It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 33

Episode Date: May 7, 2022

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech

brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take phone calls from anonymous strangers as a fake gecko therapist

and try to learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's very interesting. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's very interesting. Check it out for yourself by searching for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Hi, welcome to It Could Happen Here, the show where we just spent a few minutes not recording

by accident and also trying to shoot my cat away so they would stop throwing uh old grenades off my desk so that's the vibe that we're going for today um yay and oh do you know what today is today is mayday famed famed one of the best holidays um so in the mayday tradition i'm not doing my job today. So we're not doing a real episode. But don't worry. We still have other content for you to listen to. Speaking of content, a friend of the pod, Marker Killjoy. Hi. Do you have anything that we can listen to today?

No. Was I supposed to prepare something? Oh, wait. What if I released the very first episode of my new podcast today? And what if it was a May Day themed episode? Would that sound good? hours a week, which is still too many hours. But if you enjoy that as opposed to more hours, you should probably thank the anarchists. And you can learn more about those people at Markowitz's new show, Cool People Who Did

Cool Stuff, here on Cool Zone Media. Wow. Also featuring friend of the pod, Robert Evans. Yes, Robert Evans is the guest on that episode. So if you're familiar with that guy, then you could also listen. So yeah. Episodes dropping every Monday and Wednesday until the world burns.

Yay. So, like, three months? Three months. Well, actually, they said, like, what, like 46 weeks? Oh, yeah. I mathed it out. It's nine months that the UN says we have to turn everything around. But as my friend pointed out, we're going to waste a month of that

just trying to do the math of calculating the weeks into months. I do love optimism. Well, that does it for us today. Go enjoy your May Day by not working or at least just kind of fucking around. That's what I'll be doing. And cool people who did cool stuff is out now so check it out wherever you get your

podcast oh my god I just realized I wasn't recording oh we are not doing this again no it's okay we'll use the zoom audio it'll be fine okay welcome Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season

digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech

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

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

At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's like a bunch of different illustrations of dictators, all done as like little anime chicks. So they're all hot.

So like Pol Pot's this like sexy girl on a throat of skulls. But Tito, they made into a milf. Like she's got all of her kids around her. It's the only one with kids. I don't know why they picked Tito for that, but it does kind of work. This is It Could Happen Here, a podcast about which anime war criminals are hottest. And it's Idi Amin, actually. The Idi Amin in that book is pretty

pretty smoking. How's Pol Pot depicted? As a, like, wearing black lingerie on a throne of skulls. Okay, nice. Does Kissinger make it in? No, no Kissinger. All like world leaders. He's a world leader in some things.

I would argue that, but he does not make the book. No, it's sad. Tragic. Anyway, this is It Could Happen Here, podcast, things falling apart, and other stuff. I'm here again with my buddy James. Sal, James, hi. Hi. Hi, everyone.

Which dictator do you think would be hottest? They were like gender bent. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. I'd have to go for like one of the old timey ones press one of the one of the one of the uh one of the czars yeah i think uh because our nicky had nothing to do but like look hot and he was a big workout guy yeah big workout guy nice to rip nice nice outfit tight trousers yeah i think i'd probably go with him yeah that that scans now

which was hottest as they were? Like, which is the most fuckable war criminal? That's a tough one. I'd probably have to think about that. I don't know. None are coming to mind, actually, oddly. Who do you go for? That Stalin picture's a fake.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Not nearly actually that sexy. No. Joseph the Stallion. I gotta go with Saddam Hussein. Yeah, that's true. He has a sort of lustful mustache. Yeah, that mustache fucks.

Yeah. James. We should probably talk about something that's not which dictators are most fuckable. Today we're going to chat about HEFAT courses and about emergency and particularly like combat medicine, which is a more relevant topic for a lot of people in the wake of a couple. There was a mass shooting at a protest in Portland. There's been a whole lot of threats made against LGBT people. Jack Posobiec launched a T-shirt that was basically threatening a mass shooting at Disney World. All sorts of fun shit's been happening.

Yeah, it does seem like we're spiraling towards the end of times. Yeah, it certainly seems, if you want to be less apocalyptic than that, it certainly seems credible to say that there's a pretty good chance there are people listening to this who have not been present at a shooting who will be present at a shooting at some point in their lives yeah and i think given that it doesn't make sense so like i'm joking about the end of times right like we shouldn't panic

and things we should think about ways we can protect each other and keep each other safe yeah so what is a he fat course because you recently went through one yeah uh so uh he fat is an acronym right uh hostile environment first aid training Training. It's a British thing. I think the syllabus, I believe, is standardized by the government in the UK. So most of the courses you'll find are in the UK, clustered around Hereford for pretty obvious reasons. But there are a couple in the United States and there are some in other countries too. And it's for journalists, aid workers, NGO staff, and anyone else who's working in an environment that would be considered like high risk or hostile and to your point that includes most of the united states

at the minute right yeah well i mean we are in this fun place where literally any moment could turn into uh a situation with the intensity of a of adensity war zone. Yeah, I mean, we have more weapons than most war zones, and also people who think it's okay to kill other people because they like Mickey Mouse. So it does seem like, like you said, it is more likely that we will see more shootings, even bombings and that kind of thing. Like, we can't say for sure.

Yeah, now, you have done some of the same kind of work that I and some other colleagues of ours have done, you know, in hostile environments, difficult places prior to going through this course. Obviously, when we're talking about, like, what sort of first aid skills should people have, the most basic stuff is, like, how to apply a tourniquet, which we'll talk about a bit more later. How to, if it's not, because tourniquets are really only for extremities. You know, you can't really tourniquet, which we'll talk about a bit more later, how to, if it's not, because tourniquets are really only for extremities, you know, you can't really tourniquet a gut wound or whatever. And so for that, it's more like packing it. But outside, so I'm going to assume you had your, more than your share of experience with that kind of stuff. What did you learn new going through this course? Like what was the stuff they

emphasized that's kind of beyond the basics? Yeah, so the stuff I've done before has been some of that basic Stop the Bleed stuff and then a fair amount of Wilderness Medicine stuff. So some of the improvised stretches and stuff I was familiar with. I enjoyed some of the releases they did. I'm not talking about necessarily hand-to-hand combat or open-hand combat, but ways to release yourself in a non-violent fashion. I thought that was very good. Ways to move through crowds.

I found that very interesting. And we did a lot around how to move under fire, how to react around explosives, how to react around indirect fire. And most of that I'd already covered. And then some of the stuff around hostage situations to include a simulated hostage situation where you're blindfolded

or hooded and sort of ask questions and poked with a blank firing weapon and such uh i think it's really good you can't really have enough fix well you can't have too much experience for that but uh to simulate that in as realistic a setting as possible i found was super helpful so i think yeah i think that was probably the most interesting thing for me. Now, when it comes to what kind of training people can get, because the HEFAT course is a couple of thousand bucks, which is beyond, I know we have some colleagues listening, and I think it's a good thing for people who are going to do this kind of journalism to consider, or if you're in, you know, an aid worker or someone who is going to be going into these situations for a living, that's, but for a normal person listening, it's probably more than you're likely

to want to get or have the resources to get. So what people, because we, especially in the wake of shootings, pretty much any time there's a mass shooting or violence at a protest, I will tweet about IFACs again. And an IFAC is an individual first aid kit. It's what like every soldier is supposed to have on their belt or on their plate carrier. And it generally consists of what are called, and this is when people ask like, what should I get to be ready for a shooting? Generally it consists of two chest seals.

These are called occlusive dressings. They're basically like kind of sheets of adhesive plastic. I would say that you like put over, if you get shot in like the lungs, your lungs kind of depressurize, and that's bad. I'm not a biology expert, but you're not supposed to have a hole through your lungs. And one of the things that you do to treat that immediately is you put this kind of a dressing over it, which stops the lung from collapsing, basically. So that's one thing you'll find in an IFAC.

You'll also find what's called a combat tourniquet. There's a bunch of kinds of tourniquets. I was doing a stop the bleed course. We'll talk more about that in a bit. But that's the thing everyone should do, like in terms of, you know, HEFAT is kind of more advanced and for people who are going to professionally put themselves in shitty situations. Stop the bleed is for everybody. And one of the things I was having a chat with people who were going to professionally put themselves in shitty situations. Stop the

bleed is for everybody. And one of the things I was having a chat with people who were teaching them, we were doing a little meeting. And one of the things that was brought up, people always talk about, well, I wear a belt in case I need to make a tourniquet or this or that. And virtually never works. Like close to 0% success rate, even when it's someone who's trained and experienced providing tourniquets. Like random shit does not make a good tourniquet tourniquets make good tourniquets yeah they're small they're easy to carry they they aren't cheap right but on the same uh you shouldn't cheap out on them either right like we've i know we've talked about this on twitter and i know like uh amazon sells them they've also had a problem with selling fakes. So like North American Rescue,

I think it's called Emergency Rescue. I'll give you some links so we can tweet out. Yeah, North American Rescue is really good. One of the, so yeah, Rescue Essentials. So what a combat tourniquet is, because there's different, some tourniquets are just like a plastic band almost, almost like if you go to a gym,

those things that people like wrap around their legs to do squats or something or lifts. It's kind of like it looks a little like that. And those, yeah, obviously like those can work, but they're not near a combat tourniquet is basically it's a little like kind of nylon fabric belt thing that you strap around and you tighten it and Velcro it tight. And then there's something called a windlass, which is basically a metal or plastic stick that you then twist around. And that twisting action, when you twist it, that's going to tighten it and that's going to stop the artery from bleeding. And then you lock it into place. There's a little place to lock it. And so when you get a cheap tourniquet, it generally means the windlass is made out of something flimsy or the fabric adhering the windlass to the belt thing is not very good

and it will break when being tightened. Yeah, and what you don't want to do is not have enough pressure or have sort of weird pressure because what you're going to do tomorrow, I'm not that kind of doctor, right, is you can cut off the venous return and not the arterial flow. And that's where you can give yourself compartment syndrome, right? I just wanted to backtrack quickly. And we were talking about how expensive he facts are. If people are listening, and they are in that kind of line of work. The International Women's Media Foundation is doing free he fact

courses for women, gender nonconforming, non binary people. And I got a I got a grant from the Rory Peck Trust to go and do mine. So for journalists, both of those are really only for journalists and media. I would really encourage people to apply. Yeah. And that's great information because if you can, even if like your journalism has been sort of like citizen journalism where you're showing up at a protest and, you know, taking pictures or whatever, give it a shot. Like the more people who have this kind of training, as a general rule, the better. When it comes to – stop the bleed courses are generally going to be

much more available. Some of them are operated as charities and we'll give out an IFAC or something at the end. Some of them have a nominal fee. It kind of depends on where you are. I've seen both. Portland has a lot of stop the bleed courses, which is why when we had our most recent mass shooting at a protest, more people didn't die because folks had equipment and were ready.

You should expect to spend about 30 bucks generally on a combat tourniquet, sometimes 20, but like the good ones are all about 30. Um, I would shoot for something with a metal windlass that's generally a sign. Again, there's like rescue essentials and, um, a couple of other brands that are reliable, but,

uh, it's called the tactical committee on combat care, which is a government funded thing. It's like, if you let them do the research, so you don't have to, they provide a list of, of chronic tourniquets, uh, tourniquetsets the one that most people have is a called cat right called that

application tourniquet if you get that even if it's not the best one or the smallest or lights or whatever every that's the one most people train with they know how to use and i think you've said this before like even if you don't know how to use it if you're in a situation where it's needed and you just say i have this i have a touriquet, someone might take it and use it. So, yeah. And it's, it's like, it's okay if you panic as long as you get that into the hands of somebody who can use it. But it's also important if you're going to carry it to train with it. They and their friends have a game where when they're like hanging out, somebody will toss a tourniquet at someone else and say like, you know, right arm or something like that. Right arm above elbow or something like that.

And they'll have to apply the tourniquet and get it on as quickly as they can in that place, which is a good game. You're not going to like in 20 or 30 seconds, like, you know, you don't have to like injure yourself doing it, but you can, you can get it on and get familiar with the motions and build like a competence with it. Yeah. Work out when you're going to lasso the limb and when you're going to take it off and go all the way around. But I think standardizing one thing, certainly among you and your affinity group or your friends is, is probably a good move. Yeah. Yeah. And it's one of those things, the kind of injuries that tourniquets are most needed for are like arterial bleeding,

which is the kind of thing that if you don't get a tourniquet on, you're dead very quickly. People will bleed out in seconds sometimes from a femoral wound. Yeah, if you've seen an arterial bleed, and I'm sure that, I know I have, I'm sure you have, you know that that person has an arterial bleed. I bet it's a pressurized gushing of blood. It's like bright, the blood, arterial bleeding, it comes out in spurts and it is like bright.

It does not look like when you cut your finger the blood tends to, unless you're really cutting the shit out of that finger. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and one of the things we did at this course, which was cool actually, was they had like a simulated arterial bleed. So the person was wearing, what, like a camel, actually, was they had like a simulated arterial bleed. So the person was wearing like a camelback and then they had like a hose pipe and it was just gushing out. And then you could actually cinch down on it right with a strap. And that actually stopped it.

Now, I mean, when it comes to like more advanced bleeding care, because there's some wounds where, number one, if it's like, for example, too high up in your like crotch or something, you know, you're not necessarily going to be able to get a cat up there. Sometimes people will literally hold the artery closed. Like that is a thing that, and that is more advanced certainly. Um, but it is, it is also like the physics of this are very basic. If you can figure out where blood is coming from and close it, blood will stop coming out. Right? Like that's the principle of all immediate wound care for that kind of thing yeah there's an acronym that you use right dr march uh which we can go over but uh danger right so uh and i think this is a thing that often gets forgotten actually um especially if you're doing like somebody's starting to bleed which is focused on first aid rather than specifically in kind of

combat care but if you get hurt not only are you useless to that person, not only are you hurt, if someone comes to help now, they have to think about which person they're going to help, right? Because it's much harder to carry two people than one person, so don't fucking do that. And then response, right? So, Robert, I see you've been shot. It doesn't look great. Are you okay?

And then massive bleed, airway, respiration yeah uh check head to toe and then hypothermia and you know one of the things that is so like a combat tourniquet you just generally you can keep it in like a kit it's also fine to keep it loose in your pocket you are not worried about sterility when you are applying a tourniquet it does not matter if you get shit in the wound like because they will die they'll be dead in a minute if you don't get the tourniquet on. Um, yeah, yeah. You're not putting it in or whatever. Like it.

So, yeah, so that's, that's one kind. And that's, again, you're talking about extremities, right? You can't put a tourniquet on a neck because that would kill the person. Um, you would use an occlusive a lot of times on the neck, especially if like the airway gets, again, this is stuff that you would, you would you would get in a stop the bleed course and i recommend people for that so we're not going to go over treatment outside of like these basics but we'll talk about like you should have an occlusive dressings two is what most ifx come with people i know who have responded to shootings say you want more like four because they a lot wind up getting used

yeah i think about i think those especially chest seals and something that i've been told by people with a lot more experience than me it's like when you're dealing with a military setting most people will have their chest covered with plates right and plate carriers in a civilian setting most people won't so you're going to see a lot more of those like sucking chest wounds or penetration of a thoracic cavity so yeah and in that setting and they are very small right you could put them in the back pocket of your skinny jeans and no one would notice so another kind of thing that you'll find in an ifac that's useful is combat gauze so there's two types of gauze that you'll get in kits one is just gauze

which you know what gauze is um most wounds if they are not life-threatening packing what gauze is. Most wounds, if they are not life-threatening, packing with gauze and wrapping is perfectly sufficient, at least for immediate care. But combat gauze is impregnated with a thing called cellox, which is our little granules. You can actually get them just as the powder. You shouldn't because it's not going to be useful to you as a random person. You should get it impregnated into gauze. But it's made from ground-up crustacean shells.

And it basically makes blood clot very quickly. Survivability of arterial wounds in combat, which was extremely low before cell locks, jumped to something like 70% or so. It's pretty remarkable the degree to which it's made

certain, particularly femoral bleeds, survivable. And it can be used if you've got like a serious arterial bleed it'll often be used in conjunction if it's on an extremity with a tourniquet but you can just use it to pack a bleeding wound and if you pack it and apply pressure sometimes you'll pack the combat gauze into there and then add other gauze outside of it like but it's it's most wounds that are bleeding aren't going to require cellox gauze and it's pretty expensive but it's another really useful thing to have if there is like an arterial bleed yeah i think actually the um where we first i think kln might be what the stuff is called i believe it comes from indigenous practices using it to stop bleeding

but yeah it comes in a small package quick clot is the normal brand and yeah it's a lot of what we've learned about stopping arterial bleeds has come from uh 20 years of war right and there are obviously a lot of downsides but uh yeah learning about how to stop those things is one of the things that has gone a lot better in the last decade or so so that's another thing and you can always buy these kits pre-made. A lot of people make various pre-made kits. Yeah, you can Google IFAC and make sure it's rated well. Do your research. We've mentioned some brands here. But it's not hard to find IFACs. They're made constantly, and it's one of those things. We talk on this show about being armed and whether or not people should have firearms. And I'm broadly supportive of particularly threatened people having guns, but there's downsides to having a gun, a number of them.

We don't need to get into the statistics, but there are a bunch of downsides to being armed. There's no downside to having an IFAK and keeping one in your car. Keep one in your backpack. There's absolutely no way you will have a negative experience as a result of the fact that you keep an IFAC on you and it might save somebody's life. Yeah, I have a little ankle holster that I use when I'm working in places where it wouldn't look very, you know, it would look off to have it on my belt. And I don't want to carry a backpack. Maybe I need to wrap around my ankle and it has a tiny combat dressing, which we haven't really talked about.

Chest seal tourniquet. It doesn't have the quick lock, but the combat dressing which you haven't really talked about chest seal tourniquet um it doesn't have the quick clot but the combat dressing has its own gauze yeah we can talk about that in a second but like i i just have like i have a couple of ifax but also just in all of my light jackets because you know oregon usually you can wear some sort of jacket i just have a bunch of cats and quick clot gauze packets just kind of scattered around like there's nearly always something just in my pocket or in the center console of my car um in addition to the bunch of cats and quick clot gauze packets just kind of scattered around like there's nearly always something just in my pocket or in the center console of my car um in addition to the actual packed ifax and yeah it's handy um it's just good to have around it never hurts to have more of that

stuff you have the means or you know uh if you are in a situation where something horrible has happened right like what happened in portland right if you in your truck have three or four of those and you can just be like go go go does anyone know how to use these use these if they're in your backpack when you're at a protest like you could potentially save several lives um so if you have the means and like we said it give them to strangers like it's not like a it's not like a gun right like you can't end your life with a with quick clot yeah um so yeah i would it's a thing that everyone should feel good about having to stop me up on. We should note again, you wouldn't want to use quick clot on a wound that was not serious because

there's some consequences, like it burns. It's, it's kind of nasty stuff in some ways. It can cause some complications for, for like when the EMTs get there. It's often recommended that you keep the packaging and give it to them. But if it's, if someone is clearly going to bleed to death, like that, then that, then that's when you use quick clot. And if you're questioning whether or not a wound is serious enough that someone might bleed to death from it, assume they will, right? Like err on the side of that.

If you're wondering, is that a deadly bleed? You're probably, should probably treat it as if it is. Yeah. I mean, you're always better of keeping more blood inside the person right um yeah with that yeah i've been told to tape that to the person and the same with the tourniquet right we should say that uh there will be blood around you can put a t on their forehead with the blood uh that's pretty normal and that works in almost any language uh and then you want to write the time it was applied to and again you can do that with the blood but i i have a half-size Sharpie that often comes in those kits. Yeah.

Write that on it. Yeah, and it's one of those things, like assuming it kind of is dependent on your situation, whether or not you're likely to have the time to mark that before the EMTs arrive. But it is one of those things, even if your first responding is a minute and a half or two minutes with a serious bleed,

that can be the difference between life and death for somebody. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And it's different what you do when care isn't coming to what you do when care is coming, but the first steps are not right.

Stop the blood coming out of the person. So we should probably talk about combat dressings a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. There are several types. The one I've had suggested that I prefer, I think, I don't know how it's pronounced,

but it's O-L-A-E-S, Olay's dressing. It has a little eye cup in it as well, which you can use for eye injuries, had suggested that I prefer I think I don't know how it's pronounced it's Olaes dressing um it has a little eye cup in it as well um which you can use for eye injuries yeah like find someone more qualified than me to teach you how to do that yeah don't need to get into that but yeah but it's it's a pad with gauze in it and then a sort of ace bandage right and what that does is provides compression and obviously like an absorbent gauze. You can also pull the gauze out. A fun thing to do is to find an expired one and pull all that gauze out. And there is just an unfathomable amount of gauze there.

So you can use that to pack a wound. And practicing packing a wound is also something that you can do. There are like little bottles. Yeah, the team I know who does Stop the Bleed courses will take foam rollers and cut holes in them and use that as like a, and you can do different sizes, right? You can actually just like get a knife and like jam it, stab it a bunch

and like use those as different practice wounds. Yeah, that's a good idea. Can you pack with two fingers, you know, more than that, even one finger, people can pack with one finger. So like what this dressing does is opposite. Sometimes they're called Israeli bandages bandages uh ole's bandages they often come in like a tan package the israeli ones yeah yeah that's right uh again like i would buy that from a reputable source and they come in various sizes emergency dressing is another name yeah and yeah those are great for things where you

don't need to use quick clot where you don't need to use quick clot, where you may not need to use a 20K. Yeah, significant bleeding, but not like immediately life-threatening. Yeah, and in some areas where like sometimes in the forearm, right, like it can be hard because of these bone structures to get the 20K to work. So like you might be able to use that and stuff, but you might have to use quick clot, right? But like having those options is important. And again, they're pretty small,

probably the cheapest of the things we've suggested so far as well and again then they make giant ones from abdominal wounds too um and so like i actually have one of those in my truck uh have a bunch more stuff in my truck i wrote a piece about a first aid kit for your vehicle which might look slightly different right if you imagine again like we've talked about shootings, but... Car accidents. That's when I, the only times I've had to use those dressings

have been car accidents. I had to help pull a fucking dude out of a truck that flipped on the way outside of Los Angeles during a rainstorm. And his like whole fucking, like right here in his hand had been gouged open where like it was quite a bit of blood. But yeah, like that's a bit

it's not all just like action movie shit like it's something you should keep on you because there's a wide variety of things that can cause people to bleed a lot yes exactly yeah yeah and i think we uh we always underestimate the risk that is driving it's probably the most dangerous thing most people do uh and yeah having that in your car you know you don't have to worry so much about carrying it it can just always be there don't leave it where it's going to bake in the sun if you're in a hot place yeah but uh yeah again the potential for you saving a stranger's life or a friend's life yeah is high yeah keep it in a center console keep it in a trunk you know keep it in a trunk alongside a machete in a golf club you know you're always ready for anything with that yeah

i'm never ready for golf but aside from that i'd be oh i wasn't saying for golfing okay just for yeah for crime yeah exactly for crime yeah medical actually make a re yes yeah they make a lovely vehicle first aid kit and they're very nice people too um so yeah that's one to look into and they also do the bags uh i have a mystery ranch uh bag that also onto, it replaces the hood on my backpack. And I have that in my truck. And then if I'm going out, especially when I'm going out climbing, I'll just clip that on.

I have a slightly different kit that I take just for climbing. But that's one of those scenarios where like, you could hurt yourself climbing. And even if people are coming very quickly, it's going to take you a while, right? And thinking another thing. Be prepared to self-rescue. That's part of why you bring that kind of stuff. Self-rescue going to take you a while, right? And thinking another thing.

