It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 170

Episode Date: February 22, 2025

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.  Coffee Unions Spread to Peet's Defining Anarchism feat. Andrew Mutuality feat. Andrew Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #4 You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today! http://apple.co/coolerzone  Sources/Links: Coffee Unions Spread to Peet's https://linktr.ee/peetslaborunion https://peetslaborunion.org @peetslaborunion https://checkout.square.site/merchant/MLR6ZV4VZRBPT/checkout/2KLSQDHYHY7D3GNP7YUX62CD Defining Anarchism feat. Andrew https://davidgraeber.org/interviews/david-graeber-on-acting-like-an-anarchist/https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/glossary/a-new-glossary/ Mutuality feat. Andrew Debt by David Graeber: https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/glossary/a-new-glossary/ Antinomies of Democracy by Shawn Wilbur: https://humaniterations.net/2016/12/28/the-distinct-radicalism-of-anarchism/ Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #4 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/world/americas/trump-migrant-deportation-panama.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/establishing-the-presidents-make-america-healthy-again-commission/ https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/18/kennedy-lays-out-hhs-plan-00204675 https://newrepublic.com/post/191630/donald-trump-tom-homan-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-immigration https://popular.info/p/in-botched-dei-purge-osha-trashes?r=4v4dm&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web  https://www.businessinsider.com/doge-list-officials-resigned-fired-musk-trump-federal-government-2025-2 https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/02/17/doge-social-security-musk/  https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/doge/usda-accidentally-fired-officials-bird-flu-rehire-rcna192716 https://www.theverge.com/news/614078/faa-air-traffic-control-spacex-elon-musk-layoff-staff-shortage https://apnews.com/article/rubio-plane-mechanical-issue-munich-conference-031928b920ff8e8d495d1590d508e1e5 https://x.com/BethanyAllenEbr/status/1892086856990237059 https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/trump-auto-tariff-rate-will-be-around-25-2025-02-18/ https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/18/trump-order-power-independent-agencies-00204798 https://www.npr.org/2025/02/19/nx-s1-5302481/trump-independent-agenciesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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straight to your ears with The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. Dive into John's unique take on the biggest topics in politics, entertainment, sports, and more. Joined by the sharp voices of the show's correspondents and contributors. And with extended interviews and exclusive weekly headline roundups, this podcast gives you content you won't find anywhere else. Ready to laugh and stay informed? Listen 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. 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 Get Appened Here, a podcast about things falling apart and how to put them back together again. I'm your host, Mia Wong. As the new regime settles in, we face a struggle on a thousand fronts. It's bewildering. It's terrifying. It's an offensive design to overwhelm us with the sheer totality of the horror. But its diversity is also our greatest advantage,

because every struggle on every front brings us closer to victory. And that allows us, and it allows you, to pick a field and hold it One of the most important friends in the years to come is labor much of what is to come will be decided on the shop floor and today we're talking about that and With me to talk about that is fellow worker Dino and IWW Pizza union organizer in Berkeley and fellow worker Cole who's a IWW pizza union organizer in Portland and both of you to welcome to the show. Thank you. I'm excited to be here. Hello, thank you for having me on.

Yeah, me too. I'm excited to talk to you both. So this is a pizza coffee union. We have talked to several other unions, but this was kind of personal to me because this is one of the sort of coffee things that my dad kind of grew up on and I'm now now here to deliver wrath against them for their many crimes. So yeah, let's start off with, can you talk a bit about how these unions came together and what the sort of like beginning process of this organizing look like? Yeah, so the first store that organized actually was in Davis, California. They organized, I think, in 2022, they launched their public campaign at the end in winter,

and then they voted for their election back in January 2023. That's around the same time period where a lot of media was writing about their unionization process. And a couple of the Bay Area stores heard about it and started to meet together. And that's kind of where we started. We weren't IWW at the start, but we eventually started meeting with unions and chose IWW. Oh yeah, so it was an independent thing that became an IWW.

Yeah, when we joined the IWW, we were basically fully organized to the extent that we were going to be. We already had our like committee set up. We had our meetings regularly. We had like Robert's rules and everything already implemented. That's so cool. You want to talk a little bit about like what the sort of process of doing that initial

organizing before you went to the unions look like? How everything sort of came together? Yeah, when we started organizing, it was very secretive and it was a little bit scary at the time because there was a lot of already kind of union Busting from management. There was a lot of Managers kind of like trying to overhear people were talking about the Union Or already instigating themselves and asking like what do you think about unions? And it was a little bit scary to try to just like go up to co-workers and be like hey like are you interested in?

you know hanging out after work and you know talking talking shit about our manager or something like that. And over time, we eventually started doing like one-on-one conversations with our coworkers and meeting together. Once we had our three stores that really were solidified, we had at least one person in each store that was like willing to like drive the campaign forward for moms and maybe even years, as some of us have been around for that long now, we felt ready to start setting things into stone. So we had meetings every single week and we had bi-weekly meetings at some point. We had committee meetings and people started to select themselves into social media or

we had outreach, we had intake. So other stores were also reaching out to us because there was like just secret kind of like people knew what was happening. People didn't want to say it out loud. Yeah. So it was just a lot of like hanging out, having socials and things like that, that kind of like created the foundation for like personal relationships for organizing. And at the time, it was mostly just us complaining for a really long time until we were like, what if he did something about this? Yeah. One thing I'm curious about is like how large roughly are these,

are these shops? There tends to be about 12 to 16 workers at each shop. So I think the biggest union shop that we have has 16 workers in it. The shop that I work at is fairly small. We only have 12 workers right now, so Fairly small and I will say just to give some context for the organizing process for my shop as well Pete's did not make it difficult to organize in terms of like the policies that they were

pushing. Everyone was pissed off about how we were being treated. And so just sort of pushing people in one-on-one conversations to look for solutions rather than just bitching about it, which is great. That's where it all starts, right? Pete's pushing poor policies, they're cutting hours. That's one of the biggest things. They're slicing our hours week after week,

even as the volume of sales goes up. And so just being like, hey, do you want more hours? Like, do you feel like it's fair for us to be staffed this way? Let's try to do something about it. Yeah. And the staffing issues is one of the things we're talking to. I mean, just people across sectors. It's really one of the it's one of the things that's the most obvious.

If you're working one of these jobs and also somehow it's not something that ever gets talked about in the mainstream at all. Like it's never a part of the discourse that. You know, you don't have a set number of hours that you're going to work you don't know when you're going to work them and also you know there's no guarantee that you're gonna get to work enough hours to actually survive and then also the entire condition of labor like every sector is just chronic it's just chronic under scheduling and chronic understaffing of everything and it you know that ranges from like coffee shops like hospitals to schools to like Everyone has decided that the way that you manage things is by chronically overworking everyone and trying to pay people as little as possible

by not giving them hours You talk a little bit of more about about the kind of the actual effects of the understaffing and how that sort of drove people into the campaign? Yeah, I would be more than happy to. I mean, one of the sort of primary catalysts for organizing for our shop was the introduction of Uber Eats. So when I first started working on the shop, it was around two years ago, they had just recently introduced DoorDash. So previously, you know, obviously it started, it was just a cafe, people would come in and

get their coffee. Later on, they ended up introducing mobile orders through Pete's own ordering system. And then when the pandemic hit initially, and everything locked down, they started doing DoorDash to try to continue having a revenue stream. Now after more things started opening up, they opened the shop up again. Obviously they continued to have DoorDash because it brings in a lot of revenue for them. Yeah.

And then without really any forewarning and certainly without any increase in staffing for us, they introduced Uber Eats, which is a similar amount of volume increase, a similar amount of orders increase as DoorDash. Like we're probably getting at peak like 30, 40 drinks per hour in addition to what we're getting in store from DoorDash and Uber Eats. That's a drink every like sub two minutes. Yeah.

Jesus. And we are expected to crank these out at less than three minutes in order. And that's per order. So an order might have like five drinks if it's DoorD asher uber eats where in particular people will order a lot of things at a time. Yeah.

Because it seems like using these sort of apps and stuff, people will order much more egregious things, much larger orders than they do when they're in store. And so everyone's really annoyed about this. Just like, okay, all of a sudden we have all this extra work to do They're not increasing our hours at all. You're not getting paid more either Well, oh certainly not and we don't get tips from that either. Oh Jesus. You don't get tips from me No, no, I mean like wait. Oh the tips all go to the driver's Jesus Christ I won't like that's not a bad thing But you should get paid too

Yeah, but it's like uber who's taking the vast majority of the money from that and peace. And so us and the drivers are both getting screwed over by this. But we both have to do all the sex-trainious work. So people were super fucking irritated about that, myself included for sure. And that really got people going with like, okay, what are we going to do about this? How can we try to push them to staff us better? Yeah, and it seems like the incentive structures for for these delivery services add up really badly in terms of like the way that incentives people to order because you know, you have

these like minimums on the amount of like stuff you have to order to get to get below like there's all this, you know There's all this threshold stuff of like, if you do this, you get free delivery, you spend this much, you get blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so that, yeah, it seems like the sort of perfect maelstrom for producing even more work. Yeah, and I will say this, is that they like to push out promotions to people of like buy one, get one free, that sort of thing

for like our Pete's location constantly and they never tell us about it. So, you know, one day we'll just be getting like five large mochas in like six different orders and we're like, why are we getting five large mochas in all of these orders? And someone pulls up the DoorDash app and they're like, oh, it's because there's like a half off if you get more than four mochas and all of these orders. And someone pulls up the DoorDash app and they're like, oh, it's because there's like a half off

if you get more than four mochas or something like that. It's just like, we never hear about this until it's actually happening. And that's the case both for DoorDash New Breeds, but also for just like internal pizza promotions. Like we tend not to hear about any of these things until we are on the shop floor working and people are asking us about it. Customers are asking us about it.

Yeah, it seems like the way that the integration of these apps into these business models is working is it's just every single thing they do just compounds the amount of work you have to do and compounds how awful the experience is And speak speaking about how awful the experience is unfortunately we are a podcast sponsored by ads So go experience them or don't I don't know there's a if you have Apple There's a there's a thing you can get cool cool is on video. We don't have ads the Android one I Don't even know what I'm legally allowed to say about that shit, but oh my god It is the biggest legal clusterfuck. I've ever seen in my entire life. We're gonna leave it up there, but we're trying, we're doing our best. We are so back. Yeah, so let's go into the other of their myriad crimes.

Oh man, where do I even start? So Pete's, the second they found out that we were organizing, launched their worst union busting campaign they could have ever imagined, wasting so much money. Right after we went public, the first big thing that they messed up on was they took me off the schedule indefinitely and we had to file a whole unfair labor practice about it. An unfair labor practice is a charge with the National Labor Relations Board and we claimed that they were being retaliatory. And at the time it was very clear that management thought I was a key organizer.

I was very public and vocal about being a union member at the time everyone was. But for some reason, they singled me out. That was one part of how they messed up. But they eventually put me back on the schedule, apologize, gave me back pay. And we withdrew the we withdrew the ULP because we're like, all right, I guess it fix itself. Yeah, that's the thing that happens, by the, like if you're submitting an unfair labor practice and the company resolves that you don't actually have to and this is actually one of the things about UOP sometimes is that like neither you nor your employer wants to go sit in front of the National Labor Relations Board and like do a whole thing so like sometimes you can get them to resolve it just by like just by the threat of it.

And then you don't actually have to go sit in for the National Labor Relations Board because they've done the thing they were supposed to do. So note for all you people out there who are considering filing one of these. Yeah, no, just stack them up. And sometimes that's enough to put pressure, especially for smaller businesses or people who just like, especially corporations that don't necessarily have experience with union investing quite yet. Yeah. So at the time that worked in within a week, I had my job back and everything. And that was right after we had filed, which meant that if for some reason I wasn't put back on the schedule,

I would have been gone leading up until the election, which would have been really bad in terms of, you know, having those one on ones with coworkers and making sure everyone was connected. I just want to mention here, like it is illegal to fire someone for union organizing. Like it's not the most easily enforced thing, but they legally cannot do that. So just note note for all the people who are listening to you need episodes for the first time. They can't do that. And if they do it, you can you can launch campaigns and you can sort of force them to do it. But yeah, just this is the Mia Labrin note of the episode. Yeah, no. And I think especially something that's very IWW of how we reacted to that situation was that my co workers were also just like being really like annoying to the manager. What happened to Dino? Why aren't they at work? What's going on?

And I think that internal pressure also made it really uncomfortable for management to realize how much they had fucked up and how much my coworkers were willing to have my back. There was definitely more talk of actual direct action in other ways that eventually we actually didn't do because I got my hours back. So that was really good. Yeah. Yeah. And then yeah. So that was still within the first few weeks of when we filed our paperwork to have an election with the NLRB to be a certified shop according to the government. Not that that's always important. Yeah. That's something that we wanted, especially as the fucking Trump regime unfolds. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's really it's a really tough position Especially because I mean we're we're IWW members and I know that there's definitely an internal debate of whether or not

You know contractual agreements versus direct action. Yeah, but there's always the option to use to both a combination diversifier tactics, but yeah, so that happened. They also hired a union buster. Of course they did. Now, according to LM reports from the government that they have to file, they spent over $100,000 in like a span of like two weeks to hire this union buster. Jesus Christ. And... What's an LM report by the way?

It's like a report that you file with the, I think, forgetting which department it is, but- Is it the OLM? The Office of Labor and Management? Thank you. Yeah. So they are required to file that by, I think, March 30th of the following year for like fiscal reasons.

So we finally got those documents this previous year. So they did spend a lot of money and this guy who was just basically messing with us for like two weeks and he was, you know, trying to be super helpful, answer any questions about the union and like tell people that the union was, you know, like racist, not for them or that the union was exclusionary or that unions cost a lot of money. And thankfully, that didn't work. We won all of our elections. But leading up to that, it definitely kind of morale dropped a lot. People felt a little bit they're questioning whether or not it was the right decision we made to unionize in the first place, because it seemed like this was just the start of Pete's just messing with us because they care on. Yeah. And it didn't seem like there was much that we could have done in

that situation other than try to maybe have fun with the union buster and mess with him. But even then that still wasn't like enough to tear out the fact that that like people were just being messed with at work and they couldn't really leave. Like there was someone like on the floor asking them questions about their activity with the union. And even though now we know it's like illegal and we could have filed unfair labor practices on that at the time, we just didn't do it. And now we're learning about it.

