It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 72

Episode Date: February 25, 2023

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AT&T, connecting changes everything. Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here. And I wanted to let you know, this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Hot fucking Moses.

Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the podcast that is sometimes introduced by me, Robert Evans. Other times it's introduced by James Stout or Mia Wong, who are both on the call today. How's everybody doing? Pretty good. We've declared victory over the balloon. Yeah, finally, the F-22 gets its first air-to-air kill.

I still can't believe it. Hundreds of billions of dollars later. We did it, guys. We did it. Worth every penny. We really built, like, the F-22 is like God's perfect killing machine. Yeah. And thus, it is a $ and what was like a 67 billion dollar

aircraft that's completely useless it is a perfect air it is a perfect air superiority craft which in modern warfare makes it slightly less useful than an 850 dollar dji drone with a hand grenade i mean to be fair to be fair express i cannot think of like a better metaphor to understand how the u.s army works than shooting us using using a 67 billion dollar aircraft to shoot a 361 000 missile at a balloon i mean just like okay listen as somebody who's got several balloons in his life i'mittedly, not this high up. It is extremely entertaining. And yeah, I can't fault that pilot. I am deeply disappointed in rural America

that no crazy rich guy with a Cessna flew his friend with a 50 cal up to like 40,000 feet to just drop that thing. Why the 17 incinerator was invented for this specific instance. And yeah, we've been let down again. Anyway, what are we talking about today, Mia? I mean, the balloon, obviously.

We're talking about the balloon a little bit. And then we're going to talk about something more interesting, which is the sort of history of US-China relations and how it's not what everyone thinks it is. I've been led to believe by the media that there is nothing more interesting

than the balloon and that we should be focusing all our coverage on the balloon. That's true. There have been other balloons. There are now a fifth balloon has hit the towers okay so yeah let's uh let's go yeah so okay so i want to start off by like i want to talk a little bit about the balloon which is that okay so we have the american arby's claim that this was a surveillance balloon. There's a chance it just was a random balloon.

Like, I don't know. I don't want to completely discount the fact that it was a balloon. I do want to talk a little bit about sort of balloon surveillance stuff, though, because I've seen a lot of people both on the left and also on the right who are just like, why would anyone ever have a spy balloon? It's like, okay, so in order to do this, we need to talk a little bit about surveillance satellites, which I come from a family of astronomers. And one of the sort of dark secrets of astronomy is that the stuff you point up also can be pointed back down again. And yeah, so one of the other things about this is a lot of the companies that make telescopes and make the lenses for that are companies that work heavily with the Nro which is the national reconnaissance office which is a a genuinely terrifying organization with an unfathomable black budget dedicated to just like spying on people from aircrafts and from space and more people more people should be like we have a lot of like people are scared of the nsa people are scared of

the cia but more people should be scared of the nro because jesus christ that stuff is but on the other hand, okay, so the NRO has a bunch of satellites, right? But the thing about satellites is that they move. Okay, you can't prove that. I will, I will prove, I will, I will, I will, I will do a war thunder. I will post classes like documents.

We live underneath a flat dome and satellites are stationary. The dome rotates in a clockwise direction around them. And that's responsible for the illusion of motion in the heavens. Sure. Yes. There's no compelling response to that.

You've been owned again. Nothing. Owned. So, okay, alright. Satellites move. They move in stable and predictable orbits, and this means a few things, right? One of the things that it means is that a satellite is only over the area you want it to cover for a limited amount of time, because it's, you know, a satellite's moving around the Earth, right? when they're going to be in range of whatever they want to look at and you know and this means you can do things like for example figuring out where the satellite is going to be and hiding whatever you're working on when they pass this this is how the cia this is how the cia completely missed india's nuclear weapons program is that they knew when that they knew when the flies the

spy satellites were flying over they just hid all their weapons equipment and the cia never figured out they were building nukes base well actually not based because nukes are bad but but yeah yeah it was very funny yeah yeah but what did they do did they just paint it like a hot dog or something and just be like no they literally just like put tarps over it whenever the satellite came around and they built things underground it's very funny i'm patenting the world's biggest hot dog idea in case someone else does that i think jam Loftus actually might have you beat to that. You'll have to duel to the death. Jamie's secret nuclear arsenal is something we're not supposed to talk about on the podcast.

Well, look, it's like the Israeli secret arsenal. It's an open secret, not a closed secret. So, okay, you can solve this problem of sort of telescope go move either by having just a bunch of satellites going constantly or by having a geosynchronous satellite, which is in, which is in an orbit where it's like basically over the same spot of the earth at one time.

The problem is that both of these are like unfathomably expensive. And that doesn't mean that governments don't do that. Like the U S is a bunch of spy satellites, like lots of, lots of countries by satellites, but you know, it's really, really have spy satellites. But, you know, it's really, really expensive. And there's a few other reasons why you would use

a balloon, which are, you know, some of the reasons the U.S. uses them in Afghanistan. One is that you have really limited space on a satellite, which means that there's, you know, you can only fit certain kinds of equipment onto each satellite. There's another issue, which is that, okay,

if you're putting spy stuff on a satellite it has to work in space and it turns out that space sucks and yeah i mean wants to kill you i i didn't like it's a it's a mark of how like bad people are at strategic thinking that they would ever ask why would you put spy stuff on a balloon? Especially if, like, it's a little weirder to float it over the U.S. if that's what happened. But like, if you are the U.S. or China or Russia engaging in most of the conflicts those countries engage in where they're not dealing with state level actors, a balloon provides perfect surveillance very cheaply. It doesn't require refueling.

Like, it's an incredibly reasonable platform to spy on people with. Yeah. And I think that there's another thing which I think has been less talked about, which is that, okay, there's an equipment gap basically between when you design a camera for a satellite and when the satellite goes up. And this means that whatever kind of cameras and technology you're putting in a satellite are going to be by definition a few years out of date, because that's just how long it takes to design the equipment and putting it and put it into the air but you know for a balloon you could you can you could use stuff that's more modern than what you would have on a spy satellite now you know and also like you can you can also just put other stuff on the balloon that's not

just cameras like you can do sigint stuff you can use so okay the the the moral of this story is that like the the spy balloon is not like a completely implausible thing i if if if you like put a gun to my head and said mia what what happened here my guess would be it was like the spy balloon went off course or some shit and they just lost control of it now yeah it probably was not meant for the continental united states because that's a weird move but it does keep happening. Hi, this is Mia in post. So back when we recorded this episode

in the heady days of early February, there had been but two balloons. There have now been so, so many more balloons. Oh my God, the US just has balloon mania. We now know a little bit more about the sort of suspected Chinese balloon it does that that balloon seems to be an actual balloon at the very least the u.s government claims that they've recovered an enormous amount of sort of technical and observational equipment from it they said it was

well what was their exact line uh the size of three school buses a bunch of signals intelligence stuff which is something we didn't mention an enormous amount but yeah like that that's another thing you can use a balloon for is intercepting phone communications or radio communications etc etc okay so like it seems like they're like the first balloon may have been an actual balloon

every subsequent balloon however we have learned more so at least one and my assumption is this is every single subsequent balloon after the first balloon. We have confirmation that one of the balloons is shot down over Canada by an F-22. And this seems to be a Pico balloon from the Northern Illinois Bottle Cap Balloon Brigade. These are just like these are these just like tiny balloons that people send out so they can surf and navigate the globe. These people are just like balloon hobbyists.

They just they just like balloons. And, you know, it's just honestly really sad. Like these are just people who like they just like putting balloons up and watching them go around the world. superpower, which spent literally more money than I've ever seen in my entire life to annihilate literally like about a hundred or $200 worth of essentially foil and some GPS equipment. These people apparently tried to contact the U.S. government and tell them what was going on, and the U.S. government was like, eh. So yeah, congratulations to the U.S. government, which has it has won. It has won an important geostrategic victory over the northern Illinois bottle cap balloon brigade. This is this has been this has been breaking news from Mia in the balloon war.

Yeah. Enjoy the rest of the episode. But, you know, I wanted to use this to talk about something more interesting, which is, again, like the sort of arc of U.S.-China relations and what actually drives it, because I think people have a really, really not very good understanding of how it works and why. Okay, I think it's reasonable to ask you, why are you talking about the arc of U.S.-China relations? Aren't U.S.-China relations always bad? And the answer is no. In fact, U.S.-China relations are sometimes actually quite good.

U.S.-China relations are driven by these two sort of interlocking forces, right? On the one hand, you have the internal domestic and also kind of global balance of class forces inside a country. And that plays a huge role in a lot of the things that are going to happen in US-China relations. And the other thing that happens is what you, I guess, would call geopolitics. And we're going to kind of start with the geopolitics side and then move back and forth between that and the sort of class angle on it so you can get us get get a kind of understanding of how how this stuff actually works and how to think about it in ways that aren't just sort of incredibly simplistic and useless so all right i'm not going to go all the way back to like the 1800s or whatever because there are u.s china relations like we actually invaded china at one point in like the 1800s

for some fucking reason uh then we actually we did it again in the 1900s too yeah but okay so but in in terms of dealing with modern china dealing with u.s modern u.s china relations is about the u.s.'s relationship with the CCP. And weirdly, during World War II, the relations were actually really good. You know, because obviously China is the U.S.'s ally in World War II. They were also allies with China's Nationalist Party, the KMT. But, you know, what's interesting about this is that there's a faction of the U.S. Army that is anti-KMT and pro-CCP, and they're not pro-CCP because they're communists. They're pro-CCP because, A, they're kind of racist, and they really don't like the KMT kind of out of racism. as we've talked about elsewhere it's just like incredibly corrupt Esquad party and that means that you know some of the people who have to like the people who have to work with them on the ground

of World War II are like these are literally the worst people who ever lived why on earth are we doing this that means that when the Civil War starts right like the US takes a nationalist side but like nowhere near as strongly as they could have and this creates this sort of like this myth around like the loss

of China that becomes this massive thing in the u.s is because this is one of the things that triggers soft mccarthyism etc etc is like everyone becomes convinced it was like oh my god like uh truman like like they lost china like we could have kept china for the communists but like they lost it and it's like well okay but this has another massive impact which is that it creates this thing called the china lobby and the china lobby is this is this sort of bank of these incredibly psychopathic right-wing anti-communist ghouls and some also people who had – some also people who were like – had been rich in China and then got owned by the CCP. And they start pushing incredibly aggressively for like regime change in China for just the U S and China not having diplomatic relations.

And this, this starts to sort of like tank relations between the U S and China. And then obviously like, so we, we fought, we fought a war with China and Korea, a thing that I feel like doesn't get talked about as much as you would think it would.

Yeah. The Korean war is the memory hold war in the UK as much as you would think it would yeah the korean war is the memory hold war in yeah and in the uk as well as america but it's the war that no one yeah i mean the forgotten war is literally like it's its most common nickname there's a pretty good book by that title too yeah yeah but you know like that war like there are there are u.s and chinese troops like shooting the shit out of each other like oh yeah well yeah like across the entire peninsula like there are there are chinese troops doing bayonet charges through their own artillery like shooting the shit out of each other. Like, Oh yeah. Well, yeah. Like across the entire peninsula. Like there are, there are Chinese troops doing bayonet charges through their own artillery, like into the American lines.

My, my, the last, before I bought my place, my last landlord was a Chinese citizen, um, living in the U S on a green card. And during a pandemic conversation over some wine,

we kind of figured out that both of our grandfathers wound up at the same battles and may very well have been shooting at each other. Yeah. some wine, we kind of figured out that both of our grandfathers wound up at the same battles and may very well have been shooting at each other. Yeah. So that's the melting pot, buddy. She became a landlord. Mm-hmm. Well, I mean, she was renting a room.

That's a dream. There is a reasonable argument that there and back again, a landlord story is the entire course of the sort of like Chinese Chinese politics in the 20th century certainly with respect to the United States yeah well and also China right because

landlords are back now it sucks oh yeah yeah not all Chinese people have become landlords but many are subject to landlord shit yeah you know okay so like obviously it's really interesting too because when people like when people write about u.s china relations they normally like the thing that they think they pick from this period tends to be like the taiwanese straight crisis and it's like okay yeah there was a there was a straight crisis but

again like the u.s and china were like shooting at each other like before this like why why is this that why is this the thing that you pick for the downturn of US-China relations? Like we were at war. OK, but baffling stuff, right? But, you know, relations are not good to like the 60s either. Like sort of based on. Very, very similar sort of lines that you'd seen in the 50s. Like this is a period where people sort of take communism, anti-communism seriously.