Be prepared to self-rescue. That's part of why you bring that kind of stuff. Self-rescue is a massive part of climbing, right? Learning the lots, learning the transfers, learning the ways that you can get yourself off a wall if you hurt yourself on a wall. And the American Alpine Club actually publishes a thing called Accidents in North American Climbing, where climbers, oh, okay, this person fucked up like this,

and they did this and this and this, and they were okay or they weren't okay. So I think that's a very good practice learning from other people and with that a big thing that you focus on in wilderness medicine is rather than what can i bring with me what do i have to already have with me and how can i use that right so uh for instance you need to split a leg or you have a broken leg using a sleeping pad or something which already has those rigid sleeves to do that. That's something that like,

I don't want to obviously advise people too much. Yeah, I don't want to, because again, so the different, this is useful. People should be thinking about this. When it comes to emergency first aid, like somebody who has a broken leg, if you're not,

like there's no real response that you should, like that's not what stop the bleed is for, right? Like, one of the nice things about emergency medicine like this, like when you're talking about someone is bleeding to death, is that one of the ways, I guess, that you can separate the two kinds of, like, first responding, because there's the first responding where you can make it worse. And if you like, somebody like breaks a bone or something and you can make that worse. Turn that into an arterial bleeding.

Yes. But if somebody has an arterial bleeding, you can't make that worse. It's the same thing with like chest compressions, right? When you get trained as an EMT, one of the things they'll point out is that like you shouldn't use an AED on an infant, but you do because if they need it they're dead

yeah and in that case yeah i think it's important also and the thing i didn't mention that i found very helpful about this course some of the sort of psychological aspects of this is to remember that if you do find yourself in this situation and you try and help and that person dies anyway then you did your best right and that is of of value like i've been in situations where i've tried to help someone and they've died anyway uh and and i think just remembering that like that person hadn't something terrible happened to them and that your help didn't you know like you tried your best to give those that person another chance yeah it is not if you are responding to somebody who has this kind of injury there is a pretty good

chance what you do won't matter like it's the same thing if you are giving someone chest compressions that's very unlikely to save their life like a fraction of the time when that happens does it save anybody but it can't make it worse if they're not breathing they're not breathing yeah they're going to die yeah yeah and i think uh you know it's not like the movies or television like sometimes it doesn't work it's important to talk about that in the context yes actually much probably much more likely the person will survive if you're doing this stuff right just slapping untorn again you do it right you will stop that person yes yes and and but you know again it is a lot of times what you might be doing is keeping them alive long enough to get to the hospital and you can't guarantee anything other than that they don't bleed out right there.

Right. And then maybe other injuries you haven't seen. That's why we do the check head to toe, right? And stuff like that, like especially in blast injuries, you might not notice injuries to the back. Yeah, shrapnel as a whole. I mean, but all you can do is like try to treat what you can see. Yes, exactly. And make sure that you don't miss anything by going through that Dr. March procedure, right?

Which you'll learn in a course. But yeah, having a procedure that you do where you make checks so that you don't miss something that you could have stopped because then I imagine you will feel bad. Yeah, none of what we've said, we should probably bring this to a close,

should be seen as like the end all be all or our attempt to give you comprehensive training on it. This is a no way training. This is advice on number one, the equipment that's necessary for stopping someone from bleeding to death. And number two, the kinds of training you should get in order to use it. And you should seek training. You should find a stop the bleed course. You should take a wilderness medicine course if you can. If you are someone who is in a field that it's relevant for, you should try to get a HEFAT course. Don't just be, okay, I listened to a 30-minute podcast.

I'm ready to stop a bleed. Go get some training. But definitely get a tourniquet and practice with it. You can do some training yourself. You can find videos online by reputable people who are affiliated with different rescue organizations talking about and showing how to apply tourniquets how to apply dressings um like that that's available and you can provide yourself with a useful amount of education and some of the basics that way yeah i think uh just to give out some resources on how you can get the education right stop the bleak.org

should be free almost anywhere you are if If you'd like to get more training, most community colleges have an EMT course that is very affordable. Yeah, a HEFAT course can run you a couple grand if it's not subsidized. The last time when I took my EMT training, it was $1,000. Yeah, I think it's less than that now.

I know people have many students who are going through EMT training and it's pretty affordable, free. Often during California, it's just often free. Often, if you're in California, it's often free. The other things you can do are, yeah, wilderness medicine. That is expensive. The American Alpine Club has grants. A more diverse group of people should apply

because all of the outdoors could do with a lot more diversity. And I encourage people to apply. Yes, so for all of these training, there are grants. And I would encourage more people to apply uh yes so for all of these training there are grants and i would encourage more people to apply to them but you get you can learn a lot for free or online you can and should try and educate your friends like we're saying it's some of this stuff is hard to fuck up and even if you don't feel confident using stuff rescue essentials north american rescue chinook medical those are places where you can buy a pre-made IFAC, carry that around, and someone else can use it. And again, for talking about the benefits of this

versus the cool-looking tactical gear and guns and stuff, it's entirely possible to have a bunch of military equipment that is worse than useless if you don't know how to use it, is actively a danger to other people. If you have a bunch of medical gear and you don't know how to use it, but you have it on you, you can always shout like, I have a tourniquet.

I have like a combat dressing or something like, does anyone know how to use it? No one is going to make fun of you in the wake of a mass shooting for trying to hand off your gear to someone who knows how to use it. Yeah, exactly. And like, you don't have to carry around a little green multi-camp pouch or

something like you can get a bum bag, put it in a fucking purse, like whatever. It doesn't matter. Yeah. Put it in a fucking purse. Whatever. It doesn't matter. Yeah, it doesn't matter at all. They're very small. They're very compact. And a bum bag or family pack is very handy because you can switch it from the back to the front.

Get to all your stuff. So, yeah, you don't have to be all tactical fucking Sammy Savior. Just be sensible and safe. Yeah, even if you panic or whatever and can't be the one to use it, you can still help save somebody's life by fucking having the shit. Because it's irreplaceable when it's not there. Yeah, I would just encourage people to not use the elastic cord. Yes.

Don't go and buy Milsurp stuff because, you know, you can probably pay the same price to get something that's not expired. And so, yeah, just be conscious. Buying from those reputable people they often have sales especially around holidays you can uh you can hold out and wait for those um there are pretty good resources on reddit as well actually there's a tactical medicine subreddit where people will sort of list their kits and often post that's a sale so sometimes worth cruising that if this is something that's interesting to you yeah Yeah, do some research. You may find right now, especially in places like Rescue Essentials,

it is harder to get combat tourniquets because the war in Ukraine has caused a shortage of the good ones, but you can still find them. You just may need to search around a little bit. Yeah, what I found was that, because you'd posted about this after the New York shooting, was that they were out of the straight tourniquet, but they were not out of the tourniquet with the pouch the pouch cost like six or eight dollars i know that that's more of an expense but if you

can if you can afford that then getting that's not a bad idea anyway because you could put on your belt put it have one of my backpack but when i'm hiking right so that's definitely something that yeah to know to look for all right well that's gonna do it, yeah, to know, to look for. All right. Well, that's going to do it for this episode. James, you want to plug anything? Anarchism. Oh, good. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, go find a hierarchy and, like, throw a rock at it.

Yeah, just look after other people and don't resort to the state to do it. Be kind to each other. And get EMP training if you can. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter?

Nocturnal. Tales from the Shadowsadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America

since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though.

I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh.

And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian, Elian, Elian Gonzalez. Elian, Elian, Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzales wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother

died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, yeah. Oh, that's a beautiful sound. This is It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and sometimes putting them back together.

I'm Robert Evans. I'm here again with Dr. James Stout. James, say hello to the people. Hi, people. We are in an undisclosed location. Is that going to get you in trouble with your immigration stuff? Almost certainly, yes. Yeah, okay.

Well, let's just bleep out the rest of that, but keep the thing with me asking if it's going to get him in trouble with this immigration officer. That'll be fine. This is a podcast that all too often, as Garrison and I say, winds up us being like, here's a problem, goodbye. And telling people about problems is important, but it's also important to talk about solutions. Now, there's been a discourse, not just on the Twitter, but on the subreddit for, it could happen here, repeatedly over the last few months of people talking about, like, how would anarchists handle things like large-scale distribution of food,

an industrial base, you know, how would anarchists, how would an anarchist society handle infrastructure in any meaningful capacity um and i think there's kind of a widespread idea among some people that like you have to have intense centralization um to do that um now james you are i wasn't joking about the doctor thing you do have a phd and your specific area of specialty is the spanish civil war that's right yeah uh even more specific than that actually my uh my very specific area of uh a specialty is uh the second republic so a period before the civil war and really like the first week uh of the spanish civil war uh but yes uh catalonia specifically like revolutionary catalonia and uh i guess my thing is the anti-fascist popular Olympics in 1936, but more broadly, Catalonia and Catalonia before and in the Civil War.

nation um with with anarchist under anarchist principles um and a number of things were done in an anarchist fashion including the production of armored vehicles the maintenance of large amounts of agriculture you know power and whatnot um so yeah how how how do how do james yeah how do anarchism let me tell you um i should start by saying like i not a big, big theory guy. I'm more of a sort of doing things guy person. But yeah, so if we look at what we had in Catalonia in 1936, the Spanish Civil War, if you're not familiar, starts on the 19th of July 1936 with a coup. Some of this will sound familiar. Maybe you should listen to our podcast about Myanmar.

But we have a military uprising against a leftist democratic government that has just been elected in 1936 after two years of a right-wing, it's called the Bienio Negro, like the black biennium. You've lived through the Trump shit, you understand. So we have this coup that happens. And in cities across Spain, the coup is largely stopped. The differentiating factor, as Obi talked about this in our podcast, is where the people are armed, the coup is stopped. Where the people are not armed, where the government says, no, we won't release weapons to you, the coup succeeds.

Now in Barcelona, the coup is stopped almost entirely by the anarchists, with a little bit of help from the police, actually, oddly, right? The one classic allies, anarchists and the police fighting together. I mean, it is also a very different kind of situation with, I mean, yeah, culturally. Like, how does that happen?

How does that happen? Well, in Spain, you have various police forces, right? And some of them are created by the Second Republic. So they are police that exist really to protect the Republic from things that would attack it. That does not mean that they do not attack workers, right? The Republic was often called the Republic of Order because they violently put down strikes and the anarchists killed them.

But in this instance, they remained loyal. The anarchists killed who? The cops. Yeah. Yeah, that's a pretty steady thing. But in this instance, the Republic was under attack from the right, right? From the military. And in some towns, the police split for the military.

But in Barcelona, they largely did not, right? You have various police guards, police groups in Spain, federal and local, but the assault guards and the civil guards in Barcelona largely remained with the Republic, right? And it's important to, maybe if we step back a second to explain the concept of a popular front, then we can understand that more Republic, right? And it's important to, maybe if we step back a second to explain the concept of a popular front, then we can understand that more easily, right?

Yeah, and we do, for more detail on this, we talk about a decent amount of this in our Behind the Insurrections episodes on the Spanish Civil War and the popular fronts, which aren't just a Spanish thing. They exist in France. They exist in a number of other countries. It's the thing that gets tried on several occasions,

often successfully, at least from an electoral standpoint. Yeah, yeah, it's very successful at this time, right? And it's important to understand that the ERC, which translates as Catalan Republican Left, had more or less been a popular front since 1931. Yeah, and a popular front is basically this thing we keep talking about where what if everybody on the left could get on the same page about stopping fascism that's the basic idea is like you've got your libs you've got your commies you've got your anarchists you've got other weird chunks of the left and everybody agrees let's all work together to deal with this specific right-wing threat right now yes yeah exactly like we can put our differences aside and move forward um so that's what you have in the second republic it's explicitly

called the popular front right and so that is why the police in the Second Republic. It's explicitly called the Popular Front, right? And so that is why the police in Barcelona split with the anarchists. Now, what happens in Barcelona is that the military march into town from outside of town and just pretty much get their shit pushed back in by the anarchists, right? All around town, gunfights break out. In one instance, the anarchists are able to persuade the soldiers manning a machine gun that their class solidarity is more important than their obedience to their officers and then they turn the machine gun on their officers and kill their

officers instead unbelievably based exceptionally fucking cool right uh the spanish civil war has all these amazing stories like that but that that's one of my favorites, right? Doesn't happen often. It's great when it does. So what we have by the end of the first week of the Spanish Civil War is a situation where in Catalonia, the city is in the hands of the anarchists. There's this meeting that happens between the president of Catalonia and the anarchists. It may or may not be apocryphal, or the exact words may or may not be apocryphal. It doesn't really matter. What happens is that the anarchists go to the president of Catalonia,

and he says to them, you're in control of the city. The city's in your hands. He actually, the president, he was liberal, but he'd been a lawyer for the anarchists when they kept getting fired. He said, if you want me to be another foot soldier in the fire, I will. I'll quit my job. I'll just be another fighter. But if I can be useful to you as a politician, I will as well.

So it's a submission from an elected bourgeois politician that the city belongs to you now, to the people, and it's up to you what we do next. What they did was they founded this. They didn't actually sort of go right it's all anarchist right the two salient anarchist groups of cnt and the fai uh the anarchist federation of iberia and the national confederation of labor um he didn't they didn't sort of be like okay we're under anarchist control they founded the people's committee of Anti-Fascist Militias. And they said this is an anti-fascist Catalonia, right? And then they began to control the industries

according to the principles of anarcho-syndicalism, right? Which is the idea that the way to move towards a more libertarian society under or moving from industrial capitalism is through industrial unions, right? And they were extremely effective i see this discourse a lot on twitter or on reddit or on places where where uh um i don't want to just like dismiss people as tankies but where we're because like you know maybe those people can can listen and we can talk and we can understand each other but where people go on the internet to talk about politics and say that it's impossible for anarchists to do supply chain.

It's impossible for anarchists to do logistics, right? And sometimes I think they think of anarchism as only able to work in groups of five people or something. Yeah, there's this broad spread attitude in part because of some social attitudes among a lot of american anarchists certainly american anarchists who are very online that like anarchism is when you live on a farm with four of your friends right like that that it's very pastoral it's anti-industrial

and a decent amount of american anarchists are it's not uncommon to find people who are like anarcho-primitivist or whatever um but it is important to note that there's a very long anarchist tradition as we're talking about now that's deeply industrial yes and like the anarchist a right the anarchist symbol that we all see that comes from america right the industrial workers of the world come from the united states the raised fist popular salute comes from the iww goes to spain right uh we have this long tradition but yeah i think a lot of american anarchists because it's easier to live and work cooperatively in a small group, somewhat detached, but what we have in Catalonia that we don't have here is the majority of the working class committed to anarcho-syndicalism.

So people return to work and work very effectively when they're not also volunteering, also fighting in something like a Daruti column, these anarchist militias, which we can also talk about because i think they're very interesting um so for instance one example i like to cite is the hispano suiza factory right uh spain swiss it's just an automobile manufacturer it's like the gm factory within three days after the revolution and bear in mind that most of them have been out shooting at soldiers for most of that time right um big thing they had to deal with was the soldiers would often use the churches, they would burn the churches. It was an extremely vicious urban battle.

They had converted their facility to go from producing automobiles for rich people at the time, 1936 when everyone had a car, to producing technicals, armored cars, right? And you can see them if you Google CNT technicals, CNT armored cars, you can see some amazing, like, hodgepodge technicals that they'd welded these things on. And they were able to turn those around and produce weapons for the front.

Another good example is the Ascaso pistols, right? So Ascaso is a famous anarchist leader. And Ascaso was killed on the first day of the revolution, when they were fighting the coup. So there wasn't much weapons manufacturing in Catalonia. And we're very familiar with that from our work on Myanmar. What they did was they set up a factory in Terrassa to make weapons. They made copies of ruby pistols actually but

then they named them after us casa so you can still buy them i'm sure you can google them you can find them uh um but these they set up a weapons factory right and then under anarcho-syndicalist principles under the principles of sort of unions controlling this production system unions controlling the supply chain system which let's be be honest, they do largely anyway, right? Like it's not Tim Apple who buys a circuit board for your phone, it's someone else. This is a slightly more globalized system with Apple phones. But the unions were able to set up and change their production, right? Not just keep doing what they were doing, but also pivot without the need for people exercising authority over each other. This important understanding, because you asked about how would anarchists continue industrial production?

It's like, well, have you ever had a job that had you work in a factory or an assembly line or in some sort of other industrial way? Have you ever been a contractor and had a boss who sucked? Would it have worked better if that boss hadn't been there? That's the basic, that's like the, like, it's entirely possible for large groups of people to coordinate in a way that is not a capitalist system where you're all accountable to a shareholder, right? Like, there's a number of different ways to do that, but there's a long tradition. And in fact, some corporations that are still around today and quite large, you can look up the Mondragon Corporation in Spain that have a lot of anarchist principles in their organizing. Not that like it's an anarchist company or whatever, but like there's significant amounts of anarchist theory in why that operates the way it does and has been significantly successful.

There's some other examples and I think it's Brazil. There's a large like steel corporation or whatnot. But yeah, there's nothing about anarchism that means you can't have a factory producing armored cars. It just means you're not producing armored cars for the profit of the Lockheed Martin Corporation or whatever. Yeah, you're producing armored cars because you are fighting in

a conflict that you hope will liberate other people, right? And that is arguably a more important motivation than wage labor. And certainly they, in some cases, increase productivity, but they were able to sustain all the functions of an industrial society. And Catalonia was very industrialized, much more so than the rest of Spain, right? And that's perhaps why anarchism was so important there. And yeah, it doesn't require the arbitrary exercise of authority for that to happen. And like you say, there's plenty of examples of that. I think both of us really enjoyed David Graeber's book,

but this idea that we move from one phase of society to another and that necessitates a different form of political organization just isn't borne out by the historical record. And I think Catalonia is a really good example of that. Yeah. And a further example of that is in a pretty similar timeframe, you're talking an earlier, but maybe like less than 20 years earlier, you have Nestor Makhno and Makhnovia in Ukraine, this kind of independent, autonomous, anarchist society that is extremely successful in war, that the Soviet Union does not exist without Makhno fighting the whites as successfully as he did in stopping an advance on Moscow. And that's rural, that we're not industrialized. And in fact,

their anarchism was very much based in kind of the traditional methods of organizing rural societies in Ukraine. And you have that a lot in other – like you have a lot – there are a lot of areas in which anarchism is common in rural areas, and it's more of like a state socialism in industrialized areas. But you can have – you also have this deep history of industrialized anarchism, and there's – it shows that there's a capability for anarchist principles to function with infrastructure yeah and if you want to look for rural anarchism you can look in southern spain right there's um if you want to look at a small case study the anarchist of casas viejas is a great example of that right people can find i'm sure it's free online as a pdf now um but yes it doesn't have to just exist in an urban or a rural society or between the two, right?

Like when the Daruti column went south. Okay, the Daruti column is an anarchist column. There were a number of other anarchist columns, but this one is the sort of the preeminent one, the one that was most successful because they tended not to get bogged down as much in fighting in rural environments where they were not skilled, but they were extremely skilled, much more so than the military in fighting in urban environments, right? So they were very successful. They went to Zaragoza and

then fought there. While they were there, they were collectivizing the farms, right? And I'm sure some of that collectivization was forced. I don't want to be like everything was rainbows and unicorns. Yeah, it's a war. There's no side in a war whose hands stay clean right like that's not minimizing or ignoring it it's just stating that like you you have to sometimes talk about the broad strokes of what's going on with without pretending to whitewash the fact that i'm certain ugly things happen there as well yeah yeah and like yeah as say, ugly things happen in war. And I think if you, if you want that not to happen, maybe, I don't know, you live on the internet.

But like, the Ruti column then goes to, to Madrid, right? The siege of Madrid, which was the, also the first conflict with the international brigades, the first battle

of the international brigades, 14. It was a very successful battle for the Republic. It was a battle that allowed the Republic, if we look at the two battles that allow the Republic to exist, right, it's conflict in Barcelona, the battle for Barcelona on the first days of the Civil War, and it's a battle in Madrid, right? Now, Madrid is not as much of an anarchist city. It is a city with anarchism, but it's also

more salient other socialism. So when the Durruti column arrivesuti column arrives and takes part in the combat there, because they have been successful, because they're very good at urban warfare, and a lot of the people in the Daruti column didn't want Daruti to go, but he decided it was important to go as part of this popular front, right, to fight this huge push

of Spain's most professional soldiers, right? And that's where Darutiruti you can read, I know someone is working on it on like a graphic novel about him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. You can help boost that as well. Yeah, yeah.

And you should give them your money if you have some. But Abel Parth's book about Durruti is very good. It's an amazing book because you turn over the line of notes and he's like, oh yeah, this book has taken me a long time to write because I was involved in a resistance against Francoanco and spent 25 years in jail solitary confinement uh but what a chad

um but so you can read about deruti there and deruti dies in the battle for madrid but it's also kind of important to look at spain is effective anika spain is effective anarchist Spain is effective in fighting fascism what stops it being effective to my mind is not anarchist principles military organization the other thing

that was that was impressive about the Ruti column was that they had embedded army loyal army officers and they listened to them and they learned from them

and they said okay we don't we're good at some stuff not good at other stuff we will learn from you other anarchists didn't and didn't tend to do as well. Yeah, this is a common misconception because anarchists are very much against hierarchy,

which doesn't mean being against professionalism or competence, right? Like, it's the idea that, like, the hierarchy, for example, that led several million young boys to get machine gunned in World War I because the people who were in charge of them had not learned how machine guns functioned was a problem but if you've got someone who has been training their entire life as a soldier and understands very

effectively how artillery functions and how machine guns function and because they have professionalized in that it's not against anarchist principles to listen to that person in a gunfight yeah yeah expertise is not a it's not yeah it's not incompatible with liberty right and so yeah they were very willing to listen to that and in the same way they would be in a like yeah again

these people have worked in factories right they understand that if you don't know how to use a lathe and you exert your liberty to use a lathe and your hand's going to end up in the lathe yeah when i when i go to a doctor and say, I have gotten this horrible infected wound, what do I do about it? I am not yielding to a hierarchy. I am accepting their expertise, you know? Yeah, yeah. I think sometimes people,

I think your listeners are much better informed than this generally, but people confuse anarchism with a predilection for chaos and violence. And it isn't that, right? It's just, it's a desire to be more free and to not be controlled. And it isn't that, right? It's a desire to be more free and to not be controlled. And I have a boot on your neck. But to wind up that thought, the reason that the Republican Spain starts to lose is not because there

are anarchists, and you will definitely see this discourse on the internet. Many people will tell me that I'm mistaken about this.'s my fucking degree uh but um yeah i would argue that it's because the whole western world that did quote unquote democracies abandoned them right yeah this is like there's there's this we talk about this a bit in the episodes we did on it but like there's this whole argument that i'm sure you'll get into more between like the socialists the communists you know and the anarchists but a huge part of it probably most of it is that like the fascists are getting guns from other fascists and tanks and aircraft often flown by professional fascist pilots who are training for what's going to become world war ii whereas republican spain

has some old bulked action rifles that got smuggled in through fr. Yeah, and some Mosins that were sold by America to Russia, from Russia to Mexico, and then from Mexico back to Spain, right? And yeah, these old Mausers that Orwell talks about that are rusted and they can't open the bolt after they fire them, and they reload their ammunition and it's shit. But yeah, and on the other side, right,

the coup doesn't work. How does the Army of Africa get from Africa to Spain? It doesn't swim, right? How Army of Africa get from Africa to Spain? It doesn't swim, right? How do these generals get from Africa to Spain? Airlifted by other fascist nations, right? We don't see that, right? Actually, France wanted to sell planes to the Republic in the early days of the war, but Britain pretty much put the kibosh on it.

There's an interesting parallel with what you're seeing in ukraine right now because in ukraine you have a republican government um and a military that has a fairly wide selection jake canahan just posted like a vegan extremist who's fighting on the front lines of the guy because it's like yeah there's a whole bunch of different ideological tendencies fighting on behalf of the broadly ukrainian side there including some very nasty ones. But you're kind of seeing what happens when a fascist power invades a country like that to stop a republic, and democratic powers send them

the most advanced weapons on the planet. Yeah, right, which is all it would have taken to roll back fascism in Spain. And then perhaps, you know, there were a lot of German-Italian exiles fighting in Spain, right? Because the Second Republic had relatively liberal asylum policies.

