It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 61

Episode Date: December 3, 2022

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

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or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by

an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. 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. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, good night. Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here. It is 3 p.m. in the winter, so it's all of those at once over here. That is true. That is true.

It is 76 here. It's regular old evening time here. No winter included, you know, just rain and hot. That's the two moods of the weather yeah yeah which winter is it right now is it rain winter or hot winter neither there is no winter winter is never well i hope that winter never comes to the island if it does i think we'll be in some deep shit, you know. If you guys get snow, things have really gone south. It's time for us all to reevaluate our practices when that happens.

Yeah. Absolutely. It means the parrots have migrated to Alaska. Oh, God. They do a lot of movements around the evening time, so I wouldn't be surprised if they decide to pack up and leave us all behind. Well, this is It Could Happen Here, as you might be aware, a podcast about things falling apart. And today's episode is brought to us by Andrew.

Hello. Of the YouTube channel Andrewism. Just to avoid confusion with other Andrews, you know, abusing my name or something. Oh, I did not realize. Yeah, that's right. Son of the Queen. Yeah, you know, you could talk about Prince Andrew.

You could talk about Andrew Teeth. You know, it's like I had to distinguish myself, you know? Yeah. You're the best, Andrew. I appreciate that. Anytime, buddy. So I'd like to spend some time today, tonight.

What is time really? And to talk about the concept of degrowth, you know, where it comes from, what it means, what it needs and all that other fun stuff. Are you guys familiar with degrowth as, as a concept?

Yeah. Yeah. A little bit. Yeah. I mean, and it's, yeah, I please please i mean it's one of those things that gets a lot of like uh flack on one hand for people saying that it's basically eco-fascism and then you have folks being like no it's a it's a perfectly reasonable response to the kind of endless growth attitude that got us into the environmental catastrophe we're currently experiencing. That's.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that having released a video on degrowth last week and having read through some of the comments I've received, I've come to the conclusion that there is no getting through to some people yeah um because oh no people people love to listen to like a third of what you say and then get really angry at what they think you said every time we talk about like the value of of things like you know the four thieves vinegar collective you know hacking different medicines or training people to be medics,

somebody hops on the subreddit and said, I think it's kind of ableist that they think that, you know, people can replace doctors with street medics. No one's ever made that case. That's not a thing that anyone has ever said. I'm going to make it my entire life mission to only specifically make this case. Mm-hmm. All we need is a guy with some gauze

and water in a bag doctors are bourgeoisie they must all die when the revolution comes they will only be replaced with street medics it's going to be great I'm texting all of this to our friend Kaveh right now Dr. Hoda yeah it's just ridiculous

so people will literally project what they think you said onto what you actually said it's very very obvious when it's just ridiculous. So people will literally project what they think you said onto what you actually said. It's very, very obvious when it's taken place. I don't know how they don't feel embarrassed. You know, a lot of times I barely comment on things. I barely like respond to things. And when I do, I check and recheck and recheck what the person has said. Then I check and recheck and recheck what I see before I make a statement.

Because it makes you feel like you're going crazy sometimes. How do you not feel embarrassed? Yeah. Like everybody who has watched the video can see that you haven't watched it. They've just done like a term search and then appeared and yeah. And like they come to engage you. Pretty much. Pretty much.

But I mean, if I were to be a slave to the algorithm, I would say all that engagement helps, right? Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure it does. It helps one thing for sure. Yeah. It doesn't help get us to a better place. Unfortunately.

And speaking of things that do not help us get to a better place, I think the growth primarily is about confronting this destructive ideology of growthism you know something we see all around us something we interact with on a fairly regular basis you see the images of the amazon rainforest being cut down to be um turned into soy farms until eventually it's made into cattle grazing fields uh you talk about the constant expansion of oil infrastructure you talk about the constant expansion of mining operations you talk about the continued rise of fast fashion that people are extremely defensive of whenever you try to criticize it um all of these systems all of these

industries all of these practices uh are part of part and parcel or rather products of this ideology of growthism that capitalism is driven by and i know it may be strange for some people to sort of deprogram from this idea that growth is like an unadulterated good uncontroversially positive um because you know nature's like all about growth right you know when you think of growth you think of a plant peeking out of the soil you think of a baby kitten growing up to be a cat you talk about like babies becoming toddlers becoming young children becoming older children becoming you know tweens and teens and then finally adults and then from there joe biden um but you, there's this whole idea of growth and that growth is like a natural part of life. And that is true. But growth in life does not go on and on and on and on. You know,

organisms grow up to a certain point and then they maintain a healthy equilibrium, or at least they try to. Of course, health is not necessarily a natural state of affairs because viruses are just as natural as the cells they attack and then you could also get all uh ephemeral and talk about personal growth and how life is a constant journey of personal growth and whatever but speaking materially speaking physically growth has a limit people grow up to a certain height a certain size and so on and when growth doesn't stop that's when we start running into problems as i understand the reason that cancer is so difficult to cure is because your own body turning against you it's your it's some of the many trillions of your own cells deciding okay time to just grow

and grow and grow without limit and what happens in most of those cases in many of those cases rather unfortunately people die as a result so in our bodies in our own bodies we understand that growth is not always positive and yet that sick logic of growth for its own sake is exactly what the global economy relies on it's not just thing has too much growth too much money too much stuff you have all these wealthy nations that continue to expand and grow and attempt to hoard i heard one person use the analogy i can't remember who it was um talking about how capitalism is now attempting to the new frontiers for capitalism is to expand and colonize our own minds um and so every economy every sector every industry is expected to keep growing keep growing keep growing no matter what one of the responses that i got

on my video on degrowth is that oh well you're saying that growth is this and growthism is this capitalist thing but you know china and ussr and they grew and they industrialize and they are just as susceptible to ecological destruction as any other capitalist country and that is true but that's also part of why i would consider those countries to be um state capitalist projects and not anything close to what i envision but of course the moment you introduce any idea that sounds even vaguely socially oriented even vaguely ecologically oriented um people automatically assume you're for like a new united soviet socialist republic but i think we need to explore different paths to improving quality of life to quote-unquote developing and that's a tricky subject i'll get into a bit later but we need to think of ways that we can help people and help people live better lives without relying on decimating the biosphere it's a tricky conversation to be had um because when people think of growth they

think of it as a positive and when you criticize that positive, they think the inverse. They think you're trying to make everybody degrade and go down to like a worse quality of life to rush back to like a lower life expectancy or to transform our mode of production back to like hunting and gathering but the truth is that degrowth as a movement as a system of thought is more so about trying to find that balance between a good quality of life for all not just this unequal quality of life that we see around the world and the capitalism while also balancing the fact that we live in a material world we live on a planet that has limited resources we need to balance those resources we need to consider and be good stewards of you know a planet that we share with other living creatures capitalism really is driven by this ideology of growthism because it is structurally incentivized structurally it's a structural imperative in the capitalist system

it's not exclusively driven by greed as some people assume i think that's that that this idea that oh it's all up to like personalities uh kind of hampers people's ability to analyze systems because it doesn't matter whether um we suddenly put each and every CEO in a position where they are all completely 100% altruistic. It's not that they're all being driven by greed. It's because under capitalism, you know, capitalists own capital. And capital that is stagnant is capital that is losing its value. And so they look for things to invest in so they can grow their capital capital being anything from real estate factories machinery intellectual

property financial assets or just the money that they use to make more money if it's stagnant it's losing value and so they're trying to increase its value um and so they seek out companies that have growing profits year after year so their capital will grow year after year and if that growth slows down they pull out and look elsewhere to invest companies that fail to grow will lose their investors and collapse and so companies do everything in their power to maintain growth so they can maintain their investors regardless of how much havoc they wreak upon the world. So if any barriers are preventing their growth,

they had to bulldoze those barriers. Environmental protections are barriers. Labour laws are barriers. Protections policies are barriers. The commons were a barrier. Indigenous populations were a barrier. And so on and so forth. All of these acts of violence open up these new frontiers for growth, for appropriation, for accumulation.

And so in comes degrowth or the French term for it is décroissant. And I know that I likely pronounced that incorrectly. It's the French, we can disrespect them. There are no consequences. Precisely. correctly it's the french we could disrespect them there are no consequences precisely i think um they need to sit down reflect on their nuclear empire um but anyway this idea of the growth really first was developed i have to say that i appreciate what the intellectuals have come up with they're good at sitting down and thinking about stuff. I'll give them that. I'll give them that.

So this one French intellectual, a guy named André Gors, in 1972 coined the term déconcent, French for degrowth. Gors basically posed a question that remains at the center of degrowth. Is the earth's balance, for which no growth or even degrowth of material production is a necessary condition, compatible with the survival of the capitalist system? I would venge to say no.

It is not in any way compatible with the survival of the capitalist system because we have seen that in the short period of time that capitalism has existed, it has rapidly triggered the capitalocene, or as some people regrettably call it, the anthropocene. It has rapidly triggered the sixth great mass extinction event. It has rapidly triggered the sixth great mass extinction event. And so I do not believe that the Earth's balance is compatible with its survival. And so Décroissant, a movement of activists mainly, flourished in Lyon in the early 2000s in the wake of protests for car-free cities, communal meals in the streets,

food cooperatives and campaigns against advertising. They went from France to Italy, where green and anti-globalization activists mobilized against this whole concept of capitalism's constant encroachment and expansion and growth. It expanded into Catalonia and Spain in 2006. It eventually built up to the size where it could sustain a movement, a magazine rather, called La Decroissant, which currently sells a few thousand copies a month.

Around the same time, in 2004, a research and activist named François Schneider took a year-long walking tour on a donkey to disseminate degrowth throughout France, and that received some media coverage. Eventually, Schneider founded an academic collective known as Research and Degrowth along with Denis Bayon and Fabrice Filippo and they eventually began international conferences one in Paris in 2008 and the second in Barcelona in 2010. so the english term degrowth

was officially used for the first time at the paris conference which really marked the birth of the international research community around degrowth following the success of the conferences in paris and barcelona other conferences were held in montreal in 2011 venice in 2012 leipzig in 2014 and degrowth as an idea spread to groups in flanders switzerland finland poland greece germany portugal norway denmark czech republic well i guess it's czechia now mexico brazil puerto rico canada bulgaria romania and elsewhere degrowth as an idea as in this movement has been gaining ground despite the criticisms that some have that oh well you can't call it something negative like degrowth

because people won't be you know happy with it or whatever um and I'll get to that criticism in a bit but it's been steadily growing since it was first you know developed in the 1970s um at this point in time if you go on the degrowth website you will find thousands of articles and studies in their library and of course that's not to say that all because a concept has a lot of followers or thinkers or published works it's automatically a-okay ultimately correct but at this point in time i think a lot of people are looking at direction we are going in and recognizing that we cannot continue along this path of growth and so they're actively looking for a way out looking for a way to find that balance recognizing that capitalism is not compatible with the earth's balance and so degrowth ultimately rejects the illusion of growth

it calls to re-politicize the public debate that has been colonized by the idiom of economism that has been driven toward, as a social objective, economic growth. Degrowth is a project advocating for the democratically led shrinking ofonsored environmental activists roll up and take your car and your house and force you to live in a cave um but degrowth and how we degrow our economy is going to rely on the popular um involvement of the people you know it's not like you could just snap your fingers or just decree it and make it so um it's not meant to be like how it is under neoliberalism where you have all this austerity degrowth is supposed to be all of us coming together to this to figure out how we can live in alignment with our biosphere with our bioregion with the planet scaling down our

individual and our community um supply chains and localizing our consumption in order to reduce the reliance on this highly extractive, highly growth-dependent capitalist, global capitalist economy. Degrowth also signifies a direction, a desired direction, one in which societies use fewer natural resources and organize and live much differently than they live today. The ideas of sharing, which is something that we teach to preschoolers, simplicity, conviviality, care, and the commons are primary concepts in terms of what a degrowth society should look like uh in one of my previous podcast episodes i would have discussed the commons a bit so if anyone's curious about what the commons are they could check that out um and of course on my channel

i also speak about the commons as an institution and about libraries of things. And so degrowth has offered a sort of a framework that connects all these different ideas, concepts, proposals. With the criticism of growth, with the criticism of GDP, with the criticism of commodification. of commodification um the process that converts social products and socio-ecological services and relations into commodities the monetary value on the constructive side because degrowth is not just limited to criticism degrowth imagines reproductive economies of care the reclamation of old and the creation of new commons man-made and natural caring for commons in communal forms of living and producing liberating our time from work and making it available to caring for our communities and caring for ecology because if you think about all of the activities that are currently so needed at this point in time uh in terms of

ecological restoration in terms of um degrowth they're not profitable you know planting mangroves to shore up our shores to defend our shores from erosion and from storms is not profitable replanting forests and sparking nature's processes of ecological restoration not profitable and of course there is a whole sort of ecosystem economic political ecosystem dedicated to these kinds of projects with all the ngos and government organizations involved in replanting the sahel region in africa for example creating the great green wall but those projects tend to be rife with issues and a lack of maintenance because they do not involve local communities in the decision making surrounding that process of restoration and on top of that of course these projects are

not embedded in a broader project for degrowth. So a government might be planting trees and planting forests in one part of the country and extracting and drilling in another part of the country. and so there needs to be an integration of all these different projects with a broader push and direction towards degrowth i want to go back around to this idea that um degrowth is a critique of gdp as a concept um degrowth is not necessarily the same as negative gdp growth but when you consider how gdp is measured as it's counted it's about financial transactions and not necessarily the non-financial ones and so if we were to green our economy if we were to-grow our society, we're not going to be seeing the yearly gross domestic activity

increases of 2 or 3%. Yeah, there's an old 2011 slogan that's if the bank takes your house, that increases GDP. Right. That is true. That is true. lot of uh positive and constructive and beneficial actions that people do on a regular basis do not contribute to gdp whereas entire destructive

