It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 68

Episode Date: January 28, 2023

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It's Lunar New Year's. Yay. Happy New Year's. It's the New Year's special. It's me, Mia. I've got Shireen with me. Yeah. How are you doing? I guess it's not the new year yet when we're recording it, but i've got shereen with me yeah how are you doing i guess i guess it's i guess it's not the new year yet while we're recording it but it will be by the time you hear this that counts that counts yeah um i i'm good i'm i got a cat recently and i called her bunny and then i learned later that this year is the year of the rabbit. So I feel really happy about that. I feel really pumped for this year. Yeah, exactly.

So I'm good. I'm good. That's an amazing, having new cat is an amazing way to start any year. Yes, yes, I agree. This is very exciting. Do you know what else is very exciting?

Transitions. They pay me to do this. Yes. For some reason. All right. This year, we're going to talk about Chinese restaurant syndrome and the whole sort of anti-MSG craze. Yes. So.

That's always been so big. I don't know. I grew up in like a, I don't know, a diverse area in San Diego, but we would always go to Pho like regularly. And the no MSG was like all over the menu and everything. It's like this thing that, I mean, every restaurant I went to basically, it was just like, come to us. There's no MSG. So I'm really curious how it started because growing up, I was like, okay,

MSG is bad, I guess. You know what I mean? Yeah. I feel like it wasn't, it wasn't really, it wasn't as intense where I was growing up but that was like i don't know it was it was a very white suburb but and people people were still freaked out about msg but it wasn't but like the the the asian restaurants didn't like talk about it ever i don't know but it was still it was still very sort of like like i remember i would go to like

eat dinner with like white families and they'd be talking about msg and i was like what yeah it was a hot topic for a good amount of time. Yeah. Having now talked about MSG for a bit, we should, we should ask like, what, what is MSG?

Yes. And the answer. Okay. So MSG stands for monosodium glutamate, which is, it's just a salt. Basically it's salt with like glutamate in it. It has a bunch of umami in it.

I'm going to read this thing from Kenji from Serious Eats because every single article that starts about this has this exact paragraph in it. So I'm just going to read it instead of trying to rewrite this paragraph that I've once written. I respect that. MSG is a sodium salt of glutamic acid and A amino acid.

It was first isolated in 1908 by Japanese biochemist Kikue Ikeda who was trying to discover what exactly gave dashi, the Japanese flavored broth with komba, Japanese giant sea kelp, its strong, savory character. Turns out that komba is packed with glutamic acid. It was Ikeda who coined the term umami, which roughly translates as savory, to describe the glutamic acid and other similar amino acids. Until that point, scientists had only discovered the other four flavors sensed by the tongue and the soft palate, salty, sweet, sour, and bitter. By 1909, pure crystallite MSG extracted from the abundant kelp in the sea around Japan

was being sold under the brand name Ajinomoto, roughly, Element of Flavor. The company exists to this day. Now, keep that in mind, that's going to be important to the last part of the story. But, you know, in the meantime, you know, around 1908, once this is discovered, it turns into this sort of enormous industry. Here's from a pretty good men's health article about it. By the 1940s, a number of American companies were producing MSG domestically for the consumer, the most famous being Accent.

There's like, it's spelled Accent, but it's spelled A-C-apostrophe-C-E-N-T. A-C-apostrophe-C-E-N-T. That's not... No, you lost me. Accent. Yeah. Whichent. Yeah.

Which was out. It's, it's, I advertising is a bleak place. Oh yeah. That's, that's a different episode. I think maybe it's partially.

Yes. Also partially this episode, but yeah, the most famous one being accent, which was advertised as pure monosodium glutamate that quote makes food flavors sing various food magazines and community cookbooks featured the additive as an ingredient in the likes of fried chicken wings and barbecue sauce recipes. By 1969, 58 million pounds of MSG were being produced in the U.S. per year, says food

historian Ian Mosby, Ph.D., for an entire generation. The ingredient was presented in a dizzying array of food products. Breakfast cereals, TV dinners, frozen vegetables, baby food, and soup. Produced by beloved brands such as Campbell's and Swanson, which today offer foods, products free of MSG additives. And, okay, if you think about this for a second, it's actually really weird that MSG is thought of as a Chinese thing. Because, like, okay, MSG,g all told has only been around for like 100 years right yeah it's heavily used in the u.s for like 30 or 40 years like it's not in it's not really in china for that much longer if it is in the u.s and it's used in just like a bunch of

american food how did that start do we know how that association started and continued yeah we'll we'll get it mostly has to do with like it has to do with restaurants and it specifically has to do with the part that we're getting to about this letter which is weird i will say like there are a lot of chinese families that like just use msg for like their cooking my house never did it because we're lazy and most of our cooking involves like as few ingredients and prep as possible so we just like i think it's also really in uh vietnamese food i feel like uses it a lot too that's that was my first association with it so i just associate i mean because i'm i was i don't know 14 i just said okay this is vietnamese uh but that's really interesting to just know like well it's really japanese too like yeah i mean it's asian it's yeah yeah yeah i don't know but

like it is just it is just it's just interesting like the like people in the u.s were just like i don't know it's like in it was in everything people in the u.s were also just using it to cook food this is also a thing that like people in China use a lot too. So it's not that like Chinese people don't do it. It's just that like everybody, like the moment everyone got it, they were like, oh my God, this makes our food taste better. We should use more of it. Of course. I mean, I'm assuming once it got demonized, it was like, oh, this is a Chinese thing,

but I don't know for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I will be patient. Yeah. So this is, this is in fact the next thing so nobody really cared about it until 1968 rolled around wow so for those 60 years msg was like yeah i won't just use it nobody yeah yeah um i'm forgetting where i'm gonna read apart

from this journal article and i've forgotten to put in what journal it's from because I'm a hack and a fraud. I think it's the journal Natural Health. 60% sure about that? That sounds right to me. Yeah, sure. It's from some journal. Some doctors wrote it. Quote,

England Journal of Medicine asking the assistance of the journal's readership in identifying the source of the phenomenon that Dr. Guo labeled the Chinese Restaurant Syndrome, CRS, numbness of his back and neck palpitations, and general weakness after he consumed meals in Chinese restaurants. Dr. Guo hypothesized that the source of his syndrome might be a reaction to the soy sauce, the cooking wine, the high sodium content of the food, or to the flavor-enhancing monosodium glutamate, MSG. Within two months, the journal received a flurry of letters from readers who had noticed a similar phenomenon after eating restaurant-prepared Chinese food. So this is the start of this whole thing. And there's one thing i need to point out right away that is in almost every single article about this that is wrong which is that this this this article says that he's talking about chinese food which is true but very specifically and this and this is this is

going to be very important in about 10 minutes well Well, I don't know. It's going to be important soon, which is he specifically has a thing about how this is about northern Chinese food. Hmm. And, you know, this is something that is something that everyone everyone sort of misses. The other thing that's interesting about this is that, you know, he he he says it could be MSG, but, you know, he's treating MSG exactly like all of the rest of the other stuff that's in the, that's in the food, right? He lists soy sauce. He lists cooking wine. Maybe he's like, okay, maybe there's too much salt, right? Like he's not really doing an MSG thing, but everyone who reads this immediately focuses on the MSG. Okay. So before I started researching this, I had heard that this whole letter was actually fake and was actually a prank and you know this is this is a thing that's like it's kind of like okay so the the

story behind this was that it was supposed to have been a prank by a white guy named dr steel who made it up as a joke and this is a sort of like a folk like okay so this story is not true the story i'm about to say is not true it turns out this letter is actually real but there was there was basically a a story that went around that it was this guy named dr steel who had made it up as a way to get published in a journal for like a bet because like dr steel like claimed responsibility for it and that got out to researchers but it turns yeah and so for a bit everyone was like oh my god this whole thing was started by a prank but it turns out that's also not true so this american life figured out that dr robert homengua is a real guy uh dr steel had pretended that he he said that he made up the name it's not true there's a

real guy they talked to his family and his colleagues and all of them were like oh no guo like wrote this thing and interestingly there's a lot of racism here too because dr steel had claimed that homan guo which is okay so this is where things get weird um i'm saying guo because that's how you actually pronounce it um it's spelled h-o-m-a-N-K-W-O-K. Whoa. Yeah, okay, so this is some... That's not what I thought. Yeah, so this is some Wade Giles bullshit. The previous attempt to sort of Romanize Chinese

was this thing called Wade Giles. It is the bane of my existence. It's dog shit. Hi, this is Mia in post. I made a mistake here. K-W-O-K is actually the standard Cantonese spelling of guo. Sorry about that. I am a dipshit. K-W-O-K is actually the standard Cantonese spelling of guo. Sorry about that. I am a dipshit who does not speak Cantonese.

Yeah, enjoy the rest of the show. They heard someone say guo and were like, this is K-W. It was like, no! No, it's not! Please! That's bad. It's literally the worst. Sometimes if you're

looking at Chinese, you'll see something that's just spelled really weirdly like or for example like the way that Chiang Kai Shek is spelled is actually like like it's actually a way Giles thing like there's a whole bunch of like things that are like that yeah yeah

you can find um I don't know that that's I mean that explains a lot but yeah it's one and part part of everything that's happening to you here is that like so and then this is also gonna be important later kuo is is a is a cantonese last name um but it's it gets really really confusing really quickly if you don't know what's going on because if if you're reading if you're reading a word that's in Chinese in the US, it could either be in Mandarin or in Cantonese,

and it also could be either written with the terrible way Zhao's one, or it could be in Pinyin, which is the one that's actually usable. But Dr. Steele, because again, the way it's written is H-O-M-A-N-K-W-O-K. And Dr. Steele claims that he wrote it to be like human crock of shit. Like, ho man crock. Yeah. Excuse me? People believed him.

Dr. Steele needs to be... Yeah, well, he's dead, so fuck him. Married again. Yeah. I don't know. That's so disgusting yeah like this is this is so racist and it's like oh you know but this like people people believe this for a while because yeah i don't know but okay so eventually people figure out that it's not true and i'm gonna to read something from the This American Life piece where they talk about how they figured out that it was actually, like, that Hou Meng Guo was, like, actually a real guy.

And when you read the original letter, there are details that seem more likely to come from her father, which is Guo's father, than from Howard. Howard Steele is the doctor. Like, when he said he moved to the U.S., the real dr guo did and how he's very specific the syndrome happens with northern chinese food in the 60s how many white guys in philadelphia could have made that distinction also oh man cool is an actual cantonese name what are the odds that dr steel threw together random sounding chinese syllables to arrive at that. So, okay. I read that and I had a revelation. I cracked this case wide the fuck open. I figured it out. I figured out what was going on with this letter.

Okay. I'm so excited for this. I've been hyping this up for like hours. I'm so excited. So some BTS of this, we have like a group chat essentially. And I wasn't sure if I can make this recording, but then Mia dropped

that bomb being like, I have this big breakthrough. And I was like, I got to be there. I just got to be there. And so I kicked James out because James couldn't make the time I could make. And so here I am. I apologize. I have not told Shireen what the breakthrough is. No, I am very excited to hear. Okay, so Hongmenguo is Cantonese, right? And he specifies in this letter that this is about northern Chinese food. My thesis right here, right now, is that this whole letter is actually about Cantonese anti-northern sentiment.

This is a whole ass thing in china so kantan or like the the region that was called kantan the west is like where kantanese people are this is like this is the very south of china right there is a whole ass thing in china let like people from north people from the south hate each other um it's actually very weird so my family is like half from the north half from the south and like when my mom was growing up she like she would like get made fun of for how she like rolled dumplings because people were like oh you roll dumplings like a southerner and she's like it is a whole fucking thing it's like people hate each other yeah i mean how else how would you know those intricacies you know what i mean unless you were from there like had history there.

Yeah, well, I mean, I would say this is the thing that's persisted in the US too. You still run into this stuff. Like there are definitely like Cantonese restaurants where like you probably shouldn't speak Mandarin. They're like, there's like, this is still a thing. It's not really talked about very much because it's like, it's kind of an internal Chinese thing. But, you you know the one place you actually really got to see this you got to see this from the hong kong and during the hong kong protests on both sides because like okay so there there's a strain of the sort of like

like there's a strain of chinese nationalism that's very sort of like it was doing this like really virulent sort of like anti-southern racism from you know you get this from a lot of the chinese nationalists on the ccp side there's another faction of like the hong kong protesters whose like thing was like we're not actually chinese because we're not like the northerners who are communist and like evil which is really funny because yeah like you know like okay the if you run through the actual history of communism in china it's like okay like the like one of the largest communist like strikes that ever happened was in hong kong like yeah sure fine but you know but and obviously like i'm simplifying all this enormously because it's very complicated there's a lot of regional shit that's going on here yeah

but so your your thesis is that the person that started all of this was like me like from the south or like just like yeah yeah i mean that is that is definite like that is that is like the like that is the most cantonese ass name i've ever heard like that guy that guy that guy is definitely from southern china and yeah my thesis is specifically it's this cantonese guy going hey fuck those northerners i hate their i hate their asses i hate their food their food ate shit eating it makes me sick but because because this is the u.s the the subtlety of this gets lost and everyone just runs with it it's like chinese restaurant syndrome even though i but this is i i this is this is my theories this is this is like this is like kind of semi-obscured

like chinese like internal grudge making point point. Knowing the origin point makes a lot more sense now, to be honest. Why would this be some random like, why would he specify a region? Like a very specific region. That's just, I don't know. That's my theory. I could be wrong about this, but

it fits with all of the details. It checks out. It checks out,. Yeah. Yeah. It checks out. It checks out, I think. Yeah. So, okay. All right. So this letter happens, and there's like a flurry of letters from other people talking about this.

And, okay, I want to talk about why this got picked up the way it does. I'm going to read a bit more. This is still in 68. Yeah, this is still in 68. I'm going to read from – more. This is still in 68. Yeah, this is still in 68. I'm going to read from, every single article in this also goes exactly the same way. So I'm going to read

from the Men's Health version so you get this section of it before I talk about why it's, I think, like, not sufficient to capture what was happening. Mosby describes the late 50s as a time of heightened

anti-Chinese sentiment. By the 1960s, domestic and international politics had shifted towards a fairly clear anti-communist agenda. In fact, he says, during this time, anti-Chinese sentiments were so widespread and accepted that most Americans didn't consider their apprehension to be racial bias. Now, this is true as far as it goes.

But we need to go to ads. And when we come back from ads, I will tell you what else was going on during that week. Hell yeah. All right. And we're back. We're back. We're talking about how this like letter to like a journal in New England suddenly became an entire like national American thing.

Okay. So the way this happened is that this got picked up by the news. Now there's a huge New York Times article article about this and that article is published on may 19th 1968 now shereen do you know what else was going on in may of 1968 i've heard a lot of shit went down in the 60s uh yeah so this is this is right this is like smack dab in the middle of may 68 in france this is this is like one week after the night of the barricades um three days before this was published the situationists who are like these this like ultra left student organization who who who at this point are occupying their Sorbonne.

Like they, they have fully taken control of their campus. They have run the cops out. They have run the administration out. Three days before this is published, the students at the Sorbonne reacting to a factory occupation that they heard about, send out this famous communique calling for the occupation of all factories

in France. And like, it fucking happens. Like the, the workers in France take control of, like, a huge portion of France's factories. Like, the Renault factories are under control of the workers.

Like, by this time, like, this is happening, right? The police have, like, the police are fighting them, but they're losing. Two days before this article is published, the Sorbonne sends this to the Chinese consulate. Quote,

Shaken your boots, bureaucrats. The international power of the workers' councils will soon wipe you out. Humanity won't be happy until the last bureaucrat is hung with the guts of the last capitalist. Long live the factory occupations. Long live the great Chinese proletarian revolution of 1927 betrayed by the stalinist bureaucrats it goes on and on like wow this this is what they're sending to the maoists right right like that that is that is how far left these people are like they they they are they are telling the maoists shake in your boots bureaucrats the international power of workers

councils will soon wipe you out like it is wild in france yeah i mean the fact that this is happening all during all of that yeah yeah that's not something uh i don't know that's no yeah no one it's really important i i have never read an article that actually puts this together and i just think it's not just that going on right like you know if you look at the situation in france they are a week and a half out from de gaulle who is the president literally fleeing the country because he's so convinced that they're about to lose the country to communism like well and i should say when i say communism by the way uh part of that message to the uh uh to the maoists is down with the state revolutionary marxism so like that these are, these people are like,

these people have are Marxists who have gone like so far left. They've essentially become anarchists. It's, it's wild. I mean, you know, and also what's happened, like the, the,

the Prague spring is happening during the middle of this. This is also like, this is a month after the Holy week uprising in the U S which is so after MLK was killed, there were these like probably the most intense riots the u.s has ever seen like even like even more so than like the ones we saw in 2020 the holy week riot like there were like like there were there were like like thousands of paratroopers were being deployed to like kill rioters yeah like it was fucking nuts yeah like that was that was probably the closest like some of the closest the u.s has ever had to just like actually having

a revolution the government losing control of the entire country and like and while this article is coming out like there are still even in may the the holy week uprisings in april but like even it like even in may there are still people on the streets fighting the cops, like while this article is being written. And, you know, if you look at the... There's something about 68. Someone put a curse on that entire year. I mean, it's wild.

Like May 16th, like that year is just the year, like the entire world went into a revolt. I mean, there's like, I can't remember if they actually successfully overthrew the government they like almost overthrew the government of pakistan like a whole bunch of students get shot in mexico because they're trying to bring down the government like it's everywhere there is all this stuff going on um and you know also the other thing that's happening is we're two years into the cultural revolution and it's kind of interesting because but by 68 we're kind of into the backlash phase of the culture revolution where most of what's happening is that the sort of various rebel factions that formed in 1967 and 1966 are just getting like slaughtered by the sort of like state factions. And it's more it's it's it's the culture revolution. It's really complicated.

But like by by by this point, the sort of like revolution part of it has like kind of calmed down and it's more the state in its sort of new form taking control. But, you know, if you're living through this, right, it looks like the cultural revolution happens in 66, then it gets to 67, and then suddenly there was a cultural revolution happening literally everywhere. And this is the context of the MSG scare like kicks off in, right? and this is the context of the msg scare like kicks off in right it it starts in like right in the middle of arguably the two most radical months of the entire 20th century wow yeah and and this is this is the kind of shit that starts like just an absolute mania in the american mind that is powerful enough that like 60 years later, it's still around. I mean, it feels like it happening at such like a manic time, like people are probably already like kind of feeling that energy, right? Yeah. It was directed everywhere, even at this article.

