It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 6

Episode Date: October 23, 2021

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Gonorrhea! Garrison, take over. I asked for some grunting. That was like a word, but okay. It was gonorrhea. That? It was Donneria. Bastards opening. That's how you open a show.

I know. Lots of the Iconocular openings have become bastards openings now. I only have one kind of opening. Yeah, Robert doesn't have more than one type of opening. No, there's two. There's grunting and then yelling something weird. That's basically the same. Learning how to do your job is cuck shit.

Also, to be honest, most of the time doesn't know which podcast he's doing. They're all the same thing. What is this? Are we doing, is this the Daily Zeitgeist? Am I Jack O'Brien? Who are we? Which one of you is Miles? This is It Could Happen Here.

Which one of you is Miles? Me. So we're talking today about the different things that are it, here being the States this time. But we're talking about basically over the course of the past few months, we have covered a few different topics on the show, some of which have already kind of had some results or have had updates to what we've already covered.

So I'm going to go through a list of three different things that we've covered and talk about the updates in these stories. Most of what we've covered around these topics have been a mix of original reporting and interviews. So now there's been further work done on this and I just want to update people. If they're not as terminally online as us, maybe they have not heard that there's been changes to these stories and i wanted to kind of put together a nice little concise thing talking about updates to all the things we've covered um so the first thing that we're going to be talking a bit about is the cop city in atlanta and the defend the atlanta forest

uh coalition so i think like a day after our episode dropped on that, Atlantic City Council voted 10 to 4 in favor of getting the militarized police training facility greenlit, nicknamed Cop City. There was 17 hours of public testimony where 70 percent of the callers spoke out against the facility. Yeah. I mean that we had that happen in portland it doesn't yeah yeah it never matters it doesn't matter what the vast majority especially when there's especially when there's money involved um yeah yeah do not do not ever be deceived into thinking that uh you live in a democracy and that what you actually want matters in any way shape or form this is just not this is empirically not true like like 65 percent of texans periods support uh vaccine mandates in some instances but the governor just made it illegal to do them ever um yeah like it's it's it's that way across the board across the

nation um people ask sometimes because like you know when you get into anarchist discussions of politics there's a lot of criticism of democracy. I think democracy is a lovely idea. I would like to try it sometime. It would be nice to give it a go. It would be nice to experience. So yeah, the city council voted to lease the 350 acres of city-owned forest land to the Atlanta Police Foundation, at least 85 acres of which is going to be slated to become the police training facility. The facility is going to cost around $90 million. Jesus Christ. I could train

cops much cheaper than that, although training is the wrong word. Yeah, that is the wrong word for that. So yeah, $90 million, it's going to include a state-of-the-art explosives testing facility, firing ranges, emergency vehicle operations course, a classroom

space, and an emergency helicopter. Well, at least there's a classroom space um and an emergency and an emergency helicopter space so you'll probably learn to read right yeah i'm sure it's for teaching people to do bad things um yeah there's gonna be a an emergency helicopter pad and an entire like mock town it is good that they have the emergency helicopter pad because cops shoot each other with live ammunition all the time in those training houses. It happens constantly. It does happen a lot. So yeah, the main backer for this project

is the Atlanta Police Foundation, which is a political advocacy group that has a lot of funding from corporations, and they try to sway the political power of the city into giving more power to the police. Oh, no way. Uh-huh. So the interesting thing about this, though,

is the vote was supposed to happen in August, but it was rescheduled for early September after there was a lot of public backlash around this proposal. Then the vote that was supposed to happen on the 13th got pushed back a whole day because there was too many callers saying that they didn't want the facility. So the vote got pushed back a day in September, but they still voted for it. Yeah, so $30 million is going to be

footed by taxpayers, and the other $60 million is going to get paid for by the police foundation, which has a lot of different, like, corporate donors. So that's that. And of course, it's on, you know, on this forest land, which is, like of course it's on you know on this forest land which is like some of the you know biggest forest land in any major american city so you know they're tearing down all this forest to build this concrete city to train cops in yeah we should also we should also mention that at the end of our interview with some of the people resisting this they basically said like if the vote goes through resistance is going to continue so yeah this will continue there's probably going to be efforts to like actually try to physically prevent the construction of this but the next thing we're going to be talking about is stop

line three um which means there was also you know physical efforts to prevent that but the type of efforts that people usually do in you know modern green activism usually are a lot more performative, or they're specifically to pressure, to create scenes that will try to convince politicians to veto the process. So it's not, you know, it's different from the 90s when it was easier to, like, actually physically stop the prevention of things. Now a lot of the people who, you know, are trying to do this, it is, they're not convinced that, you know, doing a lockbox is going to actually physically prevent it. What it's going to do is create media coverage that is going to hopefully convince politicians to be like, hey, maybe we shouldn't do this. And that's a hard bargain, right? That's

not, there's no saying that that's actually going to do the thing. You know, in the case of Stop Line 3, that did not stop Line 3. There was a really good critique of the Stop Line 3 protests posted in It's Going Down by an indigenous anarchist who lives on that land who was, like, younger. And they're, you know, watching all of these, you know, older indigenous anarchists, you know, keep on getting arrested and brutalized.

And they're like, but we're not actually doing anything. And the methods that we're doing, the methods that we're trying to, like, you know, gain public support arrested and brutalized and like, but we're not actually doing anything. And the methods that we're doing, the methods that we're trying to like, you know, gain public support, this isn't working in this specific context. Maybe we should reevaluate what we're actually doing. I know it's going down and faced a bit of backlash for posting that critique, but I think that I think the critique is actually worth reading. Any other thoughts on the Atlanta thing before I move on to the stop line three stuff? Um no other than to note that i think the best brisket i've ever had came from atlanta okay well i'll probably be i'll probably be visiting atlanta

in the near future i may be there with you um in which case i'll get some more motherfucking brisket yeah it was actually the fun story we were road tripping through town me and another friend in another car and we were talking over radios and a trucker got on like the channel we were on because we were talking about where to get barbecue and he told us where to go um it was neat it was like an actual nice like like moment of cb radio connection like this guy was just scanning the waves and found us and was like oh i can tell you where to go anyway continue garr. That was completely unrelated to stopping Line 3. So the next thing is earlier, I think in September, maybe August, I forget. It's been a while. We posted two episodes about me visiting the Stop Line 3 protests and the Earth

First camp. And a lot of stuff has happened since then. So, you know, the main, you know, thing is that the pipeline has been finished now and is basically ready to be operated, or it probably already has some operation. It's unclear how much is being used right now, but it is done construction. It doubles the capacity of the original pipeline. It's going to be doing like 760,000 barrels of oil a day. So it carves out land through wetlands

where people grow wild rice and do hunting. So overall, the past few months, police arrested over 900 people. And there's been a lot of felony charges specifically for locking down, which is pretty new because they're using felony theft charges for people just locking down to equipment. Yeah, that is an unfortunate escalation. just for people just locking down to equipment. Yeah, that is an unfortunate escalation. Yeah. So by the time we posted our top line three episodes, we kind of already figured this was going to be the result.

That's kind of how I ended the episode, saying there's been all this resistance, but probably it's going to get built. And there's other things that we can learn from this movement going on into the future. But the new developments that have happened, I did mention in the episodes how much Enbridge was directly paying cops. That was something we already knew that was happening.

But there was an article by The Guardian that really gave a lot of new information around how much police involvement there is with Enbridge. They are actually coordinating a lot. So overall, Enbridge has reimbursed U.S. police almost $2.5 million for arresting and surveying protesters, also paying for food, lodging, gas. So they're not just paying wages. They're paying for extra stuff as well. So at least $2.5 dollars has been paid from the Canadian oil company. And that includes officer training, police patrol routes, surveillance, all this

kind of stuff. The one interesting thing that was noted in the article is that the company, Enbridge, meets daily with police officers to discuss intelligence gathering and patrols. And when Enbridge wants protesters removed, it directly calls or sends letters to police. So they actually like coordinate when to actually get police involved during protests, and they have at least daily information meetings. The one other interesting thing besides just directly paying them for food, for, you know, training equipment, and the coordination between Enbridge and people being on the ground is how much that Enbridge paid for, like, proactive safety patrols

and specific, like, specific officer surveillance following alleged activists, like, home. So they would, like, trail specific cars for a long time and try to, like, do, like, in-person surveillance on specific people they thought were activists. And all of this time was paid for by Enbridge and was being coordinated with Enbridge. So it's not just paying for training. It's not just paying for equipment.

It's specific surveillance of certain people. And that is, I don't know, that's something that we weren't, we did not really know the depths of that for sure, but it's pretty messed up. I know we suspected some of this coronation before, like when we talked about police showing up to the Stop Line 3 camp and blocking off access to the road. This was at the same day that drilling under the river was just being finished. And so we suspected, like, yeah, there's, like,

Enbridge is obviously talking with police to prevent people from leaving so that they can finish up this specific drilling project that was it was pretty obvious to us at the scene um and now we have you know extra confirmation that yeah they do like meet daily to coordinate these types of things um so it's good to have that extra confirmation of the stuff we already like suspected and stuff we already kind of like put together through experience but now we have like you know court documents and like records showing the extent of the coordination all right well we'll talk about terrorism but you know who else is a terrorist oh boy the products and services that support this podcast are all right in a good way you know uh-huh like um you know like uh like uh like kind of okay all right well it's it's complicated all

right what do ads just run ads stop oh uh so it'll probably be funnier if you bleep out the name of the terrorist organization this is how we this is how we pick up from the ad break is so um garrison we got some uh some critiques that came in to the old news line by which i mean people dm'd me on reddit um which i read it yeah i never respond um i almost never respond it's nothing against people i just don't like being communicated with yeah um but too many people too many people ask me to send messages to you i'm like yeah it's annoying yeah garrison you're not my secretary i know i'm not like that's not good yet and welcome to the last three years of my life uh yeah anyway yeah i mean but that's funny sophie

what were you gonna say robert i don't know. There were people who were like, hey, I don't know if you know this, but Earth First has a problematic history with eco-fascism and that sort of stuff. Yeah, I got some messages like that, too. Yeah, and it's one of those things. They definitely are an organization that has said things in the past that I don't agree with. There's been specific people who do organizing with them that don't have great beliefs, specifically around, like, you know, a lot of like in the old green movements has been, you know, a lot of like transphobia, some like racism. It's not because they're the green movements, like all left spaces deal with versions of these issues.

Yeah, and there's a variety of stuff, you know, not like respecting like indigenous people. That's been a thing. But the specific term eco-fascism, I believe, is incorrect. Because they don't advocate for the genocide of a specific group. And they don't have far-right populist policies. So you can have bad opinions and bad ideas, and you can actually be racist without actually being fascist, especially eco-fascist. So I feel like people throw that word around a lot, and they don't actually know what it means.

But what were you specifically referring to, Robert? I'm trying to find the message here, but— Because I got a message saying that Earth First is bad because they're antinatalist, and that means they're fascist, which isn't— Yeah, I definitely got that, yeah. Which isn't actually, like, I'm just going to disagree with that because I don't think antinatalism equates fascism, especially antinatalism for, like, something like... And antinatalism is basically saying don't make people.

Maybe we should stop having more kids right now because we have a lot of problems to deal with, and maybe we shouldn't be having, like, you know, three kids it's not a take i'm not an antinatalist i don't actually disagree with that take though but i think it's more in the line of like the most fundamental of all human desires uh for the majority of the population is to make more people um which is kind of why i like antinatalism, because it has that thing that's opposite to what a lot of humans' natural reaction. And like, no one's forcing,

antinatalists don't want to force you to be antinatalist. No, no, no, no. They just want to bring up this as an idea. Yeah, and I think it's a valuable idea to discuss, and I don't think it's, I don't think you're, I don't think you're embracing like, the massacre of human beings or genocide in any way by saying, I think it'd be best if we didn't make any more people.

I think that's an arguable point. I'm not planning to have any kids because I don't see why I would, especially when there's so many children that can be adopted. Now, Garrison, we talked about you having kids so we could experiment with making them blue. This is a separate conversation that we talked about last night. This is a separate conversation. We're not talking about that on the pod. Involving colloidal silver. last night we're not talking about involving

colloidal silver we are not talking about this on the plot okay we'll just include that tantalizing hint i also just think in general when we talk about a group that's had a long history and a specific thing they're doing in the present yeah this has happened in other situations people like well you know they did this or some one of them said this. And there's a couple of things I feel about that. For one thing, it's entirely possible that the people doing the thing in the present day have nothing to do with the people 20 years ago. No, yeah. Most of the people at the Earth First gathering were in their 20s or around my age. They weren't in Earth First in 1980.

That's not – in the they weren't in earth first in 1980 like that's not yeah like so i i feel like silly about kind of making them be held accountable for something somebody else said under a similar banner decades ago and on the podcast i talked about how like people at earth earth first earth first gathering like talked about this stuff like the people talked about earth firsts like history and how they haven't handled some issues very well. There was a massive effort for this gathering to uplift and make sure everyone focuses on

indigenous voices. They invited over multiple indigenous groups to give talks on green resistance and land back. That was a big focus of making sure that this actually is something that is heard because people know this is something important. This is something that actually should be done. And there are, I think in general, when we talk about like

holding organizations and individuals accountable for their past, what matters is like a mix of what they did and what they're doing. So obviously if Earth First had been saying 20 years ago, we need to wipe out all the Jews, I would be like, I wouldn't care what they were saying now, you know, it'd be like, yeah, you can't really come back from that. If you want to do a completely different thing, it needs to be a new organization. But they weren't. And I'm not saying that where I'm just making an example. But like, as a rule, I think we should embrace the fact that organizations and people can change throughout time and be better than they were in the past and learn from mistakes and flaws. And I feel pretty unwilling to condemn individuals or organizations for the mistakes of their past, although that is dependent upon the kind of mistake and the harm that it caused.

Yeah, and how they address it in the future. It's like a lot of this. Yeah, because it wasn't like Ortho First as an overall organization. It was specific people they were affiliated with. Specifically, Edward Abbey has said some not great things around different social issues. And his books were extremely influential

on the beginning of Green Resistance. But that's something people talk about now. That's something that is discussed and debated. And he was, even in the 80s and 90s, he was kicked out of earth first gatherings for kind of being a loser like for for having these bad views were like yeah we probably shouldn't have you here anymore leave go away so like that was something that was even talked about back like back then as well that is that isn't just a modern thing yeah and i i think in general now there's a couple of things number

one whenever we talk about like an organization in a specific context, they're doing this. That doesn't mean we're embracing everything they've done. And number two, whenever we talk about the history of a movement or a group, I hope nobody ever takes that as like, here is the authoritative stance on the history of this thing. Like it's when we talked about the Black Panthers, there's a bunch of stuff we left out that's very important. My hope with those episodes and my hope with anything we do is that it like inspires people to want to learn more and read more.

And we're giving them a basis of understanding that they can use to expand their knowledge on an important topic. So please, we are, we are, there's like one thing uh collectively that that garrison and i have any kind of expertise on and uh outside of that you should not take anything we say as like here's the comprehensive history of of this because it's i i i understand one thing and it's it's how the internet makes people shitty yeah so yeah um yeah i mean that that was some this whole thing was something i thought about when writing these episodes is how much to include of this stuff and i did not feel like it was super important

to discuss this stuff because it wasn't relevant to the topic of stop line three i think you did it wasn't relevant to the topic of like the current ongoing green resistance if we want to do like a history of green activism then yes yes, this is something that would come up. I think at some point we probably should do a talk about John Muir and all of that shit. There's a ton of stuff we want to talk about that we haven't

yet, because it's a daily show, and my god, give us some fucking time, people. Speaking of Edward Abbey, you know what sells quality monkey wrenches? Okay. All right. That's fine.

That's okay. Maybe one of our sponsors. It's possible. I hope so. Ace Hardware. Ace Hardware. If Ace Hardware is sponsoring us, they do sell. You can get some good monkey wrenches from Ace Hardware.

Quality. For fixing your faucet. For fixing your faucet. For fixing your faucet. So go get wrench-pilled, and then listen to the rest of the show. Well, we're back! We just had a good discussion about what we're gonna talk about, and we realized that it wasn't after the ad break. So here we are.

In early September, we had episodes about both California's climate and the ongoing recall election against, uh, Gavin Newsom. So a few days after our episodes dropped, I think like the,

the, the day, the day, the second one dropped was, was election day. Yep. we, we,

we got the results in faster than what I was expecting. Um, and, uh, Newsom did, uh, handily, uh,

beat, uh, Larry Elder, uh, with like 60, not even close. Yeah. So people, people voted 61%

no and like 38% yes. So he, Newsom did a decent job in pushing off Elder. So this whole recall process costed California taxpayers $276

million. Well, it's not like we needed the money for anything else, Garrison, come on. costed California taxpayers $276 million. Jesus. It's not like we needed the money for anything else, Garrison. Come on. Yeah. So, you know, a few takeaways from this. What else were we going to spend it on? Firefighters?