But that's something I definitely wish we knew and stood up for a little bit more. Yeah. Could you tell a little bit about what the specific thing was so that if people are experiencing it themselves, they can know what they can do? Yeah. So management shouldn't be asking for your affiliation within a union. They're not allowed to ask or make assumptions about it. So if I'm a manager, I'm not allowed to go up up to like me and be like, Hey, Dino, like, since you're in the union, like, what is the union doing about X, Y, and Z?

Like, that's not an appropriate question. And there's definitely times where like my own manager asked me questions like that. And I definitely had to like, Hey, like, this is actually like not appropriate for you to do. Like, I don't feel comfortable with this. But that's not always the case and some workers definitely were like disclosing private and confidential information about the union to management and it was Really hard to make sure that every worker felt comfortable and they definitely picked out workers Yeah, based on you know, like social person like personalities and things like that, which is really disheartening to see Yeah, it's really scummy. And I think morale is a terrain of struggle.

And that's one of the things here too, where it's like a lot of these efforts are just attempts to make everyone in a workplace miserable and attempt to make people sort of too depressed and too despondent to sort of organize. And a lot of that, yeah, again, is like, is stuff you can organize against, is stuff that like they're not allowed to do

and whether or not they're going to be able to do it is a function of labor regulation and labor law that like they're not allowed to do and whether or not they're going to be able to do it is it is a function of labor regulation and labor law is not something that's enforced by the government something that's enforced by you as enforced by the people around you. And so you know like the law can sometimes help and sometimes dozens. It's useful to cite the management it's useful because it makes them think that there's like the full power of the state behind you or whatever but like in in turn in terms of how you deal with this stuff It is something that is enforced by you by how organized you are and by how organized your shop floor is about how organized your community is

And that's what I think important people to understand when you're forming your own unions Which you should also go do because you can just do it Which I said before I'll say it again like the people who organize unions are just regular people. Like you, person, dear listener. So you can do this too. What do they say? It's like a union is just two workers talking to each other. Yeah. And yeah, just to expand on that point a little bit, like the NLRB is quite understaffed and it will be more understaffed almost certainly as the the Trump administration you know gets deeper into gutting the entirety of the

government it already takes months two years to get unfair labor practice filings resolved for the NLRB to do most things. So that is a core tenet of the IWW, is actually taking action on the shop floor. Like that is the key aspect to unionism as a whole. And I think one of the great parts about the IWW is that it actually acknowledges that the power comes from the workers it doesn't come from laws The laws only came because workers were pushing for things on the shop floor in the first place

So it's like let's get back to the root of that Yeah, like the end the NLRB we've talked about this on the show before but the National Labor Relations Act I think it established National Labor Relations Board like that that was part of effectively like a truce that was enforced by by the government because as a way to have like labor unions stop being armed and stop getting into shootouts with bosses, so yeah It is as as as this framework comes apart It is important to remember like why we had this in the first place which was Union militias would occasionally start like small-scale civil this in the first place, which was, uh, Union militias would occasionally start like small scale civil wars in the US with bosses over stuff.

People would shoot cannons at each other and we're sort of distant from that period. But there's also another thing about direct action, which is that, yeah, it's hard to organize, but also like quite frankly with with the way that the NLRB is functioning right now, like the time to organize that A makes a union better and B is going to be faster than the NLRB right now. So yeah, this is this is this is this is your practical. We have your ideological pitch, we have your practical pitch for direct action, which is that it's quick. Unfortunately, the other thing that's quick is the approach of this ad break. Here's ads. We are back. So let's talk about sort of what's happening right now with the union, how things are going and what management has been doing. Yeah. So right now, I mean, we're dealing with a lot of the same issues as we have been dealing with. The staffing issue is only continuing to be worse, right? One of the things that

we are trying to get initially is schedules further out. Right now, we get them two weeks out more consistent scheduling, more scheduling, obviously better wages, better benefits, you know, all of these sort of things. And those are only continuing to get worse. And so, we are continuing to try to think about tactics, strategies to counter that, right, to give us more power. So we're both doing direct actions and trying to push for a contract right now. Now one of the big difficulties is that Piz has basically hired this law firm to do the contract negotiations on their behalf.

And the law firm is basically stonewalling us. Like they are responding to the emails, but basically by just kicking the can down the road. Yep, yep, yep. And trying to not actually come to the bargaining table. And so it's this very frustrating thing of like, how do we actually get them to come to the bargaining table? And that's definitely still something that we're wrestling with and that we're working on. Yeah, I don't

know if you have any more to add to that, Dina. Yeah, no, I think another thing that's kind of on everyone's mind is that a group of us got written up for another direct action that we did back in October. And then we got written up like the week of Thanksgiving and holidays and finals for most of us that were students. So that kind of just dropped morale and activity and because of the holidays, people were either kind of not paying attention or just organizing activity tends to just drop during no holidays. Yeah. People are just a little bit... Everyone just checks out.

Yeah. People check out, people go home. And especially for us and food service retail, a lot of people are kind of just around for school. So my location, we're a few blocks away from UC Berkeley. So most of the students go home and they're not going to log into Zoom for a 30- minute union meeting and like hear what's like, you know, the most recent like check ins that we need to do. So that is a little bit frustrating that he'd stuff thing wrote us up right at the perfect time that where activity kind of drops. Yeah, so they're, they're adapting, they're learning a little bit more. And it's kind of, it's really frustrating. But yeah, no, a group of us, including me, got written up for something and it was just a blanket discipline. And it started restricting

all of our abilities to like cover shifts, to swap shifts, to pick up hours, to call out. And they restrict everything so badly. And then are also like final warnings and there's no like period in which all these made up rules that they're making kind of end. I'm just like waiting to hear when my manager decides to like stop punishing me, which is like obviously very personal. And that's like really worrisome because we tried to file a grievance with Pete's according to what they told us. All our district managers were like, yeah, file a grievance with Peets according to what they told us. All our district managers were like, yeah, file a grievance with HR, we'll discuss it there. And then we did that.

We filed a grievance, we all signed on, and then management turned around and was like, actually you haven't bargained for a grievance procedure, so we actually don't care about this. And unless it's legally mandated, we won't listen to you. So now we're again stuck between like, we want to bargain, we want to go to the table, we want to meet with pedes, but they are creating these made up rules on how they want to bargain and meet with us and they're unwilling to cooperate with us.

There's like five public shops and they're like not willing to meet with us at the same time. That actually makes no sense. We have the same bargaining team members for all our shops. We're in the one big union. It doesn't make any sense that they're trying to... I mean, it makes perfect sense for management to try to divide us, but it's what the workers want to be in one contract, to be able to do one grievance and go against management

together. But yeah, it's like a really annoying thing. And it's really frustrating to not really know exactly what our next move is. I mean, this is something that I think both union organizers and management knows, which is that the first place that unions fail is trying to get the vote and trying to get to, which is trying to get enough people organized around this sort of campaign. So the second place that they fail is before the first contract or trying to negotiate the first contract. And so every company just like tries to draw the shit out as long as humanly possible. Like it took us,

God, I think, what, two years in bargaining? And that's like not even that. Like for a first contract, I mean, that's like bad, but it's not even as bad as it can get. And there's the other aspect of it too, that you've been talking about, which is that the, the way that companies break unions, just terror, right? It's just, it's just a terror campaign. It is, it is, it is a campaign to inflict sort of fear and suffering on people. And the fact that this is the way that the system works that, you know, there are a bunch of people in power who are through the way that they're attempting to keep their power is

just through fear and through like inflicting pain on people is just ghastly and if you want to sort of take a step back and go like why is everything like this? It's like well, that's because because that's what this entire system is built on. It has always been built on. Yeah, and I think in terms of countering that, one thing that I definitely want to call for from all of my fellow baristas out there is to organize your own shops, right? Like, that is the key thing.

The more people that we have pushing for better rights for workers in the workplace, whether that's through a contract or not, the more effective it's going to be. And it's when we feel alone and isolated that their terror is most effective. It's when we're together that it is the least effective, that they are the most scared by our tactics. So just keep pushing for it. I mean, I think that's one of the things that the Starbucks campaign has showed us. You know, it, they still don't have their first contract.

Sure. But there's so much closer now, like over, what is it? Like almost three years down the road with over 500 shops organized than they were when those first shops organized in Buffalo and That's due to that persistence and due to Having more weight on our side So please organize do it. That's just my little call for that

Yeah, it's a snowball rolling down the hills. Like the more the more shops organized, the more that will convince other shops to organize. And the larger that snowball is, the harder it is to stop its momentum. But what do you think the next steps are going to be for this campaign? If you can actually talk about it in terms of like putting pressure on the company in terms of like drawing other people in in terms of like what's going on in the

shops? Yeah, I think one of the main things that we think that we've been really quiet about is how much union investing they've been doing and just talking to the public about that. I think part of why we're here today also is it's going to help with that. A lot of people, especially when people were calling for boycotts on Starbucks, were like, okay, we'll go to Pete's then. They're like the good company. No.

And I think Pete's gets away with a lot because they have that kind of protection of like, oh, they were a small company from Berkeley and they're still in the Bay Area. They're so small. Now they have so many shops across the world. They're like an international conglomerate. They're part of like a large holding company and they got bought out like over 10 years ago and the quality has been declining. They treat their workers like shit. We don't get any raises anymore unless it's

like minimum wage increases are mandated by law. So a company that maybe was right and was maybe a little bit better is now like just going downhill. And I think people still like pride themselves and being like a peatnik and being a customer and being part of this like weird subculture of coffee that is no longer kind of there's just like, it's just not what it was back when it was created like in the 60s and Berkeley It's not it's not the same and it can't go back to that anymore just now with the way that their union bus you know with the way that they're just cutting the quality of everything and Over like yeah everything the exploitation of us and in other ways that they do. It's just not sustainable

Yeah, and you can see that it's not the same company by just like, oh yeah, hey, they've, you know, I mean, and this is not a defense of like, small businesses which also do just absolutely terrible shit to workers, like if you've ever worked for one, like, good lord. But, you know, like as these companies get larger and larger, and as this sort of, the endless march of capital goes on, you know, you like you see the current like nightmare of, oh, hey, here's like an additional 50% of your workload.

And also you don't get tips on it. And, you know, unless this stuff is rolled back and unless people understand what's happening, unless it's more organizing, like that's just the latest terrible thing that's going to happen there. Like five years down the line. They're going to have invented a new app that like does something though the magnitude of the horror of which we haven't even like comprehended yet. Like, I don't know. We're probably two years out from like the Chinese style thing where you could order a coffee on a train and someone has to go

run out to the train platform to the next station to hand it to you on the train Like there there are there are there are depths of even this algorithmic hell that we haven't hit yet and the only way for us not to continue to plunge the depths of suffering with a line the size of the universe is is by organizing more and by getting people to understand that you know all of these sort of progressive brands are a thin veneer for exploitation and suffering. Absolutely. And honestly, one of the legitimate worries that we have about next steps in the evolution of what Pete's coffee shops are going to look like is the register folks being replaced with kiosks, you know, like self-service kiosks.

I mean, that's something that we've seen, you know, in a number of places from grocery stores to like McDonald's now and Dunkin Donuts. They're even rolling out some like beta testing kiosk shops for Pete's in the Bay Area. And Pete's has introduced this new service deployment system within the shops, which basically pins the person on the register to the register where they're not allowed to do anything else. They're not even allowed to turn around and get coffee for the people. And you know, the more that we do this and the more that we get yelled at by our managers for literally trying to help a customer and get them something because

we're, you know, deployed to the register, the clearer it becomes that they're just trying to basically make that position obsolete so that they can shift it into a kiosk. Yeah, it's just more corporate cost cutting because, you know, if they're not bringing in any more revenue, they got to make that profit line go up somehow, right? And so, yeah, one of the big things that we're doing right now to try to push back against that is doing this sort of PR campaign to try to just bring more people into the organizing effort on the worker side of things and on the customer side of things, just making people more aware

of what's actually going on here and that, you know, we're not actually better than Starbucks. Yeah. You know, we're not the better option. We're part of a massive conglomerate that You know, we're not the better option. We're part of a massive conglomerate that is practicing the same horrible anti-labor business practices as the rest of them. Yeah, I think that's a good place to end. If people want to support y'all, where should they go? We'll also have links to stuff and what other things can they do to help? Yeah. So you can go to our social media at Pete's Labor Union. We also have our website. We have an intake form. So if any barista is interested in reaching out,

learning more about organizing, what that entails, and if you want to organize their own shop, we have members, part of our organizing committees that are willing to meet with you, sustain contact through however long you need for your campaign and you'll be part of our organizing. We have shops across the country organizing with us. It's very exciting. I'm sure there might be a shop near you already organizing and we can get y'all connected as well.

Oh yeah. And Jesus Christ, I had a terrible based coffee people of the world unite pun thing, but it's slipped from my mind I alright all of you will be spared by terrible coffee related puns as long as you go organize your fucking workplace So go do that go join the struggle go make it stronger And I don't know like there's going to be a number of you for whom this is like not your terrain right and if this Isn't your terrain to find it find find the struggle that you were going to do and wage it there and take your field and hold it. Have you ever looked into the night sky and wondered who or what was flying around up

there? We've seen planes, helicopters, hot air balloons, and birds, but what if there's something else, something much more ominous that appears under the cover of night, silent, unseen, watching? the cover of night, silent, unseen, watching. They may be right above your car late one night as you cruise down the road, or look like mysterious lights hovering above your home. Drones, or are they? We used the word drone

because it was comfortable to other people. One minute it was there, one minute it wasn't. Oh, that is beyond creepy. Do you feel like this drone was targeting you specifically? Yes, absolutely. Listen to Obscurum, Invasion of the Drones, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The more better the merrier. Title of your podcast.

