It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 8

Episode Date: November 6, 2021

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,

there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Well, I'm Robert Evans. May have said that already. I don't know. Like I said, too many motherfucking podcasts, but this is the last spooky week episode. And with me, actually in the office right now,

maskless, is a protest against the mask mandates. No. Garrison Davis. No. It's fine. It's fine, Garrison. I understand that you don't believe in health mandates. Okay. We have to respect each other's differences. It's fine, Garrison. I understand that you don't believe in health mandates. Okay.

We have to respect each other's differences. No, I have magic to protect myself. That's right. So it's fine. You use chaos magic to protect yourself from COVID. Garrison, what do you got for me? We're doing the first It Could Happen Here daily book episode. Excellent. Sexy. Erotic. book episode excellent um sexy and so erotic we were looking for for spooky content for spooky week and around halloween and i wanted to find a book written by an unhinged like christian writer

about what they think halloween is and i found i found one with very very little browsing it took it was very quick it took me like five minutes it used to be – well, no, because you did grow up in the cold. But you were too young to remember this being a super mainstream thing. I mean I was – we had no Halloween when I was a kid. We couldn't go trick-or-treating. We had like a harvest party the church put on. Oh, God. But like we had – I couldn't – I didn't – the first time I went trick-or-treating was when I was like 12 and I moved to Portland.

No, I was like 13 was the first time I went trick-or-treating was when I was like 12 and I moved to Portland no I was like I was like 13 was the first time I went trick-or-treating yeah it's um I mean it used to be like it used to be something that got more mainstream play the like anti-Halloween thing yeah um it kind of tied in with the satanic panic like I remember the early 90s that's what this book is gonna be about yeah angry about it but man it just is like it's it's it almost feels like homey and comforting. I know. Like thinking back to that as opposed to. This book has been oddly comforting because it just reminds me of my childhood. Yeah. Because that's just all the same stuff.

Yeah. So I want you to read the title and the author of this amazing book. Mm-hmm. Okay. So this is, wow, the cover is honestly just looks like a normal jack-o'-lantern. It looks like a regular Halloween cover. A bat into a jack-o'-lantern, but it's got spooky white smoke coming out of it. Yeah, very scary.

The title is Halloween, Satan's New Year by Dr. Billy Dimmily. It's not a real name. It is not a real name. Billy. Bill Yee. I swear to God, listeners, B-I-L-L-Y-E. That is not a real name that is not a real name billy billy like it's i swear to god listeners b-i-l-l-y-e that is not a name and the last name is certainly not billy that's billy but the last name was just as bad dimily yeah d-y-m-a-l-l-y dim ally i don't know ally i don't know nonsense complete nonsense

so we have whenever you find a christian book written by someone with doctor in front of their first name, you know it's going to be good. You've got to figure out what kind of doctor first. Guess what kind of doctor. Divinity, maybe? Billy Dimley, the author, earned a theological doctorate of ministry in the mid-80s

at the Honolulu Hawaii extension of the Western Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary, headquartered in Portland, Oregon. So that's fine. The Honolulu one headquartered in Portland. The branch was in Honolulu, but the headquarters was apparently in Portland, Oregon in the 80s. That makes sense.

I'm not sure if it's still here. You know, sister cities, Portland and Honolulu. She wrote at least 15 original manuscripts, her word, manuscript, on a wide range of biblical doctrines and subjects. Wait, Billie is a lady? I believe so. I mean, has she her pronouns?

All right, I gotta, I gotta, I gotta, continue, I'm gonna look this up. So yeah, Billie, so the book that we're looking at is one of her 15 manuscripts, self-published by Infinity Publishing. Yeah, this was published in 2006. That gives us a good—

Yeah, that's a lady. And if that's her actual picture on the front, she just kind of looks like a white lady. Looks like a white lady. So, yeah. So one of my favorite parts of the book so far is right when you open up to the title page, it says, you know, Halloween, Satan's New Year, the title of the book. And then as a brief description of what the book is, it says, a systematic compilation and narrative of paraphrased Bible scriptures. Oh, whoa. No, that is not her on the cover because she is not a white lady.

Is she not? No, that's her. Oh, so she's like a black conservative Baptist. Yeah, yeah. She just looks like she looks like kind of like a judge. She does look a lot like a judge. She's got strong judge energy. She has some judge energy.

Yeah, okay. Well, there you go. I do love the systematic compilation narrative of paraphrased Bible scriptures. Not actual Bible scriptures. Wow, oh God. Garrison. Uh-huh?

You want to guess what she has as her place of employment on Facebook? Well, let me think. I don't know. I'm going to read it verbatim. Okay. Works at in, and this is all caps now, the service of God. All right.

She works at in the service of God. She does work at in the service of God. Yeah. Who doesn't work at in the service of God? Am I right? right oh fucking incredible based on this book i'm guessing she got real real into q anon but that's just based on what i've read i think she may have died oh really well her last post is in february of 2020 oh well i wonder what happened around february 2022 now maybe she's just not super into facebook but she's posting

quite a lot prior to that i think there's a decent chance no she's not she's actually not super there's a decent chance covid got her yeah maybe she just doesn't use a lot of social media that's fine okay continue please so yeah i do like that she describes the book as paraphrased bible scriptures not actual yeah no it's paraphrhrased. And paraphrase Bible scriptures on the doctrines of good and evil, including an expose on the practice of witchcraft, magic, occultism, divination, and Satan worship. So that is how she describes the book. Now, the book is like almost, the book is 200 pages long. And it is mostly the same sentence rewritten in like 12 ways. Excellent. It's all saying about how good jesus is and how

evil satan is and how people using magic are servants of satan basically it's just that for for 200 pages and she includes like a lot of like a lot of like again paraphrased bible scriptures about you know basically like really classic evangelical kind of conservative baptist christianity type stuff um so that's what most of the book is. There's not much Halloween content in this Halloween book. That doesn't surprise me. That's often the case with these weird like, it's just, they've got

some bizarre theological gripe that's only tangentially related to the culture war issue. So they've got a lot of stuff on like, they've like stuff on like Zionism and the Holy Spirit and spiritual speech. Oh hell yeah, I bet she's got great takes on Zionism. Sacred books, the baptism. Like it's a whole bunch of just like regular

kind of conservative Christian stuff. Except there is one chapter that is pure gold. Oh. It is called The Witch of Endor. Oh my. Oh, wow. It is. This is the expose on witchcraft and Halloween.

I'm very excited. It is the best part of the book and i'm hand it's it's like at least like 30 pages i'm not gonna we can't read the whole thing because honestly again it is mostly the same kind of sentences but i have highlighted a few a few key passages from the witches of endor um to to distill out to us so the So the first thing that first thing for when Bill Yee Bill Yee Bill Yee, Bill Yee In a section called, What is a Witch? That is a good question.

Bill Yee says, A witch is a sorcerer, a witch is a Satanist. Witches worship ancient false gods and practice magic. Magic is the divinely forbidden black art of bringing about the results beyond the human power by use of evil spirits and including the devil and his demons. Magic always brings Satan's So it's really good. She goes on to describe the practice of witchcraft using occult formulations, incantations, magical mutterings, peeping, and chirping. No, it says chirping parenthesis

criminal hypnosis parenthesis oh okay that's good chirping that's what chirping is i'm glad she clear up that's what makes a good writer yes when you you you anticipate the questions chirping oh chirping criminal hypnosis ah yeah a great writer would have further explained is that hypnosis that is itself criminal it doesn't is that is hypnosis on a criminal no it has a hypnosis that makes you criminal no it does not give you any indication i know i know real mystery yeah so uh she she basically rounds up all all different types of of kind of magic and cultism into this into this banner of witchcraft. She says there's no distinction to be made between witchcraft and sorcery,

despite the erroneous claims that sorcery is diabolical and witchcraft is creative art. Both are diabolical and devilish. Yeah, I mean, I guess I do agree with her that I don't feel like there's a meaningful distinction between witchcraft and sorcery. In that they're both things from the books that you read as a kid but yep so the first thing she gets into in witchcraft i think is this is a weird intro but i guess it makes sense from like her perspective is demon possession so this is the first excellent this is the first like technique that she gets into uh demon demon possession is a result of which result of witchcraft incantation. In diabolical witchcraft, the witch voluntarily invites the devil and his demon spirits, who are sometimes referred to as the goddess or god, or the host of a particular names of a particular

deity for each society. However, there is a difference between demon possession through deliberate invocation than demon possession by demonic internal attack upon helpless and often unsuspecting suspects possession is often a common aftermath of certain ill of certain forms of certain illnesses such as strokes so oh okay she says that the most the one of the easiest ways to figure out if you're possessed is if you have a stroke also if you have if you have epilepsy or coma this is really you know my my my grandpa was pretty hard into demonology there at the end i jeez oh man and one of the fun things about this book though is that she really tries to hammer down in all of like the biblical examples of witchcraft which which there is, like, a few.

Yeah, sure. It's the Bible. There's lots of wacky magic and shit in it. So she really tries to convince, like, her Christian readers that witchcraft is a current problem to be worried with. Because she's kind of upset that people view it as, like, a fake thing. She's like, no, it's real. It's in the Bible. You have to be scared of it.

She's like, God's word authenticates the reality of you have to be scared of it um the god's word authenticates the reality of witchcraft therefore it's not mere superstition so a lot of a lot of this is her trying to her trying to scare people into believing that witchcraft is actually is is is is a is an ongoing problem yeah um she says that uh the familiar spirits of witches spoken of in the bible are referred to in folk history as dwarves, fairies, trolls. I don't know what this one is. What's this? What's this?

Kobolds. You don't know what a kobold is, Garrison? No, I don't. Well, they're usually like a CR1 or less little monster, little bitty reptilian things often found in dungeons. If you've got a low-level party, you want to bring them up against – I mean, kobolds are one of the things that you could have them go up against. I have not – I've not encountered them in my D& i've not encountered them to get a little weirder yeah they're they're little little little uh lizard type type goblin things yeah so those guys dwarves fairies trolls and other small spirits of northern folklore they can be friendly mischievous or malignant in folklore

they were purported as nature spirits this is the other thing she really hammers down on is that if you like nature that means that you're actually a sat really hammers down on, is that if you like nature, that means that you're actually a Satanist. Okay. That scans. Which is pretty good. That does remind me of my Explore Nature Hail Satan shirt, which is my favorite shirt. Yeah. That is a very good shirt.

It's pretty good. She traces back the origin of magic to the fall of man at the beginning of human history, as said in the book of Genesis. Is that where we got magic? That's what she says. Okay. She says – so basically the way she explains it is that magic – and this is something I actually kind of agree with.

It's like magic is the idea that you are kind of on your way to become God in some way. Now, wait. You believe that. All right. We don't need to get in terms of like in terms of like in terms of like chaos magic it's like you're trying to like increase your own ability to have power over like your own life and that's kind of the idea so what she says is that basically in the fall of in genesis when eve tried to eat the uh tried to eat the food fruit of the knowledge of knowledge of good and evil, this was her attempt to gain godlike power. If God can see good and evil, at the time, man could only see good.

So when Eve ate the fruit, she was trying to become like God. She was taking agency over her existence, which is magic. And her fact of eating the fruit gave her the magic power to see good and evil, which is what we have now. So this is how she tracks back the origin of magic. She's a biblical, she's obviously, because, you know, she's a conservative Baptist, she's a biblical literalist, she reads the Garden of Eden

as a literal historical tale, not as, like, a piece of poetry or art meant to, like, symbolize things in culture like it was obviously written as. Yeah. Okay. I mean, yeah, that scans. There's a lot of a lot of misogyny in this book um not from bill ye sorry not from dr bill sorry there is a lot especially she rails against feminism later on and there's a lot of hatred because like eve was the one that

ate the fruit so it's the woman's fault like the woman is like the tempter of man it's always their fault that's that's very well tread evangelical ground although it is extra fun when it's a woman who is hating on yeah this whole chapter is about witches and witches are typically feminine yeah um but she does say that there's like wizards and warlocks but she just kind of ropes them all together i i searched a second ago and i couldn't find any evidence that she wrote books about harry potter the book i searched a second ago and i couldn't find any evidence that she wrote books about harry potter hmm so that's this was written in 2006 so yeah she would have read i have not seen harry potter mentioned in this so far fascinating because boy that pissed off a lot of people who are otherwise very similar to yeah it sure did yeah so yeah let's see

she is she she is very concerned that that satanism and witchcraft is basically a reinvention of paganism um

and she finds this to be incredibly disturbing and tying to a whole bunch of like all of like the woo woo spiritual stuff of the 90s

she's also very concerned about she says millions are now involved in some manner of ancient magical practice and rites ranging from

walking on hot coals with no ill effect to poking knives through flesh without creating wounds, to reading from blind eye sockets, or from sighted eyes which have been masks, to magically filling decayed teeth with gold, which, I don't know, is that just dentistry? What is she referring to?

Yeah, that seems like just, um, just filling a tube. I have parents who have, like, gold fillings and stuff. A lot of people do. That doesn't, um, that's witchcraft i don't think dentistry is witchcraft well in a way that it it makes money disappear but also it's i would i would compare most dentistry to more like armed robbery but sure i haven't had great dentist experiences yeah i mean i'm not a big dentist All dentists are bastards would be my contention. So yeah,

she says that basically the sign of the new uptick in magic around, this is around 2006, this is right after the Satanic Panic, the sign of the end times. Magic is the colossal revolt against God, whose satanic purpose is to instill in fallen men the desire to be a god.

Did I say cool? That sounds rad. Yeah, I mean, that is, that's also the Mormon faith, more or less. I'm sure she has opinions about Mormons. Yeah, I'm sure she does. We're gonna get to her opinions

on the Irish later, so. Oh, good, oh, good. Oh, fantastic. Yeah, she has a lot of opinions. I bet she's real, real punchy towards the Papists. So, she does break down the difference that she sees between

black magic, white magic, and what she calls a neutral magic. She says that the term black magic refers to the direct league with Satan himself, often

involving an actual blood pact of allegiance. So she thinks that black magic is when you directly involve Satan. Okay.

And white magic is merely black magic in a mask. It may deceptively employ the names of Jesus Christ, God the Father, and the Holy Spirit magically, along with other Bible phrases.

I think I see where the Irish come in. And the Christian terminology. But this facade is covering its demonic character. So she thinks that even though they may use... So this is interesting because she complains here

that white magic uses the names of God and Jesus in its magic, but later on in the book, she complains that no magic uses God's name. So that's a fun thing that we'll talk about in a bit. Okay. And then for neutral magic,

she says, the devil shrouds himself with nature. He is referred to... Oh boy, that's her take on Wicca, huh? He is revered as mother nature and worshiped and adored by witches under this deluding guise. Yeah, the delusion of, okay, great.

So in neutral magic, Satan just dresses up as leaves. Yeah, that makes sense. Wicca only gets one mention in this, actually. Yeah, but she's clearly like, that's what she's talking about. I mean, she talks about a lot of like she uses these terms very loosely she's got a lot of gradients yeah yeah a lot of gradients yeah uh she has a small section on magical ceremonies and symbolism and kind of actually lays out kind of how magic works in terms of like using like a like like this is like symbolic objects and incantation

and like calling upon powers which is more like traditional magic um i i find it more fun to call on fake characters because it's very silly which is more of a more of a chaos magic thing yeah um because the more silly you get i think the more fun it is then she does have a nice section on um initiation rites and rituals which gets into the really good satanic panic stuff. So she describes a coven of witches coming together to have sex

with the devil. Usually maybe symbolically with a male leader of a cult or something. But then she says, when the initiation has been completed, the devil worshipper takes part in a parody of the sacrament many times bringing in the bodies of children who whom whom they have murdered oh good yeah that's the good shit that's the good shit in america alone there are over 1 million missing children at any given time many of these children who are never

found or seen again are victims of satanically controlled perverts who do the grossest forms of evil. Of course. But many more are the victims of witchcraft and incantations and other rites. Oh, that's great. These children who are being stolen at an astonishing rate each day may be stolen from unbelievers' homes. Or they may be children conceived by the witches themselves at regularly held sexual orgies. or they may be children conceived by the witches themselves at regularly held sexual orgies. Yeah, that's an old one,

that witches are having orgy babies and not reporting them to the government so they can kill them. Yeah, the children are often offered up as sacrifice to the devil. In some ceremonies, the witches may boil the children's bodies, mix them with lobes and substances,

or they may consume the children's bodies in the blood ritual parody of the Lord's Supper. So that's fun and i do like that this idea never went anywhere and is not a and is not an important part of the us's politics now no no no of course not nope um yeah you love to hear it that's pretty good that is that is that is fun yeah she she does have a small section on pagan music, magic, religion, and sorcery are some of the means used by the devil for the purpose of luring men away from the Christian truth. The heavy metal, punk, hip-hop, and other such abuse that conflating the Western and European world are... Okay.

Sorry. Yep. Nope. Nope. Yep. I don't think I have to say anymore. I do remember when punk destroyed christianity it actually gets quite more racist i'm not oh no go for it i'm not i i'm excited

it's counterpart of of the hypnotic trance inducing inducing drum rhythms employed throughout the horror world by the african nations oh yeah oh boy through the millions of which the insidious and evil message of the devil inciting them to sexual lust and Satan worship. It is incredible that in 2006, she's doing the black people music is the devil. And she is also like black, which is very sad. Yeah, it's incredible. Yeah, that's unfortunate.