And they knew the only way to stop fashion in Italy and Germany was to roll it back in Spain and keep going, right? I often have this, and I've had this as we've reported on Myanmar, this weird thought of like, I'll be reading about the Spanish Civil War in my office, and I'll look at my gun collection. I'll go, if I could go back in time with everything I have in my house, all of the ammo and guns, there are a couple of battles that might have been turned around by just that. Well, for one thing,

because modern semi-automatic arms are much more effective than bolt-action rifles. But just like the level of armament that those people had was not... There were 18th century armies better equipped for combat. i mean you see people with uh with muzzle loaders and stuff in the spanish civil war right and and then the only place they can turn for arms is the soviet union right and they don't just get arms they also get

these generals right who are quote-unquote advising they're not they're commanding units uh there's a lot of soviet politicking at play right and as much as anything and you can read like um like uh peter carroll's book on the abraham lincoln brigades or something a brigade uh uh battalion sorry they weren't actually brigade uh that will give you a better idea of like exactly how this strict authoritarian communist control really sapped the spirit out of the republic um and you can see this in may of 1937 right which is what george orwell writes about in his book right the may days 1937 when we see a conflict between the non-stalinist communist they weren't trotskyists the poom right um very often uh portrayed as trotsky trotsky himself

like you can see the letters that he wrote to them where he had strong disagreements with them, if you care to look. But we see this conflict, the shooting war, right, between the anarchists and the non-Stalinist communists and the Stalinist communists. And what comes out of that is this idea among people on the libertarian left, its broad spectrum of libertarian leftism

that we saw in Spain, that it's not really worth fighting for the Republic or for the fascists, because either way we're just going to have the boot on our neck, right? The secret police, as they were, like the secret police spent far, far, far more time going after anarchists in the Republican army than they did

after spies. Oh no. Really? Yes. The authoritarian left spent more of their time fighting anarchists than the fat? Wild. Yeah, crazy. And it's never happened again. We learned from it. We moved on. We've become better people. Yeah, it's great. We're fine now. We've fixed it. For a lot of the people fighting for the Republic, what are you fighting for? And I think that's important that we remember that even in times when things are bad, you have to think about what things should be like.

You have to try and model that uh in in what you're doing now on an economic level when you're talking about like they come and they collectivize these farms there's like anarchist like the anarchists in large chunks and like in catalonia in particular are kind of running what at the time is a fairly modern industrial economy how does that how does that work like do you have any kind of like overall state like during the period of time where you know they had reasonable control and also weren't completely overwhelmed with the fighting how did it function yeah you kind of have a state right you have this sort of people's committee of anti-fascist militias but uh not really because things things are somewhat chaotic right it's not a state as we

would maybe understand it now so what we have instead instead is anarcho-syndicalism, right? These unions going to other unions and organizing among themselves, right? Like, you know, the steel workers need X from the miners, right? The miners, then the tube makers need X from the steel workers and the gun company need X from the tube makers, right? And so organizing along industrial union levels allows things to continue, right? Allows the trains and trams to continue, allows them to continue manufacturing munitions, right? So it's anarcho-syndicalism. It's a type

of libertarian leftism. And then we see these collective or sort of cooperative, I should say, farming arrangements, right, where, again, people are farming, people are sort of joining together their industrial small holdings and then delivering those, contributing those to the city, to the war effort. There's something, as you see in Ukraine, right,

relatively special that happens in these times of conflict where people are, I think, more willing to just step aside from the, and I think that's always been, that was a thing for the Spanish working class for a long time, but to step aside from the accumulation of stuff, right, from the accumulation of individual goods and wealth and to say, like, yeah, well, let's all get stuck in together. And I think that helped to allow that to happen helped to allow it to continue but yeah these organizations

between unions and collectives worked right they functioned you can't argue that they didn't work the republican army didn't starve in a week or run out of fuel and things right these these anarchist columns were able to to travel from barcelona to daragossa and from dalagossa back to madrid like that doesn't happen if you're incapable of organizing right so yeah in the factories these people had already been organizing together right they were on strike often right they knew how to they had an existing system for organizing things because they already organized to pay strike funds they already organized to look after other after other parts of the CNT when they were out, right? They organized to have policy statements on various things.

So they had these existing means to organize. They just didn't have authorities that told people what to do. They knew how to work together to decide what to do. Yeah, I had this beautiful moment during the 2020 uprisings where I was in a city and I was hanging out with members of a medical collective. And the building that they were in, there was a couple of thousand square feet of they were producing by assembly line Kim wipes for clearing mace out of your eyes. They were producing like IFACs, medical kits. They had racks of body armor that had been donated or purchased with donated funds um and it was all it was a substantial amount of

equipment that was being and respirators and stuff that was being organized assembled put together um distributed put in people's hands put in the hands of people who are going out and utilizing it on a regular basis um and it was being done within the principles of kind of, like, a number of things can be organized that way. It is handling the collection, the distribution of equipment and the collection disbursement of funds, like, for potentially like thousands and thousands of people. disbursement of funds like for potentially like thousands and thousands of people um that's perfectly doable uh under anarchist principles and anarchists have done that kind of thing a number of times in the world yeah like if you look at the example of the the soup kitchens right the proletarian uh diners or restaurants they called them right so in uh in barcelona and madrid they

took over the writs right uh and and sourced food, food from rural anarchists to feed people, right? Rather than saying like, oh, you know, you have to buy food, you have to buy food, you have to buy food. You come here and anyone can eat if you're hungry, right? And yeah, you see people doing that. Look at the unit that we spoke about in Myanmar, right? The Karenny Generation Z Army. Those guys, they didn't have like, you know, no one was wearing rank,

right? No one was a general or a captain or a sergeant, right? They talked, and to our point before about expertise, some people... We found out the person we were talking to, Zaw, who was killed, was seen as a commander by people

because of what they wrote about him after he died, but he never talked about himself that way. No, in fact, he told us that if some people knew more, if they'd been in the fight for longer, they knew the terrain, and then we'd listen to them, and they'd have a bit more weight in that conversation. But we all just decide together what we want to do. And that works, right? Those guys were very well respected among the anti-coup forces in Myanmar

because of their willingness to fight and their effectiveness. And those guys have a good battlefield record against the government troops. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it wasn't just, again, it's not just five guys fighting, right? It's also they were able, and in Myanmar we still see this, with the underground, I think they call them the development committee, the people who are, they were the people who fought it did the shield walls and that kind of thing and people will be familiar with the george floyd uprising for them they went

underground and they're developing ways to make weapons now right so they're the people you'll see making 3d printed guns so the people you'll see making improvised explosive devices uh fertilizer bombs working out how to make handmade tutu rifles we've seen. Again, they don't need someone in charge for that. And in times of difficulty, we revert to taking care of one another and getting things done. We don't, contrary to I think what we're led to believe, sort of revert to we don don't need like a strong leader,

dear leader. We are capable of looking after one another outside of authority in the state. Yeah. And it also stands to the point that like accepting the authority of someone with expertise in certain situations, like the fundamental way in which effective militaries are organized tends to involve the existence of an NCO Corps, right? Every military that is good at fighting has an NCO Corps. Part of why Russia has acquitted itself so unbelievably poorly in the fighting in Ukraine is that that does not functionally exist in the Russian military. And the basic idea of an NCO Corps is that among fighting units, there should be dudes whose job, and I say dudes in the non-gendered sense, there should be people whose job is to make the functioning of that fighting unit be their whole life, and they stay at that job for a long time. They don't just move up and shit. They're there to keep that unit functioning.

And from the perspective of like someone who is an anarchist, I mean, as an anarchist who's been shot at a number of times, when I'm hanging out and there's like some grizzled ass fucking veteran in the unit I know, this is a bad place to camp for this reason or whatever, you listen to them. Like that's, again, you know, factories function the same way. Having been on building sites, they function the same way. Somebody tells you don't do that, it's a bad idea, and they clearly have been doing it more than you. You listen to them. That's not accepting that you have a boss. That's accepting that you have people who are more experienced and competent in certain things yeah and uh if you look at what ineffective armies sometimes have

it's it's it's it's in the officer corps right it's people who are in charge but maybe ought not to be but it's because of their status or their wealth or something else right and you see like very effective uh fighting in the anarchist units, with men and women and actually people who were non-binary as well, or people who we'd call non-binary, didn't call themselves that then. But we see that because they were willing to elect officers, right, but then listen to them. And it was listen to, not obey, right? But that was an extremely effective way of doing things.

Yeah, I was having a conversation with a buddy of mine who was a Marine and saw some very heavy combat in Iraq years ago about like the way in which certain anarchist units had worked over time and talked about the fact that they elected their leaders. And he was like, well, we didn't do that, obviously, but there were people you knew you shouldn't listen to and people you did, and you understood who you wanted calling the shots when bullets were flying, right? Like, regardless of what the actual hierarchy was, it's just like, you know, in the U.S. military, you have a platoon leader who is an officer who's been to college,

and you have a platoon sergeant, and they do somewhat different things. But every reasonable person who has interfaced with those units will agree that, like, any good platoon leader, even though they're an officer and of higher rank, it's going to listen to whatever the fucking platoon sergeant says.

Cause they've been doing that job a lot longer. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're a fool and you're arrogant if you don't. Right. And that arrogance will find you out if you're in a difficult situation pretty quickly.

So, yeah, I think it's important to look, to look at those anarchist militaries. Right. And then there are lots and lots of accounts of the, of the anarchists in the Spanish civil war. Julian Casanova's book is, is one of of my favorites if people want to read one um murray

bookchin of course has written the spanish anarchist as well uh so there there are a lot of books you can read about and some of the micro case studies are really fun right if you want to look at like what is it like to live on an anarchist farm in 1936 in rural Catalonia, in Jela or something like that. And I would encourage people to read them with an open mind. I understand it looked like the world was different than it is today, but to look at those historical examples and realize that what people were doing then

was fundamentally the same. They were trying to take care of each other and make the world better for their children, and they didn't want the boot on their neck and they were all prepared to work together to do that. And that was an extremely functional way. And what didn't work for them was being controlled by people from the Soviet Union who maybe didn't understand their struggle because they often felt it wasn't worth fighting anymore. And that's true for communists too, actually, right? Like if you look at the American communists

who went and fought, and they were overwhelmingly communists who went and fought for the international brigades, the international brigades were not the republic's army per se, they were the Comintern's army. And if there is one group of people who was hated more than anyone else, it was commissars, right?

These people who were sort of there to enforce this very strict interpretation of what they saw as Marxist-Leninism. So even those people, right, who were communists might have had a more, a slightly more libertarian understanding, didn't really take that well

to being bossed around and lost a lot of their wills, what they were fighting for because of that, right? Cecil Albee's book is another really good book about that, if you want to read that. Well, I think that's going to bring us to an end here. James, you have a book about the Spanish Civil War that you should probably plug here.

Yeah, yeah. It's called The Popular Front and the 1936 Barcelona Olympics. It's about the anti-for-Olympics that were held as an alternative to the Barcelona Olympics. It explains how the Popular Front used sport to build an anti-fascist identity in Catalonia, and it used sport to bring together anti-fascists from around the world. The Popular Olympics actually happened on the 19th of July, which is the same day the Civil War started, so they never occurred, but many of the people who went to take part in the Olympics

decided to stay and fight. So that's what my book's about. It's quite expensive. I understand people can't afford it. That's fine. I keep saying I'm working on another book, but I'm not working very hard or very fast. Yeah, yeah, look it up.

Someone's probably bootlegged it. Actually, the e-book is often free at universities and other libraries. So, yeah, just go to your library, and I'll see if I can get it. And where else can people find you? On the internet, at James Stout on Twitter. Same thing on Patreon. Those are my two main things.

You can find my writing on MuckRack. Just Google my name. Yeah, and again, help us... Dan will please bleep that out for the sake of James immigration cases. And yeah, that's good. That's an episode. Welcome.

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

I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season

digging into how Tex elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran

with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God, things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in

the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home

and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban I know all too well.

Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Despite it being past midnight, you can still see through the dense forest. The moonlit sky combined with the urban light pollution make traversing the messy woods easier than you thought. You're relieved that you don't have to use your headlamp, which could have drawn unwanted attention. The company of a few of your queer friends makes the walk through the confusing woods less intimidating. Dressed in gray and camo, you make your way through overgrown trails and hop over a small creek. Save for the occasional train, all you can hear is the

croaking of frogs and chirping of cicadas, crickets, and grasshoppers. The night air you breathe through your mask is noticeably cleaner than the air from downtown that you spent months riding in during 2020, not even counting the tear gas in the air. As you and your pals slowly trek through the forest, your feet squish into the grassy wet ground. You avoid the areas caked in clay and stick to the cover of trees, brush, and a soft wetland. After a short walk, and with only a few wrong turns, you reach an artificial break in the embrace of the forest. You look at your masked-up friends, and for a brief moment during the moonlit night, you can't quite tell who's who, which is a good thing, you suppose.

Everyone exchanges glances, but no one says anything. Everyone already knows what to do. As you approach the barren mound of dirt, you get angry, a jarring crack in the beauty and mysterious allure of the forest. You're no longer in the woods. You're at the site of destruction, a clear cut that seeks to expand its radius. Without the tree coverage, you can see the harsh blue light of LEDs in the distance. There, among the mounds of dirt and fallen trees, are several unguarded machines of destruction. With no cell phones in sight, you and your friends get to live in the moment. Your agenda becomes the sound of shattering glass in the cold night.

Hammers meet windows and serrated knives cut the inner tubing of bulldozers and excavators. The undoing of the mechanical monsters that have violated the forest has begun. No tool of the evildoers goes unharmed. Rattling cans of spray paint leave antagonistic and proclamatory messages with rebellious hiss for those who intend to continue destroying the forest. Defend the forest, no cop city, no Hollywood dystopia. In little time, the light pollution, moonlight, and distant LEDs are accompanied by a bright orange blaze emanating from the machines, lighting up the area around the sad mound of dirt.

A splash of gasoline acts as the extension of the blood that fuels the burning fire in your hearts that became a light with the rage felt at the sight of the decimated woods. By the time the fire department took notice, you've already disappeared into the night like a specter, fading like the curling black smoke that drifted into the midnight sky. As you exit the forest, you go about as if what happened tonight never did. You never tell a soul, and you never talk about it with your masked-up queer friends, since they were never there either. Details fade in your memory like a dream, but deep down, you still remember the feeling,

the peak moment of true freedom when the fire engulfed the machines. It was upon broken, unusable machines that the fires were extinguished. Laying incinerated, the excavators and bulldozers were rendered immobile, worthless piles of trash. Fires are only temporary and can be undone, but the connection between those who live in a forest, who breathe its air, and who drink its water filtered through its wetlands, is not so easily broken. Any further attempts at destroying the forest will be met with a similar response. The forest was here long before us, and will be here long after.

You and your friends, among many other anonymous strangers, will see to that. Welcome to Kadappan Here, a podcast about things falling apart, and how we can put them back together. Today we'll be spanning that entire spectrum. I'm Garrison Davis, and the story I just read isn't merely a fictional one. It was inspired by over a year's worth of communiques and reportbacks coming out of the Defend the Forest movement in Atlanta, Georgia. So, uh, excuse the pretentious poetry of anarchist-azine-speak. In early 2021, it was revealed to the public that mainly four entities,

namely the City of Atlanta, the Atlanta Police Foundation, DeKalb County, and Blackhall Studios, had dual plans to devastate two complementary sections of the South Atlanta forest. The City of Atlanta and Police Foundation plans are to turn the area of the forest known as the Old Atlanta Prison Farm into the largest police training facility in the country, complete with a mock city, helipad, and bomb range. Meanwhile, Entrenchment Creek, a public forest land, will be traded by DeKalb County to Blackhall Movie Studios to clear-cut the land on which they plan to build America's largest soundstage. This project lies at a horrific intersection of police militarization, gentrification, copaganda, and exasperating the local effects of worsening climate change by clear-cutting hundreds of acres of forest. In the last year, activists, ghost-like saboteurs,

and open-source researchers have vulturized together into an anonymous and diverse movement that's brought the plans to destroy the forest out of the shadows of secretive backdoor corporate deals and into the public spotlight, forming the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement that's consistently been able to get ahead of police and media by breaking news about the forest destruction plans and setting the terms of engagement and what's deemed as acceptable direct action, all while being able to foster a relationship with the woods that they are defending. I've been really interested in this project since I heard about it last summer.

Along with the intersection of police militarization and climate change, on the flip side, there's this unique intersection of urban city protest and classic forest eco-defense. The mix of tactics have produced a movement unlike anything really seen before here in the States. Not to get ahead of myself, but ever since last fall, when the Atlanta City Council approved the plan to build the largest police training facility in the country, dubbed Cop City by activists due to the plans to build a mini version of Atlanta within the facility to practice urban combat. But I figured that I would eventually find myself inside the forest. So this last April,

when an opportunity presented itself to travel to Atlanta, stay in the woods, and talk with some forest defenders, I could not pass it up. I packed a tent, sleeping bag, and some microphones, and made my way to Georgia. The first thing I noticed upon arriving in Atlanta is that when they say Atlanta is a city in a forest, they really do mean it. The amount of continuous tree coverage throughout the city was astonishing, and that's coming from someone who lives in Portland, Oregon. As it turns out, the city of Atlanta actually has the highest amount of tree canopy of any city in the United States. On top of the citywide tree coverage, there is the South River Forest, which makes up the largest continuous section of woods and serves as Atlanta's first line of defense in the face of rapidly accelerating climate change. The forest in southeast Atlanta is said to function as the

lungs of the city. The canopy offers shade and traps carbon, with some of the more heavily forested areas acting as wetlands that filter rainwater and prevent flooding by collecting runoff. Its marsh is one of the last breeding grounds for a lot of amphibians in the region, as well as an important migration site for wading birds and serves as a home to a lot of local wildlife. breeding birds, and serves as a home to a lot of local wildlife. Nearly 500 acres of this forest is under threat by the Atlanta Police Foundation and Blackhall Studios. If plans succeed to develop this precious strip of forest into the massive police compound and adjacent movie soundstage, the entire metropolitan area will face much harsher effects of climate change,

including worsening floods, higher temperatures, and less clean tree-filtered air. Not to mention the increased police militarization and gentrification. Speaking of, the second thing I noticed once I arrived in Atlanta is how much gentrification is currently underway. The amount of hideous 501 apartments that are being built was impossible to overlook. And as we'll see, the way police feed off gentrification, which feeds off the corporate and movie-making sides of Atlanta, is not merely a coincidence. Last fall, I interviewed Jamal from the Atlanta chapter of the Community Movement Builders, a black-led collective of community residents and activists

serving poor and working-class black communities. They focus on responding to encroaching gentrification, displacement, and over-policing. Here's what Jamal had to say on the intersection of issues orbiting around the Cop City and Defend the Forest project. Just to piggyback off of that, I think it's extremely important for us to recognize the connections between all of these things, right this like cop city is a perfect blend of um environmental justice issues uh just flat out racism uh police brutality and also gentrification right it's not a it's not a mistake that they're building this cop city right at this moment when um atlanta is also becoming the for the first time in i don't know how many decades um a non no longer majority black city because neighborhoods

like Pittsburgh where we're located out of and all across Southwest and West Atlanta have becoming more like the black people have been being displaced from our communities. So a perfect example is that with my organization Community Movement Builders, we purchased, we've been doing work in the Pittsburgh neighborhood for a while, but we purchased a community house in the neighborhood about six years ago. Right. At that point, we purchased the house for $50,000. Right. Um, Pittsburgh has been historically a poor working class community. It was, uh, it was founded as a black community, which is different from a lot of other, of other neighborhoods in Atlanta was founded as a black community, which is different from a lot of other of other neighborhoods in Atlanta was founded as a black community from freed Africans who were trying to escape some of the more rural areas of the south and found work in Haven in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Atlanta.

And it's been a poor and working class black community ever since. But now, because of the gentrification has been going on, how a house just sold maybe about a month and a half ago for $750,000. So we purchased a house at $50,000 six years ago. A house just sold just a few blocks away from that house for $750,000. Now, it's not every house is selling for that amount, but that just shows you the rate of gentrification that's happening and then and we know that cops are in this necessary part of being able to defer to displace people from gentrifying communities they play an integral role within gentrification yeah i'm just wondering does any of you have any like even like anecdotal experience with like basically marvel and tons of other industries

like invading atlanta how is that like affected specifically like you already talked about how how you know increased the increase in the film industry and other things has you know has made more gentrification but like how is that even affected just like like other types of stuff including like like policing like has has this type of like growth um affected people or people you know in in other ways yeah absolutely so i think a lot of this kind of got i won't say it got started but a lot of it went even uh you know escalated when tyler perry studio opened up in east point um and a lot of people you know were praising it's like oh look at this uh you know it's a black man that was able to move down and be able to start this thing within hollywood but no it's

all that is one of the things that also spurred the gentrification in east point which is uh you might not be familiar with atlanta but east point is like literally right next to atlanta so it's a lot it's it's really close proximity and so that also spurs over to the gentrification here in the city as well um property values have gone up since that point even more. Even my tax bill has gone up $1,000 a year for the past three years. we do we do do a lot of work around gentrification um and i think this is in tandem with you know because we have covet 19 out here now with the eviction moratorium which has now been you know denied um by the supreme court um but even when there wasn't an eviction moratorium there were still people that were getting evicted from their homes and i think all of this in tandem when atlanta specifically has already been going through a gentrification crisis and um with covid19 where people have been losing jobs left and right or not

been able to go to their jobs that they've had um and having salaries cut people have been hurting and the response from the city is not to been that has not been to provide more resources to people it's been to fund cop city to be able to get more police out who are the ones that execute the actual evictions themselves and i think it all it all it all is connected in that in that type of way i arrived in atlanta a few days before the muskogee summit a weekend event where the original indigenous people from the area of the south river or for the native name of the said land the wal Wolani Forest, traveled back to their ancestral homeland to discuss indigenous environmental philosophy, what land back and rematriation means in theory and practice. Several indigenous authors were

present and led workshops, including indigenous feminist scholar and community planner Laura Harjo from the University of Oklahoma, author of Spiral to the Stars, Muskogee Tools of Futurity, from the University of Oklahoma, author of Spiral to the Stars, Muscogee Tools of Futurity, and Dr. Daniel Wildcat of the Haskell Indian Nations University, who wrote the book Red Alert, Saving the Planet with Indigenous Knowledge. In the less academic portions, there were forest walks, community meals, and singing of old Muscogee songs, including ones that were performed two centuries ago during the Trail of Tears. Muscogee Creek, including ones that were performed two centuries ago during the Trail of Tears. Muscogee Creek attendees also gathered around a sacred fire to perform a stomp dance, recreating rhythms heard and sensed in the forest long ago to rekindle their relationship with the earth and connect back to the ancestral presences. This was the second ancestral migration the

Muscogee Creek tribal members have done since being forcibly removed two centuries ago and displaced to Oklahoma. The first one took place just this last November, and both times the particular section of land they gathered on in Trenchmont Creek Park is one of the areas under threat of being ecologically destroyed and clear-cut. Over the course of a few days during my week-long stay, I sat down in the woods to record with two groups of forest offenders. One group sitting around a campfire at night, next to a high-security child prison, and the other group during the sunny, bird-chirping day outside the Black Hole Studios movie plot. So if you hear campfires or bird sounds in the background, just embrace our forest punk aesthetic. Up front, I think it's really important to first talk about the history of the land that is under

threat. Because on top of issues regarding gentrification and the plans of this police training facility as a response to the George Floyd uprising and the false manufactured crime wave media narrative intended to re-justify American policing in the wake of the uprising, the fact that the Atlanta Police Foundation chose this plot of land in particular is particularly gross. The history of this small section of land in the South River watershed is deeply scarred and desperately needs time to heal. There are centuries of oppression and state violence tied to this particular spot of land, and now we're seeing that trying to be continued with this Cop City Plan. Local tribes were expelled from millions of acres in the southwest region of what is now known as the United States during the early decades of the 1800s. Forest removal

and displacement of the Muscogee Creek people began in the region in 1821 through a series of treaties, which then eventually led to a, quote, melee of removal. More on that from one of the force defenders I spoke to. And I'll note, we'll be using a mix of voice distortion and voice actors combined with other audio distortion to help protect the identities of the force defenders that I spoke to against possible state repression. So enjoy our cool voice distorted audio.

