It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 91

Episode Date: July 15, 2023

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as a fake gecko therapist and try to learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's very interesting. Check it out for yourself by searching for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,

there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Oh, It Could Happen Here is the podcast that you're listening to right now. And while we normally talk about it could happening here, if you've been living in France recently, then some of it has been happening to you. I don't know if that's a bad introduction. We're talking about the riots that have recently convulsed large chunks of both European France and some of their overseas territories. So we're going to be chatting about that.

I've seen a lot of disinfo. There's a lot of people flipping out about guns and stuff and a lot of bad information, people blaming it on Ukrainian weapons sneaking over. All that's bullshit. But there's a real fascinating history here and the riots, as much as people, specific bad actors have attempted

to make them into like some new and horrifying thing. It's not just like a, oh, France be rioting thing. There's like a history that's pretty clear that explains like why this happened in France this time, why it happened in 2005, why it happened in the late 80s.

Well, 2007 was, I think, the other big one in this. These have been happening for decades. We're going to talk about all of that. Yeah. So, Mia, I'm going to let you take the lead here, and I'll chime in, PR in. Yeah. So, okay, I guess we should basically briefly talk about, like,

before we go into the history, like, what actually this is. So, well, I guess it'll be two weeks ago when this goes up. A cop did, like, a traffic stop of this kid in a car and they just put a gun through the window and shot him.

It's really bad. there's video of it if for some reason you want to see a cop sticking a gun in a car and shooting a 17 year old um it's really bad this has kicked off like i i it's it's okay it's always difficult to like measure how intense a riot is when it started people were i saw people saying it was like more intense than like 2005 ones this is like you know we've talked a lot about french writing on this show these specific kinds of riots are like by far the largest and most intense like kinds of riots that happen in france this is like a significant escalation from everything that's been happening even in the last sort of like seven years, which have been, you know, like there've been a lot of riots in France recently.

These are by far the most intense. In the time I've been writing this, the police killed a second person by, okay, so I'm going to give my account of what I think happens. The French police are going like, well, who can, who can say how this person was hit by a projectile. But as best I can tell, they shot a guy in the chest with a flashball, which is a flashball is like, it's effectively a grenade launcher that shoots flashbang grenades.

Now it's supposed to be like a, it's a quote unquote, less lethal ammunition. But the thing about less lethal munitions is if you shoot people directly with him, they die and they just fucking killed this guy they're they're less lethal because they are not meant to be shot at people they're meant to have a dispersal effect when shot near people if you shoot people with them yeah they're very much lethal yeah and you know we talked about uh

in the last episode that i did about this uh there was there there was another guy who thankfully has regained consciousness but was in a coma for several months because he was also shot by I think he was shot by it. Maybe I forget I should have actually looked this up before I did this, but he was shot by like a similar less lethal munition and he thankfully has survived. killed him uh the reporting about it has been terrible like the guardian headline said man struck by man struck by projectile at protest which again this guy was shot by the cops like directly into his chest with one of these weapons so it's been really bad and you know okay so to get an understanding of what's happening here too uh i want to go through this there are sort of like four broad types of people who rioted france so okay so the first kind of writer i think is the one people are like maybe most familiar with which is like the french far left like riots a lot this is mostly anarchists

some other people and that's like a kind of standard parisian riot will be these people rioting um you know we talked a bit about sort of the development of the black bloc in france in the last episode we did about this um there's you know there's also sort of like more mainstream left like trade union groups who have giant marches and those also sometimes turn into riots because they get attacked by the police and stuff like that and those ones tend to be larger like the the trade union ones have more people but tend to be less variety there's the gilet jaune or the yellow vests who are mostly people from rural areas who either sort of like do roadblocks in rural areas or they come into cities and do marches

and riots and they riot pretty intensely um and these three groups have started to be you know part of what we've been seeing in the pension like reform protests and like riots have been these groups were starting to work together but there's another group of people in france who riot who are the residents of the bonn louis i oh bon that's not how you pronounce it god damn it okay before before before i did this i looked at how you pronounce it and i've now forgotten it's bonnie that that's how you well okay yeah i'm not gonna i'm not gonna offer you any advice unfortunately i have to say this word like i have to say this word like 40 times i can't pronounce french words without doing the which is i know i'm a child of the post 9-11 era it's written into my dna i can't help it uh i'm sorry you guys were right about that war but i still it's still

it's still like it seared into me as if with a laser cutter so i'm not going to try to pronounce it my my excuse is i'm holding a grudge for that time they owned a bunch of shanghai for like a bunch of years so that's a fuck there's actually many fine reasons to insult the french and they're just all things you can go after every other powerful white country that ever existed. Or other country, for that matter. I mean, France is pretty classic, classic colonialism in a lot of ways. Yeah, and we are, oh boy, are we going to be getting into that. Which actually, that's a good jumping off point for who these people are.

So the banlieue, I might just say suburb because I, I can't do this. Yeah, look, it's, it's the French word for suburbs. Suburbs in France

are different. Like in, in the United States, the suburb, suburbs have been up until at least pretty recently a fairly reactionary, um,

like, um, uh, whatchamacallit, uh, uh, white flight, yeah,

yeah, it's a lot of white conservatives lived in the burbs. It was kind of like one of the reliable areas for Republican votes and stuff in France, like upper income people, people with more money are a lot more frequently living near the center of town. And the suburbs, a lot of which were like built specifically for like communities of people from,

from French overseas population who were moving to the country like these they set up like public housing and stuff for them um yeah the under the idea was that if you like moved people over in communities into these neighborhoods it might make integration and stuff easier um there's a lot of reasons why this this didn't work that i'm i'm you know not an expert on but like there there were a lot of problematic aspects of the execution, including the attitude among the attitude that goes back pretty far among a lot of French folks that like, well, you know, a positive thing is if they just kind of become French and drop any other aspects of their of their heritage. And anyway, whatever. It's a

whole thing. But we're going to we're going we're gonna get into this yeah when we talk about suburbs in france we are not talking about like areas where upper middle class people bought giant houses right like that's not what they are these are these are very like they're not they're not exactly the same as like american housing projects but they're much closer to that than they are like the you know the sort of american white flight stuff yes um and the people who live there, there are some white people, like white French people who live there, but there's also a lot of French people

who are like either like pretty, some of them are pretty recent immigrants. There's a lot of people from Algeria, like specifically, and the way that like the French understand this basically is like all these people are like black and Muslim and like that, you know, okay, the French are very racist like and and and this is the thing that like i was in

academia for a little bit right like i i like thought i understood the like average level of racism of an academic holy fucking shit oh my god um i'm gonna i'm gonna quote for something about the suburbs like that That's from a piece. I'm going to talk about that piece just a little bit because I think it's a really interesting way of thinking about what the attitude in France is. So this is about the banlieue. The French word for suburb is banlieue, a word derived from banir, metter, or ban, that is to exclude or banish. And this is the thing. This is from a, a, a,

an article called the French autumn riots, 2005 and the crisis of Republican integration. And this is a really interesting piece because like half of it is like pretty reasonable sort of like analysis of how the left sort of just like failed and betrayed these people. And then the other half of it is them talking about how like, like Muslim people and like people from like north africa have like inherently patriarchal like reactionary family structures and that because of this they can't

be like integrated into french society i'm like what the fuck like this is just a random academic and he just like sounds like a storm front guy it's it's it's fucking wild um so i i want to talk a bit about how how these things came to be because i think it gets to sort of like you know what what what what these places actually are and why these people are writing and to do this we need to go back to the french conquest of algeria so all right so so the the french government yeah uh it's like yeah it's it's second maybe to the germans in terms of like the brutality of the conquest and honestly like that's it's kind of a they're both so horrific it's kind of pointless to be like which of these is worse these are both

like genocides that large chunks of the world just decided to pretend didn't happen yeah although the thing with the french version of it is it because it's the french it's like like the the actual end the french political end of it is basically like a tragic comedy so i'm gonna tell the story yeah a lot of it's the result of incompetence and i mean we talk about this in our napoleon the third episodes of behind the bastards but yeah yeah so like like the the official causes belly for the french of this war is that the french took out all these grain loans under like the directory and then like under napoleon from the algerian government the algerian government was like hey are you ever paying this back and the french were just like no so this ended in in like a tiff where the governor of Algeria hit the French ambassador with a fly swatter and this this led to the the French monarchy at this point is uh led by this guy named Charles

X who's Mike Duncan calls him one quote one of the great idiots of history and he's like about to get overthrown so he's like oh I'm gonna I'm gonna invade Algeria this is gonna like distract everyone from the fact that everyone hates me and they're going to overthrow me. And this doesn't work, right? The French conquer Algeria, but Charles X is overthrown literally three weeks after this finishes. But the sort of crucial thing here is that

the successive French governments keep control of Algeria, and they... One of the places where modern French racism emerges from is there's this, you know, the whole invasion is wrapped up in this like monumental layer of racism. That's about like, you know, we're going to go, we're going to free Algeria from quote like oriental despotism. This is like a civilizing mission. And we're going to let you know, and this is like, this is, this is the stuff that, you know, if you've been, if you've seen any like French social media posts about this, like now, right?

Like this is the kind of racism they still do, which is like, they consider Islam like a backwards culture. It needs to be like integrated into French republicanism. And, you know, this is, yeah, this specific kind of French racism is very, very old. yeah this stuff is this specific kind of french racism is very very old i i mean you also briefly mentioned we're going to mostly talk about algeria here because like a lot of the people who end up living in these suburbs are algerian but like the french had a whole empire uh they conquered a bunch of parts of like a bunch of western africa they you Yeah. And this was also, it's, it's worth noting. A lot of it was conquered very frequently, very recently. Like it was only in the late 1800s, I think that, um, they solidified their control over Algeria. It was kind of right in the same period, just kind of directly ahead of the, uh, the Franco-Prussian war that they, um, they took

a lot of Indochina. Like this was, um this was – they were kind of later to having huge overseas possessions. But unlike the Germans, they made up for it in terms of the breadth of their acquisitions, if you want to call it that. It gets fucking well. Although one thing I think is interesting about this is like Algeria – the French conquer Algeria after they've lost Haiti. Yes. Which is like a very interesting sort of like thing here but like you know but one of the things that this gets to is that like the French state you know like literally it doesn't like it doesn't matter like who like in what

period of time in French colonial history you get to the straight is just the the French state is just structurally anti-black like it is so unfathomably racist and you know the way this sort of plays out in algeria right is like they they hold on to algeria for 130 years but one of the sort of products of this right is that okay so like algeria is now part of just like the french empire effectively right and this means that over the over the sort of decades the the french government starts like importing algerian like workers into france because okay so one of the the french carry out basically like a series of genocidal campaigns where they just like like progressive different french regimes like steal more and more of the land that anyone ever in algeria had until you get to a point where Algeria is just effectively a French settler colony.

And so, okay. So they, they, they've displaced all these people and they start, you know, recruiting them to go work in France. But this,

this, this becomes a huge problem for the French state because, you know, now they have a bunch of colonized people in France who they need to like keep colonized. And in order to do this, you get like, you know,

you get Foucault's boomerang right where you have these french police that are trained in algeria who are used like against algerians in france and you know i've said it was like it's not just that it's used against algerians right it's used against like people from all over the sort of french empire from like northwest africa even even people who were from haiti who who like wound up in france but this comes to a head in 1961 when there's just one of the weirder parts of french history is there's like a second coup attempt where all of these officers these like these french officers in algeria are like terrified the french people had voted to like that could have led to Algerians

getting the ability to like vote over like self-rule right and the French like colonial officers in Algeria go nuts over this and they try to overthrow the government and it fails but the result of this is that de Gaulle gets like dictatorial powers in France for like five months and in October of that year the Algerian national liberation front which is like the you know this is like the the giant sort of movements of the like french of the algerian anti-colonial movement like they have this giant protest in paris and the police just start shooting them this is this is this is this is you know like this is not a riot right like this is this is just like they have a giant peaceful march the police start just killing them they kill several

hundred algerian protesters uh they they throw their corpses into the sen i'm gonna read this quote from the bbc one photo captured the chilling sentiment of the time showing graffiti scrawled along a section of the sen's embarkment saying here we drown algerians and they kill like at least 200 people probably more than that they are like they're throwing like children into the river to try to drown them it is fucking awful um and the french government like they deny that this happened for decades the the the first this massacre is in 1961 right the first the first like french prime minister to a French president to admit that this happened.

I did it in like it was. I think it was I think it was 2011. It was 50 years later that the first French politician like admitted they did it. And the government has still never apologized for this. So these are this is what the french police are right like they are these people they are you know they're the people who like a bunch of algerians did a protest for independence and they killed like they threw their children's corpses into a river and this is the sort of long-range backdrop of like everything that's happening in modern france like today

right is the fact that like france was an empire still like is in a lot of ways an empire and their police are just like unfathomably violent and racist i mean yeah i i think i i might say like if you're american pretty fathomably violent and racist yeah but but, like it is – yeah, I think that's a fair summary. If there was ever a reasonable society on earth that people could live in, it would be very easy to go, this is the most racist thing you've ever seen. But unfortunately, we all live in hell world. And so our metrics are like – like have the Brazilian police killed more people per capita than the American police? Yeah, again, it's one of these like we don't need to litigate this. I think the point is that when people kind of like flip out over these images of buildings being lit on fire and shit getting broken and people shooting out cameras or even like beating folks in the street as part of a riot and freak out about, you know, how the place has gone to hell.

Like violence that exceeds that by many factors has been like the norm for segments of French society going back as long as the United States has existed. Yeah. So, you know, like the the the ugliness that you see in the moment of the riot is not like it like focusing on that and ignoring what what's caused it, like why people have been like reached a pitch where they're doing stuff like that is kind of an error, an an error at least in like um uh historical analysis um and i think also an error in terms of like the severity of of what we're looking at like none like all of the the ugly shit that's happened because at least one person was killed by rioters and all this but like all of the ugliness of this current set of riots doesn't compare to one boat sinking in the Mediterranean. Yeah. Like and that those things are very much tied together. You know, France has had a significant role in why northern Africa is the way it is right now and why large chunks of like the that continent have endured waves of successive starvation famine death uh war like

yeah like you know i want to i want to like i want to just briefly talk about vietnam for a little bit because sure i think something that like people don't really understand is that like okay so right at like both in the 30s in vietnam and sort of through world war ii like huge portions of the country were starving and they were starving because the french had completely fucked their economy and was like was taking all the food and was taking all the resources and like you know like that's you know that's a big part of the reason why the original sort of like war in vietnam that the french fight happens right it's like it's like it's why people like drive them out is that there are like just innumerable people who just fucking starve and die because

the french colonialists were just like fuck you and you know like they they the the french empire it doesn't get as much attention as like the british or the spanish or like the americans but it was like incomprehensibly inhuman in terms of just like the shit that they did and i fuck them they lost yen ben food they'll lose again uh well yeah i think we should note um when it comes to like the violence of the french police we're when we're talking about how they are very American in the way they do violence, that is reflected in the statistics. The French police are the deadliest police force in continental Europe.

Part of why is that recent law that was passed in 2017, which made it a lot easier for French police to be able to fire their weapons, specifically at people they think might be about to commit a serious crime. Part of the reason for the change in the law was the, oh God, the Charlie Hebdo mass shootings. There was just this belief that, because two police officers were killed in that, and there was this kind of belief among segments of the population that maybe if the police had been able to be more aggressive, they would have responded more successfully to the shooting. I think the existence of the American police

and the number of mass shootings we have might argue against that. But that's one of the things people will say is why this shooting happened. I think it's worth noting the effect of that law. That law, it more than doubled the average number of – very specifically, the number of North and West African people who – French people who get shot by the police doubled. Yes. And depending on the year, it either doubled or in some cases almost tripled. Yeah. Right.

