It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 74

Episode Date: March 11, 2023

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

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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 gary's i started talking about crimes and so i was like, okay, I'm going to hold off on pressing the record. I didn't mention crime at all. Actually, that's true.

That's true. That's true. James said the word crimes. James is the one that brought up doing crimes. I would never talk about doing crimes. Oh, welcome to It Could Happen Here, where we never talk about anything illegal. With us today is myself, Garrison, Jamesames stout and mia wong that's right we are talking about crimes today actually uh but we're not doing any crimes uh crucially because we never

would yeah like for for example well actually i don't i don't know if it's technically illegal to to talk about jury nullification on air i i don't i i know i i don't think they can stop you from saying the words i think they can i think i think you you don't have the rights to do it but you have the ability i think is the way a lawyer explained it to me but they also said i'm not your lawyer before that so take that with a grain of salt yeah yeah you probably say you shouldn't be describing how to do jury notification or uh googling it if that's in your future stay tuned for our upcoming episode how to yeah how to nullify yourself how to nullify your jury yeah yeah how to nullify your jury uh that will be our final episode okay uh so now

we're not talking about jury duty today uh we are talking about crime. The people doing the crime in this episode, shockingly, are the cops. So I want to start on October 28th, 2016. Some of you can probably cast your mind back then, the last week of the pre-Trump era. Yeah. So inside the captain's office at the sheriff's station in Rancho San Diego,

one of the most expensive zip codes in the country, Captain Marco Garmo was making a deal. Garmo, along with Giovanni Tilotta, who's a licensed San Diego gun dealer, sold a Glock handgun, an AR-15 style rifle, and a Smith and Wesson handgun to local defense attorney, Vikas Bajaj, inside Garmo's office. Garmo coordinated backdated paperwork to avoid the 10-day waiting period required by california law for handgun purchases and supplied bajaj with misappropriated san diego sheriff's department issued ammunition oh fun yeah good times good times i'm yeah so he's he's really thriving uh and his side hustle here, Mark Ogama. I've used the word misappropriated because that's what the DOJ used.

I'm guessing the more vernacular term would be stolen here. I think he's... So when you say issued, is this ammo that was supposed to be given to a cop or is this stuff they had an impound? No, I think it's supposed to be given to a cop. Hell yeah. cop or is this stuff they had an impound uh no i think it's supposed to be given to a cop i think hell yeah i think he's good i think he's gone into the armory and just grabbed a few boxes of ammo and stole them your cops have just turned into the afghan army it's amazing yeah yeah yeah the ana they've got the uh what's that guy who had the like how he had their like night vision on backwards or something that was that was the taliban guy um yeah interestingly what they have in the compound mia is another story that maybe we should do another day i also pra'd that like the weapons that are impounded jesus christ they

have some shit uh like they have like a full auto shotgun uh like a bunch of nfa items and they keep them all for like lab testing in theory like so they can so they can be like oh well this person was shot what does that wound look like well let's get our armory out from the fuck it and shoot some ballistics gel and see if that helps us and it's like that scene from 2008's the dark knight where christian bale as batman fires a ridiculously loud gun in a sealed bunker absolutely destroying both his and alfred's hearing for the entire rest of the movie that's why they make so many bad choices fascinating yeah i didn't know there was a character called alfred in batman yeah they really welshed him on the names because like Batman is a cool name. The Joker, cool name. Fucking Alfred. Do you not know who Alfred Pennyworth is?

No. He's the one British character in Batman. He is your culture. When people think of British people, they think of Alfred J. Pennyworth. No, my culture is not a costume, Garrison. Well, I have bad news. Disgusted that this is the point of reference not one of our many wonderful modern british role models

alfred's great i don't know what you're talking about okay yeah no okay he is a working class hero he was a he was a wait our butler's our working class right oh god let's cut this discourse off very quickly I would say petty bourgeois yeah it's kind of complicated because you're like working directly for a billionaire and you're living in the billionaire's house and you're living a very

upper class life but you still are working it's kind of complicated what is your relationship to the means of production though oh that's... Wow. Well, it's all service. Like, I don't know. I feel like we have to do

a divide here between... Because I think the gender division of labor between maid and butler is very important. I love that we're debating how...

If Alfred is based or not based on... Yeah, yeah. So you can find Garrison on Twitter at... I write... Okay. All right, so we've made it to paragraph two, everyone.

In February of 2019, federal agents executed a search warrant on the Rancho San Diego Sheriff's Station. Later that year, they arrested Captain Marco Garmo. In 2021, Garmo pleaded guilty to trafficking over 100 guns which were deemed unsafe for civilians. I shouldn't say civilians because cops are also civilians, right? But non-cops. At his sentencing, the judge said,

Garmo was almost becoming a mob boss of sorts. Cool. What you want to strive for as a sheriff's captain. Garmo admitted to engaging in straw purchases, which is buying guns with the intent of transferring them to someone else. He also acknowledged tipping off an illegal marijuana dispensary

that was about to be searched. A BK-based, based, come on! Nothing this guy did is inherently wrong. It's the fact that he only did it to certain people. So that was his cousin who owned the marijuana dispensary. He was also engaged in illegal consulting with other dispensaries, which I don't fully understand. Yeah, I'm guessing his consulting emerged to being like, hey, the cops are on their way tomorrow.

Maybe stop being a dispensary by the time they arrive. Yeah, that seems like a very classic the cops take a cut kind of arrangement yeah yeah consultancy yeah i guess so yeah yeah a lot of the things in this doj thing are like uh really fantastically phrased so gama and his co-defendant uh wail will anton also helped paying clients skip the waiting list for a difficult to obtain concealed carry permit. As part of this scheme, Anton took a legal cash payment to a county clerk who ensured favorable treatment for his clients.

Garmo might have flown a little too close to the sun with this one, but it's not actually that unusual for gun laws to have carve-outs for rich people. Often those carve-outs don't involve cops stealing ammo, but it's pretty easy if you're wealthy enough to work your way around firearms legislation, which is kind of what I want to get into today. So while Garmo did go to jail for gun trafficking and multiple other crimes he was doing, the sale of so-called off-roster firearms by law enforcement officers in California is relatively common, and there's not much that's been done to prevent it since Garmo was arrested.

So to understand this, I think you have to understand California's incredibly complicated firearms laws, which probably requires like an undergraduate degree. But to give a brief summary, California introduced its gun roster in 2001 and like many of our laws it has its roots in entrenching systemic inequalities in this case legislators were trying to ban something called a saturday night special and people know what people know what that is no it's it's a small concealable affordable handgun um it's like there were this there was this these guns that came out in like the 80s and 90s that were like super small very cheap very simple uh very concealable and are they also shit well

that's the thing right so this is really fascinating so in practice right these were at least culturally associated with like black communities right that that's you see them in sometimes like certainly like there was a stigmatic reference to like it is these guns culturally associated with like black communities right that that's you see them in in sometimes like certainly like there was a stigmatic reference to like it is these guns that is causing violence and we're not going to fucking look at inequality at all right we're just going to ban the guns are they shit is an interesting question because california introduces legislation which said that handguns have to be drop safe so that means you can drop them and they can't go off that that is generally a desirable

feature in a handgun uh able to fire 600 rounds without uh more than six malfunctions and have a manual safety device and later on they added another thing that would make the gun only fire when it had a magazine inserted uh and the they put all these rules in place and had said manufacturers had to submit guns for testing. All the guns they were going after passed the testing. So I guess they're not as shit as one had suspected, which is kind of like that is the intent. They are laboring under that misapprehension,

but it seems like these guns, which are very cheap, actually pass the testing just fine. So if you look at the California roster, so once those guns have passed that testing, right, they go on a roster. And that roster, like it's done by SKU. So like by the individual code that's given to the gun. And you could look up the California roster. It's online still. And like there were hundreds of cheap small hand

guns that are on it and so they they failed in that regard um but they created this kind of bizarre system where most manufacturers had to make a california compliant model if they wanted to sell in california right because i had to have a um this magazine disconnect which means that the gun won't fire without the magazine in it which is not a usual thing for semi-automatic handguns to have. If you are outside of California and you have a normal Glock, for instance, it doesn't have that, but you would need one that did in California. So that means that these guns are going to have a much, much smaller economy of scale, right? They're going to be more expensive. Manufacturers also have to pay for the testing and submit three models. So what it de facto means is that fewer guns are available

in california it doesn't really become a big issue until 2013 when the doj in california add a micro stamping requirement but they added it earlier actually but in 2013 they certified it was possible for micro sorry can i ask something but So is the roster of the list of guns you're allowed to buy? Yes. Okay. And if it doesn't appear on the roster, we're going to get into that. You can actually buy it, but you can't buy it new from a store.

So you can buy it used. And there are two ways that these used handguns can enter the state, right? One of them is if you move to the state, so let's say Garrison moves to LA, right? And they bring with them... Horrifying. Yeah, just to enjoy.

Just like a Vulcan minigun. Yeah, they bring with them an M1 Abrams tank. It's our balloon shooting gun. Yeah, everyone on the West Coast has to have one now. So it's actually different for rifles, sadly, but they bring with them pistols, and those pistols are not on the California roster.

They can keep them, and they can sell them to a California resident. The other way that these guns can enter and be sold is cops are exempt from the roster right so yeah oh boy yeah yeah yeah yeah and when i say cops i am speaking in the broadest possible terms because a variety of peace officers are exempt to include employees of the California State Horse Racing Board. So I was like, park rangers can do this, right? I think it depends what you are within the park ranger, within the park.

And it seems to be, there is actually a list that's in the legislation, but it seems to be largely like at the discretion of the gun shop, like in practice. They could get in trouble, but like I've heard of the gun shop like in practice they could get in trouble but like i've heard of like firefighters and emts being able to purchase off roster guns which is fucking not in the legislation like uh it is also kind of funny but like um in theory it would depend on like what unit you were in or they could contact your like park ranger office and be like hey this this girl is trying to buy a gun. Does she use this at work? Because the idea is that they would

have the most up-to-date weapons to carry at work, right? Or that they could buy themselves, even though they get issued guns. So if you need a gun as a cop, you get issued a gun, right? So what it means in practice is that there's a thriving market in off-ruster firearms, but there's also a massive price premium. They often sell for two or three times their MSRP, even though they're used. And I did a little digging into this, and I looked at one particular item, which was a P365, a SIG P365, which is a fairly popular pistol right but after 2013 california doesn't didn't allow any new guns to be added to the roster unless they micro stamp their bullets micro stamping is a little feature where the firing pin of the gun stamps the casing not the bullet with a little tiny little tiny stamp which is unique to the gun right or it stamps it

with the serial number of the gun so in theory this would allow you to pick up the casings at a murder scene and be like huh well they were fired from this gun and this gun is registered to this person therefore we got someone to talk to right pick up the casings yeah right yeah absolutely no ways around this uh well i mean admittedly admittedly the one one thing i've learned over the years is that people are really lazy when they're doing crimes and so so true so true be slightly less lazy and get caught significantly less that is that is yeah that is my biggest my biggest advice to the illegalists literally think five minutes beforehand yeah yeah yeah also uh don't tweet your crimes oh yeah ever ever a green statement yeah yeah it's one of our

mottos here uh you could also just use a revolver i guess and that wouldn't eject the casings but um the that because there are no guns so in 2013 right the doj says you are not allowed to add a gun to the roster unless it micro stamps and we we've decided that micro stamping is possible no firearms manufacturer will make a gun that micro stamps because other states will require all guns to micro stamp once that technology is available So they just don't build it? So they just don't do it, yeah. It is very funny. It's like car companies just being like,

fucking, you know what, if we put airbags in that bad boy, they're going to make us put airbags in all the cars. You know, this is a thing that I've run into a lot, I think is really interesting, which is like, okay, the specific combination of regulatory state and corporations being required to do a thing gives you a bunch of really really weird

like outcomes that are like not what you would expect when you're writing the legislation which makes them ineffective like i mean like the most famous one is like the clean air act actually worsened air quality for a huge amount of time because they put in this exception for like existing coal facilities under the assumption that people would just like you know build new coal facilities and thus be like and thus like have better like create that cleaner technology and no one just no one ever did they just left these old coal facilities running or the other one like everyone always talks about those like those fucking the like why why the giant suvs keep getting bigger and the reason for that is actually i mean it kind of is sort of fascist

psychosis but like the the actual reason for that is obama era pollution controls on cars right have these fuel emission standards but the larger your car is like the worst fuel emission standards are so they keep so okay in order to get around the fuel emission things they just keep making bigger cars make it bigger amazing yeah and this shit just like i don't know this is this is i think a pretty good argument against it like against a sort of regulatory state being able to contain capitalism doing horror-blockfying shit. It's like every single time someone tries to make an air pollution thing, it just makes it worse. Yeah, they just create perverse incentives to do something which is just stupid and polluting as opposed to polluting. Yeah, or they just don't comply with the micro-safety thing.

They're just like no like yeah this like he simply will not yeah the specific interaction of like people who elevate themselves who make it to the california legislature on one hand and gun companies on the other hand just leads to this complete intransigence where like anytime a law is written it is like someone has found an end run or a loophole before it comes into practice do you know what won't illegally smuggle oh legally smuggle guns into california and sell them for two to three times the retail price mere is it all the firms that are uh doing child trafficking and that's right the washington state highway patrol we're back uh and we're talking about uh cops selling guns for a lot of money in southern

california so big uh marco gama wasn't the only cop who chose a life of crime as it turns out and yeah because every other one shockingly enough uh this practice is pretty common so a gardena police officer in 2021 was also convicted of making 41 illegal off-roster sales in a year and at least six la officers have been found to be engaged in legal firearms transfers according to a 2021 la times investigation so that's eight in a single year if you're keeping track and it's pretty common to see people like posting about this like like uh if you go on to like there's a california guns forum where people will be like where they sell guns right where they don't you don't actually sell the guns on the internet because that's illegal but people will post it and then say meet me at

this gun dealer and we'll do the background check. And you'll see people being like, oh, I'm LEO. I have a friend who's LEO and happened to be selling this gun new in package. I bought it to carry it on patrol, but I decided I didn't like it. That's the theoretical canard here, right?

Oh, God. Okay, the thing this reminds me of specifically is a very very weird use case of like people imagine the gathering tournaments where you're not legally allowed to both draw and split the prize money so you have to say this incredibly complicated series of sentences where you're like i want to draw and then new conversation can we split the prize money it's like i have to i have to like say this exact series of words in order to make it clear that i'm not doing exactly what i'm doing and breaking the law yeah this is how the law works

right like it always ends up being some kind of like totemistic magic incantation that you can say and then the thing that they're trying to fucking stop obviously no longer applies to you you can do what you want like it's incredibly asinine and so uh in mid 2021 i tried to i wanted to get a sense right and when i was doing this of how many of these off-roster guns there are in california to get a sense of like exactly how much of a farce the attempt to create this roster has been so uh i've been going after this for a while, but in the middle of 2021, there was an assembly bill passed called Assembly Bill 2699, if you're interested. And the bill required the Department of Justice

to send a letter to owners of off-roster weapons, which California officially calls unsafe handguns, to remind the people who own them of the laws surrounding them and to whom they could transfer them, right? I first became aware of this letter because someone decided to post it online. And that kind of gave me an opening where, because I can't PRA the names of the people who own the guns, right?