Literally anything else. Water? Giving houses to- You think California needs water and firefighters, Garrison? Come on. Giving houses to people who need houses? I don't know. No.

No. Yeah. So takeaways from this, the recall process know. No, no. Yeah, so takeaways from this. The recall process still should absolutely be amended. Yeah, it's stupid as hell. It should require more than 12% signatures of the last voter turnout, and the government should be requiring to get... If you're going to be elected into government,

you should be required to get a majority of votes, not just a plurality of a specific you know sect so there's a whole we we talked about the specific reasons why it was bad in those episodes those are still those are still like those are still valid those are still relevant um because there's still the same issues yeah and none of the fact that this turned out well had anything to do with the democratic party who very nearly bungled it uh and it doesn't it doesn't really impact it doesn't impact you know the california's climate issues so much and like just because newsom's in office doesn't mean they're going to get much better you

know there's still things that he needs to be pushed on to to you know make the climate a little bit more habitable in the meantime it it it means that we will continue stumbling towards a cliff rather than speed running off of it yeah yeah so generally what voting for democrats means yeah i will say it's interesting to me that it doesn't seem like you can get a uh the vote was rigged thing to work unless the election is like kind of close this is the next thing i was going to talk about um okay yeah because because like in the week before the election uh fox news republican party and larry elder and even trump were really starting to ramp up this idea that if elder loses that means the election was rigged uh this was like

they were really pushing this hard and you it, like they were giving links to it on a website before he lost even, to be like, when I lose, use this website. It was like, okay, that's... Yeah, that was very funny. That's weird. But on the night of the election, Elder seemed to kind of climb down

from the inflammatory rhetoric around the election. In his concession speech, he told supporters, let's be gracious in defeat. So once the actual results were in, he really climbed that down. So we can read into that. But the other thing I want us to read into here is that could this rhetoric around,

if we lose, that means it was rigged, could that disenfranchise Republican voters from even showing up if they believe that all elections will be stolen from them? God, I hope so so will that mean that there'll be less republican turnout if there's just if they think that it doesn't matter so that's the other side of things it's like i i'm not sure if if if the other side effects that this that this rhetoric could have yeah there's an interesting so during during the last election like national election cycle there was a bunch

of interviews people who weren't voting in florida and i thought it was really interesting because there were there were several people they talked to who were like yeah i don't vote because last time i voted was 2000 and they stole the election which which literally which which yeah and you know i i'd say that i get it yeah yeah like i think it is slightly different when like 2000 when it actually was stolen yeah like literally there was there was the brooks like the there there roger roger stone yeah roger stone led a riot to stop like the votes from being counted like whatever weird bush i think yeah people people got like struck like a bunch of people with like vaguely black names got like their names struck off the uh like the voting rolls like there was a lot of yeah but

yeah and i don't know if it'll if it if the effect can work that strongly when it's like completely bullshit which i think that's yeah i i don't know it's hard to say because it's it's it's unclear whether the voter turnout on the because like you know there were times where they were polling like 50 50 between between between newsom and elder and it's unclear i think definitely the big advertising push that corporate donors gave to newsom in the month before the election did help get democratic voter turnout you know like people voting for news yeah getting people scared about yeah fucking like very elder as the governor so that did not was not ineffective that that very much works

that did increase turnout there but i don't know because like with the whole election being stolen rhetoric that could both increase republican voter turnout and there's also the side effect now where maybe it could decrease it because they're just disenfranchised about this concept but this is kind of just speculation at this point. I don't have actual data backing up this claim right now. This is just something that I thought about while running this write-up. I'm like, huh, I wonder if this could be a contributing factor in the future. People really feel like they're always going to lose.

Maybe they just not even are going to bother. But it's hard to say. The main reason why Elder lost wasn't due to Newsom's strengths. It was because Elder is completely— He's wildly unqualified. Yeah, wildly unqualified and one of the more extreme candidates running. And yes, he did get a lot of support among Republicans, but among moderates and people you know left of center in

terms of like an american spectrum uh they're like yeah no this is going to be a disaster if he gets elected and that's the main reason why he didn't um it's not due to newsom being great um but i mean sophie did mention a few things that newsom has done since then um so do you want to say the specific details just so i don't have to look yeah Yeah, Sophie's famously a big Newsom fan. So not to give Newsom credit because this is like an obvious right thing to do situation. But at the beginning of October, the Senate Bill 796 was signed into law. At the beginning of October, the Senate Bill 796 was signed into law. It was a unanimous vote and Newsom signed off on it to give back Bruce's Beach, which was owned by a black family, Willa and Charles Bruce, back in 1924.

Their land was illegally taken away from them. It's a beachfront plot in Manhattan Beach. And I signed into law to give it back. So that's cool. That is good. I mean, yeah. signed into LADA. Give it back. So that's cool. That is good. I mean, yeah. Yeah, more of that should be done. I mean, that is kind of the basis of like, you know, that is one side of land back is just giving land back

to people who used to have it. Yeah. This isn't specifically tied to like indigenous stuff, but, you know, I've seen people make that same comparison for like, yeah, we should just be doing this more in general to a lot of people. Yeah. Yeah, I'm glad that that was done. make that same comparison for like, yeah, we should just be doing this more in general to a lot of people. Yeah. Yeah. That's a,

I'm glad that that was done. It's also now illegal to remove a condom without consent in California, which is. Wait, what? Really? You're going to have to change a lot of things about how you have sex with Californians.

That, it's the first state to prohibit. That is real bizarre. To prohibit. You didn't realize that was legal. Yeah. During intercourse. That's the, it's the first state to do that. First of all. Huh? Yeah. That is real bizarre. To prohibit moving a content without permission. Yeah, during intercourse. It's the first state to do that, first of all.

Huh. Yeah. And it's wild because under any reasonable definition, that's rape. No, I mean, yeah. Yeah. It's 100%. It's just rape. Yeah, it's absolutely rape. California also now requires menstrual products in public schools.

So that's bare minimum and great. Oh, great. That is good that is wow i didn't realize that it happened yeah and i want to be clear here i'm not giving newsome credit for this but if he had lost the recall election none of this would be happening no it's nice that he i'm sure some of this was him kind of providing a sop to the people who lined up to stop the recall and those are good things that were done yeah and i think i think that's sort of an important thing to understand about when politicians occasionally

do good things it's like they they don't do good things because they want to do them they they they they do things that benefit from you because they're either in some way scared of you or it's because they need to buy you off. And that is a legitimate way that good things happen. I've got a couple other. There's been a lot signed in recently, so I got a couple other ones that I think are relevant to our show. California will now streamline, extend assisted death law. That's good.

That reduces the time until terminal patients can choose to be given fatal drugs. Good. Starting January 1st, the waiting period required time a patient makes separate oral requests for medication will drop to 48 hours, down from the current minimum, 15 days. That is good. That's pretty rad.

Yeah. I'm very supportive of that. Yep. I mean, there's just there's there's uh i mean we'll see if this is it's hard there's a lot there's a lot it's hard it's hard to be like worse than larry elder yeah that's my that's my point this one definitely would not get get through for larry elder no no california california next law to strip badges from bad officers like very vaguely written yeah we'll see how it works it is very vague but yeah we'll see what happens California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California California

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California California California California California California California California California California California California that's why I was like shocked and very very important specifically at like the condom thing yeah yeah absolutely

and very important I was not expecting that to go through Newsom signs legislation to extend to go cocktails wait alright that's

fine sure okay fine more drinking where am I to go cocktail heads sorry

alright so at least Larry Elder's not in office there's still a lot of climate issues and maybe this rhetoric around stealing the elections not going to work every single time they do it. No, that's kind of the main that's the main things that I was going to talk about. I generally agree with is like the foolishness of voting as harm reduction. And there's been a lot of if you want to believe that it isn't, there's been a lot of information coming out from the

Biden administration that will support that belief. Yeah. But what we're seeing right now in California is pretty, it can be like the, these are not, none of this is going to fundamentally change the major problems that are confronting us. But, but a bunch of those things are going to like, life's going to like, life's going to be easier for some little girls whose families don't have much money. You know, life got easier for that one family who got their land back. You know, potentially, it's going to be easier to get bad police officer or to get particularly bad police officers off the street. And that's not, that's not nothing like when we say voting can be, off the street and that's not that's not nothing like when we say voting can be and i'm not saying that it usually is but when it can reduce harm that's what it means it means that like oh some

bad things that that would be worse are not as bad because of this not that everything is better a lot of stuff will be the same and is the same in california like ecologically nothing has really fundamentally changed but some shit's a little easier for certain groups of people as a result of some stuff and specifically specifically i think the getting getting more like contraceptive products and menstrual products inside public schools is one of the literally the best things we can do like like for the whole country that is like something that if that was required in every public school that would make so many people's lives better that is a ridiculous degree significantly reduces harm in a specific way and i i think that just because like yeah i mean it's not going to stop us all from burning up um but that doesn't mean it's not

worthwhile yeah so those those are the three stories that I wanted to give some updates for. Cause I know, you know, there were changes happened, you know, very soon after posting those episodes. I still think the California ones are worth listening to because they do lay out a lot of stuff around,

around California's climate and the specific weird stuff that it has with its specific weird things it has with its election process. I think the line three episodes are going to be pretty good to go back to as well. And then the specific Cop City thing in Atlanta, that is the stuff that I am... It's going to be the most ongoing thing still because that's still going to be an ongoing project. So I'm sure we'll come back to the Cop City

at different points throughout the next few months. So that's the updates. Any closing notes from either Christopher, Robert, or Sophie? Yeah, just I do. Well, excuse me, sir. Okay. All right, Sophie. Just reminding, we've said this earlier in the episode

that we're just giving you brief snippets about this stuff. There's a lot of really good articles online that go deep into these things, and we'll post our sources on the website. Yep. Yeah, we do a good job, I think, most of the time. Patting ourselves on the back, Chris.

Yes, yes. We do a good job. We're great. Yeah, we're the only heroes in the world. I really like us. I think that's fair to say. Absolutely. But do not have a podcast be the only heroes in the world i think that's fair to say absolutely but do do not have a

podcast be the only source of information no absolutely thing like don't do not don't listen just i am begging you no like for the love of god listen to if if you want more of a of a left perspective that is that that goes in some directions we don't uh it's going down is a lovely place to check out margaret kill's Live Like the World is Dying. St. Andrew's YouTube channel. He does some really incredible stuff. There's all sorts of good people out there. And then also history books,

more than anything, history books. History books were the thing that radicalized me. Yeah. If you want to read more about the, the, the new SIM notable laws signed recently, the KCRA in Sacramento did a, did a really good breakdown article.

Yeah. That all. Oh, sorry, Sophie. It's okay. And, and as a note,

we, we will be doing more episodes like this over time as like stories that we cover have additional things happen to them this is like we don't want to just be like dropping a story and then ignoring whatever happens next um sometimes that'll mean following up with people that we're talking to on the ground but you know we are trying to like uh keep you updated on the things that we think are important you know even when they end uh uh in a in a broadly positive sense or whatever and uh lastly what was the name of that brisket place in atlanta because i'm sure people are gonna ask

about it oh i don't remember it was some shitty little place in the middle of uh south atlanta um in like a fucking strip mall that was really helpful i don't remember so if it was like 11 years ago what do you i don't remember yesterday the best brisket you've ever had. It was. If you know anything about good barbecue, the best barbecue you ever have is either cooked by your uncle or is cooked in some shitty little place with a bathroom that wouldn't pass a code inspection. That is true. The more codes it violates, the better the brisket. If you see the chef actively shit on the grill,

that means it's going to be incredible. Jesus Christ. Anyways, Twitter and Instagram. What happened here? Pod and cool zone media. Subscribe to the feed and leave a five star review. That's it.

Don't, don't, don't shit on your brisket grill. Shit on everything. All right. Bye. Shit life. Bye. Shit life. Bye. Bye. Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora.

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

available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Garrison, is that good? Is that the show? Nope. Just keep going, though. Okay, well, it could happen here, is the show. That atonal noise is my introduction this week,

because I'm a hack and a fraud. Who isn't a hack and a fraud is our guest this week, St. Andrew. St. Andrew, you are a solar punk anarchist from Trinidad. You have a YouTube channel where you talk about solar punk. You talk about stuff like seed bombing. Yeah, I'm just very excited to have you on the show because I'm a big fan of your YouTube channel. Thank you. Glad to be here. Big fan of your work as well. Andrew, I kind of wanted to start with why this, why solar punk is important because, um, I think it's easy for folks who just kind

of skim it to see it. It's just like, Oh, it's an aesthetic. It's maybe an art style or a fiction style. Um, maybe something that's neat, but not something that has like a lot of inherent value to people trying to change the world. And obviously you disagree with that. I disagree with it too. A quote I keep coming back to again and again is one from Werner Herzog in the 1970s. And it was something along the lines of, I think that without better myths, we're destined to go the way of the dinosaurs. Right. It reminds me actually of, I forget his name right now, but there's this excellent, excellent book called The Truth About Stories.

And I think what it really emphasizes throughout the book is the importance of stories and how stories impact how we navigate the world, which is why I sort of embraced Solarpunk, you know, as a story that we can work with going forward. Yeah, I think it's incredibly important to have better stories better myths because for one thing i think where the left falls down a lot

is not having is is accurately diagnosing the problems without providing a better look at at this at the future you know um and when the problems are when the people who do kind of propose solutions it's often um not in a way people can feel one of the benefits that that that the right has that fascism has is that they they're very good at providing people with myths and providing people with kind of a fictional look at at their idealized world that draws people in you know you can laugh at the right you know they have a lot of people that work on like meta narratives and that's very very core to their ideology. Andrew because this is kind of the first time I think we've really talked about solar punk on this show even though from the beginning before any of these episodes dropped this was always a central part of our discussion about what the show was going to be. Would you kind of provide

an introduction to what solar punk is for our listeners? Sure. Sure. So I would say that solar punk is a vision of the future that places emphasis on the existing world and how we get to that future from where we are now. So it emphasizes the need for environmental sustainability, for self-governance and for autonomy and social justice. It emphasizes the need for, you know, human and egocentric ends to really be in sync and it aims to really heal the current rift between humanity and nature it also recognizes of course that there isn't this binary between climate change happens and climate change doesn't happen. Rather, it understands that how we navigate it will have a variety of consequences,

and some will be positive, some will be negative, but it's up to us to really shape that. Yeah, and I want to drill into a couple of facets of that, but I want to quickly plug one of your YouTube videos. For folks who kind of want a more involved explanation and background, you have a video called What is Solarpunk on your channel, St. Andrewism, like Andrew ISM, that I think is a fantastic introduction, not just to like the aesthetics of solarpunk but some of the practical some of the practical kind of expressions of it. And two of the ones you list is like examples of here's here's what this is, is like actual praxis, you know, and not just an aesthetic is is seed bombing. of air conditioning which i think is i think is neat because it's it's that one of the problems that i think with kind of some versions of of of particularly kind of on the more liberal end of of of solar punk imagining is just sort of like ways of replacing um ways of gaining the same kind of consumptive benefits that exist i guess not even not even so upon like greenwashing right yeah greenwashing like here let's get the same consumptive benefits we get skyscrapers

with just trees on them yeah skyscrapers with same level of consumerism same level of you know destructive extractive practices but we have some flowers and some trees so yeah and that's not enough but at the same time there are things that aren't like air conditioning is contributes massively to climate change it's also not a luxury like if you live in a place where it's 120 degrees a lot of the summer that's not a luxury yeah this is coming from someone in a tropical country yeah definitely definitely a necessity yeah so i i wonder if you could talk about kind of those two i mean or if you would have different ones you'd like to pick, but just kind of what you see as sort of the praxis expressions of solar punk sort of beyond the aesthetic, although we're going to drill into the aesthetic some too, because I also think that's important. Right.

So I think some of my favorite manifestations of solar punk in a practical context uh things like um gorilla gardening gorilla gardening is probably the biggest one because it's one that someone could literally pick up and do today or tomorrow you know as soon as they hear about it learn about it just get some clay get some seeds you know and put those things together and as you're walking home or walking to the store just toss them wherever there's some free dirt um so that's a fun one there's also of course things like a little bit more involved like community gardening and particularly forest gardening because that will provide a level of food autonomy and agency for people who have been alienated for a long time from the process of food production.