It's been extremely stark, the change. It's also worth noting that, you know, in 2005, we had a huge set of riots in the suburbs of Paris. I think it killed one person. And the riots were sparked as the result of police were chasing two uh kids i believe they were algerian french kids um and they wound up like hiding from the police inside of a building that was part of like one of the trains and got electrocuted yeah they were i think i think what it was is that they were they were they were like trying to they were trying to like go home and they started they like cut they decided to cut through like a construction site and someone called the police on them and said they're away from the police and i okay so i've heard different versions of this and i don't think we're ever going to know precisely what occurred

yeah like there there was a version that was circulating at the time and now that might be true but i don't know about but there's a version of it that says that like the police stood there and watched these kids get electrocuted. And that's possible. I don't know if that happened, but like, you know. A lot of people certainly believed that that had happened. Yeah. And it was not obviously the death of these kids, as is always the case when you have riots this big, was sort of helped to catalyze existing feelings.

One of the things that was sort of in one of the reasons why people were angry was that Muslims in France at this point in time had essentially zero representation. In 2005, Islam was France's second most popular religion after Catholicism. There were seven million French citizens of Arab or African origin. They had no representation in the National Assembly. Not a single member of the National Assembly was a Muslim or even Arab or African in their descent.

So there was literally no representation. They were targeted by the police. These kids die a suspicious death and people riot like motherfuckers,

you know? It was a pretty good set of riots. Yeah, it was. That one, the 2005 ones, I can can pull some of the stats on it uh before i i want to go back yeah i think i've got some right here actually yeah at least um i think they burned they burned 10 000 cars yeah multiple police stations government ministries like city halls yeah 230 public buildings damaged. Yeah. So it was – they went pretty hard.

Yeah, I mean it was – this is only the set of the time. This was the biggest unrest in France since 1968. And it is worth noting some of the differences between the government's reaction to the riots we just had and to the 2005 riots. reaction to the riots we just had and to the 2005 riots. In 2005, the interior minister of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, called the people involved in the riot scum who needed to be got rid of. Yeah, it was pretty ugly. And there was sort of immediate defense of the police force for their actions. It's been a bit different in this most recent case. For one thing, Emmanuel Macron immediately like said that the shooting was horrible, like the actions of the police were bad, which got the police very angry at him.

Camera like footage of the shooting then came out and made it very clear that this was an execution as opposed to a complicated situation, which isn't to like overly defend Macron and the administration. You can see just some how things have changed in France politically. But I think the other thing that's going on there is that Macron is just a way weaker government than the French government wasn't in 2005, right? Like one of the things, you know, so one thing I was looking at was so in 2005, the French deployed 11,000 police to try to contain it.

And they kind of didn't, but in like the stuff that happened like two weeks ago, they, there were 45,000 police deployed. So this is, I think like it gets to like the severity of, of what's happening and how, how scared the French state is of it.

Because, you know, like the current French state is of it. Because, you know, like the current French government is not very stable. They've been trying to like, they're on, they're like, this is like the fifth round of like riots that they've seen in the last like seven years. Yeah.

Yeah. Um, which is also evidence that like the police who have largely gotten what they wanted from the government in over the last 17 years or so have not succeeded in at all reducing the severity and in fact have continued to spark this kind of like these kind of riots. like these kind of riots the other thing that's going on here right so partially it's because the french police are like unbelievably racist yeah um the other thing that's going on here is this sort of i mean i guess you could call it like the long-range crisis of capitalism right like youth unemployment in the suburbs is 45 percent and this is the kind of thing that caused the arab spring right was like you know you have all of these populations who are just structurally unemployed, right? There's no jobs for them. What jobs they can get are these just awful, like, Americans are familiar with dogshit service sector jobs, right? It's that kind of stuff. jobs right like it's like it's that kind of stuff and you know and this is a product of a lot of sort of long range like political trends right it's it's you know like capitalism is spitting

people out of the social system the the other thing that i think is i think is really important about these protests is that like the the kids in the suburbs are like not really connected to the french left and there's a reason for that and the reason for that is this movement that happened in 1981 so in 1981 we got really the first of this kind of riots so you know these these suburbs were like mostly these like housing developments i guess, were mostly built in the 70s to accommodate a new flow of migrant workers, mostly from Algeria or from other places too. And in 1981, you get the first of these riots. And French society is like, holy shit, because there's a bunch of non-white people rioting and they lose their minds. And after the first set of riots, which first and the thing the thing that's i

think interesting about this too is the initial riots aren't that big like they're they're like pretty small compared to like what has come after compared to stuff has happened right technology was in its infancy at that point we were still okay that's slightly unfair like people people in france in that period were pretty good at rioting it's just that like these ones it wasn't as bad as it was gonna get and part of the reason it gets that bad so okay so the the the first um the the after the first of these riots there's this giant there's you know there's an attempt by the french left to like organize these people um and they have this they have this thing called the Buer movement. I don't know.

It's French. It's B-U-R. Yeah, I think we've all established that we're not going to be impressing anyone with the level of our understanding of the French language. Yeah, look. So they have this sort of anti-racism movement. And they carry out a 100,000- person march from marseille to paris but the problem is this movement starts to like fail almost immediately it starts to fall apart because you know at this point mitterrand who is he's like on and off again as the french prime minister for a lot of the 80s

um and mitterrand's from the socialist party and his, his plan for this is to basically to attempt to co-opt this movement and to turn all of these people who live in the suburbs into like a new, into a new voter base for the French socialist party. But the problem with this is that instead of, you know, okay. So the Mitterrand does some reforms kind of to like put money into these

communities but like again these these people are being structurally disenfranchised by a combination of sort of french racism like the the physical urban geography of these of these suburbs like just capitalism in general and you know these are these are sort of like macro forces and i midiran's plan to stop the riots is he has he has these summer music festivals that like hire unemployed youth that are that are that go by the name and i'm not making this up sos receives me. They're just like, y'all,

this is, this is our plan to solve the riots. We're just going to have like these, like good work guys, music concerts. I think you, I think you got it. I think you got it. This weirdly,

this kind of works for a little bit. There is, there was a, there was a, apparently a fun version, like a, a better version of that that occurred in, uh,

in Oregon. Uh, in like, I think it was the 1980s when they were uh they were going to have like a republican convention in town and so the the state governor um i think mccall was his last name um was like okay i'm gonna throw a big like music festival like two hours south of of portland and i'm gonna tell the cops not to bust people for drugs but yeah um yeah different thing yeah yeah this thing you know the problem with this thing is again like the the point of this is not actually to sort of solve the sort of structural racism of french society or do anything about capitalism it's it's to build a voter voter base for the socialist party and you know after a couple of years of this the people in this movement like the act the actual kids in the

suburbs are like what the fuck like our lives still suck shit like you guys haven't changed anything and you know there's and there's a lot of promises the french socialist party breaks one of the important ones is that they the french socialist party had been promising to let immigrants vote in local elections and that just fucking vanished right this never happened this is part of why there is like no there's so little representation in the french government and you know the the actual the actual sort of broader goals of this anti-racism movement it fails and there's a there's an undocumented workers movement that sort of comes that like splinters off from it but it's completely destroyed

by the french business class and you know france in this point period still has some very strong unions and the union is just like we're like no fuck you like die and just told them to fuck off and from there and from from the betrayal of the socialist party and also simultaneously the other thing that's happening in the 80s is the rise of sort of like these french neo like the french new right is like resurgence these guys when i say the french do right these people are like fucking neo-nazis right like very very very very a bunch of very famous french neo-nazis who modern neo-nazis reappear in this period um and they start doing there's a bunch of anti-immigrant murders that are just horrible and but you know the state is just could of going like, whatever, like, fuck it, you guys can die. And so – and this has a massive impact on the culture of these suburbs and what kind of political possibilities they have because these people – like to this day, you will get people talking about the great betrayal and how they got fucked by the socialist party and so like these people don't like they have very little contact mostly with the mainstream french left the mainstream french left is especially the

central left is really fucking racist like even the communist party is really fucking part of what was happening here too is the 80s is the period where the communist party collapses and you know and so like all of this sort of like the organized left factions like don't like them the unions are like what the fuck are these algerians like fuck them they're muslim we hate them uh and you know so so the the legacy of this is that the government does some welfare policies and they like try to do some job creation a little bit but this was always just doomed to fail because these are you know like what like france in this period is de-industrializing.

And so the product of this is like, you have all of these people who are now just unemployed, who were attempted, like, like, you know, there was an attempt to integrate them into the left and the left just fucked them. But, you know, obviously they can't, they're not going to go to the right because the right hates them like even more than the French left does. And you get these, you know, and what happens is like these people, these, like this masses of like precariously employed or like unemployed immigrants become this like massive focus of the French state. And when conservatives take over in the nineties, like they use them as this like racist scapegoat for like every problem. They begin this like massive authoritarian, like campaign against black and Muslim people. And like, you know, like we're, we're in the U S right. Like we know what that looks like.

And, you know, and one of the other things that that starts to happen is like like the french state and the french right like portray all these people sort of like like the 80s is also the period like you know this this is this is right after the uh the iranian revolution there's this like rising fear of like islamism and you know and and the way that like the state responds to this is basically by is by going well all these people are like like islamist terrorists uh we hate them all of all of the jobs programs that have been set up and all of the welfare programs disappear like the funding for the music concerts even just vanishes and all of this stuff is happening particularly it's like particularly intensely in the early 2000s and that's that's the other context that leads up to 2005 riots is that like by 2005 people who are living in these places

have seen like like really serious deteriorations in their standards of living in like the last like four years because these programs are just being destroyed and you know and then you know and you get these these protests that start in in 2005 and there's there's another very similar uh thing that happens in 2007 when the police like crash into two kids on a motor like a police car crashes the two kids on a motorcycle and kill them and there's like there's like a smaller but like very very intense like series of riots and then it's kind of weirdly quiet for a bit and you know i mean i might say quiet okay it's been quiet from the rioting end uh the french police keep killing people one of the things that everyone the people are talking about in this one is in 2017 it came out that the french police just like fucking raped a teenager and it it's fucking horrible yeah and and then i think leads us kind of into into like into the sort of modern like the thing that's happening right now which is that you know like the the kids who are riding in the street

and i think i think this is a big part of the reason why it's this intense is that you know these are these are like 17 and 18 year olds right they are they're old and they're you know they're they're too old to believe in this sort of like fairy tales of french liberty inequality right they they know what that looks like they know that it's like french french like french liberty inequality means a police baton fucking breaking your skull because you were walking down the street right but they're also you know they're 17 or 18 they're they're too young to to know that they're supposed to be afraid and because of that they have you know like they burned down multiple police stations like it's the the writing has been just incredibly intense one of the things that is has probably been the major touchstone

people have heard about these riots uh on social media and stuff is uh or at least the thing that i saw being spread the most was like the fact that rioters were using firearms. There's a couple of things that like I noticed. One was people flipping out over like the presence of guns in France. And interestingly, folks on both sides of this, I think, got stuff wrong because people on one hand, you had people being like, where the fuck did they get guns? Something suspicious must have happened. They must have come in from Ukraine because France is a European country and European countries don't have guns in the civilian population. Like, yes, yes, they do.

France actually, interestingly enough, France is one of those countries that primarily regulates who is allowed to own what kinds of guns as opposed to what kinds of guns can be owned. as opposed to what kinds of guns can be owned. So in France, with the right licensing, you can own most of the kinds of firearms that you can own in the United States. In fact, in France, if you have the proper kinds of permits, you can own something like an AR-15 with a 30-round magazine,

which you could not purchase in the state of California. Now, these are still very stringent gun control. If you're going to have, because again, they split the state of California. Now, these are still very stringent gun control. If you're going to have, because again, they split the kinds of firearms into category, and the most restricted kind of firearms are semi-automatic rifles like AR platform guns. If you're going to have something like that,

you're doing an intense background check. You're doing, like, you're submitting to random searches, you know, by the police. Like, it's not nearly as easy as it is to acquire firearms in the US, but there are quite a lot of firearms. I think you're allowed to own up to like 10 magazines per gun and 1,000 rounds or something like that. That said, I don't believe the majority of the guns that we've seen on the streets in the riots are normal legal civilian-owned arms. are normal legal civilian owned arms. That said, the existence of guns in these protests has also been heavily overstated,

largely a result of footage of shit like people shooting out cameras with what are actually air rifles that folks just assume are real firearms. There's also been shit like, there was one video that went really viral that was a petrol bomb being set off by protesters at a government building. And it was just blue checks on Twitter, people who pay Elon for it, were spreading it saying, look, people are using RPGs in the riots.

Rioters have rocket launchers. There were a number of folks who got tens of thousands of shares and likes claiming that these were examples of heavy weaponry from Ukraine getting over to the US. For one thing, if guns were – if weaponry was getting out of Ukraine, RPGs are not the thing that people would be psyched to get. You can get RPGs in Europe, and you're generally getting them from North Africa, right? Or from the Balkans. There's no shortage of comm block weaponry in that part of the country. you're generally getting them from north africa right like or from the balkans you know there's no shortage of com block weaponry in that part of the country but it was not an rpg being used yeah well this is something i want to talk about a little bit is that the the actual thing the the

actual weapon of the french writers is fire and this is something they are way better at this than the americans are right like i mean i saw a video absolutely of i've seen i saw a couple of videos that were just wild like there's some i don't even know how they did this someone had set like one of those like skyscraper tall construction cranes on fire and not the bottom of it right they set the they set the cabin on fire it's like i don't even know how you do that because like like did they did they climb up the thing like they got they okay so like did they set it on fire and then climbed down while was on fire? Like, how do you even do that? I saw another video that was unbelievably funny where a bunch of protesters like like in front of the mayor of their town covered his car in gasoline and lit it on fire, which was very funny.

But like but like, you know, this is this is the thing like these people... Fire is, like, fire is area denial, right? Yeah. Like, that's, and that's key. Yeah, it's area denial. Like, you're able to close down avenues of advance. You're able to protect your flanks. And also, also, it is a very, very good way to, like, it is a very, very, if the thing you want to do is destroy a police station, like, lighting it on fire is a very, very good way to do that. And, you know, it's very effective at, like, destroying cars, too, is the other very good way to do that and you know it's it's very effective like destroying cars too is the everything i think i think absolutely

enough of it sure yeah and and and like the other thing that's been happening is there's been a lot of looting but this is i actually think the most depressing part about these entire riots is that most of the looting you know like i'm i am pro looting this is this is like one of my stances right but like like there is a lot of looting. This is, this is like one of my stances. Right. But like, like there is a lot of looting that is people looting high end goods that they normally just would never have access to. Right. That's not what's happening here. Most of the looting that's happening here is food and medicine.

Yeah. And that is the most depressing thing. The fact that people are doing subsistence looting is like maybe the most depressing thing I've ever heard in my entire life. Like, yeah, I, I, I, Jesus Christ. Oh, like maybe the most depressing thing i've ever heard in my entire life like yeah i i i jesus christ oh god yeah i mean it it makes sense you know yeah and like the last like you know it's the cost of living crisis just like and again and again, the fact that like, we're talking about places with 45% youth unemployment, right?