Or even where they live, because obviously that's protected information and it probably should be. And I don't think that information is even actually stored by the state. But I can PRA the letters they sent out. So PRA is a Public Records Act request, right? It's what people might know as a FOIA. And so I did that, and it took me more than a year, and it cost me more than $100,

but eventually I managed to get the DOJ to send me the information, which showed that at least at the time I got it, which is the middle of 2021, 4,510 firearms have been obtained by the subsection of the law that allows exemptions for police officers. There are some other exemptions for like antique and collectible firearms as well. So it's not clear that all of those were cops. They also noted that it had sent 213,804 notices to the owners of off-roster weapons, which suggests that if we think of that, the roster became a serious issue in 2013, right?

So that suggested about 10,000 weapons a year since the roster began in 2001 have entered the state that are off roster which kind of kind of makes the point that it's it's a rather farcical attempt at gun control right but it still is that the the roster which i don't think like you're fine right you can you can buy a very effective gun in in california like as we have seen like they're very effective at killing people but it does kind of make it a joke that if you have enough money or a friend who's a cop then this doesn't apply to you right then you've over 200 000 of these guns which is supposed to be like banned in circulation as long as you're wealthy enough to buy them uh i tried also to pra if any of these guns have been involved in

crime or murder and they wouldn't tell me that and what uh it's always worth pointing out that like the cops themselves are issued guns which are illegal for civilians to purchase right or it's not possible for them to purchase some new i I should say. The off-ruster guns are issued to the cops, right? So by definition, some of these guns have been used in the accidental shooting of bystanders, shooting of officers by themselves, and shooting of officers by other officers that have occurred in California since the ruster began. So the sort of by definition off-ruster guns that kill some people. So this isn't actually the only way that being wealthy can get you around gun laws.

And I want to go a little further east for my next example. I want to go, in fact, to a little town called Lake Arthur in New Mexico. Benny, are you guys familiar with this part of the world? Not, well, not that specific. I lived in New Mexico very, very briefly when i was a small child but not there so so uh i've been using google street view that's my uh my dive deep it appears to be the back arsehole of nowhere um and in lake arthur they have one cop who it turns out was a volunteer and was being paid a dollar a year uh aha yeah so this is this

is where the problem starts this guy is called william norwood and uh i'll i'll issue a spoiler here that william norwood is no longer a cop nor does the department exist uh and that's because norwood was running a scam that took advantage of something called leosa leosa is the law enforcement officers safety act uh and what the law enforcement officers safety act does is allow cops from any state in the union to conceal carry a gun in every state in the union so this was a big deal yeah i think you might be able to see where this is going this was a big deal before the supreme court bruin decision right the bruin decision was the one that uh significantly reduced the uh impediments in between you and getting a concealed carry weapons permit

i didn't totally remove them and it didn't make it any less expensive and california seems to be going about trying to make it even more expensive, which is bullshit. Everyone should have the same rights, regardless of how wealthy they are. But if you were covered by LEOSA, if you're a law enforcement officer, you could conceal carry anywhere. So this is very desirable for some people. One of those people is Robert Mercer. Do you guys remember Robert Mercer? No, I do not. Okay, so

Mercer is a big-time Donald Trump appreciator. Oh, yeah, he's that, like, super-rich guy. Yeah. The Breitbart guy? The Cambridge Analytica guy? Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah, so this guy is rolling in it.

He actually hosted, like, a, like, success party soon after 2016 election this this guy is definitely pivotal to the whole trump scene right like like his bank rolling a bright bar of cambridge analytica he as it turns out is also a cop in this little new mexico town which is kind of weird right especially when you consider that 150 other people are also cops in this new mexico oh it's one of these scams yep so that's uh that's one cop for every 2.9 residents jesus yeah and it turns out they're probably not doing much copying uh but they are doing at least a certain amount of volunteering it's actually unclear how much so um the uh the lake arthur treasurer was and bloomberg did some pras

around this and it turns out that mercer was what's called an honorary member of the police department but there there are no records to indicate they actually did any policing uh but nonetheless he took advantage of leosa right and thus carried in all 50 states so these jurisdictions there are several of them uh another famous person who's taken advantage of this is a friend of the podcast steven seagal oh yeah yeah yeah steven seagal. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Steven Seagal, who apparently has been a volunteer cop for a very long time and actually was doing some copping, according to a reality TV show he made called Steven Seagal Lawman. You know, the thing about that show, right, is it's like. Are you going to come out and defend the show? Are you pro the show really here's

my thing on this show right like obviously Seagal's doing stuff that's really messed up but it's also unclear how much worse what he was doing is than the average cop like probably what he's doing is worse than the average cop but I don't think it's

like like I don't think it's as bad as like, a Chicago Special Operations unit. Wow, I can't believe you just came out in defense of Steven Seagal. Being a cop, specifically. He has work to do to reach like, the true upper echelon of like, dirty, shitty cops.

This is a man who gave his time freely to volunteer for Joe Arpaio. This level of apologism coming from you right now is simply shocking. I don't know how to deal with this. This is Seagal apologism. Seagal-ogism. Seagal-ogism, yeah. That is what I was working my way towards but i couldn't finish it

yeah thank you for delivering the coup de grace yeah me coming out with the some cops a bastard to take scab uh okay so what what is uh garrison's garrison's deceased? They've died. Okay, so these badge factories, like the ones in Lake Arthur, generally trade influence, cash, or connections for a badge and the right to carry a gun nationwide. Mercer and his son-in-law, George Wells, have supported the town generously. So Mercer's kind of the best investigated example

of this right because bloomberg went after him um bloomberg a publication not bloomberg the dude he went down there personally to sort this one out he formed an alliance with apparently uh at one point this this police department did do a raid on a meth house. And I would love to see Bloomberg forming an alliance with the meth dealers of Lake Arthur to fucking take on Mercer. If Bloomberg can take on 9-11 single-handedly, surely he can bust up whatever operations going down in New Mexico. 150 Steven Seagals.

Would you rather fight one Bloomberg-sized Steven Seagal? And don't bother messaging... 50 Seagal-sized Bloombergs. Do not bother messaging me. I know he wasn't the mayor during 9-11. That was the joke. Don't bother messaging me. I already know.

Thank you. No, no, no. Sign that up. I write okay. Yeah, Gary's on Twitter again. I write a a case he also famously dropped staten island phil bloomberg you guys don't know about staten island phil not at all okay that's a staten island phil is a groundhog this this will be in a bastards episode as well so it's a second mention of staten island phil for some people staten island phil is a groundhog uh to Puxatawney Phil yeah but

he lives in Staten Island and unfortunately why would we say that second pretty disgusting take from Mia anti-Staten Island this is why Mia gets cancelled episode

going back in time and getting rid of the Yankees things of this nature yeah yeah This is why Mia gets cancelled episode. Going back in time and getting rid of the Yankees. Things of this nature. Yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, Bill de Blasio dropped the groundhog on its head and it died. What? Bill de Blasio blames the groundhogs

for its reduced popularity. Everyone who's been the mayor of New York is such a weird type of unhinged Yeah yeah yeah It's true The current mayor just went on TV today and talked about

How he has this magic sponge That Magic sponge So that he can absorb Despair and wring the despair Out What the fuck I'm so sick He could absorb despair and wring the despair out. What the fuck?

I'm so sick. The only thing I saw out of New York was the whole, like, there shouldn't be any separation of church and state. That is so much funnier. He's doing a sham wow for sadness in New York. Yeah, it's wild. Oh, what a place. What a town.

All right, so if you're wondering how much it costs for Mercer and his son-in-law to carry guns everywhere, they paid at least 93,000 to set up this thing called the Southeast New Mexico Police Reserve Foundation, which is doing the valuable work of supporting reserve cops in Southeast New Mexico because they are the thin blue line between us and people not being able to buy, conceal, carry

permits in all 50 states, I guess. Under its bylaws, at least half the foundation's net dues were required to be paid to police departments whose reservists were members of the foundation. At the time of its founding, all of the members were Lake Arthur reservists were members of the foundation at the time of its founding all of the members were lake arthur reservists so just a good public public benefit probably just money going around in circles he also paid for lake arthur officers to get

swap training in vegas again there is only one full-time cop and he's a volunteer so uh some of the lads went to vegas i guess and this was a donation that was probably tax deductible um the way that this came out is when uh a quote-unquote firearms expert from north carolina got drunk and shot his brother-in-law in the leg and people were like why were you carrying bro like you're a cop and uh yeah from there things began to unwind a lot of the other clients for this place are people like bodyguards and they they were clients cops volunteer officers i should say uh they're people who do close protection for wealthy folks right um and carry guns as part of that work.

And I'm guessing it's their employers who are making these significant donations to Lake Arthur that probably allowed these people to be reserve officers, which allowed them to carry in all 50 states, which in turn allowed them to protect these wealthy people, right? So it's another, and like,

it's important to understand that like New York, for instance, declined before, this is before the Bruin decision, a concealed carry permit applicant from like an FBI informant who had taken down a biker gang. They were like, no, you don't need to carry a gun. Like it was almost impossible for people, even if they were like helping the cops to get concealed carry permits in some parts of the United States. And California was very hard, lots of places before Bruin. helping the cops to get concealed carry permits in some parts of the United States. And California was very hard, lots of places before Bruin. I think, what's it, Nancy Pelosi had a concealed carry permit? Or Feinstein or someone?

This is the whole thing. Okay, so this was Feinstein. One of the other scams for this is you can get deputized as a federal marshal. There's like a bunch, like Feinstein's rumored to have done it. There's like a bunch of like Feinstein's rumored to have done, there's like a bunch of, like a bunch of sort of like California, like Congress people have done this.

They get deputized as marshals and so they can do this shit. Yeah, incredible stuff. Yeah. So I guess what I want to come back to is that like

all of these laws, right? All of these gun control laws are circumventable if you have enough money, right? So if you want a nice brand new gun that doesn't micro stamp, it doesn't have the magazine disconnect. And like modern carry guns, especially, are a lot nicer than they were in 2013, right? They're smaller. They have a higher capacity.

You can put a little red dot site on them if you want to and if you want one of those things you can have it in california as long as you're rich and if you're if you're not then you can't and the same applies with this 50 state carry right if you want to carry a gun all around the country and even now with bruin um states are not required to recognize each other's concealed carry permits, right? So I have a concealed carry permit in California. It's not recognized by any other states because California doesn't recognize

any other states' carry permits. So I can apply for one in Arizona that costs me more money. But if you want to carry in all 50 states, you can just make this donation to the cops, right? You can, almost all of these things, these aren't the only examples. Rick Mears cited the federal marshal thing.

Another one is the NFA, right? The National Firearms Act. Yeah, Act. Which like, essentially, it's not illegal to have a suppressor. It's not illegal to have a short-barreled rifle. It's not illegal to have a machine gun, actually. You just have to spend a shit ton of money to get one which mercer has a collection of machine guns i guess so all of these things yeah it's great it's fine it's great that we live in a country with two tiers of rights for people those are those those machine guns are

totally going to be used for normal completely normal things like armor in 20 years yeah yeah a totally normal guy who will use them for normal stuff and just i'm sure likes to like make holes in paper with his friends and it's not problematic at all that like to be as rich as this guy is you have to be a problematic dude and maybe those are the people who shouldn't be having guns yeah but instead it's uh it's it's gonna be poor people who you can't be having guns and i think regardless of what you and it's perfectly reasonable to think that like there should be fewer guns in this country um it's perfectly reasonable to believe that and i think like it's perfectly reasonable to think what the fuck should we do about the fact that kids get shot in schools?

That's not an unreasonable stance at all. But if the way around it is saying, well, only rich people get to shoot people, then that's not really a solution. It's just kind of the appearance of one. And I don't think any of us, certainly if we were on the left, should really support that. And yeah, that's where we are in California,

which is great. Yay. really support that and yeah that's where we are in california which is great yay so that's about all we've got on this if people are interested in seeing more about uh either the mercer case or the public records i have we'll probably we'll put them all up on our sources page you can find our sources page uh on the it could happen here website and we put all our sources out there for all our episodes so So yeah, go check that out. Anything else to finish off with, guys? The cops having guns, bad cops being cops, bad cops? Bad?

Yeah. Oh, what about Steven Seagal then, mate? This is a dramatic change of form from your earliest times. I only ever argued that he was slightly more violent than a normal cop. That was the extent of my argument. He is only slightly more violent than a

regular cop. She is flip-flopping on the some cops about it issue. Again, you can send me your opinions on the police. She's on Twitter at I write okay. You can send me your opinions on the police. She's on Twitter at IWriteOK. Welcome. I'm Danny Threl. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter?

Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-ch 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 shadowsadows. 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. 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. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech

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

Today we have two special guests, Sprout and Sherian from the Black Flower Collective. And they're here to talk to us about the dichotomy between urban and rural political organizing. I mean, as we can all recognize in this day and age, being politically active is incredibly important. There are a lot of vulnerabilities that we are all facing under this intersection of systems. And we are looking for ways to get out. But it can be difficult to navigate,

especially when you don't know exactly where to begin. That's part of the focus of my channel, and it's also something that these folks are here to talk to us about. But before we delve too deeply into the meat of that discussion, let's begin with a quick introduction. You know, who is Black Flower Collective? How did you all begin, and what are some of your goals as a group? Hey, this is Sprout.

And we got started organizing with the Black Flower Collective through previous organizing projects here in Aberdeen, Washington, such as the Chehalis River Mutual Aid Network. That collective got started after the Black Lives Matter rebellion in so-called Seattle and was started by feeding the movement out there in Capitol Hill and Chaz and then brought that organizing effort back to the community to start a Food Not Bombs here in town. Through those meetings and relationships that we formed, And through those meetings and relationships that where people like us trying to support the community could come together and cook meals together and serve them in a collective area.