That stops being true very quickly. On the other hand, these sort of geopolitics things have real material consequences, right? You can look at this in the American side where, for example, the industrial buildup of the Japanese and Korean economies, and also the industrial buildup of California, right, has to do with these sort of trade languages that are, that are being set up in order for you, you has to run the war in Korea and run the war in Vietnam. And China has its own sort of version of this where, which, which starts getting more and more apparent by it. It starts around the mid sixties. They have this thing called the third

front, which is okay. So having, having now been through, like, I don't know how literally, I don't even know how many wars since the start of the century, the CCP goes, okay, we need to shift our production away from sort of the coast and into the middle of the country so that they can't be attacked by the Soviets and they can't be attacked by the Americans. effect in terms of what sort of chinese industrialization looks like over the course of the mid-20th century is you get you get this industrial belt that's built up and that is going to be destroyed later on and it's destroyed in part because of of what starts happening in the 70s which is to sort of warm up between the u.s and china based on sort of nixon and kissinger's attempts to sort of peel the chinese away from the soviet union and you know like robert you've talked about this on bastards before um but you know part of what's going on here is that china like basically gets into a war with the soviet union

in 1969 it's not called that it's technically just called the border dispute but like like there are troops like shooting at each other yeah like all across the border people are beating each other to death with sticks like people are people are shooting borders at each other it's it's it's a real war and it's like in the grand british tradition of course calling like massive conflicts an emergency or the troubles yeah yeah it's like okay you know but this but this this this really sort of this this really sort of drives Chinese sort of international relations to the point where they're like, okay, so I know we're supposed to be communist, but also the other communist power next door might march an army across the border at any point. So you get the sort of triangle diplomacy of Cessna trying to sort of bring China into the – well, at least away from the Soviet sphere and then closer into the US sphere. And this starts to work, right? And you can ask – there's other things going on here, right?

China's not just playing pure geopolitics. um there there's there's another factor involved which is that part of the sort of conditions for u.s and chinese sort of like i don't know what you call bilateral relations or whatever sort of geopolitical can't bullshit you want to say for like getting along closer is the u.s starts sending these technology transfers over to china like i mean literally like like like taking like sometimes like taking factories basically and like taking them apart and then putting them in boxes and shipping them over to china and you know okay and this this is this is a huge deal for the ccp because like the the chinese economy in this period has been really bad and part of this is just, you know, this is what happens when you bow, but a secondary part of this is that China has had a real, basically, China's been dealing with this sort of economic crisis

since, like, literally since they came out of World War II, which is that, okay, so most of China's industrial capacity was completely destroyed during the war. The parts of it that weren't were, like, there was this belt in Manchuria that, okay, so most of China's industrial capacity was completely destroyed during the war. The parts of it that weren't were like, there was this belt in Manchuria that had stuff, and the Soviets literally loaded the factories on trains and shipped them back east, or back west. So by the time that the CCP takes over,

like, China has less industrial capacity than, like, Russia did at the beginning of 1917. Jesus. So the situation's really bleak, right? And the other thing that's bleak about it is that, okay, so in order to build an industrial base, right, we've talked about this a bit on the show, in order to build an industrial base, you need food.

But in order to increase your agricultural productivity, you need mechanical goods. But you can't get those mechanical goods unless you can increase your industrial capacity. So you have this bottleneck. And this winds up being one of the solutions to the bottleneck is getting technology transfers from the u.s and you know the sort of product of this is that now uh all of our products and services which uh we are about to talk about which you should buy are made in china

so yeah go go go buy go buy those things that are the product of all of this there's no problem yeah don't don't question it just purchase it go to alibaba and just find the express get aliexpress and just wire them 700 within i'm gonna say two weeks to 17 months you'll get a package of something yeah get a drone buy a drone honestly if you order something from AliExpress, there's no real way to know what you will get. That's the beauty of AliExpress. Look, on the other hand, there is a non-zero chance

you get a collection of really, really sick Chinese shirts that just have absolutely random bullshit on them. It's great. Sick Chinese shirts or like knockoff versions of military grade optics that work well enough for the taliban to use liberating people the world over aliexpress optics all right and we're back so okay the chinese swing into sort of like alignment with the u.s they start doing things that are like

even a lot of the u.s's right-wing allies won't do like for example china china's one of the U.S.'s right-wing allies won't do. Like, for example, China's one of the first countries to, like, to diplomatically recognize Pinochet's Chile. And they, like, send him a shit ton of money. They send him loans. They send him direct cash transfers. And, like, this is a point where even, like, France and, like, the U.K. are like, ooh, ooh, ooh. That's a, like, we're not gonna have, we're not gonna acknowledge this military dictatorship.

But China's like, yeah, this rules. Hell yeah, pitochet. And, you know, they do other stuff that's very sort of pro-US, right? They invade Vietnam in 1979 in the war that, you know, the only war that's more forgotten than the Korean War is the Sino-Vietnamese War. There were some really good Twitter threads that taught me a lot about China's non-aggression

towards other countries last week. Yeah, it's a good time. We could also talk about the Sino-Indian war in the middle of this, where they just invade India. Non-aggression. Which is great. But, you know, okay. But, like, what this sort of comes up to is

like, you get a point where the US and China by the end of the 70s and going into the 80s are very much on the same side. Like, for example, when Deng Xiaoping came to visit the US, he takes like an hour out of his schedule to make a secret visit to the CIA so that he can set up a joint like USC listening post in China to monitor the Soviets. We talk about this a lot in the Kissinger episodes from last year, but folks should generally be aware that like chairman Mao and Richard Nixon legitimately got along, like enjoyed one another's company as did Nixon and Ceausescu. Like they were, they were all good friends.

Yeah. Which is something, something one ruling class etc etc yeah there's almost a class analysis you could make there yeah but you know okay we're gonna do it we're gonna do a slightly different class analysis which is that like okay so us china relations are very good literally like basically until tiananmen and then everything gets kind of messed up because tiananmen tiananmen it a very, it has a set of like very weird and contradictory effects, right? You know, we talked about some of this in our Tiananmen episodes, but it does two things, right?

On the one hand, like in the US, people are horrified, right? You know, the entire media class just like watches this happen outside their windows. There's just like, it's just this incredible uproar. It becomes one of the sort of central – I don't know. It becomes a thing that's incredibly central to just the memory of what it is to be an Asian American is to sort of remember quote-unquote Tiananmen. But on the other hand – so, okay, what you would expect from there is the U.S. China break off diplomatic relations and like the Cold War II starts again immediately with the US and China. And it doesn't happen like that. And it doesn't happen like that because the second thing that Tiananmen does is it finally crushes the Chinese working class. Once the last deal of Chinese working class is just gone, right, and all that's left is an incredibly disorganized and incredibly desperate sort of migrant working class, suddenly, hey, look, we have a very highly educateds, which is that you have this double deindustrialization going on. You have a deindustrialization in the US where the last of the old Rust Belt falls apart.

The sort of like minor industrial boom that had happened under Reagan just implodes. And some of this is decentralization. Some of this is these jobs go to the suburbs and shit or places like DeKalb that are just incredibly accursed but real call out there mia i look i i i'm sorry to anyone who lives in decalb i i wish you best luck fleeing there goes that decalb tourist board sponsorship that we've been looking for yeah but you know but but simultaneously there's there's another wave of deindustrialization

happening in china too which is that that old third wave industrial belt that I was talking about, right? Those people had worked in like basically the equivalent of – like the Chinese equivalent of sort of like good union jobs, right? They're working for state-owned enterprises, so they have housing, they have healthcare, they have pensions, and all of that is just destroyed. Like all these people lose their pensions. They fucking lose everything. There are like millions of people who are pushed out of their jobs. And, you know,

both of these things happen at the same time. And a lot of companies who are watching the sort of East Asian companies, like economies collapse, who are watching the Vietnamese, sorry, who are watching the South Korean economy collapse or watching the Japanese economy collapse, suddenly start looking at China.

And throughout the course of the 90s, sort of more and more American capital – I mean there's already been capital from East Asia sort of flowing into China. More and more American capital starts flowing in. And what you get here is you get this battle between geopolitics side and the sort of like – the side that like the media is on and the side is at the sort of like the sort of intellectual, et cetera, et cetera, like anti-China class is on is – they don't want to let China into the World Trade Organization. But it doesn't work, right? Those guys just get destroyed. China gets admitted into the World Trade Organization. Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush support China entering entering the wto and they do it because they can they can see what i'm partially a little bit of it is because they they for some like they've

been drinking the kool-aid and they believe that like if you have capitalism then democracy will follow which i yeah empirical data suggests yeah like price. Yeah, like, okay, sure. Sure, neocons, like, whatever. But, you know, but it's also because these people have financial backers, and their financial backers are telling them, like, hey, look, we can, you know, if all of the sort of weird sanction regime shit is worked out, and if

China's fully integrated into the capitalist system, like, we can make a lot of money. And they do. This is what the 2000s is, right? Like, Walmart and, like, Walgreens and shit, like shit like directly integrate all their supply lines into chinese supply lines they make deals with the chinese government in order to do this and suddenly by you know by in 2001 china's i think like the fourth exporter of goods in the world by 2009 they are number one by like an order of what's on order of magnitude but they're like very very much the dominant export like world's dominant export economy.

And this is a problem, right? Because on the one hand, you know, if like American Chinese relations get, they're actually really good around 9-11, they're actually really good, right? Like the US, like there were guys from Xinjiang who like China sends to Guantanamo. It's like, here, take these people and the US tortures them for China.

Like, you know, yeah, like relations are good, right? It's like, well, okay in the u.s tortures them for china like you know yeah like relations are like relations are good right it's like well okay hey we both have like this like quote muslim extremist threat that we're like dealing with you know and they try to get in the war on terror but eventually relations kind of degrade like you have the whole olympics thing you have there's like in like the 2010s there's this whole fight over these islands that the philippines claim but you know but the the problem is like, okay, so you get on the one hand, a faction of the American right that is really – and also like there's a faction of the American right that's really, really hardline anti-Chinese based on sort of racism. There's American liberalism, which has this thing about the rules-based international order that China is violating. They're also racist.

And then there's progressives like Elizabeth Warren, who are also racist. But whose thing is like, oh, well, workers' rights in China are really bad, so we need to do competition with them. It's like, okay. That's how you fix it, with more capitalism. Yeah, right. But they have a political issue, which is that there's another massive section of American capital that has enormous investments, both sort of financially and in terms of where their factories are, where the logistics are, where the supply lines are, that make them incredibly supportive of sort of closer US-China relations. Or at the very least, it makes them oppose any kind of sort of like real, like anything

that goes beyond kind of geopolitical posturing that makes it harder to do business for them. And this is something I think people have a tendency to forget when they try to think about US-China relations in terms of economics, is that like, okay, so the US has a military industrial complex, but that's not the entire US economy. Like there are other people in the US who have lots of money.

There is an entire financial sector. There is an entire tech sector. And those people also have a have lots of money. There is an entire financial sector. There is an entire tech sector. And those people also have a shit ton of money. And even sort of tech companies, right, who have a foot in sort of the American contracting business also often have a bunch of their, you know, a bunch of the places where the technology is built is in China, right? So, you know, even people who could theoretically be brought into a sort of like a military industrial complex political coalition against China, like, have reasons not to do it. And, you know, and this, this works down the board, right? If you look at when Trump did the trade war, he, you know,

initially there was a lot of popular support among sort of like American, like mid-sized businesses who were like, oh, we can bring industrial capacity back to the US. And then all of them discovered that I, they, they had to pay, then all of them discovered that i they they had to pay like all discovered that like they had to pay more for their chinese goods and we're like wait hold on we fucked up we've made a mistake he's actually screwed us and like you know there's there's another kind of guy right who there's a lot of people who you would expect to be really anti-ccp who aren't right and elon musk is the best example of this like he is he is a guy that, like... I think we'd expect Elon Musk to fully support anyone

who can fully stamp on the face of their working class because he is about that, if nothing else. He's the kind of person who you would expect, by pure racism, to be, like, a really hardline anti-CCP guy, and he's not because, like, he has... There's a class consciousness, I think, which overrides even

apartheid boys racism well and and like he has there's a tesla has this like oh god it's called the gigafactory which is a name that makes me want to die yeah i it but the gigafactory is in shanghai right and like he has even even during when like the media was like like pretending to care about the uighur genocide like he opened a showroom in Xinjiang during that period. And there's also people like Michael Bloomberg who are very – if you read Michael Bloomberg talking about China in the media, he was also talking about how great of a leader Xi Jinping is. And it's because these people have financial interests there. It's because these people have financial interests there. And this means that even the sort of media coverage of this balloon bullshit, right?

