It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 35

Episode Date: May 21, 2022

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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. If I know one thing about diseases, it's that their home bodies.

No, it's fine. We make it. They just want to Netflix and chill. We just line up the entire population of the U SS. in a line across the U.S. and we shoot any deer that tries to cross the line. I think we should do the reverse and have deer shoot people who try to cross the line. It's the only thing that can protect us from the dangerous east.

No, no, no. Look, look. Well, I guess it works in the east. In the west, we have to maintain the right to arm bears. Yep. I guess it works in the East. In the West, we have to maintain the right to arm bears. Yeah.

I'm of the opinion, given how dry it is in New Mexico, that we need to sink every part of the country east of New Mexico to give it a coast that can keep it moist. I wonder how much of this is going to get in the final cut. Well, if you live east of New Mexico, welcome to the ocean. That's my suggestion. Speaking of people east of New Mexico, this is It Could Happen Here, a podcast where some of the listeners are east of New Mexico,

even though I don't recommend that. I'm Robert Evans. On the call with me is Christopher Wong, Garrison Davis, Shereen Lonnie-Yunus, and then our producer, Sophie. Today we're talking about terrorism. We can do it in a little NPR voice. So recently, the same week as the Supreme Court leaked a document stating that they would be taking out Roe v. Wade

and ushering in an era of theocratic fascism in a number of states, an individual or individuals unknown in Wisconsin attacked an anti-choice headquarters building with a Molotov cocktail and spray-painted graffiti on the side saying, if abortion isn't safe, then you aren't either. That same group or individuals claiming to be from them later reached out to me through an intermediary and sent a manifesto of sorts about the attack, promising follow-up attacks within 30 days. But they wrote in cursive.

So who can say? Who can say if this actually happened? So we'll talk first. I'm going to just go over first what happened in factual terms, and then we'll talk about the discourse around it. So basically, there's this attack on this um anti-choice like advocacy organizations headquarters in fucking wisconsin um it was a seemed to be a pretty good molotov in that uh like garrison you and i have watched a number of people fail to properly utilize i've watched a few people get ignited by molotovs I've watched it is easy to fuck up I did I watched one not cop get ignited by him all yeah I've seen a couple not

cops get ignited by molotovs yeah um they're they're they're not like people can fuck them up easily whoever did this did not fuck them up it was seemed to be at the moment no one has been arrested now it's possible by the time this drops, Wisconsin police will be like, oh, no, there was totally surveillance footage and they fucked up and we just caught them. But at the moment, it doesn't look like that's the case. effective action that did material damage to part of kind of the physical infrastructure of the anti-choice movement and ended without anyone getting caught. So that's the fact of the actual attack itself. A person who claiming to be affiliated with the individuals or group who did this, uh,

reached out to, uh, a source of mine who I'm keeping anonymous, but somebody who I've known for a while with a very good track record of being accurate and said, Hey, these individual slash individuals have a communique they would like put out. Um,

and I was sent, uh, an, an on files link, which is a link. If you view it in a normal browser, you'll get some fucked up shit. Don't put it in a normal browser. I specified it's like, you're supposed to, if you put it in Tor, it will download a text file, right? And the text file is the communique. So using the Tor browser for that link, you can get a text file in which they lay

out. Number one, they named themselves and the name they've chosen for their group is Jane's Revenge, which is a reference to the Jane Collective, which was a pro-choice group in the late 60s, early 70s that provided women with access to contraception and abortion illegally. A bunch of them went to jail. They were pardoned after Roe v. Wade, if I'm not mistaken, or at least otherwise. If you want to know more about it, listen to Margaret Kiljoy's Cool People Do Cool Stuff two-parter on the Jane Collective. Yeah, yeah, very well-timed. So they're calling themselves Jane's Revenge, and they basically

said, hey, if you are an organization in the anti-choice movement, you have 30 days to close down your operations. Otherwise, there will be follow-up attacks. They specifically noted the long, and it's at this point like a 40 years long history of terrorist attacks from the anti-choice movement, many of which have assassinated doctors, something like 16 people have been killed, dozens of bombs and bombing attempts, something like 100 acid attacks. So they made a note of all that and said that basically we will be responding in kind and attacks after this initial attack will be correspondingly more severe. They also claimed to have a pretty wide geographic reach, said they had folks in a number of cities and that, yeah, there's going to be follow-up attacks and they're prepared to defend their bodily autonomy with violence. So that's the gist of what was claimed in the communique. In terms of what I think about its legitimacy, I don't have any reason to believe they're not representing the individual or individuals who carried out that attack in Wisconsin.

representing the individual or individuals who carried out that attack in Wisconsin, based on the timing of when the communique was made and based on the fact that the communique is pretty consistent with what we saw from the actual action, right? So among other things, what you can tell from the physical action that was taken is that the individual or individuals who did this were pretty well organized. They carried out a competent action and they they thought there was a value in very clear messaging, because there's clear messaging surrounding the attack. The communique is very clear messaging. It does not sound like a right winger writing up a fake communique. It takes great pains to both connect itself to history, to frame its violence within the context of the violence perpetuated by the anti-choice movement for decades. And just in general, the communique seems consistent with the action that

we saw in Wisconsin. Now, we cannot say, I cannot say to a statement of certainty whether or not it's legitimate. One helpful thing they did is state that there would be more attacks in 30 days. So we're kind of waiting. If 30 days pass and there's never any kind of follow-up attacks by this group, then we can probably assume that this was either somebody bullshitting or that the heat got too much for them and they decided not to carry out follow-up attacks. But we're all kind of in this holding pattern now to see what happens.

My personal speculation is that they were exaggerating a number of things. I think that their claims about having members in a number of states and a capacity to strike in a number of states was more aspirational than literal, in that I suspect the people behind this attack and this communique are hoping that by carrying out attacks, they can inspire other people to carry out attacks and credit it to the same organization, right? Yes. Which is not an uncommon tactic in the history of terrorism.

And again, this is terrorism. That doesn't mean I don't think they have a point or that it's like fundamentally unjust. Terrorism is just like a set of tactics that different groups can use. And it can be ethical or unethical depending on how you choose to do that. You can attack purely infrastructure in a terrorist manner. And I don't think that's necessarily unethical. And you can also attack civilians in a terrorist manner. And I think that is unethical. At this moment, these people have not done anything I view as inherently unethical. They burned a building, which I think is often justified and is in this case justified.

So that's my opinion on the matter. Let's open it up. On the point you kind of closed with, I mean, yeah, they showed effective direct action. They did a physical thing. Molotovs are not the best way to do like to like arson a building, but they are good for a very quick attack. It caused this whole media thing, right? There's a lot of people talking about it, then releasing the communique through someone who can give it a lot of visibility. Jane's Revenge and saying in 30 days there will be more attacks in different cities, the message is that, yeah, you can... One way to look at this is if they don't have tons of members or allies that they know across different cities, is that anyone can do this. Anyone can do this and call themselves by that name and be a part of this larger thing. If you spread it around,

then it can become this thing that anyone can glom onto. You don't need to be part of a member of a specific group. You can just do stuff and release communiques safely and add on to the specter. Yeah, it's not hard to set up like a text drop in the same manner that they did. It is relatively secure. Like there's no perfect – if you are committing terrorism, there is no perfect manner to issue a statement. But of the different things they could have chosen, this is relatively secure, especially doing it through an intermediary. I haven't had direct contact with any of these people, but we should probably note that there's a huge discourse that started before the communique came out, arguing that this is like a false flag attack. Yeah, that's – yes. In a long line of calling pretty well-planned out direct action, when it actually happens, people will default to calling it an op or calling it a false flag from a variety of people there's like libs who say oh this is a staged thing to make our

movement look bad there's tankies who think it's like the CIA planning something there's random other folks who are like eh I don't know if it's legit a lot of people get various justifications for calling pretty effective acts of direct action and questioning their legitimacy.

I think some of this comes from, because there's obviously, there's the bad faith elements of this, but I think the good faith folks who question it, there's a lot of learned helplessness there. This idea that because somebody did carry out a pretty successful direct action attack that kind of did what its intention was, then it has to have been the FBI or whoever, right? Because obviously the left could never have pulled off something as cunning as throwing a single

Molotov at a building and spray painting the side of it. And I do think that that's a problem, whether or not you think the solution to issues like the right-wing attack on reproductive health care come from direct action. The fact that folks almost can't conceive of effective action being taken by the left without the feds being involved is really an issue. Yeah, and this was a federal infiltrator and you got people you got crowds turning people over to police you got people on twitter like trying to track down um like who was throwing molotovs and videos and like one of the people they caught they turned over the police it

turned out had been like had been the girlfriend of someone who got killed by the cops yep and so i mean this stuff this stuff has has this stuff has real worldworld consequences. It has already sent people to jail. It has this enormous demobilizing effect. I don't remember people. Do people remember the two big 2020 conspiracies? Okay.

The two big Twitter conspiracies were... Bricks! Who's dropping off the bricks in the protest yeah yeah people would see a pallet of bricks famous thing never seen in a major American city right next to a

construction site they'll be like how are all these pallets of bricks showing up there's like a construction site a block away and you're like okay who's distributing the fireworks how did these fireworks get here? Never mind it's June 29th. If you look at the history of the FBI,

some people will mistakenly throw the CIA in there. The CIA doesn't really tend to do the domestic fuckery. They're international fuckery. But if you look at the history of the FBI fucking with left-wing social movements, it's not by handing out brick pallets. Yeah. That's not what they do.

We have a lot of documentation about what they do, and it's not bricks. And if there is some secret group who's maliciously giving out bricks so people attack, throw them through windows, or throw them at cop cars, like, who cares? Bricks are getting thrown at cop cars.

It doesn't matter where they come from. People are still choosing to do action. like unions that could be controlled by the state and he marched a bunch of people into a square and the police shot them and that's how and that's that's literally how the russian revolution started like it doesn't it doesn't it like there's a there's a point okay there like there's two layers of this one is that like there there almost is never a conspiracy going on and two if the conspiracy is we want to push people towards doing things it almost it doesn't there's a point at which it stops mattering because a lot a lot of people forget about occam's razor when we're talking about these types of things usually this the more simple the answer the more likely it is the more the less involved parties the more likely the the more likely it is so if there's a choice between rad people fucking up an anti-choice headquarters versus

a government conspiracy to do false flag operations to make the anti-choice to make the the abortion movement look bad like one of those is much more simple and much more uh likely and it's people just deciding to do stuff because guess what you can you can actually do that you don't need to rely on these these weird narratives to like to justify your uncomfortableness at like at forms of radical direct action because it's it's people use that false flag idea so they don't need to actually engage with what direct action will mean and if it is someone's moral imperative to physically attack like physical manifestations of these sources of oppression yeah i think you're right

on the money there i think one of the things that's most frustrating to me about this is it kind of suggests that a sizable chunk of people who ostensibly consider themselves on the left are like focusing their time not on doing anything and not on taking any action to materially change the conditions they're angry at, but are instead looking for reasons to disavow other folks on the left and that that's like the primary, which is if you, again, if you like look at what we know Herbert Hoover was saying about the FBI's COINTELPRO program was the goal of COINTELPRO, right? Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking. I'm just like, I feel like this promotes, I don't know, a morality-like race or just competition where the only thing it does is just promote infighting when you have this, like, you're on your morality horse. But I think if you actually support real change, you have to come to terms with like you have to do illegal things and like holding on to like these made up laws that someone made up about like how to achieve change is useless.

And there's I mean, like dividing up a side that's supposed to be going for the same thing. Like that's exactly. Yeah, it's just it's missing the whole point and people don't really – yeah. If you look at the right, you've got all these folks who were like legal and whatnot proponents of ending reproductive healthcare access. And then you have the folks who were doing repeated acts of terrorism. And the folks who were on the legal side of things didn't disavow those people they were often affiliated with churches that did shit like auction off the possessions of like extremists who had murdered doctors and shit like they were like even the most they would do is just not directly talk about those people they didn't disavow them they didn't't attack it because they understood that

a diversity of tactics was going to be how they achieved their goals, that it was a mix of pushing for these legal changes and carrying out so many terroristic attacks that it frightened people away from supporting abortion service providers and other kind of reproductive health care service providers. I think that's the biggest difference between the right and the left, though. Republicans are really good at uniting on this big picture. And I feel like Democrats are not. I feel like they just, I don't know. There's too much fighting and that's why it's always fractured. Part of it is that on the Republican side, you have Republicans and you have the far right who are also Republicans. And even though a lot of you have the far right who are also Republicans. And even though a lot of folks on the far right bitch about the centrists in there,

like the folks who are closer to the center, they all get in line for really radical stuff. Like the center of the Republican Party always yields to the radicals, whereas Democrats do not acknowledge leftists as having anything to do with the Democratic Party or Democratic politics other than to yell at them when they don't vote. And on the other hand of things, there's a lot of folks on the left who hate liberals more than they hate fascists. And it's – I think one of those is a bigger problem than the other. I think the failure of the democratic establishment to like deal with the left at all or make any kind of progress that could be seen as actually left wing is much more of the problem. Yeah, but I think there are structural reasons for that too, which is, OK, if you look at what is the basis of conservative alliance right if you're a conservative you know okay if you're from the sort of like moderate business wing of the party if you're from the fascist wing of the party right you can have one judge who gives both of you the things that you want right because if you're if you're like the coke brothers the thing that

you want is deregulation right you want to be able to just like dump poison into the environment if you're on if you're on if you're an evangelical the thing that you want is i you know to no one can ever have an abortion again and you know if you if you're like a fascist i don't know maybe you want like we don't give food to immigrant children anymore so they starve to death and one judge can give you all of those same things because the the the sort of the the class and social issues of the republican base can all be fused together without harboring each other but the problem with with with this with the democratic party is that like the democratic party's basis is like what's left of the union movement but then also like a bunch of corporations and banks and like weapons manufacturers and stuff

but then also like a bunch of angry students and also like a bunch of people from different minority groups and all of these people like have different interests and you know in the democratic party ultimately like the thing the thing that they care about is keeping capitalism going and you know if they have to like if if that means that yeah i mean well okay if if your thing is you want to keep capitalism going like of course you're just going to throw your left wing out to the wolves, right? Like, it makes sense for them to do this because the part of their base that actually matters isn't like the people to have this, like, immediately, anytime someone does, like, people remember, like, when Nancy Pelosi's driveway got graffitied. Oh, yeah, yeah. With, like, the name.