Yeah, unfortunate would be a word for it. Yeah. Well, is it time for an ad break? I'm not looking at the clock. Yeah, it's probably about time for an ad break. Speaking of... Oh, boy. Millions of missing children?

Yeah, speaking of millions of missing children, maybe some of them are in these ads. We're back. Putting more children in the cauldron? Oh, we're recording, sorry. Anyway, back to reading this magnificent 200-page book by Dr. Dymely. Did you read all of it, Garrison? I've read the first 100 pages because after that, it's just the same words rewritten again and again in different combinations.

That's how a lot of these books are. It's just the same stuff. Yeah. So the next section is, this is, and again, I'm skipping over a lot of stuff, but this is like the rough, this is the most fun sections of her stuff on magic. Yeah, that's what we need. Now we have her section called Halloween, Satan's New Year. She starts by explaining witches celebrate eight major festivals or sabbats each year. Halloween is the primary annual festival commemorating Satan's New Year.

She then goes on to explain that the sabbat is a parody of the Holy Sabbath of God. Now, this is actually a really interesting kind of historical tidbit. So, yes, the word Sabbat in terms of witches does come from the Sabbath. Yeah, the Shabbos and all that stuff. A bunch of words with the same. This actually probably comes from the persecution of witches being heavily tied to anti-Semitism in the Middle Ages. So the first witch hunting book was called The Hammer of the Witches. And it is –

Yeah, the Malleus Maleficarum, right? Yeah, and it is – large portions of which are plagiarized from a previous book called Hammer of the Jews. Ah, there we go. In fact, entire sections are copy and pasted, but they just changed the word Jews to witch. And you really had to put the effort into plagiarism back then, because you're hand-hatching that shit. You're not copying and pasting anything.

No, you're doing the whole thing yourself. This is also where a lot of the pointy hat witch stuff, a lot of the big nose, with a really big nose, green, oily skin, all this stuff kind of comes from anti-semitic tropes because the persecution of Jews and anti-semitism

was heavily tied to the persecution of witches often they're the same things so when they would do sabbath they would say they're doing like a sabbat, they're going to basically do like blood libel with children with the devil which is what a lot of witches are about like finding children and stuff because it actually is tied to all the stuff now i'm not

saying we have to cancel witchcraft witchcraft is totally fine you can do all this stuff it is really cool but the or a lot of the origins of witch hunting is tied to these anti-semitic tropes um so anyway she she goes to describe different like pagan like festivals throughout the years, like Yule and all this kind of stuff, Midsummer, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the last one, the eighth one, is October 31st, or Halloween. She calls the unholy, satanic New Year. She says that the rites and ceremonies on which Halloween was originally observed had their origin among the Druids.

In the course of time, there were added to them some of the rites particular to the Roman festival of Ponema, which presided over the harvests. November 1st among the Druids was the beginning of the year and the festival of the sun god. They lighted fires in honor of their false god. They believe that October 31st, the end of the old year, the lord of death, which she puts in a parenthesis, the devil. Oh, good. I'm really, I'm really, again, very appreciative of how, of how clear her writing is. So the Lord of Death gathered together all the souls of the dead who had been allowed to enter

the body of another human being. The belief is that the root, this belief is the root of the false belief in reincarnation. Now, I did not fact check any of this. So I have no idea how, how accurate these these claims are for what she views as the origin of halloween but i think they're pretty funny um i know like there is halloween like halloween kind of traditions are there is like stuff around this time throughout a lot of like old pagan stuff like the modern notion of halloween is pretty pretty modern like the whole like trick-or-treating thing and all like the way we modernly think of halloween is pretty it's pretty new because i mean there was of course like all hallows day

or like all saints day and the eve of which other people would do shenanigans which is what we currently have as halloween because it's the day before all saints day all saints day is november 1st um but like you know the modern notion of halloween is not it's not super old so i'm not quite sure how tied these old harvest festivals really are to our modern Halloween. That's something I could look into later. But I just picked up this book and I'm reading right from it

because that's easier. So yeah. So she views Halloween now as a pagan holiday. This pagan festival, Halloween, is broadly celebrated throughout the Christian nations as a major holiday.

In America, Halloween has become a kind of Saturnalia for children. A night in which the rules are suspended and children venture out to demand treats and threaten reprisals against the stingy. Yeah, okay. I mean, that is a cooler way of looking at Halloween. That is a much cooler way.

If it were literally the Saturnalia, children would actually take the role of the parents and make decisions for the family and demand. Yeah, I mean. What a nightmare. Parents would have to go to school. Kids would have to go to work. That would be pretty funny.

That would actually be an incredible holiday. That would be a great holiday. So many people would die in plane crashes. It would be pretty funny. Especially if you enforced it. Like, you don't have a choice. You have to get on the plane. You are piloting the plane today. And a bunch of other kids are getting on it to go on work and all the kids on air

traffic control they don't know what they're doing either forcing all of the soldiers out of the various countries we've put them in having like the children of special forces guys conduct raids in namibia it is pretty easy for a kid to use an ak so it is it is ar is even easier yeah it would be fine yeah a lot of people are not going to have very successful heart surgeries that day, but it will be very funny in like a cosmic sense. Increasingly and alarmingly, this celebration is assuming dreadful expressions of evil and harmful acts are perpetuated against the children themselves in serious proportions. The treats are increasingly found to contain drugs, poisons, razor blades, needles, ground, grass, and many other harmful substances.

Maybe she meant weed or something. Oh, yeah. I didn't even think of that. Because that's like needles and grass. Yeah. I'm like, oh, no, grass. So, yeah, she does seem really, really, really thrilled with this idea that people are giving out free drugs which man what a dream i wish um halloween like christmas is also highly commercialized and it's part of a major

money-making event for the merchants okay raking in at the present time second only to christmas in that vein halloween is the satanic new year and is a celebration of the devil. And he is using the world today to gain greater acceptance of the perversity as he continues to proclimate his doctrine of demons. So that is fun. Then she has a very small section on old world Halloween traditions, which I'm not going to read tons of. Because, again, I don't know how verified these things are. But I am going to read. She goes on to talk about like how, like the laws against witchcraft in like the,

in the 1600s and other, I'm sure she was a big fan. She was, she was, but I do, I will read just the, the first sentence of the old world Halloween traditions section. Irish traditions,

devilish in origin. Yeah. Hear that Irish? We're coming for you. Irish traditions. Bring it on. Devilish and origin various methods of defining the future in halloween were accepted as tradition

so that's really all i'm going to say because i just love the line irish traditions devilish and origin yeah i mean that's i think every irish person i know would agree with that that's really all you got to say yeah yeah oh man it is it is, wow. What a, what a book. It just keeps going on. She talks about, like, the, basically, like, the people's different, honestly, this section's not even tons about Halloween, and more about different people's belief in witchcraft. So, like, she goes through, like, all the laws against witchcraft in Britain. She goes against, like, she goes, she talks around the witch trials in America, saying that there were witches.

She doesn't talk about all the, like, how many of them deserve to die? Yeah. Come on, you coward. Yeah. Yeah.

Uh, it's, it's pretty, she, she has a little bit of, I, I, I,

I, I, I, I, I'm actually going to read some of the stuff on, on, on, on America.

Belief in witchcraft was common to the early settlers in America. The witches were charged with making waxen images of their victims and causing their illnesses by sticking pins in the image or making them waste away by melting the images before the fire. This belief is held by the peoples of Africa, as well as other pagan people in widely varying civilizations and localities. The early settlers do not initiate this belief in America, but found it already to be belief in the American Indians who populated this country.

So that's her little section on that, which is, I don't know, hashtag problematic? Yeah, I would call that slightly problematic. I would call that slightly problematic. You know what's not problematic, Garrison? The products and services that are gonna hopefully sell no candy to the kids we we guarantee that less than a third of them are responsible for the disappearance of a million children million million children that's the behind the bastards guarantee less than a

third of our sponsors who knows how many are undocumented too well yeah which is making much more it's likely much more but anyway here's the ads here's the ads ah we're back we are all right bring it home garrison bring it home so yeah uh she she does mention that the devil likes to withhold the fact of existence of witchcraft the devil likes to hide it so most people kind of live in the dark. She says, although the imps which frolic on Halloween now are small children, raping on doors and gleefully receiving treats. Rapping on doors. Rapping on doors. Not raping on doors.

That's a very different holiday. Well, who knows? That might be Canadian Thanksgiving. I don't know. That's Canadian Halloween. The night which was formally accepted as the time when witches met and demons in the form of ghosts and ghouls were likely to wander about has

come to be regarded as a time of merrymaking and frolic. The majority of people are so engaged and are unaware of the satanic consultation of the magic oracles and the covens and groves on this night. Covens. Covens? I say covens.

That's not how you say it. Well, that's how I say it. You just got COVID on the brain. COVID. COVID is what you call a coven that meets during COVID because they're not properly socially distancing. All right. All right. There we go.

But basically, she thinks that basically all of the witches and magic doers are meeting all these ghouls on Halloween and people trick-or-treating are unaware of this. The ghouls flooding the streets. And she's extremely concerned that children might walk in on a ceremony and then get murdered. It is very funny when you realize how isolated these people are from the real world

because they've never just stepped outside during Halloween. Not really. Especially, I mean, Halloween in 2006. I was 18 then, so maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think it was, it wasn't huge then. No. It's gotten kind of smaller every year. The biggest fear back then was like traffic accidents.

Yeah, that's always the biggest. That's like the number one thing every year. Yeah. Thinking back on it, my parents shouldn't have let me be a ninja as often as they did, but I made it through. Again, so we're saying so many of the same words again because that's what most of the book is, but Halloween, Satan's new year,

Halloween has a long and dark history of devilish traditions, which has survived both Christianity and the science for 2,000 years. It is to be considered the chief festival for the worship of the devil, which begins his new year. Halloween and witchcraft are the means

by which the devil seeks to reintroduce the worship of old false gods by a synthesis of polytheism and feminism yeah that's what halloween is yeah polytheism and feminism yeah two sides of the same devil coin i love to worship multiple gods and respect women just really that is my that's my way to spend a night with my ghoul friends. Incredible. There's also a real, here's a real good quote. There is no question of the existence of modern witchcraft. It has been admitted of by thousands upon thousands worldwide and growing rapidly in the Western countries, particularly America.

The word of God makes it undeniably clear that witchcraft is real. It has existed at least six thousand years and it still exists today oh good yeah that's good six thousand years going good good for happy six thousand i just like that she had saw that it's a little bit around for all these six thousand happy six thousand six thousand years witchcraft on i'm guessing because it's the devil's new year this is also the birthday of witchcraft i mean also just the birthday of the world because if the world as we know birthday of the world, because if the world as we know it was born when Eve ate the fruit and Adam and Eve went into the greater world, if that's like the

birth of dawn, witchcraft's been here since the very beginning. Well, since the beginning of like the fallen world, because you have to assume that they had a hundred years or so beforehand. It's real unclear. It depends on what denomination you're in and what kind of theological viewpoint you have to assume that they had a hundred years or so beforehand it's real unclear it this yeah it depends on it depends on what denomination you're in and what kind of theological viewpoint you have on whether there were people outside the garden there is people who believe that some people just don't um it that is up for debate among different congregations yeah yeah so and and the other thing

that she's really concerned with is that witchcraft is making more people have sex because she thinks that most of witchcraft is practicing sexual orgies on, quote, every continent of the world. And that's what Black Mass is to her. Okay. So she is very concerned. I mean, there are sometimes in Black Masses sexual elements to them. I mean, I hope so. Yeah. That does sound much better.

sexual elements to them. I mean, I hope so. Yeah. That does sound much better. But she thinks that that's another one of the main catalysts of her being fearful of paganism and witchcraft

is that it's making more people have sex. And again, she reiterates that this is just a new form of paganism, saying that Satan's current day revival

of paganism is a sure sign of Christ's second coming. And it's pretty good oh yeah this is the section where she where she complains that magic doesn't use the bible even though previously she said that white magic does because that some some witches draw on other false religions such as the kabbalah uh sufism or various eastern religions but never the holy bible the word of god or is employed in their beliefs or practices except in a paradoxical counterfeit imaginative magic rites and rituals performed in the covens.

Covens. In the initiation of the converts and their celebrations of Halloween and other satanic sabbats. So that's what she thinks. I don't know if it might be Sabbath, but I'm pretty sure it's Shabbos. It's Shabbos. It's the Sabbath. It's the Sabbath. I don't know'm pretty sure it's all like the shabbos it's the sabbath it's the sabbat i've heard coven and sabbat in the stuff that i've watched all right all right all right let's have let's have a debate everyone everyone at no don't don't do that um she also claims that this is this is this is very exciting several universities in america offer a bachelor's degree in magic which i was

unaware oh i would love a bachelor's degree in magic unaware oh wow because this will read this will this will make me consider going to college now a bachelor's degree is that a ba or is that a bs i like is that like is it a bachelor of arts or of science it really that's a that's a key question about how the school views magic magic is is both an art and a science, so. Yeah, well, that's why I'm wondering. She doesn't say. She doesn't say what university she claims does this. I mean, I've always wanted to open a witchcraft store, so I may go back to college and get a BA or a BS in witchcraft along with my MFA.

Or not my MFA, my, what's the business thing? What are they? I don't know. Fill it in with the acronym for the business degree, whatever you get. I don't know. I dropped out of college.

Garrison hasn't gone. Yeah. I went to film school. That doesn't count though. No, it doesn't. It absolutely does not. Yeah. And then in this last section,

she really ties modern witchcraft to the rise of feminism um specifically starting in the 60s she says the the preeminence of the goddess in witchcraft has made it attractive to some feminists in 1968 which the woman's international terrorist conspiracy from hell oh great was founded as a political protest acronym great acronym yeah amazing was founded as a political protest group who who pur who purportedly justified their name as mere jest. Oh, it is. What of the members of this feminist movement are unaware of the cultural movement within the political, and many more are entirely unaware of the spiritualist movement within the cultural moment. So a whole bunch of weird stuff around how witches are using political feminism to inject cultural feminism, to inject cultural witchcraft into the mainstream. This is all what the goal

of feminism is. So yeah, and she has this whole, a whole paragraph called feminist, feminist witches. Feminist witchcraft is at present the most rapidly growing segment in the witchcraft revival. And it is from the spiritualist core at the heart of the feminist movement that the political and philosophical women's rights tenants as as a whole emerge. To name one such tenet, the right to abortion. Or, more correctly phrased, the right to murder children not yet born. This coincides with the

witch's present ritual practice of murdering children already born. So she thinks that abortion is just a way for witches to speed up the process. Just killing more babies to immanentize the eschaton. To speed up the ritual process. Yeah. That is what, that is her, that's her main bomb at the end.

For sure. That sounds, that sounds accurate. Yeah. She does, just have a great section describing the different tools which is used. An athleem, a phallic penis symbol of the liberated unbridled unlawful sex represents the power of self-will it's pretty pretty good that is good yeah sexual symbols are common in witchcraft and witches are unrepressed by god's moral law in their sexuality their use of sex symbols is rooted in paganism so again she's very scared that people are having sex and enjoying it, specifically women.

She's very scared that women are having sex and enjoying it. That sounds right. I mean, I hate it when the people pushing this line are themselves women, but it does, I mean, that's a huge part of the evangelical propaganda movement. Yeah. See, a bunch of shit Margaret Atwood wrote, you know? Now she gets to describe some of the coolest parts here.

A typical witch's Sabbath celebration will have a sky-clad, parenthesis, nude, parenthesis, which is gathered in an isolated place, a grove of trees if possible, around an altar which holds an icon or statuary of a false goddess and or gods, candles for fire, a chalice for water or wine, a container of salt, and a container for earth, rather than the bread, and a sword or a wand, which sounds amazing to just have a whole bunch of naked witches

in the forest around a ritual altar fire. This sounds like the best time ever. It does sound like a good Saturday night. This does sound like a good Saturday night. Hell, maybe even a Friday. Who knows? We can get wild.

So yeah, she goes in to describe what she thinks magical rituals are and different things that she could do. Again, she is very concerned. Ritual sex is engaged in to intensify the magical power raised in the cone of power through the combined wills of the coven witches. The cone of power is symbolized with a cone-shaped hat seen in typical pictures of witches in literature and paintings. Are you fucking kidding me? Are you fucking kidding me? It's right there. It's in the book. Because nobody wearing one of those hats has ever gotten fucked.

I feel confident. Hey, I wore that hat. All right, let's move forward, Garrison. That's not fair. Allegedly. Let's move forward. The cone of power. That's not fair.

Allegedly. Let's move forward. The Cone of Power! Mm-hmm. Yeah, the Cone of Power is incredible. After raising and- It is phallic, so it must be for fucking. After the raising and release of the Cone of Power, a ritual coven communication with cakes and wine,

which the priestess or priest has consecrated by dipping into the chalice and touching the cakes with other unholy tools, are passed on from a kiss from the priestess to the priest um basically this just sounds like a fun time um yeah but i i do love uh the cone of power which i've not read in any other magic book no i have not ever heard of i've read a decent amount pure her and i've never heard of the cone of power yeah that feels like pure her. And I've never heard of the cone of power? Yeah, that feels like pure her. That feels like somebody who's deeply sexually frustrated seeing

a hat that's kind of shaped like a dick and being like, that's gotta be a penis! Oh, poor lady. I'm so sorry for her. Then she has a small section on Satanism, particularly like the Ayn Rand version of Satanism. Sure. So I'm not even gonna get into that. I find that boring, and it doesn't matter.