Yeah, I think it's important to let the land heal because a lot of our comrades, Muskogee comrades and extended relatives that are identified as Muskogee that were pushed off as lands in the early 1800s, a lot of them did not go quietly into the night. I think that's important to remember because I feel like a lot of people are just like,

the Trail of Tears, or like, they were pushed out. But they fought against being pushed out. And then when a lot of them were pushed out or killed off, then it was used to incarcerate and house mostly black people. So we're taking it back. Most of the people that I have seen involved. It is a diverse group of people. It's not just like white anarchists in the woods. That is a misconception. There's all kinds of folks, which really I think is interesting and makes

the struggle unique and important. But there is also a lot of like white anarchists that are using their privilege to help take the land back for our comrades that want to see it back. And it feels, things feel like they're in a good way. There's good relations that are existing between, like, the anarchist and indigenous alliance down here, where, like, obviously no one person speaks or represents any one group, but the alliances that we do have are very informed of the variety of activities that have happened down here, including the arsons of machinery. And we were positively told to, quote-unquote, keep on going.

So that feels empowering, and it feels beautiful, and it feels important to note that some of the comrades that have ancestral ties to this area, it's such a dark history, and they're still here is something that they're mentioning. And they're excited, the people that we're close to, obviously, we're not close to all of them, they're excited that people are choosing to use their privilege to help make sure these facilities don't get built. Continuing with the scarred history of this land, shortly after the lands of the South River Forest were stolen from the Muskegee Creek people, plots were distributed to white settlers in the Fourth Georgia Land

Lottery of 1821, which made available landlots of 202.5 acres. Many of these white settlers established slave plantations on which cotton and other crops were produced through slave labor. Through archival records, we know of at least 12 plantations that were on this land that existed from the 1840s up until 1865. And then, in the early 1900s, the very same land started being used as a prison farm, now known as the Old Atlanta Prison Farm. The Old Atlanta Prison Farm was originally bought in 1917 to incarcerate prisoners of war, but this plan was abandoned within two years, and the land was converted into a prison farm where inmates, including moonshiners, public drinkers, and just loiterers, and really anybody, were sent

to and forced to perform unpaid agricultural labor. This shift from plantations to prison farm marks the rebranding of slavery into for-profit prison labor. This labor included washing cows in arsenic-laden water, which led to the early deaths of countless prisoners. The facility ran up until 1998, in which it was shut down, and then two child prison facilities were put on the adjacent land. And the Atlanta Police Department already currently uses sections of this hallowed ground as a firing range. Tear gas canisters and bullet casings can be found throughout the forest. For more on that, here's some other parts of my sit down with the forest defenders and then i guess like fast forwarding a little bit from this land where indigenous people lived

to the prison farm um and then how this has like a long incarceral history and history of being tied to policing uh both with the child prison that's still here, the prison farm, and then now trying to build this militarized training facility. Just continuing on this legacy of state violence, which is just another massive aspect in terms of they're trying to take

this very land that needs to heal from the centuries of violence and just tear it all down and build more of that. I know there's like there's the firing range that we've been hearing shots from or there's the

it's like just this never-ending thing. It just keeps happening. It's a pretty weird surreal experience. Makes me feel like we're all like an endangered species living in like the last part of the forest in fucking south atlanta i remember when i was explaining it to one of my relatives they're like i was reading the internet about defend the atlanta forest and not sure quite what's all going on but sounds like you're living

in hell you're between two different child prisons one's a high security one's a low security a large massive power line cut, an old prison farm on two sides of the road, at least three different police firing ranges, and a wastewater treatment plant that doubles as a firing range and pseudo-training facility for police. Another interesting facet is this particular piece of land where they're trying to build, uh, Cop City is, like, a really important turning point in the history of slavery in the U.S.,

and, like, this is where a lot of things went from, like, shadow slavery, um, and transitioned into what we now have as prison slavery and as we're sitting here on what was literally a prison farm even people in pretrial detention were here and used for unpaid

labor even people who had not been convicted of any crime and so it's kind of a, like, it's, like, a, like, very, like, visible, like, stain on the, like, history of, of, like, what is racist policing, but it's, like, harder to cover up and harder to, like, pinkwash. but it's harder to cover up and harder to pinkwash. And so even as there is a place where children are locked in cages over not 300 yards from me, so too is this a place where people were brought for being used as slaves and, like, died and were buried in unmarked graves?

Yeah, um, could I, uh, talk a little bit more about that? This was the transition, this is, like, the intermediatory, like, intermediate transition between child slavery and mine bay prison slavery. And it was especially horrific. There is two lakes on the property that were at one point said to be filled with arsenic, where

the slaves were not only washing cattle with the arsenic to remove them like bugs but also in those in those lakes and like suffering horrible diseases and like dying from this uh the reason the prison farm actually got closed down was because of the amount of people going in and out of like the reason why the city pushed to close it down was because of the amount of people being sent to the hospital week after week and day after day, like actually overloading the 1980s or 1990s.

And, like, during the Civil War, escaped prisoners from here would be, sorry, escaped slaves from here would be, like, going across battle lines and feeding information to the Union side in order to, like, serve their own forms of liberation. I mean, we, like, this land also exists right next to a major, uh, or, like, major road re-entry facility, the, um, metro youth detention center, and, like, a couple other buildings, um, uh, and, like, it's not just, like, the 80 lands that they plan to clear-cut here, it's also the, like, 300 that they plan to continue with the carceral legacy of, like, terror and horror, um, from going from, like, chattel slavery and indigenous displacement to, um, the intermediary, um, horror that the prison farm was to this new legacy of like cover up of it all and then and it

yeah the continuation of this land being used by the state by police by all these like oppressive groups to further their cause is a really interesting aspect of this

for going to prison farm and then police trying to now turn it into a militarized police training facility. Yeah. So first, I think this is Muscogee land, and it's during the Muscogee summit, and it's cool.

Muscogee people have been displaced for the most part and they're trying to participate in this migration back and so they're on the land right now and it's been really special to have them here and to be able to express solidarity and like work together with them has been really amazing and learned a lot and it's yeah it's cool to understand that and you know what you're saying that interaction of like um settler colonialism displacing people um like early slavery prison slavery and this this specific land has always been a place that I feel like has been almost like the vanguard of how policing and settler colonialism has experimented with how to reproduce itself in sustainable ways. is with just in general the domestication of humans and the domestication of animals. And that's what APD is trying to do on this land.

And it's a direct reaction to the George Floyd uprising, which caused a crisis in policing because it actually bit back with serious power. And so they're trying to figure out and experiment with ways of reproducing policing for the future in the exact same way that when slavery took a serious L, they said how can we recuperate and how can we reproduce this in a way that's sustainable and that's why we have a modern prison system that lives on to this day and that's why they're realizing as we're gaining and we're threatening it, oh, we have to do something good, and this land has always been a site for doing that. They're going to keep trying.

Atlanta is a heavily corporate city. It's been dubbed the Silicon Valley of the South by people who surely must be insufferable to be around, but it is true that Atlanta and Georgia's economic policies have attached a swath of corporations to either start, grow, or migrate to the city. It's home to Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, UPS, Home Depot, Chick-fil-A, and multiple media conglomerates, as well as having headquarters for, like, Google and other tech companies as well. The city serves as a massive transportation hub.

In fact, Atlanta, the city, started off as a train hub, and now it boasts the world's busiest airport. Recent tax credits for the film industry have made Atlanta and Georgia the new hot place to shoot high-budget Hollywood movies. There's a whole effort to make the city effectively the new Hollywood. But like all economic growth, this comes with some heavy consequences, most often affecting those at the bottom. Atlanta is also the most surveilled city in the United States, and the city with the most wealth inequality. All the corporations and film industry stuff moving to Atlanta has indeed created jobs, but many of those jobs go to workers from out of state.

On average, less than one-third of new film industry jobs have gone to people who were already living in Atlanta. The result of this out-of-state economic migration boosts cost of housing, cost of living, and pushes lower and middle-class residents of Atlanta out of their neighborhoods, disproportionately pushing out black people. And this is all while the increasing corporatization and gentrification is actually pitched as, quote-unquote, providing opportunities to the city's black population, which is certainly something, because the state of Georgia has the fourth largest incarceration rate in the entire world

if you put U.S. states on the same level as, like, every single other country. The other top three states or countries with the highest incarceration rates are Louisiana, Mississippi, and Oklahoma. So yeah, but Georgia's number four. Those in Atlanta's top income bracket make nearly 20 times those who are at the bottom. And if you map the wealth disparity onto the layout of the city, it's a one-to-one match for the city's old segregation lines. The entire city runs on these, like, Reaganite neoliberal policies, but under this mask of woke identity politics. And who enforces that wealth inequality and gentrification? That's right, police. Which leads us to the origin of this plan for so-called cop city. I'm going to quote a Crimethink article that came out last month called

The City in the Forest, Reinventing Resistance for an Age of Climate Crisis and Police Militarization, which I recommend you guys read. I'll have it in the source notes. But yeah, here's the quote from Crimethink. Quote, the government of Atlanta has developed a few tentative solutions to the dilemmas they face. To follow through on their commitments to their backers, city politicians need to continue sacrificing public assets on the altar of the economy in order to attract more major investors to the region, especially the film industry and technology companies. To maintain control in a

period of rapid displacement and rising cost of living, with chronic tension between the conservative state government and the liberal city administration, they need to funnel more resources towards law enforcement throughout the region. Finally, to appease the increasingly rebellious lower classes, they need to frame this process of restructuring and repression in the language of black empowerment, social justice, and progressivism. The bureaucrats are not in a good position to handle this. Decades of tax cuts and deregulation have created infrastructural failures and breakdowns of all kinds. Among other concerns, Atlanta lost the bid for the second Amazon headquarters, because the public

transit, one of the least funded in the United States, was not even operable when the corporate scouts came to visit. At the same time, it's precisely the low taxes and absence of regulation that attract capital to the state of Georgia, so cultivating a social democratic governing strategy may now be impossible without creating a flight of wealth to other parts of the country. It seems that the current plan is to give over as many public contracts and resources to private developers as possible, to allow them to incur the costs of social disintegration and anger, to use police to control the blowback, and to use images of Martin Luther King Jr. to preempt any meaningful resistance. Thus, the plan to transform a wild space into a police training compound is dubbed

the Institute for Social Justice. That's right, The plan to make the country's biggest militarized police training facility, they're planning to call it the Institute for Social Justice. Ignore the bomb range and urban combat mock city section. Anyway, here's Jamal again from the community movement builders. I think one thing that's also really significant is that so my city council person uh for is district 12 joy shepherd um district 12 is where pittsburgh is where summer hill is where several of uh poor and black working class neighborhoods of atlanta are located they're also the areas where they're the most uh gentrifying areas of the city as well and it's in in city council district 12 joy shepherd she is the person who brought this proposal forward right she is over the quote-unquote

public safety um you know they ain't keeping shit safe uh quote-unquote public safety um you know they ain't keeping shit safe uh quote-unquote public safety um you know commission and um she brought this forward and she has been uh since she's been in office she has been a uh even uh she's been a champion of gentrification right she's been a champion of over policingpolicing as well. And I think it's a tie between even our city council or even our representation has in their interest of gentrifying the city because that gives them more tax dollars. It gives them a way to be able to say

that they are decreasing their crime rates, et cetera, and all these different types of things when it's really just deplacing poor folks. And so I think that's an important, about talking about how this kind of was established that's an important topic to be able to address is that even and she's a black woman right so even um you know even how like when people when people might you think they might be representing your interests um when they get to be in these positions, we have to recognize that they are not necessarily Florida people. In the aftermath of the George Floyd uprising against police violence, the city responded by striking down any police reform measures

and restricting opportunities for public input, while increasing the police budget and upping citizen surveillance. On a national level, a media-manufactured crime wave narrative has been used to re-justify American policing in the wake of the 2020 uprising, and the city of Atlanta is using that narrative while wrapping their increased militarization plans in a nice, woke social justice package, i.e. a militarized police training compound being dubbed the Institute for Social Justice. social justice. Heading up this effort is the Atlanta Police Foundation, which is a non-profit police advocacy organization that claims to have, quote, united the business and philanthropic community with the Atlanta Police Department. It's backed by an array of Atlanta-area corporate donors, including Delta Airlines, UPS, Chick-fil-A, Cox Enterprises, which owns the Atlanta Journal Constitution, which is, like is the city's biggest newspaper.

And they were formally, formally backed by Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola dropped out this last November. A leaked promo video for the Institute for Social Justice details some of the features of the Atlanta Police Foundation's, quote, world-class training campus. Foundation's, quote, world-class training campus. With an estimated cost of $90 million, the space will provide a place for recruiting, training, mid-career education, and practice with new technology and equipment for police and fire department personnel. The renderings show the campus will house a, quote, mock city for real-world training, a canine training center, and 40 horse stalls for police horses.

12 acres of forest land are slated to be converted into an emergency vehicle operations course. And the whole compound will be located across 380 acres of the old Atlanta prison farm, which is city-owned but technically outside of city limits, located just east of the city in unincorporated DeKalb County. The police foundation has proposed funding the training center through a public-private partnership, which will leave taxpayers to pay an estimated $30 million for this out-of-city police training facility, which is one-third of the early estimated cost. According to the land use ordinance, the property will be leased to the police foundation by the city for $10 a year for 50 years. It's almost 400 acres of forest land for $10 a year. The ground lease will, quote, provide that the city will be able to have input or approval on the stages of

construction along with the development of the property, and will allow waiving of certain code requirements. Such a facility would be three times the size of the New York Police Department's training facility, and four times the size of the LAPD's. It's worth noting that the NYPD and LAPD are the two largest police departments in the country, while Atlanta is only the 19th largest, yet they'll have a facility that's like three times the size of New York's. According to the mayor of Atlanta during the time of the facility's announcement, the massive training complex would quote, raise morale among officers and hopefully bring more recruits to the department. And importantly, the whole project

was initially supposed to be totally under wraps, approved through backdoor dealmaking. this was like very much designed to be under the table pushed to as fast as possible the public wasn't really supposed to know about it the videos that existed were only meant to be known by um the sponsors board members funders of the atlanta police foundation um and like the atlanta police foundation unlike most police unions, is a foundation that is made to funnel corporate money into the hands of police. The cop city side of things is just one part of the Defend the Forest project. The other big aspect of this is pushing back on the movie studio, Blackhall, from being able to clear-cut more forest to expand their soundstage. from being able to clear-cut more forest to expand their soundstage.

Projects shot on their current lot include Godzilla King of Monsters, Venom, Dear Evan Hansen, HBO's Loved Craft Country, and Amazon Prime's The Tomorrow War. On the east side of the forested land, the part that's referred to as Entrenchment Creek Park, was bought by Home Depot co-founder Arthur Blank in the early 2000s with a plan to combine that section of land with 300 acres of the prison farm to create a 500-acre park, a project that never came to fruition, and now the park is currently under control of DeKalb County.

On top of the heat insulation and air filtering that the tree canopy provides, Entrenchment Creek plays a crucial role in maintaining the South River watershed, being a partial wetland and marsh that mitigates flooding in South Atlanta. Quoting that Crimethink article again, quote, the plundering of public assets for the benefit of a movie company and real estate mogul is described as an opportunity to create, quote, good jobs for local Atlantans, not as a criminal expropriation of infrastructure. The clear cut that Black Hole Studios plans to trade in exchange for a section of forest is to be renamed Michelle Obama Park, unquote. So yeah, that also clearly demonstrates the type of gentrification wrapped in this nice woke package by doing this really

sketchy land swap and then building a park on it and calling it Michelle Obama Park. Cool stuff, guys. Black Holel Studios is currently a 150-acre complex about 10 minutes south of downtown, and they seek to add over a half a million square feet of soundstage, 200,000 square feet of offices, 420,000 square feet for warehousing, and 22,000 square feet of catering space, according to a filing made through the state's Development of Regional Impact Program. The DRIs are filed when a project's size is large enough that it's likely to impact the infrastructure of neighboring communities. The DeKalb County Board of Commissioners in October 2020 voted to approve

the land swap deal with Blackall Studios as a part of the planned expansion. The county would give approximately 40 acres of mostly wooded land around the South River Forest, and in return, Blackall Studios would give the county around 50 acres of nearby land as well. The project has faced some legal and construction issues ever since then, and we'll discuss the details of those shortly. Also worth noting that Blackall Studios was sold to a private equity firm in LA just last year, and this last February announced that they purchased another 1,500 acres in Newton County, Georgia, which is about 40 miles east of downtown Atlanta.

And they plan to shoot productions there for an upcoming, quote, action-oriented streaming service dubbed Black Hole Americana, which sounds horrible. Here's a quote from Black Hole CEO Ryan Millsap, quote, this is the kind of space we need to fly in Black Hawk helicopters and drive Humvees at speed. We have lakes, we have swamps, and rivers, and forests, and fields, and hills, and dales. That's the nice thing about 1,500 acres. Yep, so look forward to Blackhawk Americana, the new hit streaming service coming out of Georgia, destroying the forest for Blackhawk Americana, the new hit streaming service coming out of Georgia, um,

destroying the forest for Black Hall Americana. Oh boy. Uh, but yeah, if this project succeeds, it would cement Atlanta as the new Hollywood, uh, along with, like, Tyler Perry Studios and all the other movie studios moving to Atlanta, and it would continue the skyrocketing cost of living in Atlanta and accelerate

gentrification at a even more horrifying rate. So, actually, the Blackhall site that's being defended as well is also in the Weelani Forest, which is what the Muscogee name for the South Atlanta Forest is. And it's actually right across the road from where we currently are. Um, so the, and it's like, I want to believe three or 400 acres by itself. Um, and that is actually under imminent threat as well. Uh, they are waiting on the land destruction permit to pass, and that can happen any day or any week. On what you were saying about the gentrification issue,

that's something that's been really noticeable to anyone that lives in Atlanta and has for any amount of time, just looking around them. Like, the filming that is just regularly happening here and all these kind of new companies popping up around it black call was sold uh maybe a little over a year ago now to a hedge fund out in california they're getting funding for all of these projects and rent here in atlanta i'm sure across the

country i'm not sure what the trends are elsewhere, has been skyrocketing. Like, you'll see homes that sold during the financial crisis for like $80,000, $120,000, selling for like half a million dollars today. And, you know, I'm not like a fucking economist, but the way that the film industry has been exploding and other industries like Google and Microsoft have been building these massive massive expensive new headquarters while people literally go out on the street because they can no longer afford to pay rent here and people just get displaced it's like the opposite of white flight back into the suburbs when you know folks are moving into the city for economic opportunities that only very wealthy people can get.

I mean, it's difficult not to see Blackhall as ushering in just another huge wave of gentrification. Yeah, Blackhall explicitly says they're making movies to support the American way of life. Yeah, Blackhall explicitly says they're making movies to support the American way of life. We hear gunshots from the police firing range all the time, and we hear almost as many gunshots from the Blackhall filming sites. And, yeah, it's very much about creating propaganda that makes people think they need police.

And that's, like, a huge part of kind of what they're doing and why they're filming. And on the gentrification thing, even just driving through the city the past few days, I've noticed so many places that used to be wooded totally torn down, and they're putting up these horrible quote-unquote luxury condos, which are like $2,000 rent per month for a tiny studio. And I've even seen things that were used to be section 8 housing turned into luxury condos like it's it's been absurd driving through the city and watching so many places that used to be wooded just turn like so much like active construction sites building these exact same like these identical apartment complexes that are the

most hideous things you've ever looked at and completely unaffordable for anyone who's not, like, someone who's working for a tech company? Yeah, so, um, like, currently they are, like, destroying a section of Atlanta called Chosewood Park, and it was, like, a large green space that was largely, like, unmanaged and in Lakewood, um, and creating and creating quote affordable housing which is really just the legal term for they have a certain amount of available housing

like 10 units like a 100 unit thing is affordable housing affordable just means market value or like the median market value low income is things that people that aren't like average money makers can afford right and i wonder like i think it's has kind of gotten lost throughout the struggle that the actual defend the atlanta forest struggle is like

not specific to just cop city or black hole is actually the entire forest as a city um and that like part of the reason why it has been so focused is because of like how pressing these current things are and how like stretched thin people kind of are who are working on this and

that like yeah Chosewood Park is a good example there's also an area that's like near Grant Park and, like, the Zone 3, old Zone 3 precinct, and there's, or, like, the zoo. They were, like, actually in the same property area. Um, they kept the pigs near the zoo. Um, and, like, it was an entire forest land, like, absolutely massive that they, that they clear-cut and now are doing disgusting condos all along the road. And it's a continuation, again, of a distinctive political pattern in Atlanta.

Back when Mayor Jackson was elected as the mayor, he, at first, tried to build, like, affordable, not affordable, like, low-income, and do community projects and stuff. But the business end of Atlanta fought back against those efforts. And that is what saw projects like the 1996 Olympic Games, which destroyed an entire community in Atlanta. You should look up People's Town here in Atlanta. And Summerhill, completely completely raised to build arenas and all of this shit, and it feels like a continuation of the pattern where politicians

decide what is best for the city. The Olympics, a new police training facility, or whatever business measure is on the table today. Not to mention that, like, during the 96 Olympics, they, like, specifically built Atlanta City Detention Center for a place to put houseless people who had been sweeped off the streets and, like, criminalized them.

And during the George Floyd uprising in 2020, that was reused to, uh, as detainments and overnight stays for protesters who were, like, going to get low bail just as a form of repression. It is regularly used against, like, that, uh, jail is regularly used specifically against protesters and isn't used for anything else. It is a, like, absolute scar on the face of humanity keisha lance bottoms said during her term that she was going to turn that into a social justice side or what it's still a jail it probably already

it probably always will be until we fucking destroy it uh and like now the fulton county sheriff wants to take over the jail and use all of those beds because the jails here are so overcrowded with bullshit charges that they are just expanding and expanding and expanding, and there's no sign of stopping. For every one time that they promise that they're going to be closing jails, repurposing shit, doing all this liberal reform bullshit, there's a new training facility,

they're selling jails to people that are using them more. The system just continues to expand and expand and expand until we fight back and destroy it. Police need Blackhall. Yeah, police need Blackhall just as much

as Blackhall needs the police. You know, and these are the symbiotic relationship between the two of them. Police are instrumental in gentrification, and also, police need gentrification to capture poor black and brown people and lock them in cages. And so these are two

things that feed each other in a relationship, so it's very important to do our best to attack both. Is Atlanta, was it the Atlanta police who had, like, the point system for arrest? Yes, Atlanta police had, oh, sorry. Yes, Atlanta police has actually a point system where among the highest points is capturing a child and arresting them,

or alongside felony charges, felony warrants, and other things. Along this point system, they use it as a rubric to measure how well an officer is doing. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, in terms of needing gentrification to continue your job, yeah. That's the exact same thing. Let's have this point system so we can get races and arrest all the people who are on the street. And it's a mask-off moment, as they say.

Yeah, and I also think it's this funny thing. I don't know, right? They're building this fake city to train in, and I wouldn't be surprised if if black hall ends up renting it out from time to time to shoot films right well absolutely but also at the end of the day even if they don't it's literally the same exact thing right one is training people to actually do it and the other is performing it so people think it's cool exactly yeah yeah so i just pulled up the um actually my friend just pulled up the

uh like chart which is uh it's a one to five scale it's five scale it's five for juvenile arrest

five points for felonies four for a misdemeanor charge three for a city charge four for deal lies and it goes on

um and like the fact that juvenile arrest is the top one is fucking monstrous no I i expect it like they are the monster like yeah yeah yeah like if it's not it's not shocking but it shows the extent

of like the the the horribleness of of what of like what their job is like that is their job that's real police yeah that's what that's what Like, that is their job. Real police shit. That's real police shit. That's what they do. That is the entire thing. One thing that's given the Atlanta Defend the Force movement an edge is being able to consistently set the terms of engagement and establish a media framework regarding the destruction of the forest and the development of Cop City to stay one step ahead of the enemy. Like we've mentioned, the Cop City project was never actually initially announced by the city or the police foundation.

