It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 62

Episode Date: December 10, 2022

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new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Ah! Ah! Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a show about things falling apart and also putting things back together. Today, we have an episode about, well, this is kind of a big one, folks. So, everyone who listens to the show regularly will know that there have been a rash of attacks by the far right on drag queen story hours and kind of similar events to that. Events that are LGBT friendly events that also involve children have been regularly attacked all over the United States. At the same time, there have been escalating attacks by right wingers, often the very same people on reproductive health care, resources, clinics, that sort of thing. on reproductive health care, resources, clinics, that sort of thing. This is happening all over the country, but one place where things have been particularly aggressive as of late is in New York, New York City.

And today we're going to be speaking with a couple of different people who live in New York who have been present at some of these actions and who want to talk about what's been going on with the far right and the attempts to defend these people in these organizations from right-wing aggression. So I want to introduce Talia. Now, Talia, you are known to our audience. You've been on this show and some of our other shows a couple of times in the past. Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. And hello to everyone who still remembers what I sound like. And do you want to, you want to drop your, your, your Twitter and stuff up at the top here too, because you do a lot of on the ground reporting at different times and in the city.

Sure. It's pretty simple. It's Talia OTG as in on the ground. And yeah, that's where i do my uh reporting on events uh analysis all that dumb shit and then uh our other guests are two new yorkers sorry new york people um who are both anti-fascist activists who have been present in the streets for a number of these recent events. I'd like to introduce Tom and Barry. Do we want to go around and do pronouns real quick here?

I'm he, him. Yeah, sure. I'm she, or they. This is Tom. I'm he, him. And I'm she, her. Awesome. All right. Well, that is so I guess I'd like to kind of start and hand it over to Talia if she wants to give kind of an overview of how all of this has has has gone down.

But basically, we've seen I mean, the thing that surprised me most in the coverage that I have watched from a distance is how aggressive and large some of the right wing presence has been at like reproductive health clinics in New York City. I was kind of surprised to see that in New York. Yeah, so there's a group in New York called NYC for abortion rights, and they host once monthly clinic defenses at the Planned Parenthood on bleaker in lower Manhattan. the Planned Parenthood on Bleecker in lower Manhattan. And they do that because there is a church nearby, the Basilica of Old St. Pat's, that hosts a coalition of anti-abortion religious zealot groups. They organize these large, they're usually processions to the Planned Parenthood, organize these large, they're usually processions to the Planned Parenthood, where they pray outside, they throw holy water on the building, they attempt to hand out propaganda and literature and intimidate people who are coming into the clinic for necessary health services.

And these same individuals have been seen attending anti-vax rallies. The man who leads the procession to the Planned Parenthood, his name is Christopher Muncinski. He's also known as Fidelis. And he has invaded clinics in White Plains, New York, in, I think, East Hempstead. in, I think, East Hempstead. He has been trying to revive Red Rose Rescue, which people who are familiar with the fight for reproductive rights are probably aware that that is the primary group that invades clinics and tries to harass patients, threatens doctors and care workers and all sorts of things.

The main people who lead Red Rose are either in jail or have died, thankfully. And he's trying to revive that here in New York. And he has attended rallies organized by far-right conspiracists, anti-vax conspiracists. And it's like, you know, he went to DC for the March for Life and then he stuck around for the My Body, My Choice anti-vax rally.

It's very contradictory, but we see these same people because they're aligning on conservatism, on Christofascism. And we're seeing them pop up in shared spaces pretty frequently in New York in ways that I think are more transparent or like more easy to clock here, even if there is like a larger density of them that do mobilize to these specific things like clinic crossments. Yeah. That's that's a really interesting point. And that's also what we've seen a lot in the Pacific Northwest. You know, we just had an attempt, did rally at a drag queen story hour in Eugene.

And it was a lot of the same old crowd who used to rally in Portland before they got scared off of Portland. a lot of the same old crowd who used to rally in Portland before they got scared off of Portland. Now, I'm wondering, kind of, what, how would you characterize the response of the police to these events and how they kind of have treated the right wing at these? Well, it is about as cliche as cliche comes, because every single time um when i've covered clinic defenses specifically the police are helping move the procession along and threatening clinic defenders with arrest on the basis that they're blocking the roadway um they are they they essentially work as like secondary security um sometimes they will split off from the other

police and be like pushing and shoving clinic defenders on their own in a way that doesn't make any sort of strategic sense. But it's like they're getting enjoyment from doing that. It's the same story over and over again. You know, we see it in, in San Diego, uh, when anti-fascists were mobilizing against, uh, like Trump supporters that were being very violent, the Trump supporters were doing the violent and it was the police that were attacking the anti-fascist trying to fight against,

like trying to defend themselves against the far right. and we saw the same thing at Penn state just the other night yeah we did the there was a a gaggle of like proud boys or or i think tess owen referred to them as fascists in all black who were uh macing the crowd and they um they you, didn't do anything. The police escorted. There was an incident where a Proud Boy was assaulting. Like, somehow there was a fight that happened with a demonstrator and a Proud Boy. And the demonstrator, the police threw the demonstrator on the ground and then escorted the Proud Boy into the building where Gavin McInnes and Alex Stein were supposed to put on a very bad comedy show that didn't end up happening.

Lead him back to his friends. Jesus Christ. I asked that question, and I know everybody listening, and I know all of you knew what the answer was going to be. I feel like you still have to ask it. I am curious, the NYPD has a kind of manpower, access to manpower and access to surveillance equipment that, in my experience, outdoes most nations I've been in. And I'm interested particularly, and everyone's responses are welcome, but particularly what Tom and Barry might have to say about what sort of roadblocks that provides towards organizing responses to these events and kind of how activists have had to adapt to that. This is Tom here. I mean, I will say it's very clear that the NYPD constantly monitors any sort of online space whatsoever.

And I think most people know to organize, you know, in person or on signal with a small group of their friends rather than trying to get a larger group of people to come to a thing publicly on the Internet. Because anytime that happens, it's like there's instantly, you know, that much larger of a police presence. You get dozens and dozens of what's called the SRG, the Strategic Response Group, which I think Talia can maybe speak on that a little more. But they're basically the hats and bats that come bust up protests. Yeah, I definitely agree with that. And I would also say that because of the sheer volume of events, that these exact same group of people who are now attacking drag story hours and clinics, because we know this group already already and they were having almost daily anti-vax rallies which objectively stopped kind of being a thing to even consider try to mobilize

the counter protest for so I think there is kind of a large disconnect right now which whether by design or accidentally or I think a lot of people feel like people who might attend a counter protest that is might feel like oh no it's just those same idiots up to their nonsense again you know that that's we don't worry about that like tell me if it's the proud boys coming then we'll mobilize to kind of protest

so I honestly feel that it's sort of the mental kind of the mental associations that we have with these familiar faces I mean despite the fact that it's been kind of obviously well observed that the anti-vax stuff is a direct pipeline and radicalization platform for these more extremist and post-fascist and transphobic actions now, people still can't really detach that this is actually serious now. So, but yeah, I agree with what Tom said, that it's a matter of not dropping it.

I mean, that gets to another kind of advantage these folks have, which is because of how much additional state repression y'all are dealing with, the kind of personal cost of attending these events and countering the right is higher, both in terms of potential risk and just kind of in terms of the trauma incurred. I know from personal experience, I mean, I haven't been out in the street in quite a while, about a year at this point. And I know a lot of other people who are in the same place because it just kind of, you know, you can't only take so much as an individual. What are some ways in which y'all as a community try to cope with burnouts that you can continue to meet the pace at which the right is doing this stuff? I mean, I think it's really relying on other people, like the same one,

two or three or four or five people can't keep doing everything. As soon as people start to get exhausted, I think that it's time to, you know, take a step back, take a week off, take three weeks off. Like there have to be other people that are ready to step up, you know, throughout your community, but throughout everyone. Yeah. And definitely, I think there's going to be more of a need to emphasize that this requires everyday anti-fascists. I think in New York City, especially we kind of fell into a trap where any kind of public call to counter was very militant in style and wording, you know, very clear that it's a cab, wear black, if you water, things like that.

And the kinds of people that are just community members that we actually do need to also show up and tell the fascists that they're not welcome in their neighborhoods either. They're not going to respond to something like that for a multitude of reasons. And what can you say about sort of the numbers that you're seeing kind of on both sides on the ground here? What's like a normal action looking like in terms of that? I mean, you know, just from reporting and keeping tabs on different types of protests. In New York City, we have a lot of nonprofits and more established type groups that organize larger events. And those are typically just marches for visibility and awareness. And when it comes to a counter or some sort of direct action, like mutual aid, for example, we see much smaller numbers. But

those numbers that I mean, that I see, at least is that these are people who've built community and communicate together, as opposed to seeing a flyer and showing up just for that one day. These are people who consistently are engaging with one another and with that space. So like I mentioned, mutual aid, we have Washington Square Park Mutual Aid, which meets every Friday. And the core group that sets it up and distributes and everything is relatively small. But the people who have shown up to support in some capacity in the past two years that it has been active, they all know each other. And that doesn't mean that, you know, they're like necessarily like going to birthday parties together

or, you know, donating kidneys to one another or something like that. It's not necessarily like best friend groups, but it's people who have built a sort of neighborhood in this ideology and in this space, in this time. I would also say like these particular events have kind of brought in like a different group of people. It's not like the same crews of people that were doing other things because there's more kind of liberal people getting involved that are like coming to these drag stream court drag queen story hour, like defenses to, you know, be joyful and hold up signs and sing and like welcome people into the

library. So that's also made it more easy to keep these going because we've kind of got a larger revolving door of people rather than, you know, smaller groups. Yeah. That makes sense as like, particularly as a way to not burn people out, you know? I'm curious as to what have you seen as far, like, one of the major tactics anti-fascists

always use is identification and exposing people who are attending these events, rallying with fascist organizations. Have you noticed a difference on how well this works for the people who are showing up to protest at like Drag Queen story hour events versus the people showing up at reproductive healthcare clinics at Planned Parenthoods and such? Because it kind of strikes me that one of those is more mainstream maybe than the other, although perhaps I'm being kind of optimistic in that. But I'm wondering, does it appear to be more effective against kind of one kind of rally than it is in another kind, if that makes any sense? So a lot of the people who are engaging in the client harassments are known among their networks and because their goal is to present a sort of legitimizing face for opposing abortion um they don't typically show up to

things that are a little bit more volatile but we have seen that with so it as it happens that this the the people who are harassing drag story hour for the most part have been a part of one specific core group of people that i've been monitoring and reporting on for the past year so i know all their names which has pigeonholed them into what they can and can't do we had um there's there's this far-right propagandist, Oren Levy. His brother was at a, he was trying to harass a drag story hour at the Andrew Heiskell Library for the Blind. And that was an event put on for neurodivergent children. And he was attempting to harass that. He ended up pepper spraying two people. And he is known his name is out there his face

is known and he is identifiable across all social media networks it was very easy for those people to be able to file complaints against him that's um yeah and another thing too is that because this one group does all of these harassments together they started out doing anti-vax stuff where they were going and harassing a restaurant called Dame in, I think it's in the village or yeah, it's in the village. They were harassing that restaurant for a while. And then they started harassing the health commissioner's house and then Gracie mansion, which is where Eric Adams lives.

And they were all doing these things together. So their network was very easy to monitor and trace um and so when they started harassing drag story hour which was undeniably they were doing that as a result of far-right propaganda that was being pushed into all of their social media spaces trying to convince them that drag story hour is you know the satan incarnate um they start showing up and trying to harass those and immediately they're known they tried to harass um they tried to disrupt um aoc at a listening event that she was doing in queens immediately they were known it was like i saw the footage and I was like, that's Robert White. That's, you know, Cliff Lee, that's Ronan Levy. And it's doing that because they're known because it's

clear that it's one group that's showing up and doing this, trying to, trying to follow the lead on what is the trending outrage on the far right that week. It limits the number of people who are interested in joining them because they rely on making it seem like they are just neighbors and constituents who aren't happy with X, Y, Z. And it's like, no, you're a coordinated group of harassers. We know who you are. So that mask being off definitely, I think, has helped to reduce the willingness to grow in those uh harassments but i can't necessarily speak to the future on what would hold or like what other people have been

inspired by them because we have seen neo-nazis show up in other states to protest drag story hour the same way that these this little you know band of harassers has been harassing story hours yeah um yeah sorry just a direct response to that that i definitely agree um that yeah we've been monitoring the movement of uh the main actors in the anti-vax movement for a while but i didn't want to say that it is occasionally other groups but that they all have the same thing in common and that they attach to the kind of hot topic issue that they see happening in other cities and states so we did have actually like a very like certainly christophash's group um uh tfp i believe that it was called who um you know had publicly announced a rally to harass

Astoria, or initially latched onto that, but all of it is kind of following national trends because they were initially trying to make CRT in schools be the thing. That was a multitude of different groups that were trying, and

they're looking for something that sticks, and they're looking for something that passersby or any given passersby walking by will see their side of if they hear it. But their lack of success, though, is because of their, you know, violence and not especially convincing and very human on sounding antics to where it is clear that they are not actually there protesting what they claim themselves they're protesting. You know, they're losing sympathy because eventually their signs started being about Antifa instead of about allegedly protecting the children and stuff. So their own messaging is kind of probably also at fault there. But this issue is still always going to be at risk for attracting different neo-Nazi groups. I mean, we've seen Orlando

and others have a coalition of Nazis who are joining together to attack Story Hour. We've actually seen some of that in New York, although it's just coincidence that this one crazy anti-vaxxer group was showing up to attack Story Hour the same day that

perhaps other groups were. i don't want to say too much about that at the moment because i think tom had something yeah i was just going to say i mean about the you know neo-nazis and other areas coming and uh protesting these drag queen story hours i mean at the first bigger one we did was at elmhurst library there were not only somebody who was at a neo-Nazi rally in front of Trump Tower once. We had a January 6th insurrectionist. And I think Talia can probably speak to those two characters a little more. But then there was another Drag Queen Story Hour where someone from GDL showed up.

