It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 77

Episode Date: April 1, 2023

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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. Ah, welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about world stuff falling apart, putting it back together, all that good stuff. Today, we're actually covering something that's at the intersection of all of that, both how fucked up things are and the attempt to make them more just, more equitable, less nightmarish.

We're talking about war crimes, the International Criminal Court, and most specifically, the warrant that was just issued for Vladimir Putin's arrest, which is something you've probably heard about on the Internet. People have various takes on this. In order to kind of talk about what's actually been done, what it actually means, and sort of the history of attempts to hold the leaders of nations to account for war crimes. I want to talk to Nick Waters. Nick, welcome to the show. Hi, Rob. Nick, you and I have some connections outside of this. First off, you're here on the show today because you work in an investigatory, investigative capacity. Geez, can you tell that I'm not used to waking up this early? For Bellingcat, where we both work together,

your focus has been primarily on war crimes. You've been covering Ukraine lately, but you have a pretty wide purview and a pretty wide base of experience, including crimes in Libya. And yeah, I wanted to talk to you a little bit. First off, welcome to the show. Thanks very much, mate. In honor of Behind the Bastards, I have the largest knife I could find in this place next to me. It's not quite machete, but yeah, I mean, I thought I should have one just

in case. That's good. I've got, well, yeah, I actually am more or less knifeless here. I do have a 9mm in the desk, but somewhat more limited span of uses. Now, Nick, you and I have shared one of the strongest bonds that two men can share, which is eating some really delicious arepas. But we also share an interest in the somewhat difficult history of attempts from our species to kind of grapple with the nature of war crimes, of acts of genocide, and hold people to account for them. I kind of think before we get into what's happened with Putin, we should talk about what the ICC is and what its history comes from. Because this,

it actually dates back a little over 100 years, attempts to make the ICC. I think 1919 was the first convention in which a number of European nations were like, boy, we should really have some sort of court put together to attempt to hold leaders and individuals to account for committing war crimes. Yeah. I'm not that familiar with the kind of the very long history of attempts at international justice. Suffice to say that so far it hasn't worked out quite how I think everyone expected it to. That is the TLDR. International Justice Good Idea hasn't happened yet.

Pretty much. Yeah, I mean, there have been lots of agreements. Obviously, kind of everyone knows the Geneva Convention, etc. Lots of other agreements about how not to kill people in the most horrific ways possible in war. And, you know, as part of that, like Rome statute, which created the ICC, yeah, was agreed in 1998. So, yeah, there's been kind of like 100 years or so of efforts before the ICC actually got here.

I should probably also, I need to say, like before we kind of get going on anything, I'm not a lawyer, which is super important because I know all the lawyers out there will be, like, angry about it. So, Nick, I want to talk about what, in particular, this decision means, because there's been like, obviously, I think it's fair to say in the immediate term, probably nothing like it's not like, uh, the international, um, uh, uh, warrant agents are going to come out and arrest Vladimir in, uh, in the Kremlin or in his, his mansion that you see fake Photoshopped images of on, on Twitter all the time. Um, but yeah. Yeah. Uh, yeah. So in kind of like day-to-day stuff, yeah, it doesn't have that much of an effect. Um, so Russia doesn't recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC.

So it's not like, you know, the FSB are going to storm into the Kremlin and arrest Putin and like export him to the Hague in a, you know, diplomatic bag or something. That's, that's not going to happen. Um, but in other ways, it's's not gonna happen um but in other ways it's it's a big deal in other ways um and also it's a for me like really the biggest uh thing about this is that it's an indicator about how seriously the icc is taking taking this war uh international justice moves so slowly uh you're talking like measured in decades. So to have an arrest warrant out in one year is like a really big deal for the ICC at least.

And this is because, if I'm not mistaken, both Putin and the woman, because he's not the only one, by the way, that's been charged by the ICC. There's also, I'm going to attempt to get her name right, Maria Lvova Belova, who is the Commissioner for Children's Rights in Russia. And part of the reason why this has happened so rapidly is that both Putin and Maria have made pretty unequivocal statements about the removal of Ukrainian children from their families, forced deportation into Russia and adoption by Russian families, which is that is a war crime. That is an act of genocide. Yeah. So I think the actual crime is unlawful deportation or the actual citation is unlawful deportation, or the actual citation is unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children, which, yes, could be arguably, and again, at this point,

emphasised not a lawyer, I think can feed into the kind of accusations of genocide. And so it's a pretty big charge to level against Putin and this commissioner this early on. I think it's also like one of the easier ones as well i like in the view of the russian states this is a you know wonderful thing they're doing they are essentially kind of rescuing these children from uh and you can't see it but i'm doing air quotes right now like ukrainian nazis yeah educating them and bring them up as as russian children um and you know they're they're taking these children away from their their culture uh Ukrainian Nazis, educating them and bringing them up as Russian children.

And, you know, they're taking these children away from their culture, their families and their country to basically erase who they are, which plays a quite big part in the accusation that this could be part of an act of genocide. Yeah. Yeah. And it's interesting to me. Yeah, and it's interesting to me, Lvova Belova has kind of described this, like her justification of this, and I think the Russian state's justification of this is both that, yeah, the Ukrainians are Nazis. And also, I've heard claims from her that like, well, we're removing children from a dangerous war zone, which, you know, that begs the question, why is it a dangerous war zone right now, among other things. dangerous war zone right now, among other things. But one of the things that's interesting to me is that Lvov Obolova is not just part of the state apparatus of carrying out this act, but has also thanked Putin publicly for making it possible for her to adopt a child from Donbass, which is one of the Russian occupied parts of Ukraine. So yeah, it is kind of interesting, the stuff that had to fall into place for this

to be able to happen in such an expeditious manner. Yeah, I think it helps that they view, or the Russian state views, this act as something that is beneficial. And so they want to say, hey, look, we're rescuing these children. And you can see kind of similar you've seen similar vibes with like uh uh basically stealing ukrainian uh cultural heritage uh from uh like museums and stuff like that they or the russian state believes you know that they are doing the right thing like we are very proud that we have taken these um objects away and we are saving them again from ukrainian nazis um and so they like make public pronouncements about it they say yeah we're doing the thing it's awesome isn't it yeah um and so the

result is quite a lot of evidence that they're doing these pretty bad things um and so yeah there's there's quite a lot of evidence there there are statements from uh this commissioner for children from putin uh it's pretty clear what's happening. So it's quite a, I think it's quite an interesting charge to bring. Yeah. And we're just for, so people are aware of the scale president Zelensky, if Ukraine at least has says that his country has recorded about 16,000 cases of forcible deportations of children. That's not like a final number, just like the, the death tallies and whatnot are not final numbers. But that is the Ukrainian state's estimate of how many kids have been taken away,

which is a, I mean, that's a pretty staggering number. I mean, yeah, that's a huge number of children. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's an absolutely huge number of children. And then you have to account, you know, that it's not just the children that are the victims here. It's also their families who are the victims. So we're talking about like a knock on effect with, you know, that it's not just the children that are the victims here, it's also their families who are the victims. So we're talking about like a knock on effect with, you know, tens of thousands of people who've been affected by these acts, if not more than that. Yeah, I think probably, I mean, 16,000 children, probably higher than the tens of thousands in terms of family members and whatnot who are impacted by this. In terms of what technically this means for Putin, there's, I think, 120 signatory nations to the Rome Statute. Within those countries, theoretically,

if Putin or if Maria were to travel there, they would theoretically be arrested if they were to set foot in one of those signatory nations. Yes, so theoretically theoretically it's doing a lot of walking there yeah um doing a lot of heavy lifting uh okay so yeah in theory if putin travels to any of these nations he should be arrested but some of the nations don't recognize or believe that heads of state uh are basically immune and i imagine there'll be several of those signatories who will likely refuse to extradite Putin should Mr. Putin visit them.

And this has actually happened before. So I think it was South Africa refused to extradite a former head of state. I think it was the leader of South Sudan, but I can't remember. Yeah, wasn't it Omar Bashir of south sudan but yeah wasn't it wasn't it omar bashir yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah i believe it was omar bashir yeah so he managed to travel around um and was not arrested and extradited as theoretically should have been uh however

um it still gives mr putin and especially security detail some headaches because they're still going to have to check with these states when they go and visit. You know, hey, are you going to like arrest him? Yeah. Which is not like a call you usually have to ask. And then if they were planning to arrest him, you know, they might not tell them that they're planning to arrest them. So there's always going to be at the moment, there's still like a cost applied to Mr. Putin in terms of traveling to these countries that would still, you know, might still like consider the ICC jurisdiction over heads of state to be lacking. Yeah. Yeah. So it's still there's still like some some cost applied there. If I'm remembering correctly correctly there have been three

sitting heads of state that have faced icc charges in office we talked about omar bashir um momar kaddafi uh and now putin is is number three um which is if we're if we're looking at the history of the last you know i mean just since the establishment of the ICC, fewer than the number of world leaders who have been involved, allegedly, in crimes against humanity, I think fair to say. Which brings us to the question of like, what does it mean to be a signatory to Rome, to the ICC? What does it mean to actually be bound by any of these rules? Because both Russia and the United States, I was looking at a map earlier that kind of lists out every country's relationship to the ICC and both Russia and the United States are in the position of like having endorsed aspects of the ICC and then not signed on.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Again, not a lawyer, not that familiar with how the icc works in in practice uh but basically if you sign up to the icc you have to uh agree to enforce their judgments you know including arrest warrants uh which again is something like the us and uh

us and russia haven't done uh the idea that basically the icc marks itself as marks itself basically thinks of itself as a court of last resort. So they're not going to be out there prosecuting individual soldiers, or very unlikely to be prosecuting individual soldiers who've, say, executed 10 prisoners of war in a ditch. That's something that is unlikely that the ICC is going to prosecute. They are going for high-end commanders, people who've carried out extremely severe acts, and especially in cases where a state is not able

to carry out such a prosecution. So, for example, take the UK. So UK has, in theory uh conducted investigations into uh allegations of war crimes in iraq conducted by its troops um that was i had so the iraq uh historic allegations team um it was pretty shambolic it was extremely shambolic it was a really bad investigation uh the uh not just for the victims who basically no one really ever got justice from it yeah very very few people ever got justice from it but also the people who are actually accused uh were sometimes like investigated multiple multiple times um but because the uk made some kind of effort to investigate it

even if it was absolutely shambolic um it's unlikely that the ICC is ever actually going to investigate UK soldiers for war crimes in Iraq. Because in theory, that should be the UK carrying out that investigation, and in theory, they have carried out that investigation. It's completely inadequate. But yeah, that's the justification. That's incredibly interesting to me, because it does seem like – on one hand, I can see the logic. And this is part of why the United States, my country's justification for why we are not a signatory, is that the Constitution does not allow us to agree to have our citizens tried for crimes that they are being tried for in the United States by an international court, something along those lines. and abide by any aspect of its rulings as if it does not overly interfere with their national sovereignty, including their ability to prosecute their own soldiers for war crimes. On the other hand, the state of affairs, as you've just related, the state of affairs is inadequate,

right? Like that is the system that has been developed is not adequate to trying or achieving justice in a case like the Iraq war, in which there were a lot of crimes committed that people have not been punished for. And I mean, obviously, you have to kind of marry that to the fact that the attempt to do something at all in this way is extremely new, as we've said, like there are, we have like, most of the people who work on my show are older than the ICC. And so that's still an achievement. I don't know. I'm wondering what you see as the positive future for attempts to hold individuals and

nations to account here. Is it continuing to grind like this? Or do you see a more positive opening coming forward as a result of particularly the attention that all of these war crimes in Ukraine have gotten? I mean, I think it will continue to grind. When you look at the history of atrocities that have taken place in conflict over the last, you know, like 20 years, it's just absolutely huge. Yeah. You know, there's like atrocity upon atrocity upon atrocity. And the ICC can only investigate a tiny number of those.

The reality is that only a tiny fraction of those atrocities will ever actually be investigated and the victims face justice. That is the reality of the situation. The ICC does, you know, carry out investigations and does carry out prosecutions. you know carry out investigations and does carry out prosecutions um but again we're talking like the most grave crimes possible uh and usually you know really senior people who often are able to evade those kind of prosecutions i think there's a better chance of uh some kind of justice at like a national level with uh universal jurisdiction um so recently uh universal jurisdiction was used in germany to prosecute two uh syrian officers who basically carried out torture against uh syrians during during the revolution and those those two syrian officers basically fled to fled to germany and

were later prosecuted there and so it's not just the ICC, it's also universal jurisdiction. It is, you know, tribunals, there's other stuff there. But again, like this is only a tiny fraction of everything that gets investigated. I've been reading, I'm going through several different books about Joseph Mengele most recently, and including some accounts from, you know, Jewish doctors who were enslaved and who were forced to work at Auschwitz. And I've been thinking a lot about the different kinds of war crimes, right? You have a group of Australian or US or British soldiers in Afghanistan or Iraq who commit a massacre, kill a number of civilians, and that is a war crime. But there's also the kinds of war crime, that is a war crime that is the result of individuals taking individual actions, right?

As opposed to the actions of a state and the actions that are a result of years worth of directed cultural efforts, which I think is part a way to look at what the Russian state's attitude towards Ukrainians are and a lot of the crimes that have been committed over there. The denial of the existence of Ukrainians as a people is deeper and more complex than the kind of crime that a soldier might commit in a moment of passion and fundamentally different from that. And it's one of those things, if you, like, for example, to go back to Mengele, if you're trying to judge Mengele

for his crimes, you have to judge the entire German medical establishment, which joined the Nazi party in higher numbers than any other group in the country, and which was directly implicated in how Auschwitz functioned

and why it worked the way it did. And there's realistically, like most of the doctors, Mengele, there were attempts to punish him. Obviously, he escaped. But the doctors who educated him, who taught him, who inculcated him in the attitudes that were directly responsible for the crimes that he committed, were never punished. And legally, I don't know how you would punish people for that. How do you punish someone for promulgating ideas, like the ideas that Ukrainians are not a people, which leads to a lot of the violence that you're seeing over there?

Like how do you like there's not realistically, at least in my understanding of the law, a way to punish that. But it is a factor in these crimes. Yeah, the creation of a culture absolutely is. The creation of a culture absolutely is. A key, like a really good example of this is the radio station Rwanda. Yes. Who, you know, broadcast basically what were effectively caused to genocide. And I think they were actually ended up being prosecuted by the ICC.

I think actually as well. I believe, yeah, I believe there were at least attempts. Yeah, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Yeah. I mean, it's one thing when you're talking about like direct incitements to violence. It's another when you're talking about like kind of the stuff that Dugan is responsible for, which is absolutely a factor. The kind of ideas that he is one of the people who is kind of promulgated under the direction of Putin and others in the Russian state are like a factor in the behavior that we've seen over there. But it also is harder to kind of qualify it as a direct call for war crimes in some cases, although some of the stuff Dugan has said, I think you could argue is

certainly like a direct call to violence. Yeah, I mean, like, yeah, well, it's really difficult to kind of get that to raise that to the threshold of prosecution uh it's really difficult thing to do especially if you are external to the culture that is or to the organization that is creating that internal culture and I'm yeah like very familiar with this kind of stuff having uh for for those of you of your listeners who might not be familiar I was an army officer. So quite a big part of my job was making sure that the culture within my platoon was a beneficial, good culture in which the blokes would knock off and murder people. And you read about stories like My Lie.