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It's dangerous and illegal everywhere. A message from NHTSA and the Ad Council. Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here. Because it could. My name is Andrew Sage and I'm also Andrewism on YouTube and at time of recording the year is still technically new. So I wanted to start it off with some refreshes on anarchism. In the first episode we'll look at the meanings of anarchism, authority and anarchy.

And the next time we'll look at free association, mutuality, mutual aid and the role of solidarity. And don't worry, next month I'll be getting back into the Latin American anarchism series as I still haven't done Uruguay and Mexico yet. Oh, by the way, I'm not talking to myself. I'm here with the one and only... S.S. Beowong. Oh, I keep forgetting that you do an actual throw instead of actually saying the name. Yeah. Yeah. So not to worry. I've only been doing this for several hundred episodes now. You'd think you'd think, but no, you got it. You got it. Hello.

I'm excited to do this. Also excited for the Mexico episodes because Mexican anarchism is a trip. Irrigation anarchism is also a whole lot of people digging tunnels out of prisons, but we'll get we'll get we'll get to that later. We will we will. So I suppose to start off with, I want to find out and I ask this question with tongue in cheek, of course, how familiar but you say you are with anarchism? You know, I have a very silly, like, kind of like, how did I like actually finally become an anarchist? Because I've been around anarchists for a long time.

But like the thing that like actually convinced me to be an anarchist is I sat down and I got a bunch of like anarchist history books from a library and started reading them. Like Marksnet, Lowe and them sorts of people. So specifically was a lot of like crumps like Hades, Yuzo and pure anarchism and in interwar Japan, which I've talked about on the show 100 billion times. Actually, I read Capuletis,

anarchism, Latin America around that time, too. It's a very good resource. Yeah. Yeah. So pretty pretty familiar with with stuff. Yeah, yeah. So pretty, pretty familiar with stuff. But yeah, we'll see. We'll see. I'm excited to talk about it. Yeah. I mean, we'll see is right because that's happened in anarchist. When I was introduced to anarchism, I would say somewhere around 2017, 2018 through Christian anarchism, actually, that was during my read my deconstruction.

I stumbled upon Christian anarchism and briefly flated with it, but didn't really get seriously into the study of anarchism until like late 2019 early 2020 around the time and late in 2020s when I started my channel. Let's say I've been studying anarchism for about five years. Seriously, I feel like I'm now getting started. You know, like I'm now starting to grasp what it is. And the thing is, there's so many interpretations of anarchism, you know, so many different schools of thought.

I mean, that's not to say that it can't be defined or that any attempts to define anarchism is like exclusionary or unanarchist. And I see that argument floating around that like, well, no, you can't define anarchism because that's actually authoritarian. But, you know, there are such a thing as definitions, but there is room, of course, for a negotiation of meaning.

Yeah, it's a very, well, usually, it's a very syncretic ideology. It pulls from a lot of different places and it pulls from lots of different, of its own strands. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But let's say if you had to like define anarchism, like right now, like what would you see as a non-negotiable, basic fundamental definition for you?

I mean, the opposition to hierarchy on a basic level, the opposition to the state, to capitalism, to patriarchy, to two systems of hierarchical power is, I guess, like the baseline definition and then also in terms of what it's, you know, the replacement for that can be a lot of things. But yeah, it's the building of a society where we don't have power over one another. I think it's like a very baseline kind of thing. Yeah, I think that's pretty solid. For me, I find it fairly similarly. I would say that I think the opposition to authority is the most important part. I would say the definition I've been sort of workshopping, sculpting over time, as a writer, I really like to play with words a bit and find the best ways to put things.

So for me, what I've come up with is that anarchism is the political philosophy and practice that opposes all authority along with its justifying dogmas and proposes the unending pursuit of anarchy. A world without rule where self-determination, mutuality and free association form the basis of our society. And so basically the rest of this episode is going to be me breaking down how I came to this definition, what I'm expounded upon with this definition. So for one, just taking a look at the structure of it, we are looking at an oppositional stance

and a propositional stance and a propositional stance, opposing and proposing. You know, we're not just for the negation of all things, although there are schools of anarchism that do lean in that direction. We also, of course, we want to be constructive. We're not, as some people seem to presume, obliterating the state and then leaving warlords in their wake, you know? Yeah, Bakunin sucks in a lot of ways, but the creative verge is a destructive one, has

the order of events correctly, where like the point is to create something. Exactly. Exactly. And as you know, Bakunin is one of the earlier thinkers of anarchism, though I've never really been partial to him, you know? Yeah. Usually I've been more of a Kropotkin and Malatesta kind of guy. But lately, as you know, somewhat problematic as he is as well, I haven't gotten into a

bit more Proudhon. I recently got the pictures of Proudhon reader that Ian McKay put together for AK Press. Extremely problematic guy. Oh boy. Yeah, but he certainly wrote a lot. And so I want to dig through and see what gemstones of his work I can I can find. You know, yeah, I think that's that's important to sift through. He's a he's a mixed and baffling figure who also was a pretty large influence on Marx, if you like, read him, even though Marx hates him, which is very funny. Mocks also didn't always understand for the on this definition. Honestly, I don't think we're on necessarily always had like a very consistent application

of his ideas. Hence the misogyny despite being anarchist and becoming a politician at one point in his life and all that jazz. Yeah. And people may know this who listen to this show, but the term libertarian was invented by anarchists specifically to describe how they were different from for Don because they weren't sexist It's it's a whole thing actually wasn't aware of that. Yeah, yeah That's why that's why in most parts of the world libertarian is like is a term that means anarchist

It's just it's mostly largely in the US where that's not a thing because the right libertarians like took it. Yeah. I won. Unfortunately, the US's cultural hegemony has sort of propagated that American version of the term as the popular one. But yeah, yeah, whether you're talking about anarchists or libertarians or mutualists you're all getting it from basically that same sort of original hool of late 19th century early 40th century thinkers and we're sort of using their sort of explorations to build something of a political philosophy.

But in my definition I call it a political philosophy but that can be a contentious way of describing it you know. Anti-politics is a term that's used to describe opposition to or distrust in traditional politics. And traditional politics is usually associated with the art and science of government. So there are anarchists who would argue that anarchism is not a political philosophy it's actually an anti-political philosophy. I think these people are very... okay this is one of the things about being an anarchist, right? This is the thing about being a leftist and it's something you have to be able to set aside when you have to do things but a lot of being a leftist is being annoyed at other leftists and I could put together an actual detailed theoretical critique of anti-politics

But mostly the people who talk by anti-politics just annoy me It's it's like an affect thing. I Feel you to me, it's like It's not like to pick up look around that, you know play with for a little bit put it back down kind of thing You know, I got this I've limited to it But I think it's like it's good to look at more than one angle of definition and understanding. Yeah. I mean, of course, I suppose a critique that could be made of the final anarchism

as anti-politics is a sort of a narrowing of the definition of politics to just that sort of art and science of government, when politics can also be defined really broadly as just about the relationships between people and groups, which anarchism is concerned with primarily so. But I do find it an interesting point to wrestle with. And so other than it being a political philosophy or anti-political philosophy, we could also define anarchism as a practice. This is something that I believe Graeber did in his life. He saw anarchism in one interview, he said, quote, did in his life. He saw anarchism in one interview he said quote, It's possible to act like an anarchist, to behave in ways that would work without bureaucratic

structures of coercion to enforce them, without calling yourself an anarchist, or anything. In fact, most of us act like anarchists, even communists, a lot of the time. To be an anarchist, for me, is to do that self-consciously, as a way of gradually bringing a world entirely based on those principles into being." End quote. So this is basically the idea that anarchism is not just something you think in your head. It's a method of change, something that you practice. It's something that in fact some anarchists don't even want to call themselves anarchists

because they see anarchists as something that you do rather than something that you are. Yeah, those were great. I think Ursula K. Le Guin kind of had a similar, a similar relationship towards calling herself an anarchist. Yeah, that's possible. That sounds really, really familiar. Yeah, I think I think a lot of was like she didn't feel like she could because you had to do it.

But yeah, it's a pretty common like way of thinking about anarchism that I like a lot. Yeah, for sure. Another part of the definition of anarchism that I put forward is the opposition to all authority and that statement could actually get me some pushback to get me in some trouble with some anarchists surprisingly. And I'm sorry, I blame Noam Chomsky. Oh my god. As a historian, as a linguist, okay, whatever, sure.

But it was not historically controversial among anarchists to say that you were opposed to all hierarchy and all authority. The definitions of those terms do get confused often because like a lot of words in the English language they do have multiple meanings. You know, you don't want to fall into the equivocation fallacy where you use a word or phrase in one way and then you use it in another way in the same argument. So someone might say for example, anarchism opposing authority is stupid because authority just means having a difference in expertise or a difference in influence.

Or that opposition to hierarchy is stupid because food chains or the hierarchy of needs. But as we know anarchists are focused on very specific things or we use these terms. So arguing against it with other definitions doesn't make sense. And by hierarchy anarchists are for instance stratification of society which gives some individuals, groups or institutions authority over others. An authority refers to the recognized right above others in a social relationship to give commands, to enforce obedience, to control property, to exploit and so on. And I really don't see the benefit in Chomsky's sort of unjust authorities or unjust hierarchies approach to define him.

And I feel so. Yeah, because I mean, the thing about hierarchies is that every hierarchy argues that it's just like you, you, you, you, you would get slave owners like doing these whole speeches about like the inherent morality of slavery. Like it's not actually a, it's not actually like an ethical position that leads you to like the opposition to hierarchy because again every hierarchy is self-justifying. Exactly, which is why I say opposition to all authorities and their justifying dogmas. Because all of them have dogmas, including the example that Chomsky uses, which is typically

of the parent pulling their child away from traffic. That is not an exercise of authority. And the relationship between a parent and a child is something that can and should be interrogated. You know, that is a caretaking relationship primarily, a relationship of responsibility. It does not have to be a relationship of authority in the sense that, I suppose. Yeah. And the way that it turns into a relationship of ownership is something that genuinely can and should be opposed.

But it's also something that like gets a lot harder to oppose when you're sort of stuck up on this like, well, actually, no, it's good because this is authority or whatever. So I think the way that Chomsky obfuscates this stuff makes it harder to actually do politics that's useful. the stuff makes it harder to actually do politics that's useful. Exactly. Because then it also makes it harder for people to sort of question the authority they're more comfortable with or the hierarchies they're more comfortable with. So you'll see that way. So go on and say, oh, no, we don't actually oppose all hierarchies, you know, parents thing. And you really, you see it in ground in a sense, because you make it harder to identify and really question those things because you're shutting down that avenue of questioning. And so when we speak of authority, we're really speaking about that right, the rights that

authority gives to certain people over other people, privileges that are recognized and enforced and a right being a sort of a priority that is above others. The right of authority is a guarantee to actions or resources that absolve the individual holding that right of consequences. The right of authority compels and support needs the desires and needs of those below that authority. So you know, authorities have the right to command recognized and enforced by the underlings. You know, authorities have the right to command recognized and enforced by the underlings. You know, they have the right to enforce the obedience of the underlings and the right to control all the properties the earth has been carved into. You know,

the rights absolves them of certain consequences and sort of goes in one direction. It's a unilateral sort of thing. So the authority can take your house, you know, the bank, the government, the landlord, they can take your house, but you can't take theirs. An authority can assault you, be a soldier, police officer, whatever, you cannot assault them. An authority can take the fruits of your labor, they can take from the wealth of what you produce, but you can't take from them, that's theft. Authority cannot be an authority by themselves.

They have to have authority over, they have to have a hierarchical social relationship that deprives some of their benefit. Anarchists oppose authority because among other reasons those subject to authority become controlled, they become dependent, exploited, prevented from accessing their full potential and even their bare necessities. I read that prevented from accessing their full potential is why a lot of anarchists have spent a lot of time targeting or approaching parenting and or approaching education. Just this morning I was reading a bit of Emma Goldman and she was talking about Ferrer's

schools. The way that she speaks honestly she shows an excellent right, an excellent speaker, but the way that she did so and the way she approached and recognised this need to tap into our potential, particularly from young, to prevent it from being limited by the imposition of authority is just extremely profound. It's necessary to start at that age, but really at any age, to break away from that condition that recognizes and enforces and obeys and accepts authority and the right of authority. You know, if everybody, if everybody, including their underlings, decided tomorrow not to recognize and enforce the authority of presidents, of kings, of capitalists, that frankly would

be gone in an instant. Also, when he starts with us being able to actually question, to challenge, to resist authority, and that's something that has existed since humans have been humans. Throughout history, we see this sort of compulsion to resist authority. And that sort of seed of resistance is what anarchists hope to have flourish. Fortunately, we have to go to ads, disaster, fiasco, principles in shambles, but here's ads. We are back. So like I said before, authority gets confused with a lot of different things. Force and violence is a main one.

It's one that Marxists in particular love. That sort of conflation of authority with any use of force. You know, the slave for just a slave owner is actually an example of authority. Incredibly silly. People who are otherwise reasonably intelligent will just say this stuff. It's like, really? What, what, what are we doing here? Just come on.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, force and violence are associated with authority and they're, they can be a mechanism of defending authority, but they're not in and of themselves authority. They're not the source of authority. They don't constitute authority and you could just as easily use them to resist authority. Yeah, I want to go back to the slavery thing specifically about authority because the argument that it's an imposition of authority for slaves to free themselves is an argument that was specifically made by the Southern plantation class class. Like that was that was their argument about federal tyranny was that specific argument.

