It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 84

Episode Date: May 20, 2023

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That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. 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. It's another mass shooting. I don't have a good way to start this episode. Uh, yeah, but welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is also just about mass shootings now because yeah, great, great world we live in.

Uh, with me is Gare and Robert. Hello. Hello. Yeah. So a Nazi killed a whole bunch of people again. Yeah, in case there's been another one, we are talking about the specific mass shooting in Allen, Texas, with the guy who was covered in swastika tattoos

that certain people are claiming is a fed. Yeah, that happened on Sunday, May 7th. So I think Mia has some details about what actually happened to kind of put together. But for the majority of this, we're actually going to be talking about people's reaction to this, including some of the most influential people on the planet and the level of reality denial that is, it has been bad before. It's just extra visible right now. And it's visible to a degree that is, that is pretty worrying. Um, and we, we felt it was, it was worth talking about just because of, uh, you know, whenever a reality fracture is, is, is big enough to, to be like this, this noticeable, that is always, uh, always an interesting sign of, uh, where we are at as, uh, as a culture. Yeah, I think before we fully dive into that,

there's something that I do want to talk about briefly with this, which is that in the sort of mold of white supremacist killings, this is very, very targeted at non-white people. So he shot one white guy who was a security guard, then he shot like three latino people and then four asian people and i don't know i wanted to just sort of like remind people that anti-asian violence is still like a thing because everyone seems to have forgotten about it and you know this is like i mean, I think if you exclude the three in California that were also committed by Asian people, this is like the fourth mass shooting in two years that's been at least half the victims have been Asian. It fucking sucks. I mean, we've talked about anti-asian violence a decent amount on this show

none of the things we've ever talked about have gotten any better i the only sort of actual instrumental results of any of this is that like violence against asian people gets used as a rhetorical cudgel to justify killing black people which is fucking abhorrent and yeah i just i just wanted to get this in because the media has collectively forgotten that that was a whole thing and no one really talks about the shooting in that framing and i think it's important to do so at least for a little bit i think the other thing to kind of just talk about at the top here latino white supremacists and Latino Nazis are not, they are not an uncommon thing. This is actually quite common. Two of the most famous fascists in the world right now,

Nick Fuentes and Enrique Tarrio are not white. No, I mean, just like think about, think about where, I mean, think about the fact that prior to World War II, Argentina spent a significant chunk of their defense budget bringing over Nazis to train their military, which is a big part of why so many Nazis escaped there via rat lines. You know, we just did a series of episodes on Alfredo Stressner, the fascist dictator of Paraguay, who put up and hid Joseph Mengele along with a bunch of other Nazis for a while. Mengele had citizenship in both Argentina and in Paraguay. Like this is it's not uncommon. This is not like a new thing. We're not it's not like some sudden shift in the way that fascism works. Even the shooter himself like posted memes about being a Latino white supremacist. Like it is a subculture big enough that it has its own like

meme vortex. So and this shooter was actively engaged in in said like a memetic culture. No. And it's also worth noting that a lot of the same things that we talk about when we talk about Nazi mass shooter culture in the United States, the fact that a lot of shootings are kind of incited on 8chan and 4chan and similar boards. This happens in Latin America. Brazil in particular has a website called Dagolachan that has spawned at least a couple of shootings. In the last year, they've had several more mass shootings that are political in nature, that are kind of driven by online fascists. This is not the only place that this happens. Serbia just had a couple as well. But, like, what this guy's doing is very much,

just as the Christchurch shooting was very much something that occurred within the broader envelope of a transnational accelerationist fascist movement, you know, the Allen shooting, as far as we can tell with the information we have available, seems to fit very well into that schema. Okay, we should talk about the shooter a bit. So, there's a sort of, I don't know, there's like, after every mass shooting, there's this sort of like identification cycle thing that happens where like a bunch of news agencies and organizations to try to figure out who the shooter was um so i think like the day after very very very like pretty soon after the shooting there's the new york times runs an article that reveals that the shooter has this like has an account on like

a kind of weird russian social media site and from from that information uh eric toller who's a uh researcher at bellingcat like tracks down the site and he finds a bunch of wild stuff he finds like i mean obviously the shooter is like he finds that the shooter is a nazi he has like a swastika tattoo he has also has an ss tattoo from the shooting he's wearing like a right wing death squad patch it's like it's just like a whole thing that the proud boys also do it's like a patch that says like rw yeah they sell rwds patches i mean i think a lot of it kind of comes out of some of the discourse around pinochet that goes back a few decades but at this point it's a much broader thing than that. I've got a bunch of photos of Jeremy Bertarimo, I think is his name, who was

one of the proud boys. I believe he's the guy who got stabbed prior to January 6th during one of the big riots in D.C. after the 2020 election, but with a big RWDS patch on his chest. And you can find like a Tassitala Tozi, who's a, a, an inveterate writer with a Patriot prayer up in Portland would wear them all the time. They're, they're a common piece of fascism merch. Yeah.

And, you know, and, and this, this, and also, yes, the,

the, the other thing that's kind of important that gets found on this like social media site, which, okay. I wish you mentioned, it's a kind of weird thing like he doesn't i don't know the the social media site seems like he was basically using as like a journal like there's he doesn't like follow people or like have followers so he's just sort of posting this stuff he also finds a bunch of clips of like tim pool videos and so this immediately sends the entire right into like you know full-on defense mode right you know it turns out it's not great for your brand with like

the sort of general array of people if it's being associated with a guy who just did a mass shooting so tim pool responds so the other thing is there's like a manifesto on it and tim pool responds to this by i think i i think what actually like legitimately what happened is he read the manifesto and there's a thing in the manifesto like talking about the nashville shooter being trans or like specifically about the nashville shooter and i i think i think specifically he read that and was like oh shit this is my out I can go back and talking about the Nashville shooter um sure and so he starts he starts this there's this whole sort of train of like right wing stuff about how all of this is fake um so he starts arguing that like this isn't the guy's social media account

uh this this sort of very very rapidly morphs into i mean just like full-on like sandy hook shit um one of his employees like tweets why is the corporate press so threatened by people questioning the authenticity of a mexican neo nazi's russian social media account uncovered by state-funded media and this because this immediately becomes the main line right state-funded media things they're talking about bell and cat which they're and they're hopping on all the tanky conspiracy stuff and yeah running with it because twitter is a is a cultic milieu of conspiracy and you can latch on to one talking point to make you feel okay about denying an entire like facet of reality and then it becomes an easy out yeah and we're gonna we're gonna circle back to like specifically the janky people getting involved in this because they do

what they're doing is a little bit of like an uh from what folks kind of in the debating Christians about evolution and shit called the Gish Gallop, where the original idea of the Gish Gallop was when you're arguing from a creationist perspective about stuff like, you know, the age of the world, you bring up so many different kind of topics, you know, from different very niche issues, you have a carbon dating to, you know, specific problems you have with like the way scientists are interpreting specific fossils. And it's just too much detail for somebody in like an ad hoc public argument to really like counter at once. And kind of the evolution of it is when you're dealing with something like this, rather than deal with the broader picture, which is there's just a tremendous amount of evidence that this guy was a Nazi, that this guy was motivated and kind of brought into the community by a lot of content that guys like Tim Pool make. Instead, you focus on, you pull up one single thing that you can kind of like try to get people to latch onto. And if you can get them arguing about that thing, you can get them to ignore the bigger picture. Like at least you can distract

attention from it. And it works. It works for a lot of people. It's especially effective on social media. Yeah. And unfortunately, the social media platform that this is mainly happening on is Twitter, which Elon Musk owns. And Elon Musk immediately like decides that he's just fully in on this shit.

that he's just fully in on this shit uh and he is i mean he is like like elon musk is like it's just actively promoting the sort of weird conspiracy that basically what the sort of right-wing story about this becomes is that like okay bellingcat is is the cia and they're being paid to create a like a false flag thing. That they're being paid to create a false flag to make this guy look like a Nazi and a Tim Pool fan to distract people from the Nashville shooting. Which is just like. Absolute nonsense, but, you know, you immediately get into like that that tim pool employee again like it like starts doing this whole like uh we are enshrined like with liberty to freely scrutinize every claim just as the sanctity of like every human being in america like has the right to question stuff it's like this is like literally like literally word for

word stuff alex jones was saying in the Sandy hook trial, but we've gotten to the point where you just, you know, like the, the sort of mainstream of the right just does this about every time there's a right wing mass shooting. And this, this particular time it's been just everywhere.

Yeah. We're, we're, we're gonna, there's no, no, no smooth way to break to ads in an episode about a mass shooting, but that's what we're doing. We are back. I want to talk now a little bit more about the actual exchanges that Musk was involved in and how this narrative of like a psyop and this whole narrative around the shooting being a psyop how that viewpoint got inflated on twitter because musk controls where all of the interactions go for tweets um and

actually like specifically get into how this specific conspiracy is is is a is a demonstration of how much of just a separation from reality that people like musk are like actively actively working towards. One of the main accounts that Musk was kind of riffing off of in this and who was trying to feed Musk this type of stuff was the redheaded libertarian who works for Tim Pool. She created a bunch of memes about this shooting, talking about how the guy can't be a Nazi because he's Latino. Why would someone use a Russian social media site,

even though it's actually very common for American Nazis to use Russian social media? We used to do an exercise at trainings that I did for Bellingcat where people would go through and use VKontakte, which is a Russian like kind of Facebook clone. And you would kind of use geographical search to find groups of like KKK members and shit in the American South, because it was really common with them because it didn't have any kind of content moderation. So, yeah, so the types of like right wing content creators who are within Musk's Twitter orbit start

pumping out all of this stuff. Right. And is where musk gets all of his information from um so he he starts he starts like just questioning the validity of this story but then also specifically targeting bellingcat um saying that didn't didn't didn't this story come from bellingcat which literally specializes in psychological operations which first of all is just a wild thing to say um when you're talking about it specifically like an open source journalism website like it's the most it's the most honest way you could do journalism because it's giving people the tools to literally check all of the work themselves like it's yeah i mean this is kind of like a minor aside but one of the things that happens here constantly with all these people is they're like absolutely astounded like how like how how did

belling get possibly find this guy it's like well it's not that hard it's really easy but the thing is the thing is right if if so like i am not a journalist right i i learned everything i know about this from gare in like one night and like i i i have tracked down like mass shooter social media accounts and like before the police got them like it's not that hard but the thing is it requires you to even like just a tiny tiny bit be a journalist and not a single one of these writing people has ever like done journalism ever and so like just like the tiniest bit of journalism just like destroys their brains and they're like they're physically incapable of comprehending how someone could have done a journalism and then they use this to sort of feed their base because their base also just doesn't understand how someone could do a journalism.

And this lets you do this cycle of like, how could they possibly have found this? They must have been given it by the government. All it really comes down to is who is on their computer at the right time when this thing happens. Whenever I find out or whenever i can id people it's always just a coincidence that the thing happens as i'm already at my computer so now i can look into this thing um right it is it is yeah who has access to the internet at the right time is the way that we figure out like who's gonna end up id'ing somebody yeah it's it's a mix of that and it's a mix of just who has the patience and the motivation to sit and comb through shit for hours and days.

Which is the same thing that like it's the same thing that anti-fascist activists have been doing for years, you know, especially since Charlottesville, where you're just like, I'm going to watch the same videos of the same event and find new ones. And I'm going to spend three years doing that. spend three years doing that. And eventually I will catch a tattoo or a shirt with a logo and that will let me ID somebody because, you know, of the of the different social media shit that I've been pulling up. Like it's it's it's not it doesn't take like spy satellites. It just takes motivation, being in the right place at the right time and having nothing else to do. Yeah. So eventually they started just kind of harping on this term PSYOP. So PSYOP obviously means psychological operation. But what they mean when they say PSYOP is that they mean this is a false, manufactured

government planned operation. That's what they actually mean, right? In the conspiracy space, PSYOP is more like a loaded term. They don't actually refer to like actual PSYOPs that get done like against like, you know, you can look at like COINTELPRO, right? You can look at, you can look at various ways that the FBI or the army has done PSYOPs. But what they mean when they say PSYOP is this is like, this is a government conspiracy theory, and it's a false narrative that's been crafted to like, change public opinion. So I guess, I guess these people, Mia, you mentioned how they're making it sound like this was this was

created to distract from the Nashville shooting, or just they have various like motivations for why they want to, but it the important part is that they could use this word to just easily deny reality. And that is, that is kind of beyond like whatever motivations they have. It's just easy for them and their ideology to just block off this section of reality so that they don't have to like people who are like actually libertarians don't need to like confront what the extent of their ideology actually means. Right. Um, you know, there's a, there's certainly people who are like, okay with mass shootings happening or, you know, are totally fine with like non-white people

getting killed in mass shootings. But there probably are certain libertarians who don't actually like mass shootings. They don't actually like when fascists go kill tons of people. And it's easier for them sometimes just to block off this section and ignore it than actually confront what their ideology means. So Musk kept saying,

this is either the weirdest story ever or a very bad psyop. The answer is neither. The story is not super weird. It's actually very explainable if you understand the mechanisms at play here. And it's also not a bad psyop. Yeah.