There's a really good example for this book called Black Hearts, this American plundering in Iraq. Yeah. And it's really clear where basically institutional culture has completely failed or has created a culture in which basically committing atrocities or murder is either, you know, mildly ignored or actively encouraged. murder is either uh you know mildly ignored or actively encouraged and yeah that that culture is something that is really difficult to police um because it really has to come from within the institution itself uh you know unless you just completely destroy the institution itself which is also another option which is what the canadians did with their airborne regiment after some of their guys uh in somalia like roasted uh some poor guy alive on a fire jesus um the canadians basically just disbanded the entire airborne regiment they basically said

like the culture in this regiment is not um it's it's too far gone basically uh we're going to disband this entire regiment which is what they did so you can do that too but it's quite difficult thing to do kind of the last thing i wanted to go over is the uh the most recent the response of the russian state to these warrants um one of them has been they've announced that they are in carrying out an investigation into the icc which um is is it you know um i'm sure as meaningful as uh as the sentence I just said and I the other thing that they've done is sort of threaten

to launch a hypersonic warhead at the Hague which I mean like it's not he does have a lot of missiles so it's you can't like completely disregard a threat from a nuclear

armed nation to launch missiles at the Hague. But it's also just, threats like these are not completely, and in fact, there's a provision in, what is it called? Let me double check on the name here. I'm so bad at remembering the names of laws. The American Service Members Protection Act that does theoretically allow the use of military force by the US if American citizens are extradited. So this is a much cruder version of that. If you arrest us, we'll nuke the egg. But it does, it's one of those things we're laughing about it but if you if you were to go back 10 years and imagine that threat being leveled like even by putin it would seem like farcical um i guess it is farcical but we're here yeah it's it's it's completely insane isn't

it yeah i i i mean like how do you respond to that like right like i'm gonna i'm gonna hypersonic the hay yeah the hay response it's just like i know it's mad like when if you go to the hay uh like the icc you know you'll have like the security guards sat there with their nine-mil pistol and they're buzzing through that kind of stuff. And the idea of them trying to fight off a Delta Force assault on the ICC in the case where an American soldier is hit,

it's farcical. But then the idea that they could do anything because a hypersonic missile is 30 seconds away from obliterating the entirety of the Ic you gotta really you gotta really lead the missile i mean the only kind of benefit i suppose is that like the icc is on the outskirts of the hague yeah so they would irradiate uh actually quite a bit of residential area and then a lot of sand dunes yeah yeah yeah i mean one of the upsides is that if russia does nuke the hague we will have deeper concerns than what to do about international

criminal law in the wake of that including taking sufficient iodine pills which i'm not by i mean people everyone gets is antsy about enough today i don't think this is like a realistic threat. I don't think it's likely that the Russian state is going to nuke the ICC. Unfortunately, part of why it's unlikely is that it's unlikely that Putin is going to face direct justice for his actions unless he is somehow overthrown, right? Like that is realistically the only case by which he winds up in front of the ICC is if he is forced out of power. Yeah, I mean, like when this news first broke, there were some people who were saying, hey, is this a big deal at all? Like we'll never, you know, Putin will never see justice. And like, yeah, he might, he probably won't.

But on the off chance, it's always good to have that there. You know, when Slobodan Milosevic, you know, stepped down as president of Serbia, you know, I think there was a law which meant that he couldn't actually be extradited to the ICC. So everyone said the same thing, you know, he's never going to face justice. And then he ended up at the ICC. And if there is some kind of coup coup or something you know not now maybe in the years time two years time 15 years time you know putin is a very valuable bargaining chip yeah and

being able to send him to the hague uh would be an extremely powerful message of uh hey, guys, we're entering a new era. Like the Russian state doesn't want to be associated with what happened under Putin's rule. Here you go, have Mr. Putin put him on trial. And, you know, he becomes like quite an important bargaining chip. And so, yeah, the chance of it happening is like pretty small, but it's still there. It's still worth doing this.

And that's, I think, where I land is, So yeah, the chance of it happening is like pretty small, but it's camp function. And these guys rebelled. They blew up a bunch of stuff. And the whole attempt, this whole attack that cost hundreds of them their lives, was in the hope that one of them would get out and tell the story of what had been happening inside. And when you think about it that way, what historically, and not just going back to the Holocaust, but the entire long history of human war crimes, which go back as far as war, the desire of victims to have someone be aware of what has happened to them, I think makes this a positive move in the middle of an incredibly dark chapter in human history and an incredibly awful war. The fact that this is happening at all as flawed, as imperfect as the whole, and it's, you know, people keep bringing up things like the inequities

of the prosecution of like the United States and Israel for a number of different acts of their states and militaries. But like, even given all that, the fact that this is happening at all is, I think, meaningful. I do think it matters. It's definitely meaningful. Like it's very much like a statement of intent from the ICC and especially from the new prosecutor, the ICC, Kareem Khan, who came in last year. And he's kind of like, as far as I can tell, come in and shaken a few cages. And it's a very clear statement of intent from both himself and from the court as well. Yeah. Well, I think that's as good a note as any to end on.

Nick, do you want to direct anybody towards a place they can donate or a place they can go to read up more on this or other issues of international criminal justice? I mean, yeah, I'd direct people to Be bellingcat.com which is who i work for uh my twitter is n underscore waters 89 uh i don't really go on twitter that much anymore something happened there i don't know me uh uh yeah but i post there occasionally every so often uh but yeah bellingcat.com would be where I'd recommend. Um, that's where like our work is anyway. Yeah. Well, Nick Waters, thank you so much for coming on, uh, for, for lending your expertise here.

Uh, that's going to do it for us here. It could happen here. Uh, sorry for using the word here so many times. Uh, have a lovely day, everybody. 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 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.

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on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. one of the former episodes because we are recording this in the immediate wake within a couple of hours of America's, the United States of America's most recent mass shooting in Tennessee at a Christian school called Covenant. You know, obviously there are way too many mass shootings in the United States for us to cover each one. We are talking about this now in a timely manner because there's a bunch of very specific disinformation coming out about it, and particularly disinformation that is part of the broader targeting by the right wing of transgender people. So I'm going to, for the first part of this, I'm going to turn things over to

Garrison, who has been doing specific research on the shooter and what we can actually verify at this moment about their identity. Upfront, I'll say that the police have identified this person as Audrey Hale, 28, of Nashville. NBC News notes, quote, who said she identifies as transgender. Again, this is not quite right. We'll talk about it. But the right wing is obviously running with the idea that this is a transgender shooter and part of a series, they will argue, of transgender attacks on Christians. We're going to talk about the right wing sort of analysis of this later. But first, I'm going to, again, push to Garrison, who will talk about what we actually can verify about this person and about this shooting at this point. Yeah. Just as a note here throughout this episode, there will be some what is probably misgendering because we're going to be quoting from a lot of other people's statements.

And also there will be mentions of like a few slurs against trans people just because we are quoting from a whole a whole bunch of stuff. And some of the details regarding the gender of the person in question is relatively unknown at the time. So just as a heads up. Okay, so yeah, I'm just going to go over a few things regarding what we know happened, what the school was, because I think that might play into it, but that will kind of veer on speculation. So we're just going to limit it towards what we actually know. And then we're going to attempt to avoid speculation on this episode. Yes. So someone carrying multiple firearms entered a private Christian school in Nashville this Monday morning and shot and killed three nine-year-old students and three adult staff members in their 60s, including the head of the school, Dr. Catherine Kanz. Police initially

claimed the shooter was a teenager, but minutes later changed course and described them as a 28 year old woman from Nashville. It was then reported pretty quickly in NBC News that the shooter was identified as Audrey Hale, 28 of Nashville, and the police chief said she identifies as transgender. NBC has another article out there that says Audrey Hale, 28, who police say was a transgender woman, quote unquote. So we will get into that here in a sec. But the shooter entered the Covenant School via a side door, according to the Metro Nashville Police spokesperson, Don Aaron, and was armed with at least two, quote unquoteunquote, assault-style rifles and a handgun, unquote. It looks like it's an AR rifle and an AR pistol, and then also a handgun. Nashville Police Chief John Drake has said, quote,

At one point, she was a student at that school, but we are unsure of what year, unquote, and that Hale shot through the door to gain entry into the school. The shooter made their way through the first and second floors of the school, firing multiple shots before Hale was killed by police on the school's second floor. So it's assumed by the police at this point, and they may have evidence that's not been made public yet, that the shooter did attend the school. But they are unsure for exactly how long and what years specifically. I think it's important to mention a few things about this school just because this is a very unique mass shooting in a lot of ways. Mass shootings at private schools, let alone private Christian schools, is very rare. And this is also a preschool through sixth grade school.

So the Covenant School is a preschool through sixth grade private Christian school founded in 2001. And it shares the same location as Covenant Presbyterian Church. The website states it has 33 teaching faculty and around 200 enrolled students per year with tuition at around $16,000 a year. $16,000 a year. According to the school's website, quote, the Covenant School is a ministry of Covenant Presbyterian Church created to assist Christian parents and the church by providing an exceptional academic experience founded upon and informed by the Word of God. So, I mean, honestly, this is something that's pretty similar to the type of Christian school that I grew up in. It's the school that's attached to this church. I also had around 200 fellow students. So this seems to be relatively pretty similar and not super uncommon for this type of private Christian school.

That's kind of all I'm going to get into that here. I mean, I've looked around the school's website a lot, and it seems pretty basic in terms of these types of Presbyterian private Christian schools. But now we're going to start getting into some of this stuff regarding the identity of the shooter. And a lot of this because there's a lot of information going around. NBC News is now claiming that the shooter is a transgender woman. I don't think that's fully accurate, but we're going to. They're quoting directly from the cop. Yeah, this is to be fair

I mean partly NBC's fault because they should have done as much research as you did Garrison but they are quoting the police the gist is that the police identified this as a transgender woman they have a manifesto we don't know what's in the manifesto

but yeah please continue Gar and I guess one other thing that's reported is after police said this was a transgender woman, they also talked about how Hale had conducted surveillance and prepared for the attack with detailed maps. And then also the aforementioned manifesto. But yes, we're going to move on to some of the stuff that we do know using just basic open source research stuff. So there is a LinkedIn page for someone named Audrey Hale in the Nashville area. They list a lot of various illustration jobs they've had for the past few years. And they do have a little pronoun marker next to their name that says he, him.

Hale appears to have had a website for their graphic design portfolio called AH Illustrations, so just their initials, AH. They have posts in there being tagged from 2023, from 2022, so it's been at least up for two years. I tried to do metadata stuff on some of their artwork. I did not really get much in terms of what year they were posted, but we may be able to learn more about that later. The website has an about page that introduces the person as Audrey Hale, but it also directs you to a now-vanished Instagram page called at creative.aden. So we're going to go through some of the rights initial stuff a bit later, because they were already calling this a transgender shooting before any information came out at all as a part of like the Sam Hyde joke. Yeah, for reference, Sam Hyde is kind of a right wing comedian who had a show on Adult Swim for the last several years.

It has been a meme to every time there's a shooting. There's a specific picture of Sam Hyde holding a rifle that people will post and say, I'm getting this picture that, you know, this was the shooter at whatever. It's been at Parkland. It's been at El Paso. It's been at Uvalde. Every single shooting this happens. And with this shooting, someone photoshopped some lady's head onto Sam Hyde and claimed immediately that it was a transgender person. This also ties into the Highland Park shooting where the shooter wore women's clothing at some point to try to escape, and the right continually tries to claim that that makes it a transgender shooting. Anyway, please continue, Gare. Yes. So by going through their online portfolio dated as far back as 2022, I found a self-portrait that has a different social media username titled at Cree.TivDre.

I think Dre is for like Audrey. And this also appears to be an old Instagram handle before they changed it to at Creative Aiden. Hale's website also has another self-portrait just tagged with the name Aiden and Aiden Creates. That one appears to be from maybe slightly after, but it's kind of unclear with how the website is laid out. So although the Instagram page for this person appears to be taken down, it's unknown if they took it down or if Instagram took it down. But it is gone and there's no archive of it.

took it down, but it is gone and there's no archive of it. It appears that Hale did have other social media accounts that are still online besides the aforementioned LinkedIn. A TikTok account by the name of Iam underscore Aiden 10 shares a profile picture with Hale's own website, and it also links to Hale's Instagram page, which is mentioned on Hale's website. Hale's Instagram page, which is mentioned on Hale's website. The TikTok was seldom active, but their first visible post is from March 15th, 2022. There are two other posts from that month, and all three of these posts are like about late 90s, early 2000s video game nostalgia. And thanks to TikTok's username embedding feature, we can see that the account used to be called AudreyVideoGameNerd underscore 10 before being changed to IamAiden10 sometime between March 16th and April 15th of last year. Hale's last visible post is just from over a month ago, February 9th, 2023. And yeah, just as a note, kind of,

I've gone over less of this than you, but I've combed over what's available. I don't notice any of the normal red flags. There's not even like pictures of this person posing with firearms. There's not threats. There's one video where they seem to be mourning a friend or a relative,

but it's a pretty normal, like, in memoriam style video. None of their art strikes me as disturbing in any way. No. It's one Red Ram one. They have one piece of Shining fan art that the right's been using. It sticks out, but also the Shining

is one of the most popular movies of all time. Yeah. No. As someone who's looked through the social media accounts of a lot of shooters this this account is relatively normal like they there's nothing in here that would be immediately red flags they did a lot of like corporate work i think i think they did artwork for the city of denver yeah it looks like it they were being commissioned to do graphic

design for a lot of businesses a lot of like local events in Nashville. There is one other thing from their website that I will mention. Part of their bio, they have this sentence that says, there is a childlike part of me that loves to go and run around on the playground. And the rights using this in a weird groomer way, being like, oh my God, this kid wants, this adult wants to go around with to playgrounds

and they're childlike this is this is a completely normal thing to say this is like this is not a red flag this is i i also enjoy going on the playground this is not a red flag either this is just part of weird culture war stuff yeah yeah i have another thing about being a kid forever and ever as well it just seems that they you know connected with childhood things and we'll find those kind of things yeah and like psychologically maybe being kind of stuck in the past or whatever is a part of how they describe or justify this in their manifesto we just don't know but the point of the matter is if you had looked at this person's social media prior and and this is very different for most shooters, you would not have thought, oh, this is a person who is of danger to people. There's just not signs in it.

I mean, the one thing that is, the kind of last thing I'll mention is the, I think the two other adults that were shot, one was a custodian, the other was, I think it was like a substitute teacher. They were all in their 60s um it's unclear how long those two other people have been with the school uh the head of the school's been been there for a while um but i mean uh because because it is a preschool through sixth grade school um hale would not have been at the school relatively recently i i can try to i'm trying I'm trying to do like quick math here to be like if you'd be in 6th grade

and you're now 28 17 years ago 11 years old right American is plus 5 yes it's certainly it started in 2001 so yeah that is possible.

Yeah. I do want to note a couple of things before we move on to the right-wing reaction. One of them, just kind of again to sort of boil it down, based on what is available publicly, we know this person seems to have been born and raised as Audrey Hale. this person seems to have been born and raised as Audrey Hale, started going by Aiden at the latest sometime last year. Their LinkedIn shows them at that point as using he, him pronouns. But still with the name Audrey. But still with the name Audrey.

It is actually very much at this point still unclear how they exactly precisely identified what pronouns they used we certainly don't know whether or not they were on any kind of like hormones not that that would have an impact on any of this but we we have very little actual information the police are saying that they identify themselves as transgender in the manifesto at some point we might learn more as a result of that but but it is it is a lot of what's being put out is either unclear or wrong in one way or the other. There's just a lot of information that is kind of missing about this person. People are jumping to conclusions on stuff. So we will probably learn more there later.