Now, see, that was, like, that's never, never, that's horrible. Don't graffiti Nancy Pelosi's driveway. That's evil. That's an ISIS. You did an ISIS there. Yeah, everyone lost their mind and was like oh this is obviously a false flag and it's like what you know but the reason they do this is because they have they have like democrat optics brain where like instead of anything being about politics every

everything is just about optics and optics how does it look how does it look how does it look and like the only people who care about this are like weird pundits but because because everyone's so sort of absorbed in like the twitter media sphere like they they think that like the actual general public cares about the things that pundits care about because the only thing they're seeing is pundits writing angry articles but like nobody cared like zero people especially the graffiti thing because man people like dissect how someone sprayed an anarchist a yeah yeah if you're not aware like a big chunk of the discourse re it being a false flag or whatever was that the they spray painted yeah and that they they did they did like a they did like um the anarchy a inside the

inside the circle um and it's wild because, I mean, spray painting what they said, like, if abortions aren't safe, then you aren't either, in cursive is a genius move. It's great. Because if you spray paint it in some, like, random punk font, that's easy to be ignored. You're like, oh, it's just people doing, like, whatever, yeah, people spray painting stuff. But doing it, like, methodically in cursive is actually a really good choice because you're like oh it's like we're dealing with adults it's like like the type of things that people will go through their minds when they look at it is great um and it's just a weird denial to assume that no one who

takes radical direct action would ever write in cursive it's just it's like the most brain worms thing and it's also like it's also very, like, okay. So I am very bad at spray painting. Right. But like I have, I have used a spray paint can and because I used a spray paint. Well, this isn't a legend. I was, I was, I was, I was making, I was making banners for stuff. So this wasn't even like, this wasn't even crying. But this was just like regular spray painting.

It's like, that is hard. Like writing that in cursive and having it look that nice with the spray paint can is like difficult which you know if if you think about this about five seconds this makes it more likely that it's actually left just doing this because it's like what okay hold on so the anti-abortion people have one person who's really really good at graffiti and this is the person that they've yeah they sent him to the anarchist school in secret it's like it's nonsense but it's like people people just people want everything to sort of like like and i think this is the other angle of this is that people think that like

have this wild over assessment of the capacity of the state yeah and they think that anytime something looks slightly weird it's like oh it must be the state like like one of the one. Like one of the things that happened with the Brooklyn shooting too was like you had all these people. There was a tweet going around that was like, oh, the cameras just happened. All the cameras in New York were working except the exact one that would have caught the shooter. And this is like everyone circled around this and everyone was like oh my god this is a false flag and then no it turned out that like the guy had literally called the police but the police were so incompetent that like other people like saw him on the street and got to him before like the cops did and like the camera it turned out wasn't even like the camera that was out wasn't even the camera that like like they had him on camera it was a different camera but it was like everyone

everyone just immediately has this like conspiracy brain thing where they see like one thing out of context that looks slightly weird and they go oh my god this whole thing is is a state like cia like yeah it's so depressing it's so depressing because it's such it's so depowering you're specific you're like it ties into the learn helplessness thing that robert mentioned like You're convincing yourself that we don't have power to change things, that we cannot take any physical action to change things. And that's a not great mentality to have if you want to improve the world or if you want to destroy the things that harm you.

You don't want to fall into that specific that specific like i don't have any power mindset because you turns out you can do stuff it things happen you can people threw a malt off and broke windows and did graffiti shall we say cool people sometimes do cool things yes just like the name of the podcast. Do people... Stuff, yes. If you're going to plug the show, plug the show. Sophie, Sophie, Sophie, Sophie. That's my name. Sophie. One of the things that's interesting to me, and it might hold some lessons for folks

thinking about radical direct action and what gets attention and what doesn't. So obviously, this attack has garnered a lot of national attention, right? The fact that, and I think it's because there was both an attack and a message. There was another attack, and it's not 100% that this had anything to do with the pro-choice movement, but I suspect it does. The Attorney General of Virginia, Jason Meares, on the 10th of May, there was a somewhat a shot into his office, like a bullet was found in the office. It was probably fired when no one was there.

We don't really know more than that. It is unclear as to whether or not this is involved with things. But three days before the shot was fired into his office, he had basically Catholic groups had been planning big masses to celebrate the leaked draft opinion. And protesters had been organizing to protest the Catholic masses. And he had threatened to charge people who protested masses because he believes the right to freedom of religion trumps the right to free speech. So it was kind of like a fucked up situation. People got angry at miyarez um and it seems kind of noteworthy that someone shot into his office three days after this um also i mean there's been a lot of stuff i mean like on on may 8th there was an attack on the oregon right to life building yes yes yes which was certainly

appropriate a pro-choice yeah yeah there was there was there was at least two molotov cocktails uh thrown and there was a break-in inside so it's like you can do things you don't have no power like you physical you can interact with politics in a physical way um people do interact with politics in a physical way yeah and people people have this assumption that like this is going to be incredibly unpopular and again i want to point out burning the third precinct had a higher approval rating than both presidential candidates like which i mean i i again tend to advocate in 2024 we should elect the burning of the third precinct in minneapolis as president look every look the, the way that works is the burning of the precinct

takes office and then every day you burn another precinct so that you can actually have a president. Well, that is how you fill the cabinet. There needs to... All the staff positions filled with different... The Health and

Human Services Secretary will be the West Los Angeles Police Station and so forth. I'm real excited to see which one gets picked for the Housing Secretary. I'm just on my toes. It's exciting. Democracy can be quite fun. Electoralism has some really cool points. You too could go in front of the national labor relations board and the national labor relations board is just seven is just seven on-fire police stations so yeah i i we just we just want we wanted to at least talk about this because if whenever a cool

thing happens and a large swath of of people who are ostensibly leftists or even or even anarchists default to calling anything cool uh a false flag or an op it's like well like what do you want like do you want people just to stay at home all the time and not do anything like what's what's the end goal here uh if you're calling everything that happens enough yeah and and also just like if you're going to if you're worried about ops and thinking of suggesting that something might be what is your line is it just that people broke a law are you saying that if people do illegal things that's always like a government op because that doesn't seem like if you call yourself an anarchist that

doesn't seem like a good strategy. Yeah. I mean, especially when it comes to reproductive rights, like you're going to have to do illegal things. People are going to have to break a shitload. Exactly, Shireen. So it's like very pick and choose. I'm 100% convinced that like all of these people,

if they'd seen John Brown, would have been completely convinced that John Brown was hot. Oh, John Brown was for sure the FBI. He founded it. The original op, John Brown. would have been completely convinced that john brown oh john brown was for sure the fbi he founded it the original op john brown i think there's an aspect there of also like okay if if you're on twitter right mostly you're not doing politics and the the the thing that you're actually doing on twitter is trying to feel smarter from everyone else. And if you're the person that's like, oh, hey, look,

all these sheep will believe that this thing wasn't an op or like, oh, I, I, all these people believe. Yeah. It's like, it's like, yeah. Okay. You, you very quickly like spiral into just like every, all, all, all the sheeple who are smart person finds this suspicious. It's like, yeah.

Yeah. And it's like, it's just, finds this suspicious. Yeah. It's just a bad, like, looking at an element of event and going, oh, this is weird. But in a way that is, oh, huh, isn't this weird? It must be the government. Like, that's just a bad way of thinking. Like, in the mere hours, in the mere minutes after anonymous people broke into the portland police association headquarters uh back in i think was july of 2020 just in mere hours people were calling it a false flag that the police were dressed up as black block they credited as the feds the feds they said people had started

protesting the feds yes they alleged that this was like, I guess, the FBI or Homeland Security trying to get protesters angry at the cops again, which is, I mean, for one thing, if that actually would actually happen, that sounds like if there were to be a point where the left wing had the FBI fighting or the FBI or Homeland Security, whatever, fighting with local police over who was getting protested. That's a win. That's a big, solid capital dub for the but no people thinking like like the fbi is in block breaking into the police union building and trying to light it on fire you're like well doing doing less physical let's be honest doing less damage to that police union building that i have seen my friends do when attempting to deep fry french fries like yeah i have watched people do more damage to their living rooms than that protested to the PBA.

It's astonishing. Cause like there was so many people at that action and so many, so many people using the moment to, to actually gain like a physical political power for a brief, a brief moment. Um, and to take that away from them is just a, is a bizarre impulse.

And I would like to see it end, especially as we're going to see, hopefully, see that people realize that direct action is going to become more and more important for securing your personal rights and securing your personal freedom. And also, I would say to these people, okay, if you want to be completely sure that something is happening, it's not an op, do it yourself. Stop yelling about it on Twitter. Look, do it yourself. Then you'll know it's not an op. As a general rule, as a general rule, look at France. What do the French do whenever something they consider a right gets taken away from them? They burn downtown Paris down.

They light banks on fire. They burn downtown Paris town. They light banks on fire. They like Paris. Everyone who has gets elected to a position of power in France knows that if they cross certain lines, the capital will be ungovernable. And there is a reason why French people have such quality health care. Well, with with with that, I mean, I can't believe we're ending on the note. Be be like the French.

Look, the French have made a lot of good calls, a lot of bad ones too, not trying to whitewash France, but there's a number of things they got spot on. So anyway, we will be counting down the days until that 30-day marker. And who knows, maybe other attacks will happen with people also calling themselves Jane's Revenge. And obviously, this is something that we as journalists have no opinion on one way or the other. We're just reporting. Just pure reporting. Anyway, listen to cool people who did cool stuff to hear about the Jane Collective.

And maybe also recreationally read about what different civilian groups are doing in Ukraine and the degree to which a wide variety of incredibly available tools can be repurposed in neat ways. All right. I think that's the soad. That's a good soad.

That's the soju. 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 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 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, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. 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. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black Literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the

chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, and it continues to happen here. I'm Robert Evans. This is a podcast about things falling apart and what to do after

that happens. And we are all currently dealing with the falling apart of several decades of progress on reproductive justice, the Supreme Court leaking that they are coming for Roe v. Wade. And yeah, today I'm here with Christopher Wong and Shireen Lonnie-Yunus, and my producer Sophie. We have two guests from the Bridget Alliance and the Midwest Access Coalition. We're going to talk more about what they do in a second. Broadly speaking, both seek to attach people who are looking for reproductive health care and abortion access, but cannot get it easily in their area with clinics and the things that they need in order to get to the clinics, including

transit and time in hotels, whatnot, in order to make it easier to get access to that kind of health care in places like the Midwest, where folks have been spending decades making it much more difficult, even prior to this recent ruling, to get that kind of health care. So I'm going to let our guests introduce themselves. You've got the floor. Well, hi, I am Odile Shalit. I am the executive director at the Bridget Alliance. And I'm gonna introduce my counterpart here. I'm Diana Parker-Kostoff. I'm the executive director of the Midwest Access Coalition. this Supreme Court decision that's in the pipeline. But anti-choice activists have been working very hard to essentially create a post-Roe world in chunks of the United States prior to this point. So y'all have been kind of dealing with the reality that a larger number

of people are going to be living under for a while, right? Yeah. Yeah. Missouri has been able to effectively ban abortion in its state for years. And now I think there is maybe a handful of abortions that the one clinic there are able to do because of all of the trap laws, which is the targeted restrictions for abortion providers and the waiting period. So people have to go to another state, Kansas, Iowa, or Illinois for Missouri. And we've been helping those folks for years. And I'm going to guess this, I mean, just because you've been living in with this for a while, I'm going to guess the announcement last week did not come as a total surprise. The timing of it certainly did, which for Diana and I came at the heels of a conference that we were at, thankfully together, which was kind of just pure luck for us so we could actually commiserate together. But no, ultimately, this is not a huge surprise. I mean,

I think we're all still waiting to see what actually happens in June, but the writing has been on the wall for months and years, if not longer. And, you know, as you were just pointing it out, essentially for organizations like the Bridget Alliance and the Midwest Sexist Coalition, we have been existing already because the protections of Roe are insufficient to actually secure abortion access for all in this country. So this has been our lived experience. And preparing for this moment has been a long time coming. has been a long time coming. And I'm sure there have been a number of conversations that have been going on about what to do and how to prepare for this, right? Because the primary change is going to be, at least initially, until they make some sort of federal push, that states that have some sort of functional access to abortion are going to be flooded with an even higher number of people in need of care. Could you kind of walk us through what sort of steps have been taken to in order to kind of

brace for that impact, so to speak? Yeah, so I think a couple of things and the first to sort of pull back on that for a second is to say that part of preparing for what's to come has been our orgs and the community that we exist in, this incredible expansive landscape of different types of organizations that have existed for decades to secure abortion access, where the laws were insufficient, where people were faced with barriers like income inequity and geographic inequity and the unavailability of providers. This network, though, has existed largely unseen. And so a lot of preparing for what is to come is really embracing our existence,

feeling affirmed in that and in our value, not shying away from the expertise within this community, which is held both by volunteers as well as staff. And so I think a lot of the last couple of years has been focusing on really trying to harness that expertise and that knowledge and compassion. And the fact that many of the people who are leading a lot of the efforts in the reproductive justice movement are people who have had abortions themselves, which is an enormous and valuable part of how this movement moves and hopefully will continue to center the people most impacted by the fall of Roe. I think more specifically for Bridget and orgs like MAC, preparation means deepening our relationships with the clinics that we work with. They are critical, of course, and their sanity is critical to abortion access, is making sure that we have the sufficient funding to continue to staff, train, vet, volunteers systematically and mindfully.

And ideally do so in a sustainable way so that we're not all overwhelming ourselves with the sudden surge of need and the sudden surge of impact. And then, you know, for Diana and I, even personally, it means deepening the relationships that us practical support organizations have with one another, because no one organization is going to be able to help every single abortion seeker who will need to travel. It will rely upon really strong and transparent collaboration. So those are some of the things that we've been focusing on. One of the things that strikes me as a problem that's going to be, if not immediate, then pretty imminent for y'all is we've already seen threats and promises from

legislators in some states to attempt to criminalize leaving a state where abortion is illegal in order to get access to health care. What kind of preparation is even possible for that sort of world? Because it does seem like we're staring down the barrel of that. Yeah, I think the only preparation we can have right now is to expect that the courts will allow them to do that um they're very creative now that they've seen sb8 go into effect and hold on as the law of the land even though it's in direct violation of federal law um scot, the highest court of our country, is the one that has been allowing that to happen. And so that sends a huge message to all these forced birth legislators that, you know, bring us

your worst take on the law. We will find a way to let you keep it. We're working with you on this and you just need to get bolder and bolder and see what you can get away with. So we can't really predict how they're going to do that. Although Missouri has indicated that they're going to consider an egg as soon as it's fertilized a resident and a resident of

the state that they have you know responsibility for protecting um completely ignoring the fact that it's growing inside a uh complete human being that has rights um but that's that's the latest that i've heard of them figuring out how to restrict someone's travel. But it would require a significant shift in how we understand constitutional law and the basis for our legal system. them yeah and that that seems like something that i don't know like really genuinely seems to be on the table in this moment i mean we have i think it's louisiana who's trying to like part part part of their bill is that they like literally it says that they can disobey the federal government which we had a civil war about that we had we had a nullification crisis about that we like so yeah i guess i'm wondering what your impression is on like how far this can go like do do we get to the point where states can just like tell the federal government no yeah yeah i mean that's what the architect of the isp8 law

essentially told the court is that they don't have jurisdiction. And all the laws that they had passed in the 1800s are actually enforceable, and the federal government has no authority to stop them. And there, the 5th District and SCOTUS has indicated that, no, maybe you are right. Maybe that is the correct way to interpret our constitution. So I feel like all of that, all of our decades, centuries of figuring out what the law means for this country is just up in the air. And we may be looking at laws now that are just more and more bizarre.

