It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 97

Episode Date: August 26, 2023

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Introduction, always the worst part of a podcast. Maybe that could just be our intro uh hi mir how are you we're doing a podcast uh i've been fide the the chess world has decided that my chess powers are too strong and i'm now i'm now being discriminated against it's a good time i'm very excited yeah having a great time with my biological advantage at chess yeah that's right well you know you got to reach those uh those chess pieces somehow uh and it's all to do with your hip angle uh this is what i've learned from trans investigators my my my wrists are too powerful this allows me to write down my moves faster than my opponent, thus giving me an advantage on the clock. I can also reach the clock faster.

It's incredible stuff happening in the world of chess. And not just chess, sadly. But in fact, the TERFs have got their claws, I guess, into many sports, which is what we are talking about today. Specifically, I thought we could talk about how the turfs ruined cycling yeah because that is a thing they have been trying to do for some time uh it's a thing i've written about before and hopefully a thing i'll be able to write about again uh unless unless the cycling press just kind of gives itself over to the turfs which doesn't seem to have done to be fair generally generally the cycling press just kind of gives itself over to the turfs, which it doesn't seem to have done, to be fair.

Generally, the cycling press, I think it's fair to say, has lacked an intersectional analysis of anything. But they've been better on this than I had expected, especially the outlets, which are not run by white cishet dudes in Boulder, which, to be fair, is a minority. But yeah, strange that. that odd how odd um but yeah shout out in particular to outside for including a gear guide to the gear the cops used at the 2016

rnc uh which could perhaps be included as the most tone deaf article ever written um yeah yeah incredibly and and then to leave it up in 2020 to not like cover your tracks you know this is one of those this is one of those like when the workers take boulder like no biker will go hungry moments like this is oh oh yeah boulder colorado is a special place for bad things i won't say bad things to happen because i had an awful mass shooting but uh like social uh yeah intersection analysis has not made it to boulder sadly um great great shame but we're not talking about boulder uh today we're starting out with a little discussion of cyclocross so cyclocross are you familiar with cyclocross, Mia? No. Okay, so it's a fundamentally silly sport in which I've competed, of course. It's when competitors race skinny-tied drop bar bikes on an off-road course.

For it? Yeah. I would... Please Google... Perhaps... Okay, I'm going to send you one cyclocross video uh it is iconic uh for people who are who are at home uh the video is called is joey okay we can we can have me reacting live uh the the first picture that i saw when when i googled this is two people not riding on their

two people carrying their bikes yes so this is a thing right you get really good at cycling you train your entire life and then uh and then in cyclocross there are parts where you have to get off unless you're very talented you can hop the barriers um i've tried that with mixed success um uh you can also you can ride the stairs uh but you you do have to be a bit of a boss so there are barriers and challenges which you have to get off it's called field riding in dutch which is about right basically riding have you watched the video holy shit we'll include a link in the notes for everyone else uh but it's it did you watch it with the

sound on yeah i okay i'm trying to figure out how to describe this effectively what has happened is this guy okay so this guy's like going at full speed and then while the bike is still moving he's attempting to get off the bike before he gets to this barrier and he like he just goes he does not get off in time the bike's going too fast and he like he is he's like sprawling but in mid-air as he's flying off his bike over this barricade thing it is it is incredible yeah all the time people are shouting his name and that's what you're supposed to do you're supposed to dismount and just carry the speed you kind of you can either swing your leg through or throw your leg to the outside and then carry the speed and jump and then hop back on it's

a very strange sport right and a big part of cyclocross is heckling um so uh the the crowd will heckle you right they will they'll do all kinds of things like often like crowd hand-ups are a big thing in cyclocross so like i've been handed dollar bills what is happening in the sport oh yeah it's very funny the moment you're not competitive you're just grabbing shit off the spectators so like uh like i remember racing in las vegas at night there was a race in las vegas at night and uh i ain't gonna win right like and so i'm just grabbing dollar bills and shoving them down my like people hand you like drinks i've had beer hand ups donuts bacon uh one notable occasion a cookie

that was not just a normal cookie uh which you should fucking disclose to someone uh before you yeah that was a bad day uh i also had a pretty rough traumatic brain injury that day oh no yeah i'd already sustained a brain injury then ate the cookie i thought my blood sugar was low so it was like yeah i'm gonna get that cookie and it's gonna be great it was not it wasn't the blood sugar that was affected my cognition so cyclocross is fun and silly and heckling is part of it but like heckling occurs within a certain certain bounds right like you're not supposed to be mean it's just supposed to be funny like everyone's supposed to laugh so i think in 2021 everyone was rather as funny signs a part of it too right but in 2021

we saw some shit that was distinctly not funny uh when a group called save women's sport posted up at the race and held what were as you can probably guess by the name, transphobic signs throughout the race. So a lot of people were upset by this. And by their own admission, nobody wanted them there. One woman told the protesters, your shit feminism isn't welcome here. Which I think would be a great t-shirt. If she's listening, please, we'll license your t-shirt from you. And they were pretty roundly rejected by most of the community which is great um but the bigotry they bought

really wasn't a surprise to anyone who'd been paying attention to online discourse for a while especially with respect to cycling the harassment of trans cyclists has been escalating for years um for at least five or six years now, the governing body USA Cycling has known about this and chosen to do nothing to stop it. So this particular focus on cycling came about in 2018 when anti-trans cadres began to focus on the sport because of the success of a woman named Veronica Ivy. She wasn't called Veronica Ivy at they at the time and she was using she had a different name then uh but that's her name now so i'm going to use that name out of respect for her choice for that to be her name um it she um she won a world championship in the women's 35 to 44 spring category now like i have no disrespect at all for masters athletes it's

great i'm glad people are out there exercising this is not the same as an olympic gold medal right like uh the the big i would i mean people may disagree the biggest determinant of your ability to win a master's track cycling gold medal is the amount of free time you have to exercise and the amount of money you have to buy fast gear and get to the event right wait what what what is like the difference between like masters is it's competitions for older people so uh it's it's so in cycling you have juniors and there are various you know obviously the eight-year-olds don't compete with 18 year olds but up to 18 is juniors espoirs is 18 to 23 uh we use a french name because you know you want to be cool what what

is what it's what jesus christ yeah yeah the french name uh under 23 right you can call it if you want it to be an anglophile uh and then uh from there you go into the elite competition uh elite competition is uh it's actually 18 and for like an 18 year old could compete in an elite competition so could a 50 year old right but it's the highest level of competition and then you get protected age categories again once you get to 35 so so 35 to 44 45 to 54 going 10 year blocks right um and that's for people who uh are only of that age now it's the older you get the less competitive it gets just because more people will fewer people will be racing right but um 35 plus masters sometimes they call it baby masters is um not you don't

have a significant decrease in your endurance performance at 35 so like some of these people are still very good and uh that's why they call it baby masters i guess but like track cycling is not a big sport to begin with right that's going around in circles on an indoor velodrome masters track cycling it's a smaller sport and the amount i know some excellent masters track cyclists who just don't care to go to worlds right they've been professional cyclists are very high level amateur cyclists and once you reach your mid-40s some people don't care to travel and spend that money and do that competition, right? San Diego has a really great track scene. Some people who I know very well have recently won multiple world championships on the track. Like we have a very thriving scene,

but not all of those people even care to go to la to race worlds like let alone travel across the world right so it doesn't necessarily truly mean the people who win masters are the best athletes in the world for their age group and uh certainly i wouldn't say there are lots of things that make this competition unfair one of them is how much track bikes cost how much track time costs and how much travel costs to get to the event but of course it didn't matter to these people right uh what mattered is that a trans woman had won and she became the center of the culture war um and this was really at least the first one that i was aware of um sort of instance of someone a trans person winning a very like a notable event in cycling. And maybe trans people have been competing in elite races in cycling for 40 years.

Like Wally Cameron was the first trans woman to race in a World Cup. And Monty's been racing for a while. And no one said shit. No one cared, right? But around 2018, the culture war around trans people was becoming heightened and so people got mad about her winning the race and since then there's been

this steady increase in transphobic sentiment towards bike racers um it's really the sort of leading voice in this has been former pro bike racer inga thompson and she's been joined by a few amateur women in various fields voicing their feelings about the participation of trans women. And Thompson has made a lot of statements, some of which I'll choose not to share with you. You can Google them if you want,

but most of them will be, like she misgenders people all the time, right? That's what you can find her on Twitter, misgendering people. And I think that that is kind of the giveaway that this isn't necessarily about sport right and i think yeah that it's really important that people regardless of where you stand on sport understand that this is a wedge and it's a wedge that's designed to push trans people out and away from femininity and away from inclusion yeah I think one of the reasons why it's important is that it it's a way of like focusing the discourse

like on trans people on like really really weird interpretations of physical characteristics yeah and then this is something that you can use to sort of like you know this this is the wedge that you can use to sort of like tear this sort of issue open it's been really really effective at this and it's also been like you know it's something that's sort of like vaguely plausible to not plausibly deniable and it also plays on a really kind of effective branding strategy that that these people had which is that like you know if people remember what feminism was like in like the 2010s it was almost entirely about you know and not just in the 2010s like even sort of previous to this right like the the the notion that like women are weaker than men was something that was like