Like it's the conditions are so unbelievably bleak that like, yeah, I mean like this, this is what happens when you do this to people is like, they fight back. The other thing I want to talk about is, is that a lot of these people are like, one of the things that people focus on, it says actually think it's very funny that there was there was a guy interviewed

in the new york times who had like the moderate position on the riots and their moderate position on the riots was it's okay that they're burning police stations but why are they burning schools and i want to talk about the burning schools thing a little bit because this is something that gets talked about a lot and you know okay like this this is you know this is the sort of sociological question i get because because this this is like burning schools has been a thing that's like this this happened in 2005 happened in 2007 even going back to some of the riots in the 80s and 90s people were burning schools and the reason these kids are burning schools right is that most of the people the people who are burning these schools are like there were kids who went to these schools right and you know they were either in these schools or they just got out and they realized these schools

didn't do shit right like going going to one of these schools doesn't lift you out of poverty studying hard doesn't lift you out of poverty you're fucked and you know it's like yeah of course like of course these people are lighting these, are lighting their schools on fire. Right. They're, they're, they're attacking,

they're, they're like the, they're attacking like the actual friends, like institutions that were systematically set up to fuck them. And one of, one of the other, like, you know,

like one of the things that always, the people always talk about is like, well, why, why are you, you know, this, this,

you get this with American riots too. People ask like, why are you burning your homes? Like why, why are you burning your own you get this with american riots too if people ask like why are you burning your homes like why why are you burning your own community and i mean specifically with the french suburbs right like these suburbs are a cage they were built as a cage they were built specifically as a cage to contain a bunch like as as france's way of containing this non-white labor force that they that they imported into the country and so you know and it's like yeah and every every single day the bars of the cage are just are fucking getting are shrinking right the the cage is shrinking the walls are getting tighter and tighter there's less food

there's less money there's less opportunities and yeah you know at some point people start burning down the cage and and everyone just is like walking around going why why why are you burning your cage down at your home? But it's still a cage. The fact that people are made to live in the cage doesn't make it any less a cage. And that's why these people are burning it. Because they know from the experience of their everyday lives of what it's like to live here that this place is fucking killing them and so you know they're they they they responded in sort of the classic french fashion which is to light it on fire it is like if the goal was to integrate

these people into french culture there's an extent to which they worked you know yeah absolutely uh there you go you know like Yeah, absolutely. There you go, you know. You created, like, you created the absolute best writers in all of France. Yeah, I, again, like, in terms of the people flipping out about stuff, like, I think it is important to think about, to keep in mind why people are doing this, how bad a situation has to be for people to, as you said, like burned their houses, their homes down around themselves. Like when, when you think about like looting as a function of basic survival, like that's the degree to which these people have been like stretched out. Yeah.

And the fact that people are freaking out over shit like guns. And it's largely, honestly, when I talk about that, largely the reason why is because there's a whole ecosystem of mainly largely right wing people like media influencers, a lot of whom got blue checks as soon as Elon offered it because it puts them up higher in the search results, who started making money in 2020 posting riot porn from the United States and who are desperate to return to those days. So anytime there's disturbances anywhere, they're going to try to like, what is the most, you know, oh, you know, a lot of folks on the far left and a lot of folks on the right are angry at, you know, the US for sending weapons to Ukraine. Well, let's blame this on that. Or, you know, I want to make some sort of point about gun control

and pretend that French gun control laws don't work because some of the rioters have old shotguns or AKs that got smuggled in from across the Mediterranean. So I'm going to make it about that. But all of which is number one, like calculated in order to increase the profit of a specific kind of dishonest media influencer. And all of which ignores like the humanity of people who are in a desperate situation and acting desperately as a result. Yeah, and I think the other thing that really pisses me off about this is that it obscures the actual parts of this that are interesting and that are genuinely radical in ways that I don't – like one of the things that people tried to do in this was like people tried to break their friends who'd been like arrested by the French state out of prison.

And they didn't – they ended up failing because – and this is one of the other things that's been happening is lots of countries have police anti-terrorism units, right? The French have like multiple kinds of them. They also have like military police units. But the French were using these like anti – like specifically anti-terrorism units against the protesters, and that's one of the units that got deployed. I'm pretty sure if I'm – if the sources I've been reading are correct, that was like one of the things that happened in this was an anti-terrorist they sent an anti-terrorism media to stop a prison break and that's i think you know it's it's a really sort of emblematic thing of what the french state is and like where it's going right it's like the the the french republic was born from a bunch of people trying to storm a prison and it has now gotten back to a bunch of people trying to storm a prison and they send a bunch of like fucking anti-right like anti-terrorism

after them some of these weird right-wingers were like look this is what happens when you when you let all these foreigners into your country they destroy the culture i'm like man there's not a goddamn thing more french than attacking a prison. Than attacking your own prison. Like, that is the most they, like... These people have literally returned to tradition. Yeah, they think

they've become French royalists again. It's just like, oh God, like... Inshallah, they suffer the same fate. Like, I... Anyway, whatever. Like, inshallah, they suffer the same fate. Like, I, anyway, whatever. It's very frustrating the way in which, like, we're seeing kind of, I think, I don't know. We'll see. I probably shouldn't be such a doomer because I don't actually know the extent to which all that worked for the kind of people who were attempting to grapple and wrestle

these riots into something that could make them quit cash. But it is kind of a reminder that those people are still there, that like infrastructure of deceit still exists. And every time, you know, the next time there's big riots or protests here, every time it happens anywhere, that shit is all going to spin up um i will say one of the in terms of like stuff that worked uh the use of pellet guns to take out cameras was it seemed to have been extremely effective oh i should okay there's another thing i should talk about that like didn't doesn't show up on film much for obvious reasons but like one of the most effective things that

was happening in these riots was people using cars to break down the fronts of stores yeah and and the second the second one that was very effective was people using like there's a lot of use of scooters as like a way to get as a way to get a like move around really quickly as a way to redeploy as a way to like like as like like you know okay the the the thing about these protests that is that is really sort of interesting in a lot of ways is like it's – what they've basically done, like not from a sort of anarchist ideological perspective, but from an organizational perspective is that they've created like a bunch of networks of affinity groups. And so like the way this stuff is happening is you get a very small group of people who are capable of moving very quickly and they just go do a thing. Right. They don't they don't tell anyone else what they're doing. There's no sort of like there's there's no sort of like top down central command that you can just sort of like stop.

Right. It's this incredibly sort of decentralized. I like it's this incredibly sort of centralized movement and the police just like. movement and the police just like it took them like a week like over like about to like really like take back control of these places and you know and like right now with the period we're entering is like a period that we saw right after the george floyd uprisings which is like this is the period where like the police cracks down and like tries to arrest a bunch of people yeah simultaneously like i don't see a world where we don't see another one of these in the next like five maybe ten years because none of the structural problems are like all the structural problems with the french state are just getting worse and worse

and worse and worse and yeah you know at some point someone is like like i think i think the the problem with this and the problem with the french movement in general has been for the last about 20 years right there have been a lot of very very similar sort of riots trying to bring down governments and they mostly don't work but at some point someone is going to figure out something and they are going to do it and france like could well be be a place where that happens just because the state's capacity to do violence is you know like well the state's legitimacy is just purely reduced to its capacity for violence and i don't know that's not great but i mean it's it's what's happening and yeah i don't know i hope i hope i i i hope someone

beats them and i hope the people that beat them are better than the current like pack of murderous jackals speaking of other things that are like a long and proud tradition in french politics yeah like there is nothing more french than overthrowing the i mean that's not just french right that's like yeah that's like everywhere where you're like, wow, these people suck. I hope they get overthrown and also not by someone worse. Yeah. No more Napoleons. Yeah.

No more Napoleons. Napoleons bone apart. That's the plural. All right. Well, I feel like, are we, is that us for today? Yeah, I think that's been our riots. All right. That's been our French riots episode, everybody.

Until next time. I don't know, maybe acquire and train with a pellet gun. You know, they're easy to get. Surprisingly effective. Legally not firearms. You know, you can like, look, the thing they're very useful for if there's like small animals that are like trying to eat your fucking garden. Yep, you can use them on that as well. Small animals for the government.

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Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here. I'm Robert Evans and this is a podcast about things falling apart. And nowhere, I don't know, showcases collapse quite as well as the U.S.-Mexico border. And that's my little introduction. Now I'm going to pivot over to James Stout. James, what are we talking about today?

Well, today we are talking about the U.S.-Mexico border, specifically in the great state of Texas, which people might remember from its winter power grid failures, its upcoming summer power grid failures, and Greg Abbott's sort of hilarious and also very cruel and terrible antics on the border. And we're joined today by one guest who, or two guests we've had before to talk on the border. And we're joined today by one guest who are two guests we've had before to talk about the border on the podcast. We've got Jen Budd, a former senior border patrol agent and author and an activist and Mariana Trevino Wright, who people remember as the butterfly lady, the previous owner of an M4 assault rifle, the lady who made the cop walk off her butterfly sanctuary once,

and hero occasionally of Twitter.com. How are you guys? We're good. We're good. Good to see you guys. That is nice to hear because this is normally the time of year where Texas is rough climactically. In this particular year, it's downright apocalyptic down there. Yeah, we just don't go outside.

You're likely to vaporize spontaneously. Yeah, it looks bad. So what I've gathered us here today to discuss is the upcoming implementation of a floating border wall, a barrier which is going to make children drown. I don't really know how to describe it. Perhaps one of you could sort of describe this proposed, Greg Abbott's talking about it, but it's clearly not just a state thing. So perhaps we could start out by explaining exactly what he's been talking about, what this design looks like. So the floating border wall, I confess in the beginning I was kind of like, I don't get it. Because I'm thinking a wall extending upwards but essentially what it is are these giant buoys plastic buoys

that are very tightly woven together so that you can't go in between them and then the buoys also spin so if you grab onto them you're going to just spin down and then underneath the buoys is uh four feet of netting so if you try and swim underneath it you will be captured in of netting. So if you try and swim underneath it, you will be captured in the netting and then you will likely drown. It's originally, I think the original design for the makers was to prevent groups like Greenpeace and so forth from getting to oil, what do you call them, oil stands out in the middle of the ocean and keep their boats from getting to them so now they're going to use them and string them because the border technically most americans i don't think know this the border technically along a lot of parts of the rio grande in texas is in the middle of the river depending on where the river's flowing

that year and so they will have to also be weighted down as well. And the hope for the governor is that most of the people will drown trying to get over to the U.S. side, which means their bodies will remain in Mexico and then we won't have to deal with them. Easy peasy. Yeah, that is a particularly dark consideration I hadn't thought of. Our border is already... If people aren't familiar with Decolonial Atlas, they have some good visualizations, but you can see where migrants die.

They have one, I think it's called Where Migrants Die. There are various sort of colors for different people dying from exposure, people dying from dehydration, drowning. Overwhelmingly, people don't die on the way here. They die within a few miles of our people don't die on the way here. They die within a few miles of our southern border, normally on the northern side. Our border is already, and Jen has covered this extensively,

how our border is already killing people. But this is, I think, particularly cruel. Is it something that, like, Abbott started talking about it maybe a month or so ago, maybe two months ago now. Is it something that he's doing sort of of his own, like the Arizona sort of container wall? Or is it something that he's proposing as a sort of federal operation? What's going on with? I think he originally probably got the idea because in the Trump administration they had promoted this. And so I believe that the former chief under Trump, Rodney years, to research this and make something like this happen. But I think that they abandoned that because they knew that that's just not going to fly federally.

But although, why wouldn't it? I mean, all deterrence policies are based on this kind of cruelty. So I guess visually, they thought it would be too much. But since Rodney Scott is no longer the chief of the Border Patrol and he resigned, he's been working with the state of Texas and specifically with Governor Greg Abbott to develop new policies and so forth. And he's been down there helping the union and helping other ex-Border Patrol agents come up with new policies and new cruelties for Greg Abbott to install. So I think originally the idea was a federal idea, and now it's come down to the state of Texas. Okay. So I guess how far along is the state of Texas in? I know before Trump built his border war route, we had these little 30-foot prototypes

in San Diego. He gave a lot of contracts to people who'd given him a lot of money in his election campaign. Was it Wheatland Tube, I think is the big one? It makes steel.

But how far is the state of Texas along in its plan to create a floating murder barrier? The buoy barrier, border barrier, is already created and it's available in various lengths and i i should add in addition to the buoys in between the buoys are spinning radial blades so you yeah it just i mean every aspect of this how can i miss that is a bloody nightmare

yeah i went to the manufacturer site and it it addresses this too um so you can't even get to like the middle of the buoy with uh you know something and and cut the string of buoys because there are these radial razor blades too. Cool. So the state will be deploying it in thousand foot strips. And Jen and I did a little podcast on this, I don't know, a couple of months ago when we first saw these signs appearing on the river, and they were super strange. It was Memorial Day weekend, I believe.

And they were numbered. And they said like RGV for Rio Grande Valley, RGV 191, 192, 193. RGV 191, 192, 193. We thought, are these mile markers like we have on the freeway? But they weren't at any particular distance. And they were put at various spots that appeared as though they could be areas where migrants cross. They can also be the paths where the cows and the horses come down to drink jen's been on the river with us she's observed that um at various uh platforms on the river where water pump stations are for farmers and irrigation districts and such so we saw these signs. The RGV-191 is facing the river, facing Mexico. The backside of it is a caution, danger, risk of drowning sign in English and in Spanish. But it is facing the United States on the bank of the Rio Grande River in the United States. So it's in no way a caution to anyone who might be approaching the river.

And we thought, why are they suddenly putting up these signs? Because, you know, forever people have been crossing the river and Border Patrol is on the boats there, Texas DPS, the Coast Guard, the U.S. Coast Guard, now game wardens, now Florida Highway Patrol and Florida Fish and Game and all these. I mean, it is, everybody's floating the river now, not for recreation, but hunting migrants. And so then we thought, well, maybe these are so that when these

out-of-state interlopers and at times even the militia who show up to help them could easily communicate with the authorities, say I'm at marker number 191 or whatever. Then it was just a few days after that, that the announcement of this floating border buoy barrier came up. And I, my guess is the markers will be used to determine where those are deployed, where they get moved, and that sort of thing, so that then they can be accounted for. Right. So are they proposing the entirety of the river be covered by this thing, or are they going to move segments of it to areas where they think it's a high-traffic area?

They're going to begin in Eagle Pass, where four people drown just this weekend uh but then according to uh steve mcgraw who's head of texas dps it sounds like they will be putting them all along the river in areas they believe are high traffic right yeah yeah And Jesus Christ, it is the darkest. And yeah, Eagle Pass is where all those people died in the, in the un-air conditioned trailer, like I think two years ago, right? Was that Eagle Pass? Those kinds of trailer horrors have happened near us in Falfurious and San

Antonio. Unfortunately, they happen throughout the border region. And there are so many ports of entry, land ports of entry along the Texas-Mexico border, because Texas is, I mean, Mexico is our number one trading partner with the US. And we have NAFTA, which established the North American Free Trade Zone. So if you have a television or a refrigerator or you drive a car in the United States today, chances are those pieces and parts are manufactured in Mexico in the free trade zone, and then they get brought over by truck. Same thing with so much of our produce. over by truck. Same thing with so much of our produce. So the amount of that trailer traffic is enormous. And those trailers are used for human smuggling at much higher numbers, we should note,

than the river area. Same as for narcotics trafficking. Those things are coming across by the truckload and in shipping vessels, not in small bundles across the Rio Grande River. Right. Yeah. I think most narcotics enter the country through ports of entry rather than between ports of entry. Jen's nodding. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. the the narcotics that are very expensive even when i was an agent in the mid 90s i used to say why do we only get marijuana and and the agents would say well because cocaine's too expensive to put on somebody's back and hike it through the mountains across the river or in the desert so it's just easier to buy

off a cbp agent or a border Patrol agent and just get waved on through. Yeah, they're not like dumb. Otherwise, like these are huge money businesses. You're not throwing a half a million dollars of cocaine on some guy's back. Yeah. And risking it floating away in the Rio Grande River. Yeah, it's valuable merchandise.

Like they're no more cavalier with it than like Target is, you know? Grand River. I mean. Yeah. It's valuable merchandise. Like, there are no, like, no more cavalier with it than, like, Target is, you know? Like, right.