So it's probably not a good theoretical basis for understanding what authority is. If you're if you're making the same argument as the Southern Plantation class, it's going to just get just gonna leave the one out there. Exactly, exactly. And really we have to understand violence force was the things that are used by authorities. But if I punch somebody in the face, that doesn't make me an authority over them. You know, if I defend myself from being a punch, that doesn't make me an authority over the person trying to punch me. And these sorts of authorities really about that, that right, that position that recognized right above others, that position, that social relationship above others. That's what grants authority, it's recognition. The general of an army is not an

authority because he's holding a gun to the heads of all the other soldiers and making them do things. The general is recognising his authority because of his position and the privileges and rights and powers that that position gives him. If tomorrow all the soldiers decide to tune on their general as has happened historically, that is 100% possible. That is an instance of force or violence being used to resist authority rather than being used to be authority. Another thing that gets confused with authority is influence or respect. So influence is really something, I mean I might find somebody's abilities or qualities

or achievements admirable, right? I respect that about them. That doesn't mean they have an authority over me. I might be inspired by someone in a way that affects my character or development or behaviour. But again, that influence doesn't automatically translate into authority. You'll find that a lot of the anarchist thinkers of the late 19th or 20th century, they were very influential. They were not authorities, but they had a profound impact on the people around them.

And they were a profound inspiration to us even to today. Yeah, there's a paper I always think about where I found it like a kind of liberal, well, like a maybe center lefty academic writing about Malatessa who we've talked about a lot on this show. He was an Italian anarchist, did a whole bunch of stuff. So when the Italian revolutions are happening in 1918 1919 like malatesta comes back to Italy because he'd been all over the world doing a bunch of other stuff and He gets called like like Italy's Lenin for those who have listened to some of my anarchist history episodes You know that he kind of shows up sometimes. You know that he he shows up in Egypt literally everywhere

He shows up all over the place. Yeah all over Latin America is in the US and you know and so he gets called like the Lenin of Italy and this paper was about like was he act did he actually act like Lenin and the conclusion that they came to you was like well no he didn't try to he didn't come back to Italy to attempt to seize control of the country like he simply did not because he was an anarchist because that's what it means to sort of you know have influence but not like rule. Exactly, exactly. And that really gets into sort of the interesting conversation around anarchism and leadership and the different ways that you can sort of interpret the concept of

leadership. But I'll save that for another discussion. There are two other things that authority gets confused with that I want to address. The first is coordination and what's interesting about coordination is that it's very much tied to authority a lot in the present day. A lot of the roles we have in the current system, coordination and authority get tied up together. So you have a manager of an enterprise and that manager coordinates all of the workers in that enterprise but the manager also has authority over those workers you know to fire to to discipline to all these sorts of things or a general in an army might have a coordination role of ensuring that there's communication between various militias or you know various regiments and that the soldiers within that regiment know exactly what their you know their goal is what their task is and how they can go about accomplishing it.

That is in many ways a coordinating role but it's also tied up with the authority of the general as in the right above the soldiers to command them, to enforce obedience, to punish and that sort of thing. So we get tied up between coordination and authority a lot but coordination does not have to be ties to authority. In its simplest form, coordination can just be the communication of information between parties to ensure they work together smoothly and effectively. That can and already does take place between equals. So, okay, here's a good example. You're trying to move a couch into a house or an apartment. For those of you who have had to squeeze a couch in through a doorway, you kind of

know what I'm talking about already. Because you have to kind of come at it at a certain angle. You know, the size of a doorway and the dimensions of a couch require a very particular approach. So you might have somebody who stands to the side and they tell that person, okay, all right, so in're going to start getting this way. Because when you're lifting a heavy couch, you kind of just want to put it down. You can't really think, okay, what angle should I take it at? So you might have somebody in a position to say, all right, back up, okay, come forward,

okay, turn it slightly, turn to the left, that kind of thing. That's a coordinated role. But that person doesn't have authority over anybody there. It's just communicating information to ensure the shared task that the people involved have can be executed effectively. So that's a long way of saying that we can have coordination and organization in anarchy. It doesn't have to involve authority. Finally, one of the pet favorites of confusion is the confusion between authority and expertise.

Authority and expertise is a great example of the equivocation I was talking about earlier. Because authority is a synonym for expertise by certain definitions. But the kind of authority that anarchists oppose has nothing to do with expertise, which is what Bakuyan was talking about with his authority, the bookmaker argument. Now if I could go back in time, I would just go and tell Bakunin, listen, a lot of people are not going to read this in full and understand the full context. So maybe don't use the word authority here. Maybe be more specific and use the word expertise or something so people don't get confused.

Because I mean, in context, it becomes very clear. But there are people who take the title of that article, or they take one quote or one passage that's taken out of context from the whole, or they take like, for example, there's a version of that article that is cut off from the entire thing on marxist.org, I think. So there's like an incomplete version of that text available in one page and then the full version is available in the anarchist library. Incredible.

See, there are people who basically use that article to argue that actually, you know, Vakunin wasn't against authority, but in context it makes sense. What he's talking about authority there, he's specifically talking about expertise. And yet he still says that in the end, he's not going to be commanded by that expert end he's not going to be commanded by that expert, he's just going to take their perspective into account because he understands the incompleteness of his own perspective. That is a very different relationship from the sort of command and support nation that we see in an authoritarian relationship. And while expertise often gets conflated with authority in positions in the current system. That often is damaging to authority itself.

If you think about the relationship people have, for example, with... and this is sort of a contentious one, but... if you look at the relationship people have with their own personal doctor, their family doctor, which is the relationship that they might have with a public health professional. When people go to their personal, well, a doctor is very easy for them to sort of, you know, accept that sort of expertise. They have a relationship with them. They understand that they trust them. Whatever the case may be. Of course,

there are places where because healthcare is inaccessible, people don't have that relationship with their doctor. But, you know, speaking internationally here. Yeah. Also, I need to put the trans note here which is that like it is very hard if you're trans to find a doctor that you personally trust because right yeah Oh boy, that is true. That's what that is a time that is true That's that's the influence of you know, sis had her a patriarchy and it's its impact Yeah And so it's also it's also an example of why you can't just sort of blindly accept the authority Like you can't accept the authority of people who have expertise because it's like sometimes they don't.

Exactly, exactly. Like a lot of times in fact the credentials don't actually mean that this person knows anything about trans health care, like the ASCO. Exactly. It often just means that the person has been given the stamp of approval by an institution that has been granted authority. Yeah. But the institution being granted authority does not necessarily or should not have monopoly on expertise and often does not in practice have the full understanding that people who produce by that institution do not necessarily have that full grasp and everything to see that they can be treated as an unquestioned authority or expert.

Yeah. And it's something that you have to have a kind of balance between what, you know, kind of like neoliberal, like technocracy, where you get, like we put the experts in charge and the quote unquote experts running the economy, like did 2008. Or come out to like right wing think tanks. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like the other hand, the kind of like reflexive contrarianism and desire

to build a new expert that gets you like RFK Jr. as the future like Secretary of Health and Human Services. So you know, you have to sort of like, you have to sort of like balance between sometimes these people fuck up and also vaccines are good. This is not a problem that requires us to like, fly through the pin of a needle. We do have to have a little bit of I don't know. It's not that difficult of a problem to deal with, but. But the way that authority is construed has created a sort of backlash to it has been used to sort of delegitimate genuine useful expertise

and create sort of like false expertise. Yeah, and that's exactly the point I was going to make to the institution of authority and the fact that authority so frequently, you know, mess up and so frequently like abuse the trust of people, increase the sense of mistrust, a rightful and valid mistrust in authorities that can often be misdirected or exploited towards ends that are not necessarily equivalent. So because these people in public health positions are tied up with a government people already don't trust. Any legitimate expertise that they may have gets soured essentially by that position of

authority poisoned by their association with a government that has clearly proven itself to not have the best interests of people in mind. Anarchy Alright, so just to get back to the definition again. Anarchism is a political philosophy and practice that opposes all authority, along with its justifying dogmas, and proposes the unending pursuit of anarchy, a world without rule where self-determination, free association and mutuality form the basis of our society.

So I mean I've spoken a bit about that those justified dogmas came at Chomsky a little bit and we spoke about how that's sort of incoherent because every ideology opposes unjust hierarchies. So I think it's important that anarchism calls out all the justifications. I'm sure you could think of some of the main justifications that tend to be used. One of the oldest justifications is of course the divine rights of kings. Yeah. That one's mostly been broken. Hopefully we don't have to deal with that shit anymore.

But I, you know, I don't know. I have eternal cynicism. I don't know, maybe the American people yearn for the Trump dynasty. Yeah, we're gonna create their god-king. Aww. Yeah, his imperial presidency. But yeah, I mean, in more liberal circles, the justification for authority is usually the social contract theory that individuals implicitly consent to authority.

But I don't know about you, Mia. Nobody asked for my consent. And also, I don't have any way of relinquishing my consent. Yeah. So is it really consensual? No. Like, some fucking assholes in Philadelphia, like 200 years ago, were like, we we're gonna set up a thing and also slavery is good. That's like really?

What are we doing here? How- in what meaningful way did I agree to this? Yeah, exactly and it's not like I can step out of it. I mean you hold a monopoly on literally every inch of territory on Earth. Some state leaves, some claim to some part of the world is no escape. So it's not a contract you can opt out of. Another justification that authorities tend to use is an idea of meritocracy and economic Darwinism. That the best of the best rise to the top. That there aren't really any systemic inequalities or structural barriers. that there is a survival to the fittest and the fittest win and the losers are losers and they fail because they're

losers. That's a very cynical sort of take that I don't think many people openly espouse outside of right wing circles but it's definitely one of the justifications for authority that gets used. Another one is also in conservative circles the idea of natural hierarchy. The idea is that hierarchies are part of the natural order. People will use evolutionary biology or religious texts or pseudo-scientific claims to justify the inequality between genders or races or classes.

Colonial and imperialist powers for example would justify their dominance by claiming cultural superiority. They would use ideas like the white man's burden and civilizing missions to enforce their authority over other peoples and their lands. And that justification, while questioned and challenged to be, still is at the basis at the root of almost every institution in our modern world. Yeah, it's something I think is going to become increasingly visible in the US over the next few years and coming out of a period where it was like slightly

more obfuscated. But, you know, all of the people who are about to be coming into power, if you if you spend like even the tiniest amount of time, you will see them start talking about like fucking racial IQ shit and like all of this really pretty pretty explicit ideology that they have that like of this sort of like racial superiority that they think they have. That's like, you know, that is like the motivating ideological factor and also the thing that used to sort of justify their power.

Yeah, it's it's it's unfortunately becoming more and more open and common to see that sort of discourse on mainstream platforms like Twitter. The necessity of order and efficiency tends to also be used as a justification for authority. The idea that authority is needed to maintain order, to keep things in place, to make decisions. And this is really ignoring the capacity that people have already proven historically and presently to organise cooperatively, to organise without authority, to take on horizontal and decentralised approaches because it's something that is treating complexity as synonymous with hierarchy that you have to organize this way.

It ignores all the inefficiencies of bureaucratic systems. It ignores all the harm caused by authoritarian systems that just says that we need these things to function, but we don't. One of the weirder artifacts of the 2010s was David Graeber had an argument with Peter Teel. They did a debate. And one of Graber's arguments is like, well, what do you mean? Like our technical technological systems mean that we have to organize society in a way like like it is the argument that you're making that technological possibility makes us less free. It's like, no drugs. What are you talking about?

You know, this is all people like who make these arguments don't necessarily have an understanding of our systems. The internet is not organised by one central body. The internet is already fairly decentralised. It's become more centralised upon certain platforms. But as an infrastructure, the internet is really a network of nodes that are all over the world and all over space. Or we could take for example the international postal system.

All the mail that gets distributed around the world internationally is not one central global body that's in charge of that. It's multiple organizations that coordinate their activities to ensure that you get your mail. Or if you look at even basic supply chains of goods and resources, it's not all handled by one central industrial body. It's not all handled by the government or by one corporation. It's a set of relationships between groups, between companies, between mining companies

and resource extraction companies and shipping companies and processing plants and factories and all these networks already not undertaken entirely by one central body. They may be organised internally hierarchically but that can very easily change. Finally, the final justification I want to get into is this idea that authority is the lesser evil. That authority might be imperfect but it's preferable to boost alternatives like total anarchy.

And of course some people say anarchy here but they mean it in the pejorative sense. They don't mean like actual anarchy in the sense of the political philosophy. They mean it in the sense of instead of having one central authority they have one to compete in authority and power. It's a bunch of warlords fighting for power. That is not anarchy in the sense of anarchists pursue. That is, you know, petty authority fighting for dominance. Which is, if you think about it really, how historically states came into being.

Yeah, well it's like, what do you think we have now? Like, what do you think that like 190 something states are doing? Like I, I don't know. I feel like a lot of these arguments are just describing the current state of affairs and going, well, it could be like that. It's like, oh, what if, how would like communes deal with war? It's like, wouldn't the communes just start going to war with each other? It's like, well, okay, like what, look at the world right now and ask yourself the question How are states dealing with the problem of war? The answer is they're dealing with a problem of war by going to war with each other like what are we doing here?

Exactly exactly So the more positive side of the definition of anarchy is one that I haven't quite gotten into yet And I haven't broken down the ideas of mutuality and free association But I'll save all that for the next episode. If you can't wait until then, my videos on how anarchy works and what anarchy needs should whet your appetite. But until then, I've been Andrew Sage. You can find me on YouTube at Andrewism and Peter on at St. Drew. This is It Could Happen Here, the show where we chronicle collapse as it happens and explore how we might build a better future.

And in my case occasionally take a look at the past as well. And that's it. All power to all the people. Have you ever looked into the night sky and wondered who or what was flying around up there? We've seen planes, helicopters, hot air balloons, and birds, But what if there's something else, something much more ominous that appears under the cover of night, silent, unseen, watching? They may be right above your car late one night as you cruise down the road, or look like mysterious lights hovering above your home. D drones, or are they?