I mean, it's not even like, it's not on its, like on the whole, it's not a particularly complicated story. Like there are it is not an uncommon thing. I mean, the biggest, most recent one before this was that that shooting in New York at the grocery store that was like a directly inspired Nazi attack. Like this kind of shit happens constantly in the United States. It doesn't require nobody has to be secretly armed by the feds. There's an AR-15 behind every bush in this country. It's not hard for this kind

of shit. It's not hard to see where this originates from. Yeah. So it's, I mean, Musk just kept replying to both Tim Pool employee tweets, tweets from the very blatantly fascist account to end wokeness, which Musk has been replying to quite often recently. So this, and I think the reason why we wanted to just talk about this specifically is just because of, you know, like all of these Musk tweets are getting like millions and millions of views if the view counter is anything to go by. At the very least, he's in the top three accounts with the highest engagement on Twitter. So these types of

conspiracy theories are getting inflated to extremely high degrees, at least online. And the separation of reality online is inflated for these mass shootings in a way that I have not seen in quite a while. I have not seen this much just denial of information regarding mass shootings in a way that I have not seen in quite a while. I have not seen this much just denial of like information regarding mass

shootings in quite a long time. And it just, the combination of the stuff, like the stuff with Bellingcat coming from the tankies and how those conspiracies have now mashed with all of these like neo-fascist shit. It's, it's, it's,

it's a combination of reality denial that is absolutely worrying for like future mass shootings as well. It's a pivot in the kind of reality that's being denied, you know, not we have nothing to do with these Nazis who are parroting some of the things that we say about immigration. It's this is fundamentally not the attack

that you think it is. This is our enemies creating an attack to try to make us look bad. Like the fact that that you've always seen bits and pieces of that, the fact that it's being parroted by the wealthiest man on the planet using one of the biggest information fire hoses that exists is is completely novel. completely novel. Yeah, because I mean, a lot of these same conspiracy theories that specifically about like Eric Toller, we saw we saw leftists and tankies bringing up the same stuff during the during the stuff with the Nazi National Guardsmen a month ago. And so we have a lot of the stuff has kind of been writing on the back of that and just continued and accelerating. Since then, it appears there's a few outlets like Business Insider and Bellingcat themselves

reporting that they are receiving basically shadow bans on Twitter right now with their account and their posts having very limited reach. An interesting shadow ban too, because it's not like, it appears at least from what I've seen that what they're doing is they're making it so that when people type bellingcat into the search bar nothing comes

up as opposed to like throttling the reach of the actual posts themselves trying to make it deliberately difficult for people to actually look up information which is interesting to me yeah and i guess i guess it's worth saying that the police in Texas have confirmed everything about the shooter's political beliefs and his neo-Nazi ties. He has neo-Nazi shit in his apartment. Obviously, his body is covered with neo-Nazi tattoos. things that some of the kind of right-wing content creators were trying to do is they were trying to say that um the specific pictures of the individual that bellingcat found online that that these pictures were not this person they in they in fact they were saying they were saying that the shooter is just somebody else yeah which was also proven wrong but yeah they also they also they they did another classic right-wing thing which is that they they they misidentified the shooter

yes i thought it was another guy with the same name because they're horrible and open source intelligence. Like, and then they misidentified the shooter and they misidentified the non-Nazi tattoo that he had. Yes. Cause he had a, he had weirdly enough,

like the city of Dallas is seal tattooed on his hands. Yeah. And Texas tattoo on his shoulder. Yeah. They, they, they like definite, like there were a lot of conspiracy theories about that.

And a lot of them related to the fact that like the first photos we got of the guy were like the kind of photos you get of a dead man at a mass shooting that someone takes through a window while sheltering. So it wasn't clear. So they would take a picture of like a social media picture of the tattoo on his hand and then a picture of him dead. And like the tattoo on his hand in the picture of him dead was like blurrier. And they were like, look, the lines aren't straight.

They're straight in the picture on a social media. And it's like, well, yeah, because those were taken by very different cameras in very different situations. Like, you know how cameras work. You know how this is. One of the funnier ones that one of these content creators was doing was they were posting the photos of the Nazi tattoos

that the shooter himself posted online being like, look how fresh these tattoos are. How can, how can, how, if he had these tattoos for years, why do they look so fresh in these photos?

Because the photos were from right after he got the tattoos. Like you do when you get a tattoo yeah there's like i have tattoos pictures of me getting tattoos from like 15 years ago somewhere on my facebook like you could do the same thing suspicious robert one of the interesting things is that like we we see the same thing with all of like all of the worries around like deep faking stuff like all of all of the like weaponized on reality stuff doesn't need to actually be convincing it it doesn't need to be good like like deep fakes don't need to be good quality you can you can post a meme of like a picture of biden's face and some text under it with with a quotation mark posted on Facebook. And millions of people will believe that's just true.

Like it doesn't need to be real or convincing in order for it to have it like an effect. And it's also it's not just about I think it's thinking like it's not just about convincing people. It's not about making them believe it. This is like this is the thing that I tried to talk about years ago during the 8chan shooting. It's shitposting. Part of the goal is just to disrupt conversation. It's to make people engage with the fake stuff. It's to make people break kind of the lines of reasoning that they are going in with. Like it's to make people distract people from the stuff that is really clear and obvious and just kind of fracture the

conversation. Because the more that you do that, the weaker you make the response to what's happened. And the more kind of that you can distract people from the degree of complicity that that the people in kind of the media sphere on the right have for all of this shit. Yeah, and I think that's why it's like specifically the going after the Bellingcat stuff has been really effective with that because like like i there are like people who i am friends with in real life who like are convinced that bellingcat is a cia psyop like this is like a like like really not insignificant portions of the left believe this yep and that means that it's you know unbelievably difficult to form any kind of coherent response when like half of the people who would normally be doing this stuff are like oh well they are actually cia so like yes the the netherlands based cia unit yeah it's like yeah it the i mean like at least in the time i was there the primary people funding us was the dutch postcode lottery like it's it's it's i don't know like almost every news organization they take

grants where yeah they can get them yeah and like i i want to specifically talk about the ned a tiny bit because people like so like the main conspiracy is about like they like at one point they took they took a grant for national endowment for democracy and like yeah those people do weird shit sometimes but they also for example for example, like if OK, so if you're going to have the line that every single person who's taking money for the NED is a CIA thing, like you have to accept that, for example, like the pro Beijing electoral party in Hong Kong is a is a CIA op because they also got a shit ton of NED money. Right. Like they like NED just gives money to a shit ton of people. right like they like energy just gives money to a shit ton of people it's definitely worth emphasizing that like the initial groups that were pushing the bellingcat conspiracies were all gray zone people that are specifically specifically paid by the russian government like because russia was mad at bellingcat for exposing their war crimes yeah and like that's

where all of this stuff starts there's i don't know how much point there is in laying into this specific thing too much. I would remind you at all times when you are dealing with breaking news like this and there's a bunch of different kind of conflicting arguments about what's actually happening. Occam's razor isn't 100% of the time the way to go. But in a situation like this, you have two possibilities. One is that a Nazi went on a killing spree, as happens constantly, as has been happening since the Nazis became a thing. The other possibility is that the federal government,

for unclear reasons, convinced a man to cover his body in swastika tattoos and shoot random people at a mall for gun control that's not going to get passed in the state of Texas. I don't know. Like, which of those seems likelier to you? I did this thing very deliberately to myself about a year ago, where I was very deliberately like, I'm going to un-conspiracy theory my brain. Because, you know, there is a lot of, like, the kind of reasoning you get in this stuff, which is like, hey, here's a thing that like, quote unquote, looks weird. So this whole thing must be suspect. So it must be an op is like a really really kind of like it's a really common kind of reasoning now that just like a lot of people across the entire political spectrum have and it's not actually a good way to understand

the world like it's it simply is not like we we live in an increasingly absurd world where every single weird thing is more and more visible because of the internet so we're more aware of how much weird shit happens all the time and stuff that may not necessarily be weird because like everything there is an expert in every field who can explain to you why this thing actually makes perfect sense

and it's just people being exposed to things that they're not used to I think one of the last things I think we should mention about this is just the influx of how militant neo-Nazism or visible neo-Nazism has just been, people have just been saying it's feds in an increasingly concerning way. I think last month there was this viral video of a whole bunch of Nazis dressed in red and black protesting something. I forget the exact circumstances at the moment. last month there was this viral video of a whole bunch of nazis dressed in red and black

protesting something i forget the exact circumstances at the moment i think it was a drag i i think it was i think it was some drag related protest but yeah there was there was this group of nazis dressed in red and black doing nazi shit and when you looked at any of the videos on twitter you saw hundreds of replies from people with blue check marks just calling them feds saying oh wow look at all these feds well oh i can't believe the feds are so busy today blah blah blah blah you know it's it's it's like the 100 person npc meme with them all wearing the blue check mark on their forehead saying it's the feds just because it's it's once we get to the point where we have more nazis doing mass shootings again the same way like there was an influx between

like 2017 to 2019 and 2020 there was kind of a dip because all all crime kind of had a dip as we're gonna go into the next next election cycle as things are gonna start looping again um when more and more nazis start doing shit just how there's gonna be a bigger swath of the population who just denies that's what's happening and that is going to make make the problem of nazis probably a bit harder to deal with i mean there's there will still be anti-fascists doing their work to like docs and id people and and and all that stuff but the amount of like visibility and the amount of traction that that this level of reality denial is getting around like militant neo-Nazism and around Nazi killings will be a kind of a new thing to navigate or not a new thing, but like it's a, the problem will be

bigger than what it used to be. I wanted to kind of note one thing on a, on the other side of the ideological spectrum and, and, and not to equate the two, but there has been something kind of concerning that I've been seeing crop up in liberal circles. You may have noticed kind of as a response to all of the mass shootings and the generally consistent Republican line that there's nothing to do except for be shittier to marginalize people, that there's been kind of this like focus in a lot of mainstream liberal media on articles and the idea that you should spread pictures of victims of shootings and a focus on the amount of damage that like a weapon like an AR-15 does to a human body. People can have their own opinion on like whether or not this is a helpful idea, but I have noticed in sort of arguments I've been having with people

a troubling trend, which is when I talk about the importance of doing stuff like taking stop the bleed training, carrying things like tourniquets. I've gotten responses from a couple of people that are like, AR-15s are so powerful, the wounds are not survivable. There's no point in doing this. That is not the case. I have known dozens of people who have been shot by AR-15s, in some cases, AR-style weapons, in some cases multiple times, and larger weapons and lived. It is always worthwhile to have stopped the bleed training and to carry equipment. If you hear anyone saying that, please correct them. Because whatever you think about gun control, it is very important for people to know how to deal with those kind of injuries. And it is important in the immediate wake of an attack. One of the things that was really unsettling is in the immediate wake of the Allen attack after the shooter was down,

there was a couple of people who ran in to try to provide life-saving aid and a bunch more who took photos of the people who had been wounded and killed. And it's possible that if more of the people taking photos had gotten in and attempted to provide aid, some of the people who were injured might have survived. No way to know, but always worth having that training. That's just something I've noticed, not to put it in the same moral universe as trying to pretend your calls for violence aren't calls for violence, but it is something that concerned me and that people should maybe keep an eye on.

Yeah, I mean, I, I, that was like the case with the Rittenhouse shootings. There was someone who basically had most of their arm blown off, but they did not die. So yeah, that is, that is not,

not true. And I've, I've watched a lot of the Rittenhouse footage and yeah, it is, it is, it is nasty. Yeah. But no,

that is, that is, that is a good Um, but no, that is, that, that is a good thing to note. Yeah. And also like on just a fundamental human level, like do, do not let yourself be consumed by the algorithm so much that your first reaction to seeing someone get shot is to try to film them. Like, yeah, we, we need to be better than this. Like we have watched people die because of this like like this this is not a thing as a society that we can continue to be doing like we simply cannot

we simply have to act and not like become part of a sort of like mass media spectacle instead of doing something yeah the footage of things is not going to change it, especially with mass shootings. Footage of mass shootings usually actually makes the problem worse and is mostly used by people who want to be mass shooters. Yeah, that may be a conversation we should expand on at a later date. But, you know, don't let the bastards grind you down. Take a stop the bleed course. You know, bring a tourniquet with you out in the world.

These are, these are action items, uh, that, that, that you can do that might in fact help. So that's going to be it for us today. It could happen here, uh, until next time, you know, keep your head on a swivel welcome I'm Danny Thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora

an anthology of modern day horror Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows

as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI

to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every

week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez.

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

Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRad Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to another episode of It Could Happen Here with me, Andrew, of the YouTube channel Andrew Rizzo. with me, Andrew, of the YouTube channel Andrewism. Today I'm joined by Mia, and today we're going to be discussing another leading figure in the Black radical tradition. If you've heard the episodes

on Kwasi Balogun, you know exactly what's up. Today I've got the first part in a two-parter about Lorenzo Camboa Irvin and his vision for revolution. Irvin's life has been one of resistance, resilience, and radicalism. His contributions to the anarchist movement, especially his work on Black anarchism, even to this day with his ongoing podcast, continues to inspire activists around the world, myself included.

So Mia, what is your experience been with Lorenzo Campo-Irvin and his work? Yeah, so I've read Anarchism and the Black Revolution, which I really enjoy. I've listened to not all of, but like a pretty good amount of the Black Autonomy podcast that he runs, which is great. And so, yeah, I'm excited to talk about him. Awesome. Yeah, he really is a fantastic and necessary figure

in this, you know, broader movement, especially now. For those who don't know, Lorenzo Combo was one of the earliest founders of the Black Anarchist Movement, which was a distinct tradition born out of the Black Anarchist Movement, which was a distinct tradition born out of the history of Black radical politics in the 1970s. Like, Black anarchism is not just, oh, we're throwing on an adjective onto anarchism. There's a history behind it, and there's a distinct tradition that accompanies it.

tradition that accompanies it. There were anarchists historically who were Black who were not part of this Black anarchist tradition and well of course Black anarchists who weren't part of those earlier movements. I think one of the most notable sort of go-to examples is Lucy Parsons was a very important anarchist figure in the sort of the peak of the movement, at least in the US in the 20th century. But although she was Black, her contributions don't necessarily contribute to that sort of black anarchist lineage um so let's get into uvin right uh born in 1947 by the time he was 12 lorenzo uvin had joined the naacp youth group and participated in sit-in protests that helped end racial segregation in chattanooga, Tennessee. He was later drafted during the Vietnam War and served in the army for two years, where he eventually became an anti-war activist. And in 1927, when he was 20 years old,

after his involvement with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Lorenzo Cumbo Irvin joined the Black Panther Party as a rank and file member. Two years later, he hijacked a plane and fled to Cuba while he was on the run for attempting to kill a Ku Klux Klan member. But instead of receiving support as some Black radicals had received when fleeing to Cuba, Cuban authorities had jailed him, deported him to Czechoslovakia, and eventually he escaped from Czechoslovakia to East Germany before eventually being caught, tortured, and brought back to the United States. And then after being drugged during his trial, he was handed two life sentences by an all-white jury in a redneck town.

Tough break, as you can imagine. Irvin had very quickly become disillusioned with the dictatorship he had experienced in Cuba and the socialist countries he visited. And during his time in prison, he reflected on his life and found an alternative method for black revolution distinct from the form he found the panther party now even wasn't the first person to criticize the black panther party's style of organization um one of the splits between the east coast and west coast panthers was on um what form of organization they would take i discussed that a bit in the kawasiba Lagoon episodes.