Yeah. Yeah. Obviously, this is part of a sort of larger, I don't know, Abbott does a lot of posturing on the border,

right? And that posturing has real consequences for migrants. And it has real consequences for people living on both sides of the border as well, right? Especially right especially i think people have listened to our previous

coverage of that will be very well aware of that perhaps we could sort of characterize this within the context of operation lone star within the other like you've said right the other deployments it's not just even texas uh national guard who are now deployed to the border so could you give us like a an overview of all the ridiculous lapping that's being done well there are 12 or 13 states to date that have sent prison guards, their National Guard, fish and game or wildlife officers, and state police to the border. And this is related to two different campaigns, basically by the Border Patrol Union. campaigns basically by the Border Patrol Union. One is Biden border crisis with that hashtag, which they launched in March of 2021. And the other is every state is a border state, which was a battle cry for MAGA politicians during the midterms. And so what we see now are these red states with

governors who want to capitalize on looking tough on immigration, sending reinforcements to the border. DeSantis obviously was the first to do that because he's been very vocal about envying Abbott and how Abbott had kind of a leg up on him in any campaign because Abbott got the border and Abbott got to, as you said, posture there and be, you know, the new sheriff in town and, you know, stepping in where Sleepy Joe is, you know the new sheriff in town and you know uh stepping in where sleepy joe is you know not performing but what we see in reality is brandon judd who's the president of the national border patrol council was stuck to trump you know they were best buddies and, you know, basically campaigning together. And then Brandon Judd kind of fell away from Trump when he lost re-election and has become

Greg Abbott's best buddy and press junket sidekick and help stage the launch of Operation Lone Star, which, you know, was like a 4th of July type parade with the tanks and the helicopters and the planes and the boats and the, you know, the ATV agents and the horses, the whole nine yards. And people think, I think most people in the United States believe that Abbott is this renegade doing this all on his own. And what we see as the reality is it is a joint operation between the state government and the federal government, but the feds won't admit to it because of the optics. It's bad enough that Biden continued border wall construction, which most of his supporters opposed. Now he is working hand in glove with Abbott. And when I say our experience, what we see daily and what I have documented is U.S. Border Patrol working with Texas Department

of Public Safety troopers and Operation Lone Star Texas Texas National Guardsmen, literally riding in the same vehicles together, responding to scenes, patrolling together. And at the Butterfly Center, we had National Guard, Texas National Guard parked on the levee at our property, blocking our access back and forth. on the levy at our property, blocking our access back and forth. And I went and said, hey guys, this is our property and we have to have access to it during regular business hours for my staff who are working here and our members and visitors who come to explore and enjoy. So I need y'all to move. I need you to move your Humvees so we can get back and forth. And I recorded this interaction as I do all.

And they said, ma'am, we don't take our orders from you. We take our orders from Border Patrol. And that was a revelation to me when this happened a couple of years ago. So I actually got on the phone with the patrol agent in charge, the highest ranking border patrol agent at the McAllen station. And I said, his name is Tony Crane. I said, Tony, you need to come out here and tell these guys to move. They're saying they'll only do it for you and they only take orders from you. it for you and they only take orders from you. And Tony drove out there to the butterfly center, to the levee, and instructed the National Guard to move their vehicle and they did.

And this is something we've seen over and over. And I now have in email, regional director of Texas DPS, Victor Escalon, who the rest of the nation may know from the Uvalde tragedy. I have email from him where he is invoking the federal statute that DPS claims gives them the authority to ignore our fourth amendment rights and enter private property without warrant as long as they're working with border patrol and they are claiming that they are doing so at the request of the united states attorney general according to the federal statute oh yeah and importantly the like federal government in any of its aspects isn't saying no this isn't true or like you know that they're working like you say hand in hand with these and

like it's not even just a joint federal and state operation like i know i think it was south dakota's deployment was it that was funded by a wealthy individual like the state didn't pay for it um i can't remember which dakota it was but yeah it was funded by a wealthy donor who paid for it and yeah the whichever state christy noam is uh in charge of yes and i believe that also happened in kentucky or tennessee same thing it was a wealthy donor who funded their state National Guard deployment. Yeah. And then perhaps, Jen, you could explain to people why it is so different if they believe they have these, within 100 miles of the border, and then again, within 25 miles of the border,

so many of your fundamental rights don't apply. And could you explain how that works and then how then if the national guard see themselves as also having the ability to sort of waive the fourth amendment what that would mean for the privacy of people living along the border in the united states border patrol academy so i i went through the academy and um i started in June of 1995. So I can at least testify to that. They basically, you know, I had a four year in law, so I knew a little basics about it. And then going to the academy, it was really kind of sad because they don't really teach you much of anything. They're just like, you know, their rights are limited. We're allowed within 25 miles of the border by the law to go on anybody's

private property and even search their buildings as long as it's not a domicile. And that can sometimes be in question, whether it's being used as a domicile or we consider it as a domicile. And then within 100 miles of any land or sea border, which encompasses two thirds of the United States population, we can basically stop you and ask you to prove that you're a United States citizen. that are a little ways away from the border, where they, under the guise of asking for your citizenship, they then get to police American citizens or legal residents. And as the years have progressed, Border Patrol keeps trying to push those authorities. In the beginning, you know, we weren't allowed to work with local PD, the local sheriffs. There was a very clear separation, a very clear line between Border Patrol and local cops, or at least legally on written paper there were supposed to be.

And after 9-11, what we end up seeing is the Border Patrol decides to get very heavily invested into surveillance. And it's not a coincidence. Former Chief Rodney Scott was in charge of that during that time. And his basic statement was, you know, if a car is bombed in Iraq, the Border Patrol needs to know about it. So they considered anything in the world to be important to the Border Patrol. And they wanted the Border Patrol to be the go-to

agency in as far as surveillance. So that's why you see them being used in Black Lives Matter protests and things like this. And we saw them a lot in the Trump administration where they were supposedly guarding federal buildings and then went and attacked them. So what you see is the border patrol trying to quietly eke into what is typically considered peace officer authority. So they're trying to get peace officer authority in Texas through the state legislature, and they just keep trying to expand their authority more and more. What I see in Texas specifically is when you look at the history of immigration, when the United States, when we first, you know, when, when, when Texas first became a state and all this other stuff, originally the states did their own immigration patrolling. And so if you went and you just

decided you're going to somehow you landed on the coast in Georgia, then you would have to go to a Georgian official and pay whatever it is that they required of you and stuff. And so what I see more and more is like, Texas is taking back that authority and saying we're the ones that are going to say this. And so then they can make money off of the deterrence policies, and all of this other stuff. So it's just a constant expansion of the rights of the cops, while at the same time, constantly reducing the rights to the people who live here. And even the people that cross here, a lot of people think they'll say, you know, that migrants don't have

any constitutional rights. Well, that's not true. They have constitutional rights because it says people in the U.S. Constitution. It doesn't say citizens. So in certain areas, it will say citizens, and then that is exclusive to United States citizens. But the basic rights are afforded to even migrants. But because the migrants don't have much of a voice, the Border Patrol gets away with everything, secret teams, cover-up teams, and all this other stuff. Border Patrol agents will just flat out tell you, Constitution doesn't exist down here. And they never get in trouble for it. So. Yeah. One of the things Jen just touched on is Texas DPS getting in on this immigration business is when Governor Abbott declared that Operation Lone Star would be targeting Hispanic males. And in some places they talk about a fighting age. So they're already depicting all of these individuals as like soldiers in some invasion in a gang war and, you know, that they're

again, hostile combatants to the United States. But they were going to charge them all with criminal trespass. So we hear a lot about how awful the cartel is and how much money they take from migrants and then hold them for ransom and how expensive it is to get across. Well, once they get across, the state of Texas becomes the cartel. They arrest them, charge them with criminal trespass, put them in the county jail. It's a $5,000 fine. Then when they're released from state custody, they're immediately handed over to federal detention. And that is generally the for-profit, GeoGroup, or CoreCivic. And there, my understanding is fines for detention can be $10,000 to $12,000 for your federal detention. And so here we have, it used to be just the for-profit federal detention facilities cashing in on our criminal immigration policies. And Governor Abbott's like, hey, why aren't we getting a piece of the pie?

So that is what Operation Lone Star is really about. It's not about public safety. It's not that all this fentanyl is coming across the Rio Grande River, being smuggled by migrants. It's about cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching, putting all of them in to the county jail at $5,000 a head. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and it's all the while, right? I know some of the Texas National Guard people aren't getting the benefits they would normally get if they'd been mobilized or deployed

because it's a state deployment, not a federal deployment. And as much as Abbott and DeSantis try and paint the border as a dangerous place full of like i'd know like drug warlords and cartel violence like overwhelmingly the people in that in lone star who have died have died because they got drunk and drove because they had an accident with a personally owned firearm because texas law doesn't allow them to stop the national guard bringing their own weapons they're they're not getting into gunfights with sicarios right like it's not it's not any any uh anything like that it's the standard problem of taking a bunch of men away from the place

they normally live and making them do mind-numbing duty yeah yeah they're they're doing mind-numbing duty in you know exasperating heat it's boring as hell we see them asleep in vehicles watching netflix doing other things um when national guard totaled their enterprise rental truck on the gate at the National Butterfly Center, what we found were Bud Light cans on the ground, which we can only assume bounced out of the truck bed when that truck made impact and was destroyed. The local police will not release any public information related to calls and reports that they have to take of drunken disorderly conduct, noise complaints, property damage, sexual assault, all of these things happening at the hotels where National Guard is staying. But we know from visitors and from property managers and others that this is happening regularly because they don't have good leadership. And it's frankly, it's like really young kids that are down there. And the other thing that that we need to say, too, is that the National Guard that's being posted there, the young National Guard kids are seeing increased rates of suicide. agents because when you're an oppressor and you do that kind of work then you're going to end up you're the suicide rates go through the roof as as they are with the border patrol and now you're

seeing that with the national guard but mariana's right there's a lot there's a lot of stuff that that they're suppressing about what these national guard kids are getting into because they're bored down there so they're sitting down sitting down there in Texas drinking and opening it up and getting in trouble. But it's all kind of hush hush quiet about that. Yeah. And not only are they bored, but these are, like you said, 18, 19, 20, 21 year olds getting paid $6,000 a month. Like they have never had this kind of cash before.

And what are they going to do with it? Yeah, they're going to go buy guns at our local pawn shop yep they pay the national guard that well that's what they're being paid and um initially their taxes were not being withheld or anything so that was employment yeah that was a whole nother issue and then for a while they were trying to unionize because they were not getting the benefits of a regular deployment. And the ones who were working in law enforcement already as police officers, firefighters, paramedics and such, they also, while they're on on deployment do not accrue their hours toward their pensions so they're taking another hit for that and um so these were all things that i guess the state didn't really think through when they called all these people up and forced them to come sit on the border and do mind-numbing work for the most part.

No, it's just a terrible idea. Like, comprehensive. It's one of those things, if you spent any time studying the surge in Iraq in kind of the later part of the Bush years, and some of the shit that happened when they just grabbed a bunch of National Guard guys and threw the, like, it's a lot of the same shit. It's people who were, like, finding ways to get alcohol and drugs who were crashing cars who were because like yeah you were it's just this is this is an inevitable consequence which is why you shouldn't do

something like this unless there's like a dire reason to need to bring the National Guard into a situation like a natural disaster yeah I think go ahead i would i would say that they all need house mothers i mean like fraternities have and stuff because every time i run into one of these young men and they start to like look at me or open their mouth a certain way um i just want to grab them by the ear and be like, uh-uh, you know, Junior, I'm gonna spank you, you know. Whippersnapper.

You are 19. You should not be in this position right now. Go home? Get out of here. Yeah, go back to your mom. Shut up or I'll take your gun from you too. Yeah, go back to your mom. Yeah, shut up or I'll take your gun from you too.

Yeah, but we spoke to a few of them, like Robert and I, when we were down there, and one of them was just saying he was trying to get some money for college. I don't think they're accruing those benefits because if they're under state orders, they don't get it. So Greg Abbott's kind of screwing everyone apart from himself and his little friends, I guess.

Maybe to finish up, I know that one, I think the only case like I can come across of this happening of someone dying or trying to rescue migrants was a National Guard soldier

who tried to rescue some people from the river and drowned, from what I understand. And like, obviously this drowning barrier is going to if border patrol are even invested in investing in getting people from the river which they might not be if they're from the from the mexican side if they're still on the mexican side of the border right theory, it would put those people, those like National Guard and Border Patrol agents in danger too. So what have Border Patrol to say about the floating barrier so far?

They haven't said anything about it so far. And there have been a few Border Patrol agents who've lost their lives jumping into the river as well. There have been other migrants who've lost their lives trying to save their children and so forth. Migrants die every day in that river. And the Border Patrol is just going to stay quiet about it because they like it. It's their management who's going along with it. And if they didn't like it, and if the Biden administration didn't like it, then they would come out and say so, or they would come out and have Chief Gloria Chavez come out and say, no, we're not going to have this.

This is going to kill people. This is not right. You know, on our first blah, blah, blah, which we all know it's bullshit. But the truth is, is they really don't care. They just don't care. And as they say in the Border Patrol, and we learn and you all learn, I knew it, but you all learn from the 1015 group on Facebook. They call them floaters and take pictures of them and make fun of it. So the Border Patrol could care less. It's just one less migrant they got to process.

Well, and as Jen said, if U.S. Border Patrol was opposed to this new border barrier, they would say something. Well, I think it's even worse than that. In 2018, Trump got border wall funding. And as you mentioned, he had his, you know, commando climb all these border wall prototypes in the desert and all of that. In 2019, he got his second tranche of border wall funding. But 2020 and 2021 were continuing resolutions. So he was getting border wall funding after that, but it was always for existing approved designs. And those are the concrete with the steel bollards. So for even though Trump floated the idea of this border barrier, this floating border wall to get congressional approval or U.S. Army Corps of Engineer approval for such a thing would have been an issue. Also, there's the issue of the International

Boundary and Water Commission Treaty, which is a binational treaty with Mexico that governs the Rio Grande River, the water that flows in it, the boundaries, who gets to take how much water from it, things that are built and might affect the flow of the river. As Jen mentioned, the international boundary is the middle of the river, no matter where the river is flowing now, because over millions of years, it has shifted. The channel has shifted many, many times and greatly. So we know the feds, probably Border Patrol with the Trump administration, so DHS, wanted this floating border wall. The easiest way for them to get it is to have Governor Abbott do it. the Real ID Act, in that act of legislation, Congress gave the Secretary of Homeland Security the authority to waive every law, local, state, federal, for border barrier. So it doesn't say

border wall. It says border barrier. So presumably this buoy border barrier would also be covered. So the feds don't have to worry about something like the National Environmental Policy Act or the Endangered Species Act or the Rivers and Harbors Act in deploying this. But they do not have authority to waive treaties or the Constitution. So since at least 2005, the federal government has been trying to devise ways to effectively waive the IWWC treaty. One of the treaty, in spite of Mexico's objections, thereby setting a legal precedent, effectively waiving the treaty. But now Abbott can do this, and who's going to sue him? The IBWC isn't going to do a damn thing because they have no authority to sue on their own. They have to go to the federal government and ask the Department of Justice to sue on their behalf. And it's the Department of Justice that has already settled with Fisher Industries for the we build the wall fraud fence in violation of the treaty.

The other issue is Texas doesn't have to abide by NEPA or any equivalent law. have in the past devised really nasty reach-arounds for the law, where if they get busted doing something illegal, like having Customs and Border Protection spray imazapyr, a broad-spectrum herbicide that is a known carcinogen, all over people, animals, and plants on the border, they get sued and made to stop that. They'll simply pass the money through to the state of Texas and ask them to continue it. And I think this floating buoy border barrier is exactly that kind of thing. The Biden administration can say, we're not doing it and they don't have to get approval for this design

and they'll just find a way to either pass the money through to Texas or allow Texas to continue to basically fundraise for it by prosecuting immigrants for criminal trespass and fining them to get out of county jail. Yeah, well, that is dark. I think it's interesting to point out, though, that when Governor Ducey of Arizona put up his train car thing, the Biden administration did get involved with that, and they were upset about

that. So far, we haven't seen anything about this and and so we'll see if they deploy it and the biden administration stays quiet about it yeah i mean we're closing in on uh like november 2024 and i think biden really is very sensitive about being seen as quote-unquote weak on the border. And given the absolute disaster that was the end of Title 42 and the way they handled that, they didn't really say anything when Border Patrol was clearly holding people in conditions that are in violation of their own detention standards. I don't have high hopes for the Biden administration.