And I'm sure you're familiar with GDL, Robert, right? Yes, yes. Yeah, the Goyim Defense League. These guys drive around in the hate bus flying the swastika. Yeah, I mean, you just said swastika, but in case people are not aware of what Goyim means, what you need to know is the Goyim Defense League are hardcore Nazis. Yeah, like they are legitimate, straight-up neo-Nazis. They fly the swastika, they go harass Jewish neighborhoods. Capital N. legitimate straight up neo-nazis they fly swastika they go harass jewish neighborhoods yeah um so capital n yeah yeah capital n nazi yeah one of them uh went and harassed one of the

drag queen story hours recently uh then he uh ran off and said he was going to get his friends and didn't show up with anyone else from what i heard then uh speaking of neo-nazis you probably know uh jovi val oh yeah jovi and i had a conversation a couple of years ago with with my good friend goad yeah your old buddy well he showed up at a um i believe it's a pediatric health care facility i don't know if they do gender affirming care but he was in front of that neither did he have to sign i'm sorry i said neither did he yeah exactly it was it was literally because the clinic had pride flags in the window yeah that makes sense okay that that makes sense he was holding up a sign that said uh i'd rather a nazi than a pedophile which is just like a nonsensical and b like just

say you're a nazi bro just say you're a nazi bro we all know just say you're a fucking nazi why is that the choice it's so funny because there's like pictures of him with the swastika necklace like doing the roman salute like dude everyone knows you're a nazi yeah no he's completely unashamed and that's the weirdest part about him because of uh you know he learned an interesting lesson about wearing just a you know a maga hat in a bar in brooklyn a few years ago if anyone knows what incident i'm talking about oh yeah so i i find it interesting that this actually did not deter him from ever leaving his house again you know nearly losing his entire nose um so and then still deciding to just double down and actually start carrying the

nazi flags thinking it'll go better this time um and apparently he just yeah he's trying to make nazi shit he's trying to make his name again in 2022 like jovi val is like he's he's expired and he doesn't seem to realize that no he's one of like you know what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna show up and i'm gonna have nobody with me and i'm just gonna be standing in front of a closed pediatric clinic like with a sign telling people all they see from a distance is the word pedophile and the word nazi yeah like i mean he did have his one little buddy with him in fairness according to his own videos that he posted of the encounter and that buddy of his whoever he was could be heard saying uh something like hey man you know i can't fight i actually i saw the video that jovi that got posted on telegram and he said jovi i can't

fight i can't fight man jovi i can't fight and uh you can also hear jovi yelling what are you doing what are you doing as he gets tossed into like a construction area and he's such an embarrassment to like even other nazis they were even making fun of him online i mean somebody literally said uh why does jovi always get his ass kicked this is ridiculous he is he is the kind of he is the kind and generation of nazi that other nazis consider cringe like exactly fucking jovi val i hate him so much at the same time though it is a little bit alarming because all of this uh tension on uh figures such as jovi val failing every time and like stepping on rakes metaphorically every time he goes outside it does kind of open a nerving vacuum up to like oh what i can? I can be a way better Nazi than that.

So that is the part that concerns me. If the constant attention is that, you know, Jovi Val did not succeed in organizing a transphobic Nazi rally outside of a closed pediatric clinic. Okay. I guess that's a win, but who else sees that and sees and thinks, oh, we can do so much better because we do have a problem with unidentified nazis throughout new york city there's you know there's been increases in all sorts of graffiti all over the subways um nazi literature being put on trains and left to places

it's uh you know so who is seeing this and how what is the messaging exactly to say that like you won't succeed if you try this either just because you know jovi keeps getting his shit rocked like we need you to know you will you will get your shit i mean that's the most important thing at least in in my experience and that is mostly as an observer i'm not an organizer but i've watched what's happened in the Pacific Northwest. And the reason why these people don't rally in Portland the way they used to is they were faced with consequences. And that required, I mean, that was not a simple process. It took fucking five years and a lot of people got broken bones and a number of them got killed. But like that is that is the thing people like these

people's lives have to be cratered. And one of the things that is a real problem is that it's a lot easier to crater people for rallying or it used to be number one, it used to be easier to crater people's lives because they were willing to rally with Nazis. But also now, the right has succeeded in mainstreaming these two specific things going after after drag Queen's Story Hour events and going after reproductive health care clinics and the people using them to such a degree that it's gotten a lot harder to ruin people's lives over this sort of thing. That's that's true. But at the same time, there is an increase in so many of them who are just unabashedly that way. Yeah. an increase in so many of them who are just unabashedly that way yeah post their full names addresses photos they say uh you know identifying or doxing them is not there it's just actually

almost uh yeah empowers them i think being a bigot is in vogue again yeah like most like a large chunk of the country is totally fine if you're a crazy bigot. The far right is radicalizing in a sort of gradual pace over the course of many years. countering them is that there is this density of media and pundits sort of looking down their nose at the decorum of countering them. So, you know, we look at Penn State, students showed up in mass, hundreds of them, significantly outnumbered the Proud Boys did show up the fascists that did show up and successfully shut the event down but there's still this like armchair punditry reflex to say oh well they didn't do it right there's no like it's not the right way to protest and i think um what barry is sort of barry mentioned earlier about everyday anti-fascist.

Yeah. And that's again, like with your neighbors and recognizing that it's not this weird, inaccessible, like isolated group of people who solely show up very militant and in black block. And they've got like all this training and all these like slogans and slang and words. And, you know, in black block and they've got like all this training and all these like slogans and slang

and words and you know it's it's none of that iconography because that is also the conservative media i.e andy no constantly refers to all sorts of things as oh this is just antifa and the purpose of that is to make it seem like you can't do that too when in in reality. Yeah. Andy know that little shit thing. Yeah. He referred to the defense of the, the successful defense at the Elmhurst library. He claimed that it was Antifa militants. And I happen to know there was a pastor who was there.

There was a nursing mother with her infant and her toddler who was there. There were librarians present and there were people who showed up because they were in the neighborhood and they heard that far right extremists were going to try and harass. And sure enough, just like Tom mentioned, there was a J6 insurrectionist who tried to get into the building. I recognize him. He tried to rush in. I recognize him. Like rushed into the building. Yeah, he tried to rush in. I recognize him. His name is Mitchell Bosch. He's best known for getting arrested

for taking a knee in a Burger King. God damn it. God damn it. MLK hoodie. Yeah. This guy tried to rush in and I don't know how it happened, but all of a sudden my arm was hooked into his arm,

twisting his upper body slightly. So he didn't have a good, he didn't have good leverage to try and burst into the building where I knew that if he got in, he would refuse to leave until he was physically removed by police. So then he could then go online and say that he was fighting for freedom and collect bullshit donations for bullshit legal funds. So getting all back to this, though, is that the media and like these, these pundits and everything, they are complicit in making it harder for people to build community. But people need to understand, it is literally your neighbors, it is your local librarian, it is your friends, it is your co workers, it's regular people, the same way people showed up to protest in 2020. They, you know, oh, should I bring a sign? Should I bring a bottle of water? Should

I bring my ID? What should I bring? And they just showed up and they marched. You can do the same thing because when you have a significant number of people, you don't need to worry about being militant because you outnumber them. And across the board, if you look at data, because you outnumber them. And across the board, if you look at data, the, the, the, the positions in the politics that these people hold and the things that they're pushing are in the significant minority of opinion. A majority of people are totally fine with trans people. They're totally fine with drags story hour. Like it's not a thing,

but people aren't showing up to remind them that their opinion is the minority and that they are outnumbered yeah yeah i was going to say i agree with that last point and unfortunately the problem seems to be about our kind of cultural um inability to agree on the definition of violence and how even though people are okay largely with queer and trans people and protecting trans kids um and they definitely do not support nazis um they still do not think that um any kind of militant action including violence against these people is ever appropriate um and just a direct response to the penn state thing it goes beyond punditry even because Penn State itself released a statement saying that

it does not condone violence without saying who started the violence, aka the Proud Boys who are Mason people. They said that just because you don't agree with a speaker and their right to free speech, aka hateful tour of Gavin McInnes and the Proud Boys,

that there is no excuse for violence. So they denounced the content of the message as well as the response to the message. So we're kind of in this limbo where people who have the voice to send these messages are still playing the meat at the dinner table, both sides. Surely we can come to a peaceful resolution and then blaming the side that actually is militantly opposed to it. And how to overcome that? I don't know. But I do think that, like Talia also said, everyday anti-fascism is a pretty good start. Yeah, I mean, with everyday anti-fascism, like the right does this grassroots

organizing and gets people to like tacitly agree with what the Proud Boys and these fascist groups do. I think there's plenty of like normal people who would tacitly agree with what we're doing on this side of things. But I mean, you look at like I think it was somebody campaigning for maybe it was Ron DeSantis. Robert, you know about this? It was like a literal neo-Nazi who got. No, it was a Ruby Rubio. And it was a, the guy was a member of the,

he was a Cuban fascist who was a member of the league of the South. Yeah. Confederacy guy. Yeah. Well, like there was a journalist online who was like, this is awful. And somebody was like,

he's literally a Nazi. And then you look up this journalist, like history of articles she's written. And one was like, this is why you should be friends with a Nazi or I'm paraphrasing, but that's's like, he's literally a Nazi. And then you look up this journalist's history of articles she's written, and one was like, this is why you should be friends with a Nazi, or I'm paraphrasing, but that's literally like, we should befriend Nazis. It is ridiculous how so much of the mainstream is like, let's come to the table and be polite. I mean, I really think, and I think a lot of other people think, when it comes to Nazis and fascists in the far right, you have to make it as costly as possible, whatever that means to you. You have to make it as costly as possible for them so they

are deterred from doing this organizing. Yeah, I think that's the most durable conclusion, certainly, that I have. It seems like what y'all have experienced too and are continuing to experience. Is there anything else y'all wanted to get into about what's been happening with these events before we kind of close out for the day? The only thing I could think to add was that it's not over. And people might think,

oh, they stopped coming to Drag Story Hours for whatever reason, but they're going to find the next thing, the next issue, the next clinic, the next hospital, the next healthcare provider, the next family who has trans children. They have dresses, they have names, they know where to go. They're just looking for when they feel most emboldened to do so. And it's kind of, it's hard to communicate that because people think, oh, okay, that was a successful action.

You know, we're done. We're done with them for now. But I don't know. It's, it's, it's just, it's really hard to communicate the message that like, you know, it's like head on a swivel. This is the, this is the hardest thing to not just to get across to people, but to kind of like actively accept for yourself, because it's it's one of the most frustrating realities of living in our society. But there's no way to get around it, which is that like not being eaten by these people is the result of constant vigilance against them.

Like they they win if you don't continue showing up and one day in in in the bright blue yonder i do believe that if people continue showing up and continue making it clear that their cause is hopeless these people will all drink themselves to death or whatever but um you know that's that's not an immediate term sort of thing no i know well and i mean on from just my personal note, like, yes, that is exactly the mode I'm in now. And I mean, I'm a Jewish anti-fascist organizer. It's almost this kind of history repeating itself, ancestral need to keep at it. And I'm one of many people in the same kind of mindset kind of mindset towards not an option to rest and wait until they,

you know, strike when they think we're not looking. Um, but it's, it's, you know, obviously hard. Yeah. I mean, we have like, we have evidence that they are looking for the next thing. We have evidence that, um, you know, there's this one woman who got heavily involved with, um, the anti-vax group New York Freedom Rally. And she would go on Instagram live stream saying a lot of transphobic stuff.

But she never transferred that over onto public spaces until this week, where she reiterated the same points that she was making in the privacy of her home on that live stream to her little audience she's now saying it on a stage that she's sharing with the candidate for governor lee zeldin um she's she's repeating these same things so it's showing also that they are finding it they're finding themselves more comfortable in saying these bigoted things and pushing more extreme things and expecting for their followers and their friends to follow suit. There's people who've shown up to these harassments of drag story art who have said directly to me that they don't really agree with the harassment itself, but that their friends are there doing the harassment. And so they're showing up for them. And that's a very quick road to they're going to decide to care about this very deeply and go very hard about it. But what has worked is when people

show up and make it not happy and not good for them when their footage is ruined when their soundbites are fucked up when they are blocked from doing the thing that they are trying to do to generate that content to feed that like bigoted beast when people show up when those events keep happening that's a big thing is that like the venues that host these events need to not cancel them yeah because when those venues cancel it tells the bigots that they are winning. And what needs to happen is the venues feeling brave to put out calls for community support the same way that happened in Eugene. Because when that venue put out that ask, they got hundreds of people. And they outnumbered the bigots 10 to 1.

people and they outnumbered the bigots 10 to 1 i was just going to say i was i'm very heartened by like how supportive the uh people in the neighborhoods and libraries have been whether they're allowed to officially support anything or not it's been uh you know nice to know that people are happy we're there and also i would really love to see a meme of Jovi Val stepping on a rake now that you have that image in my head. Yeah. Was there anything else we wanted to get to? Self-defense is community defense. if people are interested, people in New York created something called IFAC fund where you donate funds and then people who want to receive individual first aid kits can request one and receive one for free.

And it was created in honor of a anti-fascist badass named torch um who is always presente um but yeah if if people wanted to check that out it's uh the twitter account is just at ifact fund ifak fund um they want to donate i think it's uh cash app is ifact fund, you know, someone else could look it up to check. Yeah, it's dollar sign IFAC fund. Oh, I'm sorry. Dollar sign IFAC fund. Thank you. Dollar sign whatever.