And China has been threatening revenge or whatever for the shooting down of the balloon. But this isn't going to turn into anything in the same way that like the last 17 goddamn of these scandals isn't going to go anywhere and it's not going to go anywhere because there's a there's an enormous like faction of american capital who relies on this stuff i think it serves like the the military industrial complex and military specifically to have china be like schrodinger's next world war right like that they're always a threat but like they're not a threat you know like we can justify so much spending and allocation of resources if we can always like wave this stick of potential conflict with china yeah and i think this is something that's kind of like this important to understand is that like both the china hawks and the china doves are enemies of both the american chinese working classes like the china hawks and the china doves are enemies of both the american chinese working classes like the the china hawks thing is they want to like you know they want to pit the chinese

and american working classes against each other and it's like nationalist fervor in order to get everyone to ignore the fact that like both the societies are collapsing around them and by the way did did we add we have no no i don't i don't think it's this has really made the news yet but norfolk southern fucking basically set off a chemical weapon in iowa by crashing one by crashing a train full of toxic chemicals yeah and it's it's literally exploding uh like right now as as we're fucking recording this episode it's on fire good you know i love how when you deregulate train industry so that you can have just like one guy working a massive train hauling huge amounts of toxic chemicals it works out great yeah that happens it's called efficiency robert yeah look a train crash like this would have normally taken dozens of people to engineer

so we have we have improved our efficiency markedly well and also in terms of efficiency robert like think of how bad it could have been if we hadn't crossed the rail strikes. Yeah, see? It could have been a disaster. It would have been terrible. There might not be a giant poison gas cloud in, what is it, Ohio?

We can't have that, yeah. It's in East Palestine, Ohio. It's Palestine. They don't say it. No, yeah, you can't call it Palestine. Can't have American things. Solidarity with the cosmic chemicals. Oh, no.

Free Palestine. That's what I'm saying. That's been done already. The first Palestinian youth. This will seem like it's in bad taste if a lot of people wind up dying, but... Yes, I don't know. I also want to

mention here that i i'm gonna take this opportunity to mention that china is the second largest israel second largest trading partner and they do like yeah and like they they they do like security exchanges with each other where people trade each other's militaries it's great it's great um yeah but but you know you can rely if someone is oppressing working people they've done a security exchange with israel that is like the golden law of cop beating you in the head with a stick it says don't never more than two degrees removed from the idf okay there's one last thing i want to talk about really briefly which is okay so one of the things you will see people talk about who are like pundits or like people on the news

talk about this thing called decoupling. And the thing you need to understand immediately is at the moment someone says the word decoupling, you can stop listening to everything they're about to say because they are lying to you. Like, it is bullshit. So in theory, decoupling is this thing where like, supposedly like the US and Chinese economies are going to decouple, right?

And all of the American firms in China are going to pull out, and they're going to pull out their supply chains, and they're going to relocate them to somewhere else in the world. And the US and Chinese economies suddenly will not be coupled to each other. It's like, no, they're not. This has never happened. If it was going to happen, it would have happened in 2017 or 2018 when Trump was doing the trade war. It didn't happen then. happened it would have happened in 2017 and like 2018 when trump was trump was doing the trade war it didn't happen then the only time it's ever happened or the only time american companies ever sort of pulled out of china like en masse or tried to was ironically in june 2011 but in 2011 they

were trying to pull out because uh of the wukong riots and this like massive surge of strikes in china and suddenly all these companies were like oh my god china might not be able to keep our might be not be able to suppress the working class hard enough. And then they, yeah, they got horribly crushed. And the other thing that happened was like companies tried to go elsewhere and they couldn't do it because no one, like no other countries had the combination of like things like a stable electrical grid and like working roads, like an actually highly educated population. So they didn't have all of these things at once so they all came back and you know that that was that was closest ever came to happening everyone talks about this all the time they're lying to you

ignore them yeah it's it's not it's not going to happen the u.s and chinese economies are inexorably bound to each other and they're going to continue to be. Yeah, I mean, we can't run... Our economy, to a large extent, our society runs on providing treats to the working class just enough to prevent them from rebelling or from trying to actually change anything. We can't keep the constant stream of treats running

if we decouple from china right of like cheap consumer goods and also like the chinese economy relies on like is an expert economy right like they've they've been trying to turn to an internal consumption economy for a decade it's like not really working because hilariously it's not working because they don't pay people enough to buy shit and structurally no one will ever do that because. Yeah, then that fucks the economy. Yeah. So, you know, but yeah, it's great. But, you know, OK, I guess like the gist of what I wanted to say here is that like like US China relations are driven by forces that are more complicated than man on TV. Yell at balloon.

And as as powerful as man on TV, yell at balloon seems like in the moment, it's not actually the thing underlying what's going on here. And you need to be able to look past man yell at balloon on TV in order to look at sort of the broader the broader political and social forces that are that are going on here. do is recognize that there's a deep emptiness at the center of american society that should have in this case been filled by rich people in cessnas and their friends with high caliber precision rifles flying into the sky and a noble cahoteus uh quest to shoot that fucking balloon down just having sancho panza crank i've never been so disappointed in this country. I expected 40 or 50 people to die, but that balloon to be taken down. There was a time when we had a country.

Yeah. Our founding fathers would have dropped that son of a bitch. Yeah. Joe Brandon has forced them all into retirement. Yeah. And China has revealed its gender to the world. Anyway, I hope China sends another balloon. Yeah, what else are we going to do?

Hopefully it'll be like a Mickey Mouse, a fucking Frozen balloon, you know, if they do like the girl from Frozen. Sure. That would be cool. I'd like to see that. They should start pranking us with character balloons. I'd fucking love that.

Oh God, but then the US would start sending like Winnie the Pooh balloons over to China. They should start pranking us with character balloons. I'd fucking love that. Oh, God. But then the US would start sending, like, Winnie the Pooh balloons over to China. Elizabeth Warren would commission a Moana balloon to, like, do racism. If it was legal for anything fun to happen, we would have, like, a balloon-based Cold War where the United States starts shooting over balloons across China

and the Russians start floating. And it's just... Yeah, we got to close the balloon gap. Albuquerque becomes the number one world power. Green chili jackboots stamping over the face of humanity. A strong wind decimates our military capacity. The developers of Balloon's tower defense get hauled before a Senate committee

for supposedly knowing the future. God. Yeah, we've got to nationalize Mylar production in order to monopolize it. All right, well... Balloon pause, yeah. I think that's our episode. Yep.

All right, until next time, everybody. Go forth and balloon. Yeah, yeah. Float a balloon into the airspace of a sovereign nation. Just to have fun with them a little bit. Buy a camera on AliExpress. Put it on a balloon. Uh-huh.

Send it somewhere. Put a flag on it. Be the CIA you want to see in the skies over a sovereign country. Just write CIA on the balloon. Yeah, spray paint it on the side. Why not? Why not? What's the harm?

What could possibly go wrong? Let's send a flotilla of balloons. Now I'm going to listen. On an unrelated note, I'm finally going to listen to the song 99 Red Balloons for the very first time. So I'll report back to see if this changes my opinion on what people should do with balloons.

All right, everyone. Out. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows Presented by I Heart and Sonorum An anthology of modern day horror stories

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New episodes every Thursday. 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 mean, he looked so 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 Cuba. Mr. González wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian González story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, everyone. It's It Could Happen Here. And today it's me and myself, and we're doing two interviews, which is going to split over two different episodes. What we're talking about is a case in Asheville, North Carolina, where a group of people doing mutual aid work with unhoused people have been charged with felony littering. Now, we're going to get a little bit in the episode into what felony littering is. Unfortunately, I don't think any of us can explain why that exists as a charge for individuals and not for BP or Shell or something, but such is the state. And so in the first episode, we're going to talk to Sarah. Sarah is one of the people facing these felony littering charges. Sarah has also been banned from parks in Nashville, which we're going to talk about.

So Sarah will explain a little bit of the process that led up to those felony littering charges what situations like in asheville for mutual aid and front house people and then we're going to talk to maniba tomorrow maniba is one of the lawyers at the aclu and she will explain a little bit of the legal background to the case and what is sort of the way that the aclu is helping these people oppose the ban and so we'll have two separate episodes, but we actually recorded them in a different order. So you're going to hear Sarah maybe referring to some stuff Maniba said and Maniba saying Sarah will say some stuff. Just know that we recorded Maniba first because she had a pressing time commitment. But we felt that Sarah's interview gives you a better setup for listening to Maniba's interview

tomorrow. Okay, hope you enjoy. We're going to start out talking to Sarah, who's one of the people who is a quote-unquote problem child in Asheville. We can... Oh, you've seen those? Yeah, yeah.

Sarah, would you like to introduce yourself and tell us why you're a problem child? Yeah. My name is Sarah Norris. It's so funny to be called something like a problem child because I'm mostly like what I am as a mom of a little kid. I'm a social work student. I am a career educator. yeah one of 16 local organizers who who has been facing for almost the last year felony littering charges um in conjunction with a december 21 december 2021 uh arts-based protest yeah i'm sorry that this bizarre thing has happened to you. Obviously, like on the face of it, felony littering is a bizarre charge. And the fact that you are banned from parks

is also very weird. So let's maybe start off with like the situations before this. What were you all doing in the parks that led to you being deemed unsuitable for parks? Gosh, in a way you'd have to ask those who so deemed us, but I can talk about what I did in parks for the year prior to being banned. And that's, I was part of a collective who,

who at the beginning of the pandemic did like six times times a week, meals, coffee, gear distribution and parks. By the time I came around and started participating in these food sharings, in these community gatherings, we were at like two or three times a week. And really what, or three times a week. And really what the way I spent my time in parks was Saturdays and Sundays, I brought my daughter to Aston Park. And we brought food with us, gear with us, art supplies with us, or nothing with us, we just showed up as us and we hung out and we distributed food, tents, packs, socks, toothbrushes, really whatever we could get our hands on. And towards the end of the year, we got a little bookshelf and we were in charge of bringing books on this little white plastic shelf and talking to people about

what they most wanted and seeing if we could match them up with whatever we randomly had. It was really like sitting in the sunshine and making sure the coffee thing was full and mostly just talking to people, people who were unhoused, people who are housed, people who walked by and were like, what's this? What's this picnic? Why is everybody like using glitter glue? Like, oh, because 2021, I think we know there were at least 21 sweeps of homeless encampments. And a sweep, like that name for some of us really connotes violence, but I think it's important to name how violent those are. are then considered to be trash, are bulldozed over, are at a minimum lost to them. And this had happened over and over again in the city of Asheville. And yeah, there's a way that that being in the park weekly felt like a thing that happened in Asheville that was the opposite of speech that was like we're here we're all here together like here we are and so the the protest

itself around which in the context of which like these arrests have come, um, happened, uh, in December, um, and it was an arts-based protest and was really about, was in, in favor of sanctuary camping in the city of Asheville with sanitation services. Um, that was the point of it and there were like kind of standard protest related events um on or sorry arrests on christmas night so that's what um asheville police did and i think it's important just to to note that there were not unhoused folks evicted that night on christmas night um and no one who was there was pretending to be unhoused and was arrested. That's a strange narrative that the city of Asheville Police Department has set in open court.