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All your old Brooklyn Nine-Nine friends are appearing on your favorite podcast, More Better. Don't miss Brooklyn Nine-Nine stars and show hosts Stephanie Beatriz and Melissa Fumero, as they welcome their friends and former castmates back to laugh about old times and swap some stories. This week, it's Gina Linetti herself, the talented Chelsea Peretti. Remember when we were in that scene where you guys were just supposed to hug and I was standing there? So I was like, can I also hug them?

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Mama always used to say, God gave me gumption in place of a gag reflex. And, as I was about to learn, no amount of showering can wash your hands of a bad hookup. Now, take a big whiff, my brah. Listen to the hookup on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When I smoke weed, I get lost in the music. I like to isolate each instrument. The rhythmic bass, the harmonies on the piano, the sticky melody. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey Everywhere. A message from NHTSA and the Ad Council. G'day G'day, this is Andrew Sage bringing yet another episode of It Could Happen Here, as my granny used to say when she answered the phone, What's Happening? And the answer in this

case is Anarchy. Last episode, I gave a definition of Anarchism. That Anarchism is the political philosophy and practice that opposes all authority along with its justifying dogmas and proposes the unending pursuit of anarchy. A world without rule where self-determination, mutuality and free association form the basis of our society. And then we took that definition and broke it down a bit further. You can go back to that episode if you want to hear how but I left my explanation a bit incomplete.

I didn't get into the positive side of the definition. So today I am joined once again by Mia Wong, also who does this podcast and who is excited to talk about building the new world in the shell of the old. Let's go. So Antichristism proposes the unending pursuit of anarchy, a world without rule where self-determination, mutuality and free association form the basis of our society. The unending pursuit element is another important part of the definition. It's ongoing, it's a strive, it's not some perfect utopia that we reach and stagnate

with it. In fact, it's not even assuming that people will become perfect anarchists. It's about currently and constantly pushing to be better. To create systems that produce better outcomes and greater anarchy. To continuous redevelopment of the values necessary to maintain anarchy. To never get complacent and to understand this is a species level project. The idea of anarchy being a world without rule is actually something that gets some pushback from savannicus as well. There's this sort of rules not rulers version of anarchism that has a lot of sway in some

circles. Ah, the anarcho-constitution. Yes, the anarcho-constitutionalists. It was popularized by the sort of direct democracy, libertarian Marxist crow that kind of got their popularity in the 80s and 90s. But it's not something that I consider an accurate representation of what anarchism strives for. You know now that we have access to more historical anarchist literature than ever, if you dive into any of it and you get to the root of what anarchism is, it becomes very clear that anarchists were not into this whole terror of democracy thing. They weren't really into any form of democracy as in the

rule by majority or the rule by some abstraction called the people. Anarchism is really about, it's not just no rulers, it's also no rule. I've been brought into this understanding by the efforts of the translator and sort of scholar of anarchist history, Sean Wilwell, who in my opinion is putting forward some of the best historical analysis of anarchism today. He's actually who inspired a lot of my definition of authority in anarchism. And so I'll have his work linked in the show notes of course, but in this getting into this sort of no rule of this definition of an anarchy a lot of you might ask you know wouldn't we still need rules but of course enforceable rules are just really a full of laws that are backed by authorities

which anarchism opposes and unenforceable rules are not really rules at all they're closer to norms of behaviour. And if living in a society tells you anything, you should know that norms should be as open to questioning as the most rigid of rules. In fact, norms can be even more dangerous if we let them slide as just the way that things are and the way we do things around here. Yeah, like patriarchy, for example, something that is, I mean, like, obviously, yes, particularly is enforced by the state and by like explicit violence. But it is also really, really enforced by norms.

Yeah. In a way that like, you know, requires you to like reckon with norms as a concept theoretically. Yeah, there's a concept of authority that is inherent in patriarchy. And that is also the set of norms that exist to aid and to reinforce that authority. We tend to speak a lot of the people and the community and stuff for Danica circles, but I think it's important to make sure it's clear that there's nothing special about the people or the community. What the people or the community thinks is right and wrong should not be all that must test on what is right and wrong. There's no virtue in being a majority

and there's also no virtue in being a minority because we can see with instances where there are minorities such as the elite, the rich who obviously have us over all the time and there are instances of majorities that just exist to reinforce a lot of the rules and norms and authorities that are keeping all of us down. So a Likma's test is not majorities, what a majority votes for, what a majority wants, or what minorities desire. It's really the absence of authority, the absence of this sort of power over others at all. And it's also inevitably the absence of permission and prohibition, the ability to permit things, the ability to prohibit things. When a thing is allowed and a thing is disallowed, yes,

people can do what they want, but everybody else can also do what they want. And so that creates the incentive to be thoughtful and responsible in what you do and to be thoughtful and responsible in how what you do affects other people. You do things and your things are open to like any number of consequences. And so if you want to avoid negative consequences, you gotta get informed. You have to learn about how your actions might affect others, through communication with individuals and groups, and you have to find compromises and solutions to points of conflict. You're not an island, you're part of a web of mutually interdependent relationships.

And that's something that exists in every kind of society at mutual interdependence. The problem with hierarchy is that in a hierarchical society, to access that web of mutual interdependence, you have to obey authority, you have to take part in the authoritarian systems, to have access to human community. So in an anarchic society, you don't have us obeying authority, but our behaviour is still regulated in a sense that we are dependent on other people and we want to have as much as possible a harmonious relationship dependent on other people and we want to have as much as possible a harmonious relationship with those other people. Perhaps controversially I could say that

it's actually the absence of rules and rulers that makes anarchism work because for one harm can never be fully captured by rules and rules cannot capture all the possible circumstances where harm could occur. But also for two, the existence of rule often provides protections for authorities. This is something we talked about in our definition of authority in the last episode. This idea that authorities, there's a right that grants it privileges and protections. The idea that the police officer can beat you up but you cannot raise a hand in defense of yourself. The bank can evict you from your home, but

you can't be throwing molotovs into the bank. That sort of thing is a very unequal relationship that is enforced and defended by rules, by the rights granted by those rules. And so rather than approach in society with a one size fits all approach to rules that are enforced by some type of authority, we can instead create solutions that are tailored to specific problems. And yes, we might approach concepts like best practice and solving problems and conflicts, but that'll be different from rules. That's something that's not enforced, something that's constantly in negotiation, something that's constantly taken into practice and developed and shifted and is

far more flexible. And I know that it can be difficult to break away from the idea that we need rules and that the rulers are essential. But it's necessary that we can conceptualize anarchy from that angle with that implication. It's difficult because of how we've been socialized, how we tend to view human nature. I take time to develop these ideas, to dwell on them further. I'm still grasping some of these things and trying to understand them. But between this episode and the next and all the books and all the work that is being

put out there to sort of develop anarchism, to bring it to more people. And of course, through practice, we can get a clearer sense of how anarchist organisation can work in all of its harmonious complexity. Now I say organisation and complexity specifically because it is often assumed that the presence of anarchism is the absence of organisation or the absence of complexity because those terms are often associated with or synonymised with hierarchy and authority. But you can have organisation and complexity without them. So on the next part of the definition we get into the idea of anarchy being a world where self-determination, mutuality and free association form the basis of our society.

Self-determination is probably the easiest to explain of the three terms that are used to define such a society because it's just the idea that individuals can define and pursue their own paths. It's the belief that people, individually and collectively, have the capacity to live and organise themselves in ways that reflect their own needs, desires, and values. It rejects the notion that others, whether they be states, corporations, religious institutions, or other elites, should have the power to dictate the lives of individuals or impose structures of exploitation and control. Self-determination is the basis of autonomy, which is necessarily followed by free association.

But first and foremost, I want to get into the idea of mutuality. Mutuality is feeling and action, a relationship that is based on shared benefit between individuals and groups in a society. It is reciprocity, it is communication, it is sharing of sentiment and an exchange of positive actions. And it is not unique to anarchy. Mutual interdependence, which is a component of mutuality, is's not unique to anarchy. Mutual interdependence which is a component of mutuality is also not unique to anarchy. It can be found in pretty much every society because we rely on mutuality to survive and

progress through our day to day life. Whether we're working together to clean the house for Christmas or troubleshooting a problem in the workplace or taking part in a club or sport or sharing resources following a natural disaster, Mutuality happens constantly, informally and often without recognition. This is something that Graeber talks about. In depth of his 5000 years he says this is the glue that holds society together. Not contracts or power but solidarity, empathy and the natural human inclination to care for others. Our world is so divided and yet we still find ways to care. And are there obstacles to that care?

Of course. There are various prejudices, propagandized mindsets, socioeconomic systems and material conditions that limit our practice of mutuality. These are problems that Anarchy seeks to rectify. Obviously issues like colonialism and white supremacy have fractured societies along racial lines and created distress and competition where mutuality could flourish. The propaganda perpetuated by states and corporations also limits our capacity to imagine mutuality and creates a sense of scarcity in this competitive mindset that creates an unnecessary dichotomy

between the success of the individual and the success of the collective. Because of the very nature of these hierarchical systems, a force in our sense exploits their relationships. Things like mutual aid end up being replaced by transactional exchanges. Care and community become commodities. Basic human needs become profit driven markets. And the state takes on a lot of the role that was formerly filled by mutuality. The idea of disaster response for example is dominated by bureaucratic agencies that monopolise and direct the resources that could be used and more effectively used by people addressing their own needs locally.

And of course with the implementation of the property regime, with privatisation and fencing of the commons that once supported communal life, it creates that sort of scarcity that limits our interpersonal practice of neutrality. And when people are poor and they're struggling to meet their own needs, they often lack the resources or energy to extend help to others. Food insecure families may not have the capacity to engage in community support networks. Or if you look at how cities are often designed, they're structured to isolate people. They make it harder for people to form bonds of trust.

The existence of all these non-places like highways, the absence of third places, and the prevalence of suburban sprawl all make it more difficult for us to form bonds of trust and solidarity. And then of course you have the intervention of the state into people's efforts to engage in mutual aid. You know, the state punishes and criminalizes mutual aid efforts for migrants or for homeless people. You'll often see the police or border authorities preventing people from helping those people,

charging them with criminal penalties just for trying to help their fellow human. All these are things that limit the free and full flourishing of mutuality. We shouldn't look to the limit of mutuality in our current system as an indication of how it might be limited in another system. In fact, we can look at these limits and see what ways mutuality could flourish even further when they no longer exist. So by taking the time to dismantle prejudices, to challenge propaganda, to build alternatives and to create abundance, we can start to recognise the potential of our mutuality. And so really getting from point A to point B, it becomes a matter of expanding our solidarity,

which would expand our capacity for mutuality to drive our social organisations. Solidarity is about establishing and recognising the bond between all people. Understanding that I sense a gain from you doing well and vice versa. Remember that our system incentivises selfishness that acts to the detriment of others. So anarchy doesn't need perfect people, it just needs systems that have better incentives. So anarchic systems would incentivize generosity and selflessness of course, but the real trick is really in creating systems that utilize selfishness to the benefit of others. Making it so that even the most self-interested and

self-absorbed people are a net positive or at least a net zero on the impacts on the rest of society because they will find themselves acting in ways that are generous and that are selfless in order to get the gains that they desire for themselves. You could call that a kind of a selfish selflessness. Yeah and it's funny because like that's the sort of justification that capitalism uses that like, oh, if everyone that purely acts in their self-interest and everything will like get better for everyone, you know, but it's effectively just like a coat of paint that's been put on a system that

people use their self-interest to make things better for exactly them. Yeah. So clearly the system of capitalism has these systemic incentives and structures that allow for selfishness, not only expand and propagate and be reinforced, but also ensures that that impulse that inclination has an extraordinary impact on the lives of millions of people. An individual selfish person alone cannot do that much to impact others, but put them in a position of power and all of a sudden their decisions can impact the lives of thousands, millions, even billions.

So the practice of anarchy is a way of creating a society where no one stands above another and where our lives are built on cooperation instead of domination. Reshaping how we practice mutuality by building new habits of cooperation that work without rulers. And that's what social revolution is all about. It's an ongoing and intentional transformation of our society, of our economy and culture and philosophy and technology and relationships and politics. It's the ongoing negation of all forms of authority and prejudice and the ongoing affirmation

of freely associated equals. It is in many ways a reconstitution of our natural initiative, our capacity for mutuality and our responsibility for ourselves and each other and that starts here and now, not at some distant point in the future. It won't be easy but it's necessary to unshackle our mutuality, to create a society where it can flourish. And this is where we get into things like mutual aid. It's confused with charity very often, but it's a manifestation of our mutuality.

It's a voluntary and mutually beneficial exchange of services and resources in a society, and so it's not about tit for tat payback or measuring each person's contributions, it's about taking responsibility for one another as members of a society and building social relations that sharpen our ability to collaborate and share. To paraphrase Peter Kropotkin, practicing mutual aid is the surest means for giving each other into awe of the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and progress, bodily, intellectually and morally. With mutual aid, like I said earlier, it derives its basis from our interdependence, which

is another component of mutuality. Mutual interdependence is the very basic idea that we rely on each other for various aspects of our lives in every kind of society. In anarchy, our mutual interdependence is unrestricted by authority and instead guided by complementarity, so we are all approached and appreciated as unique equals, cooperating on that basis. Mutual responsibility is another manifestation of mutuality. As the idea that in the absence of legal order, in the absence of authority, when society

is no longer guided by laws that are binding and enforceable by some authority, we must be guided instead by responsibility. That actions are not pre-authorized or prejudged by external rules but that each action is undertaken freely and subject to any number of responses, positive and negative. If you're curious about this idea of legal order and permission, prohibition and mutual responsibility, I recommend Sean Wilbers' A New Glossary on the Libertarian Labyrinth as it offers the exploration of that concept and a lot more to synthetic anarchism. So Anarchy demands a high degree of self-awareness, care and reciprocity from individuals and

communities. Not through coercion or enforcement, but through voluntary, continuous and conscious negotiation, incentivized by the nature of the system itself, with its basis in cooperation and the desire to prevent unnecessary conflict. In hierarchical systems, units of justice often escalate conflict. Imprisonment, for example, tends to breed resentment and resistance and further criminalization. In anarchy, the absence of pre-authorized retaliation encourages us to find dialogue and to create restorative practices. If a conflict arises over a resource,

people have an interest in reaching a resolution that benefits both, rather than escalating things into prolonged disputes. So such a society will necessarily require responsibility. Both responsibility for the environment and responsibility for other people. If you are costing the ecosystem its resources, you can't just offload that cost onto everybody else as it's common in capitalist systems. You have to be in dialogue with other people to ensure that your actions are balanced by replenishing the resource by mitigating harm or by securing some kind of collective agreement. And if somebody is creating a disruptive situation, if they're blasting loud music

at night, we cannot rely on an external authority to mediate, but we have to mediate in some way. We have to find ways to ensure that they pay the costs of disturbing others, whether that involves apologizing or making amends or adjusting their behaviour, or if they don't want to take on other people facing other consequences as necessary. So social revolution really aims to prepare us for that responsibility. It's as Wilbur describes a basic principle for encountering, recognising and engaging with others. It's our beefed up and extremely demanding version of the golden rule.