As long as, you know, the GOP and the right have control over so many bodies of our government, you, it really is, I can't even fathom. I don't think we can predict what's going to come, honestly. Because we have seen a number of states, California kind of leading the pack, committing to maintain potentially open people like you up to criminal charges just for trying to support people in getting, you know, reproductive health care outside of their state. Is your question, do we think that elected officials that are pro-choice are going to back us? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, it's entirely possible that we're going to see some sort of federal law that not just criminalizes abortion, or even like prior to that criminalizes

aiding people in seeking abortion outside of states that have banned it right like that's on the table how does that change the landscape for you do you suspect that like in kind of a similar way to how some of these uh some of the legislators and states trying to ban abortion have said like we're just going to ignore federal law if it contradicts our state law. Do you think that pro-choice legislators in states like California are going to be willing to go to the mat and protect you? Or are we, I mean, yeah, I guess I know this is kind of an unknown, but I'm kind of, these must be conversations that y'all are having, right?

I mean, I really freaking hope that they are. And if they're listening, please, please prepare to do so. up with really clear language around their support of not just choice, which was the language of the past, but abortion and are saying that and are starting to invest in things like abortion funding and travel to themselves actually, you know, put forth their own efforts to contribute to the people who will need to travel into their states. And, you know, Diana was just speaking the other day with a bunch of elected officials in Chicago. So I think this is also why what I was talking about earlier in terms of orgs like ours coming into the light is so important, is that we're going to need those relationships with those politicians. We're going to need them to know us and see us and understand that we're a critical part of how we're going to serve their constituents. And that, yeah, we're going to need

them to back us. Will they? I can't say definitively, but I really freaking hope so. Yeah, yeah. And hopefully those, you know, as Odile said just now, I was in a press conference yesterday, the city, the mayor's office announced this fund to support abortion procedure funding and practical support. And my hope is with municipalities will talk to each other and give each other the models for doing this protective, preemptive support for people traveling to our states for abortion care. And yeah, I'm in with talks with the ACLU in Illinois to talkradited or sued or shut down by prosecutors in other states that want to claim that they have jurisdiction because, like I said, they figured out a way to give residency status to fertilize eggs or something. status to fertilize eggs or something you know i still can't get over that just completely fucked that that's kind of what we're staring at right like that that's that's a thing that you have to be concerned with is like out of state law enforcement i don't know like and that's the thing no one knows what it's going to look like right like we know that they have

a vested kind of interest already in in doing parts of this through bounties which is kind of like the thing that i'm worried about are we going to see like out-of-state law enforcement bounty hunting people trying to folks up with reproductive health care and i guess that's just kind of an unknown at this point but it's right and it really depends on like our local protected state jurisdiction like how far are they going to go to protect us from those entities that are going to try to come in for us um just this just today uh one of our staff members tweeted about practical support funds and who to support throughout the country that provides the sort of travel logistics uh help for people and they got followed by a sheriff's department in Missouri.

Oh, fun. Yeah. So they're already, you know, targeting and surveilling abortion seekers and the people who support them. Yeah. And of course, I'm sure that there's a degree to which some of these folks are working with, shall we say like non-state actors in order to, like I know they've been prepping with that for a while as well. Absolutely. What is,

I mean, one of the things that I know, cause I've been having some conversations with friends of mine who are in, like, I guess we could say adjacently adjacent organizations to, to where y'all work and who were at, in some cases, the convention you were at,

who are concerned that as providing people with reproductive health care becomes illegal, there's going to be a lot of fair weather friends kind of revealed. And I am interested, like, is this a thing that in order to be engaged in providing people with reproductive health care, you have to be willing to engage in a legalism at this point like is that really where we are that's really interesting question yeah as as member like as 501c3s uh you know uh looked at by our state governments, our federal governments, we can't engage in anything that's legal. But people have forever on their own done things that the state has considered illegal in order to have bodily autonomy. There are people who can't afford it.

There are people who are just so far from the nearest clinic that they can't even fathom how to make that trip. There are undocumented folks. There are people near the borders that can't even physically move past a border checkpoint because they're just trapped there and can't get care in other parts of their state where it's available. So that will be a thing. I think that is going to increase because the need will not decrease. And I do not, like my organization can't really say anything about that. But, you know, personally, I'm like, you do whatever it takes to live your life and thrive.

Laws are made up, especially now. Yeah, that is nice to hear. the sides of this fight that are, you know, working through 501Cs and the like and engaging in electoralism, the people who are, you know, doing stuff like trying to figure out ways to provide access to like miso pills and whatnot to people, because that's just where we are. We've talked about the degree to which you guys have already been living in some people's future, you know, just because of the specific nature of what your organizations have been doing. And the degree to which, you know, you knew some of this is coming, what has surprised you outside of just like the fact that it got leaked ahead of time,

about kind of what we've seen in the last week and change? about kind of what we've seen in the last week and change. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. I think I am, I'm not so much surprised by the response from folks. Um,

I'm a little frustrated that it took this moment for people to realize what has been happening in this country for the past decade few decades honestly this is this is a very long game uh for the antis but ever since trump was put into office and started just flooding the federal courts with very young, very anti-conservative judges. And SB8 was a huge flag. But I think I was surprised that there was a mass amount of people that were going to step up when the decision came out um it's it gives me hope

i hope it's sustained for the many many years we're going to need uh practical support and abortion funds while we fight for our legal rights um Yeah, so I guess the surprise is a mixed bag for me. supporters and newer supporters are about, as Diana mentioned, the existence of abortion funds and practical support organizations, that practical support is even being talked about is huge. We couldn't get this conversation into the media a couple of years ago. So, like, this is really remarkable and important. But what's more, there seems to be also, like, a deeper understanding of why we have to exist. It doesn't seem to be shocking people quite as much, although there certainly are still tons of people who are shocked by this. But for many, they're not shocked that for some abortion has simply been inaccessible,

and what those reasons are. And, you know, that's thanks, obviously, to a lot of the really hard, important conversations that have been had over the last couple of years about racial justice. And I think that, you know, it's a silver lining for sure. But I'm grateful to find that the depth of the conversations is there now. And hopefully that means that the commitment is going to be sustained in long term. Because this is a little bit of deja vu for us in the sense that we've had little moments like these ever since our organizations existed um when a single ban goes into place or is threatened to go into place this like swell occurs i'm using my hands a lot which obviously

you can't see if you're listening to me right now so i'm gonna put my hands down um and you know and that and that brings out a lot of really incredible donors and a lot of really incredible offers for volunteers and and then they tend to go away um and especially when Biden was you know elected there was definitely this like moment where everyone was like okay we're cool right we're chill this guy hasn't said the word abortion but we're still fine and we're not we're like the furthest from fine so yeah again like pleasantly surprised that people seem to have um a sense of why we're here yeah i just wanted to bring up that website did biden say abortion yet.org i think one of our colleagues has a big no i mean just like it's so unfortunately hilarious to me um but i'm just really glad it exists um and then

they someone reached out to the someone in the biden administration to make a comment on this uh when the when the the draft was leaked and they said well we tweeted it or like whatever it's and it's like it's he said it once in a tweet and like once in like a statement or something so i just think well there you go i don't know what more we want but like i just think it's important to what you were saying earlier um how legislators in like oregon or california like it's so important they're saying the word abortion not just pro-choice because I think a lot of people are a lot of people are scared about that word For some reason or it sounds scary to them if they're not that educated about what pro-choice Means or what abortion means so I think yeah, I have a little bit more hope seeing more people even saying that word

Yeah, we really have to take that. Yeah. Yeah. I think the statistic is something like the antis have been using the word abortion three times as much as we have. And that is why it's so stigmatized and difficult to talk about. And I definitely try to encourage people to say the word abortion, to talk about abortion with everyone they know, just so we can stop hiding. I guess kind of the last thing I'd like to ask, and we can cut this bit if this winds up not being something you want to get into, but have you felt an additional need to worry about, given how public you are in your advocacy, personal protection, um, as things kind of

have heated up? Uh, you know, we were, we were recently at the conference that you mentioned before. Um, and it definitely, with all of my colleagues in one place, it definitely made me feel a little vulnerable for myself and them, but honestly, the people who are targeted are the providers by far. I'm not worried about my physical safety. I'm worried about the physical safety of our providers. to peaceful protesters outside Kavanaugh's house and talking and asked for, I think, Susan Collins on the sidewalk outside her residence results in legislation being passed. Immediately. Immediately.

They all somehow got together for once in their lives to do something about the terrorists who chalked sidewalks outside legislators homes um uh is it's it's really demoralizing um because we have our providers have seen violence and um we have our providers have seen violence and um yeah they've seen violence almost every day murders acid attacks bombings um yeah chris shireen do you have anything else you wanted to get into yeah i wanted to ask one thing so you know okay seeing this sort of increasing fecklessness of our politicians even by their standards and you know their response to this being let's give more power to the u.s marshals which is a great idea yeah worst idea i've ever seen but what what can just people do about this in it you know i mean we talked about

like giving to abortion funds but like what how can people get involved and how can people get involved in a way that's sustainable over the long term? Yeah, I mean, definitely give to abortion funds, give to practical support organizations like the Midwest Access Coalition and the Bridget Alliance. If you are interested in volunteering, reach out to your local organization. in volunteering, reach out to your local organization. There are a couple of really great resources for lists of those organizations and where they are, like the National Network of Abortion Funds. And you do bear with all of us because we are handling a flurry of emails, and that's incredible, but we won't be able to plug you in immediately. It might even take a little bit of time. But then I think that, you know, voting is still critical, especially in local, in any local elections, especially if we're thinking about how we're going to prevent the possible criminalization of abortion seekers and of abortion providers. We need to make sure

that we've got good judges and good local elected officials at the very least. So do not stop doing that. Yeah, I think those would be the things that I would say focus on. And the thing that I always say, which is just like, talk about it. Like, I am totally that person who is like the downer at the dinner party talking about abortion, but be that person and go and talk about it and share why it's important and how it's not just about abortion. And it's not just about women. It's about families. It's about parents. It's about queer folks. It's, it's about immigrants. It's about minors. We've got a lot to be worried about right now. So don't stop talking, listening,

We've got a lot to be worried about right now. So don't stop talking, listening, reading, consuming, whatever you can. Yeah. And just to jump off that, if you are in a safe state, you're not going to be safe forever. They're going to come after us. They're going to come after the legislators, the Supreme Courts of those states uh they're usually a thin margin um as far as conservative versus progressive judges on state supreme court so find out who your local org is that is leading that um voter turnout to make sure that people are voting for the right judges to go in. And also I want to lift up escorts. Escorts are on the ground many days of the week. They will put you to work and they're going to be needed more and more.

Yeah, I think that's all very important and a good note to end on. Does anyone else have anything else? Or should we let y'all get back to your very important work? Um, and thank you again for, for making the time for us. Absolutely. Thank you for covering this and talking about it. Yeah. Yeah. Happy to do so. We'll be, we'll be continuing to, to do that.

And I hope you all, um, um, geez, I don't even know what to say. Like, I hope you, um, um, geez, I don't even know what to say. Like, I hope you, I hope you fuck shit up for the people who are fucking shit up, you know, we'll try our very,

very best. Absolutely. Yeah. I hope the support doesn't like dissipate as like, yeah, the trend goes away or whatever, you know, I think that's so disheartening if that happens.

I'm like, hopefully the flood of emails, but not necessarily remains a flood for you but like i hope that people are actually serious about doing something and um i think this time they might be just because i keep being surprised about uh little things so i'm not gonna expect anything anymore maybe people will surprise me yeah but i really appreciate the work you do um so thanks for coming on to talk to us thank you thanks for having us welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows,

presented by iHeart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. 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 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. 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.

Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me in a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Talk to your Zoom H6 about crack cocaine abuse. Some amount of crack cocaine is perfectly normal for a recording device to use. It is part of the recording industry. But everyone can overdo it, and if your Zoom H6 starts not reading cards or, for example, stealing from you in order to pawn your stuff to buy more crack cocaine, you might need to do an intervention. This has been Robert Evans and a public service announcement about the Zoom H6 handhold recorder. How was that?

Are we good? Yeah. Is that a good way to introduce a podcast? What podcast? It depends on your answer. That's a great question, Sophie. Scholars have debated for decades which show this is but personally it is the opinion of myself uh and a large body of researchers at oxford and cambridge that this is it could happen

here a podcast about how things are falling apart and how maybe put them back together one of these days figure it out i'm here with garrison and chris how are you guys how are y'all doing just just absolutely splendid. I'm extremely excited that every time I leave Twitter, there's a new mass shooting. There was like 20 the past weekend. It's been a lot. There have been quite a few mass shootings in the last 48 hours,

and there's a non-zero chance there's been at least one between when we record this podcast and when you listen to it. I'm not trying to be flippant that's just a reality um so i think we're going to talk about the two most recent ones one of which um was the mass shooting in buffalo new york by a 4chan motherfucking white supremacist uh very much patterned after the 2019 8chan shootings, particularly the Christ Church massacre. And then the day after, I guess it's not technically a mass shooting because only

one person was killed, thankfully. But there was a shooting that was certainly an attempt to be a mass shooting because he attempted to close the exits and stop people from leaving at a Taiwanese church in Southern California, which was stopped by the congregation before nearly as many people could get killed. It appears to be, it's just come out motivated by nationalist hatred of Taiwan by a Chinese man. That's the broad understanding of both.

It's complicated. Yeah, I'm sure we'll get into that but we should probably deal with them chronologically um the buffalo shooting is it's one of those things i made a big chunk of my bones as a journalist in the field that i used to spend most of my time reporting and covering the 8chan shootings. And after every one of those in 2019, I had an article within about two hours. I haven't written anything about this one. I don't plan to, because there's not much to say. It is what we've seen before. I know there's some debate over how much of the manifesto, as there should be over like how much of the manifesto you can take at face value, which is none of it. And as to whether or not there might be something more going on here.