Yeah, having a safe place to be able to just cook food and plan other types of organizations or collectives is imperative because we face a lot of backlash from the reactionary politics around our town um being in the kind of the heart of trump land and the type of people that show up in the big city protests to mow people down with their trucks and whatnot right and how has that affected your outreach efforts would you say thankfully see? Thankfully, not too harshly, but we've definitely had some scary situations. There was one time at the homeless camp we were told about by the campers there

where somebody had tried to run down a tent that somebody was sleeping in and they managed to jump out before they got hit. They jumped out of the truck and was waving a police baton or some sort of stick or something around threatening people. Somebody got a bigger stick which prompted them to get in their car and start waving, pull out a pistol and start waving that around before they end up driving off. Yeah, sometimes when we get new volunteers there can be a bit of hesitance from people to like you know take food

or supplies because there's a bit of a relationship that needs forming there of trust because of those actions of right-wing actors in town so it's kind of like what is why you're out here feeding so there's a bit of hesitance there but once they realize they're with our group, we've established enough of a reputation that, that, you know, that name drop is usually enough to reestablish that trust. Right. But it's good that you'll have somewhat established yourselves, you know, locally and built up a reputation. Would you say that that has been one of your major goals as a group, to build that trust in the community?

And where do you all see that trust going from where it is now? I've always seen that personally as our only asset. We don't have a lot of money. Obviously, we're not funded by anyone. So all we really have is our reputation in the community. And in the wider community, our reputation has led to some of that backlash that Sherry Ann was talking about. But within the actual unhoused community, we have a reputation of doing whatever we can to help people and always showing up consistently and always being willing to go the extra mile when someone needs something in crisis. That's fantastic. That's fantastic. various movements that were happening in 2020, what would you say are some of the major differences

that you've noticed between organizing in major cities and in urban areas compared to rural political organizing? Well, I'd say the majority of the issues we've noticed depend on the material conditions of the town that we're in. Being a small and rural area, there's a lot more poverty here. And so those material conditions lead to a lot of differences between urban and rural areas, I found. Before coming to the area, I was involved with uh occupy oakland back in the day

so i had a bit more of a running with the larger city larger city's way of doing things uh what about you sherryan well i've grown up here in this town my whole life and haven't really left outside of it all all too much um This type of organizing is always something I heard about more so through rumors than anything else versus actually seeing people on the ground and doing things. Once we got our Food Not Bombs chapter started during 2020, it opened kind of just a new world for not just myself but a lot of people around here right so one major difference that we've noticed that is the dichotomy of electoral politics in

the town uh most of the opposition that we've faced has not been from the city, but from grassroots initiatives. And so some of those people over the course of the last two years have taken positions on city council, but the police that they control are still demonstrating an unwillingness to attack their own community in the way that far-right politicians would want them to yeah so take like uh the police that show up and like big city protests or what not they'll bring in all police stations from all surrounding areas people who aren't familiar

with the community who you know it's just a job to them, which helps sever that their connection to that area. While here, it's the same people dealing with the same people every day. And in the minds of police, it does create a sense of community in their mind that makes them a little more reluctant to use the type of violent force that we see in the bigger cities. And it's not to say that force isn't present and doesn't happen here, but it definitely doesn't happen on the frequency. If I could run back a second. By the way, this is Mia. I'm also on this episode. Yeah, if I could walk back a second to ask about something. This is Mia. I'm also on this episode. Yeah, if I could walk back a second to ask about something.

When you say that most of the resistance to what you've been doing is from grassroots movements, are you talking about grassroots right-wing political movements? Are you talking about NGOs opposing you? No, we have a local grassroots right-wing initiative in town that's been the main brunt of our little group's opposition. And they have, like I said, they have run and won a few city council seats since then, but it started as a grassroots, you know, clean up the trash sort of campaign. Yeah, you can still find their page on Facebook. It's Save Our Aberdeen. Oh,'s a save our aberdeen um oh god save our aberdeen please soap is and they got like little soap bubbles and whatnot and they're

here to clean up the city streets and oh boy i i don't think they're talking about the trash not trash as we would define it yeah so sort of right So this is a place where right-wing anti-homeless stuff has been their main way to build organization? Yeah. It's a huge... I mean, I don't really even know, Sherry-Ann, what other talking points do they have other than the homeless? Everything centers around the homeless. Even stuff that has to do with businesses in town and local economics, that gets blamed on the homeless even stuff that has to do with like businesses in town and local economics uh that gets blamed on the homeless you know everything gets blamed on the homeless so it really all goes back to that yeah they are the scapegoat for every problem that

the city council faces um or not just the city council but businesses you run a shitty business it it's it's the homeless's fault i don't have customers it has nothing to do with the fact that i haven't sold anything in years and this is just a hobby shop for me because i got a fat inheritance but yeah i'm talking about you all that glitters oh we call the names no Oh, are we calling names now? So you spoke about how this grassroots right-wing movement has picked up some steam and won some seats in the city council. grassroots movements is that they tend to have to sort of balance their goals with the trust they need to build with the broader public with the perception that the public has of them and how they're trying to shape that perception so how would you see that the public of Aberdeen views the right-wing initiatives,

the SOAP movement, as you're referencing, and how do you think that they have tended to view Black Flow Collective? Well, I think a lot of people feel scared to voice their opinions if they're on the left in town. But we do get a lot of support for the mutual aid that we do. The base of the right-wing movement in town is pretty strong. in town is pretty strong and I don't see them drawing in a whole lot of new people because of their extreme nature and their tendency towards conspiracies, but they do have

quite a substantial base that whatever they say, they're going to agree with and they're going to go along with. Take, for example um here about a year or two ago um i think it was november of 2021 or august um there was a big uh anti-trans rally outside of a star wars shop here in town that uh yeah they had to bring in a bunch of proud boys from you know out of town and like fill their numbers from outside you know with outside uh help and whatnot while chanting about how antifa was coming from seattle to burn the shop down and kill the shop owner and

all this and all this stuff they had the guy during the whole protest they gave him like a bulletproof vest that he's walking around in. It brought Matt Walsh to fucking town. It was a mess. Wow. It's really

a classic example of pot meat kettle with a lot of the rhetoric in my experience. I think the majority of the public, though, does care about the issues that the homeless are facing and the fallout issues from that. But it's kind of this tug back and forth between us telling them what's really going on on the streets

and the stories of people down at camp and this other more right-wing tendency to just blame things on the homeless and take the simple route of saying if we just get rid of these homeless people then our problems will be solved and local efforts to gentrify the area with the influx of Terry Emmert, a right-wing capitalist who's bought up like 60 properties in town recently. And as well as just the local media landscape in town has a right-wing tinge to it. I mean, where we're at, everything has a right-wing tinge to it. But so it's hard because there's not a lot of voices, even though there is a lot of sentiment

of caring about the homeless, there's not a lot of voices that are actually telling the truth of what's going on on the streets. And so when you get all the lies and bullshit coming from the police and city hall and just being reported verbatim by the papers in town, it leads to a lot of people forming conclusions based on faulty facts. And so they might think, oh, the homeless did this, the homeless did that. And we go into the comment sections every time and push back and say, you know, actually, this is what happened. comment sections every time and push back and say, you know, actually, this is what happened. And it's actually a lot of times that we get people, you know, opening their eyes and saying,

oh, I didn't know that. You know, it's not always just the standard dig your heels in sort of thing that you see on social media, because it is a sort of smaller town. Right. Everyone kind of knows everybody. it is a sort of smaller town right everyone kind of knows everybody yeah there's a bit more accountability in that sense if you're going to spout off online it's you know it's likely not only that but it makes like for organizing in general um anonymity, a lot different of a tactic in how you use it. Because, like, say in the big city, you're constantly surrounded by security cameras everywhere you go. You're constantly being monitored, watched, or whatnot. But it's a lot easier just disappearing the crowd. Just another face.

You know, like, you can go out can go out spray paint ditch not a big deal in place like here in aberdeen for example but like i could mask up and do everything um you know i can but if i get known in any kind of sense of the way if i go out and you know spray paint a wall it's like oh there goes sherry and you know spray painted walls again yeah and once once you are doxxed or identified it's really hard to undo that and just sort of re-anonymize yourself so we've taken anonymity and our our security in that aspect very seriously from the get-go a couple people in our organization who didn't uh have faced you know public harassment and stalking so yeah it is a big deal

so you've managed to maintain a level of anonymity uh despite the outreach efforts in a small town yes well to a large degree to a large degree. To a large degree. Okay. There's different people in our group. It's not like our group has rules about it. So some people use their real names, some people don't. But those who are concerned about it have been able to. Although it's difficult. And once that identification comes, it's pretty much games up.

Right. It also kind of has affected our recruitment in the sense that people on the outside looking in may see what we're doing as more dangerous than it actually is because of those security concerns. And they might be scared of retaliation and not want to participate because of that. So we have taken to kind of reducing the fire in our online social medias for some of that mutual aid stuff so that we don't get as much of the backlash on those accounts and we found that it's helpful to have uh ancillary groups that can go and do more autonomous stuff if we need stuff done that or said that is uh gonna create more backlash right so sort of different layers of the organization I remember the Afrofuturist Abolitionist of the Americas, one of the statements they had put out, they had used the term move like mycorrhizae in the sense of having sort of different levels of network in place you have like the above ground level of you know more visible public facing action whereas you have that sort of underground fungal network of anonymous and probably more risky action taking place yeah because we have to sort of maintain a certain

level of goodwill in town for the sides of our organizing. Like the police, for example, they're always down at camp. And so having an amicable relationship with them is advantageous in certain scenarios. So yeah, splitting apart roles, I would you know one role being the the public facing side of things and one role being the more private uh autonomous group and how would you say you're talking about your semi-amic couple relationship with the police how has that uh been sort of sort of set up? What's the basis of that? Well, as we were mentioning, the structure of policing is a little bit different since the police in an area small like this is going to hire locally as opposed to in large metropolis areas. You generally see police departments in big cities

hiring from the suburbs surrounding the area, which leads to sort of like a foreign occupation feel. That's definitely the feeling that I got when I was doing stuff in Oakland, was that the Oakland Police Department was not made up of anyone who lived in Oakland. You know, they were coming from the surrounding suburbs that were much more affluent and removed from the problems of Oakland.

And they were just there to occupy by force. And so we get more like the Andy Griffith feel out here where it's like, uh, the cops are the good guys who's helping grandma cross the road and will carry your groceries up the stairs for you and that kind of stuff.

At least that's more the public perception anyway. They also have a small tank and conduct all sorts of drug raids. Right, there's that constant dichotomy, like, yeah, we're helping you, you know, we're walking you down the

road and carrying your groceries in your house for you, but then also... But because of the small town aspects of it, though, being able to play on their wanting, you know, for the ones who do want to help,

but are misguided because they're cops, a cab. Um, but for the ones who are trying to help, who aren't like specifically going out, trying to fuck over homeless people, besides their jobs, you know,

ones who occasionally go out and buy stuff of their own money or whatever to like help. So, so whatever, they'll kind of like rely on us to deal with that side of the population so they don't have to waste their time dealing with the homeless is how and which is allows us to deal with more of the problems in the homeless community in-house versus having to get the police involved right because you know the police aren't really trained uh or capable of

resolving those kind of issues for example like my father for uh for example um he was in and out of prison his whole life and after i was born and he got out of prison uh that last time um he had a moment where he's gonna get ready to have a relapse right uh he went to his dealer's house you know he's there he's he bought his eight ball he's sitting there you know getting ready to have a relapse right he went to his dealer's house you know he's there he bought his eight ball he's sitting there you know getting ready to do his thing and there's a knock at the door and they open it up and it's police they're they got a warrant for the dealer they're raiding the house and this one cop you know pulls my dad aside because he knows if the other cop sees him he's going to send him straight to prison and he's like you know hey you know what are you doing here man and whatever possessed

my dad to do it he's like I just want to go home he put the eight ball in that dude's hand and cops kind of looked at him was like just get the fuck out of here just go because he knew if the other cop you know saw him he would have sent him to prison right then and like and again a cab like this is you know the best story you're ever going to and again ACAB this is the best story you're ever going to hear the best story of a cop is a cop not being a cop pretty much

yeah exactly every time but you definitely get more of that here though their advantage to take over yeah and we have a certain people in our group that can liaison better than others with the police. And so we've used that to our advantage as well.

They've largely ignored. I want to say the police, not the city, the city wants to stop us. It's like their undying wish, apparently, but the police have largely ignored or shown tacit support for our efforts because they're members of the community. And they, at least the older crop of officers, have been working these streets and seeing the same homeless individuals for, in some cases, longer than I've been a lot.

for, in some cases, longer than I've been allowed. So, you know, there are relationships there, even if it's one mediated by that position of being a police officer. When you see someone struggling for that long, you know, it's hard not to be empathetic as a human. And so we've been seeing a bit of a shift now that they are, all those officers are starting to retire and we're getting a new crop of younger, more gung-ho police. Cause who would, who would bond,

who would sign up to be a police officer in 2023, you know, other than people who have something going on. So we're seeing a bit of a shift. Yeah. But for a while there, it was this, you know, other than people who have something going on. Some very distinct politics, for sure. Yeah. But for a while there, it was this, you know, that sort of old crop of police officers who had built relationships in the community and had that public image of being the helpful peace officer,

as it were, which makes it hard to push back when you're a group that's trying to advance, you know, abolitionist thinking and anti-cop sentiments. When they are beating people with batons, it's easy for your community to look at that and be like, okay, these guys are clearly the enemy. But when they're just, you know, helping grandma across the street, it's a lot harder to make those arguments. So that's been one aspect that has made things difficult for us. And another dichotomy in just the list of these in the mirror differences between the conditions around organizing in a small town, rural area versus big urban cities such as, say, Seattle.

small town rural area versus big urban cities such as say seattle yeah but despite all of their health helpful nature there they are enforcing local ordinances that criminalize the unhoused despite the ruling out of the ninth circuit court of martin v boise that says it's unconstitutional to do so so even with even with no alternative shelter available this year, we have zero cold weather shelters in Aberdeen. They're still out there sweeping people and telling them, hey, you got to move along when the maps handed out by the city say specifically, you can sleep here and you can camp here as long as you leave enough space for pedestrians to get by you can set up on the sidewalks and yet they move along every day yeah as we're talking about you know the different dichotomies that you face between urban and rural political organizing

i would imagine that population is certainly an issue that you might have to face as an organization trying to make a change in a small space. Have you found it challenging to build your base and get connections and stuff going? Yeah, for certain. As we said, there's already the issues of us having a more reactionary-based politics in a lot of our population, and that's scaring what allies that we do have here. So it's definitely resulted in us having to do the best we can to network outside as much as possible. outside as much as possible. Yeah, there's not a really wide base of radicals to pull from, so we have to

work with a bit wider ranging group of folks out here. Although it has always shocked me how many people are willing to get involved in radical organizing here in town. I think the smaller group size has led to a need for more connection and more listening in our decision-making processes, which has been nice.