Yeah. And, you know, it's just a matter of like knowing that we keep us safe in every sense of the word yeah and i think that's a that's a perfect note to end on thank you all for your time thank you for continuing to be out there in the streets um and everybody else get out there and make a fascist stay worse. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill.

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

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose.

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

mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian.

Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. 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 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. We live in an age of uprising. From Haiti to Hong Kong, from Ecuador to Sudan, from Chile to Myanmar, from the US to Iran,

an entire generation has been confronted with the horror of our world, and took the simple expedient of picking up a brick and throwing it at a cop. Yet as the uprising swept the globe, there was one country where it was considered impossible. Every expert, every policymaker, every kid on a street corner knew there was simply no chance of a mass street movement in China. On Monday, it was unimaginable. On Friday, it was everywhere. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. What we've been watching for the past three weeks now is the failure of one of the most sophisticated political regimes in human history. A political, social, and economic regime designed specifically to stop this one moment. After 30 years of

repression, the national mass street movement has returned to China. This is what it was all about. Everything from the censorship policies to union busting to subsidized mortgages for a rising Chinese middle class. It was about keeping people from going back to the streets, to make even the idea of it impossible. And yet, here we are. In one sense, the party has little to fear from this round of protests, barring an immense intensification of violence which, at the moment, seems extremely unlikely. But in another sense, the CCP is perhaps the last regime on earth that truly remembers the previous age of revolution, that remembers when the workers took Shanghai in 67 and very nearly took Beijing in 89. These are people who understand that China's political system is

built on shaving a sleeping bear. And no matter how profitable that system is, there's always a chance that one day, that bear is going to wake up. Now, the bear isn't fully awake yet, we are not watching in China a full-scale uprising a la Sudan or Myanmar. But that bear, the heir to maybe the most militant working class the modern world has ever seen, is starting to open its eyes. So what is the CCP currently facing? Since about November 26th, there have been widespread anti-government protests in China. Unlike anything we've seen in the last 30 years, these protests are everywhere. They're in Beijing, they're in Nanjing, they're in Shanghai, they're in Guangzhou,

they're in Xinjiang, we'll get back to that one in a second. They're in Wuhan. Reports I saw said that there were protests at 77 universities. That number is almost certainly an undercount now. And these student protests are not just taking place at small colleges in the middle of nowhere. There were protests at Tsinghua University, which, for an American audience, I would compare to China's version of Harvard. It's the college that produces the upper echelon of the Chinese ruling class. Xi Jinping graduated from there. So did his predecessor Hu Jintao, and the only reason that Hu Jintao's predecessor did not graduate from there is that that guy was so old that he went to college under the Japanese occupation.

When I was originally writing this, I had a joke here about how the only city where there haven't been protests is Harbin, which is the city in the absolute middle of nowhere in northern China. But no, I googled it, and it turns out there have been protests in bloody Harbin. For people who aren't very good at Chinese geography, which is probably most people, this means these protests are everywhere. They're in the north, they're in the south, they're in the east, they're in the west, they're in the far west. And it's true that a lot of these protests are not that big, although some of them are absolutely massive. But the importance here is that this is the first time in 30 years that we've seen

widespread national protest over a single issue in China, the enormity of which is compounded by the fact that people in the streets of cities like Shanghai are openly calling for the fall of the CCP and Xi Jinping, something that by itself can get you a decade in prison just for saying. We can ask what these protests are actually about. The version you see in the American press is that these are anti-lockdown protests or protests against China's COVID zero policy, or that they're also pro-democracy protests against the entire regime. And this is sort of true as far as it goes, but it doesn't capture the core of what's going on, which is that what we're seeing is a widespread fusion of labor rebellion,

anti-police brutality protests, and a revolt against the authoritarian state. The thing that's brought all of this together is the CCP's COVID policy. But that's because that policy is the most visible and most concentrated expression of the state's general authoritarianism and brutal war against the working class. We can learn a lot about what's actually been happening by going back a little bit to the very start of the protests. There are three specific events that sparked the protests, two of which are pretty well covered, and one of which has been basically ignored because of how long ago it happened.

The first spark is essentially an event in its own right. This is what I would call the Foxconn revolt, a series of worker uprisings against the manufacturer of the iPhone, which, with a single factory, controls vast portions of the regional economy of Hainan province, where its largest factory is based. The Foxconn Revolt has been brewing for a long time. It began essentially when Foxconn began to impose what's called the Cl-loop system. The closed-loop system was originally developed by the NBA to run an NBA season during the beginning of the pandemic. The idea is that you keep everyone inside a closed loop.

This means that everyone in the production process has no contact with the outside world at all for as long as the manufacturing cycle goes. world at all for as long as the manufacturing cycle goes. The CCP started adopting the closed loop as they hit problems with their twin imperatives to both stop COVID and also to make sure that Foxconn hit its production targets so Apple could have enough iPhones for the Christmas rush. The result was that as an October wave of infections hit Hainan province, where Foxconn's largest factory was located, 200,000 workers were put into a closed-loop system, which meant they were trapped in the factory in their dormitories. In order to keep this factory running, Foxconn needs about 100,000 migrant workers. The problem from Capital's perspective with migrant workers is that they can,

if things get bad enough, just go home. And that's exactly what happened. Workers inside the Foxconn plant started to be quarantined with people who were sick in the same dormitory. And it's worth noting here that these dormitories are tiny. The conditions, even outside of lockdown, are atrocious. And when people were suddenly getting quarantined with people who were sick, workers essentially just said no and started to stage massive breakouts. There are incredible videos of these trains of people like along the road, walking home and sort of hitching rides on people's trucks, fleeing the factory.

We don't actually know how many workers escaped, but it was enough to be a massive problem for capital. Again, they need these workers in order to make enough iPhones to sell for Christmas. Current estimates suggest that Apple is somewhere between 11 and 15 million units behind what it needs to make the Christmas rush. So, Foxconn had the local government recruiting people to go work in the factory. What they told these workers was that if they entered the closed loop for 30 days, they'd be given 3,000 yuan, which is about $415, to live on for the next month, and then get paid 30 yuan or about $4 an hour. And then, after the end of the next 30 days, they'd get another 3,000 yuan. In the US, this would be a sub-minimum wage poverty job.

For a Chinese worker, this is a lot of money. Or it would have been, had it not been for one minor problem. All of it was bullshit. Foxconn and the CCP were lying out of their asses. After workers were already in the closed loop, they learned that the two 3,000 yuan bonuses weren't going to be paid until March and May of next year. Meaning that in order to get what they were promised for two months of work, they were going to have to work for seven months. Also, the 30 yuan an hour wage that they were promised was a lie. They were getting paid substantially

less than that. So, on Tuesday the 22nd of November, workers who had emerged from quarantine to start work, only to learn that they had been systemically lied to by both the government and Chinese and Taiwanese capitalists, came out of their dormitories and demanded that they either get their money or be allowed to leave. account that I think complicates a lot of the sort of narratives that we've heard about what these Chinese protests are about that did not make the Western press at all, which is that these workers were also demanding that their bosses, quote, implement pandemic prevention and control measures. It's not entirely clear what the specific demands refers to, but it seems to be about not quarantining sick people in the same dorms as healthy people. A thing that seems relatively obvious, but capitalism. Regardless, the product of bosses ignoring these demands was several days of full-scale fighting with the police. On November 23rd, a bunch of videos began to spread of workers

taking those metal police barricades that you see all the time in the US that are essentially an arch with a bunch of bars snuck into a flat base. You've probably seen these. Picking them up and straight up throwing them at cops or grabbing them and beating police riot shields with them. I have never seen anything like it. It was absolutely wild. At this point, after several days of fighting, after their own regular security people literally refused to show up to go fight these workers and police from outside had to be called in foxconn gave up said okay we will give you 10 000 yuan to literally leave right now please just stop and a lot of people took the money and left and in any other year in any other, that would have been the end of it. The Foxconn riots would be another episode in the never-ending series of they-tried-not-to-pay-us riots that are one of the most common forms of workers' protests in China.

states, videos started to circulate of a fire in a residential block in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. There are several videos of the fire. In one that journalists were able to verify, you can hear people screaming from inside the building as they tried and failed to escape the flames. Further videos showed that cops had barricaded off the streets with metal wires as a way to enforce Xinjiang's 100-day-long lockdown, which prevented firefighters from getting to the scene. Firefighters can be seen firing water hoses at the building only for the hoses' arc to fall short. Trapped behind barricades, it prevented them from getting any closer. Speculation about whether the doors of the apartment building themselves had been sealed shut with locks or barricaded from the outside, as had happened to so many other people's homes during the lockdown,

ran rampant. One video I saw from another city appeared to show workers in hazmat suits, who've become known as the Big Whites, literally welding someone's door shut to keep them in. To make matters worse, the head of the Urumqi City Fire Rescue Department blamed the families for their own deaths, saying, quote, These are the videos, the fragments of nightmares brought to life, that started the mass protests. This is a revolution scene in 30-second intervals. Everyone is trying to beat the censors. Clips flow back and forth between WeChat, Twitter, Telegram, back to WeChat again. Ironically, many censors were already home

for the weekend, allowing clips and posts that otherwise would have been removed immediately to circulate for hours, and sometimes even days. These brought back the memory of the third spark, the one that's basically been forgotten about in the West, if anyone even cared to know about it in the first place. In September, a bus full of people with COVID in Guangzhou that the government was shipping to a quarantine center crashed and killed 27 people, wounding 20 others. Conditions in these centers, which COVID patients are often forced to go to rather than quarantining in their homes, are atrocious. which COVID patients are often forced to go to rather than quarantining in their homes, are atrocious. Pictures and videos circulate constantly of bathrooms covered in human shit from failing drainage systems, as China's already overtaxed medical system simply failed to keep up with the demands on it placed by the government, which, like the American government,

has and continues to systematically refuse to invest in medical infrastructure. Intimate familiarity with these wretched conditions and the raw horror at the deaths in Xinjiang and Guangzhou sparked protests across the country. In Arumqi, a now 70% Han city under constant police occupation, Han protesters appeared to be moved in solidarity with the families killed in the fire, and fought the police with a ferocity unmatched anywhere but the migrant worker villages of Guangzhou along the Pearl River Delta, one of China's great manufacturing hubs. These desperate struggles were given relatively little attention by a Western media class enamored with the image of students carrying blank white pieces of paper to protest the censorship, a common form of protest in places

like Hong Kong. This time, at least, they were tied to a particularly funny piece of media censorship. As protests mounted, people started posting an article version of a speech by Mao called Let the People Speak, The Sky Will Not Fall. Chinese censors quickly ran into a classic CCP problem, which is that in a state whose heroes are communist revolutionaries, celebrated historical figures produce an immense repertoire of slogans and quotes for subsequent generations of revolutionaries to draw from, which has caused the CCP at various points in time to ban the opening of its own national anthem, Arise Ye Who Refuse to Be Slaves. As censors banned Let the

People Speak, the sky will not fall, people began posting the article but with the words replaced by squares. This, too, was also deleted. And then posting simply blank white squares themselves, which saw their reflection in the students in the street. The CCP, in turn, retreated to its traditional tactic of blaming the protests on foreign forces interfering in China, a claim which is less than credible in a country that has rolled up the CIA's entire in-country intelligence network at least once in the last decade. There's an incredible exchange that has made the rounds between a cop who is telling a group of protesters that there are, quote, foreign forces around manipulating the protests,

a group of protesters that there are quote foreign forces around manipulating the protests who is immediately yelled at by a guy screaming who are the foreign forces marx and angles stalin and lenin another man appears and asks hi can i ask if it was foreign forces who started the fire in xinjiang was the guizhou bus overturned by foreign forces? Another man grabs the mic and says, was everyone told to come here by foreign forces? The crowd shouts no. He then makes an incredibly obvious point. We can't even access the foreign internet. How are foreign forces meant to be communicating with us? Another man says, we only have domestic forces not allowing us to govern themselves. Where are these foreign forces? From the moon? Still, managing these accusations has become a constant part of the protests, with calls from protesters to stop chanting things like down with the CCP in attempts to keep the demands focused on COVID policy, like ending COVID zero. And this is where things get

incredibly muddled by a western press that decided to stop giving a shit about COVID deaths a year ago, and a set of contrarians arguing that no, actually, China's COVID policy is actually good. This entire debate hinges on the conflation of the state-of-government policy of zero COVID, which is an attempt to stop all cases of COVID, and the actual execution of the policy, which has taken the form of a war against China's working class and a set of draconian police state abuses. One thing that Western quote-unquote experts have been quick to point out is that, well, the CCP has to keep doing COVID zero or 1.5 million people will die. There is a tiny bit of truth to this in that one reason Chinese COVID restrictions are so harsh

is that if COVID was simply let rip like it has been in the US, it would go through China's largely unvaccinated rural elderly population like a chainsaw. And unlike in the US, if a million people died in China because the government fucked up a pandemic response, party officials would be getting beaten to death in the streets. And part of the reason for the crisis in China in the first place is that the rest of the world gave up on trying to contain COVID entirely. If the rest of the world had, you know, done their jobs and stamped out the virus, none of us would be here right now. On the other hand, no, absolutely not. You do not actually need to weld people into their houses or drag them by force out of their homes so they can die in bus crashes on their way to unsafe and unsanitary pseudo-hospitals with bathroom floors literally covered shit in order to contain the pandemic. as shit. Just because the two great world powers have decided that their COVID responses are kill a million people by forcing everyone back to work so that no one has to actually deal with

the political consequences of telling a bunch of unbelievably deranged and heavily armed fascists no, and lock 200,000 people in a factory and force them to make iPhones and then beat the absolute shit out of them when it turns out you've lied to them about their pay, doesn't mean that there aren't other options that we could take for pandemic responses if we decided to stop letting a bunch of venal and corrupt assholes rule us all. And this is something that people in China also understand, even if the Western press corps is dead set on presenting their demands as if they're American anti-maskers. You can tell, obviously, that Chinese protesters are not simply a copy of right-wing American fascists by simply looking at a picture of a protest and seeing how many people

are wearing masks. China is not the US. Regular people actually do care about containing the pandemic. This is why there was a real pandemic response in the first place after the government utterly botched it. If you look at the actual demands of the protesters, you will see things that normally would seem more at home with liberal American protesters attempting to see pandemic restrictions enforced properly. Things like, our pandemic response must be based on science. But people, even people who don't want to die of a plague, do not want to be horribly abused by cops or horrifically exploited by the state and capitalists. And that, I think, is something we do all understand. Only time can tell what will happen to these protests. The government is quietly making concessions and not so quietly

hunting down people who took to the streets. It is entirely possible that the protests will simply die. And that, in two or three years, most people will have forgot they ever happened. From a sort of brutal materialist perspective, however, it seems unlikely. China's social system could function fine as long as growth was at 15%, or 10%, or even 8%. But when growth inevitably comes down to 2%, the deal of keep your head down and everyone will get rich starts to look a lot less attractive. COVID has simply intensified all of the traditional contradictions inside Chinese society and made visible the horrors that previously had been obscured, and it seems unlikely that those contradictions will someday vanish. But here

in the present, the impossible continues. And every day it does is another day that the gates of possibility inch a bit further open. This has been It Could Happen Here. You can find us at HappenHerePod on Twitter or Instagram. We have a website, CoolZoneMedia.com, where you can see the sources for this and other episodes. Enjoy your week, and remember that you too can defeat your own ruling class. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me as 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 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. It could happen here rail strike edition i'm robert evans garrison davis chris how are we all how are we all doing how's this we're talking about a rail strike today we're praying for it

we're praying for it it hasn't happened if're praying for it. It hasn't happened. If you're listening to this, you probably know the broad strokes of this, which is that the people who make the trains go, and by the way, trains are like a critical part of us all not starving to death or running out of insulin or whatever. The people who make those trains go have a pretty hard job and there's not a lot of them.