It was brought to light by activists digging through open source data and public records. In April of 2021, when activists discovered the proposal to destroy the South River Forest, first news spread via word of mouth for several weeks about a large information-sharing session at Entrenchment Creek Park, one of the areas under threat. On May 15th, over 200 people gathered for a barbecue and info presentation night on the threat of the forest and the broader campaign to defend it. The city government had yet to announce its plans publicly, so the activists and forest defenders were able to craft the public narrative first, and lay the media groundwork. At the information session, presenters were able to accurately contextualize the development within the cross-section of racist and authoritarian backlash against the George Floyd protests,

the increasing gentrification and urban displacement, and the devastating climate effects such a project will inflict upon the region. Having activists and forced defenders break the news of such a development denies the the region. Having activists and forest defenders break the news of such a development denies the city and the police the opportunity to introduce a development to the public with a distorted narrative, assuming that they were going to announce their plans and make them public at all. And then on May 17th, less than 48 hours after the info-sharing barbecue, seven unguarded machines at the forest destruction site, including excavators, barbecue, seven unguarded machines at the forest destruction site, including excavators, tractors,

and other pieces of heavy machinery, were targeted by sabotage. With smashed windows and severed inner tubing scorched by fire, the destruction equipment was left inoperable. An anonymous statement appeared online detailing their motivations and methods of attack, while tying the actions to the struggle against colonialism, authoritarianism, and the history of this particular land as the site of horrific abuses, of the site of displacement, chattel slavery, and prison slavery. The communique ended with, quote, To the developers, governments, contractors, corporations, and politicians that perpetrated the heinous deforestation, any further attempts at destroying the Atlanta forest will be met with a similar response. The forest was here long before us and will be here long after.

We'll see to that. Defend the Atlanta forest. To date, no one has been arrested for these actions. The presence of such a targeted direct action campaign this early on in the movement is important for a few reasons, one of which being it cemented sabotage as a part of this movement from the very beginning, like it was woven into the genetic fabric from the conception. So any debate around the validity of these tactics was virtually non-existent, because they were there from the beginning. That's what this movement is. And that's been super interesting to watch, because usually this type of sabotage or direct action happens later on in these movements. You escalate to that point. But in this case, it's been happening since the first week people knew

that this thing was existing. Over the following weeks, there was meetings, posters and flyers that spread throughout the city. People organized public forest walks through areas of the woods that were under threat. Even a few candidates for city council adopted the struggle as a component of their electoral campaigns. The movement's consistent ability to break the news on the development and the destruction of the forest has been crucial in the efforts to gain public trust and setting the terms of engagement and the ground rules for the conflict. The type of public discourse regarding the forest was successfully established by anonymous activists, not by politicians and not by police. I think something that's been really cool about this movement is that from the earliest

days of when this was going on, it was extremely radical. Like, it wasn't three or four months after the first initial meeting. It was like a barbecue at the park where people were lighting bulldozers on fire to prevent construction from happening. The Atlanta Police Foundation has had its offices, its office windows smashed. Like, people are not afraid to fight back physically. And this was occurring at the same time as the more electoral tactics, is how I'll phrase it. And I think that, you know, we've seen neither of these being able to successfully stop the movement, but when it comes to, like, being able to measure that the

police and their allies have slowed down, the electoral tactics have been a complete and utter failure. And physically harming the property of the police and of Black Hall and all of the fucking forces that would destroy the forest, that's been shown far and away to be a tactic that's not only acceptable in this movement but it's something that's seen as like one of the go-to strategies it's we haven't had to work our way to that people were there from the get-go yeah it was like a day or two after the info night like the very first like event that, like, bulldozers were set on fire

in, like, Michelle Obama Park, which is, funny enough, another, like, recuperation tactic of, like, destruction of the environment and, like, ongoing gentrification where that's actually Blackhall Studios' old planned site for their new studio. And the idea of the land swap was they take this shitty

land where they destroyed forests to replace it with an earth mound, and in, and as long as they turn into a park, they're allowed to, um, build and construct on public forest land. Which is like a bonkers idea. Yeah, yeah, no. It's actually like a new precedent that has not been done before. I think that one of the other things, along with the fiery start kind of kickoff,

is that the folks who, in my experience, most big, broader in my experience, most like kind of big, broader campaign type things, the people who are doing jail support, the people who have a broad reach, the people who, you know, have access to resources, et cetera, kind of the like backbone, life-sustaining things of a movement tend to be folks who have really rigid moralizing ideas of like what is acceptable uh etc and you know people in atlanta have been there's a lot of credit due to folks who have been putting in a lot of work and are a little wiser than to have such like a limited narrow view so most of the folks that control and or not control most

of the folks who like backline and are working really hard to do the more like reproductive things and jail support and get food and things like that are also people who have a really like creative and accepting view of you know like what kind of things are okay, and really don't want this movement to fail and aren't going to limit themselves based on abstract ideas. And so that's something that is really special. And yeah, no one gets excluded for doing things that are effective. When talking with the forced offenders, the other thing that was really emphasized is that instead of waiting for dissident politicians to save the environment, and instead of dedicating tons of effort into petitioning companies with moralizing rhetoric to make them feel bad in hopes of them dropping into the project,

you can instead have immediate material attacks that hit them where it counts. And where it counts is their pockets, because you can't expect companies to be swayed by moral decisions around harmful policing or the environment, but you can attack their physical and social capital. If it's framed as, hey, this is something that is not a good look, fam, and this is going to hurt your bank accounts, that is the type of general language that these corporations do understand. I feel like this is the most intersectional thing I've been a part of in a long time. There's just like so many different ways to oppose the facility. And there's so many different people involved

and I'm really grateful for all of the comrades, especially the anarchist comrades, who've been holding it down for years and have helped push the struggle in a certain direction. I think other people are touching on this. We want to keep bringing it up because it's important. In other struggles we've been a part of, like the liberals control a lot of the money for jail support or able to do and not able to do like no one's

getting thrown under the bus for alleged behavior like when i was reading about this before i came down here almost exactly a year ago there were like machines are on fire and i was like holy shit it's like usually that's like way later in the struggle and that was like right out the gate people whoever they are were attacking the machinery, and I think to be honest with you, that was drawing a lot of people here, because people are tired of the NVDA, or non-violent direct action. It's not about like, let's criticize something to death that makes us feel bad. It's like people are tired because they're losing a lot of comrades to long prison sentences. They're getting three different felonies that are like the same amount of time or more than if you would allegedly arson something. So these are things that are coming up for people, and people

are realizing that old tactics aren't working anymore. A lot of the comrades that were burned into a weird shape from the green scare are aging out, or the things that they're afraid of are very valid, but we're living in too dire of a time to neglect those tactics on a larger level. And people just are seeing how terrible things are. And it seems like more people are down or just don't care anymore ever since the George Floyd uprisings. They've just seen an uptick in a lot of this behavior. There's a campaign that launched publicly that mentions all the subcontractors that Reeves Young, one of the construction companies on the project, has to employ to make the Atlanta Police Foundation's project here

possible. And a lot of that could be home visits. It could be going to where they, I don't know who else would do this, obviously, but I'm just saying, long story short, everybody knows this, but you find where they store the evil equipment. That's the best way to stop the project. Long story short, they usually don't listen to what we have to say, but actions speak louder than words. And if you really want to hurt them, you hurt them in their pockets. And if you cost them enough money damage, they may pull out of the project. They shut down. And even if there is other subcontractors that they could get to rent machinery from to cut trees, whatever the fuck it is they're going to do, we want them to be afraid. If you look at very romanticized

struggles that have largely been successful in their own ways throughout the world, I'm just going to mention a couple because people talk about them constantly, like the Zod in France, or the Humbach in Germany, or Notav in Italy. A lot of it revolves around property destruction and defending your area. Another strong point of the movement to defend the Atlanta forest is that it's not simply coalesced around a single coherent strategy, whether that be sabotage or above-ground organizing. For over a year now, force defenders and movement participants have employed several parallel strategies in tandem. The strategies of one approach can fill in for

the shortcomings of another. Often, these differing strategies can be mutually beneficial. As sabotage was happening, opponents of Cop City also organized a continuous stream of educational events on the land, as well as pressure campaigns aimed at pushing city and county officials, investors, and contractors to drop out of the project. As summer began, more traditional political activist organizations, like ones connected to nationwide socialist organizations, abolitionist networks, and ecological advocacy groups, began doing more direct community outreach by knocking on the doors, talking with people in the neighborhoods next to where the forest was being slated for destruction. Forming connections

and allyships with the local community in the vicinity of the South River Forest is crucial, especially since that they would be among the first of those impacted by deforestation and the close proximity to such a militarized police hub with, you know, explosives testing and helicopter pads. Plus, you know, local community outreach is useful for learning what might help mobilize more regular folks. Other tactics and strategies emerging during early summer included getting those involved in the planning of Cop City, to realize that they don't get to operate in some safe, politics-only realm. Their political decisions have real-world consequences and real-world effects for those people that they allegedly represent. So perhaps they too should be forced

to feel real-world consequences. On June 16th, there was a city council meeting which was supposed to vote on the Police Foundation's land lease ordinance, sponsored by then-Councilwoman Joyce Shepard. At this point, back in 2021, the meetings were all virtual due to the COVID-19 pandemic, so the city council members hosted their conversations from inside their homes. With just a little bit of work, activists and researchers were able to locate the home address of Councilwoman Shepard. A group went to her home and displayed a banner during the city council meeting. Most protesters just chanted from the public sidewalk, and one individual approached their house, knocked on the door, and rang the doorbell before returning to the street. Turns out, Councilman Shepard did not like this very much, and went into a bit of a panic. Also, one of the movements that have been, like, kind of effective in terms of, like,

city council or other targets has been, like, whenever the first time they were going to vote on this, like, Institute, uh, Institute for Social, actually, Cop City. Um, when they were going to vote on Cop City, um, someone went up to, uh, Joyce Shepard's house and knocked on her door. There were a handful of protesters outside, and someone just knocked on her door, she went to a frenzy freaked out called off the vote left the meeting ran to the precinct and public comment during the public comment section and then gave a like long speech to like a bunch of police and press which like called out which effectively called off the vote for another like three months or so just because someone visited the house of a politician because they had names and addresses

and like that's also happened with ryan milsap that's happened with that's dean reeves the uh ceo and chairman of reeves young there's this whole idea of politics as existing within this political astral space, right? It's the same thing with corporations, right? Everything exists in the corporate space that's removed from people's actual lives, right? It's removed from actual personal consequences. People in positions of power assume that their actions occur in this political or corporate astral plane. That means that consequences of their decisions won't directly impact them. But we don't need to play by those rules.

After a friendly knock on her door, Joyce Shepard called off the vote and left the meeting early to call the police, who arrived after the protesters had already dispersed. Immediately after, Joyce Shepard held a press conference from the newly constructed Zone 3 police precinct. There, Shepard stood, surrounded by police officers and news media, and described in detail the aims of her land lease ordinance, the nature of the Cop City project, as well as the efforts of protesters to stop her.

By doing this short public statement, she catapulted the movement and the story into the mainstream, out of the political backdoors that it was existing in previously. An Atlanta City Councilwoman says protesters came onto her private property to speak out against a piece of legislation. And Joyce Shepard says while she supports the right to protest, this time it went too far. People have a right to come out and say whether they're for or against it. I have no problem with that. I've been doing this for years and know that people have that right. But what they don't have a right to do is come up on my private property, knock on my doors, protest on my lawn, on my porch.

They don't have that right. So I'm saying tonight that I'm still supporting the academy. I'm not scared. However, there will be no rights for people to come on my property and protest. The next day, she made another statement, which you just heard a little bit of, where she also claimed that she would be pushing through the ordinance no matter what the city residents that she ostensibly represented had to say. And her and her fellow city officials took a stand against

the protesters and rejected their tactics, falsely implying that the methods like going on a sidewalk were illegal. But by showing up outside a politician's house and knocking on her door, just a few people were able to achieve an early goal of the movement, to transform the cop city and black hall developments from backdoor agreements into big public scandals. It got out of the shadows and into the spotlight. As a bonus, the vote was delayed, buying more time to develop further strategies in defense of the forest. It was an effective demonstration of the potential of direct confrontation with people in power, and it led to the emergence of another strategy that's become a big part of the genetic

fabric of this movement, pressuring decision makers directly and dissolving their notion of a safe political or corporate astral space. During this time of showing up at politicians' doors, more sabotage and direct action were also taking place. Signs appeared in the forest warning that trees in the area had been spiked, making it possibly dangerous to attempt to cut down trees, with the risk of saws being damaged and possibly injuring unlucky workers. On June 10th, three more excavators were burned at the Black Hole Studios site. Neither action appeared much in the local news media, but anonymous communiques and photographs of the incidents and damage

circulated online among the radical anarchist milieus. In late June, there was the first planned Week of Action. There's been another one since then, and there's another one upcoming from May 8th through May 15th. We'll talk more about the upcoming Week of Action in the next episode, but I strongly encourage people to travel to Atlanta as soon as possible if you can make it for any of this upcoming week-long event. Again, that's from May 8th through May 15th. If you can make it for any of that, please go to Atlanta. It will be fun, I assure you. The June 2021 Week of Action featured guided walks through the forest by day and by moonlight, discussion and conversations on ecology, abolitionism, colonialism, and queerness.

There was nightly bonfires in safe, open sections of the woods. At a nearby radical venue, there was a hardcore punk show during which hundreds of concertgoers repelled the buzzkill police who were trying to shut it down, and there was a night rave deep into the woods where 500 people were dancing with glow sticks late into the night and early into the morning. In all, throughout the week of action, thousands of Atlantans got to gather under the banner of Defend the Forest. They were able to learn about the project and get plugged into taking action. During the week, people under the cover of night visited the home of Black Hole Studios CEO Ryan Millsap in the Atlanta suburb of Social Creek. They also visited his second home in Tuxedo Park and the UPS he frequents in Edgewood.

According to an anonymous online statement, According to an anonymous online statement, quote, flyers were distributed to all his neighbors' mailboxes, as well as plastered on his front gate and the streets that he frequents. The flyers let fellow concerned community members know about the harm he is responsible for and nicely provided the address to his 100-acre farm

so that grievances could be addressed there. The flyers, placed all throughout his neighborhood and investment properties, were also distributed in hopes that it would, quote, inspire others to research and take the fight to those directly responsible for the destruction of the forest. Two days later, on the final day of the week of action, around 50 protesters marched to the headquarters of the Atlanta Police Foundation. Quoting Crimethink again, quote,

As the crowd emerged from the Five Points Metro station, a small contingent of officers attempted to arrest somebody. The crowd engaged in hand-to-hand fighting with police and successfully repelled them. Advancing past security, they marched straight to the Atlanta Police Foundation's office and smashed the glass doors and windows before overturning tables in the tower's lobby. According to police, on Friday around 4 p.m., multiple protesters stopped the flow of traffic on Peachtree Street and Andrew Young International Boulevard. Photos taken by a local freelance photographer showing a group called Defend Atlanta Forest shattering glass doors and also holding signs that say, Are woods, not Hollywoods? CBS 46 reached out to the group, but have yet to hear back. Atlanta police believe the protesting ignited over the building of the new public safety training center. When officers arrived, protesters quickly fled the scene, but the damage still remains. At this time,

we know no arrests have been made and the investigation continues. In Atlanta, I'm Barbara Mullion, CBS 46 News. Momentum was growing throughout the summer. Police and corporate press had failed in crafting a counter-media strategy. Meanwhile, the Defend the Forest Project brought together police and prison abolitionist organizations, environmental justice and preservation organizations, civil and human rights non-profits, and even neighborhood associations near the proposed site, including the East Atlantic Community Association, the Grant Park Neighborhood Association, South Atlantans for Neighborhood Development, and the Kirkwood Neighbors Organization, each of which passed resolutions opposing the proposal.

Grassroots organizations that mobilized against the proposal included Defend Atlanta Police Department, Refusal Communities, the Atlanta Sunrise Movement, Community Movement Builders, the South River Forest Coalition, A World Without Police, and the autonomous organizers working under the banner of Defend the Forest. Organizers spread informational flyers and online graphics, conducted interviews, knocked on doors, and organized phone-in campaigns during subsequent city council meetings that were still held on Zoom because of coronavirus-related restrictions. conducted interviews, knocked on doors, and organized phone-in campaigns during subsequent city council meetings that were still held on Zoom because of coronavirus-related restrictions. Throughout August and September, the Stop Cop City Coalition and others

worked to introduce tension and clog up the city council process. Taking cues from the protest outside the home of Joyce Shepard, which resulted in the vote being delayed for over two months, protesters gathered outside the homes of possible yes voters on the nights that the vote was slated to take place, causing further delays in the entire process. It got pushed back from August into September, so again, another delay. Briefly, it seemed like there was a possibility that the Stop Cop City campaign might be victorious before the end of summer. Votes on the ground lease ordinance were repeatedly delayed because of these objections and demonstrations at the homes of Atlanta Chief Operations Officer John Keene and City Councilwoman Madeline Archibong. Eventually, September 7th was set as the final vote day.

as the final vote day. 17 hours of pre-recorded comments from over 1,000 Atlanta residents delayed the discussion due to the sheer number of public comments. The vote got pushed back another day as city council members spent most of Tuesday and Wednesday listening to the playback. After months of organizing, community outreach,

and public education efforts from the Stop Cops City organizers, approximately 70% of the callers fiercely opposed the proposal, explaining in great detail why their quote-unquote representatives should vote it down. The minority of callers who supported the Cop City project either self-identified as residents of the disproportionately white and wealthy Buckhead and Northeast Atlanta area, or were just like actual cops. At least 30 officers called in to say that they support the destruction of the forest

and the building of Cop City. So, big shocker, the cops want Cop City. Pro-Cop City callers invoked the false crime wave narrative propagated after the George Floyd uprising, and used the language of so-called white flight by threatening to leave the city if something wasn't done to stop the growing crime wave. And yet, when the 17 hours of public comments ended and the council's discussion began, council members largely failed to acknowledge the

hours of public comment that they had just spent two days listening to, much less acknowledge the far-ranging movement that produced such overwhelming public discontent. Quoting Crimethink again, quote, As those who study revolutionary movements know, the police perform an essential function in class society, without which many other hierarchies and exploitative relations could not exist for very long. This is not simply an economic or civic issue that can be worked around with some clever ideas and a bit of pressure, unquote. Despite the efforts of organizers, which culminated in 17 hours of primarily oppositional public comment, the ordinance was passed on September 8th, while the police arrested protesters outside the home of Councilwoman Nathalene Archibong about an hour before the final vote took place during the council's final session on September 8th. The city council voted by a margin of 10 to 4

for the creation of the $90 million facility, handing over almost 400 acres of forest to the Atlanta Police Foundation. Obviously, many folks were pretty disappointed and kind of demoralized about this. Some turned their frustrated energy into the upcoming local elections, hoping that the city government may be stacked with abolitionist or progressive candidates that might strike down the project. Mayor Bottoms did not end up running for re-election, and the former mayor, Mayor Reed, lost to the now current mayor, Andre Dickens.

lost to the now current mayor, Andre Dickens. I do think it's really funny that the old mayor of Atlanta was Mayor Bottoms and the new mayor is Mayor Dickens. Anyway, city councilwoman Joyce Shepard, who introduced the Cop City plan, also lost her campaign for re-election. But since the elections in November, nothing has actually changed regarding the Black Hole and Cop City developments. Nothing has changed on the electoral front. There's no indication of electoral strategies being impactful.

And thankfully, not everyone focused their efforts on electoral reform. I'll leave you today with this sentiment that I kept hearing during my stay in the forest. When you criminalize non-violent direct action, the end goes away. On the final day of the vote, people went and protested outside a city council member's house, and 11 of them got arrested, despite the fact that they were already dispersing and following orders. During the Stop Line 3 movement, people were receiving felony theft charges for using lockboxes to attach themselves onto construction equipment, which of recent hasn't even really been an effective strategy resulting in any material wins. But if they're going to arrest you for

standing outside of a politician's house and give you charges, you may as well consider doing something a bit more spicy. If you're going to get felonies for basic non-violent direct action, like locking yourself onto machinery, you may as well light that machinery on fire. When non-violent direct action results in felony charges, if they're going to criminalize standing outside of a politician's house and holding a sign, then going into the forest and doing monkey wrenching suddenly becomes a very similar consequence level. And the action that can be done in secret turns out to be actually a bit easier to get away with. The funny thing is that this is the state's fault, not anyone else's fault. When state repression against public non-destructive tactics increases,

then what happens is the less public and more fiery tactics, which in this movement were already present, will just end up becoming more and more prominent, and even more integral to keep the movement going. In the next episode, we'll hear about how the more radical folks continue to defend the forest after the vote, and you'll hear a lot more from the forest defenders that I interviewed. And finally, if you can, please head to Atlanta if you're able to for the upcoming week of action from May 8th through 15th. More boots on the ground are crucial as the large-scale destruction of the forest is becoming more and more imminent. You can go to defendtheatlantaforest.com and scenes.noblogs.org for more information.

See you on the other side. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field,

and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry

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

And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez.

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

available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis, and this is part two of the two-part miniseries on the Defend the Forest movement in Atlanta, Georgia. Last month, I traveled to Atlanta to stay a week in the woods and talk with some of the forest defenders. In the previous episode, I covered the movement from its inception to where the city council approved the Cop City project near the end of last summer. I went over a lot of historical

background between the land itself and the history there, the increasing gentrification of Atlanta, how the movement pulled the veil off the secret of plans for Cop City and pushed it into the public spotlight. We talked about the early days of sabotage and the targeting of individuals in positions of power. Basically, I did a lot of talking. Maybe too much talking. This episode will be more led by the discussions with forced offenders that I had during my week-long excursion to the woods. that I had during my week-long excursion to the woods. We'll learn about how the movement evolved in the wake of the city council vote up until the current state of affairs. One thing that makes the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement

very different from previous eco-defense projects in recent memory is that it's right in the middle of a sprawling metropolitan area. Right outside the forest is an Amazon facility. Downtown Atlanta is just a 10-minute drive away. We'll be talking tactics a bit later on in the episode, but just the simple nature of doing a forest eco-defense project while still inside a city gives a lot of pretty interesting tactical opportunities. You get to selectively use some of the older, more rural eco-defense strategies while having the backing of a city-based

mutual aid network. There's the option of rapid response popular mobilization that city-based protests can have, but are more challenging for eco-defense stuff that's like three hours into the middle of nowhere. For the people camping in the forest, they can easily get supplies or switch out who's staying in the woods and who's living in the city. The combination of forest and urban prompts and necessitates the crucial experimentation and innovation that's been badly needed in eco-defense projects and protests for the past decade. There's a lot of trains that go by here. It's generally pretty noisy, so it's definitely the most urban forest defense thing I've ever been a part of but it's really beautiful and unique to see a lot of like urban folks who live in the city be able to be involved in like urban tactics kind of mixing with you know more traditional whatever

the hell that means anymore earth firsty forest tactics it's kind of like the rule book i know a lot of people say this but i like it so, so I'll repeat it. The quote-unquote rulebook for how to engage with the multiple enemies in this area has been, like, chewed up, spit out, shat on, and burnt over because we're kind of doing something that doesn't really happen a lot. Something similar I can think of is the sacred oak grove that was being protected in Minneapolis in the late 90s, maybe early 2000s, and it was another kind of anarchist indigenous alliance with a big earth-first presence, but that's kind of one of the more urban, in this part of Turtle Island, struggles I can think of like this, but this is unlike anything I've ever done. I think another interesting part is, like, a lot of forced

defense stuff is focused on, like, old growth. Being like, we should defend it because it's old growth. Yeah, this is not an old growth horror. This is, like, a messy, dirty, confusing... I've gotten lost so many times. It's tires. Yeah, there's tires. There's barrels, right?

It was built on the prison farm. You'll find, like, old portions of the prison, which is incredibly fucked up and haunted, right? Like in terms of like haunting is like, there's the specter of what used to be there. Police are trying to build over it with their more like a bomb range, right? It's like, that's very much like they're just building over the thing. But it doesn't need to be old growth to be worth defending. And that's an idea that I think people need to understand more, is, like,

it has value, even if it's not, like, 500 years old. Like, it has value despite... Not even despite being a 100-year-old forest. It has value because it is a 100-year-old forest. Like, it has value because it is a forest in a city, and that's something that's worth, like, emphasizing.