Yeah. And I genuinely think if this had happened two months later or two months earlier, I don't think there would have been like a big scare about it like it might have been a thing i stuck around for a bit but i i think the fact that the end the new york times article came out exactly like in the middle of may 68 and that like the original one comes out like right before the like the original article that gets sent to the thing comes out like a couple weeks before the holy week uprising i i think it was the fact that it was exactly in this moment where everyone on earth is if you're living through this like this is the capital r revolution like has come and you know and that that shattered everyone's brains like i don't know i wonder like do people remember what it was like like when like when like the

height of 2020 was happening like just how sort of wild like it was just psychologically i'm telling you there was like an energy yeah yeah this collective yeah strange i mean like obviously it's different than it was in 68 but i really do agree with you like if it happened in january i don't think it would be a thing you know yeah yeah and you know i so the the other thing that's interesting about about this whole sort of like chinese restaurant syndrome is that you could actually track its spread like across other countries by sort of like moments of like peak anti-chinese like sentiment and also anti-japanese sentiment to a lesser extent because that that that sort of replaces the anti-chinese stuff by

time you get to the 80s and 90s but well that replaces but it's like it's like the the dominant mode of like we have a person we need to be afraid of in east asia right right right um but there's an interesting okay so if if if you if you look up um like if you're looking for like medical stuff about chinese restaurant syndrome one of the things you will find is a case report of the indian journal of critical medical Care from 2017 claiming that they were treating a patient who got Chinese restaurant syndrome and like couldn't speak because the thing in the back of his throat had like inflamed. And, you know, and they had this whole thing about like this. This is like this is like a serious disorder. And they specifically cited that letter to the editor from 68.

Oh, the power of that yeah thing and you know what okay so if you look what was going on in in india in 2017 and it turns out the thing that's going on is like a giant rise in anti-chinese sentiment culminating in the 2017 indian chinese border incident where do you remember when all those guys were like beating each other to death in the mountains with sticks? Yeah, I do vaguely remember that. I've been associated many times in my life and especially post pandemic,

my brain is broken, but I do vaguely remember that. I had kind of forgotten about it. And then, and then I looked at this article on Solos in 2017. I was like, wait, hold on,

hold on. Wasn't that, wasn't, didn't, didn't that happen in 2017 and it's funny because like yeah rise attention rise again suddenly uh chinese restaurant center reappears wow it's it's really it's really incredible it's it's yeah it's an incredible set of brain worms um i just i mean this is definitely not on topic, I guess, but even just seeing like COVID being blamed on China, like there's always like a way for ignorant people just to point the finger at China, which is really fucking shitty.

It's so shitty. It's yeah. like one of the things you sort of need to have a national project is that in order for you to be in order for you to be like a nation you have to have a you have to have an other you have to have people who aren't part of the nation right and the u.s does this pretty effectively they have they you know they can have this sort of rotating cast of people who like aren't yeah like from the nation right yeah if you want to stay in there are people that need to stay out yeah sometimes with mexico sometimes sometimes you get it with sort of like like internal subversion from like black people or like indigenous people yeah but yeah you know they have this rotating cast china's always one of

the ones that come back to you because it's just big and there's a lot of them and you know for whatever reason people are easily feared by it like i think it's just like it's unknown and maybe people don't understand it very well that don't look into it themselves and want to fucking be educated. But for whatever reason, people fear it so easily and it's so bizarre. It's so bizarre. Yeah, it sucks. Oh, yeah. Okay, so I'm going to do an ad break and then we're going to talk about more of this stuff because it keeps going and we're back.

All right. So obviously we're dealing with sort of anti-Chinese sentiment and anti-Japanese sentiments as, you know, anti-Japanese sentiment escalating as the 60s turned into like the 80s and 90s. But there's more going on here. Part of the reason, you know, back like this in theory could have been about like soy sauce, right? Like there's a lot of things that they could have picked out of that to be the thing everyone's excited about. But they picked MSG. And part of the reason they picked MSG is that this is the period when people start like figuring out that food additives exist. And people start to get really sort of touchy about it.

And actually, Ralph Nader, a famous... I remember that guy. and people start to get really sort of touchy about it and actually ralph nader uh famous that guy yeah so he's around in the 60s um because he's old as shit yeah yeah and he's you know okay so i i give i give him credit for for like he has probably saved as many lives as like any other american single american you can name by being the guy who like lobbied to have seat belts in cars being mandatory right i think that was not before because the u.s is a like truly deranged country yeah he wasn't half bad most of the time yeah but come on he's also one of the guys who's like the big pusher for getting the U.S. government to study MSG and a lot of other food additives in like 1960,

in 1969. So, you know, and like there's a bunch of other food additives that they're studying the health effects of. And on the one hand, you're like, yeah, it probably is good to study the effects of like food additives because like, I don't know, companies do stuff that sucks all the time. And so it is good to study what's in your food.

On the other hand. Okay, this is going to sound really ignorant. So I apologize. What, where again, if you already said this, where was it found? Where was MSG found? Is it created in a lab?

Like what's the molecule? Yeah, but by this point, it's basically created in the lab that the first time someone was able to distill it was they did this whole distillation process from seaweed oh yes seaweed yeah but but by this point it's no worries yeah no like it but by by by i mean even by like the early 1920s i think it's it's mostly being produced artificially which is why everyone's right but easily added to food yeah yeah and it makes it taste better but like like you know it is something that like you like you can find it

like in in dashi like you can find it in like soup broths and stuff like from seaweed so it's it's not like i mean i didn't know that i've i've known about msg for most of my life and i never like for whatever reason growing up we always associated it with sodium, like salt, salty. Yeah. Well, I mean, it is right. Like it is a kind of salt. Yeah.

But like, I don't know, like people, people, people have this whole thing like, oh, it's artificial. It's like, like, yeah, we make it artificially, but like, it's not, it's not like it's not a thing that you can get out of plants. It's just that we don't do it that way because it's easier. Yeah. I mean, the source of it is not artificial but also like you're gonna be a stickler on this one thing when you eat like i don't know so many other and drink so many other things like there was cocaine and coke yeah like it's just there's every every every every american like in in 1969 is like by by their body volume drinking two pounds of lead a year

so like it's like this is the thing you're gonna stick on yeah well and you know and this this is this is this is sort of the problem with with what ralph nader is doing with the sort of like pushing the government investigation of it is that like you know like i i i don't know how racist 1969 ralph nader was my my guess is that like i i i don't think that his big thing was we need to study this because it's the dirty chinese like salt or whatever i i think i think he mostly just wanted to he wanted a thing to study food additives i could be wrong about that i don't know i haven't looked i've looked into this exactly zero percent but like you know the problem is that what like what once this sort of racial panic is going like

you can't put you can't put the sort of cork back in the bottle right and you know okay so there have been a bunch of studies about this um and like it but you know okay so the the problem with what's happening is that because of the way MSG has been sort of racialized, like, the studies don't matter. Like, it just does not matter what anyone actually sort of writes about it until you get an actual cultural change because the studies, the science, like, is irrelevant. They have the study to justify a bunch of things, and that's the only study they care about. Yeah, yeah. It's like the fake vaccines cause it's like the like the fake fact vaccines cause autism shit like right no it's they they just believe this they have one paper

that's literally a joke exactly and that's all they claim does it yeah that's like 17 others that disprove it but like no yeah this was like a million others like that by the way that study i want to point this out the methodology of that study was they asked parents who thought their kids had developed autism because of the vaccine if they thought their kids had developed autism because of the vaccine and then the parents said yes and that's the study that's the study yeah that's not a fucking

study it's not it's a joke like it's literally a twitter poll that like got published and then retracted because it was a twitter poll right like this is the scientific basis of all this bullshit and this is i guess what qualifies as a fucking study then like you could you could i don't know you could you can publish fucking anything if you put your mind to it this is this

this is this is what i'm telling all of you like follow your dreams try to get something published they publish this bullshit so like you know i'm gonna i'm gonna do a study okay yeah well the other thing the other thing specifically like there's a real problem here with like with this is the thing with medical studies because like you can have a medical study that you get published with a sample size of one because it's you found a thing in a guy and you're like oh i'm gonna publish this but you like medical studies like oh you can just like you can publish any bullshit and like it sucks but okay so alright like

lots of so after this there are lots of studies by lots of people and like mostly what they find is they can't find any so there's some like initial studies that like find some alarming stuff in mice but the problem with these studies that what they're doing is okay yeah it turns out if you take a mouse

and you just like fill a syringe with MSG and inject them with it, it's bad for them. Oh, you think so? Yeah, like, oh, shit! Yeah, you would inject a mouse with pure salt and bad things happen. Like, yes, if you took a human being and you injected fucking a third of a cup of MSG

directly into their veins, it would probably be bad for them yeah I would just think so you know right and they found out the conclusion from that was basically like okay if someone ate like a third of a cup of MSG raw having not eaten

for like 48 hours it would probably do things that are not great for you but can't you say that about a bunch of other fucking things like i don't know if if you didn't eat for 24 hours and ate a third of a cup of salt like that's probably that's not good for you like don't do that so like you know okay um very very specific circumstances have to light up for you to have any reaction to msg so there's a study from 2000 where they they also this is also another empty stomach study by the way because they've okay no one has ever been able to replicate like any of

these results with a person eating food that has msg in it they've never been able to do it they've been able to get some results if you have people eat like basically pure msg and have not eaten any food like around it yeah it's like okay that's useless because the the molecule at that point it probably interacts with other things and that you know what i mean like if it's just by itself it's not the actual i don't know yeah i i'm not very good at chemistry so i'm gonna i'll let the chemistry nerds argue about this i did fail ap chem so same great yeah i i luckily only had to take chemistry in so i just didn't take ap chem because i was like i suck i took a chem like my first my freshman year and i was like let's not do this again i can't do this i just i don't take chemistry is the thing i wanted to be a psychiatrist for

a really long time but failing ap chemistry and just experiencing chemistry i was like i can't do this yeah it sucks it's the worst but okay so the reason i was talking about the like vaccines cause autism like autism shit is that there was another thing with msg where people were claiming that it was causing asthma and it no they had there's they had another like an incredibly elaborate pseudoscience bullshit about like msg like getting absorbed like getting absorbed improperly through like like fetal membranes that's like completely nonsense like it doesn't yeah people people like what white people love to say that the diseases they've gotten from fucking the fact that like they're they're the air in their house is 97 co2 by volume and like and and because they've decided to run an entire country by just putting

fucking trucking yards everywhere yeah like okay there has to be a finger to point at right like it can't be yeah yeah no it can't be the air quality right you know what i mean like yeah i should point i should i should make this clear by the way when i when i when i when i say when i say that like autism is not sorry when i say that asthma specifically is when i talk about the bad air specifically talking about asthma i'm not talking about autism with that that that is not what causes autism or whatever like it's just i got what you mean yeah and it's cool and also fuck autism speaks yes yeah uh but yeah i i i want to put that on the record that's what i mean i'm not i'm not saying that trucks cause autism they don't like yeah but yeah so okay but there's a lot of like

incredibly weird racial very dumb anti-scientific panic about it it's possible that there exists a group so originally it was about like like anyone who eats this will have these symptoms right and then over time the argument got sort of fizzed down to there might be a group of people who in the populate like a small group of people who are like specifically sensitive to it and that's probably plausible like there's some experimental evidence that shows that there could be a group of people for whom they're more sensitive to it than a regular person and i don't know sure people have allergies like whatever yeah exactly like yeah peanuts and soy yeah yeah like it's not like

like yeah it's it's not a thing to sort of like yeah i don't know like if you're a person who gets allergy reactions to shit like yeah, yeah, that's allergies. Right. But like, it's not the sort of like, I don't know if the panic about it is utterly unjustified. There may be of there may be a group of people who it has some effect on because they're allergic to it or whatever. But yeah, imagine imagine demonizing peanuts because there's a group of people that can't eat peanuts. You know what I mean? Like that is that's that's why? like, why would you ever do that? To be fair, I, I, I, I am okay with demonizing peanuts specifically,

specifically if it gets people to stop fucking, uh, worshiping that bastard, Jimmy Carter, who was a neoliberal ghoul and his reputation has been fucking, uh, just like, like his reputation has been saved entirely by the fact that every single person who came after him was an utterly deranged war criminal and his war crime was like wait what did Peanuts have to do with it well he was a peanut farmer

oh sorry this is the this is the deep Jimmy Carter lore yes yes I'm on track now yeah okay but you know alright is this is the the deep the the deep jimmy carter lore yes yes for the real jimmy heads out there okay got it yeah okay but you know all right so going back i think so this was the kind of thing that like you know people avoiding msg is just kind of had just kind of been like like a part

of daily life like it was just like a thing that existed in the world but it wasn't like at a certain point it became the kind of thing that people would talk about like in conversation and like they'll did you know you could just get people to do anti-msg rants but it wasn't really a sort of like mainstream political issue in the way that it had been like in like 1969 where there's well the other thing that happened is in the 90s the fda did a study about it the fda was like it's fine like don't don't don't eat 300 grams of it at one time like but as long as you're not sitting there like eating msg raw out of the fucking like they would say the same thing about like high fructose corn syrup you know why yeah and like

by by volume high fructose corn syrup has killed way more people than MSG. Exactly, that's what I was thinking. Also, now there's like a whole thing about like MSG causing obesity, which I don't know if that's true or not. I think their studies are fucking whack. But, you know, it might cause obesity like every other food that the U.S. has made in the last 20 years. Exactly. Yes. Yeah. 20 years exactly yeah

and one day we will do a episode about like the politics of anti-fatness because it's fucked but today we're doing this episode and okay so you know every once in a while the way the way this stuff sort of works every once in a while there would be

a sort of like a mainstream like Asian American figure who would talk about it so for example there's a Korean chef named David figure who would talk about it. So for example, there's a Korean chef named David Chang who talks about it. And he gave speeches about it and the demonization of it. But it didn't really get back

to mainstream discourse until 2020 when our good friends, Ajinomoto, the people who made the stuff in the first place, hired a bunch of Asian-American celebrities to do a pro msg campaign so they hired eddie huang who's like a writer and chef who's like probably most famous

for the being the guy who wrote fresh off the boat and so that they have this whole sort of campaign and this like takes off right like he he this is this is one of those things that was like completely forgotten that happened in 2020 that no one now remembers because this happens like before covid like before we had the lockdowns and before i mean i'll be honest i it escapes my memory oh i i i have no memory of this happening either but apparently it did i don't know i was i i i think this was still while the i think this is while the election was still going on so yeah i pay no attention to this time to to do that yeah 2020 the year everything happens yeah but okay so you know this campaign like takes off

like like eddie huang's on on nbc and did you like the talk show circuit with jenny amai advocating for like so their whole thing is that they wanted to remove Chinese restaurant syndrome from the dictionary. And they had this whole like hashtag redefine CRS is like the redefine Chinese restaurant syndrome. And this is like a whole thing. And, you know, and there's this. OK, but this was one of the things that sort of drew me to the story, because if you look at the press for this, right, it's like activists pressure Merriamion webster and like that's kind of true like it superficially it is kind of what happened and like yeah i'm glad the dictionary changed the entry to say like this is like outdated and kind of bullshit but like okay think about what actually

happened here right a company that makes a product hired a bunch of a bunch of sort of Asian-American, like big celebrity people to do a marketing campaign for them in the name of anti-racism, which like, yes, I am glad we are addressing the racism around MSG. however comma i feel like it's a really sort of like it's a really literal example of the kind of like vapidity and listlessness of like asian american identity and culture and politics like pre-covid like this is this is this is this has something like early january right so covid is still sort of like some disease in china like we haven't hit full racism yet and again like this is not like an activist campaign you know i mean like activists get on board with it, I guess. But like activism is doing an ad campaign for a company that makes salt. Right. Yeah. It's not exactly grassroots.