And for a variety of reasons that boil down to companies not wanting to spend money uh it's impossible for that they don't get sick days um so there were a bunch of other shit thing like things that were shit about the job including pay especially since uh rail company profits have been at like record levels so they were threatening to strike there were union negotiations some of the union leaders reached an agreement with the rail companies, but it didn't include the sick days. So a lot of workers, potentially most of them, were at least willing to strike. And then Biden came in and had Congress basically say, do the same thing Reagan did to the air traffic controllers in the 80s where it's like no if you strike it's illegal because this is a too critical a service for the country anyway

that's broadly the situation chris you know this a lot better than i do probably the most pro-labor president the most pro-labor press okay i want to put this out this i think this is actually like that's that's i don't like that's my knowledge and i think that's close to a layman's knowledge so i'm i'm waiting for you to fill in the gaps okay all right let's let's let's start with what biden has actually done because it's it's it's slightly different than what reagan was doing there with the air traffic controllers um part of the reason everything is fucked up with the railroads is that like railroads almost since their inception have had had an almost entirely different regulatory framework than anything else.

So your normal strike is covered by the National Labor Relations Act, right? You go through your National Labor Relations Board. You do your votes, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. If your railroad workers are not covered by that, they're covered by something called the Railway Labor Act, which lets Congress just be like, no, fuck you. You have to take this contract. And the other thing it does, I mean, there is like a – it is a – Oh, I didn't realize that. So well before like the modern era and Reagan did his shit with the air traffic controllers, there was a – it was written into the law that congress could say like yay or nay to a rail strike that's really interesting i guess that probably goes back to the

days when they were literally making them out of human bones yeah and i mean it's been so it's been amended over time and it's changed a bit and there's some other stuff that happened in the 90s after there's a there's a there was a failed rail strike in the 90s where congress is also just like no fuck you you have to take this contract. But, yeah, the important thing about this is that, like, okay, so in order to even potentially strike, you have to go through so much bullshit. It's called self-help in the law. Like, people have been trying to strike for two years, and everything that we're seeing now is the product of two years of bullshit of these like there's all of this nonsense you have to go through there's these like cooling off mandatory cooling off periods you can't like uh you you know you have to like wait before you do anything else you have to go to the

next step the next step and the final step is joe biden had the choice to either let these rail workers strike and actually get the things that they fucking needed or he could tell them to fuck off and just eat a contract and that that that that's what's happened right now is that joe biden has just and and i also again with the support of both houses of congress and i i also like explicitly want to mention here that a lot a lot of nominally socialist politicians including like aoc a lot of social democrats have signed yeah yeah voted yeah let's talk about that too because that that's that's another part of it that again so my my surface and i guess i'm playing playing the podcast idiot in this one uh which is not abnormal for me but my like layman's understanding of what happened with this is that uh there was a bill up in congress as to whether or not to endorse this and uh a bunch of

progressives said that they wouldn't vote on it unless it included seven days of paid sick leave, including Sanders. That got pushed off into a separate bill, and there was some kind of sketchy wording about, well, we won't... I don't 100% understand the congressional hijinks, but I know they just wound up voting for what the union had negotiated without any sick leave. It seems like it kind of provided an opportunity for a bunch of progressives in the House to vote yes on the sick leave, knowing that it wouldn't pass the Senate and knowing that the strike would still get stopped, right? What am I missing there? I mean, it's basically that.

I'm not a Congress knower. Yeah, I mean, there's a bunch of sort of hijinks that were happening in Congress where there was a slightly different version of the bill in the House, and they had this whole thing. But, okay, I actually... The House one for sick leave did pass with support of every Democrat

and three Republicans. But, okay, the thing I want to point out here, and I want to move away from the sick leave thing, because the fact that these people don't have sick leave is important. This is also not, like, the main thing the strike was about. Like, things are so much worse. Like, things are so much, like, infinitely worse than people, like, at all understand.

Like, the thing this real strike is about if you if you go like actually talk to the people who are doing it is that these people are on call for 90 of their lives like and then when i say 90 of their lives they are on call while they're asleep they're on call constantly uh there's there's there's no way to even there's no way to plan a consistent sleep schedule because you can just be on call. And part of what's going on here, and if you read the sort of detailed accounts, you will see a lot of people talking about this thing called precision scheduled railroading. Yeah, precision scheduled railroading was – it was a great theory kind of that was implemented so atrociously badly it's basically fucked like the entire economy um the idea behind it was like you could you could schedule when like a freight railroad was going to go right and this this would give you a bunch of efficiency bonuses you could plan like you could

schedule things around each other um this just didn't happen people implemented it but what they implemented was just this nightmare like amalgamation of we're going to reduce a bunch of staff and then we're going to make these trains that have like 200 fucking cars on them and this has been a catastrophe let's go monster trains there's there's uh justin rosniak who's a podcaster it doesn't seem like a good solution to the problem of not enough guys to make trains work is make the trains huge. Yeah. It seems like it's destined to end in horrible train crashes.

It's awful. These trains are nuts. Again, these are 200 trains long, right? So if you don't get the weight distribution right, the train will fucking fall over. They keep doing this. This has been happening for like several years now is there's trains everywhere derailing. There's like no coverage of it. You know where I knew that from,ris garrison will tell you when i get when i

get drunk or something late at night my favorite thing to watch is videos of trains hitting stuff and train crashes are amazing to watch it's incredible to think of all the human ingenuity it took to make that big bingo boom there's thousands of videos on youtube of a semi-truck cargo getting stuck on train tracks being pulverized in the air they get vaporized it's so cool so the downside is that one day we're gonna have one of these trains that is run by a person who has had three hours of sleep in the last 48 hours and it's going to be carrying like fucking i don't know it's gonna be carrying like sodium nitrate on it or some shit and it's just going to explode and it is going to kill an enormous amount this actually

happened in canada like a decade ago but yeah like these these trains are too big they're so big they don't fit in the fucking rail yards like they're so big that most of the train infrastructure doesn't work for them they are so the other thing is okay they're really really really badly planned despite the fact that this is supposed to be precision scheduled railroading like they're unbelievably badly planned you have people just like being forced to just like sit there for 12 hours in a train wait like waiting for the the rest of like the other like 95 cars that are supposed to be on this train to show up you know the whole situation is like is utterly nightmarish of the other 95 cars that are supposed to be on this train to show up. The whole situation is utterly nightmarish.

And the other thing about this is if you're an engineer and you're in one of these trains and you're sitting there for 12 fucking hours in this train, you legally can't have your phone because – I mean, this is a safety thing, right? In some sense, this makes sense. It's like a safety measure. You can't have your phone because you can't be distracted while you're driving, but you're just fucking sitting on the tracks for like 12 hours and you know this stuff is you know and the fact that people are on call constantly

the fact that the entire rail network is just physically falling apart because the other thing about these trains right is they make an enormous amount of money none of them ever fucking show up on time it's a disaster it's a catastrophe like genuinely like part of the reason why we're having all these supply issues is that no train has fucking showed up on time in like four years and it's because of this the new contract it's okay that

the new contract signed in says that workers can have up to three unpaid days off for medical appointments oh wow that's something oh yay it's three unpaidpaid days off for pre-made medical appointments yeah solving the problem forever yeah and again like like these people are on call for 90 percent of their lives you can't even like like you can't schedule when you're going to sleep because you might be on call and on call might be you have to fucking like drive like several hours to a place so you can get on a train and the train cannot leave and the train eventually leaves like six hours later and you fucking drive and then you're just like dropped off somewhere in the middle of fucking nowhere

and then unpaid you have to go back to like where you live it is like it like okay the thing the thing i want to like get out of this is like the railroading system in general the system of freight railroading that we have in the u.s is is in the midst of collapsing like it is falling apart it is not working it is is becoming increasingly dangerous it is i mean utterly inhumane for the people working on it and and you know none of the fucking even this even the sick bill contract like didn't do anything for it, right? The only way this actually could have been resolved is if Joe Biden and if the Democrats and if Congress hadn't been fucking cowards and had let these people strike because these kinds of concessions. And, you know, I also, like, I don't want to let the fucking unions off the hook here, too, because they know all of this.

But, again, most of the sort of, like like senior union people are very tight with are very tight with democratic party this is part of why all of this shit was postponed until after the elections because they didn't you know they didn't want to fucking deal with this shit they've been trying to force people to sign these contract too and it's it's it's a shit show it is a just absolute catastrophe on on every every level yeah i mean it's almost as if the rail system probably shouldn't be run by private interests. No! It shouldn't! Yeah, because there's going to be now 115,000 rail workers who are forced to work under these still not great conditions.

Meanwhile, the managers and the owners of the railroads get to go back to just making tons of money. Yeah, again, record profits. None of this is happening, not that that would make it okay, but none of this is happening not that that would make it okay but none of this is happening in an environment well well you know we're running at a loss and we we have no money and no ability to like take like they have they're making hundreds of billions of dollars yeah like this is this is like one of the most profitable times to run a railroad and you can incentivize more people to be railroad workers if the job isn't a fucking nightmare for example what if instead of not being able to have their phones if the job isn't a fucking nightmare? For example, what if instead

of not being able to have their phones, we gave each of them a DVD player and a screen with a DVD of Step Brothers, and they could watch Step Brothers as much as they want while piloting a train? I think that would actually get people I think that would cause mass layoffs at the

rail yard. That's how we get the strike. We include this in the next provision, then they'll be forced to strike. I was stealthing in my accelerationist beliefs here. This is the fastest way I can think to destroy our transit infrastructure.

We've got like two years before this whole thing fucking implodes anyways, because part of what's keeping people in the railroading system is that so railroading also has its own pension system that's like disconnected from the regular pension system and you have to you have to work there for 10 years in order to collect your pension this is why like enormous numbers of people just haven't left right people have been leaving right but there's a there's a huge number of people who were hired in these giant expansions in 2004. And we're two years out from that contract, from all these people being able to collect their pensions and fucking leaving.

Yeah, at that point, it's like, this is the only chance I have to ever not work myself to death, so I have to tough it out. Yeah, but those people are going to leave, and this is the sort of hammer that capitalism has built over its own head, which is that like, yeah, congratulations, you successfully flexibilized and casualized your entire workforce. That means that if people don't want to do your shitty job, they can leave and find another job. At some point, like, there is shit in this economy that, like, actually does need to be done. But these people have been sort of, like, so blinded by just, like, you know, they're so blinded by line goes up. They're so blinded by short-term profit that they really don't understand that at some point there's just not going to be fucking workers to run the railroad. Yeah, I mean, a lot of this situation is built off of, instead of being compared to Reagan's stuff with air traffic controllers, it's actually more similar to what Carter did

with some airline workers. Then also with the 1980 kind of railroad deregulation act, which gave a lot more power to companies to run the railroads. And that is what kind of shifted shifted things to our to our current our current problem because they were they gave permission for these rail companies to close down lines that were less profitable and to set their own um freight rates and it's yeah it's a weird thing it's not being controlled by the interstate

commerce uh commission instead it's being controlled by okay so that that thing's weird right because like on the one hand like the the wave of corporate consolidation that happened after that is like a disaster and the fact that there's basically like four real like real companies now is a disaster on the other hand like it is also true that the interstate commerce board was like dog shit at his job yes absolutely it sucked and for a short like yes absolutely it sucked and for a short period of time it actually did improve things um it just got worse now it's it's it's it's powers coalescing again into the very types of monopolies that caused the that caused um railroad regulation to be necessary back in the 19th century, like in the first place. Power is being consolidated again.