like broadly considered to be sexist like that was not a feminist thing that was right like saying women are weaker than men and then you know you're when you're getting into people complaining about like like trans women like being on jeopardy or like this shit that's happening in chess that we're going to talk about later it's like okay like if you go back in time to before sort of trans derangement syndrome set in like and you told someone that in the future this person is going to be arguing that like like like trans women have a biological advantage in jeopardy because men are smarter than women they'd be like what the fuck are you talking about like this person is like a neo-nazi yeah it's or that women are only defined by their ability to bear children right and and that yeah that is your sole characteristic and value as a woman like

yeah and like like this is and this is something that you know if you go back to like simone be before god i hate french it's really a true it's a truly terrible language. Yeah, that is the official stance of this podcast. Anti-French action. Yeah. Always has been. You actually read the second sex, and the second sex is talking about, literally, her famous line, no one is born a woman, a woman is made. it's it's it's it's a social process not a biological one and then you know and and but because there was like a kind of cultural victory for feminism where it suddenly became really really difficult to be a mainstream person and

like call yourself uh like call yourself an anti-feminist like all of these people who believe all of the same shit that like phyllis schlafly did like have to relabel themselves feminists and yeah you know and sports is the sports the thing they pick to do that because sports is the like it's the area they can pick where they can like with some plausible deniability start doing all of this like oh women are inherently weaker than men and have to be protected from men like shit again yeah yeah and it's just it's very much sort of like unreconstructed stuff that we would have seen as not feminist that 10 20 years ago now sadly it's being advanced by people laying claim to feminism i guess yeah so in the most recent cycle crosslocross Nationals, trans athlete Austin Killips finished third. At the event, local John Brown gun club members

had attended to step in and protect trans athletes where the sports governing body wouldn't. And it was actually a really, I mean, what you saw was a lot of discourse online about Austin, quote unquote, blocking a cis woman athlete. And then you saw like a lot of people sort of saying that and like cis women had been uh i guess like you know that austin's inherent biological advantage i'm using heavy scare quotes here had allowed her to come third she got beaten by two two cis girls

right this is always the thing like there was one of these in skateboarding where this TERF skateboarder was yelling about how she'd been beaten by a trans woman and you look at the results and she was getting beaten by eight. She lost to an eight-year-old. She was outplaced by an eight-year-old. Like, shut the fuck up. It's all just bullshit. And a lot of the discourse about Austin, quote-unquote,

blocking someone, like like I don't know but it to me it very clearly seemed to come from people who hadn't watched many other bicycle competitions right like

that's what we do you push on each other you lean on each other like if you didn't do that people would fall over a whole lot more it's a race you're trying to get

to the finish line first but she didn't do anything that anyone else wouldn't have done and at the time Turfs kind of tried to make this a big deal but were unsuccessful and it was not really until austin won a race in new mexico a big race tour of the healer um that it became again like like it was in 2018 a very big deal right um so one of the key leaders as i said is inga thompson inga is a very accomplished cyclist there's no doubt about that right

she's a bicycling hall of fame inductee five-time national champion three-time olympic team member a tour de france feminine podium finisher a three-time silver medalist at the uci world championships but i think she's arguably more famous now for her anti-trans bigotry um she's appeared she tried to encourage cyclists to take a knee uh in protest at the uci's transgender inclusion yeah which like fox fox news finally finds something that they're okay yeah right first player stating an E for. Yeah. Yeah, finally. She was actually removed from her role on the board of a France-based American pro team for her statements there.

I thought that their statement was kind of interesting. They said, if shared in the absence of politics, her knowledge and experience would benefit many in advanced cycling for everyone. However, she has decided to dedicate her time to excluding people that otherwise currently eligible to compete in uci events she is also tempted to use our team as a platform for political activity which like is a very neutral stance but it's also it's also like

it's fine right like our cycling team isn't here to hate trans people if you're going to use it for hating trans people please go somewhere else like it it doesn't you don't have to like i do take a hugely radical stance to be like no this isn't a hate platform for hate speech like like go away yeah and uh that they added to be clear miss thompson is entitled to her opinions and advocacy but her methods and personal attacks are inconsistent with Siniska's mission to advance opportunities for women. These methods, well documented on Ms. Thompson's social media presence, include dehumanization of transgender people, spreading misinformation,

demagoguery, and personal attacks on anyone who opposes her views. Spoiler alert, that includes me. She doesn't like me at all. Don't be mean to trans people uh don't misgender my friends uh so i did think it was very funny that like this team isn't like the uh like i don't know like the woke team for woke people they're just trying to get along with helping women cycle and they can't do that if they're one of their board members is so consumed by hate that yeah no no one wants to have anything to do with it um

so in the wake of this protest the 2021 safe women's sport protest uh flin lettered uh they're an official with usa cycling published an open letter calling for the resignation of the organization's ceo um and the safe sport coordinator kelsey erickson who's responsible for preventing hate speech and bullying they gather 105 signatures from racers and other cyclists in support of their demands and the day after they sent the letter De Martini announced he was stepping down so he has a bit of a failure of just like there's a statement he made in an interview where he said it would be different if our athletes were going to be affected when he was talking about bans for trans athletes in interscholastic sports uh he said we don't believe they will be which uh look in technical in a

technical sense because cyclists compete for clubs not schools they might not have done but like if you think that a ban on trans kids playing at school isn't going to affect participation of trans athletes in all sports everywhere yeah if you're just either completely myopic or you're burying your bigotry um he claimed he was quoted out of context uh but it was part of a pretty big block quote like i don't see how that could be taken out of context um they did say at that time that they're against any legislation that limits trans inclusion. It's worth pointing out that cycling has a body as to all Olympic sports

that should prevent hate speech, bigotry and bullying, right? And that's called Safe Sport. Set up in 2017 and that was following what happened at USA Gymnastics, right? Which was widespread sexual abuse of athletes.

People I'm sure, will remember that. SafeSport, I feel fairly confident in saying, has completely failed in preventing abuse, preventing harassment, preventing bullying. What it has done is perhaps given a legal shield to governing bodies, so it has prevented them getting sued but it's done nothing to prevent this kind of bullying which is why athletes and the community have had to take it upon themselves to do that right like if there's one thing you should expect a governing body to do to make sure everyone feels safe at races but people were legitimately worried about racing in areas where they knew there were a lot of not just turfs but like groups like the proud boys right who have kind of hung their hat on transphobia i know

people who didn't go to races in areas where they were worried about that um i know people who like you know it went out of went to an effort every day to drive a different way back to their hotel at races because they're worried about like like people genuinely felt unsafe doing something that no one should feel unsafe doing which is playing um so uh as i said you know who won't make you feel unsafe i i i'm gonna say the products and services and then i'm gonna um they will wrap you up in a cocoon like blanket of gold and coins and meal kits how could you not feel so safe uh when you're surrounded by reagan coins no one fact check this this is. This is a fact-check-free zone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The following and preceding 30 seconds

have not been fact-checked. All right, please enjoy these adverts. And we are back, and we're still talking about TERFs. So, Saints Women's Sports, which is this organization that put on the protest, presents itself as an organic reaction

to the participation of trans women, who it repeatedly misgenders, in women's categories. It claimed that several races in the cycle across national championships privately contacted the organization to express concerns, but only one, Evie Edwards, competed under the SWF team banner. SWS at the time was not a non-profit, so it was relatively hard to find out what exactly their financial ties to various other transphobic

and right-wing groups were. It's registered in Minnesota as a business, but it appears to be a sole, or at the time, again, it was a sole prop run by someone called Beth Stelzer. Both Evie Edwards and SWS used the race to aggressively fundraise for their campaign.

Stelzer, for instance, at the time was making $385 per month on Patreon by, quote, creating awareness of males invading female spaces. Her page has been taken down since then. She turfed too close to the sun. She also received donations on her Venmo page, which is very funny, because I don't think she realized her Venmo page was public. I checked it out.

Oh no. Yeah. That there is no, there, there, there was no distinction made between, uh, advocacy spending and personal spending on that account,

I will say. And, uh, she was taking advocacy donations and, uh, you know, making emoji purchases, uh,

on, on her Venmo at the time, i think maybe since has made it private but this is something that like if you ever want to just like i don't know if someone just like appears in the news and they suck like go try to find them on venmo because people just don't realize that stuff and oh yeah you know people like people recently caught uh like i think we talked about uh clarence thomas i think it was clarence thomas like people amazing paying his staffers on venmo like you can find a bunch of very funny stuff because people people are bad at doing crime now yeah i cannot tell you how many people uh literally uh had things on their venmo like travel to dc and like on january

6th right like yeah venmoing each other for like revolution tacos after they debated the capital smart stuff and no no please keep doing that uh if you're if you're planning transphobia or coups uh so much of this awareness that safe women sports awareness like i think if you're ever donating to someone who's promoting quote-unquote awareness of anything there should be a large red flag uh it's an extremely nebulous concept that very rarely does anything to help anyone uh but much this awareness seemed to be tied to pretty standard right-wing anti-trans talking points. And not the many, dozens, maybe hundreds of instances where trans and cis women happily compete alongside each other, have a nice time, do exercise, go home, and don't engage in any bigotry. In the past, SWS has worked with far-right organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Family Research Council to prepare a guide to quote help parents understand the transgender issue again if you're framing the existence of other people as an issue uh yeah you

you're not that far from framing it as a question are you yeah yeah like i'm impressed that self awareness avoided the transgender question but like only by you know, using the thesaurus to reframe it as an issue, I guess. The guide refers to the transgender trend, quote unquote, and repeatedly calls trans women men. They, of course, also, you know, Stelzer in particular appears at anti-abortion rallies, anti-marriage equality rallies, things like that, right? This is part of a wider space of hate and bigotry.