Yeah, it's interesting because you would think like the whole thing from the union and everybody that is pro border patrol and anti-immigrant was like if you end title 42 then then it's just going to overwhelm the border patrol and more people will come and we kept saying for a year like no that's not going to happen it's going to be drastically cut and so it's drastically cut. And you would think the Biden administration would be like, look what I did. But they're not. I mean, they have no clue how to talk about the border and what to do on the border. It's sad. Well, it's this double edged sword of get in line, do it the legal way. So the people who say we're not anti-immigrant, we just want them to do it the legal way so the people who say we're not anti-immigrant we just want them to do it the

legal way and get in line so title 42 ends we've got the cbp1 app which gives them an appointment so they can stand in line to cross at a legal point of entry port of entry and do it legally and now they've got to find a way to thwart that and to mess it up and and biden as you said is not saying look at what we did we've got everybody standing in line doing it the legal way yeah i think they don't want to look at cbp one too hard given what a disaster it's been and and how how biased it's been and how bad it continues to be but yeah for sure for sure they've failed to offer any other options and yeah i don't really have any hope that things will not just get worse there seems to be a bipartisan consensus that it's okay to kill lots of people trying to come

to our country for help because it's it's bad if fox news is mean to you jen has been uh very vocal and produced lots and lots of research and documentation on um how our deterrence policies are designed to kill and um and they're not a whole lot of people using the g word but jen has been courageous enough to do it. I was recently told by my employer that I could not use it. And I think it's a horror, but Jen can speak to it. We have to do a whole other episode on that. Yeah, I think we should do. episode on that. Yeah, I think we should do. Well, yeah, we will. We're definitely going to keep covering this because it's

one of the things that just disappears from a lot of national media in between election cycles or in between Well, and unfortunately, it's one of the things where kind of the numbers are heading in the wrong direction nationwide because like the

right is winning on border stuff right now. The right is winning on immigration. Like there's some pretty dark polling. Like as much as some of the last couple of elections have been positive in terms of the pitiful performance of like kind of MAGA Republicans, like if you look at kind of how Americans are polling on border issues and immigration issues, it's pretty bleak at the moment. And I don't really I don't think anyone has a great clear clue as to like how to reverse that at the moment, which isn't to say that it can't be reversed. It's just it's it's it's difficult. Well, it's difficult, especially when the Democrats are always ceding the argument to the Republicans.

Like, they're afraid to make the argument that a robust and humane asylum system that can inspect the people requesting asylum is a national security issue. And you need one. You can't just not have a national, you can't have an asylum, not have an asylum system. You have to have, it's an essential part to the national security infrastructure. So people that argue that we shouldn't have an asylum system because it's a threat to national security are completely ignorant about what they're talking about. And so they have to start framing it as a national security issue, you know, one where we can have people come and be inspected and so forth. And then the people who are the nefarious people, yeah, they're going to go in between the ports of entry, fine, arrest those people, but let's have a humane system otherwise. It's also fundamental to the success of our economy. And with, you know, the U.S. birth rate is declining, and without a robust, safe, timely immigration system,

ideally one that allows people to go back and forth. Because what I hear from people here is, I miss my country. I want to return to my country. I want to come here to see my family, to my country. I want to come here to see my family, to work for a season or for a spell, to send money home. But then I want to be able to return. And our current system is too deadly to allow them to make it through and then go back and attempt to do that a second time. a second time. Another issue related to the narrative and red winning on immigration is we found at the Butterfly Center that when Biden continued building border wall and we said, oh my gosh, you know, this is what's happening. And we posted photos and video and everything of it. People who had supported us, Democrats, liberals with a capital L, who had supported us said, you're lying. Or that's just their continuing trumps. They had to. Trump's, they had to. And then when we contradicted every one of those arguments with facts, then was president about being humane, about needing an effective system, about creative solutions and all of this and now it's suddenly well you know we can't let everybody in and and so i have honestly found and i'm gonna take a lot of flack for this but there's basically

no difference between a moderate republican and a liberal capital L. Yeah, it certainly seems that way. Certainly, Trump had months of Title 42, Biden had years of it. Like it's- Yeah, certainly. I mean, it's, I think, pretty much impossible to argue with that, at least on a broad scale.

Like if you're just kind of like looking at national trends, there's ample support for that argument. Yeah. I mean, Obama deported more people than anyone. Absolutely. Yeah, massive number. Yeah.

Well, cool. Yeah. Yeah. On that happy note. Yeah. Where can people find out more terrible stuff about the border? Is there a podcast they can listen to? We do have a podcast uh border

patrol watch mariana and i have kind of started it just to talk about a lot of these issues that we feel are being left out and um it's on youtube we also have a tiktok uh account and twitter for the moment we'll see how that goes um and facebook and facebook and instagram and there is border patrol watch.com yeah and that list uh there's a page on there for all the agents arrested for rape and pedophilia uh there's a corruption page there's a page on how they try and indoctrinate the youth down here on the borderlands and so forth. So, yeah, I'm all about that jazz. Yeah, that's hashtag on a first.

And so where can people, it's all Border Patrol Watch. How about you two? Do you guys have individual accounts? Where can they find you? Jen is doing most of this, and I believe it's under the Border Patrol Watch banner. Yeah, it is. doing most of this and i believe it's under the border patrol watch banner yeah because um you know both of us uh found ourselves targeted or throttled or um being you know really uh suppressed by twitter and uh facebook and lost my 40 000 followers yeah oh wow yeah but bottom trial which is great you had a great thread on uh agents who are facing charges for sexual assault and that's a very small minority

of agents who have done sexual assaults sadly uh but yeah there's some really good information for people on there yeah those are just the ones who are being prosecuted or have been convicted yeah exactly yeah most of them sadly have not and even the ones who are being prosecuted or have been convicted. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, most of them sadly have not. And even the ones who have, it took too long and it was far too convoluted. We can talk again on that happy topic another day. But thank you so much for giving us some of your afternoon, guys. We really appreciate it.

Thank you. Thank you guys for all you do and for getting the word out. 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

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where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast it it could happen here it it's it's the podcast that's happening here that's not why we called it that but you know such as such as such as such as the world uh And today I'm going to be talking about one of our, I don't want to say rare, but we're doing one of our How Do We Put the World Back Together episodes. And in order to do that, I'm going to be talking with Mira and Corin, who are two organizers for the Dual Power Gathering Midwest.

That's happening in, what, like two months-ish? Yeah. Corin, Mira mira welcome to the show hi thanks it's great to be on yeah it's great it's great to have you two um okay so i guess i should i guess we should start with so this is this is well i don't know if second's the right term the the first of these happens last year in Indiana. Is it last year? Yeah, it was last year. I had to do a quick checking my memory to make sure that 2022 was in fact last year, and we haven't somehow skipped into 2024 already.

Oh boy, things are going great here. But yeah, I wanted to wanted to i guess start with talking about what the dual power gathering is and yeah like what what what happened at the first one and how did it go yeah so dual power gathering uh i guess maybe i think to start with is what is dual power yeah we haven't talked about that in a bit. We can re-explain it for new people. Maybe the best way to put it is something that maybe a lot of people have heard before, which is building a new world in the shell of the old. So we live in a society, right? Unfortunately. So there's a lot of institutions that we have to deal with. And for a lot of people, it's essential to rely on these institutions because there's not other options.

And as anarchists, it's kind of our goal to build those other options. And dual power is that building a second power in opposition to the state powers. So, you know, like tech stuff, so internet mesh networks, just alternative infrastructures, alternative medical care, though I'm sure that specific phrasing can imply something else, which I did not mean, but just working with communities to try to not rely on the state. And so dual power gathering is bringing together, you know, a bunch of people from orgs and independent activists, and honestly, people who just want to get involved and don't

know a lot to help build those counter structures and honestly this uh cool zone media brought a lot of people the one to the podcast from last year uh so it seems like your audience really really likes this stuff i'm sad i'm sad i wasn't able to go to last year's i was in the process of like setting up for and then i had a covid scare it had to like lock down for like an entire week and it and it turned out that i didn't have it but i'm very sad i preferred that you didn't spread covid yeah i was like you know okay let's let's not like endanger people's lives that seems better than uh in fact doing that and on that note since there's been questions both other events uh we will be having mass requirements and um at the event to make sure

that immunocompromised people are not being excluded i want to make that clear yeah and this is this is like you know so i like the last one from my understanding you like you know it was it was a bunch of it was a bunch of people camping in the dunes, basically. And is this one also going to be mostly an outdoor thing? Yeah. So it's going to be, we're not just going to say the location here. You can find that out through registering. But the location is just near Chicago. And it's similarly outside.

It's a big open space, not a lot of trees, which is sad this year. But yeah, it'll be mostly camping, but there's cabins and people can stay in hotels nearby also. Yeah. So I guess, okay. We've talked, we've talked a bit about what dual power is and sort of building this kind of counter power and building, you know, I mean, I'm like, I'm like, I, I guess I would just want to say a little bit, like these are like dual power institutions are just a lot of the things

that, you know, just, we talk about building or like people, you know, or we've been involved in building it. These, these are, these, these can be things like tenants unions, like a different, like different, different, like regular unions, like caucuses and unions, like mutual aid networks, like worker centers. So there's, you know, there's all sorts of things that can be involved in this. But so now having gotten, we've gotten through dual power,

we've sort of gotten through gathering, but we should, yeah, I want to ask a bit more about like, what, okay, what happens at the thing when you go to it? Yeah. So it's built on the unconference model of doing things, which in essence is aiming to kind of counteract the idea that we need to have a sort of structured event that's, you know, you do this at this point, you do this at this point, you do this at this point. It instead is meant to be built more towards libertarian

socialist principles and it is where people are able to kind of build their own agenda from the start of the event and kind of structure their day how they want to. So you can talk to these people to go to a skill sharing event on a stop the bleed training. You can talk to these people to go to a skill share event on how to facilitate meetings. You can talk to these folk to learn a bit about anarchist history. Just all these different things that can be formatted however you may so choose and that are all kind of happening at the discretion of people who are

involved um so it's very much so just up to you to build your own day and of course you can also talk to other people there if you need some help. Plenty of the organizers involved are more than willing to help out and lend people a hand in figuring out where everything is and what they might want to do and what other people are doing to structure their day around. But at the core, it's built around individual choice, autonomy, and just a non-hierarchical method of going about it so i can talk a little bit more about how that looked practically uh from last year so the first

night i wasn't there so i can't talk much about that but it was it was just mostly getting to know everybody um people were coming in uh throughout the night because work and all that on a Friday. But then that Saturday after breakfast, which I don't even remember, it was like oatmeal or something. We got together in this assembly area and brought out whiteboards and marked out days and people like just stuck up what they wanted to talk about in a session on the board in a time slot. And then we got everyone to figure out, you know, which ones of these can be condensed. You know, do two people have similar ideas? Can they talk about how they might want to have a session together? And then people just chose which sessions to go to.

We kept the whiteboards up so people could see what was going on and where. And that worked out pretty well. I think the biggest concern from that was people wanted to go to everything. We simply did not have time. They were like, can we make this a week? And I think that's pushing it money-wise. It's expensive enough to rent a campsite for a weekend. Hey, if anyone has just a bunch of land they have sitting around

they want to give to us for this. If you can make whatever ranch or farm you have accessible for people, then yes, please reach out for future gatherings. But the most important part, I think, was that the gathering model allowed all different groups there who had similar interests. For example, there was a POC caucus to self-organize. There was also a sex workers group. They were able to come together on their own, figure out what's going on.

And it wasn't based on what organizers thought was important. It was based on what participants thought was important. And I think that also facilitated a lot of networking. You were able to see, hey, there's a DIY medicine

circle going on in this campsite. Well, I'm going to go maybe stop by. I might not say the whole time, but I'm going to check it out, see if I'm interested, see if I like the people there. And it allowed for especially newer folks to interact with veterans veteran activists and just engage with stuff they might have only felt uh interested in slightly and actually get involved and contribute so yeah that that's how it practically went for the unconference and we didn't hear that many complaints about it except that maybe sometimes sessions were not timed, like the time was too short or too long, or

that it wasn't a week or two. Yeah, I mean, that's stuff that especially the first time you're running an event, stuff like like that happens and you know we can okay this is i i have not an enormous amount of experience running like panels and stuff but like i've done it and it's like god getting the timing right is really hard and very annoying but it's you know this is this is a this is a thing that subsequent events will can and will sort of iterate on and get better at because

you know i guess what what what one of the things that we are in fact learning at these is how to do these things that you know i guess in this way hasn't been done before yeah and it's not i mean not technically not been done before but not done in this way yeah yeah like like there's crime think convergences or like the bashback but yeah yeah well i think it's an interesting thing too on a sort of like i don't know i i think i think there's a way in which this is in some sense kind of getting back to like older like models of anarchist organizing that kind of like i'm not gonna say they disappeared but there had been sort of less of them

due to like you know just sort of like political shifts and just like shifts the way people organized and like just what kinds of stuff were happening at any given time and so you know and i think like the the consequence of this is a lot of people sort of relearning or, you know, relearning and inventing things that like had been known. But, you know, everyone's working through it together. And, you know, it turns out we're like, we're pretty good at building things. Yeah. Yeah, like, one thing that I think is really cool about DPG that kind of shines through is seeing how something like building an event like this, like, when I first got involved, you know, I pictured building. You needed to know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy. You needed so many different resources at your disposal.

It never really hit me that this could be something that just regular people could just up and decide to do. It's not to say it doesn't take a lot of effort and work. It does. But it's still ultimately something that is in the power of people to do if they really set themselves onto it and are able to find enough helping hands, both physically and in terms of the actual event. So it's like, it's really cool to see just

everyone coming together in the organizing process and it just being a very organic natural thing it's like i don't know you see it a lot with like other specific um events i've done food not bomb stuff and i've seen it there too but like it's different when it's something that you typically foresee at least least I did, foresee as like, oh, you know, building a whole weekend long event. You know, you need, you gotta have corporate big shots doing that. You know, how can you expect the little guys to do that? And yeah, it's also cool to see people just jump in and help who might not even have other organizing experience.

contribute and i think the resounding result was people finding political hope that was a term i heard a lot from from individuals who both went and helped organize the last one and we're hoping to create a similar similar thing this time yeah and that's something that like i don't know i think i think everyone can use a bit more of right now in a sort of, in a very sort of depressing and bleak, like, there's a lot of bad, there's a lot of bad stuff happening. And the ability to generate hope and, you know, you can even think of it in sort of, in just terms of like morale, right? Like, it's really, really, really hard to actually achieve or change anything if everyone has just sort of given up already. the hard to actually achieve or change anything if everyone has just sort of given up already and you know like being around other people and being like

planning events with people and doing stuff with people like is a very very good way to you know just sort of break the kind of like existential dread and like depression of like living in and you know sort of hopelessness of like living

in this like disaster that we've all been thrown into yeah something that um somebody had mentioned at the last gathering that really stuck with me was that because of the uprising and covid most leftist organizing was formed through trauma bonding. Yeah. And it was really nice to form relationships outside of traumatic incidents. And they felt longer lasting and much safer than relationships built during crisis. Yeah.

during crisis yeah and i think you know i mean i think like i think that's just sort of important along those lines to remember is that like like building relationships there's a decent extent to which that's just all organizing is yeah yeah i mean it's it's not all organizing is but it's it's a really important part of it and the way that people are able to do this especially in the wake of a bunch of like you know i mean really sort of traumatic and horrible experiences people went through like yeah glad we have a better way to do this yeah like stuff like this is essentially one of some of the only things that give me a sense of optimism for the future because those who know me know I tend to be a very pessimistic person. I don't look at current events to put it concisely and say, oh, wow, things are going pretty

topsy-turvy out there. But when we have stuff like this going on, that's just built at the level of hey we're people trying to make things better and prevent the chaos from the outside world and the world around us from just consuming everything it's like it gives gives a nice sense of community and a nice sense of, hey, we're not alone in this and that maybe tomorrow things will be a little bit better than they were today. Yeah. It's especially important in my opinion. I, the first gathering, I was not living in a city as I do now. I was living in, not a city that people in big cities would call a city.

I was in Nebraska and I was going to make a joke about Davenport or something. And that's kind of unfair to Davenport. Yeah. So being able to meet other rural organizers in various places, especially honestly, the Appalachia region, which I did not realize was so related in their struggles, was important because no matter how much I wanted to network, it wasn't really that opportunity. As much as there is in cities, and in cities, it doesn't mean you're necessarily meeting more people or people that you necessarily would like to organize with. There's just there's often more need and not necessarily more anarchists. Yeah. Yeah.