The organic emergence of this responsibility and the incentives of this system could create a sort of mutual understanding, which is another aspect of mutuality. As people will necessarily form norms of behaviour that will guide the interactions between them, they'll facilitate consultation and negotiation, they'll restrain the escalation of conflict, and they'll maintain the viability of shared commons and libraries of things. And similarly our desire to prevent the escalation of conflict, to prevent threats to our being and to prevent threats to our social harmony,

our society's integrity, would thus develop a sense of mutual defense. It's in all of our interests to minimize the potential harm of our actions, to practically seek out solutions to potential and actual conflict, to ensure that we won't get flak and pushback and negative consequences to to ensure that we won't get flak and pushback and negative

consequences to the things that we do and threats to the sustainability of our society and our lives. And for yet another manifestation of neutrality, weity becomes the idea of mutual interests, which are what make free association as the basis of anarchic social organisation possible. Free association is the founding principle of anarchic social organisation and it refers to the ability of each person to move around, to associate and disassociate with others as they so choose, without being subject to authority. Free association is free from the impositions of wage labor, from the boundaries of citizenship, and from all other hierarchical relationships.

This is different from the sort of liberal idea of freedom of association where under capitalism that freedom of association is the freedom that comes with signing contracts and controlling private property. So being free from authority, we still have to do what we have to do because we're still mutually independent. But that free association empowers people to connect with others and to form groups based around shared interests or desired actions to pursue those interests or actions. So interests might be as broad as wanting to eat, or as niche as wanting to maintain

the traditional Japanese art of wood joinery, or they might span the globe, or they might be unique to a particular interest, such as those who are interested in maintaining the cleanliness of a local river. So groups don't just exist for the sake of existing, they don't exist to perpetuate their own existence. They exist with a particular goal in mind, whether that is maintaining roads, producing and distributing food or building housing. And then such groups may exist for a long time or they may dissolve frequently.

They may split or they may merge, they may overlap or come into conflict. And the spaces where they interact could be called spaces of encounter. They can place in factories or gardens, specifically tailored online platforms, or some sort of community centre. So free association may occur on the level of networks of individuals, or federations of groups. But I need to explain the commune and the federation, because those are things that can be interpreted in a few different ways.

You know, federations, people might think of government, communes, people might think of, well, local government or counties or something of that nature. Yeah, hippie cult. That too. So anarchy is about finding ways to cooperate in ways that are not bound by the traditional boundaries of authority. And that includes the traditional boundaries of shared territory. The anarchist commune has been confused very often with things like intentional communities or administrative divisions. But if we go in by Kropotkin's description in Words of a Rebel,

chapters 10 to 11, he makes it clear that commune describes any group formed on the basis of free association. In fact he juxtaposes the free commune with traditional conceptions of the commune. He says for us, quote, commune no longer means a territorial agglomeration. It is rather a generic name, a synonym for the grouping of equals which knows neither frontiers nor walls. The social commune will soon cease to be a clearly defined entity. Each group in the commune will necessarily be drawn towards similar groups in other communes. They will come together and the links that federate them will be as solid as those that

attach them to their fellow citizens, and in this way they will emerge a commune of interests whose members are scattered in a thousand towns and villages. Each individual will find the full satisfaction of his needs only by grouping with other individuals who have the same tastes but inhabit a hundred other communes." End quote. So Kropotkin's commune is essentially a fluid collective of individuals and groups, wherever they find themselves, coming together of their own volition and according to their shared interests, projects and activities without being bound to territorial designations.

So don't expect to see a bunch of mini-governments all over Anarchy. Because an abstract group in the community may not even necessarily share many real interests in common. And so trying to put them all into one body, one polity that is responsible for identifying and enacting their will, it tends to be dominated by the group's most dominant voices. It tends to subordinate individuals to the will of a nebulous collective, a nebulous majority. As the alternative to this sort of polity form, as Wilbur describes it, is the Federative Principle, understood in its most radical anarchic senses. So not in the sense of networking conventional static polities like a confederation of city-states,

but instead bringing together the information and perspectives necessary to facilitate the dynamic process of free association. We could look to Antinomies of Democracy, another bit of writing by Wilbur, which further explains how the Federative organisation is the process by which we identify specific social selves as an interest or need and establish their involvement in large-scale collectivities that are formed on the basis of those conversion interests. So these collectivities might exist on a consultative basis, as they seek out and disseminate information or advice that relates to interests, but the recognition

were relevant of expertise. There might be such associations based on armed defense, or co-housing construction, or agroforestry. There might be consultative associations with a journalistic focus, or with a rewilding focus, or an accessibility focus. And they may exist on any scale, depending on the specificity of the information needed. From as a local, as an apartment building, to as far-reaching as a continent, or even the entire globe. Consultative associations could create blueprints, they could document their variable labour and expertise, they can source resources and they can share feedback. All that interested

and affected individuals and groups can easily access everything they need to make informed decisions. So in Anarchy, we'll see a variety of individuals grouping together and interacting in ways that are perhaps illegible from a top-down view of society, but in ways that work to accomplish their goals, resolve their conflicts, and maintain social harmony. It can be difficult to imagine this possibility due to how thoroughly our disempowerment and domestication has been. We live under a global order that seems to deny any alternatives and extols its understanding of human nature as the only valid interpretation.

The propaganda of our education, our mass media, and our inherited understanding as subjects in a hierarchical society has limited our consciousness of our situation, and thus our drives and powers to transform our situation. There are those of us who can overcome this through theoretical and historical study, but there are others who can only overcome this conditioning through demonstration. Some are not convinced by intellectual anarchist arguments. They have to be transformed through experiences. So to borrow the terminology of innovation adoption, it is up to us early adopters, those who are into the revolution before it becomes cool, to convince the majority of

the possibility of freedom by example. And furthermore, as William Gillis wrote in The Distinct Radicalism of Anarchism, quote, to reach a moment where we sit back, entirely satisfied, would be to abandon anarchism. To the radical there is no litmus for due diligence, no final finish line, no moment where we pat ourselves on the back. The vigilance of the radical is never satiated." And that's it for me today. We'll get more into revolution, powers, drives, and consciousness, and more in future

episodes. In the meantime, you can check out my channel, Andrewism, on YouTube. I talk about things like this all the time. I've been Andrew Siege. This is what could happen here. All power to all the people. Peace. Have you ever looked into the night sky and wondered who or what was flying around up there?

We've seen planes, helicopters, hot air balloons, and birds, but what if there's something else, something much more ominous that appears under the cover of night, silent, unseen, watching? They may be right above your car late one night as you cruise down the road, or look like mysterious lights hovering above your home. Drones. Or are they? We used the word drone because it was comfortable to other people. home? Drones? Or are they? Listen to Obscurum, Invasion of the Drones, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The more better the merrier, title of your podcast. All your old Brooklyn Nine-Nine friends are appearing on your favorite podcast, More Better. Don't miss Brooklyn Nine-Nine stars and show hosts Stephanie Beatriz and Melissa Fumero as they welcome their friends and former castmates back to laugh about old times and swap some stories. This week, it's Gina Linetti herself, the talented Chelsea Peretti. Remember when we were in that scene where you guys were just supposed to hug and I was standing there?

So I was like, can I also hug them? Then next week, the 9-9 nonsense continues as the more better amigas sit down with Joe Lattrullio, AKA Detective Charles Boyle. There'll be more laughs, more conversation, more stories from the set, and more, more better. Don't miss a minute. You felt safe enough to throw out a bad idea, right?

I mean, that is the key, because you're definitely not throwing out good ideas all the time. I mean, that's just not how it works. Listen to more better with Stephanie and Melissa on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you remember what you said the first night I came over here?

How goes lower? From Blumhouse TV, iHeart podcasts, and Ember 20 comes an all new fictional comedy podcast series. Join the flighty Damien Hirst as he unravels the mystery of his vanished boyfriend. And Santi was gone. I've been spending all my time looking for answers about what happened to Santi. And what's the way to find a missing person?

Sleep with everyone he knew, obviously. Mm, pillow talk. The most unwelcome window into the human psyche. Follow our out of his element hero as he engages in a series of ill-conceived investigative hookups. Mama always used to say, God gave me gumption in place of a gag reflex.

And as I was about to learn, no amount of showering can wash your hands of a bad hookup. Now, take a big whiff, my brah. ["I Heart Radio"] Listen to the hookup on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When I smoke weed, I get lost in the music. I like to isolate each instrument. The rhythmic bass, the harmonies on the piano, the sticky melody. Hey. Hey. Hey sticky melody. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey A message from NHTSA and the Ad Council.

Oh, welcome to Executive Dysfunction, a podcast that if you... That's not what it's called. ED? It's... Electoral dysfunction? Yes! Electile dysfunction? Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast... Whatever....cast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world and what it means for you.

It's not about dick stuff. It's sponsored by hims. Not yet, hopefully one day. I'm Garrison Davis, today I'm joined by James Stout, Mia Wong, and Robert Evans, who never knows the title of the podcast that he's on. In my defense, I'm on a lot of podcasts. I was going to say that just because Robert Evans lives in like a constant podcast. This episode we are covering the week of February 12 to February 19.

Let's start with a brief Eric Adams update or as I call it in EU. That's the Turkish for Eric Adams update. So in response to the calls to drop the Turkish corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams, eight top federal prosecutors have resigned in protest. Then we had four deputy mayors leave office. The New York governor is now considering removing Adams from office, which somehow is something that the governor of New York has power to do, by the way. And also the city council speaker has called on the mayor to resign. There's a judge doing a hearing on Wednesday as we are recording this right now on whether

to appoint a special prosecutor to continue prosecuting the charges despite Trump's effort to have these charges dropped to help Adams make sure that ice raids can continue in the city in a very, very clear quid pro quo. So this is a developing story. We will continue on the Eric Adams front as this changes. By the way, people could miss it the first time. Like a few months ago, we did record an entire episode about the things that he actually did, which are unbelievably funny. So go listen to that. We're not going to talk about them here. But it's very, very funny corruption. Yeah, if you didn't get the turkey joke, we explain it in detail there. I'm sure people are familiar with the turkey situation in general. All right, next on a related note on Tuesday, President Trump instructed the DOJ to fire all Biden

appointed US attorneys. Now, usually these types of appointments do resign at the end of their president's term, but Trump just immediately going out to fire all of them is new, unique, and noteworthy. And Trump has done some other noteworthy things to expand executive power. And for more on that, I will turn to Mia Wong. Oh boy. So yesterday on Tuesday the 18th, Trump signed an executive order that effectively is just him saying the words, I am the law over and over again. The actual sort of content of the executive order is convoluted. But basically what he's saying is that like the presidency and like him specifically is in control of all government agencies.

And this is an end to a very, very long standing practice of well, okay, an attempt to end the long standing practice of there being like independent regulatory agencies, which were set up by Congress. And what Trump is doing here is claiming that, you know, this is the thing called the unitary executive theory. There's a whole history of this Republican party. This is the most unhinged unitary executive theory thing we've ever seen, where he is just straight up claiming that he should be able to run all of these things that none

of these independent regulatory agencies, and this includes stuff like the FCC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, stuff like that, actually all just directly answered to him and not to, you know, Congress or as you know, function as independent bodies like they were set up to be by acts of Congress. It states that everyone's legal opinions that come out of these things like have to agree with legal opinions of the presidency. And it basically sets up a reporting thing where all of these things have to like report any major policy decisions that they're going to make to Russell Vought, who's like one of the co-authors of Project 2025.

Yeah. Yeah. So in some sense, it's a codification of the stuff he's already been trying to push for this complete unitary executive power as like running the entire, not just running the entire executive branch, but all of these agencies that they want to rope under the authority of the executive branch. Yeah, and there's a there's a number of sort of alarming things about this. peak war on terror Bush administration shit where they're just like grabbing people off the streets like this is a unprecedented sort of seizure of executive power Too and I think this is also worth noting in the context of a bunch of the shit He's been saying over the past week like last week He had the the he who saves his country does not violate any law which is like I think a fake Napoleon quote It's a fake Napoleon quote from a movie made in the 1970s in the Soviet Union.

I believe the name of the movie was Waterloo. That rules. It's famous because they had some massive thousands and thousands of actual, like, soldiers, like set piece battles. But yeah, that's where the quote, I think the quote may have another origin, but that's the famous origin. It probably was never said by Napoleon. Well, and earlier today, the official White House account tweeted about abolishing the

New York City congestion pricing with basically like a magazine cover style image of Trump wearing a crown with text that reads, Long live the King. Yeah. Then again, that was the that was the official Twitter account of the White House. Which has also been doing some like unhinged posting, including like ASMR deportation videos. Yeah. It's like really dark stuff, like like viscerally upsetting. Yeah, it is like the opening credits of a disaster movie. The the White House Twitter feed right now.

Yeah, it's it's the stuff like you used to not be able to talk about being a king in American politics pretty recently. That's kind of the whole point of this country. There's a state where the whole motto is six simple tyrannous. And the unit of the United States military. Yes. Yeah. Okay.