And it's this vicious cycle that fundamentally puts short-term profits above the conditions of workers. Yeah, I think like, you know, okay, so there have been a lot of people talking about like what the potential solutions to this are in a sort of macro sense because like okay even even with a better contract right like something actually has to be done in order to force the railroads to not fucking suck

and to like actually properly schedule their goddamn trains and not work everyone to death and you know i i want to put the it is worth noting like we actually did like have national nationalized railroad company for a while yeah and it was kind of a shit show like it okay okay this is something that's also important to think about this like there's a lot of like there's a lot of different kinds of nationalization right like there there is a huge difference between a firm that's like tech like you know like we we sort of technically nationalized a bunch of the like car companies after 2008 right we bailed them out but you know

like we like it went in that stuff we didn't really like take it we owned we owned like a bunch of their stock we didn't like take a controlling interest there's no saying how they run or how they treat their employees and like we got like nixonite like proto-neoliberal nationalization of the railroads last time and it kind of contributed to some of the problems we have now there was also a period where uh conrails union was trying to like buy like the railroad so we all we almost we almost got a railroad system that was run by its but it was owned by its own union and then the the company just like refused to sell it to them because they were like wait no hold on we can't have a worker run railroad but one thing one thing i am interested

in is i i because i don't actually know this what would what would the how would it how would an illegal strike actually work like what's what's the how what is the differences between people striking illegally now like there's some some discussion how what is the differences between people striking illegally now like there's some some discussion of that who knows if that's actually going to happen but what is the main kind of difference between that and um the non-illegal strikes okay so the basic thing is okay so the the thing about the national labor relations act right which is the thing that covers normal strikes was that like and and this is also to some extent under the robot like okay so if you're doing a legal strike you have legal protections right like there there are things corporations can't do to you um like yeah there

there's there's a bunch of stuff that can't like i don't know like it's it's a lot harder to just sort of fire people the other thing is that also like especially something like, it's a lot harder to just sort of fire people. The other thing is that also, like, especially with something like this, there's a, like, you, if you do a wildcat strike like this, and it's specifically a strike that is, like, that is specifically illegal under this act, like, you can all get fired. I think they could technically arrest you like it's it's i don't know that that part of it's not exactly clear to me but yeah i don't know i mean there there's sort of like i feel like if if if they arrest you just for not going to your job i feel like that is is not a great... That has happened to people. Oh, I know people have been murdered. This is a thing.

Yes, like in the long history of labor struggles, people have been straight up killed. But at least in 2022, I think it would be a bad look. Yeah, I mean, I think, okay, so the other thing is... I think where we're headed, and I think what they ought to do, is just force, get all of, like, the worst criminals. I mean, the murderers, the terrorists, all of those guys.

And you make them run the trains. Whoever blew up all of those power transformers in North Carolina, you make them run the trains, and it'll be fine. Nothing bad will happen as a result of this. It'll work out perfectly. Well, the alternative plan and the thing that maybe these rail companies are just holding out for, because maybe they're just making conditions be not great and underpaying and not giving sick days, is because they're waiting for

trains just to become autonomous they're already planning to severely cut down the crews that are on the trains there's already um trains in australia that are a totally autonomously run that carry mining materials over for hundreds of miles and that is the future that these companies want because they don't need to pay for employees to actually run the train. It's so frustrating because in an actual if we were anything that approached a society that dealt

with things ethically and humanely and equitably then this would be good because it seems like working on trains sucks and it would be great if like, because it seems like working on trains sucks, and it would be great if we could automate most of that work, and then people, less people would have to work in order to keep society running, but that's not what's going on. Except less people don't have to work, less people just get even shittier jobs. Yeah, we're just going to run through these people's bodies by, like, as we get up to

automation, and then we will throw them away. Yeah, well, okay. like, as we get up to automization, and then we will throw them away. And then because they'll do it badly, there's going to be a disastrous train crash caused by the fact that they got all of the people off of a train hauling nitroglycerin or whatever, and it's going to destroy, I don't know, Duluth. Which, you know, not the worst city to lose,

but I'm sorry, Duluth, y'all are fucked. Well, okay, it's worth mentioning like this stuff like the automation stuff is already happening right like that we have right we have like this well and i mean it's like a very real sense that there's this sort of nightmare one of the other sort of nightmare things that's going on right now is that there are these like like i don't know like driver assistance programs basically that are being run on trains now where that are that are you know they're supposed to be like making decisions like for and with the drivers but a they suck ass um b they're they're

designed they're designed to basically maximize uh designed to maximize profitability right and the way you maximize profitability is by running trains really really slowly and you know that's contributing to the fact that every train is fucking late now and the freight system doesn't work and the third problem is that these is to the fact that every train is fucking late now, and the freight system doesn't work. And the third problem is that these things keep fucking running trains off, like, this is another reason why trains keep fucking crashing, is that they suck. Yes! They keep running trains off of tracks.

And, like, you know, and, like, there's, like, there's a lot of shit here, right? Because it's, like, if you override the system, like, you can get disciplined for overriding the system, but then you have this sort of, like, you have this thing where it's like, okay, so do I get discipline for overriding the system and not making the train crash, or do I just make the fucking train crash? You're doing the trolley problem! Yeah, yeah, it's literally, yeah, Justin Ross is going to talk about this a lot. I do love that this is just going to inevitably result in an exact recreation of the trolley problem it's already like this is already happening to people it's just like like it's none of the none of this stuff works automation is gonna make us crash into this orphanage i can divert it instead hit this old folks home so it's literally

happening like it's just like none of the stuff like okay the thing that's like frustrating about this right is okay if any of the people at the sort of like at the level of where they're planning these trains could even sort of do their job right this isn't even a thing that's like an inevitable contradiction between capital and labor like this is just if any of these people could actually fucking schedule the railroads which is the thing they're supposed to be trying to do if they could actually schedule when the train was supposed to go and when it was supposed to leave, you wouldn't have these problems, because then all of the people who work there would also be told when the fucking train was leaving and they could schedule around it, but no, they can't fucking do it, because they're too fucking lazy, they're too fucking stupid, and they don't want to spend the

money to actually make any of these systems fucking work, and so the consequence is just this bullshit. And then also because again, and this is everything like that, like capital is also really falling down on the job here because like the rest of capital needs to get their shit together and force the railroad to do something because like it's your asses on the line too. If this railroad thing collapses, but because of, because of the sort of immediate amount of money that the that these these shitty rail companies that pumped into congress they were able to buy people off and the rest of capital was just like yeah we don't care that's like three years out we don't have to care about this shit it's like guys like bernie sanders is fighting to save capitalism right these people are trying to save you from yourselves and you know you won't you won't even let that's that's their entire job

though like of course it's like yeah no but that's their entire job, though. Of course, that's the entire reason they exist. What is happening here is that liberalism is running an accelerationist program to cause the American infrastructure to fall apart, and social democracy is attempting to save capital from itself, and capital was like, literally, fuck you, eat shit. fuck you eat shit no it's it i i've i've i'm reading right now in interview with a railroad workers united member and they're talking about how like there's this plan to increase uh uh increase their pay 24 over the next five years and he's there like he says that um lots of the railroad workers that he's talked to as a part of the union is saying like, people are willing to work for less money and take a job at like an Amazon factory or like a trucking job because at least those offer slightly more

consistent hours. And like, yeah, like it's, it's at least when you're not working, you're not working. Yeah. And I just wanted to mention that because,

because we were bringing up like how these people are getting not very good pay, which is, which is true. But for a lot of people, it isn't even just a pay question. It's just overall working conditions. And when you're thinking about moving to an Amazon factory instead because they have better working conditions, like, oh, God. yeah it's like i mean they they've they've managed to create like one of the worst systems that is imposed on like any worker in in the country like it is it is genuinely stunning and right now again they're getting bailed out that people are by the fact that people are stuck in because they want their pensions but like but as soon as those people are done and we

start moving to more autonomous things then it's not it's not going to be worth it i know media companies have spent decades trying to convince kids to work for trains with thomas the train chuggington for for decades and decades we've tried to send train propaganda to these kids and i i don't think i don't think they're going to buy it yeah i also did you guys know that in thomas the tank engine canonically World War II happened? And canonically all of the diesel engines sided with the Nazis? Well, that doesn't

for us today. That is official Thomas the Tank Engine lore. Oh, God. I wonder how many other Zoomers will sympathize with me on this. I recently found out that Thomas, the train wasn't just the uncanny train segments.

They used to have live action actors in like little intercut scenes. No, and it, it was fucked up. Cause by no good, by the time Thomas, the train was airing on television. When I was a kid,

all of those were reedited. They were, they had no, they had no live action segments at all. It was all the weird stop motion animation, which is still very uncanny with the faces. But I had no idea until a year ago that there was live action actors in the original editions of Thomas the Train. Completely oblivious. Well, I'm glad we're going to have this important union discussion. I am too. I'm going to could have this important union discussion. I am too. I'm going to admit to you all right now,

there was a moment earlier where, Chris, you kept saying that the owners of the railroads were blinded. And I very nearly went into a bit where I just started reading the lyrics to Bruce Springsteen's Blinded by the Light, but I didn't do it. I didn't do it. We thank you for that. I'm glad we were saved from that.

That's because everybody, nobody gets the lyrics to that one right because of the Manfred Mann's Earth Band version, which makes it sound like he's saying douche when he's really saying deuce and talking about an engine, which is why it would have been relevant to railroads. But none of y'all would have gotten that, and you would have fucking made a big thing about it on reddit so to hell with you all anyway support rail workers if they do an illegal strike

make sure we set up things so that they get protected and they get food and yeah i think go fight cops go make railway like i mean people like i just keep it keep an eye on what's going on and if it happens there will be ways there will be ways to support these people through the u.s government like i don't know things of this nature yeah i mean that would be that that would be nice but if we got to put a pin in that you know keep an eye on the situation and if these people go on strike there will be community resources and what not popping up to support the wildcat strike it's a thing that's happened before wildcat strikes

have a long history in this country too um you know and we will be collecting resources if that happens for ways people can help with the wildcatters so this is a thing to have on the old on the old noggin as we lurch forward into the holidays

and possibly a gigantic labor battle. We'll see. People in the UK have been doing rail strikes for a good part of this year. There's been on and off rail strikes for most of the past few months um it's possible except again they're they're they're british so they stopped doing the strike when the queen died well of course so yeah look look there's certain realities that can't ever be eclipsed regardless yeah but here's the thing

here's the thing we we have thrown off the shackles of the Anglos. Our rail strike stops for no one. All right. Except for the most pro-labor president, Joe Biden. All right, and that's the episode. Yeah, that's the episode. And remember, if you see a diesel train, it is a Nazi.

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Take It Up and Hear, a podcast about it happening somewhere else. You know, okay, the theme of this show has gone slightly off the rails since it was first conceived. However, comma, I do think this is something that is very important to talk about, which is getting some more sort of background information and an understanding of what the history of sort of labor

and general protest is in China as we look at the sort of current protest wave that is going on there. And with me to talk about this is Eli Friedman, who teaches at Cornell University and is the author of the book, The Urbanization of People, The Politics of Development, Labor Markets, and Schooling in the Chinese City. So Eli, welcome to the show. It's good to be here. Yeah, so I'm excited to talk with you about this. Partially because I think... Okay, so insofar as you've gotten sort of mainstream coverage of it,

there's been a lot of focus in terms of the sort of current wave of protests. There's been a lot of focus in terms of the sort of current wave of protests. There's been a lot of focus on like the A4 paper stuff and people sort of, you know, hanging signs up. And as the coverage has gone on, there's been a lot less about the Foxconn stuff. There's been a lot less about the broader trajectory of what protests has looked like in China in the last 20 years, as everyone sort of like immediately reaches back for their stock Tiananmen comparisons because I think this is, this is, has nothing really to do with it, but I guess we could start with why, why are the Tiananmen comparisons bad and why is everyone still reaching for them 30 years later? Yeah. I mean, there, there's maybe a couple of reasons why. So the unsympathetic take on it is that you have a lot of people outside of China, particularly in the United States, who hope for things to go poorly in China as part of our imperial competition. And so 1989 was a bad year for China, whichever side of that movement you were on. And so they believe that it heralds the downfall of the Communist Party and therefore America can march into the rest of the century without any real competitors. So that is a real thing, right? I think the somewhat more sympathetic take on this is that the Chinese state, which means, you know, no street protests. It means relatively little dissent online. And to the extent that you do see forms

of collective action, they remain pretty small scale and fractured. And so when you see deviations from that, that suggests that, well, they've kind of lost control because they do want to maintain this absolute image of placidity. And if we look at the whole sequence of events that led up to where we are now, I think we have to trace it back. Well, there's a bunch of things, but one of them is the Satong Bridge protest, which is just a single person hanging banners off a bridge in Beijing. And a single person hanging banners or holding signs in any other big city around the world does not create that kind of a stir, right?

I mean, you know, you're in Washington, D.C., or you're in Berlin or Tokyo or whatever, you know, nobody cares, right? So that, but that just shows or you're in Berlin or Tokyo or whatever. Nobody cares, right? But that just shows a little bit of a crack in the system. And so then people let their imaginations kind of run wild. And we're clearly not in a 1989 situation right now. It's not inconceivable that it would develop in that way in the future. At the same time, I don't think it's particularly

likely for for all sorts of reasons and we can get into that if you want yeah i mean one of the things that i think i don't know one of the things that i've been looking at with these protests versus 1989 i partially it's just the the the sort of class composition is just very very different like there are student protests but it's it's they're like these people these the students now like are not the 1989 students like this is just this is a very different sort of like it's a very different student body it's a very different like the class composition of those people are different the the experience that they've had in the chinese system is very different. And then also, I think some of more interesting is like it's not the same working class that showed up in 1989 because that class doesn't really exist anymore.