industries contribute significantly to gdp rent every month we started this by talking by comparing kind of the quest for endless growth to a cancer but i almost think a better comparison is like you know there was that article earlier this year about how specific kinds of people particularly like rich weirdos in the tech industry are paying thousands of dollars to have their legs broken and like lengthened so that they can like be three inches taller like that's that's that's that's a shitload of how at like it's yeah i mean it's weaker they can never we can never run again but you are technically taller so we'll count it as growth yeah for real go up yeah of a coward to wear platforms yeah yeah so you don't you don't have the chutzpah to be a short king unbelievable sometimes i do think that like when anthropologists on earth are civilization they

wonder why we were so fascinated about line go up but like then they realize that the whole point of the civilization was line go up like that that was our deity truly it's I don't know my eyes bleed sometimes thinking about how this whole system is structured and how it just continues to chug along but

that's why I spend so much time writing and reading and talking about these issues right trying to find a way out and so that is also what degrowth advocates are looking to do they're looking for a way out you know a way for a better life for us all which brings me to the whole criticism of degrowth that is essentially optics right they say it's not appropriate to use a negative word to signify desired positive changes but degrowth advocates deliberately choose i mean in my video i said that i'm fine with either calling it degrowth or calling it post growth

or whatever but degrowth advocates have chosen the term degrowth for a reason. The use of negation for a positive project is aimed towards creating that sort of questioning, you know, towards getting people to reconsider this idea of growth as a ultimate good to decolonize an imagination that has been dominated by this whole capitalist conception of the future consisting of you know line go up is this automatic assumption an association of growth with better that the word degrowth wants to dismantle wants to deconstruct and so degrowth is a deliberately subversive slogan and of course

degrowth is not aimed at you know deconstructing the most necessary sectors devolve in the most necessary sectors we're not talking about de-growing education de-growing medical care de-growing you know well renewable energy is kind of a tricky subject but de-growing renewable energy um it's more so about primarily and first of all targets targeting the most dirty and destructive industries you know the financial sector we would prefer to see institutions like health and education flourish rather than grow or develop we want a change that is qualitative not necessarily quantitative we want to see a flourishing of the arts a flourishing of philosophies a flourishing of um vernacular architectures a flourishing of

the creativity of people that's qualitative it's not about oh well line go up so things more good you know it's not about we have 10 industrial outputs last year now we have 12 that's so good you know we want something we want qualitative change and if most people really sit down and think about what they want in their life i don't think think a lot of people are going to think of, oh, well, I want next year's iPhone to have a 12% increase in the camera quality. You know, it's more so that you want better, you know, rest, more connected communities uh healthier commute or healthier

um i guess city layout um that's more conducive to interaction it's more conducive to uh small scale movement it's not about like i said you know it's not about trying to get lying to go up i can cryptocurrency as i think about it it's like perhaps the best example or like nfts right like they created a bunch of value that literally created nothing i had nothing other than exchange value exactly exactly it's just nonsense yeah pretend money i also want to talk for a moment about like development as a concept right because another common criticism of degrowth is that oh well what about the global south what about the third world what about all the poor countries and poor people of the world you just want to leave them behind and for one i i find it strange because the person in question at least the video

response i got implicitly assumes that i am from like a global north nation and i'm just fine sitting down with my you know um same day Amazon delivery and Starbucks and sprawling suburbs and whatever it is that, you know, they imagine my lifestyle is like. whole move for degrowth is to consider um like i said raising improving people's quality of life worldwide which capitalism is not interested in capitalism will maintain a perpetual underclass because they're easier to exploit and so there's this whole idea of development right it has this baggage um this very colonial baggage but it's development is really like growth it's meant to have like a limit it's an unfolding towards a predetermined end you know an embryo eventually develops into a fetus so she eventually develops into a baby she eventually develops into a baby she eventually develops into a child she eventually develops into an adult who then ages and dies but development for the

sake of development with no end with no aims with no goals with no sense of um self-critique or questioning it's a disaster waiting to happen. I can look at my own country. I'm from Trinidad and Tobago, for those who don't know, and think of things that need to get better, right? Things that would really improve people's quality of life. To think about the fact that we really need to get rid of our reliance on cars and bring back our train system

that was dismantled so long ago i could think about the fact that we need to improve our food autonomy because we are extremely reliant on food imports things like that i can think about that would improve people's ability to live well and sustainably on this island but those things those aims those are those are goals right i'm not just thinking oh development development development i'm thinking okay there's point b how do i get there from point a how are we going to meet people's basic needs and this whole and the whole degrowth project is really about that whole conversation between

the global north and the global south right the global north needs to reduce the demand for a lot of the resources and goods so that they're more accessible to the global south but in making those things more accessible places in the global south are not meant to follow the same path that the global north took that put us in our mess the whole idea is that we need to find a different path we need to find a different trajectory we need to think for ourselves instead of trying to keep up with the joneses in order to determine what a good life would mean for us in our ecological niche in our geographical situation yeah a lot of us is like we did we did we did this in china right like we we did

the entire development thing and the product is now like people literally walking 18 miles on foot after having broken out of a foxconn factory they've been locked in and forced to make iphones because someone had like three people had gotten covid so they just like locked everyone in the factory so like you know it yeah i think it's also sort of like briefly worth mentioning that like development as a concept and the sort of like developmental economics field was like this was like specifically developed in sort of the bowels of the american state department as as a response to like basically as like as a way as a kind of like simplified capitalist version of marxist theory they could throw out to sort of

like explain what was happening in like as a way to as sort of an alternative to marxism for like all these sort of like newly uh post-colonial nations and you know it's gone about as well as you would expect this thing cooked up in the bowels of the State Department to be an alternative to Marxism to go. Pretty much, yeah. It's like... Well, this has been fun. I love, I don't know, thinking about capital. I mean, this is important because, like,

we always need to be thinking about what comes next. This is constantly, like, a problem that the left has and certainly a problem that the left has, and certainly a problem the liberals have, which is that the vision of the future is very rarely anything more than fighting against kind of the demons of the moment, as opposed to like, what does it actually look like to get ourselves to a better place, to a place that's more sustainable, both in an environmental level and in a manner of human ecology, too. And yeah, I think this is kind of the hard work that people need to be thinking about, wherever you wind up landing on degrowth as either a concept or as a term. These are the paths we have to start beating out of the bush, you know?

to start beating out of the bush you know exactly so there are many potential paths that have already been thought up and there are many that have yet to be imagined in ecuador the project of sumac cosey in really the rest of latin america the idea of buen vivir in much of south africa the concept of ubuntu in india the kandyan economy of permanence all of these projects and more explore alternatives to quote-unquote development alternative trajectories to a good life um that is rooted in environmental justice that is based in a retreat from the narrow confines of the global north's imagination um and what that imagination has promoted worldwide and forced upon the rest of the world degrowth requires us to think for ourselves to think creatively about how we plan on creating a good life in the context of

capitalism's degradation the earth's degradation due to climate change and what that will mean for our future is we really need to sit and think about what our future as a species would have our future as regions our future as communities our future as individuals is going to look like what trajectory what path we want to take and how we begin that journey. And so in the second part of this two-part series, I intend to discuss what concepts are essential for degrowth, the steps we can take to move towards degrowth, and how we can integrate degrowth in anarchist politics all right and uh that's going to be the end of part one come back tomorrow for part two and uh probably more discussion

of that weird surgery rich people get to have their legs broken repeatedly until they're taller 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. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to the leading

journalists in the field and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology, I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Wherever else you get your podcasts, check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean.

He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with.

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

available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a show where things happen and people talk about it. Yes, in this present location that's correct last episode we spoke about the concept of degrowth and what it means to degrow how degrowth as a movement came about what inspired the critique that degrowth pushes and what degrowth means for those of us who live in the global south. How we can go about imagining new and different paths to a better life within ecological limits.

This episode, we will continue in that conversation, talking about what is essential for the growth as i discussed in the previous episode degrowth is about striving for a self-determined life and dignity for all it means an economy and a society that can sustain the natural basis of life. It means a reduction of production and consumption in the global north and a liberation from the one-sided western paradigm of development so that the global south can explore our own self-determining paths of social organization. Degrowth means an extension of democratic decision-making to allow for real political participation. Degrowth means that social changes organized and oriented towards sufficiency and self-sufficiency and ecological sustainability rather than a pursuit of a line go up,

a pursuit of economic growth regardless of its impact on people and planet. And degrowth, of course, advocates for the creation of open, connected, and localized economies. economies there are several steps that need to be taken in order to achieve a degrowth society achieve a degrowth will to degrow for one i think that as jason hickel advocates in his book, Less is More, we absolutely need to put an end to the practice of planned obsolescence. Whether it be in household appliances, in tools, in furniture, in computers, we need to shift away from this idea of products being produced to break down in a certain timeline and require replacement. I personally have witnessed a lot of older technologies

that continue to last to this day because they were invented before this whole practice of plant obsolescence really came about. My family, we have a microwave that is like a decade older than i am and it still works fine wow yeah and i mean in my own lifetime i've had to purchase multiple microwaves so it's it's ridiculous yeah this is always one of the things that i always thought like there is a real sort of like the this is how you this is how you appeal to conservative people with this is just like

hey we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna bring back like 1960s microwaves where everything is a dial and it doesn't break ever yeah it's like no actually yeah i think what's what's missing in the conversation about team growth is a lot of people, they assume because they reacted negatively that everybody else will. They kind of project their own reaction to others. But I think political spectrum aside, or political charts, or however you want to map out the unmappable. I think that people generally, as I was discussing in the previous episode, want a good life and that requires qualitative changes

far more than it requires quantitative changes. Of course, there are places where quantitative changes are needed to make certain things accessible to that population. But we already overproduce a lot of different things. And a lot of overproduction is completely unnecessary because it is based in planned obsolescence in order to increase profits.

And so that needs to, once that is discarded, I think people will have, will best be able to access that quality of life. Because when you look at a lot of the sudden expenses that people have to deal with, your fridge suddenly breaking down, your stove suddenly breaking down, your microwave or your toaster suddenly breaking down.

Or your washing machine. I think in this year alone, I've had to fix the washing machine three or four times because it just constantly breaks down. And when instead we can save those resources, save that time, save that energy, save that money, just produce it in quality for the first time. Putting an end to those deliberate manufacturing decisions and developing long-lasting, modular products that can reduce our material and energy use worldwide. That can reduce our material and energy use worldwide. I think in a lot of cases, we don't necessarily need more innovation.

I don't think we really need a smart fridge. I think we just need a fridge that works for decades without breaking down constantly. without breaking down constantly. Yeah, and so much of the stuff that's sort of like nominally is supposed to be innovation is just, how can we make this product in such a way that we can sell consumer data about you from it? Exactly. It's like, we don't need to do that.

We can simply not. We can simply not. We can simply not. Exactly. Exactly. And speaking of things that we can simply not we can simply not exactly exactly and speaking of things that we can simply not we can simply not assault our senses constantly with advertising because advertising just continues to serve this purpose of generating social divisions highlighting class divisions and manipulating people into consuming stuff they don't need. As a card-carrying member of Generation Z,

I do not typically watch much TV. I used to watch TV because I'm the older Gen Z contingent. But with the rise of streaming services, which I do not use, yo-ho-ho, I just have to say about that, I have not watched much TV. But there are certain reality shows that I enjoy, like The Amazing Race. And so, those tend to be shown on TV.

Or like Jeopardy. I like to watch Jeopardy. And the constant, deeply unfunny, irritating, annoying, loud, flashy barrage of commercials deeply unfunny irritating annoying loud flashy

barrage of commercials it's quite aggravating um honestly the golden age

of commercials being funny was a long time ago and now it just hurts one of the things that I mentioned

that in um in the episode that I mentioned that in, in the episode that we had done on the commons, one of the things that I, one of the positions I held even before I was an anarchist was my opposition to the advertising industry, to advertising. I can't stand advertising. Everywhere you walk, everywhere you scroll, everything you watch and listen to, it's all trying to sell you something.

I would love to be able to go outside and not see ads all the time. I would love to be able to scroll through the internet without seeing ads all the time. And so getting rid of the advertising industry, getting rid of all these ads that are just pushing us to consume more and more, and oftentimes just promoting a lot of really harmful societal ideas you know um body image issues and alcoholism and a lot of our worst practices and a lot of

really terrible things are being promoted through ads and so so, yeah, tear it down and watch consumerism perish. And you think about really the history of the advertising industry and how it came about as a mass communication student. That's something that I would have spent some time looking into. Advertising really came about in response to this need that people had really, that companies had to get people to consume. Because in a lot of cases, people would buy something and a newer model would come out and they wouldn't really pay attention to it because, oh, well, I already have the thing. I don't need to get another thing. But you can't run a profitable business that way.

So they basically used advertising to push people to consume more. And so we need to get rid of the advertising industry. Another step we can take towards degrowth is to shift from ownership to use of fruct. Use of fruct is something that Marie Book bookchin social ecologist talks a lot about um in his book the ecology of freedom and it's essentially the freedom of individuals or groups in a community to access and use but not destroy common resources to supply their needs uh the term usufruct comes from roman property law i believe which would include usus the right to use sorry unfortunately i did not take latin yeah practice is the right to enjoy the fruit of one's property and abuse us, which is the right to destroy one's property.

So use us, fruct us, and abuse us. And so use and fruct is really the combination of the first two principles. Right, to access and use and enjoy the fruit of commonly held property without the right to destroy it so that everyone can supply their needs. So instead of, I mean, two libraries are already a concept that exists around the world. Rather than 100 people in a community, each individually owning an electric drill,

one person or rather one library can host or three or four electric drills and effectively serve everyone's need for a drill when they need it because unless you're a carpenter or really into arts and crafts you probably don't need an electric drill all the time another thing that would really help in our push towards degrowth would be getting rid of car dependency because the consumption of vehicles, the maintenance of vehicles, the maintenance of the infrastructure that vehicles use,

all of those things requires a lot of resources, you know, concrete and oil and gas and metals and rare earth minerals. And rather than forcing everyone to produce those things so we could consume those things, we can instead shift towards a walkable model for our urban environments so that people who do need to use vehicles in rural settings, for example, can use them and use them without causing unnecessary harm, contributing to unnecessary harm, superfluous harm on the planet. Getting rid of car dependency would also mean that fewer people would need vehicles and the few vehicles that we do produce

can be shared in common to serve needs that cannot be filled by bikes or public transportation systems. shared in common to serve needs that cannot be filled by like bikes or you know public transportation systems another element of degrowth would really be the reduction of our energy material use through the transformation of our agriculture systems it is true that we currently produce enough food for i believe 10 billion. A lot of that food is wasted. A lot of that food doesn't reach people. It's really an issue of allocation and not necessarily production.