There are also practices like coppicing or coppicing, and it's like a way to produce lumber without chopping down a whole set of trees. So you are able to get the wood from the trees but the tree remains alive um there is also things like of course solar powered um technology whether it be algae based um windows that you know extract energy from the sun or solar sails or solar ovens uh or like the terracotta air conditioning which by the way i learned recently can't really work in a human environment yeah but yeah there are a lot of different opportunities there also there are things like you know tool shares and maker spaces and seed libraries all different ways to sort of bring it into fruition so that is yeah and i uh i i i think a lot of that's really valuable um i'm interested in in part sort of your attitude on what – let me think about how to phrase this.

What do you think are kind of the things – as we talk about sort of the things that can be at least potentially replaced with less extractive, less consumptive methods as sort of an example of solarpunk practices replacing those things. There's also things that we're not going to be able to have if we actually want to live in a more sustainable future that doesn't contribute to some of the nightmares that we're all going to be increasingly facing. You're, you know, and again, I think it's telling that so much of kind of the future fantasies of that are written by people who come from, you know, my part of the world, the United States, focus on like kind of post-scarcity methods of guaranteeing the

continuation of consumption just through, in some some cases like fantastic methods um you know magical 3d printers and the like um you come from a very different part of the world very different perspective what do you see is the things that like we're going to have to give up coming from a country that is actually reliant on oil and natural gas production we have to get rid of cars yeah we definitely absolutely have to get rid of cars um freighter ships as well and really the whole way that you know global supply chains are structured right now not to say that there won't be any sort of global um sharing of resources in the future but the way that it's happening right now it can't continue to go on we can't continue to structure our cities and our lives around cars you know and

other methods of gas guzzling transportation because we're literally going to run out and we've known this for a long time but it's nearing the day is nearing closer and closer. And yeah, we have to find a way to do without it. we have to stop global trade because and global travel because the people have have sought and done that for as long as there have been people in one form or another it's it's a fundamentally human thing but there are aspects of it like you know expecting that every kind of fruit and vegetable will be available year-round which is certainly a thing that we in the united states expect um that doesn't that that's not part of a realistic future. And if it's part of the future, then it's only going to be part of the future for an ever-shrinking chunk of the country. And you can see that in sort of – or of the West.

And you can see that in kind of the – like what we're dealing right now with like the supply line shortages and failures and like one of the i think the symbols of how far we have to go in my country is the degree to which people are freaking out by the fact that christmas presents might be late um let alone being like yeah you might not be able to buy coffee um um ever or all the time you know you might not be able to get uh tomatoes in december um which reminds me, I think one benefit to guerrilla gardening, and that's also the mindset, is as you learn to sow, you also learn to reap, right? So a lot of people who get into guerrilla gardening also end up getting into foraging. And there are apps and stuff you can download that allow you to, you know, learn how to identify plants in your area. And you'd be surprised the number of plants in your area that are, you know, useful for teas or for salads or for whatever purposes that can be used as replacements. coffee, but they could be beneficial in recognizing how we have to live with our local ecosystems,

basically. And a big, you know, when you talk about learning how to live with our ecosystem, stuff like planting forest gardens and the like, or food forests, I think is the term. I think something that has to be discussed is the matter of indigenous sovereignty, especially when we're talking about, you know, it's not just, you know, North America, a lot of chunks of the globe, indigenous people had spent, you know, in some cases, thousands of generations setting forests up in order to sustainably produce food. And when colonialism arrived, that was often just seen as like, oh, these are wild places for us to extract or tear down and replace with monocultures, single crops. And so a big part of actually building back that capacity, the capacity of us to survive off of the food that can sustainably grow where we live, is looking back to those indigenous methods and also, you know, giving back land in a lot of cases.

And yeah, that's something you talk about in your videos that I think is really important to explain to people. Yeah, I mean, there really is no way to separate the violent and oppressive institution of colonialism with the ecocidal nature of modern states. You know, those two are deeply intertwined, deeply married together. And so you can't fight climate change without addressing the issue of sovereignty, of indigenous sovereignty and land back. Yeah, it's really interesting. I've been up hunting on Mount Hood

with a friend who went to school for forestry management. And as we were driving, we had to drive through a chunk of the reservation in order to get to the BLM land where we're able to hunt. And he pointed it out. And once he did, it was immediately obvious just how different the land under indigenous control looked from the land just feet away that was being managed by the federal government in terms of like how much better the the forest management was how much how much smarter it was

it was managed in order to um reduce the chances of like a ladder fire that that actually kills you know the trees and whatnot there's this whole thing blowing up on twitter right now where you've got uh a chunk of marxists who are trying to frame land back as uh just like shifting ownership of resources which i think is really missing the point but i find interesting about twitter because the exact same discourses are repeated over and over and over again so i remember this exact conversation happening around this time last year around april last year um earlier this year as well it's just the same discourses get recycled over and over again and it's reached a point for me where i realized that these people don't want

to learn about land back what it really means because they are invested in the structure as it exists and they don't want to have to interrogate that. So, yeah. This found out to be an interesting thing of note. Yeah, and it's frustrating. I guess that acts as a general description of Twitter discourse. But certainly does. Yeah, I think it's I think it's telling the degree to which people even on the left treat it as a fantasy as opposed to doggedly pragmatic and proven so like proven by like like you know like you can read u.n reports that will that will essentially say land back in the space of a 500 page you know study on how indigenous

land management functions a great deal better than um than a lot of the stuff that's like centralized by the federal government where we're like our federal government is terrible at land management um and it's part of the And it's part of the problem. I think one of the things that excites me about solar punk as an aesthetic and idea is getting back to this relationship with the land as opposed to talking about just preserving it as talking about managing it. Because none of the land that people live on is like wild in the sense that exactly mean it as it's been cultivated and that's the thing right the whole philosophy of you know um land uh preservation as was taken up by the u.s government with the whole um you know you can stop forest fires kind of thing ended up leading to more forest fires down the

line because if they we have a role in the ecosystem we're not just there to stand back from afar and just observe it so we don't do our part to manage the underbrush and whatnot and clear it away and uh excise you know control fires but we end up in the situation we're in today. Cultivation, not just sterile preservation. Yeah. Now, one of the things that you talk about well, because one of the more frustrating discourses, this is not just a Twitter thing, this has been going on for years,

is the discourse around GMO crops. And usually, I would say the two most commonly heard sides are GMOs are bad because M you know, Monsanto, cancer, whatever, or GMOs are good in thought. And the thing that you point out, which is I think the accurate take is GMOs, the preponderance of evidence says that like there's nothing inherently dangerous about genetically modified crops, but the way in which they're often used in order to create these massive monocultures is really toxic. So there's a lot of promise for GMOs in terms of keeping our existence on this planet sustainable. But what's not sustainable is the kind of industrialized agriculture where you have 10,000 acres of one thing, which just doesn't happen in nature.

Exactly. And if you look at how genetic modification took place prior to all advancements in genetic modification technology, I'm not sure how many people are familiar with the dozens upon dozens, if not hundreds, of varieties of just corn that were present in the Americas prior to colonization. A lot of those varieties were wiped out or were suppressed in favor of these monocultures. But if we're able to cultivate a diversity of these crops and maybe bring some of them back through genetic modification, that will really help us with food resilience in a world

with an increasingly unpredictable climate. Yeah, yeah, I think that, I mean, I think you said it perfectly. I want to move back to kind of what I introduced the episode with, which is talking about the value of fiction and myth-making in a very pragmatic sense. I guess I'll start by saying I think one of the clearest signs of the danger that we're in and how toxic our society has gotten, and I am speaking from a primarily U.S.-centric standpoint here, but I don't think it's unique to the United States,

is the extent to which- Trust me, as the saying goes, when the U.S. sneezed, Trinidad catch a cold. So anytime there's some phenomenon happening in the U.S., there are the copycats down there as well. And I do think this is pretty global. I mean, you see it in South Korean films and it's just all over. I know what you're going to say, yeah. The obsession with apocalypse. And when we go to the future, it's always a dystopia. There's a degree to which we've almost forgotten how to imagine utopia or even not just utopia just a way of living that

is an improvement in a lot of ways a future that's better we've forgotten to do both utopian fiction and any just kind of like positive fiction in a lot of ways i mean yeah yeah it's understandable because the world is kind of terrible right now in a lot of in a lot of ways i mean yeah yeah it's understandable because the world is kind of terrible right now in a lot of in a lot of ways but there's also there's been utopian fiction inside other terrible worlds as well i think just the modern interconnected media sphere has really rewarded this type of like dystopian and collapse based apocalypse fiction yeah and i'm sure that's that's worth interrogating, but it is a problem that needs to be solved. Yeah, and it is.

And I think it's important, it's not entirely based in how fucked up things are. Because when the first Star Trek came out, we were at the height of the Cold War. Things were terrible. There was a lot of utopian fiction during World War II. Yeah, during World War II. I will always be impressed by the fact

that Gene Roddenberry saw it as incredibly important both to be like, okay, well, in the future, like in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement, in the future, we will have overcome, like, racism. But not just that, but like, I'm gonna stick a Russian on the bridge, too, because

nations are going to end as a concept and, like, this stuff won't matter. And that just, that kind of utopian fiction at least at this at the scale of popularity that you know star trek was in its time just isn't present anymore and i that's tremendously worrying to me and i i see a lot of hope in in solar punk for that um i, I'm, I guess for starters, I'm interested in, in your thoughts on this and your interest in the,

Andrew, what you think is like the pragmatic value of, of, of positive, of fiction that, that, that imagines a better world. Yeah.

So I've done probably, um, I think I've done like two videos on Solarpunk so far. Two major videos on Solarpunk as well as a smaller video, two other smaller videos. And what I've seen in the comments and in the general social media reaction again and again is Solarpunk saved my life. You know, Solarpunk has given me hope you know i was slipping into despair but this video really gave me a jump start to try something new and to start afresh and to pursue action as opposed to just lying down and taking whatever comes next and that that is it for me you know i think the fact that solopunk offers like an energizing vision it's not just a vision it's an energizing vision because

in every step of the way it shows what you can do you know when you show when you look at solopunk art or um you look at the small but growing genre of solopunk literary media or you know you look at well there's not that many solopunk video games right now but hopefully there will be in the future um when you look at the various forms of solopunk media that are coming out and people's responses to them you see that it's not like as you're all mentioning like star trek where it's all this far out technology that we can only aspire to for now yeah you know solar punk is something that you can literally put in your backyard or your balcony or your home or your school or your community. You know, you could put these things in place like from now, you know, and you could incorporate

it into your politics as, you know, as they are. And they could also help to push your politics forward, you know, because through Solarpunk, we can open up discussions about, okay, so how do we ensure that people live comfortably within the parameters of, you know, the Earth's carrying capacity? You know, you open up the discussions about indigenous sovereignty. You open up discussions about the relationship between the global north and the global south and responsibility with regard to our response to climate change. Well, you open up a lot of different discussions through the realm of Swolapunk.

It energizes people, as I said, and yeah, I think that is its pragmatic purpose. It doesn't stand alone, of course, but it is a driving force. Yeah.

Would you kind of give out a list of if people are, you know, if this is someone's first introduction to the concept of solar punk, what is some reading you want to draw people towards? What is some fiction? Like, I know you mentioned The Dispossessed by Le Guin, right? Yes. Which often gets cited. Yeah, I'm interested in kind of other recommendations you might have for our listeners. Ari, that.

Right, so I'm still getting into the genre myself, so I don't have too many recommendations. There are some decent short story collections like Sun Vault by a couple different authors there's also multi-species cities solopunk urban futures um and the one i read most recently was ecotopia which is quite is much older than all the others. It's actually a book that was published in 1975. And not all aspects of its politics are things I agree with, but I think for a first,

it was one of the really the first of its kind in that sort of eco-utopian genre that really laid out what this society would look like. The book is structured in a series of novel entries and notebook reports by a journalist from the United States who has gone to this country called Ecotopia, which is sort of where the Pacific Northwest states are. And he's basically breaking down, he's going to different parts of the country and breaking down how they have lived and how they have decided to structure their lives. And even though not every aspect of it is one that I would want to see implemented, I still think that it really sparks the imagination, really gets you thinking, well, maybe I wouldn't do it this way, but how else could this be done? the capacity for a solopunk story to just generate that thought and generate one's imagination is

very useful in a world where we don't really get to use our imaginations much not really since childhood you know and um yeah i uh i think it's often understated the degree to which using your imagination is a vitally necessary part of actual radical politics. Yep. And I think there's a lot of people who consider themselves radicals. Some of these, not to slam every Marxist-Leninist on the planet, but certainly some of the ones who were coming up with these bad faith criticisms of land back. It's like, you're not a radical. You're a conservative who wants to go back to a different kind of problematic thing.

Exactly. Ignore the fact that the Soviet Union poisoned the largest body of water in Europe. All the different things that the Soviet Union did that were horrible for the environment and extractive. I find it interesting that, you know, there are these people who call themselves radicals, but at the very first encounter with a radical idea,

their first instinct is to shut down. Their first instinct is to just push back against it. Whereas, not to toot my own horn or anything, but when I see an idea that I haven't encountered before that may seem strange to me, that challenges my preconceived notions, my first reaction is not to shout about how this goes against everything Lenin said.

My first reaction is to investigate it and to open space for it in my mind to really, you know, turn it around and imagine what it might look like and how it might fit with what I have learned about before. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that think that's that's that's great advice for radical politics it's also just good life advice yeah yeah especially for engaging with ideas that you are less keen on at the moment or or just unaware of yeah i mean my whole thing is if i have like a strong gut reaction to something it might be because it may be hitting a part of me that might be benefiting from that system you know i mean i don't benefit from the system in a lot of respects you know as a black guy from the caribbean but as a man as in as a cis head man

you know i do have privileges that i must be aware of and i can't just like be so quick to shut down you know something that might make me a bit uncomfortable you know yeah i think that's such a valuable thing to keep in mind especially as a a more or less cis white guy like a you know yeah i think that's such a valuable thing to keep in mind especially as a a more or less cis white guy like a you know a significant number of people listening are if you're uncomfortable by a new idea is it is it because the idea is bad or is because it it strikes at an area in which you may not even have like thought about being privileged like i'm i'm uncomfortable i had even though there's no i have no intellectual argument against it with the idea of uh of ending our use of cars as they exist because i love i love to drive but that's also heavily rooted in in in tremendous

privilege on my behalf um american car culture and so yeah And, you know, we did talk about that a bit in the opening episodes of season two, the idea that like a more, you know, when we kind of had our little utopian ending, the idea that like, well, maybe you'd have a car that's communally owned and used for certain tasks. But, you know, the idea of car culture as the center of a city is death. It's just death when we talk about getting past cars is not to say that like people will never use vehicles that move again like obviously we will they're necessary for something we're not all going back to horse-drawn buggies i think one of the last things on like solar punk and kind of tying into the whole kind of nature of the shows i really liked andrew your point on like how solar punk is like an energizing force and i feel like we have very few of those on the left and especially on the anarchist left um like i've i've i've had my decent stint of like anarcho-nihilism and the problem with that is like it's very easy like anarcho-nihilism is one of like the

easiest ideologies to to to grasp onto because it validifies all of your bad feelings yeah um but it also it most of the people who i know who are like real into anarcho-nihilism they're generally not very happy people like no because it's kind of it's kind of miserable all the time um and sure they'll like scoff at like solar punk is like some like green washed yogurt commercial like you know like a utopian thing but also like it's actually lots of solar punk that we've talked about it's like actually about doing specific things like it's actually like actually going to do something rather than just being an insurrecto kid um or just just you know talking about nihilist zines and books on twitter for all day

i think one of one of your one of my favorite videos of yours is your video on the psychology of collapse um yeah because yeah i think that's one of my my favorites as well it's it's it's it's a it's really just like a masterpiece in how deep you get into every different type of collapse thinking. Because it's not just on the right, it's not just on the left, it's not just whether you're more anarchist, more authoritarian.

It's like you get into every specific type of thinking that plays into this idea around collapse. And I think if, I recommend everyone check out your channel, especially watch your Solar Punk videos, but specifically on the topic of collapse. And I think if, I recommend everyone check out your channel and especially watch your Solar Punk videos, but specifically on the topic of collapse.

Like, you know, part of our show, we were trying to kind of be a little bit like anti-collapse. And I think your video really shows the depth of that topic and how to approach this.