Yeah. And and. You know, OK, and it works right. Like this is a thing that like the asian american community like picks up right i mean sort of i don't know i i don't remember it but i when i look looking looking back on the articles and hashtags and stuff it's like wow they got lots of tweets but you know i i i think i think the reason that this worked is is because of the sort of self-conception of like asian-american-ness as this like

backstory of like like immigrants stepping off the boat and they start a restaurant and then your kids get an education so they enter the professional class and like there isn't like i don't know like this is in fact this is literally like part of the reason i was doing this also was like this is literally what happened to my family like they like they showed up from taiwan they worked in a restaurant then they opened a restaurant and then like i don't know like every successive generation well okay i was gonna say every every successive generation got more like professionally but like i have a bunch of doctors but but then they also produced me who's a podcaster so i'm defying asian america stereotypes by being uh more dipshit than my

parents um but you know like this has become like this single sort of cultural narrative of like what it is to be an asian american right like you see this in every single story that asian american media like has produced in the last like 10 years it has one plot right there's a family in the u.s they're trying to fit in they almost always have some kind of small business and then something appears that challenges their ability to like assimilate into american society this is and then you know they deal with it and that's the end right this is the plot of crazy rich asians it's a part of everything everywhere all at once the part of fresh off the boat it's the part of the fucking cw kung fu show it is the plot like

literally everything that like we produce has one plot and it's this. And the reason why is it's, you know, the reason why this is the only sort of like piece of media that the sort of Asian American cultural class has been able to produce is the reason why all the fucking activism and ad campaigns are just like

fucking, we got hired by a company and we're going to talk about why racism is bad so that this company can sell more product like the reason it's this is because this is an incredibly marketable self-conception of asian-american-ness like the conception of it as being restaurant owners right is there because it's it's a form of culture that can be sold to white people right yeah it's hey look we're different we eat wacky food but you can eat it too and ultimately we're all in this for capitalism in the patriarchal family like just like you are don't worry it's hey look we're different we eat wacky food but you can eat it too and ultimately we're all in this for capitalism in the patriarchal family like just like you are don't worry it's going to be fine and you know that that really depresses me because this this is a moment that demands

something else and i think that's why kind of like i think that's why the sort of mainstream like asian american reaction to like you, like there was there was another there was another Asian woman like who got stabbed to death like two weeks ago. And there was like fucking no coverage of it. Like nobody gave a shit. It's just gotten to the point where like this happens like six people report on it. And then everyone just sort of moves on to their life. Yeah. report on it and then everyone just sort of moves on to their life yeah and i think the reason why the sort of like stop asian hate shit has gotten to you know like it's gotten it's gone through

the sign cycle where everyone like had the signs up and they took them down right and so you know like and i think the reason why it was it turned into this sort of like like the organizing turning this like incredibly vapid like put a sign in your store like tweet a hashtag stuff like is because of this is because what like what what it means to be sort of asian american has been hollowed out and hauled out and hauled out and sold and sold and sold for just decades and decades and decades and now you know like in in a time when it's actually sort of like you know when it when it's really in danger and it's called to action it hasn't been able to do much right and well yeah pointing out the film and tv thing is really important because

i mean so many marginalized communities have this experience but i think china like asian culture in particular i think it really people if they're ignorant and they just see what's depicted on media they don't see them as three-dimensional beings you know what I mean what they have is like a very hollow version of a human and so I don't know it kind of upsets me because I feel like media is the first thing people learn things from whether it's film or tv or whatever but yeah well and also i i think it's i think it's part of the reason why like the the the way that those those depictions sort of obscure class where you know because in these things right like a lot of these families are poor but they're still business owners right right and that that's like like if if you're a poor american as well it's because you're a business owner you're like a sort of struggling like american entrepreneur and this obscures the fact that there is a massive asian american just underclass people

who are like or delivery drivers or work in warehouses or you know i mean like there are there are groups people who like come to the u.s and china who you know like live in like basically completely isolated communities in parts of chinatown where they're only speaking chinese and they just fucking like they're the people who have to do a bunch of like warehouse shit and then they leave and that's it. Right. Like, and, and these, these people, this shit never, you like, you never actually get any kind of sort of class analysis because the, the, the way that media thinks about Asian

Americans is like, there's, there's one of, they're either one of the three things. They're a business owner. They're like a rich professional. So they're like a doctor or something, or they're like the fucking people on bling where they're just like super rich assholes right and that that allows i think like a specific kind of anti-asian politics to work that like asian people are seeing this sort of like perpetual like an elite and it's like no i don't know like it's just not you know it's not true and and it means that when you get like asian american political movements like the sort of anti-asian hate thing right like you have like the guy who founded doordash right is like is is an

asian is like a chinese american guy right he's like he used to he's a tech billionaire he used to be like an email like you know you would have these stop asian hate events like this fucking guy is is on there like is up on the stage talking about anti-asian hate and it's like okay this guy has like brutally and horribly exploited like literally millions of asian americans but you know there's there's there's no there's never gonna be a reckoning with that yeah because you know successful and he's yeah capitalist like he's achieved the capitalist dream or whatever the shit yeah and and because because asian American identity has been flattened in this way like those people are just completely invisible and it it sucks and I hate it and yeah yeah yeah I it's just I don't know there's nothing good I can like anything I can say to make

anything better but I think it's just I don't know maybe we can do an episode one day about like film and and tv and stuff because I think it really starts there unfortunately like like it's it's silly but people that don't know a Chinese person will see a Chinese person on their TV and be like, that's the only Chinese person I've ever seen in my life. And I'm going to make assumptions about the whole race now. But one day I'm going to do that. But we're going to do an episode that's entirely me shitting on Jackie Chan. People are going to get really mad at me. But fuck that guy.

That's a hot take. He started his career as a fucking scab. That was literally his first thing, was he was a scab. And he's, yeah, he's a fucking homophobic piece of shit. Fuck him. Yeah, done your parable damage. I'm down for this episode. Let's do it. Yeah, alright. That will be a

part of the episode where we are teasing you with subsequent episodes. Yes. But, yeah. But yeah, I don't know know it is a little bit upsetting how these really important movements are just like they plateau and they become like this vapid thing like you're saying like i think that gives people such an easy out of like quote unquote being an ally or supporting because i think they're doing something by like holding up a sign or something without really internalizing or spreading the the awareness that is necessary and uh i don't know i guess i guess the thing i

want to end on also is me being pissed off at a bunch of asian american kids in the 60s so one of the stories you will hear a lot if you're studying Asian American politics is the story that the term Asian American was invented by these activists who actually were doing a bunch of stuff in 1968, who were these radical student activists. And that's true. But the thing you have to understand about those people

is that all of those people were like, all of those people were like like all those people were basically like we're third worldists and part of the reason this whole politics collapses well a part of the reason part of what happened was like part of the demands of these students in 1968 of these sort of like radical student groups like you know they're formed to sort of like support the sort of like black radical student groups and to like advocate for themselves but like one of their big demands was they wanted cultural studies departments in in american universities and they got them but you know okay so what what what are those cultural studies like departments they basically just became these giant

traps for radicals where instead of like overthrowing the government you like come do this cushy job in academia and like all of all of the sort of like old radicals like from that era either like got regular jobs or became like i became academics right and the other thing that happened with this politics was the reason why it was completely unsustainable was that and this this has been a sort of a problem with the asian american identity right is that okay like what the fuck is an asian, right? It's like anyone from like, I don't know, like anyone from like the edge of the Pacific to like, I don't know, like how far,

how far like, what's it called? Like how far west does that go the other direction? Like who knows? It's like it's incoherent. How big is the swath of all of that? I mean, this is like billions and billions and billions it's incoherent swath of yeah like i mean this is like billions and billions and billions of people with completely unrelated cultures and languages and stuff like that and the reason they were able to do this right was because they were mirroring their movement off of like the third world right but the problem that they

ran into and this is the problem with all the third world movements was that okay so the third world movement like as a thing was it was based on a bunch of different nationalist movements right like it was based on that there was going to be this like alliance between like the sort of like the the rising socialist powers in africa and the rising socialist powers in uh uh in east asia and they were going to sort of like ally with like the rising sort of like might not like the the rising sort of like minorities gaining power in the US. But, okay, if you look at those nationalisms, right, you have

Chinese nationalism, Cambodian nationalism, and Vietnamese nationalism all colliding with each other. And, you know, it turns out like, okay, so what happens if your movement is based on sort of like the unity of a bunch of nationalist movements and they go to war with each other? And, you know,

what happened was when, when, when China, when Vietnam invades Cambodia in, in, in Vietnam invades Cambodia and then China invades Vietnam in 1979. Right. That entire politics is fucked because what,

what, what are you supposed to do? Like what's, who's, whose side are you supposed to take here? Right. Like you, you can do the,

you know, like if, if, if you're going to be like a Marxist, like a Marxist Leninist, like the, probably the correct line is support Vietnam. Right.

Right. But that's a mess because you know, how many people are Maoists? Right. And if you, but you know, if you're a Maoist and you're fucking people just invaded Vietnam, like,

you know, what are you supposed to do? Right. And there was, there were earlier tensions with this too, where like, like China, what China was backing, like a really shitty faction in Angola who ended up being backed by the US and South Africa.

And that caused a whole bunch of tensions between the Chinese Maoists and a bunch of the black radical groups because they were like, why the fuck are you guys backing these people in Angola? But this whole thing became a problem because all of these nationalisms are competing nationalisms, right? There was never going to be one unified third world. It was always, it was always going to end with a bunch of nationalists fucking fighting each other. And when that happens, the Asian, like the Asian American movement, such as it was just fucking died. And, you know, as a radical movement, it was just over. And so, you know i i think i think the the the lesson that i would take out of this is just that like do not build do not build your movement based off of someone else's nationalism because those people are going to do things because they're nationalists that are just fucked right

they're going to win they're going to invade vietnam like kem like the cambodians are going to invade vietnam and then vietnam's going to like you know like are arguably justifiably because they've been getting attacked and because they're fighting the khmer rouge but like you know they're they're these people are all going to go to war with each other right like you're or you know you're going to be stuck in the situation where like you're you're you're being forced to choose sides between like the derg and the and like the the marxist government in somalia because they've they've randomly gone to war with each other so don't do this um this has been my rant that i wanted i wanted to do about this because yeah no i'm glad you did i'm glad that i was here for it too because i don't know it's good to know this

this stuff and i get to learn by listening to you to tell me um and yeah i i appreciate all the research that you did thanks yeah yeah and yeah so i guess this has been a good episode yeah yeah it's the episode you can find us uh happen here pod on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at itmechr3. Yeah. Yeah. I'm at shirohero666 on Twitter. And then on Instagram, just take out the 666s.

But maybe I should add them because who cares? Anyway, thanks. Bye. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. 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 name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian.

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

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

My name is Jake Hanrahan. I'm a journalist and documentary filmmaker. Today, you're going to hear me reporting from an undisclosed location in Europe where I met with anti-putin russian partisans so right now i'm heading into the forest somewhere on the edge of europe there's snow absolutely everywhere it's pitch black and it's very very cold i'm heading into the forest to meet with anti-government russian partisans. They've been launching attacks inside Russia against Kremlin infrastructure. They've been blowing up railway tracks and attacking military recruitment centres because they want to disrupt the continued Russian invasion of Ukraine.

These partisan attacks have been taking place all across Russia, but obviously over there, there's a complete media blackout on this situation. So this group have come over and agreed to meet with me to tell me what's actually happening and to let people know that it's not everybody there that supports this. And some people are even taking up arms, taking massive risks to try and stop what Putin is up to. When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24th, 2022, the Ukrainian people bravely mobilized

to fight back against Putin's attack on their country. Russia's so-called three-day special operation has turned into a grueling year-long battle where the Ukrainian resistance has been highly effective. Despite this chaos, it seems many people in Russia have come out in favor of this brutal war. Even now, with over 40,000 people killed and over 14 million displaced, there's still large-scale support for Putin's attacks on Ukraine. This much is fact. The idea that every Russian is in favor of the war is not. Russia is a huge place with a population of over 140 million. Many people there do not support Putin or his war. Some have even taken the risk to fight back. As I mentioned, there's a quiet but highly effective network of anti-Putin partisans

that are fighting from within. They're doing this by blowing up military railways, sabotaging Kremlin cell towers and burning down war recruitment centres. All this in an effort to help Ukrainians from afar. If caught by the Russian security forces, they face torture and life in prison. Despite the risks, in the last 12 months, there have been more than 80 confirmed attacks against the government inside Russia. The attacks have taken place all across the country as well, from Moscow in the west to Vladivostok in the far east. There are dozens of different partisan cells and lone wolves. As is with real life, the partisans have varying different political ideologies

from far left to far right. For the moment though, they all share information with each other, recognizing their common enemy in Putin. One of the most organized groups is made up of militant anarchists. They're known as the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization, They're known as the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organisation, more commonly referred to by their Russian abbreviation, BOAC. It's two fighters from BOAC who I'd arranged to meet in a Russia-bordering forest of Eastern Europe. We'd spoken weeks before via encrypted email. They told me which country to fly to

and then sent me coordinates of where to meet them within a specific window of time. I drove as far as I could, abandoned the car and took off into the forest. Eventually a red torchlight emerged through the trees cutting the silhouette of two figures. As the two approached it was clear it was the BOAC fighters. They were both dressed head to toe in black and were both wearing balaclavas. We confirmed things, shook hands and set off to find a spot for the interview they led me through an underground tunnel to an area they felt comfortable

with just just a moment it sounds like to protect the identity of the russian partisans we've scrambled their voice that voice you just heard that's ulya she's a female and the other fighter the voice you'll hear that's jura he's she's a female. And the other fighter, the voice you'll hear, that's Jura, he's a male. Can you explain the actions? Like, what are the main things you've been doing to disrupt Putin's invasion? We disassembled railways, which leads to the artillery warehouse in the Moscow region. It delayed supplies to the front, so it gave to the Ukrainian people more time to prepare for the counter-attacking

Russia. Derailing trains in Russia is something the partisans specialize in. They've managed to knock several Kremlin cargo trains off their tracks. Trains that were destined to deliver weapons to Russian soldiers as they continued to invade Ukraine. We'll probably never know how helpful this was for Ukrainians, but every second counts when battling for frontline positions in war. For example, if Russian soldiers were left waiting for a resupply, which was delayed because of partisan attacks, they might then be overrun by Ukrainians.

This would definitely be an effective blow for the partisans. I asked the BOAC fighters why they felt the need to form such an organisation. We see that we need to create a partisan organisation because in Russia the state oppression is very hard, so you can't use some legal methods to do some step-by-step changes. Even if you do some so-called legal actions, anyway you'll go to the jail. We are attacking the state to make it weaker. To show people that

we can do it. We as people, people of Russia, people of all the world, we have this power in our hands and we... It is possible. Them, the state, they are small and we are... There's a lot of us. And the second direction which we are developing is a coordination of such kind of attack, partisan attacks,

all over Russia. Recently we published, I think, maybe even more than 10 attacks from many different regions. We help small partisan cells to find out how to make attacks, help them with supplies to help such small partisan groups. It's increasing. It's increasing, yeah. And they're making more and more serious attacks. For example, not a long time ago, they bombed some kind of military railroad near the Ukrainian border.

So our power is not in what one small group can do, but we have a lot of small groups, and all together we can change things. So you guys have been around before the Ukraine war started, or at least since the invasion started this year. But that's when you've got a lot more known, I think, online. We're seeing that you guys are actually doing attacks inside Russia and in Belarus.

Very dangerous thing to do. What is it that spurred you guys on? Why are you doing this? Why are you taking such a risk to basically attack Putin in his own country? Because it's not his country, it's our country. We can't do nothing. We can't do legal things,

and these partisan attacks can make military machine of Russian state. We cut the supply lines we attack the military recruitment centers so the army becomes weaker and as it was very often in russia and many others states history when the state lose war there is a window of possibilities opens for the people of this country. Whilst BOAC are pragmatic, focused currently on the pressing issue of Putin's war on Ukraine, they're also looking to carve out a space for themselves

in what they believe will be a wild post-Putin Russia. When Putin dies, there will be a vacuum where many other groups feel the same. BOAC, in their minds are setting down foundations already. For now though they concentrate on assisting the Ukrainians. or is this just like a movement you guys are doing yourselves? Of course we have contacts. We can't, of course, say what exactly contacts. Yes, but yes, we have contacts with different, not only on his organization, in all ex-USRSA. And other countries as well.

Also, yeah. As well, we try to provide information for those other groups which don't yet know how to do things and don't yet have funds enough for supplies because even gasoline costs money and they don't have money. And as well, near the start of war, our group organized a few attacks like on the mobile cell towers near the Ukraine border. As we've seen from the Telegram channels, the kind of underground, there's definitely a lot of attacks, as you've said, as you've been doing. How big is your organization? Because it's hard to tell.

How prevalent are these attacks inside Russia? There is about two or three thousand affinity groups, and everyone has a different uh number of members and uh what about geography uh as you know partisans acts uh from the kaliningrad west of russia to the vladivostok which is far east of russia almost russia yeah specifically being anarchist but being partisans is extremely, extremely dangerous inside Russia. You're taking a massive risk doing this kind of stuff. Some people are going to see this and go like, why? Why would you take that risk?

If we won't take those risks now, we won't have future at all. Are you not worried? You're not scared of getting caught? Of course we are. We're not stupid enough to not be. But it's much more scary to live now that you had a chance to change something and you didn't. Our people killing people of Ukraine and making the world worse and worse every day with the dangers of nuclear war and so on. Because if we do it now, maybe we will not have the future at all.

Not only in Russia, but all over the world. People on the internet, they'll see what you guys are doing and they'll say, oh, you guys are doing and they say, oh you guys are CIA operatives and stuff like this. Particularly like Westerners that actually support Putin. Now, you know what it's like living there under Putin.

How would you address that? What would you say to those kind of accusations? I think if we would be CIA we would act more effectively but we act Я думаю, якби ми були ЦРУ, ми бували більш ефективними. Але ми працюємо з тими військами, з тими ресурсами, які ми маємо. Ми намагаємося збільшити їх, але, як я сказав, це час, це процес. Зі зірою партизанських атак до повної партизанської війни.

Ми мали такі атаки до повної Партизанської війни. Якби ми були ЦРУ, ми мали би багато більше ресурсів. Так, ми маємо домашні бомби, або будь-яке інше, що ми можемо зробити зі своїми руками. We even speak about the resources which we used when we disassembled railways. We used simple instruments which could be bought in hardware stores. We are showing people that they can just go to the store and buy those tools and do it themselves. It's not just us doing some stuff with some specific materials you can only get in the dark net now let's be honest it's likely the cia are up to something in russia considering their past history but personally i believe bowack when they say they're nothing to do with that i think it would be pretty unlikely that that the CIA would help an anarcho-communist group

when there are ultra-nationalist groups doing similar things. How do you get the information? Like, how do you know which railway to blow up? We use Wikimapia, a service which provides... Description for each object. On the map, and everyone can contribute to it. So you just open it and you find okay military objects here, it's doing something like that, that is it's photos and people who did it,

they didn't do it for us, they just did it because they want to share this information and you just can take it and use it. So they use Wikimapia to help plot their attacks. This found quite funny it's like the modern version of guerrillas gathering intel from locals about the enemy only the locals in this case don't even know they're doing it scouting is also a big part of their sabotage preparations but of course we need to a lot of scouting yeah scouting yeah like you you check out the place? Of course. Yeah, of course. Many times before the attack.

I know that anarchists specifically in Russia have been tortured quite a lot if they're captured for anything. What do you think would happen to you guys if you got caught? For sure we're going to be tortured as well. If we will be, if we will leave enough because we are not willing to get caught and be handed. We don't give any information on our comrades. And when you are tortured, it's hard to say when you would or would not be brave.

You never know how you react to torture. So it's better to prevent this by dying fighting. Does that mean you have firearms? If you want to do a revolution, you can do it with firearms. Why are you doing this? Why are you giving us the interview? Why do you want this information to get out there? We think that it's important that people see us not as some internet warriors. We want people to hear our voices and to hear what we have to say.

We don't want people to think that we are some shady organization, but we want them to see that we are real people just like them. And just like us, they can do things that we do. A lot of it is online, but there's definitely a perception that all Russians agree with the invasion, the destruction of Ukraine, what Putin wants to do. Obviously, people like you very clearly, you know, a small but effective resistance against Putin's policies. What do you think about that? How would you respond to that? Is it in the country? Are more people against it than it would seem or what? There are a lot more people against it than it seems because propaganda shows only people who agree

with Putin and many many people don't agree and many people just just silent because they afraid to lose their jobs. If you beat dog every day then some day it will think that you, I live like that, it's normal. So as we see, a lot of people in Russia are also victims of Putin's regime. At the moment, they just don't think that if they speak up, they'll change anything. I think our main message is that people shouldn't just sit and wait that someone else is going to do anything for them. They should take their lives in their own hands. As we often repeat, if not we, then who? If not now, then when?