I think we've gotten really good at operating as a small, tight-knit group, which may be organizers in larger areas where groups are larger have to deal with a little bit differently. have to deal with a little bit differently. There's also the difference in terms of where we socialize. In places like Aberdeen, there's nothing to do in terms of social gatherings. There's no center of socialization in town. The only thing that we did have was the mall, which has been closed for a couple of years now. So there's not a lot to do in terms of activities. And there's also just not a lot of space, like physical space in which to gather as a community. That's why we are currently serving our Food Not Bomb meals under a bridge, because the city has removed all covered areas in one of the most rainy areas in the country.

just about any street poll and see flyer after flyer after flyer for this event, this concert, this group's doing this, uh, this, this, these classes are taking place, et cetera. They straight up have a law against putting anything on the polls in,

in town versus let alone there actually being any events happening worth using the polls in the first place. Right. Right. I would imagine that part of your aims as a collective would be to find ways to bring the community together through those sorts of social events, informal and formal. For sure.

And that's definitely a big part of our goal with the Black Flower Project is to create a sort of social center, For sure. And that's definitely a big part of our goal with the Black Flower Project. Is to create a sort of social center, a place for the community to come for various reasons and experience whatever they might discover. So it sounds like you'll have a good lay of the land in terms of what is happening in the town and what sort of movements you're going to be making in the next part of this episode you can join myself and Mia and Sherianne and Sprout as we discuss

the actions that Blackfell Collective plans on taking in their community and what sort of material conditions they've continued to have to navigate in this space Blackflower Collective plans on taking in their community and what sort of material conditions they've continued to have to navigate in this space. Until then, I'm Andrew of the YouTube channel Andrewism. You can follow me on Twitter at underscore St. Drew and support on Patreon.com slash St. Drew. And you could also check out Blackflower Collective and support their work. Yeah, you can find us at linktree.blackflowerllc or blackflowercollective.noblogs.org.

at linktree backslash al1312, where you can find our podcast, Molotov Now, and a bunch of our other projects by Sabo Media. Thanks a lot, guys. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of Michael Duda 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. 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. 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. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search,

better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse

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

Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here. Joining me again for this second part of a two-parter uh uh sherry ann and sprout from the black flower collective in aberdeen washington as they've joined us to discuss the dichotomy between urban and rural political organizing last we spoke they gave us some background on exactly how the black flower collective began and what sort of motivating factors they have been in their development as an organization, as well as some of the dichotomies that they've experienced

between urban and rural political organizing. Now we're going to take a moment to explore some of the other material conditions that they have faced in their city, or rather in their small town. Sharyan? As we were talking about in the last episode, there's a huge difference between the modes of socialization in big cities and then versus small towns like our own. Here we socialize more like in our houses.

You meet friends at the homes of other friends houses where in the you know bigger cities it's more so that you know you went to a club you went to an event concert class what what have you um and these are definitely things that have evolved and developed based on the different material conditions. There's not as many classes around here and events and stuff like that because A, people just don't have the money to go

to them and B, nobody has the money to really put them on or any of that startup capital um there's not enough money coming through the town that's why the far right are always trying to push this homeless narrative because they're trying to make like turn this town into like a tourist town or something which makes no goddamn sense to me there's nothing in this town to come here for but like the only reason you're coming to this town is because you're driving through here to go to the ocean

that's it the highway dumps out here and then it's old highways back to the rest of the ocean sounds pretty isolated it can be pretty isolating out here but it doesn't disconnect us from the overall struggle throughout our organizing

we've discovered that there's a lot of things that we can do for urban comrades through our mutual aid. For example, rural people can do anything that is virtual, such as graphic design or web support. We can also offer up rural spaces for rest and recuperation for frontline activists in urban areas. While we may not be present in the heat of battle, we can make our isolation a strength, as often people abused directly by the system require peace and solitude to recover from such trauma. We can also use our local networks to to identify enemies and report this to the wider radical community out here there is a huge number of uh out here and in the pacific northwest in general there's a huge number of white supremacists and neo-nazi militias and organizations and so they generally organize in small towns like Aberdeen. You see a lot of

that here. And so people living in those towns bear the responsibility, we think, of reporting on the activities of those groups to the wider community. Because a lot of times what you see is, you know, it's kind of like the police coming in from the suburbs. The extremists often come in from the outlying rural areas, was filming videos out there and collecting information for their organizing back here. So we can also be doing the same throughout the interim and collecting information on those groups for our comrades in urban areas. interim and collecting information on those groups for our comrades in urban areas. Right, right. That sounds like some really viable and potent ways to build that sense of urban-rural solidarity. Yeah, because there's definitely a lot of people out here that need some notes taken on them. For example, during the height of the 2020 protests, there was a small

solidarity protest that was essentially just five women holding a couple signs, which resulted in a line of reactionaries and their assault rifles harassing and threatening this very small group of women

of saying how Antifa was coming to the town and they were going to burn the town down and all this stuff you got people like in Walla Walla for example you have Henry Contrera who utilizes what connections and what not that he has out there to like call other white supremacists

around the nation and essentially be like hey you know move here we'll get you a job we'll get you a house we'll get you all set up just come here and organize with us and we kind of have our own version of that here in uh aberdeen with uh cash mccullum a, the leader of the Pacific Northwest Wolfpack, our local neo-Nazi group. And people like that, I think, it's not just them. It's a whole group that, or a whole social setting that follows them.

And us being in rural communities are going to have the best opportunity to keep tabs on that kind of stuff and warn the wider community. Right. Yeah, that's absolutely vital. And, you know, one of my questions that I prepared in coming to meet with you all, I was going to ask, actually, you know, how can we avoid this sort of idea that a lot of people have in their heads, all radicals have in their heads, sort of the distant commune trap, you know, this idea that, you know, radicals, they move out to the country, they set up their happy little commune,

it either falls apart, turns into a cult, or just like pulls away from the broader struggle. But it seems like in some ways, y'all have been able to utilize that distance as a sort of a strength. And you've spoken quite a bit about how rural communities, different ways they've been able to help urban communities in the broader struggle. But now I just want to turn the tables a bit and ask what sort of ways urban radicals can support the struggles within rural communities?

Well, one way that we've seen a lot of solidarity from urban comrades has been in the topic of harm reduction. It's really hard to access services out here where we're at. There's really only one player

in town and they are highly bureaucratic and the line to get any sort of social service from them is a mile long. Also, fun note, that Cash McCollum person I talked about earlier is on the board for that social service as well, as well as other people who are part of the SOAP group. Yeah, so we've seen a large um show of solidarity from urban comrades sending us harm reduction supplies such as narcan which has literally saved dozens of lives since we started that program health care in general is a is a tough issue for rural areas.

Transportation, distances, lack of providers, lack of services, all of those things compound to make it really difficult to get appropriate healthcare. And so anytime anyone has any actual injury in town, they just send them to Seattle. Our hospitals out here are really terrible. They just send them to Seattle and our hospitals out here are really terrible. And so training, I think, would be a really huge benefit to not only just Aberdeen, but any rural area that that was to take place in, because that would allow those communities to start employing harm reduction and general first aid in their communities and prevent transportation out to these more Metro areas. Yeah.

The more we could do skill shares, the more we could do workshops, the more we could do radical classes or anything under the idea of kind of unschooling that we could do for rural communities is imperative because the outside of high school unless you're going to college for something specific there's just not much for learning out here what about the next generation what about that uh site of struggle in education well i believe sprout could probably delve into this a bit more, but it definitely would say that our ideas for, you know,

education was in the next generation as much as everything kind of goes under this. Uh, I forget, um, the name of it, but it's this idea of the, like,

uh, seven years generation, um, in, in our planning and the, like, what, what would this look like for the next uh next seven

generations right seven generations sustainability or some generation stewardship is another team used i think education uh is central to a community it's really the same sort of you know you're going to get the same answer with all of these healthcare, addiction, poverty. They're all interrelated out here. And because education is so crucial, we have focused the Black Flower Collective's initiatives on a lot of educational programs. So we're trying to get this space set up so that we can start having some revolutionary coursework that we can offer there. We would really like to develop it into a real campus for learning, both for youth programs and for like continuing education, GED and college level kind of stuff. We think that the unschooling method is pretty cool, where people can kind of just pace their own learning

and decide what it is they want to learn. So that's the method that we would go with. And we think that that allows for a lot more diversity in the styles of learning that are employed. And through that, you can kind of learn new ways of learning, I guess, which helps add resilience to any community. And I think that a lot of those skills offered at a place like that, like Sherry was saying, skill shares, I think a lot of that will need to come from urban communities because skill shares i think a lot of that could come from will need to

come from urban communities because we don't have a lot of that out here of our own right so hopefully right when we get our when we get our space set up we can host all manner of gatherings and start bridging that divide between the rural and the urban yeah and i mean i've been learning more about your space uh did a bit of research on it, you know, prior to the episode when we first started talking. Very inspiring stuff, very much in the vein of something

that I plan on doing locally here in Toronto and Tobago. Let's pretend that this is a revolutionary version of Shark Tank, right? Let's just pretend this is a revolutionary version of Shark Tank, right? Like, let's just pretend this is an anarchist Shark Tank. Give me your elevator pitch for this piece.

Like, what is the plan there? Okay. Our plan is twofold. The property would be divided into two separate sections. The public facing section would be dedicated to the social center we've been speaking of. The public facing section would be dedicated to the social center we've been speaking of. And the rest of the property would be what we're calling an eco village where residents would live. The social center will be where we centralize community resources and the self-governed eco village would have immediate access to those shared resources.

The plan is to run the social center as a bit of a small business incubator for various community initiatives that we've been talking about, and as well for the residents of the eco village to start their own small personal businesses, because in our discussions with people on the streets, you know, everyone has an idea of how to make money. with people on the streets, everyone has an idea of how to make money. And it's just always some small barrier like paperwork or permits that gets in the way of them

starting to have their own income and that sense of independence. So we want to be able to help with that. It would also obviously be a central hub for preparing and serving food, which has been the basis of all of our organizing so far is the coming together and sharing of meals. We want to have an internet cafeteria and a community kitchen there. We would also hold space for the mutual aid network to store supplies and conduct its work both on and off-site.

We want to have enough space to have a meeting hall for potential unions and start pushing on the unionization locally with the IWW. All of these spaces would be rentable to the public. So the Union Hall, for example, would be a great venue for an event that someone wanted to throw or perhaps a wedding even. being a backend bookkeeping services that we're going to have as part of the business incubator and the permaculture design services that we're going to have as part of the eco village. It really sounds like a lot of the different ideas that I've had converged on my channel for some time now, you know, this idea of a sort of a library economy, you know, this idea of the eco-villages, the sort of permaculture spaces

and moods and centers of community outreach and education. I'd be lying if I didn't say that we're a huge fan of your channel, actually. Appreciate that. Appreciate that. And I'm honestly, in turn, this project is something that really inspires me as well. Yeah, I'd like to say that none of this is from us. We've taken so much inspiration from other projects to cobble together this plan. That, yeah, it's been a real joy to just go through all of everyone else's different content and kind of see like, oh, this could fit with that and this could fit with that and come up with a plan that we really think could start to solve some of these issues that we're seeing in town.

Right. I think that's the real, one of the few beauties of the internet these days. You know, the fact that it's still able to connect people and ideas uh from all over the place yeah for sure i wanted to ask as you mentioned these sort of eco villages and that that whole idea uh having spaces for housing um and benefiting the people in that community developing that sort of sense of interdependence uh i wanted to you know you can't really talk about urban and rural rural and urban without bringing up the fact that urbanization you know seems to ever crawl into the rural space you know like there's always this sense of the encroachment of the city on the surrounding rural regions. What is your take on that?

Yeah, it does seem to be a one-way street. I think the model that we're trying to push is one of degrowth, where you would see sort of a reversal of that trend of gentrification or urbanization. reversal of that trend of gentrification or urbanization and you would see more of like a ruralizing of urban spaces to start having more green spaces more growing of their own food and more production of agricultural products right there in the urban centers. Right. You know, which is kind of what we want to do with the eco village is provide a bit of a model for how a community organizing, of how a community could organize itself around ecological principles. Prefigurative politics in action. Exactly.

Another note that I guess I want to bring up before we start to come to a close is, you know, again, we've been speaking a lot about the urban and the rural, but one element, except in a, you know, sort of a passing sense of our discussion of the police, one element that's kind of been lost in that, and that I know people might be asking about is what about the suburbs? You know, like, do you see a space for organizing there? Where does that fit into that urban rural dichotomy?

What sort of focuses do you think suburban organizers might want to tackle? Well, I think suburban comrades are probably going to have a bit of both worlds, as it were, because they're not in the downtown core of a city where most protests or sites of struggle happen, but they're also not out in the boonies in a rural environment. So, you know, they might have police that are a bit more preoccupied with the actual community and actually from the community. And so they might need to take some lessons from the rural center or from the rural areas in that regard and try to diversify their group into multiple different roles, multiple different channels, so that they aren't having continuous backlash

against a group that's just trying to feed the homeless. But at the same time, they have a lot of resources that rural people don't have access to. And so they could be coming into rural areas and providing those same sort of trainings and workshops that urban comrades could. And they could also be going into urban centers and learning and providing workshops and skill shares in those scenarios. I think they're kind of maybe play a bit of a buffer zone between the two. So what does the future look like for Black Flower Collective? What projects are you planning on tackling in the here and now, a couple months from now, a few years down the line, and how can folks support? Well, right now we are definitely focused on securing funding.

The housing market is horrible. Property prices are going up. And when there is a good deal on something, it's gone usually within a day, within hours. So we are definitely full focus on fundraising right now. We need to have the money on hand to be able to jump on a piece of property when it comes up because we need a good deal and we need a good amount of land to make sure that we have the room to grow and build various projects in the future uh yeah so the projects that we're focusing on right now immediately is the permaculture design services.

And so if anyone wants to have us design their farm or garden or house or balcony, they can go to blackflowerpermaculture.noblogs.org and get started through that process there. Hopefully, once we get land, as you were saying, in the next five years, the permaculture design services can grow into a permaculture design course that we could actually start offering people to come and do like a two-week intensive study on the building techniques that we're using on site in the ecovillage and on how to apply those back at home. Another project that we're currently working on is the bookkeeping.

This is sort of the bedrock of the business admin side of things that we're going to be folding into the business incubator once we get that going um and we are looking into a couple different grants for that but as sharian said you know right now we're focused on fundraising so we are we do have a couple different platforms that we're collecting donations from and we are starting to plan a few benefit shows here locally in Aberdeen. So if anyone is in a band and wants to roll through and play a show for us, that would be much appreciated.

They can just get a hold of us through our website. So our role in Black Flower is trying to spread awareness, help with this fundraising, give them kind of free advertisement in order to help their growth. Mean Sprout and our podcast Molotov Now are from the Sabo Media Collective, which once things are going good with Black Flower, we're hoping to be housed by them to help grow our media efforts. But if another good way to help in supporting Blackflower is to go to our website at sabot media.noblogs.org and share our podcast, Molotov Now. Check us out on social media, on whatever social media you are on,

from Collectiva Mastodon to Facebook at Aberdeen Local 1312. We have articles that we write on the Harbor Rat Report and a whole host of other content for people to check out and share with donation links that all go to Black Flower's efforts. That's fantastic. And I would encourage folks to check out what they're doing and all these different platforms. And well, that's been it for It Could Happen Here.