And she even says that these Satanists don't believe in an actual devil. Oh, good. Okay. Well, that's actually a little bit more nuanced than I expected from her. They just use Satan and Lucifer as a personification of evil. So I'm not even going to bother with this section, because it's just talking about the dumb Ayn Rand version of Satanism, and I don't care about that. Yeah.

If you like it, I mean, whatever. Whatever. It has anarchist-y stuff, kind of, but it's also very Randian, and it has a lot of not great stuff either. I don't... It's fine. It all is more effort than I want to put into thinking about the universe.

And then, I think this could be... I think this is our last paragraph. Here we go. Oh, good. Oh, good. This section is titled, The End of the Witches. Oh, no. Witches are children of is called titled the end of the witches oh no witches are children of the devil the end of the witches sorry the end of the witches revelry before their idolatrous altars at their depraved sabbats where they eat and drink and play their gross music and sing and dance naked and shameless and corrupt and defile themselves and

desecrate god's holy sabbath shall surely be accomplished by god who will put them who will put them to death and cut off their souls forever yeah from among his children so that's that's the end of the witches everybody we're gonna be dancing naked shamelessly like having an undeniably good time being able to dance naked in a group without shame listening to gross music and singing what a time sounds like the ideal weekend and then God will put us to death

that does sound a little bit like our last weekend but it was very cold so people were wearing lots of clothing I was very happy with the weather that is most of the good parts of the book. Again, it gets 200 pages. Yeah. No, it's a nice breezy read.

Grab it this weekend. It's only 10 bucks on Amazon. Wow. What a deal. What a steal. Yeah. And it is fun that she does... There is one section where she outlines

what all she thinks magic is. All of the different groups. She puts them into a really nice little package but i i don't think i can find that because again there's 200 pages and i did not mark off that section but i think i think we decently got the gist of the the main main parts of this book um again most of it is just her talking about jesus yeah that sounds right and and and the christian soul um but the one which witches of indoor section is pretty good and honestly worth the read so well i that is my first book report of where it could happen here all of you satan's new year beloved children enjoyed this this this book and are properly warned about the dangers of

witchcraft which is coming to make your children have a pretty rad time. You're going to dance in the woods listening to gross music. So I hope everyone on this Halloween danced in the woods listening to gross music. I hope those of you who climactically could did so naked. I hope none of you got hit by cars while dressed as ninjas. And I also hope that most of you weren't out trick-or-treating because I think the average age of our listeners is sometime in the mid-20s. Yeah. That would be a little bit odd. That's a little awkward. A little bit weird. But hey, whatever. It's your life. Do your thing.

Do your thing. Hello, everyone. Garrison here. Just going to be adding in one quick correction for our Halloween Satan's New Year episode. So towards the end, we made some assumptions about the Cone of Power, which were apparently incorrect. So, the Cone of Power does actually seem to be a thing inside ritual magic, but particularly Wicca. So, I'm not super familiar with Wicca. This is not my system of choice. So, I wasn't aware that this is actually a thing, but apparently it is. It is a method for centering or directing or raising energy. It is less tied to the witch's hat, though. So that part is

more made up. I cannot find much tying the cone of power directly to the cone-shaped witch's hats. This is mainly an invention of Dr. Bilyeu, at least from what I can tell. But apologies for assuming that the cone of power was completely made up

when in fact it is a part of Wicca. So sorry to the Wiccans and the more proper witches for that gross assumption on mine and Robert's part. Anyway, this wraps up our spooky week of content. I hope you had a good Halloween. This episode should be releasing on Halloween itself, so I hope you are having or had a good time, and hopefully you were able to celebrate Halloween Satan-style, just like it was designed to. So, goodbye everybody, see you on the other side. And hopefully we can do Spooky Week again next year.

Goodbye! Bye! Woo! 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. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about, well, mostly it's about how things are bad, but it is also sometimes about what you can do about it. And today we have two people who are, in fact, doing things about it. So with me, we have Abrar and Janine, who are part of the Common Humanity Collective, which is a mutual aid group out of California. Hello, Janine. Hello, Jean. Hello, Barbara. How are you two doing today? Doing well, thank you.

Doing pretty good. Thank you. So, yeah, we wanted to have you two on to talk about basically your mutual aid work and then also the sort of political aspect of that because I know that's something you two have been wanting to talk about. I've read the media coverage of it and it does not ever make it into the interviews so yeah and i guess i guess to start so you two started doing mutual aid stuff with with this group specifically around the beginning of the pandemic as i understand it you know what can you walk us through how it started and what you guys were up to? Absolutely. And I think it's interesting to trace out the different stages of

this work because it's very much been a kind of evolution. So let me go back to the very, very early days. And this is really the first day of lockdown in the Bay Area where we live. I'm a PhD student at UC Berkeley. And as COVID was spreading from the East Coast to the West, we knew that things would quickly get shut down in California. And there was someone in my lab, a good friend named Yvonne, and she and I just quickly realized that this pandemic was going to hit, given the sort of crumbling public health infrastructure, the poorest among us, the elderly, the dispossessed, these people would be vulnerable.

And as PPE just completely disappeared from store shelves, these people, especially those living in cramped housing conditions those with essential work those in nursing homes just would not have access to the tools they needed to protect themselves from this disease and in the very early days when we thought that this stuff was transmitted via surfaces all of the attention was focused on hand washing hand sanitizer the problem was you couldn't even find hand sanitizer anywhere so here we were in our labs and you know our fumes weren't being used and everyone was getting sent home and we realized that we could pull ethanol from the scientific reagent supply chains and stir up some hand sanitizer ourselves in lab and distribute it just to homeless shelters, to people who needed it in the city,

et cetera. So this began as a very sort of low-key, quiet, under the cover effort. And, you know, we didn't have a name. We didn't even know what mutual aid was, I think we were just following our basic instincts. And fast forward a week or two, and suddenly a whole lot of people got involved. We had this elaborate distribution infrastructure, which started sort of self assembling. Lots of people came to find ways of getting the sanitizer to everyone who needed it. In the meantime, we realized that as the demand was enormous, we needed to come up with ways of procuring the supplies and mixing it at scale so that we didn't have to turn anyone down. So we called upon lots of different labs on campus

and asked them if they could do this, if they could shift some of their discretionary funds towards getting these chemicals. And, you know, again, within a few weeks after that, we were mixing hundreds of gallons of hand sanitizer and delivering it to absolutely everyone who needed it. My phone was just getting called nonstop from the moment I woke up to when I went to sleep. I was forgetting to eat. I was barely sleeping, just responding to these cries for help

from all over the Bay Area. And in that time, we met so many people and we figured out how to do this work efficiently and effectively, But also, as the attention shifted from surface transmission to aerosol transmission, everyone started realizing that, in fact, masks were probably the primary way in which we protect ourselves from the coronavirus. And that's when a good friend of ours, Chris, who was a PhD student, and he's now a postdoc, brilliant, brilliant, creative guy, came up with ways of actually making sub micron masks out of just supply chains that weren't getting tapped. And then he started looking at nanofiber material.

And he found ways for around 60 cents making a mask that was basically the quality of an N95 mask that could be made in just a few minutes at home. And so we suddenly just integrated that whole effort into our own and started just recruiting volunteers, sharing all of our resources and this large assembly network of these little pods situated all across the Bay Area, each of them with a team lead, with a little army, a battalion of assembly volunteers and dedicated drivers. We're just making thousands of these masks every week, which we were then distributing through the distribution infrastructure that we had sort of put together earlier on in the pandemic. And so we found ourselves, and this was still very much in a time when you couldn't even find cloth masks or surgical masks in shops. We found ourselves astonishingly being the primary source of this essential PVE for

tens and tens of thousands of people in the Bay Area. And as we recovered in the early days by the Chronicle and the LA Times, loads of people started joining the volunteer network. We started getting donations. And that was the earlier stage of what we did. And I'll pass it on to Janine to talk about what we did next. what we did. And I'll pass it on to Janine to talk about what we did next. Yeah, so kind of as Common Humanity Collective was working on this project, Abrar, myself, and a couple other folks started adopting kind of a Democratic Socialist of America or East Bay DSA side of what was happening. And through this project, our intent was to have a little bit more political education and think really critically about how we could make this true mutual aid, which Aura and I have learned is really, really

difficult to do, especially under capitalism. And so because we started this project around December, so kind of the height of the pandemic, we wanted to make it accessible for people who were really COVID cautious. And so we would assemble kits of masks in a park with a couple folks outside. And then we would drive these kits to people's homes and get on Zoom. And we would have a breakout room for people to learn how to make masks. People, oftentimes people who had only come to the build a couple times started teaching new folks how to build these masks. And in the other room, we were doing readings.

We were reading, you know, Panna Cook and Jane McAtee side by side talking about trade unions and solidarity unionism. We were reading about tenant organizing. Abrar, do you want to talk about Rosa Luxemburg a little bit? Yeah, I mean, it was an amazing thing. We were trying to sort of expand our own political consciousness. And we did things like host a three-part series, just discussing, examining, analyzing the political theory of Rosa Luxembourg. And we had huge participation. And this was at a time where in our DSA chapter, in many of the different committees, people were panicking because no one was showing up.

And yet we found an enormous number of people joining our effort in these discussions were so energetic and so enthusiastic. And, you know, this was a lonely time. It was a difficult time. And people seemed to find something in what we were doing. What do you think about that, Janine? Yeah. And I think, you know, not only were people coming and participating, right? We had high school students, we had people who had dedicated the pandemic to reading political theory, right? And so you have this huge breadth of knowledge, we have more liberal people joining, we have like, anarchists and communists, right? Like all in this space that are actually talking together. And what was so empowering to me was everyone felt like they could speak. We had people that were really introverted, that in the beginning didn't talk at all, slowly start to open up. We had high schoolers asking really incredible questions, right? Like, is revolution even possible right now? And kind of getting into some of this. And I think one of the most impactful things was that we had these calls from seven to nine at night. And after that, we had what we called late night where folks would stay on till like 12 at night and talk to each other. and depression. I don't think anyone that I know, at least was having a good time in December,

January, February, right? People were coming together on Zoom and actually staying on Zoom after what we were doing, to feel some type of camaraderie to feel like they were part of a community. And we were able to actually create that space. And I think that that was something that to me was really incredible. And I think, you know, framing this also from the George Floyd protests that happened over the summer and thinking, you know, more about abolition, right, thinking more about community building, I don't think you can truly, or I can't imagine a future without the prison industrial complex that doesn't involve communities of care, that doesn't involve giving people both the resources and the like love that they need to be able to not be pushed into situations where they have to commit crimes and also having accountability amongst each other.

Not to mention, right, this work is really, really hard. People burn out. We're exhausted to be able to create a space where everyone cares for each other, where we're checking in with each other, where in the beginning of this virtual mask builds, I think, you know, Abrar, myself and a couple other folks were doing the majority of the work. And by the end, we were doing none of it. We had like been able to reallocate those tasks. We had been able to develop leaders and we had essentially organized ourselves out of a job, which to me is like the organizer's dream, right? Like that's what you really want to see happen. what you really want to see happen. And so that's kind of what was happening on the production side of the mask builds. On the distribution side, again, we're thinking, how can we actually make this true mutual aid? And so we started to partner with Tank, Tenant and Neighborhood Councils, which is one of the main tenant groups in the Bay Area, and working with them to go to food banks, right, places where people are generally low income, where they might not be able to have the resources to get masks. And we're distributing masks, asking them,

are you having trouble with your rent or your landlord, right? The goal in this is to give people the tools to organize around issues that are deeply pertinent and urgent to them, especially with an impending eviction moratorium, right? And so we learned a lot through this. We went to a lot of different food banks. We found, you know, some of them were places where people primarily spoke Cantonese and Mandarin. And so we, you know, used our networks, again, that we'd created through this project, these relationships of trust to find people that spoke Mandarin and were willing to come out and talk with folks. We found people that spoke Spanish that were willing to come out and talk with folks. We found people that spoke Spanish that were willing to come out and talk with folks.

And we started to develop relationships at these food banks where we were able to distribute masks to people, talk to them, understand what issues they were having and invite them to come to meetings where they could actually get the resources to try and tackle some of these issues that they're facing. Abraj, you have more to add on the mask project?

Yeah, I think it's worth saying that we're all very busy. I'm a PhD student. While we were doing this work, you know, in DSA, I was teaching a class and I was doing research. And Janine is a extremely busy union organizer. And normally, you know, we'd come home after work and be absolutely exhausted. And this was very tiring, but we felt somehow energized. We felt driven to do this. And we found that lots of the other people who participated were also busy with their jobs and yet would make time to do this. And in terms of our actual practice, in terms of trying to develop the political dimension of the distribution aspect of our mutual aid, there was a constant interplay between what we were reading and what we were practicing. So as we began working with this radical tenant organizing

group tank that Janine mentioned, whose aim is to give tenants the tools to form tenant councils and tenant unions in order to use tools such as rent strikes to rebalance power between themselves and the landlords of real estate companies, etc. During that time, during our mask builds, we would then go and read articles and newspaper clippings from, you know, early 20th century when there were examples of, you know, 20-year-old factory girls in lower Manhattan organizing groups of apartment buildings to go on rent strike, you know, 10,000 families in one case to go on rent strike. These incredible, deeply inspiring stories where people suddenly became subjects of history and not merely objects. And I think part of what sustained our own work in this group was some similar feeling.

And at the same time, when we were trying to imagine a future beyond capitalism, we were looking at moments when that future seemed within reach. And so we were studying, for example, Paris in 1968, which is a moment within many people's living memory, although not our own, and studying how it was that these protests began with the student movement and then spilled out into these massive strikes and all the sort of self-activity that emerged from that. And there was such a wide, wide breadth of people who came to these builds. There were people as young as high schoolers were also much older people in their 70s and 80s. And when we were having this discussion, someone who lived through the 60s and witnessed these things very up close came to talk about Paris

in 1968 and shared the wealth of his own experience. And again, all of this was driving what we were actually doing with our hands, what we were doing on the streets, what we were doing at these food bank lines. And so it was very critical that everything we were reading was somehow feeding into our practice. Yeah, and I think, you know, we had over 100 people participate in these mask builds. And I think one of the things that I really took away from this is, again, people were craving that community. They were craving relationships and people came back because they felt that in this group. And that translated also as we transitioned, right? We had built a culture of friendship and of caring for each other that people wanted to

continue working on this. They wanted to continue to be a part of this project as we transitioned to building air purifiers, right? As the, you know, vaccines became more prevalent, masks were still being worn, but to a lesser degree, and we started turning to fire season. As these disasters, right, continue to strike, especially with climate change only getting worse and worse. One of the things that I think is really powerful about mutual aid and is really powerful about communities is that these disasters have been happening and continue to happen at a greater and greater frequency. And I think what I've learned from looking at, you know, the heat waves that recently

took many lives across the Pacific Northwest, the really, really freezing temperatures that happened in Texas about a year ago, and especially COVID is that, you know, the government local or federal is not stepping in to help people. Billionaires are not really stepping in to help people. It's really only communities and networks of relationships that are keeping people alive. And the only way, you know, that we're going to get through this is through having those relationships through understanding where people need support. And we started to do this with the distribution of masks, right?