But it is kind of my opinion from the information we have that this is the kind of attack we've seen before and the kind of attack we will probably see again more than once before the year's over. radicalized primarily against the immigration or the existence, really, of people who are not white in the United States, and believes that the best way to cleanse the country of people who are not white is to carry out mass shootings that will radicalize other people, and that will lead further to the breakdown of civil society in the United States by pushing it kind of like hot button issues like gun control in order to further, you know, it's an accelerationist sort of attack. So, yeah, that's what I'm seeing here. Yeah, I mean, it's, yeah, like we said, it's very, very much riffing off of Christchurch. I mean, at least over half of his manifesto was like specifically plagiarized yeah manifesto which of course that manifesto itself was was

ripped from a lot of other manifestos it's kind of just a series of like launching mimetic language from one shooting to another just kind of compiling into this massive conglomerate that's all based on trying to convince more people to do the same act. That's really... That's why when people are talking about this and people try to limit the attention on the manifestos and that kind of stuff,

because it's all crafted specifically to get other people to do the exact same thing. It's filled with memes, filled with in- with in jokes full of like in group out group stuff to convince people to kind of go down a similar path and all of it's carefully crafted that way the one really interesting thing about this is that there's not only manifesto but also like almost 700 pages of diaries that he posted as well um and logs from from like over like like like from a long long time uh tracking his inner thoughts but

also like again he posted it and he knew he was gonna do this so there's no telling how how accurate that is yeah it's all it's all in this package that he wants to present to people so a lot of the nitty-gritty is not even worth talking about in a lot of a lot of cases no and i'm not i think there's broadly speaking things you can learn. And I'm also, to be clear, I'm not against researchers studying, and I think it should be, absolutely. I am against just finding a thing in there and like posting it. Like when I made my post, I was pretty careful to note a couple of things that seemed consistent based on other aspects of the like, things that he claimed about his radicalization that seemed consistent with what we were seeing like he noted that he was primarily radicalized online

that seems plausible to me because of how fucking online the manifesto is um yeah like and it's one of those folks are not entirely wrongfully bringing up the fact that the the great replacement white genocide sort of conspiracy theory that seems to have motivated this fellow is basically identical to shit tucker carlson says that's not not that's not what radicalized him though but that's not what radicalized yes this is not a dude who was watching fox right that's something i've been frustrated by looking at the discourse because yes obviously tucker shouldn't be talking about this because he's normalizing this very rhetoric that you find in these manifestos to be talking about this because he's normalizing this very rhetoric that you find in these manifestos but he did he did not find this from tucker this is like it's a whole whole different

ball game um and when there's that conflation i do find that to be slightly frustrating yeah and some of the problem with discussing this is the problem with discussing basically any of these attacks is that the mass media coverage of it is nearly always going to flatten it to a degree that works in the favor of the people who are using this as propaganda of the deed yeah and we can talk about maybe are there ways to deter that you know i've i've definitely that's something that i've spent a decent amount of my career kind of struggling with. different bunch of belief systems and sides immediately trying to spin it in order to push the narrative they think is useful for the attack to have. And some of them believe legitimately what they're saying. I think most of the people who are like, this is, you know, Tucker Carlson's

doing are generally just folks who have not spent as much time in the fever swamps as we have and see, oh, Tucker Carlson's talking about this. This guy carried out a shooting. They must be related, right? I don't think that's like, that's wrong, but I don't think that's malicious. And then you get folks who are malicious with it, right? Like you have- All the Azov battalion stuff is- The folk, right. One of the narratives we've seen form, particularly from what I like to call the shithead left, is folks being like, well, there was a son in Rod, the black son. It's a Nazi occult symbol. People who are more nerds about Nazis will even quibble that. But that's the broad strokes of what it is.

And it's a symbol that's definitely on some Azov gear. It's also has been on a bunch of shit well before there was an Azov battalion. Since the 30s, since the 40s. Yeah, it's all over the fucking place. And the reason he did it, the reason he had a black sun on some shit was not because of the Azov battalion. It, in fact,

he talked about wanting to break up NATO a bunch, but it was because the son and rad was on the chest of the plate carrier of the Christchurch shooter. Yes. Yeah. He's a big fan of the Christchurch shooter. There's all of these people who are like, yeah,

authoritarian left or whatever, who are being like, oh, how can Americans condemn this attack when this guy is using as of imagery? And there there's no telling how genuine they are with this. Like, there's there's no telling if if they actually know what they're doing or if they're just or if they're just being like if they're purposely misinformed or what's going on it's like he doesn't it doesn't matter but yeah my my assumption with those folks is that they are doing it because if you are um a competent paid propagandist you want to always be pushing the narrative in a way that furthers whatever it is your job to push. And if your job is connecting Ukraine to every bad thing that happens and a mass shooting that has nothing to fucking do with Ukraine or the Ukrainian government, if you can connect it back to them, then you're back in your wheelhouse, right? wheelhouse, right? Because maybe you're not so strong talking about the fact that you and some of the people around you have been friendly with fucking Tucker Carlson, and he pushes a similar

narrative to the one this mass shooter used. Maybe that's uncomfortable. What is comfortable is saying, no, this guy who did this bad thing is tied to these other bad people who are tied to this group that my entire career is about attacking. That's a much stronger position to be in, you know, if you're you're you know a propagandist it's just like you see folks on the right who don't want to grapple with the fact that this was a right winger who carried out a terrorist attack um based on an ideology that even motherfucking ben shapiro has pushed elements of um you don't want to deal with that so you call him a leftist because you saw the same thing with christ church yeah he made a couple of vague

he's not a leftist he repeatedly identified himself as right-wing and as a fascist as a nazi um as a an ethno-nationalist um but he made like a couple of vague comments that they're taking out of context and being like see he was on the left which he wanted to happen that is like which he wanted to happen that's why he put it in there right it it's like it is like it is all part of the bit it's all this it's it's it's it's all of this like i like irony poisoned thing that they do on purpose to give anyone a propaganda out or give anyone a propaganda it's all yeah if you'll remember before it's not it's not new but it's frustrating yeah in the christchurch manifesto tarrant um said that he'd been radicalized by candace owens yeah who's like a person who says a bunch of shitty,

fucked up stuff. I don't like Candace Owens, but like had nothing to do with that guy's radicalization, right? Like that's not where he's fucking coming from. But he did it because he wanted to, because it's fucking, it's shit posting, you know? It's to muddy the water.

It's to get people, like it's to reduce the ability of people trying to grapple with what has happened to accurately see what has happened and accurately identify the problem and respond to it. A big motive for this stuff is to cause this kind of social and discourse chaos, right? They want people – they want everyone to be confused and they want everyone to be fighting each other and disagreeing on basic terms, right? and they want everyone to be fighting each other and disagreeing on basic terms, right? Because the whole point of this is to encourage gun control legislation, which will get the right match,

which will cause people to be more willing to do mass shootings or to do attacks against government, right? It's all part of the very basic accelerationist talking points and tactics. So the confusion is not accidental. It's all intentional. No. I think a good way to look at this, if you, like, fighter planes and helicopters in a combat zone will have a type of countermeasure

they will launch if someone's shooting a missile that's like a tracking missile, heat-seeking or whatever at them. It's called CHAF, and it basically, it looks to the missile the same as a helicopter does. So you shoot a bunch of these out, and the missile goes and hits something that's not the fucking helicopter, but to its sensors looks like a helicopter. That's what they're doing. They're shooting out chaff.

They're getting you to box with shadows rather than potentially landing a blow against the central problem. And the central problem is not an easy one to grapple with without all that stuff around it, right? Because the issue here is how – the way in which the internet enables radicalization, the way in which online communities are prone to radicalization, The conservative media and aspects of just basic American history play into this specific people who want to do violence in this way for this reason, which is why the cops don't notice them even when they're on their ways in which the internet has created a perfect incubation chamber for radical violence. And that is one of the stories here, right? People are focusing on gun control, which – this guy bought his gun in the state of New York, which has the most restrictive gun laws in the country. which has the most restrictive gun laws in the country, was more relevant, even if you're on that end, is this guy was deeply involved in like tactical Reddit. This guy was heavily involved in tactical videos and training videos and talking with other people about the best weapons, the best ways to use them. And if you watch the – don't watch the video.

But he was competent. He engaged competently. He did – he maximized his ability to do damage. He took out somebody with a gun who was attempting to stop him. That shit, the stuff that he did to prepare tactically worked. And the kind of tactical chunks of Reddit, of the internet, which are not all right-wing, but a hell of a lot of them are, and a hell of a lot of them have gone in very scary directions in the last couple of years um not only do i suspect contributed to his radicalization but i can say certainly contributed to his ability to effectively kill people yeah i mean he had like over five pages just on what helmet he picked out he had pages on what socks he was wearing which is not which is for multiple reasons it's one to make the actual act more effective it's two to inspire not like discourse like this

but also to to get people to replicate what he did right it's crafting all of these symbols that people can replicate be like oh he picked out these socks that means i'm gonna get these socks i'm gonna get these socks it's all this branding thing um we should take we should take a break and then i want to come back and talk about some memetic language stuff. You know, who else can give you good advice on socks? Oh, boy. All right, here's ads. Okay, I want to talk about some memetic language stuff, because this was all heavily riffing,

and I specifically used the term riffing, off of the Christchurch shooting, which itself was riffing off of the Christchurch shooting, which itself was riffing off other stuff. Right. But he, he went so far. I mean, the Christchurch shooting was a copycat shooting of the Anders Breivik shooting,

or at least descendant of whatever term you want to use, but that's what inspired the Christchurch shooting. And it's, I mean, he was the, for, for the Buffalo shooting, he was testing out different live streaming platforms.

He was doing all this stuff to craft a very specific image. And images are very powerful. We've talked about meme magic before, if we want to get silly about it. But he was very much involved in crafting these things that could be replicated visually. That's why he wanted to live stream it so bad. Just the same way uh christ church was and this is like really important for why we don't share this type of stuff and why we why we specifically clamp down on this on this on this style of propaganda and why we really encourage people not to share it not to look at it not to do that stuff because he he does in in the few

parts of the manifesto that he did write um he does he did say like watching the christ church video was very impactful for him which i don't disagree with i'm sure i'm sure it was he he did change the course of my life yeah even and he did great lengths to recreate it um and this is why we the people who are like researchers and people who kind of try to handle this kind of stuff in their time on Earth, are so particular about this. Like, I think last year, like a year and a half ago, there was this film company based in New Zealand

who wanted to make a Christchurch film. And they were going to film a recreation of the shooting, but they said, like, oh, but it's to show the horror and to show the impact it had on the victims doesn't fucking matter it matters zero amount because once you put that language into cinematography you are giving them basically ammunition to help create propaganda which will get more more people killed this is why the same thing we see the same thing on fucking um roblox we see people recreate the christchurch shooting on roblox it was actually a major problem

like a year ago specifically. It was a huge problem of people recreating the footage inside this game engine. And it's specifically it's a very powerful tool that they use to spread around. It's targeted specifically people ages 12 to 18. This guy

was 18 years old. He was heavily involved in online gaming he was really heavy um reddit user specifically um he loved discord so it's these are the places where it spreads even more so than 8chan now to yeah and i would say we and i called him like a 4chan shooter because number one he definitely was familiar with with poll and number two he was on there he announced his live stream there i do agree with you reddit was a bigger part of his radicalization i suspect and a lot of and discord probably and i suspect he did purposefully minimize the extent to which conversations on discord were part of

his radicalization journey in particular that would be my assumption at the moment but for countering this type of rhetoric in this type of propaganda right right, because they're trying to make themselves look cool, they're trying to make themselves look tactical, they're trying to make themselves look like they're in a video game, they make it look like they're in a movie, right, they're trying to be cinematic. He was testing out different cameras. He tested out, like, a GoPro.

He tested out his phone camera, right, trying to get a specific look. And we just talked about how he was tactically proficient in some ways. But in handling this type of thing, we have to, when we're crafting counter stuff to make this thing less likely, we need to not even focus on that.

We need to make them look stupid, make them look juvenile, make them look like they're pathetic, make them look like they're stupid and silly like they're LAR that's one of the things that saved god knows how many lives at kind of the high point of the eight chan shootings in 2019 was that fucker in hall germany tried to carry one out and got the piss beat out of him by a dude at a mosque yeah um and was photographed the next day just covered it's like beat to shit um that image probably saved some lives they they want to be cool they want to be memetic they want to be spread around as a symbol and we need like culturally need to yes this is obviously very

scary this is a very real threat for many for many people many people of color many black people many many muslims people of different religions jewish people queer people but we need to when when specifically crafting rhetoric and propaganda against these things we need to make them look pathetic right that that's what it needs to be framed as because if you make them look scary and competent that's actually going to make these things worse. Um, because they, they, they love that, right? Like if you film it,

the Christ, if you do any kind of like movie about the Christ shooting, no matter how you shoot it, they're going to love it. If you're showing people in pain, they, they want that. They want that.

It's that's the, that's what they're looking for. You need to specifically frame this as these people LARPing and these people being pathetic and people being terminally online and having bad social skills like you need to frame it in this way that makes them look not desirable

because their whole point is to craft this desirable and visually stunning propaganda and I think yeah that's that's I've been thinking about this for the past day or so because there's just been so much but like identifying these people isn't the problem, right? Like this guy, he was, he was talked to by, by counselors last year cause they were afraid he was, he was going to do a school shooting.

Um, like there was a lot of the red flags and stuff that like he was, he was taught, he was talked to by people before this happened. Like he wasn't an unknown factor. He wasn't an unknown of. He wasn't an unknown vector to be a person that can do this. But there's no way. People are good at finding these people before they do it,

but we're bad at actually stopping them from doing it once we find them. There's really no power to stop it. And interrupting any kind of radicalization pipeline is really hard. So it's more about laying the groundwork to make the pipeline look pathetic so it's harder to happen again.

But always countering this stuff is frustrating because if there was a good strategy, we wouldn't be here. Be deeply... I want to move on to the shooting in California. But at the end of this, to close out, be deeply suspicious, if not outright contemptuous, of anyone who posits a simple solution to these shootings,

whether that solution is gun control, whether it's expanded police powers, whether it's fucking arming everybody so that they can shoot shooters. Anyone who proposes a simple solution to this, this is a deeply complicated problem because we let a number of horrible, horrible, obvious problems go on for way too long. And the solution to this will be painfully, agonizingly difficult and will take time. painfully, agonizingly difficult and will take time. And there is not a simple, all-encompassing way to deal with this. One of the things that you can do right now to better prepare yourself to potentially deal with this problem is take a stop-the-bleed course, carry an IFAC and a

gunshot wound kit as often as possible. And that continues to be my best immediate advice to people because there's no downsides to doing that and it could and does save lives in other shootings. All right, let's move on. In other news. In other news, the next shooting. Yeah. Hooray.

Yeah, okay. This is a weird one. hooray yeah okay this is a weird one um and i i think the thing we need to make clear up front is that this happened yesterday um as a time of recording still yeah time of recording details are still emerging and it's weird there's a lot of potential. So for people who don't know, a Presbyterian church in California was attacked by a Chinese guy. This is a Taiwanese church. It's mostly senior citizens. And there's a few important things up front that people should probably understand about this. One is that, okay, so Taiwan is ruled by military dictatorship.

Basically, the better part of the post-World War II period, it is ruled by military dictatorship run by the Nationalist Party, the KMT. The KMT is extraordinary. In this period, it is extraordinarily violent. They assassinate people all over the place they kill people on American soil they kill they train death squads in Latin America and you know

they're known for the sort of human anti-communism but eventually they're sort of toppled by revolution isn't quite the right word but as you know the KM t as a party is still around today as one of the two sort of major like taiwanese political parties but they're not like the sort of desk they're not exactly the sort of death squad mafia party that they were

through most of the 20th century um the the sort of the the sort of progressive forces that work to overthrow the dictatorship a lot of them coalesce into a party called the ddp and one of the things about the ddp is and there's a lot of sort of complicated taiwanese political stuff here but they are very very closely connected to the presbyterian church in a lot of ways and this i i don't know the specifics about this church but there is there is a very strong connection between and then the the ddp are okay pro-independence is putting it too strongly but if you're a pro-independent like you you want taiwan to be an independent country and you don't want them to sort of like either continue well okay this is the problem with taiwanese politics it's

enormously convoluted uh there's a lot of stuff going on at some at any time and people are going to get mad at me for the supplications i'm making but yeah the short version of the story is that the sort of anti-ccp pro-independence e-forces are and the sort of like progressive movement is sort of lumped into the ddp and those are the people who are getting shot yeah like because yeah because again there's there's this very strong connection between presbyterian church and the ddp um and the kmt who again, okay, they've had an extremely complicated relationship with the Communist Party over the last hundred years. It's incredibly baffling, but they've basically swung around towards being more favorable to China. And there are some extremist factions of it that support unification.

just unification um what seems to have happened here is okay so this the the shooter's family seems to have been like deported from china to taiwan and he like did not like it in taiwan and and this is where it starts to get very murky um the the police statement we have says that you know it's about sort of racial like it's it's it's anti-taiwanese animus but that can mean a lot of things and yeah this this again i keep saying it's murky and it's because it's it's genuinely murky there's a chance that this is one of one of the things that's been happening since the Hong Kong protests is a solidification in mainland China of anti-Taiwanese sentiment has sort of lumped in.