It's been great to have you both from Black Flower Collective. I've been your host for today, Andrew, of the YouTube channel Andrewism, which you can follow youtube.com slash Andrewism on Twitter at underscore St. Drew and on patreon.com slash St. Drew. All power to all the people. Glad to have you on.

Thanks for having us. Thanks for being on. Thank you, guys. Great recording with you. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter. Nocturnal. Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonoro. 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. 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. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.

From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check better offline.com that's my getting absolutely screwed over by the medical establishment voice

people thought it was another sheep podcast they were briefly extremely excited nope the sheep the sheep podcast will uh i make no promises about the sheep podcast well we're going to tell them about the lost sheep episode no yeah okay we'll try we'll just leave that one yeah this is this this is it could happen here the podcast where uh you you would think that the medical issue is a trans thing and it's absolutely not and it's amazing and i love it uh yeah it's it's a podcast where i complain about medical issues and talk about other stuff uh with me is james yeah i'm a person who complains about medical issues and sometimes goes to mexico to buy drugs say yay legal drugs medical drugs

while we're being recorded the thing is making me think of this i was in oh god i don't remember where in mexico i was um i was not very old but so we took off we took a ferry and it was I got like so seasick it was like the most seasick I've ever been so we had to like go back and um we so I at this my Spanish is not great at this time my Spanish was much worse than it is now um and we have to we go to this drugstore and we're trying to find something that's like an anti-seasickness drug and we buy this drug called vomison and we're looking through the we find the part where it says side effects and i remember and i look at this and i and i read it and it says hallucinaciones and i'm like oh no and i was like oh god it wound up actually it was completely fine uh yeah yeah i did not

vomit over the rails again i'm in hydra on the ferry ride back i have a good uh i have a good inadvertent medicine hallucinogen story and then we can we can actually do the podcast and i was when i was a bit younger i was climbing a mountain in morocco and um became like extremely altitude sick like my fucking nose was just like unleashing my blood like it was a real moment um yeah i bet i look great and uh so i tried to get some medicine we went somewhere and like you know i speak french but most of the people spoke berber and and it wasn't a language that I speak at all anyway I received some medicine which I took in the form of I think like a powder

that I mixed with honey and I was like okay this is unique and different whatever fuck me did I have some incredible dreams I just kept taking it because I was like well it was definitely opium was the thing I was taking I bought it down and was like this stuff just really helps out with my altitude sickness one of the adults I was taking was like i bought it down and was like this stuff just really

helps out my altitude sickness one of the adults i was with was like ah yeah don't do drugs kids speaking of not doing drugs okay so what we are here today to talk about democracy the opium of the masses yeah so this this script was originally written in a period where i had spent an enormous amount of time being forced to watch documentaries about what democracy was and my conclusion from all of this is that the history of democracy begins with a mistranslation okay so okay what what does that mean the answer is that okay the the whatever someone starts talking about democracy the first thing they do is they go like i'm gonna start i'm gonna i'm gonna start by translating the word democracy now the the most

common translation that you'll see this like like everywhere from like astra taylor's like documentary what is democracy to just like the thing that's on Wikipedia, holds that democracy is derived from two Greek words. You have demos, meaning the people, and kratos, meaning rule. So you put these two together, you get demos kratos, you get democracy. I can't pronounce Greek very well. It's fine. Whatever. This is ancient Greek.

Yeah, but this means rule by the people so, okay this translation has several advantages right, foremost among them it is simple enough to be taught to school children, and catchy enough that there's a non-zero chance that like the most pedantic of them will remember it after, like the day after

the test, which presumably is the explanation for why this is the translation of of democracy it opens every single fucking thing people write about democracy unfortunately unfortunately for our beleaguered grade school teachers and and sort of the broader populace as a whole this translation is so blatantly wrong that i have been forced to start a thing about democracy and also about rioting, yelling about ancient Greek. Great. Okay, so what is the actual issue here? The actual problem is the mistranslation of Kratos in particular is incredibly important both conceptually and ideologically.

is incredibly important, both conceptually and ideologically. And the actual sort of proper translation and the implications of this are worth examining in some detail. So the anthropologist David Graeber, who we have mentioned a lot on this show, wrote in his regrettably very poorly read essay, There Never Was a West, he describes Kratos thus quote in this this in turn might help explain the term democracy itself which appears to have been coined as something of a slur by its elitist opponents it literally means the force or even violence of the people kratos not archos the ancient greek word for ruler also the root of anarchism or without arkos yeah so what he's yeah so what he's saying there wasn't kratos a dude like he he's a dude

i've undersold him an immortal dude uh yeah he's also he's the the main character of the god of war games okay that is the thing i did not know and hilariously that that is like him him being the main character of the god of war games that is actually a better way to understand what kratos is than the rule by thing that everyone usually translates this out because like like ancient greek has a perfectly good word for like rule by right it's archos it's the root of anarchism it's like an it's it's the word of anarchism it's like the normal thing where you have a greek derived word

where you want to say rule by is that is arcos right yeah but democracy is not that right yeah like all go because like that but like like democracy is specifically kratos and this is because what democracy literally means is rule by the violence

of the people based yeah well and this you know okay so like this this this like this sounds like i am essentially pearl clutching about translations but the context here is actually important right as as graver points out the sort of you know athens which is is the exemplar society against which the original anti-democratic philosophers rail. By the way, this is like Plato, et cetera, et cetera, hates democracy. Most of the people who you read from sort of classical Greek-like philosophy despise democracy even though they live in them. Huge, you know, not to like whitewashwash athenian society but like these people are like sparta apologists and it's like we haven't really it's funny people have definitely i don't know if they've actually recovered plato or red plato or they just uh get mad when donald trump doesn't

win elections but like this whole like this whole like benevolent philosopher king shit has definitely uh definitely made a comeback in recent years, and it's troubling. Yeah, and I think part of this – this is another complaint that I've had about sort of like – the way that like the sort of like great authors thing is taught in universities is they deliberately – like there was like an – in what specific readings they assigned there was like an incredible intellectual effort that goes into making sure you never see the absolutely deranged shit that these people believe like plato plato literally worships angular momentum i like that is his god is angular momentum um like he he he he hates democracy he loves like spartan like oligarchy basically like all of this stuff is like that's like something like you don't read when you get assigned play-doh it's like yeah there's a huge like um as someone who's taught like a ton of universities there's this huge

fucking impediment to you assigning that stuff like i've specifically tried to assign different stuff in these like writing courses which which end up being like great white dudes of history right like um that like if you can assign different things but like the cost of of assigning those and that cost isn't born by you or the university right it's born by your students it's massive like even if like for a while there like we would just like a lot of texts, you know, if you take the time

as a professor to label out the text, you can take it to a print shop, get them to photocopy it. And almost inevitably, you need to find someone who's willing to kind of play fast and loose

with copyright. But still, it will end up costing your students so much more than the texts which are in the book that you can fucking auto-generate

the quizzes because the book also has a website and you still get paid like you're doing a job when you're not. So yeah. Yeah, and this stuff has had sort of profound ideological influences. It's had sort of profound influences on just sort of the

way that ancient Greece and Rome are like conceptualized. And, and, and I, and I think this also really has, you know, it hasn't, it makes it very hard to see what was sort of actually going on in,

in a place like Athens. And, you know, a great, great, we're sort of points this out, right? Like Athens is a sort of like exemplar,

I like, you know, sorteber sort of points this out, right? Like, Athens is a sort of, like, exemplar, like, you know, sort of, it's a sort of exemplar, like, it's like, well, this is like the first democracy or whatever. This is actually like a very normal sort of society, and it's not. This is an extremely weird society. And what Graeber sort of points out about this is the thing that is – okay, so there have been lots of societies over sort of the course of human – like hundreds of thousands of years in the sort of like course of human history, right, that have had collaborative decision-making systems. What is very, very weird and almost unique about Athens is it has two things put together. It has a decision-making apparatus where people have equal say, and it also has a violent enforcement mechanism to impose the will of the people on other people and as you know as we'll get to in a second uh also impose the will of those people on other people most society yeah that that that that turns out to be a very important part of sort of the athenian empire etc etc like who the people are yeah this is this is not all the people

yeah well we'll get to that in a second too nice but so so most societies graber argues either have one or the other of you know having a having like a decision-making apparatus for people of equal say and a violent enforcement mechanism right you have a lot of societies with collective decision-making apparatuses that involve the entire community but the thing is these these processes invariably sort of like develop some kind of consensus process as a sort of expedient to keep the community from just tearing itself apart through constant conflict right because like okay like if if you can't actually without the threat of force right you can't actually have a society where you constantly have really really controversial decisions being made by like 51 49 splits where both sides

absolutely hate each other and one side is opposed over the other right in order to sort of like keep your like you know your like city or your state together right you have to actually create political solutions that you know people people, not that they necessarily like fully agree with, but that they're willing to live with. And then, you know, this generates sort of like various, increasingly elaborate, sometimes not very elaborate, but you know, various sort of forms of consensus processes. On the other hand, you have societies with extremely violent enforcement mechanisms, but these societies are almost always incredibly hierarchical and

they're ruled either by sort of monarchs or oligarchs who just simply do not care about the notion that like people should rule themselves or that you know other like other people who are not like the king or the body of oligarchs should have like anything even remotely to do with making decisions and that that's what makes athens really weird right is athens has both of these things it has a sort of it has like a violent it has a way of like imposing decisions on people through violence and also it has this principle that like people should be able to make decisions for themselves collectively by you know like through through a sort of process that doesn't involve them all being ruled by just like some guy

and you know what makes athens and the others and the other sort of greek democracies because there are there are other democracies in greece over the sort of period that this goes on what makes them unique is that like the people the people, quote-unquote, is composed largely of soldiers. As Graeber puts it, in other words, if a man is armed, then one pretty much has to take his opinion into account. One can see how this works in its starkest in Xenophon's Anabasis. I have now been told by several dictionary sites that this is, in fact, how you pronounce it. I don't know. Anabasis sounds terrible to me, but such is the will of of i don't know dictionaries which tells the story of a greek army of

mercenaries who suddenly find themselves leaderless and lost in the middle of persia they elect new officers and then hold a collective vote to decide what to do next in a case like this even if the vote was actually 60-40, everyone could see the balance of forces and what would happen if things actually came to blows. Every vote was, in a real sense, a conquest. So what we're dealing with here, right, and this is sort of what democracy is in its very rawest form, is you're dealing with a group of very heavily armed men who need to find a way

to convince slightly more than half of the group to agree to help them impose their rule on everyone else. Do you know what I will get you? Do you know who will fail to pay your mercenary contract leaving you stranded in the middle of a Persian civil war

which you have backed the wrong side? Vladimir Putin. Yeah, don't take mercenary contracts on Vladimir Putin. And we're back. So, you know, as I was sort of saying, what we're dealing with here, we have a group of very heavily armed men and they need to find

a way to make you know, they need to find a way to make like half of, like slightly more than half of the group agree with them to impose their sort of rule on everyone else. So in slightly more technical terms, right, Athenian democracy or democracy in the Athenian sense is composed of two co-determining elements fused together. There is a decision-making apparatus and an enforcement mechanism. a decision-making apparatus and an enforcement mechanism. The two are co-determining because the structure of the enforcement mechanism,

which is 51 blokes with sticks beating 49 blokes with sticks over the head, also determines the structure of the decision-making apparatus, which no longer needs to concern itself with the opinion of everyone in the group as they would in a society without the ability to sort of employ violence to enforce decisions as long as they have enough people to sort of militarily defeat a minority of the group right you know and you could you could see how the how the structure how how the enforcement mechanism is is the thing that is structuring what the decision making process has to look like right it's the thing that sort of sets its limits, and this is something that it turns out is very, very sort of important in what a democracy is. The enforcement mechanism too is also determined by the sort of decision-making apparatus because the people here are armed soldiers. So the 51% that becomes the sort of like basis of democratic majority, of the democratic majority rule, you know,

it literally composes the enforcement mechanism itself. And this sort of double-coated termination is the origin of majority rule democracy, right? The institution that, you know, it, in various forms,

and we will get into this, like this has gotten increasingly less and less quote unquote democratic over time. But this, This has gotten increasingly less and less quote-unquote democratic over time, but this specific form is the thing that has come to sort of define what democracy is. If we look at what democracy is as a political project though, right, what we see is that the essence of democracy itself is to transform the majority from a simple count of military strength into a into a signal of morality right the citizens of democracies and even even a lot of people who are either not citizens of a democracy and live in it or who don't live in a democracy simply believe that is the moral right for a majority of people to be able to impose their will in a minority this is this is just you know this this this this is what this is what forms a kind of democratic common sense right it is the thing that everyone believes that is sort of the basis of everything

about how a democracy functions right and you know democracy is almost never framed this way explicitly except by you know every once in a while you'll get someone who makes this argument who is like i don't know they're a billionaire or they're like you know i what's his name i i yeah hayek will like like if you press him like milton freeman for to also like if you pressed him we'll make this argument right which is like no one actually wants to live in a democracy because you know like if you you know if if we actually live in a democracy everyone will just like increase our tax rate or like marginalized groups will like these are critiques made of the united states as well and it's like earliest inception right yeah you know what's his name i think it was i think it was john adams so some

of the early founders like very explicitly this was their argument against like made very anti-democratic arguments against giving anyone who didn't have property to vote which was like i think the exact line was if you give people the vote the first thing they will do is uh erase the debts and redistribute the land yeah there was a whole ass rebellion about this right yeah yeah i wish it would have been based uh good program usually kind of kind of messed up in the u.s where you have to ask where that land comes from but you know yeah but like you this is an argument you really only ever hear from people who have like the only minority that makes this argument are people who have a shit ton of property who are like oh god and you know and their their thing here is well okay we need to make the system

less democratic so that people can't take our property away yeah or give property rights yeah yeah but on the other hand the reason for sort of pointing out that this is what democracy is in theory is really sort of cynical and like reactionary. But the thing that the reason this argument works, quote unquote, works with sort of like, you know, with sort of libertarians is that this equation of sort of numerical superiority with the more right to exercise power is like the key underlying assumption of democracy. It is the idea without which democracy simply ceases to function, right? But this is something that – people don't talk about democracy like this, right? The sort of trick of the democratic system is to push the enforcement mechanism into the background right when when you talk about democracy with like regular people the thing that they walk and normally they think about voting right but you know any any kind of thing that is like a collective like decision making process right a regular person is going to call

democracy and you know they're if that's kind of true. But but, you know, if if you want to sort of get like technical about it, it's not. And there's an there's an incredibly large ideological apparatus that's specifically built up around making sure that people don't look at the way that the that the enforcement mechanism is is as much, if not more so, a sort of key element of what democracy is than the part where everyone comes together and makes a decision that everyone talks about all the time. I was watching an interview with Graeber the other day, such are the things I do in my free time, and he was talking about democratic confederalism in northeast Syria, right? And he talked about it as like democracy without the state which i think is interesting like it's him using that vernacular yeah so okay so like i i'm i'm