It's build relationships with community members in, you know, Fruitvale in Oakland, which is not a large, not a place that many people from DSA or from Tank are living currently, right, and starting to build relationships with people that do need these resources in times of crisis, so that we know where we can plug in and also build relationships amongst our fellow organizers so that we can support each other through these disasters. And so as we transitioned to the air purifiers, we started, you know, thinking about everything we had learned from the mask project and kind of making that even bigger and better. And how can we, you know, continue to take what we've learned and change it and turn it into something really, really

incredible. And we, you know, Chris, who Abrar mentioned before, who came up with the masks, came up with a really incredible way to make air purifiers that's like ridiculously efficient, is really, really useful, especially for wildfire smoke, but also for just people with asthma. There's a lot of environmental pollution in the Bay Area, right? These things can be used year round. And we began to build these air purifiers out of, you know, box fans and HEPA filters with a shroud, with weather stripping, right, to make the air like only go through the fan to make it extremely efficient. And started to think about how can we make this like community aspect even bigger, at least this is what I was

thinking of, because I started to realize, right, I think the only thing that we can rely on is each other right now, especially. And so we started bringing in a bunch of different groups to come to these builds. So we have, you know, East Bay DSA, we started working really closely with Sunrise and developed a level of trust and reciprocity in that relationship that has, you know, continued to be really beneficial to us and really helpful. We met amazing people that came out, you know, they've helped fundraise for us as our funding has gotten really, really low because these air purifiers are not cheap, though they're much cheaper than commercially available, but we're, you know, giving them to folks for free because we want this to be mutual aid. And so working with Sunrise, we're working with Asians for Black

Lives, Berkeley Mutual Aid, Mask Oakland, who both came out to our builds, but also helped us distribute air purifiers to Reno and to places that had, you know, AQIs of 500, right? When fire season was so bad, when the smoke there was just like unlivable, we were able to work with them to distribute these air purifiers where people really needed them most. most. We were able to, you know, continue to work with Tank. Some folks from the IWW came out. We were able to distribute these air purifiers to the Segorite Land Trust, which is a land trust that is run by Indigenous women and is working on essentially giving Indigenous land back to Indigenous people. We were able to distribute with Critical Resistance, an amazing abolitionist group started by Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis in Oakland. We were able to distribute to SRO, a group that is working with low income Chinese immigrants in San Francisco who are generally living in single family homes, right, with really bad air quality. living in single family homes, right, with really bad air quality, and work with like all of these different groups, you know, Berkeley Mutual Aid, we're pulling in people from just countless

networks to come and build air purifiers together. And we had, you know, an ex Black Panther talking to someone from Sunrise from San Francisco, right? Like, these just wild connections that are happening at these builds of people who are deeply political and people who are barely understanding, you know, what socialism means, but are wanting to come out and do something for their community. And through these, like, relationships and networks, again, like, we're able to hang out after the builds. People are able to, like like enjoy themselves. Everyone said they were having a really fun time. Even though we were like, literally doing work on a Saturday. People were still like, this is so fun. We had, you know, people baking bread and like fruit tarts and cheesecakes and bringing it. We had pizza,

we had music. It was like a very fun atmosphere and environment. And despite the fact that, you know, it was physical labor and it was taxing and a lot of times it was on hot days. People stayed for, you know, four hours to help do this and to do this work because they cared, because they wanted to see, you know, what they could be able to do. And they also, I think, started to build relationships. could be able to do. And they also, I think, started to build relationships. I know, you know, countless people talked to Abrar and I and had no idea, you know, we've known each other for less than a year now. And they thought we'd known each other our whole lives. And I think that really speaks, right, I think that speaks so much to the relationships that we've been able to build through this. And, you know, I think Abrar and I have met countless people and have developed like an incredible community through this work. That definitely helps me keep going. I would definitely not be able to continue to do this work if I couldn't, you know, call Abrar up at 9pm and we talk for three hours and we complain, but we also talk through like, what are we doing and how can it be better? And how can

we, you know, get through this roadblock? And I saw that in countless places as we moved to our own distribution. So we were partnering with these organizations, but we were also doing our own distribution, which I think is like a huge experiment in how to actually do mutual aid, which is something that, you know, when we talked to the organizers in our circles, we weren't finding answers to. And so we kind of realized, like, we just have to kind of try and figure this out. But we would go out and do these distributions. And afterwards, you know, have lunch with people and talk to each other. Like, what could we do better? What are we doing wrong? Is this mutual aid? Like, these are questions we're having right

after we've been standing in the sun talking to people for three hours, like the dedication of the people involved in this, like Abrar said, most of us are working 40, 50, 60 hour weeks, and yet we're dedicating constant time during the week and at least one day every weekend to either distribution or a build is incredible. I feel like incredibly honored to be able to work with the people that we've been working with. But in our distribution, we started thinking about, you know, how can we invite some of these people to come to our builds? Maybe that's the reciprocity. I think true mutual aid is really about believing that the people that we're distributing to can also give back to us rather than seeing them as like helpless. continue to do some of our distributions with Tank. And actually, we were able to do some of these distributions in a way that helped new buildings who are just starting to form tenant councils, you know, use the air purifiers as a way to open up conversation with some of these people

and say, hey, your building is being organized. Remember how bad the fire season was last year, right? Like, this is something that you can use. And let's talk more about other tools that we can use coming together to really fight for changes that we can't necessarily make on our own. So that was happening. And then we also decided to look at data around where in Oakland are asthma rates really high, where in Oakland is air pollution really bad, and where in Oakland is it primarily lower income folks, right?

We want to be giving these air purifiers to people who can't generally afford $100 to $200 air purifier. And so East Oakland was one of those places. And again, through this network that we had built, through the mask builds, we had a connection in East Oakland, someone that is part of East Bay DSA, right, that had done a lot of community organizing, and someone that was actually able to send out an email to her neighborhood and say, hey, we have air purifiers. And so we had people posting up at her house. So, you know, we were coming into a neighborhood that was not our own, which in some ways, you know, there's a lot of complications to that. But we were also able to

do it at someone's house that we knew. And our goal in this was to get people to come to our builds to make air purifiers for themselves and for their family, their community, their friends, so that we then don't have to go into those neighborhoods. Right. So that they can then start to own that distribution and own this project and like feel an autonomy over it. And so we also kind of door knocked around the neighborhood, talking to people about the air purifiers, about wildfire smoke, about coming out to a build, you know, about why this is really important, why we think, to folks in that community. And after that, that week, so we distributed on Sunday, and then a week later on Saturday, we would have a build. So within that week, right, we're calling everyone that we distributed to saying, hey, how is your air purifier working? Can you come out to a build? It's really, really valuable that you come out to a build so that you can make sure that your community has clean air to breathe, especially during fire season. And through these calls, right, I talked to someone who lived in East Oakland for an hour. And this person just started opening up and was so touched that we had

done this and basically said, you know, no one has ever cared for my community like this. No one has ever even thought about us, right? And you see, like, there are nonprofits, right? California was giving out air purifiers to certain people, like it, there's a semb see, like, there are nonprofits, right? California was giving out air purifiers to certain people, like, there's a semblance of the structure. And yet, we were actually interfacing with these people who seem to have no idea that any of this was happening, right? They're saying, you know, no one else has been able to do this. And we're starting to form relationships and develop connections in these neighborhoods and make people feel cared for and follow up. And despite all of this work, right, no one shows up to our build that week.

And I think Obrar and I both felt pretty defeated, right? Like, is mutual aid possible? What are we doing wrong? Clearly, like, class and racial barriers are really hard to overcome in this. And, you know, we were talking to our ex-Black Panther friend that has continued to be a huge part of this project. And he was like, you're, you know, you have to keep trying, you're doing the right things. And so we went to West Oakland, again, where we had a connection from our mask project that helped us set up in front of this corner next to a vegan cafe that serves trans POC for free and has really wonderful food. We were able to talk with them, give them air purifiers. They allowed us to kind of set up shop in front of their store. And there's also like a liquor store on this corner. It's like a very busy corner in West Oakland and kind of did the same thing. We're handing out air purifiers, talking to people about

the build, talking to people about, you know, why this is important. And we're also door knocking in the neighborhood, talking to folks at their homes, asking people, you know, who needs an air purifier, right? Like these communities generally know each other really well. And we're able to talk to people who are like, oh, my gosh, you know, like my aunt lives over there, and her kid has asthma, and like, you should go talk with her. And so we start to develop these connections and kind of map out the neighborhood. And, you know, again, we're following up, we're talking to these people on the phone, we're asking them to come out to the build. And we went out to this neighborhood again. So the second time we went out, I started to recognize people, right. And I started to be able to talk with people. And through I was kind of like door knocking, while people were posted

up by the liquor store in this vegan cafe. And there was like a church service going on. And I recognized one of the people there. And he recognized me and we're able to talk and he was really grateful for the work that we were doing. And he started calling his friends over and be like, Hey, you know, do you all need an air purifier? Remember how bad fire season was last year? And also, like, we should all go to this build next time. You know, we should actually be showing up and helping out. And word spread so quickly, like these communities are so deeply connected, at least from what I've, like and um that week again right we called everyone we said like you know we really think it's valuable for you all to come out to a build

we want to give you like ownership and autonomy over this in a world where i think so often you feel so little autonomy um and so little power when everything feels like it's crumbling right to have some semblance of ownership and autonomy to be able to do something that is immediately like visible and real feels really powerful, right? When sometimes, you know, talking to elected officials is moving too slowly because disasters are happening so quickly. There is a need to balance immediate need and system change, right? And I think you have to constantly hold both. But, you know, we're talking to these folks, we're asking them to come to the build. And we actually had a couple people come

out to our build from our distribution, people that had a really amazing time, people that, you know, said they enjoyed being there, and took air purifiers back and gave them out to their friends and family. And we're able to say, you know, I made this, right? Like, this is something valuable, but also I understand how it works. And I talked to one of these people, our next build is actually on his birthday. And he was like, I really want to come out on my birthday. I really want to come out and like help people and do this thing that has been enjoyable, and is also like helping people. And that to me was so cool. Right. Like someone wants to come on their birthday to like build air purifiers on a Saturday when most of these people are, you know, working 40 to however many hours a week

that they're willing to continue to even work on a Saturday, I think is a huge feat. And it's something that's definitely felt really, really powerful in this. Saturday, I think is a huge feat. And it's something that's definitely felt really, really powerful in this. Yeah, I think something that Janine brings out is really important, which is that at every stage, we've been sort of interrogating and examining the work we're doing and asking whether we are truly drawing out the full political potential of our work. So in the earlier days, when we were just stirring up vats of sanitizer and getting out these masks, you know, we did a lot. And, you know, this network of volunteers comprised well over 200 people, and it was sort of consuming all of our time. But eventually we realized that

to a large degree, we were basically just acting as a stopgap measure for government austerity and for the big gaps left behind by this extremely problematic nonprofit industrial complex. And the work we were doing then we realized realized, was sort of susceptible to cooptation started associating with an organization like Tank, which has already been doing really incredible radical organizing in the Bay Area, but eventually ran up against the limits of that as well. And, you know, DSA is an organization where a lot of us initially learned our politics, but, you know, in its current sort of stage, it's characterized by a strong degree in our chapter of sort of democratic centralism. And most of the effort

is being put toward electoral work and reform work. And everything that we were reading about seemed to point towards the extreme limits of that form of organizing and how these forms of organizing, in fact, represented sometimes the more reactionary elements of the left in earlier moments in history. And we wanted to go beyond that. And so we realized that we were spending a lot of time having to just sort of defend the work that we were doing. So eventually, we just decided to sort of reassert our autonomy. And as we shifted into the air purifier chapter of our work, that's what we were doing. And our inspirations are manifold. And as we were reading about these earlier moments in history, something which had an extraordinary effect on me was studying the example of the Spanish Revolution in 1936. And suddenly I was reading about this moment in history that's been more or less erased from most of our textbooks

or presented in a very kind of dishonest form. Yeah. And what these workers and peasants had done in the midst of fascist takeover was create on an enormous scale, perhaps the most egalitarian society that I've ever read about, which truly represented a sort of liberatory, radical, early form of anti-authoritarian socialism that stands in tremendous contrast to the much uglier forms of so-called socialism that we've seen appear in the 20th century. And what I noticed

was that this society in Spain in 1936 was absolutely replete with mutual aid. And these kind of anarchist tendencies had sort of penetrated the consciousness of many of the workers and peasants in Spain, you know, 60 years before the revolution after Bakunin and the First International sent out an emissary to start spreading these ideas. And they took hold like wildfire and spread across the country. I think one of the most incredible things about that story is the guy that gets sent from Italy as the representative.

He doesn't speak Spanish. He only speaks Italian. He shows up to this place and he's such a sort of brilliant orator and the power of the ideas that he has is so strong that you know it breaks through the language barrier

and it's this sort of I think it's just this incredible moment that you know I think ties into a lot of what you two are running into with you know I mean we still live in a place that's you know incredibly defined by language barriers and just the ability to break through that becomes it gives you this just incredible potential of power and organization in a place that's, you know, incredibly defined by language barriers. And just the ability to break through that becomes,

it gives you this just incredible potential of power and organization. Yeah, Chris, you don't know how much it means to me to hear someone who's as familiar with this as you. Yeah. Most of the time when I talk about this, it's just total blank faces, even among my friends and comrades on the left, unfortunately. But yeah, I mean, reading about Finelli, who didn't speak a word of Spanish, and he just went and with his wild gesticulations and his passionate rhetoric was able to basically inspire people with the radical politics that he came

there to represent. And it somehow then took on a life of its own as kind of an extraordinary thing. to represent. And it somehow then took on a life of its own as kind of an extraordinary thing. And what I would do to take a time machine back and just see what this guy, you know, who slept on trains and basically lived as a tramp as he went from village to village, spreading the word, mutual aid, cooperation, free association existed by the time of the Spanish Revolution in 1936. So these sort of dual power counter institutions were more or less in place. And these are the things which were the basis, the precondition for this sweeping egalitarian social revolution that then unfolded, which was unfortunately destroyed by force. But this was the sort of society that I imagined I might actually want to live in. And what you see is that there is a deep element difficult to sort of exercise these values because these things are effectively bled out of them as they

work on the factory floor. And that brought a whole different meaning to the work that we were doing now. And we wondered, what can we do to inculcate, to nurture this kind of consciousness among the people with whom we're interacting as we do our mutual aid, as we do our distributions, as we hold these builds that, you know, even though we had trouble getting initially a few of the people from our distributions to show up, there were still, you know, 60, 70 people showing up every other weekend. And now we finally started having the people that were distributing to show up. It was extraordinarily surprising and exciting. And yeah. This has been It Could Happen Here. Join us tomorrow for part two of this interview, where we'll go more in depth on the political side,

Common Humanity Collective's work. Meanwhile, you can find us on Twitter at HappenedHerePod, and also on Instagram at the same place, and you can find the rest of her work at CoolZone Media at the same places. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows,

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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. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and about how we can put them back together in a way better than they originally were. And today we're going to continue our interview with Janina Naprar from the Common Humanity Collective. the origin of the mutual aid projects. We've been talking specifically about the political aspect of their work and how they're reading the history of anarchist struggle in Spain, and particularly mutual aid during the Spanish Civil War, helped impact and shape the politics and work that they've been doing. One thing I wanted to sort of circle back all the way to you from the beginning

was the stuff you were doing at the very beginning of the pandemic. Because I think this is, I've talked about this before on here but you know the the difference between a country like the u.s where what 700 750 000 people are dead and places where that didn't happen was the degree of community mobilization i talked about this with the chinese example is that like yeah i mean I mean like the, the reason that China, the pandemic sort of got contained there, it wasn't because the state stepped in and was like, we're going to do this.

It was because hundreds of thousands of ordinary people just took to the streets and were like, okay, we're doing a lockdown now. And you know, and it takes a different form in China because you know, there's, there's a lot of different sort of things going on there, but that kind of mass community mobilization in the beginning of it,

just like it, it didn't happen that much in the U S and I, and I think like, you know, the, the, the, the world where we don't all die in the pandemic,

right. Is, is the one where the things that you all were doing happen. I mean, one of the other things I remember my sister's a bio grad student and she was telling me about how, you know, so,

so the, the, the, you know, one of the things, one of the bottlenecks beginning beginning the pandemic, and it's still kind of a bottleneck, was about being able to do COVID tests. And, you know, bio grad students can do PCR tests. Like, it's easy. You know, this is one of the first things they teach you. And that capacity just was never used.