One more note on this. The police are the ones that initiated the use of the term manifesto. Now, there was no manifesto published by the shooter. We do not know if this is a quote-unquote manifesto at all. house. So this writing discussing things around their gender or what they were doing, this could be anything from like a suicide note to just like a diary or a journal. So by using the word manifesto, they're kind of trying to tie it into that. We simply at this point do not know if this was a manifesto at all. That is a very loaded term in this context. I think it's notable that the shooter did not publish anything, whereas usually when there's manifestos, they are published online, right? The shooter themselves will publish it online, and that is kind of part of their entire attack. That is not the case here.

The shooter did not publish anything about this attack online that we've found or that anyone's found. So I think that's an important thing to note when we're talking about the use of the word manifesto here. In terms of the importance of a manifesto, speaking as someone who has written professionally about a number of them, manifestos are obviously useful, especially when trying to analyze why someone did something, what their political goal may have been, if indeed there is a political goal, what their radicalization pathway has been. But a crucial thing is to never, ever take a manifesto purely at face value.

Manifestos are political writings by terrorists, right? That is what a manifesto is. And they are writings that are kind of calculated to achieve a goal. And I don't know what this person put in their manifesto. Their manifesto may just have been a perfectly accurate summation of their feelings of why they did this terrible thing. That's possible. We don't know at this point, but manifestos are a part of understanding a shooting and what the goal was of the shooting and what the individual hoped to accomplish, but they cannot and never should be taken at face value. And that's what a lot of media are going to

do if this ever does get public. So please always show care and skepticism of directly reading from a manifesto. Like even in the case, you know, there's just a lot like in the Christchurch manifesto of like bullshit shitposting jokes and stuff thrown in there with the real stuff. It's generally possible to get to gather and understand motive from a manifesto. And I am, you know, I will read it if it becomes available, but be very careful with such things. Yeah, speaking of not being careful, let's talk about the right-wing response to this. Because I think broadly speaking, it's fair to characterize it as they are claiming this is part of a line of terror attacks by transgender people. There's a lot of folks saying that this is reason to ban gender-affirming care, to ban hormone therapy, to ban trans people from purchasing firearms.

This is pretty rampant on the right already. It became very quickly. pretty rampant on the right already. It became very quickly. So I actually want to go over one thing I just came up and saw while Gare was talking that I think is interesting is Candace Owens. Candace Owens is a right-wing commentator, unfortunately quite influential and has a sizable platform. I want to quote from her initial response. This was the immediate response when all the information was out was that there had been a shooting at this school. I live in Green Hills, and I'm positively devastated for the families impacted by this tragedy. Please suspend your politics and instead do what these families at this Christian school would want.

Pray. That's a perfectly reasonable response, at least for somebody who believes in prayer. Within a matter of like an hour or so, it became clear that – or information began to come out that the shooter was likely transgender, at which point Candace suspended her statement about not making it politics. She posted shortly after, transgenderism is a mental illness. Keep your children away from transgendered individuals and their parents. People that support and encourage this are monsters and should be kept away from children. They yelled at, Matt Walsh made a statement, why haven't we been given the name of the mass shooter yet? And Candace responded, because they're wiping the social so they can make things up about the person. She noted, as to a post by Matt Walsh being like, the question is why this culture is producing so many people who want to carry out attacks like this, take the guns and you'll still have a country

infested by homicidal sociopaths. Where are they coming from? What is creating them? Candace responded, I would start with the fact that we now celebrate clinical insanity while we admonish normalcy. People are aspiring to mental illness because they receive attention

and oftentimes are awarded for perversity. She is essentially taking the stance of like, we have to blame this on the fact that this person was transgender and being transgender is a mental illness, right? That's the stance Candace is taking. That's the stance a lot of folks are taking. One of the most widely shared posts from a right winger on this was by a guy named DC underscore Drano.

He notes himself as a husband, patriot, lawyer, constitutionalist, and anti-woke. He has 686,000 followers on Twitter. He has been relentless in posting about this as an act of transgender terror. He has spread some of the information that Garrison added on this podcast about this person's social media posts. And his posts are some of the most widely read and liked that I've seen. One of them reads, unconfirmed reports identify the Nashville shooter as Audrey Hale, a biological female that identifies as he, him on their LinkedIn. Authorities believe the transgender shooter previously attended the Christian school. He then follows, we will not let this story be

swept under the rug. Trans terrorism must be confronted head on and stopped. Tennessee just passed laws restricting sexualized drag shows for children and banning the genital mutilation of children. Was today's mass shooting at a Christian school by a transgender killer an act of domestic terror? And when will we start talking about transgender mass murderers targeting innocent school children in our schools? Enough is enough. And in this, they posted a link to a Reuters story about a shooting from last year, I think it was, in Colorado in Denver. This was a shooting where two people, one of whom was transgender, walked into a school in Denver and shot at several classmates, killing one. They claimed it was revenge on classmates over bullying. The McKinney, the transgender shooter, has been sentenced recently,

so it's been in the news. This is being billed as like a transgender terrorist attack because, spoiler, there's very few cases of trans people carrying out acts of violence, so they're kind of grabbing what they can in order to try and make an argument that this is part of a trend. an argument that this is part of a trend. In the absence of any kind of manifesto, people are claiming that trans identity motivated the killings. The police seem to have helped to jump start this. All right, so first off, we're going to play, before we continue, we're going to play a clip of the police press conference where the police chief of Nashville talks about what has happened and talks about the information that they have about the shooter based on the apparently the manifesto that they have and the maps that they have. So we're going to play that now.

Our investigations tell us that she was a former student at the school. I don't know what grade she's attended or grades, but we do firmly believe she was a student there. Does she identify as transgender? She does identify as transgender, yes. Does the shooter have any criminal history at all? No history at all. And no motive at this point? Anything discovered in the apartment or house? this point anything discovered in the apartment or house? No, we have a manifesto. We have some writings that we're going over that pertain to this date, the actual incident. We have a map drawn out of how this was all going to take place. There's right now a theory that we may be able to talk about later, but it's not confirmed. And so we'll put that out as soon as we can.

Is there any reason to believe that how she identifies has any motive for targeting the school? We can give you that at a later time. There is some theory to that. We're investigating all the leads, and once we know exactly, we'll let you know. So was this a targeted attack? It was. Should we know about a history of

transgender man or woman don't know any history of mental illness uh at this time but we are looking at that as the investigation is ongoing and i'm sorry should identify with transgender man or woman uh woman all right so uh yeah garrison you want to start off here yeah i think giving like the most charitable reading of of that I think it's possible that this police chief does not have as a full – I don't think this police chief has as an in-depth understanding of gender theory as some of us or the listeners do. So it's just confused by that question. Is it a trans man or a trans woman? And he answers by saying, yeah, they're trans, but they are a woman. So I think that could be what's going on. And then we have outlets like NBC News

saying that the person's a transgender woman because they also are, for one, not doing very basic digging online and are also just making – or just usually enjoy repeating the police's talking points when stuff like this happens because it's just easier. Hey, everybody. Robert here. Shortly after we finished this, the police chief of Nashville, John Drake, went on Lester

Holt's NBC show and gave another statement that was much more accurate than the previous statement that we just played you, which the right wing is making a lot of hay out of. In the statement, they note that the shooter attended the school as a child and was resentful of the school and of being forced to attend it, that the school was the target and not any specific individual and that the victims were random. They also, in this statement to Lester Holt, the police chief makes a lot less of a deal about the fact that the shooter was trans. It seems like the first statement that they made was based on either incomplete information or in the heat of the moment. But I'm going to play you this statement and then we will continue the episode. It sounds like things are moving very quickly. You describe this as a targeted attack. Can you elaborate? Absolutely. So the person we know as Audrey Hale,

she's a 28 year old Nashvilleian. We have belief or we feel that very strongly that she went to school here in the Nashville area, and she went to that actual school. And so there's some belief that there was some resentment for having to go to that school. We don't have all the details of that just yet, and that's why this incident occurred. Did Hale target, in your mind, did Hale target the school or someone in the school? She targeted random students in the school, just whoever, and persons. Whoever she came in contact with, she fired rounds. You recovered what you've described as a manifesto.

You've also said that Hale identified as trans. Do you believe there is a connection to that? We feel that he identifies as trans, but we're still in the initial investigation into all of that and if it actually played a role into this incident. As we know more, we'll definitely make that known. But right now, we're unsure make that known. But right now, we're unsure if that actually played a role. But does the manifesto point you in a particular direction that you can reveal? It does. It has in the initial investigation, we've turned it over to the FBI. We've looked over it as well. And it indicates that there was going to be shootings at multiple locations.

And the school was one of them. There was actually a map of the school, detail and surveillance entry points and how this was going to be carried out on this day. Yeah, I mean, I think a big part of this is that after a mass shooting in any national paper or other media outlet, you're always trying to be first with something. And that creates a situation where you don't fact check, you don't do the basic OSINT looking up, right? You just like, cops have said something, get it out, get a ton of clicks. And then that leads to this disappointing sort of repetition of half-truths,

or like in falsehoods, that we're seeing. Yeah, and it leads to, it provides a lot of, so one thing that the right has always understood is that the immediate aftermath of a story that breaks into the news is, you call it the wet cement period, where if people are talking about it, if you can lasso a narrative and drag it out in front of everybody and get momentum behind it, then that effectively becomes reality for an awful lot of people. And it's very important, which is why they're all immediately falling into line on this. One of the posts that I just ran across is from Benny Johnson, who's a right wing media guy. So Benny Johnson says the Colorado Springs shooter identified as non-binary, the Denver shooter identified as trans, the Aberdeen shooter identified as trans, the Nashville

shooter identified as trans. One thing is very clear. The modern trans movement is radicalizing activists into terrorists. Elon Musk responded to this with an exclamation point, which is great. The Colorado Springs shooter was not non-binary. The Colorado Springs shooter's lawyers made that claim briefly while they were trying to cobble together a defense after this person killed two trans people and shot up an LGBT nightclub. The Denver shooter is the person we just talked about. Well, I mean, also, they also could be referring to that.

To that. Yes, probably. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, it's like it's it's it's like, claiming that it's an act of transgender terrorism. A lot of this is spreading, particularly among people who paid for blue check marks on the new Twitter, because that's, like, yeah, this is kind of the first mass shooting we have had in the new, Elon's kind of new check mark thing, where, like, people are able to kind of the first mass shooting we have had in the new Elon's kind of new checkmark thing where like people are able to kind of verify themselves for money.

And we're about to see all of the old verified accounts lose verification. We'll talk a little bit more about how well that's actually working for them later, which is actually less clear. So that's possibly a positive thing. But, yeah, I mean, it's pretty obvious. Andy knows posted about this. He's another, he works for a place called the post millennial. He's a right wing ghoul. Um, he says the shooting comes amid a surge of far left death threats in Tennessee over

the States, you know, anti trans laws. Uh, he provides no evidence of this. Uh, he does quote or cite an M&Ms ad that Audrey Hale made that is like a pride ad that says born this way. You know, it's like a rainbow of M&M's that says born this way appears to be something that they may have done for money. I don't know, isn't really relevant to the situation. One of the uglier posts that I found on the right comes from a guy who identifies himself as an American dissident, Stu Peters. He's the executive producer of Died Suddenly, which is one of these right-wing attempts to connect every single death of a person who got vaccinated to the vaccination, which is a ghoulish thing to do anyway.

And yeah, they initially leapt into – there's a lot of, like, ugliness in here. initially leapt into there's a lot of like ugliness in here um stew is one of the more open folks calling them a a tranny named audrey hale who was a former student of covenant school um they kind of uh interpret the police statement which is at least very warbly um as the police saying this was a direct attack on christ, which the cops have not yet said. Stu posts, police admit this was a targeted attack on Christians by a demonic tranny. For some context, another one of his posts is arguing that Zelensky is waging war on Christians.

So, you know, this is, this is, should be seen with guys like this, in addition to being the troubling thing that it is, part of kind of the broader echo chamber that the right has set up for itself. This is troubling and problematic and to a degree frightening, and they're going to continue to try to push for disarming trans

people as a result of this. I suspect we'll see states introduce bills that are red flag laws just for trans people. This is the kind of thing that I am worried about. But it also is kind of worth seeing this as this is very much in line with the other kind of right wing echo chamber panic stuff that is everywhere. And so far, while this is deeply concerning, I'm not seeing evidence that it's breaking out of the right. And that doesn't mean it's not a problem, but it is kind of worth noting the actual trending tags right now on Twitter are not what you'd expect. The Tennessee shooting is not trending on its own in a particularly high position. It's substantially lower than the Uvalde and Highland Park shootings, both of which are trending right now.

This is based on a Twitter account I use that is not my Twitter account. It's just a blank account. So I'm hoping to get a little bit less of a bias thing. When I looked at my own accounts trending, it was Uvalde and Highland Park as well as Columbine was trending. Sam Hyde is trending, you know, because he always does after a shooting as a result of this stuff. Guns is trending. I think AR-15 was trending on one of my accounts.

But I'm not yet seeing evidence that this is anywhere – like that the anti-trans stuff has made it outside of the right-wing fever swamps. Yeah. You are getting like, and again, that does not mean it's not troubling. It is deeply troubling, but it's also not, when I'm looking at sort of liberal and centrist responses to this, it's noteworthy that what is trending is Uvalde and Highland Park and Columbine, because what's common is people sort of putting this within the continuum of America's nightmarish problem with mass shootings, particularly at schools, which is the right way to see this. This is part of an ongoing series of violent acts and a mass

shooter culture that exists within this country. And obviously it's tied to the availability of guns. It's tied to a number of things. But it is kind of worth noting that when it comes to what most people are seeing as a result of this, it is another mass shooting in America and not trans people are carrying out terrorist attacks. That is so far, at least, just like a thing I'm seeing in the right wing fever swamps. Yeah, I think Marjorie Taylor Greene is one of the first sitting politicians to make a statement focused on the shooter's gender identity. Saying, how much hormones like testosterone and medications for mental illness was the transgender nashville shooter taking everyone can stop blaming guns now and like this style of messaging is just blaming

the shooting on like hrt and mental health medication but there's no indication at this point that the shooter was taking testosterone or was on any medication um but this is just a clear attempt to like tie this shooting into the campaign against trans healthcare that Green has been doing for years now and to make trans healthcare seem like the reason that this shooting took place. Yeah, this person has kind of already become like Schrodinger's gender-affirming care, right?

Where Andy Ngo is suggesting they're doing attacks because they can't access gender-affirming care. Marjorie Taylor Greene is acting that the gender affirming care they did access made them become more violent. Same thing with Jack Sobiek, who was saying that testosterone increases aggression. Yeah. Jack Sobiek is an influential Republican advisor and commentator. He's a fascist. He's a terrible person. He's the guy who initially spread the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. But he is influential on the right because of his ability to get stuff to go viral on the base. I guess one thing we should mention that that kind of ties into is that Sobiak's been repeating some talking points that Tucker Carlson focused on a few nights ago during his show. Tucker Carlson focused on a few nights ago during his show.