taking a lot of the arguments from self graber wrote but he he backs away from the implications of his own argument right yeah and goes back to, albeit like caveating, and I guess it's worth noting that there are a ton of like hugely divergent, like we're not like prisoners of etymology, right? Like the meaning, like I think it's Rosa Luxemburg who said, government is politics in the people's interest or something. It's kind of bullshit, tanky interpretation of what most most people would see it as there are these broad definitions you know and i think this is something that like like asher taylor's documentary right like you know the part about that's good right it's like there's i forget who says it there's this like kind of famous political

line that's like i if if if there if there is a thing that everyone agrees is good, no one will agree on what it is. Right. Like, you know, this is something that like, you know, like I think, I think it's, it speaks to the power. I think it speaks specifically to the power of the sort of like, like the idea that more people be like agreeing with something like gives, gives legitimacy, gives legitimacy to that thing, which is that like every like like even societies that are like not even like really remotely democratic right we'll pretend that they're still democracies right like the bathists have elections every sort of like cycle right like yeah i mean like this is the thing i think isn't very well understood but like like this this was also a thing like for example china has this like okay

sorry i i as as i'm preparing to explain this i'm realizing that the china want like the the like chinese government experts are going to get mad at me because i'm i think i think i'm about to confuse the united the united front with the united front works department but so china china like technically speaking is there are like other parties technically that are kind of remnants from like you know for example like the the left faction of the kmt which is like the chinese nationalist party right there's there's like technically a faction of them that's part of this thing called like the united front there's like technically other parties and they have like this like constitutive role it's it's it's an incredibly convoluted and elaborate system but you know like that whole thing and you you you you can find you know like

the chinese system is like not it's not democratic in the sense of like you can like vote for someone or like okay like it's not democratic in the sense of you can make a vote that will make a thing happen right you know and to be fair the u.s is also not democratic in the sense of you can cast a vote and make a thing happen right but this is sort of like you know okay like it is it is a it is a society that is is less democratic than the u.s which is sort of astounding considering the u.s like doesn't even have one person. Right. We'll get into like republics a bit in a second. But like, you know, like Chinese like quote unquote democracy is like not it has very little to do with like the principle of like the moat, like 51 percent of the population votes for a thing. And it happens. But if you look at the sort of rhetoric that you see from – and the internal justification of like – you sort of like read Chinese bureaucratic documents or you read sort of like their PR stuff. They constantly talk about like, yeah, we're going to make a more democratic society because like that legitimacy – like the idea of democracy is really incredibly powerful and enduring and it's something that like even like you know like i mean like i don't know like the saudis don't pretend to be a democracy really but like like

most of the other like gulf monarchies have like electiony things right like it's it's it's an idea that is that is enduring and powerful enough that even people who don't agree with it are forced to sort of like do this pageantry of it and i i i think that's really interesting and i think it explains a lot of the kind of i mean especially around occupy but i think it explains a lot of the kind of political movements that we've been seeing over the last about 15 years which is i i think this is also an explanation for why why we see so many riots as as a form of sort as a form of politics and why you get these demands that are sort of like i don't know you you like in the 2011 revolutions you sort of also see this now you get a lot of sort of very abstract calls for democracy while also doing things that like are quote-unquote not legitimate in a democratic society like for

example like rioting is not supposed to be sort of like a legitimate political action in a society because you know like there's this whole like a because there's a system under which violence is supposed to be administered administered right like you have a state the state is the thing that's supposed to do violence if anyone else does it outside of that they're like you know they're an illegitimate extremist but okay if if we go back to our sort of base definition of what democracy is right democracy is a collective decision-making apparatus and an enforcement mechanism it's like well what is a riot right a riot is both of those things happening at the same time. There are a bunch of people collectively making a decision

and then imposing that decision immediately. Yeah. Is it A.P. Thompson who called the Luddites collective bargaining by riot? Quite possibly. Yeah, yeah. It's often referenced now in other stuff. People talk about, like, your hair often like referenced now in other stuff. Like people talk about like, you know,

like your hair they use all the time. I think the origin of it is, or is it Eric Hobsbawm? Could be Hobsbawm. Anyway, yeah, famously the Luddites were called collective bargaining by riot. Yeah, I think, well, I think there is something sort of interesting there about collective bargaining by sort of physical force. It's like the decision-making apparatus is happening outside of the sort of normal bounds in which the decision-making apparatus is supposed to happen.

And I think there's a sort of – this is another – I forget exactly which Graber thing this is from. But there's Graber, this might actually be something about Batman, which is pretty funny What's his take on Alfred's class status? I don't think he, unfortunately I think that's the one thing he doesn't mention I'm pretty sure there's no

Alfred discourse in it, there's lots of other discourse he calls is it Bane? No, he callsoker he calls one of the batman villains a zirzanite which i think is very funny um yeah but you know okay he he has this argument about sort of like okay how do you you know so so the the other part of democracy is it's it's the part about the people, right? And this is always a thing that's very much in contention.

Like how do you determine what the people, quote-unquote, are? And the structure of Athenian society is very much determined by who is and isn't included in the people, right? Like women can't vote. If you're a slave, you also can't vote. There are lots of people who are directly under Athenian rule who can't vote and are not part of the people and therefore are sort of like – and this is in some sense the origin of like the trajectory democracy the founders of the u.s right if you look at sort of that style of 50 of 50 plus one style majority democracy right those guys you know as we talked about like they didn't want a democracy because they thought in a democracy people would vote against their sort of like aristocratic interests yeah and so what did side on in that yeah they're like yeah it's like okay well all these people own slaves all these people owned a bunch of land all these people like i don't know like bankers and shit they're like

okay so it's gonna be a bad idea if we let people like decide what to do with our stuff so instead you know they they go to this republican structure and the republican structure is i think very interesting because it it takes the 50 plus one structure right but you know it it abstracts it to the point where like the like your like your vote for the most part basically simply does not matter like every once in a while like a local election it can do something but you know like what's actually happening right is is you are like you you you are selecting who is going to rule you and you know the other part of this is that the enforcement mechanism becomes autonomous from the people itself because you know unlike unlike an athenian

thing where like everyone's either like on a ship because they're like a you know they're part of the navy or they like you know they can go strap on their fucking shield and like plates and grab their big ass spear right and he looks like okay well this is this is the state right the state is like fucking jerry and his friend like patrick cliss or whatever the fuck you know like forming forming a shield wall with like the shields they have at home you know but but you know and that's like in in in in sort of like warrior democracies of that style like there are there are there's like the kasachar republic i think the same of it um there are these sort of like they're like

you know like there there are republics like this or quote-unquote republics like this that that exist in in various places in the world you have these sort of like military classes that you know like do 50 plus one but those people write the enforcement mechanism is very is very very direct in a republic the enforcement mechanism becomes autonomous and also the decision making apparatus becomes both with both of them become autonomous from like the people quote unquote who are supposed to be making the decisions and suddenly you have the situation where you know okay if you live in the u.s right it is very very clear that there are lots of things that everyone supports that simply like are not is not like like it's not happening right like

you know i mean you you could look at sort of like universal health care like i mean for example another example that we could take that's i think for poignant right now is like there was a pretty recent study on like what percentage of the population in the u.s supports trans people getting like franz affirming health care it was like 70 percent and then you know but you know you look at a fucking state-by-state basis right and it's like well we'll be talking about this more sort of later but you know on a state-by-state basis like oh well that's not fucking happening right people are just making it illegal and it's very easy to look at this and go like well okay so the the the principle of 50 plus one is being violated right like this is not a democracy something else has happened one sort of solution

to this is to go back to you know is to very literally go back and and ask the question who is the people and and this is this is you know a lot of ways what occupy is doing right like occupy to answer this is like we are the 99 right it's okay so like there there there is a thing that is claiming to be the like the demos in in democracy which is you know congress right but like okay congress trivially is not the people right it's at best a section of them it is definitionally not in any in any yeah right you know and okay so you have you have lots of versions of this like the american one tends to be a lot of people sitting in a square you know but like like actually convening a a something that's kind of like a democracy but even but you know that's the other thing about it's like is is occupied democracy right like they don't have violence as like a political tool really i mean this isn't to say that like

there wasn't some weird shady shit that happens but like you know like they don't have the ability to sort of like coerce people into accepting like a 51 decision that that people like genuinely can't live with right so so they don't they don't really like they they in some in some sense in challenging democracy they create something that isn't really a democracy right they create a sort of like elaborate consensus process and this is you know like if if the kratos part is i'm trying to think of a way i've been here i think for like 10 minutes but wait to phrase this but like if the if the strength and power is like is the people and is evenly distributed among the people as opposed to – it's the state and it's a theoretical abstraction of the will of the majority of is if you think that it is legitimate to use – for a group of people to use violence to enforce something, and at that point everyone is still armed, then you get a 50 plus 1 structure, right? Right. But if you don't think it's legitimate to use violence to coerce people into sort of like doing whatever the thing is you want to enforce then by definition you get some kind of consensus process

but you know we we have a system that every everyone like thinks that what's happening like you know in some sense like the ideological principle is that like you know everyone thinks that what's happening is is you have a 50 plus one system and that's where the like the legitimacy of the system comes from because like you know we voted for these people but also it's so clearly not and also like the police are so clearly just this sort of like roaming like bandit force that is like not even like remotely like like they they technically draw legitimacy from the people but like you know okay like what what what what what happens if you try to convene an assembly of the people in the u.s the answer is they beat the shit out of you with uh sticks and then tear gas you and then like start shooting you yeah so yeah

you know this is sort of what you know like like this this is what occupy proved right which is like if if you challenge the sort of the claim of of the government to represent the people right because like who who the fuck are these assholes to like to be like a halo no like we we we are the people we are sort of like the legitimate manifestation of people if you want to do anything like you have to go through us well it's like okay so like how how did how did they get that how did they get that authority right and the answer is they did it they did it by staging an armed revolution that that's what they're looking that's what their actual legitimacy derives from right is they they want they won the armed revolution yeah and violently dispossessed people of that land before they did that like

piggybacking off colonialism to do an armed revolution yeah and so like okay but like you know their their legitimacy is incredibly tenuous, right? Like this gives you this question of how do you determine – how does a democracy determine what the people are? And one way that you can make a sort of counterclaim against a democracy is by physically assembling a shit ton of people in a place and going like we are – like physically we are the people and we are going to make decisions. And that can look like Occupy with like a seven hour meeting about whether where we want to put plants right or it can look and this is you know you get this a bit in occupy but like or it can look like you know here are a hundred thousand people like they are going to fight they're going to just like throw shit at the police until the police run away and you know that that is that that that is a that is a thing that like

we have seen in this country this this will be like another episode but this this this was a thing that happens in mexico in 2006 in oaxaca where people basically ran out the police by literally hundreds of thousands of people like wait wait waking up to a bunch of police like a bunch of police just beating the shit out of like a bunch of striking teachers and then like picking up a brick and throwing it. You see it a little bit. Not really, but like in like Podemos in Spain, if you're familiar with that. Yeah. Like they kind of their attempt to have people determine their policy platform is not largely a successful one.

But like. Yeah, well, I mean, interesting. Obama did that too oh really yeah this was the thing obama had this job like one of obama's initial pitches was like he was gonna have there's gonna be this like online thing where people could vote and like decide on policy things and he immediately mandated and podemos also immediately like this is this is one of the things that like this is this is like one of the ways you try to like capture this kind of like you know because what what what you're what you're really like when riot police are like fighting

like a bunch of people in the street right like what what you're watching is is two kinds of democracy fighting with each other right you're you're you're watching a sort of like like you're you're watching the crowd which is an you know a very immediate, literal form of democracy, right? Where the crowd makes a decision and people do things. Fighting the police, who are like a very – the police are technically a part of a democratic system, right? But the police are just purely the sort of like – they are you know they they they are the violence by which the people rule and you you are watching you're watching these two things sort of like clash with each other and you know i mean i i i i think i think one of the the sort of like products of of of the

way that republicanism like specifically developed or republicanism in the sense of like this is a republic not a democracy etc etc in terms of like yeah like yeah small r but also in the sense of like okay so instead of you voting on things directly like you know you vote for some asshole who yeah like representative democracy yeah whatever yeah right like that that sort of like unmooring of of of the means of violence from the people which was you know which was is the essence of democracy good or bad right and and i would also say like you know that can go like that that sort of like having having violence and democracy like you know violence decision making being paired together like that's not always a good thing that can go really really badly right like you know because like like for example like a race riot right like like a clan march right is tactic like is technically

an expression of democracy right it is you know it is a group of people convening themselves as the people and then doing an action and you know and you like i this has been something i've been sort of been forced to think about a lot with the anti-trans laws which is that like trans people are like you know the most optimistic estimate you could like have is like maybe two and a half percent of the population if you assume there's a bunch of people who are trans and don't know that they're trans right like you know and if if you were two and a half percent of the population in a in a 50 plus one system it is very easy for 51 like there is no physical way that you can have

like if 50 plus one percent of the population decides to kill you while there's nothing you can do right like there's there's no there's no amount of like voting that you can do that will make you not die because that that's the sort of like. Yeah, the tyranny of the majority or whatever. Like, yeah, yeah. Are you familiar with like the argument against utilitarianism that like the greatest good for the greatest number or the greatest happiness for the greatest number? If you're looking to serve the greatest happiness for greatest number of like 10 people get two units of happiness from beating one person to death with sticks yeah yeah she can't experience as much sadness as they experience happiness like yeah yeah democratic impulse in action yeah and and you know like this is a thing that is again

when we talk about like is normally brought up by like incredibly corrupt corrupt and sort of veto elites who want to protect their status but like it is also you know and like this is part of the reason why for example the u.s just fucking puts like immigrants at camps right because they can't fucking vote right like they're they're not part of like quote unquote the people right like there are large sections of the population who are just you know like booted from this entire process right um this is an argument that william c anderson and zoe samudzi make in the book as black as resistance which is that like yeah like black people like fucking are not part of this shit right like they're not like a constitutive like part of the people tm right yeah and you know this they they call this they call this the anarchism of blackness um which is this sort of

like it's it's a position of being like removed as like a legitimate sort of like subject in the state who can you know exercise your like democratic rights or whatever the fuck it's like yeah okay like lots of people have never had this and you know this the even even it even in this sort of like you know relatively egalitarian like you know like there there have been like parts of the u.s like especially the early u.s right you have your like sort of like new england town council right it's like well what is what is your new england town council vote to do it's like well it votes to send out the fucking militia to kill indigenous people right like you know even you you can you even even even when the u.s has functioned as something that is closer to like a like democracy

tm where like the means of violence and the means of sort of decision making are actually placed in direct directly in people's hands right like that doesn't always go well right yeah you know but like you know we we we we have now developed a like in in we we developed a system that has like the worst of every single parts of every single aspect of this right we're like okay so we we have 50 plus one as the sort of like legitimating factor but also 50 percent of the population plus one does not actually vote for a thing it is possible for like more than half of the population it's possible for a majority of the population to vote for a presidential candidate you get a different one right like yeah it's possible like we've seen this like

so many fucking elections have had this now like two in my lifetime like like and and also also we have we we have the other part of it which is that we we also have like the the we have the other democratic principle of like you should be able to enforce a political opinion by violence. We got that in space. Yep. Guess who fucking gets to make that decision? It's not 50 plus 1 of you.