And I mean, you know, it's something we've talked about before, but we've basically built it. Well, OK, I say we we didn't really build this but the social system we lived in the social system that we live in has been built sort of very specifically and very deliberately to isolate people and yeah and you know this sort of functions in different ways depending on sort of geography and like regional stuff but yeah like i think i think this is you know an important tool to sort of break that and to bring people together and to bring like i don't know like i i think i think like another part of this we haven't talked about as much as like just like really incredible things

happen when you bring people together from struggles that like turn out to be very similar but like aren't like aren't usually involved with each other or like aren't you sort of like not like i haven't haven't been able to sort of like link up before you get very sort of like i don't know you get a lot of really interesting sort of like ideas and strategic stuff from it yeah like one thing that i've noticed um especially and because i've done a lot of small town rural organizing is that you can kind of easily develop like very isolated communities and isolated radical cultures in like

specific regions and it's not a great pitfall to fall into because you miss out on a lot of developments that might happen elsewhere you miss out on a lot of other things that might be happening in other regions and even

beyond just regions going into specific um intersectional issues like different different organizers who might focus specifically on racism versus queer phobia versus ableism they can there's all things to learn from each other yeah there's all interconnectedness and when you tie that into interconnectedness of different regions there's just a big need for things to be kind of like a large web of connectivity instead of just you know oh things are kept separate and now we're stuck developing on our own and that's that's never fun yeah and you know and i guess circling this sort of back around to the specific event the the thing that y'all are doing to combat this is the is the dual power gathering midwest so i wanted to talk

a little bit about like well okay hey when is this happening and also what are the plans so far for what it's going to look like and what people are going to be doing so it's august 17th through 20th and this year is going to be pretty similar to last year um and you can also look at Dual Power West, which had their gathering earlier this summer. There's a good, if you go to Sabo Media, I think it's sabomedia.noblogs.org or whatever, the NoBlogs addresses, you can look it up.

They did a good report back on how that went. And we'll also have a documentary up if people want to learn more. Sorry, that's sidetracked. We'll put links to that in the end stages of setting everything up and getting everything connected. And part of that is we want people to bring over what they want to share, you know, skills they want to share, cool things they've learned about leftist history, things that are important to know for modern day society, intersectional issues, discussions, basically

anything that people could think of that might be worthwhile, come on over, bring it in. We'd love to talk to people and hear more about it. So in terms of specifics that we might have planned, that is where we're currently at. We're aiming for it to be like last year in that it's a Skillshare event and a discussion. It's like a set of discussions and just a way for people to share what they know with each other. And a few of us currently involved, you know,

we all have our own ideas. And a few of us currently involved, you know, we all have our own ideas. I personally want to talk about unions and kind of be like, Hey, unionize your workplace. But that's more so just me and that it could be up to anyone, but what they want to do kind of building off the unconference model of it it's if people want it and you know it's not like how to be a fascist 101 then it's welcome some things we predict that will happen at the gathering will probably be circles on trans health care and abortion care given recent events well it doesn't it's not really recent feeling anymore but uh

that plus uh i think much more community defense is coming up because of those uh and i think as always there's all the diy folks who come in. Last year, pretty cool. I might overemphasize how much that's a part because I'm also one of those DIY people. It's a problem and an addiction at this point. But people who wanted to just build their own car. It's cool stuff. Yeah. The random expertise of people coming was wonderful uh and that all came together in ways i don't think anyone could have predicted that's so cool like

literally the showing how to use batteries and how to like in a correct way chaining them i education i have an engineering degree i a lot of this stuff was so new to me in a very good way um and i hope that similar people come back uh we can never predict uh i don't know leftists are wild you never know if they're going to take to something we don't even know if certain people liked it because they just dropped off the map because they were just walking to Denver or something after

the gathering but I think the gathering is, our focus has been on getting people to network. I think we can talk about in a second is just making sure people come away with like the relationships we've talked so much about already and trying to give people the opportunities explicitly to socialize because we also know that people tend to be not very friendly when approached in maybe everyday organizing, even though you say they should be maybe, but life's stressful and I don't blame people. So we're trying to make it a very friendly environment for talking to other people and trying to maybe make that the only other structured thing in the day besides meals. Yeah, well, and I guess I should also say that

if you can do something cool and you want to go show people how to do something cool, you should in fact do this because it rips. Please. Just for me. Like, please call please just for me like please come and show us some cool stuff like

there is so much opportunity for amazing things yeah and I guess you know speaking of amazing things yeah we should talk about food a little bit because you know food important part of all human societies so a little bit because you know food important part of all human societies so for food we're aiming for it to be uh catered vegan food from local restaurants along with

various uh cooked meals as well is what we're kind of shooting for. So we're going to be covering three meals a day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and aiming to have enough to cover everyone for the three days of the gathering. Yeah, and if food we have doesn't work, we also have plans to make sure that we can accommodate people this is not far from other it's not like out in the middle of nowhere we'll be able to access various like stores and stuff um a lot of the gatherings would rely on the typical way of just having i don't know some gatherings just have the food way of just having, I don't know. Some gatherings just have the food happen. They just say, well,

food's on the group and that's fun and all but we also want to ensure that there is food. Yeah, and that there's vegan options for people. Absolutely. And stuff like that. Do you have anything else that you want

to talk about the event before we close out? Yeah, I'll just say, too, that we are aiming for this event to be accessible to folk with disabilities, folk with children. Essentially, to anyone and everyone who would be

interested, we want this to be accessible. On our website, we talk a bit more in detail about the specific ways in which the site itself is disability accessible. And we also invite folk to, if there's any suggestions, concerns, anything of the sort for how we can make this more accessible for people, more welcoming, more open. We invite people to come and let us know. We're still learning and still trying to do this better. So anything we can improve upon, please let us know because we want to do right by folk. And on the note of families and kids, youth are absolutely welcome. We have some families and some parents are absolutely welcome we have some families in um well some parents

specifically in the organizing right now uh we hope we want kids to be able to be as involved as they want to be uh last year i think that it ended up working out with the kids that were there and they're amazing and you can see that in the documentary too, but we want to make sure that's something we actually plan for this time to make sure that they don't feel excluded. And also that parents are able to fully participate. And yeah, you can see more on our website, which is dpg midwest.org.

Yeah. Well, we'll have links to that in the description too yeah and on there you'll see linked is our open collective where if you go there you can there's a variety of options on there which might be overwhelming there's a donation option if you can't come but would like to donate and then there's tickets they don. You can use pseudonyms. It's pretty anonymous. It's fine. And you don't have to pay

necessarily. But there's a suggested donation listed on there so that we are able to afford the campsite and people don't have to pay too much up front to buy the campsite. I guess rent the campsite for the days and get food and stuff.

And then there's options to reserve a spot in a cabin. If there's still spots left, we don't need to have a reservation, but we're trying to make sure that we're prioritizing people with those access needs. And of course, our email's also listed on both the Open Collective and the website. So that'll probably be the main source for info. We also have a Collective account despite the problems happening right now.

Learn Opsec, do that, people. It's good. Learn OPSEC. Do that, people. It's good. You will go far. Come learn OPSEC at the DPG. Yeah. God, I'm thinking about making a Tumblr because what's happening? yeah, it's also

at DPGMidwest at collectiva.social yeah and once again this is running from August 17th to the 20th and yeah if it sounds interesting go sign up and yeah yeah thank you two so much for

joining us why am I saying us sorry I just reflexively do the us and then I'm like, wait, hold on. Hold on. There's the royal we and the anarchist us. Yeah, and I'm excited. I don't know.

I may be there. I may not be. It depends on a bunch of scheduling stuff that I have very little control over. But yeah, other people should go. It's going to be a good event. And yeah, thank you to you again. Thank you.

Thank you. Yeah. And this has been, it could happen here. You can find us in the usual places if they still exist by the time this episode comes out. Oh yeah. We have,

we now have the cooler zone media thing if you don't want to listen to the reagan ads or like i i don't know a bunch of other ads for podcasts or whatever weird things playing right now i think i've been getting casino ads lately which is kind of interesting but if you don't listen to that we have a subscription service from apple that you can buy uh and then you don't want to have ads for all of our shows we're still working on the Android one that hopefully will be happening soon but that's

never a thing that's we're doing our best we're not we unfortunately are not Apple like we don't own all of the stuff so we have to do a bunch of stuff to work through it but yeah go out into the world build duo power

and have a good time while you do it 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 Sonorum. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

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Hello and welcome to another episode of It Could Happen Here with your guest host, Andrew of the YouTube channel, Andrewism. Today I'm joined by Mia and I'm looking to discuss a topic that I brought up in person in a previous episode, that being the idea of conviviality and the episode in question being in my podcast on degrowth. So when I first stumbled upon this concept of conviviality, I thought it was just, you know, one of those exciting, fluffy, agitprop buzzwords, right? Something you, you threw into, you know, your, your propaganda, your, your conversations,

your, um, descriptions of a better world. You're like, Oh, I would love to live in a world that's more convivial on these different things. Convivial being defined in the dictionary as the quality of being friendly

and lively, right? Uh, synonyms include amiability, affability, congeniality, et cetera, et cetera. I didn't come here to be a thesaurus. I came here to talk about the deeper meanings behind these things, right? So in searching this word and this term up in more depth,

I ended up going down this rabbit hole. And I discovered there's a whole history to the tomb that spans I mean I mean I'm not going as far back as its Latin origins right I mean we could talk about the French and their loan words making their way into the English language we could talk about the Spanish concept of convivencia being interpreted literally as living in the company of others. Or in one particular context, such as in Spain between the 18th and 15th centuries, describing the peaceful coexistence between different religious groups. But I'm not going that far back, I'm sticking to the history of the term from Ivan Illich to the degrowth movement to the conviviality manifestos that have come out of online and offline discussions, academic and non-academic discussions of this idea of conviviality. discussions of this idea of conviviality. Now I gave a sort of a basic dictionary definition before but I want to go a bit deeper right. So what is conviviality exactly? Conviviality is

about creating a fun and friendly atmosphere where people can come together and have a great time. That's it in this essence right. It's that feeling you get when you're surrounded by lively conversations and laughter and a sense of celebration. You know, those moments where everyone's enjoying each other's company and there's a real sense of camaraderie. I think using conviviality as a barometer is really helpful in in organizing situations right if you're in

an environment where you are organizing where you're doing praxis and you're not picking up those convivial vibes it may be a sign that there's some toxicity in the mix there i'm not saying that um the work of activism has to be uh a trip to an amusement park right it doesn't have to be a carnival but i think there does need to be for solidarity to exist i think there should have some level of camaraderie and conviviality uh in the atmosphere so you can think of conviviality in the atmosphere. So you can think of conviviality as the spirit of hospitality and warmth, right? It's like when you gather with your friends or when you have those family occasions and bring everyone together, even in the workplace, you know, when you and your workers get along really well and you're organizing to create this union and you're going to take down your boss.

It's a fun time, right? And so how do we get from this, you know, sort of seemingly simple, sociable idea of living and enjoying life in the company of others, making people feel welcomed and included? How do we move from that idea? This conviviality is a vital part of human interaction to conviviality in a more political context. How do we go from just talking about social connections

and adding meaning to our lives and enjoying festivities and shift to conversations about the social and political state of the world right now. Right? There's this one particular guy who's kind of responsible for this. A guy I personally like to call the illest, that being the one and only Australian philosopher, social critic, and Catholic priest, Ivan Illich. Over the course of his nearly 80 years of life since 1926, this multi-hyphenate,

I think that's the term we use for people who have a lot of different titles, right? This multi-hyphenate from Vienna, Italy had a significant impact on a bunch of fields, you know, from education to medicine, technology to social justice. I know his name because he came up a lot when I was doing research on unschooling, de-schooling, and just the education system as a whole. But apparently he's done a lot more than just that. He's challenged conventional thinking

in all sorts of fields. And he's questioned the inherent assumptions and structures of modern society. Ivan's, and I hope he doesn't mind that I call him Ivan, because I don't know if I'm pronouncing his German name correctly, right? His German last name correctly. So I just call him Ivan. He probably wouldn't mind because he's dead, but Ivan's intellectual journey took him through a bunch of different paths, right? He studied theology and philosophy and eventually became a priest. And he lived and worked in different parts of the world, including Latin

America, where he witnessed firsthand the effects of development projects and the power dynamics between developed and developing nations. And those experiences deeply influenced his critical perspective on the modern industrialized world. He also became a very prolific author, known for his thought-provoking and often controversial writings such as Deschooling Society, which he published in 1971, Tools for Conviviality, published in 1973, and Medical Nemesis, published in 1976. And in these books, he challenged established institutions and systems, offered alternative visions that emphasized individual autonomy, community engagement, and, wait for it, convivial relationships. systems contributed to the development of alternative educational approaches such as homeschooling unschooling and learner-centered education his examination of the medical establishment sparked discussions on patient empowerment and the need for a more participatory

model of health care something i would like to discuss in a future episode though i would like to find someone in the disability justice space to have that discussion with, because that is an area of experiential ignorance for me. Yeah, so if anybody has any suggestions, I'd appreciate it. But Ivan's legacy, right, it extends far beyond his lifetime. As is clear, he has a lasting impact on critical theory, on social philosophy, and the quest for a more just and humane world. I know I'm gassing up the guy a lot,

and I'm sure he has some flaws that someone will no doubt inform me about. And I have not read all of it. So, you know. He did co-sign the Catholic Church church by being a priest i assume right so i'm sure he has his flaws um and i have not read all of his literature i haven't even read medical nemesis yet but in tools of conviviality in particular i want to discuss his perspective on conviviality and its role in society right in the book he expresses these deep concerns about the negative

effects of modern institutions and systems and he argued that they often hindered personal freedom autonomy and human flourishing he believed that many of our social structures had become oppressive as they dictated not only how we should live learn and interact but also how we saw ourselves as people he argued that our systems had become highly centralized relying on professional expertise and complex technologies that limited individual agency and self-determination now one could be bad faith I suppose and say that oh is he saying that Ivan was anti complex technology is he some sort of

popular culture bastardization of Luddites or something but his concern was not necessarily on the technology itself and the complexity of the technology but more so how that technology slotted into the complexity of technology but more so how that technology slotted into the structure of society as a whole right his concern was about how these elite

professional groups had established what he called a radical monopoly over fundamental human activities including health agriculture home building and learning and this monopoly is monopolies criticizing all the technology but the monopoly according to ivan had led to a detrimental war and subsistence that deprived formerly peasant societies of the essential skills and know-how yeah and i mean like i feel like that's a pretty i i think it's pretty hard to, like. To that line. Well, I don't know if it's, I think, I think, like, I think specifically that line in agriculture is pretty hard to, like, not, like, not agree with. If you look at the effects that the Green Revolution had on the people who do agriculture.

Oh, yeah, for sure. people who do agriculture oh yeah how sure yeah i mean and i think this goes to it like this falls in with the sort of like you know like the sort of social technological aspect of it of like the fact that this was combined with this massive sort of social technological push to you know drive farmers into debt um you know so they could afford the inputs for this stuff and what it what it did to sort of what it did to the actual farming communities and what it did to people's livelihoods and you know the way that like a lot of this was just a sort of smokescreen for like consolidation of major landowners etc etc like i think i think he's pretty he's on the right point there yeah yeah for those who don't know by the way um the green

revolution refers to a period of technological advancements in agricultural strategies that took place during the mid-20th century primarily in developing countries it aimed to increase agricultural productivity and food production through the adoption of high yielding crop varieties increased use of fertilizers pesticides and modern farming techniques and the green revolution is basically responsible for a lot of the most damaging practices that we see in agriculture today. Right. From the heavy reliance on chemical inputs like fertilizers and pesticides, which leads to, you know, soil degradation, water pollution, lost biodiversity. You know, the emphasis on monocultures and replacements of traditional crop varieties with high yielding ones that reduced agrobiodiversity and led to diseases proliferating between certain species.