It was just sort of left and, sat there and rotted and it sat there and rotted because you know the the actual pandemic response was run by a state that just didn't care and a bureaucracy that even when it did care was sort of you know didn't have this capacity to mobilize it you know its entire existence is about making sure that sort of the capacity for autonomous mobilization never happens and i think that that was one of the like most interesting and powerful parts of what y'all were doing was that you just did it and it just kept spreading. Yeah, no, I think that's a really good and important point you're bringing up. And I should mention that before we started doing any of this stuff with PPE, I was actually, you know, as word, as the fear of the pandemic started

spreading, and we finally had a picture of what the US would soon look like. I remember going to a union meeting among my fellow grad student workers and talking to some people afterwards and saying, like, hey, I don't think that we have anywhere near the kind of testing infrastructure that we're going to need to prevent the spread of this stuff. Like, why don't we just, is there any way that we can just take PCR machines and set up these little gorilla operators and start testing people for free? And unfortunately, one of the things I noticed was that people, you know, were just like

very confused by this idea. They had much more faith in the state's ability to assemble these infrastructures. And I just realized that was not the way in which I was going to be able to help out. And so it's unfortunate. But a lot of people have, even though they have these instincts for sort of mutual aid and for this kind of autonomous organizing, this stuff lies just below the surface, often they don't feel actually capable of it. And I think more than anything, what we've done with this project is we've created a context, an atmosphere in which things which people typically feel like they cannot do,

they suddenly realize they can do. Again, it's just to come back to that idea that most of us, you know, we live our lives, we sell our labor for wages, a few people who own the means of production, you know, accumulate profits and use them to manipulate the state for their own purposes. And this has an effect on us. I mean, this has an effect on dulling our consciousness. And it's an extraordinary transformation in our social relations and our sense of our own individuality when we do realize in these moments that we can be subjects. Unfortunately, my initial attempt to try to stimulate some of this activity around testing didn't work out. But yeah, it just presents this recurring problem, which is that people are not used to doing this kind of work. And Janine and I have found many, many times that, you know, people are willing to come and use their hands and build something for a few hours. But then what we try to do is get them involved. We say, come to the meetings. You have decision-making power. You can determine the trajectory of this work. And that's always a very, very difficult thing to be doing now, given the way that sort of people have been conditioned right now. And I think that's something which is concerning, because these traits of subservience

and sort of submission, I think, are incompatible if there were a moment of revolutionary rupture. I'm not sure that that would necessarily lead to any better sort of society. So I think this stuff is deeply, deeply important to get people involved in this kind of work. I just want to go back to one of the things you said, like you mentioned the community aspect and like those relationships. And I think that I know I've said this so many times in my organizing space and even on this podcast today, but I truly have felt like building community is one of the most powerful ways to organize. And I think so many people in leftist spaces right now see

organizing as like a place where you just do work. And I actually think that that's a really terrible way to organize. I don't think that you're going to have people come back, right? Like, I don't think that anyone is going to feel empowered. And, you know, kind of through talking to a bra, I've started reading this book on the free women of Spain and like thinking more about this also. Right. And thinking about how they're talking about community building and how they're talking about like community as believing in each other and like helping each other realize their full potential. And as a way to actually find equity and equality through like horizontalist structures, through allowing people to reach their full potential. like horizontalist structures through allowing people to reach their full potential. And I think, you know, these are some of the politics that have informed what we're doing,

that have informed how we're trying to allow people to grow. And so many people have come to us and said, you know, these mass builds or these air purifier builds are like the highlight of my week or the highlight of my month. Or I'm thinking about the like the way that you're structuring your distributions and thinking about how I can implement that into the work that we're doing. And I think that those things are so powerful when you're able to create these spaces, again, where people care for each other. And like you're saying, that goes a long way towards being able to mobilize when there are disasters, to being able to mobilize around protests, to being able to mobilize around protests, to being able to mobilize around these ruptures, because you have solidarity that's built through relationships and that is allowing you to build power. One of the things that you two are

both sort of getting at is that, you know, there's, it's hard in a lot of ways ways because, yeah, I mean, the U.S. has – I mean, baked into just – to every single part of your life is there's going to be someone who is above you who can order you and tell you what to do. And that's the defining characteristic of life in the United States. And the second defining characteristic is if you don't do what they tell you, a person with a gun shows up and either just beats you or hauls you away and enslaves you. person with the gun shows up and either just beats you or hauls you away and enslaves you and you know that that that has these enormous sort of psychological consequences that you know create creates this culture where people you know i mean and this goes along with this there's this whole diskelling process that's been a sort of part of the broad arc of capitalism that you all are trying to reverse but even even yeah you know he reverse. But even the people who have the skills just don't sort of... They don't believe in their own autonomy in a way,

and that becomes this incredibly powerful tool of keeping people in line. But when that breaks and when people start to see it, it can take time. But yeah, the kinds of power and the depth of the sort of organization that you build from that is incredible, and I think this is one of the other things about the Spanish

example that people tend to forget, which is that you know, okay, so the CNT, which is the sort of giant, CNT-FAI is the giant sort of anarchist union that's running a lot of this stuff, you know, they're almost completely destroyed over the course of the Spanish Civil War, and they're, you know, they're destroyed by the Stalinists, they're destroyed by the fascists, and by the end of this stuff, you know, they're almost completely destroyed over the course of the Spanish Civil War.

And they're, you know, they're destroyed by the Stalinists, they're destroyed by the fascists. And by the end of the war, you know, the fascists control Spain for about 40 years. But even that, you know, I mean, they kill hundreds of thousands of people, they, like, there's massacres, you know, it turns into literally a fascist

police state. But the moment that, the moment the fascist dictatorship collapses, the CNT reappears. And they, even in 70s Spain, in a place that is in a lot of ways deindustrialized, they still almost overthrow the government one more time. And, you know, I mean, they're still around. They're sort of in much reduced form to this day, but once you build that kind of power, even 40 years of fascist dictatorship wasn't enough to completely destroy it. It was still there, sort of waiting underground, and then the moment there was a rupture, it reappears. This is a really important thing that you're bringing up, Chris, because I think it has a lot to do with how we just measure and talk about success on the left. What you're describing, which Spain is typically, by many people on the left,

described as kind of a failed experiment. Oh, it was nice, but it ultimately failed. So let's look at Russia. But some people have argued, and I think very correctly, that you can't put the genie back in the bottle once something like this happens it's there those energies are there they are not forgotten they are not lost and there's you know a very um vigorous sort of uh left-wing radical anarchist movement that's resonant um uh sort of consistent with the earlier movement during the

30s. And I think that's an extraordinarily important thing to think about. We tend to measure these projects in these very sort of linear sort of status terms. And we discovered, especially when we were doing work in DSA, that a lot of people were trying to frame our own project in that way. You know, what are the demands that you're making? What pressure are you exerting on the state? And so there's these criteria that people use to evaluate kind of the efficacy or the success of projects like these. And the Spanish example tells you that the way that these things work is in fact much more complicated and much more interesting. And that by assembling these structures, these organizations, even if at some time or another, they don't necessarily exist anymore, all of those people who participated in

them are transformed. And the people that they interact with might then also be transformed. And so something like the CNT, which is an extraordinary organization, the FAI is what really gave it the kind of anarcho-syndicalist content that defined the quality of that revolution. That never got lost. That never went away, even when it seems to have disappeared.

And so I think we have to learn to think about success and failure as we very simplistically use these terms very, very differently. And this is something which informs our own work when we're asking, was this successful? Was this not successful? I think that's a much more difficult, you know, we can go into sort of DSA factional politics for a little bit, but like, I think like, in some ways, you see the shallowness of a lot of the approaches that was happening in the DSA where, you know, like, if you look at a lot of how the sort of Medicare for All stuff went, or a lot of how the sort of Bernie campaigning stuff went, right? It was, okay, you know, you have these organizations that are like a mile wide and an inch deep. And it's like, okay, they're capable of mobilizing people to vote one time, but, you know, then they lose the election. And then what, right? So they don't have, you know, there's supposed to be this whole thing of like Bernie being organizer in chief and this whole sort of plan to use the sort of list he developed as an organizing thing. It just never happened. And, you you know it didn't happen in a lot of ways because it was just sort of they they they

treated the whole process of building power as essentially a bureaucratic exercise right it's how many people are on this list how many people are showing up to the state like you know and like how many how many doors have we knocked on and no relationships yeah yeah yeah it's just it you know and that's the that's the other thing you're talking about with the fact that organizing And no relationships. democratic party you don't have an infinite amount of money or the ability to sort of you know you don't have the ability to call an rb to enforce what you need to do right you don't you don't have uh you you don't have the fallback of bad methods of organizing which is violence and when that happens you know and and suddenly and and you can't confront your own failures because you're stuck in this things just start to sort of implode you start to lose people and you start to sort of you know you see this sort of stagnation and

decline that i think you know talking about yeah without getting exactly too much into what's going on in east bay like that's that's that's been everything i've seen out of it yeah and i think to go kind of off of what abrar was talking about to kind of put this into terms of the work that we've been doing right you know through the mask builds um as they were winding down we weren't quite sure what our next project was and you know we talked a lot about like how do we keep this energy going like we don't want to just lose this and i also felt you know a certain amount of social obligation to you know keep this community amount of social obligation to, you know, keep this community together that had formed during the pandemic. And so we started a book group kind of in the interim,

reading How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney, and, you know, had around 30 people show up to that. And I think, as you know, you're talking about the importance of once, you know, these relationships are formed, once these ideologies start to percolate, that they don't just go away, right? These people that we, you know, brought into DSA in a lot of ways, East Bay DSA, came to join this book group and later came to join the Air Purifier Project, despite the fact that it was more outside of DSA, a lot of these people, because of, you know, what we had built and what we had created, continued to be such a huge part and take on incredible leadership roles. And, you know, facilitate this project in a way that it would not at all look like what it does without, you know, these people dedicating so much of their time and energy to this project kind of throughout the process. people dedicating so much of their time and energy to this project kind of throughout the process. Yeah. And Chris, going back to what you were saying earlier, I think I've seen a very interesting kind of reflection come out of some of these organizations and you see these different splits and sort of uh wings developing but yeah i mean i janine is a very sort of organic radical and revolutionary who i've learned an enormous amount from but i think my own trajectory was much more characteristic of what you described

earlier which is that you know i'd put all my eggs in this basket i I thought, okay, Bernie Sanders, like that's, that is, that is the, that is the beginning of how we undergo a sort of democratic socialist transformation. And then, you know, in a few snaps of the finger, even though I'd spent just like hundreds of hours, just knocking doors and promising all these things to people who might, you know, vote for him at their door and, and all this stuff that, and, and, and just sort of regurgitating all these things to people who might, you know, vote for him at their door and all this stuff that and just sort of regurgitating all these slogans and talking, you know, rapturously about these welfare programs. I saw all of that dissolve in a moment. And I realized that I didn't leave anything behind. And there was, you know, in DSA and our chapter,

you saw that there was a large group of people who just wanted to keep that flame burning and just say, we'll do better next time. You know, we'll do more work at the local level to elect representatives. But then there was another group of people who was much more disillusioned and really started wondering, is this what we should be doing? Or at least, is this all that we should be doing? And you see the same thing coming out of a group like Sunrise, whose primary sort of mandate is to just put pressure onto Congress to urge the necessity of a Green New Deal or whatever. And nevertheless, out of Sunrise, we've met people who after the George Floyd protests,

after the dissolution of the Bernie campaign, have been led down the same radical path as some of us found ourselves traveling in East Bay DSA. And they're the ones who've now come to help our project and, you know, using whatever autonomy they have at the sort of um hub level in sunrise because even though it's an organization with sort of paid staff and something of this bureaucracy right now in this moment the individual little local hubs actually have a surprising amount of autonomy i really hope they're going to fight for and protect that autonomy so they've been able to use that autonomy to actually put a lot of effort toward raise money, thousands of dollars for our work at CHC and come to our organizer meetings, become a part of the effort and urge upon their own

friends and co-organizers and people they know in Sunrise to shift the direction of their work of their branches towards doing more work like this so there are these kind of interesting different uh splinterings that you see happening which give me some hope that we're not just going to keep running the same tape over and over again so one of the other interviews we did on this show was with a bunch of people who were working with the – basically this giant effort in Atlanta to stop this like just atrocious sort of destruction of a bunch of forests to create this like weird teaching cops how to do counterterrorism enormous academy thing that's being funded by a bunch of the little corporations in atlanta and they were describing you know they they didn't talk about sort of the exact same process of dissolution but you know you saw they were like you know one of the people with their hair was from sunrise and they were also talking about how they they'd

pulled together this just like enormous coalition of a bunch of community groups that was you know and like their their initial goal was to start they're trying to pressure the city council into stopping the into you know not approving it and that doesn't work but you know if you know some some of the other groups that were that were involved in this are talking about like okay well you know they're planning is like if this fails we're gonna go stop it ourselves and and i think that pivot right is is one of the most crucial things that is happening right now because – okay, if you pull out your policy space diagrams, it's the United States. The policy that's enacted even if you're going to try to do an electoral thing, right, you need 60 votes in the Senate. There is one arguably socialist senator, and we've never elected another one. So, you know, and you start looking at this, right, and it's like, okay, like, you know, we elect, like, two, maybe three socialists in in the house every year and if you know if you continue at the same rate

it'll be like what like like 200 years before you have a majority there and it's like yeah you know at a certain point it's like yeah i mean we're like we're not gonna be around because we'll be dead but like most of most most of the stuff on earth will also not be around because it will have been a blitter black climate change there and And at some point you have to get to, we're going to have to do it ourselves because no one else is going to do it for us. And I think the work you two have been doing is just incredible. This is an incredible example of how that can actually happen and what that looks like. Thank you. Yeah, I think that it is so important. And I think that that's one of the reasons that to me, it was also so important to get

all of these groups at these air purifier because I think oftentimes organizing is so siloed. And it really frustrates me. And people seem very like loyal. At least I found this in East Bay DSA to like their particular organization, any other organization they don't even really want to talk about, or they don't even know still exist. And to me, like, if we can give people the tools to organize, I don't care who they're organizing. But if we can also like, have these groups communicate with each other, right? Like, different groups are doing exactly the same thing, right? We have the

eco socialist group in DSA, right? You have Sunrise, you have the IWW, right? We have the eco-socialist group in DSA, right? You have Sunrise, you have the IWW, and then you have the labor committee of DSA. And it's like, sometimes there is cross communication, right? But to me, it never feels like it's quite enough. It never feels like we're really all working on this, or we're really all in it together. And I think we really should be, because like you're saying, like, there's kind of a ticking clock. We only have a certain amount of time to actually make the changes that we want to see. And when we're not willing to actually work with each other and communicate with each other, things are not going to happen as quickly. And so being able to have like, you know, a table of people assembling purifiers from

DSA sunrise tank, right. And they're all talking about the organizing work that they're doing and sharing stories and strategies so that we're not all constantly reinventing the wheel that actually working together on this, I think is so, so valuable. And this is something that we've seen, one of our friends who's helping lead one of the tank locals has come to a number of our events and was telling us how he's actually tried to bring things that he's seen that we're doing into his own local. And we've heard this in other contexts as well. So things spread. And that's, I think, a really important thing that, you know,

especially because of Janine's, you know, just, just attempts to try to get all these groups together into one place to communicate, to build relationships. We're now seeing what we've built sort of emanating elsewhere. And we're also learning a lot from all these different people and groups who come to our builds and then become organizers in the effort. And, you know, to mention someone like, you know, Gerald Janine referred to earlier, who is this wonderful, cantankerous ex-Black Panther, you know, who has such an enormous history of experience. For him to give us that historical perspective for everything that we're doing has been an enormous boost of confidence.

And it's allowed us to focus. And, you know, just to reiterate what she said earlier, we were really depressed when we went out and we were talking to people in West Oakland and East Oakland, and everyone was telling us, we're going to come. Yeah, we'll show up. We'll be there. And then, you know, while many other people showed up from Sunrise, DSA, CHC, elsewhere, none of those people showed up. And we said, Gerald, CHC, elsewhere, none of those people showed up. And we said, Gerald, they're not coming. What's going on? And he said, keep going, keep trying, keep doing it. Do not give up. Do not judge from that one experience. This is really hard work. And these people have had the door shut on them over and over and over again, and they're tired and it's the weekend,

but you keep doing it and they will come. And then the next time they came, we may not have gone there again, had it not been for Gerald bringing in this enormous breadth of experience to share with us at the end of our previous build. There's this quote that I remember from, oh, I forget who it that I remember from one of the people who'd been heavily involved in the Egyptian Revolution in 2011 had this quote. She was talking about, you know, I'm going to be doing this for decades, right? And she's like, yeah, because you have a

protest and if 800 people show up, you're happy. And if 100 people show up, you're depressed. And then one day 800,000 people show up and you kind of just forgot that could happen. And yeah, that is something that, you know, yeah, you're like organizing is not easy. You're going to spend a lot of time like not winning.

You're going to spend a lot of time feeling like you're barely treading water. There's going to be a lot of time where, you know, nothing works and everything seems to be falling apart. But you know, if you keep pushing 800,000 people show up apart but you know if you keep pushing 800 000 people show up and you know and suddenly the regime is like taking is like you know trying to catch planes out of the country and yeah and you know and you you get to that that clr james line about how the ruling class is not defeated until it's ruling until it's running for its lives but you know they do run for their lives this is a thing that happens yeah Yeah. And, you know, if we do this together, we can get there.

Totally. And I think, you know, whatever our saying is so true. And we also, you know, in doing these distributions, talk to people, and I literally would say, like, what will get people to show up, right? There's a certain amount of like, honesty in these conversations of like, you know, this is what we're trying to do. Like, there's a reciprocal relationship here, again, like help us understand also like what we need to do in order to make sure that the reciprocal relationship is actually realized and actually happening. And I think that that was kind of an exciting moment of like having people have some autonomy and like say and like, you know, they know this community better than we do. Right. They know like how people are going to show up and how maybe they won't.

But Chris, just to bring it back to what you were saying, I think describing the kind of nonlinear trajectory of popular movements in history is something that we try to keep always in our minds. Things may begin small, things may seem small, even when you study the examples in Spain of sort of the groups of people who formed sort of the early FAI, who were just sort of discussing these ideas around the fire before they tried to sort of infiltrate the CNT. And then this became the sort of predominant

mood and sort of ideology that characterized the CNT, which then, you know, spread out and sort of characterized the Spanish Revolution at large in massive numbers, millions of people, you know, and just seeing what happened with the George Floyd protests and studying the examples of, you know, Paris in 1968, where it at first just seems like small groups of students. And then, you know, just a few days and weeks later, you know, there's thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of workers, you know, who are out, literally just pulling out cobblestones from the street, you know, up against the police. And the way that these things happen is very unpredictable. And I think that's also a very important thing to

keep in mind as we're trying to evaluate, you know, what we're doing in a given moment. Yeah, I think that's a very good note to end on. It's, you know the the struggle we have embarked in is an incredibly difficult one and we're not going to know how it ends for a long long time but that doesn't yeah you know that doesn't necessarily means it ends badly and the kind of resiliency we can build is incredibly deep and incredibly powerful okay plugs time where do you two want people to go what do you want people to know and yeah we can we can link stuff if you want to send it to us in the uh in in the in the chat chat we can we can we can link stuff we can we can we can link stuff in the description of this episode this is why we have editors thank you daniel yeah I think definitely like our social media.