It's a bunch of assholes in suits and six cops. I think a good way to view the US is a bunch of landowners made a system where land votes and people don't yeah well and then you know and then and then they went about making sure that like even if the land does vote for a thing if it's not yeah it doesn't happen there's 75 weird dudes in between your vote and anything actually happening yeah which is how you get like this kind of constitutional magic

that the trumpets are always trying to do because like it's not actually like that far from reality right there there are like 17 magic incantations i have to get set after you put your ballot in the box and then an old white dude's in charge again yeah and but you know i think like you know the u.s system is like it's stunningly bad like it's it's what it's like a it's a really dog shit like terribly written democratic system like it is it is designed not to function like that that that was actually the point yeah yeah yeah there's like there's a king a thing that like you shouldn't have like the the president is supposed to it's supposed to be a king right like i think like if if you go back and read like the the president is supposed to is supposed to be a king right like

i think like if if you go back and read like what the balance of powers was supposed to be it was like they're doing the roman thing of like you need like you need to combine a king and oligarchy and a democracy and it's like well okay so we have like a fucking king who could just like kill people it's great it's great it's great but you know you know okay so the the i think i think the the the the broad total argument that i want to make here is that what what we have been seeing over the last about 15 years right with the sort of movement of the squares with the series of uprisings that we saw i mean you know in 2020 in the u.s but also like all over the world from about 2018 to i mean like some there's still some of them are still going like now right you know it's it's it's it's it's been a reaction to sort of this right it's it's

it's been a reaction to democracy as a legitimating principle not matching like democracy like you know even even even even what the principle is supposed to be. And then people going out into the streets and doing democracy and the sort of clash between like democracy and theory and democracy and action mostly has resulted in democracy and action winning because it turns out the thing about republics is that they're really, really, really good at creating like military apparatuses that are very hard to defeat by just purely fighting them yeah sadly yeah but however comma sometimes they lose and you know and as as as the as the old ira thing goes that they have to get lucky every time we only have to get lucky once so you know keep collectively bargaining by riot what the fuck else are you going to do

vote like yeah yeah yeah your life depends on it kids you can vote if you want to there are instances in which it might meaningfully reduce the cruelty of the state a little bit some places sometimes

but yeah it's not gonna it's not gonna like take away the central fucking canard of the whole thing yeah yeah so uh do democracy by rioting that is our official legal position

this is legally legally non-actionable but also legally actionable at the same time this is called dialectics and yeah this has been Ickit Appet here find us in the places don't find us in the places

read David Graeber yeah do that read The Never Was It West it's great nobody reads it it's it's really good people have been asking for a graber book because we keep talking about him so yeah read i'd never read there never was a west uh read towards an anarchist anthropology um bullshit jobs it's a good start if you've yeah read if you if you if you if you want to be the real grabe head and read something that fucking no one has read go read uh towards an anthropological theory of value i ran into one of my colleagues at the supermarket the other day and we were talking about that

good book no one has ever read it it's uh yeah read more graver Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

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shit falling apart uh that's the only intro you're going to get because garrison is right now in the city of atlanta georgia reporting on the continuing stop cop city protests uh garrison's done a number of scripted episodes covering these in detail over the last year and change. They're in the thick of it right now, so I'm just going to bring them and a friend on to talk about what has been happening this week. Yes.

That's your cue. This week is a special week because this is the fifth week of action that has happened here in Atlanta as a part of the Stop Cop City and Defend thelanta forest movement this episode is going to be like a mid-week update because this this week of action is still very much ongoing uh there's still many many days that that things can happen with uh but a lot a lot of this a lot has already happened in in these in these first few days anyway so we're going to kind of do a quick a quick little update and then a more comprehensive piece will be later down the

line but with me here to help uh talk about what's what's what's gone down so far is someone from the atlantic community press collective uh clark hello welcome to the show hey thanks uh for having me on so thanks for being on yeah we've we've been kind of we've been we've been kind of uh teamed up the past few days here as as many many many things both silly and serious have have taken place across atlanta yeah um safety in numbers safety yeah it's always nice to have friends when you're watching jackbooted thugs go fucking ape shit with all of their new toys and i mean i think that is part of the week of action idea is getting as many people here as possible and hopefully some of that makes makes

some people uh uh more safe um that's something that we'll probably talk more more in detail later when we have kind of hindsight uh but i guess today today, let's just start on what's kind of happened so far chronologically. I guess starting on Saturday, I met you Saturday for a rally at Gresham Park. I think it's where we first met up this week. Yes, we met at the rally at Gresham Park, which had about, I would say, an hour's worth of speeches before, they kicked off a march down the bike path from Gresham Park to what the activists call Wilani People's Park, which is the site of the protests beforehand. So the forest around it had been unoccupied since the raid in in january that saw the killing of torte gita so this was the first sort of uh permanent return to the forest uh so we took a i don't know 40 minute march down uh the path and then landed in uh wilani people's park they had one more little round of chance

with a promise to defend the forest and then they they broke off and uh everything was a it was a nice really relaxing day yeah it was it was a pretty positive start to the week of action um people essentially retook wilani people's park uh and started to go into the forest once again. Camp got set up in the forest. Lots of people from both in town and folks from out of town started to camp in the woods again. And then in the hours after this small march, people started to prepare for the music festival, which was planned like a few hundred feet away from the people spark, I guess, inside inside like a more like open field area. And music festival went off without a hitch the first day.

It was pretty, pretty rad. Yeah, I think there was about 500 people for 500 people that first night of the music festival. Yeah, the vibes were great. everyone was having a fun time i think it went on until about 1 a.m and i i don't think the first day could have gone better i i think it went on till about 4 a.m okay well i went to bed at 1 a.m i i did not go to bed at 1 a.m i was i was at the music festival quite quite a bit longer i'm quite a bit older and i think that was the reason i had to leave uh so yeah garrison doesn't understand things like uh needing sleep yet so give another year or two before they hit that sweet sweet wall so so true then i'll have to find another teenager to go do journalism

just every every like four or five years you just find a new one yeah just just keep re-upping like leo dicaprio perfect so so the the first the first day was uh good. There was no substantial police response that I saw. Police kind of left people alone in the forest. The march from Gresham Park was fine. And people got to spend a night in the woods again, which, you know, we had not had that many people in the woods in, like, months. And this is, it should be be said like camping and a music festival

but it's like relatively high risk because people have gotten significant charges just for camping in the woods in the past yes the very recent past part part some some of the warrants that that have been issued that justify the charges like domestic terrorism have included things such as sleeping in a hammock with someone else in the forest. And that's the reason why they're getting charged as a domestic terrorist. So yeah, it is a music festival. People are camping.

It's kind of chill. But also there's absolutely this kind of, this just like a ever-present kind of fear that despite what is being done being pretty normal and not in and of itself militant or radical, still the consequences from this state are always looming. Which kind of leads us to Sunday. Yeah. Which picks up exactly where we left off. so i i got there around noon on sunday i think and the first thing we see is a bouncy castle large large bouncy castle in front of

the music festival it has a big stop cop city banner um massive multi-colored bouncy castle uh people are having a pretty pretty good time yeah as soon as they finished setting up the bouncy castle it was it was uh filled and uh everyone uh i think there were about 75 100 people just set up uh on blankets around the stage initially i think in in the next few hours that definitely grew to there being hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people returning to the music festival for the second day. I mean, I think the march on Saturday

was anywhere between like, I saw estimates of anywhere between 500 to 1,000 people. Music festival seems to be like over 500 people. And then on the second day of the music festival, it slowly grew in size to again being hundreds and hundreds of people. And it's, yeah, it started off just kind of continuing on with the music continuing on with

uh people people having having nice times in the woods i i walked around the campsites and got had conversations with people talking about all sorts of anarchy related things and then they're slowly throughout the day um i think that this was posted on social media as well there was a plan for a rally at 5 p.m to meet on part of uh part of the field that the music festival was also happening on by the time that happened people people met up uh the group that that kind of uh converged was in a mix of black block camo block. So like people like covered head to toe in various, various camo print. Um, and they set off from, from the RC field where the music festival was at. So they left, they, they, what they went down

Boulder crest road to the section of the woods called the power line cut so to understand what is going on here you kind of have to understand some of the geography of the walani forest so we have like the walani people's park parking lot and that immediate kind of kind of campsite this is this is like the the eastern most part and then there's the rc field which is just like right right next to that to the west and then even west of that is Entrenchment Creek and Entrenchment Creek kind of divides up this this uh this dissection of the forest and then everything everything west of Entrenchment Creek is generally referred to as like the as the oldanta prison farm area and the the power line cut is is pretty close to to to the creek and to that that is kind of where this this this prison farm section

is and this is this is an area of the woods that cops have been more rigorous about policing more rigorous about surveilling more rigorous about having kind of constant surveillance and people on the ground. It's estimated that they're spending over $40,000 a day running security on this part of the woods. Yeah. Wow. Yeah.

See, and for that amount of money, they could hire like more people than are on the police force if they just used Fiverr. That's really the tactic they ought to be embracing. And I think if they had used Fiverr, they might have had enough people to counter the protesters. But to catch the overbloated police salaries, they only had like 20 people. Yeah, they did not have many. So this group set down Boulder Crest. They they marched up the power line cut.

They laid out like tire barricades in the street and then upon them marching on the power line cut after they arrived near the police surveillance setup

that we just mentioned some of the equipment somehow burst into flames. People have blamed shoddy construction. People have said that sometimes equipment just does that. But yes, no. So people set a whole bunch of police infrastructure on fire, set some construction equipment on fire that is being used to destroy sections of the forest where

they wanted to build cop city um police were repelled with stuff like rocks and fireworks the the cops that were stationed there very quickly retreated i think uh lots lots of stuff was set on fire there was the the surveillance tower was set on fire a bulldozer was set on fire well i mean it's it's winter people need fires to camp comfortably i understand a utv a utv was some kind of like like a like big like a big like trailer like storage unit thing was set on fire yes and the cops were very worried about that they didn't know if there was flammable material inside that you you wouldn't store flammable materials in an easily accessible area oh we shut down an entire interstate because we did

that a few years ago. We would in Atlanta. Atlanta would. All of Atlanta collectively. This happened. A thermal chopper from a thermal police helicopter was watching all of

this. Honestly, the footage is pretty pretty interesting it is it is it is worth it is worth discussing how this type of how this type of surveillance works um almost the same uh thermal cameras that are on the bayractar drones that turkey makes by the way it's it's it's it's pretty it's pretty fukos boomerang yeah oh absolutely no it's it's it's it's pretty it's pretty Foucault's boomerang. Oh, absolutely. No, it's it's it's pretty it's pretty frightening with their ability to track into to track individual people. I also think it's worth because there's video of the cops being pelted with stuff, including fireworks. I think it's worth noting that, like, while it is unpleasant to be pelted with the kind of stuff the cops were pelted with, you and I have both been pelted with numerous fireworks of similar size, and it is not a serious threat to life and limb.

No, no. We survived. It's modestly unpleasant. But the cops that were there were not very happy about it. They put out calls for officer in need of support and for all available units in the greater Atlanta area to converge on the forest um people who were who who marched to to this to this section of of the power line cut started to

disperse throughout the woods and i i was back by the road watching this from hundreds and hundreds of feet away because i i did not need to go up there that would not have been helpful in any way um but as this as this was happening a whole bunch of police cars zoomed by so i started following those cars i went back to the music festival um i i i met up with with some with some other other media people that i was that i was communicating with. And then I got a text message saying that a cop showed up in the parking lot of the Walani People's Park with an AR-15. I start making my way over. And then as I'm running across the music festival, I see a whole bunch of police at the parking lot for the music festival itself at the RC field. So I don't make my way over to the walani people spark

parking lot where there's the air 15 because instead i see way way more police closer closer to where i am so i i staged there uh minutes later police start running into into the music festival they start tackling seemingly anyone who's like by themselves and that they could like get their hands on it didn't it didn't seem incredibly targeted um it's this is something that will kind of i'll probably like discuss in more detail once we have slightly more hindsight

but a lot a lot of the arrests did not seem specifically targeted um in the bail hearings from just yesterday as of time of recording they said they were going after people who had mud on their clothing and like it it it rained a day before the music festival incredible detective work only only a true terrorist would have mud i think a month and a half ago ryan millsap tore up the parking lot so it rained the day before and anyone who walked through that

parking lot or the trail system had to walk through mud you're walking through but also people are just sitting on the dirt at the music festival like so yes i mean this might also include like useful advice for people in the future because if the movie predator was telling me the truth and it's never lied to me yet coating yourself entirely in mud makes thermal vision no longer function. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yeah.

So police started tackling people. It was definitely they were going after people who were like by themselves. And yeah, people with mud. The police alleged in their warrants that were read out at the bail hearing that they were going after people who had metal shields. And they said that almost everyone they arrested was arrested carrying a metal shield. Now, here's a few funny notes about that. There was not a single metal shield present at all. There were a few small plastic shields, not a single metal one.

And in looking through all of the footage of arrests that footage that i have that's been sent to nlg footage other people have had no one was arrested carrying a shield let alone a metal one um so a whole bunch of the the reasoning for these arrests is incredibly suspect uh police so raided once tackled arrested like five people carried them out they raided again and this is where they started launching tear gas into the forest um i got gassed decently bad uh it was not was not very fun first time i've gotten tear gassed in years uh old old old memories um and during this time a kiss from a dear friend. That was exactly what I was thinking. And I did not...

I brought gas masks to Atlanta, but I didn't bring them on Sunday because usually you don't bring gas masks to a music festival. Yeah. The thing about gas, the thing about tear gas and gas masks is that like,

when you're used to getting tear gassed, it's really easy to have them handy and get them on when like you're not used to being tear gassed. You're probably not going to bring it with you. Yeah. So people got people, some people in the forest got gassed pretty bad. I mean, the whole point was to sow confusion, make it so that people could not hide out in the woods. It was to make people scatter, run away so that they can be tackled and arrested um one person that was a national lawyers guild legal observer was arrested um they're also a lawyer at the southern poverty law center uh this oh boy this person was the only person arrested that i'm aware of that was released on bail um everybody else is being

held bet everyone everyone else is being held indefinitely that actually includes there was a second legal observer who was not wearing the hat uh so during the bail hearings yesterday their lawyer uh said that they were a legal observer but because they weren't wearing the hat and because they were not local they were not given bail it was reported there was like around like 35 arrests the night of. Yes. Initially, APD released a press release that said there were 35 detainees, which at the time they released it was a very interesting term because we thought 35 people had just been arrested and were on their way to jail. Yeah. But just about 45 minutes after that, 12 of those 35 were released. So this was very curious. There is a lot of theories going on for what has happened.