But there were standard sort of like misdemeanor trespass resisting officer arrests that night, including of journalists. And then these felony littering cases came much later and in a in kind of a different context um but that's what that's what happened uh around christmas okay yeah that's already pretty weird but uh i think it's yeah it gets weirder yeah yeah so so presumably if you were not arrested then i, went home, did Christmassy stuff. And then at some point, a letter comes to your door saying that you've been charged with felony littering. So my own experience was that people, organizers in the Mutual Aid Collective

that I'm part of who had been showing up in the parks week after week distributing food and gear started getting arrested in mid-January for what we learned was something you could be arrested for, which was felony littering and or aiding and abetting felony littering, which like, honestly, exactly. And, and some people had one, some people had the other, some people had both. People were, and this is, you know, our understanding is that there's an unstated, but generally followed policy by the

city of Asheville Police Department that they don't go arrest people at work, but they went to people's work with five cops and arrested them. And this began in mid-January and it continued into February. And the arrest, I mean like honestly the charges on the on the charge sheets would read like crazy statutes that weren't even felony littering it seemed like they it really seemed like they were making it up as they went along just from the what i can say is i mean i can't speculate about what they were doing but there was a a strangeness to, um, to even like the documentation that people who are arrested received. And then, um, at the, in the first week of March of last year, um, the letter that I received, um, was similar to others that others, other folks received that day, which was, um, in an envelope

from the Asheville police department, but was on Asheville parks and rec stationary that told me that I had been banned from all city parks for a period of three years based on the commission of a felony. And this was how I found out that I even had any charges was through this letter. Yeah. And that's true for more than me. That's true for a few defendants. So, you know, not everybody who is now we understand to be banned from parks has even received one of those letters. But I did. And a few of us did. And there was on there a sort of like, if you would like to appeal this, you have seven days. But the letter had been dated

sort of five days before that. And we were like, wow, what are we even doing? And so it's hard to, it's hard to really communicate the like level of um both like sort of desperation and nonsense that was involved the next day but um you know so a few of us found this out we were self we self-surrendered um and and because we were a lot of us around the courthouse and city hall we were trying to figure out what do these letters even mean? Like, what does it mean to appeal this? What does it mean to be banned? And so we traipsed around city hall, city offices, the courthouse, trying to get some sort of answer.

Like, here we've got these. What does this mean? And every place sent us somewhere where they were like, we don't know what that is. Parks and Rec said, we don't know what that is. Go talk to the police. We said, we don't know what that is. Go talk to the magistrate. The criminal magistrate said, oh, this seems like a civil magistrate thing. So there's like a group of five mutual aid workers, you know, sort of just traipsing around trying to find out like, can I, do I get to go give out sandwiches and tents in the park this week or

not for three years like what is and who can help me figure this out and no one could and and what ensued we never got an answer that day we just had city employees looking at us often with a like wow we don't we're sorry this is happening to you this seems really dumb um uh expression and eventually via email it became clear that they were like we don't know what this process is but we're going to tell you soon like thank you for your email you know saying you're going to appeal it and over time we kind of got a little bit more like okay we're going to schedule the hearings. You will have a hearing eventually. Like, okay. We asked who will be these for what, what is a hearing? And they didn't know. And then like, oh, okay. Well, there will be some police officers there. And you know, the city,

a representative from the city attorney's office, and you will have a chance to provide information. And, you know, at this point, like none of it, I think none of us had, maybe we'd had admin appearances, but like at this point, like, none of us, I think none of us had, maybe we'd had admin appearances, but like, at this point, we're dealing with felony littering charges that we don't understand. We're trying to figure out whether we can continue to provide community care in the way we've been doing for years. And it seems like what the city is offering is a chance to come and maybe entrap ourselves. Like it's, it doesn't make any sense to us. Um, and so, you know, those of us who had representation that we could speak to said, Oh, we're coming.

Um, and have you heard the, um, recordings? No. Well, if you would like them, I'm happy to send them. Mine is particularly, I can't listen to mine. I have a huge nervous system response. But mine is my attorney asking over and over again questions of the representative, the city attorney. It's John Maddox, who's named in the ACLU demand letter. Just saying over and over again, like what,

at that point we hadn't even seen any discovery. Like we don't know what information this is even based on. Like there are two cops in uniform pointing body cams at, I have to assume pointing body cams at me in this hearing. And my lawyer is just asking over and over again, like upon what evidence is this based? And is just asking over and over again, like upon what evidence is this based? And they just said over and over again, you are here to give information.

We are not giving any information. My lawyer asking, what is the standard of review here? Like upon what is this based? And the parks director just saying like my decision and then what you know, what are the, what is the remedy? If this is, if the appeal is denied, there's none, then the appeal is denied. Like, and so it really was for me one of the moments where I realized like,

Oh, the city is, is pretty hell bent on keeping a bunch of sweethearts who give out Tencent sandwiches out of the park. And they're going to like, they're, they're up to something here. But I'm happy to share that recording. We have all of them. Yeah. I'd like that. That'd be good. What a bizarre performance of like pseudo legal ceremony. I don't know.

Well, and like, yeah. And like pseudo in a dangerous and extrajudicial way like i had no protections there right yeah yeah it was so strange like yeah there's nothing to respond to yeah it's like these these are these these are star chamber proceedings like like the the king of france is gonna walk out like halfway through this. I was just thinking, it seems like such a British thing. Yeah. You told me this was in Britain and you'd been like shooting the queen swans or something. I'd buy it, you know,

here we are in the land of the free. Well, and I think the equivalent of shooting the queen swans here is hanging out with poor folks in a park and in ways that inconvenience or that apparently inconvenience the folks who go, who pay money because you have to, to play tennis at a public tennis court, which is like right by Aston Park. And we can go in in a minute as much as you want to, to what you saw as far as like their attempts after, their attempts to sneak through an ordinance. Now we know quite clearly from public records directed at food sharing in

Aston Park. Yeah, it was really, I keep thinking about that, that Helder Kamara line. we know quite clearly from public records uh directed at at food sharing in eston park yeah it's really i i keep thinking about that that helder camara line i uh when i give food to the poor they call me a saint when i ask why they are poor they call me a communist but it's like they really seem to have blown all the way back like they didn't even get to part two they were just like wait hold on you're giving food to the poor like it is time for a military response it's just just horrible yeah and being banned from parks for three years has a pretty big effect on my on my on my little life you know like there there are constitutional um aspects to it that matter far beyond me and, and which matter in many ways more to me.

But the fact right now is that like, I can't legally take my young child like to the park by her house without risking arrest for misdemeanor trespass. And, and to my knowledge, I won't be able to for three years. Um, and you know, they've succeeded in getting us out of the park. They caused the harm to, they disrupted community care. Um, they did it. They didn't need the ordinance. Um, you know, it has, it does happen. Food distribution happens. Um, but it's in a place that really isn't the same. Like my daughter can't go there.

She has sensory stuff, like being in the loud place that it is right now, like really doesn't work. Um, so yeah, there's this, there's this very, um, like the scopes of all of this um from how ashville as a city views and treats the folks who live on the street here who the city has most abandoned um there's the legal mechanisms the like very strange way they are um like doubling down on criminalization of folks doing community care. And then there's just like the really day-to-day personal bits of this that affect all of us in different ways.

And a felony would affect lots of us in different ways. Like it endangers professional licensure. Like I'm trying to get a social work license. Like people, it endangers professional licensure like i'm trying to get a social work license like people it endangers professional licensure of course our right to vote housing and employment and um you know i'm the like middle-aged white middle-class mom second graduate degree person in the group um i am not really representative of our group like folks are in a lot, folks are in a lot more precarious material circumstances than I am. And so much so that like, you know, it feels safe for me to come on this podcast. It doesn't feel safe for everybody and i think um yeah i think that that's something that that has to be named too of like how what a threat this is to to folks future material well-being as well as

currently like folks have lost housing over this folks have lost employment over this like um jesus christ yeah like even if you're found completely innocent or whatever like this has robbed you of your time or people at the housing or people's, their jobs that caused stress. And, and in that way, you know, it does feel and often to us,

like the, like the punishment is the process. Yeah. It's just harassment. So I don't know if, if y'all are updated on like there are five of us being taken to trial is that something you know okay yeah so yeah yeah but our listeners probably aren't so explain like uh so like right after this happened or at some point after this happened so i know when we started

speaking i was like oh well i'd pra this shit out of all your city council people and you were like we already have um so can because there was some stuff in there that was just weird yeah can you explain what you got from like this is where the problem child monica comes from among other things sure yeah gosh it's so even talking about it i have such a reaction and um that i can feel um and i should say you know i i speak about this to my name not not about the city the text necessarily but i speak about the situation to a lot of people um because it does feel to us like you know they're also i think they would like us to be ashamed but we are not ashamed of what is happening to, I mean, that's part of the degradation of the court system. And so, you know, all of my neighbors know what is happening to me,

all of the people that I work with in the various like school related jobs and such that I do. And to a person, everyone in Asheville starts with disbelief. They're like, no. And then I'm like, yes. And then they're just so disappointed. Like they're just, they're like no and then I'm like yes and then they're just so disappointed like they're just they're so appalled often people say the the number 1984 like often people are like wow I really I didn't know some people did know you know that the city was was like this um but you know that that sort of paralleled my experience in a way, just like disbelief and then, and then disappointment. Um, but yeah, we recently, it's intensified recently seeing the, the publicly available, uh, communication between council members. Um, and I think, um, I want to be careful and I don't have it in front of me. And so I don't want to, I don't want to misquote it, but what I can say, um, is that

anybody can go find, uh, on the city of Asheville's public records request. Anybody can go get those now, um, because they've been requested. And so they're publicly available. And we have texts between council members that, that are kind of debate that, that are in contemplation of an ordinance that would restrict food sharing in public places to, to require permitting in contemplation of that like we have we have texts from council members calling um those who do those who do food

sharing in aston park problem children um and saying that it's a shame that the problem children have ruined it for the rest of the class we have we have one saying like you know probably if we go ahead we city council go ahead with this with this ordinance and there will be a lot of protests and a lot of pushback which of course there was once it came out um and we have the other council members saying like yeah that might be um but if permitting is the only way to get them to stop then so be it and. And I mean, I read that and I have a variety of reactions, but mostly just like a kind of nauseous disappointment. Council because some folks have tried to like understand the gap being filled by folks who give out food and gear in a park. And I think some of the Council and have recognized it as a gap that is being filled. And I think some are so aware of what it says about the city that folks have to show up in a

park and give out food and gear. And there's never enough of either. They're so aware of what that lays bare about the abandonment that the city practices of those who live here, that they can only see that and they can only be angry with us and call us problem children. Like I'm 43. Yeah. You can see the sort of like the kind of just like petty dictatorship mind that they've gotten themselves into where like they can't see the people who like, you know, nominally they're supposed to be serving. Right.

But like, OK, we know how far that goes, but they can't see like you as anything other than just like a child, because that's the kind of like this is the sort of dictator brain that they've that they've yeah from like holding this power it's it kind of reminds me of um uh like how uh usually with the 14s you said let us in one like the state is me and therefore attacks on my reputation or like attacks against the state like yeah that's how it feels like you're being treasonous by making them look bad and i don't know if you saw this also in in there but um on the day that the arrests happened so that so those discussions about the ordinance were i think a little earlier in january that we should actually check that um but there's a there's one that came right on the the day of the first arrests for felony littering that um where someone asks like can those arrested be banned from certain places

um and and we know now yes but it is it's a lot to see that it's a lot to see that. It's a lot to see what looks, what looks so deliberately like depriving us of, of the right to be in a park. Yeah. Yeah. It's a hell of a lot. And so where is, where's the, five of you are going to trial. Yeah. Unknown number of people are banned from parks in Asheville. Yes. Yes. I i my understanding is that we someone has been told um oh we don't keep records of that which also doesn't make a

lot of sense yeah how can you enforce a ban if you don't have a record of who's been like wait yeah and i shouldn't be quoted on that but um but my understanding is that like um is that that has been the it's like oh no there aren't records that we can that can be made public about that because there simply aren't the records um which that just seems like incredibly bizarre secret police shit of like yeah no we have like we have we have lists that don't exist of people who are banned from spaces and we won't tell you what they are because they don't exist yeah you'll find out when the SWAT team comes from behind the swings and uh yeah just yeah yeah what yeah terrible so yeah you're banned from the park you're facing you're going to trial um yeah. Five of us have been,

have been scheduled for trial and the other folks have been kind of what's called taken off the calendar. So they don't have, nothing's dismissed, but, but they're not scheduled. There's no, there's no next court date for them.