Yeah, I also think that's cool and, like, people talk a lot about, like, invasive plants and there's, like, I think the Bradford pears in this forest are a really interesting example. They're these trees that are, like, feral. They used to be, like, planted here when it was a, um, a farm, plantation, or whatever.

And, um, those trees are fucking spiky as shit. They're sugar-fying trees. They're spiky as shit. Well, but, you know, the good news is they're awful, and the bad news is they're awful. I know where they are. When I haul ass through the forest, I usually don't get Bradford Pear in my eyeball.

But someone chased me, and so it's just cool to kind of interact with all these things and get to choose how you want to interact. And like, yeah, it is a... You know, I think it's interesting it's not yeah like a traditional forest or like whatever forest that people would value in that way um but for me uh i connect to it i think even more than that because it's not this like held up as this thing of like purity like they fucking bulldoze and like a month later

that shit was overgrown, and you couldn't see it again. That was all, quote-unquote, invasive plants, like, whatever the fuck that means, which is often, that's a whole thing, they're often racialized plants, you know? It's almost like a punk forest. It's like, we're surrounded by enemies,

and it is, the problem is, they see this as a cesspool, and something I talk to a lot of liberals about like when they're taught we're telling them about defend the forest like oh is it a pristine wilderness with large old growth trees and like you know what

that would be cool the problem is this forest needs to be allowed to return to that because there's been so much abuse and part of like whether I don't know what it means to quote unquote win or lose

but there's a lot of like little wins and losses all along the way and we've had a lot of wins there is some big trees that are left in the forest they're legally supposed to leave all the big trees by the creek but from what historical precedent do we trust the cops to quote unquote be accountable to anyone i don't know where we're thinking that'll happen. I've heard a lot of people be like, oh, some of these tree houses are strategic. They're in the spots they can't cut. I'm like, you know what, friends, I've looked at the map and it looks like this whole motherfucking place is cited for clear-cutting. Exactly one month after the city council voted to approve the land lease ordinance for Cop City, the Defend the Forest slogan was put to the test. On October 8th, 2021, contractors and land survey workers showed up around the forest and appeared to be clearing

land to take reference photos and collect soil samples. Two dozen forest defenders emerged from the woods and confronted the workers. The people hired to destroy the forest fled the work site, and after they left, a police surveillance tower in the area was toppled, and the forest defenders were able to disperse with no arrests. Ten days later, a similar turn of events took place. A group of survey workers and construction teams were on site again. A small group of rapid response forest defenders disrupted the surveying and ground clearing at the old Atlanta prison farm. Simply the mere threat of an on-site protest shut down construction for the whole day. offenders disrupted the surveying and ground clearing at the old Atlanta prison farm. Simply the mere threat of an on-site protest shut down construction for the whole day. Key access points

for machinery were blocked using available materials like piles of nearby tires, preventing vehicular machinery from moving freely through the destruction site. No construction occurred despite the attempts of the DeKalb County Police and the Atlanta Police Department, who mobilized 20 vehicles in the vicinity of the forest in an effort to prevent the protest or punish the participants. By the end of the day, no one was arrested, and yet again, select monitoring systems and police surveillance towers were toppled and dismantled. A statement released online from anonymous force defenders read, quote, this war will be won one battle at a time. Pressure must continue in a variety of ways to halt all construction. It became clear that for the next phase of the struggle, to defend the force, people would have to directly target and oppose the contracting companies hired to decimate

the woods and build the facilities. To date, we know of at least three companies that have been contracted by the Atlanta Police Foundation to do work on the old prison farm land. Some of the surveying work appears to be done by Long Engineering, and two companies, Reeves Young Construction and Brassfield and Gorey, were hired to do grounds clearing and early construction. It is not yet clear who will be contracted to clear the land in Entrenchment Creek Park, where Black Hole Studios hopes to expand their soundstage. Again, quoting the Crimethink article, The City in the Forest, Reinventing Resistance for an Age of Climate Crisis and Police Militarization, quote, the information that is known to date was hard won by diligent activists

on the ground. Shortly after the city council voted in September, surveyors and small work crews began entering the site near two key roads. The trucks and uniforms revealed the names of the contractors, which once again gave opponents of the Cop City Project a chance to initiate a struggle on their own terms. Had the forced offenders utilized only virtual or bureaucratic channels to collect information, they might not have learned that Reeves Young were being called in to do the actual destruction until it was publicly announced much later. The ability to break news to the public before the city government has been a consistent advantage. In trying to keep the momentum of the movement going post-city council

vote, a second week of action was planned for November, albeit with some new twists. From November 10th through 14th, various groups organized a wide range of cultural events, info nights, bonfires, and meetings. For this week of action, many of these events occurred in or near a publicly advertised encampment on the Entrenchment Creek Park side of the forest. Days after the second week of action, 30 people converged on the Reeves Young Construction Headquarters in Sugar Hill, Georgia, 40 miles outside of Atlanta. Holding banners and demanding that the company sever their contract with the Atlanta Police Foundation, the group was able to walk right into the offices, disrupting a board meeting involving company president Dean Reeves and CEO Eric Young. Initially, the executives tried to keep their cool, but in short time,

the businessmen started getting more annoyed and eventually violent towards the protest. There was a protest that, like, was at the Reeves Young office, went into the office, and disrupted a board member meeting that happened to have a lot of the people who were, like, CEOs and chairmen there. And, um, from what I gather, it was a brawl. Yeah, I know there was reports of the Reeves CEO guy punching protesters. Yeah. There's a joke that a worker puts someone in a guillotine, and I love the notion of these workers doing WWE style. But yeah, the brawl is what it's generally referred to.

We'd love for more cop fights, fights with cops to just be WWE style. Disrupting the board meeting was another successful step in the goal of applying direct confrontational pressure to the Atlanta Police Foundation's contracted construction service providers. Days later, two more bulldozers were lit on fire. Ready to entertain me right after the vehicle fired at 2058 Goldsmith Road at a no-name construction site. The entertainer's on scene. We got two construction vehicles, a bull involved. Entertainer will be out to speak. So radio, go ahead and send PD out to my location as well. This equipment was located on the land swap parcel by Blackhall Studios, the planned future location of, quote, Michelle Obama Park, unquote.

These were the 11th and 12th pieces of heavy machinery to be sabotaged, and I think now we're at like around 25, which is a lot. The anonymous communique this time was short and to the point. Quote, we burnt two bulldozers in the South Atlanta forest. No cop city, no Hollywood dystopia, defend the Atlanta forest. On top of the more publicly advertised encampment at Entrenchment Creek Park, around the second week of action, a small cluster of forest defenders set up a secondary, more secretive encampment on a stretch of woods in the old Atlanta prison farm. Again, quoting the CrimeThink article, quote, A few dozen people pitched tents, erected tarps and makeshift kitchens, hung banners, and constructed a bonafide protest camp in the woods.

Establishing a semi-permanent presence in the forest was a way to gather information on an ongoing basis and to provide an immediate deterrent to developers. So, I was involved in the original occupation of the forest. There was a group of autonomous individuals who, many of whom, were housing insecure and were like, we need fucking housing

and, like, there's this struggle and we believe in it and we want to fight in it. And so we moved to the fucking woods and we lived in it and we want to fight in it. And so we moved to the fucking woods and we lived in these woods. I believe the official time is six weeks that we were in the woods. And we had a higher quality of life than many people who lived in houses and apartments.

We had the nicest kitchen of anyone we knew. We had armchairs and couches and fire pits and we, you know, we had more food than we knew what to do with. And so we just started feeding people. And like, we created a social space that like allowed the movement to grow simply because we're like, well, we need these needs met in our lives. Why don't we go do that? And that, like, evolved over time. Little over a month after the more secretive encampment was established, about a dozen protesters, some bearing witch hats, marched to the gate of Black Hole Studios on Constitution Road

and blocked the main entrance. A communique posted online read, quote, iconic spells for destruction were loudly chanted at Blackhall's general direction as the witch block held hands, cackled, and skipped in a sunwise direction, blocking Blackhall Studios' main entrance. Smoke torches were lit. Approximately one hour post witch block antics, DeKalb County police responded to a call made by Black Hole Studios saying that they, quote, followed the protesters into the woods and deduced an encampment they came upon must belong to the apparent witches, unquote, which is quite the sentence. Shortly after, a large contingent of police raided the forest,

evicting the protest camp established there. There was, at one point, a group went and held a demonstration outside of Black Hall's outside of Black Hall's

site near the woods, and they expressed their discontent at the things. Yeah, an entirely peaceful protest at Blackhall Studios that was just kind of standing in the front gate where employees leave and enter, and generally doing stuff like burning American flags, holding signs, like, um, and just, like, taking up space and making the, like, actual entrance and leaving of it, the facility, like, uh, less doable, and their response

was for Blackhall to lie and say that, like, the camp encampment wasn't trespassing on their property, which was actually in place in, like, a public park, um, and orchestrated with the police to evict, um, and they orchestrated with the police to do, like, a pretty, like like intense eviction for like what it was essentially we were what amounted to a homeless camp living there and they had two helicopters circling more police than i could count they were throwing our shit into dump trucks and like actively, pursuing people through the woods. It was, like, an absolute, I mean, it was, like, a, like, very, like, visible show of force against us. Quoting the Crimethink article again, quote, At the urging of Blackhall, DeKalb County police entered the forest en masse, mobilizing police cruisers in the parking lot, officers on foot, helicopters and drones overhead,

mobilizing police cruisers in the parking lot, officers on foot, helicopters and drones overhead, and unmarked vehicles in the streets. The officers were likely intimidated by the low visibility terrain. In any event, all of the forced offenders based in the encampment escaped without being detained. This was the first time a concerted effort was made by law enforcement to engage protesters in the South River Forest. And, to be honest, it was a fucking pain in the South River Forest. and, like, DeKalb County's, like, capabilities and, like, how they are, like, surveilling protests and how they're surveilling camps and, like, how they figured out where we were and, like, what triggered them to act against us. And, like, that's allowed us to move

in far more confident ways that are also far more subversive. It's really interesting that, you know, just like when they make it, you know, illegal to do NVDA, whenever they attack like that and do these really violent raids that put people in, like, awful positions and, like, traumatize the shit out of people, they are teaching us how to fight back. They are showing us their weaknesses, and in a really ironic way, the next time they come in and they fuck it up because people know

what to expect, it'll be a monster of their own making, because, like, for every one step of aggression that they take, that's two steps further we can take towards them with everything that we learned from the struggle. Yeah, and obviously this forest is really beautiful, and the more time I spend here, the more I feel connected to it and driven to, like, protect it. But also, a big part of it for a lot of us is, or for me, is, like, you know, they are doing this for their own morale. And so my goal is to make sure they are unhappy. And so, yeah, even if I, uh, yeah, even if they win, as long as we come back and we learn from that and we keep pushing back, you know, it is a war of attrition and, um, it is about their morale. And like, it doesn't matter if they build the police facility. What matters is that every single time the police move to recuperate their losses, which they just took a big one,

they are faced with just unyielding hostility. And I think that that's something that's really important is that we don't expect to not take a lot of L's. In the forest occupation, we understand the nature of this thing. We're in a static position and the police are moving around us. But it's about making them fight for every inch the best we can. The encampment was just one part of a large, ongoing fight. Over the course of those six weeks, hundreds of people were able to circulate through this camp,

enjoying meals and performances, making art together, and spending time around campfires, building and sharing a life in the woods. After the camp was attacked and structures were destroyed by DeKalb County Police, land offenders and Atlanta residents mobilized quickly to recover camp supplies and belongings, and continued on with efforts to defend the forest. A great thing about these types of

free autonomous zones is that they can directly demonstrate to people what a free life outside the confines of regular society can look like and what it can feel like. It's not just like we want to save this woods and we want to go back to our regular ass lives. A lot of us are realizing that we're living in the apocalypse and we're just gonna, we want to keep living like this. It's not just this woods, it's not just this police facility, and we want them to not have any more space or platform to organize as police, but we want, a lot of us want to be free. We want other people to, like, join that idea of, like, whatever the fuck it is, hitchhiking, train hopping, living in the woods. The fact that it's a fucking crime

or considered crazy to be the people living in the woods is insane, and that's kind of the vibe we got from the Muscogee folks yesterday. They're our whole world like we're here trying to reclaim our culture because there's a lot of hope for saving the land from like an indigenous perspective if people would respect them and the whole point is the u.s government doesn't actually want them and doesn't actually respect them and reservations are literally a prisoner of war numbers because they're hoping by blood quantum, if they kill these people off, they can take their land back. So the whole land back idea fucking freaks them out.

Anyway, we want to save this forest, but it's not just about this forest. We're kind of endangered species. We've talked about ourselves feeling like deer. Like how deer, like they'll be chilling, they'll be like, alright, I'm being a deer, I'm eating food, and they're like, always on guard, you know, to do something else if

there's an enemy around, it kind of feels that way, like, we'll be chilling, nothing's going on, all of a sudden there's cops. But the whole point is, if it can happen here, ha ha, did it, it can happen somewhere else, and we hope to spread the vibe that people, not like Occupy, what a horrible name for a movement, but it's cool that that happened, at the time

that word made sense, Nobody knew any better. We know better now. That's great. But, we're getting this vibe to continue this kind of stuff. And obviously, there's people in all kinds of places that squat buildings and do all sorts of shit, but the more territory that we occupy

and control and can help rematriate back to indigenous grassroots comrades, not IRA Indian Reorganization Act government sanctioned indigenous groups, right? Not everyone's our ally. These have to be allyships that make sense.

The Muscogee comrades that we're close to, obviously not all of them, that's some romanticized, generalized bullshit. They said the same shit that when we talk to them, they're like, even our own people betray us sometimes, because we're not all the same. That's some romanticized, generalized bullshit. They said the same shit that when we talked to them, they're like, even our own people betray us sometimes because we're not all the same. That's some homogenous bullshit.

And I've seen that play out poorly in other places. They're like, we gotta give the land back to the natives. I'm like, which natives? Like, people, we're all on a spectrum of colonization and decolonization, and sadly, some of us are further along the lines than others, and it's very much the colonizer's fault for doing that, but where we're at is the people, the people that feel the call to energy, the people that feel the call to some kind of radical left orientation that can find it in their hearts and in their patience

to tolerate each other, we need to band together to come up with better plans because we're all we got and it doesn't get better. It's getting worse. So hopefully this can be an inspiration for people to do other shit. I'm inspired. I'm not from anywhere fucking near here, but I've been here for a year now and I don't want to leave because I'm tired of the same old tactics. And I have been a part of stuff that has been successful before and I had nothing to do of stuff that has been successful before, and I had nothing to do with nonviolent direct action, and I had to do time for it, and I know people that have done time for it also, and if there's any message I can give to the young generation is there's no future, and it's worth it, and like, if your future is just like working

a nine-to-five, and like, watching the earth's solar, like, shrivel into nothingness, I would argue, that's not really life. Might as well be dead. So, I hope you live. I hope you choose to live. I think it's a really, like, interesting thing, the psychological aspects of this. Because the first time you do, the way we're socialized in this society is to be obedient and fearful. And the first time you do something illegal,

the first time you do something that, you know, is against the world, the first time you steal some food, the first time you smash a window, the first time you do any of that, you're scared. But then you get away with it. You realize that this is a thing you can do, and a thing that the state can't stop you from doing. And you realize, oh, I can do so much more. And once you get over that initial fear, once you

smash that window, and you've gotten home, and you're like, oh, I didn't go to jail for this. But when you, like, get home, and you're like, I have all this food now that I didn't have to pay for, you start to realize, maybe I don't need to work a job. Maybe I don't need to work nine to five, or, you know, five to midnight every day to, you know, get a job and pay rent, you realize, wait, maybe I can just steal the food I need. Yeah, I've been wanting to talk about that for a while for, I want to make another Hyper Objects episode and talk about the anarchist properties of Klein bottles. And I describe this type of freedom as like, it's like how a Klein bottle works, or like a fourth-dimensional object.

It's like, there's this extra degree or extra dimension of movement that we usually don't think is possible, but it is actually there if you know how to interact with it. And yeah, it's like we're domesticated in so many ways to view, here's what's possible, here's what isn isn't possible i have to exist within this framework um and only doing these things which are seen as correct and there's actually more degrees of freedom than that we just don't often like acknowledge them but you can totally phase through things and you can totally find that extra degree of freedom and once you do that's a super interesting feeling

as opposed to like waiting for gay luxury space communism you can instead do like fourth dimensional hyper anarchism which gives you so much more freedom right now instead of just waiting for the communism that will never come and the relationships you build

the relationships you build that are based on a trust that is i trust you to have my back i trust you to work with me and do this thing is so much deeper than the trust of i guess i trust my co-worker but like i really trust them not to snitch to my boss like the trust that comes from a relationship where you're like, hey, yeah, let's, like, we need food, let's go steal it together, that kind of trust is not something that can be recuperated, and that kind of, like, relationship where it's like, our relationship is built on the fundamental, we will do what we have to to survive.

It creates an intimacy that you can't find anywhere else. A criminal intimacy. A criminal intimacy, you might say. Yeah, and that was the point. Somebody else? Yeah, just to double down on that too like I think it's it's cool too because

when you also come to a space like this like you can live like that on your own or with your friends but then there's something wild when you come to this space and then all of a sudden it's like when you come to this space, um, and then all of a sudden, it's, like, when you start attacking

something that a lot of other people want to see attacked, all of a sudden, all you have to do is attack that thing, and food's there, you know, and, like, you know, like, and, and, like, yeah, and, like, you have all these resources, and you can focus on that, and so, like, yes i'm like it's like a joke to some degree but like if you want to be a lifestyle anarchist like if you want to actually be an anarchist right now and do anarchist shit you can come to atlanta and do it and like it's not easy it's fucking scary it's sketchy it's hard there's freaky ass bugs but like yeah you don't have to wait and like yeah it i think that that's something that like for me is really magic is that like actually the more you attack and the more you like position yourself to be antagonistic towards

the world the more this like fourth, fourth-dimensional, like, wing-free shit you're talking about, like, which I immediately understand, like, starts to kind of, like, self-actualize, and, um, yeah, I think it's cool, and, like, it freaks me out to think that there's mad people who are probably pretty cool, like,

waiting for some opportunity. Like, waiting just teaches waiting, and we don't have that much time. Yeah, you can live anarchy now. You don't need to wait for the collapse, TM, because it turns out that already happened. It's already happening. That already happened.

We're just waiting in a liminal space until the climate change catches up. The emissions are already there. We're already living in it. We just don't realize it yet, or some of us are in denial of it yet. But the collapse is like now. It's already the thing. We don't need to wait for, or some of us are in denial of it yet, but the collapse is like, now, it's already the thing. We don't need to wait

for the one big collapse, because that's a myth. But you can live anarchy and do stuff. You don't need to wait for the next communist president who's going to run and fail. There's no coming social movement. There's no coming collapse. There's

nothing to wait for to keep on waiting as madness. I think a really interesting aspect of this movement about, like, how we are attacking a popular target, and how, like, in attacking a popular target, we've built this, like, thing is we are, we're not just here and attacking this thing that doesn't exist in isolation. We're here, and we've built a movement, and we've built a, we've, through attack, we've built a we've built this popular idea that actually

you know, like if you want something to not be there instead of talking to a politician, you can set it on fire. Vote harder. Vote harder. Just one more vote. I swear I'm not a victim. I'm not a victim. Just one more vote. This one's different. I swear I'm... I'm not a victim! I'm not a victim!

This one's different! This one's different! I swear I'm not a victim! I'm not a victim! This one's different! I swear I'm not a victim! This one's different! This one's different! They'll save us!

Now, I'd like to talk more about tactics. Since the City Council vote, on-the-ground tactics have gained a much more integral role and grown past the basic sabotage and house visits, although both of those still are crucial aspects in keeping the movement going. Different ways of preventing physical construction, surveying of land, and destruction of the forest made up most of the on-the-ground direct action efforts inside the forest. I think a really interesting aspect of the way that the struggle has happened here is that because it's so decentralized, there are people, and no one really knows who, but there are people who will just show up and, like, you know, it's like, there were people who were, like,

getting the cops called on them in the woods and shit, and then, like, a bunch of fucking anonymous people showed up and, like, toppled all the camera towers, and people stopped getting the cops called on them in the woods for a really long time, and, like, that kind of decentralized thing, especially where it's, thing, especially where it's, like, you know, regardless of even, like, if the people in the woods were, like, you know, like, into doing shit, it's, like, it's really useful when people who have more skills and people have more knowledge and more ability to do things and more ability to take risks. It's really awesome when those kinds of people can come and make things safe for a larger mass of people. And I feel like that is, like, a strategy in, like, the insurrectionary space that can

be truly, like, expanded on where people who know their shit can make things safe for large groups of people to generalize revolt. Yeah, I look at a lot of how this struggle has been framed from the very beginning as there was no call to action, do X, Y, Z. There was a bunch of people pursuing their own individual desires and what they saw as a forward-facing, like, a projection of their own ideas into the future and made that happen. And it was underneath this framework where there was no limit, there were no boundaries, and there was no idea of, like, us all having to be on the same page about that. having to be on the same page about that yeah you don't need to like attend a march to be to like do effective things in fact it turns out doing things that are not attending a march can often be way more materially effective yeah and to double down on that like um so many times there's just like a

script that people follow oh this is how we do it and then there's and there's like this action that's applied to like everything that people don't like and holy shit that's a crazy book that was a wild fuck um i don't know think about that uh but yeah there's these like things that are applied to everything and this struggle very much has no script uh which is really exciting and but but what's even cooler about that is that it's not it's also not reinventing the wheel and so there's people who are taking from you know like kind of like classic insurrectionary anarchist uh like approaches there's people looking at eco-defense stuff from all over the world, thinking about, there's people looking at some successful nonviolent direct action, there's people looking at ALF struggles and how those campaigns, targeted campaigns, secondary targeting, how things like that work. bad work. The contracting and subcontracting companies hired by the Atlanta Police Foundation made up the new targets of the pressure campaigns and direct confrontation methods

that threatened physical and social capital. Bringing back the house visits mentioned in the previous episode, in late December, banners that read Reeves Young out of the Atlanta forest were hung in the backyard of the private residence of Dean Reeves in Suwannee, Georgia. Dean Reeves serves as the chairman of Reeves Young Construction and was among the board members present at the November action, and he personally, allegedly, shoved and assaulted protesters inside the brawl. After the backyard banners were hung, an anonymous online statement read, quote, we hope this action gives but a minuscule dose of what the creatures in the South Atlanta forest you want to bulldoze might feel, unsafe in the place they call home. A month later, on January

18th, Reeves Young Construction and representatives of the Atlanta Police Foundation entered the forest with a bulldozer. They started knocking down trees to complete more surveying work and determine the construction supplies needed for laying of building foundation. Forest destruction was halted when approximately a dozen protesters approached the workers and Atlanta Police Foundation representative Alan Williams and demanded that they leave. and Atlanta Police Foundation Representative Alan Williams, and demanded that they leave. Workers were safely escorted out of the woods, and the bulldozer was left at the scene and was subsequently taken out of commission. In my interviews with some forest defenders, I believe one of them referred to this as the bulldozer chirping and falling, so that's fun. The day after, autonomous groups of people finished construction of multiple well-built treehouses up in the canopy near the site of the previous day's

confrontation. People climbed up into treehouses and announced their intention to remain there in order to delay further construction, riffing off the old tree-sit and bipod tactics. From October 2021 to this point in the struggle, which is like mid-January 2022, work was consistently able to be stopped by small, dedicated groups of people without resorting to force. Throughout the next week, attempts at land surveying in the area of the old Atlanta prison farm continued, but now with workers being accompanied by the Atlanta Police Foundation, Atlanta Police Officers, and DeKalb County Police accompanied by the Atlanta Police Foundation, Atlanta Police Officers, and DeKalb County Police. With the backing of cops, workers were able to accomplish more of their tasks, including tree felling and soil boring. Per Crime Thing, quote,

In some instances, only a handful of activists were on the scene behind makeshift barricades. Reinforcements cannot arrive rapidly enough to assist those on the ground, unquote. Reportedly, undercover cops surrounded the forest, intimidating those who would park nearby. As such, some outside support did show up, but not in mass. Meanwhile, in the forest, it was a game of cat and mouse between the workers, forest offenders, and cops. Police went so far as to start chasing people on forest trails while riding on ATVs. Barricades and the tactical removal of land survey markers did slow down work on some days, but ultimately, efforts were unsuccessful in halting the destruction process entirely.