It's not just about sport. Cyclists have taken it upon themselves to protect trans riders. So actions of solidarity have ranged from blocking SWS protesters at national championships, announcers allegedly refusing to mention racers on the SWS team. That's pretty funny.

Yeah, it is pretty funny. Also, Mollyeron has this organization called ride um which is let trans kids ride uh like and uh molly makes these wristbands it's like a trans flag the trans pride flag um and uh like one of my friends won the biggest race in the u.s uh he's this guy uh with his trans pride wristband on which is you know a little thing but also like it's it's nice to see people show up like yeah it's it's nice to see and like it's rare that you'll go to a race and people won't be you won't see a few people wearing that like in pro men pro women you know both like it's there are overwhelmingly people don't give a fuck they're just happy if you're

enjoying riding bikes it's not like it's a big sport uh you know the real threat to cycling is all of us getting killed by people in teslas playing pong like it's not uh it's not trans women um but unfortunately the solidarity hasn't extended to the governing body so two years after this initial protest, right, the UCI effectively banned all trans women from participating in elite level cycling. This happened just a few weeks before the world championships. Like I have friends who had to cancel their flights.

Jesus Christ. Yeah, it was the most bungled, fucked up pseudoscience kind of half-assed. Like it was just a mess the whole thing was a fucking mess they had an extraordinary meeting in august just a few weeks before the world championships and like people previously had to have a to have a submit blood numbers to show a testosterone level to compete right which is a thing lots of governing bodies have been doing for a while now uh they had certified

people like weeks before this they'd be like yeah you're good to go for another year and then psych no you're not you can't compete ever again and like this is people's jobs right this is their livelihood it's how they pay rent it's also like being an elite cyclist is hard it is most of your life right like you're you gotta sleep or got to sleep or you got to eat, right? You got to train all the fucking time. You can't go out. Uh, you're going to be resting when you're not training to take all that away from someone with a click of the fingers and bringing no consultation for them. It's incredibly cruel. Um, the UCI, I'll just read their statement. Cause I think there's a couple of things in it we should pick apart. Obviously, can't take

warning for it being inherently transphobic. From now on, female transgender athletes who have transitioned after, quote, male puberty will be prohibited from participating in women's events on the UCI international calendar in all categories in the various disciplines. Notably, they also said, it's also

impossible to rule out the possibility that biomechanical factors such as the shape and arrangement of the bones in their limbs may constitute a lasting advantage for female transgender athletes what yeah it's uh yeah there's a lot going on there right like uh they um they use female uh where most people would use woman the barrier they set is to rule out any possibility of an advantage right which is a very high barrier that's like uh a kind of guilty until proven innocent situation right like also like the arrangement of the bones in my limbs changed significantly when i was racing bikes because i broke them all the fucking time uh like such a

strange category to choose also this that you transition before puberty, that's not the same as taking puberty blockers, right? They're requiring that you're taking hormones before puberty, like 11 or 12. Yeah, which is also now illegal in an enormous number of states. Yeah, and even most, from what I understand, most gender-affirming care takes the approach of taking puberty blockers rather than... Yeah.

Well, and this is sort of like... I mean, this is sort of the disaster that's been happening in the last four or five years on this, which is that taking puberty blockers was the compromise position. Yes. That was the position that was taken because people thought it was too dangerous to like let kids do HRT, which it's not like it's completely fine. In fact, it's actually like, you know, you're going to go through puberty anyways, right? You're like, like if you are in a human body, you are doing uncontrolled puberty and that is less safe than doing a controlled puberty, which what you know doing like doing hr2 when you are a child is yeah but yeah my position was like oh well we're not we're gonna do this we'll do puberty blockers and then like everyone went insane about puberty blockers and now like even the compromise position's been sort of like you know i mean like right it really did away with that and it's like okay like you know and then like and then you know

like now and then having done this right and it's like oh well now you can set up all of these rules that are like require you to have done a thing you've now made illegal it's like this is great so yeah exactly right you now have a rule that basically bans almost anyone from participation like uh you have to begin transitioning at 11 uh it's also very nebulous like male puberty like what does that mean what what point are you defining you have been through male puberty like are we going to ask people to submit their fucking testosterone numbers from when they were eight like yeah like what like it's it's just a man it's what it is right like it is you can't ever transition satisfactorily enough.

Yeah, or like, for example, I don't know. So, like, let's say you are on, like, let's say you don't start hormones until you're, like, 24, but you've rearranged the bones in your body. Does this allow you? You now have feminine bone arrangement. Does this now allow you to cycle gender affirming orthopedic surgery yeah and like um also this and i want to get into this a little bit because

it completely uh obfuscates or ignores i guess what, what we know to be true, that there is not a binary puberty process because humans don't exist in a binary sex, nor do they exist in binary genders, right? So I think probably the best example of this would be Maria Jose Martinez Patiño. If people aren't familiar with her, obviously, Google is right there for you uh but uh she was dismissed from the spanish olympic team in 1986 for failing the gender test she's publicly shamed for for being like a secret male she loses her fiancee she loses her funding she loses almost everything uh she fought and won a successful court battle uh illustrating the fallacy of this binary gender approach but she's not a trans woman to be clear she's an intersex woman who has androgen insensitivity syndrome uh but she was able to

they were using chromosome typing right like like you'll often this is a thing that you'll still see turf trotting out right something that was outdated in 1986 um that that like xx or xy that that is that is that is not a binary that that fits the entirety of the human species yeah there's like a lot of people with a lot of other different kinds yeah mosaicism and like it's again like i get it you didn't you're not a biologist that's fine it's okay to shut the fuck up if you don't understand something um yeah this is this is one of those things that sucks because it's like i i wish these people had decided to like try to build airplanes based off of like pre-newtonian something because it's like like there's no consequence for them for not understanding biology but it's like i don't know

like it like if you if you if you're trying to argue that like general relativity doesn't exist like your your like your satellite is gonna fall on you but this this is the one thing where you can just like, you can say shit that it's not even like, like people make the joke, it's like high school biology. It's like, it's not. It's just like elementary school biology. Yeah, it's preschool biology.

Like YouTube biology, isn't it? That's what it is. Yeah, yeah. Yes, exactly. Yeah, but unfortunately the consequences are for people who are not them. Yeah. And that's hugely unfortunate right like even we see like carlos emenya won a court case this month or last

month like allowing her to compete again uh like we found time and again that this notion of a binary sex is as nonsensical as a notion of a binary gender and yet we continue to try and force people into these different competitions and i just want to read a statement that austin made and like it's very hard not to see this as them specifically seeing austin winning a big stage race in new mexico and going like right we can't fucking have that like as soon as trans women win stuff right it's fine if they come and don't win but as soon as they win stuff stuff, right? It's fine if they come and don't win, but as soon as they win stuff. And again, if she had this inherent massive biological advantage,

she would have won everything, which hasn't happened. She said, I'm devastated by the UCI decision to renege on the policy and framework they had previously set out for inclusion. My journey in professional racing has allowed me to see the world, build lifelong friendships,

and most importantly, give my absolute all to something I find deeply fulfilling. No one should be denied the opportunity to chase that same joy that I and others have found through racing. Which I think is great. And I think it's important

to lift up her voice in this and other trans-athlete voices. In theory, there is what's called an open category, which is the men's category uh the problem is that there are no open races uh and that uh this category like if you line up as a trans woman in the fucking open category you're being very clearly othered right yeah you're being like you're some of them also will have women's licenses like it's not clear what men's category they can race in um but it more importantly i think as chris mosier pointed out people will

be familiar as chris is the first trans athlete to attend olympic trials in the u.s um the open category contradicts both international olympic committee guidelines on fairness and inclusion and extensive research that states trans women do not have an inherent advantage in sport. Chris is a good follow on Twitter. It's the Chris Mosier. But it contradicts even, like, the IOC, again, not like on the bastions of wokeness, people who sent the Olympics to the Nazis

have a better policy than this. And yet cycling has chosen to go above and beyond and in large part i can't not see that as because of the attention paid to this by people who do not give a fuck about cycling yeah because they found a wedge and because our community has generally been inclusive like even after this at the world championships there were people with trans flags of course you know like it went world championships which trans women could not compete advocating for inclusion right it was in glasgow and as a rule the sport i think has been accepting like i've never cycled not known there being trans people in cycling. And I've cycled a lot.

But this has allowed trans people to thrive. And when trans people started thriving, these fucking bigots decided to make this a wedge issue. And that's why it's happening here. But it's also fucking happening in chess. So do you want to talk about chess, man? Yeah, this is insane. Okay, the weird part about the chess one is like,

I don't know. I had, this is not something that anyone in chess was like talking about. Like chess has like a lot of incredibly weird and bizarre political stuff going on. But like there, I had, I don't know. Maybe I just missed it or maybe it was just like a part of the chess discourse I wasn't following. But I don't know. It really, truly, weirdly, just seemingly out of nowhere. I don't know what is going on with this.