And yeah, and I guess that that's another part of this that I think, I don't know, there is definitely extent to which these protests are weird in that it is like it's it's it's it's a bunch of people in different places who are protesting about the same thing which hasn't which you know hasn't really happened for a long time but also like i don't know there seems to be this reluctance to talk about the fact that there have been like not insignificant protests in the last 30 years like especially in the 90s there are these huge protests against sort of uh like de-industrialization like the destruction of sort of the chinese welfare system and i guess one of the things i'm interested i don't know in asking you more about is like there's there's a kind of trajectory of what urban sort of protest has looked like what urban sort of protest has looked like and like as as as the sort of like as the chinese working classes like increasingly become a sort of migrant working class and so yeah i guess

we could jump off from there to also also i guess because it's the other thing is like chinese cities are very different now than they were 30 years ago which is a thing that is both incredibly obvious and also like people don't really seem to understand very well yeah let's see there's a lot in that question maybe we should circle back around uh to the question of the class composition of the students and the workers today in comparison to 1989 but first let's just talk a little bit about the sequence of labor protests over the past. Yeah, sorry. There was a lot of me going through stuff there. Yeah, I mean, all really important insights, each deserving a little bit of their own attention.

So, you know, after 1989, there's this big divergence in the opportunities that are afforded to the two constituent groups that were in Tiananmen Square and other places around China. So you have the students and you have the workers, right? And there's other people, but that's sort of the social backbone of that movement. The students basically get this deal with the state, which is they demand compliance and political acquiescence in exchange for which they will enjoy a couple of decades of unbelievably fast growth. And if you are graduating with a degree from one of these elite universities in Beijing, or even not super elite universities in other cities, there's a pretty good chance that you're

going to experience upward social mobility, that you'll be able to buy an apartment, that you will feel more materially secure than was the case for your parents. I think that that deal is coming undone right now, which in part explains the students that we see out in the street. But in any event, that certainly was the case for about 30 years after, or at least 25 years after Tiananmen. The workers who were in the square in 1989 had an almost diametrically opposed social trajectory. Because immediately thereafter, they were subjected to a brutal regime of privatization, of dispossession, of theft of public property. They were thrown out of these jobs that they had believed they were going to have forever. It was called the Iron Rice Bowl.

One of the main architects of that was Jiang Zemin, who's just died, he along with Zhu Rongji. I saw a great quote where someone was like, this is basically China's George W. Bush, where everyone's remembering him fondly because things are so bad now. But oh my God, this guy was awful. Dying right now is maybe the best thing he ever did. Like it's, oh God. And it really is a testament to how bad things are now, but he is, I think, the most neoliberal anyway of China's leaders more so than, than Deng Xiaoping in some important ways. And so, you know, that old working class who was told that they were the masters of the nation, you know, under Jiang Zemin in the late 90s,

they were just subjected to these real subsistence crises. And in response to that, actually the largest mobilizations to have happened since 1989 occurred in the late 90s and really the early 2000s. In some cases, you had these protest movements with many tens of thousands of people occurred in the late 90s and really the early 2000s. In some cases, you had these protest movements with many tens of thousands of people out in the street resisting privatization, resisting the theft of their pensions, and basically this private profiteering and theft of public property. And I think that even the protests that we've seen in the last week or two are still not on the scale of those worker uprisings that we saw 20 years ago.

Yeah, which I guess, you know, like part of the reason why we are where we are now is that those people lost. And I think that's been one of the other sort of themes of like Chinese protests is like, I mean, I think like some of the local ones like win, like i mean i i think like like some of the local ones like win but the large scale ones have kind of just been like just like really just been getting owned for the last like 20 really like 30 years like it's it's been kind of a bleak march and i mean i actually i want to circle back around a bit talk a bit more about the deindustrialization, because I think this is a thing that like really is badly understood, especially on the left. The other thing I wanted to talk about in, in,

in that is, okay, so you have this massive wave of privatization, you have this industrialization. And can we talk a little bit of also about how, like for, for the people, for the people who held on and stayed on industries,

what the sort of transformations that happened inside there was like, because I think that's also not understood well. Yeah. So you have two processes. One is the they talk about as smashing the iron rice bowl. Right. And that involves two processes. One is just unemployment. And there's been a lot of efforts to try to

estimate how many people lost their jobs. It is very hard. A political scientist named Dorothy Salinger wrote an article called Why It's Impossible to Know How Many Unemployed People There Are or something to that effect. But certainly tens of millions of people lost their jobs and were just kind of thrown out into the market. And it's worth remembering that they were thrown out into the market largely in regions where the market was not at all dynamic, right? So in the northeastern part of the country, which did not have the booming economy of Guangdong province or, you know, Jiangsu province or places like that. So there were those people. People also probably know that there are still a lot of state-owned enterprises and something like

a quarter to, you know, maybe a third of China's economy is still accounted for of state-owned enterprises and something like a quarter to maybe a third of China's economy is still accounted for by state-owned enterprises. But those enterprises have increasingly come to function like capitalist enterprises, at least with respect to labor relations. They still receive a lot of subsidies from the state. They still enjoy monopolies, so they don't face competition from other firms, at least domestically. And like monopoly-based firms in capitalist countries, they offer somewhat better pay and somewhat better benefits to their core workforce. So if you think of GM or Ford in the middle of the 20th century in the United States, or you can think about Facebook or Google today, these companies that are also basically enjoy monopoly position, their core workers enjoy, you know, somewhat better pay, right? But the other thing that's happened is they have increasingly come to be surrounded by a very large contingent of temporary and flexible workers, right? And so in many of these state-owned firms, more than 50% of the employees are the what they call in china dispatch workers right

they don't enjoy any of those same benefits they don't enjoy the same job stabilities and they in in response to market fluctuations and profitability those are always the first ones to to be let let go right so you know the fact that they are state owned, I think matters to some extent. But when but it doesn't mean that the old labor regime from, you know, the 1970s has kind of continued unchanged. Like they are being these firms are being subjected to market pressures and that's reflected in how they treat labor. Yeah. And I mean, that's something that like if you listen to Xi Jinping, like actually talk about what's going on he he just constantly every every like two speeches that he gives there is a line about how like the the the economy is directed by the market and like oh yeah no he's very clear about it yeah in some ways he's he's like very reaganite like he's just like we don't we don't want to let these lazy people just enjoy welfare

benefits like they believe in the power of the market to discipline people. There's no question about it. Yeah, and I guess the other sort of consequence of this is China's enormous migrant worker population. And that's definitely another thing I wanted to talk about because that was another round of protest that happens in the 2000s that's about this giant fight over household registration that I guess was the last kind of successful, like really mass protest thing in China.

We talk about that a little bit. Yeah, I mean, there haven't been the same scale of of collective protests by migrant workers. But, you know, just as a little bit of background, you have the old state state on working class is kind of declining or subjected to the market pressures that we're talking about. And so unrest in that sector becomes a little bit less significant over the course of the 2000s. But that's happening at precisely the same time that the working class in the private firms is increasingly constituted by these rural to urban migrant workers, when they come to the cities, they are treated essentially as second class citizens and don't have guaranteed access to all kinds of social services, healthcare, pensions, education, et cetera. And so there is a lot of mobilization.

I mean, you know, the, the HUCO household system, household registration system still exists and it still has an important role in structuring people's classed experiences. But it's a little bit less coercive than it used to be. So in 2003, there was this famous case, a migrant named Sun Juegang was taken into custody as frequently happened at the time. Police would just ask people for their papers on the street if they looked suspicious and they had a thing in place at the time called, uh, custody and repatriation where they would take you into custody and they would, they would repatriate you back to your village. Right. So very similar, you know, to like ice raids against Chinese people. Yeah. Yeah. Like they had, you know,

this was, I think one of the things about like in insofar as you can make comparisons between like the chinese system and the soviet system is like that that's one of the few things that was i think kind of similar is that you do have these very intense in well okay it's simultaneously you have these very intense like internal restrictions on migration but also very similar to the u.s system it's like the economy is based on everyone breaking these things that's right simultaneously it's illegal yeah yeah right exactly like there's no illegal immigration to the united states but the economy would obviously collapse without undocumented workers and it's exactly the same in china like you know they're like we we know that these people are here. We know that our economy, particularly in the coastal cities is completely dependent on them, but we're still

going to have cops ask you for your papers on the street. And if they don't like you, they can, you know, round you up and send you home. In this, in this particular case, back in 2003, the guy they got, it's like he was the quote unquote wrong guy because he was actually a university student and they detained him and killed him. And so when this came out and they're like, oh, they killed a college student. Like if they killed a normal migrant worker, that'd be one thing. But he's a college student. So that created a big fuss. And as a result, you know, they actually got rid of detention and repatriation, which is good there.

And so migrant workers today, when they're on the streets in the big cities, are not likely to, you know, just have cops randomly ask them to see their papers. But they're still subjected to all kinds of social discrimination and definitely, you know, institutional discrimination. Yeah. So, OK, we're speaking of institutional discrimination. We're going to take an ad break and then we'll come back and talk more about this. So enjoy some ads from companies who are probably benefiting from all of this. And we're back. So, okay, that's another thing that I do want to sort of, I guess, use this to push us forward a little bit, is that okay this this is obviously skipping a lot of riots in 2011 but one of the big things about the covid restrictions that i don't think people

understand has been how bad it's been affecting american workers and the extent to which you know because one of the things about the household registration system is like as best i can tell this is this is the way a lot of like a lot of resources in terms of like, here's how you're getting food having being distributed. And if, you know, if you're in a place that's not weird, house of registration is,

it's like, well, okay, the state's not giving you your food. How are you going to deal with this stuff? And yeah, they're not telling you that, that,

that, that, that's been a big thing that like, I don't know. I, but a lot of this has been me being upset with the media coverage of these protests because like people will just say covid zero and then not explain what the actual consequences of this are so yeah i was wondering if we could talk about sort of specifically how how the lockdown, especially as lockdowns have gone on, have been affecting

migrant workers and then how that's... Yeah, okay. We'll start there before I jump into a question with 700 parts. I mean, I do think it's really important to understand why people are opposed to zero COVID. And sometimes for people outside of China, they think back to the spring of 2020 when in the United States, we had libertarians with guns when you know in the united states we had like libertarians with guns being like in the lockdown like we want our freedom like it is not that for all sorts of reasons um and and the way to get at why it's different is to understand some of the the classed differences that zero covet has has entailed and i should just say it's been pretty terrible for everybody including rich people and like you people, and we can feel some

sympathy for them too. But it's had some particularly nefarious consequences for migrant workers. This became really clear in the Shanghai lockdown. It's also worth noting that there are 300 million migrant workers in China, so this is not like a routing error

or anything. This is like half the population of Europe. Like that's how many people we're talking about here. It's absurd. It's almost an America-sized population of people who are not living where their household registration is. there is a lockdown and you're a migrant worker, you, you kind of don't exist from the states or you might exist, but like you might also be overlooked from the perspective of the state. So one very concrete way that this, um, screwed people over was in these hard lockdowns, you're not allowed out of your house and you're dependent on the neighborhood committee, which is,

which is connected to the state. It's kind of the lowest level of the state. You were dependent on the neighborhood committee which is which is connected to the state it's kind of the lowest level of the state you're dependent on them for the delivery of everything that you need to survive right critically food uh and medicine yeah i want to back up and say something about this this is something this is something very very different than the american lockdowns which is like well okay it it depends on a like it depends on a on onby-province basis. I know my family was in Inner Mongolia. In Inner Mongolia, the lockdown isn't like you don't go to work. The lockdown is you cannot leave your house.

I think their lockdown, their first one was one person in their house once a week can leave to go get groceries. But it's not like, like it's it's you like you physically cannot leave you will be if you attempt to leave you will be prevented from doing so and this means that you don't really have an independent way of like getting food or like going shopping or that's right yeah like getting i don't know like toilet paper like yeah no toilet i mean that resonates with uh with amer don't know, like toilet paper. Yeah, no, toilet paper. I mean, that resonates with Americans and our toilet paper shortage of 2020. But I mean, in some cases, like people would actually just be literally chained into their apartments, right? So like this is not whatever people in the U.S. or even in parts of Western Europe, you know, where the lockdowns were a little bit more intensely policed. Like it is not that.

It is a qualitatively different thing. And so, yeah, you're completely dependent on the state. So therefore, it's really, really important that the state know that you are there and that the state feels itself to be tasked with your survival. And if you're a migrant worker, so one of the very concrete ways that this affected migrant workers is that a lot of them live in informal housing, even in the biggest cities, even in places like Shanghai and Beijing, because those are the only places that they can live. As far as the state's concerned, like that informal housing might not

exist. There are very, very frequently more people living in those dwellings than are sort of legally accounted for. So, you know, like there's 10 people living in an apartment that's supposed to be for, for, you know, a family of three. living in an apartment that's supposed to be for, for, you know, a family of three. And so they deliver three people's worth of food, but there's actually 10 people living there. That's a subsistence crisis,

right? You know, the medical stuff is just, it's like astonishing and very harrowing. I mean, you know, just people just dying in their apartment because like they can't get insulin or,

or all kinds of other things. I know, I know people whose family died because they had cancer and they couldn't get treatment for it because yeah yeah like yeah it's a disaster yeah so so that's that's the situation that's one of the problems with them for the migrant workers and then in the very intense lockdowns at least in shanghai back in in the spring of this year um you know they also can't leave. So one option would be like,

okay, will you go back to the place where you do have your household registration, back in the village and you have a piece of land and you can survive? They couldn't leave, right? There's no transportation. And so they were trapped in this situation where they couldn't work.

The government wasn't delivering them food and they couldn't go to some other place where they could get food and so you know there's been a lot of attention to these recent protests which are extremely important and qualitatively different but even back in in april 2020 we saw food riots like in shanghai a group of group of migrant workers just like requisitions uh like a truck full of cabbage you know and just started like tossing cabbages to people on the street because people were like literally starving. So, I mean, yeah, so it's a real problem for the migrant workers. And on that note, this has been It Could Happen Here.