Thank you very much. Good luck with everything. Thanks very much. With that, the two partisans from Boak vanished into the forest. As Russia's war on Ukraine approaches its 12th month, Russian partisans like the ones I spoke to are continuing to disrupt Putin's war effort from within. Organizations like BOAC are fighting an uphill battle, but still their attacks have definitely been effective. As we said, several military trains have been derailed and word of the partisan underground is spreading.

Whilst there's next to no Russian state media coverage on this, the Russian government is clearly aware of it. Security around Russian train tracks has been tightened and a Russian court has fined the Telegram app for allowing partisan networks to share information there. Not to mention the uptick in unexplained fires breaking out across the country. Even though Putin's government acts like they can't see them, they know the partisans are there. If you want to watch the extended documentary version of this reporting, go to youtube.com slash popular front and look for the documentary russia's anti-putin underground music in this episode of it could happen here was by sam black sees music at sam black pf.com reporting production editing was by me you can follow me at jake underscore hanrahan h-a-n-R-A-H-A-N

Please do check out my platform Independent Grassroots Conflict Reporting www.popularfront.co 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.

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Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is today about it happening here, or more particularly in Atlanta. So it's here if you happen to live in Atlanta, Georgia. Otherwise, it is still happening there. And I don't actually know much about this because like the rest of you, I have been watching from the sidelines since a forest defender was killed by the Georgia State Police. But someone who has been in Atlanta for most of the last week is Garrison Davis. Garrison. Hello. Hi. Hi. How are you doing? It's been a long week. Yeah, it sounds like it. You had just gotten back from CES when all this happened and booked the next flight and flew out and were on the ground during some of the immediate protests that followed news about the death. Do you want to just kind of take it from here?

protests that followed news about the death. Do you, do you want to just kind of take it from here? Yeah. So we're going to be putting together kind of a, a more in depth thing, similar to my, similar to my, uh,

on the ground at the, at defend the Atlanta forest episodes from last May. That is, that's, that's going to come out, but you know, it'll take a little bit cause I'm doing a lot of interviews, doing a lot of on the ground stuff here.

Um, but this is important enough that I feel like it's it's worth that it was worth mentioning something a bit sooner which is why we're recording here uh today just to kind of give a 101 on what's been going on ever since wednesday so wednesday january 18th there was a raid on the walani forest or the South River Forest in Atlanta, where people have been currently staying in encampments for the past year and a half in opposition of this upcoming proposed police training facility to be built on this same land. So Wednesday morning, there was this raid. There's a few things different about this raid. morning there was this raid um there's a few things different about this raid one it seemed uh to be in some ways kind of led by the georgia state patrol um this is a you know a state a state run police that has not been in this force before um other raids have been coordinated between a

dekab county police and atlanta police so the SWAT team was was unfamiliar with the forest they had not been in there before there was there was other police on site. This was an interagency thing. It does seem like there was Atlanta police here as well. But this started at around 8 a.m. and then at around 9 a.m. we got word that a forest offender was shot and killed by it seems like an estate patrol officer that they are not releasing the name of nor are they releasing the name of one other officer who was injured and georgia state patrol claims that they were shot during this raid as well police by the decision yes police police claim that they were shot by the person that the georgia state patrol killed there's very little information about this um no body cameras

nope they have said that there's no body cam which does seem consistent because georgia state patrol are not uh are not required to wear body cam. So that obviously hit a lot of people pretty hard because this is, to our knowledge, the first environmentalist protester to be killed by police. It's the first fatality that we've had in this movement here in Atlanta. And for the record,

it is still deeply unclear what happened. It's certainly not impossible that this person fired first on the police officer, but it's also incredibly important to note that there is no evidence of this that's been presented. The only evidence that the police have presented is a photo of a, of a pistol on the ground. Um, and then they've made the very weasel-y worded claim that, um, ballistics testing has shown that the bullet that struck the officer was consistent with the gun that they're saying with the, the individual they killed had.

And all that means is that it was nine millimeter. That it was the same caliber, right? A caliber for which there are tens of millions of guns in this country. Most ballistic science is in terms of like identifying bullets to guns is actually nonsense. There have been massive lawsuits about this. The FBI has, this is a bigger topic than we can get into today, but it's very shady. And all that they actually said is the cop was shot with a 9mm and hey, look, we found a 9mm. Not, interestingly enough, we have confirmed that this gun was fired. Correct.

So, anyway. No one knows what's happened. It's shady. I mean, so I got here less than 24 hours later. A lot of people on the ground have been sharing their memories of the person that was killed. So the person was named...

Their forest name was Tortugita, which means little turtle. Their name that has been released is Manuel. I'm going to call them Tortugita or Tort. Sure. People have spent a lot of the past few days talking about torch, remembering tort, um, the types of things that,

that they, they advocated for the types of things that they would talk about. So we'll, we'll get into some of the more kind of specifics of that, of that, of that later. Um, but yeah,

a number of other journalists have talked about their conversations with Tort, including the fact that they evinced a pretty principled and extensive commitment to nonviolence, at least in interviews. This is something they had been quoted on by other journalists a number of times. And this is something I've heard a lot of people bring up, is that Tort was a believer in nonviolence and would talk about and advocate that. The other kind of angle to this, and I'm not taking a position one way or another here, but this is something that I think is important to mention, is that I also don't want to remove the agency of a person if they did decide to do this.

Because the other thing I've heard a lot about Tort is that they always made thoughtful decisions, meaning that they put thought into everything they did. They acted strategically. They did not put people in unnecessary danger. They would not do something if they thought it would endanger other people. They did not put people in unnecessary danger. They would not do something if they thought it would endanger other people. They always acted with thought. And that could include if you feel like your life is under immediate threat.

What actually happened Wednesday morning, we will probably never know. We will never know the exact series of events. Yeah. And in some ways, we should respect tort either way because they made a decision that they thought that was right in the moment or they were just flat out murdered by police. So that's kind of the gist of what happened Wednesday morning.

Throughout the rest of the day, police continued their raid on the forest. The last tree sitter was eventually taken down like 20 hours later after the raids. Someone was stuck up in a tree for over 20 hours, no food or water, police agitating them the entire time. And many, all of the other people arrested, I think a total of around seven, got charged with domestic terrorism, among other charges. So that's pretty significant.

That is people that, and we will circle back to this point a little bit later. So that is what happened on Wednesday. The first few hours after the shooting, people were unsure of who actually got killed. It was hard to say. Other force defenders who were in the area did report from what they heard. There was a pretty quick single firing of guns, multiple guns going off in a pretty quick succession. There was no one shot, and then seconds later,

a bunch of other shots. It was all kind of one event. This is reports from people on the ground. This is what they've said. A lot of people speculate that this could have been friendly fire if this other patrol officer got shot. They went to the hospital, so they were shot. It does appear that a police officer got a bullet inside of them. Yes.

But obviously, there's a number of ways in which that could have occurred and and i i don't find it i certainly i don't think it's conspiratorial at all to conspiratorial at all to say they have not presented evidence it is certainly possible that a bunch of cops wandering through the forest somebody would have a negligent discharge you know somebody would just pant you know there's enough we and again as you've stated we just we probably will never know precisely what happened. Yeah. And that's the feeling on the ground. A lot of people coming to terms with the fact that we will never know. A lot of people, you know, thinking that it, you know, very likely chance it was friendly fire. Other people, you know, trying to emphasize the fact that, you know, we will never know.

We cannot say one way or another. But it's also important not to minimize someone's autonomy especially since they're no longer around to advocate for themselves or their actions yeah let's go let's have a let's have a an ad break and then we'll kind of continue on to what happened in the in the days after we're back garr, please continue to take it away. So the day of the shooting, there was a vigil. Before we found out who it was, there was a vigil set up at Little Five Points in Atlanta. And then the next two days, there was a vigil space created at Entrenchment Creek Park or Wolani People's Park. This is an area of the forest that's to that's on like the eastern

side and this is the section that is currently um being sought as a a place to expand black hole movie studios so this is this is separate from the actual cop city element of this but it's still part of the defend the atlanta forest side of this because this is all the same forest they're just kind of split um down the middle by this uh by this power line cut so this section of the park is on a section of land that's contestedly owned by ryan milsap the guy who runs black hole studios i first arrived at at walani people's park on friday for the for like the more public facing vigil and i just just kind of i i want to talk a bit about the park because this is such a i think it's such a solid encapsulation of what's changed since last time i've been in atlanta so last time i was in atlanta there was um the muskogee Creek people were traveling from, I believe, Oklahoma to Atlanta.

What is now Atlanta? What used to be Muskogee land. And they were giving talks and presentations about the forest inside the section of forest that the Defend the Atlanta Forest stuff is about. And I went to one of those events at Inter-Edge Point Creek Park. It was, you know, green, trees all around. There was a nice gazebo. There was a piano inside the gazebo. People handing out food. A little

kitchen was set up. Pretty picturesque. It was pretty great. Then, when I pulled up to this same spot a few days ago, it was pretty great so then when i pulled up to this same spot a few days ago it was like apocalyptic the gazebo has been completely torn down and is laying in shambles in the front of the parking lot like it for everyone to see the destroyed remains all of the all of like the uh the the the concrete sidewalks and stuff have all been torn up

and it's just scattered everywhere. It's just a massive mud pit. It's such a different place. And, you know, when you get there for a vigil, the mood's not cheery, obviously. There was people sharing stories of torrents, singing songs, and, you know, building this this almost like a vigil shrine. So that was the first big thing, Friday night.

So a lot of people talked about their memories of tort and the different things they contributed to not just the Defend the Atlanta Forest stuff, but stuff across the entire south they did mutual aid work um and stuff to secure housing for people in florida uh they helped defend uh drag shows in uh in tennessee they they did they did stuff all all across South. And, you know, they had, they had allies and accomplices from across the South, you know, talking about how great tort was to work with and the types of solidarity that tort would show to,

to many, many different people. So that was Friday. And everyone was kind of, I, you could kind of feel the almost calm before the storm. In some ways, people didn't really know what was going to happen in the coming days. But there was a sense of like eerie quietness.

And then Saturday happens. Saturday, there is this protest planned meeting in Underground Atlanta, which is a spot in downtown Atlanta, kind of on the south side i got there for this protest there uh initially there was people from this like socialist organization called psl they they tried to lead the march one way um the crowd rejected their authority and was like no we're not going to go to the federal district we're not going to go to the cnn center which are places notorious for getting kettled at um and they and people autonomously redirected the crowd um north towards the and and north is also just so happens

to be the direction of the atl Foundation headquarters, the pseudo-union lobbying group that is behind the big push for Cop City. Before this march started, there was similarly people giving speeches about tort. People, not speeches, people just sharing memories of tort, so that tort can live on in some way, so people can know about them now live on um in some way so people can you know know about them now that they're no longer around you know people from a local medic collective talking about you know torts torts involvement in that and how much tort cared about you know helping other people so this this this march starts up um it was funny there was a few blocks away from this march

location there just so happened to be like a single police car in the street but like parked on the wrong side of the road and this police car sees this march coming and it's like kind of freaking out it doesn't know what to do it drives in reverse for like like two blocks trying to find a spot to turn around as the marsh is like increasingly getting closer like you could just you could just feel you could feel the the anxiety of the cop inside this car he they they do not want to get surrounded by a crowd eventually they're able to back up enough to turn around and they they get out they are they are zooming away they do not want to be anywhere near this and short shortly after uh people arrive at the

atlanta police foundation headquarters windows spontaneously shatter um as as is expected a few bank windows also get um get get broken uh wells fargo being one of them r.i.p yes r.i.p bank windows uh wells fargo being another one wells fargo is a major contributor to the atlanta police foundation so this happens two cop cars that are just you know blocks away um that are sitting completely empty get their get their uh windows smashed you know there's people there's there's fireworks going off around the crowd um there's there's this one clip that i that i saw from some some uh some group that was live streaming um that there was there was a few a few officers like stationed beside the atlanta police foundation and as soon as they as soon as they heard fireworks they again similarly just like

ran away as fast as they could they were not equipped to deal with um to deal with us fireworks were the main thing they seem to be scared of so two two cop cars get their windows smashed um fireworks going around march continues goes for about a few more blocks and uh then uh corkers notice police police are starting to come uh police are approaching the approaching the crowd head on police start rushing towards the crowd um one they, they tackle a few people holding a banner. I think people scatter. Most of the crowd gets away. The crowd splits up into two groups.

The largest chunk is able to move away from police presence. There's people chanting, be water, all of the stuff. So most people do successfully get away. The smaller section of people split off in another direction. Cops follow. They are able to tackle and arrest a few more people in this group.

In the end, it looks like there was six people arrested. Most people got away. After all these arrests are happening people start noticing something that in the background a few a few blocks previous to where people were marching uh it looked there looks to be a glowing police car uh so we we look back and sure enough in a police car is up in flames um Completely, completely, completely glowing. Huge, huge flames.

So as that happens, more and more cops show up. This is where the cops now are taking over downtown. Cops with AR-15 or AR-style rifles are going around, starting to do patrols. So this is like, the night is over at this point. Now it's time for people to scatter and leave, which is what people did. The aftermath of this is super fascinating.

And unfortunate, if not unexpected. There's been very little statements about the police killing of Tortuguita, of an environmental activist, forest defender. Very little statements addressing this matter at all. A huge flood of statements, however, seeming to be extremely concerned

that a few windows were broken and that a cop car got torched. Terrorism. This is less than a week after Martin Luther King Day. This is, you know, this is the big quote was that the, the police chief, a few hours later declared that, uh, breaking windows and starting fires is terrorism, which is a wild thing for a, a police chief to say as the mayor stands behind nodding in agreement.

It's one of the most fascist things that we've, that has, that has occurred in the United States. You cannot understate like in my severity of time yeah like this the severity of this of this change in the types of framing by the state yeah to describe civil disobedience to describe property destruction to describe vandalism as a form of of domestic terrorism is appalling. I mean, if this holds up,

then in states where this is done, there is effectively no longer any right to protest. Yeah. And I mean, we'll get into some of the details of this in a bit, even in this episode. And I think the other side of this is that this is something that I've heard people talk about here on the ground, is that if breaking windows is terrorism, right, if the destruction of inanimate objects is terrorism, what exactly is destroying an entire forest? Like, this is like the juxtaposition that people are dealing with on the ground right now.

So, the result of this is that we got six people who were, to be clear, arrested completely at random. This was very clear. Police were tackling anyone they could get their hands on. They were not doing targeted arrests.

They were not going after specific individuals who they suspected of, of like actually doing crimes. They were, they were tackling random people as is kind of usual for these sorts of things. Yeah. But they have gotten a series of ridiculous charges, riot,

arson, interfering, interfering with government property, and also domestic terrorism. So this is domestic terrorism, not even for people that are in the forest, just people protesting out on the street. Yeah, out on the street when windows were broken.

When windows were broken. There's no evidence of this. The bail hearings were today, as of being recorded. This is Monday. Bail hearings were today. of being recorded this is Monday bail hearings were today the judge for the hearings specifically said that these hearings are not to litigate the facts of the issue

what actually happened doesn't matter there's obviously no evidence to support that any of the people arrested did any crimes there's no evidence that shows that the specific people arrested did anything beyond marching in the street and that does not matter that that that simply does not matter the the brutality is the point in this case um two two people have had their bail set at three hundred and fifty five thousand each. So that's over $700,000 for just two people's bail.

The other four people arrested were deemed to be from out of state by the judge and then thus a flight risk, including people that are just less than 90 minutes away in Tennessee. And again, this is where people are born. There's this sense that people no longer have freedom to choose where they live. That people no longer have any freedom of movement.

That they no longer have the autonomy to go to different places. This is in line with the outside agitator angle that's been being pushed by governments and media especially since 2020 this is in line with that sort of stuff but because these people were deemed non-local or a flight risk

these people are not getting any bond at all these people are going to be held in jail indefinitely indefinitely detention it could this this could literally be years. The legal system is so slow and like being held in prison or in jail for, for years with no evidence presented that you did literally anything wrong. Um, I've talked with a lot of people, people from solidarity fund, which will, I guess I'll mention here at the end and,

and, you know, just, just people around like what they're you know people are getting arrested with no evidence and getting you know indefinite time in prison hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars to be released like the the the obvious abuse of power by the state um the the sheer audacity and uh you know the extreme danger that if these are able to stick and hold is incredibly frightening for any kind of future...

Yeah, it's meant to be. Any future civil rights movement at all. You might say that it's the strategic use of terror in order to achieve a political end. One might say that. And I mean, it's, we're in Atlanta, the streets they're marching on,

there's banners of Martin Luther King hanging above us. Like it's, it's incredibly frustrating. The solidarity fund, which we interviewed on the show literally days before that, well, with the episode released days before the killing of Tortugita. But the Atlanta solidarity fund is providing both legal support and bail for people arrested for political actions.

The previous amount needed to bail out people was over $100,000, which is a lot of money. And now, just for two people, it's $700,000 more. Now, just for two people, it's $700,000 more. So the Atlanta Solidarity Fund desperately needs funds to continue supporting people and to continue resisting state repression. We'll talk about this more once I have my deep-dive episodes out on this topic. topic but it's it's crucial that that if if if anyone cares about people's right to protest to people's people's you know ability to resist state violence um that it's it's absolutely crucial that that people support the solidarity fund right now uh just just today i went went to another kind of vigil at Emory College here in Atlanta. More people were sharing stories of tort.