Seemingly out of nowhere, FIDE, which is the International Chess Federation, released this statement, released this policy that says that it has a lot of weird stuff it effectively sets up fide as like what i can only describe as a gender council where like if you want to like change your gender you have to like submit it to fide and then fide gets to decide what gender you are so great great things happening here and then also for some reason um okay so chess has had this thing for a while where chess has like there are like women's sections for stuff and there's a lot of some weird stuff going on here so like there's the regular title like grandmaster there's also like a woman's grandmaster thing which has different qualifications slightly different and this was this was set up basically because like the guys who play chess are insane like i've talked about this some of the bobby

fisher episodes right like they're like most of the most famous chess players in history are like utterly deranged neo-nazis or like like people who are even weirder than neo-nazis like like like on unreconstructed like 1917 czarists like people like that like just people with with like truly truly deeply weird political ideologies that are like unbelievably right wing um and you know and like part of part of what like happens here is that like just chess in general is like unfathomably sexist like it's it's really really bad um and you know like the the solution to this effectively was like to create this like kind of parallel like women's infrastructure which kind of worked and kind of hasn't in a lot of ways and you know like part of what's going on

is just like okay so a lot of girls like young girls play chess um but there's this bottleneck that happens around when you're like 13 or 14 well this is like 12 to 13 so that's 14 where like the number of girls playing chess just like collapses right and the reason that happens is because boys are fucking dog shit like this is this is like literally what's happening right is like you have a bunch of sexist like really sexist boys and then the product of this is that because there's so many fewer like women who play chess and there are many play chess, like there's just like, for example, like there's way less like women who are like really high rated chess players. And that's because there's just like, like the barrier of institutional sexism to like become a woman who's really good at chess is so high. And then, yeah.

Okay. So this is the sort of background so like there are these separate like women's like tournaments and stuff like that and so fide which is the chess federation released this thing where okay so they say a few things. One is that... The big one is that if you are a trans woman, you cannot play in official FIDE events for women until FIDE does something, and it's not entirely clear what that is.

So is it like a testosterone level you have to submit? Literally, I'm just going to read this sentence because it's utterly unclear what is going on here. In the event that the gender was changed from male to female, the player has no right to participate in official FIDE events for women until FIDE's decision is made. Such decision should be based on further analysis and shall be taken by the FIDE council at the earliest possible time, but no longer than within a two-year period.

So you could be out for two years. Wait, why? What the fuck like what what what what like what what are they possibly like analyzing here right like i i i is it is it like like what what what what what it what is supposed to be the thing that differentiates like the genders that like lets you that makes you not be able to compete in the women's category? Is it like if you play too aggressively or some shit? It's baffling.

Yeah, that is a bizarre decision. Yeah, like you say, it's not even like they're not... It's not an Olympic sport, right? It's not like they have to conform to any IOC guidelines. No, FIDE is the chess cartel, right? They can do whatever they want. right it's not like they have to conform to any ioc guidelines it's fucking sandy yeah fide is the chess cartel right like they can do whatever they want

yeah i mean like i i know expecting fide to do stuff that isn't insane is like look like this is the organization that after uh i that after bobby fisher went on the radio in the philippines and said that he hopes that the government like rounds up all Jewish people and kills them, like they let him back into FIDE after that. So like, you know, great organization run by amazing people here. Yeah, but this is, I don't know. It's incredibly deeply weird. i don't know it's it's incredibly deeply weird like i the the thing i keep thinking about is i don't know this is kind of a weird kind of silly story in some ways but like so like the first trans person that i was like aware of uh was a trans starcraft 2 player named scarlet and she's great she's awesome scarlet rules uh she actually she she she's she's one of three non-korean players ever to win a tournament in korea

which like i i i don't know how to express how difficult it is to win a starcraft tournament in korea like it would be like if a football team from like siberia showed up to the US was somehow allowed to play in the NFL and then like won the Super Bowl. Like that's about the level of difficulty it is to win a Starcraft tournament in Korea. Yeah. It's a Jamaican bobsleigh team moment. Yeah. Yeah. But like, yeah.

So like, you know, it's one of those sort of like really wild things. But like one of the things I remember about that was like she was always as best i could tell like always allowed like starcraft also had a women's division because you know very very similar like probably even more intense sort of sex oh yes yeah yeah sure i can see that being pretty toxic you know and like like yeah like it was actually you know over the arc of like the like the like over a decade she's been playing like i you know like i've seen the scene get less transphobic but like as best i could tell there was never like a thing in the women's tournaments they were always just like yeah sure hey look a girl wants to play starcraft like this rips and yeah yeah

yeah that makes uh one more of us like yeah yeah like you know and she's also like and she's like again really really good at the game um but like you know but like like this is the thing that like historically hasn't i don't know like like jenny wiley like in in, like this is a thing that like historically hasn't. I don't know, like like Jenny Winely, like in in games like this that are like not. Well, OK, Starcraft is enormously more athletic than chess. But like, yeah, like, you know, like this has been a thing where people like. There's. If you're in one of these like incredibly sexist environments there's like a a real like

really obvious like both trans women and cis women like we're all in this together thing because you get a look at like the fucking ravening hordes of like absolutely deranged psychos in like the twitch chat and be like oh god they hate both of us yeah yeah which is also like i i i think the other thing about this is like it's unclear like who at fide like decided this like this doc just like appeared and so there's like a non-zero chance this decision is being made by men like pretty high this is just like a decision made by a bunch of men because fuck them and they've just decided that like you know after just like literally not giving a shit about women's chess for like the entirety of its existence they've finally decided to do something and

do something is uh make me not be able to play in women's tournaments it's like right yeah you didn't take action when bobby fisher went full nazi but you decided to uh yeah it's like okay this is great great great things are happening i don't know yeah uh talking of nazis there was a it was i think actually a uh a again a non-bind or like an intersex woman who competed for the nazis in 1936 at the olympics yeah uh with uh i'm not entirely sure uh of her um like uh like external gender external sex presentation i guess uh but later definitely served as a man in the german armed forces but that could have been a forced social transition uh but yeah there's a long history of us trying to work out gender shit through sport um and i guess i just want to finish by like if you don't give a shit about sport you

have to understand this is still important and because like sports are always about like who's on our team and who's not right that's why we didn't let black people play baseball in this fucking country uh it's why they took uh like olympic medals away from indigenous people for violating stupid amateurism rules because they were designed to only let people of a certain class pay um it's why uh colin kathmick doesn't have a job right yeah that's why people didn't want to go to the Nazi Olympics and went to one in Barcelona and it was bigger. Like, sport's not just about being the best at exercising.

It's a social tool to include or exclude people. And if you care about including people, then I think you have to care about sport right now because that is the wedge that transphobes are using to exclude people so yeah that's that's what i have for you i don't know um if you have money you can give it to molly uh molly cameron you can you can find her online and she will help more trans kids ride or uh yeah i don't know go go ride a bike it's fun and uh if if if you are one of the seven people in the world who still thinks that colin kaepernick doesn't have a job because he's not good enough

at football come fight come find me in the bears parking lot i will force you to watch an entire season of the chicago bears like like watch every quarterback we've ever fucking had in my lifetime and then i will beat you you will you will you will you you will be You will be in a catatonic state after that. I will be proven right. Molly's website is ridegroup.org if people want to check that out. Oh yeah, find Colin Kaepernick on the internet. Watch videos. Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo.

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but robert has been coming after me for not doing a total streak to start the podcast enough so that that's how we're starting this episode it could happen here the podcast where we take into no man's victory lap because yeah so if you've been following the the discourse about inflation over the past about two two and a half years um and especially in the last like maybe year or so uh some very interesting stuff has been happening and the stuff that we've talked about on this show and then also stuff that's been sort of moving around in in the sort of broader discourse and has now reached like the imf and the thing that's been happening is that uh the theory of inflation that i've that we've been pushing on this show and that also very importantly

i that has been being developed by strange matters has been like incredibly vindicated to the point of everyone else adopting it and then claiming that they invented it. So yeah, we're, this is, this is, this is the,

this is the inflation victory lab episode. And to talk about the fact that, that these two people and their colleagues were right about inflation and a bunch of other stuff too, is John Michael Cullan and Steve Mann, who are both co-editors of the magazine Strange Matters and yeah both of you two welcome to the show thanks thanks so much for having us

yeah and I'm excited about this because I've been wanting to do this episode for like ever since so the IMF tweeted out a graph that was arguing that like I think it was like 50% of inflation in the EU was based on corporate

profits which was like them basically and this is this is them and like all the mainstream economists are finally like having to admit that we were fucking right about inflation yeah so i guess before we get into what we were what what you two were arguing and what your colleagues are arguing we should talk a bit about like I guess who you two are and also like talk about Strange Matters again because I think it's been a bit since you all have been on. Yeah, absolutely. So Strange Matters is a – this is our kind of boilerplate, a magazine of new and unconventional thinking in economics, politics, and culture. And we have a political bent. So we are broadly speaking all some flavor of libertarian socialist is kind of the umbrella term that we've used for ourselves. But that varies depending on the individual kind of members