So Twitter and Instagram is see humanity, see for folks to be able to donate, to visit our website, to be able to plug in if they are in the Bay Area and want to get involved. They can find ways to do that through those social media channels. You know, they can message us. And then our fundraiser, I don't know if we should just send the link or what the best way to do that is. If you go to commonhumanitycollective.org, there's a donate button which leads to the fundraiser. Also, if you go there, you can see instructions for how to make the fans and they are so cool. They're awesome. It's sweet. do go do that

too because it's sick and there's also instructions for how you can make them as well and we hope people do this elsewhere please reach out to us we want to not be the only ones doing this and so this is why we've tried to just put everything online so that others can replicate this model and this is why we're coming on a show like this and going into so much detail into our history, just that, you know, we don't have to keep reinventing the wheel. I think, you know, Abrar and I have learned so much from this project. And a lot of it really did feel like reinventing the wheel, which is unfortunate, because I know that, you know, mutual aid has been done elsewhere. But with the organizers that we were talking to, a lot of the things that we were doing, we were having

to kind of start from scratch. And at least my goal is like, we're both very accessible people, like, if there are questions, you know, to be able to reach out so that we can, you know, explain our experience to other folks, and talk through, you know, our relationship with Sunrise started because they heard about the mutual aid work that we were doing. And they said, we want to do that also. And we're like, great. And, you know, Abrar, our co-organizer, Joe and I, and this woman from Sunrise met in a park and ate dinner and just talked about mutual aid. And, you know, the pitfalls that had happened and what went well and how we could do it in the future. And then like this beautiful collaboration began like Abrar was talking about so um i think

you know we're we're really happy to talk about where things have gone awry and what we've learned from this project and thankfully at this point too like what successes we've had yeah so yeah go go everyone go go go go find them go out into your communities go do this themselves and yeah go go go get us another spanish revolution we need another one yeah thank you thank thank you to you so much for joining us i so agree chris this has been such an huge pleasure for me talking to you we've we've been covered by a lot of places but never quite like yeah just thank you so much for doing this and thank you yeah such an honor to be here and so much fun to talk with you both. Thank you so much for having us.

Yeah. And yeah, so this, this has been, it could happen here pod. You can find us at happen here pod on Twitter, Instagram, and at cool zone for just the rest of the stuff that we do.

All right. Bye everyone. 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 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. with supernatural creatures. I know it. 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. What's critical? My race theories. Well, alright. That's not a great great introduction but it's not a great time in america uh i'm robert evans this is it could happen here with me tonight as often but not always uh is is is garrison davis uh and our good friend christopher wong uh we're here to talk

about um a bunch of stuff largely Largely, we're talking about the increasing and escalating attacks on school boards and attempts to take over and dominate school boards by far-right activists. And a lot of this is centered around critical race theory. A lot of it's centered around vaccine mandates. It all kind of blends together like a good gumbo or like fascist syncretism. One of the things I would say that's kind of most relevant right now, as we're recording this, I don't think the race has been officially called, but it's become increasingly obvious that Terry McAuliffe has lost his reelection bid and the new governor of Virginia will be a Republican who, among other things, has like promised and based a huge amount of his campaign on banning critical race theory and specifically like banning books and shit from being taught in Virginia schools. And this is all the result of a pretty far reachingreaching and complex and honestly pretty scary campaign.

And we're going to talk about that tonight. Garrison, do you want to take it from here? Yeah, I'll do a little bit, then we can move over to Telegram. Yeah, you're like the Geddy Lee of this, so this is your drum solo time. of this, so this is your drum solo time. Yeah, we decided we needed to do an episode on this sooner than later when a few weeks ago, a large number of anti-vax and anti-mask protesters took over a school board meeting in Portland. And the reason why that is special in and of itself, because this has been happening

across the country for a long time, but the fact that they were able to overwhelm and shut down an entire school board meeting with hundreds of people like invading this building um and shutting this down with just the sheer amount of like power that the people had there was it was it's notable because it's like it's it's a liberal-ish city right it's a that's generally how people view it as and we're used to this happening you know more like southern states and states that are more like overwhelmingly conservative but when like a portland school board meeting get shut down people were like oh wow this is like extra important because this is showing that it's not this isn't isolated to like quote-unquote red states right this can this can spread out everywhere now you know. Now with Portland, it was a mix of like hippie types

who are like anti-vax, but there was a good deal of like actual Proud Boys there as well. Yes, and it was partly organized through an organization run by the Bundys. And there were some direct ties and they helped to advertise it. So there's a lot of um i mean one of the things that was so unsettling is that a lot of these people were not portland residents but they were showing up and were able to effectively like take over and dominate a portland school board meeting

um in part because uh law enforcement is never ever willing to do anything against yeah there's there's a there's a lot of a lot of points here so like yeah one of it being is like these like these big mobs are definitely able to benefit from being you know white mostly middle class like parents and stuff or maybe not maybe not not even parents they can just be white middle class um which means they can like storm buildings and shut stuff down without any real consequence because police aren't police and security aren't really going to get involved that much and the like the libs are not gonna like really be pushing back on this in any kind of meaning no they'll just make fun of these people if they misspell something on a sign yeah so like basically the idea for this episode is we want to talk about why and how school boards

have become kind of the new front lines for pushing far-right stuff into the cultural zeitgeist because they've really become the new space that people on the right are able to push things that are more extreme and push things that are going to hurt kids mostly. So looking for this we put together a decent amount of stuff from organizing chats for how basically the right is talking about these things and how they're trying to organize it um and one really interesting kind of thing of note which will come up later in the telegram stuff is that in, I think, when was it? It was late September. The National School Boards

Association, so like the National School Board Union, put in a request for federal assistance to stop ongoing threats and acts of violence against school boards, like meeting members and people present at school boards, because this has been ramping up. This was happening in the last school season as well, but really the past few months, the prevalence and the number of these types of mobs overtaking these school boards has become so much more common that the school board union sent a letter directly to the president saying hey we kind of need help here um so it's it's not just it's this is this is a problem that's recognized widely even among people like on school boards because yeah they're getting like harassed they're getting death

threats um this is becoming like unsafe to hold school board meetings um and whether or not you like our modern school system or not the the resulting effect of this is that it's going to be hurting like kids and like yeah like it's a good whether it be through like covid whether it be through teaching them racist like curriculums or whether it be to you know making trans kids have make their lives a whole lot harder right all of this kind of stuff is gonna be worse by this. So it is something definitely worth caring about. Yeah, it's worth caring about. It's clearly an attempt in order to arrest the kind of progressive tilt that society has gone through. All of this is a reaction both to, I mean the religious right was initially more than anything a reaction to desegregation and the women's liberation movement.

And what we're seeing now is a reaction to primarily the gains that LGBT people have made in the last like 20 years, including the legalization of gay marriage. the ultimate goal of all of this is to stop progress towards racial justice, to roll back gay rights, to enshrine white supremacy using violence. And that's why that's why all of these different school board meetings like the threat of violence from these people is a constant factor. There's regular discussion of it. There's like I mean mean, that's why the proud boys are showing up is, is to be a, a, a, like is to be a death squad. Um, you know, a little precursor death squad. They're not quite willing to start, start pulling triggers yet, but they want people to know that it's possible.

They want to scare people away from getting involved in local politics unless they adhere to a very specific far right political ideology. It's working because a lot of these school boards are getting these school board meetings are just getting shut down like they just can't have them in person or sometimes not at all because they'll just they'll like zoom bomb like it's not like they're just shutting down so they cannot take place or school board members are afraid to go out in public because these people are are going to hurt them um and this is like a lot of people involved in this are maybe not themselves

like proud boys like they're they're not super like they're individually are more kind of regular republicans in these states but the reason why it gets so extreme and it accelerates so quickly is mostly because of how these organizing efforts take place and also because of stuff like fox news and newsmax and OAN, pushing people further right the past few years. But specifically, the method of organizing on apps like Telegram and Facebook groups, this is the thing common on the internet, but it rewards accelerationism. It rewards the most extreme takes.

Those are the ones that get shared the most. So even if this is just some mom in her 40s who's not a proud boy by any means, she still poses a threat in this way because she's boosting this same rhetoric and is part of these same organizing channels that are full of actual fascists. There's a decent amount of very popular posts

from very popular channels I pulled that talks about the Jews in the school boards and we'll get to that kind of stuff shortly so there Robert do you want to start on the telegram with the the whole

school board telegram channel that is popped up by no means the most popular telegram channel for organizing but it is specifically dedicated to school boards. And because of how telegram works, this channel gets shared around a lot in other much bigger channels. Yeah, and just so you know, so the way telegram works, if you're a decent person and you don't live in a country where telegram is a legitimately good choice for you there's some areas where it's perfectly normal social media network but for the most part in the united states it's used by fascists and weirdos um so if you're fortunate enough to not use telegram the way it works is you have open groups and closed groups open groups are anyone can view them uh you don't expose yourself by looking at them and people largely just kind of post images, memes, videos, and then can comment on them.

And a lot of what's posted in any given Telegram channel is shared from another Telegram channel. So for people like Garrison and I who research extremism, one of the uses of Telegram is that by looking at what's being shared in one group from other groups, you can actually start to build networks and see, oh, there's affinity between these two groups because this group may claim that they're just concerned conservatives, but they're sharing all of this content from this far-right Pepe group that's also sharing a lot of neo this kind of like right wing organizing who present themselves as more just like regular conservative channels. If you I've been in this channel for like years at this point and this channel used to be a like Proud Boy channel. They just changed their name. Yeah, it's like that happens all the time where a lot of the big organizing channels used to be like openly violent organizing like for different mobs to go beat up people and now they've rebranded to make them appeal more to like just regular trump voters uh yeah that is the other thing that happens all the time and one of the main channels that we'll be talking about today is is one of these one of these channels that used to be a proud boy thing and is now just kind of right wing organizing in general. Yeah. And it's I'm just going to get into it. So actually, you know what

I'm going to get into before I start talking about fascists on Telegram trying to destroy the concept of democracy. You know what else is trying to destroy the concept of democracy? That's right, Chris. Products and services. That's right.ris products and services that's right oh my god we are just having a great time here so let's talk about stand for students which is a the telegram channel that garrison pointed out to me and i spent more time than i really wanted to yeah yeah that's never never never a good idea so the stuff in here this is number one on the surface a much more moderate group these people are not r ranting about like Jews destroying civilization or the need to like execute black people or something like that. clip from a jesse ventura uh wrestler uh predator star and a former governor once had a conspiracy tv show there's a popular clip in anti-vaccine uh circles from it where he's talking with alex

jones uh about the bilderberg group and stuff so i found that in there which is like pretty garden variety like early 2000s conspiracy nonsense definitely like oh yeah these are like older people like i don't think quite mostly boomers but definitely like gen yeah these are like older people like i don't think quite mostly boomers but definitely like gen x and stuff like folks who were in like their 40s and 50s um this is the kind of shit that they would have been like exposed to in their late 20s and whatnot um one of the posters i found uh commenting on that video said quote aired on tv in 2009 about a plan for depopulation through a virus and injections. Too much of a coincidence. And another responded to this. I was never a huge Alex Jones fan,

but he was right all along. My kids were born in the early 80s and I refused their vaxes way back then. Unfortunately, one of them is now a late 30s CNN jabbed zombie and has infected my grandkids with this in spare experimental treatment. I'm done. Which is silly, but it also keys you into, like, these are, it's what you see a lot with QAnon, right? It's these folks who are, you know. Yeah, it sucks that they're getting brought in onto Telegram.

Yeah, it's great, it's terrible that this person, this lady, who has to be, what, in her 50s, 60s? Yeah, she's, yeah, she's a 60s. About my parents' parents age so Boomer is on telegram which two years ago even was the only Americans you would find

were like extremely online Nazi weirdos yeah I remember doing like old trainings like yeah it was like over two years ago and telegram was nowhere near this prevalent for like regular organizing no and this is a result of um of the de-platforming of folks in the wake of the capital attack but anyway we

don't need to get too much into that right now so i want to talk a little bit more about some of the things folks are sharing in this in this channel which is again kind of like i'm going to guess everyone here is kind of late 30s to maybe 60s, 50s, 60s. There's one local story that it was actually very popular among a lot of like lefty folks on Twitter of this like group of dads who showed up to stop. There's like an epidemic of fighting in their school or something. And they showed up to do like a community policing or a community self-defense sort of thing. It was celebrated by a lot of folks because it was like, oh, hey, this is, you know, a way that communities can protect themselves without cops, yada, yada, yada, which is a nice thing to see. It was also celebrated by these people, by people in this channel. And specifically the clip of the news story covering this I found was from the Pepe Lives Matter channel, which is, you know, an outright channel like in it again, as we were talking about earlier, the Pepe Lives is an all like the way full Nazi pilled stuff.

But it shares a lot of stuff from channels that are straight up Nazis. And so you can you can see already this like lady in her 60s who's probably was some pretty normal boomer three years ago is now two steps away from adam waffen type motherfuckers that's just the way telegram works um and they're all kind of bonding over again this is not a bad story what these local dads did but it very much ties into this idea of like we got to get all these parents together and take action in the real world like you can see that's gonna go towards taking action against the people you don't want showing up in your school, meaning like black children and gay children and trans kids. Yes, yes.

That's what that means. Yeah. Yeah, community self-defense is great, but also it really depends on what community is defending itself from what. So that's a... We'll have to talk about that more at some point in the future. But yeah, another thing I found on that channel was video this this I dug into a bit. So there was this video that was claimed to be an ad. It was, in fact, an ad that Comcast had refused to air. ad claimed that it was about it was telling the story of a 13 year old girl, Maddie DeGaray,

who was vaccinated. She was part of a Pfizer trial and had she claims like a disastrously bad reaction. An ad about her situation was rejected by Comcast. And this girl like has done the whole right wing in her. I'm guessing her parents are the drivers and the whole right wing media kind of circuit at this point. The fact that Comcast banned the ad is what the people in this Telegram channel were yelling about. And I want to actually quote from an article about why Comcast rejected it, because it makes clear what's actually happening here.

Comcast is said to have told the ads buyer it was rejected because it needed substantiation and all graphic images needed to be removed. Documents reportedly submitted for substantiation included the girl's complete medical records, which are said to have outlined symptoms such as erratic blood pressure and pulse, muscle spasms, muscle tremors, headaches, brain fog, mixing up words, and the inability to walk and cough. So you've got this case where, number one, there's graphic images, and number two, there's documentations that this girl has symptoms, but there's not documentation that they're tied in any way to the vaccine. Like, it's just one of these the the Comcast is being careful to not spread unsubstantiated shit about vaccine reactions and stuff. But within the Telegram channel, the focus is entirely on how this is evidence of this conspiracy to hurt kids. They're suppressing their information.

Yeah, they're suppressing information. One response was, why in heaven's name don't these parents do their research before having their kids vaccinated? My heart goes out to the precious child and family. What a lesson to learn for so many parents. Never too late to educate yourselves, people. Also, I want to point out just the spelling and the the the emojis in this are yeah incredible there is an upsetting amount of emojis that is honestly i couldn't care less never never two with one oh late to educate your space

selves uh it's just again and now i'm doing the you're doing the thing i'm doing the thing i tried not to. I did try to give it a straight read-through. It can be challenging when it is a good portion of the content. It's very funny. Yeah, but I think this goes back to the whole point about how this radicalization works, right? Which is you have, especially with anti-vax stuff that has this sort of larger base from just like regular pure like hard right nazi stuff you you get to see people who you know otherwise probably would be a vaguely

normal person very very quickly get all this stuff and very quickly just go off the deep end they're not like yeah it's these it is it's hard to like say like these are all extremists because like they themselves aren't extremists they're just surrounded by so much content that is made by extremists that it's making them do these things, which is how, which is how extremism works. Right. Yeah. But it's challenging because like when you try to explain this to someone, you're like, no, this is obviously just like a regular grandma or something. Right. Yeah. And it's hard to explain to them how fast this thing can move to the point where they're showing up at a school board with their grandkid children yelling at like teachers and stuff yeah and it's not that this lady is a nazi it's that this lady can be through the process you just outlined convinced to stand up

next to a nazi and like uh uh defend his his right to do violence to people she has been convinced are a present a threat to the lives of her her grandchildren which is people may say like the whole like oh it's not worth parsing out that much if you're standing next to a nazi or a nazi but like i would argue no what's actually the the the logistics of what is happening here are much more dangerous than a grandma got radicalized into national socialism anyway Anyway, another meme I found, it was a screen grab from fucking Shawshank Redemption with Morgan Freeman and whatever, one of the white dudes in that movie, in prison jumpsuits sitting next to each other. And the text on it is, what are you in for? I spoke up at a school board meeting. I spoke up at a school board meeting, which you see a lot of stuff like this idea that they're going to jail. They're going to get raided by the FBI because they're like showing up at school boards to protest vaccine mandates and mask mandates. And then like in the middle of all this stuff, mostly talking about like anti-vax shit.

There's also this post talking about how this post that's a video of a woman at a school board talking about how a book needed to be banned and she's reading it the book she's reading is a queer memoir um and it's about like i'll talk about this more at the end but you could definitely mention it here because it comes up a lot it's it's a gay it's a gay coming of age story right and as a result there's a couple of of semi-graphic scenes in it and she like gets up in front of the school board and reads this and argues that it's basically like pornography for children they think it's child pornography yeah yeah that's what they're marketing it as mistaking what child pornography is they're trying to they're trying to get all

the people at the school board either killed or arrested for over this that is that is their goal and i'll talk about this specific instance later because it keeps coming up in all of these channels. And it's one of the main things that links someone from a Sod on Red channel to a channel like this. This is one of the main things they've been using the past few weeks. All else is current.