But at the same time, that production is extremely harmful. It relies on a lot of damaging chemicals. It relies on the stripping of our top soils it relies on the overuse of antibiotics it relies on the abuse of animals the way that we currently feed the world is deeply unequal extremely inefficient environmentally degrading, and energy wasting. We cannot continue to treat our farms like factories. We need to find ways to feed ourselves densely and compatibly with the living world.

Scaling down to localized permaculture can help. Regenerative-based agricultural systems community supported agriculture urban gardens aquaponics cultured meats aquacultures and exploring other more traditional forms of

food raising will need to be the route that we take. Already, we are killing our soils. We are running out of the fossil fuels that the agricultural industry relies on. And if we continue along this trajectory, we have a big storm coming.

We have probably the greatest famine the planet has ever seen on its way if we do not aim to build food autonomy aim to rewild our ecologies aim to reconfigure our consumption patterns our food production and consumption patterns to sequester more carbon to allocate to more people to produce healthier foods and really to recover the earth another important step we can take in degrowth would be to get rid of or to scale down to some especially destructive industries. There is, of course, agriculture. There's the fossil fuels industry, the arms industry, private jet industry,

the automobile industry, the airline industries. All of these industries must either be slimmed down or gotten rid of because as the pandemic has shown very few of the jobs that are currently undertaken around the world are truly essential to maintaining the bare bones of of life and of course we do need to reconfigure the way that we live our ways of life in order to reflect ecological limits but do need to reconfigure the way that we live, our ways of life, in order to reflect ecological limits. But even with that reconfiguration, I think we know what industry is needed and what aren't. I always find it strange, this is, I guess, a tangent.

I always find it strange that politicians are celebrated for bragging about creating new jobs when in reality i believe and really the vision was in the 20th century that we would reach a point where fewer and fewer people needed to work and that we needed to work for less time um and so that really is part of the aim of the growth reviving that pursuit reviving that goal because we have reached the point where we can um scale down the amount of time each person has to work scale on the amount of jobs that are necessary um if you've read bullshit jobs by daveber, you'll see that a lot of, particularly service economy jobs, are practically worthless.

And I actually saw a kind of funny video talking about how at this point, office culture is more of a... A religion. Cult. Yeah, it's so good. Yeah, so that going around, making a surround on

Twitter that was really funny but yeah we just move around bunch of people move around a bunch of numbers if you've seen the show succession so that's not succession severance you've seen the show severance it's it's pretty much like an r slash anti-work

type show and so I think more and more people are coming to the realization that hey this kind of sucks the fact that we have

to work this much so we need to reduce the amount of time we work the type of work we need to change the type of work we do so it's a quantitative

and qualitative shift. And something I spoke about in my video on anti-work or post-work, whatever you want to call it. These changes, these steps to scale down total energy use can be taken by a broad range of organizations, groups, mass movements, popular assemblies, unions, cooperatives, not waiting for the state, but going beyond it. I think we've seen by now, I think if you have not seen by now, you need to open your eyes. The state is not doing enough or in some cases not doing anything at all to respond to these crises and we need to take it into our own hands to do so. I have a video in store for December that as one of my patrons joked might have the alphabet agencies after me.

But there are a lot of different actions that we can take to integrate degrowth, to move towards a degrowth society, to degrow our economies. A combination of acts of confrontation and non-cooperation and prefiguration. In sum, degrowth challenges the dominant growth imperative it's in the name it is intentionally subversive in its title because it requires us to think about how we can collectively organize the restructuring of our economy and the downscaling of energy and resource use worldwide to transition back into balance with the living world in a safe, just, and equitable way. Degrowth means striving for a self-determined life in dignity and abundance for all. Degrowth would mean liberating ourselves not just from the ways that the growth imperative has shaped our technologies, education. Degrowth would require that we not just liberate ourselves from the ways that the growth imperative has shaped our technologies and institutions,

but it demands that we also reconsider our education, our cultural norms and values, our identities, our mindsets, our relationships. It will be a massive shift what anarchists call a social revolution. But it's one that is worthwhile. As some degrowth advocates would say, worthwhile as some degrowth advocates would say it's degrowth by choice or degrowth by force because the use of degrowth here is being used slightly differently um degrowth by choice being like i described a collectively organized democr democratically managed, you know, restructuring the economy to bring into balance the living world in a safe, just, and equitable way. Whereas degrowth by force is more so a combination of austerity and apocalypse. So, up to you.

Yeah. All power to the people. up to you yeah all power to the people so there's there's a japanese marxist named kohei saito who's been writing like a bunch of stuff recently who basically like he's been like probably the biggest voice of degrowth in japan and his book capital neanderthal scene is finally getting translated into english pretty soon so yeah check that out when it comes out his stuff is really good and he basically has revived both Marxism and

degrowth in Japan after Marxism's kind of like implosion after a bunch of weird we don't need to get into the story of the collapse of the Japanese left but yeah that's coming soon. So check that out. Yeah, I'm looking forward to that book when it comes out.

Yeah, me too. If you want to check out my videos on this topic and others, just go to youtube.com slash andrewism. You can also follow me on Twitter, while Twitter still exists at underscore saint drew and you could potentially even support on patreon patreon.com slash saint drew that's it peace Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora.

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

has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming

and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God, things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian.

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

as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It could happen here. I don't know why I did that voice. I'm Robert Evans, host of a podcast that has many other hosts who all are are on the podcast right now we have in order of them being on my zoom screen chris garrison shereen and james hey everybody how's it going good great we've brought the full crew in to talk about the worst shit so yeah a whole bunch of kind of kind of not great things have happened

the past week yeah um so yeah we took we took last week mostly off from work due to a series of court cases um and uh thanks to an injunction we're allowed to podcast again. So I figured it would be we had a couple of, I mean, horrifying stories break in a row that we as the people we are kind of had specific bits of insight on that I think might help catch our listeners up to some maybe underappreciated aspects of some of the big stories of the last week. So we wanted to start with the mass shooting in Colorado Springs, last week. So we wanted to start with the mass shooting in Colorado Springs, specifically talking about the family of the still alleged, but you know, definitely did it shooter. James, you want to kick us off there? Yeah, I wanted to start out with this. So the alleged shooter is called Anderson Lee Aldrich, right? But comes from a an LDS Latter-day Saint family in San Diego.

And, like, I think everyone has probably seen this very viral 30-second clip of his father that went around Twitter the day after the shooting. And his dad, just so we're super clear on this, says some disgusting things and is a piece of shit for saying them. I don't want to excuse any of the shit he said. I also don't want to excuse the way that that was cut because I think it was pretty, pretty shitty.

Like there are people we should be really fucking angry at. And his father is one of them. But his father didn't excuse the shooting. And if you look at the eight minute interview, he says that like what happened was wrong, et cetera, et cetera. And there are people who have excused the shooting, right? Like, I think Chris is going to speak to some of them. Tim Pool, Tucker Carlson, people who created a climate where this happened

and have asked for it to fucking happen again and are asking continually for it to happen again. His dad didn't do that. Again, his dad doesn't seem to have been a great dad right his dad was was uh like using when he was a kid his dad was abusive rewarded his violence i think we all know lots of people who were raised in those climates who didn't go on to shoot up a nightclub and it just kind of i saw some i don't know i was upset by the response to that in a sense, because like,

I know so many people who come from, from families and homes like that. And I like being like, oh, he was doomed to be this way because of how his dad was just like, isn't, I don't know. It just upset me. It's not the response we need.

You know, like, I think we should hold, like hold what his dad said, like hold his dad to account for what he said but also not like allow that to explain yeah i have a couple i like i have confused feelings on it because his dad does go into a long thing where he says you know you shouldn't there's nothing that justifies violence you know these people's lives were precious all lives are precious but he also was like i taught him that violence uh was a great way to

solve problems um and you know expresses that he was glad to learn that his son wasn't gay and i don't he's fucked up yeah i don't know i don't yeah i i don't know how much i want to like interpret that as he he really meant what he said about nothing justifying this and those people's lives being precious because that is kind of this thing that like you justifying this and those people's lives being precious, because that is kind of this thing that like you get on the, and this guy's obviously not a thought leader on the Christian right. Not like a, he's not like a luminary. I don't think he contributed outside of, you know, the things he may have raised his son to believe, uh, to the broader national climate of, of hate right now. There was just a study that was released today that from the

Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, data confirms that anti-LGBT mobilization is now the leading driver of far-right protest activity in the US. So obviously, this guy didn't make that happen. But I noticed a similarity between like the, there's nothing worse than my kid being gay but also oh when a bad thing gets done by a christian to gay people well their lives are still precious we just like hate what they how they live them yeah um i don't know i don't know how where to where to go further with that but you're right that like that the the 30 second clip is very dishonestly edited in order to like um cut out a lot of what this guy was saying which i have a problem with regardless of who you're doing it to yeah it's just it's bad journalism

and like i would rather we point our rage at the people who are going to make this happen again unless we stop them um yeah like this guy i'm this guy the degree to which this guy contributed to this massacre by being this dude's dad. I don't think there's anyone else he's going to push into killing if he indeed did that. Whereas people like Tim Pool are going to continue to do that. Yeah. Yeah. And also, I do want to say, like, like the the Mormon church does not get a pass for this. Yeah.

Like, no, absolutely. Unbelievably fucking homophobic like absolute piece of shit super racist like yeah and you know a lot of people really haven't been talking about this and they should because they fucking suck and yeah this is this is as you know like yeah it turns out when you fucking have a bunch of people like giving sermons about fucking musket balls like this is what happens. Yeah. You know, they don't, they don't get off the hook for this either.

No. And they're like domination of politics in some areas. It really needs to be seriously looked at. Um, talking of like domination of politics, I do want to talk about his grandfather a little bit. Yep. Cause his grandfather is bonkers.

Uh, so his grandfather is called Randy Vopal. Uh, might be pronounced verbal. Um, but he was mayor of santee so santee is a town east of san diego uh it's not not very far east i think you're probably familiar with santee right yeah santee is a place that's that's about yeah that's about it people sometimes call it clan tea uh definitely uh like metzger was there for a while right and yeah when vocal was mayor in 2001 there was a school shooting in santee uh about which he spoke he hasn't spoken about this one yet at all he's uh he's he's lost yeah

strange that strange uh he he's pretty much gone which is not like his when this guy speaks he uh he rarely helps himself uh when he speaks to media who don't agree with every position he's on so i want like i want to ground like he became mayor of santee in 2000 in 1999 a black marine uh by the name of carlos colbert who was the lance Corporal in the Marine Corps Was beaten and paralyzed by five white men At Memorial Day Party in Santee And that doesn't represent the whole town But that was How people thought of that town

In the early 2000s It was always a place to avoid Like you don't really want to go there I don't know Yeah, I have friends who still don't want to go to Santee I have friends who still don't want to go to santee like um i have uh friends who are like delivery drivers who are like black people who who have been told like they used to not send black folks delivering to santee like it definitely has whether or not that's

the case now it's becoming more more diverse i think like ethnically but it certainly has a reputation of being a place where like it's not safe. Um, and this is a place that elects him as mayor in 2000, right? Uh, 2001, they have a high school shooting,

uh, and he just kind of continues to spout some absolutely crazy stuff. It's probably worth noting that he's not as, uh, like far from the, like the norm of the gop which is still a long way from like good uh when it comes to like lgbtq stuff as he is for other things uh like his his probably his most famous crazy position is that climate change is good because most of our enemies live

in i'm quoting now most of our enemies live in hot climates Desert climates It will probably have a negative effect on their environment Most of the Muslim nations are in hot areas of the world Honestly Wow Just absolutely incredible Did we find the world's first pro-eco-fascist? Also

No, I am a pro-climate change fascist I have met a fewascist? Also, it is pro-climate change fascist. I have met a few anti-cis people who are pro-climate change because it'll bring on the destruction of civilization. But this is like a whole other level. Well, they'll like dry us out. Guys, do you want to know why he thinks this climate change happens?

Please. Oh, God. I believe about 1% of climate change is impacted by human beings the rest of the 99 that should not rest of 99 rest of 100 buddy uh is solar cycles quote the natural wobbling of the earth and volcanic activities oh this is this is the classic anti-climatic stuff yeah yeah there's some there's a couple of good ones i'm oh i i personally partial to we didn't have enough co2 and climate change is the only thing that's going to save us from the co2 shortage that we're experiencing notable other vocal bangers include uh i'm

getting attacked out here by the vietcong, stealing my copper, and I don't like it. It would be super funny if it turned out that the Viet Cong had sent, like, a deep cover spec ops unit to California just to fuck with this guy's copper. To pull copper out of his head. Yeah, just... Oh, God. yeah just uh uh all right god um he's just he's just a yeah just a powerful example of what happens if you lick lead paint uh yeah like just an incredible boomer um so he was voted out in

2020 by a considerable margin i think he got about 30 percent of christ oh my god he's he's 22 sorry this this so he's serving out his he just got voted out yeah his name was after 20 years he's 10 or how many he he moved in i think 2016 he moved into the california assembly so representing like this this is christ yeah yeah statewide office so like yeah i mean this is the thing here on the left coast california it is it means one thing to people who have never been to the west coast but have you been to the west coast the conservative parts of california like the republican party they're massive and the republican party has absolutely locked in control. It is very difficult to move them in places like fucking OC.

There's more Republican voters in California than most states. Than most red states. Yes, yeah. If you want a slice of Eastern California, just check out Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco's Instagram, where he mostly just rides around on a horse and criticizes COVID restrictions. But yeah, this is, yeah, it's really something.