So I want to come back onto the thing for a second and talk about one of the things that probably will be the crucial legal fight, which is that he's claiming the ability to be the person who interprets the law. And, you know, there's a whole bunch of sort of legal fuzziness about that and about to what extent these things are supposed to be independent, but probably isn't the culmination of his attempt to literally like rule the entire country by executive fiat But if this is like a big step, yeah This is a massive step towards that and I think you know and we again This is one of these things where we literally have no idea what the consequences of this will be Because like we are we are so far into the great beyond that Shit is happening that a year ago if you proposed it everyone would have thought you were completely out of your mind Yeah, well, and this is stuff that that like Roberts been talking about for a long time there's been a lot of people talking

about the heritage foundations push for the unitary executive theory stuff that Curtis here has been talking about like my article last week on Shatter Zone underlines where they are going with with this and and yeah like the consequences are so vast and unknowable because we've never had an executive that is kind of this successfully or this focused in his attempts to seize total executive control over the entirety

of the federal government. Yeah, and I wanna end with one of the other really chilling parts of this, which is that if you read the executive order, the underlying logic of it is that like the president is like the physical manifestation of the will of the people. Yeah. It's just the fewer prints. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Never been done before. Like that. And also specifically then Napoleon quote about like he says, his country's not violent. You know, like that is literally the legal principle that Carl Schmidt developed like specifically to put

Hitler and power as the Fuhrer. So this is great. I mean, and Musk and Trump have been saying stuff akin to that in interviews, like being asked, like how is Doge allowed to do this sort of stuff? Musk and Trump have been saying, well, the people voted for this. Like we are enabling the will of the people,

even if that like, you know, goes past like our technical authority, it's what the people wanted, so we're going to remove all of these bureaucrats that ordinarily would try to stop us because we have the consent of the governed. The mandate of heaven. Even if that just completely bypasses Congress, even if that denies the courts, which we'll talk about more later, they are willing to go as far as they can. Yeah, and no one stopped them yet, right?

Some of the courts are trying, but trying isn't good enough. They seem to be an open violation of that, though. Yeah. They were told to keep paying USAID stuff, and they just said they won't. More on that later. Let's touch on immigration with James, and then we will have a quick break. Yeah, perfect. Okay, so what I want to talk about is this. It was first reported by the

New York Times, I've since confirmed it was sources on the ground in Panama. The Trump administration is detaining migrants that can't deport to their home countries in Panama currently. So currently, these are places where the US doesn't have good relations with their government, right? They'll be Afghans, there'll be Iranians, people like that. The US seems to have found a way to deport Venezuelans using an airline that was sanctioned until the day it apparently landed at the US military base to take Venezuelan people

back to Venezuela. If you want to hear about people leaving Iran and why they're leaving Iran, you can listen to my episodes I did in the Dalyan Gap. They came out late October and November of last year. But right now they're being kind of corralled in a hotel in Panama City, from what I've heard, and just this morning the transport to San Vicente began. So the New York Times kind of mischaracterizes

the detention center at San Vicente. I'm guessing this is because they haven't been there, and I have. They called it like a detention center that's being built, quote, close to the jungle. It looks close to the jungle if you're looking on Google Maps, I suppose. It's off the Pan American Highway, actually. You literally take a dirt road off the Pan American Highway and you come across this huge prison facility. It's all big, modern white buildings. The old facility that was there burned down. And it's been rebuilt largely, I'm guessing with money from when the

Biden administration was funding deportations from Panama in 2024. It's a vast detention facility. At the time when I went there, my fixer, Daddy and Ella and I weren't allowed to access the facility, but it was very clearly like too big for what its stated purpose was. Its stated purpose was people who had warrants for their arrest and had been found to have warrants for their arrest when they entered Panama and were being deported back to the countries where they had warrants.

I've spoken to half a dozen to a dozen people who were detained there. And I just got one quotation I'd like to read and then we can talk about this. They treated us very badly, verbally and psychologically. We all had to do our business in the same cell. They threw food on the floor for us to eat. And we were all in handcuffs. Jesus Christ. So is this a result of like Rubio's negotiations with Panama?

Like how is this like logistically operating in terms of like the US dropping people into a totally different country that like they also just don't have citizenship to? Yeah. So the gality of taking someone to a third country is a little unclear, right? Of course, the United States has done this, well, Guantanamo Bay is technically American soil, I guess, but they've also they've done it in other places around the world that are not Guantanamo Bay throughout the war on terror. This is not the same as the El Salvador plan. The United States Department of Homeland Security, the Secretary

for Homeland Security, attended the inauguration of the new Panamanian president. DHS and the Panamanian executive have a very close relationship. The US was funding deportations from Panama under Biden. They claimed that these were only people who had warrants for their arrest in the countries they were being deported back to. When I spoke to those people, I was there when they literally took the families apart, right? Put the people in a truck, sent them off to San Vicente and deported them. And these guys, if they had warrants for their arrest, it seems very odd because when they arrived back in Colombia, they were not detained or arrested. If you have a warrant for someone and they get handed to you, that's when you're going to detain them, right?

And none of them were detained. They just released back to their day-to-day life in Colombia. So like, there was definitely precedent for this set-by-to-by administration, but what's happening now is a degree worse, right? Taking people... I don't know what the long-term plan for these Afghan and Iranian people is, right? Were they going to live in San Vicente? Like whose custody are they in?

Yeah, like, it's just like a DHS black site? Like is it a... Yeah, no, absolutely. Are they on US soil in San Vicente? Certainly when I was there, it was secured exclusively by Panamanian authorities, not by US authorities. So like, the legal process, I'm guessing, like, I don't know if there is one beyond like, we can't deport these people back to their countries we want to number needs to go up, right? There's been reporting that Donald Trump is upset that his deportation numbers haven't hit the numbers that Biden did. Yeah. And so they're doing things like this, which appears to be move fast and break things, I guess. Like, I don't really know how to describe it.

I mean, it's the entire motto of the new Trump term in general. And things are being broken. Yes, they are. Yeah, including lots of human rights conventions. As we're recording this on Wednesday afternoon, I just heard from a friend in Panama that 300 people were transferred to San Vicente and it looks like 179 of them have no sort of clear path to be deported back to their home countries, no accepted place to send them. So those are the people who seem to be in legal limbo right now in Panama and San Vicente for a

matter of time that we don't know in a status that we don't yet know or isn't clear. But yeah, this is pretty bad. Like I say, I've been on the ground. I don't know in a state of so we don't yet know or isn't clear. But yeah, this is pretty bad. Like I say, I've been on the ground. I don't have many other reporters who have been on the ground at San Vicente. We're very well sourced in Panama and among the migrant community. So we're going to continue reporting on this. I've already sent some requests for comment out. So I would expect us to have something out on this in the

next couple of weeks, hopefully. All right. Let's go on a quick ad break and come back to talk about RFK Jr. Okay. We are back. I need to take off my plate carrier. It's crushing me. As James takes off his plate carrier that he's wearing for some reason...

It's company policy that we all wear body armor while recording because of an accident that occurred several weeks ago. We don't need to get into it. Garrison, please continue. Did Garrison say something rude or offensive when I had to take my headband off to take off my plate carrier? Yes. So last week, RFK Jr. was confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services. This is one I thought there might be a slightly more pushback on, but oh, oh how naive I was. Oh yeah, no, they are beaten into a corner. I didn't put up much of a fight.

On February 13th, Trump signed an executive order establishing a commission to make America healthy again. In the third paragraph, the order states quote unquote concern over the quote unquote staggering increase of autism. And the next paragraph takes aim at ADHD medication. Not great, not ideal. And the order continues to be pretty bad. I will do a direct quote here, quote,

this poses a dire threat to the American people and our way of life. To fully address the growing health crisis in America, we must redirect our national focus in the public and private sectors towards understanding and drastically lowering chronic disease rates and ending childhood chronic disease. This includes fresh thinking on nutrition, physical activity, healthy lifestyles, over-reliance

on medication and treatments, and effects of new technological habits, environmental impacts and food and drug quality and safety." Fresh thinking. Yeah, like, one of the types of guys who I've run into when I'm out in the mountains is people who like have very Reasonably assessed that people in the United States don't have access to the healthiest food Especially they don't have a lot of money and the baddies impacting their health, right? That's a fair enough assessment sure to go from that to like and I just want someone who will do something about it So I guess this RFK guy is okay. No

No Everything in this order has the most like dog whistly language. Oh yeah. That not only like directly targets life-saving medication, but it can also be used to target like vaccines. Mm-hmm. And like it's really worrying. And there's a measles outbreak right now, right?

In Laredo, like in Texas. 300 people last I checked in Laredo, around Laredo, yeah. There's been an increasing number of measles outbreaks the past like five years in this country. Yeah. If you're not aware of how devastating measles outbreaks can be, I'd really encourage you to look into the outbreak in Samoa and the absolutely heartbreaking consequences of that.

Yeah, which RFK Jr. helped to cause by pushing a shitload of anti-vaccine propaganda here. Something like 80 people died, most of them children. Jesus. Yeah pushing a shitload of anti-vaccine propaganda here. Something like 80 people died, most of them children. Jesus. Yeah, they ran out of child-sized coffins and had to ask for people to send more. Well, which leads to a separate problem. But, you know, if you go to childcoffins.com and put in the promo code, it could happen

here. Anyway, 10% off. Yeah, RFK gets you 20% off. It's a good business to be in. Speaking of, section two of the order calls to quote unquote aggressively combat critical health challenges such as quote, the rising rates of mental health disorders and diabetes. So RFK has made a number of statements that are worrying, which is just a blanket statement that I can make.

But specifically talking about how to treat diabetes with lifestyle changes and changing your diet habits and a whole bunch of extremely worrying stuff. Section 5 of the order states that with 100 days, this new commission made up of the heads of 13 various agencies and chaired by R.F.K. Jr. is supposed to submit their findings that, quote, assess the threat that potential overutilization of medication, certain food ingredients, certain chemicals, and certain other exposures posed to children, and assess the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics,

mood stabilizers, stimulants, and weight loss drugs." Unquote. The idea that we're going to be trying to take away people's antipsychotics while also making handguns more available across the country. Yes, more children with handguns, less children on antipsychotics. But this is targeting depression medication, mood stabilizers, meds for ADHD, anti-psychotics, and then also, you know, lines about certain chemicals absolutely being like an anti-vaccine dog whistle. Also, we have to mention too the diabetes part of this. Yeah. Where that is an unbelievably alarming thing for him to be saying. Yeah, it's pretty bad. Because like, the thing about diabetes is you don't have, like, your body can't, like,

literally can't physically fucking process shit. You can't actually solve that with exercise. Like... Yeah, and like, I'll just say, like, I've worked in diabetes education in the past, right, and in various nonprofit capacities, not that kind of doctor, but I have seen the people who have died because they have been subjected to this kind of bullshit. Like I know the people who have lost children and loved ones because of this. And it is heartbreaking to think that somebody, normally it's somebody trying to make money,

would lie to someone about their health, right? And the people who are most vulnerable to this are the people who are also already struggling to access healthcare and access medications. And it is disgusting to see the government pushing this. On Tuesday, RFK Jr. made his first official statement since being confirmed, promising that quote, nothing is going to be off limits, unquote, in his quest to make America healthy again, telling Health and Human Services staffers, quote, some of the possible factors we will investigate were formally taboo or insufficiently scrutinized, unquote. And then according to Politico, R.F.K. Jr. suggests that he would direct HHS to investigate antidepressant drugs, ultra-processed food,

electromagnetic radiation, and the herbicide glyphosate. So that seems to be some of their first targets. Ah, 4G, 5G cell tower shit. Great, great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no. I am excited for people to both not have food and also not have Adderall. Uh, that's really going to make quite an interesting mob. Our economy is going to crash. If they remove Adderall, this whole country is going to cave.

We are going to see stockbrokers leaping out of windows at rates unheard of. It's... That stuff works. Either that or we are simply going to move to an economy that is entirely based on the consumption of cocaine and meth. Like, one of these things is going to happen. That's true. Adderall is going to be worth more by weight than gold. Vyvanse will be the new legal currency.

I'm going to start storing them like peppercorns. I bought a house with two months of Vyvanse. Yeah. Jesus. Lastly, before we go on break, border czar Tom Homan has been on a crusade against AOC and others for holding Know Your Rights trainings, specifically informing constituents, including legal citizens who are being harassed by ICE, that you do not need to open the door if ice knocks on your door You can ask them to leave you can stay silent

You don't need to share personal information You have the right to speak with an attorney and you do not need to sign anything or hand over any documents So there's been you know, like webinars and trainings informing people of their rights and this is really upset borders are Tom Homan who last week went on Fox News to accuse AOC of impediment, which is not a real word. And he announced that he has directed or has asked the DOJ and the Deputy Attorney General to investigate AOC for interfering with ICE actions by simply educating people about their rights. I have a clip here I'm going to play in the podcast with Homan on Sean Hannity. When does it cross a line into aiding and abetting law breaking? Would it have to have

direct involvement by her in helping people to evade ICE? That's exactly the question I posed to the deputy attorney general. I asked him to look into it. I said, you know, I know through my career someone steps in front of you and the person you arrested and they're repeating, yeah, that's a violation. But at what point do you cross the line on saying you're educating people versus you're teaching them how to evade ICE arrest? So I've asked that question to the Department of Justice for clear guidance so I can share that with the officers of ICE.

So we're looking for that clear direction so we can start taking action on people who want to help educate these people to evade ICE. So hopefully any day now we get that guidance sent out to the field. Let's turn this over to discussion. James, I'm sure you have some thoughts on this. Yeah, this is kind of foundational to the constitution, right? It's the access to an attorney, the right to an attorney. And it's again something that even under Biden, the DHS have been taking a swing at.