This is the past few weeks. And this, though, has been going on for a while. You've seen a lot of them, like the Libertarian right wing, a lot of like, kill your local pedophile shirts. Because who's going to... And most people don't think't think like who's going to defend a pedophile. They're not talking about actual pedophiles. Yeah, the proud boy at the Portland school board who was standing and ready to fight the security guards and stuff, he was wearing a kill your local pedophile baseball cap. Yeah, and it's – this is the thing.

This is the thing the right wing figured out, and they figured this out a long time ago, ago which is that okay if if you want to get a bunch of people who are vaguely normal to do like absolutely horrible violence the way you do it is to tell them that they're threatening kids yep and it doesn't matter that's why q anon works so well yeah yeah it's in the q anon yeah yeah and you know and this once and what once you've convinced you know like this this is is just a very, I think a very important thing about media messaging in general is that the literally the instant someone says, think of the children, you need to stop and you need to disregard everything they're about to say after that. Ideally, get them in the head with a stick. Yeah, like 99.9% of the time, that person is like about to try to convince you that like, you need to like, we need to murder the gays or something like 99.9% of the time, that person is about to try to convince you that we need to murder the gays or something like that. That's the thing that follows. I feel confident saying no one has ever advocated thinking of the children and meant anything but I want to kill this specific group of people.

That's not even really hyperbole. it's it's a a trite and true organizing tactic for these people and it's part of the reason why like the the famous white nationalist catchphrase is focused around we need to secure a future for white children right like that's what they're always talking about with all of this shit and it's it's about being able to demonize a group in a way that they can't be defended it's about ending any sort of debate or conversation and it's about justifying thoughtless violence because it's you're protecting children um you know who else protects children robert definitely not the advertisers of this show um because we are sponsored by raytheon brand school bus seeking missiles,

the only missiles that only seek school buses. You cannot shoot them at a tank, at a technical, at a terrorist training camp. They go right for school buses, no matter where you aim them. So in that way, they're a fire and forget kind of weapon, as long as you're willing to forget anything but hitting a child's school bus with a missile. Okay, here's some ads. Check it out. All right. We we're back still talking about this uh yeah so last segment for this episode as we as we as i was talking about there's a post that and and the post is a video of a woman from a different school board meeting reading out a graphic graphic ish sex scene from this queer memoir and ranting about how it's it's child pornography comments include fucking monsters running these schools satanic and disgusting an elementary

school unreal why aren't charges brought against the school for distributing pornography to minors it's not even where's it's not even i don't reading they could request it's just a book that's available yeah from some other library it's like because you can request a lot of books at libraries in all caps where's the sheriffs where are the city county state and federal task forces and uh yeah it's i'll talk about this more in the next episode tied to just the overarching anti anti queer anti-trans anti--gay school board side of things. And of course, other things I found, there's like video of them celebrating Capitol rioters, celebrating Josh Hawley for defending Capitol rioters. I went into some other channels that

were adjacent that I saw shared in this channel. One of them was Oscar's Midnight Writer Patriot Post channel, which actually has thousands and thousands of followers. Average post would get 2,000 to 3,000 views. Here's one. I'm considered a domestic terrorist if I tell a school board that I don't want my 8-year-old daughter watching sex videos in her third grade classroom. And that post was right above this post. The Constitution actually says you can legally overthrow your government if they are tyrannical. can legally overthrow your government if they are tyrannical. And that post was right above this post, which was a screen, which was a screen grab from a Twitter account for a guy who calls himself Murray Rothbard 1776. The FBI didn't raid Epstein Island or protect hundreds of young female

gymnasts from being sexually assaulted for years, but they'll raid your PTA meetings when you question the curriculum and unscientific mask mandates in their indoctrination camps. I mean public schools. And of course, this from a Twitter user named Emerald Robinson. And again, this is all shared in that channel. It's like a screen grab from Twitter. When the FBI starts arresting parents at school board meetings, just remember the GOP senators who made it happen by confirming Merrick Gardland as attorney general. And then it's a list of Republican senators. Also, Emerald Robinson is the White House correspondent for Newsmax. as attorney general and then it's a list of republican uh so emerald emerald robinson is the white house correspondent for newsmax oh right oh my god yep you're right uh-huh yep great great so i don't know that's probably all i should get into uh well no there's no we can we can go one

more thing yeah so oscar's midnight writer which was shared which was shared in that school board channel, took me to the Western Chauvinist school board channel, which took me to a post with a video, with a link to a video. The text with the video was, woman at school board meeting calls out Jewish power by name. And it's a woman ranting about how the Jews are behind all of the critical race theory in schools. So again, not hard to get to this kind of shit another post was uh it was in the western chauvinist telegram it was sharing a post from the murder the media telegram who were part of the capital riot um that post from murder the media was national school board association apology letter for calling you domestic terrorist it was we'll talk about this later but the comment

in the western chauvinist was like we don't apologize for being like for being domestic terrorists like yeah yeah we're we think it's rad that they called us domestic terrorists because we are chauvinist channel by the way has over 50 000 subscribers um and used to be a proud boy channel which is now just a general kind of farther right-wing organizing channel that it's probably it's one of the most shared telegram channels in this whole network yeah um and they are really good at creating propaganda that appeals to trump voters while slipping in a lot of accelerationist talking points yeah um to slowly lead people on that breadcrumb trail to make them be okay with mass violence there was a comment in there uh forwarded from uh another from the telegram account of a guy named eric striker

um and this was a post striker made commenting on a video of a father being dragged out of a quote woke school board meeting um for uh uh complaining of complaining about this kind of shit. The post from Eric Stryker, I think, is worth reading, and I'm going to read it now. For now, all we can do is impotently watch injustices like this unfold. This is really upsetting. We must build our political organization to the point where we can rapidly mobilize to defend this man, including physical demonstrations.

Send him free legal support and make people realize that the time of fucking with whites is over. We need our own media, civil society groups, and activists. We need money and volunteers. It's not the Republican Party or anything in the conservative movement. It never will be. We need to build it from scratch. We are well underway.

National Justice Party. We must quietly and patiently build. Eventually, we will have the capacity to come on the scene when they least expect it, and we will be too powerful to stop. And that's probably where we should end for today yep that that's a good part one motherfuckers good sad intro into the current problem of school board meetings we'll get into a lot more like accelerating rhetoric in the next bit and then talk about kind of where this stuff originated from and the other side of things beyond just like the CRT and mask stuff

because it branches out into a lot of other kind of adjacent culture war bullshit issues. Anyway, yeah, we'll do that tomorrow. You can follow the show on Twitter and Instagram at HappenHerePod and CoolZoneMedia if you want to be on those apps, which I don't know why you would. Yeah, don't be on those apps.

You know, I just found out they'll deliver skinned gators to your door. Get into cooking gators. That's what I plan to do. I'm getting off Twitter and I'm... Gator is the new social network. So... Gator.

Gator. Gator. and Sonoro, an anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. 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. attempts to attack and dominate school board meetings in order to further their ability to do violence on marginalized groups and also erode democratic institutions from the ground up catchy title yeah yeah that'll uh that'll click well oh i'm so glad we don't have to worry about

clicking and titles and that took up a lot of my mind back in the day, Garrison, back when the internet was different. Now we don't have to worry about that anymore. But what we do have to worry about are mobs of fascists attacking school board meetings. Yes, happens every week. Keeps happening more often. School boards are calling for assistance. They seem pretty not thrilled.

Yeah, they seem not psyched about uh all that yep so where where when we left off i was talking about some things i found on the gram telegram uh garrison what's next i'll go into my preliminary research on telegram and particularly response basically i looked through every single telegram post and all of the main fascist channels I lurk on that mentioned school boards from the past two weeks. So again, this is current stuff ongoing. I got to a lot of the channels I was already familiar with, like the Western Chauvinist channel, which has 50,000 subs,

the Stanford Students channel, which is one i was less familiar with specifically dedicated to this school board issue um one of the posts i we have on there is uh says your enemy isn't some far-off shithole country your enemy is just down the street at your local school board meeting uh teaching your kids to hate their ancestors you and themselves so like again that is a very much white supremacist dog whistle just right there um talking about yeah producing hollywood movies writing the not even really a dog whistle no they're basically it's basically just a whistle yeah um so yeah they then they you know the same post talks about you know masks and shutting down businesses and the vaccines and stuff and saying the fight is here and the fight is now. So just in terms of like, yeah, they're really wanting to hype people up

for doing this thing at school boards. They're trying to really hammer down the school board points. So like I found this, I found this post. This is a post from the Stanford Students channel. And I saw this one reshared in a lot of different channels. One of the other first ones that I saw pop off was from Ron Watkin's channel, CodeMonkeyZ. He is one of the architects or one of the people who really pushed QAnon stuff into mainstream discourse.

He's the guy who ran the physical infrastructure of 8chan and 8kun for years. Yeah, and he's trying to pivot into having just his face be a kind of alternative right-wing figure right now. He's running for office in

Arizona, I believe. Anyway, he has a very popular Telegram channel and he made this post that had over a thousand comments on it, which is a lot for Telegram. A thousand comments on Telegram posts, especially Telegram posts of Code Mickey Z's size.

I want to see how many subs it is. So, just for context, Ron Watkins has 432,000 subscribers on his Telegram channel. So, yep. Anyway, CRT is being rebranded

as SELE-L, social emotional learning. If you are attending school board meetings, as you should be, do what you can to make sure you stop both S-E-L and CRT and make sure that they are banned in your school districts. So, again, just direct calls to action for getting people to show up to these school boards and also

social emotional learning is not crt and of course crt is not even taught in schools i think everyone who listens to this podcast knows that crt actually critical race theory isn't taught in schools this isn't an actual thing it's it is like a legal theory we'll get into more of how this got like pushed towards the end i think chris has some stuff prepared on that. Yeah, yeah. None of these things are actually real. It's a complex legal theory. What they're really mad about is people are teaching that racism is an issue that's built into a lot of American institutions and is an

ongoing thing. It's not a thing of the past. That's what they're actually mad about, and they just call that CRT. Some of the comments from the Ron Hopkins post, stuff like, these snowflakes are so annoying I'm about to start cutting power to any school in my community that teaches this great so yeah

more again that's just a direct threat of doing terrorism I mean less of a threat and more of a promise yeah does that make it better no it sure doesn't. All right.

Well, I don't understand things the same way you Zoomers do. Please continue. Yeah, a lot of posts being shit around from channel to channel, including just full Nazi channels, were trying to...

Of course, a lot of Nazis actually thought it was pretty funny that the school board union put in a call to assistance to the federal government to deal with this issue. Of course, they thought that was funny, but the school board union put in a call to assistance to the federal government to deal with this issue they of course they thought that was funny but they're going to use this to like spread into networks to be like hey the government wants to stop you they're calling you a terrorist you like regular folk are being called terrorists because you're showing up

at school boards right that's the kind of message that they're going to shoot out so they a lot of nazi channels crafted a lot of posts like that that got shared around a lot. Yeah. Yeah. In trying to basically all tying critical race theory. And if you protest against critical race theory, they're calling you a domestic terrorist. That type of thing. And this got shared in the school boards channel and a whole bunch of other stuff being talking about how if you stand up, you're going to be a domestic terrorist. You have to be brave and do this. A few days after the school board, not a few days, I guess this was in like in October, the school board association retracted some of the words that they used in their letter

because of this backlash that was created. And this was also shared in lots of fascist channels. The main one it was shared in that I saw was the Honk Pills channel, which is just another type of Pepe meme. One of the other big kind of groups active in this whole sphere, and this has been a group going on for a while that we haven't talked about on the pod, but we probably should do something eventually, is this group called White Rose. So White Rose is a COVID conspiracy group that has been very successful in creating on-the-ground organizers who are regular people. They do a lot of sticker bombs in lots of neighborhoods.

If you ever see an anti-COVID or COVID conspiracy stickers in your neighborhood, it was probably a white rose sticker. These are all over the states and basically every city. As a quick heads up, the original white rose was a student protest organization that existed in Nazi Germany. Yeah. And protested illegally. And its organizers were executed by the Nazis. And I think it was the mid 40s. I mean, would have it like 43, maybe, maybe 44.

Sophie Scholl was the person most associated with them. So they've taken the names of these heroes in order to, it's just disgusting. It's very gross. There's a decent amount of, decent amount of researchers

in this field thinks that there's like actual bad people behind White rose of course with like bad people because they're spending covid stuff but like like way like like more like bad actors use basically astroturfing this thing uh but white rose deserves its own piece later but uh because they have such a big following on telegram they are of course uh using using this to using the school board thing to gain more support they have about 50 000 subscribers to their specific telegram channel they they shared a post a few weeks ago saying thank you to all the brave parents going out to their school boards and standing up for the children um and they they try to you know get people to do sticker bombs and

stuff but the fact that there's like specifically calling out people in school boards is like an an extra step of like beyond just putting stickers up in your neighborhood um another another uh another white white rose post they shared a shared a video um that was captioned as concerned parent absolutely destroys school board with facts the school boards are the battlefield of our time. This is how it's done. And just the increasing rhetoric around like battlefields, this is where like the fight is at, all that kind of stuff.

There was another, the white chauvinist channel shared a video from Fox News. And they, the Western chauvinist channel, which is again, it's one of the most shared ones in this whole network, they captioned this saying, parents in Virginia are trying to fight back against the school board that is anti-white.

Every school district in America needs to have an anti-mandate, pro-right parents running for the school board. So, that's just the, it's this type of stuff all over. This post was – it has like 11,000 views. There's ones that are way more openly anti-Semitic, saying the Jews that run X school board are trying to force vaccinations on every student over 12.

There's this fake Clint Eastwood channel on Telegram that's pretty popular, someone who's pretending to be Clint Eastwood. Yeah, that makes sense. That spreads far-right stuff. He had a post that was shared a lot that started by saying, start taking over school boards. Start taking over city councils. Start taking over city boards. Start being poll watchers. Start being poll workers. Start taking over sheriff's departments.

It's not enough just to vote. So this is the other thing that we're going to see a lot more of, is rhetoric around voting isn't enough. You need to start doing more things. There is one of it. here here's here's one this is gonna this is referencing some of like the trans stuff i'll discuss in a bit but i just want to tie it in now a post from the western chauvinist channel saying there is no political solution which is a a direct nazi a direct nazi line i mean that that's what uh i did an article earlier this year on Riley Williams, the Nazi who stole Pelosi's laptop during the Capitol riot.

And then like the video that we were able to identify her as a Sieg Heilig Nazi. And that's how she opened her quote. There is no political solution. It's a very common catchphrase among like the the fasc right. Yeah. So there's been a lot of stuff around harassing like specific school board members harassing specific teachers there was this teacher in uh i think in california that was trying to like introduced like uh like anti-fascist type rhetoric and talking about how

fascism is a modern thing they got absolutely bashed um and like doxed um and they got i think fired because there was like hundreds of parents organizing on apps like telegram to harass this one teacher at school boards that you know they took over massive school board meetings and just talked about this one teacher endlessly um and it was interesting because like all the parents were like yeah my i i got worried because my student actually really like liked the teacher and said that they were doing like giving really interesting points about like systemic issues and the parents were like that they were giving really interesting points about systemic issues. And they brought

their kids to the school board meetings. The kids are just standing in the back as their parents are ranting about this and talking about how the kids actually thought they were learning things about systemic issues. And then that got people mad. So... You know what else gets

people mad? Advertisements, yeah. so you know what else gets people mad uh this is a advertisements yeah and we're back we're gonna we're gonna touch on the uh the specifics like all the stuff we've been talking about most of the modern most of like the current organizing is a lot of it's around like mask mandates and vaccine mandates um like all of this like all like you know the the stugelbord channel all of this kind of stuff is usually around vaccine vaccines and mask stuff uh of course there's critical race theory was the way more popular thing a few months ago right now it's a vaccine thing the other kind of like ever-present thing is uh being upset that trans kids exist and being very fearful that there are trans kids around your kids.

This is a thing that's been, you know, a thing for years that people have been fighting against. And since the school board thing is becoming more popular, people are starting to bring – basically do these kind of flash mobs specifically around trans issues. One of like the more like astroturf type things was people getting mad that there were like two specific books available in certain high school and some middle school libraries. was like a uh like uh one of it was the memoir that robert mentioned the other one was like a graphic novel memoir about uh someone realizing they're genderqueer so these these are books that are not in curriculums these are just books that are available at the library um and basically there was people who just who found these out and got turned it into like like a meme on telegram essentially like people like sharing information about this. Then you like look it up,

see if it's in your library. So then we have all of these like coordinated attacks on school boards by these knobs of people, all about these same two books. Um, and the goal is to not only just get the books like banned, but they're also trying to like fire or arrest the teachers and school board members for allowing these books to happen.