In this sort of nationalist anti-Hong Kong thing, there was a hardening of rhetoric against Taiwan. But also, there's a lot of people in Taiwan, especially KMT hardliners on the hard right, who really, really, really intensely hate the sort of progressive, anti-CCP, pro-independence people. Sure. And this is something we don't know what his affiliation is. He was in his 60s right yeah well and this is this this is this is weird because like there's a lot of things that could be true about this because of how old he is like again you know i mean he he he is around

when the kmt is is straight up a death squad party right yeah yeah so it could be that it could be he's sort of like independently radicalized. There's been some like rumors might be too weak of a word, but there have been some kind of sketchy reporting that like his ex was leaving for Taiwan and that that may have played a part in it. But, you know, violence between the KMT and people who don't like the KMT is a thing that there was a very large amount of in the US for a lot of reasons. And even though the KMT is sort of like, I mean, their alignment to China has like flipped in the past about 40 years. I don't know. I'm really, really desperately hoping that this isn't going to set off i mean because i mean there's already been a lot of especially around hong kong there's been a lot of physical violence like people attack each other at protests about between for example people who protest and uh chinese like ccp nationalists but this is something different very weird very embedded in the taiwanese context and i don't

think we fully understand what's going on here um the other thing again is like this guy like he lived in taiwan like he was speaking taiwanese like when when he was essentially like going into this church to infiltrate before he shot everyone so like he this isn't like this this this isn't and i think people are reporting it like this because they don't know what's going on but like this this isn't a case of like a guy who is from mainland china who like decided that he hated taiwanese people like this he he was there he likes he speaks he speaks taiwanese he like understands the taiwanese political situation very in depth which presumably is why he targeted the specific church but other than that it's it's the motives are still kind of murky and this is

the other problem with it which is that like the sheriffs like there's no way that the sheriffs have any idea what they're looking at like they've apparently reading his personal notes and it's like i don't trust their analysis of it good lord no yeah like these if you weren't here we would have to find someone else who understands that conflict in order to talk about it i don't feel comfortable like trying to figure out or analyze that guy's notes i sure as shit don't trust some fucking sheriff's deputy to do it like yeah this stuff is like yeah um i don't know yeah and i think that that's i don't know i will say like this i think was like the worst possible scenario for what what that shooting is about because this is a kind of this is a kind of violence that was really intense like right after world war ii and sort of like

you know there's been periods where like yeah i mean people have been like people have gotten killed here but it hasn't been that violent in a long time and i don't know i'm hoping this is just one guy who had a particular grievance who i don't know like was was pushed by sort of external factors but if this is a sign of like if this is a sign of sort of anti-taiwanese like national okay so there's one other thing that that we need to talk about because that's unclear because there's two kinds of potential right-wing Chinese nationalism at play here. And it's unclear which one's happening because there are people who are right-wing Chinese nationalists who are like pro-CCP, right? like a kind of like it shifted, but there's also like a, a,

a, like a, a KMT nationalist based right wing Chinese nationalism, which favors sort of like reunification with China, but is, is not the same thing as, as the sort of mainland nationalism and has its own particular, like very local political grudges,

like with, with the DDP and with the sort of like progressive e movements in taiwan and i don't know anything beyond that is kind of like trying to figure out which one it is like we just don't know unless the police unless the police actually decide to like show us this guy's notes or like give us recordings of what he's been saying uh we're not gonna know and maybe maybe by the time this is out like there will be more stuff but right now it's very muddled very bad the fact that this guy also i think was an american citizen but was born in China has gotten every...

Even the Chinese media outlets are saying extremely weird stuff because they're confused by it. So it is a muddled mess. Everything about this last weekend has been muddled. There's been so many different mass shootings this weekend. There's been people being paranoid about copycat mass shootings. You know, yesterday there was reporting that a gunman entered a church in Buffalo. That was not actually true.

It's someone in the church yelled, like, there's a gunman or something, or get the gun down or something. And it caused people to create this kind of rumor, but there wasn't actually someone with a gun. Someone was reacting to the sermon that was being had. But yeah, everyone's been super paranoid about every stuff, this kind of stuff as they should be so sorting through sorting through all this stuff is very complicated and not a great time because it's not

fun and we shouldn't have to do it but it sucks do you think it's also worth noting that the police did not stop I know specifically they did not stop the one in the church. Any of them. A pastor hit the government with a chair.

Hit him with a fucking chair. Hit him with a steel chair. And then they hogtied him with an extension cord, and then the police came. Which is dope. I'm sorry they were ever in that position they should never have to be in that position but it turns out more and more people are having to do stuff themselves because it it's not also the first time that a mass shooter has been stopped by someone hitting

them with a chair if i'm not mistaken that's how the gifford shooter was stopped eventually or part of how he was stopped is somebody fucking decked him with a chair it's um yeah it's really works yeah it's really useful to have something beyond just your limbs yeah if someone is trying to shoot you with a gun ideally you get away but if you can't get away trying to hit them in the face with something heavy is certainly a choice that has saved a number of people's lives god what what an absolutely dog shit country it's not a great when i you know i i noted earlier anyone trying to sell you like simple solutions and i mentioned gun control on that which is not to say that like the outrageously easy how how ridiculously easy it is to get any kind of gun in this country obviously that's a factor in these shootings. My hesitance to take gun control as a,

if you'll forgive the term, magic bullet to fix any of this, is number one, the sheer number of guns that are already propagated. Number two, the fact that a lot of gun control measures boil down to making it harder for poor people to get guns, and neither of these shootings seem to have been poor people shooting up folks. And just also the fact that while some states are capable of passing additional gun control number one new york's basically done everything it's constitutional to do re restricting gun ownership um and federally

biden and their dims can't protect roe v wade they're sure as shit not going to pass any federal and that's specifically what these people want as well. Like they're specifically doing this to get this stuff started so that it increases political tensions. Whether or not, to agree with my fundamental claim, you don't have to, you can believe that if gun control were to be passed, it could be the solution, but it's not going to be. And so like, as regards those of us trying to survive um we have to look

in other directions because you're not going to get an assault weapons ban it's just not happening yeah i mean i the one good i don't want to say good thing but it has been uh nice to see people slowly uh dropping the whole whole lone wolf terminology. Yes, that is a positive development because these are not fucking lone wolves. It's not a lone wolf. It's part of a intentional effort to cause these things to happen.

The groups may be decentralized, but they are not lone wolves by any stretch of the imagination. They are decentralized and acephalous, but they are deeply, deeply sophisticated and connected. Yeah. Just not in a way you can drone strike easily. Well.

Yeah, and I think. I would have some target suggestions, Garrison. Anyway, get an IFAC. Do stop the bleed. Get an IFAC. Do stop the bleed. And don't feed into their propaganda in the ways that they want don't feed into their propaganda

organize with folks in your neighborhood this sucks yay okay well kids, adults boys and girls and individuals of non-binary or other gender identities,

cats who happen to be listening in, airwolf, the helicopter, if you're listening in, everybody, every sentient creature listening, you know, I do believe that things can get better. So part of that is not letting the crimes that these, the things that these people do, like part of the purpose of an attack like this is to make people feel hopeless and overwhelmed.

It's to black pill you, you know, to utilize some of their terminology. So the way to fight against it is, among other other things if you're talking about immediate things you can do uh go out and do something nice to help people yeah and you know i would say like as a sort of like one brief last note like yeah like in taiwan they overthrew their tatership and oh hey it turns out people stopped getting assassinated by the kmt in american soil so you know over overthrow your governments and you too can make peace with your enemies. Yeah.

Yeah, overthrow your government, overthrow another government. You know, it's all good. It's all good, baby. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of Michael Duda 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, or wherever you get your podcasts. time's 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. Elian.

Elian. Elian Gonzalez. 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. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and

contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, everyone. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the podcast about things falling apart and sometimes how we can put them back together. Today, it's me, Garrison, Chris, our producer Sophie, and Andrew joins us once again. Yay! I love that guy. Oh, me too! Me too!

Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Andrew talking about whatever he feels like talking about. Today's episode, I am happy to announce that I finally, finally finished Dawn of Everything by Dave Graber and David Wenker. It took a while, you know, there were some points in time, some weeks just went by where I didn't even like make a dent. You know, life got in the way and stuff, but I finally, finally finished it. And now I get to talk about it and say, you know, with some authority that I've read Dawn of Everything, you know?

Yeah, it's a very dense book, but it was 100% worth it. I mean, there are some critiques that I've been digging into by some authors in the field. And so I highly recommend people look for critiques as well not just you know taking it and consuming it wholesale but in addition to those critiques like armed with those critiques um such as by people like um what is politics on youtube and also a couple academic writers as well i think you could get a lot out of the book and i certainly have yeah this is a this is a very good book i'm excited to talk about it because i read it like oh it was a while ago now like it's like five months ago or

something oh wow i feel ashamed to talk about it i've been like waiting for the chance i've been i've been i've been picking up bits and pieces of it but unfortunately my book list to get through is way too long at the moment so I've not been able to actually dive fully into the text itself but it is definitely on

my list after I get through my 20 other books I need to read for my job yeah it's a lot it's a lot at least we get to read books for a living or something adjacent to that um and i mean it is a difficult book i would say to like discuss in its entirety and i didn't i don't intend to not to read any parade or anything chris but i don't intend to talk about the entire book you know because that's like several hundred pages yeah you know and each chapter covers like so so much um but i actually

wanted to talk about chapter four in particular um where the authors explore the concept and the origins in a sense of cultures um in one particular segment I mean there are a lot of mysteries of the upper Paleolithic that we don't know right I mean that's why the mysteries um but you know we've come to learn you know through the course of the book that you know this assumption that everything was just these small tight-knit bands and that was just the entirety of the human social arrangement until states at least it's new to the layman to realize that this is not

necessarily the case that there is a lot more political structural diversity in that time period we don't know at that point in time you know what languages people were speaking you know of course linguists have been able to like reconstruct like proto

languages and stuff and i mean i'm just a hobby linguist just like i'm a hobby everything else but i think it's been really cool to see how i think we're just able to do that like can we just take a second to realize that like linguists are able to take scraps of existing languages and just kind of piece them together to get a sense of how they're related. Like, how do you all do that? There's a lot we don't know, right? We don't know about their language, we don't know about their myths, you know, their conceptions of the soul, what their favorite foods were.

I mean, we know what they ate, but we don't know what Joe Skeleton thought about his breakfast that morning. But what we do know is that from the Swiss Alps to out to Mongolia in the Upper Paleolithic, people were using a lot of the same tools, playing a lot of similar musical instruments, carving similar, rather interesting female figurines um wearing similar ornaments and conducting similar funeral rites and there's also reason to believe that people actually traveled a lot more than we would expect them to do and actually traveled longer distances than we would expect for that time period i mean we don't have they didn't have rather you know like cars or or chariots or trains or planes or anything like that so to think that these long distance um

journeys were occurring you know places like austral Australia or in like North America is just really interesting to think about. Yeah. I was wondering if you can talk about like one of the things that I thought was really interesting about this is the way that they talk about culture areas where you have these, yes, yes.

Yeah. You have these like very large, I mean like, like almost like, like half continent sized areas where people are speaking similar languages like the same language and you have these like you have like these clan structures that are like you know you you can go from like go from like missouri and you can end up in like mississippi and you'll be in a place where they still have like you know the sort of like four basic like clan lodges are still the same you'll meet people who are like

from your clan and he has this really interesting line about how like sort of kind of intuitively like the world's gotten like the world like even even when there was like people spread over geographic distance like the world sort of got larger as technology progressed and not sort of like smaller in the way that people sort of think about it because like in i don't know instead of there being these sort of like mega like culture areas you can go from one place to another and you'll there'll be people who speak the same language and you can sort of slot into the like systems that are there you suddenly have this like incredible diversity of stuff right right so i mean specific to like north america you know um where you had all these different clan structures we usually tend to think of um you know these groups as

and you know especially like your immediate relations with people that you know it's like close-kin family that kind of thing um but there's actually at least in some studies of hunter gatherers there's some suggestion that their composition can be quite cosmopolitan so you know you have these these groups and biological relations might only make up a small percentage of like total membership they're actually drawing from a wide pool of individuals of a larger stretch of area i know not all of them even speak necessarily the same first language um there's this youtuber an indigenous Anarchist YouTuber named TwinRabbit and he had this excellent, excellent video

I need to re-watch it on Plains as Sign Language which is this method of communication that indigenous Americans used across the plains to conduct trade and diplomacy and discussions, even if they didn't share the same language. In Aboriginal Australia, people were able to travel halfway across the continent, moving across people who spoke entirely different languages

and still find camps that had people of you know their same totemic moiety you know and those people which we treated like their brothers and sisters you know so like no hanky-panky but you know they had this this you know cross-continental bond of like hospitality from the great lakes you know to Louisiana bayous you can find settlements of people speaking entirely

entirely separate languages unrelated to their own and yet still you will find you know bear clans or elk clans or beaver clans

that were obliged to host and feed them you know and we could only really guess as to like what kind of systems were like and how those systems might have worked 48 000 years ago you know in the upper paleolithic but what we do see with the you know similarities and material uniformities and stuff of these different tools and musical instruments and stuff suggests that there might be a bit of a similar system in place at that time roughly around like 12 000 bc we start seeing like

new pottery you know getting dropped we're starting to see the outlines of more specific cultures in specific areas new stone grinding tools uh new ways of preparing and eating wild grains and roots and other vegetables um different ways of chopping slicing grating grinding soaking draining boiling and storing smoking and preserving meats plant foods and fish and suddenly we start to see something that really brings people together. And that is cuisine and cuisine, you know, being the birth of cuisine, being the birth of like really more specific cultures. You know, the kinds of soups and porridges and stews and broths. and broths and basically what they were talking about was the way that people who like wake up and eat fish stews every morning tend to you know develop a different sense of themselves in relation to their world compared to people who might wake up in the morning and eat some porridge

with like berries and wild oats you know and then from there they start to develop different tastes in in clothing you know in in dancing and drugs and hairstyles um i remember later on the book um the davids point out that some indigenous um native american groups were actually known for specific hairstyles and i kind of knew that based on the fact that you know we tend to associate mohawks with people you know mohawk hairstyle mohawk people but i didn't realize that you know other groups also had their own kind of like culturally specific hairstyles right and there's also like courtship rituals and forms of kinship and styles of rhetoric and so of course you still have these large cultural

areas in the mesolithic larger than some nation states but you're starting to see a bit more specificity a bit more diversity in shorter spans of area if we look at now for example where you know we have in the amazon all these different languages and cultures that coexist merely kilometers from each other i think the overall trend of human cultures you know over the past tens of thousands of years has been the opposite of marginalization and it makes me think a bit about the whole concept of the nation state and how it tries to like bring people together to just like one narrow conception of what it means to be you know xyz and how humanity naturally seems to like resist that and naturally seems

to like split off from that like even when you have situations with the forceful spread of english in you know the caribbean colonies you still see like a diversity springing up with a bunch of different unique creoles and dialects making the language something different you know if not for the enforcement of language standardization through the you know school system i think we would actually see an even more rapid um explosion of you know linguistic diversity developing out of these creoles and dialects you know like a couple centuries from now you know patois and trinitarian creole and british english may be entirely incompatible even in britain itself you know patois and trinidadian creole and british english may be entirely incompatible even in britain itself you know you might have a case where london english and i don't know sussex

english or whatever starts to sound like entirely different and we already have that with accents but just to see how you know even in short spaces time, as short as a century or two, because, for example, Trinidad was not always an English-speaking colony. We actually spoke French Creole for most of our history. And only in the 19th century did we have that period of Anglicization, where English was, you know, brought in. was you know brought in um and to see that in that short space of time in that handful of centuries that you know trinidad already has its own unique english-based creole you know it's just fascinating to see um there's something really interesting to me about the way this process plays out because it's it's it's almost like because you have this sort of like, like you have this period in the Mesolithic. All the period names are blanking out of my head, but like 40,000.