Join us tomorrow for part two of this episode, where we'll be talking more about lockdown, similar problems with migrant workers, and this all going. 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. 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. network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose.

This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things

that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, you look 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, 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. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the podcast that you're listening to right now. It's your host, Christopher Long, and we are back with part two of our interview with Eli Friedman about the recent protests in China. I want to go back and talk about lying flat and that whole kind of, I don't know, movement discourse that was happening last year, because it seems like the the kind of i don't know if nihilism is the right word but this kind of like collective understanding that the whole sort of bargain of the chinese

social system of you know and this was to some extent extended to everyone right like the the bargain of the chinese social system of everyone keep your head down we'll get rich together it suddenly became clear that this just wasn't going to happen and you know i mean i i think like in in some sense it's possible to sort of like you know you can you can put on your sort of like hard materialist hat and you can like look at like the number of hammers banging out and you can just look at the sort of chinese gdp graph of the last decade and be like okay well so eventually like when it when it when it hit like two percent eventually we were going to have protests but yeah i i guess i guess i i wanted to talk a bit about like yeah what lying

flat was we covered this on the show a long time ago when it was happening but and then also sort of how that attitude shift was important or wasn't important i don't know maybe it wasn't i think it was but yeah i i think it's very important, right? So yeah, you can't just be a crude materialist and like mechanically read social protest off of some chart of, you know, falling profitability or something like that. But it is a cultural expression of real fundamental changes in the organization of the Chinese economy. You know, we already talked about how the post-89 generation was like you go to college and like you come out and you

know you'll you'll be middle class right on average and that's just not at all the case anymore and young people in china and and older people middle-aged people you know who are who have children who are going through the system um feel immense pressure in like immense competition in all spheres of life, beginning from a young age in elementary school, all the way up through high school, through the super competitive and intense university admissions process. And then after graduating university and getting a job and then getting a job that can, you know, you can earn enough money to be able to afford an apartment. And so here we have to understand, you know, the cost of housing and all of the other costs associated with social reproduction. So like the cost of care workers, right? If middle-class people in places like Shanghai

and Beijing expect to have domestic workers, you know, looking after their children, they expect to be able to hire tutors who can, you know, who can tutor their children in English or in math. And so just people feel under unbelievable pressure. And this is in a situation that part of the reason that the pressure is really ramped up is that there are fewer good paying jobs. You know, youth unemployment now in china is is around 20 percent um and so one of the responses to that is just forget about it

or you know we're gonna lie flat uh we're gonna we're gonna reject all of this there's different expressions and i don't actually the other the sort of like you know sociologist in me is like well we don't actually have numbers to know how many people are lying flat. And like, that is true. Like maybe most people are still just going to work and, you know, doing their job, but there's enough, you know, stories. And certainly in terms of cultural resonance of people just doing the bare minimum at work or working for short periods of time, earning just enough money to survive and not worrying about meeting those kinds of social expectations around buying a car, buying an apartment, getting married, having kids because people just see it as kind of hopeless. And so I think that's a really important backdrop because we have to understand at some level that these protests are about a sense of hopelessness, right?

of hopelessness, right? Be it economic opportunities, be it the political system where Xi Jinping is going to reign as long as he wants, or be it zero COVID where, you know, at any given moment, you're going to be locked inside your apartment and you're not going to be able to see your friends or do anything. So, um, yeah, so I think it's very relevant. Yeah. And, and I, I wanted to, I guess also to, is this something I talked about on this podcast a lot, but I need to like, I want you to like drill into people's heads, like just the sheer amount that people in China are working, just like,

like the, the, the number of hours, the number of days a week, the, the amount of effort that is being put in is like, it is, it is,

it is a level of raw surplus value extraction that like, like, like most places in the world haven't seen in half a century. Or even longer than that who don't really ever get like talked about because they're not tech workers or they're not people who have sort of like a platform chinese society yeah it's it's extremely normalized you know i mean like the 996 thing which which first of all it is maybe worth mentioning that china legally has a 40-hour work week you're only allowed to work 36 hours of overtime a month right so probably you know not more than 49 or 50 hours a week that's that's like the legal yeah the legal standard nobody even remotely pretends like that is a thing in any industry there's legal

debates about like whether it applies to professional white collar, you know, salaried workers or not. But, you know, when the 996 thing came out and there was a pretty cool, I think, movement based mostly online among tech workers, it was great. It was very inspiring. And also every single blue collar worker in China was like, we've been waiting for nine to six for decades, you know? And so, so it is, it is very normal across these, these different kinds of, of stratum for sure. One of the cool things about nine to six is people were, were,

were revolting against it and saying like, is an unacceptable way to live and again it comes back to this whole thing of like all of these feelings of you know these enhanced pressures right where it's just like how do i live in this city how do i find like decent housing like if you know if i want to have like a social life which is the thing that some people in their 20s want to have you know like how do i do? It's impossible under those circumstances. So so again, like you can't read these movements mechanically off of these these these structural changes. But like that is a thing that has been happening that is unresolved. the, the blank paper protesters, the kind of the more elite students and stuff, they haven't specifically articulated, um, their grievances as labor demands. Um, but it's, it's at least an important backdrop to what's happening today.

Yeah. And I think it's, I remember like, how I think, I think this was like mid 2019. I'm trying to remember when I, when I think this was like mid-2019. I'm trying to remember when I saw this specific video. But there was a video from the Hong Kong protests that was like, in some ways, it was like literally one of these classic like sort of Twitter things, but like, what do you want out? What do you want to do after the revolution? And it was like, most of it was like, I want to start a bakery. Like, I want to work in a library.

And it strikes me that there's these things that get subsumed under, you know, when when when you see a pro-democracy movement. Right. When when you see, you know, like the sort of well, I guess there's something interesting to hear about the like like day one of the protest there were a lot of videos that were talking about iran and that kind of seemed to like like the very early videos were about sort of solidarity with the protest in a room g and then like it was like it was like specifically tying that to iran and then to sort of pro-democracy demands and then later on you get the sort of like uh like the the shanghai like down with the party down with xi jinping like we want democracy and free speech stuff but it strikes me that like a lot of the times when you see people making those demands it's because they think that like

you know it's like there's a whole set of of like things that they like things that they believe about the future and about what will happen in the future that are like not articulated in the demands. But if you talk about if you talk about them, like if you talk to people about what they think is going to happen after that, there's this whole sort of like opening up of social stuff that they think will be like the necessary results of like the end of the one party state. And it's like, you know, I don't want him like I don't know. I had this debate a lot with like like there's a specific kind of like chinese international student you get in the u.s who like comes to the u.s and is like immediately like enormously enamored with the u.s it's it's sort of the

mirror image of how we we have a bunch of people who are like incredibly enamored with the chinese state and then you get people who come here and are like incredibly enamored the american state and it's like well yeah okay the this politician will see you and they will talk to you however comma in about two years they will be voting to throw you in prison so like you know but like obviously like both people in china understand the chinese system sucks and that the promises that people like in the u.s believe about it are fake and then people in the u.s understand that you can get a multi-party democracy and things can still be absolutely shit but yeah yeah you know it strikes me that there's a lot of stuff sort of embedded in in in these demands that are like not really explicitly articulated

until later and then that's also i guess been a hard part about these protests is that like i don't know it's hard to get information out you can get short interviews with people mostly what you're getting are like 30 seconds of footage of people yelling at a cop. these cities all over the country, dozens of universities, protests among, you know, working class migrants, like middle class people in Shanghai, like, you know, all across the country, like that suggests that people have a variety of sets of grievances, and they're kind of funneling them through this, this meta narrative around ending the lockdown, which is not to diminish the significance of the actual lockdowns, which causing real human suffering but there's definitely a lot going on and you know one of the big ones is what's happening in xinjiang like it's we still don't really know how uyghurs are feeling about all of

this the fact that like all of the all the protests in the big eastern cities are about commemorating what happened in Urmchi in a fire that killed mostly, if not exclusively, Uyghurs. That deserves to be talked about. We don't really know how the Han people on the streets in the eastern cities, if they're thinking about this backdrop of massive repression, surveillance, and mass internment of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities. But that's another thing. And I think the same thing goes for the treatment of migrant workers in Foxconn and these other blue collar workers who are put into the closed loop. Like, to what extent are urban Han people still kind of willing to go along with sacrificing migrant workers and treating them as second class citizens? Or is there a possibility of developing some real sense of solidarity

with ending not just the closed loop, but ending, you know, like hukou based discrimination, ending the camps in Xinjiang? You know, I mean, you can kind of spin out from there if you are interested in thinking about what it would mean to democratize China in a robust sense of the word. I think points that I never think about these protests that are complicated, right, which is that like they are cross class in a lot of ways. But I don't know. It seems to me like the way they're manifesting is very much down class lines. seems to me like the way they're manifesting is very much down class lines like okay I genuinely

don't understand what's going on in Guangzhou that like every single video I see out of Guangzhou is like 70 people throwing bottles at a cop and like every video I see out of like Shanghai is like six people holding a piece of paper but it very much seems like you know like when the cops are getting to

like these sort of like these working class neighborhoods these neighborhoods neighborhoods that are informal housing, these neighborhoods that are full of migrant workers, there are these really, really intense conflicts with the police in ways that aren't happening. Well, I mean, okay, that kind of stuff seems to be happening in Urumqi, and I think it's happening there partially because this is like, well, okay, I don't know off the top of my head whether it's more militarized than tibet but like one of the most militarized like one of the most heavily policed places in china and then also people are just really like the the immediate and palpable anger seems to be the highest there because you know i mean like like it you're gonna be more pissed off when it's people in your city or like you know you you maybe were like three blocks away from this fire yeah as it like kills these people but yeah

one of one piece about about urmchi is that they've been in some form of lockdown for like 100 days yeah you know yeah so that's not and and part of that has to do with the fact that it is this colonial setting where they feel like they can do things to people that they can't do in Beijing and Shanghai. Like people in Shanghai are not going to do that, right? It's just like it's inconceivable. There's obviously a lot of Han people and Erntschi is actually a majority Han city. Yeah, I think it's like 70% Han now. Yeah.

I think. Yeah. That sounds right to me. And Xinjiang is increasingly Han han as well although i believe uyghurs still constitute a plurality so you know there's just like each the the lockdowns kind of filter down to these different localities and into different communities with their different social and class compositions in different kinds of ways and have different kinds of effects right so you can put people in lockdown in Xinjiang for 100 days,

and they're going to be really pissed when they get out. In the case of Guangzhou, you know, this was also part of the sequence that I think has been written out of the official narrative. It wasn't just Foxconn. You had the initial Foxconn escape in late October, early November, and then you had these pretty intense riots that happened in Guangzhou. but those were in these urban villages, so-called urban villages, largely informal housing, very densely populated that are overwhelmingly migrant workers. And in this case, it was mostly people from Hubei, um, which is, which is where Wuhan is. And, um, and so, you

know, just those migrant communities were put into lockdown in Guangzhou. So if you were over in Tianhe District, which is the newer, fancier part of Guangzhou with lots of high-rises, those places were not under lockdown. Jesus! They put the migrant communities, and I saw some really not nice stuff. People just being like, oh yeah, the local Guangzhou people on the other side of the river are just like going about their life and they're okay with what's happening to the migrants. And the migrants were, as is the case in some of these earlier lockdowns, actually facing real subsistence crisis. Like they didn't have enough food to eat and they couldn't leave to try to get food. have enough food to eat and they couldn't leave to try to get food um so that's why you saw these super intense riots and that's why you see them confronting the police and you know screaming at

them throwing things at them you see tear gas uh all these things yeah i think i think that's the only place i've seen tear gas so far like maybe maybe in a room sheet i'm not i there may have been a video i don't i don't remember specifically about a room but definitely Guangzhou is the only place I've seen that level of repression I mean you know the Zhengzhou Foxconn was probably the most violent in the largest scale but you know that was

a little bit different Guangzhou it's kind of like smaller streets they're fighting you know street by street so they have a different experience of it people in Shanghai again not to minimize their demands. And I think it's, it's important for people to find points of commonality, um, uh, against this policy. Um, but it's, you know, it's not like that if, if you're, if you're a middle-class person, uh, Han person, uh, in Shanghai, which is again, not to minimize the very real difficulties that those folks

have been facing as well. Something this kind of, you know, I think there's like another group of people who we should probably talk about a little bit, which is like this sort of downwardly mobile class of business owners who've been kind of just getting annihilated by the lockdowns. And that happened in the US too, although the chinese version of it seems they're like less marginally less absolutely psychotic like they haven't tried they haven't tried to like kidnap a governor yet like they're not like they're not as fascist as their american counterparts fewer guns for sure yeah but it's it's it seems it seems like there's a kind of interesting

i don't know there's there's a class dynamic that kind of reminds me of occupy in that you have this sort of like kind of tenuous alliance between like some some parts of the working class these elite students and like this downwardly mobile middle class but it strikes me that you know i mean this is the the sort of defining thing about occupying i think like the defining thing about the whole sort of 2011 2013 wave of protests was that like it was it was really really easy to get people together into a physical space and when when you were in that single physical space it was like you know it's not like class disappeared, but it was a way in which classes were mixing, and you could form this new identity based around what you're doing in this place. And it doesn't really seem like that's possible here.

It really seems like, I don't know, there's these huge... This is a protest that is happening in a lot of different places at the same time, but it's like, it doesn't. They're segmented. Yeah, they're segmented. They don't really have a sort of like cohesive social identity that in a way that you could get out of a bunch of people being in the same place. Yeah, no, I think that's right. I mean, they're spatially segmented. Yeah, no, I think that's right.

I mean, they're spatially segmented. Someone pointed out on Twitter, I can't even remember who, but they're drawing comparisons to the 1989 protests and the physical arrangements where people were living. And so particularly given the online censorship, that's been really important. So you have these worker dormitories and Foxconn. You can organize by actually talking to people or student dormitories, right?