There was an NPR segment about trans people who are purchasing firearms to defend themselves that interviewed somebody on a number of folks. One of the people they interviewed is a person who goes by Queer Armor on Twitter about why they've chosen to be armed and like advocate other trans people arm themselves for self-defense. be armed and like advocate other trans people arm themselves for self-defense tucker took quotes from that person and made a very fear-mongering piece about uh how npr and the liberals want to create an army of trans stormtroopers and disarm regular americans right that's the piece yeah talking of like i guess armed americans one thing that's also trending is just like incredibly crass photo that the representative for that fifth tennessee's fifth district which is the district the school was in who's called andy ogles ogles maybe posted for his christmas photo i guess which is him it's a classic republican politician photo right entire family uh everyone holding a different variant of an ar-15 and it's yeah like i think regardless

of what you think about guns this is kind of crass to be parading them as like culture war tokens like this and i've noticed uh that's been trending across a lot of the least of timeline i'm seeing yeah this is this is at the nexus of a number of things that are like fucked up about this country i'm just uh enjoying ian miles chong's timeline uh unfortunately and who is he miles chong right wing agent provocateur yeah he's he lives in thailand right um malaysia i believe malaysia malaysia he has like he has like half a million twitter followers relatively influential on the online sphere. His telegram is culture war room,

which is, you know, giving you what you need to get, I think. So I'm just going to read this tweet and obviously like all the sort of content warnings you'd expect. Today a mass shooter murdered three children and three adults at a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee. The murderer pronouns was, were, was transgender and had written a manifesto detailing their intentions, which come days after Tennessee passed child protection laws intended to curb children from being subjected to trans surgeries and other irreversible procedures.

Their heinous actions follow a month of media-driven rhetoric about a trans genocide and calls for a so-called trans day of retribution in the United States. It is conceivable that much of the conservative public derided as cis is now open season for gender extremists who have been terrorizing women who dare to speak out against a woke ideology when they tell you what they intend to do believe them so hale has posted nothing about a trans day of retribution has posted nothing publicly about being trans really there's not a single post discussing their gender identity online um this is just they're just trying to yeah weird political points by purposely like making it sound like this person was writing

about this stuff online and there's no evidence that they had writing about this stuff, nor is there any of it online that we can find. And yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's, it's, it's basic stuff that people like him do in the aftermath of like any type

of event like this. Yeah. You know, we're going to end now because anything pretty much anymore we said would be getting into speculation or just belaboring the point about these fucking right-wing ghouls. But I do want to end on a post from a follower, a Twitter personality, who I consider to be pretty savvy. They go by Juniper on Twitter. They noted this. 15 years ago, anytime there was a shooting, they would blame it on Muslims,

and if it were a Muslim, they would go hog wild trying to indict all Muslims. They're doing that right now with the Nashville school shooting, and will try to indict all trans people. Just don't engage. See a Matt Walsh take that is incredibly aggravating? Ignore it. See a politician tweet misgendering the shooter while simultaneously trying to blame all trans people? Ignore it. Anyone with a brain and a shred of empathy will see right-wingers as the psychopaths they are.

A lot of trans people are rightfully scared in the world right now. People hate us without even knowing us and how amazing we are. Just know that you are loved and we will win. The world cannot hate us forever. Hey, everybody. Garrison and I are going to put together a post, a sub-stack post, sort of synthesizing their research and what I've got so far

in the right-wing response, and we'll be posting that up. It'll be at shatterzone.substack.com if you want it in an easier text version that you can kind of share with people. 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, 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.

The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hey, I'm Gianna Prandti.

And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down.

I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like every single year, you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast where the thing is not, well, where here has temporarily been relocated to the UK once again. Oh, what an awful place to relocate. been relocated to the UK once again. Oh, what a beautiful place to relocate. Yeah, I'm your host, Mia Wong, and today with me to talk about things in the kingdom that is united for some reason is Nick, who is a resident nurse there.

Nick, how are you doing? I'm doing all right. A lot better for being on holiday right now. Yeah. Yeah. Getting to escape the sort of dismal swamp of rainy fat rainy uh turf island yeah so on the other hand there there are things that are in motion on turf island which are interesting and cool and that is on it okay so i i have no idea

once again, when this is going to come out, like this could be coming out like four weeks from now. Like there could be six more prime ministers. Like who knows what's going to happen. Yeah. Six could be. Rishi's outlasted the lettuce.

I'm like our last one, but you know, sorry to anyone who's not up to british political memes that's going to be arcane and inscrutable and i'm not correcting that we we we we ran them through a like two hour british politics boot camp a couple of weeks ago so hopefully they still remember yeah but so the reason saying so on on the day we are recording there are a bunch of strikes going on in the uk there have been a bunch of strikes going on in the UK for a while. They keep doing this weird.

Okay, this is my, this is my, my, my, my, my, I'm going to do my one bit of what, what are you guys doing strategically thing, which is okay. So they keep having these strikes and then they'll like go off strike for like three weeks as like a quote side of good faith for their negotiations. And then nothing happens and they go back on strike and it's like, well, okay, like you could just not do this. Yeah. So strikes have been continuing. And yeah, I wanted to talk to you about some of the nurses strikes that's been happening and about the sort of organizing that's been going on because that's what's been really cool and not reported on enough.

going on because that's what's been really cool and not reported on enough i guess the the place that i want to start with this is with the last sort of deck well i mean i guess there's been a lot of austerity in the uk but i want to kind of start with the last sort of decade of austerity and the damage that's been a centralization of healthcare services a closing down of hospitals and making larger hospitals and contain more and more specialties so for instance my hospital that i work in it was the result came about the clothing downs about i think think, three smaller hospitals. Jeez. And each hospital that was lost,

we lost about at least 100 beds for each one that was created, that centralised into R1. There's been massive cutback and lack of funding in preventive healthcare and community healthcare. One interesting example of how that manifests is like they shifted the provision of community healthcare and social care for new mothers to being run by the local council. That's like local, either county or city, even larger cities, level government.

And then they would put out the process where rather than just, it goes automatically to the NHS, it needs to would put out the process where rather than just it goes automatically to the nhs it needs to be put out to tender and give like charities or non-profits or even private health care providers an opportunity to bid on providing the service that's and now that's a terrible way to run the system oh no it's absolutely insane it's absolutely insane and what this and then the end result of this is the nhs service gets it because they're the only one that can actually credit credibly provide the service but they have to essentially massively underestimate how much it will cost to run it all to run this to run the uh service oh because they

have to they have to underbid the other services that are not going to do it. Wow, that is a terribly designed system. Yeah, and then there's also the introduction of trying to, in order to cut back on the backlogs that the cutting down on services have created via outsourcing some surgeries and stuff to private healthcare private hospitals but then they're able to just pick and choose the easiest

least risky and most profitable ones and of course any uh any complications that result of the problems with surgery issues with treatment adverse reactions the surgeons fucking it up because they were working overnight in order to get extra in order to get some extra money after doing a shift in the nhs hospital which is often the case then falls back on the nhs proper and then in terms of workforce the average on average this isn't just nurses there's a universal pay scale used in the nhs for everyone called agenda for change there's a history behind that confusing name but yeah the reason for that is it was a very much it was a less unified system before like the early 2000s everyone knew it was messed up there was a big like push by unions

and also by government who wanted to rationalize the whole thing to make it make more sense in theory tie people's wage to what they were actually doing more directly in a more consistent way hence agenda for change because an agenda for changing up what's happening but it's been in place for over 20 years now so the name name doesn't make sense, but basically everyone on agenda for change has on average in the last 10 years had a 20% pay cut in real terms. Then doctors and dentists, because they're special boys, love them,

but you know, um, have on a different pay scale and junior doctors on average have had an even worse pay cut of about 28%. Yeah. And then they're on strike. They're on strike. Like right now. Yeah, they're on strike like right now. Yeah, they're on strike right now.

And unlike my union, they haven't pissed about. The government, they've gone straight to a full three days. No derogations the term for agreeing to not provide services for life in order to protect patient safety, which the RCN went in for in a big way. In some ways, they've got it a bit easier in that they can just say, oh, the consultants will do all of this. Like that is, to translate into American healthcare,

that would be an attending. And so this strike of junior doctors includes everyone from like their first two years post-medical school, what we call foundation years. Possibly that'd be equivalent to internship in america and then our registrars so people who rest in specialty training equivalent of like a resident i believe um the government tried to persuade them to call off in order to go into talks but they hadn't made a big show and promise of like we will in good faith we will call off strikes and go into negotiations if if the government agrees to

have serious formal talks so they were able to just say to the government no you're putting too many preconditions on these talks we're not doing it until you make until you stop messing us about whereas unfortunately my union the rcn is addicted to protecting the image of nursing and acting in good faith, even when they're dealing with someone who had no intention of dealing in good faith. Yeah, which, yeah, that, I don't know. As a strategy, it's really frustrating

because you can just get locked in endless negotiations where just nothing is happening. Yeah, it's really frustrating. To provide some historical context to this, the RCN in England, Wales, and Scotland, Northern Ireland's a slightly different story, had never had a strike until last year. Historically, the RCN was an anti-strike union.

Wait, what? Yeah, yes. That's a thing in the uk man like i i know i know like the us has a lot of weird not very good unions but like i don't know i'm not sure i've ever heard of it really that's yes wow so that changed either in the 90s or the early 2000s i i honestly can't remember when i tried to look it up but whenever you're trying to search this stuff just your search results are like flooded by stuff around the latest round. What are you going to understand is the RCN is 106 years old. It only became a union though,

about 50 years ago. So the RCN is both a union and a professional body in that. Okay. It also does stuff around developing nursing best practice, research, and that kind of thing. And that's what it existed as originally. So, yeah, so like a professional association. Yeah.

Okay. Exactly. And so it still has a dual structure of its union side, its professional body side that develops nursing practice and stuff like that. Yeah. Well, I guess,

I guess, I guess that, that raises the sort of question of like, like what was so like unbelievably, like what, what, what, what happened like such that for the first time in like a hundred and

whatever years, they finally went on strike. So it's partially a matter of breaking points. such that for the first time in like 100 and whatever years, they finally went on strike? So, it's partially a matter of breaking points. The nursing turnover in the UK is absolute dog shit. Thousands of people leave the profession every year. There's this

massive pay cut that's happened over the last 10 years, and nursing was always underpaid in the UK, to be frank. There's also, then, there was the cut in the nursing bursary about five years ago so it used to be the government would pay for you to train as a nurse it would also give you not enough not like enough to be equivalent the wage of the work you were doing nursing in the uk has a far higher amount of practice hours

than it does in the us i believe it's part of the degree and like a lot of that time you're working as a as a hca that or cna um as you'd say in america can you explain what that is for uh people who don't know like medical stuff so uh hca healthcare assistant or uh medical stuff so uh hatia healthcare assistant or uh what was it cna uh certified nursing assistant i think what stands for is essentially a healthcare worker who does a rate a range of like what you describe as nursing tasks but but not the role of a foot of a nut of a registered nurse. So they would assist with mobilizing patients, monitoring observations, hygiene, potentially taking bloods and some investigations such as setting up an ECG,

but they wouldn't do more advanced investigations, risk management, care planning, medication management, assessing of patients and that kind of stuff. So yeah, like about five years ago, the nursing bursary was cut. So then it became, as with every other degree, having to take out a student loan in order to pursue it. And then in 2018,

there was a particularly disastrous pay deal where the RCN, in a number of ways, just absolutely fun, not just the RCN, the other healthcare unions representing healthcare workers also messed up hugely. But they really fumbled the ball. It resulted, arguably, some people describe it as the leadership selling out the membership. And then after that, a general an emergency general meeting called the rcn

which resulted in the entire executive being booted wow um around this leading up to that there'd been like increasing like grassroots militancy around nurses recognizing that this was an awful situation we were in there this also then resulted in um like there were various grassroots campaigns started such as like nurses united uk we started employing organizing the uk to like agitate nurses there was a concerted effort to put pressure on the rcn by like i'd say a radical minority but one that represented like a genuine genuine feeling among nurses on the on the front line to push for the RCN to take a more radical stance then at the same time I don't know if this was covered in your talk in uh about English politics your like two- deep dive. But Northern Ireland didn't have a government

at this point, because as they are now, the DUP and Sinn Fein had fallen out. And legally it has to be both of them together as the largest Republican and largest unionist party, unionists in pro the United Kingdom party after former government which meant it was impossible legally for any to have for any pay rise in the nhs in northern ireland at that time there was not a government that could legally enact one great amazing and this was and this resulted in the in 2019 the first strikes by the rcn ever and also like the first nursing strikes in the nhs in a very long time i might be wrong about this i think the last ones were like in the 80s or the 70s i might i might be wrong about this though and this was both called by the rcn and one of the other biggest trade unions in the, probably the biggest trade union,

as it's a generalist trade union in the NHS unison. They both called strikes at this time, and they were a significant factor in getting the Northern Ireland government back meeting alongside other things. I'm not going to give ourselves all the credit, but it was a significant factor that often gets overlooked. And actually having any pay rise in that at all the in northern ireland just to clarify for a second this this strike was a specifically like a strike that was happening for nurses in northern ireland yeah in 2019 i think

it's very important i think that triggered something of a sea change in the rcn and that was kind of the culminating point of like trying to push for a more militant attitude on the rcn and that was kind of the culminating point of like trying to push for a more militant attitude on the rcn and it really like broke the fog gates open and made what's happening now possible even though a lot of nurses in england particularly i can't comment on the situation in wales and northern ireland like how much people know about you about what was going on but like a lot of nurses in england didn't even know about it And when I was going around the wards, pushing for people to vote in favor of the strike action, a lot of people weren't aware that that had been a thing that had happened until I told them about it. Because people in England, as much as England is determined to keep Northern Ireland,

don't know what's going on in Northern Ireland to any degree. To a terrifying degree sometimes, I would say. Yeah, that sounds like a thing that happens when you're a colonial power, etc. Well, yes. I mean, I feel like, well, our equivalent isn't

the right term, but around the same time people in Puerto Rico ran out their government and almost no one in the u.s like like in the continental u.s has like ever heard of it so yeah yeah i would say if that yeah if there's not bombs going off in northern island people in england aren't paying attention i I would say. Yeah, that makes sense. It's also really depressing. Yeah, I would say Northern Ireland, maybe in some ways

it's a better position than Puerto Rico in that it actually has a degree of political representation in the main in Westminster and such even though it obviously should have its independence. But yeah, Puerto Rico doesn't even have that,

is my understanding. Yeah, and I mean, there's a whole thing there. The Puerto Rican statehood people are weird reactionaries. The independence people are cooler, but also there's this whole sort of, I don't know, there's a kind of paralysis anywhere it's like that and it it like dc is kind of similar where there's this whole sort of there's this kind of paralysis where like nothing's ever going to be done about it other than the u.s just like basically imposing whatever random colonial governor that they've decided to bring in as an

emergency manager or whatever yeah sorry okay but we, but we are getting far afield from... And also, I want to start before I put my foot in it and saying something about Northern Ireland that will piss off everyone. Yeah, and also it's pretty good too. And like, I'd even know even less about what's going on about Puerto Rico. Although I'm probably more than the average person in Britain.