Intensive farming practices that could not be kept up with by small scale farmers. Like Mia was saying, the consolidation of land and the ability to manage that land into these agribusiness corporations and major landowners yeah and i think it's worth emphasizing that this was very explicitly seen as an anti-communist thing i mean the the state department's like actual explicit line was a green revolution to stop a bread revolution so like a big part of what this was about was like stopping land reform from happening, which is incredibly bleak.

Yeah. And now it's the dominant practice globally and it's having detrimental impacts globally. And yeah. And, and I mean, some of those people are dead. Some of them are going to be dead very soon.

And yeah, the rest of us have to suffer the consequences. Story of my life yeah which is my existence on this earth right yeah the other thing that's sort of wild about it too is that like the countries that did land reform like developed better capitalist economies than the ones you didn't but yeah you know like yay yay they're better doing capitalist yeah well i mean like yeah it's like they're better it turns out doing land reform actually does help both like non-capitalist and capitalist economies but unfortunately the green revolutionary people the green revolution people like aren't even like people who care about the efficiency of capitalism

they care about like the power of the landowning class. Well, yeah. And I mean, I don't know if this is a saying, but I might make it a saying. I think socialists are better doing capitalism than capitalists are. Yeah. This is the entire story of China, right?

It's like, yeah, Marxist-Leninism is a really, really efficient way to turn a feudal economy into a capitalist economy yeah like if I was in charge of capitalism I was going to make sure that the people at the bottom class bought into the system wholesale

and yeah propaganda and education is a part of it but also you want to make sure they're not vulnerable to being radicalized and the best way to do that is to ensure the basic needs are met yeah um but you know even arguing that will have some people uh misinformed i would say but well-intentioned labeling you a socialist um like i think people should have good things oh you dirty red comment you you know it's it's just well it's just literally welfare capitalism but

apparently that's too much for a lot of capitalists and apparently i mean literally the reason we have welfare capitalism is because uh socialists fought for it um in the early 20th century and early to mid 20th century so you know we have socialists to thank for everything basically but i'm getting off track right so like i was saying uh this monopoly this radical monopoly over fundamental human activities led to a detrimental war and subsistence that had deprived peasant societies of the essential skills and know-how. Instead of promoting human flourishing, all this economic development ended up feeding into what Ivan has termed modernized poverty. And it's something that I think about often, right? this idea of the poor back then versus the poor now

right and of course it depends on which society you're talking about which time period you're talking about but let's just pick some random um like historic uh poor person right let's just say i don't know generic civilization a um this person's poor right they have to work they have to work the land back break and toil sometimes raiders would rule it and be like oh we're gonna take your stuff now and then they would like ride their horses away and probably i don't know dab on you or whatever or the raiders will roll in they'll take your stuff and then it'll be like oh i want to stay and then now you have to pay taxes to me every year and you know that's how a lot of states were created um but whether it's you know nomadic warlords or

settled warlords at least you had a house at least you had a community at least you had the ability to grow your own food even though a lot of that food was being taxed um and you know at least you had certain skills that you could use to sustain yourself right compare that to modern poverty where you have this large swath of people who are dependent who are mechanical parts in a system that they cannot fully understand comprehend and control for themselves with this you know whole uh industrial revolution where you take this process of making a chair for example and you break it up into a bunch of different steps and each person that step only knows how to do one thing but they don't know how to do the entire thing

um right like the poor today versus the poor of yesteryear the latter still had these skills for subsistence and many of today's poor particularly the urban poor because i know the rural poor a lot of them still sustain themselves still practice um you know sustenance subsistence farming that kind of thing but particularly the urban poor they don't even have like a lot of those skills to rely on to even sustain themselves on that level uh for the urbanists in the audience you might appreciate that ivan also talks about the dominance of cars and how they've created this radical monopoly over land, turning our urban environments into the domain of cars, which not only compromises the environment for pedestrians and cyclists, but also disrupts our innate mobility as human beings. Steven takes it a step further, right?

And this particular opinion of his is a bit shaky for me uh so it's something i've been letting stew in my brain a little bit more um but let me just read the quote the radical monopoly cars establish is destructive in a special way cars create distance speedy vehicles of all kinds render space scarce they drive wedges of highways into populated areas and then extort tolls on the bridge over the remoteness between people that was manufactured for their sake this monopoly over land turns space into car fodder it destroys the environment for feet and bicycles even if places and buses could run as non-polluting even if planes and buses could run as non-polluting non-depleting

public services their inhuman velocities would degrade man's innate mobility and force him to spend more time for the sake of travel i'm sure he could pick up on why that particular opinion is a bit cheeky right yeah it's not just anti-car he's also a bit anti-plane and bus um to be fair i'm also anti-bus but like planes i don't know like are they great for the environment no do you sometimes need to go to another continent yes yeah yeah yeah so he is um he probably reads like r slash f cars and he's like uh y'all don't take it far enough liberals but yeah um so i highly recommend reading the actual book in full for further insight and context and i do want to dig into his thoughts on it further in the future but

you know food for thought let me know what you think of those inhuman velocities um but anyway memes aside i think the benefit of Ivan's critique of the radical monopoly is that it provides a different perspective, right? It sheds light on the negative consequences of excessive specialization, technocratic control, and the prioritization of speed and efficiency over human well-being. Zoe B on YouTube actually has a really great video on the idea of efficiency as this ultimate moral good so i recommend checking that out especially since the standard narrative that we are utterly bombarded by is that all these things are uncontroversially good right what i appreciate about ivan and his ideas is that they challenge us to reconsider our relationship with systems tools and institutions and he encourages us to strive for more balanced and convivial society

and what does that convivial society look like to him well let's continue Ivan's solution argues for the development of new accessible and user-friendly instruments that would allow average citizens to regain practical knowledge and reclaim control over their lives as well as resist the domination of specialized elites that's why Ivan Illich's book tools for conviviality is sponsored by Skillshare all right i know that was a bad joke um ivan believed that society should be organized to serve the needs and aspirations of individuals rather than creating systems that limit their potential and autonomy and so for ivan conviviality here we society in which individuals had the power to shape their own lives free from excessive dependence on institutionalized systems. He envisioned a world where people had access to convivial tools, simple, user-friendly technologies that empowered them to take control of their own destinies.

For example, the dominant education system separates learners from the real world and disempowers them. Ivan advocates for a more self-directed and community-based education where people could pursue knowledge and skills according to their own interests and needs. Ivan also critiques the over-reliance on medical professionals and called for a shift towards a more participatory model of healthcare that gives individuals access to information and resources that allow them to actively participate in their own health decisions, rather than being these passive recipients of medical interventions. In transportation systems, he also advocates for more human-scale

and community-oriented transportation alternatives. He envisions neighborhoods designed for walking and biking, which would foster social interactions and reduce the environmental impact of excessive motorized transport. In essence, Ivan viewed conviviality as a transformative concept that aimed to restore individual agency and personal connections and a sense of empowerment in society. He challenged the prevailing structures and systems that limited human potential and proposed more participatory, community-driven alternatives. his ideas continue to inspire discussions on how we can create a convivial society that values human relationships, self-determination, and a shared responsibility for shaping our own lives. What I found particularly interesting in researching this was learning that the book's vision of tools that would be developed and maintained by a community of users

that actually had significant influence on the first developers of the personal computer mind-blowing i know um most notably one of the great first developers of the pc lee felsenstein lee felsenstein um he and several others were just were inspired by this idea uh within the book. Because remember, Ivan is writing this before the internet. And they go and they take this idea and then they make the internet, or they make the personal computer. Because computers existed prior to the personal computer,

but they weren't as accessible. They weren't a tool of conviviality, whereas the personal computer of today is. And I just think that's beautiful and amazing. But Ivan's ideas did more than just shape the course of human history. He also would shape the creation of a convivialist movement. In 2010, eight years after Ivan died and 37 years after Ivan published Tools for Conviviality, Raymond de Boisvert published Convivialism, a philosophical manifesto. And in it,

Boisvert begins by discussing the key theme in Michael Pollan's books, The Botany of Desire, which is a great read, by the way, and The Omnivore's Dilemma, which I haven't read yet. great read by the way and the omnivore's dilemma which i haven't read yet but the key theme is co-evolution right the first book humorously suggests that plants manipulate humans to co-evolve with them taking care of their needs in exchange for nutrition or beauty and the second book the omnivore's dilemma the importance of interconnected components for a vibrant farm is emphasized, with corn serving as an example of a plant that relies on humans for survival. Boisvert proposes that focusing on the prefix co- in coevolution can have philosophical implications, similar to William James' emphasis on the preposition with.

emphasis on the preposition with by you know examining the significance of these prepositions cool calm con or cool as well as sin the author argues for a philosophy that recognizes omnipresent interconnection michael pollan's books do this well uh in the context of food but boisvert wants to take um this the implications of this uh taken preposition seriously into a rearrangement of philosophy itself and now we're getting you know kind of heavy right as Boisvert argues philosophers have often neglected the significance of interconnected relationships while farmers recognize the significance of interconnected relationships while farmers recognize the importance of interconnectedness you know how things like land and water and stuff all work together um modern philosophy on the other hand according to barbier since the renaissance has been focused on these self-standing and independent entities

not interconnected entities i don't know how true this is because i i'm not uh i didn't study philosophy but i'm just um communicating boive's arguments here right um and so the idea of autonomy in modern philosophy, according to Boisvert, seemed to exclude the with factor in existence, relegating relations and interconnections to a secondary role. So, Boisvert is saying is that philosophy is taught on this foundation that we are autonomous and self-sufficient first, right? And then everything else comes after. You know, Rousseau, for example,

portrayed an idyllic existence where connections, independencies were viewed as these impositions. You know, we went from being autonomous to being stuck in this web of interdependencies. And then as a result, coming out of that, the philosophical idea of liberation for some ended up returning, for some meant returning to this original state

of authenticity and disengagement from connections. The concept of freedom itself became something that was anti-interdependency. And so the focus shifted away from this idea of humans being inherently interdependent. But then this alternative point of view came about, right? And this shift coincided with the introduction of the term symbiosis in biology which combined the greek word for life with the

preposition with and the concept of symbiosis um found its way eventually into everyday language and discourse so that's the greek term symbiosis then we go to the latin term conviviality meaning with living and that long predated you know science and philosophy used to describe just ordinary experiences and so to avoid getting lost into the philosopher's favorite pastime of, you know, navigating various words and all their baggage. To boil it down to its simplicity, Boisvert is seeking to ask what a convivialist turn in philosophy might look like and what changes in philosophy might be taking place. And what changes in philosophy might be taking place. For one.

He's concerned with how. Embracing trivialism might change. Our understanding of metaphysics. Right. By embracing this metaphor. Of existence. As. About the relation. And conjunction between components.

About the interplay and interconnectedness of various elements, rather than about a collection of separate units, you end up going from this position of isolation to this position of profound interrelation. And then you begin to focus on the interactions between people rather than just the experiences within people in the sphere of philosophical anthropology Boisvert argues that a convivial turn would mean redefining humanity. You know, taking this concept that, you know, we're not just these purely logical and calculating beings.

We are homo sapiens. And the term sapiens is derived from the Latin word for tasting, which highlights the human capacity to constantly try and test, to constantly experiment, to actively participate in interactions with our surroundings so in this convivial turn we return to the original definition of the name we gave ourselves right as tasters as flexible educable subject investigation and improvement uh constantly testing and experimenting and seeing what is best in specific contexts

um seeing the taste as sapiens as homo sapiens taste is inherently pluralistic because there is no universal taste there is no single taste that is like oh this is the taste everybody must adhere to this taste everybody has a different taste we talk about that when we talk about taste and i think the implications are particularly profound uh when we bring it into the preferent of this sphere of preferent of politics right where as tasters as experimenters we are looking for ways to prefigure um new social relations and institutions and relationships and structures and systems for the future in the here now and that requires

tasting that requires experimentation that requires an acceptance of pluralism because everyone has a different taste and everyone's going to bring something different to the table and that's beautiful and then also in the field of epistemology the confivulous perspective challenges the opposition between subject and object in understanding reality. It rejects the idea of the mind as a mere mirror reflecting reality or projecting potent conceptual schemes onto reality. Because convivialism is about how the intermediaries, the facilities or interactions, how they affect the way that we perceive and reflect on reality itself it also requires us to let go of this subject object dichotomy in our pursuit of knowledge and understanding which itself has implications on even the field of science because you know the idea of the scientist in the popular imagination is, you know,

the subject who is whatever that scientist is studying, that is the object. But convivialism causes us to pause and reflect on how that subject, that object, and how intermediaries between them affect their perception of each other, affect the subject, the scientist's ability to pursue knowledge and understanding, and affect the objects, if the object is a person, to do the same. And finally, Boisvert digs into the rigid division between nature and culture and how the convivialist perspective challenges that

the continuous interactions and transformations that occur in existence makes it problematic to consider the divisions between human societies between human societies and the ecosystems that surround them as fundamental aspects of existence right the boundary between

nature and culture is one that constantly blues it it is difficult to place, particularly when there's an embrace by certain cultures of that interconnectedness and interdependence between their culture and the nature that surrounds them. And then when you see that blurring of lines between culture and nature, you might also recognize a blurring of lines between human and nature you might also recognize a blurring of lines between human and non-human in the context of community the idea of community being an exclusively human domain becomes less apt i suppose as i recognize the way that non-humans influence and affect and engage and interact with humans in this, you know, collectivity.

We use terms like community and city and society and stuff to refer to the human aspects of interaction. refer to the human aspects of interaction and we use things like ecosystem and biome to emphasize non-human aspects of interaction but the interactions between humans animals plants and inanimate entities do not always slot so neatly into that metaphysical description of reality of course we use these divisions for certain specific research purposes we say oh i'm a sociologist i'm an anthropologist i'm a biologist an ecologist etc but we can't forget that convivialism conviviality asks us not to forget that those are human impositions that we should not let obscure our ability to make sense of reality as a whole i know things got really heady there um i hope that everything i said made sense um and if you need a breather or some time to pause

and reflect further on the implications on this simple, cute, fun to say little Latin word, conviviality, we're going to take a pause here. But next time, you can join us as we discuss

how people have gone from this term to Urge's ideas, to Boisvert's philosophical implications, to more recent manifestos of the convivial movement, and how they can relate to degrowth and beyond. degrowth, and beyond. You can find me on youtube.com slash andrewism and you can support me on patreon.com slash stdrew. Once again, I'm Andrew, joined by Mia, and this is It Could Happen Here. 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 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.

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. names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like

identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to part two of Conviviality. What is it? What are people thinking about it? How is this funky Latin word changing and evolving and turning into an entire movement? And how is it affecting other movements? Last time we spoke about the idea of country reality, you know, which is essentially good vibes.

Fun, happy, chill, cool interactions between people, you know, living well together and enjoying life in the company of others, making sure people are included and welcome so they can relax and have a great experience. We spoke about the illest multi-hyphenate that is Ivan Illich. We spoke about the philosophical foundations that are being built around conviviality and what those implications have been on metaphysics and

philosophical anthropology and epistemology and more. And so now we're going to get into the actual movement. So the first manifesto was published by the center for global cooperation research in 2014 it discusses some of our current threats including global warming and its consequences ecosystem degradation nuclear disaster risk resource scarcity poverty wealth disparities political disintegration interstate conflicts terrorism insecurity criminal networks influencers speculative finance and politics blah blah blah, blah, blah. You know, you know the drill.

If you're in this space, everything sucks. It could happen here. That's the name of the show, et cetera. The central challenge is that we could drive ourselves to extinction right now

if we don't turn this car around and we could take most of the world with us. This particular manifesto is just asking four basic questions and their considerations and what we should consider about them right for one the moral question what may individuals legitimately aspire to and where must they draw the line and the manifesto answers with considering

that every individual has a legitimate aspiration to be treated with equal dignity to have access to the necessary material conditions for their vision of a good life or considering other perspectives and participate meaningfully in political life and decision-making. However, individuals must also avoid exceeding bounds and succumbing to this infantile desire for power and control which jeopardizes social cohesion and the principle of common humanity. What that means is that we need to actively be combating corruption, refusing to engage in actions that compromise personal values

of personal gain, opposing the corruption of others to the extent of one's ability to encourage, fighting hierarchy. I mean, the manifesto doesn't say anything about fighting hierarchy,

which I think is a fault of the manifesto. But I think for Anarchist reading it, the implications are pretty clear. And that's what I have to do with a lot of the stuff I read, you know, like read between the lines and pick up the points that the author missed. And so that's the moral consideration, right? What should we aspire to?