Because collapse is a feeling, like it's a feeling we all have and it needs to be interrogated. And I think your video does just a magnificent job interrogating that feeling. um, the insurrection last year, one of its tremendous defeats is that it has become characterized in a huge number of people's eyes as breaking windows and,

and starting fires. Um, and yeah, that's a lot of that is because the media is trash, um, and it's trash at reporting on, on all of this stuff. But some of it is because a lot of people have let that be their

primary praxis um and that again i don't care about people breaking windows i don't care about people lighting dumpster fires but if that's what you're presenting to the world as your praxis that doesn't appeal to people and you have to um because you have to remember that yeah anarchism is not just destructive it is also constructive yeah it's the constructive part we need to be boosting more than ever and there were some you know from the context of portland some really strong examples of that last year the incredible amount of mutual aid that was was put together yeah during the fire relief was incredible. And the Red House, the eviction defense

occupation, was a really good riposte to the disaster that was the Chaz in Seattle, that this was like this was an area that was temporarily autonomous from the police that did not collapse into violence, that succeeded in its goal, and that cleaned up after itself

and presented an option for people like, this is how it can look when we try to evict people. You know, this is what can happen. So I think there I don't want to like be too negative, but I think that a lot of folks because of for a variety of reasons, you know, the there's been so much focus on kind of the insurrection. Not even that, because I think on kind of the insurrection not even that because i think that building can be insurrectionist i think that seed bombing guerrilla gardening can be profoundly insurrectionist it's like um destruction has an immediate result of making you feel better right yeah it has an immediate rush of endorphins and hormones it makes you happy when you do it it's it it is it is an exhilarating act and you feel like you're accomplishing something allegedly what's harder is to like

have that same feeling by doing seed bombing right by actually like improving your community slowly through these types of like so the perk ideas they don't have the same immediate emotional reaction so a lot of people like when they you know think about what insurrection is they can a default to this destructive tendency which destruction has its time and place. But if that's your only praxis, we're not going to improve the world at all. Like, right? That's not going to do anything. Helping through, you know, giving out food, helping through giving out socks and clothes, helping through all of these solar punk ways.

These are things that actually, like, Are going to improve things on a tangible level And they're going to make more people be like Oh hey what are these anarchists doing That's actually interesting Versus oh what are these anarchists doing This is stupid ignore everything they say Yeah people have to remember as well That there are seeds of solarpunk

In Kropotkin's writings From the conquest of bread to mutual aid and um those are sort of things that should be just as emphasized as the destructive uh exhilarating aspects of anarchism yeah there's a line in a frank turner song a couple of lines actually in a song called 1933 that i go back to a lot but one of them is you can't fix the world if all you have is a hammer. And that's, I guess what I see is like the primary practical benefit of solar punk, just as an aesthetic, as a piece of fiction is getting people to expand their toolbox. Yeah. Get yourself a trowel, you know, um some screwdrivers you know yeah keep the hammer you need that sometimes too but let's let's grab some other tools expand the toolbox thing is a really great metaphor for all of this type of thing yeah yeah um i think that's most of what

we're going to get into today um there's a couple of pieces of things I would want to read one of them isn't this isn't directly I think it predates the solar punk but it uh I think feeds into some of what I think it emotionally feeds into a lot of what we're talking about here it's an essay from David Graeber called the shock of victory um which I think is really useful that's a good one yeah um and i would also recommend um uh cory doctorow's new fiction novel walk away um which i think is oh yeah a really wonderful piece that was a wonderful wonderful book i should have included my um recommendations but it was really great yeah i i read it recently and it made me um it made me feel the way like as a fiction writer that a good piece of fiction should, which is like I felt bad, bad about some of the things that I had written, because there's there's there's such there's so much more courage because I wrote a piece of fiction that has some solar punk elements, has some quasi utopian elements in the dystopia. quasi-utopian elements in the dystopia.

But I didn't have the courage to kind of go as far as Corey did and to imagine a kind of pacifism that he has the courage to kind of put into the hands of his protagonists. Like, I really respect that about the book. I mean, the book goes in some very interesting AI directions as well. Yeah. It's got some great shit. And I always enjoy Corey's love of Burning Man, of what it could be,

as opposed to kind of what some of it's turned into. But yeah, Andrew, is there anything else you wanted to get into before we close this out? I just want to remind people to check on your friends. You know, um, we are all going through various stages of collapse.

As I outlined in my video, I know we shift between them from time to time. So try not to go through it alone. You know, there's no, there's no i in solopunk yeah yeah um check out uh saint andrew on youtube at saint andrewism um andrew is there any anything else you wanted to kind of plug uh from your own your own uh personal work yeah so um other than the you know the soul punk videos and the collapse videos i want to remind sorry i rather i want to shout out my video on black anarchism uh i think that

is a pretty essential look into uh the history of black anarchism in the United States and in the world. I also want to recommend my video on the psychology of authoritarianism. I know a lot of people have family members who are conservative or on the right, or maybe leaning fascist. And I think that might be helpful for, you know, helping them to,

or rather helping you to understand where their mindset's at. And also, check out my video on Pumicultures. I think that was a pretty fun one as well. It breaks down a lot of, it breaks down how you can go about implementing food forests or Pumiculture gardens

wherever you find yourself. Awesome. go about implementing food forests or permaculture gardens, wherever you find yourself. Awesome. Thank you very much for being on the show, Andrew. Thank you all for listening. We'll be back tomorrow, or if this comes out Friday, we'll be back another day. We'll be back at some point.

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

I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Podcast. All right, Chris, you can go. So welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that i think for the first time is just me and robert uh-huh this is this is the very first time that this is happening you're you're all here at a moment of legendary significance and historic importance so try to try to face

it with the requisite awe that's all i ask yes another thing that, man, this is a terrible transition. Something else we're facing with requisite awe is weird shortages of goods and price increases. It's fucking rad. I was just at the Asian market today, and they did not have the snack chips that I most prefer. Oh, no. So this is now officially a calamity. We've entered crisis, Phil. Of historic proportion.

Yeah, I don't think we're going to live through this one. Nope, we're doomed. We can't look. Without the Asian snack chips, we're done for. It's the ones that are like pieces of seaweed, but that have been fried in tempura batter. Oh, that sounds really good. Completely out.

Tragic. Absolutely tragic. I think there's a couple of things i mean you've got a script so i'll probably just let you do that in the not too distant future but one of the things that's frustrating to me although maybe it shouldn't be because i i'm probably partly responsible for this is that this is being um this is often kind of being talked about with by people online as like, oh, it's a sign that like, society is crumbling. And what they mean by that is that like, oh, we just don't have stuff like we're not able to like, keep up with with demand and like the ability to produce these things is crumbling. And it's actually much more complex than that, and a lot less rooted in a lack of

specific resources and more decisions made under capitalism about how the supply chain would work and it's i don't know i think it's important because it is you can say it still is like a situation where this is an example of the system falling apart but it's not falling apart because we don't have the paper to make toilet paper with it's falling apart because decisions were made in order to increase the stock prices of companies by reducing the amount of products that they kept on hand and that's uh led to an incredibly fragile system that that did nothing well but maximize profits and i think well okay i think there's there's a couple of things with that that we should talk about yeah because there's a lot of different explanations that are floating around for why it's happening and i think some of them are good but i think

a lot of them are missing part of the story yeah and and i think it's important because okay so like like my grandma like called me yesterday like like called our family to like talk about the the the the supply chain problem because someone had like she'd been like fed a conspiracy theory that like the shortages were because american dock workers like didn't want to open containers from china yeah it's like yeah like i mean this is not what's that's not right but it's not like if that had happened it would be like well okay yeah that yeah it does scan like yeah and i think yeah yeah and like i think this this is a moment where yeah you know okay think think things are not working how they're supposed to and there's a lot of sort of

competing stories about some which are good some which are bad and i think most of the conventional accounts and robert was talking about this uh you know even the really good ones they they start with sort of the the 80s wall street takeover of corporate america and the transformation of sort of all corporate management into an attempt to like raise short-term stock prices yeah and you know part of this is is lean in production and this is true and this is sort of true but this misses about half of the story and and the part of the story that it misses that's really important i think is is the sort of it's it's the broader like frame in which all of this is happening in is essentially the story of how the working class essentially loses the

class war in the 60s and 70s and weirdly it's also a story about fico's boomerang which yeah hell yeah oh yeah this is a this is a long Throw in the music clip that we've all decided is going to be the one we put in whenever someone talks about Foucault's Boomerang. Yeah. Which is probably just going to be another time machine noise. Real quick. Foucault's Boomerang

noise. Credit to Cody. Okay, continue. Brief refresher on what that is. So basically, Foucault's Boomerang is that if a government credit to cody um okay continue brief refresher on what that is so basically it because we were is that okay if you if if a government does something like repressive like technology repressive technique or passive technology like in a colony like in a war somewhere eventually it'll come back and be used against like the citizens of that country and yeah a great example would be fingerprinting was invented for the british like policing um

insurgents in malaysia and is now has come back to every you know colonizing nation now uses fingerprinting which is also deeply flawed as a technology but anyway yeah yeah and you know and i think most people tend to think about this as our armor personnel carriers but uh we will eventually get to this the the boomerang technology here is actually shipping containers hell yeah which have done like irreparable damage to the mankind all right all right i'm ready for this i don't know much about this hit me all right bear with me with this because we're we're gonna talk about two threads they're going to seem like they have nothing to do with supply chains and then they're all going to tie together it turns out is literally all supply chains so in the 60s and 70s you have

you know in very very broad general strokes you have two kinds of class war the first kind is what i'm sort of very broadly calling the war in the factories and this is this is an enormous series of sort of strikes and outright uprisings a stretch from sort of detroit to turin to tokyo and you know the most famous of these is the student sort of worker uprising in may 68 in france and they you know they're they're close enough taking the country that like french president charles de gaulle like flees in a helicopter to uh in in secret and like flees to germany in secret and you know and that that that's like a big event but it sort of it sort of fades what doesn't fade is may 68 in italy and you know it doesn't fade there because italy italy has been in the middle of a strike

wave since 1962 64 it's the whole 60s that basically just put strike waves there and you know they have their own 1968 and unlike in france where peter's out in italy you get the just incredibly named hot hot autumn of 69 which is oh yeah my favorite name ever yeah it rules yeah i'll bet it was a hot autumn. Yeah, it's great. And so basically what happens is you get hundreds of thousands of workers go on strike. They start seizing control of their factories.

Most of this is playing out in the Fiat factories. Yeah, these giant car factories in Italy's industrial triangle. And, you know, I mean, they're there for like, they're there for a long time. They're like 1970 and eventually they lose but you know italy is just sort of rocked by conflict and sort of class war stuff and all of this sort of culminates in yet another enormous uprising in 1977 this one driven like in large part by people who are basically just like fuck

this i'm not working in the factory anymore it's awful which which i think is something that like you know if you're looking at the modern political landscape you have a bunch of people who are going like fuck this i'm not going to go like die in these factories anymore and yeah those people all have in a lot of cases uh safer employing situations than many people today yeah yeah yeah it's like it's starting to get worse then which is why people are frustrated but like there were pensions yeah yeah yeah you know and this is sort of interesting because there there's a kind of like vicky osterweil we've had on here, calls it the monkey's paw thing, where it's like people in the 70s in Italy

wanted autonomy and freedom from work. And so what capitalism gave them was like, oh, we'll give you autonomy. We'll just make you all contract workers. And now, yeah, you don't have to wake up every morning and go to a job in the factory and leave at five or whatever. But now you're a contract worker, so you just have no stability whatsoever,

and that's your autonomy but you know this this is this is really bad for the italian ruling class like they almost lose control of italy three times in 10 years and after 1977 they're just like fuck this and they i mean they start to start doing mass arrests they imprison like tens of thousands people, they torture a bunch of people. And, you know, but it becomes clear that pure political repression is not going to be enough to just destroy the section of the working class movements that, you know, God help you thinks that you should run production for themselves. And so they start looking elsewhere for answers and the place they find these answers weirdly enough is in the second set of wars that are going on in this period which are the sort of national liberation wars and you know these are the national liberation wars these are full scale like these aren't sort of metaphor class war metaph. These are, you know, this is Guinea-Bissau, this is Algeria.

And, you know, importantly for our purposes, the U.S. fights two of them, which is Korea and Vietnam. Now, Korea and Vietnam are strategically really bad places for the U.S. to fight wars. Like, they're on the other side of the world, which, which you know it makes it more difficult to do war crimes because you know if you're firebombing a village right you have to be able to move fire bombs jet fighters and like oil and rations to the other side of the world and this is hard as it turns out a lot easier when they can commit war crimes and like i don't know duluth yeah yeah well even even like you know you you got to commit a war crime in Mexico. It's like, okay, you just sent a bunch of people over the border.

Oh, it'd be so easy to commit war crimes in Mexico. Yeah. And really, really up our war crime quotient. Well, I always say this. We do do a lot of war crimes in Mexico. It's just that, like, they're done basically by proxies. That's true. We've killed like

we've killed like a million people there in the last like 20 years in the war on drugs but yeah you know so the u.s you know the u.s okay so it has this logistics problem and logistics problem is that it can't do war crimes enough and so it comes up with a couple of solutions to them all right one of them is essentially they rebuild the whole japanese economy in order to use japan's industrial base to fight the war in korea and then after the war in korea ends they rebuild the south korean economy in order to you know fight the war in vietnam and this works but it doesn't solve the problem that you know okay even even if you're you know you you have an industrial base in Japan, you still need to be able to efficiently move things by sea to Korea.

And there's still supplies you need to move from the US. And so the solution for this is containerized shipping. And containerized shipping, this is the pivot point upon which the entire history of the 20th century and everything that's happened in the 21st century hinges on. This is the pivot.

And I, you know, this isn't even really an exaggeration. Because it turns out that the ability to have uniform boxes that you can stack on top of each other like Legos and put on a ship is like, it's like, comparable to the nuclear bomb in in terms of how important it is which is really weird used to the

only way to get things from a to b was a big wooden ship filled with doubloons like pile bags and stuff yeah yeah i don't know how did we like global commerce work before shipping containers what did we what did we literally like you just like sometimes sometimes you would just like physically people would just pick up the items and put them on the ship or they would like sometimes they put them in boxes or like you would like strap them to like the top of the ship and so with the trains a lot they would just like strap like machinery like onto a train car and this was like not this is like really inefficient it's really slow yeah and so the u.s in order to like do war crimes in korea and then it you know it's just like oh

hey what if we just make metal boxes and then they get they progressively get better and better at it because you know they have to go do more war crimes in vietnam and but by the time you're getting to the end yeah yeah you know look lots of war crimes that do you need good logistics networks to do all of these war crimes i mean it makes sense that that's where we got shipping containers but i didn't realize i had just assumed it would have come out of the shipping industry as opposed to like we had to get more missiles over to these places yeah well this is the interesting thing we'll get to this in a bit but basically like a lot of the logistics revolution stuff either comes out of the military or is developed by ex-fascists and and a lot of the reason for

this is okay i mean this is you know the 60s and 70s there's still r&d happening like there's still actual research and development but the military is doing just an enormous amount of the research and development for all of global capitalism and you know and and the the other thing that's what's happening here in the you know this this is the sort of fukui's boomerang thing, is that the containerized shipping logistics stuff that had been used to just obliterate the global south suddenly starts spreading into broader shipping. Because people look at this and they're like, oh, this is efficient. And then the contracting companies the US is using. This turns into the solution to both sort of the war in the

factories i was talking about in in in europe and the u.s and in like japan itself and then also to the solution of the national liberation movements and sort of like communism in east asia because you know okay so you have this question right the u.s like we kind of fight to a draw in korea like we kill a enormous number of people but yeah, about 20% of the North Korean population. Yeah, but we don't really win. We can't actually defeat the Chinese army. And we lose Vietnam. And so the question is, okay, so how are we going to stop communism?

And the answer, it turns out, is to just integrate the communist countries into the capitalist supply chain and i mean there's a lot of examples of this like margaret thatcher for example is like very good buddies with nikolai chochescu oh that's nice it's nice that they could be friends despite their the fact that they uh well i guess they weren't really that different as people. No, not really. Basically, the difference is that Ceaușescu lost and thus got murdered on state television. He got the shit murdered out of him. And got a state funeral. Yeah, she should have been. Yeah.

The Ceaușescu treatment. That's my official stance. They should have Ceaușescu'd her. Yes. For stuff we will talk about in a bit. But yes, the archetypal example of this is actually china and you know there's a lot of very sort of skilled diplomatic work by kissinger and also the u.s like throughout the 70s just like they're just like sending entire factories

to china like like they'll like they'll they'll take an entire factory break it down put it in boxes and they just like ship it to China. Great. At the time. Yeah. They're just sending technology to China. The end result of this is that China goes from fighting American troops with doing bayonet charges through their own artillery. Yeah, like massed human wave shit. Yeah, yeah.