Yeah, I would also say okay like so people don't get mad at me all of the US is a colony it's like the substantive difference between New York and Hawaii and Puerto Rico was when like when we took it over but

yeah so we're turning actually well you know okay alright I will take this complete interruption of the flow as a but yeah yeah okay so we're turning we're turning actually well you know okay all right i i will i will take this complete interruption of the flow as a point to do an ad break so uh do you know what else is an extensive colonial power that uh who's might cannot be checked it's it's the products and services that support this podcast yay all right and we are back yeah so i wanted to move from the northern island strike to talk about the sort of broader strikes that have been happening in the last like my understanding about a year or so um yes okay yeah yeah is it going longer

than that yeah i guess we should talk about like yes like what what happens to move from the northern island strikes to the current situation so do you mean with specifically nhs strikes or like specifically with the nhs strikes but i guess we can talk about the broader wave if you want to too okay um so obviously all the shit with COVID happened. Yeah. And then we came to the payoff of last year. And at this point, there'd been general building of an attitude that we don't just need a decent pay rise that keeps up with inflation. We need one that goes towards restoring lost pay.

and the RCN leadership after the kicking out of the entire executive in 2018 kind of on the back foot kind of like wanting to appease the membership go along with it a bit more also we had new general secretary Pat Cullen who was the secretary of the Northern Ireland section of the RCN during the Northern Ireland strikes, took a more militant position in the joint union pay negotiations with the government towards the beginning of last year, where the RCN took a position of, we need inflation plus five percent now this is a bit of inside baseball which like i don't think i've ever seen like put out officially but what i know from various people involved in these things and like statements by different unions what my understanding of it is the biggest of

the trade unions in the nhs in general the Unison, put forward a line. It was only willing to go for a generic, significantly better than inflation pay ballot, or like pay demand from the government, which the RCN was due to like changing attitude of its membership. What happened when it accepted a bad deal last time was not willing to go for and resulted in the RCN splitting from the joint union, like pay council, like the joint union council over this issue.

Which then the government's pay thing came in. It said, we will do a flat 1,400 for everyone, like on all bands, so not percentage like it normally does. And, you know, to be honest, if it was a significantly higher amount that was bigger than inflation for the lower bands, like the lower paid workers in the NHS, wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. But this 1,400 isn't good enough for anyone.

And while I'm talking about this i'm talking about specifically in england it was slightly different in wales and scotland i think generally slightly better but still far lower than it should have been than it needs to be and so the rcn was the first of the unions in the nhs to say it was balloting it was doing a pay ballot. And this kind of sprung on the other unions, like a week, two weeks, three weeks later, all said that they were doing it as well. The RCN also at the same time hired a load of paid organisers to support the pay ballot effort.

And what I'll say is obviously paid organizers, they're no substitute for rank and file militancy, but it was very helpful to be honest, because I think there was a lot of like militant sentiment to the RCN, but although there were some like rank and file initiatives, which had a massive impact on like pushing the RCN to a stronger position, I don't, I don't think that could have materialized and there wasn't enough people like

actually who had an idea about organizing about what it meant to go out and push for this kind of thing to get what we needed in that timeframe. Sadly, I wish that wasn't the case, but I do think these paid organizers, much as not what I think the correct model for workplace organizing is, did help a lot. And this then resulted in the RCN strike ballot

passing in 176 NHS trusts across the UK. Let me just, yeah, check that I've got that right. Yeah. Which is huge. It's not all, but it is, it's over 50%. It's pretty much all trusts in Scotland. All trusts in Scotland, all trusts in Northern Ireland. I think all bar one or two in Wales

and the majority in England. It's also worth pointing out the ones that didn't pass it, they didn't pass by less than a percentage. Wow. They didn't pass by like 10 votes in all cases. I think the one in Wales that didn't pass, it was literally by three votes. Jeez. And it's also worth knowing that I think in 2016 or 2015,

anti-union legislation was passed by the Conservative government, which raised the bar you need in order to have legal strike industrial action. And under the law, as it existed a decade ago, every NHS trust that the RCM balloted in would have passed the ballot.

Also, unfortunate timing, it was happening at the same time as postal strikes were happening. And in the UK, ballots for industrial actions to be legal have to happen by post. A little bit of sad irony there.

It's like, it's bad timing, guys. Yeah. Full power to you. You're getting fucked. Like, oh God, I wish the timing had been slightly different.

Yeah. But yeah. and of all the of all the trusts of all the unions in the in the nhs that were passing ballots the rcm was the most successful we we passed it in significantly more places than other unions did um to my shock to be honest because like when i was going around balloting or like um talking to people like on my days off like going around the wards talking talk to people while i was at work everyone was like yes it was in other unions like yes i'm voting for it i'm waiting on tenterhicks to have my ballot when's my ballot arriving why is my union not opened their ballot yet and so like when particularly like other unions didn't pass in my trust i was really shocked i was really confused and it seems like a lot of them didn't

actually want to fight to a degree in that like they were opening it because the rcn had opened it i'm certain people in those unions might disagree with me, but that's really, I find it really hard to understand how these unions that have historically, they're all, none of them are that militant, you know, but they all have a history of strikes in other sectors of organising for this. They've never had been anti-strike unions.

UNICEF in particular, it was the, came about like several unions being collaborating, like joining together, including unions that had been founded by nurses in the 70s in reaction to, like,

the RCN being anti-strike and going on, like, that was the last big wave of nursing strikes at that time. So that really shocked me. This has been It Could Happen Here. Join us tomorrow for part two of the interview and in the meantime you can find us on twitter and instagram at happen here

pod and you can find us twitter and instagram at cool zone media welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now

at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hey, I'm Gianna Prandenti. And I'm Jemay Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone.

But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian To Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast increasingly about nurses' strikes. And yeah, this is part two of our interview with nick a nurse in the uk enjoy we've entered the toffee turvy land where the rcn seems to be the people who are like leading on the militancy in this in this french where yeah yeah and i think part of it comes down to is because the rcn was historically for a significant part of the city was not a union became a union late in the day. For then, it was for ages anti-strike.

A lot of unions, because we can talk about the general critique of unions and particularly institutional unions, how they become service providers, how they build up a protective bureaucracy against militant struggle or against grassroots militancy, the RCM. It's not particularly democratic as these things go, but it doesn't have that kind of built-up

institutional inertia on the trade union side because historically it hasn't needed it. And that meant, I think, it was actually far more susceptible to grassroots pressure and militancy

than some of the other more established unions were. Oh, sorry. And that kind of like was the thin end of the wedge for the RCM to take a very strong stance over the pay rise in response to like grassroots organizing and like a demand from the grassroots to do that, which then resulted in them

like batting for strike action first which then meant other unions had to and then we got the and then the cascade of like strikes in the nhs that have occurred since then so this this is this is a very very broad question to be asking, but how have the strikes been going? That's kind of a difficult one to say. So Scotland, for instance, has not been called out, has not actually had any strike days because the Scottish government went into negotiations to begin with and then made an offer it was rejected strikes were announced they made another agreed to come back negotiations so like it's been effective in getting something

moving in scotland their current offer of 15 over two years so six something this year five something next year is currently being voted on by the RCM membership. It's not a good, but it's a significant move in what came before. Wales, the Welsh government, after saying, no, we can't have any more money. We can't. We literally can't because Westminster controls our budget. Westminster won't give us any more budget for this has now made an improved offer it's crap

but it's like something, it's forced them to shift when they were claiming it was physically impossible for them to do it every single time, I can think of exactly one time ever where I've seen an employer make that demand and it was actually true but this is not, like, that was

like, what, Norfolk Southern in, like, like, the 1970s and it was only true once and it's never been true ever since then. Like, you will hear this from every fucking employer who you attempt to go on track against and they're always lying. Like, every single time.

What I will say is, like, in the case of Wales, it is very true. The Welsh government's budget is set by Westminster, by the central government. So it's a lie, but it's a plausible lie. And Wales is generally massively, Wales has like some of the highest rates of child poverty outside of Eastern

Europe in Europe. The reasons, part of the reasons for this is because the Welsh government is chronically underfunded. Yeah, yeah. Due to political decisions made in England. But it's still not true.

And then in England, like, it's got to the point where a government who are categorically opposed to any negotiations with trade unions have actually come to the negotiating table.

So from that, although I suspect loads of preconditions that haven't been publicly talked about, they're going to not make a credible offer in my view, and as a stalling tactic, but the fact they even chose to come to the table at all. I hate saying this because it's the kind of thing that makes people complacent, but that is actually quite big, that the Conservative government actually agreed to do it, to come to the negotiating table, stopped hiding behind, oh, there's an independent pay body that decides these things.

Stopped saying we can't afford to fund the NHS anymore, actually just coming and sitting at the table at all to negotiate. It's like a big move in and of itself. negotiate is like a big movement of itself now if we talk about numbers of participation in strikes there's been a lot of difficulties a lot of nowhere near as many people have participated in the strikes as should have been i will be frank and say so now we're going to talk about the derogations the situation derogations which is like the rcn voluntarily saying we will allow this many people to continue working day these days and these areas in order to maintain patient safety which is on one hand we don't want any patients to die obviously on the other hand it's a very easily abused stance to take and there are

just nurses who are in other trade unions who aren't in trade unions as well. And ultimately, if they want that not to happen, they need to just come to the table earlier. And so this resulted in a process where, so ITU and time-sensitive chemo and pediatric A&Es were derogated by default. And then there was an agreement of if the wards had less than like nighttime numbers, we would agree for a small amount of our membership to go in to work on those wards to maintain nighttime numbers for the

sake of patient safety but that had to be applied for on a case-by-case basis but there's a couple of problems with this one trust just not taking it seriously lying of not trying to establish these things to make accurate requests uh leaving it to the last minute and then asking for blanket derogations ah we don't know if it's going to be safe or not managers like ward managers not actually knowing what was agreed and to giving incorrect information to their staff people not understanding what was and wasn't derogated and just generally it was a system that was very open to abuse. And so a lot of things were just left open in general,

or that shouldn't have been. But at the same time, I know that it didn't happen in every case, but there was a lot of success in members of the strike committee going round wards and saying, no, you're over number. You need to come out. And people doing it of like surgeries being canceled,

like elective surgeries, non-time sensitive surgeries being canceled due to it of like really making hospital managers sweat over like proving each thing needed to happen. They wanted needed to happen those days, all of which built up, even if we didn't get the full amount of people we should have had out on strike on strike really built up the pressure significant degrees on them to then put the pressure up the chain of the nhs to the government's like we can't keep on going on like this and at the same time each each set of strikes the number

of people participating did increase. So, like, for instance, I've just got the government statistics from the 15th of December, I think it is. So this was the first strike day that was called. It was 9,999 absences due to industrial action. Then on the 20th, it was 11,509. Then on the 18th and 19th of January, and just one important factor, they didn't call all hospitals out at once.

Again, I think a mistake, a strategic mistake, should have gone hard gone hard fast but the the argument was we just we don't have the facilities to organize all of this effectively on all of these massive amounts because like it was a huge amount of trusts they needed to do that with um two days then in February it was 15,998 and then 14 on the second day 14,000 and then 58 people which is far lower than it should have been. I can't remember how many people there are, nurses there are in the NHS, so I should have had that statistic ready.

But it's not an inconsiderate amount. It meant lots of outpatients' appointments being cancelled, a lot of surgeries being cancelled, a lot of chaos and stress for managers of the NHS and therefore for the government are looking really bad for them. And it's a clear upwards trajectory, which meant that when the RCN announced,

we're going to do two days consecutive, we're going to keep it going through the night, which they hadn't done previously, and we're not doing derogations. ITU will be staffed. We're not doing anything else. I think, no, even ITU wasn't staffed. We'd consider it on a case-by-case basis.

We won't be considering... What's ITU? Sorry. Intensive care. ICU for America. Oh, I see. Okay. Okay, yeah. So that meant that at that point, the government was like,

okay, we need to move to a new delaying tactic. They're not just going to give up. And I think with that, as it went on, people were itching and itching to go further. And so, for instance, like A&E was derogated. So which is the area I work in. But like a lot of people and this is reflective of like most areas that were derogated. When I spoke to people, we weren't like, no, we need to be out.

We need to be out the picket line. like no we need to be out we need to be out the picket line and like after the first two rounds there was also a growing effort to like try and find out from the membership what the actual situation was so that unlike staffing on the wards because all wards are chronically understaffed so when they said oh well these this amount of people say no we know that's a lie we know on nights there's actually only three registered nurses there's not the four you're claiming and stuff like that which again i think was a really positive move in like embedding a kind of like workers inquiry and workers knowledge about their workplace into the organizing of the strike that had been quite a top-down process um but yeah and i'm kind of worried about how this delay and break in the strike action will affect that momentum that had been building up i think like to a large degree people

are like itching to go again and i think that desire to go again is building as it goes like when it initially happened when this strikes were initially called off there was a lot of like trust like in like the big whatsapp groups and stuff and talk to people there was a lot of like people thinking uh at least i don't know if this was represented general opinion but people being quite vocal and be saying no we need to trust like pat knows what she's doing they wouldn't have called it off for this thing it's like it's getting more and more those people being like no we need to we need to go we need to we need to get back on the picket line and there's been a petition that's been going around that's

been getting quite a bit of news like setting out some hard lines like for to the rnc leadership about what kind of stuff they should accept like saying no we need to stick to the above inflation busting we need to not compromise on, we need to stick to the above of inflation busting. We need to not compromise on this. We need to not compromise on this, which has, I think, got 880 signatures. At the moment, which doesn't sound like a huge amount,

but like, again, you're going through quite a lot of inertia of like attitude of like, you've got to leave it to the leadership among the membership, even when they were unhappy with it. And it's only a thousand signatures that are necessary in the RCNs where the RCN works to call an extraordinary general meeting,

which they can do pretty much whatever it wants. And that's how the leadership in 2018 was kicked out after the bad pay deal then. Oh, that's really interesting. Yeah. So the RCN, very undemocratic, except for this one particular thing. Yeah. Is that a normal thing for unions in the UK? Or is that just like a weird... I think all unions have an amount of people, a set amount, where if membership's calling for an extraordinarily general meeting, they have to do it.

The RCN's one is really low. Interesting. Essentially. general meeting they have to do it the rcm's one is really low interesting essentially the us and like there were some moves were like people in the rcm saying oh we need to change it we need to get rid of that and we need we need to raise it to be more in line with other unions um but uh that again is something that will have to that if that does happen that kind of change would have to go through like a membership wide vote it's not something the executive leadership could just impose that's good yeah yeah so like there is a process of like these strikes were like a result of like increasing

general level of militancy with among nurses in general and among nhs workers and i think particularly because everyone knows it's awful the situation yeah and then with like a slightly more organized and spear in it that resulted in that in that um petition in 2018 arguing for stuff at like Congress and things and then that's what Active Strike has like got the membership feeling like they should have a more active role and I think it's pushing things in a positive direction even though I

think the RCN leadership has gotten to a point where by mistake it ended up way ahead of the other unions and it's now trying to back paddle but I don't, I think there's a lot of potential for like more grassroots organised by the membership to prevent that happening.

Yeah. We are in a difficult position though in that the time is running out. Strike mandates in the UK only last for six months. We are, when the government agreed to negotiations,

we're at two and a half months left of the mandate it's now two months left of the mandate you have to give two weeks notice before strike action oh so that's that that that's that's what the sort of like run out the clock strategy is about on their side okay that makes sense exactly now nothing's to stop us from reballoting yeah but it will be a whole process. It has to be a month. It has to go through the mail. It'll be drawn out. We'll buy them a lot more time.

Yeah. Also, Postal Workers, I think, are on strike again today, too. I think so. I've got the strike calendar up on my computer. Let's see who's on strike today. Like an absolute fraud. I have it on my other computer, but I don't have it on this one. Yeah, so today's the 15th.