Okay. So when, when will you, if you don't mind saying when would your trial date be our trial date right now is set for february 27th um okay so coming up it's coming right up yeah that's tough uh we'll make sure we get this out before then how can people support you support the work that you uh are not doing in parks anymore how can people help you through this this what i'm sure it's a really stressful trial process yeah thank you for asking um so we post um updates uh

in a few different places um uh like we don't have our own instagram right now because we're we just don't um but uh our our defendant statements get released in a few different places, including at AVL survival on Instagram. We also have a website where we always post our own statements and also all the press that comes out about us. And that is AVL solidarity.noblogs.org. We have a Venmo, which is used, those funds are used for attorney fees.

And frankly, like, you know, when someone loses housing or their car breaks down and they have had trouble finding employment because they have felony littering charges against them. It's also used for material needs in that way. And that is AVL Defendant Fund. And all that's actually on the website too. You can find those. And honestly, it matters so much that people just know this is happening. When I tell people it matters so much that people just know this is happening. You know, when I tell people in Asheville, like more people know now than did before.

When I tell people outside of Asheville, there's very much a like, huh, I thought about coming there. I heard it was cool. They do want those who make not just like a living from tourism, but those who make tons of money from tourism are certainly invested in you thinking that it's really cool and coming to spend your money here and it's not cool in the ways that they want you to think it's cool it is cool because neighbors show up for each other and you can come here and we'll talk to you about that um but but there's a way that like people knowing what this place is really like um does matter and there's a way that honestly people just like sending us like their,

their beautiful energy and hope really matters too. Like that actually, that actually really does matter. So they can send us their beautiful energy and hope and material contributions as they might have them. Yeah. I'm sure people will. Cause it's horrifically fucked up. I wanted to ask what is the sentence range for felony littering? Yeah.

Guidelines. So it's the lowest class of felony. As it happens, none of us have any criminal history. We'd be facing felony probation. And so there's a range there of whether that probation is supervised or unsupervised. There's a range of how long it would be. There's a range, um, of restitution in terms of community service. Um, and, and I actually don't have the paper in front of me that says what the range of those things are, but I feel like it's eight to 12 months on for probation. Um, and a lot of that

is simply at the discretion of, of in sentencing. of in sentencing and and and I think that that there are some possible restrictions on just like being able to leave the state okay what yeah Jesus Christ yeah yeah yeah I mean yeah sorry Jesus Christ like this was fully fucking sent me now because a guy a man called robert wilson in san diego was arrested for hate crimes because he assaulted his gay neighbor uh since he was arrested he's driven around san diego and la dressed as a nazi sometimes with a horrifically anti-semitic slogan has just left the country and is living in poland oh i fucking sure because i because fucking like somehow I don't, I'm sorry.

I'm just, I'm all right. I love it. This is fully, fully sent me now. We need anger too. Yeah. Yeah.

What is wrong with this shit? Yeah. There was something else you wanted to get to. Yeah. I think I wanted to name. So, you know, people are so in a way,

like I wish I had a super cut of everyone. I've said the word felony littering to, just like their faces over and over again. Maybe I'll come to Asheville and just vox pop some people. Yeah. So there's a way that, you know, of course, that's just like, and if you add on aiding and abetting, which we've all been bumped up to felony littering um but or sort of but but but the misdemeanor is conspiracy to commit felony oh no what's next like a rico charge giving someone a book yes so um so on its face you know it has this ring of of absurdity and of course like it is you know a lot of the press about us, you know, they'll go talk to someone at the school of government who says like, well, this is baffling.

And at the very least seems like a misapplication of the statute, which is about huge amounts of waste often being like dumped by businesses. But I think it's telling that a couple, maybe a month or two ago, there was an article in the Citizen Times, a local paper about a company, WastePro, which had dumped an entire dumpster's worth of trash somewhere outside of where it should have been like in the in the landfill um and but it was all about like how actually they had followed procedure because there was like maybe a little bit of a battery fire or something there was something going on with it where they weren't supposed to bring it in so they just had to dump it um but in the course of this article um they they interviewed a lot of people about like, well, what's going on with like litter in general and like big amounts of litter? And our case was never mentioned, but they did talk to some folks who do river cleanup, an organization called Greenworks.

And that person said, you know, sometimes there are like huge amounts of dumping that happens and we call the city and they say yeah that's illegal but we don't actually prosecute that and like you know that's the sort of thing also that seeing in print i'm just like what what sort of strange like dystopian novel am i living in where the city is so up front that like oh no like we wouldn't prosecute felony littering um but when it comes to aiming to disrupt a kind of community care and political speech that they don't like um they're willing to expend an incredible amount of resources on it. You know, like the number of resources that have gone into this would have funded like

sanctuary camping with sanitation services, like for years, for years. And, you know, I think you alluded though, maybe this is in the future in the podcast, like to the way that the city of Asheville or our lawyers have been clear that when you like to the way that the city of Asheville or, um, our lawyers have been clear that when you, when you look at the city of Asheville's like public pronouncements and, and, um, the way that, that they talk about, um, homelessness, it does seem like, oh, wow, we're really, we're really trying to get on this. Um, but at a recent meeting, um, where a consultant group often referred to as like, yeah, that other, like that, that consultant group from now, because it's happened over and over again, presented findings about like, what should actually be done to end unsheltered homelessness

here, presented findings to the city council, um, and the county commissioners. No one was allowed to talk except for, it was a huge meeting, no one was allowed to talk except for council members and commissioners and those who were presenting. But a man who actually has experience, was experienced with homelessness, got up and talked anyways. And he was interrupted by the mayor. And like, that's telling in its own right. Um, and like, that's telling in its own right. Um, that's, that's telling in its own right. Also telling is that later, um, also not allowed to speak. A local pastor got up and said, you know, I saw that happen.

You know, like what we need to be doing is actually listening to the folks who've experienced this and like data. Yes, we need data, but we also need to like actually listen to the voices of what's going on. And he used the phrase, um, which I think was echoing, um, the, the man who had spoken earlier, spiritual death and said that this, he thinks as a pastor that Asheville is in a moment of spiritual death. And in a way, that's why I say like, we need your,

we need your material contributions um to us as defendants to to collective care like when we have extra money in that defendant fund we just give it away so people can buy more tents um and we need like we need some hope because asheville is in this moment um where it's as a city it's making choices that seem so misaligned, not just with like the image that it would like to sell to tourists, but like with the people who live here and are actually like about it day to day in a neighbor's caring for neighbor's way, like really misaligned with what we actually want and what we actually are capable of offering each

other yeah yeah it is deeply sad that like we've created this abstraction of society which is being entirely anti-social like no one wants no one yeah no reasonable person would do that but we've got the state which in theory acts on our behalf and is is doing it and yeah yeah which also is probably i don't know to editorialize for a second uh often people make this argument i see it specifically around gun laws but with other laws too where this law won't always be enforced they'll only use it if they need it if they have to get a bad person they will use it if anybody threatens their interest their shit right like it's uh it was extensively mobilized for a ghost gun law here which uh made some bizarre things illegal like

the bang stick which you use for spearfishing is now a ghost gun and a felony and like there were definitely boomers who have dozens of those in their garage right and don't keep up on local audiences and are now in theory at risk of committing a felony and then obviously the response to that from the council is oh well we wouldn't charge them what like who who are we do we can't trust the state to be benevolent when as your experience has shown it's anything but and you know we and i i can say this personally because i've spoken i've spoken to people in city government or in state government who I've just said like, hey, do you know this is happening?

And they're clear about how, sure, it sounds nutty, but the city, but like, but that we as a group have been painted as particularly dangerous. And that part to me is like, I mean, don't do this to anybody, you know, don't do it to anybody, but the part where, um, where what's going on is like, it's, is this strange justification,

um, with the idea that, that we are dangerous people who deserve to be taken you know who need to be taken out of a who need to not be allowed to be in a park you know is is particularly easily disproved by anyone who actually like hangs out with us knows what knows who we are and what we've done but not when it's just like a weird whisper campaign in the, in the halls of city government, like, Oh no, they're bad. Like they're just bad. Like we we've heard the, the lies that they've told about us. Some of them we have in, in, you know, public records requests like that we haven't even talked about, but it's,

it's a, it's a really strange thing to be to be painted that way. Yeah. Yeah. It's bizarre. And again, I'm Yeah, it's bizarre. And again, I'm sorry it's happening to you. So I think to wrap up, maybe again, you could just give that Venmo so people can support materially. And if there's any other social media accounts where people can follow along, where people can send their support and best wishes,

anything like that. Yeah, that's great. Our Venmo is avl defendant fund and um yeah you can so on instagram we're easy to get to through avl survival um and there's a way to contact us through our website we have a little we have a little email it'll be so cute to get some supportive emails and that website is avl solidarity.noblogs.org amazing yeah and thank you all so much no thank you for giving us your time i'm sorry that you're yeah dealing with nefarious state bullshit all right so that wraps up our interview with sarah tomorrow we'll be talking to maniba from the aclu theberties Union, and she will be giving us a legal perspective and some more insight into this case. We'll look forward to talking to you then.

Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters To bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. 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. ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba.

He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez.

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

this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzá Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, everyone. It's James again. I just wanted to remind you that this is part two of a two-parter,

and if you haven't listened to yesterday's podcast, today's might not make a lot of sense. So I would suggest starting there. Obviously, you know, you have your own life, do what you want, but you're going to understand today's a lot more if you start with yesterday's. Today we're speaking to Maniba with the ACLU about the legal response to some of the bizarre things that the city of Asheville has been doing. If you hear reference to Pip in this episode, that's because Pip is another of the activists.

They weren't able to make our call, but we're going to be speaking to them as well in our ongoing coverage of this. So hope you enjoy today's episode and know that we'll keep you updated as this moves forward. All right, so our first guest today is Maniba. And Maniba, would you like to introduce yourself explain your relationship to what we're talking about today? Yeah sure so my name is Maniba Talikdar I'm a staff attorney with the ACLU of North Carolina and I represent some of these wonderful folks that you'll be talking to after me and And it's unfortunate that we met this way, but I'm happy to be working with them.

So basically I can go into it or do you want to ask me questions about it? I think it'd be great if you could start off by sort of walking us through how Mutual Aid seems to have met with this bizarre prosecution. Yeah, of course. So we got connected to our now clients, this group of individuals who have been doing important advocacy and mutual aid work on behalf of unhoused folks in Asheville. And we were connected by this other organization called Center for Constitutional Rights and kind of filled in quickly about how this group of people were not only banned from parks, but, um, these bands were based on

this absurd criminal charge called felony littering, um, which, um, you know, it sounds as crazy as it is. Um, as crazy as it is. Um, so, so yeah, you know, I think, um, my colleagues and I at the ACLU, we were eager to talk to these folks and, and learn more about what happened and, and see what we can do and, you know, start talking about some of the legal issues that arise from when a city tries to ban a large group of people from one of the few places that they have to convene and to protest and demonstrate, which, you know, one of the first things I learned in law school is like how or like one of the first things I think I learned as someone living in the U.S. Like you, you always hear kids say, oh, I have free speech, like, oh i have free speech like you know free speech is like so it's such a central

part of being in this or like growing up in this country and being a citizen um or member of this country is just the way that it's thrown around sometimes inaccurately, but people generally know that speech should be protected and cannot be restricted except in very narrow ways by the government. Not by, like, you know, your mom. You don't have free speech in front of your mom. Like, that's not, I learned that quick. free speech in front of your mom like that's not i learned that quick yeah when i took my being an american test i took like i became a citizen a couple of months ago and there's like only like 50 questions they can ask you and i think two of them are like

what is free speech like who like yeah yeah can you claim free speech when uh you get banned from twitter.com? Yeah, it's something that's very integral. Yeah, and I think it's absurd to's also like equally as troubling to take away this, this important public space from people that, um, you know, especially in a city like Asheville, if you've been there, it's one of the few public spaces that people can convene and, um, get together and enjoy each other's company. You know, that being separate from also one of the few places that you can protest and engage in discussion about how to fix problems. So it's really troubling that the city of Nashville had taken that route.