of the team. So we've got people who are anarchists, we've got people who are inspired by like democratic confederalism, we've got like people who don't like a lot of those labels, but are really into like direct democracy stuff. But like, you know, the, the, the four of us basically converge on the direct democracy. You know, socialism is putting people in charge of the decisions that affect them kind of school of things. the decisions that affect them kind of school of things. So in terms of our economics pages, however, we've for the last couple of years been really dedicated to publishing heterodox economists, economists who don't correspond to the usually quite right wing mainstream of the economics discipline, but challenge it in fundamental ways. And there's a bunch of

different schools of heterodox economics, like, you know, everyone knows about like Marxist, but there's also post Keynesians and ecological economics, feminist economics, and a whole bunch of different schools. We've been dedicated to publishing people from all those different schools and trying to kind of get them to write in a style that's more accessible for ordinary people so that some of those ideas actually start not just reaching the public but actually reaching each other because they don't really talk to each other very much. This is one of the big problems is like – I mean even just inside of Marxism. Like if you get six Marxists in the same room, you'll have nine different positions and they'll all be like ready to murder each other over it. ready to murder each other over it and that's that's just the marxists and then you expand out to all the rest of the other heterodox economist people and there's a lot of weird

and sort of pointless rivalries going on that prevents people from like fusing really useful theories together yeah absolutely yeah we tried to be a platform for diverging opinions to actually be put into dialogue with each other and we've definitely, I don't think there's been a single piece that all of us have been in lockstep agreement on, theoretically. And I think that's a real strength, actually. Yeah. Like, there's quite a few pieces

that at least one of us is like, I still don't really know about this thesis, but there have been times in which I've been down on a piece, but it does amazing, so let's go with it. And also, part of the reasoning for that is not just a kind of like loosey-goosey, know, climate change, the whole crisis that the democracies have been going through since the 2008 crisis, the whole, and since like the rise of global fascism in the 2010s, like the, what are we going to do about the these these horrible culture war uh type issues that like you know people talk about it as the culture war but actually it's these massive reconfigurations that we have to do of our consciousness in order to think about you know uh gender and national identity and ethnic identity and all these other things in different in new ways that are actually like freeing and emancipating and stuff like, like all of these problems are vast and nobody actually knows what the answer

is. And that includes leftists. Like there's a lot of these problems that are either like too technical or too complex for any one person to have the solution. So there needs to be a space where we kind of come together, people who are kind of like of good faith and who like are trying to kind of do the whole democracy and egalitarianism thing. And we actually butt our heads together across lines of difference. And they're like, okay, what are we going to do about this? And what are our different perspectives? And what's the common ground? And what are some little bits and pieces of things that people have figured out that we can kind of stitch together into

something that will let us not just get steamrolled by the fascists. And that's the kind of space that we're trying to be. And that's why we try to accommodate these different perspectives, even though we ourselves tend to come from rather strong perspectives, both individually and as a group. Yeah, well, and I think we can – this inflation sort of argument that's been playing over the past few years I think is a really – it's a really good indication of how well this stuff can work. If it's if it's like, you know, like. The fact that y'all have basically had the inflation theory that like a bunch of mainstream economists were going to stumble over in the last like eight months had effectively written. over in the last like eight months uh had effectively written we're discussing and we're writing it like two years ago is a is a sign that something is going right yeah we feel really

vindicated yeah it's it's been very very very funny to watch um so i guess we should move into a bit about what this theory actually is and the very very short version of it is that it's a supply chain uh theory of inflation it's a theory of inflation that tracks you know tracks price increases based on like like price movement based on stuff happening like backwards in the supply chain and yeah that turns out to have been a really useful both predictive thing and explanatory thing once the inflation actually started. Yeah. I just really wanted to highlight that it's Steve who wrote the initial essay where we first put those pieces together.

It's Steve's supply chain theory of inflation more than anybody else's. So I definitely, I defer to you in terms of laying the groundwork for it. Well, I wrote a piece called Notes Toward Ethereum Inflation, and it was kind of born partly out of frustration over the fuzzy language in which economists will try to speak about inflation. And when I was a grad student, I would encounter it, not just from any particular school, but from, broadly speaking, most of the schools of economics. from, broadly speaking, most of the schools of economics.

And prior to this inflationary episode and history, it's been almost 40 years since we've experienced anything like this. And in the last period of runaway inflation in the 80s, people were having a similar reckoning, although they didn't quite coalesce around supply chain and cost-push-related theories of inflation like they are this time. But in a nutshell, the supply chain theory of inflation is essentially saying that there are groups of businesses called supply chains who buy inputs from each other in order to produce products and sell them to either the next person in the chain or to outside consumers, like the end user. And over time, given stressful enough biophysical conditions that they all find themselves in, even if they don't want to raise prices.

And broadly speaking, we know from empirical studies that most businesses most of the time are very biased towards not raising prices. If the situation gets dire enough and they've exhausted all of their non-price-based mechanisms for dealing with bottlenecks, what are called bottlenecks in the supply chain. They just don't have enough of the inputs that they need in order to sell enough stuff at their normal price in order to make enough revenue to socially reproduce themselves in their supply chain.

Eventually, they will exhaust all options, and there will be one person who's kind of like the progenitor price increaser. Because every single and like what is inflation really it's a general rise in prices what are prices prices are things that people themselves inside of firms it's their job to set and so any theory of inflation needs to start with a theory of price essentially and like so these managers whose job it is to set prices when they change prices why did they do it well we have answers going back many decades almost

a century of of surveys of of economists who have gone out and actually conducted surveys asking under what conditions would you raise prices? And at no time did anyone say, oh, I raise prices because I looked at monetary aggregates and I saw that there was too much money. So I raise prices because of that. And so that was kind of a starting point for me. When I read these surveys conducted by Gardner Means, who was an economist and doing this work in the 20s and 30s

along with Edel Berle. I got really excited because I'm like, oh, of course, well, of course, it's inflation. There's so much mysticism about like piles of money building up and then it's like demand pull and cost push and like, what does this all mean, right?

Well, at the bottom of it, it's what are pricing managers doing when they make that fateful decision to be the first guy to to raise prices because there is one it has to start with someone and it's usually like i was saying they've they've exhausted all of their other methods of dealing with this such as rationing inputs or economizing like increasing their efficiency in their production or like diversifying their product lines and all of this stuff in order to maintain customer goodwill throughout a period of biophysical stress to the supply chain.

And they're just going to raise prices because they have to get a certain amount of revenue in order to make it as a business. So that's essentially what the supply chain theory is. It's that when that happens, it propagates along supply chains first. And then because nowadays our economy is so extremely integrated, it's not just one supply line. It's an entire supply chain network nowadays and it's global in scope. So if it it can it's it's increasingly less constrained to just like one industry or even one country these days that was a that was a beautiful explanation that's um that's probably the most concise uh that we've that we've accomplished yet at boiling it down i'll just because this is the

problem is that we could go on for like 30 minutes about this. Just this. I guess I have a couple of things to add that are just like digging out a couple of nuances that I think are important for listeners to understand. What Steve said about inflation being about a continuous general increase in prices is really, really profound. I think the first person to articulate that that I'm aware of is John K. Galbraith in an essay that he wrote about that in the 50s. But that's honestly not the way that we usually think of it, right? Usually we think that inflation is when money, the value of money goes down. Money buys you less than it usually does.

And that is not just because that's how we experience it in our pocketbooks. Everything else just got more expensive. It also has to do with the kind of history of theories of inflation. Because back in the day, the first OG theory of inflation, which people still, some of them believe in, is the quantity theory of money. And it basically envisions like the entire economic universe as a bunch of like atomized individual agents. And by the way, there's no like distinction between companies and households or anything like that here. Everyone's kind of like funny. Everyone's an individual agent, and there's a bunch of stuff that already exists out there in

the economy, how it was produced. I mean, you deal with that in a production function. Other than that, like you don't talk about it. So there's a bunch of existing stuff out there in the economy and it's scarce, right? So like, how is it going to be distributed? Well, we're trading the stuff that we have for the stuff that we need. And when things are more scarce, they're more valuable. Uh, when things are, uh, more abundant,

they're less valuable. Uh, and when we, and when we want them more, um, the, uh, they're more valuable.

We want them less. They're less valuable. So that's kind of like, like the, the, the very basic universe that they're kind of like operating in and money was just seen to be one, uh,

one good being traded like any other. It just so happens to be the one that we trade in exchange for everything else. So rather than, uh, doing barter, uh, like,

like of everything, you know, this many chickens for this amount of haircut, uh, you know, like, like instead it's like, you know,

we, we, we choose one thing to, to, to, to, to be exchangeable for everything else. But it still has a value, which is basically determined, according to this theory, by how much of it there is. So if you increase the money supply, money gets less valuable, which is why everything becomes more expensive. Prices go up. thing becomes more expensive. Prices go up. Whereas if the money supply shrinks, then the value of money is higher relative to the goods that it buys. So therefore, prices will go down.