This week of land destruction and cat and mouse culminated on January 28th. Around 60 people, the largest crowd in months, gathered to march into the South River Forest and onto the old Atlanta prison farm to directly confront construction workers who were boring holes in the ground, doing soil sample collection. DeKalb County police attacked the protesters, tackling multiple people and arresting four. The first arrests inside the forest within the context of the movement. Quoting Crimethink again, quote, police attacked the march, tackling several

people. The other demonstrators did not mount a proportional response to this aggression, despite outnumbering the police. Perhaps some of the tactics popular during the 2020 rebellion, such as the mass use of umbrellas or makeshift shields, could have equipped the participants to feel more capable of decisive action. Alan Williams of the Atlanta Police Foundation was filming protesters looking a little anxious as he did so. A statement on the Deftheforestscenes.noblogs.org site concluded their report back with this sentiment, quote, At this point, we are in need of two main things. More people to help support tree sits and defend the forest from destruction, and legal attempts to delay construction.

Yeah, always you want more people to be on the ground in the woods in the city. Chaos. We need chaos. The chaos star, we like that shit for a reason. You want to wear out the enemy in a lot of different ways and the enemy is a lot of different people. The enemy is Reeves Young, the enemy is their subcontractors,

the enemy is the police, the enemy is Georgia Power. Georgia Power owns quote-unquote owns the power cut and that divides both entrenchment creek and the opf side there's a lot of different people so if there's a lot of and we also have a lot of different people involved in a lot of different ways there's people living in the woods there's people living in town so in reality people already know these things and it's already happening we should be visiting the offices we should be visiting these fuckers at home at their goddamn church.

We should be visiting them in the forest. There should be no peace for the enemy. And I believe that's how we can win because we need to make it unpopular and unsavory and hopefully next to impossible for them to make these choices because even though this is a small part of the forest, they're just going to continue on to the next thing. I want to briefly go into some details about a method of protest that combines pressure to both physical and social capital in hopes of resulting material changes from businesses, corporations,

or people in power. It features many of the actual tactics we've in fact already discussed. We'll refer to it as the shack method for reasons that will be shortly explained. House visits, targeted vandalism, phone calls, and hanging banners in backyards all have a place in this methodology. It's a focused drive to dissolve that safe political or corporate astral space that I talked about in the last episode. The CrimeThink article contains a really good summary of the Shack method, so instead of just regurgitating their explainer, I'm just going to narrate certain sections of it, because that'll make my job easier and I'm a hack and a fraud, blah blah blah. Quote, the goal is to hold those responsible for these projects personally

liable for their decisions and the decisions of the companies they own. Because the entire system of rules and norms we live under dictates that exploiters, warlords, mass murderers, and those that destroy ecosystems must not face pressure at home as a consequence of the decisions that they make at work. This strategy is bound to be controversial. It rejects the entire logic of limited liability that forms the basis of corporate rule in our society. At the beginning of the 21st century, animal rights activists in the UK and the US set out to take down the biggest animal testing corporation on the planet, Huntington Life Sciences. The campaign to stop Huntington Life Sciences was called Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty, or SHAC. It formally disbanded in 2014, and is best known

for its period of ambitious international participation in the early 2000s. The methodology of this movement, which encompassed direct action, symbolic protests, cultural events, sabotage, pranks, and more, included many features that had been since used in a wide range of campaigns. The overall strategy of SHAC involved mobilizing a few hundred people to maximize their effectiveness against a major enterprise by focusing only on their ability to function economically. The SHAC model is centered around tertiary targeting, i.e. isolating service providers from third-party contracts in order to limit their ability to provide services to the

client, which is the actual target. Okay, now I'm just going to pause here because if that sounds confusing, let me briefly provide an example. So the actual target here would be the Atlanta Police Foundation, since they're the ones with plans target here would be the Atlanta Police Foundation, since they're the ones with plans to build Cop City. The Police Foundation has contracted a few companies, Brassfield & Gorey for one, and Reeves Young. So these companies are the service provider. The shack model attempts to isolate the service provider, so Reeves Young, from all of their third-party clients and contracts, which will in the end go back to hurt the actual target, which is the Atlanta Police Foundation. Back to Crimethink. The service provider, so in this case Reeves Young,

the service provider depends on many third parties. Third parties provide the service provider with insurance, materials, equipment, security, catering, cleaning, mail service, data maintenance, and more. All of those third parties can be pressured to drop the service provider. Furthermore, the service provider is likely a company with more than one client. And those other clients can also be pressured to drop the provider. Any company or contractor that is able to move their money away from the service provider because they have other economic opportunities

can be pressured to do so. Essentially, this strategy does not directly challenge the bottom line of any of the third-party companies. It only isolates and demoralizes the service provider and therefore the end target. To date, it still remains unclear whoizes the service provider and therefore the end target. To date, it still remains unclear who is the service provider for the Blackhall Studios development, although that information will come out sooner than later. In considering the limits of the shack strategy, in actions outside of the forest, it might be more difficult for activists to maintain a sense of urgency. Targeting individuals at their offices and homes will chiefly bring out those who are excited about such confrontational methods, rather than those

who prefer to maintain welcoming spaces of encounter, to build treehouses, or to clean campsites, to cook for others, to cultivate the kind of collective imagining that is needed to transform society. Also, if people fail to do proper research or mapping, activists could waste their time targeting minor institutions and companies that are unwilling or unable to drop their contracts. They could spend months facing down insignificant companies with many possible replacement subcontractors. Sorry, that was a lot. That was a big info dump, but I think it is useful information. So the goal isn't to sway companies with moralizing arguments, but to frame their

association with militarized policing or ecological destruction as a bad look that could hurt their reputation and ability to secure future clients. Combined with economic incentives inflicted on the service provider, like acts of sabotage, the resulting targeted campaign attacking physical and social capital can lead to pressure on third parties to influence the decision of the service provider on whether or not to stay on the project. Methodologies can be put to the test through practice and be judged by the outcome. The proposal to employ the shack strategy to defend the forest is just built on the simple hypothesis that if Reeves Young is forced to drop the

contract with the Atlanta Police Foundation, the Atlanta Police Foundation investors will then lose the confidence that's required to find an adequate replacement, and the project could stumble or fail. The same goes for the Black Hall project. If activists defeat Reeves Young by means of direct action and self-organization, even if the project finds a new contractor, the sophistication and confidence that the movement will have developed in the process will likely help it evolve once again. Also, like, one thing that we, that people have figured out, because, like, for the first two, after the first two arsons, you could literally just walk up to, during daylight, up to the, like, area of Michelle

Obama Park, and, like, touch, take pictures of, like, uh, have sex around, like, make out with, uh, the construction equipment that had been burned, and you could see the stickers of where they had rented these, like, construction equipment, um, destruction equipment. And, like, after the first one, it changed. It was no longer rented from the same company. And after the second one, it changed again. And there is reason to believe that with every arson or attack that they are changing construction equipment companies because rental companies tend to not like it. Whenever their equipment is destroyed, it costs them a lot of money, and oftentimes they cannot afford hundreds of thousands of dollars going down the drain to support a project that is highly unpopular.

Yeah, and the other thing, what we're talking about with the modified, like, policing modifying itself is it's interesting because we're at this point where policing is highly unpopular, and so it's kind of hedging its bets, and it's doing two things. First, it's calling itself, like, the

social peace and justice cute bunny rabbit center for your racist if you don't like us, or whatever, and then it's also just, like, mask off, doubling down, buying mad guns, like, like, yeah, just becoming increasingly more militarized, increasingly more violent, and, like, moving mask off like an occupying force. So there's this split where there's no, and people are well aware of this, there's no like public chance of convincing a lot of companies that this is wrong, right? Well, it's very divided. So the people who are committed are very committed. There are fucking enemies, and we're their enemies, and that's it.

But then there's other people who are doing this for economic reasons, and kind of understand that policing is not cute, right? And that it's at least unpopular or going out of fashion, to some degree, and can make money in other ways. degree and can make money in other ways. So yeah, it's this interesting thing where like being able to like fight battles for public opinion maybe doesn't super work and all you have to do is kind of try to like cut away the people who are supporting people who are ideologically committed to our destruction and we are you know feel reciprocal if you look at the photos of what was happening with michelle obama park the land swap site they were trying to build on you can tell that heavy yellow equipment llc of marietta georgia stopped providing them equipment after like the first or the second time that their machines got lit on fire,

and now it's ALIF, A-L-I-F, of I don't know where, Georgia. So, you know. These are photos that you can see. Like, you can look at these communiques and just tell. Like, if there's a photo attached, like, there is a traceable, like, trend

of companies are dropping the fuck out. Because they, for whatever reason, just cannot take the heat. No pun intended. On June 12th, 2020, while fully in the throes of nationwide revolt against police after the murder of George Floyd, two Atlanta police officers killed Rayshard Brooks, a black man who had been sleeping in his car in the parking lot of a Wendy's. Not long after, the restaurant was burnt to the ground by determined crowds. In the time period between June 2020 to the end of the year, more than 200 Atlanta police officers left their jobs, including their chief of police. Local sheriff's deputies, state patrolmen, and transit cops also resigned during the year of the uprising at a higher-than-average rate. As the entire system of policing and capitalism face a crisis of legitimacy, corporations, business owners, landlords, business associations, and international real estate companies demand a public pacification and a reassurance of a future with stable consumerism.

Profit incentive and police need each other in a symbiote-like relationship. I'll do one of my last crime think quotes here. Quote, forces in local and federal government, business associations, police departments, and armed militias have continuously worked to make sure a popular uprising does not reoccur. A large part of the institutional reaction to the 2020 popular uprising has focused on managing public perception. Industrial interests and private investment companies have conducted influence campaigns using local news outlets, 40% of which are owned by Sinclair Broadcasting Group, a right-wing news organization. Between Sinclair, Nexstar, Gray, Tega, and Tribune, this coordinated reframing of events has damaged the way that many sectors of the television-viewing public perceive the 2020

revolt and its consequences. In the wake of the uprising, a false narrative circulated to the effect that police, while demoralized and underfunded, cannot control the crime waves currently sweeping the country. This orchestrated narrative has shaped the imaginations of suburban whites, small business owners, and many urban progressives. The crime wave framework implied that police departments around the country had in fact been defunded or had their powers curtailed and were consequently unable to assure social peace or free enterprise. In reality, the vast majority of police departments received an annual increase in their budgets as they normally do. If anything, they accrued more power following the events of 2020. So it's no coincidence that the Atlanta Police Foundation and the Atlanta Police Department are pushing to build a militarized urban warfare training center in the wake of the 2020 uprisings by leveraging that crime wave narrative and the fears of future social unrest. They want to have the tools to bring down the inevitable upcoming revolts for racial, environmental, and economic justice, and now more than ever, including reproductive justice.

Cop City is leading the charge as a part of a new effort to adapt American policing strategies to our new era of societal decay, and the ever-crumbling that will define this century as we face the escalating consequences of industrialization and climate change. I think another really, like, important thing to look at with this also is, like, when you look at the George Floyd uprising and the crisis it brought in policing, when they realized that, oh, holy shit, people are so angry about this that they will pose a threat to the sovereignty of the state, which is the first time that has happened in an extremely long time. When that finally happened, the state, the morale of police departments around the country was broken. Cops everywhere were like, it was a demoralizing thing. And when you

think about cops as an occupying force, as an occupying military force, thinking about the fact that we broke their morale is really important. And then thinking about this place as they intend to build a training facility to increase morale, which is a classic military tactic of create cool and interesting ways to train your soldiers to do a murder, is like, that is a classic military tactic, and when you begin to think about this as social war, when you begin to think about this as not just a struggle against Cop City, but as a struggle for disabling and destroying the police, when you think about this as a material struggle against the occupying forces that are the police, this becomes like way more contextual.

I feel like that is the best way to contextualize this movement. Yeah. So one interesting thing is like after Rayshard Brooks is murdered and the two cops involved were subsequently charged.

What was it? 600 cops went on sick out? Hundreds. Hundreds. And their morale was broken. Atlanta police has always been understaffed for as long as I've known. And not understaffed by, like, as long as I've known. Um, and not understaffed by, like, any media propaganda spin standards,

but, like, every single day they are facing backlogs in every zone where they cannot answer calls. And that's a good thing. This is a war of attrition where their current training facilities have broken toilets, have leaky pipes, have unmanaged... Some of them are and operable sinks, have like have undeniably miserable conditions. Their cars are out.

Their cars are continually on their last legs. And we that's that is a path to abolitionism, making it so it is so undesirable to be a cop in this city or any city that no one would dare do it. It is crucial that police are not the only ones that seek to evolve their tactics for a new era. And moving beyond the kind of non-violent action that's become so common during protests during the Trump era and the post-Green scare, and even like post-Occupy, there is this looking for a new form of anarchist or radical resistance. I want to really emphasize the learning things here is that this struggle,

like, took all the different rulebooks, tore them up, set them on fire, and used the ashes for their shitter. Like, everyone here is learning things. People who have been doing things a long fucking time are here and learning new things. We're not just, like, tearing up and, like, destroying the rulebooks. We're, like, we're like lodges out of them. We are, we are... Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. out of them. We are, we are... The robuxes are like, don't hold them back. Yeah, yeah! They're like, it's them. Yeah. It like, put them, like, it like, tore all of them up, made collages out of them, and like, is trying to create this like, weird papier-mâché mesh of a experimental path

into the future. And like, when we say we are experimenting with new forms of revolt, new tactics, new strategies, we truly mean there aren't existing models to do what we're doing. We are writing the book as we do it.

And yeah, we fuck up sometimes, but we've also got some really cool shit happening. Shit that hasn't happened in 20 years is happening, and shit that hasn the, you know, much of the, like, eco-defense shit that's happened in North America for quite a while has, like, not done, you know, or at least not released communiques about, like, shit that happens here seemingly every couple weeks The shit here is Crazy and wild beyond your dreams. It's also scary and hard and traumatizing and it's beautiful and terrifying and And, like...

Yeah. If that sounds great, you should come! Yeah, this is a step away from us actually evolving out of the... I look at this as, like, a huge step in what land defense looks like after we have...

after we have faced greenscale repression and now we are moving past the post-green scale repression movements and figuring out how to move forward. And regardless of if this lands in a really repressive, like, boots down our throats situation, I don't think anyone should ever stop experimenting. I don't think people should ever stop experimenting i don't think people should go back to the old ways i don't think that we should be resigned to not experiment i think that everyone like we are in a situation where there is no future there like the collapse is now we're probably not going to avoid 1.5 degrees warming. Our police are only further militarizing.

And the reality of resistance is that we desperately need experimentation. Yeah, if there was a winning strategy that was proven to be effective, then it would have been effective and we would have a winning strategy.

There's a popular meme in the forest, which is the, are you winning some meme? Instead of, are you winning some? It says, are you experiencing the joy of attack, son? And I think that is an important one. The same way cop cities are part of the new evolution of American policing, defend the Atlanta forest can be seen as kind of

trailblazing for future movements, a look at how they might develop post the George Floyd protests. For my last and final crime think quote, quote, this campaign represents a crucial effort to chart new paths forward in the wake of the George Floyd rebellion, linking the defense of the land that sustains us with the struggle against police. The movement opposing these developments, mobilizing around the watchwords, defend the forest, and stop cop city, have passed through several phases of experimentation, using a wide array of tactics and strategies to keep pace with the current course of events. It represents an important effort to revitalize eco-defense and police abolition strategies in the wake of the George Floyd rebellion.

So considering the possible wide-ranging impacts of both the evolution of policing and the evolution of resistance tactics, the Defend the Atlanta Force movement is extremely relevant to all people who want to improve the world whether or not they live in atlanta atlanta has for a very long time been a testing ground for new surveillance tech and like in like experimenting with new forms of struggle here in atlanta there are things that not only are we in many ways on the front lines of experimenting with new tactics and integrating new strategies and how they work, but we're also on the front lines of, like, different kinds of both, like, in-person and digital forms of repression that don't have to be worried about other places, and, like, it also provides a proving ground for ways to struggle specifically against those forms of surveillance

and understanding the different ways that sometimes the most effective thing in protecting yourself from repression isn't some super high-tech shit. It's a ski mask, a pair of gloves, and not bringing your phone. And people don't seem to think about that. I don't need to go into that part, but yeah. So, speaking of surveillance, we actually have, like, not we, I don't claim that. The police here and the state here has, like, the video integration system, which I believe is, like, one of the, like, video integration center, where they take, where businesses and homeowners with, like, ring cameras

can volunteer their video surveillance equipment to be plugged into a network, um, that can be monitored and pulled up at any time by the police, um, in a downtown location. And they, and that is, like, one of the largest surveillance, uh, network systems in the world, I believe. And it is actually leading the charge in new forms of surveillance and other cities are looking at this as a model of how to better surveil their own cities. Which obviously makes the Atlanta Police Foundation trying to create their own little mini-city a very interesting prospect in terms of establishing new...

This was mentioned before, in terms of establishing new, this was mentioned before, in terms of establishing new ideas on how to take policing forward into 2020s, 2030s, after we've had these waves of social justice, like uprisings and uprisings for Black Lives Matter. I mean, not many places actually got

defunded, but the propaganda has to be different, and the way that police optics work definitely needs to be changed from their perspective or they're trying to have them be changed one of the strongest things i feel like came out of this movement really puts ahead was our ability to get have the game on like the narrative and then never being able to recuperate that narrative because their plan was this institute for social justice is a new way of training police to quote be better or like not murder people as much and like more refined um and i don't want more refined like police that like murder quote the right people or beat the right people or cage the right people

that's not my desire i want to end to policing yeah i think that there's a lot of projects happening in the forest and you know i also just want to emphasize like i'm not from atlanta but i feel like it's really important for me to be here. You know, I think a lot of people who felt inspired by the George Floyd uprising, like, this is an attempt to recuperate. Like I've said this a million times, it's an attempt for the police to recuperate from that. And I'm trying to finish what we started. I also think that we need to understand that this isn't just about Atlanta. that they're trying to build, and, like, one of the points of this training facility is that it is, like, a hub in the same way Atlanta, with a movie theater, the same way they're trying to make Atlanta this hub, right? It's, there's an infrastructure for it being a hub from shipping and stuff like that, and so now they're trying to make it this economic hub in a more white-collar

way, and so they're trying to make it a hub for police in Atlanta, but also to train police to do fucked shit and to mutate, like, nationally. And I know that the police from the, you know, whatever city I live in are probably going to come here and go back and fuck that up. So I'm trying to make sure that they can't come here and that, you know, police are demoralized in every city and they're having trouble in every city. And this isn't just about the APD. If you live pretty much anywhere on the East Coast, there's a high chance that your police are going to come here and then go back to your house and fuck you up. So come here and make sure they can't.

And the other thing I want to say is, like, yeah, they want to make this a training facility for police. Right now, it is a training facility for police uh right now it is a training facility for anarchists if you come here i promise you you will leave with more courage and with more skills and knowing a lot of fucking people who are really fucking down all over the country um and i think it's worth it that's what i'm saying I wanted to jump in and say, like, this is about you. An hour or two hours south of here is the School of the Americas. You might have heard of it. It's here in Georgia.

It's where a lot of awful fucking dictators and their henchmen learned how to do really awful shit, a bunch of war crimes. and learned how to do really awful shit, a bunch of war crimes. And here in the city of Atlanta, a local school, the largest university in the state, Georgia State University, hosts something called the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange, or GILI, which is where they and the IDF get together to train local police forces here in Atlanta and around the country. And if you don't think that Cop City is going to play a huge role in your police department learning from the IDF how to beat you up, you have another thing coming.

You should come here to Atlanta and join what's going on because this is about everyone here. This is about the whole country. They are coming to Atlanta to learn how to brutalize people, and it's going to take all of us to stop it. A funny thing about this project is that there's these sort of dual intersections and dual microcosms. On one side, there is the intersection of policing, gentrification, racism, ecological destruction, and climate change. And on the other side, there's the intersection between the tactics of urban city protest and rural eco-defense.

But there's also this dual microcosm. On the side of the state, they're trying to construct this police facility with a mock city to train in microcosm for protest suppression and practice urban combat against people who live in American cities. And on the people's side, there's this microcosm, not only for how resistance movements can evolve post-2020, but more importantly for the people involved in the struggle, a microcosm for how you can live a life free of the oppressive societal mechanisms that we claim to oppose. I think another really interesting thing about this being like such an ungovernable space of societal mechanisms that we claim to oppose. happened other places. Like, where else are, like, people in their everyday lives just gonna be able to walk around as genderfucked as they want and, like, just... it's fine.

Like, you know, if a queer basher comes into these fucking woods, like, it's gonna be a bad time, because literally everyone here is queer. Like, we don't... That's the thing, is, like, when we exist in these spaces, in this ungovernable way, we, like, are creating mini versions of the society we want to see at large. Yeah, this is something I wanted to talk about

in terms of, like, the microcosm-macrocosm idea of after 2020 uprising looking for new paths forward the defending line of force thing can be viewed as this micro like this microcosm of how we can approach different struggles going into the 2020s going into the 2030s and stuff um because yeah like it is, this small version of what we want. There's also the whole idea of, like, what I've seen here in the forest more closely resembles, like, an actual temporary autonomous zone than, like, the Chaz ever did. In terms of, like, people actually, like, actually living free, actually living, like, not relying on, like, city water. Like, not living in, like, a downtown metro area. It's an actual free space where people can be queer and be all of the things and climb trees and talk with the deer. And people are actually allowed to do that.

There's not all of the stigma that even a thing like Chaz had so many problems. Extremely hashtag problematic in terms of how that resulted. This is such a microcosm of an autonomous area where people are able to do those things. I also kind of want to talk on

our ideas of safety and security don't reside in the ideas of a safety or security force it doesn't it resides in our trust in ourselves and each other it resides in like we actually keep each other safe we have each other's backs we like will fight for each other and any threat to any one of us is taken seriously. We have this intimacy, this criminal intimacy, that allows us to build more genuine relationships with high highs and low lows than anything ever could.

And the deadening that society puts on us, And like the deadening that society puts on us, this like chemically induced regulated median of gray and terrible is, that's not what we live. Yes, some days here it sucks to wake up and everything you own is wet and you gotta go shit in a hole, but it's flooded. But also, some days, things here are fucking awesome, and I get to wake up to the birds calling and go, like, have a party with my friends. I don't, like, exist here in a way

that is, like, comprehensible or legible to, like, a wider, like, society. I don't exist in a way that people look at this and be like ah that's what you need but i have never been happier than when i've been in the woods with people i trust and care about and no have my back people people don't have to worry about working to pay their water bill because you can go just get the things you need from places you don't have to pay for it. And, like, you don't have to worry about all of these things,

all of these societal pressures. There's not this constant threat of, oh, I lose my job, oh, all those things. All those things, all these mental constructs that control us aren't there anymore because we've built a world that doesn't rely on that in the slightest. And I think that's a really powerful thing, that we've already met our own needs, and so we can fight back in these beautiful and fiery ways, pun intended, that, like, allow us to just experience things that, like, have been stolen from us for generations. Yeah, I was gonna say we're not safe, but we're free, and I think that anyone who

makes that decision, as an active decision, to not be safe but to be free, we're not safe, but we're free. And I think that anyone who makes that decision, it's an active decision to not be safe, but to be free. I may not like, but by definition, I'll ride for them because I made that decision. We're now nearing the end of the episode. But before I finish, I need to go back to talking about tactics for a bit and end with some actual good news. From January 2022 to present time of recording, there's been an increase in solidarity attacks in cities across the country, some targeting Reeves Young and

Long Engineering Equipment in other states, third-party service providers of contracted construction companies, or locations and offices of corporate sponsors of the Atlanta Police Foundation. This past March, six machines owned by Reeves Young, including two large excavators and a bulldozer, were destroyed in Flowery Branch, Georgia. The online communique reads, quote, So long as you continue to contract with the Atlanta Police Foundation for the destruction of the South Atlanta forest and the construction of a cop city in its place, know that your equipment is not safe,

your offices are not safe, your homes are not safe. Unless your company chooses to pull out of the Atlanta Police Foundation's cop city project of its own volition, we will undermine your profits so severely that you'll have no choice but to drop the contract." Subsequent solidarity attacks have happened in Portland, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Minneapolis, and Highland, Michigan, to name a few. Many of these attacks were targeted at Atlas Technical Consultants, who own many smaller companies, such as Long Engineering, which has done work with Reeves Young and Brasfield & Gorey for the Cop City project. Reeves Young and Brasfield and Gorey for the Cop City Project. In the vein of shack-style methods,

this past April, on the 9th, a website called StopReevesYoung.com launched onto the interwebs. The site listed some of the various third-party clients and subcontractors under Reeves Young Construction, and ways to contact them to voice concern about their relation to the deforestation and this urban warfare construction project, as well as including the names and addresses of executives within Reeves Young and some of their affiliates. On the day I was set to leave Atlanta and say goodbye to the forest for the time being, activists got word that Reeves Young Construction might be dropping out of the project. This would obviously be a big, big win, and an indication of the possible effectiveness of the shack method

combined with sabotage and the forest encampment tactics. At a stakeholders meeting for the Cop City project the next day, it was publicly confirmed that Reeves Young will not continue work on the new police training center. In the public statement addressing Reeves Young's lack of future involvement, the Atlanta Police Foundation tried to frame the situation as Reeves Young simply have finished their role in the project. This is a laughable deception, as Reeves Young is one of Atlanta's major construction firms and has even built massive quote-unquote public safety facilities in the past.