A nightmare. Yeah. charges like yeah like mass human wave shit like yeah yeah nightmare yeah i was just like yeah to to you know being an american ally in like invading vietnam as a way to like stick it to the soviets basically and so you know so the u.s essentially just integrates china into the global supply chain and they eventually do the same thing to vietnam which again is another country that they couldn't defeat militarily but what they you know what they actually beat them with it's a shipping container and before the shipping container this would have been impossible right like basically it was too inefficient and too expensive like the cost of shipping was too high to have all of this production you know like some half your parts made in china some of them made in india some

of them made in like japan some of them made in korea and then ship them all around the world which is how the modern system works. But with containerized shipping, suddenly, shipping is really cheap. And it becomes much cheaper to pay shipping costs than it is to pay labor costs. start making too much noise about pay or like again god forbid start talking about like taking control of factories and running them democratically like some kind of anarchist monsters corporations could just move the factories overseas and this becomes an incredibly effective way to just destroy the labor movement because anytime you know organized labor starts making demands you can be like well okay sorry we're just going to pack up and we're going to you know we're going to go to china we're going to go to somewhere else We're going to go to somewhere else. And this coincides with the thing that gets talked about a lot in the conventional accounts, which is the Wall Street sort of corporate takeover.

Well, the Wall Street takeover of corporate America, which is something I think that sounds really weird to us now. But the whole story here is really interesting and extremely long and if you want to like have a very detailed account of how this all played out uh the book liquidated by karen ho is in just incredible uh like ethnography and history of wall street she like yeah she's karen ho's an anthropologist and she like went and worked on wall street she like yeah she's a karen hosen anthropologist and she like went and worked on wall street and like did ethnography there for a bit and it's just very interesting stuff but it's kind of outside of our scope so the the the very very very short version is that the wall street bankers basically figure out a way to just like buy out corporations to like raise a bunch of

money and just entirely buy out corporations and then once they have the corporation right what what what what you know is this is corporate rating so they're they're they loot all the assets they sell it off and they try to sell off their stock at a higher price the process of this is sort of complicated but the net result of this is that wall street completely takes over the corporate world the way they hadn't before like the wall streets the wall street like finance people are now you know they're the people making all the decisions and you know and and their their only goal is to raise the stock price like that's that's the only thing they care about they don't they don't even care about making money right if you lose money and your stock price still rises like you don't care and those guys start looking at a lot of the things that had existed in

corporations before that things like pensions uh particularly things like research and development and they look at it and go okay why are we spending money on r&d like this this doesn't this doesn't raise our stock price this doesn't have any immediate short-term value so they cut it right they start cutting pensions they start essentially just destroying the unions and you know, because this is happening at the same time as corporations really, like, get the ability to outsource for the first time,

you know, they lean into it and they start essentially just slashing the amount of people who work for the company, right? And so, instead of having direct employees, they start working with contractors and they start moving the contractors overseas and, you know, this so instead of having direct employees, they start working with contractors and they start moving the contractors overseas. And, you know, and this is where we get to sort of this whole outsourcing wave because, you know, something I don't think is talked about enough with outsourcing is why actually are the labor costs lower in the countries that these people are moving their

factories to and part of it is you know people talk about development like they're moving to undeveloped countries and you know a part of part of part of development is just you know how much technological capacity their manufacturing system has right and that you know but but the other part of it is that if you move your production to say columbia right and that you know but but the other part of it is that if you move your production to say columbia right or like you know you're investing in sort of like cocoa bean farming in columbia and people try to do union organizing you can hire death squads to murder them yeah and yeah yeah it's like you can basically just sort of like you can you can outsource the violence and you can you can you know the the corporate term for it is reducing labor costs but really what

you're doing is just like murdering people with death squads and terrorizing them and you know that that does lower labor costs right but you know and i think there's another example of this like this is a lot of what like the killing at tiananmen was really about it was you know not so much in tiananmen square itself i've talked about this elsewhere but like the workers that they kill outside of the square like a lot of the reason they're doing i know very little about tiananmen square other than like protesters china government bad the guy stands up the tank and then yeah yeah i i yeah i i've talked about this elsewhere more like the the very short version is so there's a bunch of students in the square, right? And the students in the square itself, basically, they kind of want democracy.

Mostly, they want market reforms to go faster. But then outside of the square, Beijing's whole working class shows up. And there's these enormous demonstrations. They basically start barricading blocks and blocks and blocks and like this radius outside of the street you get this sort of like mini commune thing and those guys are like you know like they're they're advocating for democracy in the factory like they're you know they're they're talking about things like like they're like you know they they they they have their like marks out and they're talking about how like they're they're calculating the rate of surplus value that's being extracted

from them by the capitalists and those are the people like almost everyone who dies at tiananmen is is from those guys like those are the people that they just get massacred and you know and and the reason that happens is that the ccp is looking at this and is like okay this this is this is like this this is sort of this is the return of organized labor and we need to destroy it before it like gets anywhere and so they do and organized labor in china just implode i mean it was already pretty weak because you have a lot of state-controlled unions but i mean now it's just nothing and know, and I mean, there have been attempts to do labor organizing in China sort of recently, and like, yeah, this is to be just to rest everyone, right? And so, you know, this is the price of cheap labor, right? It's just incredible state repression. This is a sort of macro scale thing of why the supply chains suck.

Because everyone talks about the efficiency of the supply chains, but the supply chains aren't efficient. They make no sense. If what you're trying to do is move something quickly from point A to point B, they make no sense. Because these supply chains are spread all over the world. Individual parts are being made in six countries right you have like people will like for tax dodge purposes like they'll have one part of a component built in one country and then they'll move it to another country to have another part of it and then they'll ship all of it to mexico and they'll ship it across the border and they'll have the whole thing be assembled in the u.s so they can say it was made in the u.s like there's all of

these things that are just just nonsense right they're not they're not efficient at all it's completely ridiculous it's it's this just you know it's just completely absurd web and and the the the reason why it's designed like this is as as a giant sort of kind of uncertainty thing like the the the reason the reason supply chains are are just bad is because they're you know they they they're not designed to move things they're designed as an instrument to just like solve the problem of of of class power right they're they're they're they're designed to destroy unions they're designed to make sure that nobody ever sort of like gets any ideas about wages to make sure nobody gets any ideas about like taking anything and so you know but and this this this can work for a while the problem is again like they're not efficient like it's it just it

just it is not efficient to like move have everything made in like six countries and then you have to send them somewhere else yeah and so and so, you know, in order- It's efficient in the sense that it efficiently maximizes the value of stock prices for like stock buybacks and stuff. And that's generally what is meant by like efficiency in that sense is like what makes the 70 people who actually own this company the most money. That's the efficient thing. But it's horribly inefficient

in every practical sense of the word. Yep, and this is kind of an interesting change because, I mean, mean you know this isn't to say that like the supply chains that worked before this were like better because they also sucked in a lot of their own ways but all of the like efficiency stuff that we're about to talk about like just just in time production etc etc like you know what isn't produced just in time? Sorry. But it is an ad break time. Yeah, they're not produced just in time anymore because the supply chain is falling apart. It's our sponsors.

That is our promise about our sponsors is that they're not at all in time. Who knows when they'll get your products to you? There's no way to tell. It's impossible to know. We're back. Yeah, we're back to talk about how you know having having developed an entire network of extremely inefficient supply chains that just

absolutely suck and don't make any sense uh people tried to make them efficient and this this is where we go back to japan because japan you know i guess this is this is this is the other fukos boomerang which is that you know okay so we we industrialize japan in order to like fight our colonial wars right but then you know this turns into this huge like pikachu face moment when japan suddenly starts like industrializing more efficiently than the u.s does yeah it's very funny and then writes a bunch of books that are the premise of all of them is japan scary yeah it's really funny yeah you know like it's interesting it's not this is an interesting thing here which

is that like all of the panic around china there was exactly the same panic like around japan in the in the 70s and 80s it's exactly the same like right down to like a bunch of socialists going like hey look this this is a model for anti-capitalism like people said that about the japanese model and it's like it's all it's all the same thing it's just it's just happening again but you know what what type what japan did and specifically what toyota does is create this thing called the Toyota production system, which eventually becomes known as just-in-time production. And if you've read anything about sort of the modern supply chain problems, you've almost certainly heard of just-in-time production or lean production. And just-in-time and lean production are technically different, but

the differences don't matter for us. So and and this this stuff is derived from what toyota was sort of doing in the post-war era and basically the goal of it is you're you're never supposed to have any inventory that's just sitting there so the whole system is supposed to be constantly the whole system is supposed to be constantly in motion so you have parts come in they get put into their immediately get put into the production so the whole system is supposed to be constantly the whole system is supposed to be constantly in motion so you have parts come in they get put into immediately get put into production line the finished products immediately shipped out to the stores

and you know the theory is that the stores are only going to carry exactly enough product to meet demand and it's supposed to be quote unquote flexible which means that it can like react to shifts in consumer taste and demand by like increasing or decreasing production and it can't do this this is what we've been seeing for the entirety of covid which is that

you know this this is why every time there's a run on toilet paper everyone runs out of toilet paper because it turns out that these systems can't even a 10 increase just completely obliterates this entire system and it just collapses and can't produce enough toilet paper yeah and again just because it's expensive to store things it's pricey this is a big part of like why actually the john deer strike which has the potential to disrupt the status quo more than more than any strike in in recent history um is so potent because john deer tractors are kind of a necessary part of the agricultural industry not just their ability to sell new tractors but their ability to repair the extant tractors. Like if harvest season comes around and there's not spare parts to repair tractors that break, like food doesn't get harvested.

It's a significant issue. John Deere – we'll talk more about this at another date but like not only did the most that they could do to squeeze their employees, to suck out pensions, to cut expenditures on wages, but they set up their factories in such a way that there was no extra space. So they could not scale up any of these factories to increase demand when they needed to, so that now that John Deere's going on strike, if they lose a month of productivity, they can't ever catch up. It's impossible because they can't actually expand the productive capacity of their factories and because the strike is hitting they didn't have any extra spare parts lying around so if shit gets broken they can't manufacture the parts necessary to keep tractors functioning in a lot of american farms because they didn't store

anything because that was not the most efficient thing for the economic bottom line of the ceo who gets 160 million dollars a year yeah and this is anyway this is this is the funny part about this whole thing which is that you know okay so this whole supply chain system was based around just like destroying destroying the organized working class right but it's like they were so successful at it that they've like turned around and fucked themselves with it because like you know this is this is the thing about about the john deere strike right it used to be you know back back back if you look at like like how how the unions were broken in the 80s or like if you

look at like the giant like auto strikes you'd have in the 70s right and companies still do this to this day but like they're worse at it the thing thing they would do is – okay, so if you're a company, you know roughly when a strike is going to happen. And the reason you know when a strike is going to happen is because in the US, the way labor law works is that you can basically only strike when a contract is up. I mean, you can do wildcats, but it's illegal. when a contract is up, I mean, you can do wildcats, but it's illegal,

but you know, okay. So they, they, they, they knew that the auto unions, for example, we're about to go, we're going to go on strike when,

when the contract like was, was coming up and, you know, they'd have spies and you can get a sense of like, you know, okay. So are, are,

how likely are they to, to do the strike? And, you know, so, so that, that, that lets you do things like build up an enormous sort of inventory of spare parts.

It lets you build up an inventory of supplies, and it lets you build up, you know, it basically lets you build up the capacity you need to outlast a strike. But the problem with Justin Time is they can't do that anymore because, yeah, they've, you know, they've completely fucked themselves. Yeah, and in the John Deere situation, cause they hadn't strike, the workers hadn't gone on strike since 86. Yeah. They'd been putting funds into their strike survival fund for years, but the company had nothing like has. Yeah.

Um, it's rad. And this is, you know, this, this is the other part of, of, of why everything like good that's happening right now is happening is that

they, they they they you know that we everything has circled back around and suddenly all of these companies are you know we are incredibly vulnerable to strikes again because yeah as you're talking about the just-in-time production thing it only works if if everything actually comes in on time right like if if any if any individual part is late the whole system starts to fall apart and then and then you can't repair it and yeah you know and there's a lot of ways that that this this this can be very bad um you know we've talked about the john deere we talked about the labor stuff uh the other big thing that's happening is covid

which has happened and continues to happen and has killed off just enormous parts of the working class. I mean, it's like 4 million dead worldwide or something. And again, that's also probably an undercount because that's just direct guess. That's not like, yeah, it's probably like twice that. I mean, we're looking at a minimum of 725,000

to the US, and again, that's probably a million undercounted at least. Yeah, it's a horror show, right? And the people they again, that's probably a million undercounted at least. Yeah. It's, it's a horror show. Right. And,

and the people they killed with that, you know, like especially in the initial phases, like it was just, it was just, they, they, they took a change chainsaw to the working class.

And those are a bunch of people who, you know, they're, they're not replaceable. They're, they're very highly skilled and they do a bunch of jobs that absolutely suck. And now, you know, one of the places that this has caused a bunch of problems is in the ports. Because the other thing that this entire supply chain relies on is being able to very quickly and cheaply move parts from, you know, China to the U.S., from China to mexico from like bangladesh to like simbalia

you have you have you have to be able to continuously like keep moving stuff around in in you know you have to continuously keep moving ships around and you also have to be able to load and unload them and we you know we we saw like there there was the the that when that ship got stuck in the suez there is that whole yeah yeah you know that that was yeah sex asses were uh where people couldn't get sex asses because the world's supply of sex asses for months was on that one ship um it was a real crisis for the sex ass community those are plastic asses that you have sex with, if you're curious. Yeah, it's... The world appears as an immense collection of commodities,

some of which are sex asses. Yeah, most of which, in terms of the ones that matter, are sex asses. Yes. The sex ass industrial complex is really the linchpin of global capital, but please continue. Yeah, well know the sex asset industrial complex falls apart and you know and it's not just the ship being stuck in the sea like made everything way worse right but and was very funny yeah it was it was extremely funny it

was extremely funny the part the thing that's like not very funny is that like okay so in order to get any of this to work right you have to have a bunch of longshoremen you have to unload all of this shit and you know one of one of the problems that is that is happening in the sort of global supply chain right now is that the ships can't be unloaded fast enough and part of this is like this job sucks and people just a lot of people don't want to do it a lot of people died yeah and in the eye and it's causing this huge problem and and there's and there's there's another you know if you want to take like the macro perspective about this it's that this whole system is relying on logistics workers and so it also needs you know you need truck drivers and we're coming back and you know in the u.s is like there's yeah you know there's there's a

shortage of truck drivers now because again their job sucks and they've been like just absolutely screwing these people over for decades and decades and decades now and turning them into subcontractors just not paying them and you know and this and when you know when the port shut down like not even shut down but like when the ports are behind unloading

stuff and when the trucks like that are supposed to be moving this stuff there aren't enough of them and like the cost of that are supposed to be moving this stuff there aren't enough of them and like the the cost of that increases it throws off the whole system and that's that's another big part of like why this whole thing is is sort of imploding and and it's interesting because i remember this there was like a decade where like every other article would be talking about how they were going to like automate like truck driving it was like ah the truck drivers are all going to go out of business because they're going to automate it just never happened at all

and say the same thing with with their you know there's i mean there's been some port automization but like not in the scale that you know actually does anything and part of the reason for that is you know i was talking about people not investing research developments yeah so the biggest people who aren't doing that are the shipping companies and that's a good time because the shipping basically like container shipping has been taken over by what's essentially just like a monopoly of two companies and those two companies make just an indescribable amount of money. They have like a thousand farmers to repair uh their tractors yeah yeah they're they're you know they figured they figured out that like the the easiest way to make money is just get the state to shake people down for you it's like ah fuck like investing in in making

anything that we have better let's just you know like let's just turn the state into a debt collector and and it's interesting because so this this is is the part of the supply chain crisis that Biden's been focusing on. But Biden's plan, Biden's plan's great. Biden's plan is literally make the longshoremen work harder. So his plan is... There we go. There we go. There we go.