Yeah, so like you have this period where you have kind of like you have a lot of cultural standardization like spread across a long period like a bunch of places and it's used sort of as a mutual aid thing it allows people to travel because you can go to a place and know that like there will be people who are like you there and they will take care of you and it's interesting to me it's like okay so this breaks apart as sort of like these these new cultures like as people develop local cultures around like food and around just like graber has this thing that he loves talking about. He's been talking about for ages called schismogenesis, which is like, you have two people.

It was like, I think, I think his original example is like a few people who are arguing with each other and they like disagree minorly over like one thing. And then by the end of the argument, like they're, they've, they've taken like completely mutually opposed identities to each other based on like right an incredibly minor disagreement and you get this with yeah

you get like you get cultures to sort of like define themselves against each other and like they have things that they like and things they don't like and it's interesting to me that that you see you see the state trying to sort of like reimpose that kind of like like 40 000 year old cultural homogeneity on all of these places that are like incredibly not homogenous but they're doing it for like the opposite reason they're doing it because they need sanitization in order to sort of like make their make their bureaucratic like systems work better and make their sort of like yeah seen like a stage kind of thing yeah yeah and also like like i mean this was a huge thing everyone in the in like the early the late 90s and early 2000s thought that like the extent of capitalism on the around the globe

was going to make make everything exactly the same there's only one culture and that like kind of really didn't happen but there was this real sort of i don't know like there was this real sort of of fear that it wasn't just going to be the nation-state spreading, like, homogenization, but, like, capitalism was going to sort of, like, spread homogenization. And I guess the thing that they wound up doing instead was, like, figuring out that you could just sell everyone in their individual cultural niche, which... To some extent, yeah. Because, like, we see McDonald's in the US and McDonald's in Bangladeshdonald's in the u.s and the mcdonald's in bangladesh and the mcdonald's in japan and they sell all the same mcdonald's stuff but they've also like sort of specified to their you know specific country yeah we have the worst version the u.s is the worst version of it by the

way the the uh uh the like taiwan has one that has like they have like rice sticky rice patties it's it's so much better than the yeah i mean i will say though if i did end up traveling to taiwan i mcdonald's would probably be the last place i would want to go yeah we we wound up eating there and we were we had to catch a plane and so we wound up eating like um taiwanese taiwanese mcdonald's yeah taiwanese mcdonald's airport food because we had like 5 minutes you know what they say about airplane food but yeah that's exactly what I was about to get into

actually the whole idea of cultural differentiation you know and this tendency that humans have to subdivide and to distinguish themselves from their neighbors and i mean it's natural to assume that you know this differentiation comes from like differences in like language you know with you know language splitting off over the centuries and people associating with their native language and ethnicity but that really tell the full story

you know like for example in northern california in the early 20th century the ethno-linguistic map uh had really a jumble of languages that drew from entirely different language families you know as distant from one another as like arabic and tamil and portuguese and yet these groups still shared you know broad, broad similarities. You know, how they went about gathering and processing food, you know, their most important religious rituals, how they organized their political life. And they also managed to keep themselves distinct. You know, you had the Yurok and the Hoopa and the Karok and so forth.

And I mean, to some extent, these identities did map onto linguistic differences, but their neighbors, who spoke different languages still had more in common with them than people who came from their same language family in another part of North America of course you know European colonization had like a severe impact on like how native americans were distributed um but we still tend to see this trend of how like these modern nation states they went around at the time to you know order populations into these neat ethno-linguistic groups you know this idea that the world should be divided into these like homogenous units with their own history and

everyone has a claim to like a certain territory and all that it's been it's really a a concept that is born out of this mythology of the nation state and you know of course we had to be real careful before we project those kind of uniformities back in time yeah it's definitely really like 200 years old. Like it's pretty young. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But there are some concerns, you know, with the concept of culture areas. Because that whole notion of culture areas came out of North American museums who wanted to arrange their stolen artifacts to illustrate their theories of the different stages of human adaptation. You know, like lower savagery and upper savagery and lower lower barbarism and so on and so they had to

determine whether they were going to organize these artifacts based on like language family or regional clusters um or some sort of like traced history of of of regional of ancient migrations right eventually they realized that you know this way of organizing to regional clusters seemed to work best where the art and technology of different eastern woodlands tribes had some very similar um things in common compared to like trying to group people based on like say the Athabascan language or all the people who relied on fishing or all people who cultivated maize and they were able to find similar patterns in the Neolithic villages of central Europe you, finding these regional clusters

of domestic life and art and ritual. And so, like, this whole cultural area concept was kind of a way of pushing back against this way of, you know, talking about human history that, like, ranked populations into higher or lower anything. You know, this idea of of claiming that you know people were of a certain superior genetic stock and have reached a certain advanced level of technological evolution and so rather this there's been a there was a shift in anthropological focus

to look at the diffusion of more cultural traits like ceramics and sweat lodges and you know the treatment of young men or certain sports um and so they wanted to try to understand how these different tribes of certain region came to share this mesh of culture traits so one of the people who were thinking on this you know whole culture traits cluster idea um was a guy named boss right and he wanted to figure out why it is that like geography seemed to define the circulation of ideas you know it's like mountains and deserts forming these natural barriers and how basically the diffusion within those regions was basically historical accident a libo hypothesizing that there was some sort of like way to eventually develop a kind of a natural science developing how and even predicting the ebb and flow of styles habits and social forms and eventually marcel mouse pulls up you know and

he's basically taught he basically like writes a bunch of essays on nationalism and civilization and he says basically this whole idea of cultural diffusion is nonsense because it's based on a false assumption and the false assumption is that the movement of people, technologies and ideas is some sort of rarity, something unusual. Instead, Mauss argues that people in past times traveled even more than people do today. but people of other cultures and they see their cultural traits they reflect on that and find a way to relate that to their own cultures right so like people who were traveling back then obviously all of them you know were aware of basketry you know or or or featherworks or whatever the case may be that other people were using a couple miles away seem to be said for like certain drum rhythms or certain you know games or like for example

he spent some time focusing on the distribution of the ball games around the pacific ocean around the pacific rim from japan to new zealand to california and what he realized is that whether people pick up certain ideas certain traits from other cultures comes down to how they want to be defined against their neighbors against their closest neighbors the question becomes less about why certain culture traits spread but why other culture traits didn't because if you're aware of all the things that your neighbors and stuff are doing all these foreign customs and arts and technologies i mean we know that the silk road for example even we talk about the silk road you know we had a silk road going from china all the way into europe and all across the silk road

all across central asia and west asia and despite that constant you know sharing of ideas not every idea that you know came from china or came from Persia or... I don't know if Persia was around during the Silk Road, but you know what I'm saying? Like not every idea that was along the Silk Road, everyone necessarily picked up on, even if it was a technology that might have benefited them because cultures are effectively structures of refusal.

So for example, there's this guy on youtube um religion for breakfast he did a video recently on the pork taboo in certain cultures and certain religions right and one of the things he pointed out was that the taboo tends to be strengthened in times of like repression so for example or in times of cultural um definition so for example he was pointing out that in the period of roman conquest the jewish people were more inclined to define themselves as, you know, against the consumption of pork compared to the Romans. You know, for example, the Chinese are the people who use chopsticks. You know, they don't use knives and forks.

Or you're the Thai, the people who use spoons and so on. You know, it could just be said that, you know, it's like aesthetics, like styles of art or music or people manners. Of course, those things might differ. But even like technologies that have like an adaptive or utilitarian benefits might still be refused by people who might even benefit from them. Like, for example, the Athabascans in Alaska refuse to use Inuit kayaks, despite the fact that they are a lot better suited for the environment than their own boats. And the Inuit, for example, don't use Athabascan snowshoes. At least in the time that Marcel Mauss was writing.

And then, of course, this is a self-conscious process you know this is a process where a debate and discussion of all these different customs would have been occurring you know for example in the chinese courts when different foreign styles and customs would you know come into the lands there'll be debates and arguments put forward by the kings and their advisors and their vassals, discussing whether they would ride the horses or drive chariots or adopt the Manchu dress codes and customs. and so societies mouse said live by borrowing from each other but they define themselves by the refusal of borrowing than by its acceptance the question to adopt a certain form of agriculture or to cultivate a certain crop more specifically or to adopt a certain style of dress it's not just a matter of mere utility, of mere caloric advantage, or material efficiency. It's also a reflection on a questioning of the values that that group of people holds, or purport to hold, who they consider themselves to be. or purport to hold, who they consider themselves to be. I like to think about the development of cultures.

I like to think about how our ancestors or distant ancestors even considered themselves. It's easy to just fall into this trap because it's a very common cultural trope that once you go before the invention of writing or whatever all of our ancestors are just like ooga booga cavemen kind of thing but to think of them as self-conscious and politically conscious, politically considerate, thoughtful actors, not, you know, static or passive props. It's just, I think it's, I think it's just very cool.

I think it's very cool. And I think that we should keep, you know, these developments, this recognition in mind as we, you know, in the modern time, look to try to transform the cultures we live under and to try to develop new values, new values of like anti-thorchianism and anti-capitalism and of you know a greater priority on mutual aid and on egalitarian social relations yeah i think there's a lot of very interesting political consequences of of thinking about this because like i think there's sort of like two tendencies that that we sort of get stuck in when we think about like our social structures which is there's there's the there's one which is the sort of like i guess it's called like capitalist realism which is the assumption that like nothing else could possibly like this is the only system that works nothing else can possibly exist and that's unproductive and you know you go back and you look at like any other culture or society

and it's like well no like there's there's like an unbelievable like nearly infinite number of ways you can organize your society but then i think i think the second one is that like yeah if you look at this sort of cultural diffusion and cultural refusal stuff you you see a lot of examples of people doing stuff that like under sort of like classical economic or like sociological laws they shouldn't be doing right like there's no reason why you shouldn't use a more efficient canoe if you're in a place of the part of the world that's like extremely hard to survive in right and and i think that there's this tendency to sort of like reduce culture and reduce just all of the ways that our social and political systems function to these sort of like oh they're

the product of these like abstract historical forces and like ah it's all like it's all determined by technology and like how you farm and stuff it's just not true yeah i mean not to say that material conditions aren't you know very important in understanding um you know how these cultures develop and that's one part of um don't everything that i found was a bit lacking i think that not all the time those dots were clearly connected, I'd say. But I do think people put too much stock in solely material and materialist explanations. And that kind of ends up precluding or leaving out the more messy human realm of explanation. messy human realm of explanation yeah and i think i think part of why this happens is that like it's much if you assume everyone is like behaving according to historical forces or like the thing

that they're trying to do is like maximize um they're trying to like maximize their utility they're trying to like maximize the amount of calories they have that that's a very easy thing to like you like think about numerically right like it's a very easy thing to refuse the numbers it's extremely difficult to refuse the numbers like to reduce to like reduce to numbers a society that is like i'm going to i'm going to intentionally make my life harder for myself because this is the way we do things and we've decided we don't want to do things like other people we've decided that we have some kind of political value that we have that makes it such that we're going to like induce difficulty into our lives and like that i don't know like that that kind of stuff the the the fact that culture is not just a sort of like superstructure that gets that's like a product of like some kind of economic base like that that is very important and something that

gets ignored or downplayed constantly that i think i don't yeah like i think like yeah i think i think you can argue that don't everything like maybe goes too far in the other direction but i'm i'm sort of okay with that just because we've been so far on the side of like everything is historical forces for so long that you need something to remind people that like societies make conscious political choices and not only have they made conscious political choices for like tens of thousands of years. choices that are not just sort of like pure reflections of like however many tons of iron have been extracted and like what percentage of like workers are currently working in hospitals versus like making cookies or something right thank you for that oh oh oh analysis chris really i i agree that that's a joke like 12 people will get I love you if you understand that joke

also I'm sorry yes you can wrap it up Carson all of this has been very fascinating what I've learned the most is that i need to finish reading all my books so that i can read the dawn of everything um i know i i like i like got it for my dad for christmas because um because i i knew that it would be uh at least i think i did my memory could be i could actually be wrong i could have only intended to get it for my dad

for christmas and then forgotten to actually get it but i've been meaning it to i've been meaning to both buy it for myself and get it for other people um because i've heard a lot of interesting things about the book so it is definitely on my list uh it's been a pleasure listening to uh y'all uh discuss it um andrew where can if people want to check out more of your work, where could they go about that? Right, so you can still find me on Twitter

at underscore St. Drew when I'm not hiding. And you can also find me on YouTube Andrewism, youtube.com slash Andrewism, where I post videos about also stuff random stuff you know that i'm thinking about politics history all that jazz a few days ago as of time of recording um andrew put out a wonderful video on solar punk stuff um i have

no idea when this episode will air so this it's probably been like a month or two or something um but uh definitely check out uh the andrewism channel it's one of my favorite spots to uh watch something when i feel like i can't put any words on the page i go watch your things because it's very helpful um yeah so that does it for us today uh you can find us at twitter and on twitter and instagram at happen here pod calls today. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at HappenHerePod, CoolZone Media. You can find me posting about hyper-objects and liminal spaces at HungryBowTie. And I heard that you have a Twitter, Chris. Yeah, it's at ItMeCHR3. You can find me mostly complaining about other people who are doing communism wrong i guess that's most of

what i post about love that for you uh you too will be able to differentiate between the 16 different actually that's not even true there's not even 16 there used to be long ago in a galaxy far far away i made a decision and that was that i was going to sacrifice my brain to understand the different kinds of maoism and if you too want to understand why it still exists and all 20 000 varieties of them uh yeah go there if you don't want to do that do not you'll be happier well what a ringing endorsement uh goodbye everyone go uh i don't know oh should we should we plug up please plug the other shows? Yeah, I guess. Everyone's tuned in at this point.