One person was reading out a letter that they sent to their comrades in Italy who are setting up a vigil as well. There's been a good amount of international support. I've seen vigils from Germany, from Italy. There's been events, demos, rallies, direct actions and vigils all across the United States about to defend the Atlanta forest and about the killing of Tortugita. People here absolutely do appreciate the solidarity and the other thing people are saying is that i mean all of these tactics are meant to scare people away from the idea of protesting and yeah people are still needed on the ground here this fight is not this fight is not over um this is this is not this is not the end you know tactics may have

to change tactics may have to shift. Tactics may have to shift. People may have to approach things from, you know, different angles. But it's not over. And people have said that there's still a need for support roles for people on the ground, for people to be in Atlanta, because it's not done. I mean, I think there's a lot of sentiment on the left that what's happening in the Atlanta forest defense is probably the most important radical action

going on in the country right now. And I think there's a few reasons for that, not just the fact that the forest that is going to be torn down for Cop City is a crucial part of the city of Atlanta's tree cover. And that all of this ties into both the impossibility of actually combating climate change under the present system and the complicity of the police in making it impossible to combat that or even to mitigate it in many cases. But I think what you've gotten to is probably the most directly frightening thing about what's going on in Atlanta and the thing that's most relevant to the future of any kind of resistance in this country, which is

the gloves are coming off, right? This is not going to be the last time that state security forces use the fact that terrorism has a special place in American law and that crimes that are deemed to be terrorism open up the ability of the government to act in ways that they normally are not supposed to be able to act in ways that they normally are not supposed to be

able to act. Um, like that is going to be, it's not going to be just forest offenders that gets used on. It's going to be anyone who ever carries out any kind of act of protest that has a chance of upsetting the balance of power, um, in this country. Like that's, that's where this is headed. in this country. Like that's, that's where this is headed. And yeah, it's a bummer. Do you want to talk a little bit about the, the role of the media in this? Because that is something that is, I'm certain going to be of a, we just had a thing today where some weirdo lefties on the True and On subreddit decided, and someone on Twitter decided to accuse me of getting a bunch of people in Atlanta arrested for terrorism because I interviewed them on camera. I've never interviewed anyone in Atlanta. I simply have never worked

there. I'm not sure where the rumors started, but it's reigniting this kind of debate about- It seems like tanky stuff. It's- It's nonsense but it has reignited i saw this on the it could happen here subreddit people talking about like um obviously you know this is nonsense but it is a you know looking at these terrorism charges it's a simple fact that uh activists should never talk to press and um obviously a lot of these arrests had nothing to do with anyone talking to the media, like folks were present at a riot and the cops were tackling folks. That's that's nobody but the cops' fault.

But there's a there's a there's a conversation to be had about what is the what is the smart balance in terms of getting PR and getting press coverage and getting word of mouth about a radical movement and the fact that doing that will inevitably ramp up pressure. Like, that is a reality. Yes. When radical activists get attention from the media, the state cracks down. Now, does that mean that the media is responsible for the movement getting

cracked down? Or does it simply mean that the cops judge whether or not something's a threat by the amount of press that it's getting? You know, this is an ongoing, like, thing people are going to be talking about. And in a lot of ways, it's a continuation of conversations people were having in 2020. But I'm interested in, because when you went over there, we had a little a few hours of debate after it became clear that the cops had killed a forest offender over like, OK, what's the right thing to do? Should should Garrison head over to Atlanta? Should we have some boots on the ground for this? Because you've been covering it for so long. And one of the things you pointed out is that there was a call for media coverage from people who were on the ground for this because you'd been covering it for so long. And one of the things you pointed out is that there was a call for media coverage from people

who were on the ground in Atlanta. Yes. This is something I will get more into when I go in depth with this for an upcoming episode. Probably a two-parter. This is a conversation that people are constantly having in Atlanta. This is a conversation I've been having with people nonstop ever since coming here, ever since before coming here. This is something I don't want to just parachute

into someone else's city. I had conversations with multiple people before coming over. There's a few aspects to this. The amount of people doing stuff and how many people are in the forest, not a giant number of people. There's not hundreds many people are in the forest not a not a giant number of people there's not hundreds of people living in the woods there's there's not this there's not there's not tons of people um a uh an intentional media strategy has been a part of this movement since the beginning um even among the insurrectionary anarchists who are here. This is, this has been something that people have been,

you know, working on as, as a part of a decentralized movement, having conversations about. There's been a lot of, there's been coverage in the Rolling Stone that people here seem to be pretty happy with. Yeah,

it was very, and the Guardian also published an extreme, like people have been pretty happy with published people have been like people have been pretty happy very good article people have been pretty happy with coverage from the guardian um there's uh people been pretty happy with some stuff from aj plus um people have been uh decently uh happy with the the work that i've done on this but based on many conversations dozens and dozens of conversations I have, I've had with people here.

Ultimately, I don't, for what, for what cops are doing in the forest, I don't think there seems to be a clear correlation between media coverage happening of stuff of, of, you know,

the movement and cops response to the forest there doesn't there does there's no linked timeline there cops are doing stuff in the forest because they want the forest cleared so they can build their police training or their police training facility from what I've talked with people the amount of pressure that has been caused by media covering the forest has not only elongated the construction process and elongated the the amount that stuff that they're that they're able to do it's it is it has it has made it harder because this is this this is not a very popular proposal even even before the encampments started it was estimated that like 70 of people in atlanta were not for this we're not for the

construction of this facility so i think people people make a lot of intentional media choices. That's not to say that there isn't also intentionally harmful actors who are trying to frame this as Atlanta burning down, Atlanta in disorder, Antifa taking over sections of Atlanta. That is absolutely another part of it. But there is a very – people here have a very clear distinction between between um bad actors between people who are you know providing accurate fair coverage of what's going on um and then you know people who are just out to profit which is you

know like a lot of like local tv channels um there's there i think uh stuff that happened on the protest on saturdays is a good example. There's this far-right account that I'm not going to name, at least not yet. I might talk about it in the future, who tries to collect information on protesters. They have someone on the ground who films. They also have a really good aggregate of random people's Instagram and TikToks or Snapchats of filming people from unfortunate angles. Local TV, like the local Fox News station, tries to get as much sensational footage of crimes as possible. And people, to the best of their ability,

will try to block that off with umbrellas if they see that happening. But it's meh. will try to block that off with umbrellas if they see that happening. But it's meh. There's definitely a clear intention that people in the movement do not want the media narratives around this to solely be decided by the state and be decided against people who are in clear opposition to them. That is absolutely something that people are putting in putting attention in uh they they just that's because that that creates a lot of uh really really harmful scenarios

because there's the state itself is already a pretty powerful propaganda machine already a lot of local news just regurgitates state talking points right this is the idea of the fourth estate there is does seem to be a pretty a distinction between stuff like the fourth estate and stuff like the derivative idea of the fifth estate, of being more of the people's voice for these sorts of movements. decentralized media collective run by a lot of rad people who help to coordinate media coverage, who help to coordinate

stuff with... They've worked with us on the history of the old Atlanta prison farm. So I would say there's a lot of thought put into media strategy um and not like in like a libby like optics way but like actual effective media strategy that will improve

material conditions and will help push the goals of the movement forward the goal being that the construction of cop city does does not continue so there's a lot of thought going into that, and that is viewed as another wing of the effort. There's stuff like the encampments. There's stuff like sabotage. There's stuff like protests. There's stuff like very above-board stuff that very above-ground organizations will do, that like very, you know, like above ground organizations will do

like, you know, writing campaigns, calling campaigns. And media strategy is another angle of this because to completely give up the public perception of what's going on to the state is seen as a bad thing. So but this is this is absolutely a contentious topic. I think people inanta have a lot of nuanced conversations about this and media stuff is handled with a lot more intention here than it has been in the pacific northwest um that is my that is my subjective opinion but based on based on i mean it's a smaller community so i think maybe it's easier. It does seem like there's more solidarity within the community and more of a shared vision. I would say that's true. The community is forced to reinforce itself. It is small enough that it cannot treat people as disposable. It needs to maintain the people that it has. And so people work through problems, people work through conflicts and ways to actually resolve it and keep going to build everyone up and make them stronger. There is a

shared community space, which I've been to a few times. And I think even just something like that is so useful in being able to actually keep something that resembles a community. You see a lot of like anarchists, um, talk about how like community isn't a real thing. There isn't actually community. you know, and in a lot of places I would say that's, that's true.

A lot of places are just click driven. Um, you know, uh, uh, scene drama. It, it,

it, it honestly gets towards or like interesting conflict if you don't want to use the word drama. Um, whereas circular firing squad type shit yeah whereas here there is such a feeling of actual community like that that actually is a thing here because people are forced to foster it we're in the south we're surrounded or you know you're you're surrounded by a lot of people who want to hurt you um atlanta's

the most surveilled city there's so many different police forces. There's a police force for Fulton County. There's a police force for DeKalb County. There's a police force for Atlanta. There's the Georgia State Patrol. There's the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. There's the Georgia Department of Homeland Security. There's so many people,

so many agencies are involved in this. There's so much, so much outwards threats to people that you really are forced to keep people uh keep people close and and trust the people around you because the consequences are quite dire um so people take things very seriously and they put a lot of thought into into a lot of into a lot of things yeah that makes sense i mean that that also gels with my own experience in the south right it's it's easier to find communities of people who are um doing anything kind of radical because there's that that bunker mentality right you're under siege you're surrounded on all sides

and um you know that's very different when you go to a place where there's kind of more like what what would be in other places deviancy is more the norm um and yeah i guess that that is probably has a lot to do with the fact that this forest defense has so far been so successful in delaying the construction of this facility. Which it has. Construction deadlines continue to have been passed and been passed and been passed. It has at the very least showed that stuff like this can be resisted and significantly delayed. And at this point, they're projecting construction won't be complete for about four more years. And again, these deadlines keep getting pushed back and back.

And that is really what the movement is trying to do. Keep these deadlines getting pushed back and back until they just give up on the project or try to put it somewhere else. And if they try to put it somewhere else, then the forest was defended. But then there's still the stop cop city aspect of being like, yeah, it can go somewhere else. But we don't want it there at all. And then at that point, the movement would change, you know, very significantly. But in terms of the defend the Atlanta forest aspect of this, right, the whole goal is to make this as unenticing as possible. including stuff like propaganda, agitprop, media strategy, sabotage, direct action call-in campaigns,

stuff about pressuring the construction agencies, all those sort of things. That's so much more – because what you're talking about is what we call in sort of conflict studies a strategy of friction, right? And so much – there's always so much focus on kind of these like we had in Portland in 2020, these like grand moments that are very visually spectacular of resistance. But what actually what actually wins because the state has the ability to take a lot of hits. It is a durable force. And if you're going up against a durable force, the only way to win victories is to be durable yourself and to wear away at them. It's friction. And I think that's still the winning play, is to keep up pressure. It's just the kinds of pressure, especially now that they've cleared out the tree sitters and stuff, and now that we've seen what they're going to do to people who are arrested at demonstrations, the kinds of friction that can be applied have to change. Otherwise, the movement's going to get worn down before the state does in this fight.

Something that Tortuguita has said is that the state is very good at doing violence we we cannot we cannot beat the state at violence the the state's good the state will probably win that game that's that's that's the entire point of the state that it like the state has a monopoly on violence that is the entire point they will win that um but there but there are other ways where we can see successes and we have seen successes before. Um, so it's not over. It will probably grow and change. Um, what actually happens will remain to be seen, but I am, um, just, I'm prepping to

go through a whole bunch of my audio files. Yeah, welcome to that hell. And piece together kind of a pretty succinct deep dive that is a true successor to the original On the Ground at the Defend the Atlanta Forest episodes that I did last May. Well, I look forward to that. I'm sure I know everyone else is as well. Thank you for going over there and being in the thick of it. And yeah, we'll continue to cover this story as best we can, whatever comes in the future. All right. I think that's an episode. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill

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

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

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

as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and how to put them back together again. I'm your host, Mia Wong, and today I am returning to my roots in the seedy criminal anarchist hacker underground, which has gotten much less seedy and somehow

even more gay since I was last there. And with me to talk about this is Maya Arson-Crimeu, who is most recently famous as the person who owned an airline so hard they got a copy of the fucking no-fly list. Yeah. Just first-day things. an airline so hard they got a copy of the fucking no-fly list which is yeah just just first day things yeah so maya how are you how are you doing being deluged with one trillion interview requests

and um so yeah it's not my first time experiencing like a big news cycle but this is certainly the biggest one yet it's i'm surprised that this is bigger than the one i've had before with other stories yeah but i feel like becoming a trans femme meme at the same time as i have like a national security uh news cycle going on probably helped a bit i'm i'm i'm very happy for weed catcat like that that cat did like that every single other thing that has happened to Weedcat has like done that thing dirty but I'm happy for it

yeah Weedcat is now just like a hacking icon and I'm so here for it did you see like just like 15 minutes before we got on call there is now a like bingle meme from the SCP foundation on their twitter they commissioned an artist to make an like 15 minutes before we got on call there is now a like bingle meme from the scp foundation on their twitter they commissioned an artist to make a bingle meme like it has just turned into

a thing now like that that's the why it's so good it's not even it's not even like the whole hacking story anymore it's just the fact that i have bingo into a meme like how yeah and especially that bingle turned into a meme because that started as a like discord in joke like that that's all it was and now it's the name of this cat well okay so we should explain for for people for people who don't know what this cat is this is the pokemon sprigaro is this sprigarado how do you is it sprigatito i think i don't know how to properly pronounce yeah neither do i it do I. It's Italian. I'm under no obligation to pronounce an Italian-sounding thing correctly.

It's fine. It's the Wheat Cat. Like, Wheat Cat and Bingle are now the only two acceptable names for this Pokemon. Yeah, but in the blog where you went through and talked about how you got the no-fly list by

owning this thing you'd posted a picture of of of this exactly yeah yeah i did actually like take that picture while i was like hacking this stuff and like talking in some like small friends discord about it and i just posted that together with like the phrase this aviation should get serious that's why that's also in the blog i expected that to with the phrase, this aviation shit gets serious. That's why that's also in the blog. I expected that to become the meme that blows up, that this aviation shit gets serious, because that's just so stupid.

But I guess bingo it is, and that's funny because it was just an in-joke nonsense word, and now the entire world knows about it, and it's like a trans femme thing. It rules, yeah. nonsense word and now the entire world knows about it and it's like a trans femme thing it rules it rules yeah so i okay i guess we should talk about what actually you did so i i am not a very

technical person i'm out here defying like defying trans girl stereotypes by sucking ass at coding um so my understanding of what happened is you were browsing a list of servers that are connected to the internet that you can use through sort of like various search engines that do this. And you stumbled upon the server that belongs to Commute Air, and then they just like had a bunch of hard-coded privileges there and like AWS. and like AWS. Exactly, yeah. It's still funny to me how like I realized what it was because I saw like the word ACARS and stuff. And I was like, wait, that reminds me of like mentor pilot YouTube videos

because of course I'm an autistic trans femme and binge watch mentor pilot while eating dinner. So that is the only reason I clocked it as like an aviation thing and as something I should dig into deeper. Because like you can imagine like while I'm going through these search results, I'm looking at like hundreds of servers in a day. And most of the stuff I decide is boring or it was too easy to hack so I'm not going further because I have ADHD. So yeah, and in this case I was like, wait, that's an aviation word. I've heard that before.

So I digged a little deeper, and there were just passwords there. And then, like, two minutes after I found that server, I was looking at, like, ACARS messages, as in, like, messaging between ground stations and airplanes. And I was just like, yeah, this is a story, and started tweeting about it looking for journalists to work with because with stories like this i like to work with journalists from the very start because i want to make sure it doesn't get wiped under the rug when i report

it to a company so i make sure that when i do reach out and get things fixed i reach out via journalists so that the companies know yeah yeah, this is being reported on. So they can't be like, yeah, we will fix it under the condition that you never tell anyone about our bad security. Because the whole point of what I'm doing is exposing security issues, but also exposing, yeah, with a political background

at the end of the day. Yeah, and I guess another thing, I don't know how many people sort of are aware of this, but like another thing that has happened with people who have tried to go to companies and been like, Hey, here's a security thing is like the company tries to like go after them criminally,

like immediately, which sucks ass and it's the worst. Yeah. So, so, so from that standpoint, it doesn't even matter if I like do it like this or actually report it to them but this way i get to talk about it publicly and like that's important

not because i'm on cloud like i i i don't mind the cloud but like yeah yeah and so okay so i i there's there's been a lot of focus on the fact that you found the no fly list on there which is very funny but okay why like okay one of the things i'm trying to figure out why was there why were there just messages from like ground crews to airplanes just like sitting around on this random server that's just like exposed to the internet right so the messages weren't directly on that server but like it's a server where they like uh for testing purposes like i don't know how much i can understand really but where they like test the software automatically and and so there is all and because of how they configured the

server uh i could just have access to all the source code, which included lots of passwords, for example, for the server that then had the ACARS messages on it. Okay. But yeah, or access credentials for APIs that would have allowed me to update the crew on a flight or canceled flights. Which if you think about it, that's almost the bigger story that yeah like at least theoretically could have been able to change crew crews because like that's the real terrorism risk yeah like if i'm just like if i'm just allowed to spell it out like that like that that's the dream of any yeah yeah like i mean you know you know like i'm one of the things you were

talking about when when you're writing about this was that like journalists thought that you were the one who had like caused all of the flight delays i was like no that was just their computer breaking no but yeah like that was just funny because i didn't even know the thing with yes yeah with the faa happened but i was like tweeting about oh i have a big aviation story any journalists interested it's like a security breach and people were like wait what did you do to the faa and i happened but i was like tweeting about oh i have a big aviation story any journalist interested it's like a security breach and people were like wait what did you do to the faa and i was like what faa oh so that happened like i am so not up to date on news anymore yeah i mean so for people who don't know what that story is so basically the the federal aviation administration had a

computer problem it was the very very short version Administration had a computer problem. It was the very, very short version. They had a computer problem, and this grounded, like, a shit ton of flights because the huge, like, computer bottlenecks where if – we saw this over, like, last month when there was that – when all of those flights got down by Southwestern because their computer system just went down. Right, yeah. It's the same thing, except US-wide.

Yeah. But it's just funny because, yeah, I first found this server, like, exactly the day after. Like, that was literally a day after the FAA incident, so people were rightly assuming that that was me, which it obviously wasn't, but, like, it would have been cool. Yeah. It's also, like it it is very disturbing

to me that like this kind of stuff is just sitting there and like someone yeah could just like theoretically go in and screw with all of this stuff which is like and then also the fact that like there was just all of like the personal information of all of the pilots on there like what the hell like that is yeah that yeah it's terrifying yeah it's it is crazy how much stuff is just out there and like that's part of what i try to show with my work it's just yeah there is so much stuff out there and it's just waiting to be found and i both mean that in in terms of like yeah you can find shit if you try to but also in the sense of things are not secure like yeah like all the systems are like entire lives depend on nowadays not none of those systems are really secure they're entirely dependent on

like one system administrator who doesn't get paid enough our entire like computer systems depend on like a bunch of furries um yeah being motivated enough to do their work uh so basically like the moral of the story is pay furries well enough yeah yeah and this is probably to look at everything that i was thinking about when i was looking at this which is like you know okay so like when i was like a teenager like one one of the things i think i was the most wrong about that i believed was like i actually genuinely believed that like automating cars was a good idea because humans are really, really bad at driving. And then, and then, and then I had to learn to program and I had to like see scientist code and I had to, I, I, I, I, I, I open a program and there's a section of it that no one knows how it works. And I look, I look at the notes and the notes say, I don't, I didn't write this.