Incredible poster. But this is, I think, an insight into like the side of California that people, it doesn't mean that everyone who lives in East County, of course, is bigoted or racist. There are lots of very nice, kind people in East County. I know there are some like anarchist communes out there. But yeah,

this, Vopal claims he hasn't spoken to his grandson for years, but this guy has been spouting this shit for 20 years, right? Like he became mayor of Santee in 2000. That was when this shooter,

Aldrich, was born. So like for his entire life, Vopal has been saying stuff like the Vietcong are stealing my copper i mean it is it is true that this this person did grow up surrounded by a constant bubble of of homophobic rhetoric um dehumanizing rhetoric and that that does shape the person that you are obviously that doesn't yeah it doesn't mean you're going to go do a mass shooting. There's lots of people who grew up in those environments who turn out to be

very wonderful people. Um, but, but yeah, that is definitely like the environment that you were raised in and around obviously doesn't obviously affects who, who you're going to be. And yeah,

this, the shooters posting like burning a pride flag on on his very limited social media presence right yeah and like every time his granddad had the chance he voted against rights for yeah he was raised in an environment where hatred of lgbtq people was not just like present but was used as the justification regularly for like legislative action and he was also raised in an environment where all of the men around him would have praised violence in different ways and the fact that he wound up doing violence uh against the queer community is not like surprising yeah yeah wasn't his dad also like an mma fighter yes u UFC. UFC. Whatever. Yeah.

Some sort of combat sport. Yeah. He's also in a bunch of porn movies. A lot of porn movies. I think a lot of things were normalized that were just like maybe not for other people. Yeah. That is a man who has no barrier between the two sides of his nose due to a lifetime of snorting every single chemical he can possibly get his hands on. Not that there's anything wrong with that yeah his dad doesn't seem to be like entirely lucid and since you um

well the other aspect of this is that the shooter in colorado was like a known figure as well he wasn't he wasn't a nobody like people had he did like a bomb threat last year there was a standoff with the police where he was in armor threatening to go out shooting yeah that's i was really i'm really hoping the conversation shifts more towards him as a person because i can only blame the family so much yeah i it. He's done some terrible things. I think that's getting glossed over by the fact that he has people in his family that are questionable. I think the number one thing we should be pointing out,

because I also don't believe we should be focusing entirely on his specific actions. We should be focusing on the fact that it would have been incredibly easy to stop this guy. He was the most obvious candidate for a mass shooting imaginable. And nothing was done to stop this. Like that's that's the obvious answer is that like whiteness is very helpful when it comes to hate. But yeah, and like I don't know with crime and all of the time I've been following mass shooters, I can't think of one that more directly talked about wanting to do a mass shooting in a way that was immediately obvious to all of the law enforcement in his area and had already forced a response from them.

There was absolutely. And again, for talking about his gun control always comes up in this. Colorado has red flag laws like Colorado has the restrictions people say should be. But the problem is that none of them were actually used against him. Anyway. And that, I think comes back to like, again,

the, the, the, the problem, like one, one of the largest problems again with gun regulation is that you, you're relying on the police to enforce. Exactly.

Yes. And the cops believe like 95% of the same shit that this guy does. So, you know, yeah, they keep letting these people come to pride. This is going to go great for you. They just assumed he was an excitable boy and it was going to be

he just needed to get it out of his system that time he had a standoff with the police over a bomb threat where he talked to his mom about wanting to go out as a mass shooter. Like most young men do. Like all young boys haven't we yeah um yeah should we should we take a break yeah yes we should oh yeah do you know what else nope nope here's a break yeah do some insulin we're back I hope everyone took insulin. Everybody.

I don't know what it'll do. You'll get sleepy. You'll get very hungry. Sleepy and hungry pilled. Look, James, as a podcaster, it's my job to tell people to take medicine, not to have any responsibility for what happens when they do. Well, I'm just going to go fly up to Canada

and get some free insulin and then come back smuggle it down that actually yeah dude yeah maybe consider just have them fill up your car what are we talking about next yeah so i i want to talk a bit about the reaction to this on the right because yep this is something okay so like the far-right's reaction to mass shootings has never been good. Like, I just want to put this out as the baseline. No, but it's usually been like, oh, this is still unfortunate that it had to happen. Yeah, yeah, it's usually like, well, this is like mental illness, this is like the pills, something. Like, they are just pretty open.

Okay, so here's the thing. When I originally did this, right, I had a Tim Pool tweet that I had pulled. And then he made, like, every successive time we were about to record this episode, he makes another even worse tweet. So here is the most recent bad tweet. First off, I do want to, we have to one of the things I want to try to keep in mind

is we are more online than a decent chunk of our audience. Tim Pool is a guy who attained prominence live streaming during the Occupy Wall Street rallies. He kind of framed himself as a broadly progressive kind of liberal

journalist, but he's like a skateboarder and he's doing shit. He's live streaming a lot. He's experimenting with all these novel ways of covering the news at the time. We're talking 2012. Obviously, people since then have pointed out that like, he was kind of a giant dick at occupy.

I know people who were there who fucking hated him. Yes. Like, yes. He, he, he had a big platform as a result of that. He got hired by vice for a little while.

Most serious journalists who have worked with him will point out that like, he's a giant asshole and like kind of not good at anything and just like not very smart like doesn't really know what's going on or deliberately obtuse i've heard people like the anyway uh he gained prominence as he kind of increasingly through the trump years would lean in on hard right stuff while still claiming to be liberal and progressive and just that he was increasingly lost by the progressives who have gone crazy for too far yeah anyway he's just gone so that he's he has a huge audience he does a lot of like live streaming so the primary

way that like and when i say that he used to do live streaming where he would show up at a thing he's rich now he doesn't leave his his house in maryland he sits there and he like plays clips from the news and he reads news articles written by other people and then talks about them really usually wrong yeah poor commentary on it and has millions and millions of followers yeah and is constantly and continues to platform people who are self-described fascists uh far-right people um he's kind of he's like a he's like a vector point in yeah in that whole yeah he's very large he's fairly influential within the social media algorithm of particularly twitter um he's able like his he's able to get shit trending a lot on twitter so he's not someone

you can entirely ignore he has he has an impact on like national discourse and he's a lot of people on the right see him as a valuable person he's had alex jones on he's hanging out with kanye and nick fuentes now which is what we're about to talk about but the thing since uh since the colorado spring shooting he's gone kind of completely mask off about the groomer thing. And most of his comments have been along the lines of like, well, these people were hosting a groomer event. And so violence was inevitable. Yeah.

And I mean, like, that's not, I'm just gonna read one of those tweets. Like that's not an exaggeration or any kind of reading of subtext. Literally what he said was, quote, it seems around 10 p.m. Club Q posted that they were having an all ages drag show the next day about two hours later the shooter came in people keep calling for wood chippers and this

is what happens yeah like yeah and this has been this has been a thing across the entire right like they're just they're just openly either like very very openly celebrating this or you get you know like this is one of like one of the things that it's inevitable because the gays are so degenerate like jimmy fucking door has gone like just completely like like i literally started with like started this thing on this with a giant rant about how like how like disgusting it is that like drag queens around kids it's like they they are just openly into full scale just openly into the like we need to get these people killed this is in some ways the most horrifying incident like this because this is the first time that the reaction widely on the right has been either this was a good thing or this was this this obviously was going to happen

because gay people are evil and are grooming children. So violence has to happen against them. And that's such a popular sentiment on the right in the aftermath of the shooting, whether it's implied and whispered or whether it's just said completely outright. It was a very clear consensus that this is what the Republican reaction was going to be and anyone farther right of the Republicans. Like it wasn't even just like a Nazi talking point. It was just like regular Republicans in office were talking about this style of rhetoric in response to the shooting. And for that reason, it's kind of the most horrifying instant we've had um because you know like in the aftermath of like the pulse shooting we did not have rhetoric like this mainstreamed in the way

that it is happening for the club q shooting it was a very very different response to the to the pulse shooting yeah also probably because the shooter there wasn't white um yeah they had connection yeah they'll be like no the problem here was immigration right and no for this like he's like he is obviously a white dude um his lawyers are pulling bullshit to get his hate crime charges pulled but like it's obviously it's it's obviously this white guy and the the right's response is yeah he was probably justified in doing what he did yeah i mean i i feel like they're setting him up to be the next kyle

rittenhouse where like he's just gonna become like this kid celebrity that profits off of killing i don't know if we're there yet yeah partly because he got the shit kicked out of him um but i think shireen's no not by police by a trans lady and uh yeah i think you've made a good point there that like what they did get away with some shit with carl rittenhouse that like yeah i think they would not have pulled even five years before that like i think you wouldn't have found in 2015 people being like yeah he shot people in the street and this is good fuck them and it is like the slippery slope fallacy isn't always a fallacy but like you know once you start there i don't think it's a massive leap to being like

yeah this kid shot queer people in a nightclub and that's what they had coming like even even if they don't make him a hero like i do think that that like the overton window moved with written house yeah and it's moving again with this little fucker yeah I think he's slightly too toxic to go through that same celebrity status that Rittenhouse is he also can't speak I think he's been like in his court appearances

he's like not capable of saying got beaten very badly to shit yeah which is what you get the thing that scares me as like a potential written house event but uh kind of in the in the anti-queer mass shooter vibe is like you have some father or something who's separated from the kid and their other parent takes them to a drag queen event and dad shows up and starts shooting and like that's a thing that's a lot easier to get the right to pile on yeah that's that's the instance where that person

now becomes a cultural figure in a way that's more similar to what has happened with written house and that just is like the hell scenario and i i think the other important thing here is like they're deliberately trying to incite this like this is this is deliberately absolutely like and. And like, and this, there was an interesting thing, like Nick Fuentes had this interview. And I mean, this is partially just, this is just who fucking Nick Fuentes is. But he had this thing after the election where he was like, well, I'm like, we, we, we, we, we, like, we, we can't, we can't take power via like, like, we, we, we can't actually get our agenda done by voting. We have to do it by like theocratic fascism. Right. by like theocratic fascism, right? And I, you know, okay, so obviously this is Nick Fuentes, but I think this is part of what's happening right now, which is that the reason

that they're doing this, right? The reason that right now, the thing that they're trying to do is incite a genocide is because they're fucking losing. They know it, right? Every single day, church attendance drops.

It's been dropping for fucking 20 years. It's never coming back. Like 9-11 didn't do it. Like Trump didn't do it. Nothing is ever going to bring people back to these churches like unless maybe they solve their sexual assault problem but that's not like they structurally can't do that right so you know every single day religiosity drops in this country every single like every single day very slowly and we have been doing this roughly for about 15 years now we are winning and this is what they're fucking terrified of, right? They have to move right now, like exactly in this moment is the moment they could exterminate us.

If they wait any longer, they're fucked because they're, you know, the base for this kind of sort of like, like this specific kind of Christian fascism isn't going to be there. Like there will be other fascisms, but, you know, every, every, every single day that they fucking wait, like another person leaves the church. And so, you know, like right now in, in, you know, and they, they, they can't do it electorally. Right. We just saw that they got fucking destroyed trying to lean into the shit because, and then this is the other thing, right? Like the other thing that's been happening since the two thousands. And this is the thing that is very different about this moment than any other moment that has happened in us history is that the vast, vast majority of people are,

are, are pro pro crew whites, a pro LGBTQ, are pro gay marriage, gay marriage polls consistently at about 70%. Right. And even with this shit, that,

that hasn't moved the needle on it. Right. They know that they, they have to right now. Right. They have to fucking kill us. All they have left is this. All they have left.

They, they have, they have no direct action, basically. It's it's like yeah they see no other viable way to to mainstream this and that's why we have hours after the shooting lips of tiktok posting about uh queer events in colorado because they're they're trying to get this thing to happen they're trying to do more trying to press the They're trying to do more stuff. They're trying to press the attack. Yeah, but I think this is, on the other hand, this is a sign of their weakness. And again, the physical number of people who are pushing this shit is not that large.

And again, I've talked a lot about how the silent majority in this country doesn't fucking agree with this shit. And like, there literally are not that fucking many of them. We can stop them. Yeah. This is an actual thing. Like, you know, like there,

there, there, there's a limit to which we can even sort of talk about this, but like, okay, we've been doing community self-defense like as, as sort of like the big principle of the left since the Trump era, we have reached a point where like, you know, we can defend ourselves,

but if we, if we're limited to just defending ourselves, they're going to kill a bunch of us first. And that means that we like, we actually have to start taking the fight to these media platforms, right? We have to start taking the fight specifically trying to get these people fucking off air. And then, you know, failing that, like fucking showing up and like blowing a fucking air horn in Chaya Ryichek's like ear every single time she leaves her house right because all of all of these people fucking their entire lives depend on our labor right every single fucking uber they

take every single meal they eat is all prepared by us and you know we can fucking find them and we can we can make their lives fucking hell if this is what they're gonna do to us garrison do you want to do you want to talk about Focus on the Family at all? And Colorado Springs. Oh, yeah. Speaking of the kind of direct action Chris was talking about, showing up where these people are and making it very clear that they don't get to pretend anymore to not be complicit in murder.

That's a story. Yeah, some people did show up at the colorado springs focused on the family headquarters um did a did a graffiti left some left some uh messages out front and posted a communique of sorts i think they called them demonic which is pretty funny if i'm remembering the message written thing, right? Yeah. That is a weird place. It talked about how Satan can disguise himself as an angel of light.