I hope they've all stopped the podcast player. So I think... Go be free. Yes, go outside and be free. There, you can edit that into something that is more concise. Sorry, Danil slash Ian. I don't care. 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 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-ch chilling brushes with supernatural creatures

take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted latin america since the beginning of time listen to nocturnal tales from the shadows 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, 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.. His father in Cuba. Mr. González 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 González story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature.

I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers

and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's, well, it is the podcast. It could happen here. But for once, it is not about the world falling apart. It is entirely about putting it back together again. And joining me to talk about putting it back together again

is zero of the other people who are normally on the podcast. But I'm joined by Shannon and John Hieronymus, who are part of the team of organizers working on the Dual Power Gathering. Shannon, John, welcome to the show. Hi, thank you. Hey. So I guess the first part of the Dual Power Gathering is dual power. And I think we should walk through what actually that is and what our sort of visions for it look like.

Because, I mean, I know we've talked about this on the show before but that was a very very long time ago but which i mean like probably only like seven months but you know feels like ancient history so yeah i guess do you two want to talk about what dual power is and how how to do yeah sure i'm gonna stop trying to think about what happened seven months ago and i can't and how to do. Yeah, sure. I'm going to stop trying to think about what happened seven months ago. And I can't, I'm trying to, okay.

Remember you said that, I was just like, oh, wow. Okay, no, nevermind. So dual power. John, how about I go ahead and share with our audience what is sort of the poetic language that we have up on the website from the the organizers and then we can kind of like break it down and talk about it um yeah yeah that works for me all right so uh the website text is such uh dual power is a way to imagine the moment just before our movements converge as the possible becomes the actual. When the seeds of social transformation we have sown for generations bloom, when the old world

begins to wither and new worlds can be born, is a way of thinking about how we got to that moment and beyond it. Dual Power is the project of building self-determination, mutual aid, solidarity, and direct democracy in our communities by creating spaces that empower us all and from which new emancipatory institutions can emerge. It's so pretty. Yeah. So what does that mean? So what does that mean? First off, I want to say, like a shout out to a lot of people have been working on this vision of what dual power is for uh years and years now and that includes uh a lot of groups um that we are either in conversation with or have been taking inspiration from um One of the biggest, I think most developed groups

that's doing that work is Cooperation Jackson, Jackson, Mississippi. And I think the goal is people went out, oftentimes when people like hear dual power, if they don't have any other

context for it, but they are maybe from the left, they've heard about this moment in the Russian Revolution when there were these two competing bases of power in Russian society while they're undergoing this revolutionary change. And Lenin wrote a pamphlet about it calling it The Dual Power

and looked at it as a thing that needed to be overcome by workers in Russia to establish a worker state, which they outlined in a book called State Revolution. But when we look at what they were describing we kind of look at this as a thing that emerges in any time when there is a social revolution kind of unfolding in a society where you have various classes who are like who are changing social relations. So workers, peasants, different groups of people who have a class, have come together around a class interest

and overthrowing their oppression. And they have to go through stages of building their collective power, their collective identity, and and their uh kind of like overall strategic movement in a particular direction um and they create this tension between the existing state order and a newly emerging like uh like social revolution that's like overthrow challenging uh and overthrowing that like um power so that being said okay we want to ground that we want to ground that a little bit in a like less historicized uh context or whatever we could say maybe that's the work that we're doing to build up the institutions and relational structures that we need to care for ourselves and each other as we move through sort of like

different stakes of like institutional organization in the society right so when we're thinking about how do we meet our basic needs together in ways that are not dependent on the oppressive institutions that we're trying to overthrow we're talking about dual power yeah and it's like anytime working class folks and it's like in a broad definition communities people who aren't necessarily working but like depend on like taking care of each other or who do the work of reproducing every you know society um basically build their own independent power like uh to chat like to be able to fight back and to challenge the you know the status quo so like there's a lot of things

that are kind of percolating that we've been like uh that have been happening in north america that takes inspiration from areas of the global south um but also our own homegrown like traditions um so that could mean anything from like your local mutual aid network to uh your local tenant union to like a rank and file um union of like amazon workers or teachers or care workers um you know whose existence puts them in conflict with the state capital um and like patriarchy settler colonial relations um you know like indigenous water protectors um folks who are building up places where the more developed it becomes the more it kind of builds its own momentum and you have spaces that are like autonomous fully like autonomous regions from like state power and to begin to like pick apart at capital and like reconfigure our

like relations of like how we make things and do things and take care of each other in like fundamental ways and we have lots of beautiful examples of this from the like organizing history not even that long ago and people will be familiar with some of the Black Panther programs or some of the programs that were integrated into the farm workers movement and some of the programs that were put together by the anarcho-feminists who were trying to support women's bodily autonomy and secure abortion rights through things like mutual aid health care and things like that. So we'll see. There's a lot of really beautiful examples of this work happening over time around successful organizing movements. And

we're all really excited about what's going on now. And we want to see that just to sort of come together and flourish. I think it's important to think about dual power or something that's like, I don't know, like, I think there's a lot of people who look at it as sort of like dual power is planting a garden. It's like, I mean, sort of, yes, but like, there's, you know, there's sort of two components of it, right? There's this sort of, there's a defensive component and an offensive component. There's a component that's about taking care of each other and there is a component that is attack right there's there's a component that is the people who are preventing us from taking care of each other need to be

stopped from doing that and so yeah i think i i think it's important to yeah think about different kinds of like different kinds of institutions that you would not normally think of as doing the same thing as being part of the same struggle and yeah i guess that brings us to what you two and a lot of other people have been working on for god this has been this has been in the works for a long time uh yeah which which which is the which is the is this dual power gathering. And yeah, I guess you do want to talk about what that is. Sure. Yeah.

Yeah, well, you know, we've all been sitting around the past couple of years dreaming about being together. And so I think this is kind of the fruit of that dream, right? Coming up at the end of July, we're inviting everyone out to the Indiana Dunes for a camping trip. And during that time, we're hoping to see a collaboratively produced event that incorporates everything that the participants can bring to it, which we know far exceeds the sort of even the scope and vision of the organizing body. So we're really trying to just create a space for people to come together who are interested in these ideas, who have various levels of experience working with it that will be valuable to everybody, from people who are brand new to this stuff and just

want to learn more about it to people who have been doing it for years for decades even um and yeah that's sort of the the underlying ambition of it is to get people together in space so you know a lot of us have been to these kinds of events before and felt like the most important thing that we got out of that was the relationships that we were able to build and the people that we were able to meet that we could then carry on ongoing dialogues with and that we could find inspiration uh in in those dialogues and in those connections that would birth new projects that you know we don't yet know are even possible and so this is kind of at at least for me,

that's the really important and exciting force of the plan. Yeah, I think that some of the things about this, I think are really, it's been really a collaborative effort to come up with this thing. We had the discussions about, this is a thing that need that we thought needed to happen because at the end of like by the end of the middle of 2021, we were like, look,

clearly we've all been through so many different experiences over the last 10, 15, 20 years at this point, some of us are getting to be elders. And we need to... It feels like now is a really great time to have an actual conversation about where we're coming from and where we're going and and where we're going.

And how do we translate these experiences into networks of trusting relationships and sharing of all this knowledge? It's like we need to debrief. The past five years, I think in particular, have been crammed. It feels like the like the past five years i think in particular have been like it's like crammed it feels like you know the whole saying like some some years nothing happens and some you know and some months decades happen paraphrasing or whatever and it's like so

much stuff has come we've all gone through so many things and come to like, and we're seeing people who didn't have like maybe a stance on various political things or are like seeing their communities torn apart by like the, the real lived experience of like climate change and wants to, and need to do something about it. That sort of thing, like bringing in people who have lots of experience and people who have maybe are just now figuring things out and really kind of like using and taking this as an opportunity to maybe to generate new knowledge so that we're going to be like

kind of like clarifying what we've gone through and where we're heading and, um, get people like in the same space who might... I do a lot of union shit. So I'm always thinking about how do I get rank-and-file union radicals in the same space as a neighborhood abolitionist or a tenant union organizer or a community land trust and getting all these like different groups because

together and then like thinking about how they overlap and support and build off of each other because we i think the operating theory of many of people who are involved in this is that every context is different where we're organizing but many there are many principles that can translate across contexts. But the context will shape very... I was just talking with one of the organizers who's 20 minutes away over in Northwest Indiana, like in Gary and those areas. And their context for building something

like an ecosystem of dual power organizations is going to be very different from my context where I'm down the street from this big global center of capital that's like University of Chicago. And it's doing all... And my neighborhood's being gentrified by $2 billion corporations. And I've got a big nurse union. Whereas they're in the middle of a community that's being actively divested and destroyed.

Just eaten away at because capital is just pulling out. And has been doing that for basically as long as we've all been on this earth at the same time y'all are dealing with the same like biosphere complications and climate change implications and so yeah we're thinking about the ways in which like the kinds of affiliations that make sense for us to be successful in our projects are like you know look they're not just they're not just local they're not just national they're not just continental there they're not just national, they're not just continental, there's, like, a lot of different things that are going on there, and that the only way for us to really, like, sort out who we need to be in coalition with on any particular issue is to know everybody, and to try to understand better their, their specific

contexts and their specific experiences, and I think there's like, you know, I think, you know, to John's point about, you know, how much has changed in the last, you know, handful of years or whatever. I think one thing that we've all come away from is the pace of change is pretty humbling, you know? I think we definitely all, we got to, we got, we took in a bit of the, of humility around, around around that what is it that we actually need to do we are definitely not prepared for it you know and it doesn't matter how many decades we've been doing this organizing work we just are not ready uh for how quickly things are changing right now and the only way for us to get ready is to make sure that we shore up and strengthen

the networks of people that we can rely on to produce kind of positive interdependence um as we move forward with the continued chaos that is the contemporary world yeah i mean and then part of this is also like thinking about um because the way this is structured this isn't just like a series of panel discussions where we've like the organizers have curated like you're gonna listen to you know so-and-so who's like you know a prominent tenant organizer or so-and-so is like a prominent like like in like climate change direct action work like the goal is is that we like specifically chose a format and like

officially it's called like like an unconference but the way i think of it is it's like which which comes out of tech which i find kind of irritating but that doesn't but the the core of the idea of the thing is is that we're coming into this space in generating new knowledge, not necessarily sitting there and receiving a bunch of knowledge from people who we designate as like movement leaders or experts. That doesn't mean that people who don't have a lot of experience and a lot of like skills aren't going to be there. It just means that we're going to be, because one of my things is popular education coming from the tradition of like palo frere and like um everybody learning together is like it's like taking those principles

and kind of like doing them in parallel in various circles where there'll be a circle here of like cooperative organizers or people who want to get co-ops off the ground there'll be a circle here of like cooperative organizers or people who want to get co-ops off the ground there'll be a circle here of people doing land trust work there'll be a circle here of like unionists there'll be a circle here of uh people doing like abolition uh work and or interest or people who are interested in all those things are getting those sorts of things off the ground and as they work through like a like they present tell stories share ideas do debriefs on like the various things that we've all been going through over you know whatever how far back our timeline is depending on how far uh which elders decide to uh attend um but then taking that knowledge with our facilitators and then being like, you know what, I think that these two conversations are happening in parallel would be better if they were merged together and beginning to build that. setting up like a predetermined set of conclusions for people.

We believe, and based off of, we've been having monthly community calls for people who are going to be attending. All the different groups of folks who will be coming to this is going to be, I think like the depth of experience is going to be really phenomenal. And people coming from, we definitely have people confirmed

who are coming from Canada, people who we may be having folks with experience, the indigenous communities in Mexico. like northern syria and iraq um and taking all these different ideas and experiences and then generating next like coming to new conclusions maybe unexpected conclusions or things that we didn't quite uh that we weren't anticipating but even asking new questions right like this is a kind of it's intended to be a prefigureative space for engaging with things where we don't know what the right answer is. And I think we all need to really sit with the fact that we do not have like a clear right solution to the problems that we're facing right now. Like I've been kind of pulling on the slogan a little, it's like, no gods, no masters, no right answers, you know, just like get used to it.

We need to be more creative and we need to be more open to experimentation. And, you know, there's just a lot of, there's a lot of stuff that's going to be coming at us fast. And, you know, this is a, we, we hope this can be a space where we can kind of take some time to slowly get square with what it is we're going to have to be thinking about, even if we don't know what to do exactly yet so i had a i had a really good experience where i was listening to like one of the like a person who came out of act up uh giving a talk in my neighborhood and

she was saying because we had had questions is this going to be about a lot of theory are we going to be talking about a lot of abstract stuff and um this uh organizer was like you know act up had no theory right they did they took action and the theory followed afterwards and so the idea that we're like necessarily having coming to this with like the right answers already figured out is just not like something that i think it's going to be a super generative discussion the idea of coming up with like coming up with orientations and thinking about like where we are heading kind of in a general sense and then seeing how that unfolds and builds is i think um a big key a key aspect of what we're trying to do when we come to uh come together

which is not to say yeah which is not to say that there won't be theory because that's not up to us that's up to y'all so you know um i probably you know like like what I'm really interested in is having conversations about the community mental health care, you know, and like for me, the theory is less interesting than, you know, like talking about what we bring to that space and what we can get out of it um by just thinking that we all are contributing something constructive to that conversation well and then also there's going to be a lot of discussion about like literal practical skills like here's how you like here's how you uh this has always been the perennial thing this is how you pick a lock this is how you. This is how you organize comms on a picket line. This is how you pull together

a demand letter for tenants. These are the sorts of things that we're going to be talking. We're going to be doing concrete skill shares plus these discussions about our experiences and sharing our stories. And hopefully we're going to come away from this.

A big goal of it is to come up with a lot of different... Just like content. We're going to be recording videos and audio and like, and then transcribing things and writing things up. But we're hoping that once we're done, we're going to have a big report that we can share out with people who can

attend. Yeah. Privacy concerns, obviously considered. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Consent is a big,

is a big thing with us as organizers I should hope so you would think but you know not everyone is as down as you would imagine so basically we're building a perfect little utopia

for like four days and y'all come out because we're going to fix the revolution kidding obviously on a more concrete level like what does and y'all come out because we're going to fix the revolution. So, kidding, obviously. On a more concrete level, what does a day here look like? What are we doing? Oh, that's a fun question. If I may, Sean.

Yeah, yeah, go for it. What we're thinking right now, basically, is that a day looks like we get up in the morning, we drink coffee we have breakfast and we have a little assembly check-in to see how things are going if we need to make any major adjustments and we put up a sort of schedule for the afternoon's events that was populated from the conversation that was happening in the evening the night before and anything that anybody wants to bring up to that schedule that happened between yesterday and this morning. Then we're going to roll off into

basically what would be some of the kind of like things we already know for sure that we wanted to see happening that we could get on a sort of schedule ahead of time. So some of these skill shares that were planned that would require kind of like pre-planning or maybe some discussions that people reached out ahead of time that they definitely wanted to have. So that stuff would be happening earlier in the day. We're talking about having sort of just like sandwich bars and make your own lunch kind of situations going on. There should be a lot of different things happening in different geographical locations on the site. So you kind of get a choice of where you want to go. It's not like there's one big event.