I don't know how it works. This was produced. This was produced at 4am onm on like like 700 milligrams of caffeine that's like yeah yeah oh on at least caffeine if not yeah well these are these were astronomers so i i i think it was actually just a lot of caffeine and not amphetamines but yeah like you know then i had the realization the the only single thing that we as humans are worse at than driving is coding. Exactly, yeah.

We are even worse at that. And then the other thing we're also very bad at is labeling data, which is like the whole thing machine learning is dependent on. Because like the entire intelligence of like an automotive car, like a self-driving car is entirely dependent on how intelligent the like underpaid workers in Kenya are. Yeah. Get paid like two bucks an hour to label things as car, human and child and then make moral decisions of whether or not those should get run over.

Like. Yeah. get run over um like yeah like this is you know one of one of my sort of political things that i'm coming to is i i i i i i think the only person people who should be allowed to do machine learning are astronomers and no one else should be allowed to do it and even they and you know because they have like they have a legitimate reason which is that like they actually a they're doing a bunch of big date like most of astronomy is just big data analysis yeah and then b like the the analysis itself doesn't really hurt anyone uh you you could argue about where they're putting the telescopes but like you're not you're not like

yeah just like anything that involves humans probably yeah also involves ai in any way yeah terrible idea but yeah i guess okay circling back around to the point I was going to make and then got distracted talking about AI because such is the world. Yeah, so, you know, it's really remarkable to me, like, how little technical skill you need to just, like, absolutely own enormous corporations and governments. Yeah. And, you know, but the other thing that struck me about this that I've been thinking about for a while is that, like, okay, on the one hand, you have how easy hacking is. Like, this server stuff's, like, easier than the stuff that I remember back in the day, which was a lot of, like, people, like, someone somewhere long ago in a galaxy far, far away wrote, like, a script. And then you just copy and paste it into, like, every single text box on a web page. like a script and then you just copy and paste it into like every single text box on a web page and like that's i think like that's probably maybe like more hackery quote unquote than just like

looking through a list of servers but like even that is like the level of technical sophistication is so low or or you know yeah you don't need technical yeah it's just need to be stupid enough to pull it up like yeah but but you know but the thing that i realized about this i was thinking about this was like on the one hand the level technical sophistication you for this is extremely low on the other hand one of the sort of like like one of the sort of trends of of the way capitalism has been distributing digital technology which is sort of by apping it like by sorry which has been packing it into apps and these closed garden ecosystems and like putting uis in between you

and like well like you and what's actually happening on your computer has been you know it's been designed in a way to make it quote-unquote consumer friendly but also it's been designed in a way such that like successive generations of computer users just have less and less knowledge of how their devices and technology actually work. Yeah, there's that whole thing about how younger kids nowadays don't understand the concept of folders anymore, because that's

completely abstracted away on smartphones and tablets. Yeah, and Chromebook in particular, which I genuinely think we need to ban Chromebooks in schools. Just for the sake of human computer literacy. Yeah, I forgot how big of a thing that is in the U.S. Yeah, it's awful. Like, oh, God, they're the worst.

Yeah, I don't know. Like, at the end of today, what I wanted to say earlier about, like, how easy it is to hack all the big corporations and stuff, and it's just, like, the answer as to why is just capitalism. It's cheaper not to give a shit about cybersecurity. It's cheaper to just pay when you get hacked than to like secure your shit up front because like the only people that will really suffer is like your customers and your employees and they can forget your your

shareholders are gonna be just fine yeah and you know and you you look at the way the regulatory structure works it's like okay so what what what happens if you get in trouble for something like this? Well, the government takes a cut. That's it. Yeah. Yeah, that's it. Like, it's literally like you can botch it getting hacked. There is cyber insurance now.

You can get insured against getting hacked. Like, it's just capitalism at work. I feel like one of the things that journalists have sort of – I don't know. I understand why they focus on it, but I feel like there's a lot of focus in tech journalism and in journalism on the hacking stuff in the really big, sophisticated like Stutnix or what was the more recent one? I can't remember the name of it. But yeah, the really sort of convoluted trawling program. The things that, like, you know, take nation-state

level resources. And it's like, well, yeah, you know, this was always the thing with, like, the NSA, too, where it's like, well, okay. So, on the one hand, the NSA does have enough money

to, like, spend, like, $50 million factoring one number so they could break a bunch of encryption. On the other hand, like... They can just force U.S. companies to give them access. And other hand like they can just force us companies to give them and also they force us companies to give them access and also like i don't know they can they can get most of this information because like some server admin in like a farm in like the middle of rural nebraska like misconfigured a file like misconfigured a

server so like you know i i don't know that's that's also what i find funny about the things i find because i like almost exclusively go for like the low-hanging fruit because like why would i invest more effort when i can get the really big scoops like this and also sometimes sometimes i do kind of think about how hey uh you know like maybe i just cut off access to the CIA. Maybe this was like how the CIA got this access. Maybe the NSA was here. Obviously, most likely not in most cases, but it's just a funny little thought of like, who did I just cut access to by reporting this issue? I will say this, like, I can't imagine that there isn't someone at the NSA

and there isn't someone at the CIA whose job it is to do exactly the same thing you do and like scroll through your server list every day like absolutely like like like that that's why by now i use sumai like yeah the search engines there's shodan which is like the famous us one which is why i still always say i found it on shodan even though by now i use yeah because shodan has like half of like all us ip censored and they have an artificial delay between finding the servers and showing them to you and have really bad search. And I'm pretty sure it's just because at one point the US government got upset

because they kept getting hacked. Yeah. And so, yeah, but like the Chinese are very willing to give me all the US IPs ever. They do censor a lot of Chinese IPs though. I think a lot of that was so i was i was trying to figure out why that name was really familiar but then i had this i

remembered that there was a story where some researcher did like almost the exact same thing you did to a chinese security company and found out that they were doing guess what exactly the same shit the u.s government was doing which was using using a bunch of surveillance cameras to spy on muslims and it was like, well, this is great. Yeah, it's always like, it's always appointing and doing the same thing behind the scenes. Like, yeah.

Okay, so we, unfortunately, are going to have to take an ad break. Yeah, but then once we return from capitalism, we will go back to opposing capitalism. Welcome to 2023. All right right and we're back nice yeah so speaking of any capitalism that that was another thing i wanted to sort of talk about which is that okay so like long long long ago in a galaxy far far away little little little baby 15 year old mia was radicalized like back back back back when i was overthrowing trying to overthrow my first government it was

um a lot a lot of it was being in the same spheres a lot of sort of anarchist hackers that were in the sort of like loose anonymous sphere but you know but by like 2015 2016 like that stuff was kind of falling apart like partially because of infighting partially because of fed infiltration partially because

you know like everyone got arrested yeah yeah point all the big players have been arrested like three years prior yeah and and you know and the other thing that was going on too i think was like anonymous like its politics were always really incoherent like you you had i don't know you had just like everyone like you know the thing i remember was there was a big split between like basically the fascists and the anarchists over Trump specifically. Yeah, I think the thing with Anonymous is just the way it started. It started as just a group of trolls.

Yeah, unfortunately. It was like, well, okay. I mean, it makes sense that Anonymous is the way it is and has been the way it has been. I think it's still important that it is and has been the way it has been uh i think it's still like important that it exists and that it motivates people uh like i have been involved with anonymous before uh there's the one thing i can talk about with like operation myanmar where we did like support things um that was shortly before my indictment but yeah it's it's interesting like anonymous brings people together to do operations yeah and that's what they do and they can do pr for stuff uh yeah i i don't want to like

talk down on them yeah no but i i think like well i think especially especially like in like when i was getting involved in 2013 it was like like it was it was a lot different like it was you know like it was like it was a thing yeah it was it was it was both like a thing and also it wasn't just like like it wasn't just that it was sort of like okay we're like we're we're like trolling we're trolling a government by like taking down their web pages or whatever like they were actually sort of there was like there was real coordination between like people like you know revolutionaries on the ground in like egypt or in like brazil and that like that does still happen yeah that does still happen it's just less of a public thing like that's what we did in in in myanmar as well as where we did communications with people on the ground where

we helped them communicate among each other where we helped them keep the internet up even when the government tried to turn it off which is really sick other fun other other fun shenanigans like that uh and also archival and that like just in case some kids that does decide to do this literally every web page in the country which is mostly nonsensical but like yeah but i i do find it interesting how like yeah there's like the 2012 2013 generation that was mostly anonymous dominated and now we're in like this new generation where it's just small little groups yeah and i wanted to talk about that because it's much more decentralized i don't know i it's weird to talk about it because uh at the end of the day i inspired a lot of it which

is really weird to say yeah it's so weird to say that I, like, but yeah, I'm kind of part of what revived activism. And it sounds so pretentious of me to just say that myself, but like, it is kind of what happened in like 2019, 2020. Yeah, and like, that was interesting to me too, because it was very like i don't know like the the 2012 stuff was also like it was very very i guess media centered in a way where it was it was about drawing like drawing masses of people into things and then using it

to sort of get media attention using it to sort of like i don't know be be this sort of like online like also this sort of like online social movements in a way that i think is very different than the modern stuff so this is my conception of it though because i i've also been kind of like i don't know i i was off doing other stuff in 2019 that had nothing to do with this so yeah i'm curious well okay how do i put this so i i i i'm curious a like how how you see the politics of these new groups either sort of as different from what came before it i i think it's hard for a lot of the groups it's hard to like see what their politics are and some of them aren't even like there's things like lapsus that aren't specifically doing hacktivism but they're accidentally doing anti-corporate activism by just leaking everything uh like uh and that's

like groups that are like in the way that they operate are very clearly inspired by my work that i used to do um and they're just not very like political yeah per se they but but i still call them hacktivists because even if it might not be their intention they're doing activism and they're making corporations angry and wasting corporate resources and in my book that counts as like yeah activism and the fact that they in a way fight for like freedom of information even if that might not be the goal uh yeah i don't know i feel like that is the main unifying factor now it's just a fight for information because like they're currently like the single biggest active hacktivist thing happening right now since like 2019 it's just

leaking the whole leaktivism thing that happened before as well but like now that's like the main thing before it was often a lot like just dedosing and stuff but now we're so focused on like getting documents getting software getting uh files getting like proof that things happened getting fucking no fly list it's just it's just a very different environment where like the goals are probably about the same in a lot of ways at least for the people who do have an ideology yeah but but like yeah i feel like it's just much more focused on like releasing information into the free which i find really great like that that is kind of my big fight that i try to devote myself to. Yeah, I wanted to ask

also sort of just about your personal anarchism because, I don't know, I like talking about anarchism and... Yeah, everyone has their own. I don't know. It's a difficult question and I feel my answer to this question changes like every other day.

I especially find it hard because like i am like doing work in very specific focused bits of like anarchist work and so i don't really want to lock myself into like some sorry so so it's it's like very fluid i'm just like obviously against states i'm like i don't know it's it's. No governments, no shitty corporations, and just having fun with friends and being gay. That is like... There's rules, we take this.

This is a good form of anarchism. Yeah, I don't know. Just some form of queer anarchism. Being gay and doing crimes, it's a it's a good it's a good thing i guess in a way like what kind of defines me and what keeps getting me into the spotlight is that i do just kind of have like a very strong moral compass and i go by that rather by what's legal or not legal or like sure i try to stay within some safe boundaries, especially now post-indictment, given that there are definitely even more eyes on me now than before,

and this podcast is definitely being played at some FBI. Oh, yeah. There's, oh, yeah. So that's something to consider. But, like, yeah, I feel like that's kind of what i want to demonstrate is that like if you have morals you can't just stick by them like no one is stopping you from doing that they might try to but like you can just stick with your morals yeah and i i think it's i think it's worth mentioning even like you know okay like a lot of people go to prison for doing stuff like this some of them didn't.

Like, to the best of my knowledge, there is at least still one Lulzak guy who's just in the wind, who they never got. And Lulzak, like, they had a fed mole in the group, and one of these people still got away. Fuck Sabu. Yeah, fuck him, by the way. Just to interject real quick, fuck Sabu. Yeah, fuck him, by the way. Just to interject real quick, fuck Sabu. So for people who don't know, Sabu's basically the guy that the feds flipped inside of Losec,

who got everyone sent to prison. Yeah, fuck him. I do have to say, I kind of get why he flipped. He at that point already had a family and stuff. I get that that is hard. But still, you gave up your friends yeah simply do not do that and like like i don't know and the fact that he still like has some sort of

image honestly i don't know it's just infosec community i guess it's i don't know it's it's interesting for sure but yeah i i can't comment too much on my own case there are a lot of funny jokes to be made that I shouldn't yeah the feds suck I'm just gonna say that oh god

it's been a bad week of feds in the US too like yeah honestly just one thing again about the tsa i am so curious what's going to happen with the congressional inquiry yeah i don't know if you saw that yeah like especially since like uh this means that the republicans are going to be exposed to my blog post presumably uh and i am so excited for all the slurs they can come up with. It is going to be

extremely funny. I'm also very excited for the TERFs to be like, this is terrorism, see? We've been right all along. I have gotten that before. I have gotten TERF replies before on articles about me where they were like, see, no, women don't

commit crimes, so this is clear proof that it's just like what what are you talking about this is this is my male genes coming out it's also like ma'am committing crime ma'am you are British like do you do you do you know what people what what people did so you have the right to vote, like, come on. Yeah, like, that's the funny thing, is that they, at the same time, also, like, fetishized the whole suffragette thing, without having no fucking clue what that movement was about.

Yeah, it's like, no suffragette would ever horsewhip Rishi Sunak. I mean, not suffragette, no TERF would ever horsewhip Rishi Sunak, unlike the suffragettes, who, yeah. Yeah, exactly. I don't know it's it's silly i'm surprised how little harassment i've gotten on twitter so far if we exclude the whole bi lesbian discourse yeah i i'm so sorry for restarting that discourse i think me talking

about that single-handedly restarted that discourse across all of Twitter. It just happens periodically. Yeah, yeah. It's just funny because I was just like, yeah, this is going to get me some hate replies. But within five minutes, I had 21 private quotes. Jesus Christ. Yeah, I mean, I won't make an official statement on that, which is that if you give a single shit about people calling themselves bi lesbians like please let me know so I can trade lives with you like you

seem to have like very few problems going on I would love to like have grown up in the world where like that's like that's the thing that you think like I don't know I think it's funny how there's people who were like wanting to follow me wanting to interact with me as like and it's funny how there's people who were like wanting to follow me, wanting to interact with me as like an it-its, a theory and kitten who like does funny things to the US government.

But then they draw the line at the specific sexuality. I then made like a post where i was like sorry i deleted that i didn't i don't have the energy to deal with people getting so upset over an innocent word and that has gotten so many many quote tweets being like yeah and that innocent wording question was by lesbian as if i said like the n word or something like that was literally the kind of response i got and it's just like do you not have anything else to do in your day? Yeah, like, like, ugh. Like, do you know how many people the cops killed last week? Can you please do something? Like, come on! Out of all the things that are happening here right now, like, ugh.

Especially then when some of the people that come up with that are like non-binary lesbians, which if you know anything about this puritan discourse like half of them would also like throw these under a pit because non-binary lesbians also can't exist and like it's just why are you why why are you fighting for the turfs like that that is my one single question i have to all the 14 year old queers on twitter.com yeah also why did that why did the discourse ever escape tumblr like that was well it's because all the tumb-year-old queers on twitter.com. Also, why did that discourse ever escape Tumblr? Like, that was enough of that discourse four years ago.

Because all the Tumblr refugees came to Twitter. Yeah, but they could have left the discourse there. Yeah, but no, the world... I don't know, Twitter in the last, like... Okay, like, Twitter's discourse has never been good, but, like, in the last couple of years

it's just been getting steadily worse and it's it's just the same it's not even that it's just bad discourse it's just the same discourse every week and I'm just tired of it and I guess now that I'm a big account I have to have an opinion

on everything and also the fun part about being trans is everyone is like like absolutely razor focused for like the exact one word that you say wrong so they can act so they can like

legitimately quote unquote be transphobic at you and it's like this is great like this is a great system that we've developed for existing with each other we could simply not do this yeah you can just say like the fact that literally like i was like i'm gonna see what happens if i say bi lesbian on an account with 24 000 followers and and the fact that it literally took seconds for people to tell me to tell all their mutuals to unfollow me because i'm highly problematic um was it was quite interesting and someone was just like this has completely shattered my

worldview and i'm just like sorry if your worldview gets shattered by my sexuality you have some soul seeking to do like yeah like like like like like actually like Like, actually, like... Huh. Like, I agree. Like, for some people, me saying the phrase bi-lesbian was genuinely, like, my milkshake doc moment. Yeah, it was like a second... What's it called? A second sexuality description has hit the towers. Like, it was... Yeah. God. It's so like god it was like 5

a.m when i made that tweet it was just like oh i'm gonna get a little silly with it and and i i just expected like a backlash but not that much it was just too much and yeah like i know it's not like backlash that matters and i should just ignore it but it's just like so overwhelming yeah I guess do you have anything else that you want to say? I don't know I think that's that covers like most of the things I have to talk about

cool yeah just like be gay do crime hack the planet oh my god genuinely it is one of my favorite things in the world that they made the movie hackers and it was the worst depiction of hackers but then also yeah right like i i it was funny so i didn't watch that i mean okay i watched it like not for the first time like it wasn't like like like i was i was like not that old when i watched

it but it was after i like first ran into hackers. And so it took me a while to figure out that like, wait, hold on. No hack. The planet is a thing that everyone says, but that's actually because it's a joke about hackers, which I love. Yeah. See, I still find it funny how hackers is a movie that got hacking culture completely wrong and changed it forever.