Oh, yeah, yes. That's talking about the types of self-righteousness that these Christian fascist groups put on. But in effect, they're all kind of murderous snakes um that was people trying trying to use the bible against these guys which is is funny in an ironic way and i don't think they actually care because they don't i don't think they actually care what the bible says no they don't give a shit about what the bible says they give a shit about yeah the Bible says. They give a shit about, yeah. But showing up and doing a little thing outside their headquarters is definitely a good first step. Yes, I agree. When me and James went there, you know, like, in terms of,

this is just an interesting comment, like, police did not help at the Club Q shooting at all. They came afterwards and they held and they, they, you know, as, as they usually do, they'll,

they'll, they arrest the person who, who, who helped, who helped stop the mass shooting. Um, when me and James went to the focus of the family headquarters last summer, um,

there was a Colorado police officer inside the building the entire time. Um, constantly there, mostly watching me because I was the obvious, obvious, uh, outcast inside there. But that police are stationed at focus in the family all the time,

24 seven, uh, to make sure nothing bad happens there. Uh, but they're not going to do shit to help queer people getting murdered, but they're going to stay. They're going to have a police car outside of the focus in the family building and have have an officer inside uh all the time because that's what the police actually do yeah i mean it's it's like it is increasingly obvious

if you have been paying any attention in the last decade the only consequences that exist in this world is us and you know it it is in our hands to decide what the consequences for these people fucking attempting to incite a genocide are. All right. Yeah, that's going to do it for us here. It could happen here until next time. Uh,

I don't know. Until next time. 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. rushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry

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

else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian.

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

Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and occasionally about how to put them back together again. And today we have a special episode. We're going to be talking about a place where things did in fact fall apart and people are, you could say, still in the process of putting them back together again and trying to do it in a way that is much more equitable and

better than things had been before the collapse. That is Rojava in northeast Syria. I'm going to introduce kind of that concept in, I'll do it right now. Basically, if you don't know anything about this, you might check out our podcast, The Women's War. But it is an autonomous region, not a state in northeast Syria that is not under the control of the Assad regime or of any other state in the area. It's an independent community that is based on some pretty radical, its organization is based on some pretty radical political philosophies, in large part ones that were sort of initially explored by a man named Murray Bookchin, who was an American social theorist and anarchist political philosopher. And some of his ideas were adopted by the leader of a militant group in the region

called the PKK. And the leader of that group was a guy in a Turkish prison named Abdullah Ocalan, who was, you might say, a Kurdish freedom fighter. Ocalan encountered Bookchin's ideas and started writing his own books of political theory that were kind of based off of them. And then when 2013, you get the Syrian civil war reaches its kind of height. ISIS becomes a thing. Suddenly the government's not in this area that has a large Kurdish population, northeast Syria. And, you know, people who are followers of Ocalan take over and start, as they're fighting ISIS, instituting this kind of radical feminist egalitarian vision of society, which is currently under attack by the Turkish government, which is what we're going to be talking about. So I want to

introduce our guests for today. First off, we have James Stout, and we have Chris on the call from our Normal Cool Zone team. And then our guests today are Debbie Bookchin. Debbie is a journalist and author and co-editor of The Next Revolution, Popular Assemblies, and the Promise of Direct Democracy. And then we also have Megan Beaudet from the Kurdish Peace Institute, where she is the director of research. Welcome to the show, Megan and Debbie. Thank you. It's great to be here. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you both for your time. I think maybe to start us out, Megan, would you be willing to talk a little bit about why the Turkish government is

so aggressive towards this independent region in northeast Syria and kind of what the situation on the ground is now? Yeah, absolutely. So for some background, essentially since the division of the Middle East into the modern nation states that exist there today after World War I with the agreements by European powers, the Kurdish people have been divided between four different states, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. And all of those states have had governments that have been ethno-nationalists, that have been repressive, that have not provided Kurds and other ethnic and religious minorities equal citizenship rights to participate in politics and to practice their culture, to speak their language, in addition to denying many of these rights to many of their other citizens of different ethnicities and religions as well.

And so as a result of this repression, and the repression in Turkey was some of the strongest and most systemic, and most systemic. The Kurdish people in these regions have continued to struggle for and demand self-determination and freedom in different political forms. What happened in Turkey in the 1920s and the 1930s, there were Kurdish revolts against the new Turkish Republic, which was a very autocratic nation state that denied the existence of all non-Turkish ethnicities. And these revolts were all violently put down with attacks that not only targeted those who tried to resist these policies of assimilation, but that also resulted in Turkish mass violence against Kurdish civilians in these regions. You had forced deportations, you had ethnic cleansing, you had all kinds of brutal violence against civilians

in order to specifically create this homogenous Turkish ethnic identity in Kurdish regions. And so after this period of time, there were, there was a period wherein there was less resistance. And I think, you know, the Turkish government believed that the Kurdish problem had been solved by force. They had successfully been able to kill or assimilate all of the Kurdish people. But in the 1970s and the 1980s, sort of concurrent with many national liberation movements around the world, you had the beginning of the PKK or the Kurdistan Workers' Party's national liberation struggle. Now they began as a socialist movement seeking an independent and socialist Kurdish state and they saw Kurdistan as a colony that was occupied by Turkey. And with the colonialism of Turkey in Kurdistan was supported

by imperialist powers in the rest of the world as well. And they sought to right that as other national liberation movements in Africa, Asia, Latin America, many places at the time did with an armed struggle for independence. And in responding to the PKK's formation and armed struggle, the Turkish state once again, rather than acceding to any Kurdish demands, they responded with brutal, violent oppression of not only Kurds who were active in the armed struggle, not only politically active Kurds, but on all forms of Kurdish identity. After the military coup in Turkey in 1980, the Kurdish language was banned. Kurds were imprisoned on false charges or no charges at all. Torture was prevalent. Show trials were prevalent. Any kind of publication

or other public interaction in Kurdish was completely illegal. So there was this full scale effort to repress the Kurds and any other progressive segments of society in Turkey that would have supported them. And as the conflict went on, Turkey did very little to change. By the 1990s, the success of the Kurdish movement had forced the state to recalibrate, as had developments in Iraqi Kurdistan, with Kurds there achieving autonomy. And so you started to have the ability of Kurdish political actors to work within the system. We saw the development of pro-Kurdish legal political parties at that time. But there was still very severe repression of any and all PKK and the Kurdish movement between 2012 and 2015. That process failed when Erdogan's government saw that it was allowing for

Kurds to take advantage of expanded democratic space in Turkey, organize and achieve electoral political success. The government abandoned its commitments and sadly returned to war, and the conflict has been going on ever since, and has included, you know, again, not only this military component, but this component of crushing all forms of organized Kurdish political and cultural expression. So what we've been seeing in Turkey over the past nearly a decade now, more than a half decade, is the repression of the pro-Kurdish political opposition in parliament, the People's Democratic Party or the HDP. We've seen repression of Kurdish media, attacks on Kurdish journalists. We've seen any kind of Kurdish activism, not only that that's explicitly political, but any kind of acknowledgement of the Kurdish language, of Kurdish colors, of Kurdish clothing, very readily criminalized. of course, expanded beyond Turkey's borders. So Turkey opposes North and East Syria because the

Syrian Kurds have created a form of autonomous governance that protects and promotes Kurdish rights, because they have done so in the framework of the Kurdish freedom movement that has its roots in Turkey and in Öcalan's ideas, as you explained, and because they've been able to create a successful alternative to the very sort of nationalist project that the modern Turkish state is based on. You know, I would say that the Turkish Kurdish conflict, and I don't like to call it that, but that is what most people call it today, is really a conflict now over two competing visions of regional order, with Turkey's based on the right-wing neoliberal nation-state, and the Kurdish movement's vision of a Middle East based on self-determination, liberation, equality for women, and other values, not only for Kurds,

but for all people. So because North and East Syria represents both Kurdish success in creating an autonomous region, and it represents these ideas of the Kurdish freedom movement that challenge Turkey's nationalist project, Turkey has been trying to destroy the autonomous administration of North and East Syria by all possible means for a very long time now. They've invaded Syrian territory twice to attack the Autonomous Administration and the SDF, the Syrian Democratic Forces. Once in Afrin in 2018, Afrin is in northwestern Syria. And then once in 2019, after Trump and Erdogan's phone call that we all infamously remember in Sary-Khaniyeh and Tal Abyad in northeastern Syria.

So you've had these two invasions and occupations of north and east Syria's territory that have included not only the terrible violence of invasion and occupation, but also all kinds of crimes against civilians who remained. We've seen uptakes in violence and abuse of women, ethnically motivated, religiously motivated, hatred and persecution that's driven virtually all of the non-Arab and non-Muslim people living in these regions to flee their homes, attacks on anyone who is perceived as having collaborated with the prior administration, all being carried out by Turkey and Turkish-backed Syrian militia groups. So we've seen the persecution of the civilians in these areas

with the intent of changing demographics and installing not only a government sympathetic to Turkey and the military structure sympathetic to Turkey, but also removing the social base for the Autonomous Administration's project. And then in addition to these all-out attacks on the Autonomous Administration in these regions, Turkey continues to threaten the territory that North and East Syria does have left, which is still nearly one-third of Syrian territory concentrated in the Northeast. There's been an escalating campaign of drone strikes targeting leaders in the Autonomous Administration and the SDF, as well as Syrian civilians. Turkey is cutting water access to north and east Syria by restricting the flow of the

Euphrates River. This is an agricultural region. People depend on that water for all aspects of life and certainly for the economy. That's caused a great deal of suffering. The entire Turkish-Syrian border is very heavily militarized. When you drive by it and you see the wall and, you know, very lit up at night with the barbed wire and everything, and you just look at, you know, these civilian towns, very peaceful on both sides, it's something very disturbing to see. But it's a highly militarized border, and it is a completely sealed border. Turkey does not trade with North and East Syria and supports an international economic blockade on the region, including by pressuring its allies to restrict the access of goods to North and East Syria. So there's economic warfare going on there. There are really every tactic that Turkey is able to use,

whether military, economic, environmental, political, or anything else, in order to crush and destroy North Korea's political project and force the Kurdish people and the other peoples of that region to flee so that there is no base for such a project again in the future. They're doing everything they can to achieve that outcome. So the situation is very difficult, and it is a direct result of Turkey's, you know, century-old Kurdish question that it has been unable and unwilling to honestly and in good faith seek a peaceful solution to.

And we'll get to it later, but the international community has played a very big role in ensuring that that conflict goes on with all of those negative consequences for northeast Syria. Yeah, I mean, and that's one of the, so obviously Turkey is the second largest military in NATO. And has, you know, one of the things that is such like, so messy about this is that on paper, and on the ground, in fact, the United States has been supporting the autonomous region in Northeast Syria, and particularly the YPG and the YPJ, which is, you know, the militia, essentially, as partners in the fight against ISIS. And still to this day, right now, there's an operation going on in the Al-Hol camp, which is where a lot of ISIS prisoners are held, that is like a coalition-supported operation.

And at the same time that the United States is doing this, we're selling weapons to the people who have essentially declared the folks that our military has been aiding a terrorist organization, which is a peculiar and frustrating situation, to say the least. Yeah, and actually, the other thing that's happening, Robert, is that Turkey, while it's threatening a full-scale invasion, while it's threatening a full-scale invasion, they've been doing all of these things that Megan described sort of on this sort of low-intensity warfare scale, a kind of military strategy that uses a whole variety of tactics that are short of a full-scale invasion, which still may come.

And so there's these extrajudicial killings of some of the leaders of the SDF, which is the Syrian Democratic Forces, which is the sort of umbrella group of the two militias, Kurdish militias that you described, and which also includes many Arab fighters and others who have been central in defeating ISIS at the cost, I might add, of about 13,000 lives, you know, and, you know, and the use of their proxy groups like the Syrian so-called, you know, SNA, Syrian National Army, which is really, you know, a group of jihadi militias that Turkey has kind of assembled and now completely is responsive to Turkey and are the sort of shock troops for when they did go into Afrin and for these other

invasions. You know, economic pressure, as Megan described. But the point is that this kind of warfare, it produces these sort of ongoing low-level attacks, but it keeps it sort of off the radar of the bigger political and media machine. And therefore, it keeps it from getting the attention that it really deserves in Western societies. It also has the impact of displacing hundreds of thousands of people, and many hundreds have also been killed. I'm sure probably you're familiar with some of the recent bombings by drone that have been occurring in Rojava, which including many civilians, school children. Turkey doesn't care at all about who gets hit, and they have been very aggressive without any respect for civilian casualties as well. So, you know, so, I mean, I think it's important to also just note that this democratic project in Syria is a deep threat to Turkey, and that every time Erdogan steps up

these military sort of, this aggression, it leads him to rise slightly in the polls, which is something that's important to him because he has an election coming up next year. So there's that sort of political dimension to it. But the fact is that Rojava is basically a women's revolution. Women are involved in every aspect of running society there, the political, the social, the economic. And Turkey is essentially a femicidal state. It not only reviews women within Turkey as less than human, where husbands can basically get away with murdering their wives, but it targets girls with drones, as it did on August 18th when a Turkish drone bombed a UN-supported education center for young girls in Haseka in Rojava. So, you know, it's very much, as Megan said, a war of ideologies as well. conflict between, you know, Russia and the Western democracies. That was why, you know,

part of why initially, like, Turkey was such a valued partner. And then as time has gone on, it's primarily, one of the big things is we have a massive airbase in Turkey, in Serlik, where a number of U.S. nuclear warheads are kept. So there's a tremendous fear, cowardice might be a better way to say it on behalf of, um, politicians in the United States and other Western countries to actually engage with the ethnic cleansings, um, and with the human rights abuses that the Turkish government, particularly under Er this, you know, if you think about the way in which ISIS was discussed by US media, was discussed by, you know, conservatives, by Donald Trump during his campaign, you know, it was this ultimate boogeyman. Well, a huge chunk of the support for ISIS, and in fact, even logistics for some of their fighters, came allegedly courtesy of the Turkish state. And there's some evidence for this. There's certainly evidence of support for wounded fighters and kind of a lax policy that allowed a lot of people to come through Turkey and get into northeast Syria to fight. And as you noted earlier, 13,000 somewhere around there, fighters, men and women in the YPG and J, died fighting ISIS. And we're not just

fighting ISIS kind of with the backing of the United States, but prior to getting any support, one of the most important things they did, while ISIS was on the move in Iraq, as well as Syria, they were carrying out an active ethnic cleansing, a genocidal operation in Mount Sinjar against the Yazidis. And that was only really stopped because while they were fighting a defensive war in northeast Syria, the YPG sent fighters into Iraq to stop the genocide. And they were successful in this. You know, you talk to, as I have, a lot of Yazidi survivors of the genocide, and they'll say the only reason we got out is because of, you know, the YPG. And the PKK, by the way.