This was a theory that was developed in like the 16th and 1700s to try to explain a massive global inflation that happened then in the so-called price revolution of the 17th century. And frankly, everyone by the 20th century knows that there's huge issues with this. So they start trying to evolve away from it, away from the quantity theory of money, because it has no real empirical basis. I mean, some people tried to kind of like, you know, juke the stats to make it look like there was. But like, really, our best estimates of the money supply have no real good correspondence to prices in the economy. It's not, it doesn't really work that way. So yeah, this is, this is the, the, the sort of modern version of this is called monetarism, which is like, that's right. Yeah. And this is

like, this is maybe the only thing I have ever seen, even like most neoclassical economists drop because it's empirically wrong like it's stunning like do you know how wrong something has to be for neoclassical economists to go wait hold on maybe this isn't right like i it's it's incredible but the problem is that they retreated into theories that are not necessarily right either. Perhaps groping their way clumsily towards the truth, but not really that right. So this is where all that pull and push stuff comes in. And it's a little too technical to get into. Steve's essay has the full version of it, but basically they started evolving away from a theory where the absolute amount of money

in the economy is what matters most and towards theories where, for example, it's the amount of money relative to the goods that can be bought by it. So if you have a bunch of people spending money to buy stuff, but there's not enough stuff to meet that demand, then that'll basically mean that there's like scarcity and shortages and things like that. And that'll cause prices to go up. Uh, although why they do like the underlying micro economics of why prices go up when there's shortages and stuff, this theory doesn't really address because it's a macro theory and it'll kind of like fall back on supply and demand stuff or various kind of weird hydraulic metaphors about like, well, God, I, yeah, yeah. So it doesn't really like, like, you know, different people will

have different versions of this that have totally different explanations of why it's happening. But they'll generally say, if you look at the economy as a whole, if the stuff that's being made is less than the orders being put in for it, then that causes inflation because you're just not producing enough stuff. And they call that demand pull because the pull of basically it's like demand pulling, you know, for, for stuff that isn't being produced. So it's like, okay, well that, that, that causes price rises. There was a parallel development where they're trying to get away from the QTM another way where some people were like, well, what's the most important single cost for businesses across the economy? And they say labor, obviously, right? Like everyone needs

to pay somebody to do wages to keep the business going. So they just said, okay, well, if the cost of labor goes up across the economy, then that'll cause prices to go up. So that's called cost push, which now theoretically this could be true of any cost. And this is kind of like where Steve's theory comes in is because it actually starts talking realistically about what the cost of businesses are. But originally this was, again, a macro theory. So they picked the one cost that's common to all the things in the economy. So they picked the one cost that's common to all the things in the economy, and they said that basically inflation is the cost of workers agitating for higher wages, which leads wages to go up, which causes cost push inflation. The costs go up, so that pushes – puts pressure down the supply chain because it's a cost for everybody downstream of it.

So then it causes it to – the prices to go up. Now, the problem with these theories is that, like, they're very, like, rigid. It's like it has one cause, and it's also like, you know, and it's this one thing, and it has to operate across the entire economy, right? But that's not actually how our economy is put together because our economy is not this general equilibrium produced by the trading of individual agents who are buying cheap and selling dear to each other. That whole universe doesn't really exist. The universe that we actually live in is one where businesses are not isolated. They're interdependent, right? Like the, the, you know, the, the, the people who collect sands, you know, from the earth and other minerals feed into the factories that turn it into glass, which feeds into the construction industry that puts those glass, uh, uh, well actually,

or I know, sorry, I missed a step there that, you know, it feeds into the factories that turn that glass into windows, which then feeds into the construction industry, which puts them into buildings that then feeds into like real estate conglomerates that rent it, which then feeds into businesses and households that live there. Right. Like that's the entire supply chain. Um, and all those businesses depend upon each other because they're each other's customers. So how much glass do they make in the, in the glass factory? It depends on how much, how many windows, the window factories that are all their customers order. That's what determines how much they're going to make. Um, you know, this whole picture of the

world as supply chains is common sense to anybody who actually like works a job. Uh, especially if they're like in a management position where they have to maybe be dealing with some of the supplier relations stuff, um, or customer relations stuff, uh, economists just don't talk about it. It's not really in their models because their models are developed from the ground up from this kind of like everybody's just trading as individuals perspective. And that's a great deal of the reason why Steve's theory is so powerful. Now, a lot of the supply chain picture that I'm painting, besides coming from the real world, it also came from a particular heterodox economist that I wrote a very long profile of called Frederick S.

Lee. Before we get into Lee, we unfortunately do need to take an ad break because capitalism, but do you know what Frederick Lee would have hated? And it's this ad break that we're about to do right now. All right. And we're back to talk about Frederick Lee, who was very cool and I'm very excited about. Yeah.

Well, unfortunately, sorry to disappoint. We're not going to talk a ton about him. The only really important thing. So he was, he was a great guy. He was an anarcho-syndicalist. He was a lifelong member of the IWW. He actually helped recover Joe Hill's ashes from the federal government and properly bury them. That's not in part one of my profile, which is published. It's in part two, which is coming up.

But in addition to that, he was also a great economic theorist. pieces of this alternative picture of the economy where, for example, prices are not this thing that allocates resources automatically through supply and demand and their price changes are telling us how much to produce and how much to consume, which is the kind of mainstream neoclassical picture. But rather, prices are a markup that businesses set themselves. They're not receiving it from the market. They set a price markup over their total cost of production, uh, to, in order to get the money that they need to keep the lights

on and stay in business. This all sounds very trivial. I know, but believe it or not in economics, this is like a revolutionary idea. So then it's like, okay, well, if that's the way that an individual company is, how are the companies linked together? He basically comes to – he doesn't call it this, but to a supply chain view of the economy, especially in his last textbook, which tries to create a model of the economy as a whole. And he says that the entire economy is basically just a circuit of supply chains. It's all the businesses sort of linked up together, forming a closed circuit that loops back on itself. And that is the economy that we use to produce the goods and services that just keep society going day to day, week to week, year to year. So Lee basically had all of that. And that was the main ingredient that we used. But it was Steve who then took that framework and used it to create a new theory of inflation. Because if you have a world of these supply chains, then it becomes very obvious that if prices are going to rise all across the economy, it's going to be because people's costs go up. So then the question becomes, why do people's costs go up? always what Steve called his progenitor price increase. This first guy who chooses to raise

his prices. If and only if that person is in a position in the supply chain where a bunch of people are downstream of them. And that tends to happen when, for example, an input that goes into the entire economy, like energy suddenly goes up in price or becomes scarce. Or it happens when a natural disaster causes disruptions in a couple of businesses that everybody else depends upon. Or when there's an adverse shift in the balance of payments, you know, the, the, let's say that the, the, the, the peso, you know, starts becoming, you know, versus the dollar, you know, the dollar becomes much more expensive. So imports become much more expensive. So any business that depends upon imports, you know, will suddenly, will suddenly have their costs go up. These are the kinds of events that

are like an external shock that leads to a rise in prices and key nodes in the supply chain that because so many people are connected to them as customers, their costs become more expensive. And these costs increase travel across particular supply chains. So you have to actually know how all the businesses are linked together so that you can identify what the origin of the stress was and see which particular supply chains is traveling down. It's not this like this thing that has to do with a single factor across the whole economy or this, or much less the amount of money that's being printed. The amount of money is almost like irrelevant in this situation, basically. I mean, it maybe has relevance in as much as like, you know, if people have the amount of money in their pockets that they have, usually they might start purchasing more things than can

be produced at this moment. But that's usually like, like usually it balances out in normal situations. The only reason why that would be true is because there was some kind of disruption upstream so that what's normally produced isn't being produced. And so you always have to look at the particular supply chains and the kinds of stress that they might have. Did I communicate that roughly right? Yeah. Yeah, that was a fantastic summary. I have like a few small notes just to add to it.

In the sort of survey of existing theories of inflation that I did in the paper that james c like very ably summarized for us um like specifically for the cost push guys um they i think they have a tendency to focus on like macro dynamic forces at work in the lens of cost push. Partly because it relies on high-profile fights between labor unions and companies that the audience already kind of understands. And it makes a lot of sense that you would go to union fights in particular, since one of the big items that they typically fight over is cost of living adjustments built into their wage increases and so that's like an obvious like okay if there was ever a time in which macrodemic forces would convene in to specifically to raise inflation it would probably be fought over like the Colas adjustments, cost-filling adjustments. And like the

that leaves so much of the story untold. Focusing on Colas adjustments in these union fights leaves so much of the story untold because it's putting like what's really this incredibly interdependent micro-based phenomenon onto

the backs of like one union against one uh company fighting over one contract and the way they make it work in like a lot a lot of the modern interpretations of cost push in this macro dynamic sense the way they they square the way they square how it gets from that fight to become a generalized inflationary episode, which is what people want to know about. Like, like they don't want to know about one. Well,

they, they want to know that politically about a union fight, but in terms of the economics, they want to know about the inflationary episode. The way they square that is that there's typically like, and what they call an information diffusional component to this to where, and that's a fancy way of saying people learn about the outcome of the fight and then replicate it monkey see monkey do yeah so one union fight or one or one company backlash against a union fight word gets out it spreads

