why there's all these panics about everyone being addicted to gaming, because it's like, well, okay, you're not making money for us. But I think it's interesting- Instead of playing truck simulator, you could

be driving some actual trucks. Yeah, yeah. But i think it's interesting truck simulator you could be driving some actual trucks yeah yeah but you know i think it's interesting that i i this is a political intervention into that of creating something that's you know precisely the opposite of that that it's you know you're not sort of like it's not just like an incredible intensification of the sort of like reward systems of working it's hey we're going to come together and we're going to tell we're going to you know make collaborative decisions and overcome challenges and i think i think that's a very interesting sort of political angle to come at this from

yeah i think a lot of a lot of tabletop games in particular compared to video games, I think, well, I'll say role-playing games in particular, put you in a driver's seat in a way that I think is hard, right? Like, sometimes I'm too tired to, or I think, you know, I have a D&D night and I'm like, I don't know if I have the energy for this after working all day. night and I'm like I don't know if I have the energy for this after working all day um whereas I might have energy to play you know a video game RPG that kind of walks me you know hand holds me through a story um it's kind of more like watching more passive um but I just think there's something so important about thinking through what it might be like to live in this utopian society. And it's important, I think, because if we don't, well, for one, a ton of people just don't even think about it. And so to the extent that this game is something that gets bought or played with families of people who are, you know, one of the many people who have been depoliticized in this

country, I think that can be really helpful. But I also think that I've played it and I've found really fun and exciting ideas that I wouldn't have thought about if I was staring at a power map or something and thinking where can we intervene in my city to you know help help solve this or that problem so I think yeah I think there's power there so I think one of the other things i think is interesting to me about how youtube sort of the team put this project together is that it's also like you know so like you can buy the versions of it that have like very very nice art but you also just put the cards and the rules up for free and you can just sort of print and play it so i wonder yeah if you could talk a

bit about the decision to do that democratic accessibility is really important to us. It's part of the concept that we wanted to integrate into every aspect of the game's production and distribution. And so, yeah, the whole thing is available as a free print and play PDF download. It's all creative commons licensed. So that's, yeah. And, you know, at the same time, as you mentioned, we, we are interested in materiality and want, wanted to create something that could, could accompany, you know, a face-to-face interaction as well, which is, you know, frankly, well, I'll just speak for myself. That's probably

more my interest. Um, even though I think, you know, like the, we have a tabletop simulator version too, which I think is really cool. But as far as the decision to make the game, you know, free, free forever, um, we want people to play it. We want it to be genuinely useful. We want people to play. We want it to be genuinely useful. This is not a capitalistic business venture. We're running a break-even budget and want to just keep doing projects and elaborating the solar punk tradition and connecting it to social ecological communalist politics. If this can be a catalyst towards being able to do more of that, then we'll have succeeded on our terms, at least.

What's the status of physical copies? How can people, if they want to use cards and stuff, how would one go about getting those? Yeah, so there's a couple different ways people can uh download the free print and play if they like if they really love it they want to buy the physical copy we sold out of the kind of first edition that we were able to afford to print but we're raising money on kickstarter a second edition so if people back us at a certain tier there I think it's $45 or higher you get a copy of the game when we're able to print them and so yeah

so it's a and of course as Max mentioned you can also play on Tabletop Simulator but yeah we're really excited about it i think we're also hoping to take it around to some you know political workshops uh probably on zoom for the foreseeable future yeah get maybe game convention tabletop game conventions and stuff uh and also some art shows to be announced, but there's a couple art shows that we're excited to be

showing it in. Yeah. One thing I'm really excited about in terms of playing this at some point is the... I think, starting from the point of you're trying to build the world now,

you can really easy, it's really easy to run into ruts. Starting at the end point and then working backwards, I think because that produces that reverse type of thought, I think it's a little bit easier for it to find the path than just starting here and looking at the world and being like, oh, how do we do anything to make it better? Instead of being at the opposite place and being like, what is the way to backtrack? I think can maybe give you some

connections and ideas that you may not have had otherwise, because we're kind of always stuck in the now, how do we get now better? So I would be very excited to try this out at some point and experience that backtrack thinking because I think it's, yeah, I'm

really intrigued with that specific aspect of the game because, yeah, I'm sure there's going to be a lot of solar punk games within the next decade probably. Um, and this is one aspect that I think actually is really unique and something that's not just intrinsic to solar punk. Um,

you know, it's something that's kind of been added on. So, uh, that's something I'm really excited about and yeah, would love to love to, uh, pick this up,

uh, soon. Yeah. Thank you for saying that um i think one of the things that we hope that the game does is help people break through that capitalist realism yeah yeah like there is no alternative it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism etc um and you know similarly if you ask people to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism etc um and you know similarly if you ask people to imagine the future uh it's very hard yes and uh and if they are able to at all it is often extrapolating sort of the worst trends of today into a dystopian future yeah i remember just slightly i remember so when i was in i was in middle school or something we had this assignment we had to like write a you'd like write what our perfect

like utopian society would be and we like did it and like three quarters of the like society people come up with were just like the worst imaginable dystopia and it was just like it's just such a grim sort of yeah if i was gonna if i was gonna make what i thought was an accurate prediction of the future it it it might be more similar to the first season of this podcast than yeah uh some of the hopeful futures but i don't i also don't think i don't think the door is closed on any kind of solarpunk future. I think it's important. One of the important aspects that we included that makes solarpunk different than just kind of vague utopianism is that we ask people to also think about the barriers they run into.

To think about who's going to oppose you. to think about, you know, what, who's, who's going to oppose you, uh, if you're trying to, um, you know, deal with, uh, polluted water and you find some really great, uh, system and improve a region's water supply, you know, Nestle might come in and buy the rights to the whole region, the whole watershed. So, you know, imagining those, that opposition, the material conditions that might change, uh, and how you adapt to them. We hope that's something that people also benefit from, uh, who play this game and, and make some predictions about the strategic decisions that capital is going to make to oppose your utopian vision. And I hope there are more solarpunk games. Like you said,

I hope there's a preponderance of solarpunk art in the next decade. That'd be amazing. And to what you were just saying, you're right. right solar punk doesn't mean the end of politics doesn't mean the absence of conflict um so i think we tried to integrate that into the game what makes a good solar punk story is that it is plausible yet distinctly anti-utopian anti-dystopian rather um it you know provides a glimpse into a future possibility for say the reharmonization of humans with other humans, humans with non-human nature. And that is going to involve some amount of opposition on the one hand and

reconstruction on the other in short to, to critique by building as the slogan goes. All right. Yeah. Uh, plugs time. What do you,

what do you two have plugs? Uh, so yeah, we have an upcoming, uh, live stream on Twitch with veterans for peace. They have, uh,

some gamers for peace and Tuesday night, uh, on the 18th at 8 p.m they're going to be playing solar punk solar punk futures with us uh if people are interested in the game they can download it for print and play on our website at http colon slash slash the future dot wtf uh and uh people can also find the link to our Kickstarter on that website. If they're interested in pre-ordering a physical copy, which we very much appreciate.

We're, we're, we're getting close to funded. That's very exciting. I hope, I hope, I hope it, I hope it gets funded.

I want to see more of these because the art is extremely cool. And yeah. Well, thank you to you for coming on. Uh, this on uh this has been it could happen here and we'll see you the next time an episode goes up i don't know when that's going to be right now so yeah wonderful extras 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 slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably

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