I'm going to I'm just going to relay what I heard when I was listening to the bail hearings yesterday. So a defense lawyer for some of the people arrested said yesterday during the bail hearing that to his understanding, the 12 people that were detained but not arrested were people from Atlanta. And the 23 people who got arrested and charged were not from Atlanta. And part of, so what police could be doing here is basically, if you're from Atlanta, well, we will ID you, but we're not going to actually arrest and charge you. But we will arrest and charge you if you're from out of state so they can continue this outside agitator narrative so they can say every single person arrested after this protest was from out of state. The cops and the media have done a lot of weird collusion regarding the events of Sunday night. They've conflated the location of the arrests a lot.

Police want to make this seem like they arrested people at a crime scene. They arrested people as they were torching construction equipment, which just isn't true. They arrested people, almost seemingly at random, at a festival that was like hundreds and hundreds of feet away. Like it was it is it is not an it is not an easy walk from from the power line cut to the music festival, because not only do you have to go through some like pretty, pretty harsh brush, some woods and like jump over a pretty large creek of the. Alternatively, you have to like walk down a road, which nobody did. So the police have done a police and, and, and like local media, like large, like large corporate local media have, have tried to make it seem like that this, that this music festival thing is just like a red herring that it's, it's not, it's not important, but a lot of the people that, that were,

that were, that were arrested seem arrested seemed to be people that were just enjoying this music festival. So 23 of them have been charged with domestic terrorism. Most of those people are being held indefinitely for now. The bail hearing is going to get appealed to the Superior Court. We'll see if that changes anything. The judge said that they were not presented with any evidence that these people did anything wrong, but they still decided to not give them bail. The reasoning for that was that the judge thought that people who did not have any local ties to the community could be a flight risk. And some people who did have local ties to the community, they said still were a

threat to the community somehow despite many of them not having any prior convictions not not having any prior arrests it's it it seemed it seemed pretty suspect during during during the during the bail hearing but that was that was most of sunday night um eventually police kind of surrounded and kettled the group of people that was still at the music festival hours after these arrests happened. They gave like a five-minute dispersal warning, and then they gave a 10-minute dispersal warning. Eventually, cops let most of the people who were gathered right in front of the stage leave. There was probably like 50 people at that point because people throughout the night were trying to leave um as as police were you know like raiding the forest some people were able to some people were just like let go and like were

able to leave others were detained almost arbitrarily it's it's it's it's hard to say so that that was the first two days of the week of action and it felt like a week what happened the next day so yeah the non-violent uh direct actions and then the monday the events oh no monday yeah because that was only that was only the second no monday is the city council meeting that we were in for eight hours yes yes so monday there was uh there was an interfaith coalition of clergy that held a press conference outside of City Hall, basically endorsing the Stop Cop City movement. Clark, how would you describe what happened? So there were a couple of elements to the clergy. We'll just call it an action.

The first thing was they presented a letter with over 200 other clergy members who had signed that denouncing cop city, calling for an independent investigation into the killing of Tortugita and calling for an independent investigation into the use of domestic terrorism charges to chill free speech. And then during that press conference, miko shaban uh called for land back and called for land back of in the wilani forest uh to the muskogee people to stored in um coordination with the legacy black residents of the area yeah so they were both like uh talking about the need to stop cop city but also providing a plan on how this land could be used this this land that is that is leased by the city it is on dekalb county after this press conference some of these people from the coalition uh gave public comment during the city council and that was most of the events on monday that i can recall oh there was the there was the purim in the forest that night

and that was that was very enjoyable that was kind of the first time people like tried to go back into the forest since since the sunday night raid um and i think that started to slowly boost morale again. Yeah, and I think we should talk about also, after the raid, there were a few really unique things that happened. There were a lot of people who didn't have housing and they were housed by local activists. The bus network was set up to transport people from the site

where everyone was getting arrested to somewhere safe. They moved breakfast off site to a different location. So there was a lot of work done in continuing the week of action and providing some sort of infrastructure for all of these people who had come into town and didn't have anywhere else to go. Yeah. Once again, the resiliency on display was impressive, and people's ability to adapt to the ever-evolving situation was tested, and people adapted pretty well. Tuesday, there was starting to be, like, typical nonviolent direct actions happening throughout downtown.

A whole bunch of banner drops happened around highways and interstates around Atlanta. People were, uh, detained for, uh, uh, uh,

three people were briefly detained at the site of, of, of a banner drop. Um, but throughout, throughout the day, there was people handing out letters to people, to folks like the,

uh, the CEO of Nor norfolk southern norfolk southern uh alan shaw and then similar similar types of like non-violent direct action were happening uh a small a small march was led from woodruff park to at&t and georgia pacific um there was like maybe maybe 50 i think 50 is an accurate number 50 people gathered to march well there were 50 marchers gathered and then like 120 police officers in the in the uh in the surrounding area massive massive police presence police caused a huge a huge disruption to to downtown um that's something we've seen kind of ever since the sunday raid

the police have been incredibly heavy-handed in their response to every single thing whether that be people handing out flyers or whether that be you know uh you know people at people at a music festival um a whole a whole bunch of police were mobilized to stay night near the forest like a hundred again like 120 cops at least three or four different agencies uh bearcats helicopters uh i think they're it's it's unclear what they were doing um this is something that we might we might speculate further on once we have hindsight when I when I put together my my kind of my kind of a more more intense deep dive. And then then today, the thing that me and Clark just got back from, how do you want to explain today's today's events? So today was a lot of leaflet handing out and marching.

It was a smaller group than the uh march yesterday i would say there was like 20 25 people yeah like it started off being like only only about like a dozen um and it slowly grew to like maybe like two or three dozen but yeah small small small group of people yeah small group of people and when they met at noon they they met and they broke into three different groups yeah and so the group that we followed was just uh they walked a little northward and started passing out flyers at the petri center marta station they went to all three entrances and each uh group warranted its own police uh surveillance unit massive police surveillance unit was following everybody around. There was a SWAT vehicle parked right outside where these people were handing out flyers.

There was like 50 to 100 cops flanking people from different sides. Eventually, all of the smaller groups that kind of branched off converged again. eventually all the all of the smaller groups that kind of branched off converged again and police then gave a dispersal warning to people who were on the sidewalk on a sidewalk outside of a hard rock cafe who were handing out flyers okay well i mean look in that case they may have been protecting people because you want you want to get folks as far away from the hard rock cafe as possible garrison someone might go and that's a real dangerous i was i was campaigning for all of the press gathered to meet afterwards at the hard rock cafe it was between the hard rockers on that one so so garrison i watched you at the rainforest cafe you barely made it through that dessert.

The Hard Rock Cafe is even worse. That was different. I was, I, I did, I did get food poisoning from that Rainforest Cafe. I will, I will continue to claim. And I woke up with a headache for another, an inexplicable reason. Not because you were carrying around a bottle of bourbon throughout, throughout Las Vegas. bourbon and a thc yogurt or a milkshake or whatever yeah yeah so so cops gave a dispersal warning to people who were not not in fact blocking a sidewalk were simply handing out flyers you people were still walking everywhere um so they basically moved to a different section of the sidewalk and cops kind of left him alone um nearby a group of indigenous activists from the indian collective

i believe is what it's uh it's actually muskogee nation the muskogee nation uh went went to a a meeting that the mayor of atlanta andre dickens was having nearby uh clark i think you know slightly more about what happened here than i do yeah so several of the indigenous activists uh entered so where he was having this meeting uh is a is a mall in true atlanta fashion um so they entered the mall and they they found where he was in the building and uh so miko colonel shaban delivered a letter essentially evicting the city of atlanta from the wilani forest uh so they got in without the police noticing um and then the moment they got out a large squad of police mobilized they were they were not happy

how close people got to the mayor so at this point we don't know what the full reaction of that's going to be uh we do know that the mayor ran away from accepting the letter and then one of i believe they handed it to one of the mayors. I do love a mayor running. There are few more beautiful sights than a mayor running away. No. More mayors need to spend time fleeing from their peoples. So, this episode comes out, I think, like late Thursday night, Friday morning. Thursday afternoon. So, we are recording this Wednesday.

There's plans for Thursday. There's going to be a large march at 6 p.m. I believe there's going to be a youth rally at Saturday. And then on Sunday morning, Manuel Teran, Torte Guita's family, is holding a memorial for Torte in the Wolani Forest where I've been told that they're going to spread towards ashes inside the woods. And that is kind of the last thing that's going to happen. And so those are the things that have not yet took place.

But we've explained in pretty excruciating detail some of what's happened so far. So yeah, that's kind of the current state of on the ground at the week of action um i guess robert do you have any questions for uh clark as someone who's kind of been on the ground in atlanta for years covering soft puff city yeah i mean i'm curious what over the last few weeks like you've you've had some direct clashes with the police that have ended in a variety of ways. Broadly speaking, is there anything that you're you're kind of leaning towards? This doesn't work. And is there anything you're kind of leaning towards? This seems to work really well. So there is something to be said for the more aggressive actions, and I think they serve their purpose. And there was definitely something to be said for the more aggressive actions. And I think they serve their purpose.

And there was definitely something to be said for the forest occupation. It continued the movement until there was a groundswell of support. So at this point, I think the actions have sort of switched gear into more nonviolent direct actions, as we're seeing this week. And I think that those actions will continue. I'm sure the anarchist contingent will continue to do some other more aggressive, shall we say, direct actions. Yeah. We have a large swath of different avenues of engagement that the movement has developed, and each of them has their place. And if they're used in the proper place, they are used to great effect.

I think one kind of change that has happened, we've seen a bit of a decrease in the types of, like, nighttime sabotage, like, the sort of, like, attack and disappear tactics that was really popular in, like, the early days of the occupation, of, like, the forced occupation of people living and camping out in the woods. And, you know, because, like, the last two much more like militant actions were done during the daytime during like large rallies there was there was the protest on saturday after tortuguita was killed where a cop car was torched then there was this then there was this protest on on sunday night um that people that people marched people marched to the to the power line cut and then the police started doing repression at the music festival um but like those things were happening like during like before the sun was setting um so i think that that is one interesting change i feel like some

people are definitely thinking about this especially because there's been 23 people arrested during this week of action and they're being held in jail uh and we have no idea when they're going to be able to have the option of getting out so i think this is something this is something that people are thinking about in terms of how they are how they are doing direct action and how how their involvement in direct action will affect people who did not participate like with people at people at the music festival who who were not who were not present at the power line cut uh uh direct action and how some of those people are undoubtedly now facing like punishment from from the state um

so i feel like there is definitely going to be some discussion about that. I've seen discussion about this threat in the city. But I mean, the week of action is still ongoing. It is only Wednesday. It feels like it's been a month, but it's only been like three or four days. But I mean, people are in this for the long haul. Um, we're, we're starting to see more solidarity from, from groups that are less militant, like with the interfaith coalition, right? Like you're not, I don't think any of like the priests, the priests or the clergy were there throwing Molotov cocktails, um, at the, at the surveillance tower.

Yet the very next day they're standing outside of City Hall and demanding the same things that the people throwing maltabs are demanding. And it should be noted that they didn't denounce that. It is solidarity across the movement. Absolutely. They talked about how them as clergy, you know, and in the history of Abrahamic religions, how many people associated

and are the figureheads of such religions have been killed by the state, and how often these religions have been in opposition to the state during their formative years. I don't know, I just can't think of any prominent Christian figures or Jewish figures who were murdered by the state. That's just not – nothing's coming up right now. None. Zero. Yeah, no, I grew up Christian, and I can't really remember anyone. so far uh there will there will certainly be be be a more uh a more detailed deep dive with like analysis and like you know a narrative through line in the coming weeks as we're actually able to like look back on what has happened um interviews with more people who are who are like actually involved interviews with like organizers protesters force defenders um but people despite the massive amount of repression that we've seen on Sunday,

the increasingly heavy-handed response police have had to both direct action, that includes property destruction and nonviolent direct action, despite all that, people are still continuing to be in the woods. They are not letting it scare them away. The woods are still a place that the people are able to be in the woods they are not letting it scare them away uh the woods are still a place that the people are able to like exist in uh they're still able to to live live together in the woods stay in the woods the the cops don't like being in the woods no there's a real fear that's why you're trying to tear them down. Yes. The cops are still very much scared of the woods. And people have not let the violence shown by police

scare them away from wanting to stay in the forest. So that is something that continued. Every day there's been guided tours throughout the forest showing off the different types of plants, the different sections of the woods, different old campsites that people have slept at. Um, yeah, it's, uh, it's been, it's been pretty nice to see with the, with just the incredible level of resilience.

Well, I know that, that I, I am, and I'm sure many people are kind of watching this from a distance, and very happy to see that folks are continuing to adapt and endure and take punches. It's unfortunate that the punches keep coming, but the ability of the community to take those hits and continue iterating and adapting remains tremendously impressive. I think kind of the note that makes most sense to end on is to say that this is still a winnable fight. Absolutely. And that is a sentiment that literally everyone on the ground shares. Like, we are at a point where like people keep saying like at this point, they have to win. Like,

like there, there is no other option than winning. Um, and people have the ability to win this. This is a winnable fight. Um, and that is, that is something that people continue,

continue to talk about. And that, that is why people are fighting so hard. That's why people are, are, are risking getting these ridiculous charges because they know that this fight is both worth it and they know this fight is winnable like these are these the actions and the risks that people are the actions and the risks that people are taking are not for nothing like they they know

that it is impactful and there is a very good chance that this this will lead to victory and will lead to the forest being preserved to being protected and being able to continue continue to grow it does have a feeling of inevitability that they will win that that we're we will win i don't know which the appropriate yeah way to say that is as a journalist, but the feeling is that that cop city will not be built. And that is something that's shared, I think, by all of the activists in this city. And I guess the last thing I'll say is Atlanta Solidarity Fund, if you've been listening to any of our coverage, you should already know what it is. If you've been listening to any of our coverage, you should already know what it is.

You can find the Solidarity Fund at atlsolidarity.org. You can donate there to help the forced offenders and anyone who's arrested in relation to this with legal expenses, lawyers, that sort of thing. Yeah. Well, that's going to do it for this episode. And we'll have more from you, Garrison, and more from Atlanta soon. Until next time, everybody, keep an eye on shit. 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,

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