Building back better, baby. Yeah. We're going gonna keep the ports open uh 24 hours a day seven days a week and like make people work weekends now and then he also got uh fedex walmart and ups to do uh 24 hour seven day a week shipping so yeah the solution is literally just like feed more workers into a grinder and make them work longer which is which is great and and you know will not in any way backfire no it's fine i don't even think we should be talking about it no it's great it's gonna it's yeah it's you know but again like this is something

like this won't work and like it can't and the reason it won't work is that like part of the reason there's a shortage is that you know it's it's not it's not just about the like the fact that people aren't paying enough it's about the fact that these jobs are just awful like you you have people you have people working like 12-hour shifts that start at like 6 a.m and then they have to make another 12-hour shift eight hours later and they just keep having to do this over and over and over again. And it's- Well, and they don't, like the way that these shifts are usually put on them is that like, you'll find out when you come in

that instead of working 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. or whatever, they're actually gonna need you to stay until eight. And then they're gonna need you to come in. By the way, you're gonna need to come in like two hours early tomorrow. So you realize that like in between your two shifts, you have a total of eight hours to get home and sleep. And if you say no, well, the idea is that if you say no, like you won't have the job, it's required. Now, the reality is that most of these companies are

also pretty desperate to have these workers and a lot of these manufacturing and packing firms, it takes time to train people up and then they quit a couple of weeks in because the work is is miserable and the schedule is fucking miserable um and it's yeah it's all it's it's it's it's simultaneously like deeply inhuman but also is leading to a situation there's a reason why there's so many strikes on right now is that there is opportunity because in sort of the chasing of short-term profits a lot of these fucking oligarchs have exposed themselves in a pretty vulnerable position. Yeah, and I think this is coming back to a sort of – the other way that when there was a crisis in the 60s and 70s, the other way they solved this was just authoritarianism, right? It was – this is the in the 60s, 70s, the other way they solved this was just authoritarianism, right? It was, you know,

is this is the Pinochet solution, right? Like, oh, like workers are using control compromise. Okay. We'll just shoot them. Right.

And, and we're out of workers. Yeah. And yeah, and this is, you know, they're, they're finally running into a point where,

you know, this is, this is the solution they've been trying to do now with, with, with this crisis is, you know, they, the,

the, they're relying on the fact that just the workplace is just indescribably authoritarian i mean it's it's like it's it's it's a dictatorship on a scale that is like like even to like the most despotic absolute monarch is just like unimaginable like your boss gets to control like when you shit like they get a control when you eat they get a control exactly what you're doing like at all times they get control when you do it they get a control like when the next time you're going to do it is they don't even have to tell you when it's going to be until like you show up and you know for the this is this is this has been the gamble for for you know capitalism the entire is this is this has been the gamble for for you know capitalism the entire existence which is that like you just have to take this and eat shit or they

take away your ability to eat get medical care and have a place to leave to live but that's not true anymore like you can just say no you can tell them to fuck off you can you know you can you can you can organize a union you can just fucking just leave your job like just leave it fucking walk out yeah this is why we focus i mean this is number one why within the context of unions strike funds are so important but also a mutual aid is so important is it it potentially when organized well enough provides people with the option to like well how are you going to feed yourself well there's people in my community who want to make sure that I'm fed because they believe in what I'm striking for.

That's the promise of all of that. That's the practical behind the kind of, uh, uh, high minded, you know, anarchists, uh,

uh, just, you know, whatever theorizing is the ability that like, well, this actually is a weapon too. Yeah. And I think, you know, this actually is a weapon, too. Yeah, and I think... You know what else

is a weapon, Chris? I hope we're not being sponsored by... Some of them. I hope we are, Chris. Look, I've said before, for weapons, I'll read any ad for a weapons manufacturer as long as they send me some weapons. So, come on, guys. Get on it.

You could be in the middle of this conversation. Raytheon? manufacturer as long as they send me some weapons so come on guys get on it you could uh you could be you could be in the middle of this conversation raytheon you know send me a couple of missile guidance chips lockheed martin you know you you want to give me an f-35 uh we'll uh we'll plug you you know that's that's that's the deal that's how it works baby all right we're back hopefully hopefully you have now heard the advertisement for knife missile to knife missile harder now with like five knives, a thing that I am not making up and actually exists.

Yeah, people keep being surprised that the R9X is a real thing. Yeah, but there's another one. There's one with more knives. They put more knives. Yeah, what are you talking about? Look, again, you can't, it's like with Apple products,

right? Planned obsolescence is critical. You have to, you can't just rest on your laurels, you're gonna run out of money. So you gotta make another knife missile with a couple of more knives. Yeah, just keep adding knives, nothing can ever go wrong. Do not ask any questions about why you're developing knife missiles please do send me one send me one and like a drone or three swear to god i'll use it for legal purposes yeah so i guess the the last thing that i that's really interesting about this moment

that doesn't usually happen is that you know okay so if if you if you if you you read your very basic marks right one of the things marks talks about is that there's this thing called the reserve army of labor which is it's just like you know there's a bunch of people who are just always unemployed and they they they get along by doing sort of like odd jobs or like you know i like my my quintessential person for this is like if you ever go on a subway there's you know it's the guy selling candy bars in the subway yeah it's people who quasi-legal you know sometimes yeah right illegal they're just kind of like doing whatever you know yeah we call them in the west coast you have a lot of those like yeah people who trim marijuana for a

couple of months and then just kind of like crashing you know campsites the rest of the year whatever like yeah there's a bunch of those folks for sure yeah and you know and like the the number of these people who've been just like kicked out of like the formal labor system has been increasing for a long time but what's interesting about this moment is that you know every every strike you see has a second strike behind it and that strike is is the informal general strike which is just again people just quitting their jobs and leaving and and you have this weird moment where normally the sort of the reserve army of labor is this thing that like capitalism can always sort of rely on as a way to sort of solve its problems because like oh well

all right if you're not going to do this job, we can bring another person. But this is a weird moment where the reserve army of labor is fighting on our side. libertarianism of these workplaces that just horrific abuse the fact that you know they're they're being in a lot of cases just asked to show up and die and they're saying no is is a really sort of is a really incredibly powerful thing and and when when you add that to the fact that you know all these companies have completely screwed themselves with how they design the supply chains or it's it's all it's all come back around and suddenly all all the supply chain stuff that they carefully laid out over decades and decades decades as a way to just like break the union movement and make sure nobody ever asked for more wages you know it's it's it's it's it's been revealed to be incredibly fragile and you know weak to our attack and that leads us i think to this other tension in in biden's plan to sort of

like revive the economy which is that so the u.s technically speaking has this like very large central planning capability but it only has it to like build weapons so you know like the the army has this incredible ability like there's a lot of bullets you know despite the huge stress on the bullet supply chain it really has scaled you know the prices have increased but uh we're we're still still still getting bullets uh america's great at making bullets yeah it's less great at keeping tractors working but yeah it won't ever be a problem yeah then you're like even if you remember at the beginning of the pandemic it was like the u.s just couldn't produce masks like we said we we never we never like did that right like the like the government never at any point was

like we're just gonna make masks and give them to people like they just never did it and so you know our mass supply all those supply chains suck and the only way that like the states can intervene and get the supply chains to work is by doing one of two things it's by either doing a thing biden was doing which is just go to a bunch of companies and tell them to make all of their workers work harder which is the thing that like you know totally won't backfire or explode in his face and then the second thing is for biden basically to like do all this saber rattling about how we have to have medical supply chains in the U.S. because national defense or something. And that's the second thing he's trying to do.

But that just makes the problem worse, right? Because once you lose the ability to outsource, you lose the hammer you've been beating the unions with. right? Because once you lose the ability to outsource, you lose the hammer you've been beating the unions with. And so, you know, all of the sort of all of the tendencies that are making things

bad and scary right now are also weirdly making this you know, the fact that prices are rising, right? The fact that there's all these shortages it's it's it's making this like the best moment to you know it's it's it's making this the best moment that and that anyone's had in ages to actually try to make something better

yeah and and and the important thing is we're starting to see it happen and yeah and we're we're going to talk more about striketober and sort of the strike wave in the coming you know weeks and months but yeah we're gonna we're gonna be hitting this pretty hard even just next week um we have a lot of stuff in the pipeline kind of wish we'd gotten to it earlier but there's a lot of stuff to talk about in the world happening that that's within our milieu it turns out when you're when your specific focus is things falling apart uh you're always behind uncovering all the things that are falling apart but i think it is a good time to to to drive this to a close to drag this episode out behind the farm, the barn, and shoot it and bury it in a shallow grave

and break its bones with a hammer so that the police can't identify it. Chris, thank you for putting this together. Got anything else to say? Quit your job and or unionize your workplace and or take it over and run it yourselves because lord knows the people who are telling you what to do just literally

do not care if you die yeah and with that no no no no I was just gonna uh uh I don't know what I was gonna do Chris I don't know what I was gonna do go do something you know

you're listening to. Go do something. You're listening to things. Go do something. Yeah, and if you want to listen to us do more things, we are... Allegedly. Allegedly. Allegedly. We are at CoolZoneMedia on the Twitter and the Instagram.

You can't prove that in court. It's true. Good luck. Good luck to them in trying to prove that we did this. Yeah, that's right, motherfuckers. All right. Bye. Bye. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter?

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

as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Excellent work, Chris. That's good. That's good. That's the kind of atonal grunting that people have come to expect from the introductions of my podcast. I was hoping it wouldn't be that, but then it was so bad that it was great.

No, Sophie. I loved it. I'm thrilled. That's our brand now. It can't be anything else. We've established it. Look, nobody else is doing that. The Comptown guys, I assume, aren't atonally grunting to start their podcast. I don't know, actually, but I assume not.

What is this podcast, Chris? I guess this is just how we start. It could happen here. Is that true? You don't sound like you believe it. Enthusiastically, Chris, with feeling. This is a podcast. Damn right it is.

About things happening here. That's right, motherfuckers. It's about things falling apart. Yeah, excellent. That's how we do it. Okay, what are we talking about today? Well, one of the things that is happening here, as we have discussed briefly in previous episodes, is a bunch of strikes. And with us today to talk about one of these strikes, specifically the Kellogg strike, is Mel Buer, an independent researcher, educator, and freelance journalist based in Omaha, Nebraska, where this particular strike is taking place.

this particular strike is taking place who has done a lot of journalism previously on the local sort of protestant uprising history in 2020 and is also researching and writing a book on alternative media hi hello welcome to the show thanks strikes strikes apparently is what's up it is it is striketober we're doing strikes strike wave baby ye ye so this this specific strike um why don't can you can you walk us through a bit about how we got to the point where this kellogg's factory is on strike um well first off it's four plants. It's all four American Kellogg's cereal plants have gone on strike. The workers in these plants are represented by the Bakery Confectionery Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union. I do love that bakeries and tobacco workers are in the same union. Yeah. That's rad.

Yeah. So their contract was up for renegotiation in 2020, actually. And due to a series of weird things happening, they pushed the negotiations to 2021. They renegotiate their contract every five years. And at stake this year was a sort of pushing back against a recently introduced two-tier employment system that the company sort of strong-armed the union into in 2015, which essentially is not a good deal for anyone. In 2015, they pushed in this sort of two-tier system where one tier is a lower transitional tier and one tier is a legacy or full-time employee tier. And what it is is, you know, it amounts to a difference of 12 bucks an hour and less benefits. Yeah, that's significant. Yes, yes.

Dan Osborne recently did an interview with Max Alvarez at Working People Podcast, and he really kind of talked about exactly what was going on there. And, you know, there's 1,400 people who work in four plants. There's about 480 employees at the Omaha plant, which has been around for decades. 80 employees at the Omaha plant, which has been around for decades. And essentially what this tier system does is it's capped at 30% of their union workforce. And the whole idea is as these full-time employees retire or quit, then these transitional employees will sort of be funneled into the full time tier, right? Over the last five years, it hasn't really happened, really, at all.

It was a bad deal from the start, according to many of the workers who sort of felt like they were backed into a wall because Kellogg's was threatening to close the Memphis plant if they didn't ratify this negotiated contract. So rather than experience 500 layoffs in Memphis, they just agreed to it. So they knew going to the negotiating table in 2021 and 2020, that they were going to try and

sort of walk that back. Because these workers all work in the same plant, same days, first, second, third shift. Transitional workers are working side by side with these full-time employees, working the same hours, which can amount to seven days a week, 12 to 16 hours a day on mandatory overtime, and they are making $12 an hour less, and they are not getting the benefits that these full-time employees are getting. So really, these full-time employees are kind of going to bat for the transitional employees. Kellogg's wants to remove the cap, which the union negotiated, which is at 30% of their workforce.

They want to do away with that so that they can continue hiring more transitional workers, and they want to fuck with the insurance benefits. and they want to fuck with the insurance benefits. So the union tried to negotiate this. I think according to the local union president, Kellogg's negotiators were at the negotiating table for 10 hours and they negotiated eight hours a day, five days a week for two weeks. Ten hours they were at the table. So they weren't interested in negotiating a contract.

They had laid out their terms, and they essentially told the union to go kick rocks. And so the union said, you know, we have until October 5th, and then our contract is up, and if we haven't ratified a new contract, then we're going out on strike, and that's ultimately what happened. So they've been on strike for that's ultimately what happened so they've

been on strike for this will be their 14th day today i think the fight against the two-tier system i think is an interesting part of this because that's been a huge part of a lot of the different uh strikes you've been seeing this has been the john deere strikes this is part of the kaiser strikes and yeah i'm wondering what you think specifically about the fact that this is like this is the moment that people have decided to like push back against against two or even three tier systems that were introduced in the last really like 10 or 15 years for the most part well i think it's just you know it's a divide and conquer strategy for kellogg's or for these other companies and ultimately what it looks like is it destabilizes well-established unions,

especially at Kellogg's. And it pits workers against each other, you know. Particularly at Kellogg's, if they are able to remove this cap on this tier system, what they're essentially doing is they're creating a more precarious workplace for these workers. The turnover rate in the lower tier at the Omaha plant is right around 40%. And, you know, prior to 2015, you didn't really see a whole lot of people leaving the Kellogg's plant.

You know, these were these are workers who are spending their entire careers at this plant. Their parents work there. Their grandparents work there. You know, because they're all getting paid around the same amount of money, there isn't this tension on the line. So they're working with each other. They're helping each other, right? Um, and with this tier system, what they're doing is they're throwing these newer workers into, uh, pretty, uh, insane factory conditions, um, and of these workers were transitional workers who weren't officially hired by the company, you know, that aren't full-time employees. They aren't receiving benefits

like the full-time employees are. For five years, they work this every day, seven days a week, three months on end, right? They have this really, you know, punitive attendance-based point system that discourages you calling in sick. There's injuries that happen in the factory all the time. I went out to the line and wrote a piece for the real news about this. And pretty much every person I talked to showed me scars from accidents that happened, injuries in the plant. The union president himself got his hand stuck in a, like a mill and broke all the fingers in his hand. He had to have 10 surgeries on his hand, you know. Jesus Christ.

There was an accident at the plant two or three weeks ago where a transitional employee got both arms stuck in a conveyor belt, you know. Jesus. The thing is, is these folks super proud of the work that they do like absolutely 100 take this work extremely seriously you know they're not even asking for changes to their overtime they are not asking for you know anything that you know from me on the outside i'd be fighting for more humane working conditions but to them you know it's it's not like as a point of pride but they feel that they have put blood sweat tears uh you know fractured relationships time that they could be spending with their children

into this factory and kellogg's is essentially fucking them over. Yeah. You know, they see it as we have sacrificed for this company for years and years and years. And we are asking for equal pay for all and for everyone to have the same health care so that we can do this job, you know. And Kellogg's is saying, no, absolutely, you know. I think the union president said that some of the negotiators called those demands outlandish during negotiations which i think is just incredible you know just

corporate greed yeah i think the other part of the story is that like i mean it's kind of a weird consequence of it but like one of the things one of the consequences of sort of like rising uh like staple commodity prices like staple grain prices and stuff is that kellogg's like they're doing they have like record they have record profits right now oh yeah and they're still just doing this shit because yeah they made record profits during the pandemic yeah they gave their ceo a pretty hefty raise bonus um there was a stock buyback program that helped happened among the C-suite folks last year. They made a lot of money, a lot of money. And, you know, these workers worked every day through the pandemic, continually understaffed, you know, doing their best. Because

again, they take this job very seriously and they are proud that they are feeding the American people, you know, um, and they are proud to work at Kellogg's and, uh, they feel that this contract is just shit. It's just shit. And, you know, the only sensible thing to do is to, to walk out on strike because, you know, they've been backed into a corner and negotiations have stagnated completely. And they don't want to back down from this. And I agree. I feel what they're asking for is fair. It's very fair. I mean i i think asking for a lot more would be fair but

not my place to be doing one of the things that strikes me about this you talk about this tier system that kellogg's introduced which i i can't help but think of what happened at john deer where uh they uh i think in 96 cut pensions by two- thirds and then like last year eliminated them entirely. And this kind of bid to pit chunks of the workforce against each other where you have like, you people who are getting pretty well taken care of in their jobs and other newer people who are getting more screwed over in kind of this attempt to create division within the workforce so that this kind of organizing doesn't happen.

I would agree. And you also have to think, if they are able to remove this cap on the transitional tier, what that means is they'll be able to, instead of,ing one of those transitional workers into that full-time space. What ends up happening is suddenly you have, instead of 70% full-time to 30% transitional, it starts tipping, right? It becomes a more precarious workforce.