And then of course there were other figures who came out to the Black Panther Party with their own criticisms including, if I remember correctly, Assata Shakur and also Don Cox. While in prison, Irvin had begun receiving anarchist literature and he also was starting to pick up what another black anarchist who he was briefly imprisoned with at the time, Martin Sostra, was putting out. Martin Sostra is what I believe one of the first major black anarchist figures in that sort of 1960s, 1970s period. And so him being imprisoned with Sostra at the same time sort of really helped

Irvin to understand exactly what anarchism meant and how it would apply to a specifically black experience and black context. Irvin was also inspired by Peter Kropotkin, everyone's favorite Russian former prince and ultimately

Irvin adopted the ideology of anarchism. His case was soon taken up by the Anarchist Black Cross and the Help a Prisoner Oppose Torture Organizing Committee, which led to an international campaign that petitioned for his release. Irvin's writings on anarchism and the Black Revolution, which was written in prison, Irvin's writings on anarchism and the Black Revolution, which was written in prison, gained immense popularity, and so he was released in 1983 after serving nearly 15 years. In his book, he emphasized that anarchism is the most democratic, effective, and radical way to obtain freedom for the Black community, but that Black people must be free to design their movement without the approval of north american anarchists he believed that black people and other people of color would be the backbone of the american anarchist movement of the future the first edition of anarchism the black revolution was published quite a while ago it's still the edition that is available in the anarchist library you can check out um but it is i would consider it to be a sort of a rough early edition um there are certainly some

typos and editorial mistakes and stuff that were addressed in the most recent edition uh that was published in i believe 2021 um and edited with some help from William C. Anderson, who also is another leading figure in the modern Black anarchist movement, having written works like Nation on No Map. Irvin took and still takes a principled stance against capitalism, white supremacy, imperialism, colonial oppression, patriarchy, queerphobia, and the state, recognizing that the government is one of the worst forms of modern oppression. His emphasis on intersectionality has played a crucial role in the shift away from class-exclusive analysis in the American anarchist movement. analysis in the American anarchist movement. And today he remains active, as I said,

recording a podcast called Black Autonomy with his wife and fellow former Panther, Jonina. So today, we draw on from Irvin's book, Anarchism and the Black Revolution, to delve into his picture of revolution in North America and beyond. I think one of the strongest strategies for the development of a black revolution would be a Black Labour Federation, as Irvin discusses in his book. Black labour has been a critical economic factor in America

since the country's inception, and it was through the toil of black labour, beginning with slave labour in the Old South and extending to sharecropping, farm labour and migration to the north for factory jobs that the foundations of the american nation were built however as is obvious black workers have been routinely excluded from that share of the wealth of the american nation and routinely excluded from the trade unions that struggled to regain some of that wealth like for example the American Federation of Labor. The National Colored Labor Union, the National Colored Farmers Alliance and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Carporters

as well as the League of Black Revolutionary Workers and other unions and associations of black workers were then formed to represent these interests that were being left out and not at all brought to the table. Black workers were very much instrumental in the Congress of Industrial Organizations campaign of strikes and sit-downs and other protests to organize unskilled industrial workers, but they didn't get to enjoy the benefits of their pivotal role. Most of the black population is working class, and black industrial and clerical workers still hold significant potential power

in the struggle for black liberation. A lot of these workers have already been organizing to defend their rights at work and advocate for their interests, even if union leadership is conservative, even if they won't challenge management, even if they're not even unionized. We see as well in modern times, a lot of black figures stepping up to organize these unions. union to be organized in Amazon was spearheaded by a black worker, Chris Smalls. And workers, black workers across history have already been creating union caucuses and creating independent labor unions where necessary to push for their specific

interests. Because I mean, the unity of black workers and the rest of the working class is essential to combat and overthrow capitalism. But there needs to be a recognition within that unity of distinctly black interests and a distinctly black history. Which is why black caucuses within unions are able to take up the mantle of struggles that unions have turned a blind eye to such as discriminatory hiring firing and promotion practices and you know lack of equal treatment um i think these caucuses could even go further as irvin also argues to democratize their unions to eliminate um some of these discriminatory practices and to really push for the radical fighting spirit

that has been lost in some of these sort of reformist union structures. The Black Caucuses and also the workers more generally should be stepping up to demand democratic control of the union, to demand equal treatment, to demand affirmative action, to demand full employment, to demand shorter shorter work weeks to demand the right to strike the demand to social security and unemployment compensation demand for livable minimum wages of course all of these accomplishments or demands are really sort of short-term benefits that would still retain a capitalist structure but they're necessary nonetheless especially when unionization is at an all-time low historically one of the

things that even also advocates for which i'll get into more in the future uh is this idea of unions advocating for companies to put aside funds specifically for programs to rebuild inner city communities and provide work for black workers um and he also talks about worker self-management of industry by factory committees and workers councils and um elections by workers themselves but the main idea that he's pushing for at least in terms of black the black working class and black labor is as i mentioned a black labor federation both on a national level and on an international level a national black working workers association would serve as both a revolutionary union movement for workplace organizing and mass social movement for community organizing combining tactics from both labor and the black liberation movements to multiply their numbers

and build their strength and turn their unions into these militant class struggle instruments. An example that we can see in history during the late 1960s was the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, which was organizing black auto workers out of the Dodge Revolutionary Movement. Sorry, let me rephrase that. One example of that type of organization could be found in the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, which organized black autoworkers during the late 1960s. The League had grown out of a major affiliate, the Dodge Revolutionary Movement, and it was a Black Labour Federation that existed as an organized alternative to the United Auto Workers, which had been excluding Black workers.

The League was also a very major force on the streets, as it was, in addition to organizing its workplaces, organizing college campuses and Black inner-city areas. But its potential was stifled unfortunately by political faction fights among leadership um there was a division between uh those who want to take a more marxist leninist approach to the organization compared to those who want to take more democratic approach to the organization um there was a lack of a solid enough organized base in the factories. There was, you know, significant company and united auto workers and state repression,

of course, organized racism, a lack of cooperation among white workers and other reasons that eventually led to the league splitting into mutually hostile factions that would die after less than five years of existence. Classic organizing history story. I don't think that we should look at these failures and use them as an opportunity to give up. I think we look at these failures and we use them as looning opportunities, use them as opportunities to recognize, oh, we can do something like this, but not exactly like this. Yeah, and make sure that Baba Venkian is never involved at any point in the process. Exactly, exactly.

I mean, we still need these sorts of labor organizations and associations and unions. We still need Black workers spearheading these sort of organizations to organize other black workers in their communities to support the strikes and workplace organizing will be necessary for significant changes. And of course,

we need the groups to be established to avoid the pitfalls and ideological squabbles of Marxism and Leninism. But beyond just the sort of American approach, because in case those of you who don't know, I'm not living in America.

I'm not American. Which is why Irvin also addresses and advocates for an international Black Labor Federation to wield the collective power of Black workers globally that have been universally oppressed and exploited. Around the world, as a racial group, black workers have been oppressed as workers and as people. And this dual form of oppression is really what emphasizes that need to organize for our own rights and our own liberation. In African and Caribbean countries, including Toronto and Tobago, there are labor federations and labor unions,

but a lot of them are reformist, a lot of them are government controlled, and there's a lack of militancy. There's a lot of collaboration with the government and with companies they're supposed to be organizing against. And so it's necessary to have an organization with an internationalist scope that is pushing for solidarity, that is pushing for radical change.

And so I think that's the real strength of an international Black Labor Federation, that idea of increased solidarity across several countries, the idea of strengthening our collective bargaining power and ability to organize better working conditions. Of course, we'd also have the benefit of shared resources and the benefit of greater visibility

to the issues that we are facing in the workplace and in society. And then, of course, there would also be the ability to exert using that visibility and resources and solidarity to exert greater political influence however you know an international black federation we still struggle with political barriers particularly in countries that are actively hostile to that sort of organizing um of course the powers that be would do everything in their power to keep such a struggle from being able to attain and maintain any kind of momentum or power. The constraints of time and energy and resources and engagement may also prevent such a federation from gaining ground. But I still think of all those issues

that we should keep in mind. If well-developed, I think that national, regional, and international caucuses can do a lot to implement significant changes. In fact, one strategy that Irvin advocates for is something that I believe an international Black Labour federation or any

kind of international labor federation will be necessary to help to organize and that would be a general strike because the vast majority of the black community consists of working class people in the U.S. because many of them are engaged in manufacturing and medical service and communications and food production and retail. A lot of blue collar work that really makes the country go around, really makes them an essential component of the capitalist economy and of the American economy. the capitalist economy and of the american economy um i think it positions them as really really key players in any sort of protest campaign that would involve post-racism and class oppression um and it could go even further into beyond just stepping up and striking for demands in the workplace control

over the workplace you could also go a step further and accomplish it and accomplish an even more revolutionary goals and it would of course involve using tactics like industrial sabotage and factory occupations and sit-ins and slowdowns and wildcat strikes and other work stoppages that would help to reassert our collective power. Of course, as I'm always really careful to emphasize when I bring up general strikes, they're not easy to organize. A friend of mine, Alki, he has a video on his YouTube channel about general strikes and how they work and some of the history of some past general strikes. So I think that's required reading, quote unquote reading, to definitely check out. But yeah, general strikes are not easy to organize. They're not something that you could just call for on Reddit or Twitter or Facebook or wherever.

You know, it takes serious community and workplace mobilization it takes significant planning it takes strike committees and support committees um because and even defense committees when employee employers may be trying to retaliate against striker workers or um blacklist or fire workers yeah and i'd also say like something that i i think people okay there's not a delicate way to say this like look if you're gonna be engaged in like a long term serious general strike you're gonna have to do things like you're gonna have to start seizing stuff like you're going to have to start committing theft in order to make sure that people can like eat exactly you're gonna have to start appropriating stuff

yeah exactly it's not just standing around in a picket line you know like a general strike is an extremely involved and invested you don't get usually you don't get two chances to do a general strike you know like you have that chance and after that they usually if you fail you usually introduce legislation or put things in place to ensure that something like that never happens again yeah or you get like there was a thing that used to happen back when you know back in like the early 1900s when these happened a lot was you would get these general strikes but you know they would kind of they would be like like two days long and there's this great malatesta quote from oh it's 19 1924 i think where he's talking about how he's talking about the factory occupations that that started in italy in the like during the the two red years and he has this line that goes general strikes a protest no longer

upset anyone neither those who take part in them Nor those against whom they are directed If only the police had the intelligence To avoid being provocative They would pass off as any public holiday One must seek something else We put forward an idea The takeover of factories Exactly, exactly

You have to step beyond Is this legal? And look into What can we make possible? You know? Yeah. people um there's always the issue of scabs you know it can have significant consequences for workers who depend on their wages to survive and to support their families um it can have a lot of ripple effects uh and it could also involve you know workers ended up going to jail or just losing their jobs but still it it's it's a powerful tool that if we can recognize if we start working towards if when people were calling for strikes back in 2016 and 2017 and 2018 and 2019 and 2020 and 2021 and 2022 if all those years where we spent calling for

general strikes actually more an effort was being put in to actually put the foundation in place for general strike to occur then 2023 we would be prepared to support a general strike in a long-term way in a way that would actually signify you know revolutionary change in our lifetimes i mean don't be disheartened dear listener there's still potential for such a thing to occur it just takes preparation and organization and speaking of things to take preparation and organization another one of irvin's tactics is a mass tax boycott you know people should refuse to pay any form of taxes to the government be it federal income estate or state

taxes while they continue to be exploited because as he would argue you know the wealthy and their corporations pay next to no taxes while the poor and workers pay the brunt of taxation and do not receive any benefits in return. You know, all these taxes on income and goods and services, but communities are still suffering. And that money ends up going to fund the Pentagon and defense contractors and consultants who get to, you know, loot the government for their own gain. So part of a black radical movement, the black revolution as Irvin argues for, is a mass tax resistance movement to boycott taxes. Similar to the peace movement's war tax resistance, taking all the taxes that would have been reaped from personal property and income tax and stocks and bonds and funneling that towards community development, funneling that towards community projects and organizations.

As with any revolutionary action, significant legal consequences would be involved in that, of course. I think such a tactic needs some serious mass support and backing behind it to succeed and even then i don't believe it should be the backbone of any movement i think it's more so like an accessory in the event of a major rupture a single tool in a broader arsenal like i don't think the entire movement should be built off of tax avoidance you're just going to get a bunch of people thrown into prison there has to be a lot more to it than that when i look at the sort of cost to benefit analysis like yeah it'll get a lot of federal attention but if it's not properly implemented i don't

really see many immediate benefits for the long-term goals of the movement i mean i could be wrong but it's not a tactic that I would personally favor unless such a struggle is already in existence and in its later stages. Another type of boycott that's even references is, of course, the regular conventional, unconventional sort of boycotts used during the civil rights movement. used during the civil rights movement. A lot of black consumers would boycott particular merchants, public services, refusing to treat with merchants who would allow for racial discrimination, and use that loss of revenue to force them

to make concessions. Today, black consumers in the US spend hundreds of billions a year in the capitalist economy. Of course, not all of those consumers are workers. And all those workers are able to boycott. But I think boycotts are still a potential tool in the arsenal, again, to wage economic warfare

against corporate structures. I i mean it could be expanded from anything it can be expanded to cover everything from specific products to entire industries right um dr martin luther king jr himself recognized the potential of a national black boycott dr martin luther king jr himself recognized the potential of a national black boycott dr martin luther king jr himself recognized the potential of a national black boycott of america's major corporations shortly after he was assassinated he established such an initiative called operation bread basket which aimed among other things to force corporations to pour money into national black community development projects for poor communities.

I think, you know, boycotts have a way to put economic pressure, but they, I also believe, are a little bit less effective in our modern globalized world due to the fact that you know a lot of these companies are owned by the same like three corporations um they usually have ways to mitigate economic losses in one market by targeting other alternative markets or even if they experience a dip in demand in one sector they may still enjoy demand in another sector in another part of the world and on top of that companies can also use it as an opportunity to sort of get people off the movement for example boycott a second place they, oh, you're trying to boycott.