Where must we draw the line? We aspire to be intrigued with equal dignity, having access to decision-making power, having a good life by having access to material conditions met, and we try to avoid exceeding boundaries, our social boundaries, and we should try to avoid exceeding social boundaries related to hierarchy and control and power. The second question is political. It asks us, which are the legitimate political communities? So the manifesto argues that the establishment of a single world state in the near future is unlikely, and a political organization will continue to be based on a plurality of states. And that, I think, demonstrates the limitations of this manifesto's imagination of confivulism.

That's what happens when you have this clearly radical idea and you try to squeeze the radical idea into a fundamentally unradical and status quo idea as nation states um but let me not excessively editorialize i'm just presenting this movement and what its proponents have been arguing. According to their perspective, states and political institutions are considered legitimate only if they uphold principles such as common humanity, common sociality, individuation, and managed conflict. To me, that's wishful thinking but i digress legitimate states and it pains me to even say this but again i'm just communicating i'm just communicating what the manifesto argues the legitimate states extend rights beyond civil and political rights to encompass economic social

cultural and environmental rights. They ensure a minimum income for the poorest citizens while also implementing a maximum income to prevent excessive wealth accumulation. Legitimate states maintain a balance between private, common, collective, and public goods and promote associational activities within a global civil society. They view digital networks as tools for democratization and treat them as commons, fostering openness, free access, impartiality, and sharing. And they also revive the tradition of public service

and prioritize the preservation of existing common goods while promoting the development of new common goods for the benefit of humanity again it goes without saying i take issue with this investment in states i think a lot of their goals are noble uh if not if they were not so tied down by this investment in the state structure. Because from Anika's perspective, many of these ideas are not compatible with the structure of a state. And even theoretically, even hypothetically, if a state were to implement all of these changes

where people had full participatory uh involvement in decision making where the where the hierarchies were flattened and where everyone had free access and open access and there were commons and all this la-di-da some anarchists not every but some anarchists wouldn't even consider that to be a state anymore but let's just get into the weeds of anarchist discourse and we're moving on um the third question that the manifesto ask is an ecological question which is what we may take from nature and which is what we must take from nature which is what we may take from nature and what we must give back and the manifesto asks us to consider that human beings should no longer see themselves

as owners and masters of nature but rather as interconnected with it right to ensure ecological justice and preserve a well-managed natural heritage for future generations humans must establish a relationship with nature based on giving back as much or more than they take the manifesto argues that the level of material prosperity that can be sustainably extended to the entire planet is roughly comparable to the average wealth of the wealthiest countries in the 1970s and that wealthier nations must bear the responsibility to reduce their demand on nature relative to 1970s standards even as they maintain their current quality of life.

Priorities of this manifesto include reducing CO2 emissions, emphasizing renewable energy sources, over nuclear and fossil fuels, and shifting away from viewing animals as mere resources for industry. The principles of gift and interdependence should thus guide relationships with animals and the earth as a whole. Lastly, the first manifesto leaves us with an economic question, which is how much material wealth may we produce, and how should we go about producing it if we had to remain true to the answers given to the moral political and ecological questions manifesto asks us to consider there is no proven connection between monetary or

material wealth and happiness which promotes the need then to explore alternative forms of prosperity beyond economic growth as you could see earlier on we're making those connections to the idea of degrowth more on that later and so this calls for a plural economy that balances the market the public sector and social solidarity economy based on the nature of goods and services involved again their perspective but while the market and profitability are legitimate they must align with principles of common humanity social cohesion and ecological considerations and by addressing the issues of the financial economy such as rent terrorism and speculation through strict regulation oversight market restrictions and elimination of tax havens humanity can tap into a broader

spectrum of riches beyond economic and material wealth including fulfillment derived from duty solidarity enjoyment and creativity in various domains which of course highlights the importance of creativity and meaningful relationships with others as an essential component of a prosperous society, even if not materially or monetarily prosperous. The manifesto goes on to define convivialism, the term that they use to describe all those elements and existing systems of belief that help us identify principles for enabling human beings simultaneously to compete and cooperate with one another with a shared concern to safeguard the world and the full knowledge that we form part of that world and that its natural resources are finite.

When it comes to convivialism, it's crucial for us to hold on certain principles that can guide us in managing conflict prioritizing cooperation while being mindful of the limitations posed by scarce resources recognizing respect not to interview points and doctrines opening the door to engaging dialogue and praise to these perspectives and being open to questioning and growth all of that this manifesto sees as essential to the idea of convivial itself it even goes on to propose convivialist policies right you know the minimum maximum income protecting natural resources through various reforms and regulations tackling unemployment promoting reduced working hours supporting the growth of the associationist economy of course i feel that's where the manifesto falls short but i do appreciate um the some of the ideas that it introduces or that it expounds upon. I may not appreciate all of the answers to the questions

that it raises, but I appreciate it raising those questions, even if I might have slightly different answers to them. The thesis of this manifesto seems to be that a different kind of world is not just possible, but crucial and urgently necessary. I don't like that it doesn't call out capitalism sufficiently or really at all. Yeah, it seems to have an overly cozy relationship with the state too, which is not the greatest. Not cool. They do say, quote,

there will clearly be as many perhaps conflicting permutations of convivialism as there are of buddhism islam christianity judaism liberalism socialism communism etc not least because convivialism in no way invalidates these so fair enough in a sense i appreciate that they can accept that their particular interpretation is not the only one that there can be. I'm sure by this particular passage, they mean that there will be socialist orientations of convivialism and liberal orientations of convivialism and Christian orientations of convivialism and etc. Because they don't see convivialism as incompatible with any of them i think i might take some issue with i guess not refining convivialism further i appreciate that

they themselves didn't refine it because you know they're clearly quite liberal but i think that convivialism as an idea is something that needs to be uh I think that Contrary to this idea is something that needs to be distilled further because when you have this sort of

free-for-all everybody and everything goes approach to the ideology I think it opens up a lot of room for states and corporations

and NGOs to kind of slip in there and be like, oh, look at us. We are going to add confivialism to our constitution and that kind of thing. It's like, then they go and everyone applauds and like, wow, XYZ government just added confivialism to their constitution. Three cheers for them. wow, XYZ government just added convivialism to their constitution. Three cheers for them. And then the government just continues doing what it usually was doing before it added convivialism to its constitution. You know, it's like with the whole, I spoke about this in my Buen Vivir podcast episode.

It's kind of like a situation with Yasuni ITT, right? Ecuadorian government was like, we are going to protect this forest. We're not going to drill for oil in this forest, even though it has a bunch of oil in this forest, over $6 billion worth of oil in this forest. We're just going to ask the international community for like 3.6 billion of that oil.

And once you all pay that, we're not going to drill the oil. And we want to set this precedent for other countries to follow and yada yada. And we added a point of view to our constitution and all that cash money, right? But then they got like $200 million worth of pledges. And then they were like, actually, no, we're still going to do it, even though we didn't get all the money. And then a year later, they're like, nah, we're still going to do it, even though we didn't get all the money. And then a year later, they're like, nah, we're not going to do it anymore. And then a couple of years after that,

they started drilling in the national park. And then a couple of years after that, they started drilling even further, even closer to indigenous territories within the park. So, you know, that's like I caught up in the fluffy words of states and corporations. Yeah, there was a version of this that happened in Bolivia where they did a very similar thing.

And then within half a decade, riot police were storming the offices of one of the giant indigenous confederations. So it's, you know. Yeah, I mean, keep in mind, a lot of what states do, a lot of politicians do is just PR. Right. And I think a lot of people are able to recognize that when it's happening in their own country.

But due to ignorance, perhaps, of other countries, they see a politician doing the same thing in another country. And they're like, wow, why can't we be more like them? And it's like, well, yeah, to yeah to be fair you know there are politicians and governments that are doing better than other politicians and governments and i'm not gonna like blind my eye to that but yeah you know at the end of the day they're still politicians they're still governments they're still doing their pr putting out their best image, putting out their best foot forward to hold on to whatever power they have. Yeah, and with both Ecuador and Bolivia too, it's like, well, okay,

if you want your politicians to have PR like that, you too can block every single road in your country and start starving your capital out. Like, this is a... Yeah, yeah. These politicians do not descend from the heavens. They are the product of a combination of material conditions and social forces.

So get better social forces. Exactly. Exactly. That's, that's the, that's our elevator pitch for anarchism, by the way. But I did say there were two manifestos, right?

So what about the second manifesto, right? Confivialist Manifesto No. 2. Published by the Confivialist International in 2020. Ooh, recent. And they define confivialism as a comprehensive philosophy that encompasses humanist, civic, and political principles aimed at fostering harmonious coexistence in the modern era, emphasizing the importance of living together and outlining normative principles to guide that endeavor. The second manifesto of convivialism emphasizes the need for a new political philosophy

to challenge neoliberalism and address global issues pause this idea of um this is something that you see a lot particularly in that sort of ngo space right a lot of not radical organizations and movements will speak about challenging neoliberalism and it could usually tell because they specify neoliberalism they don't say capitalism they're not anti-capitalist they're just anti-neoliberalism which in itself is not radical because neoliberalism in itself is just a recent permutation of capitalism. Yeah, and I should point out, like, as bad as neoliberalism is,

like, there are forms of capitalism that are worse than it. Yeah, of course. See, as evidence, World War II. Yeah. Yeah. I just wanted to put that on the record. Yeah. I just wanted to put that

on the record for all. Just a little note. Yeah. Yeah. But just for the sake of people's own ability to scrutinize information and scrutinize movements,

it's an interesting trick of the language because by rallying against neoliberalism, they're able to like bring in a lot of the anti-capitalist people into the mix and draw from that crowd. But a lot of these movements are not themselves anti-capitalist.

And, you know, if you want something more than a nicer capitalism, that is something to keep in mind. Even if you were, and even if, you know, you take part in the movement, nothing wrong with that. Still something to keep in mind even if you were and even if you know you take part in the movement um nothing wrong with that still something to keep in mind uh so the second manifesto it also highlights the interconnectedness of young people's concerns about climate change and environmental degradation uh talks about the struggles of those seeking freedom from dictatorships or those being forced to migrate. And it aims to offer an alternative vision for a post-neoliberal world by promoting shared values and a sense of agency.

Furious intellectuals, activists, writers, and artists are all committed to this collective project with the aim of creating this globally shared vision for the future, that is more inclusive and more participatory. The manifesto, the second manifesto, like the first one, talks about the post-World War II growth in principles like human rights and the shift in capitalism towards speculative and rentier practices. It talks about the decline of liberal democracies

and the rise of illiberal democratures. And it speaks about resentment growing from past colonial domination and radical movements, including Al-Qaeda, reflecting that animosity again like the previous uh manifesto talks about ecological threats like global warming and air pollution uh oceanic pollution accumulation of plastic waste nuclear disasters weakening ecosystems rise unemployment job displacement, wealth inequality, lack of regulation for transnational companies,

political fragmentation, terrorism, all that fun stuff. And this time, the second manifesto outlines five principles to form the basis of policies or ethics or organizational actions right common naturality common humanity common sociality legitimate individuation and creative opposition these principles emphasize one the interconnectedness of humans with nature. Two, the importance of respecting the shared humanity of all individuals. Three, the value of social relationships. Four, the need for individuals to develop the individuality while respecting others. And five, the recognition of peaceful rivalry for the common good.

common good these principles are meant to be guided by the imperative of hubris control which promotes cooperation and prevents the desire for power and excess a manifesto also emphasizes the importance of balancing these principles to avoid their potential negative consequences one of the things that the manifesto is really trying to get at in particular and the reason that it even establishes this imperative for hubris control is because it argues that ideologies focus primarily on satisfying material needs and overlook the crucial role of recognition and desire and that by reducing politics to the fulfillment of needs ideologies fail to address the problem of limiting the desire for power and control to me it just seems like um the people who wrote this manifesto

aren't familiar with anarchism and anarchism's centuries long confrontation with power control and the desire for it that has altered the course of various human societies but i digress um manifesto instead points to religions as playing the historical role of trying to religions as playing the historical role of trying to curb our desire for power and control that seems to me like a very poor argument considering the history of religion but the point that the manifesto is trying to make is that modern democratic discourses struggle to restrain limitless desire and often reproduce the hubris of the aim to combat and so the role of a contrivialist movement then should be in part on persuading individuals to renounce the desire for dominance and

reinforce the principles of common humanity, sociality, naturality, legitimate innovation, and creative opposition. Again, I don't think that the direction people are taking convivialism is radical enough because I think it leaves room for it to fall into existing structures. I mean, the manifesto even talks about creating

a convivialist party to reignite hope in liberal democracy. Yeah, and I also want to just point out the sort of like, just how weak of a position it is to, you know, have one of your goals be to just convince individual people to want less power. be just to convince individual people to want less power like I think that's just just sort of boldly anti-structural as a prescription

yeah but I mean I guess that's something that I've come to expect from certain milieus right a lack of engagement with structural domination and how structures inform how individuals behave you know like yes individuals act within structures but i think

people vastly underestimate structural incentives like it's not just about oh if you get rid of this bad person from a position of power and of this bad person from a position of power and put this good person in a position of power then everything will be hunky-dory like nah they're still they're still like you still haven't confronted the way that that structure that position incentivizes certain behavior but like i said before i'm an anarchist i take what i like i leave what i don't't they also say in the manifesto that confivilism belongs to nobody so I've decided that

you know my version of confivilism is not going to be this watered down watercress salad kind of pithy weak limp-wristed

take on you know world-aling structural change lastly um i didn't want to touch on because i did say i would um this significant role that conviviality has played in the degrowth movement particularly highlighted in texts like degrowth a vocabulary for a new era um inspired by evan's ideas confluviality and degrowth has referred me into a society that values joyful sobriety responsible consumption and the use of limited tools that are emancipatory and responsive to human needs the ideas that evan uh outlined in Tools for Conviviality,

which I spoke about in the first part of this two-parter, is considered part of the intellectual roots of degrowth as an idea itself. And conviviality is often discussed in relation to technologies, including digital technologies, and

how technology is suitable to a degrowth society must be convivial. One particular tool has been developed for self-assessment, political education, research and learning with convivial principles and that is the Matrix for Convivial Technology or MCT. And the Matrix for Convivial Technology or MCT and the Matrix

for Convivial Technology is to go with a very basic definition a normative schema that fosters discussion concerning deep growth technologies in context of political education

the MCT is meant for us to reflect on the dimensions of the materials we use in technologies and how we produce those technologies, how we use those technologies, how those technologies fit into the infrastructure, how accessible they are, how interactive they are with the environment, how adaptable they are in changing circumstances,

and much more, how appropriate they are, and much more. But beyond the MCT, conviviality is also being used in the degrowth space to describe public spaces, goods, conservation movements, and even humans within degrowth literature. Transitioning to a convivial society is considered to be one of the core objectives of the degrowth movement, one of the core objectives of the degrowth movement one of the core shifts that need to take place for us for us to degrow as a society and so that's the long and short of it uh the configurist manifesto configurism and conviviality as ideas how how they've changed and been adapted and how people have been building

on the ideas they're in, in the sphere of philosophy and politics and education and technology and more. Food for thought. I hope you appreciated this brief exploration. As I like to say at the end of my videos, and I consider it particularly apt here in the context of conviviality and conviviality technology is all power to all the people.

Once again, you could find me, Andrew, on youtube.com slash andrewism and support me on patreon.com slash stdrew. And as usual, this has been It Could Happen Here, where things happen. We talk about stuff. Peace.

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