So when the ACLU got involved, we thought it would be best to list out some of these legal issues. speech. But there are also a lot of procedural due process problems that are issues that come up when you ban folks from a park. One of, you know, one of the things that the city didn't do is provide proper notice. So a few of our clients never received notice that they were banned from the park and, you know, found out that they were banned either through the discovery process and their criminal cases or, or by doing like very intense investigation of their own, which, you know, that is not a, that's just not okay. Like a city needs to, you need to, this is like a very basic thing, right? Notice and hearing, those are the tenets of procedural due process. And the city fails there.

The city fails there. The city then fails again at, didn't have any opportunity to defend why they shouldn't be banned or be heard about why they shouldn't be banned before that happened, which is, you know, it's not okay. I think a pre-deprivation hearing is really important when you're taking away an interest, like the First Amendment interest that I laid out. And then the hearing that was provided was problematic in a lot of ways. For one, these were very short cursory hearings that lasted from, I want to say, like five to 30 minutes, but I'll let Sarah and Pip confirm. And they had people from Asheville Police Department who are, you know, arguably also involved in the criminal cases that several of our clients are still battling through. They were not allowed to ask questions. And, you know, several of our clients do not have the resources to have proper legal representation. So sometimes our clients were there alone and um had to fend for themselves and navigate that tricky area of not saying something that could hurt you in your

criminal case and you know the hearing was just a mess in all of the ways. How does the city legally justify banning someone from parks? Is there a way in which they can do that? So they have this policy called the Restricted Access to City Parks Policy. And it is, I think we should call it the park ban policy. is I think we should call it the park ban policy. It basically allows the city to ban folks from parks based on certain violations. I think the categories are city park rules, city parks and recreation department program rules,

city ordinances, state laws, and federal laws. So what's interesting is there's nowhere in the policy that says when a person has committed or that defines what a violation of any of these rules are. Like, is that a conviction? Is that a formal citation? The policy does not provide that. So this is important, I think, especially here where our clients, none of them, or actually I shouldn't say none of them, or actually, I shouldn't say none of them, three, three of our clients have pled to lesser misdemeanor charges, but everyone else has an open case, and they have not been formally convicted of anything. And, and so it's, it's strange that, you know, you can ban someone based off of the felony charge that hasn't even been fully litigated.

Yeah. Have they banned, is there like a record of the city banning people from parks? Or have they just like dug this one up from the bowels of legislation to ban these people? just like dug this one up from the bowels of legislation to ban these people so that's a really interesting question and i'd i'd love to know the answer myself we did submit a public records request to try to figure out if they have um but i imagine the city is not going to want to tell us and i think sarah you you can speak to this later, but I don't think they have, they,

I think they've rejected PRRs that you all have done and have not provided that elusive restricted access list, which they have of like folks that they've banned from the parks. And, and maybe that list is just you know our clients which yeah i mean maybe they have i don't know what's worse like if they have a parks blacklist and they're just not notifying people uh until like they send a SWAT team after them or if it's if it's only people who are helping unhoused people and they just don't want to admit that both those are pretty dark on the topic of weird legal things what on earth is

felony littering i'd love to know i'd love to know what felony littering is because um i'll tell you this when i told my partner like i was like oh did you know there's something called felony littering and he's like i hope that's when corporations get punished for you know dumping toxic waste into the sea but no it's apparently when um community members come together for a demonstration and um the city is mad about what's left behind which um you know that's uh i think it's really telling that the city has chosen to to prosecute folks on this like felony littering charge, which, you know, has I think in the past 10 years, there's only been one felony littering case out of Buncombe County where Asheville is.

Okay. So I think that's really telling. And I, I think it's, it's really troubling that the city of Asheville seems to be really taking out a position in silencing speech. It does not like. Yeah. There's a silencing. Yeah, go ahead.

No, they just seem to be taking the most bizarre and run around the First Amendment that they can. Yeah, it reminds me a lot of the Occupy era stuff where all of these cities suddenly realized that like wait hold on these people can actually use a park for political activity and then immediately like suddenly all these like ordinances started appearing where like everyone has to like clear out of the park by 10 p.m so they can clean it or something that eventually just like was used to force people out and i don't know it seemed like there's something interesting too about like it seems like it's it's almost whenever like a city

government tries to do something like this it seems like they always like immediately reach for sanitation ordinances like yeah i'm saying like that was that was like the big occupy thing like they're doing this here too it's i don know. I think all around the country, we're seeing the government fish out these weird ordinances and make new laws to criminalize poverty and to criminalize unhoused people existing. And I think that trend, unfortunately, carries even in places like Asheville that are seeing, especially after COVID, youed out to target folks and new laws that lawmakers are creating. whole sort of anthropological literature about like how colonial states used uh used like sanitation ordinances as a way to sort of destroy like indigenous public spaces and the places they

colonize and i guess like yeah i don't know like there's there's a lot of sort of throughput i guess between like the the sort of old like colonial uh governance regimes and the way that people still use sanitation is like the default way to sort of cleanse people out of public spaces i i think it's interesting how uh like um an analogy one can make maybe is that there are people with rights and people without rights even when in theory we all have rights and and like this attempt to sort of yeah use sanitation to be like oh these people's rights don't matter or they don't have those rights at all yeah it's not not linked to the way uh like metropoles rule colonies

i think also just you know going back to this position that the city of Asheville is unhoused population, you might get the sense that they're trying to find solutions to address what they seem to acknowledge as a big problem. But then, you know, on the flip side, you see these actions that directly contradict that sentiment. And, you know, these park fans's that's one of the ways that um the city of Asheville kind of indirectly is like no please like let us do our thing we don't want to hear anything bad about what we're doing like we're trying our hardest you know that's rich

on its own but you know there's so there's the felony littering charges, there's the park ban. police body camera footage of the arrest of two journalists for the release of the footage that shows the arrest of these journalists covering the eviction of encampments of unhoused folks in Aston Park on Christmas night in 2021. So around the same time that several of our clients, you know, are being hit with these felony charges and then shortly after with park bans. And the rest of journalists in a democracy is very, or should be very rare and should be troubling. And these journalists, like just to give you some context, we're not shy about their critique of the city

and how it's handling the unhoused community. And that critique is protected by the First Amendment. But the city of Asheville, I think, is just, you know, doing its own thing when it's allowing arrests of journalists and and um the release of that body camera footage we think is important to to just show what what happened because that's that's that's kind of strange like just in the same way that felony littering is strange. Yeah, it does seem like there is kind of

a bipartisan commitment to not wanting journalists to meddle with you harassing unhoused people. It seems to be, like, very much a Democrat thing as well as a Republican thing. Were those journalists charged with anything, or were they just arrested? They were also charged with, um, I want to say second degree trespass. Um, and they've been

pretty vocal about, um, their arrests and, and, um, and I think what's been happening, like their names are Veronica Coit and Matilda Bliss. I'm not sure, Sarah, if you want to add more to that. Another thread that's important to this story is like all of the different ways that Asheville is operating to silence folks and to continue doing what they're doing. Which, you know, like if you look at just their own narrative where they talk about, oh, yes, we've, you know, evicted these folks as a success story. talk about oh yes we've you know evicted these folks as a success story and you know like they'll they'll maybe list like all of the hotels like free hotel nights that um these folks got for one or two nights but that's obviously not a sustainable solution to um to you know the plight of that community yeah certainly and yeah i think sometimes things get done because things look good on a press release rather than because it gives anyone like long-term access to housing so i wonder like what's the situation several of your clients are now facing a felony felony charges are serious right if people maybe aren't in the u.s or don't realize maybe you could explain like a felony follows you around for the rest of your clients are now facing a felony. Felony charges are serious, right? If people maybe aren't in the US or don't realize,

maybe you could explain, like a felony follows you around for the rest of your life, right? Yeah, and just to be clear, the ACLU is not defending on the criminal charges. I think all of our clients have separate representation for their criminal charges. I think all of our clients have separate representation for their criminal charges. We've taken on the charge of addressing these park bans and how we think they're constitutional. So I'm sure like I can speak a little to this, but know i i think um you know maybe getting uh getting one of the criminal defense

attorneys to talk if they can about the criminal case might be more helpful for sure yeah maybe can you explain just in general terms um like what a felony would mean for someone living in north carolina in terms of just how it would affect their life going forward? Yeah, so there's a lot. I think, you know, I'm not a criminal lawyer, but let me just think of a few things. You know, having a felony on your criminal record just on its own, nobody wants a criminal record in a country and state that is still looking and, you know, allowing background checks for certain jobs and having to explain that in any context. Like I will just, you know, let me just talk from my own experience where I've, whenever I am getting admitted to a bar,

I've moved a couple of times in the past few years and had to deal with the unfortunate process of being admitted into that state's bar. There are several intrusive questions and many of those involve like what kind of, what your background is. And that means what your criminal background is. Like we have to do like I have gone through the moral character fitness test for three states now. And it's never fun. It's, you know, as someone who is privileged and does not have a criminal history background, it's not fun for me because I like the,

the number of questions they ask you, it's like, you really like, you know, have to dig back into really like you know have to dig back into the past like your whole life like they ask all of the addresses that you've lived at in in the past 15 years and if you get it wrong you're lying so you're okay i'm going off on a tangent but the the point is like any any sort of certification or job or new opportunity, that is something, a criminal record is something that's looked at and considered and oftentimes in a negative way and can result in people not getting jobs. I think Sarah and like other, Sarah and Pip maybe can explain more about like what the consequences would be like if you've had conversations with your attorneys. Any kind of criminal charges slash convictions that you're facing can be used by ICE, can be used by USCIS to deny you immigration privileges and to deport you having to have this hang over your head where the process is not short, it's not easy, it is mentally taxing.

And it's honestly degrading to go through our criminal legal system. it's honestly degrading to go through our criminal legal system and it's degrading for everyone. And, and I mean, that's, that's all I can say as like someone who does like general civil rights work. But if you talk to someone who's doing criminal defense work and in this all the time, I'm sure they're they're you know can paint a better picture of how dark that that process is and how dark it can be to have that on um a record i think another thing with this is um about okay i i am not a lawyer

i'm also not like your lawyer legal advice, et cetera, et cetera. But I'm pretty sure the way it works in North Carolina is that if you have a felony conviction, you can't vote until you serve out the time. Jesus. So, yeah. In country. Yeah. Yeah, so that's another thing. And I'm fairly new to North Carolina. I moved here in March, so almost a year, but not quite. But I do know that the hoops that you have to jump through just to vote are a lot more than other states that I've lived in. And, you know, of course, that is also another thing done on purpose to silence certain voices yeah that's

dark um and certainly like you'll lose your second amendment right so it'll be jobs you can't do there will be things you don't have access to like yeah your rights will go away potentially forever which is bad when you're just trying to help some people who need some help it's pretty unconscionable yeah i think that's the other like really wild thing about all of this is like a lot the folks that are you know being banned and being targeted on this way are providing really important services in in a way that the city hasn't been able to and hasn't. And it's filling in this really important role of making sure that folks stay alive and have support and are fed and clothed.

And it's unfortunate to have that taken away. Like being banned from a park means being banned from one of the few spaces that our clients had to do this work and where they were able to distribute food and other aid to folks who don't have a home and it's just it's wild that that kind of action is being taken when when we know that this is a crisis that the city is just not addressing yeah they're like taking action against people pointing to the crisis rather than the crisis itself which is yeah very sad so what what state is your i know you have to go in a second here what state is your like you said the aclu was challenging the park ban how is that how has that gone for you so so far we've sent a demand letter to the city the city has responded to that letter with um right now kind of wishy-washy commitments of like reviewing the policy. And while I think that's a great first step, I do think the city needs to commit to doing more

and to commit to retracting the bans for all of our clients and potentially others who have been affected by this policy. They also need to change the policy, like reviewing the policy. That's a great first step, but I want to see what are the things that they are building in to make sure that folks are getting proper notice, that this policy isn't being abused and used by Asheville Police Department and others in an unfair way, and that there's, like, you know, basic standards of, like, when the policy can be instituted. Like, is there a conviction involved, and what are the convictions? Like, does it make sense to ban someone from a park for i don't know like i'm trying to think of like something um felony illiterate

yeah it's just so bizarre like it's clown stuff it is bizarre and i think like you know historically park bans from what i know is like they've been used against like people who have committed like sexual offenses and um and so it's kind of it's kind of out of left field too and and i'll just say this that the city like were in their response they cited to one of the cases that or two cases that involved sexual offenders who are banned from parks which you know yeah it's not really the same. they are not willing to put in that work and to take some of these actions that I've laid out. I do think that we will continue to challenge these park fans and, you know, we'll continue to prepare to file suit if that's necessary.