Well, we just put a sale out 50% off, 60% off while stocks last. And then you have people sort of, you know, breaking off of the movement. And I mean, of course, not everybody will do that. Some people are principled, but that is still a tactic that you see some companies using when they start to experience that sort of economic pressure they try to fragment the movement uh quote unquote votes in with your wallet even mass coordinated in my opinion is limited in its ability to challenge the root causes of oppression inequality i don't think it brings us any closer to anarch anarchist world. I think it only weakens the current world.

So I think it's another tactic that really cannot act alone. And then we've got another tool in the os now. We could call it a rent boycott, we could call it a rent strike. It's a way to achieve certain legislative changes and also a way to achieve certain more radical changes if you get into sort of occupation and squatting and that kind of thing. In Harlem, in New York City, rent boycotts were so successful that it led to the creation of rent control legislation, which prevented evictions, unjustified price increases,

and required reasonable upkeep by property owners and management companies there is a track record of rent strikes providing some benefits you know allowing tenants to negotiate with landlords and to bring certain issues to light and it could also bring about of course certain policy changes and push for or highlight further the need for affordable and accessible housing but again rent strikes are legally risky they can also be difficult to coordinate especially for those who are really kind of risk uh eviction i mean nobody can really risk eviction right but that's where the risk sort of comes in um and then if there's a lack of support if the landlord has significant resources behind them

there are also you know ways that it could go wrong i don't want to mislead um like i want people to be aware of the reality of how difficult this sort of organizing effort is, all these organizing efforts are. It's not a walk in the park. It's not, you know, like, act the end of act three in some revolutionary movie where the good guys are able to win with the power of friendship, but that kind of thing. It's tough work. And we have to be aware of the risks even as we

engage in such actions. Levin also advocates for squatting in tandem with rent strikes. So in addition to withholding rent payments from exploits of landlords and banks, also movements to engage in urban squatting, to seize housing, to seize

empty plots of land, to seize unoccupied and abandoned buildings, and to redirect payments that would have gone towards rent, towards necessary repairs to improve living conditions, and to claim our cities for ourselves. for ourselves but again while squatting does provide an immediate housing solution for those in need while it draws attention to the issue of housing inequality while it creates a sense of collective ownership and while it can help to improve all these neglected areas

and urban environments it's also illegal it can also involve eviction and arrest a lot of squatting conditions can be fairly unsafe or unsanitary particularly if a property is not up to a particular standard and then of course squatting is also sort of temporary as a solution it doesn't really address the root causes of housing um it is really a precarious position to keep people in.

And it's another case where without mass defense and support, without a mass movement backing it up, it's going to be very easy to dislodge any gains that might be made in the short term. Finally, even also argues for the establishment of the commune as a staging ground for black revolutionary struggle the concept of the commune

is basically like a dual power structure an institution meant to compete with government power to serve as a counter to government power in order to assert collective and community power Forming and unifying

various organizations of struggle taking control of existing communities and institutions and working to fight against economic and political and cultural discrimination, exploitation and servitude in this capitalist society. And he goes on to talk about inner city communes

as centers of black counterpower and social revolutionary culture to serve as sort of a living example of what revolution could look like. I think this is a case where at the time he didn't have the word for it, but we do now. And that would be prefigurative politics. The idea of establishing

these sort of institutions in the here and now that would be able to prefigure the world that we want to see in the future. Another component of these sort of communes is to provide a counter-narrative to sort of black capitalism and responsibility politics that gets pushed out as a dominant narrative within black communities in the US. The commune, the black commune specifically, the commune, the black commune specifically you could say was a place for a new society and a new culture

to emerge that rejects the internalization of oppression under this system and so when you want to get into sort of how the sort of commune would be established Uwe talks about establishing community councils

that would govern and... Irvin talks about establishing community councils that would allow for collective governance and be composed of workers from various industries and neighbourhoods and delegates to organise communities on a block-by-block basis. He also emphasizes the need to reject Black politicians, bureaucrats, and mayors from sort of co-opting these efforts and ensuring that the community on the ground actually retains control over the institutions that they establish and develop and take control over to ensure that the community's needs and desires are met.

One example that he uses is in the case of schools, right? Where the community would organize parents, students, teachers and community alike to cooperatively administer the schools. I think we see a lot of efforts by right-wing parents right now, organizing to sort of run things in a lot of public schools. But that doesn't mean that similar efforts can't be undertaken by radicals to push for the same. Of course, it wouldn't be as easy because they aim to retain the status quo, whereas we aim to change things i think it is sort of important to note too that it's like it's not like this sort

of like right-wing school stuff came out of nowhere like part of the reason this was happening was that like there had been movements inside the like inside sorry let me rephrase that there have been movements from teachers and from like inside the education system trying to sort of like you know i mean do things i teach black history right and you know like part like these these are things that like these are kinds of movements that people really tend to ignore and really tend to sort of not think about the significance of. But yeah, I mean,

it's not like these sort of like right-wing versions of this came out of nowhere. They were a reaction to people, you know, doing a sort of more moderate version of the strategy. Yeah, that's true. That is true. And to know it,

we have to push even harder to counter their counter efforts and really assert that sort of transformation in the education space and beyond just the education space

what Irvine talks about is ensuring that these councils encompass a variety of organizations, not just blocking neighborhood communities, but also labor unions, student groups, social activist groups, and even specialist youth or single-issue campaigns and issues. The idea is, of course, to continuously promote self-rule, is of course to continuously promote self-rule

to continuously develop people's powers and drives and consciousness toward liberation and to continuously offer an alternative to this pervasive sense that all this is is all there can ever be

it's it's necessary to sort of incubate this sort of embryo of a revolutionary society, this microcosm of a new lifestyle. And to highlight the necessity of struggle against these systems. And when I speak of consciousness, I'm also speaking of specifically Black consciousness, speaking of consciousness raising sessions to ensure that Black history, Black culture is accessible and available

and understood by the Black community to ensure that newly liberated and like social ideas and values are distributed within the community to ensure that newly liberated and social ideas and values are distributed within the community, to ensure that counseling and therapy are available, rooted in, of course, a Black revolutionary perspective, to help people to realize that there's disunity and distrust and violence and oppression that occurs

due to this legacy under this system does not have to continue to be so but that's it for me and for uvin for now. You can join us for part two, where we can dive into the day-to-day aspects of the survival programs that Uwe describes to build Black resilience in the here and now. If you're looking for me on the internet, you can find me on youtube.com slash andrezo and you can support on patreon.com slash stdrew. Peace. you get support on patreon.com slash saint drew peace welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter

nocturnal tales from the, presented by iHeart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.

has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though.

I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, you look so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez.

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

with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome back to another episode of It Could Happen Here with myself, Andrew, of the YouTube channel Andrewism. If you're joining us from the previous episode, we touched on the life of Lorenzo Kambua-Uvin, who he was as a leading figure in the Black anarchist movement, how he ended up in that position, sort of his life story,

and how he ended up writing Anarchism and the Black Revolution and sort of breaking down that vision of a Black revolution, including tactics like communes, squats, French strikes, tax strikes, boycotts, general strikes, and of course, a Black Labour Federation. But that's not all that Levin has explored in his work.

And today we're going to dive into his vision for survival programs, things to agitate for and actions the Black community can take to survive under the current system. Now, historically, Black communities have been subjected to economic exploitation, with businesses and financial institutions often taking profits out of the community without investing in its growth and development. And this, of course, has led to disinvestment, poverty, lack of resources for community members, and, of course, persistent relative deprivation. members and of course persistent relative deprivation. So the demand for community control of businesses and financial institutions that Irvin outlines is something that seeks to shift power and resources back into the hands of the community by placing control in the hands of

community members it provides an opportunity to build economic power and to ensure that businesses and financial institutions work for communities rather than vice versa because such institutions and businesses would be under the control of the workers themselves. So in a cooperative model, members work together

to achieve common goals and share the benefits and risks of a business equally. The governance structure of a cooperative typically involves a board of directors who are elected by members to make strategic decisions on behalf of the cooperative, but there are of course other ways of organizing, including horizontal consensus. All members of a cooperative have an equal say in these decisions,

with each member typically having one foot. And the board of directors is meant to just be accountable to the members and act in the best interest of the cooperative. Now, cooperatives already exist. They operate in various industries and they can operate in various industries, including agriculture, retail, finance, housing, healthcare, and more. For example, in a cooperative agriculture model, farmers can pool resources to purchase seeds, fertilizers, and equipment at a lower cost and then sell their crops collectively to increase bargaining power and reduce costs. In a retail cooperative, members can buy products at a discount and have a say in the type of

products offered, while in a financial cooperative, can access bank services and share in the profits that are generated by the cooperative. Cooperatives also often provide mutual aid and support to their members with surplus profits from the businesses reinvested either in the businesses or distributed as dividends to members, which ensures that the benefits of the business are shared equitably and members have a stake in the success of a cooperative like i mentioned cooperatives already exist which means they are capable of operating within capitalism but within a broader program of social revolution they're meant to build our alternative power in a dual power struggle to eventually enable us to assert our independence from this system as it were but even here now it is necessary to survive

under this system and i think cooperatives offer a more humane and more empowering model a more humane and more empowering model. Another example of that sort of cooperative structure could be found in mutual aid banking societies, again, owned and controlled by the members and are created specifically to provide access to financial services and support to individuals and communities that have been traditionally excluded or marginalized

from a lot of traditional banking systems. So they function to provide low-interest loans to members for various purposes, including starting businesses, purchasing homes, covering unexpected expenses, and members are required to put in a certain amount each month to fund these sorts of loans. And in addition to providing financial services, these sort of societies can also provide education and support, help with financial planning, help with budgeting, help with financial literacy to enable members to better survive

within their current financial situation under capitalism. And so that's one aspect of the survival program, right? And emphasis on survival. It's existed now in this system. So that's one aspect of it. Pushing for community controlled businesses and financial institutions and creating community cooperatives and mutual aid banking societies another aspect of that survival program that even outlines is achieving community controlled

housing to help address issues of gentrification, and lack of affordable housing. Through legal and illegal means, such as rent strikes and demonstrations, armed actions, open squatting to drive landlords out and take over the property. Those are more precarious approaches, right? And they're also the above-the-board methods. I spoke about those approaches, some of those approaches in the first part. some of those approaches in the first part. The quote-unquote above-the-board methods would be establishing things like community land trusts or CLTs. A CLT is essentially a non-profit organization that owns and manages land for the benefit of a community. The CLT can acquire land and then lease it to developers or residents

who agree to use the land for affordable housing which allows them to retain control of the land and ensure that it's being used for their good rather than being solo of the private developers for the sake of profit in a situation under a clt where a homeowner wants to sell, wants to move, they can only sell the building that they occupy. They can't sell the land itself because the community land trust retains control of the land. The community land trust also retains the right of first refusal to purchase the buildings, which basically means before you can try and sell the building to anyone else, you have to give the community land trust, community itself an opportunity to buy the building back um and that would enable them to also make sure that um people

aren't coming in to just profit off of such affordable housing and they're also doing it so that the housing stays affordable so they can ensure that they can resell the building to somebody who's also seeking that you know affordable housing and by providing that sort of housing community land trusts can stabilize communities and prevent displacement in the long term um they can help to revitalize distress um distressed neighborhoods. And they can also invest into things like community facilities, like pools and laundromats and gyms and that sort of thing. In terms of how you actually create a CLT,

laws, of course, vary from place to place place but essentially you form a non-profit organization obtain tax exam status acquire the land either through purchase or donation and then begin developing affordable housing or community facilities on the land in addition to that a community land trust would need certain guidelines in place for leasing the land. In addition to that, a community land trust would need certain guidelines in place for leasing the land to homeowners and to maintain the affordability of the land over time. And of course, community land trust requires a system of governance and decision-making to engage in that sort of ongoing effort of involving the residents themselves and ensuring that they are educated in how community land trusts work and how this model can be expanded to other communities.

Of course, establishing such a thing requires significant resources. Another approach to community-controlled housing that also takes some resources is through limited equity housing cooperatives. So in this model residents uh own and manage the housing development they each have a same decision making process it's run democratically um they each have a share in the cooperative which gives them the right to occupy a unit in development the share price however is set at a fixed rate which means the unit can only be sold back to the cooperative at the same price, which again helps to make sure that the housing remains affordable in the long term. where you own the building but you don't own the land in an lehc or um you know limited equity housing cooperative you don't own the building or the land you own a share and the cooperative

owns the property itself you're also required of course to contribute a down payment and to pay monthly fees which helps to maintain and manage the property. You know, it's difficult to organize things, as anyone with some experience organizing can tell you. And something as high investment as housing is no different, right? It's a challenge. It's a challenge in fundraising challenge it's a challenge in fundraising it's a challenge in organizing people it's a challenge in ensuring that such efforts are defended and are able to establish themselves in the long term but it's still a promising model i believe for survival because of its priority on community ownership and control it really relieves that one major stress in a lot

of people's lives uh in terms of affordable housing of course in the long term housing should be decommodified entirely but that is the future the survival program is for the here and now another aspect of the survival program that Irving talks about is food autonomy, the establishment of Black community-controlled food systems to establish self-sufficiency, to control the production and distribution of food, to ensure basic needs are met, to ensure that Black communities are no longer at the mercy of food deserts and other systemic barriers to accessing healthy, affordable food. and other systemic barriers to accessing healthy, affordable food. By creating trucking networks and warehouses and communal farms, farmers' cooperatives, food cooperatives, agricultural unions, and other collective associations, Black communities can ensure that healthy and essential foods are readily available.

Rather than just treating the symptom, such institutions would treat the root cause of food insecurity, which is a lack of control over our food chains and food networks. So, for example, a trucking network would be used to transport food from communal farms to warehouses, which could serve as collectively owned distribution centers for the food in a sort of a library economy setting. The warehouses could also serve as storage facilities for other non-perishable

food items to bank seeds to distribute those seeds and other items and tools to community gardens and food cooperatives. And such community gardens can be established on vacant lots, on rooftops and unused spaces within the city, particularly in areas where access to fresh produce is limited. And all of these efforts would involve members of the community who would be responsible for each step in the process

and ensuring that such things are accessible equitably. Um, food cooperatives within communities for, could, for example, um, be organized through sort of a share structure where each household or each individual has a share in the cooperative that entitles them to sit down to

food each week. Uh, or you could have in a sort of a library structure there are different ways that you can organize it you could even have as well agricultural unions provide support and training and education on sustainable farming practices access to tools and equipment financial assistance for farmers in need all these efforts would establish the foundation necessary for food autonomy under this sort of survival program that even has developed and as i mentioned in the previous episode even also talks about under the survival programs

developing autonomous education, ensuring the community has control over every aspect of the educational system, from the curriculum and textbooks to the hiring and training of teachers and administrators. And as I spoke about in the previous episode, the same way the reactionaries fight and advocate for control of education is the same way that we can do the same. It won't be as easy, but we have to counter their efforts because they have already been countering ours. The minimal gains we've made in, for example, ensuring that an accurate account of history is told in schools is already being fought against.