They do not merely do preliminary subcontracting survey work. They work on projects from start to finish, taking lead contracting roles. It was speculated that Reeves Young itself may have been the main subcontractor hired to do complete construction of Cop City by Brasfield and Gorey, who have more established ties to the Atlanta Police Foundation. Quoting from the Stop Reeves Young website, quote, The Atlanta Police Foundation would have us believe that Reeves Young was contracted to do nothing more than hire a bulldozer and walk alongside long engineering work crews as they planted a few surveying stakes

and did some soil testing. Police and their corporate backers don't want to let it be known that a focused group of activists have delivered a devastating blow to the Cop City construction. While the Atlanta Police Foundation tries to save face, we are celebrating a major victory, pressuring a main contractor out of the project. We are pleased that the movement has built up so much momentum and that the Cop City development continues to face setbacks because of the intelligent actions of regular people. However, the struggle continues. Brasfield and Gorey, another large general contractor, remains with the project. A Georgia Open Records request from April confirmed via paper trail that

the Atlanta Police Foundation has been working on the Cop City project with Brasfield and Gorey, another major general contractor in the southeast region of the United States. Brasfield and Gorey is an LLC and a multi-billion dollar general contractor, ranked as a top contractor in the Southeast by Engineering News Record. Based on recent Atlanta Police Foundation emails requiring through public records, we can now assume that Brasfield and Gorey act as the sole contractor for Cop City. Quoting again from the Stop Reeves Young website, quote, Brasfield and Gorey are dependent on subcontractors to complete their projects. Now they must hire a new entire set of subcontractors in order to build Cop City.

We believe it is in their best interests for Brassfield and Gorey to follow the lead of Reeves Young and drop Atlanta Police Foundation as a client, rather than remaining complicit in the destruction of the forest. It is up to all of us to make that clear to them. of the forest. It is up to all of us to make that clear to them. We can pressure Brassfield and Gorey out of Cop City by complicating their ability to do business. This does not have to be limited to the Cop City project. Their various construction projects and third-party service providers are numerous. If Brassfield and Gorey begin to feel like they must choose between all of their contracts and their Cop City contract, we are

confident that they will choose the former. By working to convince subcontractors, consulting firms, surveyors, architects, etc. around the country that Brassfield and Gorey are not a good business investment, we can make it easier for the construction company to do the right thing and dump the Atlanta Police Foundation for good. This has been an incredible period of momentum and research, but nothing is over yet. Now that we have made a decisive victory, it is important to remain more focused than ever. In the coming weeks and months, we will need to continue pressuring all of the contractors associated with the project to create economic incentives for them to simply move their time and resources to other endeavors.

The Stop Reeves Young website will continue to serve as an educational hub for this ongoing campaign. End quote. On top of confirming that Reeves Young was dropping out of the project, a few other interesting pieces of information came out at the recent stakeholders meeting held on April 26th. Allegedly, there will be a bid for the next contractors or subcontractors in the coming weeks, and that will be publicly announced. It was also announced during the meeting that the cop city planners will keep construction timelines secret and may surround the construction site and future facility with an unwanted fence in response to the, quote, law-breaking protesters. Atlanta Assistant Police Chief and Site Security Chief Darren Sheerbaum said, quote, we are working with DeKalb County to address any criminal acts related

to trespassing and vandalism, unquote. He also stated that police were also concerned with protesters targeting those who work on the project at other locations. Here's an interesting note from our Forest Defender pals on how the Atlanta Police Department function and are allowed to operate while inside the old Atlanta prison farm and Entrenchment Creek Park. This is something that's true of city police departments in general, police departments in general, but as soon as a cop is, you know, out of, like, streets and things like that, that cop is uncomfortable, and, like, cops here are carrying 20, 30 pounds of gear on them at all times, and not only are they carrying that much gear, but they spend most all day sit- running around and sitting in a car, and like, you know, that cop not only doesn't want to chase you through the woods, but they also

probably aren't capable of it. And aside from the obvious, like, you know, their infrastructure issues, them being away from their cars, not being on the streets, having all of their gear. We're also not in the city of Atlanta in this forest. We're in unincorporated DeKalb County, which means Atlanta Police Department doesn't have legal jurisdiction as police here. They only have legal jurisdiction as agents of the city of Atlanta because the city of Atlanta owns this property, which is outside of the city. So at any time when they're conducting an arrest, they have to have DeKalb County Police Department officers present with them.

There can be an Atlanta Police Department that has been major, like one of their huge high ranks, who has no legal authority here except to represent the city. And that relationship is kind of, like, tenuous at best. They're not pals. They hate each other. Yeah. And, you know, so if you're headed into town, like, bear in mind, that is a huge place to drive a wedge, because they fucking hate each other.

Yeah, no, there's, like, um, there was, like, one thing, one time where, like, Atlanta police officers were, like, inside the forest, um, with, like, a specific goal in mind, and DeKalb County police cruisers, not only did DeKalb police not want to get out of their cruisers and go into the forest, because they have, they didn't care, they didn't want to do this, so the Atlanta police, uh, were screaming into their radios, saying, get this person, they're walking out of the forest, get this person, they're walking out of the forest, and it would just be, like, five or ten minutes before the cab police, like, cruisers would just roll down the road, and, like, you know, there were, like, people who, like, ran into the woods, and, like, ran from them, and the cab police And like, you know, there were like people who like ran into the woods and

like ran from them. And the cab police like were like, I'm not going into these woods. And I'm also not calling to let the Atlanta police, to let them know that this person just ran from me into the woods because then I'll have to actually go in after them. Also during the April 26th stakeholder meeting, Security Chief Schierbaum announced that the FBI and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation agreed to an assistance request in mid-April from Atlanta Police Chief Rodney Bryant

and will be assigned to the site while attempting to work with neighborhood watch groups. He noted that, quote, we look forward to working with those agencies to ensure that this is a safe project that is occurring here and addressing any criminal acts that may be occurring on site to try to stop the project from proceeding, unquote. The co-chair of the Stakeholder Advisory Committee, Sharon Williams, invoked the term eco-terrorism as relating to the forest defense, marking the first time that word

has been used by the government officials to refer to this batch of protests. She also thanked the COP city planners for, quote, transparency in explaining why they cannot be transparent on the construction timeline. Emails between the Atlanta Police Foundation and the City of Atlanta obtained via public records requests do give a possible look into the future of the development. In a January 2022 email, Police Foundation Representative Alan Williams said that we, quote, plan on enabling work possibly in the May 2022 and June 2022 timeframe. Our project will last until the last quarter of 2023, and our contractors are currently working on an overall site logistics and safety plan, unquote. Although at the time,

their contractors still included Reeves Young, so there's no telling how accurate that timeline is now. Other emails detailed plans for Homeland Security to obtain ring camera subscriptions to monitor, quote, criminal activity at the new academy footprint, unquote. In general, when involved in any level of protest, no matter of the alleged legality, security culture considerations should always be among people's top priorities, especially with more eyes being directed to the Defend the Atlanta Forest project. Each person should be responsible for themselves. And I think that that type of action you're interested in taking should severely inform the type of personal security precautions that you're taking. I think that's been a recurring theme as the movement builds. There are folks that come into the movement not having heard the term security culture, OPSEC, or whatever you want to call it. And so that can be really jarring for folks that are just first trying to get involved.

But people pick it up surprisingly quick. Once you have built as a community like norms and customs around, is this a phones on or phones off meeting? Are we talking about this on Signal? Is the call for this action going out on social media? Are we just sharing this amongst friends? Where that hadn't really been a thing and where frankly a lot of people face significant repression here in Atlanta

during the uprisings because of security culture decisions that were made, I think that a security culture is being built here that, where it didn't really exist before, or at least wasn't widespread before, is going to survive long past this movement. I think one of the biggest aspects of these things is the social aspects of it and the generalizing of the norm of if someone answers you vaguely and seems uninterested in continuing the conversation, just understanding that they have your best interests at heart when they don't want you to know, and, like, quite frankly, you just can't accidentally share information you don't have. And so, like, you know, when we sit here in these woods and people say, you so, like, you know, when we sit here in these woods, and people say, you know, like, you say, like, so, you know, you know, where have you been, blah, blah, blah, and they're just like,

oh, you know, you know, places, or something like that, I just don't ask questions, and I understand that I don't just, not only do I not need to know, but I probably don't want to know. And, like, you know, when it comes to, like, more, like, material, technical things, those are important, but, like, the social aspects of security culture are so, so much more important than the technical aspects. It's like, I don't know, everybody talks about security culture as, like, take your phone out of the room, but, like, you know, if you take the phone out of the room and talk about doing crazy shit with complete strangers, you don't, you know, and have a reason to trust them, and, like, coming here to Atlanta, like, if you want to do crazy shit, don't, you know, if you want to do, if you're coming to Atlanta, let me rephrase that, if you're coming to Atlanta and you want to do crazy shit, think about how to do that in a safe way or as safely as possible. Don't come to us and be like, hey, I haven't met you before, but, like, do you want to go do some federal

felonies? Because no, I don't, and I don't want to know that you're doing that either. Like, we have, if you want to do crazy shit, that's cool, just, like, I don't want to know you did it, and, like, if you're, like, coming here with the intention of creating, like, I don't want to know you did it. And, like, if you're, like, coming here with the intention of creating, like, with the intention of, like, doing shit because it's, like, cool and fun, if you're coming here with the intention of, like, I want to gain social capital because I did crazy things. Like, maybe rethink that. Like, if you want to do crazy shit and you do want to come here, find your closest friends, plan a road trip, and don't tell anyone. In a recent interview, Atlanta Police Foundation President and CEO Dave Wilkinson estimates that Defend the Forest quote-unquote group members

have done hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage to utility equipment and has brought up plans to add a fence around the entirety of the site as construction begins, saying, and anyone on the site will be arrested and as we move forward the enforcement will become stricter and stricter, unquote. Also stated in an interview is that, quote, the police foundation also hopes to build separate museums on site dedicated to police officers and the labor prison that was once located there. So that's what the kids call mask off moment of building a dedicated museum to cops and the labor prison, aka slave labor prison, anyway. The first phase of the project had the initial $90 million price tag attached, with taxpayers

being forced to pay $30 million of that, and it's still unclear what the final cost of the facility is slated to be, or what the estimated operating costs are, or really how many phases of construction they really plan on doing. The past few weeks, the sight of cops in the woods has become a more and more common occurrence. Whether to do scouting or just apparently detonating explosives for funsies at their current makeshift shooting range like they did a few days ago. One morning when I was there, I woke up to people yelling, cops in the woods, which by the way is a very effective substitute for caffeine in terms of making you very awake and alert quite early in the morning. And then while running through the forest, I saw a beautiful deer and a hopping rabbit.

So nice clash of feelings and sensations there. In terms of closing sentiments, based on conversations and observations I had from my brief time in the woods, it's this. Play to your strengths. Don't play by the enemy's rules. Utilize the intersection of urban city-based tactics and resources while taking inspiration from classic forest-based eco-defense. Attacking from the cover of the woods and ensuring that the terrain is as unwelcoming as possible to vehicular machinery can help buy time for rapid response popular mobilization

from people living in the city if and when that time comes. 10-5-0, go ahead. Hey, y'all be careful coming down Key Road. They throwing bottles at the police and all that, bottles and smoke bombs. So be careful. They in the woods throwing at the police cars and stuff like that.

I'll copy. Appreciate it. Yeah, and despite the defensive nature of defending the forest, there still is a large amount of making sure that as often as possible you can do the prep work to set the terms of engagement so that they're fighting on your terms. You're not always complying to theirs, which can be useful for defensive stuff, obviously.

The whole aspect of defending a forest like this, that you, I think, defenders can have this almost, like, spectral quality of, like, cops don't know where people are, what they've built, what's in the forest, what's in the woods, and it's, like, spooky. Like, you, like, you don't know who's, who's spooky. Like you, like you don't know who's, who's up in a tree house. You don't know who's behind what tree. You don't know what things are in the woods. And that spectral quality of the forest defense is a really interesting aspect of it that you don't see in, you don't really see that in like pipeline protests as much. You don't really see that for like protests in a city. Um, cause the city very much is like a more of like a cop's terrain. Um, so I really do like that aspect of like cops are kind of scared to go in the woods

because they're spooky they have openly testified like in court testimony that said that when this forest offender was arrested the police officer that gave his statement to the judge was shaking, physically shaking, because he was so afraid from being yelled at. Like, that was all that had happened is a bunch of protesters were yelling at them, and he was shaking. The police are really dependent on their infrastructure. They are dependent on all of that kit that they carry around. They are not mobile. They are meant to be attached to that squad car, and every further step they take away from that, they are more and more uncomfortable,

and when they look around and realize they're in the middle of the fucking woods, that's terrifying for them, and that needs to be, like, taken advantage of, and it is. Woods that, like, they, that their drones and their police helicopters have problems, even with their thermal tracking, of seeing through the canopy.

Woods that, like, and I want to say, like, it was really funny to me that in that, like, it was said that the protesters were screaming, we know where you live, we know where you live, we're coming, we're coming. Yeah, which is, like, the whole ghost thing. Because, I mean, in terms of thermal thermal stuff i brought a thermal camera of mine here and the woods are very hard to see through with my thermal camera i cannot see more than like 20 feet away i've tested it on people it's that's a super interesting aspect and yeah like it's the whole like fern gully princess princess mononoke thing thing of when people come out of the woods wearing ski masks,

that's freaky. You can be the thing that goes boo in the night. That is you. And that's something that should be taken advantage of when there's people invading the forest and trying to destroy it. I think this is a really important thing to touch on, is that for a lot of us, even though many of us have been socialized to think of the dark and the night and send me off into the woods, there's nowhere I'm like, there's so much we can do, because we're not in this position of, you know, entering hostile territory to, you know, do things. This is territory that we control, and this is territory that we are using to fight back, We control, and this is territory that we are using to fight back, and we're weaponizing not just, you know, the cop sphere,

but we're weaponizing the terrain itself, we're weaponizing the trees, we're weaponizing the hills, we're weaponizing the ruins, and we're weaponizing everything here as, like, literally a thing to use to attack the state. If you give me a ridgeline, I can hide from the cops better than any fucking, you know, high-tech thermal scattering ghillie suit is ever gonna give me, you know? Out here, you don't need a bunch of fancy shit to, like, engage in conflict with the state, you don't need thermal cameras and all that. You can walk into a military surplus store and buy, you know,

for 50 bucks you can buy everything you need to, like, do just about whatever you want out here, and that's, like And that's, like, that's, like, a really important and beautiful thing, is it's not hard to do what we're doing. You just have to break down the mental barriers and do it. Yeah, we do our best to protect the trees, and the trees protect us, too. It's cool living here, and it's, like, obviously something everyone, most people probably, like,

think about is, yeah, how important wild spaces are, but it's cool to really fucking feel it, and it's, like, yeah, this place is super important because of how it interacts with the ecosystem and how it filters the water, and that it's a safe haven for a lot of like really beautiful animals and plants, but also this place is important because wild spaces are fucking uncontrollable, and I want to live in an uncontrollable way, and like you need those things, and um it is it's really cool that this is a wild space. It's also a forest in a city, which is cool. It's fucking weird. Like, there's city people who come here who are fucking weird and do weird shit, and it's sick. And, like, it is an uncontrolled space. And, like, sometimes that means that there's, like, fucking shit chemicals that are, like, fucking plants up, but also sometimes that means there's people who, like, are doing things that are free and doing

things they couldn't do in the city, and, um, and it doesn't matter if I like it or not, it makes me, yeah, it makes me happy to just know that those people can act on their desires, um, and, yeah, it's not always fucking convenient or good, and sometimes I end up in antagonistic relationships with that, because it conflicts with my desire, but there's no mediation, and there's, there's, there's no one getting in between, and, yeah, it's just, it's really important, and I think, like, the, the slogan that people say of not, what is it, not one tree, not one blade of grass like is like an inspirational thing but it's also like a strategy you know like it's like a tactical

assertion that is important for us like yeah if like this forest and these wild spaces are essential not just for us to physically stop the police, but like essential to be an anarchist. Like if there are not wild spaces, spaces that they can't put security cameras up here because there's no electricity and the trees are too dense for solar panels and they get smashed anyway. You know, like it's important to have those things. If there's not places like that, there's not places where you, you know, like, and so that for itself is cool. And the other thing is just living here with the fucking animals, like, it's cool. The deer, if you want to find a good hiding spot in the forest, pay attention to where the fucking deer sleep. They sleep in different places most nights.

You won't fuck them up as long as you don't pick the exact same one they're sleeping, and they're really fucking hard to find. Same thing with the coyotes, like, same thing with the snakes, and, like, it's just very cool to, like, get to observe and live with all these animals, and, um, you know, uh, there's an owl, this barred owl, and starts fucking screaming five o'clock every day. It's like a nice little marker. And that's, for me, that's better than, you know, looking at my watch. It's pretty cool. This leads us up to our present day and the upcoming week of action in Atlanta, Georgia, happening from Sunday, May 8th to Sunday, May 15th.

If you are anywhere near the Atlanta area, you have no reason to not check it out. It's a week's worth of events spanning from early in the morning to late into the evening, every day for seven days. You can find the calendar of events on defendtheatlantaforest.com. And if you are not near Atlanta, I would still recommend you make your way there post-haste if you are able to, whether that's during the week of action or later on down the line. More boots on the ground is almost always a plus. Here's some more info on the upcoming week of action from May 8th through May 15th.

So generally in the past, the past few week of actions have been like really above ground, really like getting people comfortable with forests, getting people into the forest, like, community events, like, and just, like, public gatherings, info nights, skill shares, other stuff like that. And I believe that this one, like, will likely have a lot of those events, but I also believe that, like, due to the nature of what's going on, that it's much more urgent that people come and create their, bring their own ideas, bring their own incentives, their own desires, and yeah. Week of Action!

It's odd. It's gonna be weird. It's gonna be crazy. It's gonna be all the things. I think there's gonna be family-friendly, we're like hugging trees kind of shit, and I'm excited for that, and I think there's gonna do some like what the fuck is going on in the woods kind of here's a bunch of cops kind of shit obviously we don't know what's really gonna happen but anyone that has been reading stuff like oh man i want to go throw down with the crazies you should come and do that and we have

some stuff to share and hopefully there'll be so many people here that don't know how to deal with it. The problem down here is the Atlanta police force. There is a lot of them, but honestly, they're also stressed out, and they are run dry. They're spread thin. They don't know how to deal with all this wood shit from shit that we've heard them talking about. They don't know what to do. They're not totally prepared. I think it's going to be a really fun and crazy shit show. And we want y'all to come to our shit show in a good way. I know you'll be like, oh, you shouldn't use those words. But in reality, nobody actually knows what's going to

happen. We know what we're going to do. We have plans that people can plug into. Some stuff you can bring your kids to and some stuff you should not bring your kids to. And there will be more, to be honest with you, you really got to just be there in person, because you can't put everything on Instagram. We're doing our best to communicate to folks what's going on down here, but there's just some things you got to come to,

whatever, the week of action. It's always a week of action, but this is like we're hoping people get really turned up for this week of action. It's always a week of action, but this is like we're hoping people get really turned up for this week of action, and maybe we all just become a roving nomadic war machine together. That would be the dream. So you have a thing in your hometown or wherever the fuck is going on, or your territory,

and we nomadic war machine over to your spot, and we just keep doing that. That would be cool. A few resources that some of the forest defenders wanted people to know about is first, obviously, DefendTheAtlantaForest.com, which has the Week of Action calendar. To keep up on news regarding the movement, you can follow them on Twitter and Instagram at DefendTheAtlantaForest or DefendATLL Forest. There is the Forest Justice Defense Fund at opencollective.com slash forest hyphen justice hyphen defense hyphen fund,

where people can donate to support the work of the broad coalition dedicated to saving the forest. There's, of course, StopReevesYoung.com, which has information on subcontractors and third-party service providers relating to the Cop City construction. Very useful even just for simple call-in campaigns. The website Scenes.NoBlogs.org hosts other news relating to the movement, anonymous communiques and stuff like maps of the area, and random other useful information resources. For info and guides relating to direct action,

there's a website titled warriorup.noblogs.org. And people can go there or to warriorup.noblogs.org slash guides for various interesting information, I'll say. And that last one is really best viewed on Tor, uh, with, via the Tor browser, just as a heads up. Also probably with like a VPN and I don't know. Anyway, be, be careful with that last one. Uh, but all, all of these, all of these, uh, sites will be linked in the show notes. The future lies in your hands. You have more freedom than you know if you can find the unconventional ways

of expressing it. See you on the other side, and I'll end with a word from our forest defender friend. There's no future. Let's nomadic war machine together. We might as well live. Yeah, hopefully we're going to stop the police training facility. I think we really are looking forward to people, hopefully some people sticking to stop the police training facility. I think we really are looking forward to people, hopefully some people sticking around after the week of action, because we are hoping that it doesn't die down too much to the point where a smaller entity than that was here for the week of action gets attacked. We would love it if some of y'all would stay, stay a while.

And exactly that. If it can happen here, I wasn't thinking about that, but it's funny and that fits. It could happen where you live, and maybe we can just keep... The idea is we share enough skills, we make ourselves obsolete. No one should be integral enough to the movement that you can't die off or leave and it can't continue. People should be reading manuals, sharing skills, telling stories, humming at the moon. We should be reading manuals, sharing skills, telling stories, humming at the moon, just be doing all this stuff to make each other

just aware of the different things that are possible for us to run because maybe we don't have all the, you know, the guns and the steel and the gold, but if we have enough people, like, being creative and doing some guerrilla shit, we can get a lot done.

And at the end of the day if you can do you have to be careful about how many hats you're wearing if you don't know about the RNC that's a long time ago now look that up they were really great community organizers but they were wearing too many hats it was the first time the Patriot Act kind of

new laws after 9-11 was like utilized on people and a lot of it didn't stick. But if you, what we really need is more faceless saboteurs, because honestly, if they, that's what we need. We need people to be, there's just, in reality, there's not enough people willing to do night work. It looks like there's an uptick in that behavior, which is great. But be safe, be smart, act alone or act with little. And that's what we need more than anything. There's a lot of people that are willing to do above ground stuff. There's a lot of people that

want to be known. And that's great. But we have enough of that. We need something else. and that's great, but we have enough of that. We need something else. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. you should probably keep your lights on for nocturnal tales from the shadow join me danny trail and step into the Fright, an anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into Tex Elite you get your podcast. at the underbelly of tech, brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

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