Great. And how can people follow along with that or if they want to sort of donate or support it? Is there a place they can do that? that or if they want to sort of donate or support it is there a place they can do that um you know our website um is a great space to our website i think our socials like twitter um and instagram like our comms team is amazing and they update on our work frequently and often and um and we try to provide updates there, but also kind of engage with our work and what it means broadly for folks across North Carolina and across the US. So, yeah.

Okay, great. And that's just ACLU North Carolina. Those would be the socials. Have I put you on the spot let me look it up I should know this it's fine

ACLU so it's ACLU of North Carolina dot org and if you go to our website

you'll find our socials but it's probably a very yeah wonderful well thank you so much for

giving us some of your time thanks so much for having me yeah that was great thank you bye bye bye bye bye bye bye your time. Thanks so much for having me. That was great. Thank you. Bye.

Welcome. I'm Danny Threl. Won't you join me as 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. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

New episodes every Thursday. 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 And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez.

At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. 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 to It Could Happen Here. Once again, the folks from It's Going Down are taking over the show, as today we do a deep dive into how autonomous organizers are pushing back against a wave of far-right attacks on reproductive freedom and autonomy across the United States. A note to our listeners, this episode will include discussion on both sexual and far-right violence. I'm your host Mike Andrews, let's get into it. In May of 2022, Politico first reported on the

historic leak from the Supreme Court about the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision which ruled under the 14th Amendment that a pregnant person has the right to privacy, including the liberty to abort their fetus. In June of 2022, the Dobbs decision struck down Roe, ruling that the Constitution does not guarantee a person the right to an abortion, triggering a wave of state governments rolling back abortion rights and access. For many, however, the fall of Roe only further cemented a lack of access to reproductive healthcare that's already been the norm for millions. As The Hill wrote, quote, As of 2020, six states had only one abortion clinic each,

and 89% of America's counties had no abortion clinic at all, the cumulative effect of decades of restrictions authored by anti-abortion lawmakers. This is not to say that things haven't gotten worse. They have. In the months following the Dobbs decision in states like Ohio where Axis has been attacked, a rape survivor was forced to travel out of state to find an abortion, while local politicians, including the state's Republican Attorney General, claimed on Fox News that the story was totally fabricated. In other instances, people in Ohio have been denied care even though they face potentially life-threatening complications.

In Texas, one woman nearly died due to sepsis because she was initially barred access to an abortion by doctors. And these are only some of the stories that have made headlines. The deeper impact on this country-wide attack on reproductive health has hit low-income and communities of color the hardest. A recent study from the University of San Francisco found that, quote, a third of American women of reproductive age now face excessive travel times to obtain an abortion, while twice as many are being forced to travel more than an hour to reach an abortion provider. In short, attacks on abortion, coupled with the already exploding wealth gap, lack of access to health care,

the rising cost of living, and the continuing COVID-19 pandemic will only expand existing inequalities, especially for people of color, the disabled, and queer and trans folks in particular. On the legal front, some states have pushed to expand abortion access, and many are challenging legal attacks in the courtroom. Minnesota, for instance, most recently became the first state to enshrine abortion as a right. Meanwhile, many continue to donate to abortion funds, and non-profits like Planned Parenthood are even launching mobile clinics to provide care in areas hit the hardest due to recent bans. But as our first two guests, Bex, part of a clinic defense group in New York City, and Ash, an abortion doula in North Carolina reported,

many autonomous organizers aren't putting their faith in the courts, the cops, or the state. You know, living in New York City, abortion is legal and it's legal before Roe and it's been legal after Roe, but that doesn't really necessarily mean anything kind of is what we've seen. So one of the things that we've seen is we've seen anti-abortion protesters and activists coming up from red states to target blue states now. And so you've definitely seen their presence increasing outside of the clinic that we defend in Soho in Manhattan. And so that's, I would say, is one of the biggest things that we've seen is that they really are targeting blue states, they're targeting New York City. They're actively trying to recruit people to come to New York City is, I think, the

biggest thing that we've seen. And then also in New York City, we've been struggling a lot with a really escalatory police presence at our clinics. And so that's the other thing that we're definitely really, really struggling with is the response of the state after jobs. So the first thing that I want folks to know is that people, abortion havers, people who might have abortions where I am in time and space, they have always already been navigating some of these post-war realities that a lot of folks are just getting hip to, like after that fateful Friday in June last year. And so I want to name here that we've always had a 72-hour waiting period in North Carolina, which is one of the longest waiting periods in the country.

And there's a slew of other things that we find both hostile and restrictive. And I'm using those words to describe a situation, an ongoing situation, because these are the words that are being used to describe North Carolina now, as we're seeing an influx of folks coming to North Carolina. So I'm saying that for the folks who live here always already, like they've been dealing with a restrictive, hostile climate. Bex just shared a little bit about like the presence of anti-abortion protesters. So we've always been dealing with that. In 2018, the abortion clinic that I had two abortions at in my life, they saw the most anti-abortion protesters in the Southeast. And we continue to see this. We also continue to see, as we see these anti-abortion protesters, right, a police presence. And we know, or I'm concerned about what that means for Black folks having abortions, for people who are undocumented,

and for people who otherwise, like, don't want the police all up in their business. In addition to what's changed since Dobbs, or not changed, right, but changed, we have seen an influx of folks coming to North Carolina from states where abortion is illegal, or there are bans, kind of early in gestation. And we're seeing those folks come to the clinics and access the services and the support networks that we have here in North Carolina. I think that one thing with the group that I work with called NYC for Abortion Rights, one thing that we've been working really hard on

is not only talking about abortion, not only talking about going beyond just legalizing it, but also really focusing on our communities and building mutual aid networks, building repro justice networks, and also just working overall on like community defense. So we work with a lot of mutual aid organizations all over the city of New York. And that's one thing that we're doing, like Ash was saying, is we're focusing on, you know, how do these people who are outside of our clinics are not only anti-abortion, but they're also anti-LGBTQ. They are fascist. That is something that we should be saying. They are also pro-police. None of these things happen inside of a vacuum. They're all

interconnected. And I think that that's one thing that we really, really have to do is talk about how the issue of abortion branches out to so many other things. And we can't only fight one issue. We have to fight all of them, but we also have to fight the root of where these things are coming from. And they're coming from this mass conservative movement that's been being built since the 1970s. You know, groups like Focus on the Family, like the Federalist Society, these groups have so much influence in our society and we need to be going after all of it. We can't only be going after, you know, one tiny, you know, sector of the massive problem because like Ash said, it is all interconnected here um i'm thinking

about like some political education that needs to happen like and that is uh the framework and the theories of reproductive justice i know that they recognize so many it recognizes so many things but one of the things that grounds me that it recognizes, that RJ recognizes, is that dismantling white supremacy is key to achieving reproductive justice. It also says, it posits that we live interconnected lives and not single issue lives. And it also, for me, this yields that we can't rely on the state to provide what we need. I'm seeing abortion doulas, clinic escorts, abortion funds, and other organizers and organizations really come together to support people having abortions and resist criminalization and state violence right now. And we need to see more of that. You talk about

pro-choice. I think it's so whack, like the logics of pro-choice. We need to go further beyond the logics of pro-choice and understand that RJ says that there is no choice without access. And furthermore, RJ posits that the key to controlling entire communities is to controlling bodies. So if they're coming for the trans people on their HRT and their access to gender affirming and medical care, then they're going to come for everyone else, then they're going to come for the abortion havers. They've been coming for the poor people. I think that, like, again, when we go back to that reproductive justice framework, we can begin to like make these connections. And I'm also saying this as an organizer, like, reproductive justice is my lane, but so is like environmental justice. And so is racial

justice. And I'm on the front lines of different movements. And I go back to this framework because it acknowledges that like Black people need an end to anti-Black racism and we need an end to the police and clean fucking water right now. I don't know of a framework that says that like we ought to demand all of those things right fucking now and that we actually can't live self-determined lives without all of that shit. And so I'm ready to talk about RJ. I'm ready to do that political education. I think it's ongoing work. And you don't have to be an abortion doula or a frontline organizer to help someone get to their appointment, to fund an abortion, to affirm someone's decision and support their decision to have an abortion.

And so we really need that. Like we need that vibe right now. We need people to show up that way. I think that my biggest frustration with Democrats is they've been telling us for years, like, oh, you know, vote for us, vote for us. They've been fundraising off of the issue of abortion for decades now. They have done absolutely nothing. And I think that what they've really done is they've really made us, made us as in like the general, like I'm like American populace feel as though voting is the only way that we can change things. And that voting is the only way that we can like show our impact and like help our communities when in reality it isn't, it's going out onto the streets. It's also, you know, doing abortion, do the streets. It's also, you know, doing abortion doula work. It's also, you know, going out, defending clinics. It's doing all of this work.

And we don't need the Democrats to do that. And what we need to be doing is we need to be talking about the state and how we can go beyond the state. I also want to say here, like, fuck Roe. Like Roe is the kind of legal infrastructure that made abortion possible, but it also made it possible for like both the Democrats, the Republicans, the Christian evangelicals, anyone who was checking for it to take abortion away. So like Buckrow, it also gave us the trimester framework, which is like really whack. And it also kind of made it more possible for the states and the federal government to put in bans and restrictions on abortion. That's something that we need to get clear about as well as we fight to decriminalize and not legislate further abortion. Stay with us. It Could Happen Here will return after these words from our sponsors. On July 27th, 1996, Eric Rudolph set off a nail bomb during the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia.

The explosion killed one person immediately, while over 100 more were horrifically injured. In a communique claiming responsibility for the bombing, Rudolph denounced the Olympics, abortion, and LGBTQ rights, with talking points that seemed ripped right out of Tucker Carlson's nightly news headlines. He wrote, the integrity of American society is the concerted effort to legitimize the practice of homosexuality. Whether it is gay marriage, homosexual adoption, hate crime laws including gays, or the attempt to introduce a homosexual normalizing curriculum into our schools, all of these efforts should be ruthlessly opposed. The existence of our culture depends on it. Rudolph would go on to carry out more deadly attacks against abortion clinics and the Queer

Nightclub, releasing communiques under the banner of the Army of God, a group which endorsed leaderless resistance and was linked to the white supremacist Christian Identity movement and the murder of multiple abortion providers. The Army of God was just one formation that grew out of Christian identity, a mix of white supremacy and Christianity that preached that Jews were Satanic and people of color were subhuman and needed to be destroyed in a racial holy war. Christian identity adherents set up paramilitary compounds, Bible camps, radio stations and churches, from the Aryan nations to the Covenant of the Sword in the Arm of the Lord, and they helped usher in a wave of homegrown terrorist

groups such as the Order and individuals like Timothy McVeigh carried out the Oklahoma City bombing. Meanwhile, above-ground groups like Operation Rescue cheered on the violence against abortion providers while organizing mass protests at clinics with the aim of shutting them down. In 2015, when a gunman killed three people in a mass shooting at a clinic in Colorado Springs, the far-right anti-abortion movement had carried out eight murders, 17 attempted murders, 42 bombings, and 186 arsons, all targeted against abortion clinics and providers. Wanting to know more about the history of far-right attacks on abortion access, and if they were indeed rising in the current post-Obs period,

we sat down with Melissa Fowler of the National Abortion Federation. Unfortunately, since abortion was legalized with the Roe vs. Wade decision, there has been a really coordinated campaign of harassment and violence to target abortion providers and try to stop access to legal abortion. And we've been tracking this since the late 70s. There have been a number of escalating events, everything from clinic protests and clinic blockades all the way up to arsons and murders of providers just because they do this work. So when we talk about this, it's very real. It's a very real threat. And it is really terrorism that's happening by a coordinated

group of people and individuals who really are aimed at stopping any access to legal abortion care. So we definitely have seen for a long time that there is an overlap between the people that target abortion providers and the people that are involved in other types of violent and extremist movements, including white nationalists. We've known that for a long time. It's existed many years. In fact, in the 80s, the KKK began creating wanted posters listing the personal information of abortion providers. And the first provider who was murdered, Dr. David Gunn, who was murdered in 1993, was murdered by someone who was a white supremacist who had been mentored by someone who was a former KKK member. And so we've seen

the overlap of these groups. And in the last couple of years, we've seen that overlap be more coordinated and more public. So on January 6th at the insurrection, a lot of our members were watching on TV and recognized people because they were the same people that protest at their clinics. In fact, providers had even noted that day of pulling in the parking lot and not seeing their usual protesters and wondering what was going on because they saw less people outside of clinics. And we later found out it's because many of them were at the Capitol. And, you know, a number of people who are active in the anti-abortion movement have boasted about being at the insurrection, posted video and pictures of themselves at the insurrection. And so it's very clear to us and we very much see that overlap.