Yeah. Because like, because like because like there is i don't know if you've ever seen that but from like defcon from 1996 there's a page on the official defcon website talking about how bad hackers is and how it gets everything wrong and no one should watch this movie and now you look at this like 20 years later and that's just what hacking culture turned in yeah it's very funny the most incredible thing about hackers is that someone managed to get the queerest fucking movie ever made uh made by one of the biggest companies in hollywood and also make it about hacking and

like it's it's the best piece of cinema ever and i stand by this like it fucking sucks in a lot of ways yeah but it's just they just managed to make a movie where no one is cis somehow and it has Angelina Jolie in it like so no one is cis it's pretty amazing I will say the

the two Asian characters are kind of whack but yeah other than that it's like like, yeah, it's a... Like, it's a whack movie. Like, if you look at it objectively, it's a pretty bad movie. Yeah, like, there's, I don't know, there was, like, in a lot of ways, stuff from the 90s is absolutely terrible, but also, like, there was stuff you could just do in movies in the 90s that, like, you can't now. Yeah.

Like, okay, my my example this is i may have said this on the podcast before but like they so they they they they did a like completely straight like modern day live adaptation of of romeo and juliet that is like it's romeo and juliet it's it's exactly the lines in shakespeare but it's like with characters set in like like modern times they're shooting guns each other but like what one of these happens in that is there's just like a black guy doing drag and it's just like a thing like nobody comments on it like it's just like a thing and he's having a good time and you could not like like people people people would show up to yeah

like people which people like yeah like i won't be on tucker carlson like yeah like like people people yeah you'd have like mobs showing up in front of your house like it's yeah yeah like i don't know like yeah if hackers came out now we would have like tucker carlson complaining about the woke mob trying to turn the kids into gay hacktivists yeah like uh i don't know i I love the movie so much not because it's good but because it's culturally important yes and yeah the characters are like great

like they made everyone queer somehow and I'm still not sure whether that was intentional or not I don't know I lean towards they didn't know what they were doing and that makes it even funnier yeah it makes it so much better and also the fact that it's like got past like producers and everything and it was made the queerest piece of like hollywood media i have ever seen that wasn't meant to be queer yeah it's just

like yeah yeah cool that we went on this tangent because yeah we love we we we simply love to see it be gay do crimes hack the planet uh this is not legally for the fbi this is not legally actionable this is a joke um yeah this is as you can tell clearly famous catchphrases yes from the movie hackers which, which you can watch in places. You can watch it very legally on the internet. I actually don't know if it's on any streaming platform. I don't think so. I think it is because I watched it with my family

kind of recently, which was a wild time. It's probably streaming somewhere. It's an Apple TV, apparently. Yeah, so it's there streaming oh it's it's it's an apple tv apparently yeah so it's there you can find it there you can find it in other places it can it can find it somewhere both legally and illegally yes if i'm allowed to endorse like uh piracy on your podcast it's we we did an entire episode about how to pirate stuff so you can find it both legally and illegally and if you're lucky I'm the one seeding the torrent for you

the other thing I actually should be before you if people want to find you where can they find you I'm on twitter at underscore nine crime you and in case twitter suspends me once again for the sixth time I have a website at Maya dot crime you dot gay it rules

it's so good it yes that's like half the reason I'm famous now it's just because my website is pink it's great huh yeah so this is been naked happened here you can find us at HappenHerePod at Twitter and Instagram.

Yeah, I guess I'm at ItMeCHR3. Yeah, go in crime. Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

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

why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. 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 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. Welcome back. Once again, this is the crew from It's Going Down, squatting the airwaves of It Could Happen Here. On today's show, we're going to look at the growing crisis around homelessness and how the state has moved to address it with brutal sweeps and new laws that target the poor. In the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. housing crisis deepened and homelessness grew. Following the George Floyd rebellion, Republicans pointed to a rising murder rate during the 2022 election cycle, along with growing encampments of the houseless as examples of rampant Democratic mismanagement and the

supposed end result of defunding the police. In reality, two years after the uprising, both funding for the police has only increased along with the number of people killed per year by law enforcement, while growing police budgets have had no impact on crime. Meanwhile, both parties have embraced a draconian crackdown on the houseless, as a slew of new laws target sleeping outside and police move against encampments even in the midst of extreme weather.

But a new wave of resistance is also materializing as communities mobilize to provide mutual aid, fight for access to housing, and resist sweeps of encampments. On today's episode, we investigate the history of these struggles and how these tactics, ranging from squatting to encampment defense, are spreading across the social terrain as the current crisis deepens and more people find themselves out in the cold. But to kick things off, let's talk about state strategy. Just why are they carrying out these sweeps? I think one of the first things that comes to mind for me is how this behavior from like the Democrats or like liberals or progressives isn't an anomaly, that they are, you know, that their role is facilitating a

capitalist state just with slightly different tactics than the republicans but basically they're trying to do that what they're doing which is basically demonizing uh unhoused people and sort of pushes the blame of um what's going on of the failings basically of our culture onto these individuals that are unhoused rather than on their failures as like mayors of democratic cities or whatever and the kind of logical outcome of class-based capitalist extractive society and when they can just make it that instead of it being like a social problem that people are unhoused they can make it these bad homeless people and they're dirty and crime or whatever and just kind of try and

eliminate that to protect their image but i think it's just a way of like scapegoating a built-in problem with how they operate and actually it's something it makes me think especially thinking about san francisco in terms of like precedence for this it makes me think about the ugly laws which um for anyone who doesn't know that was something kind of in the 1800s, San Francisco implemented in 1867, which was a law forbidding people who were kind of like unsightly, according to this law, to not be seen in the street. So if people were physically disabled, or they were begging or even limping, there were laws targeting them. And part of it even says that anything that's triggering like disgust or guilt is like to

not be seen. And I feel like it's a really similar thing that's happening now. And so, yeah, progressive liberals, they do this. I'm glad that you brought up ableism because I think that this ties in real, real well into that. So we live in essentially like an extremely able society that says if you don't work, you die. And I think criminalizing homeless people is a huge

part of that. I mean, really think about it. We have to rent our bodies to corporations so we can get money to pay rent to landlords. Essentially, we're being paid a tax to live. But how do you force people? How else do you get people to do the drudgery that we have to do at work if you don't show them the consequences of that? So like if they were nice to homeless people, if they were like, oh, here's a free home, then that creates a president of like, oh, you cannot work and have a home. So like they don't want to do that. So, I mean, I think one thing that people don't talk about, like homelessness is existing. way to like scare us into essentially doing these things that we don't want to do to live because you're constantly reminding us of like oh you want a quiet quit you want to go on a strike this is

what your life could be you're going to be homeless and not only that we're going to make it so that you can't exist as a homeless person in this society because if people like if you go to New York right now all these uh brunchy folks they eat on the sidewalk. They have all these like houses built up on the sidewalk. People are drinking mimosas, but you can't have a tan. But what are these makeshift things? I mean, it goes to show you like it's not even like the idea of taking public space. It's like who's taking public space. And if it's somebody who's not serving capitalism, you can't take a public space.

The housing question to really understand the connection with Democrats and capitalists understandings of housing, we have to think about how housing, property structures space, right, how capitalism structures space. And so, you know, when I was thinking about this before we're recording, I keep going back to James Scott, Seeing Like a State, which is, you know, an amazing book. If people haven't read it, absolutely pick up a copy. But in the first couple of chapters, one of the things he talks about is land enclosure. And he's talking about this structure specifically in France, in which sort of towards the end of monarchism, there was an attempt to actually create a tax regime where individuals were taxed. And to do that, individuals had to exist legally, but they didn't at that point. They existed as communities within feudalism.

They paid taxes as communities. They held land as communities. When the French government went to these towns to figure out who owned what, what they found was that every single community broke up their understanding of land differently, and that it wasn't really based on ownership, it was based on use. And so they had to standardize all of that. To do that, they had to fragment the commons. They had to sit there and go, you own this piece of land and you own this piece of land. They did that. They made maps and they went back two years later. They realized nobody was following the maps. But what they did was they started charging taxes based on the maps.

And so people had to start making money on the land to pay the taxes based on the maps that have nothing to do with their lives. Right. And what that was, was the creation of property, right? Because when we think about property, you know, there's this fiction of, you know, stateless capitalism, right? You have like Murray Rothbard, Ayn Rand types, who are talking about, you know, capitalism can exist without the state. But really, we can see the fallacy of that when we look at the question of property, right? The question of exclusion from property or exclusion from space. Not only is it fragmenting public space, but we start to look at the way that all of a sudden

property has to exist, right? And so in the Rust Belt, for example, after the financial crisis, cities, Cleveland, Buffalo, Detroit, got all this money from the federal government to tear houses down. And they were tearing down like 50 houses a day in these cities, right, for years on end. And these are cities that have people that don't have houses. And so you sit there and you go, well, why are they tearing houses down when there are people that don't have houses, right? When there's more vacant houses than there are people without houses. How can you justify tearing the houses down? And the answer was, we need to create a real estate market again. Because if you allow people to just squat, there's no reason to pay for housing. If there's no reason to pay for housing,

housing ceases to be a commodity, right? Like, this is actually the important part, that capitalism has to function through that exclusion of access. Otherwise, commodities can't have the scarcity necessary to allow them to be priced, right? There can't be a supply that is lower than a demand, for example, unless you artificially limit supply, right? And so when we really see this, we can really see not just the way that capitalism sort of atomizes us, right, creates us as people who live in individual housing units, as opposed to as people who conceive of ourselves as living in communities. But it also really comes to highlight the relationship between the state and the police and capital and how we have to understand capital as a content of the state. It is a definition of life that is imposed through policing purely and can't exist outside of that.

imposed through policing purely and can't exist outside of that, right? It's the fallacy of quote-unquote anarcho-capitalism, which isn't a thing that really exists for this exact reason, right? And so when we're looking at why are Democrats engaging in techniques that involve pushing people off the streets, this is exactly why. It's a capitalist political party. They're trying to maintain property. They're trying to maintain property value. Right. And this is why you see this happen in cities where gentrification is really horrible at a much, much faster clip than you see it in cities where there is like open housing stock. 30s and the poor law reforms and it goes back to what you were saying more about um just that making it really undesirable to be poor you know like needing a group of people who are in that position and that workhouses was something that were introduced by liberals progressives you know like this as a form of like changing this poor relief system so instead of giving people money so they could be supported and stay with their families or whatever people were put into these

institutions where they're separated from their kids from their husbands and wives or whatever and it's meant to be so undesirable that you would only seek it if you were sort of desperately needed it or whatever um as a way to like save on taxes for like money basically it's really fucked up and it's like this was part of a sort of social reform progressive like project and i think we can see echoes of in this. The other thing that I wanted to bring up is, like, you talked about atomizing and isolating and, like, how capitalism does that. One thing that I think about, specifically in New York, is that homeless encampments do offer this radical idea of, like, what it looks like to take back a public space and to collectively, like,

meet together, you know? And, like, that's the other thing that I was thinking about last night when I was high. This whole idea of what happens if we just allow homeless encampments to spread and take over, then people who are not homeless start interacting with homeless people as we do, like people in the city do. Then you form these connections and these relationships

and then it becomes perfectly normal for people to take over public spaces. And then what does that mean? Then we have to provide services in public spaces like bathrooms and showers because the public would start requesting and like asking for these things and more of a relationship they form with homeless folks.

So I think part of the cleaning, which is what the term Eric Adams has used, which is absolutely disgusting in terms of like moving homeless people, the whole, I think a huge part of it is also just like destroying the notion that we own public spaces. Like you do not own a public space and we want to let you know that, and we want you out. So I think that really, and the additional aspect of that too, is like when

you look at homelessness in New York, like a huge chunk of it are like black people too. So there's like a racial component of it too, when you really want to add it. This whole idea of like black people are not allowed to take up space. And then specifically if you're homeless, you're not allowed to take up public space. So I wanted to bring that in. It's like very much related to work, but also just related to the idea that the government owns everything and corporations own everything, including the spaces that we exist in. Well, speaking of corporations owning everything, here's some words from our sponsors. Across the U.S. in large cities, often controlled by Democrats, a war on the poor, and specifically on encampments of houseless people, has been increasingly waged over the past year.

In San Francisco, the city's mayor, London Breed, recently declared it was time to quote "...be less tolerant of all the bullshit that has destroyed our city, in an effort to ramp up police harassment of the poor and unhoused. In Portland, city officials openly toyed with the idea of forcing quote up to 3,000 homeless people into massive temporary shelters staffed by the Oregon National Guard. While in California, the Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, has pushed for quote care courts, which threaten to place those who do not complete state directives under involuntary hospitalization, a policy which mirrors efforts already underway in

New York. Bans against camping, panhandling, sleeping in one's car have also proliferated. Last spring, for instance, Tennessee made it a felony to camp on public-owned land. In Missouri, those caught sleeping on state property could now get jail time and fines under a new law that just went into effect on January 1st. Other new laws outlaw encampments in LA next to schools and forbid houseless folks from sleeping on public transit in New York. In the progressive bastion of Asheville, North Carolina, over a dozen mutual aid organizers also now face trumped-up charges of felony littering for supporting protests against sweeps of encampments.

This shift in many liberal cities to criminalize, attack, and ban encampments shows just how much the Democratic Party has continued to move to the right while embracing Republicans' line on combating rising crime. Instead of mobilizing the state's forces to house people and meet their most basic needs in a period of mass pandemic and a growing housing crisis, liberal governments across the country have instead mobilized their forces to attack some of the most vulnerable. Want to know more about what's driving these ongoing attacks on the houseless and how it relates to the housing crisis itself? We sat down with Gifford Hartman, a longtime radical

organizer in the Bay Area and a former squatter. Movements arise, like say the George Floyd uprising, and there's some changes, there's some movement towards reforms to police brutality and things like that, but then there's kind of a backlash. And I think right now we're kind of suffering through a backlash, and I think that's kind of a pattern that happens is there's pushback, kind of penal reform, trying to rein the police in a little bit. And then they kind of the backlash means just the police have more power and they have more power to really kind of brutalize on house people. And I think we're living through that right now. I think the trends go, you know, like back and forth and the pendulum has swung in the direction where right now in San Francisco, there's constant sweeps of tents and hound house people living on the streets.

There's a lot of media support given to that. And it's kind of like, as I said, the tail wags the dog and then they start doing all this stuff. And the pushback hasn't really activism hasn't really been able to kind of stand up to that and stop it or even challenge it right now, at least what I see. Booms happen and property values go up and vacancies go to almost zero. The cops crack down harder. And I think there have been periods, at least in my lifetime, here in the Bay Area, where there's kind of a lull or there's a bottom of the trough when maybe there's more vacancies, a little bit more wiggle room, the cops aren't quite so brutal. But when things are peaking or when the economy is, you know,

in its dynamic kind of high points, that's where I see the repression is the worst because there's more people to complain, there's more people whose, you know, values are tied to property and who are more willing to push the cops to brutalize unhoused people. But, you know, right now it's kind of fraying because there's a lot of tech layoffs. Yet the agenda of sweeping tents and unhoused people off the streets is kind of still kind of a rapid pace. So I don't know how much longer it'll last.

But right now it's at a pretty high point as we speak. The weather's awful and the sweeps haven't really stopped. And there aren't enough shelter beds to house all the unhoused folks. So it's really a crisis. It's not only just a human crisis, but it's a health crisis because people out in the cold rain are more vulnerable to getting sick and dying. And it should be the time where we're doing the opposite. We're making sure everybody's housed and it just certainly isn't happening. Even though San Francisco, the mayors have been Democrats, I believe, since the mid-60s, the Democrats aren't a monolith and they're not all progressive.

And even the progressive ones aren't that good. But the ones that are in power now, like Mayor London Breed, are moderates. And they really are more believe in the police more. And they believe in using police for social crimes. And when they're not moderates, it's a little less bad, but it's not better. It's just less bad. I don't know if that really makes sense. Because I don't think there's ever been a political regime in San Francisco that wasn't pro-cop.

You know, everybody loves the cops. Everybody sees the cops as ways to enforce the social values of society, which are private property and all that, and it just never stops. It just depends how brutal they are. Again, as I said earlier, it goes through waves. Presently, we're in a brutal wave. The only alternative to that is a less brutal wave. In my opinion, there's never a time when the cops don't run rapid, but right now they're actually at the high point that they've been at a long time. And now we speak with Javier from the National Coalition on Homelessness in San Francisco. We talk about the current wave of attacks against houseless people in big cities

and how they mirror historic attempts at policing and repressing the poor. and how they mirror historic attempts at policing and repressing the poor. The income that you need to rent a two-bedroom apartment, by the city's own estimation, you need an hourly wage of about $61.50 to have an apartment like that. So the income gap is becoming more evident than ever nowadays. There's a 9% increase in homelessness for every $100 increase in rent. So it's like if health care, housing, education all gets more expensive, but wages don't go up, people are going to lose their housing. So I think people need to understand how similar we are to the unhoused population and how important it is to recognize that we should have solidarity with each other. if we're fighting against each other then guess who's winning the millionaires in the book

we're suing the city because when they do these sweeps they're taking people's belongings which is illegal search and seizure and cruel and unusual punishment because the shelter that they're offering a lot of times isn't adequate for the folks who are being swept. We're looking for permanent supportive housing for folks, and it's not there. And if you're telling people that they have to move across the street every day in the morning, then it kind of shows, I think, a social and kind of cultural understanding that mirrors the ugly laws people had in place, especially in America, for a long time, which is homeless people are not supposed to be seen and they're supposed to be criminalized. And speaking of things that probably shouldn't be seen, again, some words from our sponsors. Again, some words from our sponsors. From resisting sweeps, setting up autonomous warming centers, to taking over vacant buildings,

over the past few years there's been a wide array of expressions of solidarity, direct action and mutual aid in the face of attempts by the state to displace and destroy the lives of houseless people across the US. But these projects and actions haven't come out of nowhere. Building on the radical history of groups in the Bay Area such as the Diggers and the White Panthers, who set up free stores, grocery programs, and squatted buildings, starting in the 1980s out of the anti-nuclear movement, peace activists began sharing free vegan food in a protest of the US war budget under the banner Food

Not Bombs. In the late 1980s, Food Not Bombs in San Francisco faced over 1,000 arrests for sharing free food publicly and taking part in demonstrations. Soon another group, Homes Not Jails, evolved out of the same scene and began to open up and squat vacant housing, part of a wave of other houseless activist groups that sprouted nationwide following the economic recession of the 1980s. Chapters of Homes Not Jails work to open squats weekly to covertly house people while also organizing public housing takeovers which thrust squatting into the spotlight of the mass media.