So we need to go even further. Community-controlled schools would not only reflect community values, culture, and history, not only would they be designed to meet the specific needs of the children within them, not only would they provide a safe and a neutral environment to encourage creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills, but they would also provide a space, an additional space for the development of people's powers and drives and consciousness towards liberation at any age i mean in addition to primary and secondary education even also talks about free higher education programs remedial training programs um reading programs trade programs all these things to help develop people's skills and education,

knowledge that would help to equip them to address social, political, and economic issues. Uvin also calls for a system of community-based self-defense to defend ourselves against various forms of violence, including police brutality, hate crimes, and vigilante attacks without relying on government or law enforcement agencies to defend ourselves. There are several components to this of course. It would involve organizing and mobilizing community members to participate in self-defense training programs. would involve weapons training it would involve tactics for de-escalation it would involve a network that can coordinate responses to incidents of violence

establishing community channels to quickly disseminate information enabling restorative and transformative justice practices to be included to keep the state out of resolving the conflicts between people in communities and then of course unlike a lot of these law enforcement systems and structures a community-based self-defense program or system would also be involved in the prevention of such incidents of violence and harm and conflict from occurring it would be involved in continuously evaluating and adapting to changing circumstances to analyzing the patterns of violence and gaps that are taking place in training or in resources and to continuously refine tactics and strategies and approaches to see to the long-term healing of the communities and the interruption

of cycles of violence and generational trauma in the long term another component of these survival programs would involve medical training large-scale medical training programs in black communities providing individuals with the knowledge and skills needed to understand and address health issues black communities especially those from low-income backgrounds in the u.s often face significant barriers to accessing quality health care um it's due to systemic racism and oppression it's due to um inaccessibility and unaffordability of health care just generally um and also the quality and resources available um within certain communities specifically, and also the ways that health outcomes are worse

if you are Black. Black mothers are, or rather the Black maternal death rate is one particularly heavy example of these sorts of disparities and so that's why we need community-based medical clinics and training programs and workshops and seminars led by black medical professionals public health experts public health experts and community organizers who are versed in the social determinants of health and impacts of systemic racism on health outcomes and invested in seeing that changed. Such a program would involve medical, including dental, training. It would empower individuals to provide basic healthcare services and support to their communities.

It would involve training in first aid. It would involve healthcare screenings, health education. It would involve training in first aid, it would involve healthcare screenings, health education, because underrepresentation in health matters, lack of education in one's own personal health matters, and too many people losing their lives as a result of that racial blind spot and as a result of that inequality. And so a survival program in the here and now needs to account for that. Irvin also calls for the release of black political prisoners as part of a broader abolitionist struggle, rooted in the recognition that the criminal justice system in the US

has been used as a tool for political repression against black people and other marginalized communities. He's speaking here from experience, of course. He wrote this when he was in prison mass incarceration of black people has been deliberate and systemic effort to silence in dissent to silence dissent and maintain the status quo of white supremacy and white supremacist capitalism here are now survival programs should be involved in the release of black political prisoners, especially to investigate and review the cases of those who have been unjustly imprisoned, to address the use of coerced confessions, falsified evidence and other forms of prosecutorial misconduct that has led to wrongful convictions, that has led to people rotting away in jail cells for decades with no sort of justice. I mean, these people are often some of the most committed and dedicated revolutionaries, and their continued imprisonment has been a grave injustice. Some of them, unfortunately, passed before they're even

released, if they had released at all. And by demanding their release, by fighting for their freedom, by writing to them and supporting them even now, by showing our solidarity with those who have sacrificed so much in the struggle for liberation and ensuring that their voices are heard, not only can we aid in their survival, we can also aid in our own. lastly yovan calls for the ever contentious big payback reparations yovan challenges us to build a mass movement in our communities to compel the government and the rich to provide the means for our community's redevelopment after centuries of slavery and of abuse and of robbery and of discrimination demanding those reparations in the form of community development funds to be placed in credit unions cooperatives and other mutual aid institutions in the black community so we can start to obtain some measure of economic self-sufficiency but of course from the question of who pays to how we force them to pay to how

we determine how much they pay how that pay is distributed or implemented if the pay is even in cash you know there's a lot of tension surrounding that topic i'm pro reparations not just for black america but for the entire diaspora uh i mean i've seen the u.s made sure to get reparations for itself and its allies after world war ii the victims various atrocities have received reparations for their injustices but as soon as black people demand their due demand their due everybody you know they want us to forget about it yeah yeah everybody knows and i think part of that is because everybody knows that they can't actually afford it you know if we were paid exactly what we would do they would not have the wealth they have um and so my stance has always been i don't think

reparations will come by ballot i don't want it to come by ballot um i don't want to receive some check in the mail that says, okay, now be happy, get over it. But let me not get myself in any more trouble. I will leave it at that. I don't think it will come by ballot. I don't think that's reasonable. Yeah, I've already said so much in these past two episodes. I mean, there are a lot of arms to this survival program. Let me bring things to a close a bit. I've already said so much in these past two episodes. I mean, there are a lot of arms to this survival program.

Let me bring things to a close a bit. There are a lot of areas of struggle that we can pick up. A lot of things can be applied, of course. Most of these things, I think, can be applied beyond the Black community. But there's a reason that the Black community specifically was Irvin's focus. Because of his life experience, because of the need to address black communities specifically in an anarchist text, something that was really lacking prior to the resurgence of, you know, the black radical tradition, the black anarchist specific tradition in the seventies. So it's necessary um but i just hope you know people who

are listening who are not black didn't just you know click off that i still hear that these ideas and stuff these programs are applicable more broadly um i hope that I can see and contribute to these changes in my lifetime. And as I consistently borrow from Ashanti Alston, another Black anarchist figure, who I actually hope at some point we could bring on, all power to all the people. Peace. Welcome.

I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter. Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows. Presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters, to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose.

This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, you look so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian.

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

At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, podcast fans, and welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that today is hosted by me, James Down and Mia Wong. Hi Mia. Hello. Hi. So what we're going to talk about today is Situation on the Border. We're working on a scripted episode, which will take a while because they always do.

And, you know, we want that to be nice and sort of polished for use. But I did want to update everyone because I think that what's happening, it has a sense of urgency to it. And certainly like some of the mutual aid requests have a real sense of urgency to them. And folks who follow me on twitter.com will have noticed that like in between the shit posts,

I've been down at the US-Mexico border for most of the tail end of last week and the start of this week. Sort of depicting what's going on there, along with my friend Joe, Joe Orellana, who's a freelancer who we're going to be working with on the scripted series. People can find Joe at Joe O-R-E photo on Twitter. Joe's got some really good photos if you want to see kind of what's going on. But the long and the short of it is that Title 42 ended on, well, to begin with,

exactly the moment that it ended was a subject of some contention, right? We knew it was going to end on the 11th of May. Title 42, if folks don't remember, is an emergency public health measure. It's part of the United States public health law, United States Code, public health something, something that allows Border Patrol to expel people from the United States without giving them their due process, their asylum hearing. So basically, they bounce them straight back to Mexico. This has been in place since March of 2020. We now know that the Trump administration pressured the CDC. So in theory, it came through the CDC, the Center for Disease Control, under pressure

from the Trump administration, direct pressure from trump administration direct pressure from from um pence and uh stephen miller was yeah this is a this is this was a stephen miller like yeah supremacy special yeah bobblehead looking racist motherfucker um has once again uh done something terrible uh not that some of his policies as i will get onto this in a scripted episode the biden administration has like copy pasted some steve some straight up stephen miller stuff in his transit bans and is absolutely liable for i don't want to use the word chaos at our border because it that plays into this fox news narrative there is a a very concerted plan to make people suffer more than is necessary at our border. And it would have been very easy to avoid this.

So Title 42, basically there are no consequences for crossing, but it's also very hard to get asylum. The CBP officer can spontaneously decide to give you your rights, basically. If you're like, come on, bro, I'm going to get killed if I go home, then that person can decide to allow you to be processed for asylum, which is what a lot of the Ukrainian folks got.

Surprise, surprise. Yeah, I feel like we should also mention that under like multiple legal frameworks, you have the right to request asylum. This is something that supposedly is inviolable. You have the right as a human being to request asylum in a country.

Yes, and it doesn't matter where you've been before and it doesn't matter how you got there and you don't have to do it at a port of entry. It doesn't matter how you entered the country or where you entered the country. Yes, yeah. Under multiple different international frameworks frameworks you have the right to do this uh but the usa has been denying that to people for three and a bit years now right three years something like that and you know i also could just want to briefly mention this because i feel like there's this way in which people – people will talk about, like, one border regime and then never connect the dots between this one and the other ones.

But, like, for example, like, this is something that happens all over the world. Yes. like a shit ton of money but the and this actually happened in libya too is the italian government paying the libyan and sort of sudanese paramilitaries a shit ton of money to like keep refugees like basically like trap to some extent enslave them in camps to keep them from like getting to italy to try to request asylum so this is a yeah like fredx does this like border patrol does this this is sort of like a global like yeah regime the border like industrial complex um is every bit as bad if not worse than the defense industrial complex that we're more familiar with like border policing is something that really came post 9-11 right with

the creation of dhs in the united, but we have exported that shit everywhere. And like our border patrol agents, right, CBP has an office in lots of embassies. They train Dominican border agents on the border with Haiti, for instance, are trained by our CBP people. CBP agents were deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan. Yeah, this is a global thing. And like where I guess where I am am now where i've been for a while is the place where that all began right and where we continue to see cbp innovating new and

exciting ways to fucking take some of the most desperate people in the world and make them suffer and spend a shit ton of money and preventing them from accessing their legal right to asylum and or detaining them while they do it and so what has happened is title 42 was supposed to end on the 11th of may right that was when the federal covid emergency ended so there was no reason for it to exist anymore there wasn't reason for it to exist to begin with but yeah well and you know i like don't don't don't think too hard about the fact that that was basically the last COVID policy that was still in place. Yeah, there were not vaccine mandates for the people meeting the migrants at the fucking border. Yeah.

This was never about public health. No, absolutely not. can extricate sort of like the the sort of imperialist states public health measures from social cleansing stuff which has been happening for you know generations and generations but yeah like this was this was not about that like this was just an immigration ban yeah and it became a sort of albatross sort of by the administration who didn't want to be hit on border stuff right they didn't want to they didn't want to drop it before the midterms. They initially planned to drop it in December 2022, which is obviously right after the midterms.

They didn't. Here we are in May. There's a complicated legal challenge, which there always is and doesn't matter because here we are, right? And it's supposed to drop on the 11th of May. So we're all thinking, right, midnight on the 10th of May,

we'll be out there. We'll see what goes down. They announced the day before that it is dropping on midnight on the 11th. So they're going to ring every minute out of it. And so in the days before, a number of migrants have told me that they understood that they basically had to get across before the end of Title 42, because it was their understanding across before the end of Title 42, because it was their understanding that if they crossed under Title 8, they would be ejected, and they wouldn't be allowed to return for five years, and they would face felony charges if they did. I don't quite know. Often this information spreads via WhatsApp in camps, right? Or sort of

like a game of telephone in camps. So I don't quite know where this information came from, but it closely parallels something that Mayorkas, who's the Secretary of Homeland Security, said in a press conference where he mischaracterized international immigration law. And he's done this multiple times, right? He himself, someone who is a migrant to this country, his family left Cuba when he was one year old. Has just some of the most dog shit statements on the record. And I've depicted some of those in the scripted episode. Folks can look up my piece I wrote for NBC a couple of years ago about the Biden administration's policy towards Haiti if they want to see more of the dog shit stuff that he and Biden have said.

more of the dog shit stuff that he and Biden have said. So in the days before the end of Title 42, a lot of folks started to try to cross because of this information that they had. They ended up, at least where I am, which is in Southern California, the extreme southwestern border of the United States, literally the end of the wall. Folks were crossing around the end of the wall at low tide and turning themselves in to Border Patrol, asking to make their case for their right to asylum. And I think sometimes when we think about migrants, we maybe think about people from South America or Central America. Every single continent, maybe not any like Australasians, but like just in a day at one camp, I spoke to someone from Angola. I spoke to someone from Congo.

I spoke to someone from Sudan. I spoke to a Kurdish guy. I spoke to people certainly from all over South America, Russians, Tajik people, Jamaican people. For instance, just to give you a sense of how global this is, I spoke to a Jamaican lady who was caring for a 16 and 17-year-old pair of Tajik siblings who didn't speak any of the relevant languages for communication with Border Patrol or with other people in the camp. So she would use her phone to call their mother who spoke some English, give information to the mother who would translate it back to these two young children. And all of these people had presented, like there were a lot of Afghan people too. I probably should

have mentioned that up top, but like these are the people who we fucking abandoned once. And now we're trapping them in between little fences. And it's hot in the day, right? Like I slept out in the desert last night and it was above a hundred. It's not that hot in San Diego, but in Hacumba where they're also holding people, it's absolutely getting into triple digits every day and it's cold at night. It's a really inhospitable environment for people. And so folks were held there, you know, up to a week in some cases. And are now, I think, being processed by Border Patrol. There was a ruling by a Florida judge. And I'm not exactly clear on when because I was down at the border and my phone didn't work very well.

But at some point right before Title 42 dropped that they couldn't be released on humanitarian parole which means in theory they have to be released with a court date right with a court date to appear for their asylum hearing which will slow down the process of releasing them right um and so i've heard of court dates, I've heard of folks being released already with court dates in 2027, which this whole thing has just been like a disaster in terms of the federal response, and in just the cruelest possible way.