Specifically, we've done an episode last year about transferring detained people in ICE custody away from their attorneys, right? In most cases, it was people from California, specifically San Diego County, because San Diego County had a program that funded some attorney access and moving them to Texas. So like you're either going to bleed that program dry, flying attorneys to Texas or have them do it over a phone call. But a lot of these people who are detained because they come from dictatorial countries don't feel like phone calls are secure And so they're not good. They're not really gonna feel comfortable talking to their attorney on a phone call We've done a whole episode about that. You can go back and listen to it

I like this is very basic Fourth Amendment stuff and that this this applies to you Whether or not you were a citizen this this applies to you if you are in this country Yeah, you have these rights and it is within ISIS and and the Tom Homan's interests to make people not realize that they actually do have rights, regardless of their immigration status. Yeah, absolutely. Like, they're not going to tell you necessarily what rights you have. No. They're not going to tell you they don't have the right to enter your house.

Police want to enter your home, and if you open the door, they will. But you do not need to open the door. And this is like very basic stuff of informing people. Really getting on Tom Homan's nerve. He's been on news five times the past week to specifically complain about AOC. He really wants her to get arrested for this thing that's not a crime. Yeah, I mean, that's kind of what they're going for throughout, right? But I know, for instance, in California, lots of universities have these Know Your Rights cards accessible, that you can have them in

your lectures and give them out to your students. So you can take them regardless of citizenship status, right? Which is generally the way to approach this, right? With an agnostic approach to citizenship. Correct. You don't certainly want to be holding a, if you're undocumented, come to this thing at this time and we'll give you a Know Your Rights session. Like, that is not a smart way to approach this. But yeah, like immigration agnostic, know your rights trainings, they're kind of foundational to like constitutional rights. They're pretty much front and center of things you're allowed.

Do you know what else is front and center? Advertisements. That's right. It's in there. Article 22. It's like they can't put the soldiers in your bedroom unless they're sponsored by... I mean, look, depending on the soldier. All right, we are back. Mia, it's time for Tariff Talk.

Yeah, time for Tariff Talk. Tariff Talk! Dan, I'll insert a little musical's time for Tariff Talk. Yeah, time for Tariff Talk. Tariff Talk! Dan, I'll insert a little musical jingle here for Tariff Talk. Dan, I've not been an editor on this podcast for years, but sure. Yes, yes, yes. Tariff Talk, Tariff Talk, talking about terrorists.

Tariff Talk with Mia Wong. There we go. I thought Garrison said Turf Talk in a Canadian way. No, it's like a- Very different podcast. No podcast much more cursing Why not Mia Mia tariff talk? Okay? Okay? I got a through line Which is that Trump is announcing that he's going to maybe sign an executive order to put into effect more terrorists One of those is pharmaceuticals, which would actually would actually

Like possibly impact transgender healthcare. So there's my tie-in. Okay. But the main thing is auto imports, like computer chips and pharmaceuticals are supposed to get, we think in April, like a 25% tariff. It's again unclear whether these will go into effect. Right. But I think it's worth noting this because, and this is something I haven't seen anyone

put together for reasons that are absolutely baffling to me, but I actually think that a big part of the pharmaceutical, like, tariff threat here is specifically to threaten Denmark into selling Greenland, because one of Denmark's largest companies is Novo Nordisk, who would get absolutely colossally fucked by this. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and so we sort of have to look at all of these in the context of like what kinds of negotiations are going on. The chips one is pretty obviously like a China Taiwan one, although the cars, the auto import one I think is pretty specifically, it's all auto imports. I think it's pretty specifically targeted at Mexico because there's a whole bunch of

US auto, like full car imports from Mexico. But yeah, 25% tariffs, we'll see exactly what happens with this round of negotiations. But who knows, they might go into effect. This might also be part of the push to the US to seize Greenland. This is also less of a Trump thing. But I think it's worth noting the sort of seriousness that both the kind of people around Trump and also like the media in Canada is taking like a potential U.S. attempt to just like seize Canada. Like, oh, yeah, like they might really do that. Oddly enough, this push from Trump might actually help catalyze the anti-

conservative movement in Canada, which has kind of been trending conservative the past 10 years. Yeah, yeah. And Trump's actions have really upset the country, even the conservative factions. Yeah. You are seeing support for the for the liberals as well, which has been like in like rapid decline for the past five years. So it's actually causing a pretty big shakeup in Canadian politics right now, which I'm sure I'll do an episode on in the future.

There's even I don't know if it'll it's going things are going to change enough to have a big influence They probably won't on the next German election But AFD saw its first drop in support in a while after JD Vance endorsed them Still doesn't have any juice UK we could kill reform now send him to the UK. We could kill reform now. Send him to the UK. Yeah. God, I would love to see that. I wish.

To get back on the war on woke front, I'd like to talk about attempts to purge DEI gone wrong, specifically in OSHA, who has now trashed workplace safety guidelines by banning and removing like 18 workplace like training and safety publications per popular info. Now, some of these documents have been removed for just containing the word like gender. Oh, wow.

Like in one case about how patients might need different treatments based on their gender or age. This list of banned documents also includes a document from 2009 that instructs employers on how to quote unquote, protect their EMS responders from becoming additional victims while on the front line of medical response, unquote. The alleged reason for removal is because the document contains a sentence about how EMT workers work under quote unquote, diverse conditions, and that EMT agencies have a quote diversity of state specific certification training and regulatory requirements unquote. There was also a special education program dedicated to helping young adult special ed kids transition into the workforce that got cut.

And the suspicion is because it was a child program that included the word transition. Like, we're not going to know for a while the precise reason, but all of this lines up pretty well. Well, I mean, I'm sure it would also be removing programs with the word disability, frankly. Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, and they're doing that elsewhere, too. I just, yeah. And this is affecting a huge number of agencies, right?

We could do, we probably will do whole episodes on this. I've been collecting a whole bunch of resources in a document called The War on Woke, which eventually I will turn into an episode. This is manifested in other ways as well. There's now disclaimers on the Target HIV and the CDC website, which now reads, the CDC's website is being modified to comply with President Trump's executive orders. And specifically on pages related to sexual health, there is a big, like a top banner reading, quote, per a court order, HHS is required to restore this website as of 1159 PM, February 14, 2025.

Any information on this page promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate and disconnected from the immutable biological reality that there are two sexes, male and female. The Trump administration rejects gender ideology and condemns the harms it causes to children So even though they've been ordered to have these web pages still online, they are basically defacing the web pages with these notes from the Trump team. Yeah. That also, by the way, and the extent to which this matters is basically zero because they don't give a shit what the courts say, but that's also a violation of the court order.

Pretty much. They did not put up the website as it was at the time when it was specified for. They have put new bullshit into it, like... But, speaking of violating court orders, the Trump administration told a judge in a Tuesday court filing that it will not comply with the TRO directing USAID and the State Department to resume foreign aid funding, stating that, quote, USAID intends to terminate instruments that the administrator determines are inconsistent with the national interests or you say its mission and it tries to argue that this is like in line with you say it's you know lawful ability to operate so they are just like blatantly

blatantly defying a judge's order as we've talked about how they seem to be wanting to and continuing to do for the past like four weeks. Yeah. More on that in the weeks to come as this situation escalates through different appeals courts and will eventually probably reach some kind of final showdown with the Supreme Court. Now, longtime Social Security official Michelle King has quit the agency amid fights to prevent Doge from accessing sensitive information.

The Washington Post quoted Martin O'Malley, the Social Security Commissioner under the Biden administration, and a former Maryland governor, as saying, quote, At this rate, they will break it, and they will break it fast, and there will be an interruption of benefits, unquote. Social Security is just one of the agencies that Doge is either gutting or has already gutted, and it's leading to kind of a mass resignation, not only of probationary employees and deferred resignation letter employees, right? Everyone who's receiving that fork in the road email,

but also just top-ranking officials who've been doing this their whole lives, who are quitting because now it's impossible for them to do their job with Musk's Doge, basically running all of these departments and determining who can be hired, who should be fired. In late January, David Lybrick, the highest ranking civil servant at the Treasury Department, was put on leave and then quit his job after trying to stop Doge from accessing data at the Bureau of Fiscal Service. The head of the FDA's

Food Division, Jim Jones, resigned last Monday citing Doge as inhibiting his ability to run the department. And at least four deadly plane crashes have happened this past month. Actually five now, considering one this morning. And then there's also that whole upside down Delta flight from Minneapolis to Toronto. And this is all happening amidst the Trump admin's mass firing of several hundred probationary employees at the FAA, an already understaffed agency. And this past Monday, a team from SpaceX arrived at the air traffic control headquarters in Virginia to begin the process of overhauling the control system. Great.

Cool. Luckily SpaceX has had no notable incidents, and so I'm sure that will be fine. No, they didn't just hide a rocket going off. There's good news! There is good news on this front Which is that president Trump is very very mad that his new Boeing like plane is like his personal plane for like I think is I think it's like another Air Force one or something isn't coming fast enough So he's he's now encouraging them to like do a rush job on it and like let people in and don't have the right security Clearances, so so this whole thing Critical support to Boeing critical like let people in and don't have the right security clearances. So, so this whole thing may result in some-

Critical support to Boeing. Uncritical support to Boeing, you motherfuckers. You have one job, that is to produce an airplane at your normal quality and standards. Similar to that, on February 13th, an Air Force plane carrying Secretary of State Mark Rubio was forced to turn around en route from Washington to Munich after the aircraft a converted Boeing 757 experienced a mechanical issue 90 minutes into the flight so they were forced to turn around So again critical support to Boeing. I only wish them the best in securing more and more government contracts Absolutely, you know, I think we

Well, actually we should probably call it. That's an episode before I make any more jokes about air travel. Which is increasingly scary. I flew so much last year and I am less willing to now. I do not want to now. That said, it is worth noting, I think there's two things that are worth noting. One is most of what people are pointing out as like scary crashes are crashes

that the same number happened at this point last year When it comes to like small aircraft. Yeah, those are much more dangerous than cars like tiny personal aircraft Which is why I always enjoy it CES when they they try to sell Fine cars regulated flying cars. Oh, yeah, but I also think from a political standpoint No We should actually, absolutely, every single plane crash, even if it's, you know, a tiny plane crashing and not tied to the greater shit

with the FAA, all of them should go on Trump's head. It's not about what's true. It's about what you can use to make political hay. And this is something that you can hurt Republicans with. Every time someone dies in a plane crash, lay it at their feet, right? Like, what do you get from being honest? And it has been one of the more deadly months in aviation history.

Oh yeah. Specifically for like American soil. They're definitely going to get people killed, but like the way that you do that is not wait until okay, this is finally the one that it's fair to attack. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You make it you make every time this gets in the news, you make it on their head, you know? It's certainly not helping, right? That like the FAA was already understaffed.

Like as you said, people were already dying in plane crashes. Taking staff away from the FAA is not helping. Like we can't isolate that from every crash that happens. And like, it's not just that, it's also like the continued they continued hiring freeze Largely air traffic control operators have not been affected by the firings other support staff have which are still just as crucial But it's also preventing them from hiring more air traffic controllers Which they need to because it's so understaffed which actually does lead to an increase of these like small plane collisions

And it this is this is like a similar pattern across all departments though. The USDA announced on Tuesday that over the weekend they accidentally fired several agency employees who were working on the bird flu response as a result of the Trump-Doge mass firings. And now USDA is trying to rehire them. Have we explained the provisional employee firing thing that they're doing for all of these on here yet? You should explain what a probational employee is.

Well, yeah, it's employees that have been hired for less than a year and have different protections than other career employees. And part of Doge's campaign to do massive, massive layoffs across all government sectors is by targeting, first of all, probationary employees because they're easiest to fire, and then move on to career employees. And this is just the first batch of mass layoffs because they're the easiest to do, they don't have union negotiations, they can't appeal the firing. So this is the first step in a larger series of events that will lead to a severely reduced government workforce.

And like the situation with the USDA is a very similar situation with the nuclear strategy employees who the government is struggling to rehire because they lost contact information with them after firing them. They fired the nuke police! They fired the guys whose job is to transport and make sure no one steals nuclear weapons. The one kind of cop we can all agree we need as long as we keep having those things. This is one of these things where it's like, I've been saying not even really as a joke that millions of people are going to die from this? But like, if these people are not stopped Oh, we'll have a broken arrow We are like two months into this This is the second time they have tried to fire the nuke police

and they actually succeeded this time Like, millions of people are going to die And they lost their phone number? They can't even call back? They don't have the numbers of the security These people must be stopped from doing this, or we are going to see a cataclysm that is going to make the fucking pandemic look like a fucking joke. Like, we're all going to look fondly back on, like, the year we spent in lockdown,

and the million who died as, like, the fucking, like, smoking remains of seven American cities. I have an episode on this that I'll put out at some point, but you're getting to a thing that I've been worried about for a while, Mia, which is we are every day getting closer and closer to a nuclear January 6th. And what I mean by that is an incident in which a nuclear weapon either gets utilized

or gets out of the control of its proper handlers in a way that is dumb in the same way January 6th was. So I'm not talking about, you have like an actual military conflict between Russia and the United States. I'm talking about something really fucking stupid. Like I'm talking about something incomprehensibly silly. And yeah, millions of people will at least potentially die.

Well, what another uplifting episode of It could happen here happen here stop them now. They're weak right now They could only get stronger yeah Well until someone else gets a new then channel fence are off Like I said if you are someone who has been fired from the federal government, and we're transporting a nuke, I have a large backyard. And Cool Zone would love to become a nuclear power. Also, unrelated, we have a tip email, James, we're going to talk about. For legal reasons, this is a joke. We do not want any nukes.

It is CoolZoneTips at proton.me. You can contact us there. It is protonzontips at proton.me. You can contact us there. It is proton mail is encrypted. That only means that the mail is encrypted if you send from a proton email address to a proton email address. None of that means that you are necessarily 100% secure, but it's the best option that we have for right now. If you'd like to reach out to us, please feel free to do so.

coolzontips at proton.me. We reported the news. We reported the news. 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 iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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