Again, here's Gifford Hartman talking about squatting in the 1990s. There had been a wave of really successful squats in the 1970s. One group was called the White Panthers that did it in the Lower Haight neighborhood, and they were modeled on the Black Panthers. So they actually squatted, but actually created community programs for things like food distribution. They defended their squats. They fortified their squats. And that was a tradition that kind of preceded my period of squatting. But so there were both looking at

the squatting in Europe, but also the previous generations doing it here in San Francisco. I moved to the Bay Area in 1986. I lived in Berkeley for most of the beginning of the years I was here. From the end of World War II, in the 1940s, the population in San Francisco peaked in the mid-20th century. And then it went down. Population decreased by 100,000. In the late 80s, there were still a lot of cracks in the surface of housing. And there was a lot of empty units. There was a lot of abandoned units. And it was a lot of ability for people to find squats. And I was part of that. There were various times where I either wasn't working or had a part-time job. And I chose as a political act to squat. And I began doing that in the late 80s. But most of my success in squatting

was in the early 90s. But then I kind of ran up against the contradiction. Groups like Homestead Jails were founded in 1992, had already been squatting, but then there was another wave of repression. So in 1992, the former chief of police in San Francisco, Frank Jordan, got elected mayor, and by 1993, he was doing something called the Matrix Program. And the Matrix Program was very much like what Giuliani did in New York with his zero tolerance for broken windows, which is cops would get tough on quality of life crimes, which means like broken windows and graffiti. But it also included food, not bombs. Feedings were attacked by the police and squatters were even, myself included, were attacked and cleared

out even in a way that was not legal. When I succeeded, we squatted covertly. And when we didn't succeed, often we were aligned with groups like Homestead Jails, where they were a high-profile group, very media savvy. Well, media savvy might be an overstatement. They kind of had a media focus. And the media focus was often a double-edged sword. It brought popular understanding

of the conditions of the housing stock but also it was a way for the police to be telegraphed exactly what we were doing and to come down and crack down on our squads. Homes Not Jails wouldn't be the last group to take over vacant homes for housing. In the mid-2000s, take back the land based out of Miami, Florida, work to block evictions and move unhoused families into foreclosed homes. In the present period, various grassroots groups have organized to stop the sweeping of houses and encampments. Crews in Olympia, Washington and Austin, Texas have been successful in organizing broad campaigns.

In Minneapolis, groups have mobilized mass numbers to, at times, halt evictions. In the following interview, we speak with Christian Impost from Minneapolis on the ongoing battle with the city government and police to stop attacks and sweeps on their houseless neighbors. In the summer of 2020, when George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police, it raised a lot of people's awareness as to the way that our systems and practices in our city aren't really serving us. I think there was there was a lot of work happening in Minneapolis in particular before that in regard to policing and the way that our systems do or do not serve people.

And then in 2020, the awareness just grew exponentially. And because that foundational path had been laid already, we had something to go with. And we can see the direct line between what happened to George Floyd and to the community at George Floyd square. And the way that that also shows up in other spaces in our community, such as with our unhoused neighbors. We know that the majority of people that are living at encampments in Minneapolis are indigenous

immigrant populations or Black Americans. And so we can see that there is, you know, a specific need and also a real, you know, a disparity between. And a direct through line to all of the oppression that 2020 kind of threw in the face of every, you know, I mean, person with a heart. Absolutely. And I think, too, we started practicing a lot of mutual aid more like much bigger than we ever have historically in the summer of 2020. We saw lots of people getting involved. There were encampments throughout the city as there was for some time because of COVID. People were able to stay outside and couldn't be evicted as easily at that time. And we saw lots of community getting involved in doing mutual aid. And that really helped build, I think, a movement that is, you know,

sort of beautifully disorganized in many ways because lots of people from lots of different walks of life coming together and showing up for each other. I mean, I think people started to become aware of the way that we are all connected to each other and that when we're taking care of each other, we're all happier, we're all safer, we're actually able to meet needs and the resources are there. It's a matter of the will. I cannot overemphasize enough how terrible the boy Mayor Frey has been since he took power here in so-called Minneapolis. You know, he ran on ending houselessness and was in majority funded by developers during his campaign. And we've seen what ending houselessness means to Democrats. It basically means ending visible poverty and ending the lives of houseless people.

poverty and ending the lives of houseless people. But frankly, I mean, the number of evictions over the course of the last few years has just skyrocketed. And, you know, our so-called progressive politicians love to give some money to the nonprofit industrial complex and do their private public partnership. And then when there are people who are, quote unquote, resistant to service, that's the phrase they love to use. They have all of their excuses lined up so that they can just pull those people's houses and kick them out of the roofs that are keeping them warm and dry. Our progressive quote unquote establishment here has just fully committed to jackboot thuggery all in the name of clearing the streets and making it so that people in their kind of four story mixed use condos can can have a beautiful view without having to see the poverty that that lifestyle necessitates. You know, in the summer of 2020, there were several council at the time council members who committed to defunding the police. However, that did not come to fruition. Since that time, there's been increases in the budget to policing in Minneapolis.

No decreases, only increases that police haven't been able to spend their whole budget. And yet the city continues to pour more money into them. And what we're seeing happen is unhoused people come together to keep one another safe and also so community is able to stay connected with them and you know, we'll be in an encampment and then various levels of government will come in and displace them. And so the people don't have anywhere else to go. So they need to move to a new space together. So what's happening is not housing. What's happening is not even laying a foundation for somebody to be able to get the services or support that they may want or need. What's happening is displacement. When somebody

hears about an eviction potentially happening, it becomes a situation that's, it's almost, it's almost kind of magical that people come together and it is kind of chaotic, but it always comes together. And we end up having, whether it's people that are doing cop watch or are just neighbors, like we had neighbors show up on the first day, the day that the Corey was planned to be evicted on December 28th. I can't tell you how many different people that just live in that area were coming up and asking questions and were appalled at the response from the city. Because really that the quarry encampment was in a space that you could barely see it. You wouldn't know it was there if you didn't know it was there,

you know. And we're talking about by the last day, the day that it was evicted, there were eight people there and over 150 police officers. It was bonkers. And that extreme response is something that when you see it, you can't unsee it. And so we come together in what, you know, you get in where you fit in with whatever skills you have, whatever gifts you have, whatever time you have, you know, and a lot of us show up because we are people who have experienced other forms of trauma or have seen and experienced other forms of oppression too. You can't unsee it once you do. In the last few years, mutual aid and autonomous disaster relief efforts have informed projects like Heater Block, the squatting of land for people displaced by climate change-fueled fires, and the setting up of autonomous warming centers in the middle of winter. In the winter of 2021, autonomous groups across Texas also mobilized when the

state's electrical grid failed and hundreds of people tragically died due to lack of heat. Autonomous groups have also worked to directly house people. In the Los Angeles area, this has looked like houseless folks taking over homes owned by Caltrans, and various groups in the Pacific Northwest occupying and demanding access to hotels in the dead of winter. In Philadelphia in 2020, housing activists squatted and then won the keys to homes for upwards of 50 unhoused families in the midst of the George Floyd rebellion. And there have been other success stories as well. In Boise, Idaho, after months of ongoing protests by houseless folks and their supporters, the city was pushed to greenlight the building of hundreds of housing units.

In Berkeley, California last summer, people once again tore down the fences surrounding People's Park and destroyed machines, stopping the destruction of the autonomous enclave once again. In Sacramento, California, houseless people and their supporters beat back an eviction attempt at Camp Resolution, a parking lot which is home to people living in their vehicles and RVs. Here's two Camp Resolution residents, Sharon and Cetera, who speak on the deadly impact of sweeps. I think that the biggest thing is being treated inhumanely, you know what I mean, or rudely, or like you're an animal,

or they're very mean to people, you know what I mean? When they sweep you, they take people's stuff and just throw it out, don't matter if it matters to them, you know what I mean? Which creates mental health issues for some people because people get traumatized from stuff like that, you know what I mean? Or, you know, which, you know, creates mental health issues for some people because people get traumatized from stuff like that. You know what I mean? You just coming in and the only place that they have that they can call home or a place of shelter. And, you know, stormy times like this, you know, they come and even now while it's raining and make them move and tell them, you they gotta go throw their things out or you know what i mean make them leave without it whatever they you know what i mean whatever no matter if it's important to them or not you know what i mean like i think that's the most messed up part because like i have a friend out here who who lost you know her child's ashes you know what i mean half the

half of the people that we're at that we lose contact with and then every time they sweep that's another half and they're just diminishing people where people are where are people going they're just disappearing and the further you know people who do need like other help with other things health things and stuff like that the harm reduction people and stuff like that that come out and you know give people things they need you know what i mean they'll they'll move you they move you around then you can't be found people can die like that services and people die like that all the time especially you know when they move us around sometimes we got to go to areas that are not necessarily safe especially the women you know what i mean women die out here all the time. They separate us. Camp Resolution was formed because this lot that we're on was part of the original siting plan.

And they spent $617,000 on this for a fence and a parking lot and promised folks that they would that they were going to get them into little tiny houses or trailers so they can get back on their feet and get housing. They swept them off the lot. As soon as they were finished with this, they came and viciously swept them off of the other side of the property they were on and put a fence up and promised those people, and they got nothing. And then didn't even bother to contact them or anything and just left those people hanging after they signed up for all the services and were denied and my sister-in-law was one of those people and she's a quadriplegic and she's still waiting for housing and we weren't going to have another winter of her being down and

on the county side in the weather in the water so that's why we started it and if we're here for safety so we can get back up on our feet. We're human beings. Not to mention, like, more than half the camp, you know, majority of the camp, there are males that live here. So please don't get me wrong. But this is a camp of majority women, you know what I mean, who out here, who live out here. And, you know, a lot of us, you know, we're homeless, but we're not bums, you know what I mean? Like, we're not um we have regular lives like everyone else we have family we have friends you know we and we take care of each other you know what i'm saying like and a lot of us have been camping right here for for years some of us years

up against the county and the city you know what i'm saying but for every success sweeps remain a daily constant in the united states and many attempts to push back by helpless folks and their supporters are met with extreme resistance from law enforcement. So I'm curious what you all think. How can communities continue to organize for change in the face of this brutality? Something that comes to mind is just kind of more of some things that have already been happening, basically. And I'm thinking of Echo Park that have already been happening basically um and i'm thinking of um echo park that you brought up um and the encampment echo park was really interesting to me because um it was that's a neighborhood in uh la and it grew to maybe sort of two to three hundred people living there um and as it went on it kind of like a sense of community developed pretty strongly there with support from people in the neighborhood, too. And people had set up like a garden, a community kitchen.

There were like meetings, even showers near the end. Like it was actually kind of thriving. It was like doing well. And people were like pretty like, I don't know, politicized or like aware of like what's going on and talking about it and sharing with each other. And yeah, people coming together to resist sweeps and threats of sweeps of the park. And the response to it was one of the most heavy handed sort of disproportionate seeming things that I'd ever seen, where they had been threatening, the city had been threatening that they were going to do a sweep and they were saying they were going to get everyone into housing it's like this humanitarian um offer of secure housing to people um but they came with like 400 cops

and like all the rest of like LAPD's full force you know the helicopters and just like everything they blocked um entrances into Echo Park to stop supporters coming from out of the neighbourhood. And basically, yeah, evicted people, fought with people resisting and then put a fence up very quickly, like during this whole thing and closed the park off. And that fence is still up. And that's like, what is it now, a year and a half or something, these years, that that fence has been up. And something I think is interesting about this example is i really think that the reason that response was so heavy-handed is because the very existence of it was disrupting this logic of like rent and landlord and stuff like people were reclaiming the common space

like reclaiming public space using it to meet their needs and this was incredibly threatening to the city and they needed to shut it down and sort of turn the park back into recreation middle-class people basically um and i think you know what we've talked about already like um tom what you were talking about with like enclosure and stuff like i really see that these sweeps like this is such a just a continuation of this and echo park um in a really big way and what you were saying more about just like what happens when we challenge that logic being the most like threatening thing to them you know of just like what happens if it was just like this homeless camp survives and then

another encampment another encampment and it basically disrupts everything we know about property and rent and everything anyway so I think just more of that yeah I mean I would yeah I agree with you Sophie I think it's like more of what's happening. Like currently in New York, there's still sweeps happening. Like DHS, Department of Homeless Services, puts up these like sweep notices. And the way it works is that when these sweeps notices go up, like there's a group of people who let each other know that a sweep is about to happen. People show up to the people who are about to be swept.

I hate that word swept. Oh my gosh, that's so disgusting. What can we use instead of swept? Treated badly by evil Eric Adams. I don't know, maybe we could use that. But anyway, so like, so people will go and talk to the people who are in the encampment who are gonna be swept and ask them like,

what type of support would you like? Like, do you want us to help you move your stuff? Do you want us to send, you know, when the cops and like, so the sanitation department comes usually during these cleanups and like throws away people's things. And because, you know, if you don't serve capitalism, your stuff, you don't matter. So definitely your stuff doesn't matter.

One thing that has been happening is that people have been showing up for people who are about to be have their things thrown out and either moving the things for them or supporting them or standing in the way in front of the police or like documenting it. And I think that's like a huge way to just like show up right now if you can. You sickly block out time on your calendar at work. If you know something happening down the street, like this is like something like you could do now. And I think that's really important. Like this is solidarity that we should show and we should show up for our comrades because they are on the ground of fighting for us having housing as a human right. And that's why we should show up for them and to support them. Another item that I wanted to bring up, I don't know if y'all heard about Anarchy Row,

which happened last year, where like SRG, which is a strategic response group, showed up. This is a counterterrorism group, y'all. Showed up to get people out of an encampment in Tompkins Square, which was deemed Anarchy Row. I think it was like five people. Five people brought in SRG or counterterrorism groups. It just goes to show you the extent

to which like houses, people taking up public space is a threat to the idea of property as we know it. It's a threat to capitalists and it's a threat to landlords like Eric Adams. Eric Adams is a landlord. I don't know if you all know that. The New York City mayor is a landlord if you need to know anything you all know that. The New York City mayor is a landlord. If you need to know anything as to why they're sweeping homeless people.

Landlords run everything. And they have rats like Eric Adams because he had rats and he was supposed to pay a fine. And he didn't pay a fine because he's a landlord. I guess just going back to that is like, yeah, show up for people now. The need now is like when sweeps are happening is for people to show up in place for people. And the other part of it, I want to say this, and this this is a wild idea but i've been thinking about it for a while what if we all stopped paying rent what if we all did what if we got together with all our friends and stopped paying rent and i know this is wild and i know some people might be like oh no marcella

we're gonna get evicted but what if we paid rent and we all thought the cops and they're trying to pay us when they're trying to evict all of us so like that's another part of it is like showing up to people's evictions, trying to come up together to come up with a long strategy. Because houses people right now are fighting for us to like have housing as a human right. We can meet them on the other end and say, actually, we're not going to pay rent as long as you're doing this, because we're that's like solidarity. When I'm thinking about how to resist displacement, what I go back to is squatter movements that existed in Europe, right? Like the social center movements in the seventies and eighties. Um, but also squatting that happened in the Rust Belt in the two thousands, right? And like, what was unique about those situations? Like others have, have existed obviously, but what was unique about

those situations is that squatting became about more than just space. It also became about autonomy and self-defense, right? So in those situations, what would happen is in these Rust Belt squats, people would like lock down a whole street and take over a house. And then just that was just their space, you know, and the cops just couldn't get back there or didn't want to get back there. And some of those squats held out for years, like years and years and years. And we see that in Europe, too. And so what that does, though, is it it accomplishes something really important, which I think we have to sort of shift in our discussions of this question, which is that the question isn't just about housing. The question's about space. Right. And very specifically how we understand space. So currently,

we talk about a neighborhood or when city politicians talk about a neighborhood, they don't mean what I think a lot of us mean. Like a lot of us, we talk about our neighborhoods, we mean like our neighbors, right? The people that live around the corner, the old lady up the street that feeds the cats, like whatever it happens to be, you know, like you have a community that you live in, at least where I live, when city politicians talk about a neighborhood, what they mean is real estate. They mean this fragmented space of commodified housing where individual houses can just be slotted in and slotted out and new residents could just be slotted in and slotted out. And the space becomes reduced down to its physical form. Right. And within all capitalist understandings of space, that is what happens. Space gets reduced down to the commodification of that space. Right.

And so we're talking about that inscription into our spaces, you know, saying earlier that doesn't occur without the ability to get arrested for trespassing. And so this becomes a fight against the police as much as it's a fight against housing, because at the end of the day, the enforcement of that structuring of space comes through the projection of police force into that space. Right. Whether that's passive things like surveillance, whether that's active things like sending a counterterrorism team to evict five people from a park in Manhattan. And so as we're kind of like looking through this, we can take some interesting sort of examples. I mean, the Paris Commune had a whole discourse that talked just about how they were going to rebuild the city. Like, what is the city going to look like without property? How are we going to restructure our use of space? Who gets to decide how to use these big public spaces, right? These were the big discussions that were happening. The Situationist International had a whole discourse on building conceptual

cities and avant-garde cities. And graffiti was a big part of that, because what is graffiti? Graffiti is the marking of people's presence in space. Why do cities crack down on graffiti so hard? Every single time someone puts a tag up, that's a gap in police coverage that's being marked literally every single time, right? And so when we're talking about these questions, we have to push this into a question of capitalism in general, but that makes it a question of the state. We can't talk about capitalism in isolation from that. And so we have to really talk about how our spaces are fragmented and the ways that things like even encampments or squats or things like this that are defended, that are able to be sort of preserved isn't the right word,

are able to maintain their autonomy. Those become sort of the models of different ways to live in some ways, right? These become the places where people are experimenting with different types of living, whether it's by choice or not. But these are the spaces that get eliminated because of that specific dynamic, right? That they are fundamentally violating the entire concept of property in their very existence. And that's why we see the crackdowns happening the way that they are. Democrats are just as, you know, complicit in that as Republicans are. It's functionally no different, especially after the George Floyd uprising, where you really see in a lot of Democratic cities,

them hiring a lot more cops, giving them a lot more guns, like doing the same stuff that happened in more conservative cities, right? The gap is almost non-existent. That's going to do it for us. Once again, this has been the It's Going Down crew squatting the offices of It Could Happen Here. Thanks again for listening, and we will see you soon. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us

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