Today, Amazon's on strike in Coventry. The BBC's regional services, the civil service, which will kind of be equivalent to like a federal stuff in America. So like, for instance, my dad, who's a health and safety inspector,

is on strike today. HMRC, which is the tax office, is on strike. Junior doctors are on strike. Ofsted, the school instructors, are on strike. The two main rail unions are on strike. Teachers are on strike. Ofsted, the school instructors are on strike. The two main rail unions are on strike. Teachers are on strike, and university staff are on strike. Not the postal

service today, but yeah. Yeah, well, I guess I wanted to ask a bit about that, too, about sort of just what's been happening. I don't know. What you see is sort of the potential of the broader strikes that have been happening, because this is a I don't know I mean it's not like

a like it's not like a 1970s style like strike wave but it's a lot of strikes for the UK in the last sort of decade it's it's big like there isn't the level of cross union

cooperation and talks that you would want there's a's big like there isn't the level of cross-union cooperation and talks that you would want there's a lot of like people turning up to each other's picket lines there's a lot of like solidarity present but it's not coalescing into like a into like a um unified movement which you're hoping to be although i do think if something doesn't change it is moving in that direction and like the conservative government is at like an all-time low in its popularity ratings yeah i think i don't know if you're aware from this quote from margaret thatcher about how her main political goal was remaking the soul of britain um a way because like up until that period there was a very strong trade union movement in the uk

that we had like one of the best social democracies in the world like comparable to scandinavia today it was it was far more like a collective attitude in the uk and like margaret thatcher's explicit i can't remember the exact quote but explicit project of the project of the conservative party at the time let's not put it all on her great woman theory of history is as bad as great man theory of history to move the soul the like general social attitude and personality of like people in britain away from that like orientations like community and collective struggle and action and there is a part of me that feels like this is a move away from that because like everyone you go to there's whinging about like an inconvenience caused by

strike but pretty much everyone is like yeah those they those, they have it. It's awful for them. It's all the strike drivers. Good on them for standing up for themselves. Good on the teachers for standing up for themselves. Good on postal workers for standing up for themselves. Good on nurses for standing up for themselves. Like the amount of like stuff I've been brought by people on the picket lines has been incredible. It's like each day I've just been like rolling down the hill

from my hospital to my house like with a bloated stomach from like stuffed members of the public who've brought and dropped off at the picket line it's

it makes me feel like it's there is the optimist part of me it does feel like there is a reorientation in general of British public

to like the idea that we don't have to put up with this yeah and you don't have to struggle and try and get it on your own and like it's early days yet but I do see something positive moving in that direction in the UK as a result of this strike wave yeah that's a that is I don't know that that is great news from a place that does not usually generate great news this is like the does not usually generate great news. This is the deeply optimistic part of me. On the other hand, you have a lot of bad news coming out of the UK at the moment. Yeah.

This strike wave is good news. It is the fact that it's happening in the NHS in particular, which has been so resistant to industrial action historically, in the nhs in particular which has been so resistant to industrial action historically and also just because of how what a significant part of the economy it is as well because like you know the nhs is the eighth biggest employer in the world wow i didn't know it was in the world that's that's wild yeah like it used to be like um the fifth biggest in the world wow it's it's good yeah it used to only be that the american army the chinese army mcdonald's and walmart were being imposed in the nhs

we've been overtaken by amazon and such now but yeah yeah like like strike action so like from like a worker's perspective like strike action of like the largest section of the workforce nurses in the NHS, the biggest employer in the world, leaving aside the situation for everything else in the UK, leaving aside their history of the opposition, like the act of opposition to the idea of striking within nursing historically in the UK is huge news and something to be hopeful about.

And then put into context of the more broader strike wave in the uk and within the nhs in general this is huge and it is a sign i think of a positive change and like reorientation towards workplace struggle occurring i think so i've now heard two different places I think. So I've, I've now heard two different places do this, which was, I heard this in Chile in 2019. And I heard this also on my picket line at the university of Chicago in

2019, which is I, I like, I, this is, this is the place neoliberalism was born and we will kill it here. And I mean, those are the three places,

Chicago and the UK. Yeah. I think, I think also arguably Germany, although that are Chile, Chicago, and the UK. Yeah, I think also arguably Germany, although that has a whole other... The Ordo Libs are... I don't know. I think the Ordo

Libs, from my understanding of it from listening to some things about it years ago, it's more of a family resemblance than the exact same thing as neoliberalism. Yeah, I mean, I think if we're going to, I think they got absorbed into the neoliberal bubble insofar as like,

the Ordo Libs are where the neoliberals got the sort of like, we need to have like an international bureaucracy, like sort of legal bureaucracy from. Hayek is also like, have involved, yeah, that's a whole other story, but yeah, like it is encouraging to me that it's like, I don't know,

like it really does seem like in the places where neoliberalism was born, it's like it's starting to come apart. Yeah. And, you know, I know people have been predicting the death of neoliberalism for like long, well, almost as long as I've been alive. But I don't know this like

the fact that it's happening in these places seems different than it does seem significant I think it is significant I think I am cautiously excited every time I hope something bad happens but I am hopeful now and you know

my brain isn't magic so there can't be a cause of effect there yeah but i don't know i mean like you are the second person i've interviewed from the uk who actually seem to be like somewhat optimistic about the direction it could possibly be going which is the first time i've heard that in like i mean i guess there are people who are optimistic about the direction it could possibly be going, which is the first time I've heard that in like, I mean, I guess there are people who are optimistic about Corbin, but yeah, I don't know. This is,

this is the first sort of like signs of that sense. I don't know a long time. And I think, yeah, look like if I was in the American list, just like if turf Island isn't doomed, then we're not doomed either. I don't know here's what

i'm gonna say is well i you're overtaking us on that it's true yeah we have yeah i i am yeah i don't know when this is coming out but i'm gonna i'm gonna be honest man like there's a lot of ways the uk is better than america oh yeah the us like is it's a it's a real disaster like it's it's yeah yeah i mean i think we're both equally bad in a lot of ways yeah i think the things the things that like people in the us look at england say this is awful and the things people in the uk look at the us and say this is awful it's uh it's kind of a a child looking at their parent and being pissed off at them and a child and a child and a parent looking at their child and being disappointed in them it's like no no you both suck it's just family resemblance it's a we hate our sport it's a narcissism of small differences like yeah

between the us and the uk a lot of the time. Yeah. But yeah. Yeah, I guess, do you have anything else that you want to say about the strikes? I think the fact it got this far is incredible. There's so much further that needs to go. I'm really excited and I'm really scared. I think this is the potential for like a turning point round both for the nhs but uh for my profession for nursing and also like in general in the context of the white strike

rage for the uk but you know the higher the stakes the higher the perils like this is our i think this is our fight to lose essentially I think if we go seriously and the membership takes control of it from the union leadership which is very cautious which has been put into position of being more

unprecedented almost by accident trying to appease the membership we can achieve something incredible but it's really of unprecedented militancy almost by accident while trying to appease the membership. We can achieve something incredible, but it's really... The book's open. It can go either way.

I'm excited and I'm terrified by it. Yeah, if people want to support the strikes, where can they go? Is there a strike fund they can donate to? Yeah, the RCN has an open strike fund I would invite anyone listening to donate to I would also

find the articles about the petition they've been going around like the mine of the RCM lead ship takes a stronger stance and just share that around generally create more visibility on that yeah we'll put links to both of those in the description yeah those are the main things i would suggest again the national nature of this struggle and the fact that it's not even really

against our direct employers makes it harder to talk specifically about this thing or that thing in some ways but yeah those are the two things i would ask like the bigger our strike pot the easier it is to like argue for more aggressive action and the more visibility there is on that petition the more it'll take a lot more than a petition to like shift things to the roots to be in in the forefront and the leadership position of this but it's something that will make people feel more empowered put more pressure on the leadership it's like a small stepping point towards what we need i'd also like to recommend a book to anyone who wants to find out more about the history of the nhs in the current situation there it. Some comrades of mine, like from a group called the Angry Workers

and also Revolution... I always forget the other group. They did it with his name. This is embarrassing. Yeah, anarchist communist group and Healthcare Workers United, which is like a network I'm involved in, like put together a book called Sick of It,

which is like a collection of workers' inquiries and reflections on the NHS, its history, its potentials, and stuff that's really a great book. Sadly, not available as an e-book, but it's an excellent read and it'll give you a real insight into what the NHS has been historically

and what it is now for anyone who's interested in that. That's awesome. Yeah, the Angry Workers are really cool, by the way. They're on Twitter. I probably should have. It's probably just Angry Workers. Yeah. Yeah, it is.

Oh, wait, no, I'm wrong. It's at Workers Angry. Is it? Wait, no, is this the right one yeah it's at workers angry I'm not on twitter I don't know about these things it is a cursed place yeah getting more cursed

oh god yeah if you want to find us at twitter we are at coolsunmedia yeah we're also on Instagram I'm told we're on Instagram I don't have one so I don't know this is what I've been being told

for many years if we don't don't tell me yeah and thank you all for listening and yeah go do your own strikes make bosses lives miserable please the more strikes are going on, the more people want to go on strike.

Hey, welcome. I'm Danny thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter noctcturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum. 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. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards.

Hey, I'm Gianna Pardenti. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean,

how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Toot, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year, you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is about today, about labour organising and about what happens after a strike in a labour organisation. I'm joined, I'm James, if you hadn't guessed, and I'm joined by several people from the UCSD Dollar Lunch Club. We're going to talk about the

UC strike and we're going to talk about mutual aid organizing in the wake of the strike. If you all would like to introduce yourselves, that would be great. I'm Alex. I use she, they pronouns. I'm Matt and I use he, him. Hi everyone. My name is Maria. I am a PhD student at UCSD and I use she, her pronouns. I'm Anna and I use she, they pronouns. Amazing. Thank you very much, guys. So I think people probably haven't heard much from us about the UC strike since we last sort of had some episodes around December and January. And obviously, it's been a couple of months since then. So the resolution of that strike was kind of contentious, right?

And a lot of the organizing that you guys have been doing came out of the campaign to vote no on the, I guess, the ballot after the strike, right? To vote no on the tentative agreement, which ultimately didn't succeed, right? The tentative agreement, there was a yes vote. And I wonder if you could all explain kind of, A, it's obvious how the yes vote was organized, right? Within the structure of a union which exists to, which I had obviously made disagreement with the UC in this case, and then it's the job of the people who made that agreement to then get a yes vote on that agreement. But can you explain a little bit about how the no vote campaign came together? And maybe if someone could also explain some of the substantive issues that you felt weren't satisfactory resolved in that intensive agreement.

intensive agreement? Yeah, the no vote was the end of a very long process of us feeling like the bargaining team was making progressively worse and worse decisions and basically using submission as a tactic to improve gains in bargaining. We felt like that was not a great tactic. So the upshot of the no vote campaign was that fundamentally, we felt that the bargaining team had not fought hard enough. They had made repeated sacrifices of our core demands, repeated sacrifices of our core demands, drastically cutting our 54,000 wage demands, our COLA, and that we felt particularly since it was during the winter break and we had some time to, you know, stretch it out a little bit further that if we had gone back to the bargaining

table at that point, that we would have been able to recoup some of those demands i don't think there was like a consensus that it was like obvious that uh like union resources would exclusively be used for yes vote stuff either maybe partially but that was one part of like the major conflict um was that like when some of us were trying to do like a text banking campaign um for like uh no vote stuff um i know of at least one person who like feared for their career because like their colleague was like you're misusing like personally i personal information that like this isn't why people like agreed to give it to the union and like you can't just take it and use it for like, you know, campaigning for your no vote stuff. But then we were like, this is for a union purpose. Why can't we like contact people on the same topic that all of us are getting a bajillion mass texts about? um and so like i do think that was also a point of contention within that but like like the union does not share resources uh amongst like um amongst people who are campaigning for different

sides of like ballot issues right yeah yeah so it wasn't like a there wasn't like a like an open channel where like people could have an open discussion, at least using the tax banking function, at least. unanimous vote in favor of TAing the agreement that both sides would have the opportunity to use union resources in order to campaign for their preference. And that didn't turn out to be the case. Yeah, that's upsetting. So how did you organize? Because it wasn't like the No Vote campaign is only the four people here, right? Like it was a very substantive campaign that a large number of people supported and voted for.

It wasn't like this is a kind of 99% yes situation. How did you all organize for the no vote campaign when you didn't have access to those resources? It was a pretty distributed network of, for instance, signal chats. So a lot of signal for instance, signal chats. So a lot of signal WhatsApp discord groups. And it was it was very grassroots. So if you knew someone in one of those groups, they would add you. Yeah, I'm sure Matt and Allison have more to add. I think they were in some very large group chats.

have more to add. I think they were in some very large group chats. Yes. And those group chats were both on the UC San Diego campus as well as statewide. So, you know, this wasn't just something that UC San Diego was voting on, right? This was all of the California campuses. We also had a strike center, which involved in towards the end of our active picketing before winter break, a number of people from all different departments migrated from their pickets to a more central location. And although it was not synonymous with and was unofficially kind of seen as the dissidents side, the vast majority of people who participated in the strike center ended up being no voters when the time came. I think Anna is pretty right in saying that a lot of the organization was like a distributed decentralized thing across signal chats. Like in my experience, there was, for example, the Disability Justice

Coalition, who've done a lot on, you know, accommodations and disability rights and things like that. And so they were approaching things from different angles than other chats that were like you know doing like oh here is a list of emails from you know UCI of grad students in this department please feel free to email it and you know like so there was like a diversity of tactics there if that makes sense so um it was like a lot of like petitioning emails talking one-on-one with people so me personally and several people that I know like set up meetings with like their lab mates and just be like hey how are you doing so have you heard of what's going on things like that which I think are very normal union things to do. I did find that like official,

like not, maybe not official, but in my department, we had two people kind of take up like union liaison roles and they tended to be more like yes voters rather than no voters. And I found that their form of communication to us never had that kind of like reaching out to other people. They would say like, hey, there's a campus OC happening at 5pm. But they wouldn't reach out to members of the department to get everyone's opinion until like, week three, week four of the strike. So, you know, I think what no voters did excel at was reaching out to people individually and like actually like going out to different labs, two different departments and talking with people like either one-on-one or within small groups.

So me personally, as well as another member of the dollar lunch club, actually canvassed around graduate housing. So we during the ratification, but we were literally like holding stacks of paper and saying like, hey, this is kind of the layout of what you'll be paid for each month that the union like the UAW is not showing you. Like if you're in, you know, in this year, you're going to be getting a barely like $200 raise for these several months, that kind of thing, which is like very, you know, that information just was not made accessible or made clear by the UAW.

And for me, that was purposefully done, at least in my opinion, that was purposefully done. So I think the diversity of tactics there that the no voters incorporated, and it was only after we started canvassing around graduate housing that we started seeing yes voters also canvassing around graduate housing and tearing down the posters that we had put on other people's doors. Yeah. So it got contentious, but I think because we didn't have those official resources that the UAW usually, uh, or at least our chapter of the UAW usually, uh, can depend on such as like, Oh, an official mailing list. And then we'll just like send you or basically spam you a bunch of updates we had to work around that by doing

more personal meetings by um for example in the last week of the strike facilitating group lunches right where multiple departments would come together bring food cook like nine ten instapots worth of stews for everyone and then that would be an opportunity for me to talk to people that I have like never talked to in my life from like completely different departments and tell them like, hey, I don't think this is looking really good for us, especially like we have very different conditions,

very different working conditions. And just overall, you may be part of the SRU. I'm part of 2865. Here's how we should talk. So again, that was because the UAW was not utilizing those avenues of getting people to talk to each other. So I'm not sure. I kind of went off topic, but I wanted to really hammer home that because we didn't

have all those resources, we had to rely on kind of these like, how should I say, like very distributed piecemeal strategies of like, oh, well, let's do something here. This isn't going to work for this department. Let's do that for this department, you know, if that makes sense. It does. I think it's really cool because I think that's how there's a lot that people can learn if they're interested in organizing their own workplaces, right? Whether it's organizing for a vote on a tentative agreement, or if it's just organizing to form a collective bargaining in the first place or to deal with a particular issue with your bosses whatever it is those grassroots things work especially when you don't have the uh this giant sort of uh massive union union uh apparatus i wanted to say like um just with like what it feels like like to be in like

all of the different chats um because like at at the peak of everything i was like probably sending you like a dozen different google docs a day. It was all just like, like we'll start a different group chat for, it was all just, we'll start a different group chat for this specific purpose of like, nobody's talking about disability justice. And so we want to talk about disability justice in here.