And the PKK. Well, and that is that it is it is. So we should we could talk a little bit about the PKK. They are the YPG and J and the SDF, which is kind of the umbrella organization, are not recognized as terrorist organizations by the United States or by most Western democracies. The PKK is recognized as a terrorist organization. Turkey's allegations would be that the YPG and J and other militias are just PKK affiliates. The reality is that they are, in fact, quite closely tied. The reality is that they are, in fact, quite closely tied. And you will, you know, but also it's not the exact, like when you're in Rojava and you encounter people who are PKK, people will speak about them differently than they will talk about other people who are kind of, you know, they're the folks from the mountains is the term that I hear used the most.

But the thing is, see, here's the problem. used the most. But the thing is, see, here's the problem. The problem is that whatever the PKK's history is and has been, and it's way more than we can get into, the PKK made a dramatic shift in its ideology and has done everything possible to try to restart peace negotiations with Turkey. So first of all, you know, there are several, as Megan mentioned before, there was a peace initiative that went on for a few years that then Erdogan decided wasn't, you know, beneficial to him. So he stopped it. But the PKK, and as recently as I think a year or two ago, the leader of the PKK in the mountains right now, Jamil Bayek, wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post saying, we want to have talks. We want to have reconciliation with Turkey. We're not asking for a separate Kurdish state.

All we want is some degree of autonomy. And, you know, and it's actually to the enduring shame of the Western media, including the New York Times, that they continue to talk of whether, to what extent they may be related. The political ideology is an ideology about direct democracy. It's about empowering people at the local level. It's about making sure that every adult and also the youth have a say in their communities. And it's as grassroots democratic as anything that you could ever imagine. And so really, you would think that the United States, you know, would understand that there's certainly no threat, that neither the YPG nor the YPJ has ever shown any aggression towards Turkey, which is what makes this idea of a buff, the idea that they need a buffer zone kind of a joke, you know. So really, it's an ideological shift that's so

profound and so empowering to local people that it's also something that, frankly, those of us who are on the left should be much more supportive of, I think, than people have been so far. Yeah, I mean, the thing that is most remarkable, because I spent a lot, I've spent more time certainly in Iraq than in Syria. And we should note here that we're talking about Syria today, and we're talking about Rojava. Turkish aggression against particularly, against the PKK, but against, you know, Kurds kind of in an ethnic sense, extends beyond Syria. Turkey has illegally attacked Iraq and in fact moved troops into Iraqi soil a number of times, escalating within the last year and killed a substantial number

of people in the Kurdish regional government territories. So that is also occurring here. Although it's worth noting, again, because people mix this up a lot, what's happening in Kurdish-controlled Iraq is profoundly different from what's happening in Rojava, and they're extremely different political organizations. And I think it's also worth mentioning that it's not just Kurdish groups have been attacking in Iraq. There've been a bunch of attacks on the ZD survivors. Yeah. there's been a bunch of attacks like on the survivors yeah yeah i've killed a bunch of those people too it is yeah the uh yeah they're doing the genocide again yeah the i think yeah and it's um it's interesting you know i uh it's also kind of worth the thing

that's was perhaps most surprising to me there was the degree to which people I would meet who were just like, in many cases, just like kind of, you know, terrorism police, assayish guys, or people who were like working traffic checkpoints or working in the farms. People were really careful to not refer or talk to like what the project was as a state. And it's not a state, it's an autonomous region. That's one of the terms I heard the most is the autonomous regions, which is really interesting to me. And it's hard, it's something certainly like mainstream media writing about it seems to have trouble grasping, as you say. And it's interesting, because obviously, Debbie, in case folks haven't put it together, you are the daughter of Murray Bookchin, who is the political philosopher whose ideas formed

a significant core of sort of what the organizational structure in Rojava is. Well, I just want to say, first of all, thank you for that. I also just want to say that I really want to remind everybody that, of course, you know, Abdullah Chalan read hundreds and hundreds of books, not just my dad's. So, I course, you know, Abdullah Öcalan read hundreds and hundreds of books, not just my dad's. So, I mean, I appreciate that. But, you know, he has really especially placed emphasis on the need for any revolutionary project to have the liberation of women at its core. My dad talked a lot about hierarchy and patriarchy, but Öcalan, by making women central, has really done something unique, I think, you know, in the history of, because in the history of sort of

revolutionary, you know, movements, because as many women who have participated in those movements in the past can tell you, it was always, sure, fight with us and we'll deal with the women's issue when the revolution is over. And Öcalan turned that upside down, you know, and he said, it's got to be a women's revolution or it's not a revolution at all. And the women in those movements over there really fought for that themselves too. And one of the things that, you know, was most interesting for me to see was when I would go into meetings there with women in all kinds of different, you know, military and civilian institutions in different cities across the region that before I would even bring it up as a researcher, you know, women would say to me that if it weren't

for Ocalan's theories, we wouldn't have the organizations that we have, we wouldn't have the political power that we have. And they have this incredible articulation of how they use these ideas, you know, as inspiration for their own work, and also as almost political cover to do kinds of things that wouldn't be accepted in other places, because they can go to men who they work with, who might be suspicious, but who, you know, have this public stated claim to this ideology. And they can say, well, Ocalan's books say that society can never be free without women's liberation, that women's can have their own separate institutions. So they've been able to

really take these ideas and expand on them and, you know, push them and use them with their own practice. And the way that the ideas came about themselves, one book that I would recommend anyone interested in the Kurdish movement, in revolutionary women's movements anywhere in the world, in really any topic related to any of this to read, is the autobiography of Sakina Janssiz, who was the only woman present for the founding of the PKK and was really instrumental in organizing both the armed and civilian sides of the Kurdish women's movement in Turkey. There are pictures of her everywhere in Syria. She was assassinated in France in 2013 by Turkish nationalists affiliated with the state, likely suspected, you know, hoping to disrupt the peace negotiations that were ongoing at that time.

But she's remembered everywhere in northeast Syria for her role. And you can see in her book, her talking about seeing the inequalities that, as Debbie mentioned, women in socialist movements and revolutionary movements often face, where they were asked to, you know, be as committed to the struggle as their male comrades were, but were still treated in very patriarchal ways by men that they worked with because, you know, the patriarchy embedded into these societies. And you see her talking about organizing women to overcome this. And when you look at the history of the Kurdish movement, moving into what you see in Northeast Syria as well, you know, women were really being the basis of all oppression and the form of oppression that, you know, must be addressed to free all members of society in all ways, you know, they took this and they continued to expand it. So in a very difficult place and context to do so, we know that in war, there's more violence against women, there's more discrimination, there's more emphasis on traditional gender roles, that this holds true across different societies and different conflicts.

So they face many challenges. They're up against a lot here, certainly with all the problems that they're facing in Northeast Syria because of conflict and poverty, everything that Turkey's doing that we've discussed. So they're up against a lot, and it's not easy. But they've really, you know, they've come incredibly far. And seeing how, you know, they've taken very high level theoretical ideas and then done so much in practice, and how their practice and theory inform each other is really one of the most incredible things to see over there. And it's another reason why Turkey wants to destroy them because Erdogan does not believe that women can be equal to men.

He does not see male violence against women as a problem. And yeah, you know, as we've discussed, Turkey and the Kurdish movement couldn't be any more different on this question. No, and it's, I think the thing, because, you know, going over there, I went with the eye as a journalist where like I had heard all these things and Rojava has kind of become among some chunks of the left, a cause celeb, in part because of, you know, the achievements of the revolution in that space. And I wanted to see how legitimate is it. And part of why, you know, I kind of went in with that attitude is that I had spent so much time in the Kurdish regions of Iraq. And if you remember, when the fighting against ISIS was at its height, there was a tremendous amount of coverage of the female Peshmerga and the fact that, you know, the Kurds in northern Iraq, who were the force in Iraq that collapsed the least when ISIS was on

the advance. It's overstated how well they did. That's why the YPG needed to rescue the Yazidis at Sinjar, as the Kurdish military in northern Iraq just kind of bounced at that point. But I had heard about that this women's rights situation is great in northern Iraq. It's very egalitarian. There's women fighters. And it is, it's certainly, and anyone who lives there will tell you, much safer and easier to be a woman in the KRG, the Kurdish region, like control, Kurdish regional government parts of Iraq than it is further south in the country. But that doesn't mean it's good. It is more like certain things are somewhat more tolerated. There's more freedom, but it's still a very traditionalist society. And for example, I didn't see any female Peshmerga. They did not make much of a presence on the ground, and their involvement in the fighting was exaggerated somewhat as part of a conscious PR strategy.

was exaggerated somewhat as part of a conscious PR strategy. As soon as you cross into northeast Syria, you see women manning and running checkpoint stations. You see as you go in, because you get passport and stuff looked at, and you get stamps and whatnot when you come into the region. You see a lot of women running that part of the operation. You go in to the actual country itself. And there's, we, we visited a restaurant that was run by a collective of women who had all lost husbands in the fight. And we ran, we went to a farm that was all young women who had left their families who were very traditionalist in their religious attitude and, and gone independent. And of course you see female military units and female, we saw mixed male and female, like military policing units and stuff. And it's one of those things that if you are going there kind of with a critical eye

to try and see how extensive the revolution can be, I can't imagine not being convinced of the reality of it because it's just so stark. Well, also, Robert, you know, first of all, just to, again, you could say a lot about what's going on in Iraqi Kurdistan, but just to very quickly sum it up, I mean, it is a capitalist petrol state run by a clan, the Barzanis, you know, who accrue basically all the wealth to themselves. And you can't even begin to compare it with the kind of revolutionary project in Syria. So, I mean, I just want to, in case, so people understand, I mean, I don't want to use, I hate to use the word socialist

because it's such a, it's so fraught, but you could, the closest thing, you know, it's so fraught, but the closest thing, it's built on a socialist economic model, except a better one, more like what my father and what Abdullah Chalan have in mind, which my father called communalism. And this democratic and federalist model is based on cooperatives, where people really do have the means, control the means of production as much as possible. I mean, it's obviously all, you know, still in formation, it's still growing. And there's areas like the energy sector where things, you know, are less like that, but are, I hope, you know, given time, move in that direction. Yeah, I mean, obviously, no, this is certainly not some kind of perfect utopian,

it's still in the middle of a war zone. But as you pointed out, what you see when you go there is women so active in every aspect. I would add to what the great examples you gave, the women's houses. Oh, gosh, yeah. I wanted to talk about that. Right? Where they are literally resolving so many problems for both men and women, you know, at the community level. And, and so it's, it's really quite an extraordinary, you know,

I guess what I want to say about it is that like, if, if we all got on board of, you know, one of that, that Cretan Elon Musk spaceships and found a colony, you know, where they were doing this, we'd be cherishing it. We'd be going, oh my God, you know, look at these people. They're like, they have a cooperative economy and they have women's councils at every level. Wow. Men can't overrule women on a decision that comes to say women's bodies. Think here the Dobbs decision, right, on the Supreme Court. Women, only women can decide those issues that are related to women. And there are councils at every level and people sending delegates, you know, meeting in their little

villages and towns and communities and electing delegates to the next level. It is a true grassroots democracy and it's ecological and it's feminist. It is a true grassroots democracy, and it's ecological, and it's feminist. It's like if Ursula Le Guin were writing about it in The Dispossessed, we'd all be going, wow. So really, you know, it's something that I think, especially anybody who considers themselves a feminist, you know, should be supporting. And certainly, and I hope all of us do, you know, and certainly anybody, you know, I would think who's an anarchist, to me, it's pretty close to every anarchist's dream, you know. And so I think, yeah, I just wanted to make that contrast with Iraq, because I think it's really important and really goes to why the Kurdish project really needs very badly the support of

people in the United States, because in so many ways, the United States kind of calls the shots about what can and cannot happen over there. If you look at the problems they have, you know, to all of that, because of course, all of these places are not perfect and have, you know, these serious issues alongside these serious achievements. Every issue that they have is an issue that any society would have if that society had been through 10 years of war, were impoverished and blockaded from virtually all economic activity with the outside world. If they had had to not only, you know, fight the occupation of a group like ISIS, but then immediately turn around to fight a state

army much larger than them, you know, bent on taking and occupying their territory, a society where people fear going outside because they don't know if they'll be in the wrong place at the wrong time, when there'll be a drone strike on a local military leader going around doing their job, keeping their community safe from ISIS, or a local political leader going around doing their job trying to, you know, build this new system. So I think when we look at the flaws, they're flaws that are the result of, in large part, poverty and conflict and all of the compounding crises that the people of North and East Syria have to face because of what they've gone through. You know, as Debbie mentioned, much at the hands of larger powers. So much of what happens in Syria

is up to what the United States wants, up to what Russia wants, up to what Turkey wants. All of these countries and regions, you know, with different priorities, different outlooks, but it somehow happens that at the end of the day, you know, the one thing they can all agree on is that it's okay to sell out the autonomous administration. It's okay to have consequences for them. You know, if the Kurdish people suffer, the Yazidi people suffer, the people of North and East Syria, all of these different demographics, if they're the people who are victimized, you know, because they don't have a state, because they're fighting for something different, because they're challenging the status quo, it's okay if they're the ones who face the consequences. We saw this, you know,

with what happened with ISIS. We saw this with the complete international silence when Afrin was invaded, with the, you know, piecemeal response that stopped the Turkish invasion in 2019, but allowed them to convert what they were doing to this kind of low-intensity war, you know, with a terrible ceasefire, you know, with undefined lines and with these drone strikes being allowed in areas where Russia and the United States, both of which have agreements with Turkey, are active, you know, and both of whom tolerate this. So essentially, every powerful interest in Syria can agree on, you know, ensuring that the autonomous administration comes in last. And as people in the US, you know, anyone who considers themselves on the left, who considers themselves a feminist, who cares about persecuted ethnic and religious minorities,

who opposes endless war and militarist foreign policy that props up autocrats and, you know, props up far right regimes, anyone with any of those values should be very concerned about the situation in Northeast Syria right now and should be looking at what we can do to to get our government to stop supporting some of these very harmful policies against the region, you know, even while it claims to be supporting their fight against ISIS. here, presumably most of you are in the United States or Canada or Western Europe, what can people listening here, particularly in the US, do to have an impact, to help? Well, we could talk about that. We could have an entire other podcast episode on that because there's a lot to be done. But to summarize in a few words, the way that the United States supports Turkey's war on the Kurdish people, all the peoples of the region and the Kurdish national liberation movement is through military cooperation and support through diplomatic cooperation and support, intelligence sharing and these pro war legal pretexts. So go tell Congress that you don't want them to send weapons to Turkey. There's an F-16 sale right now that it was really great to see the majority of Congress, including all of the squad members, people like AOC, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, all opposed that sale.

so opposing arms sales very important something that there's momentum there for um and that there's momentum among progressives therefore which is very heartening opposing military aid and security assistance to turkey you know i've done research on this u.s security assistance has trained senior turkish officials including the country's current defense minister and several perpetrators of the violent, repressive 1980 military coup. Obviously, we should not be training coup plotters and war criminals. That is not something I think most people listening to this want their tax dollars to go to. So calling for an end to U.S. security assistance to Turkey, very important in addition to ending those arms sales security assistance to Turkey, very important in addition to ending those arms sales, and challenging the pro-war legal pretexts and designations that allow Turkey to get this kind of Western support.