Then, say, for example, they do that in the next five years, you know, now they have 70% of these transitional workers who don't think the union is offering anything for them. They can essentially just offer a better deal to these transitional workers and kick the union out of the company at some point, you know. And these folks on the line understand that and know that that's kind of Kellogg's plan, right? that and know that that's kind of Kellogg's plan, right? They know that what Kellogg's is trying to do is essentially destabilize the power of the union inside the plants. And everyone on the line that I've spoken with know exactly what's happening, you know, and these full-time employees are out there every day making sure that their transitional, you know, making sure that their transitional colleagues know that that's why they're out there, because they want to not allow this to be something that divides their workforce.

It remains to be seen what's going to happen. You know what I mean? Yeah. They've brought in scabs to get the plant up and running again. And most recently, yesterday, this morning, yesterday, the Building and Construction Trades Council Union met with the union president in Omaha because they have about 100 third-party ironworkers, carpenters, electricians, and skilled tradespeople that are union tradespeople that have contracts at Kellogg's. And they came to what Dan Osborne, the union president, decided was a tough decision that those union workers

are going to cross the picket line to honor those contracts. So Kellogg's is forcing the unions in the city into a bind, really, because they're going to lose their own contracts at Kellogg's. So that's kind of been the most recent development here, is that rather than just temps coming in, we have now skilled union tradespeople from various Omaha unions who are also crossing the picket line to honor their contracts at Kellogg's, you know, past these striking workers. So it's a bit of a mess, a little bit, you know? Yeah. There's so much going on right now. I'm kind of wondering what

you think are the, because we've got a number of strikes kind of all coming to a head at the same time. I'm wondering specifically from the Kellogg strike, what do you think are kind of the lessons that should be taken from what's happened so far for the broader labor movement? I think the biggest thing that's kind of impacted me as I've gone to the line, I've stood on the picket line, I've covered these, you know, this strike, I've talked to people, is that when these types of actions happen,

they really only can be sustained because the community comes together to support them. You know, these strike funds that are going around and folks showing up to stand on the picket line who are not part of the union are really sort of become you know they are helping support these workers who can only hold out so long with finite resources right so the big thing to me is that past these news cycles of excitement of striketketober, of, you know, these people just walked out today. Well, they may, you know, they may be on the line for months and months on end.

And the news cycle is going to move on. And these communities are still going to have to try and back up these labor actions, right? You really can't have a true, you know know you can't have a labor movement without you know support right um and that's kind of been the biggest thing that has impacted me particularly you know this Omaha used to be a really formidable union town you know um back in the 80s it was really really something to see that the business unions and in the various locals here really had some of these union leaders had more political power than the mayor. Right. And that has gone downhill over the last 40 years.

And it's really cool to see the level of solidarity that's happening amongst the community, you know, in the ways in which people are kind of coming out to talk to and be a part of this strike and to remind these Kellogg's workers that they're not operating in a bubble, you know, and that the rest of the community really hopes that the strike will end quickly and peacefully and with a really good resolution for these workers, you know. know one other thing i wanted to ask about in in terms of sort of this this kind of restriction to the union movement and in in in terms of sort of community support is the level of violence that there's been against uh like against these strikes like i've seen a lot of like stuff about people getting hit by buses and like and i don't i don't know if i think i think i'm getting my strikes i don't know if they've been direct car attacks on this specific picket line but that's been a thing that it's been happening a lot and i was wondering a couple of documented cases yeah yeah and yeah I was wondering what you think about that and what actually can be done about the fact that we're just seeing auto attacks on picket lines regularly now?

I mean, it's a shitty development. I was out on the picket line last thursday and um they were attempting to bring in buses at shift change past the the picketers who walk slowly you know they don't stop in front of the bus it's illegal to stop and and you know make it you know so that they can't pass through the gates but they slow them down for a little bit and um one gentleman was trying you know was standing there and this bus just bumped right into him you know there's videos that have been shared uh through local news of buses knocking down workers as they're trying to cross the picket line. And I, you know, there are also

personal vehicles that go through and it could be the private security that's been hired. It could be managers. But, you know, they're running through these lines really quickly, dangerously. It's unfortunate. And, you know, I don't have an answer for what the best And, you know, I don't have an answer for what the best solution for that is, you know, but problem is on the back end, the police don't step in when they see these instances. And in fact, last Thursday when we had 100 plus motorcyclists from various MCs show up to support the strike, plus motorcyclists from various mcs uh show up to support the strike um the police were the ones who uh protected the scabs and made sure that they made it through the picket line so you know um the answer to that not sure you know yeah i mean that's a time-honored police tradition yeah they uh they historically don't don't exist to protect laborers, with the notable exception of the sheriff.

And what was it, Madawan? And during the coal miner strike in West Virginia. Well, yeah, they shot him. So, well, yeah, but he shot some people first. Yeah. Sid Hatfield, that was the name. Yeah, I don't know. I've gotten to know some of these folks on the line over the last two weeks, and they're just fantastic human beings.

They are accommodating and hardworking, and they come from all age brackets, and they bring their families out, and they're getting a raw deal from Kellogg's. And so far, the community support has been overwhelmingly positive. There hasn't really been, like, at the John Deere strike, they're not getting eggs thrown at them, you know. They get a lot more honking and messages of support than they do people driving by to yell at them for being on strike. So that's been nice to see. And actually this weekend on Saturday, there's going to be a cool vintage car show, cruise around Kellogg's event that they've got planned.

The fire department's bringing rigs and Team teamsters are fire department yes yeah and the teamsters are bringing cars and the there's a bunch of vintage car clubs that are going to be coming out so you know those types of things have like really kind of like fired up these people to keep them out on the line as long as they need to be you know so community is there for him one of the things i'm continuing to wonder about is what it takes to close the gap between understanding that you and your colleagues are getting screwed over by this system and understanding that you and all of the other people striking at the same time and perhaps even a bunch of people not striking are all kind of fighting the same fight, and that maybe there's grander things to achieve than the negotiation of a single contract? Because that seems like the big leap that is

going to be the real struggle to clear. Yeah. I will say that some of the workers are fully aware that this is not just about a point, perhaps at some point in the future, someone else is going to look at their example and be inspired by it. Right. As far as like maybe, I don't know, ideologically speaking or politically speaking, for these folks, it doesn't fit into any sort of ideology, leftist or conservative or whatever. Everyone's got their own personal politics, but they don't really talk about it on the line. What they talk about is working class versus ruling class. That's their sense.

It's corporate greed. It's asshole CEOs making $11.6 million a year while they're struggling to pay their own bills. a year while they're struggling to pay their own bills you know um yeah and and you know that conversation is more common than um trying to fit this into a larger political movement or revolutionary movement if that makes sense you know yeah um but i would say that the vast majority of the workers regardless of their own personal politics have a very clear sense of where they sit in terms of class consciousness and understand that this is one of one of the uh most effective tactics to try and and force the hand of these assholes you know um is to withhold work and withhold their labor so well this this has been great. I mean, that's everything I had to ask.

Chris, anything else? Not that I have. Is there a call to action we could have for our listeners or pages people should be following? A strike fund? Yeah. Yeah, there's a GoFundMe and there's a PayPal set up for the Omaha Strikers.

I believe the BCTGM international page has a page of each of the strike funds for each of the four plants. So that might be something that you might want to share with your listeners. I can send you an email with that because it's probably going to be easier to do. But yeah, as far as I know, BCTGM hasn't called for an official boycott of Kellogg's products. However, they wouldn't be mad if you just didn't buy any right now. There was some talk last week that some of the picketers might, you know, be flyering outside of grocery stores to try and educate the community

on what's going on with this strike. But beyond that, they also are concerned about the quality of the food being produced by scabs. So it probably would be healthy for you to not buy the food you know because uh i think it was in what 2018 during a works uh a lockout in memphis the same company that they brought in then that they're bringing in now uh pissed in the cereal on the line and And they didn't release video of that for two years after the incident. So it ended up in someone's home.

You know, gross. Yikes. Yikes, yeah. That is some... I mean, I guess that's some scab shit, but even by scab standards. Yeah, that's pretty fucked, right? So yeah, you know,

support your local strike fund and if you are in a city where Kellogg's plant is striking I'm sure those workers would love love to hear from you feel your support and where can our listeners

follow you I am on Twitter primarily at coldbroodtool i don't know why i picked that name but but i like it yeah yeah i got i uh haven't changed that handle since i got on twitter so um but yeah that's usually where i'm at uh otherwise you know i teach locally and have a podcast that i'm developing and and do a bunch of different projects. So Twitter is the best way to get a hold of me if you have questions. Awesome.

All right. Thanks for having me on, folks. Thanks for talking to us, Mel. Thanks for joining us. I'll be back at the picket line talking to these folks and I'm going to do my best to keep this shit in the news cycle so that they aren't forgotten. Awesome. We've got a link to the Strike Fund

and some other ways to help in the description. So yeah, this has been a Good Happened Here pod. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram at Happened Here pod and at Cool Zone Media for all the rest of our shows. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter?

Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A really exciting episode of It Could Happen Here. So for the last bit of time, I've been in and out of touch with a number of members of the Puget Sound John Brown Club. They have provided armed self-defense groups for a couple of different protests in the Washington area over the last year and change. And we wanted to sit down and talk to them about the ideas behind community self-defense, how to do it responsibly, how to do it irresponsibly. We also had some discussions with them about the disasters that happened at the CHOP slash

CHAZ last year. They were not involved with that as an organization, but they have some insights on the matter. That's going to be coming at you in a separate episode or maybe even a couple of episodes in the near future. Today, we're just kind of talking about the concepts of armed community self-defense, you know, what's responsible, what's irresponsible, how people should think about it. I think you'll enjoy the conversation. Here it is. A decent chunk of the folks listening, especially the Portlanders, will have experience with,

and that Garrison and I have certainly had experience with, is people at protests declaring themselves security, sometimes even wearing shirts that say security and picking up a variety of weapons, often paintball guns and mace and using them often irresponsibly on other protesters, on bystanders in the name of keeping things safe. And I think we're pretty clear, and I think most reasonable people can see that that's not community self-defense, but often those people certainly claim that what they're doing is community self-defense. And I'm specifically wanting to start by getting

kind of a range of definitions from folks, as you are all people who have engaged in community self-defense, and particularly armed community self-defense, what do you see as the actual role of community self-defense? And how should it look as opposed to, you know, a guy with a paintball gun yelling at kids for tagging a window? Ray, you want to kick us off with an answer there? I do. Community defense should be part of a broad health and safety infrastructure set up for a protest movement or community. I'm being deliberately vague here, but specifically armed community defense deals with mitigating lethal and egregious harm to members of a community. The goal is forced and foremost prevention, mitigation,

and control of those threats. In my mind, ideally community defense would involve no one doing anything, carrying around a bunch of really heavy shit and nothing happening, but deterring those from harming others. And in the absolute worst case, it means you have to actually do something that can get messy pretty quickly. I want to circle back to a couple of things. Actually, I do have one quick follow-up question for you before we move on to the next people, Ray. When you say like carrying heavy things and whatnot, I'm wondering like, what do you think? I'm interested in you, and I'll probably ask other people this follow-up. When it comes to carrying or bringing

a firearm to either a protest situation or some other community self-defense situation, what is going through your head when you determine what to bring? Because I've seen people carry a variety of different guns from like shotguns. And in one case it's a Mosin Nagant to ARs or handguns. What do you think is kind of the, the,

the logic train, I guess that you would take and like, what is the appropriate tool to bring, like in this situation? So that depends entirely on what the anticipated threat is and how one plans to mitigate the anticipated threat. There's no correct answer for that. Sometimes the answer to mitigate lethal or egregious bodily harm is not a firearm at all. Indeed, firearms are applicable in an extraordinarily narrow range of scenarios, but those range of scenarios are catastrophic and need extreme measures to be mitigated. So it depends on what, if you are considering bringing a firearm, what is the firearm good at? And then you get into the minutiae of what

firearms good for what thing, which depends on your legal context and particular threat. But I think one has to start with the question is, is the thing I'm bringing able to mitigate the type of harm I might see happen to my community? bringing a shotgun is a good way to stop a car speeding into a crowd when it clearly isn't, right? So one has to make sure that the tool, whatever they have, is appropriate for the task at hand and the threat you anticipate. Yeah, that was great. Thank you, Ray. KD, you want to give us your answer next? I agree with everything that Ray said. And the only addition that I'd make is that it specifically in our cases generally doesn't mean standing between protesters and police, but more guiding protesters or activists

or participants away from potential situations of harm. It's like we can't stand in front of police and stop cops from doing their job like that just gets you arrested and uh or worse or worse and that's not what we're here for so yeah that's all i want to add could you because i i have chatted with a couple of your number about this about um kind of the the role that that an armed contingent at a protest can play in kind of allowing an avenue of retreat you know especially during confrontations with non-state actors um i i'm interested in kind of what you um you know you're not you're not to kind of as you did kind of clarify misconception you don't see your role as standing in front of

the protesters between them and the cops and like presenting a threat to the cops. What is the utility in kind of an active protest situation that you've seen of what y'all do? So that's a good question. And if we're doing our job well, then most people think we don't do anything at all. A lot of what we do is we're

watching external potential threats who might try to come in the most common factor these days is a car um but generally we're looking for folks that might cause trouble and finding ensuring that we're not putting ourselves in a position where we're going to get cornered or trapped and and really you know just trying to help facilitate and work with the facilitators and organizers to keep things, you know, progressing in a safe way. So as far as what we're protecting against threat-wise, that ranges from everything from like angry people who are just angry and trying to go home and getting blocked by a protest, to people who are actively looking to do harm to a movement that happens to be involved in the protests, or

maybe it's something as specific as a person who's looking to specifically do harm to organizers. So most of the time, we're focused outward and just making sure that our exits are covered and that we have ways to get people away from potential bad situations. That was great. Thank you, Katie. Shannon, you want to give your answer next? Absolutely. Thanks. I would add there's a really critical element to community defense that begins and ends with the word community. Obviously, there's a big difference between proclaiming yourself security and showing up someplace and being there as an intentional community support where the community plays a role in you being there and also has some influence on that question of what are you carrying and what is the response? I think it's just really important that you keep the community aspect at the forefront. And that's a huge part of our collective work is making sure that

when we're providing community defense, we're aligning ourselves with the desires of the community group that has asked us to be there. Also filtering it through our judgment as to what's safe and appropriate under the circumstances using some of those filters that Ray mentioned when they were answering. And what do you see as, like, this is something that I kind of gets to both what is an issue with me and kind of the folks who declare themselves as security, which is that they're often kind of separating themselves from the rest of the movement,

specifically in a cop-like way to say like, well, it's my job to keep you safe, even though that means, or it's my job to keep things orderly, even if that means attacking some other people at this protest. One of the things that Scott Crowe in his, in Setting Sights, which is a really good book on community self-defense does, is set out that a key aspect of community self-defense, as you said, is that you're like a member of the community. And I think, I guess the question I have is because guns are what they are and have the kind of cultural weight that they have,

people are always, people who accept being armed as an aspect of their personality are always going to be kind of fighting, having that dominate their personality are always going to be kind of fighting, having that dominate their personality. And it wouldn't, it's clearly something that a lot of people have an issue with. The thing that is important is to be a member of the community who happens to be armed, as opposed to an armed activist whose role is being armed, right? Like, I mean, do you agree with what I'm saying? Or kind of like, I'm wondering how you think about it, because this is something that I'm kind of going right in my head about, as well, because it's clearly where a lot of the problems happen,

right? That the gun becomes central to the identity of the people who bring it, which is something that happens to the cops. Yes. And also the mentality of separating yourself from the community and not being part of the purpose of being there. And so I'll defer to my comrades here to go a little bit further with it, but I would just say that there's a significant difference between armed community defense and having an intentional presence of armed community defense at an event or a protest and being a person who shows up with a gun. Those are two really different things. And so I think that's one of the benefits of being part of an organization that does this collectively with accountability, with training, with a known role in the community so that there is consistency among what we do and why we do it and a history of folks understanding that if we're

present somewhere, it's because we've been asked to be there and that what we're doing there is aligned with and approved of by the people who are organizing the event. And then I'll let somebody else who's more eloquent than I am answer that further if they feel like they can. Yeah, I think Nova is up now if you wanted to give your answer and kind of also comment on what we've been chatting about, what Shannon and I were just chatting about, Nova. Hi, thank you so much. I would say that folks like Ray and Katie and of course Shannon really put it very succinctly very well together and answered a lot of the things that i was gonna already provided things that i was

going to add to it but um the the specifically the part about the gun becoming the driving factor in somebody's presence at a protest or the gun being a part of the personality of somebody who's going to appoint themselves as a guardian towards a bunch of people. I would say that with any responsible community defense role within a protest context, that the act of being a body in between a threat and your community has to come first and that the that the firearm has to be secondary. There was an incident on the 300th night of protest where many of us were at risk of being harmed by a vehicle attack and in retrospect a firearm would not have mitigated that threat terribly well but the idea of being in between a threat such as that and somebody else who is possibly more

vulnerable than you are bore a lot more of a significance on that so the firearm being there to respond to a threat and perhaps mitigate an active, ongoing, deadly threat to your community is one thing. But I think the primary thing is going to be just putting yourself in harm's way so that you can spare that responsibility from somebody possibly more vulnerable than you, if that makes sense. That should be the primary responsibility. you if that makes sense that should be the primary responsibility and um how do you avoid letting that turn people doing that into feeling like a separate and even elevated chunk of of the community because that again that's what happens with police you know this idea that it starts is like well we're here to serve and protect um and that that through a variety of toxic alchemies turns into this idea of the thin blue line what is the way you push back on that how do you actually stop it from

going from i'm someone who is accepting personal responsibility for the well-being of the people around me um and putting my body in between them on harm's way if necessary uh to i it's my job to protect people to it's my job to you know from turning that into kind of this idea of i think stewardship in some ways that like some people in law enforcement have where like you're there they they get to tell you what to do because that's their responsibility to keep you safe like how do you how do you stop that attitude from evolving? Because I've seen it happen to people fairly quickly when they put themselves in some of these situations sometimes. And it's certainly not like most people, but it is it doesn't take a long time for somebody to like, especially if they're vulnerable to get in that position.