and it's all over the place and that's's really like when you look at the economic history of the data of inflationary episodes, although there are union fights going on, inflation is not springing up specifically from those fights in the way that they're describing. Yeah. And I mean, one of the things you can tell this is obviously wrong is that they're just like at no point in the U. history has there ever been enough percentage of the US population who are in unions for this to mix to this to actually work. Like at no point, even if you would be really generous to them and only look at union density and like steel production, union density and stuff that are like an important part of the supply chain. Like it's just not enough people. like an important part of the supply chain. It's just not enough people. It literally cannot be true that it is purely a union cost adjustment thing

because there's just not enough people. Yeah. So in these models, one of the important tasks that they've given themselves is to estimate the coefficient of information diffusional content from these union fights. And so they will try to estimate that coefficient and thereby build a model that outputs

what price increase we can expect from labor militancy, if you're on the right wing, or company price gouging, if you're on the left wing. Yeah, and this is really just a perfect example, I think that Steve couldn't have possibly put it better, of the way that certain things that sound super sophisticated and intelligent uh because you know you can have like you know rather rather pink economists using this framework right like you know social democratic

ones um you know but the thing is that like it sounds really fancy to be talking about like the district what was it the informational informational communication coefficient or whatever. Like that sounds, that sounds incredibly sophisticated. Right. But like, actually what it is is that it's this kind of like nut. So story about how the reason why price rises happen across the economy is

because people are picking union fights when like empirically labor economists often do this, like, you know, the ones who work for unions and stuff, it's like it is almost always the case that wages lag cost of living significantly. So cost of living goes up, and that's why people at some point, usually years later, will try to, if they're organized, agitate for higher wages to catch up with cost of living. So like the causality of it, of cost push, you know, probably is not labor action. Like that's a sort of macro brain superstition. But funnily enough, this is kind of like the devil is in the details because cost push as a general framework ought to probably be the basis for any reasonable theory of inflation. Because the idea that it's costs going up, that then whatever prices are downstream of those costs also go up. That is probably true.

It's just that you have to look at particular supply chains and their costs and not just like their labor costs, but all the costs that they have and what cost in particular went up that affects those particular supply chains. Like that's, but that's a different story. And it's a story that looks more like Steve's and also a story that looks more like what's been going on in the world since 2020. my paper and subsequent papers that were on the same vein as this came out is saying that, oh, we're just conflate, like how are you guys really different than the cost push guys that you're critiquing for part of your paper? And it really comes down to this kind of macro brain, macro dynamic interpretation based on just wages or just like one union fight, and then some people see it and just copy it or something

and it's just it leaves so much of the story untold yeah i mean i like i think i think this is like the strength of looking at it through a supply chain it's like you can have it it you know it has the what like for what for a normal person is a really simple idea but for an economist it's like unbelievably galaxy brain absolutely impossible to comprehend idea that something can have multiple causes at the same time and those multiple like those those you you can't literally just reduce an entire like thing that's happening to exactly one driver which you know you would think would be a pretty like not that controversial thing but then economists can't tell the difference between

a theory in which you can have multiple different things that are working on a supply chain and a theory where you can have like a thing yeah yeah exactly yeah so like in in the covet inflation that was that transpired just after the first of these pieces of ours came out like it wasn't into full swing anyway in terms of in terms of being like a national phenomenon until just after like they're yes they're they're there's a beginning of a labor militancy upsurge happily but does like some people tried to line like the the people who were predicting no inflation but then we started to see a little bit of it started to attribute it to this uh like macro dynamic cost push story eventually of like well either like but you can you can tell that they are kind of hedging because there will be there's like a bifurcation of interpretations of

it like one is the like it's it really is just uh you can tell it's not that strong of a theory because there are two like diametrically opposed interpretations saying that, oh, here's this corporate price gouging? Or it's workers causing inflation themselves, which, like James, he was saying, there's a lag typically associated that workers are just trying to catch up with the prices that were being raised by firms in order to keep up with inflation they generate. the prices that were being raised by firms in order to keep up with inflation they generate. Yeah. If, if actually, if we could talk more, um, I, I was, I was hoping that I could actually get into, um, the COVID inflation and it's cost us a little bit, if that's okay with folks, because I, not only because it's important in itself, but because I think this was actually one of our first successes as a magazine. So we launched as a magazine in, um, April, I think it was a 2022, but we'd been working on the magazine from like 2020 on. Um, so like it was March of 2020. The, the that's right.

But, um, but, um, we'd been working on the magazine all through like 2020 and 2021. Uh, and, uh, and 20 and, and the thing is that, uh, that Steve's piece, uh, was kind of like taking shape and, you know, we as editors, but then also as people who were like helping with the research and talking things out internally and talking with other people outside the collective, we're all kind of like sort of imbibing it and thinking about it when COVID hit. Right. And one of the things that was rather magical, and there is written evidence of this, funnily enough, not as an article because the magazine didn't exist yet, but as a Twitter thread

that I made actually on March 3rd of 2021. And the reason I'm being so specific about dates is because of what happened. Where we, and I was just summarizing basically conversations that we had been having inside the magazine internally. You know, that was when some of the news stories were starting to come out about shortages that were being caused by COVID. So most famously, the chips shortage, where semiconductors, which take like a year to make, like from the moment that the order is put in to the moment when the thing is actually shipped, it's like a year. And if that process is disrupted, you have to start from the beginning.

So the shutdowns in China shut down semiconductor production. And actually, I say China, but it was really China and Taiwan, like because, because both the both of those places have major chips companies. And the that basically screwed up chips production for like, as long as the shutdown happened, and then after that, at a lag of like a year, at least. And then that in turn caused a bunch of other shortages. The fact that we were all inside meant that like, there was a huge problem in food, both in agriculture itself, and in food processing factories, you know, where the raw products that we take out of the earth are turned into the packaged, you know, bits and bobs that,

you know, go to restaurants or to, or to, you know, food product factories and things like that. Like you couldn't get people to work there. Or if they did, you know,

and, and you tried to like pay the measure or whatever, they would get sick. So they would stop production. So there was a labor shortage in agriculture as well. Then there was a container shortage, right? In shipping, where we weren't producing enough containers to actually ship stuff around the world. And if you can't do that, well, everything is made, everything that somebody needs to make something is often now

made in another country, or at least another part of a country, you know, that's connected by trucks. So if there's no containers, how do you get stuff from one place to the other? And the answer is that you don't. So they were just piling up like mountains in the docks of various countries, including here on the West Coast and the East Coast. So all of these shortages caused by the pandemic basically were hitting key sectors of the economy, right? That everybody depends upon. So transportation, everybody needs it. You know, semiconductors, a whole bunch of manufacturing needs it. So that's why cars suddenly got super expensive

is because the chips in the machines that make the cars got more expensive and not just expensive, but scarce. Like you just couldn't get them. And then food, everybody depends on. And, you know, like everybody buys groceries, restaurants need it. So restaurant prices went up. So you can see how specific sectors having these problems traveled down specific supply chains to produce the cost increases that we

all started seeing. But here's the thing. All that stuff was happening from 2020 on. happening from 2020 on. I did this thread on March 3rd of 2021. But the thing is that at that point, there was not yet inflation. We predicted that there was going to be inflation. And there was a lot of people, like including left wingers, including heterodox economists who got really angry about this, because for them, inflation fear-mongering, you know, this was in the context of the government printing out all the STEMI checks, right? So inflation, fear-mongering for them is kind of like something that a right-winger would do, you know, by saying the government's printing too much money, so there's going to be inflation, you know, quantity theory of money stuff, Milton Friedman stuff, the stuff that they

had experienced in the turn to neoliberalism from the 70s to the 80s, right? I understand that fear. But the thing is, this wasn't fear mongering. These shortages, for very clear reasons that were clear, if you had the supply chain theory of inflation framework, which unfortunately only we did because we hadn't published it yet, like, you know, it was very clear that these shortages were going to cause cost increases in very well linked together, you know, nodes within supply chains that were going to travel down those supply chains and basically be economy-wide. So I said so because I had a hunch that it was going to be true and that it would be a big deal if it was true for validating these discussions that we were having internally. So I said some predictions. One, there's going to be inflation in internally. So I said, some predictions.

One, there's going to be inflation in the next year or two, potentially lots. Two, it will be caused by cost increases due to the chip shortage and COVID-induced bottlenecks in agricultural manufacturing. Three, they'll try to blame the stimmy checks and attempt to implement austerity. Now, at the time of that first tweet, inflation was at 2.6%, which is like within normal bounds, although slightly higher than it had been before. By the end of that year, even actually, I think just a few months later, it was at 4.7%. And in 2022, it would peak at 8.73%, which was like the most inflation that we've seen since the crisis of the

seventies, 50 years ago. Like, so the, we, I, you know, I, I, I, the first success that we had as the magazine before we even came out as a magazine is that we successfully predicted the biggest inflationary crisis since the crisis of the seventies and not only predicted it, but predicted its specific causes. Because as the thread kind of was continually updated over the course of that next year, people started digging in and actually a lot of journalism was uncovering that precisely those bottlenecks were leading to cost increases. And there were other ones that were kind of added to it. So when the Ukraine war started in 2022, that increased global inflation because Ukraine is the world's single biggest and

by a lot supplier of wheat, which is a key staple in diets across the planet. So the shortages that were created by the Ukraine war, by Russia's blockades, and also just by bombing and the you know, the war disrupting the labor market over there and all these other kinds of things. Um, that meant that there was less wheat being exported, which, uh, created bottlenecks in those supply chains, which led to the global increase in the price of wheat, which led to the global increase, anything that uses wheat, bread, um, you know, and, uh, other food products. So beer, actually. Well, I'm not wrong about that, right? Beer uses weed.