And we've decided this forum is not good. And then somebody in the chat goes like well i'm with people who are also interested in like furthering this topic and i don't see them any of them doing something like you know um like analyzing uh like reanalyzing the, like, housing market data, and not just, like, taking the UAW's word for it, or, like, doing a little bit of, like, forensic accounting on the university, and then posting the Google Doc and saying, like, hey, I did some, like, forensic accounting on the university. This is something that we can use in arguments and also is like evidence of x or y um so yeah just a lot of people it helps also it helps to be in a union full of grad students yeah you do have a lot of useful skills it can also be very taxing organizing that way

uh like it can be really i know it's a lot of being on your phone uh and it's a lot of like your phone vibrating uh and you're having to switch your focus from some like in-depth discussion of disability justice to a discussion of like why the rent is so damn high in santa cruz and uh so like it can be really like i guess i don't know i i'm not a person who does well with that kind of shit and so like i wonder if there's anything because this happened a lot in in 2022 right when we look at how the the george floyd uprising or the uprising for back lives whatever you want to call it was organized it was also a whole lot of signal chats that um i know for a lot of people i spoke to like they just couldn't handle the signal chats

um so i wonder if there's anything that you learned during that organizing process that you would like to pass on to people who are interested in organizing going forward uh one one thing i'll say is um it became pretty clear uh that you know the people who had created the signal chats or the WhatsApp chats were the ones who were able to monitor, manipulate, shut it down, which happens to our campus picket leaders organizing chat. campus picket leaders organizing chat after the no vote had already failed. This was a couple of weeks later during the joint council meeting of the UAW. And, you know, the discourse and the arguments that were happening there, while certainly very painful and vociferous, were also very connecting to the campus. Lots of different departments were on there, so we still got a lot of ideas about what other departments were thinking of.

And with the locking down of that chat, which was kind of a unilateral action on the part of one of the moderators, that just really ended a lot of campus discussion. And in my opinion, furthered the divide between the two sides. And the other thing that I'll say is, you know, it's really hard from a historical perspective, from a communications perspective, to see that people who are typing slower are not getting their opinions out. People who are in multiple chats are getting certain types of information that other people are not getting. And my words of advice to any any mass movement that is attempting to use these kinds of chat applications are one um to uh be sure that you are uh uh monitoring um for accountability i realized very late in the game that you could actually download um whatsapp transcripts um so i downloaded the entire transcript just in case it got nuked. Screenshots also,

people would say, well, I said this to this person. I'd say, no, somebody took a screenshot of that before you deleted it. And the other thing is to always have backups, always have back channels, because there were so many instances of moderator-led or UAW-sanctioned chats that did not permit discussion and in the absence, we were talking about that shit in our back channels. Yeah, I think that's good advice. Ken has just joined us and I'm just going to allow them to introduce themselves before we go forward with discussing these organizing tactics. Go ahead, Ken. Hi, I'm Ken.

I am a graduate student in the literature department. So I've been organizing with Dollar Lunch Club from day, like week zero, before the strike started with Anna with Anna and yeah and me well that was from day one that's true I wanted to say um with respect to the question about like uh just on my phone fatigue. I think a large part of why we are now, this group of us here is Dollar Lunch Club is because we were just like, we all have on my phone fatigue and we want to do something actually community building and meaningful like ourselves and other grad students. Um, and yeah, getting off the phone and making soup together has been very, uh, uh, very good for that. Yeah. Maria, do you want to add to that?

Yeah, I, I was going to say the same, like, because I think phone chats are vital, right? Like, I'm thinking about how important Facebook Messenger chats were to the teacher someone can just unilaterally say none of you can reply. Only I can post updates. People can like erase their messages. They can nuke the entire chat, disable it, all of that. Because of that, it really tells you like, oh, you can't just rely on online organizing. A lot of times you're going to have to do in-person organizing which again as Alex said really well part of that is just community building like to me what dollar lunch club is it's like a continuation of that community building so that we maintain contacts so that we maintain having conversations with people that generally we wouldn't really be meeting every day or maybe

wouldn't even be meeting like like once a quarter that kind of thing you know there's people that I talk to in scripts that I never would have talked to if we weren't doing some of these lunches together and finding out uh their situation so they're in a kind of tough situation that I think would be good to talk about in soon. But I guess what I would say as advice for other people who are trying to unionize their workplace is to get people kind of in engaged, you have to start with some of that community building. And I think food is one of those really good places to start community building. It could be also other types of activities. So all throughout the strike, there was, you know, times when people would be

like, hey, let's do yoga by the beach, you know, or let's do yoga on this picket, or let's do a dance on this picket, or let's do like a fashion show on this picket. Those are all like fun activities that I think people who like do not want to be at their workplace all the time people who like just want to catch a break you can engage those like disengaged people that are just not paying attention to politics by offering activities that are important for community building and for getting to meet people that you wouldn't have talked to before so I think that's kind of like vital to a union functioning is building all of these contacts. And then when you have talked to someone several times, when you have had lunch

with them several times, then you can really get into the nitty gritty of like, well, how do you feel about the contract? How do you feel about, you know, unionizing? How do you feel about so and so? I think that kind of community building is something that like our the UAW 2865 at least really just like neglected. not the picket that I was on, but on one of the pickets, I later talked to a guy who was saying like, oh yeah, our picket is really militant. We're supposed to be like shouting at people on the street the entire time. And you know, our picket leader, she's like going all out and she, you know, has lost her voice because of that and all of that. And I was thinking like, OK, but what do you don't you want to rest? You know, like what? Like, do you do anything for fun to keep people going to the picket? Because his picket had dropped in numbers so much that they had to combine numbers with

another picket. Right. And to me, that was like, you are making this really, really stressful for people. And to me, that was like, you are making this really, really stressful for people. That's not to say that, you know, like preventing people from parking there isn't important. It is. But most people can only do that for a couple of days and then they're like stressed out and they do not want to contribute to that strike situation anymore. They just want to sit at home and not do work.

Right. Which is kind of what a strike can be. But to keep people on the picket lines and to keep in contact with them because they're they just want to sit at home and not do work, right? Which is kind of what a strike can be. But to keep people on the picket lines and to keep in contact with them because they're coming on campus or, you know, at the workplace every day, you have to make it like pleasant to be there. And so that was one of the things that I learned from one of those pickets where like, you aren't doing any community building. like your community building is a single basketball hoop that you brought and you put on the parking lot and like that's not enough you have to do like food you have to do some kind of rest you have to do some kind of art so in one of the

other pickets that um I participated in there was like chalking everywhere we were playing we were making like you know like a monopoly board, but like you would just be losing $200 every time you passed a step and things like that, right? You have to let people express themselves in this way for them to keep coming back and back and being engaged for you to be able to facilitate conversations and to ask like, hey, what do you think about the contract? Hey, what do you want to do? I think community building is the most important thing and that can be online, but it also should have an in-person component to it.

Yeah, I think that's really well said. Fun is a way, like intentionally making time and space and energy for having fun as a community and just like doing things that are just like, like this is because all of us need to eat and all of us need a break. Like that is a way to like, keep up your, um, to like keep up your stamina, um,

and like help people keep up your stamina for something taxing like a strike. And also like to help people find the kind of meaning that helps them like want to come back and continue devoting energy to the thing um and yeah that i just wanted to echo uh that like that like it was only through like finding this group that I was able to like find people of of similar minds on this. It was not in the like UAW department organizing committee meetings that I could find like minds on this. Our picket, I don't think ever like like died off like other pickets did and our picket I'm referring to like most of the other people here we were together on one picket part of that is because we were allowing like space for so many different activities to do like there is

um one person in my department who kept coming despite my department being like really politically disengaged because we had like a button maker and we could make buttons. And he was like, Hey, this is fun. I'm just going to like continue drawing buttons for people. I like doing that. And it was like, go for it. You know, like as long as you're here, as long as we can communicate with you and like hear your opinions and see what you want out of the contract and you keep on coming like we love that you know like if you allow space for different people to do different things if there's like a diversity of tactics I think you're going to get people a lot more engaged than if you have this like top down like no we should only be preventing

people from parking here we should only be shouting at students to not go to class like there has to be a diversity of tactics that would be a good time i think for us to explain exactly what dollar lunch club is and and what it does so does someone want to take take on explaining that a dollar lunch club is very much like i would say ground up organizing tactics, I guess. It's everything is sort of collectively decided in a weekly meeting. And in the past quarter, it's been lunch. We've been providing lunch for, it's targeted at grad students,

but really welcoming of all community members, regardless of affiliation with UCSD, although it's mostly UCSD students and grad students that have been attending. But we've been doing lunch for $1 two to three times a week in different places on the UCSD campus. in different places on the UCSD campus. Sort of like a, some of it is just lunches of it is sort of like ad hoc catering, I would say, of different kinds of organizing efforts or like interdepartmental lunches. So it's not totally fixed in terms of location or affiliation. And all of the members are doing this totally voluntarily. or greater donations if community members want, goes straight into just sustaining the lunch project and groceries. But mostly, yeah, there's been a lot of efforts to sort of diversify

and make our lunches as sustainable cost-wise as possible. So this last quarter, folks have been working with the Food Recovery Network to sort of supply some of the ingredients. It is very much donate what you want. As Ken said, we generally suggest a dollar donation, but I think one of our signs says, eat first, donate maybe. so it's very much pay what you want pay what you can yeah and i wanted to say and um like matt was most uh directly involved

in this transition but what it grew out of was the fact that like uh the humanities picket um started doing daily lunches together and um after the strike ended because of the ratification vote um uh matt and uh some other folks who had been doing those lunches were just like we should keep doing this this feels good and right and um more people like me jumped on afterwards um and we all have been making it into this mutual aid thing for like we need to like you know humanize ourselves to each other and like you know shore up the like community bonds that we notice we're missing um so that way maybe in the future like people will care a little more about like people that maybe they uh couldn't care less about this time around i want to just jump in and give credit where credit is due and and anna actually uh were the um originators of the strike food um and i jumped

on in day one because i i knew for i was a professional cook for a while i was really into food and i wanted to do that um and so i i guess you could say it was the three of us and then it expanded fair fair i don't i don't have my origin story nailed down yeah you got to get it on pat it's uh it's something i miss greatly from like uh leftist organizing in in certainly in like southern europe uh which is you know where i spend a lot of my life like you're always well fed uh at anything whether you're in spain or leftist organizing in in certainly in like southern europe uh which is you know where i spend a lot of my life like you're always well fed uh at anything whether you're in spain or italy or even in france and and like yeah american labor organizing lacks that so it's cool to see you

guys doing it uh yeah kind of to summarize what alex was saying for me the goal is very much two-pronged. One is food justice. So food for everyone. I think everyone should have it. It's great to hear that that's kind of a built-in thing in Europe. I didn't know that, but it sounds pretty on brand. Disappointingly, that is not the case here. So yeah, everyone needs food.

So that's one goal. And then for me me the other goal is to get people talking across uh departments so i think a big issue in the strike was that um some departments were paid much more than others um and i think for that reason the ones who were paid more were often less radical because they were kind of already slightly more comfortable. Of course, no one is paid a huge amount as a grad student, but they had, I guess, you could say more to lose and maybe were less pressed to urgently start earning more. And of course, accessibility needs and there are many other considerations. Basically, if you're already somewhat comfortable with your living situation you're less likely to be super radical um and so i think just not even being in the same spheres together uh people in those more comfortable

departments kind of did not really have any reason to interact with people in the less comfortable departments and they just didn't see them at all and so just like what alex is saying not really have any reason to interact with people in the less comfortable departments. And they just didn't see them at all. And so just like what Alex was saying, that food is a way to humanize us all to each other. It's very hard to have everyone in the same room together without, you know, seeing and talking to each other. So food was a way for us to do that. And I thought that that was a really important, continued, slow-moving goal. So weekly lunches are a way for us to invite people from across the campus and say, hey, there's free food here and it's also really good. So you should come by and eat some. And while you're here, talk to some students from the humanities department and recognize that they have real needs and they are people too and maybe next time you vote you should

keep their thoughts in mind and vote a little bit less selfishly if you can so that that's what it is for me I think getting a little deeper dig a little deeper into the origin of like how this all started. My department has been like very suspicious, I guess, of the UAW previous efforts for fair reasons, you know. And so in terms of getting folks out to strike and then also to be on the picket line it was definitely a struggle not just not really so much in that folks didn't believe in the cause but they were like pretty aware that um you know as as literature students you're not the university or the union's priority. You know, because humanities, you know, the, you know, that trend, right. And so there was also a lot of the whole strike pay systems scared a lot of folks and it was like i have to switch from this uh

you know like different kind of labor which is not really about me physically being in a place for 20 hours a week into this labor that is like me walking around for 20 hours a week in order to make sure that i am not gonna to go broke. And basically, there was not a funded, there wasn't funded snacks or lunch by the UAW. And I had actually, Matt and I, or yeah, Matt and I had asked at an early meeting, I guess, about getting a sort of like seed fund of like maybe $50 to just get us rolling on the lunch. And the UAW staff was like, nope, lunch is just not included in our budget. Sorry about that. Like, if you want to do that, you'll have to figure out how to get this organizing going on your own. And so part of doing the fundraising from the

beginning was about that. And actually the Strike Food funds that I also want to throw some credit to Anna also as like one of the people that was like most focused on building uh sort of the fundraising materials and and actively fundraising in different places and making sure that then ultimately um in terms of being able to supply food lunch funds to other pickets um that was something that we started doing about midway through the strike because we had had some fundraising success. And it was kind of crazy because it was, I remember just like the last day of the strike itself, just being at another picket where, you know, that had sort of developed more of its own like lunch culture,

like using some of that, like that fundraised cash and like, also using efforts from other folks, but, um, just the picket being like somebody at the picket being like, damn, they got to get on that lunch thing next time. This was key. And I was just like, no. Yeah. Um, but yeah yeah like exactly the lunch is key like how you how are you gonna expect to have people building community you know and you know the the cheapest the the cheapest like lunch you can i mean outside of basically during the, people were eating all of the food out of the food co-op, which is another community group that supplies food on campus.

But outside of that, pretty much there is not a meal to be had on campus for less than like $13 without tax. So, yeah, that's about that. hacks. So yeah, that's, that's about that. Alex, can I add something like before you just like a tiny thing based on Ken's point, I was going to say at one point, I think it was week two or week three of the strike, we were making so much food, we were feeding like probably 100 people. And then we would have leftovers. And we would literally walk the leftovers to the other pickets. And it surprised me so much that the other picket would just be eating like chips and donuts. And here I am, like dropping off like cooked, you know, like bean burritos or like salads or things like that, like actual food for them. So like, to me, this was like, not even a failure on the UAW

part. It was like very intentional of like, well, you're a kind of on your own, you know? So that's like the power of food to me is like, well fed people are going to keep coming back. You know, people that don't have to spend like a bunch of money on getting like donuts. I don't I don't think they're going to keep coming back. You know, yeah, what Ken was saying earlier about props to Anna. Nobody moves a secondhand Instapot in San Diego County without Anna knowing about it is one of our group jokes. Thank you all. Yeah, we love you. group jokes thank you all yeah we love you you too yeah um but yeah i wanted to offer some contrast to like uh how uh like the other folks's departments have been um like have been responsive to things and like what the attitudes are.