And then you have much smaller protests among the middle class people who are able to circulate things online. And so the consequence of that is they are pretty segmented. And I think everyone has their own grievance with zero COVID. But those grievances are actually pretty different, right? So the Foxconn workers don't like the closed loop management system where, you know, where they can't leave or where they're subjected to unsafe conditions, et cetera. You know, the, the, the petty bourgeoisie, like they don't like the fact that there's no foot traffic, you know, coming into their shops. Right. And I don't know if you saw the video of the guy,

like kicking down the wall with a soup ladle. Yeah. Yeah. I was thinking about that specifically. Yeah. I mean, it was, it was very theatrical and dramatic and a great video. You know, in terms of like the class position, yeah, you can see how it can kind of capsize into fash. Yeah. Pretty quickly. And then like the students, you know,

they want to be able to live normal student lives and like leave their dormitories. And that's a thing that I think students anywhere can associate with. So it's like's like yeah they're all against the zero covid policy but then it's kind of like what are their politics after that and i think if if this is going to open up um you know some kind of more expansive political vision like it's going to be hard to maintain that like that unity right the students are already talking about like you know censorship freedom of speech those things which i support I think are very good. You're probably not going

to get the petty bourgeoisie to like risk arrest and violence with the cops, you know, over like holding up a blank white piece of paper, you know, and then the migrant workers have another whole set of things, you know, around like basic like health infrastructure, like, you know, can they get access to decent healthcare in the places where they they're where they're living and that's not going to resonate to the same extent with the students so you know yeah i the the one i think about a lot was like there's a video going around of this guy being like i don't care about politics i just want to go to the movies and i was like this is the most american person in china like this is the one person that i'm like okay like you know and like there is that

kind of sort of like i just i just want to live my normal life like sure thing that's happening and then that i think is a kind of recognizable american impulse but then you have the stuff that's like did you see did you see those pictures that were going around of like the the the hospitals they were putting migrant workers in were just like the entire bathroom floor is just like covered in poop and like no oh god it's awful yeah it's like the whole whole bathroom floors are just flooded there's like just like the the the they that you can't flush toilet paper down it so there's just these like mountains of toilet paper and i think like oh god yeah it's awful like the difference between the people whose things are like i want to go to the movies and the people whose demand is like please stop locking me in this like like people like you know that was i

guess i guess the other sort of lost thing that seemed to be pretty big in chinese social media that i don't that wasn't talked about much here was the the uh there was this bus that capsized that killed like 27 people who were being taken like to a facility specifically to hold like you know this is like one of these sort of like i i don't i don't even really want to dignify them by calling them hospitals because they're like yeah like just a complete disaster um but where people were being held like held because they had quarantine centers yeah yeah and i don't know it seems like there's a really big sort of like you know i mean i guess it's like like the the the protests are reflecting

all of all of the sort of like existing classifieds in chinese society in ways that i think are pretty obvious if you look at it which i guess in some sense like this this does strike me as the most gentleman-esque thing but look the most gentleman-esque thing about it is the way that the media has been like specifically covering the grievances of exactly like two groups of people which is like the students and like the cheap bourgeois and then all of the labor stuff has just vanish after about day two yeah yeah yeah for sure um and i i mean i don't have much optimism that that the coverage will change um but you know there there is an experience um that middle class people i think have had pretty acutely going back at least to the shanghai lockdown of

this realization that there actually are no limits on state power. Yeah. Right. And that to them was kind of like a shock, you know, they're like, Oh, like I thought I was just going to be able to go about my life. Like as long as I didn't, you know, demand to be able to vote for the president, like I can have a job, I can, um, you know, go eat hot pot or, you know, get whatever kind of delicious food I want living in these big cities. I can travel internationally.

You know, all of these things are, you know, more or less okay. There's been lots of, you know, there's lots of other people in Chinese society for whom that's never been the experience, right? Most importantly, the minorities and the workers and the migrant workers who have always, you know, experienced that raw and unchecked power of the state. And so, you know, does this have the capacity to kind of bring them together? You know, it's going to be extremely difficult to do, especially because there aren't like spaces for political organizing and working through these differences in a constructive way. Yeah, I mean, I will say the one thing that kind of, that strikes me as something that like is just different about this cycle.

Is it like, I don't know. I don't like, I don't think I've ever seen in my lifetime outside of like really tiny Maoist sex, like people openly calling for the downfall of the government, like just in, in a kind of like large systemic way.

And like, it, it, it seems like, I don't know, maybe the censors will sort of get control back, but it really seems like there's been this kind of floodgate that's opened where suddenly like there was,

there was this brief moment where like it suddenly became possible to talk about things where, you know, know like like two months ago it was like one guy laid a sign on a bridge and like this was this was like the biggest thing that had ever happened in chinese society whatever etc etc and then suddenly like you know you just have people on the streets of shanghai like just chanting stuff that wasn't even on that banner and like yeah i don't know like it it it really seems like like it's not, it really seems like, like, it's, it's not like they've actually like fully lost control of the country or

anything. Like they're not even close to that, but it's, it's like the, the, the sort of like the, the sort of regime of terror and fear that had been in place to keep people from doing this kind of stuff has fallen off a little bit.

Yeah. I mean, I, I'd be very curious to know what the vibe is like in china and obviously i have not been there for a while um but like and this is wildly speculative and if you have any chinese uh listeners who want to correct me i would be glad to to have some more information about this but my feeling from afar is that you know like xi jinping is just like you you can't you can't say anything about him and that even in like private spaces you know people just like don't feel like the

ability to kind of imagine something different and like that has been changed like i don't think we're gonna see a lot more people on the streets chanting down with xi jinping down with the communist party like that's you know that's a risky it's a risky thing to do. But I do think that like now at least people know that there's other, other people in the country that are thinking the same things that they're thinking. And then at least within, you know, like, you know, face-to-face interactions that people might be a little bit more willing to kind of say like, oh, like these protests happened. That was pretty crazy. Like, let's talk about that. Um, and so, so, so that to me is optimistic. Um,

and I do hope that more of this organizing can take place, you know, offline because I think that's the only safe way to do it. Um, so, so yeah, I, I, I think something has changed significantly and you see it here, you know, I mean, I've been teaching Chinese students for 10 years. There's no question that people are interested in talking about things now in a more open way than was the case a couple of years ago. And like here at Cornell, we had we had a little vigil for for him as well. And people were chanting, you know, down xi jinping um which is kind of like okay you're you know you're in ithaca new york like it's not dangerous well yeah i think students

feel it to be dangerous and definitely a month or two ago would have felt it to be quite dangerous so yeah and i guess we probably shouldn't like completely downplay the fact that like the ccp has international networks in a way that's for sure like the way it tends to get covered in the press is very sort of like this kind of like right-wing fear-mongering but it's like no these people do exist and like yeah like it is possible for you to like tweet something while you're in the u.s and then like someone in china finds out about it and things start to go very badly for you very quickly and that's for for sure. Like that's a real danger. Yeah.

And regardless of how many spies there are, how pervasive they are, like it is a real experience, a real fear that Chinese students here have, right? They don't feel comfortable, you know, they might feel more comfortable speaking openly here than they do actually within China, but they still don't feel totally free.

And that is a very widespread sentiment. speaking openly here than they do actually within China, but they still don't feel totally free. And, and that is a very widespread sentiment, I guess sort of in closing. I don't know my, I don't think anyone can really have much of an analysis. That's better than them guessing about what's going to happen next, because this already was something that like two weeks ago, like if you'd ask anyone, like anyone in China or outside of China who wasn't like, I don't know, like in the Falun Gong or something, whether they were suddenly going to be large still like protested China, everyone would have been like, are you nuts?

Yeah. But yeah, I'm wondering how what you think is going to happen next. I don't know. What you think is going to happen next? I don't know. My sort of tentative read of it was like, it seems like, I don't know, it seems to me that for a very, very long time, the Chinese political system was specifically set up to stop this. Like this was the exact thing. It was designed to make sure there would never be another sort of like, like there would never be a large – well, we don't know how long this is going to go on, right? But there was never supposed to be another street movement that was like coordinated between cities that was large and that had real political demands.

And I don't know. Maybe I could be the most wrong I've ever been, but I cannot imagine this specific round of protests really challenging the government at all. Like, I don't know. Something would have to, like, I don't know, like aliens would think they can do it. But the frequency at which these kinds of things break out has been increasing steadily for the past probably 20 or 30 years. I mean, the 90s are sort of a low point for this stuff. But, you know, like if you're in a country like Ecuador, right, you've seen like two pretty large scale like mass street movements in like three years right and you know it seems to be sort of broadly the the there's there's been this sort of like the the the decaying economic conditions have combined with this like the general decaying ability of the state to prevent like a subsequent movement from from unfolding and so i don't know like i i i

my sense is that this one's not going to do anything but we might see another one of these in like three years or something yeah i don't think we're gonna see this movement in the in the weeks and months to come to like cohere into this like massive politically potent force that has the capacity to either continue to exert demands on the central state or threaten state power like i don't think that that's gonna happen um i do think i think i think the first thing is to acknowledge and to chalk up the victories that have already been um won yeah so foxconn foxconn workers got paid you know they went out they rioted ten thousand dollars something like that foxconn's like here's ten thousand yuan for you to leave not even for you to do your job right so like and those were workers

that came in after the other workers escaped so they had been there in quarantine for like a couple days rioted got ten thousand yuan which is like almost fifteen hundred us dollars like they so they did really well um and but i think more broadly you know around the zero covid the government has already made changes they will never acknowledge we're doing this because yeah people protested like that's not how they operate but um you know they said okay we're actually going to get more serious about vaccinating people which is what they need to do in order to have sort of an exit strategy. There've been some, some signals, low key ones about further loosening. I mean, I think that there's a real question about how they go about doing this because if they just

let it rip tomorrow, like actually hundreds of thousands of people will die. Yeah. So like, I think that what they need to do is they need to vaccinate people and they need to build a real public health infrastructure that includes migrant workers. But you know, that's, we'll see if that happens. So, so I think that those are already victories like which,

which we should, which, you know, we should take account of. And I think moving forward, the ability to repress like the, the, the street demonstrations should not be under underestimated.

Like the state has immense resources at its capacity. I don't think that we're going to continue to see people chanting, you know, down with the Communist Party in the streets regularly. So I think that they'll be able to at least push that down a little bit. And maybe with some concessions, people will be satisfied. You know, the guy who just wants to be able to go to the movie, like next year at this time, there's a good chance he will just be able to go to the movies.

To kind of continue with my labor centric perspective, though, I think it's going to be harder for for workers. I think it's going to be harder for them to repress that as long as the closed loop management systems are in effect and lockdowns are happening. I mean, it just puts insane demands on these workers. And there were revolts against it when it first happened in Shanghai back in April. And I think that those will continue to exist. But I think we'll probably see this kind of reversion to what's existed for the last couple of decades, which is lots of, you know, small scale, somewhat manageable and localized protests.

you know, small scale, somewhat manageable and localized protests. The question is like, does this kind of open up the possibility of politicization, which we have not really seen since 1989 in a robust way, at least. And so does this kind of open up some of those possibilities? So those local protests can begin to speak to each other with some sort of common language and cohere some kind of political force that's harder for the state to tame. We'll see. Yeah. And I guess the other sort of X factor here is like, can the CCP get the growth rate above like 5%? No, but yeah.

I don't know how they do it like that i don't know like i i short of like short of like actually just letting all of the sort of like like all all of the sort of like slack and excess capacity just get like you know just just like intentionally tanking the entire economy and just like running all of these sort of unprofitable businesses into the ground like yeah i don't see how they do that and that does seem to me like you know to be a kind of like the the the sort of like looming horizon over i mean this and this is really true of everyone like the the sort of looming horizon over like every government in the world has been that the growth rate has been collapsing for like the last 40

years and yeah china was you know the chinese economy was like the last thing that was really driving it and that's like not really true anymore it's it's a disaster i mean and then even even without covid it was sort of like not going great i mean it wasn't like you know i mean it hadn't reached like it hadn't like reached like you know I mean, it hadn't reached like it hadn't like reached like, you know, like recession or it hadn't really reached like sort of post industrialized country levels of like, here's your 2% growth every year. Be happy with it. But like, I don't know. Yeah. But, but the growth, I mean, this is maybe like another whole conversation, but like the growth has become less effective right

yeah yeah it's this like investment-led growth it's there there's massive growth in debt and they can you know build another bridge build another airport build i mean they're not building the apartment blocks as much anymore but they do that they can prop up the growth a little bit right but like the the fundamental problem that they've been unable to address is like increasing domestic consumption you're having a more equitable model of growth and the reason that they can't do that is fundamentally a political problem like they can't figure out a way to give working class people more money and to give them some social protections um and like until they resolve that political problem, like I just don't see them being

able to deal with, with that economic problem. So that means you are going to continue to have this kind of ongoing forms of stagnation. Zero COVID really hurts it a lot more. Of course, the geopolitical conflict with the U S and, and Biden, you know, trying to economically kneecap them like that doesn't help. And then the demographics of you know like all of these things are making making their lives much more difficult and so one way to interpret what's happened um under under zero covid is the expansion of a massive and terrifying surveillance state

that will allow them to weather whatever political storms are coming in the future yeah and i guess i don't know. We'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll see. We'll see whether that works for them. I am somewhat skeptical in that. Like, I don't know, like good luck. I actually terrible luck. I hope it goes badly for them. The worst of luck. Yeah. Yeah. So Eli, thank you so much for coming on the show. Yeah. It's been a pleasure. Yeah been a pleasure yeah and okay where can people find you and find the stuff that you do well I'm on

Twitter as long as it's still there Eli D Friedman and yeah I'm on the internet that's the main place. If you're in Ithaca, come on by.

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