It was, everyone could see this coming, right? That there will be more people trying to cross. There are 16,000 people, give or take, in Tijuana alone, right? So it's just across from where I live, waiting to come to the United States because they've been denied that right for three years because they need somewhere safe to go and because they're not safe there. And the best estimate we got for how many they could process from border patrol was 200 a day at the Tijuana port of entry or San Ysidro port of entry really.

But we don't know. There's no clear, I don't know how many people they're processing every day. But these people who do come in now have to have a hearing date before they can be released. These people who do come in now have to have a hearing date before they can be released. If they get through, so I spoke to a young man and his son who I'd spoken to at the border. He had been released into the United States where a charity in San Diego will provide him with two nights. Two nights of accommodation, right? And then I can't quite work out what then like is he out on his own um you know like i guess we'll find out tonight um but he has to find a sponsor um i don't quite understand how he was released without a sponsor but it

seems like the system is kind of bungling things up. And these folks have to fund their own flights to wherever it is their sponsor is, right? So they have family or community. They're having to work out how to get to that family and community. So be that a Greyhound or a plane or a train. So it's all in all a giant clusterfuck with very human consequences like

I can't stress enough how like every possible demographic is represented old people little tiny children right like I was

talking to a little Afghan girl not really talking to because we don't share any languages but I was more just like making funny faces for a while and sort of pointing at things.

And like, it just breaks my heart that there are little children who like, especially, you know, she's a little girl, she's from Afghanistan. We told a shit ton of lies about Afghan women to justify 20 years of killing people and of certain people making money from killing people. And like, this was supposedly the the like canard was that this was for afghan girls and women right and here's an afghan girl sleeping in the fucking dirt um like 20 20 minutes from where i live and i can't even give this kid like a hot meal because i can't fit it through the bars of the fence.

Everything that goes across to these people has to go through the bars of the fence, right? So someone worked out that pizza could fit through because it's flat, right? So people have been getting pizza. But other than that, they're getting bottles of water, granola bars, Other than that, they're getting bottles of water, granola bars, things that fit through a fence, beef jerky. And they've been there for days in some cases. And that's a camp that's relatively accessible, right? I can pull off the interstate, drive down a dirt road and be there in, like I say, 20 minutes. The camps are less accessible. We've heard the conditions are much worse.

A couple of Jamaican guys told me that there was another camp that we tried to get access to, weren't able to get access to, that was further west from where we were, where people were hungry. This is all just from that source. I have reached out to Border Patrol, but as of today, they haven't got back to me, saying that they were getting a bottle of water in a granola bar every day um and that like some of these other folks had taken it upon themselves to like walk over there to try and get them food right people who are already not in a great situation themselves and they kept asking why couldn't we go there why couldn't we help them

like it was very admirable right to see folks who are in a pretty bad way, be like, Hey, these people need, need help more than we do. Um, so yeah, that's the situation. I think we should take a break for advertising then. Sorry. Uh, hopefully not for a drone or some shit. All right, we're back. And this is another happy and exciting episode in which I tell you things that will brighten your day. Something I wanted to talk about, because I think it's important, is the mutual aid response to this. It's been really, really impressive. I live in a place where the Democrats are absolute dog shit. Well, we all do. It's America, right? absolute dog shit uh and well we all do it's america right but um like the just particularly cringe like carceral liberalism of san diego democrats is like as always on display right i saw one of them tweeting today about how cbh dhs and cbp are doing a great job in keeping us safe and like my like i i don't it makes me uh want to say things i shouldn't say on the podcast, I guess.

But what that means is that our government isn't going to do shit. It is entirely on us to look after each other. And people have done that. The groups like American Friends Service Committee, which is a great organization, which does really good stuff on the border, have been down there every single day, right? Like there have been days when I've left at 1am,

there's still someone there. They've been giving people water, giving people food. A huge need that people have is to charge their phones. The way that migrants interact with CBP, at least in theory, the way you get an asylum appointment is booking it through an app called CBP One. We've talked about this on the podcast before, but CBP One is terrible. It is a terrible app that doesn't work. And that's for people who

have phones and Wi-Fi, right? If you are stuck in between two fences on a dusty piece of ground how the hell are you supposed to charge your phone you don't have wi-fi right you may not have a data plan that works in that area so a huge unmet need was charging um charging phones so uh we were able to like get some donations from the team and buy a big charger. Other folk turned up with chargers. Even all the news orgs I see, to include Fox National, weren't there, which is a good thing. But we could talk about that actually as well. Migrants will specifically ask which news network you're with, which I think that's good. I think it's good to tell Fox News to fuck off because someone who participates in your dehumanization

doesn't also deserve to make money from your trauma. And so every news network that was there, right, all the local folks from San Diego were just constantly shuttling back and forth to their vans, charging phones constantly, constantly, constantly. And it became a bit of a cluster because obviously there's literally just hundreds of people in this small area, dozens of hands reaching for the fence, charge my phone, can I have my phone back, charge my phone. And in English and Spanish and French and Comanche and Vietnamese and all these other languages, right? So it was very hard to organize that. So folks came down, folks from San Diego, from different sort of mutual aid groups came down

and they organized a system, right? They got painter's tape, wrote the names of the people on the back of the phone. We had this huge-ass battery that we were able to get and that they were able to charge people's phones, get their phones back to them. And that is a crucial thing in that scenario. Not only is it your only way to communicate with border patrol, it's your only way to communicate

with your family. One guy had lost his phone, and so I just bought him a burner phone or one of those Walmart phones so that he could call his family because his family didn't know where he was. Last they'd heard he was in Mexico or maybe even further south. The phones are super important. Other mutual aid groups have been getting blankets. I saw an Afghan family turn up and they had crayons for the Afghan kids who were there and coloring books and things for children to do because it's probably boring being a kid and it's probably scary being a kid where like every day men with guns and camouflage gear turn up and they speak a language you don't understand and then you don't know what they say and then you stay there yeah and i want to kind of just there are lots of things that could get called camps that are like not camps right like this is like this is this is not a camp in the

sense of like there are buildings that you go into or even like there are tents it's just like oh yeah no yeah i think that's a very good uh thing that i haven't mentioned thank you uh yes this is people lying on the dirt occasionally Occasionally they have a Mylar space blanket. Occasionally they have a tarp. If they want to make any form of shelter, the only thing they have to use is the wall itself, right? So up against the wall, people have made like a lean-to kind of situation with a tarp, right? But no, this is by no means suitable shelter.

Literally, people are lying on the dirt like it's just a fucking cage like in a desert like it's like yeah it's it's it's it's it's the kind of thing that like like you it's the kind of thing you would put in an apocalypse movie and people would be like oh no one would ever do that shit it's like no no like this is just sort of i don't know this is this is what u.s border policy is it's these like just these open air cages yeah it's you wouldn't like you know i go to the zoo in san diego and the animals have much better conditions than that um there's no running water there was one port port-a-loo toilet for 500 people um yeah it's terrible it it is It's little, it's people wrapping their babies in my love blankets and trying to get them to sleep at night, you know, and that's the

same at several places up and down the border, right. They're starting to clear them out now. So sort of Tuesday, Monday. So some people got there a week ago, I think. So they've been staying there for a long time. And yeah, at no point does there seem to have been any consideration for even giving people shade or shelter or the very basics. And I should reinforce it. In 2018, when Trump blocked a large group of migrants from entering the United States,

the government of Mexico did considerably better than this. It was by no means a good situation for those children at all. But they did better than this, which is an admittedly extremely low bar to clear, but we have failed to clear it completely as a country. And that's kind of to our eternal shame i think yeah and i think and everything is worth emphasizing about this is that it it hasn't always been like this there's there's this sort of image that's been

constructed that this this is always what the u.s border has been is like no i mean it's not like it's not it's not like american border policy has always been like good but i mean like in my lifetime it wasn't like this in the mid 90s there were 4 000 border patrol agents yeah it's increased by a factor of 10 and its budget probably by more than that yeah and you know the the consequences of this is just basically in order to appease a bunch of just sort of like fucking like turbo racist baked dipshits, like who live in the suburbs and, you know,

have never, have never experienced a single hardship in their entire lives. Like fucking untold numbers of people are put through just in, in human suffering and for fucking nothing. Just, just like for, for, for nothing for like just dog shit electoral pandering yeah uh by people who have never seen what goes on at the border they've never experienced where these people come from um yeah it's they're just numbers to people in dc

right and and i would really urge people to not read immigration coverage or watch immigration coverage or listen to immigration coverage that isn't written by people at the border because this isn't a fucking issue about numbers every single one of those numbers is a person who has people they love and things that they've done and choices that they've made that got them there and every single one of them is someone who deserves compassion and empathy. And it's not just another number in an Excel chart, which is how it's treated. And yeah, it hasn't always been this way. This is a very recent innovation. And it's, I mean, we've talked about this before as well, but this is the proving ground for state surveillance,

state violence, fascism, all these things, right? The reason that you got surveilled by a drone if you went to a George Floyd protest in Minneapolis is because the border patrol already had one. The reason that cops listened into your phone if you went to some protest in 2020 is because of border patrol technology, right? They have these stingray towers all up and down the border. Robert and I i have seen him in mexico sorry in texas even yeah and i mean you know even even stuff like this this is sort of recent laws in places like florida and texas that are you know let the state steal trans kids right like that that's also stuff that was sort of like yeah like the prototype of that came from the i mean all like it came from the border like there's

there it all it's also something that came from sort of like like anti-black bullshit that like is sort of deeply rooted in like american family planning bullshit but like yeah like that that's also another place one of the places where like that stuff was tested and with indigenous folks like we've ripped indigenous children for their families for decades yeah but yeah we it it's a deeply baked white supremacist system that that always does its experimenting on on marginalized people and very often at the border and but yeah if you if you're worried about the government intercepting your communications with an abortion care provider that has happened because at some point they've been allowed to do stuff to migrants that was equally bad if not worse and and and like this will hurt you even if you are like kathy the liberal in minnesota like when we let the state have these powers

they don't just use them benevolently and that they weren't using them benevolently in the first place right like these are innocent people who've done nothing wrong yeah i mean like that's that's the thing about state power is any any power the state has inevitably they will one day use it on you and so you can't let them take shit like this because you know they will they they will turn your entire society into a sort of hell garrison state yeah and it's just i don't know the inhumanity that your taxes pay for if you're listening to this in america is abhorrent it's disgusting and and yeah you should do everything you can to stop it and like this probably is one of the instances where like you may be able to do something of some value by writing to a politician it's certainly

one of the instances where if you live near the border you can show up and make a very meaningful difference to someone's whole experience right like um myself and joe were down there when when this this guy had lost his phone and like you know it wasn't that expensive to buy this guy a phone uh other like people will remember Mandy and people will remember Alex, who are two guests I've had on different San Diego episodes. They've both been down there. I know Alex gave his EpiPen to someone who needed an EpiPen,

like we acutely needed an EpiPen. Like things like that, you can maybe save someone's life. Maybe just make someone's day a little bit less shit. You know, maybe you can let a kid kick a football and you'd have to deflate the football to get it through the fence early. But like, you know, you can give a doll to a little kid so they can play with it or something.

Just something that will for a moment take them out of the utterly miserable place that we force them into. And if folks want to support that, I know I'd posted Mandy's cash app and Venmo, and I think some people very generously did contribute, which is great. If you're not at the border, look at Border Kindness, which is a group out of San Diego who I know are doing aid runs to Hukumba, the Hukumba Hotel. Hukumba, for those not familiar, J-A-C-U-M-B-A. The Hukumba Hotel

was housing folks and providing a huge amount of water and shelter to people. This morning, people can look at the American Friends Service Committee that I wrote about. And I know that Joe and myself have shared some Amazon wishlists that people have and that kind of thing but it's it's a massive task but it's not one that's like insurmountable the amount of people i've seen show up to include like and i you know i'm not a religious person and i'm not a person who particularly cares for organized religion either but it does make me happy when i see like old church ladies in high heels with perms coming out and like and like giving water to children charging phones and and seeing i think it's like certainly i've lived on the border for 15 years it's been a fundamentally radicalizing experience for me um like i think

you're supposed to grow old and grow out of your anarchist politics or whatever but i don't know how anyone could live here and think that like police state good it's and i think anybody who can get down here should it's good for you too like and i always think about how oscar wilde has this thing about like how seeing people living on the streets like not only undermines their humanity but also his humanity because like seeing someone else suffering should make us feel bad. And so like he benefits when he helps someone and like, you know, we're all lifted up, right?

Like I, I guess one of the things I struggle with most of the journalist is that like, that like feeling of living in comfort while other people can't, especially when it's such like, it's one thing if I, if I go somewhere, right.

If I'm in Myanmar and I'm aware that things are difficult and scary, and then I get on a plane and it takes two days and I come back. But just from a personal mental health perspective, seeing a little child sleep in the dirt, or someone asks me for a fucking bin bag so they can keep their baby out of the rain, like a trash bag or a kid without shoes you know um and then going home to my relatively comfortable existence is really hard and i think we should all have to face up to that because it's what it's what our government is responsible for and supposedly we got the best fucking option in 2020 right this is the this is

this is the good choice of the two um but it doesn't make any meaningful difference whether you choose trump or biden to these people right like because yeah they both treat them like shit yeah it's like the kids are still in cages and yes you know until until until the entire system that that enables the shit is destroyed and it can be right like and this isn't even this this isn't even on the on the level of sort of like you know of sort of anarchist politics right like this none of this shit existed 20 years ago right like this is this is like well okay i guess it's 20 23 25 years ago none of this shit existed even within like the framework of the nation state right like this is not a thing that you that we have to do

we simply do not have to do this you could share politics with bill clinton and still ronald reagan was better on the fucking border than any than any president who has been alive in my fucking lifetime right yeah fucking reagan dwight eisenhower would have had serious concerns about the industrial complex we're building at the border yeah like this is not like this this this isn't this isn't like particularly radical political thing right it's just that we've become sort of a nerd to this death state that's been built up around us and you know doesn't it doesn't keep anyone safe it just fucking inflicts untold human misery so fucking Greg Abbott can win an election. Yeah, yeah.