So I am in the computer science department. We have plenty of money comparatively. And we are, I think steps, what the previous steps were like steps eight and nine. And we organized a lot with like the electrical engineering department, which is like step like also like step seven, eight, nine. And I remember very vividly this town hall we had before the ratification vote got announced where like there was some temperature checking about like, how does everybody feel about this? there was some temperature checking about like, how does everybody feel about this?

Like if we, if we put this up for vote and everybody was just like, Oh, you know, it looks all right to me. I think I, this like, you know, not, not incredible, but like, I'd be able to, to handle this. And then I come in and get my turn and go like guys um everything I'm hearing from the other side of campus is them panicking uh and very upset um I don't think we should do this if the rest of the campus is panicking and upset and I was just like not heard and kind of ignored um so yeah um a lot of the community building stuff like when we talk about like trying to get people to humanize other people that they didn't seem to care about. We're talking about the departments that didn't need as much help like some of mine.

like um the strike for me personally was like it definitely transformed a lot of like my friendships um for that reason um because like I don't know how to be friends with people that are like to be friends with people that are like i i see and hear that the people that you're talking to i see and hear that you're talking to people who are absolutely freaking the hell out because like we'll have struck for six weeks or so and they'll still be poor but like i don't know how to be friends after that. I just wanted to touch a little bit more on the idea of feeding strikers and the massive logistical boon that that was for a movement. Does anybody recall offhand how many weeks the strike went on? Oh, or say six. UAW rules were in order to qualify for strike pay,

we needed to have 20 hours of striking a week. So that boiled down to three shifts. You could do them every, you know, you could do two in one day and one in another day. But by and large, at least most of the people on my picket were there, you know, five days a week. But let's just say you got three shifts. Lunches we've already established at the UC San Diego campus is around $13 a person, right?

So that's $39 you're spending just on lunch, not on gas, which for me is quite expensive because I live somewhat far from campus. which for me is quite expensive because I live somewhat far from campus. So 39 times six is $234. And when we struck for these high wages, you know, that was worth it. We put in our effort and our sweat. But at the end of the day, those of us in the arts and humanities and the ASEs are seeing this year a $200 raise per month. So just in our lunch, that would have obviated the raises that we got during the strike.

So I think this shows really the necessity for mutual aid in uh in workers movements like this because you know we we nobody else is going to beat us we have to beat ourselves yeah i think that's really it's good to put numbers on it like that it's a serious expense and it's not getting any cheaper another way that i see this is it's not just for workers like Like the way that I see what dollar lunch club is doing by saying, Hey, we will provide either free or very cheap, a dollar, you know,

for lunch on these days of the week, basically every week, whoever wants to come can come, whoever wants to help can help go for it. That to me is basically like a soup kitchen. Like it is a, I, the way that I see to me is basically like a soup kitchen like it is a i the way that i see it is it's like a communist anarchist type project of making like i i'm not sure if i can say it's building power but i feel that it's not just building community but like allowing people

to worry less about expenses which means that they can put their energy into a lot of other things. Like the way that I would want dollar lunch club to continue to evolve is that we would be able to offer lunch for, you know, people who can't afford the like $12 campus lunches every day of the week, all week, like, imagining the difference of, you know, like, okay, there's 10 weeks in a quarter, five days in a week. So like 50 days that like, you might be buying lunch, at least half of those days, the difference of $1 lunch versus like $10 lunch is like hundreds of dollars, right? So to me, if we can provide that, you know, as we grow in time to all five days of the week, you know, on several locations on campus,

and we provide that for a couple of hundred students or community members or what have you, we will be making a material difference in these people's lives we will be showing them a different way that like organizing or not even just organizing but like that accessibility to food can be organized if that makes sense that it doesn't you know like getting food doesn't have to be this like capitalist project of like i am ordering this sort of thing and I am getting this back. It can be like the more along the terms of like what we're doing, which is like, we are seeing what food has been donated to the pantry that we work a lot with the basic needs hub, the food pantry, and so on to get a bunch of like donated produce out of which we make foods, right? So we're reducing food waste. We're trying to, you know, contribute to like food justice, making food as

free, as cheap as possible, and allowing people to be like, hey, actually, the cafeterias that you see on campus, you getting lunch doesn't have to be this way. It doesn't have to, you know, you getting lunch doesn't have to be this way. It doesn't have to, you know, like you pay, you know, like two bucks for an apple or things like that. And then another thing that occasionally we've been doing is also foraging. So here in Southern California, there's a lot of edible non-native species such as like mustard, curly uh wild radish things like that and so we can like forage those and even make food out of them along with food from the food pantry so i you know not that we're really doing this right now but my dream would be to really kind of revolutionize the way that food culture is in ucsd uh people like, no, it can't be a food

kitchen where you don't have to like expressly worry about where you're getting your meal the next day. You don't have to pay $3 for a banana. You don't have to do any of that. You can have like a better future. You can have like a better experience at the university or just like in life in general yeah yeah i think that's uh i think that's really i know like i teach the community college sometimes so um it's a little different from the uc but maybe not as different as people might imagine um and like one thing that i've noticed like i always have food in my office and i a lot of my students are in food precarity and have been for a while and like certainly around like the time of the fucking

travel ban when when people's parents were stuck outside the country and they you know defend for themselves it's a way that like we can move from this moment of alienation which is like you know your interaction with panda express uh where you you give money and you get a box of food you eat by yourself uh to like a moment of solidarity which is cool um yeah it's great you're foraging too um i want to do a foraging episode one day so i have to have you back for for that i want to like finish up maybe by just talking about some logistical stuff um anarchists have been feeding people communist or leftist or whatever like for quite a long time right like i can

some of my best food memories uh like uh eating beans with with people uh you know like food not bombs things that the um i do a lot of work with refugees so like food not bomb things in 2018 with a migrant caravan or people making pancakes at the G8 protest in the early two thousands. I like some of my best memories, not of just food, but like of, of forming community around food.

So like when you're doing this stuff, like is, is there any, if someone wants to, someone hears this, they're like, hell yeah, I want to do that on my campus,

at my workplace, in my town, whatever, like here says, say like, hell yeah, I want to do that on my campus, at my workplace, in my town, whatever. Like logistically, it sounds like you guys have a corner on the Instapot market, but like aside from that, like are you cooking vegan food

so it's more accessible for more people? You know, what kind of stuff like that would you advise for people? I can jump in on this. Yeah. Cooking to scale is an entirely different beast than cooking for yourself at home. And

you've already identified beans as being really... Legumes and grains bought in bulk shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody who's thought about it for a hot second that, that when you buy in bulk, it's far cheaper. Uh, but, uh, it also comes with downsides. Like when you're soaking beans, you often, you know, have to soak those beans a long time ahead of time. Um, and what we have been doing, which I think the, my, my comrades have touched on is, is sourcing from a great variety of local food banks and farms and donations, both during the strike and afterwards. One thing that I would say

we struggled with in the initial phases of Dollar Lunch Club, when we were still actively striking, was that, you know, the absolute best of goodwill in the world, everybody wanted to donate foodstuffs. And that meant that our meal planning was significantly harder because, you know, we have half a can of tomato paste and we have 25 cans of pinto beans and, you know, 10 bulbs of fennel and three crackers. Definitely, we found that it was easier to solicit both cash financially, setting up a, what's it called, And also, you know, for people who can't give money, we put them to work. And that was, you know, because people want to help.

And we felt kind of bad after a while turning people away who are, you know, offering to go to the store. And at one point in the strike, I think we got like 25 prepackaged Indian meals, which we ended up giving out to people for lunch. Indian meals, which we ended up giving out to people for lunch. But as far as feeding people on site, you know, being very specific about what kinds of things you're looking for ahead of time, meal planning in well in advance with a sort of basic framework of, OK, we got a bean and we got a starch. What do we have to throw into the bean pot? and we got a starch. What do we have to throw into the bean pot? The last thing I'll say is, as Anna has rightly been champion for, the actual cooking devices are super important too. That has perpetually been one of our biggest struggles

because, you know, we don't have a call lender, so we can't drain the beans and we have four Instapots, but they're different sizes and the lids for two don't work with wear and tear stuff is, you know, breaking right when you need it the most. So, you know, if you are getting money donations, I think it's really important to budget for the pots and the pans and the can openers and these kinds of things that really make a difference in getting food hot and out on time and in large numbers. Yeah, I think that's very good advice.

Maria had something to add. I have actually a lot of things to add logistics wise because in in our meetings we talk about some some some parts of this and so one of the big things that we talked about um over the strike but also after the strike when we were like hey let's let's continue this project is how much of our things should be like reusable versus like disposable. Right. That was like a big topic of like, well, okay. We're using disposable forks and we, we don't like that environmentally because we're putting like a bunch of plastic into, you know, the trash. Right. And we have to buy plastic each time,

but then like, we don't know, okay. You know you know, like should we should we buy like, you know, a bunch of metal spoons? But they're going to be a little bit more expensive than the disposable ones. But, you know, maybe the costs will even out after a while. And like that, that kind of, you know, discussion has to be had about like everything. So, you know, about like bowls, about like the pans in which we cook in, like mixing bowls, like all kinds of things like that, where we're thinking, you know, about like bowls, about like the pans in which we cook in, like mixing bowls, like all kinds of things like that, where we're thinking, you know, like based on the funds that we have based on our usage of some of these products, is it worth it getting, you know, like reusable things, which unfortunately we'll have to like clean afterwards. So they add to the labor,

but thankfully they don't, you know, pollute the environment in the way that disposable things do. So for us, because we do care a lot about lowering our usage of plastic, we did pivot to using more reusable things. So I think for a group that may be interested in, you know, like facilitating something like this in their workplace or in their university or something like that. I think that is one important discussion that you want to have. What is the time course that you see of this project continuing? And is it worth it getting, you know, like reusable versus disposable tools for the people that possibly you're going to feed? Another thing that is related to this is when you're first starting to cook, really, you're trying to borrow things from other people. So a lot of the things that like, during the strike, we had just borrowed people's instapots, like people brought in their

instapots, they labeled them like, oh, this is, you know, Dana's Instapot. And then we use those Instapots after the strike. We couldn't do that anymore. But there were some people that were willing to be like, hey, I'm actually like moving out and I'll donate all these Tupperware to you. And so we took the Tupperware and now we have like a little Tupperware program where if people don't forget to bring their Tupperware to put lunch in, we just like label it UCSD Dollar Lunch Club, UCSD Mutual Aid, and we just give away the Tupperware to put lunch in. We just like label it UCSD Dollar Lunch Club, UCSD Mutual Aid, and we just give away the Tupperware. And oftentimes, you know, it's brought back to us, that kind of thing. And that again, facilitates food usage. So there's a lot of places where you can find things that you might need in this kind of thing. So can openers, I have found a bunch of jars that people you know after they're moving away they leave for free around graduate housing so like there's a lot of things

that you can get which you don't really require funds for there's also buy nothing groups on Facebook that I think are particularly effective for this so a lot of people that are just like oh yeah I'm like updating my kitchen I'm throwing away a bunch of these utensils that you can just get for free. So that's been really helpful for us as well. And as someone who does a lot of sourcing as well, so we tend to shop from Goodwill and other thrift stores to make sure that, you know, our buying and consumption of some of these tools is as ethical, if you can call it that, as possible. And then a third thing that I would like to add for anyone who wants to start a project like this is I think you have to make it be fun for you, the person that's cooking and cleaning and

organizing, apart from making it fun for everyone else who gets, you know, like free food, cheap food, tasty food, right? So something that I really like about Dollar Lunch Club is that we've been really allowing our members to like run wild with the ideas that they have, right? So for example, we, I mean, Anna and I have been talking about utilizing all the frozen bread that has been donated to us and making French toast, vegan French toast out of that. So we're really excited for doing something fun like that because usually in a lot of like soup kitchen places, you have foods that are like, hey, this is nutritious, but you know, like I don't want to eat beans all day. I'm someone who like does like beans, but not everyone else wants to just eat, you know, like mashed beans all day, that kind of thing. And so having a, like a variety

of things that we cook, like we pretty much like cook all kinds of curries, a lot of like rice dishes, a lot of stews, um, pesto spaghetti, like pasta, you know, just like all very different kinds of meals that make it fun for the people who are arriving. So like I mentioned pesto, I made pesto a couple of times. And like a lot of people are like, ooh, pesto, basil, that's gonna be great. And that was with like the forage mustard that I was talking about before. And like, when you have that kind of variety and when you have like interesting, fun foods, when you can like make boba in like an Instapot or you could grab a toaster oven and make garlic bread, which is things that we've done, you make it a lot

more fun for the people that are cooking as well. And it just becomes like a community building thing, not just for the people eating, but for the people doing that labor. So that's, like, that's what I would advise people like, yes, you are under very tight budgetary constraints, we try to like, for some meals, like, because there's so much donations, sometimes there's $0. Sometimes we have to buy things, and we try to have it be less than twenty dollars so we can like feed 30 to 40 people and you can like have that you know money that's donated for like one dollar um have that be for like next time that kind of thing uh did i yeah so like make it fun for yourself, so you can like continue doing that work and you won't burn out in the way that you, you might otherwise, even as you were trying to budget. Yeah.

Yeah. I just wanted to say, um, like in terms of roles, um, so we always have like somebody who like knows how to like pull a recipe together more um we always have to have somebody who like does dishwashing and like each of these roles can have like one or two or three people in it uh in it and then there's always like people who just like do the like labor of prep um and um like yeah that can be all the same person and or it can be multiple for each um and i want to say usually i am a person who either like like i show up to uh peel veggies that people tell me need to be peeled and I show up to wash dishes um because

I'm not a person who is like I have trouble making decisions about food I do not want to be in charge of food stuff and that has been like okay and that has meant that like I do not have to like get nervous and worked up about, like, I don't know how to make decisions about food here. I can just show up and peel carrots. And it's like, kind of helped me,

um, like maybe get a little bit of a better feel for like cooking stuff. Um, so that way when I am like just cooking for myself, um, I do just think of like okay if i was uh like uh if i was in you know like dollar lunch prep mode um i know i have rice and i know i have beans and so i'm set um and uh yeah um and a lot it a lot of times uh just like taking away the like the dirty dish

bin and sort of like leaving out maybe like a few washed bowls by the sink along with a sponge and a bit of soap people get the cue and they'll wash their own dishes um it's yeah yeah yeah yeah i think that's great actually having space for for different skill sets and different preferences within your organizing is always key okay guys and where can people find like if they want to ask you for bean recipes or follow along see pictures whatever it is like a dollar lunch club social media they can find or do you have individual ones you want to share uh so i think alex can talk about the website oh you have a website yes i made us i made us a website um so we are most active on instagram uh ken can put our handle in the chat. It is dollar underscore lunch underscore club on Instagram. And yeah, the website is dollar lunch club UCSD

separated by dashes and then.github.io because you can get free domain names if it's your GitHub username uh hot tip of the day oh cool um but uh yeah primarily on instagram nice yeah it's great uh all right well thank you very much for your time guys i really appreciate it and uh yeah i hope more people do the same because as you said i think this is a really important way to organize. Thank you so much. We really appreciate it. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

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