We also see more and more of these right wing groups actually showing up and participating at anti-abortion events. So attending some of the marches around the country in a more visible way than we've seen in the past. Sometimes these right-wing groups will do, quote unquote, security for the anti-abortion movement. So when they have people who are speaking or they're holding large events to target providers, they'll get security assistance from white nationalist groups. And so, you know, it's particularly disturbing to see. It doesn't surprise us because we've known that there's an overlap in these groups for a really long time.

But as we've seen in recent years, as people seem to be more OK being more visible about their membership in these groups or more vocal about their hate in these groups or more vocal about their hate, we're seeing it more publicly. The anti-abortion movement is not doing anything to distance themselves from these groups. So since the leak happened last May, we immediately saw an increase in harassment and online posts that were threatening toward abortion providers. Even though we got a preview of the decision and we knew what was coming and that it would lead to clinics closing, that wasn't enough for some people. We saw calls for people to go and burn clinics or go and take matters into their own hands and not wait for the decision to go and try and stop abortions from being provided that

moment. And so we track those types of online posts. We saw a real spike in May and June around the decision. And we also started immediately hearing from our member clinics that they were seeing an increase in protesters, an increase in threats, and an increase in the intensity and hostility of those activities. So more really aggressive protesters that were touching patients and staff, yelling at patients and staff, photographing patients and staff. And, you know, since the decision, we have seen a number of clinics close in places that are considered more hostile to abortion rights.

But we know from our past experience that when a clinic closes, the protesters don't just give up and go home. In many cases, anti-abortion individuals will travel the same paths that patients are traveling, and they will go to other states where abortion remains accessible and target the clinics there. So we are seeing an increase in activity in the places where abortion is remaining legal and where patients are going to get care. And we're still, you know, we're just now collecting the numbers for 2022. So we don't, we won't have those yet for a little bit, but we do know anecdotally and what we're hearing from members and what we're seeing on the ground is that there is an increase in that activity. There've been a few arsons this year. We're also seeing clinic invasions continue.

And these are instances where people might pose as patients. In some cases, they go to a lot of work to try and infiltrate the clinic and find out about their practices for making appointments. And then they will pose as patients, make fake appointments, and try to get into the clinic forcibly if they have to. And then once they're inside, they're harassing patients. They refuse to leave. In some cases, they hand out flowers or sing or yell. In California, they walked through the halls screaming the name of the doctor, ordering the doctor to come out and face them. And it was very traumatic for staff. They didn't know if this person was armed or what they were doing.

And, you know, they had patients in procedure rooms with them or in counseling rooms. And they were, you know, locking the door and sheltering in place. And it was very frightening. And we continue to see these types of invasions happen across the country. And we continue to see these types of invasions happen across the country. Ironically, however, laws passed in the 1990s designed to protect people seeking abortions and reproductive health care have now been weaponized against those who have been taking action in the wake of the Dobbs decision, most notably under the banner of Jane's Revenge, a moniker used by anonymous activists taking action,

usually in the form of broken windows and graffiti, against anti-choice crisis pregnancy centers and beyond. As Natasha Leonard wrote in The Intercept, Congress passed the FACE Act in 1994, calling the assassinations and mass clinic blockades, making the physical obstruction of clinics a federal offense, as well as threats of force and violence against clinic workers and clinic property. And its 30 years on the books has been used sparingly. Now this law is being used to prosecute two reproductive rights activists who allegedly spray painted the outside walls of misleading and dangerous crisis pregnancy centers, known

as CPCs, and now face up to 12 years in prison for the graffiti. This use of the FACE Act against those fighting to protect reproductive freedom and autonomy by weaponizing law supposedly aimed at those threatening it, mirrors the numerous domestic terrorism charges lodged against forest defenders in Atlanta, made possible by a bill in 2017 following the massacre of nine black parishioners by the white supremacist, Dylann Roof. Stay with us, It Could Happen Here will return after these words from our sponsors. As the culture wars deepen on the right, and even mainstream GOP leaders have embraced white nationalist talking points,

many openly neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups have come to see the anti-choice movement as a lucrative recruiting ground and a point of engagement with the wider right-wing base. Again, we hear from clinic defender Bex in New York and abortion doula Ash in North Carolina. In our case in New York City, the group that we defend the clinic from is this Catholic group that gets an armed escort from the NYPD. And so that's one thing that really, really scares me, you know, when we talk about the far right is that the NYPD has been aiding these far right groups and giving them escorts for a very, very long time. And so I think that kind of like goes to a lot of the fears that a lot of us have when it comes to this kind of collaboration and the changing face of anti-abortion protesters. go hand in hand. And unfortunately, newly white, radicalized, I don't know if you can call them that, but politicized white women who want to defend clinics, they saw, they realized these realities. The cops are not here to defend you or people who want to have abortions.

And we actually don't need the cops to have abortions and to make reproductive justice a real possibility in all of our lives. I'm thinking here also about the need to decriminalize abortion and not legalize abortion. Again, as an abolitionist, as an abortion doula, and as someone who's had abortions, I'm making these connections, and as a trans person, right, I'm making these connections that like the folks who are standing outside of abortion clinics, the anti-choice, the anti-abortion folks, these are the same people who are pro-police people. These are the same people who are racist in our communities, who are classist, who are anti-Black, who are fascist. And furthermore, right, like these people who stand outside of abortion clinics, they are the same people perpetuating these rhetorics that like gay people are groomers, but also that like critical race theory, for do we have to do now is that we have to fight together. And one of the ways we can do that is by making these connections, right? Like, these people are Christian evangelicals. They are fascists explicitly, we need to say that. And it behooves all of us to like, really fight together along those lines.

to really fight together along those lines. In the year since the attempted pro-Trump coup on January 6, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and Proud Boys have ramped up their presence at anti-choice events. The neo-Nazi group Patriot Front has shown up to march alongside various anti-abortion groups, often to be met with handshakes from anti-abortion activists and police escorts to protect them from anti-fascists. Several weeks ago, openly fascist groups took part in the yearly Walk for Life rally in

San Francisco, California, as thousands took to the city streets after being bused in from across the state. Marching alongside them were Proud Boys decked out in their uniforms and masked neo-Nazis holding openly racist banners. Wanting to know more about this continued crossover, we spoke with anti-fascist journalist Vishal Singh, based in Southern California. In the wake of the reversal of Roe v. Wade, there was a big spike in demonstrations from the right wing, where they were targeting clinics, they were targeting any kind of school

boards with any kind of reproductive health, just anything. They were doing it for several months. In places like California, where abortion is still provided and still accessible, that makes a lot of the anti-abortion movement still feel like they're the victim of something, even though they just had this massive political victory. And at least in Southern California, I've noticed that they've continued to rally. They've had some pretty large rallies, especially for the pro-life thing that happened recently where cities around the country, including San Francisco, had some pretty alarmingly sized anti-abortion rallies. And some of them, like in San Francisco, you had some of the more extremist elements, white supremacist elements showing up quite explicitly, quite proudly.

And here in Southern California, I've seen that starting to pick up again. It's almost building off of the momentum from all these rallies targeting drag shows, which have been excellent networking opportunities for different right wing groups to work with more far-right extremists and even all-out white supremacists. Once they get into a groove together, even if these groups don't always get along, they have a revolving door of enemies. And if it's time to target somebody because they think there's an advantage to it in the moment, then they're going to do it. And right now, it does seem like reproductive rights is back in the crosshairs alongside LGBTQ rights. Now it does seem like reproductive rights is back in the crosshairs alongside LGBTQ rights. Just a couple of weeks ago, there was a rally in Southern California outside of a Walgreens shareholders meeting where a lot of right wing activists were marching through the hotel chanting that Walgreens is killing people because you can get an abortion pill through them. I think this has created a very tenuous situation where there's always someone to go after. If it's not

Planned Parenthood this week, next week, go after your local pharmacy, go after your local clinic, go after your local doctor. The anti-abortion movement is very malleable. It's very fluid. And right now they're taking whoever they can get. And that includes a lot of openly radical militant groups who they turn to as groups that can do, quote unquote, security work, you know, because they're afraid of the left coming and attacking them. movement isn't slowing down. As our guests from across the country have discussed, the more mainstream organizations with deep pockets also aren't attempting to distance themselves from the street-level fascist groups flocking to right-wing demonstrations, especially at a time when far-right violence is escalating across the country. In our last segment, IGD correspondent Marcella speaks on recent anti-choice demonstrations

which brought together both the mainstream and the fringe, organized in part by a progressive anti-abortion uprising which weaponizes feminist and progressive language against drugstore giants CVS and Walgreens in an effort to stop them from selling abortion medication. Anti-abortion people protested outside CVS and Walgreens this past Saturday in multiple places to prevent pharmacies from selling abortion pills. I'm honestly really angry at this, not only because these people are trying to make sure they completely take away our rights to bodily autonomy, but because you're also making me have to defend CVS and Walgreens. I've also thought about protesting outside CVS and Walgreens,

but not because I'm obsessed with those people's reproductive organs. I'm tired of them putting everything I need behind a glass. Anyway, like these abortion protests outside CVS and Walgreens were organized by the Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising. Yes, I will say that again. The Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, P-A-A-A-U, which claims to want to dismantle the abortion industrial complex. Honestly, it sounds like the P-A-A-A-U thinks that you can just add industrial complex to something to make it sound bad or they're just trying to sound cool to make people forget that they are fascists. Like one interesting thing about PAAU is they want to be so cool that their lead organizer Lauren Handy

calls herself a feminist. I honestly can't believe that I have to say this but being anti-abortion immediately disqualifies you from being a feminist. Fun fact about Lauren Handy is that she randomly, she didn't randomly, she was caught with five fetuses in her apartment and was indicted for blocking a clinic in Washington, D.C. in 2020. So she's out here blocking clinics, collecting fetuses, just like doing the worst. This is like just the tip of the berg about how like these people are trying to act like they're freedom fighters. The PAAU spokesperson literally said, and I quote, their vision to turn pharmacies into abortion businesses, which will exploit and kill disproportionately low income people and people of color for profit will be met with nonviolent

resistance at every turn. That's hilarious. These people are literally trying to make fascism sound like freedom fighting. Like if PAU actually cared about low income people and people of color, they would be giving away abortion pills at like every corner, not trying to stop people from buying them. And also they'd be boycotting CVS and Walgreens for totally different reasons. They wouldn't be boycotting Walgreens and CVS for trying to sell people abortion pills. What they would be doing is that they would be boycotting Walgreens and CVS for trying to sell people abortion pills. What they'll be doing is that they will be boycotting Walgreens and CVS for putting toothpaste behind a locked glass, which makes it much harder for poor people to get a five-finger discount on things that they need.

That is going to do it for us today. Thanks for tuning in. Once again, this has been It's Going Down, occupying the offices of It Could Happen Here. Be sure to follow us online at It's going down.org and on Mastodon at IGD underscore news. Until next time. 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 out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Tales from the Shadow of Wrath. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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