And it costs us a lot of money, right? Like your universal healthcare is an unmanned drone flying over some children trying to cross a desert in Arizona right now. Your free university education is a Border Patrol smart camera in the desert that goes off every time a fucking deer walks past or it rains like it this stuff is expensive and like if you're in the u.s you are paying for it yeah i think the most sort of soft of liberals

can see that this is and they did see that this shit was wrong in the trump administration and they do see this is wrong when they come right like um i've some of the best mutual aid groups i've worked with are like middle-aged folks from churches who have time and the means to help and just didn't realize that it was like no one was coming and we had to do it ourselves and when they did that they were very effective and so i would encourage folks who are in border communities near the border um near the border means a different thing if you're border patrol because their jurisdiction applies 100 miles from the border that's the other thing right the border will come to you yeah like two-thirds like statistically odds are that you are the border

already has come to you yes that's yeah yeah two thirds of people in the united states are in the border patrol uh enforcement zone yeah like i'm in it and i'm in like fucking chicago right oh yeah like yeah i think like yes people who would not think of themselves as border dwellers the border affects you and if you go to other communities in your city, you might realize Border Patrol are around there. ICE are around there. So yeah, it's pretty bleak. We're working on some scripted stuff,

but I want to get into a bit of the history of Border Patrol. I'm rereading Border Patrol Nation, which is a great book if people haven't read it. And I want... The other thing I should say about border reporting is if people don't center migrants and they're reporting about migration then you shouldn't be reading that reporting like sometimes it can be hard one other thing i guess i do want to say is you'll see in my photos and you'll see in joe's photos you're not going to see many faces um and that's because

people have legitimate fears for their well-being that's why they are fucking here yeah and not obtaining consent before taking photographs is making a terrible situation worse and like that's something that we can work on as a media right like it's something i will continue to call out when i see it uh but if you don't speak the language find someone who does or just don't take the goddamn photo um And you'll see some faces of mine. Like I like to pass my camera through the fence and give it to like teenage kids so they can run around and take photos and have fun. And like, so when they take like goofy selfies,

I'll post those. They get consent from them or their parents or the parents around it. And that's fine. But yeah, when you're looking at border coverage, always understand that these are people and if we don't turn to those people and their stories then we're doing it wrong if you can physically get to these places like you should like the the this is this is one of the like the

situations where like the amount of good that like a very small number of people could do is enormous, and the cost is not that high. No. For instance, I saw some of my friends had just gone to Costco, right? And just loaded up one of those big Costco trolleys. And that makes a meaningful difference to hundreds of people. Yeah. And so there'll probably be mutual aid networks on the ground

at almost every border area by now. Reach out to them, see if they need your money. If you can get there and help organize, that's better. If you have skills, if you have language skills. There are people, I met a guy who spoke Kumansi, the Kurdish dialect of North and East Syria. I met people who speak Vietnamese, almost every language you can conceive of. Those people really struggle to get information and they just can't talk to anyone because there's no one else to talk to. And their phone charges is a precious commodity and it's cost a lot of money to dial internationally. So those people could just be lonely.

So if you have those language skills, go. Someone broke their finger in San Diego, got it crushed up against a fence. There was a medic there to help them. If there hadn't been, that could have been worse for them. And sometimes the ambulance can come in and take people out. But there are valuable meaningful things that you could do if you have the time if not if you have the money

there are really important places to donate and those are just a couple of them we'll highlight a couple more as we go forward and oh one more thing i did want to plug is miles for migrants um where if you have if you don't have money but you do have airline miles, like I was speaking to this guy today who got across, he has two days and he has to get himself to New York where he has family. I don't have the means

to buy four airline tickets, or I would, but if you have air miles and you want to donate them, you can. Yeah, and this is the thing, like I have family who, for example,

work in Hong Kong, right? And they have like, you know, there are people like that who are like, you know, not radicals, but are sort of, you know like i have family who for example like work at hong kong right and they have like you know and they're like there are people like that who are like you know not radicals but are sort of you know like you you like like there are people in this world who have a shit ton of miles like built up because you know for like work or some shit right that's just sitting there and that that's something that you know like you can you can like like you you may not have it you might know people who do yeah yeah you might know someone who does a weird credit card flipping thing you know where they like

get air miles and like make it their whole like personality to to get air miles but like whatever if those people can help yeah you don't need to turn them into like Macnavists overnight. Like nobody wants to see a little baby sleep in the dirt. And anybody who could be there physically would be appalled by it. And I think if you can convey to those folks that now at the time, when something that costs them nothing materially,

right? Like I know tons of people have more miles that they can use because they fly all the time for work. You don't want to fly when you're done flying. You want to stay at home. So that's another way that they can use because they fly all the time for work you don't want to fly when you're done flying you want to stay at home so that's another way that people can help uh and yeah just i guess it's it's a crisis that will continue unabated because the cruelty is the point and it's for once like you know we can't stop all the climate change and all this bad shit. But this is something that is within our power to abet.

We can't make it go away yet. But like we spoke to the people who are doing water drops on the border, there are meaningful things every single one of us can do to help. Yeah, go into the world. Do not let the violence done in our name be who we are yeah show people you're better than this i guess 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.

by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if

we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez.

Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba.

Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story as part of the My Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone, Robert here. Before we get into it, I want to note my internet was terrible during you get your podcasts. or four points here where I pop in and just say what he was trying to say or what he said,

and the internet then garbled up so that you can understand what's actually being said in the conversation. So when my voice pops in and I read a line, it's me reading something that he said that got kind of distorted. I do apologize. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and occasionally about the quest to build a better world. Today we've got an episode that is in the latter category about the struggle to make the United Kingdom less, I don't know, in the thrall of a monarchy and an aristocratic class and to build a more equitable society. And our guest today is somebody who is attempting to further that cause and did so last year by attempting to huck several eggs at the current King of England, Charles the...

I forget the number, Patrick Thelwell. How are you doing today? Hi, Robert. Yeah, I'm good, thanks. Yeah. It was five eggs, five eggs, and he's the third king, the third Charles. Third king.

We've had far more than three, unfortunately. Yeah, you guys have had a few. Was one of the ones y'all killed a Charles? Yeah, yeah. That was the last one. That was the last one. That was the last one. Well, I won't say it. So let's start by talking about this is in a 20, about a year ago.

Um, at a, uh, he, he was doing a, they called it a walkabout, which I guess is when the King shows up in a city. I, in the video video i watched the video of this and like there's a bunch of people dressed in all sorts of fun costumes and some ladies got a massive sword like a sword a sword of the size that i know for a fact that man cannot lift above his head like yeah it's funny he comes out of his little car and all the little trumpets go and everyone starts you know waving their flags on cue and going like look there he is there he is it's um pretty unhinged to be honest it's it's it's quite embarrassing but yeah i i uh there's like the um the american

chauvinist in me that like wants to, wants to laugh more about the monarchy, but I'm just finished reading an article about, uh, uh, Diane Feinstein, where the journalist interviewing her was like, so you've missed a bunch of votes over the last three months. And she's like,

no, I haven't, I've been working the whole time. So I guess, uh, we're all kind of enthralled to the corpses of, uh, of,

of our past. It's hierarchy, hierarchy everywhere is the problem. So you, you decide to show up. When do you kind of find out that the King is, is going to be showing up here and, and what kind of leads you to decide I'm going to,

I'm going to throw some eggs in my pocket and, and take my shot. So, so I actually only found out that he was coming to York about three days with a megaphone and, you know, shout some, of course,

obviously, uh, the queen had died, uh, about a month or so before. Uh, and, and during the funeral processions,

there was, you know, several people were arrested for, uh, someone shouted, uh, um, you know, Prince Andrew, you know, uh, someone shouted, uh, um, you know, Prince Andrew, you know, in Scotland, they were like, oh, you're a sick old man.

And they did. And that was probably my, my inspiration. But then on the morning, um, when he came to York, my, my megaphone was just like busted. So I was just like, oh, fuck it. I'm going to get to go get some eggs then. And why eggs? What, uh, what, what kind of led to that decision? Man, everyone asks that.

Yeah. I guess I was under the assumption that we all just knew that you throw eggs at people you don't like. Maybe it's a British thing. I think it may just be that in the U.S., because of the gun stuff, people are like a lot more hesitant to huck stuff just for fun. Right. If you're throwing stuff at somebody, it's serious. hesitant to huck stuff just for fun right if you're throwing stuff at somebody it's serious yeah although someone someone threw a beer at um ted cruz yeah they sure did that was good that was good yeah um i think you know i i actually

had a lot of time to think about before my trial about um why eggs and stuff and i think they're just funny you know like there's a lot of egg puns that came out of it that, you know, not to get too philosophical about it, but they're kind of, you know, they're really harmless, you know. Yeah. But inherently humiliating as well. Yeah.

Yeah, it's hard to argue attempted murder from an egg, but at the same time getting, yeah. Well, exactly. And there's there's something to be said for contrasting the violence of the state yeah with what's obviously like very low level violence um and yeah i'm the one standing trial for it um yeah i mean it is it is like the the language that got used by the state kind of in the proceedings against you was amusing. Like I know it was a pain in the ass you had to go through, but like the kind of the framing that they put with it to make it seem like this was such a like serious offense against public order was quite funny. And I think it's beyond me to know what was going on in the now King's head at the time.

But you got quite close. You can see right after it hit, there's goop on the ground directly in front of his foot. And his shoulders slump a little and he looks down. And I wonder if it made him feel bad. I hope it did. I can't get inside the man's head. Maybe he's not capable of that but i wonder so yeah i mean i threw five and and i will say for the record that

one of them did bounce off his arm but he does have a force field so it's not my fault that it didn't didn't get the full impact but yeah i i honestly think he didn't have a clue what's going on he's pretty prettyile, to be honest. Yeah. But, you know, monarchists were like, wow, look at how stoic he is. He just doesn't even care. He just shrugged it off. He's such a badass. And it's like he's just being guided through this series of bizarre public opinions where he's got to pretend that he's you know smiles and waves at normal

people and he doesn't think that we're all plebs but yeah yeah and it was the um the the the crowd reaction around you was pretty intense from what i understand i mean like people came after you when they realized what had happened yeah and i think in some ways that spoke more, more itself than like anything that I could have done, you know, the reaction to, to the video, you know, people immediately just start like pulling my hair out in chunks and just

like screaming, like, you know, like just kill him, like stick his head on a spike, kick him to death. And, you know,

and it really, I think maybe, maybe that kind of rhetoric is perhaps more like, you know, the, the overt violence is more prevalent in American politics. But it exposed that these people are essentially fascists and that they – yeah, they're very, very violent people. Yeah.

And I think this is something people have – are starting to recognize a little bit more about kind of politics in the UK. I mean, we're looking right now, the Public Order Act of 2023 is kind of the most recent law that's gone through Parliament, that effectively, like expands the ability of the police to crack down on protests, some people will argue, and I think this seems, based on what I've read, pretty credible, that it basically makes it possible for the police to arrest anyone for almost any kind of activism. And that kind of was exhibited during the coronation when a group of kind of anti-monarchist protesters who were more on the liberal side of things, and you're kind of approaching this as an anarchist, but a fairly large group of protesters

with signs that were saying stuff like, not my king, attempted to rally doing so. I believe their goal from what I can tell was to comply with the law as they understood it. And that did not protect them from the police. No. So, you know, the context is in the wake of the police, there was a police officer, you know, last year who murdered a woman, Sarah Everard. Yeah. And in the wake of that, they passed the police's sentencing and crime bill. And that bill was really the most overt crackdown on protest. It allowed the police to arrest, at the discretion of an officer, any protest that was deemed potentially annoying. That's the specific language,

any action that could be loud or annoying. So there was a lot of protests against that's the specific language is any any any action that could be loud or annoying so you know there was a there was a lot of protests against that at the time that obviously came to nothing and they they passed the bill anyway and then and then so the public order bill just goes that step further by allowing them to preemptively arrest anyone who might be about to do something that's loud or annoying and including um this new new thing called a serious disruption prevention order, which is something that they can apply to someone who's considered an aggravated activist. He's saying, which is someone who has been arrested more than twice for protest-related offenses?

Essentially, it bans, you know, use of the internet to communicate about your ideas, basically stop you from attending protests in the first place and arrest you at the train station. ideas basically stopped you from attending protests in the first place and arrested you at the train station um and we saw yeah we saw that in in play with with republic that with this organization that had been extensively liaising with the police and you know it just seemed quite like pikachu face when suddenly they were all just rounded up and yeah but for literally you know no pretext it was they had they had um £12,000 worth of signs in a van and they were all wrapped up in

rope. The pretext for the arrest was that the rope was a lock-on device that could be used to jump in front of the procession and tie yourself with rope to the road. I really don't know. Yeah.

From what I could tell just from the coverage I've read, if their protest had gone the way they planned it, it would have been like a show, a visible show that there were people who didn't like the monarchy, but it would not have caused it. Like they would not, this, these people were not planning to like burn down any public buildings or,

you know, smash car windows or stop a road. Not that I'm specifically condemning that behavior, but I'm just stating this was not the state cracking down on people because they were afraid of a riot. This was the state cracking down on people because they didn't want the display of any kind of dissent to exist. Yeah, and that's where we're at in this country. And to be honest, the arrest of those organizers was the best thing that could have happened for

the movement because what it really did was just shine a light that it was impossible to ignore and in some ways kind of overshadowed the coronation really was far more than any speech that Graham Smith was planning to give, just so overtly that there is no acceptable form of dissent now.

The very concept is so distasteful to our aristocracy that it's banned. And I really appreciate your ability to kind of see the upside, the tactical upside in that, because I think it is true. I doubt I it by multiple friends, by a family member, because the state decided to go after these people. And I do think, I think it's also from just a standpoint, when you're talking about a struggle with as long odds as kind of struggling against the monarchy in the United Kingdom, which is, you are talking about like the most entrenched power structure outside of the Vatican, right? Basically.