We're going to try to group things that are sort of thematically similar so that they're nearby each other in case you want to go around and see what the different kind of stuff is going to be. And then in the afternoon, it's going to be like, I mean, okay, of course, this is like how we're intending right now. The afternoon would be the discussions and skill shares and events and circles and spaces that were generated out of the conversations

that have been happening in the space so that people came and thought, we had this conversation yesterday that really inspired me. Let's talk about this and I'm going to make space for that. So we're going to have big map where you figure out where you want to go and you're going to be able to wander around and meet people. We're trying to incorporate a lot of events that make it easier to meet other people that you don't know yet. There's going to be tables where you can do arts and crafts. There's

going to be game space for whatever kind of games you want to play there's going to be places for kids to hang out there's going to be a quiet tent where you can take some contemplation time you know at some point we want to do it like a kind of brief circle for people to deal with what they've been kind of going through in the world and you know some uh you know utopia envisioning arts space you know these kinds of things like where um you know, utopia envisioning arts space, you know, these kinds of things like where, you know, somebody wants to teach someone else a dance, like that's the kind of thing that we're really hoping can go on in the afternoon. Then we would be feeding everybody dinner. And we kind of had this idea we've been playing with that we would have two campfires after dinner. And at one campfire, we'll have kind of an open forum where anybody can talk for like 10, 15, 20 minutes, you know, whatever, however long people need, who are there, depending on how popular that is.

And just kind of air everything that's in their head. And we'll have a note taker so we can try to incorporate what comes out of those discussions into the next day's agenda. And so that's sort of like what we were envisioning. And then for the other campfire, it's people who don't want to do that. Don't forget the other campfire for people who are like done with talk. I need to just sit and stare at some flames for a little bit. Yeah.

I imagine I'll be going back and forth between the fires. So, you know, that's also an option. But the idea is to get kind of like somewhere between, I think, what are we calling it? It's like somewhere between a conference and a music festival, you know what I mean? Like where you're able to sort of move around and you don't have to go and sit in one place

and do like, okay, for this hour, this is where I, you know, it's meant to be a bit more informal. And we're hoping that that makes a lot more space for people to sort of explore and people to meet other people that they don't already know. I don't know if that sums up sort of like what I'm imagining, because that's like, you know, that's the spirit. So I think if that's the question, like, what does the day look like?

Well, hopefully it's fun. You know, that's kind of the main thing we're thinking here. So make it a sort of low stress and low stakes place that we can talk about some of the highest stress and highest stakes questions that we have to deal with so yeah and like that being said like because we're modeling it this way specifically based on people's experience with like the symbiosis uh federation's founding conference that sort of thing where there were a lot of stakes, and people were trying to kind of like funnel different discussions through different ways. And this is not necessarily a critique of how that all went down. It's just like based on our

experience, and our experiences with those sorts of things. The goal is to to for this to be if it's successful the first of many of these sorts of things um many of these kinds of gatherings and discussions and to provide a model for how it could happen but to keep um we deliberately decided that this we're not going to make like a bit we're not going to have a big points of unity debate and discussion and voting on assembly sort of thing we will use assemblies for you know certain things like setting up like our uh community agreements and that sort of stuff and kind of like getting the days rolling and kind of getting the days closed but the goal is like to not is to bring people into conversation who maybe don't have the basis of trust for those bigger collective discussions yet. But maybe they will later.

But the goal is for now is we're getting... We're building and expanding our networks. We're building and expanding our trust with different people and building and expanding our knowledge so that we can go out and do the kind of work that we think we need to do to, I don't know, survive as a species on this planet. So that's one of the reasons why if there are some people are like, Oh, I don't know. This seems really kind of wishy-washy. It's very, it does a very deliberate decision based on previous experience from

organizers who'd been to these sorts of things. And the goal is really to, to have a place where we can have discussions about high stakes issues without being so invested in it that we feel like if our concept of how to solve that problem doesn't come out as the like solution that we've somehow failed so it's like yeah i was to say that i think one of the one of these things that you that you uh brought up there that's really important it's like not even just in these previous conferences or congresses or gatherings that we've been to have we seen this be a problem but basically at least i can speak for myself in a lot of organizing spaces that I've been in over the past you know like 15 years that I've been pretty active in in the organizing universe um basically that one of the main problems that we have with this kind of like space of trust that we definitely know that we need to be able to work together

moving forward is that we don't really have shared language a lot of the time and we think we do because we use the same words but we often use them to mean different things or we often use different words to mean the same things as well and then we come from kind of different organizing cultures and a lot of different places like that some are more or less we we should say that maybe that there, there are different places where you show solidarity in a different way. You show good faith and you show that you're committed in a different way. What it means to be democratic in a space seems different depending on this, on the tradition that you, that you maybe come from.

So what we're really hoping to do is kind of make space to incorporate all of that. So we were, I was joking. It was a camping trip where many camping trips fit, you know? That like, that there should be an opportunity for people to kind of like learn to talk past those barriers that we might have to understanding each other. And like that success would really look like people coming away, like believing in other people's commitment

to get this done. And with the kind of contacts that they need to support each other moving forward as things come up in different places, as opposed to just like, here's a solution, like here's a blueprint for how to get this done. You know, that relationship that you have with a person who's had that experience in the past is going to be way more valuable than any document they give you based on their experience because you're going to be able to say well shit I wasn't expecting this to happen like what do we do and then you can talk through that with them and like that's really I think that's really the foundation of our being able to share this knowledge with each other is that we have the opportunity to kind of engage in these ways that are

more focused on the kind of just sort of dynamism of the of the challenges that we're dealing with right now so emergence is a big thing things are always going to be changing. We need to be prepared to deal with a world that's going to be throwing challenges at us that we haven't had solutions for. And because we're going through this really catastrophic kind of like catastrophic like uh moment of like uh climate change and um and i mean i don't know how else to say it but like in and so it's just like engendering the idea the idea that we're constantly evaluating what's happening around us uh both like at our local level and across the regions and globally and then taking new knowledge in and coming up with new solutions um in a real like in like a truly experimental way like thinking about things like experiments and how we're gonna like come up

with new solutions to these problems because it's just well like as we kept telling people because when we're out there uh trying to bring groups in everyone's telling us our capacity this sounds great our capacity is incredibly low uh and that has just been across the entire like spectrum of organizations yeah and that includes huge big big, put-together organizations like unions versus little mutual aid groups. Everybody is dealing with this feeling of exhaustion and being out of capacity. Our goal is to get people together

so that they can build capacity through these discussions and be prepared for things. Because capacity is always going to be an issue. And our goal is to get people to this point where because their mindset is, okay, new challenge, let's think about it critically and come up with solutions that fit this moment as opposed to keep trying to force things into um preset like easy i mean i

don't want to say easy but like i think that sometimes like everyone's trying to mine history for the like the one weird trick to solve all these problems and i think that the one weird trick is that human beings are creative critical thinking machines like our brain is like this thing for taking in information and generating new new thought and action and we need to embrace that um because if we don't i don't think we're going to be very successful certainly in the yeah in these times of just increasing uncertainty that kind of humility and flexibility and like continued building of comfort with that uncertainty is going to be super essential to our being able to maintain even sort of like the basic ability to sort of, I think, you know, like kind of historically the being comfortable with things changing and being comfortable with uncertainty is actually one of our great strengths, right?

Because we can actually start to get moving while everybody else is still going, what the hell? And so I think, you know, that's going to definitely be something that's going to serve us. And yeah, anyway. I have, I have one last question on an extremely practical level which is like what what is the like facility situation here like how what what are what are people sleeping in uh so like in right now we like we have a camp space reserved for 200 people um and so we understand that camping

is not always super accessible but we are very fortunate that like the national lakeshore has specific accessible facilities um for folks and we do have uh disabled like uh comrades coming to this event and we're working on making sure that those uh that their particular needs don't um keep them from participating fully in the events there's um the discussions and circles themselves will be at like shelter space a bit away from where the camping is happening so we're organizing transport between those two spaces for people who cannot camp we are working on organizing some hotel space for folks and then for people who can camp but don't have any equipment our goal is to we're going to um basically acquire like enough camping equipment for a sizable chunk of folks to come

and uh it's like literally today walking through walmart with my daughter looking at their camp equipment uh and pricing out things like sleeping bags and camp uh like uh sleeping mattresses and tents that sort of thing so yeah and with the if people have have stuff they want to donate to the cause too like i think we should be able to take some of that in i think we were just talking yesterday about the possibility of having camp gear repair zone. So if you have things that you find at the thrift store, like a torn tent or something like that, we'll help you fix it. We just want to make sure that everybody has these supplies as well because they're broadly useful. I know I've used my camping gear in some politically motivated ways in the past so i think that it's not bad for people to have it if you need it just saying also uh you know the camping aspect of it is also

it's more of a feature than a bug like there's like a like so to so to speak like the pandemic is not over yet as we're like seeing right um in spite of everything that like uh the our ruling class is desperately trying to get us to uh agree to and so having um the accommodations outside and doing the um doing the actual events, like out of doors where there's lots of ventilation. We think it is like right now, one of those events so that we're not going to get, so that people aren't going to come away from this getting sick, which is really important. I mean, as a person who's recovering from COVID round two and as a health care worker that was one of our big concerns because we when we started making these plans we really weren't sure what was going to be happening in terms of the pandemic and having it out of doors was just

like a surefire way that we knew that we could at the very least we could minimize the chances that people would be getting sick from just showing up and being in the same space together absolutely and we're definitely encouraging people who are coming together with friends and comrades and little groups to self-organize their camps as much as they would like to do that, to sort of make plans together to limit the, you know, the need for spaces, you know, with sharing up tents and all this kind of stuff, which to the extent that people are comfortable with that, that you know people, if you need to get in touch with people from around you, if you don't know anybody, you can reach out to us. If we know anybody else who's looking for somebody to try to coordinate with

we'll definitely put you in touch that's something we want to be able to do is like offer some of these connective services to help people um to link up with people who are coming from from their areas or people who are interested in the same kinds of things um and so we're kind of thinking of ourselves in the organizing body as facilitators of those connections and trying to like imagine how what we do will make those connections most likely to to happen um so in terms of the of the facilities as well i think we we talked about trying to get some camp stoves together for people who need to use sort of a kitchen space to try to limit the amount of things that people need to bring for that but definitely feel free uh to bring bring your own stuff and and set up whatever whatever you need and let us know if you need help from

us we'll we'll do our best to accommodate that and people are getting fed like so we're planning to have meals arranged and that'll be vegan and uh with the caveat that folks who want to have separate food can like do their own self organized, like cooking, but that's a thing that they're really committed to. Um, and we're planning on having like all the necessities of like lots of water and making sure that like we've got,

um, first aid lined up, there's going to be street medics who are participating in the work of organizing all that harm reduction. And just generally like, like some of the other things that we haven't really mentioned, it's like, we know that we're bringing a bunch of people with a lot of big ideas and

big personalities together. And that means we're probably gonna have to deal with some conflicts. Maybe, I don't know. So having conflicts, with some conflict maybe i don't know so uh having um conflicts uh like people who are good at mediating conflict we're going to have a crew of people who do that we're working on um like child watch training because this is going to be a family family space um making sure that we know how to take care of each other in case like shady people from outside try to do

something like whatever like our goal is to just make sure that like this is um as safe as it can be bringing people together as accessible as it can be understanding the limitations of there's going to be you're going to be outside so there might be you all the, some of the fun of having like a collective group of people all outside together, which can be a lot of fun. Like, I'm waiting for karaoke and for like our open mic and people bringing out like instruments and like just having like you know uh we were even discussing like um you know some soccer uh potentially being a thing um determining uh like placing bets on who's going to be more into soccer based on various ideological affinities and past experience and um yeah hit us up if you want to play some music if you've got an idea for something fun that sounds cool to do and just to come to circle back to this i think like with the point about conflict mediation i just want to make that like

super clear just because we're not going to spend half a day trying to come up with community with the points of unity does not mean we don't have expectations about how you act in the space so our plan is basically to say like don't be an asshole and then that means you know like in all the ways that we know uh that those things can happen and then if somebody accidentally is being an asshole or somebody's are accidentally being an asshole like that those are things we can we can. Cause we all know what it is that we're doing here. So it's definitely not a free for all, you know, it's a,

this is a space where the normal things we would expect in space are expected, you know, explicitly. Yeah. Oh, well, I mean,

I'm excited. Yeah. Me too. Yeah yeah i'm looking forward to people i don't know i i don't actually know how widespread bonfires are in the u.s but we do a lot in the midwest and bonfires are a great time i'm excited people to experience that it's it's good love it um yeah so i guess um do you two have anything closing that you want to say and also where can people find this and attempt to go to it and also when is it happening because that's that's another important it's going to be july uh 29th through 31st um. And attendance is free. There's no charge,

but we are soliciting donations. So we're doing a fundraiser through Open Collective. And we've been very generously given an offer of matching donations from one of the organizers who got a little bit of a chunk of change to contribute to that sort of thing.

We're very excited about that. So if you go on to... You can follow us on Twitter. And I believe that's at dualpower22. Let me double check. It's at dualpowergathering is our Twitter. The website is

dualpower2022.org. Yes. Yeah. If you go on the website, you'll find the links to everything you need to know. You can get in touch with us. You can give us your feedback if you can like you know give us

your your feedback if you love it if you hate it if you you know whatever we're we're probably not going to change the whole thing right now but show up and we can change it at the time i'll also say we do have like a organizing discord and people who aren't like serious about like getting involved and want to have things, want to come to this, and with things that they have specific visions for, now is absolutely the time to get engaged with that because we're working towards getting people who are the participants to really own the event itself.

So that's something we have. I believe we're going to do probably two more community calls, one in June and one in July. Every one of those calls has been really amazing. Lots of great people. And during those calls, we're going to be doing some training on, because you got to do some prep work when you're doing this kind of like generative discussion discussion like popular education

like unconference style um events like coming to them with a little bit of an understanding of what that looks like is really key to uh being successful so um we encourage people who want to come get signed up and then we'll get into our mailing list our mailing list is where we disseminate like when those calls are happening and you can also hop in our discord uh and as long as you're cool and agree to our community agreements we would like bring you in and like get all sorts of shit together and we're very excited for people to come in there's still a fair number of slots open for the event itself. We're like almost halfway full. So. Yeah. I mean, definitely we're,

we've been trying to think about this as an event that we would want to go to and we want it to be an event that you want to come to also. So help us make it so. Yeah. That's yeah. This is really exciting. I'm going to be going to it. Yeah. So yeah. Thank, thank, thank you. Thank you to you both for joining us for talking about this. I'm going to be going to it. Yeah. So, yeah. Thank you to you both for joining us for talking about this and I'm excited to see lots of people there.

Hey! I mean, we've all been wanting to see each other for two and a half fucking years, right? I miss seeing your face with dimension. Yeah. Okay. I'm sick of your flat face.

For real. Yeah. Thanks so much for having us on to talk about it. Really looking forward to it. I mean, we're getting closer and closer. It's just like, it just gets more exciting and also a little nerve wracking,

but thankfully a lot of people have been stepping up and I'm very I'm confident it's gonna be really like a really great thing yeah and we will we will have links to everything in the show notes yeah this has been it could happen here you can find us in the usual places

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