You know, a wonderful thing that we saw a couple weeks back was the Democratic Socialists of America, the largest socialist organization in the U.S., saying that they oppose the terror designation of the PKK and believe that it should be delisted. That's something that progressives support very strongly in Europe. We've seen calls from places like Ireland and South Africa where people know a lot about what terror designations and the criminalization of, can have impacts on conflict resolution. You know, people who've participated in these kinds of post-conflict processes in some of these places saying, get rid of the designation, it's harmful for peace, you know, it will be difficult to end this less violently without it.

So that's something where, you know, it seems the international case for it is something that's rather obvious and where presser in the u.s on the u.s designation to remove it would be an important step for facilitating dialogue and a negotiated end to this conflict so understanding how the u.s supports turkey's wars on the kurdish people and opposing all of those different policies and programs is one of the most important things that we can do to say this war is not in our name. We stand with the people of northeast Syria, with the people in Turkey suffering from Turkish authoritarianism, with the people in Iraqi Kurdistan, Yazidis in Shanghal being bombed

by Turkish drones. When we say that we don't want to support this war we stand with all of those people um and i think that that kind of action against arms sales security assistance and pro-war legal pretexts could be a really great base for solidarity opposing endless war in the middle east and standing up for you know peacefully ending this conflict. And it would align us with progressives all around the world and, you know, people who really believe in peace and in ending these kinds of things. And if I could just add, you know, one element to that would also be really pressing for a diplomatic solution to the whole so-called Kurdish question, because Rojava will remain in danger as long as Erdogan and his party think that they can

basically, that they have to be fighting Kurds, because, you know, to them, as Megan said before, Rojava is an extension of their own Kurds and of the PKK. So what really needs to happen, just as it happened in South Africa, is there has to be a negotiated settlement. One of the things that would help with this, and there are movements that people can get involved with if they want, would be freeing Öcalan, who has been sitting in a Turkish jail for the last 22 years, because he is sort of the Nelson Mandela, really, of the Kurdish freedom movement. And he should be involved in these negotiations and was even while he was in jail. But really, you know, a jailed person can't really do that properly. So pressing for a diplomatic solution, because basically,

Erdogan uses the PKK and the listing of the PKK as a terrorist organization to basically kill all Kurds everywhere. And in order to stop that, somehow there has to be a break in this. And so I think that, you know, people, there are certainly plenty of peace organizations and people who want to work on peace. And I think this is a really important demand that they begin, that the United States, and the United States has nothing to lose by pressuring Turkey to engage in negotiations with the PKK. This is an hour war. The PKK has never done anything to the United States. It would make, as Megan said, for a lasting peace

in the entire Middle East. And so what I would say is, first of all, folks, it would be great if people who want more information about any of this could contact the organization that I helped co-found, the Emergency Committee for Rojava, which is at defendrojava.org. And we have scripts to call congresspersons, resources, and we even have fun monthly meetings that people can come to. You know, and there's, of course, a lot of information at Megan's website, also Kurdishpeace.org. But one of the things that people could do is go out and talk to their communities, whether it's a religious community or a labor union or a food co-op or your kid's nursery school or reading group, women's group, and sort of talk and help. Because there's a lot of people who surprisingly really don't know much about Rojava. I think maybe because

the Zapatistas are a little closer geographically, that project is a bit better known, you know. So talking to people and getting people engaged. And for example, if there's anybody listening from New Jersey, Bob Menendez is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and he's been pretty hostile towards Erdogan. And keeping on him with phone calls, emails, is a great way for our... As somebody who worked in Washington for a while when I worked for Bernie Sanders, I know that these guys listen to their constituents, you know, and if they get enough calls, they start to pay attention to those things that come around. We could even get, you know, somebody to send a letter around to their colleagues in Congress saying, you know, it's time to start peace negotiations. Those kinds of things do have

impact because, as I said before, unfortunately, the United States is really at the helm in so many ways of what happens internationally in these geopolitical battles. Well, thank you so much, Debbie. Thank you so much, Megan. I think that's going to do it for us today. Please continue paying attention to this. Megan, did you have anything else you wanted to kind of add or let people know? Actually, both of you would let people know where they can follow you on the internet. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that that about covers it. Look, the only solution for peace, democracy and self-determination in Turkey and in the wider Middle East is a just and democratic negotiated settlement to the Kurdish question. think that just as Debbie said, learn about what's going on, reach out to your communities, talk to your local Kurdish community if there is one, find the opportunities that there are to engage with people in Turkey, in Syria, in all of these places, you know, working for peace and

standing up for these ideas. And then no efforts too small because ending this conflict would benefit everyone in Northeast Syria, everyone in Turkey, and all of us here, you know, knowing that our government was no longer supporting this terrible unjust war. Um, so just get out there and do something, um, to see the work that, uh, the think tank where I work, um, is doing on this issue. You can go to Kurdishpeace.org

where we have research and analysis on everything related to the Kurdish issue from all different perspectives. And you can check out our work there. And you can follow me on Twitter, Megan Beaudet. And the Twitter handle is at five underscores MJB. Excellent.

My Twitter is simpler. It's just Debbie Bookchin at Debbie Bookchin. And again, I just want to say that, you know, people we do at DefendRojava.org, and we're also on Twitter at Defend Rojava, we have so many ideas and so much information about how people can get involved. As Megan said, if nothing else, no more weapons to Turkey until they begin peace negotiations. Give Rojava political recognition. That would be another thing people can be demanding. Also that Kurds have a place at the bargaining table in any discussions about the future of Syria. So we have all those kinds of ideas, scripts, as I said, model emails, and more at defendrojava.org.

Awesome. Thank you all for being on. And yeah, that's going to do it for us here it could happen here for the thank you for having us thanks 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. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists

in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts.

Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez.

Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzales wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him.

Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, everyone. It's James here. Welcome to What Could Happen Here. Today it's just me and we're talking again about the UC strike. But the audio is not great. We had some technical issues on my end, not on Matt's end. But we wanted to put it out nonetheless because we felt it was a very important episode and things are developing very rapidly at the UC and we thought that our listeners would like it. So apologies for the poor quality of the audio. We hope you can get through it anyway. Bye. All right. So I'm talking

today with Matthew Ehrlich, who's a seventh year PhD candidate in the history department. Matthew, would you like to explain a little bit of who you are and what you've been doing with Reference to the strike in the last three weeks and maybe before as well yes uh so i studied spanish history uh the 19th century empire i've been at ucsd for seven years i was doing research in spain for two years during the covid pandemic so there was a sort of break in my university participation between my qualifying exams versus the three years I was there. And then I left and I came back and I found the campus was quite different,

both from COVID and from the increasing economic hardships. So in the last year, we have all been targeting, trying to identify a new contract. As I'm sure all your listeners are aware by this point, that has been going on for more than a year, 18 months in some cases, without a successful resolution and with a ton of unfair labor practices on behalf of the UC administration. So on November 15th, I believe was the date we walked out on strike. I had signed up several months earlier to be a strike captain for the history department. I was assisted by a sort of informal committee of five of the younger people. Nice. Sort of due to the pandemic, a lot of my colleagues in my cohort were not able to go and do their research.

So they're generally out of the country right now doing their real research. So we have a really great department of primarily first through third years that are participating and leading the effort. I also had signed up to be a picket leader. That boiled down to what I've been really occupying myself, as people say, has been being a food captain. So we have been cooking for about 150 people at our location on campus. We've been getting lots of great donations, food and cash,

and we've been reinvesting that to feed the hungry picketers and spread it to other big locations. That's really cool. Yeah, I think that's really nice to bring up, actually, because that we were speaking about before the call, right? So many people are familiar with and supportive of the concept of unions and unionization and workers' rights. But I think relatively few people have actually been on strike and seen what it takes to organize and all the little things you have to take care of. So did you just step into that food captain role like kind of ad hoc?

Yeah, more or less. I showed up on the first day and I realized we had been marching around and shouting ourselves for it. There was no water. So I ran down to the grocery store and I bought a bunch of water and that sort of snowballed into cooking.

Now we have about eight or nine people. We rotate shifts and meal planning. We actually use the history of our graduate lounge. Nice. But yeah, you know, that's really been our experience of picketing is for all the organization and signing up for different tasks that we did beforehand, hitting the ground and seeing what is needed to sustain that yeah on an apk level has has been a journey yeah i bet but it seems to have been

largely a successful one like everyone is out energetic um there have been some really impressive actions actually like i don't know if you were part of the uh la jolla village drive uh shut down i know what you want to call that yesterday, but did you take part in that? No, I was there. I was there. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I met the people who were there. Amazing. Yeah. Yeah. We actually found a faculty spy in the Navy Corps who went in and asked what time that was going to be. And I gave us our window. There's been a lot of direct action, and it's been very successful from both the morale perspective and conversational. I'm sure you're aware we approached Chancellor Goldschlag yesterday or the day before.

And even though obviously we didn't get a promise from him that he would raise our wages or tell president drake to raise our wages uh it was you know very energizing for uh people who have you know been been not able to show up because thanksgiving break or between there to go with direct action is is one of our strong suits at this point. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, it is. It is wonderful to see actually, like so many of us spent so much of our lives like studying workers movements and unionization and strikes. And it's cool to see people walking the talk out a little bit. Also very applicable.

I mean, one of the really great things about going on strike with a bunch of smartest minds in practically every field. You've got communications that are working on emails and flyers and such. You've got philosophy who are you know, being philosophers.

Some who are quoting working class movements of the past to help shape our strategy yeah yeah it's a cool thing to see um i remember a long time ago in like 2010 and when last time we were on strike and uh yeah it was very cool um one of the professors i was working with with a lit professor and she came and read some stuff, and then, you know, made people listen to me talking about Daruti for a while, and I enjoyed myself, even if maybe they didn't. So, yeah, I want to talk a little bit as well about, like,

you're in week three now, and you said, like, you've been maintaining the energy, and you're feeding people, which is great. How has, obviously, like, strikes come with an element of economic hardship that's somewhat offset by union strike funds, but given the economic precarity of people who are graduate students anyway, it could be really tough. So how has that been? We're not quite at December 1st yet.

Would that be the first missed paycheck if people are going to not get paid? Yes. We are, most of us, convinced that the UC will not have gotten their house in order by this point. We were working until November 15th, so at least we would be entitled to half of a month's pay. But because there's no real way for the UC to determine exactly which workers are withholding labor and exactly which workers are on strike, it seems like the majority of workers will be receiving their November paycheck tomorrow. We have also been receiving strike assistance from the union, from the UAW. We're all aware that if we do receive our paycheck from the university, we will have to return that money so that we can fuel future strike assistance.

And we're by and large OK with that. You know, I found out that the UAW actually did to support Thanksgiving. They double the strike assistance. It's sort of a form of holiday. So for this month, one way or another, we are all very hopeful that we'll be able to make ends meet. Next month is, you know, if the strike does continue, sort of a bridge that we'll have to cross. I've spoken to a lot of workers in the history department who are very concerned about this paychecks, particularly also from the program that I teach for

the making of the modern world, which recruits heavily from the history department as well as non-student TAs and are not covered by the union and are not eligible for strike pay, withholding their labor in solidarity. They're very concerned that, you know, they're primarily working as their full-time job. Yeah, that's tough, actually.

I've taught in that program, too, both as a student and a non-student. And it's a good program, but it doesn't pay a ton. And you don't save a lot of money living in Southern California. So it could be tough. Is there a way to contribute if people want to contribute to those people who are sort of withholding labor and solidarity uh yes so we are there is a uaw strike hardship fund yeah yeah i'll include it in the notes for people hardship fund and there's also a uh a Venmo that we're accepting donations for. We're distributing that to the nine pickets on the UCSD campus.

We've been just overwhelmed with goodwill and blessings. But depending on how long the strike goes, this would definitely be something that we'd do with large public support. would definitely be something that we do with like large public support anything i think that the public at large can be doing is is exerting political pressure on the regions to uh yeah and yeah i hope they continue to do so and let's talk a little bit about everyone we've talked to so far has been a science or engineering person and obviously the experience is a little different when you're a historian or arts or humanities person because you you don't go to a lab right you don't your research is a bit different and your work is a bit different so can you explain a little bit about the work the work that one does as a history grad student that the labor

that one does for the university and and what the difference is and what it's like withholding that labor the difference is is that uh we are the vast majority of us that are in the history department uh are ases we are tas and of that the majority of us teach for either the writing programs for for the history department um so when we look at what we can contribute to the strike, we are looking at the withholding, not only of grades, but of the type of grading that cannot be replaced. The course I'm teaching for now, there's five or six EAs, there's 650 students. I'm responsible for 60 of those students.