Yeah. When you're talking about that, it is so important to be able to look at moments like this and see the upside in them rather than just kind of feel the boot all the time. Otherwise, you're not going to have the endurance to keep fighting you know for me with specifically with the eggs um i was i've been conscious the whole time that the backlash uh and the you know disproportionate state reaction would speak more than my own actions so so for example one of the reasons why i think

you know it went pretty viral when i when i threw the eggs in the first place um uh i was a bit surprised by by how it went kind of quite internationally yeah um but but but you know so the fact so my bail conditions were um between between my arrest and my trial were that I wasn't allowed to carry eggs in public. Yeah, I know. And so that is in itself like so absurd that it's like, right. I gotta know, is there like a provision for if you're going home from the store

or are you just eggless? So the copper who was literally just like making this up at the station says like, okay, so your bail condition is you're not allowed within 500 meters of the king. You're not allowed to carry eggs in public. And then he goes like, oh, actually, like, what happens if he wants to buy some eggs? And then, okay, so they changed it.

So it's like, you're allowed to carry eggs as long as you're going home from the shops and you've got the receipt. And I think that was more viral than me actually doing it you know i mean like people were like you know that's that's that's britain for you have you got a license for those eggs you know i'm imagining you like sliding down an alleyway with like a like a like a 1940s style shoulder holster but with just like eggs under each yeah yeah and so and so you know um when i so so i had my trial um you know which was for yeah threatening behavior um that that made someone fear imminent violence um in the wake of that like i was convicted uh i narrowly avoided six months in prison, which is the sentence that I thought I was going to get.

Yeah. Yeah. And so, so, you know, in my trial, you know, I had the option to either downplay what I did as being like, oh, it's not really violence. It's just an egg. But then of course, you know, illegally it was, you know, that just counts as assault. But then I chose instead to say, okay, yeah, it was violence, but it was legitimate violence because it was necessary to resist the far greater violence of the British state. You know, citing the historic impact of colonialism. He's saying current foreign policy, like the King personally negotiating weapons deals with Saudi Arabia. And then also, you know, climate breakdown and the way in which by continuing to invest in fossil fuels, global South, like intentionally. And so therefore, you know, I was basically defending the right of, you know, acting in defense of others with

violence. Like I'm glad I did it and I'd have done much worse. So in the end, I got a hundred, I got a hundred hours of community service, which was extreme, know getting away with it essentially so yeah did you get us i wonder was it just a situation did you just get lucky with a judge or like um because that's it that's surprising i'm surprised that like that that worked as well as it did in a positive way i think yeah yeah me too yeah i mean i had a big bag with me with all my like undies in because I thought I was going down you know um yeah and uh I think it was partly yes getting lucky with the judge partly I think they were in a really difficult position and this is what I wanted to put them in essentially which is the following all of that the the you know in the lead up to the

coronation there was a lot of negative press press around the king and the monarchy. They had a choice between either sending me to prison and looking extremely authoritarian and blowing out proportion, or letting me get away with it. I think they chose to minimize the negative press. minimize the negative press you know i mean obviously supposedly there's an independent judiciary and there would there would have been no conversations with the palace uh and the police sure about the charging procedures but that's that's a load of rubbish but you know yeah and so but i think i wanted to put them in that difficult position because i knew that like i said their backlash would look worse than what i did and so so when i chose to go to the coronation following following my conviction,

you know, I had to tell my probate probation officer, look, I'm going to the coronation. I am going, I'm going to peacefully protest. I'm just going to be there, deal with it, you know? And, uh, basically he told me that the counterterrorism department, uh, had, was seeking an injunction from the courts to stop me attending. Um, but then the court had ruled that, no, I was allowed to attend. I'd already been given my punishment and he wasn't going to put any further conditions on me, not be allowing allowed to go. So, so, but I knew that if I went to the coronation, they would arrest me anyway, and it would make them look bad, you know? Uh, and then they, they did, you know, I was as well, as well as all of the organizers. Um, I was there, you know, just not my King, blah, blah, blah. And then, and then I, and then I look up and there's a little watchtower that they directed in the center of Trafalgar square.

And, um, I just saw that it was about seven police officers, just all like staring at me and, and filming me, um, from, you know, like 200 meters away. And I was like, oh, okay, they're going to arrest me now. So I gave my phone and my wallet to my brother. And then within seconds, they were just dragging me out, like, you know, in handcuffs from the center of a crowd of about, you know, 20,000 people. And it honestly couldn't have looked like more, like overtly fascist if they tried.

And that was kind of the point really. Yeah. Man, it's such a wild story. But I'm glad you did what you did. I'm impressed by the amount of thought that kind of went into the optics of it, because it's really the only way to turn an egg into an effective weapon, right, is by very careful planning. I'm kind of curious, what do you see as the route forward for both, not just kind of opposing the monarchy in your country, but sort of opposing the overreach by the police. This is a problem in more places than the United Kingdom, but y'all are kind of on one of the cutting edges of sort of global attempts by law enforcement and its supporters in the state to effectively make dissent impossible ahead of what everyone knows is going to be kind of a heightening period

of climate-based activism. Yeah. And so with the climate activist movement in the UK, we've seen Extinction Rebellion active since like 2018. And I've been arrested multiple times with them at different actions. Part of their strategy was that mass arrests, blocking roads, nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience would force the government to take action. And I think really we're seeing that strategy having run its course. And I think for a while now that's been evident that it wasn't working because they've just banned the types of protests that we were doing and also it was essentially quite naive to believe that yeah oh you know if we cause enough disruption they're just gonna put aside all of the you know lobbying interests and their literal role in upholding capitalism to just go oh no no, okay, fair enough,

they've blocked some roads. We are going to radically transform society to deal with climate breakdown. That was never going to work, realistically. And so even though we've seen every time they pass these new legislation, there's a backlash, there's some marches, there's some protests that fizzle out, and the state just keep consolidating more and more power. And people keep getting more and more disillusioned with, he says, with what an effective strategy of resistance looks like. And so for me personally, it's something I've been thinking about for a while now. But recently, we have to stop asking politicians through direct

democracy at the local level, and essentially, you know, using like democratic confederalism, you know, as they do in Rojava, to look at creating a national network of people's assemblies that builds dual power outside of the state. I think a lot of the problem with these direct action movements is that they don't have the legitimacy of a democratic mandate. So even whilst the tactics might be in some way effective, Extinction Rebellion has always said, our message is to say that climate change is a serious threat, but we cannot propose the solutions because we don't have a democratic mandate.

But the way to work around that is to build a democratic mandate through holding people's assemblies, creating forums where people can create their own vision, and then direct action can then be used in service of those aims rather than putting the cart before the horse, if that makes sense? No, yeah. I think that that's certainly like one of the more pragmatic ways forward that I think I've seen. You know, we're always talking about an uphill battle here. And I think kind of the inherent difficulty of fixing any of these bigger problems, particularly fixing the, and what we mean is dismantling the systems that are causing climate destruction. Like that is such a lopsided battle

that I think whenever you present an option to people, because it sounds hard, there's this tendency to just be like, well, you know, we have to go by the thing that, uh, that we know,

which is just kind of like trying to vote in better people. If we can take a lesson out of the last 30 years, it's that, uh, the standard electoral, uh, methods cannot provide the solution to climate change. Like they,

they simply aren't going to do it. Um, and I think the police in a lot of, I mean, in the United States right here in one of my old hometowns, Austin, Texas, um,

they just voted on, uh, a, a police accountability bill that the police have basically said, we're not going to abide by like this is, and you can find stories like that all over the United States and other parts of the world. Like the, the kind of the hope that you can just sort of like put in your however long it takes you to do voting in your country or city or whatever and uh and that

that's the method forward um it it's it seems more realistic because it's more familiar, but I think the vision you're putting forward, not to say that it's that simple, but it's effortful. And I think that whenever someone's positing something like that that requires that kind of effort from a large enough segment of the population, I see that as inherently more realistic than hoping that we can just all kind of keep putting our 20 minutes of voting a year towards solving the problem and expect it to get better. Yeah, and it's like one of those things with the idea that imagining prison abolition, you have to imagine a world where that's possible and that requires changing everything, right? And I think that applies to tackling climate change and implementing direct democracy. If you're talking about a system where people can turn up to a forum in a local community center or church or whatever once a week, then people say,

well, that's not going to be accessible. It's like, well, you're right. We'll probably have to set up a system of mutual aid that supports, you know, working class people to be able to attend those kind of events. And, you know, yeah, it's like, how are you going to pay for it? And it's like, well, you're right, we're probably going to have to, you know, set up a solidarity economy where, you know, if we if we decide, for example, that we want free public transport and bus drivers to be paid a fair wage, then you're going to have to look at a whole system whereby people are potentially getting free housing in return for being a bus driver, free food that comes from the local food cooperative. And you're, like I say, building dual power rather than attacking the system head on.

Because in a battle, in a pitched street battle, in this country at least, between us and the police, we're going to lose. And I think that we need to think smarter because at this point, they haven't yet made organizing public meetings illegal. But they probably will at some point. public meetings illegal but you know they probably will at some point and then it's a uh it's a the only way we'll be able to resist that is if we've had some public meetings to decide how we're going to do it because at the moment we haven't even had the meeting to decide what our collective strategy is because there is so much uh atomization between between these different like you know uh left-wing like social movements and civil society organizations um and so much sometimes it just depresses me to think about how many people are working for environmental charities or whatever

where all of their work and their research is going towards creating uh policy proposals for politicians to ignore and it's like if you were putting that amount of energy and your enthusiasm in service of the vision that's been created democratically by the people, then we don't need to petition anyone to make the changes we need because we'll have organized effectively enough to do the things that will really challenge state power. For example, like a mass rent strike and a general strike. Yeah. Or if those efforts that are currently going towards putting policy papers on desks where they'll be ignored or neutered was going towards putting forth policy that is then being backed

by a movement that is carrying out rent strikes, that is putting out together work stoppages, that is blocking roads, that's able to actually throttle some of the life support system of the state. bureaucrat's desk or that's going to wind up getting cut to pieces in parliament, you have something that has teeth behind it, right? The kind of force that might be able to make change. I don't know. Again, when you talk about this kind of stuff, you have to contrast it with what we've been trying so far, which is nothing. Yeah. know diversity of tactics is huge and so you know a lot of these direct action groups in the uk like just stop oil that have been blocking motorways and stuff uh have received like you know huge criticism especially from people who you know really ought to be allies and and at least recognize the the the that this action is coming out of a place of desperation because people cannot see a better

way yeah um and and you know there was there's someone from uh just stop oil who just got three years in prison for blocking a motorway um and and that's that's insane you know and and you know on some level that person is is a martyr and and you've got to like hold your take your hat off and say what that has done is shine a spotlight again on state authority in a way that, you know, if, if they have these laws on the books, but they never have to use them, then it's easy to forget that they exist. Yeah. They have that power. Do you want to talk a little bit about cooperation UK? Yeah. Yeah. So, so, you know, for me, I'm, I'm a democratic confederalist you know i'm i'm

in or like you know the rajavan project um using direct democracy but also confederating that up to to sort of replace the state with a form of governance that's democratic um and you know i'm also i'm a big believer in cosmocracy, right? Which is the proper name for global democracy. He says, essentially, you know, I wrote about this while I was doing my master's. And that is how potentially, if we were implementing this system world, we can use the internet to confederate to a global level, you know, and really start to tackle the

issues that we collectively face as humanity which is like the fact that our separation from nature and and the rise of fascism is is threatening us with extinction and so yeah i'm a citizen of earth and i'm and you know that that's what motivates a lot of my actions um but you know in some ways i've been kind of stewing on the these ideas alone uh and and so recently i met a group called cooperation uk who are you know connecting i can often get bogged down in abstract theory about like how you know changing the whole world and never actually doing anything practical that's my downfall but you know you need to start a movement like that locally uh and and and so they're copying um cooperation jackson you know who have been incredibly effective uh

you know setting up people's assemblies mutual aid economy in jackson um and also like a community land trust you know they own like like 50 different buildings you know that are used collectively by the community and this group are planning to set that up in hull which is just a city in the northeast that's incredibly deprived it's got like the lowest voter turnout in the uk but it also has a thriving network of food banks and cooperatives and mutual aid groups. And I think the next step for me is when those groups send delegates to meet together and decide on collective strategy, right? Because there are so many people doing so much good work, but there's almost like no

faith in our own vision, which is that if we're the people you know who are say uh a union for nurses then you know we should be deciding the conditions that exist in healthcare you know because who who better besides patients and uh like staff is there to decide the conditions that they that they operate in and and so yeah cooperation uk um there there's a group of us that are moving to hall i'm moving i'm moving next week i'm really excited about it um and yeah we're planning to set up lots of local neighborhood assemblies with the intention of within a year holding a city-wide people's assembly that can create a shared vision um and then and then

potentially you know uh standing candidates for local council but whose only policy is we will enact we will give power to the people's assemblies and then they can use the you know financial um power of existing institutions to support the transition to a new model. And whilst they're doing that in whole, the work that I hope to be doing is document in that process, so people can learn from the mistakes. And hopefully we can set them up in every city across the UK, because there are already people who think very similarly.

And we're at a time now where that's coalescing into the you know people are recognizing the need for this new movement with a new strategy that's based around democracy rather than just uh activism and yeah it's really exciting yeah i mean that's uh i i think that's a worthwhile idea i think it's uh it's it's uh bold and something that uh i'm i'm i'm glad to see being attempted um well it's been really great talking with you today did you have anywhere you wanted to direct listeners uh in order to help if they're interested in what cooperation uk is is doing? Yeah, definitely. So there's a crowdfunder that I think there'll be, I believe there'll be a link that you guys can access. He says, and we'll be using that money to set up the People's Assembly and mutual aid networks,

but also to create resources that anyone anywhere can use in their local community. And my hope is that, you know, as these groups proliferate you know we're going to start reaching out to each other forming a an international solidarity network that is capable of providing like the mutual aid that we that we need to support each other you know for example you know if we're talking about palestine or iran um to provide real meaningful solidarity these you know liberation groups will require more organization than just like thoughts and prayers really. And yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Patrick. It has been great talking with you. Good luck as you continue moving forward. And yeah.

Yeah. Thanks very much. Yeah. I guess I should also say I'm on, I'm bizarrely, I'm on TikTok. That's the medium I'm using at the moment. I wish it wasn't. I'll probably want to start making more YouTube videos

discussing these ideas. So maybe I'll send you a link that you can put in there. The Citizen of Earth show is my YouTube channel. Excellent. Well, Patrick Tellwell, Citizen of Earth YouTube channel.

And we'll have your TikTok in the description. Thanks again for coming on the show. Everybody go out and, you know, acquire eggs. 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. of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of

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