There has been school, school board members who have stepped down because of just how much harassment is about these things. Quote from the Western Chauvinist Channel, Jesus Christ, straight up pedophile books in our children's schools. Once again, the Jewish school board member gets mad and tries to shut them down. How can you not

connect the dots here? There's no political solution. Voting will not remove these people. There was the mayor of Houston, so the mayor of Houston. So the mayor of Houston, Ohio, heard about this, and he went to a school board meeting and instructed all of the board members to resign, quoting the Proud Boy, Right-Wing Organizing Channel, Western Chauvinist. This comes after some of the degenerate parasites in the system called educators instructed kids to describe a sex scene that they wouldn't show their mom. Of course, this didn't happen. This is – these things are not – these books are not used in any kind of curriculum anyway.

So even if they were, we're not even in that reality. So the mayor of this town basically got these – instructed all these people to resign. Earlier, I think in March – no, in August of this year, pride flags were banned at a school district inside southwest Oregon. I think around Newburgh. The Newburgh school district banned but banned pride flags so all this kind of stuff and of course that is in a lot of states but the yeah and the fact that it's in like oregon a blue state as people got made like you know there's like you know nbc articles about it because it's oregon it's not it's it's not it's it's not a red

state so it's all big it's all portland it's all antifa right yeah yeah so again this stuff is not not not like contained to one thing and like yeah if you google the the stuff around these books if you google like genderqueer book uh school boards you'll find this in so many school districts you'll see just mobs of people lined up yelling and screaming um and like like printing out giant like giant cardboard prints of of this comic book showing like like with like you know there's like a dick on it like there's like a drawn a drawn dick because that's what human bodies look like like you can look at like a lot of his like yeah like what are going to ban the statue of David because he has his dick out too? Like, come on.

Also, these are the same people who talk about like, oh, they're banning books, burning books. There was that tweet from like James Woods about like these are the books that people want banned. That means they're the most important ones. But these people love – these people love like burning books. These people love banning books. They love cancel culture. burning books. These people love banning books. They love cancel culture.

The cult that I was in as a kid, they would have massive book and CD and DVD burnings for unholy and sinful media that you would bring in and throw your sinful music onto this giant fire. These people love burning books. They love banning stuff. They love cancel culture.

But they just lie about it. So that was most of my stuff around the ongoing queer and trans stuff. Of course, this ties into bathroom stuff as well, the people showing up to school board meetings to scream about kids

going shit in the bathroom that they want to and feel comfortable in. And again, it's not going to stop with trans people either You know, and again, like it doesn't, it's not going to stop with trans people either. Right. As soon as they ban trans people, the next thing is going to be,

Oh, gay students. Right. This is, it never, it's never stops. It always keeps going. And it's just an ever present problem that is going to require a lot more,

a lot more dealing with. And again, with all of these flash mobs, like no one, no one's going to stop them because they're like the people in power they're the people that have all of the privilege there's no really effective counter organizing for these school board meetings right now um the cops aren't going to do shit security guards aren't going to do shit uh and regular libs and regular regular people

aren't going to do shit either and it's hard to figure out how to actually combat this because there's a lot of times that the people in the school boards will be like, no, we don't want this to turn into a giant fist fight. Don't come in mass to start fist fighting them, but there needs to be something to combat, whether that be running for school boards, just showing

up outside school boards, having more people there, having more presence there so that it's not as overwhelmed by like a mob of 200 anti-mask people showing up right there needs to be some type of thing happening because no one else it needs to be countered and yeah you know what they might need to get the shit kicked out of them i'm sorry but like i don't like i don't think that would actually help in this instance probably but like there needs to be fucking something like they they are the the the level of boldness that they have is evidence that

they they feel they they are confident that there is no counter to what there is going to be done and perhaps if they were being met by a wall of people in the community who were willing if they they tried to force their way in, to fucking throw down, you know, to say you're not entering this building without a goddamn mask. You're not shutting down this meeting. I don't know. Maybe that would do something. I don't actually know what would do something. I think if it was like worked, but if it was people dressed as regular people, I think that would be. Yeah, it's certainly not going to help if it's Antifa.

For the love of God, don't show up in fucking black block at a school board meeting um like what would work is a bunch of other middle-aged parents showing up and being willing to confront these people if physically and like everything that is worth mentioning is that a lot of the people at these protests like are not parents at all like they're not they're not they're not even from the same school district they're just sort of like this this is just how the this is just how the sort of right-wing outrage machine has worked and this is where they're drawing people yeah i mean i mean again like it's it's a lot of the people in there there's gonna be big dudes who want to fight but a lot of the people like screaming are are like you know middle-aged women the people

who are like really like leading the charge on this because they're able to use their privilege and because like no one's going to stop them right so that's like when they're leading the charge of 200 people who are gonna like scream and harass and chase out black security guards chase out chase out the uh all this all the school members no one's they're they're very effective at using their privilege to gain political ground by just doing stuff on the ground. This is like the January 6th thing.

This is the new future of political action. It's just showing up in mass to places where no one's going to stop you because you're the good, relatable, everyday man. You're white. Anyway, that's the stuff day man. Yeah. Anyway,

that's, that's the stuff I had. We'll probably have an ad break and then talk about maybe some of how this stuff started. Speaking of using your privilege, you know, what is the greatest privilege being able to purchase the products that, yeah,

that's exactly right there's no privilege higher than being able to engage with these consumables yay and we're back all right uh chris you want to close us out yeah so the last thing i want to talk about that is interesting about this whole thing is you know we've we've mostly been focusing on the very furthest right elements of this but a lot of the school board stuff is tied to i mean just straight up republican party operatives and people who work in this sort of you know i mean there's there's literally much people who work for the republican party as we'll get into and then there's also this sort of network of of republican think tanks republicans sort of yeah dark money dumps that a lot of a lot of astroturf groups and that kind of stuff yeah and and so i i want to talk about a few of these people because i think they're

interesting um i i think we can start with nicole nilly who's interesting person she's so she she most recently founded parents defending education who are they're one of the big groups to sort of like spread this this sort of attack on school board stuff all over the country they have chapters they organize people and they also you know they do this thing where they they collect incident reports from from school districts that they you know just distribute to all these people and they put it online they have all of these uh they they they have a lot of stuff they do they they do a lot of anti-mask mandate stuff so they have these like template letters like template like fake yeah form letter things that you can send to schools that if you don't

want to wear a mask that is a staple that's a staple of this type of organizing yeah yeah and and the interesting thing about nicole nelly is that so this is not like her first org, like three years. So in 2018, back in the halcyon days of. You know, I'm not quite going to say it was before the mask fully came off, but it was while the mask was like a little bit more on. She she previously founded a speech first. Yeah, you might remember. Yeah, as the Republican back when free speech was the big talking point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so she ran that for a while now she's you know organizing with a whole lot of

people who just want to yeah they just move on they move on to the new things it was it was free speech it was critical race theory right now it's anti-mask stuff next up is going to be trans stuff going real hard uh just today we had the fucking the person who bbc platformed the the fucking like um yeah lily cade um the rapist lily cade yeah wrote a whole manifesto where she details which specific trans women she wants to personally kill um yeah i uh i used to know lily um oh yeah yeah yeah uh real dark turn um i don know. I guess it's not super surprising. She was definitely, I interviewed her for a documentary

and it was, she was a bit off-putting. Didn't realize this was going on. I mean, yeah, there's a lot of reports of people in the sex work industry of talking about her raping people in bathrooms.

Yeah. Which again, it's like, yeah, the people always can scream about, oh no, trans women are in bathrooms. Yeah, is like yeah the people that always can scream about oh no trans women are in bathrooms yet the people the person screaming about this is an actual rapist yeah like and i said like when we say rapist here like she she she raped so many people that like on twitter like i was scrolling through my feed and i saw multiple people who were like oh i know this person she assaulted me yeah it's real bad the people who the turfs are

like pushing yeah this is like as the anti-trans stuff. The BBC was platforming it. So yeah, trans stuff, as soon as the anti-mask, anti-vax stuff dies down in the next five months or whatever, I foresee a massive pivot towards specifically anti-trans, anti-queer, anti-gay stuff. Because that's going to be the new thing. Yep. And I think it's worth bearing in mind that this stuff, yeah,

with Nicole Nelly specifically, so she worked at the Cato Institute, which is like Murray Rothbard and Charles Koch's. Now it's, yeah, it's basically, this is a slight oversimplification, but it's basically one of the Koch's sort of like money laundering, like money operation things. She also worked at freedom works who oh great yeah

yeah this is great so um this is this is one of the fun parts of this which is that so freedom works is another one of the coke's sort of dark money laundering machine things and freedom works are basically the people who created the tea party like they're the people who created the tea party like the people who turned the tea party from like a bunch of weird guy just like like six weirdos into like you know the the basically the the the the the the entirety of the pre-trump conservative political machine who like rebuilt republican party after it was like completely discredited um in the 2000s yeah and this is true of a lot of the people who are in charge of these big orgs have connections like this um the the person you found in no left turn which is uh no left turn india no for an education they're they're another one of these big sort of anti-school board things i mean

they they're the people they're one of the people who like they have a list of books on their website they want banned wow yeah it's great cool's great. Cool. And their founder writes for the Heritage Foundations magazine. So there's all of this stuff. And I think maybe the most emblematic one is this guy, is Mark Ruffo, who people may know. Yeah, fucking Ruffo. Yeah. So he's the guy who just created

the whole critical race theory thing out of nothing. He threw together a bunch of like just like these incredibly tenuous connections like there's a bunch of sort of old uh cultural marxism conspiracy stuff in there yeah it's a lot of like frankfurt school type shit yeah yeah and and but but what i think is interesting about him is less his ideas which are just pseudo-intellectual yeah he doesn't he's not actually super smart in what he says there's a lot of videos of him talking to actual philosophers getting schooled about what critical race theory is like he's actually not that intelligent in this in this side of things but but you know the thing is that there's nothing more dangerous than an

idiot with a trick up his sleeve exactly and you know and then the the the trick basically is fox news and you know the reason the reason this whole thing exists is that exactly and you know and then the the the trick basically is fox news and you know the reason the reason this whole thing exists is that this was you know mark ruffo he's very very explicit about this that this this this was his solution to the the george floyd uprising yeah was that oh we we need to we need to find this thing to stop the momentum of this uprising and this is this is who tucker carlson brings on and starts bringing on 2020 and this blows up and he immediately gets hired by the manhattan institute which a very, not that old, but they're from the 80s, but a very old, extremely powerful conservative think tank that I don't think, I think is less known than things like the Heritage Foundation or the Cato Institute. Yeah, I would say so.

Yeah, but he gets, they hire him like immediately because, you know, the sort of mainline of the Republican Party Party very quickly is like this is the thing that we can use as like a hammer. And so the Manhattan Institute publishes this – Rufo works for them now. I can't – I'm not actually sure if he – I don't know if he specifically wrote this or if he was just involved in it. it it it's it's the byline is just a manhattan institute but it had they have this incredibly detailed toolkit explaining how you know both explaining what the sort of right wing like line on critical race theory is they have like a bunch of explainers have like lists of terms if you've ever seen massive yeah yeah it's actually yeah if you've ever seen like lists of terms that people want banned like it's all just pulled from this document right so this will add stuff um but but the interesting part about this is the other thing is this this

is an organizing manual right it's it's it's a specific thing that tells you how to go and how to find other people like other other people you know if you're like an incensed right wing like freak in one of these school districts it's like okay well here's here's how you like talk to other people in your district here's a list of options of like things you can do going public and then there's a very interesting thing part of this that that i think is really disturbing and outlies like really what's going on here which is there's this whole like freak out thing about this thing called minority rule where like oh the left has this like they have this like militant minority that will compel the majority to follow them by uh because they they keep on showing up they keep on doing things and if this minority

like it keeps keep keeps uh you know being more intransigent than everyone else then they will inevitably win and this like three quarters of this section is this like weird fear-mongering thing about it but then the last part of it is a bunch is the thing that's saying oh we need to do this ourselves right this is how we win we win by being more intransigent we win by showing up more often yeah of course yeah and you know and this is this is the other thing is this is from like last year i think this is like the toolkit is this summer oh yeah okay that's sorry this is this is from yeah so this is really this year but it's interesting because it's like this is the sort of – this is the Republican Party essentially. I mean the Manhattan Institute is a very, very mainstream Republican Party.

Yeah, this is how they do effective in-person organizing. We talked about this a bit in our episodes about the – like in the aftermath of the abortion ruling in Texas and how like religious right-wing organizing has worked in local districts. in Texas and how and how like the religious right wing organizing has worked in local districts yeah this this is how they are able to get things done which is why there's been so many school members who either get fired who've had to step down who have been harassed off the job and are now there's people you know a lot of a lot of like people I would describe as people holding very extreme uh views are now running and taking these spots um because if you can do if you can do this type of like again, it's not grassroots, but it is

astroturf, so it appears grassroots. But if you can do this type of faux grassroots organizing, you can gain a lot of power over specific areas and make a lot of people's lives a lot more miserable. And that's what the goal is, right? The goal is to make trans kids' lives miserable. The goal is to get people to not wear

masks and die of COVID. Those are the results of these actions. Well, I think there's an interesting interplay here, though, because I think FreedomWorks, even a lot of the specific protests that are happening, and this is especially true of the very

earliest ones, I think the very first school board protests that were happening. Yeah, like a lot of these. Summer to fall of 2020 was when they started yeah to start up yeah and and those a lot of those were directly organized by by people who work for freedom works okay and and this is this is a lot of the crt ones yeah yeah yeah the crt ones yeah are very specifically freedom works and and this is what i think is interesting about this is that you know okay freedom works it's like okay so what I think is interesting about this is that, you know, okay, FreedomWorks,

what does FreedomWorks out of this? FreedomWorks wants a Tea Party again, right? Because, you know, this is what FreedomWorks does, right? They're basically the group that comes in when the Republicans start losing election cycles. They're like, okay, well, now we need to tip the balance of power back. We need to bring around the Democrats out. So they're largely trying

to build a sort of electoral base. And again, this will look familiar to people who remember 2010 because it's the same thing except and this is the thing that i i this is the part where i genuinely can't tell whether the freedom works people whether the cokes whether that whether this sort of dark money network either i don't i can't tell whether they understand what they're doing and like it, or they're just incredibly naive. But this is not 2010, right? When you start mobilizing people on the right wing to go to a place, they don't just sit there and hold signs anymore. No, you cannot contain them at this point.

You cannot control the spread. You cannot contain them at this point. You cannot control the spread. Once you've opened this can, and there's no way of putting them back in, because as soon as they start organizing on Apps like Telegram, they're one step away from skull masks. And then they're being okay with cheering along people that are going to go beat up people in these meetings.

Yeah, and this is really the thing that... I think it's not just January 6th. We live in the shadow of january 6th but it's also about you know if you look at how the anti-lockdown protest went in in 2020 right you have a bunch of people showing up with guns the capitals yeah and that stuff was extremely effective and that and the combination between that and january 6th has you know it's opened the floodgates and now yeah that was that was what led to january 6th being possible, is the more and more protests around capitals with people showing up en masse to overwhelm anyone.

And because they're all white and because they're all like middle-class conservatives, no one's going to stop them. Yeah, and, you know, and this is the thing, right? You know, the Kochs, I genuinely don't know what the Kochs want out of this. My guess is that the thing that they want is a new base Republican voters. But that's not what they're creating.

The thing they're creating is a new core of fascist street fighters. And, you know, at some point it doesn't it literally doesn't matter whether or not this is what the Kochs are trying to do or not trying to do because they're. And again, it's just pushing people towards thinking there's no political solution it's only violence and overwhelming people in mass is the only way to get the change that they want the change they want is to have trans kids

not exist and yeah just more and more fascistic policies whether that be banning books that mention gay people existing or what it's like to be a gay person whether that be you know banning books that mention gay people existing or what it's like to be a gay person whether that be teaching people that racism is still an actual thing that exists or that be putting a mask on so you don't kill your grandma um or whatever yep well and you know and i think i think one last thing right you know we saw what happened

last time they were in power right and it was you know and like you can talk about how a lot of the worst stuff is still happening was like yeah they put a bunch of people in concentration camps right and if they if they take back power again and there's a good chance that they're going to because you know the democrats are being they they you know the the the the democrats never want to be in power. The thing they want to be is a minority opposition so they can do fundraising. And if these people take power again,

it's going to be even worse than it was last time. Yeah, looking at the Virginia election, the night of recording is a great example of that. In terms of, yeah yeah it turns out when democrats just do nothing and just sit around an office you don't convince young people to want to vote for them because they're not actually doing anything so then they just sit out then the republicans actually do vote in people then we get a we anti-crt person elected to be the governor of virginia and that's the episode. Woo. Good times.

Well, I hope everybody's optimistic, feeling nice. We'll be back with something else. Research your school boards, who's in it, and just protest around it, and maybe show up with some of your, I don't know, buddies with your lattes and stand in front of the building and be like, no, we don't want you to shut stuff down because no one else is going to stop them.

It has to be just like regular people. You can't going to be the cops. It's not going to be any elected Democrat. And honestly, like you can't rely on teens and black block to do this. That's, this isn't, this isn't what they need to be doing.

It should be like, yeah, it'd be like millennials and gen X need to be like, Hey, no, we're not gonna, we're not going to have you doing this. Mm-hmm.

Well, that's the episode. That's the episode. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com. Thanks for listening.

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