Each of those students has a weekly discussion uh panel of five six hundred words they have uh uh content analysis papers which there's now two of them that are missing those are things that can that cannot be reverted to multiple choice it's a writing program it's not a formula it's not something that could be easily uh placed We are aware that there has been some tension in terms of strategic planning between the ASEs and SRUs in the STEM fields that on the one hand in their teaching duties, they are very afraid that their professors will be able to co-opt the teaching process by making exams multiple choice or something else. I'm not sure how that would work. I know that that's just not really possible in the humanities. And the other issue, which I can't really speak

to, but I'm sure your other contributors have explained this, is we don't work in labs. Our research is much more long-term. We primarily conduct that research either in absentia during the school year with external fellowships or during the summer, whereas SRUs tend to be working in their labs more or less constantly. I heard it said that one of the reasons that SRUs are rumored to be less committed to a long-term strike is because missing two weeks

in a lab sets them back by six months in their career. For the vast majority of humanities the vast majority of the humanities, ASCs that I talk to, two weeks is very... Yeah. Something that can be picked up, you know, if you're reading a book in your spare time, it's not something that we need to be in with Bunsen burners and S2 and animals. Yeah. to be a kind of a material uh conditions divide yeah uh the sou's nasc's on the one hand and the stem and humanities on the right yeah yeah there are definitely like two week periods i spent on my research and stuff that i never used in any of my final projects you're trying to get an archive to open in spain uh can often take that long so i i think one thing i'd like to talk

about is like the as it stands now what you're hearing from the bargaining team and how that's being received like i know there are a lot of different demands a lot of different things that brought people to the strike right the access needs cola the unfair labor practices, etc., etc. So what are you hearing on the picket line and how is it being received? So the news for the first week was on day four, the SRU bargaining team agreed to accept a 7% yearly increase versus a possible adjustment that would be paid, versus a cost of living adjustment that would be paid, I believe, for the median rent increase in, I think, the most expensive cities in California, which would be San Diego and San Francisco. And to be honest, the strike was sold to the vast majority of the un-radicalized, uneducated

un-radicalized, uneducated rank and file as being about the 54,000 base pay, as well as access needs, as well as, you know, some employment for some units and various different things. But there was a lot of consternation on day four. There was a lot of consternation on day four. And I think a lot of us became very radicalized when we realized that not only had the SRU bargaining team apparently made a concession on day four of what was supposed to be a very powerful strike. But that concession didn't really resolve the issue of skyrocketing inflation and rent costs. And, you know, different campuses are weighing in to say, you know, in Santa Cruz, rent went up something like 65% in the last year. Jesus Christ.

A 7% flat increase doesn't help us at all. Yeah. The University of California, the largest employer and the largest landlord in the state of California, is raising their wages by a flat rate, then all the landlords in that area will continue to raise wages even higher or rent even higher. of us who were really i wasn't around for the 2020 cola wildcat strike but in the process of this consternation of the sru bt giving up this uh uh cola that's fixed to the median rent um a lot of us became very um i was so disillusioned but but very radicalized and started looking into it more. In the humanities, I can say, in my picket line, where we have philosophy, literature, history, and a number of other related departments, food's very militant. That was the first kind of moment of consciousness of awareness, I think, for a lot of us.

And over the last week, the last two weeks, it's become an internal struggle over tactics and strategy. over tactics and strategy. Whether it's reasonable to expect that we can hold out for our aims, the bargaining teams have, on our campus at least, and there are exceptions, have generally advanced a sort of moderate line that yeah, 54,000 is high in the sky, is great to me, but the way the bargaining works is you offer something high and you get something low. I think we're all, you know, willing to accept that that is how bargaining works.

But we have, at least in my picket line, at least in the humanities, been very concerned by the tactical decisions to make certain concessions at certain stages without letting the full power of of our strike take hold especially the withholding of grades which is coming up yeah this weekend next week um another thing which you know most of us have not been on the bargaining team and a lot of us are just kind of checking in uh to this this very long-term process pretty late again yeah when we watch these bargaining sessions and see what you see is operating definitely does not seem like the bargaining strategy of offering a concession in order to get something uh else bigger it is working at all um we i believe made some compromises on accessibility needs uh in the hopes that would provoke the uc to offer a comprehensive economic package last week we did

uh it included a 1.5 increase for the sru's proposal and nothing for the ases oh wow wow yeah that's that's you're still a long way apart then. So in both the removal of COLA on day four and the last month's bargaining, I think there's real concern that the bargaining team is getting the short end of the stick. Yeah, that's tough. If people don't remember from last time, by the way,

COLA is the cost of living adjustment that was the initial cause of the 2020 Wildcats, right? Yes, CO is the cost of living adjustment and that was the initial cause of the 2020 wildcats right yes cola is possibly the adjustment and there is a lot of um uh really interesting discourse about kind of what that meant people who are chanting no cola no contract they define cola as as meaning specifically a yearly percentage increase that is tied to its median rent whereas uh bargaining team had argued that a seven percent yearly increase qualified as was a yearly increase right but maybe less than inflation given and certainly less than rent given what rent has done in the last couple of years in and these universities are in very desirable places to

live with very high rents they don't offer subsidized they don't offer significantly subsidized housing especially to grad students often especially not to all grad students and so yeah it becomes very difficult to live even on what would seem like a decent wage. And unless you want to commute a long way. Something like 90 percent of the work. And again, I'm a historian, not a political scientist. I believe that the vast majority of graduate students who were polled said that they were rent burdened. That 50 percent or more of their money went to rent.

Most people I've talked to, it's more like 70%. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you can find yourself in that situation working for the university and with the university also as your landlord and you're paying the census, which has control over both ends and it's not doing much to help anyone. Let's talk about withholding grades because that's coming up right and that's kind of the the next level of escalation i suppose or like the the next hurdle um that's coming up so what does withholding grades look like and can and can you explain why there's sort of a pedagogical reason that people would be obviously like worried about doing that or it's this is sort of barrier and and what it would do to the university and what it would do to your students as well yes so fundamentally the withholding of

grades is the withholding of the ultimate finishing product of our labor we can talk about pedagogy and ideology and you know highly ivory towering fields as much as we want. But at the end of the day, when an undergraduate at the University of California pays their tuition, they expect to get grades and transcripts in return. And the reputation of the UC that makes it one of the premier public institutions in the world is that that grading is accredited to be reflective of very high quality of education. We are saying that we are not providing that ultimate record, which in the end is what a student would demonstrate if they were applying to graduate school, if

they were applying for an internship, really anything that reflects their college experience would be tied to that grade. We are also saying that, you know, in addition to that very brutal kind of explicit result, the pedagogy itself is also a suffering that, you know, students are here to learn. And, you know, you might complain in an individual class, but by and large, they do get a lot from their education. And if they are not being actively taught by their teaching assistants. They're suffering. In the MMW program that you and I both taught for, the lectures are, they're very, you know, it's a very large lecture hall.

It's kind of a general district, a vast majority of instruction, both in the historical cultural content of the course, as well as in the writing aspect, which is the point of the program, to develop skilled, analytical, academic writers. And they are not getting that at all. That's a burden that is carried 100% by the TAs. And by withholding that, it prevents the students from receiving quality education, essentially. So we're hoping that, particularly in the humanities, where our library is completely

irreplaceable, that will pressure the university. Now, we have been hearing that some universities have been unilaterally extending the deadline for final dates. I believe that either Riverside or Irvine, I just saw a message about this, had extended January. There's a lot of sort of confusion about what that would entail. If the strike is over and we all go back, we then have to go back and raise all of that stuff. So post facto, it seems like some faculty have either in solidarity or in desperation decided to move final exam, change the format of those exams. format of those exams, we are, I think, at root the most afraid that the university will grant some sort of amnesty. You know, everybody gets passed.

It would, in theory, weaken the union's power, but it would also weaken the union's power but it would also weaken the universities yeah those students who require those grades to uh uh progress their college education in their life it would be a huge blow for them to receive uh not a letter grade um yeah just a p yeah yeah that would be a massive step for the university to take in undermining their own status and the well-being of their students. If you have a required class or a required grade in a certain class to progress to graduate school or to progress to a vocational degree, then that could have long-term implications for those students. Yeah, that would be a big step for them. I suppose, yeah, that's interesting.

If they extend it, are you required to go back and redo? That's a huge amount of labor that you would then be doing in a very compact amount of time to grade three MOW assignments is an endurance challenge. Grades are normally due in like mid-December, right? Is that still the case at UCSD right now? This is week 10. Yeah, the clock is ticking.

So how does the strike look if you go past week 10, right? If you go, not just in terms of withholding grades, but obviously campus is very different when the undergrads aren't there. Right. I don't think that we've had really, we have had discussions about whether or not we're in it for the long haul. We are, I think at the moment, or not we're in it for the long haul, we are, I think, at the moment, hedging our bets on the next two weeks being, in some ways, decisive.

There is a faction, a strategic faction, that once finals are over, our power dramatically weakens. power dramatically weakens. Certainly if the UC did decide to sort of bypass the rating for this quarter, it seemed like that would be a half analysis. I'm not convinced that they would do that. In my view, the longer that we withhold those grades, the more we continue to have the leverage.

I don't think the UC will just throw up their hands the weekend final and say, oh, well, it's a write-off. See you next quarter. Yeah, yeah. I think we have been about trying to hold you out. I'd love to know, like, to close out what you've learned through the three and a bit weeks you've been on strike and what you think, like, people should take from this.

Like, it's an unprecedented era for workers' organization. In the last 20, 30 years, we've seen more strikes in the last few years than we have in decades. So what can people learn from the UC experience? Yes, absolutely. One of the things that I have learned, which is very salient in my mind, as somebody who started organizing about three or four months before the strike, I was approached to be a strike captain. And then later I went to various trainings. I sat in on campus organizing committee meetings. And the message that we were given kind of before the strike began was that we had an incredible amount of power. before the strike began was that we had an incredible amount of power. The strike ratification vote where more than three quarters of the graduate students voted overwhelmingly in the 98th

percentile to vote on strike. We all went in with a very powerful sense of the historic nature of this strike and our bargaining power and our solidarity. That seems to be treated by many of the UB leadership as a finite resource, as something that we want to pull the trigger on, set the workers out, hoped for a resolution. And if we didn't get it, then worked to wrap it up uh as quickly as we can i'm sure that i'm giving them short shrift and this is probably ultimately an unfair analysis but very much the perception that you know this isn't sustainable that we are reaching our peak hour. Now is the time to start kind of pivoting

to making these concessions. And we're all kind of saying, no, the organizing doesn't stop when you walk out. The organizing begins when you walk out. And for people like me who had some knowledge,

I have experience in organizing. I've been talking to high movements. I consider myself very well educated, radical. But just the fact of getting on the picket line, experiencing it day to day, talking to my fellow workers across campuses, across picket lines, has been energizing and radicalizing all on its own. I don't think that the union leadership really knew what to do with that and how to leverage it. If horses were fishes and horses or whatever, I think that a lot of us feel that our campus union leadership

ought to have done a better job with the uh the day-to-day energizing um one issue that uh you know i can't blame specifically on on a specific bargaining unit or or uh even the uaw 265 um but it is a huge rule that comes from above is that um if you do not pick it you do not actively sign up or picket shifts around you do not get strike day um and for a lot of us who have accessibility needs or are are not close to campus or are withholding their labor and active in the strike in other ways they feel like there's not really a place for them in the strike. Yeah. And they're doing equally crucial work.

Yes, it's good to have people picketing and have that visibility. Ultimately, if there were two people picketing and everybody else was withholding their labor, we would still win the strike. So there seems to be an overwhelming emphasis on the visible symbol of our power and our solidarity. And the concession that was made in day four was explained by the dwindling amount of people who were showing up for pickets, you know, from day one to two to three to four. of people who are showing up for pickets, you know, from day one to two to three to four.

And a lot of us try to push back on that and say, yes, you know, it's hard to sustain that physical presence. But we should be also working to bolster and encourage and harness the power of those workers who can't make a picket every day, but are nevertheless doing crucial labor stops. Yeah. Is there still a remote picketing option? Does that count? Yes. Yes, there is. In any organization that's run by a mass of workers, there's going to be some growing pains. And there are issues in the first week

of dueling remote coordinators with separate lists that resolve. And they seem to have been resolved by now. Same thing with some delays in processing, strike pay, account disbursements. Again, there's no

shadiness happening. It's just thousands of workers doing this for the first time. But for people who are sort of on the fence or saying, I can't really afford to miss a paycheck, that was a real big stressor for them. It affected their willingness to kind of be out there every day. Yeah, that totally makes sense and it yeah it's already a stressful time but like you say these things will have people will learn in the process

right like it's new for so many people it's unprecedented to have like 10 of the graduate students in the country withholding their labor and so like they will of course be growing pains and i think often when we look at strikes, like both you and me as historians and as consumers of the news, we like we see one photo of a bunch of people like in high-vis standing around a brazier. And then three weeks later, we read another story about a resolution contract.

And in fact, what makes a strike powerful is feeding people and being showing up and looking out for one another so like that's what we're trying to document and thanks so much matt and i wonder where people can find if you'd like to give your own social media or where people can find strike updates from the uc and from uc san diego anything like that you want to plug uh yes i i'm partisan in this, but I would highly recommend not getting strike updates from UC San Diego. Sorry, yeah, from the campus, not from the university. Yeah. So fairucnow.com or.org. Yeah, I think it's an org.

Pretty much kind of on the ground and not been dealing with documents too much. That's a great place. Twitter has also been very positive, despite all of its current events and getting up-to-date information. Can you tell us a Venmo where people can, in the true Spanish historian fashion, feed everyone? Have you got a giant paella out there? Are you like with the spade? Have you got a giant paella out there?

Are you like with the spade? So I will clarify, this is an unofficial, this is not the UAW worldwide Venmo, but the picketers on the UCSD campus who have been organizing meetings across the big lines, our Venmo is at UCSDse-strike-food. Nice. Yeah. Easy to remember. Hopefully you get some donations. Thanks so much for your time, Matt. I appreciate it. Thank you very much. death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us

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