So how do you especially if you're approaching it from an organizational standpoint, right? You're an organization made up of people who come to do this. How do you fight back against that? Like, what is the active kind of counter programming, if you will? I'd say I don't have an easy answer for that question, to be completely honest with you. I don't have an easy answer for that question, to be completely honest with you. But I'd say that the closest thing to an answer to that would be that an almost monastic devotion to simply look outward for external threats and to be willing to respond to those threats if need be, again, putting our bodies in harm's way, but also be willing to respond to lethal force in kind should the worst case scenario arise. I'd say that the ultimate accountability rests with the people who asked you to be there. Uh, and there's no easy answer as to what that mechanism of accountability looks like.

Uh, but I, you know, in several layers that would start with your teammates, the people who are a part of your organization that asked you to be, that your organization that is asked to be there. So other members of JBGC are definitely going to try and keep each other accountable, but it's also the larger contingent of the action that you're a part of. contingent of the action that you're a part of, to be ultimately willing to back down from whatever you're doing if a concern is voiced by that community. And I wish I had a better way to word that, but just the constant vigilance within oneself against overstepping the boundaries that were clearly set by people who invited you into a space. That's really the best answer I can give for that at the moment without further percolating. Well, I mean, yeah, for one thing, I think this is

the reason we're having this conversation and I'm getting ahead of us a little is because this is still very much a developing thing on the left and and I don't think anybody has all the answers on how to do it well although I think an increasing number of folks accept the necessity so I think that's part of the reason for the conversation is this like continuing exploration of how to actually do this responsibly but I do think you hit on something important there when you talked about that you're there at the invitation of a community as opposed to you are there to police or to maintain order.

Like the idea of approaching it as if you're a guest strikes me as a really good idea in order to keep yourself on a certain behavioral standpoint. Like I'm here at the request of this community as their guest, as opposed to I am here to protect this community, you know? Absolutely. That's a perfect way to summarize what I was trying to go for with that one. I think that ultimately to be averse to being put in a position of power or authority is the best way to check against that. a servant to the community that is again inviting you into that space and putting yourself in a servile is not the right word i'm looking for a different word for that but a a position of service uh a true position like like i yes uh what what what community defense should be is ultimately a service and a burden rather than a reward of responsibility and power over your fellow community members. Okay, yeah, great. I think next was Ray again. You had something to say there? Yeah, to finish that thought, in my notes, I did a section of what happens when things go right. I think one thing that can CHOP was normalizing the idea that people can have firearms and they're not an inherent threat. Thinking of people who were armed often and were pointed out routinely, it was like, nah, he's chill.

He's a cool dude. You know, just a guy. Just like, do you really think the black guy is going to shoot up the top? I don't know, but he's, he's totally fine. I know him. His jokes are great. Again, overhearing these kinds of conversations, it, it helps, you know, firearms become like part of the tapestry of life, not this differentiating factor, not a beauty item, not something to wrap your personality around. It's just like, they're there.

And they, they can be good, bad, right, wrong, or indifferent. And I think that normalizing effect is one of the successes community defense can have. And I'm happy to talk about other things that community defense can normalize. But I wanted to emphasize the, you just have a firearm. You're not talking about it. You're not touching it. You're not thinking about it. You know, people have that. It's just around. And it became pretty chill. And there is kind of at the top specifically there's an area where firearms just kind of were around and nothing happened really um and that was kind of wonderful in my mind so um uh from my experience with uh with the club uh uh it's basically like even though we are the john brown gun club the guns are like the last thing that we even consider like uh it would technically if we were to actually rename the club it would

be the john brown de-escalation club um we would like most of the time uh any um any anything that's gone on even uh when i did visit the chop and there were some weird stuff going on, like Brother Matthew being Brother Matthew, people were using their skills to de-escalate the situation, to calm down individuals, to make sure that whatever hostility they have would be abated through just verbal verbal communication talk about that in a little more detail because i don't know i mean i was at the chas briefly but i don't know who brother matthew was or like what incident you're talking about so i'm curious is a guy who shows up up here uh all around the seattle area and also i think he's even set up in portland as well. Um, preacher guy gets in everybody's faces, usually not liked by everybody, super afraid of snakes. Uh, thanks Jerry. Um, but, uh, yeah, he like, like he he's, he's a person who thrives off of confrontation and uses the Bible as, as his, uh, mode of, of operation. But, um, I remember distinctly at, uh, at the

chop, um, he was getting it and getting into it with people, but everybody who was around tried to talk him down. They tried to chill, make him chill out, even though he was continually screaming for attention and just being weird but um but in the end um like that's just like that happens more often with uh protest uh situations or march situations or uh direct action situations where we're asked to be a part of it by the organizers. And as Ray had mentioned and Nova had mentioned, we're asked to be there. And we're not just asked and then we suddenly show up. We get involved with the people who are organizing, any of the partners that they bring into it.

We try to learn as much about what's going on with them, who are the threats, where the event is, how the event is going to be thought of. We ask a lot of questions about it. We plan and plan and plan and plan to make sure that everything is super safe or as safe as possible based on all known variables. And then the stuff that's unknown, we do our best to mitigate that somehow.

Yes, we are armed, but that's like the last thing that we ever even think of. And that's even in our planning. We say flat out, de-escalate first. If things start to ratchet up, respond in kind. um if things start to ratchet up respond in kind so like if someone you know like tries to like i don't know like starts to fist fight we're not going to pull out a gun on someone who wants to box somebody on the street we're going to do our best to stop so uh stop them um through other means like uh whether if it's just to block a punch or whatever. But the first thing and foremost is de-escalation.

Calm that person down and tell them to go away or just to chill out or whatever is necessary. I mean, de-escalation, all of the best community self-defense that I've personally watched has been de-escalation, all of the best community self-defense that I've personally watched has been de-escalation. You know, they're not the only situations I've seen. I've seen force used a couple of times in situations that were necessary. But by far, de-escalation is the thing I've seen actually protect people in dicey situations the most. And generally, that's going to be the case yeah i know for myself uh like my attitude is we all go home everybody who shows up there goes home

not to the hospital not to jail ever or not to the morgue we all go home yeah i think that's definitely seems like the best way to look at it. So into the specific question of how not to become a cop in this position and become the gun. The only way I've been able to do anything in that regard has been to not have that be my primary thing that I fulfill. I'm part of a community and I'm a mechanical person in this community. I'm part of a community and I'm a mechanical person in this community. I try to have my mission be not that other skillset or that other access to being of an aid to a community, be my actual purpose in the community. If that makes any sense.

Yeah, that makes complete sense um and yeah i think is the healthiest way to to deal with it so something i've been wondering about as so i'm like not armed at all so i guess i'm on like the other the other side of the fence of the sort of community self-defense thing when people show up to protests um and so something i was wondering about is is the relationship between this stuff and you know between the sort of cop mentality development and the difficulty of sort of integrating to the community of having organizations that are basically independent security groups and not for example like taking like i don't know take like an historical example

like there was a thing in china you'd see a lot in in like the 1900s where you know you'd have armed pickets right and so you you you have an armed force there but the armed force is like you know this is this is like a branch of the union right and that's that's how they sort of like like that that was their sort of solution to how do you stop cop syndrome, is that, you know, they're basically like a part of another community organization. And so I'm curious

what you all think about what the sort of, I guess, the strengths and weaknesses of being an independent or having sort of independent security organizations versus having, I guess, subsections of other organizations that are armed? Yeah, I feel like I can offer a unique perspective here as someone who's been privy to multiple angles of this, including separate organizations, ones integrated with others, and ones that are

sort of just parts of the community. I don't think there's any, like, inherent sort of best answer here. I do think being part of a separate organization makes it harder to be in the community versus of the community, meaning you came from the community and now you're sort of kind of separate but not really um like jb in particular has a perpetual problem with people saying oh you know uh john brown will do x and this is something that has been discussed and often this is to people's immense ire i don't want to speak for everyone here but it does seem to be that so seldom does one wish to be said, oh, hello. It's kind of like saying, oh, the union will solve this. And it's like,

turns out you're the union buddy. Right. And never refer to the union in the first person. So I do think being embedded into other groups or being sort of this loose diffuse group can make it easier to be part of the community because of the structural forces that make that, it is easier to get there. A separate organization can help focus and codify certain procedures, training, you know, make sure that people have some sort of unified goals and values at the expense of making it a bit harder to integrate into one's community. at the expense of making it a bit harder to integrate into one's community. I think given the era we're in, I'm not as we move on here.

One of the questions I see is, how do you, the difficulty in kind of, you don't want to have a situation where there's absolutely no, where the community self-defense contention is anyone who shows up with a gun. Because then anyone can show up with a gun, and you as someone else who's showing up with a weapon are potentially like if that person uh makes a bad decision that's going to i mean as it as it has in the past that has significant repercussions on everybody else and i i that is one of the thornier points because i i do one of the things I see is valuable. Someone mentioned earlier, like, the nice thing about it just in not being, firearms being normalized, not as a, like, gun culture thing, but as a, this is just a thing that is present in the community.

And I saw that a lot in Rojava, right? Everybody was armed, or at least a significant chunk of the populace had access to arms, but nobody was showing off with them. They were not, like, anybody not like anybody's piece of identity. They were just one of the tools, like a spade or a shovel, that were present in the community. Okay, I think I've skipped over a couple of people. I wanted to give Thud a chance to talk. That's actually very much sort of in line with the point I was going to make,

which is, for me, a huge part of community defense is making sure that the aspect that is defending the community is not alienated from the community because it isn't concentrated in just a few people. Because I think one of the other things that we emphasize a lot sort of outside of direct protest actions is we try to teach people how to safely operate firearms, but also to give firearms the respect that they deserve. That firearms are not there so that you are badass. Firearms are not there because you're going to get into a gunfight. And it's the first rule. Because, you know, you're going to get into a gunfight.

And it's the first rule. I mean, one of the things that we stress sort of beyond the basic four rules of gun safety is the first rule of gunfight is don't get into a gunfight. That it's, you know, you want Bray was saying, that it becomes normalized that, oh, we're not relying on these several people to keep us safe, but that in fact, as an entire collective, we are keeping us safe. And that gives recognition to the fact that some people, it's not the right choice for them to carry again for one reason or another and the at the same time the the power that is present in that particular tool is dispersed to the point where it doesn't you know you don't have people getting self-aggrandizing thoughts because of the fact that they're possessing firearms. And I think that's something that we, you know, work really hard to instill in people in a variety of contexts that I think is really critical to this question. So the question, I'm just trying to summarize what the question was earlier,

what the strengths or weaknesses of having an organized armed response are. One of the things that I wanted to bring up is the historical context of armed response, specifically community armed response in Seattle. I did some digging and found in a book called History of Seattle from the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time, Volume 2, which I started pouring through and found that there was, in 1874, there was a group called the Seattle Amateur Rifle

Association, which leased land for a range on current present day Capitol Hill, like right where the train station is, if you're familiar with the area. So like right where protests always happen these days. Yeah. Later on, there's record record in 1877 of the Seattle rifle team organizing a shooting contest. And then later on in 1886, which is a number that probably rings a bell, the Chinese riots, as they called them at the time, happened, which was sort of the start of the labor movement where everyone decided that Chinese immigrants were the cause of all of our woes, that the low wages being paid to Chinese immigrants were because of Chinese immigrants and not racism. So they decided to run

every person who looked Chinese out of town, literally. They referred to this as the Tacoma method. I'm guessing because that's what they did in Tacoma. Exactly. It started there. And it was a February 7th of 1886. This massive, angry, racist mob tried to push all of the Chinese folks out of Seattle or anyone they thought might look like Chinese. And they tried to push them onto a steamboat, but there wasn't enough room for them all there. Cops got involved. A bunch of other stuff happened. They decided, no, give them time in court. happened they decided no give them time in court but uh in the process of of making this decision you know the racist got a mob together and we're basically just going to try and put a stop to this before they the legal proceedings could to go forward so they reached out to local allies in

arms they had the home, which I'm not exactly sure exactly what the Home Guards were, but I assume there's something related to National Guard later on, or maybe just an extension of military. But the Home Guards and the Seattle Rifles, as well as the University Cadets, which I'm assuming are of course soldiers in training and uh pulled them all out and made a community self-defense group out of them they put a rifle line and held the mob back and enabled those folks to get you know safely to have their day in court um and then to protect them for a while afterward they actually organized uh a a sort of a watch because they didn't have enough police to manage the mob. They used folks from the Seattle Rifles and these other groups to sort of bolster the police forces and keep peace in the town.

So the sort of thing that we do is long standing historical presence, but I think there's a lot of things you can look at the history of and sort of take lessons from. So as Ray mentioned, a unified response is, of course, a huge benefit of having a huge strength of having an organized armed group. And it's literally if someone reaches out and says, we need help, help is available. But there are a lot of weaknesses. Businesses and clubs can be held liable legally. And this is an endemic problem within gun laws. It stands, the laws are written such that they effectively, they're, it comes down to situational context to determine how a gun law should be enforced. And the law will never be on the side of a group trying to abolish parts of the law. So you have to be very careful about how you,

how, especially an organized or formally organized armed group has to be very careful about how they put their work in play with that in mind. how they put their work in play with that in mind. Yeah, that was great. I was unaware, actually. I was aware of the riots. I was unaware of that part of the history, which is fascinating and I think very important.

Yeah, Ray, did you want to explain the threat onion? Yeah, the integrated threat onion. So is kind of a a well-known meme in certain circles uh slash actual thing and it's designed to help you understand how to like mitigate threat and sorry integrated survivability onion mitigate threats right so the teal deer is you know do you want to try to preserve life by having body armor and hoping a bullet hits you in the body armor or do you want to preserve life by i don't know not showing the fuck up to something where you might get shot and the idea is it's a meme because so often you know people are like i want to get in there and get engaged with conflict and be the

hero and the answer is you know you could just like not go there, right? And it would probably be a lot easier to do that. But there's some real weight to the survivability onion, which is, like, there are many, many ways to mitigate threats to yourself in your community. And very often, the most boring and mundane answer is probably the one that's going to actually result in the biggest impact. And the heroic answer is probably the one that's going to actually result in the biggest impact and the heroic answer is probably the absolute worst answer and only what you rely on if everything else has gone to hell so that's uh someone i think it was thud spoke to alluded to the threat onion and ways to harm to oneself and one's community and i had to repeat it because it's this this meme that's been coming up forever yeah and it is like the basic idea of the thread onion is that you have like this again you you think of it in layers that's why they call it an onion um of like things that protect you and the things that provide the most protection are stuff like not being seen or present when somebody

wants to harm you um not or being behind present when somebody wants to harm you, or being behind cover when somebody wants to harm you. And the thing that offers the least protection is having body armor. It's the idea that the things that people buy and focus on because they look cool are all things that offer less protection than situational awareness and good judgment is kind of the actual lesson, I think think to take out of the threat onion. That would be my opinion on the matter. This has been It Could Happen Here. That's all for this week.

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