I should actually know that. But anyway. Yeah, I think so. I had to do a double take there. So anyway, the point is that this was like a really big deal because like there were a lot of people, including like in the Biden administration who were denying that inflation was happening even as it was happening. Um, and, uh, and eventually they kind of shifted to a story where it was like, well, it'll be transitional because only demand pull inflation is real, right? This is clearly a cost push thing

created by these shortages, but like demand pull is the real form of inflation is when there's like too much money in people's pockets and that's not what's happening clearly. So we'll be fine. We just have to wait, right? Which is not actually the attitude that you have to take. Inflation is inflation. And like, you know, the, the, the, if the causes are these disruptions in supply chains, you actually, I mean, this is like the really edgy take, you actually have to spend more money in order to unplug these bottlenecks. You know, it's far from inflation being a product of there being too much money in the economy. You might actually need to do government spending to, for example, hire people, um, people, you know, and take extra steps for

precaution for their safety to unplug bottlenecks created by labor shortages. Or you might have to like, you know, rapidly invest, you know, on a large scale, almost as if you're in a war in order to create a new industry to like, you know, to, to, to replace something like containers that, uh, that, that you would normally import, you know, or something like that. So like, like these are, these are the kinds of actions that, uh, a more muscular approach to the inflation, um, would have, would have been, but instead they basically just waited for the supply chains to fix themselves. Even when multinational corporations and their boards of directors were begging the government to actually intervene more,

which is insane with economic planning. You know, you would never expect to hear something like that. But it was in things like the pages of the Financial Times. Speaking of the Financial Times, we do need to take another ad break, unfortunately. Yeah, do you know what the Financial Times will not be doing? It's buying ads on this show. Hasn't happened yet. Could happen.

Would be very funny. But has not happened yet. All right, we are now back from ads. Yeah, I endeavored to have better ad pivots. But, you know, you get what you get. Speaking of, like, what they could have done differently, like, there's a whole World War II playbook, essentially, that they just chose or they're ignorant of or chose

to ignore of a system of price controls, rationing, and rapid redeployment of resources to unstuck the bottlenecks along and across supply chains on the domestic side to support the war front. There's no war going on

for us directly right now but it could it could have easily been replicated yeah and that's something i think is really interesting because eventually like as the inflationary crisis sort of went on like you did see a little bit of people trying stuff like this like you saw germany i if i'm remembering right germany did these price controls on uh uh on like natural gas prices and stuff but that that that gets into another interesting thing is which is that so yeah i think we should get into a bit of this sort of like the i don't know how you describe it the the the the mainstream adoption of like a version of y'all's theory that eventually started happening that eventually started to push like some of this stuff which yeah i guess we should introduce another person who i don't know the relationship between exactly what of your stuff she read is

sort of unclear but one of the things that happens in this sort of period is um this this german economist named isabella weber who wrote a like fine like like mostly reasonable book about i like the the economists behind like the reform period in the 80s in china like started pushing well actually this is the thing where i'm sort of unclear the timeline i i started pushing the greedflation thing although she had a different name for it but yeah i was going to talk about that sort of whole thing because that was a really interesting sort of like turn in the whole inflationary discourse

inflation discourse? Yeah I think the prior prior to Weber's piece coming out in the earliest phases of COVID in 2020 and 2021 before there was any inflation, there was a group of left-wing, like a fairly large swath of like left-wing academics, progressives and liberals, and also the Biden administration itself saying that inflation would be transitory. would be transitory and that we should um it will if anything it would be moderate but would come right back down because like supply chains are so much more nimble now than than they were in like

the 70s and 80s and like liquidity sources are so much more plentiful that they have so many more like i'm probably giving them too much credit actually i think they literally just were like yeah there was no because that i remember like that would be because actually i think they literally just were like yeah there was no because that i remember like that would be because actually i'm filling the in the blanks for them as i go i think they were just saying it's going to be transitory because it hasn't happened yeah and like when it obviously in late 2022 to to through the middle of 2023, when there was obvious evidence that that wasn't the case, then they like really did like, they went like hard to starboard and said like, okay,

the inflation that we see it's because of corporate greed and it just reduces to that now. Yeah. And so it's like a purely opportunistic thing between of like the largest corporations. And then, you know, maybe later people saw that and did monkey see monkey do, but it's, it's because of them. And, and to be fair, like the, the, the tricky thing here is that like, so, so I'll preface this by saying that, like, you know, and I think this is true of Steve too.

Like I really respect Isabella Weber's work when it's good, you know, and which is often, you know, like, I think that, that she's a very solid heterodox economist who has some really important refutations of mainstream ideas. And as an example of the good stuff, for example, she actually, one of her, one of the underrated aspects of a paper that kind of pushes what is popularly known as the greenflation thing, the better part of that paper is that it actually creates a map of the current, today's supply chains in the US, like, you know, and identifies the key nodes, you know, and she uses this method called input output, input output tables, which Steve and I have written about, and we're going to write about it more on the magazine this is like the main tool that you can use to do real economic

planning jmc has been sending me input output tables for like seven years now yeah i just scream about it i i yeah i should um make it clear it's like the io table stuff was amazing and i think i think people just latched on to kind of really not like hardly the most important part of her piece. Yeah. And that, that by the way, I mean,

I don't know if she read Steve's piece or not, but it is a huge vindication of Steve's piece, which came out like a year and a half before, you know, because, because it's basically mapping the supply chains that Steve talks about using IO tables and saying, okay, these are the nodes. If prices go up here, everything downstream of them will go up. And that basically hits most sectors of the economy.

Like, and knowing what those nodes are is like super important because then you can figure out how to protect them. You know, like that That's actually one of the key things that one wishes that governments were doing. It would be one of the few useful things that they could do in a situation like this. There's another aspect of her work, which is more, and this also comes from heterodox theory, but it's just not good theory in my opinion. And it's this whole deal with like, okay, inflation is prices going up. So why are the prices going up? Well, a lot of them are going up because corporate management sees that everybody's talking about inflation. Now, maybe their costs, they're not in one of these sectors where upstream their suppliers are raising prices. They're actually getting the same prices for their ingredients as always.

But because everybody's talking about inflation, they're expecting prices to go up, right? So why not just raise prices? why not just raise prices? You know, like the – and so like that basically ended up – that basically ended up being a theory of like, well, a lot of the price rises that are going up is because of corporate greed, and corporations are always greedy, but a situation where people are talking about inflation means that they can basically get away with a price rise that they wouldn't be able to get away with normally.

Now, there might be situations like this. I'm not even denying that that's the case. There are clearly, based on a couple of journalistic exposés, some companies whose costs have not really gone up, but they're raising the prices opportunistically so that they can do higher payoffs for the shareholders and upper management. However, as a primary explanation for why the inflation happened, as an argument for the main cause of the inflation, and therefore for what the main solution should be, which is slapping on price controls and saying, no, you can't do this. I don't think that that's tenable because there are clearly biophysical stressors in

at least the places that are experiencing them that are traveling down supply chains where if you slap price controls down, that's not going to get you more chips. At least not by itself and in itself. Price control should be part of the picture, but that's not, especially in situations where there is corporate greed sort of driven price rises, but that's just not an explanation for everything. And some of Weber's followers, not necessarily her, but some of the people who are promoting this perspective are doing so, again, partly in order to avoid conversation, in my opinion, about these kinds of biophysical bottlenecks and how they might be undone.

And it's a huge issue. One thing to kind of conclude is that this whole thing that we've been saying about the supply chain as disruptions to the supply chain, as the cause of a progenitor price increase by people in the affected sectors, which in turn, through their connections to a bunch of customers, leads to price rises across at least sectors of the economy. That whole story allowed us to kind of see all this, a lot of the inflation that's happened in the world since 2020. We saw it coming and we saw specific causes coming.

And now, no less a capitalist institution than the IMF, right, has kind of been forced reluctantly, I would say, in some ways, to admit that, as Christine Lagarde said recently, you know, energy played a significant role. Then food kicked in and energy is now fading. You know, the now they still want to make it about wages. Right. I mean, that's that's the thing that ends up happening in a crisis like this is that they they do want to blame wage increases. blame wage increases but it is quite clear that even the authorities have needed to kind of admit that these specific measurable biophysical crises have been the source the main source of the inflation and then a great deal of the of the battle has been over who's going to kind of like, who's going to have to narrow their ambitions for their goals as a result of it, capital or labor.

And this is where I think Weber is on firmer ground, not as an explanation for the inflation, but afterwards, after inflation has already kicked in, who ends up having to quote unquote foot the bill, right? Inflation is already kicked in. Who ends up having to, quote unquote, foot the bill, right? Is there's now like less money coming in in these companies. So do you give it to workers so that they can, you know, since their money buys them less, you know, compared to rising costs of living, you give them a little bit more so that they can like kind of like balance it out? Or do you give it to management?

You know, now, obviously, if it's management making the decision about what to do with the company surplus, because we live in a capitalist economy, that's a dictatorship of the big owners. Guess what they're going to say? You know, and now you have a therefore a class struggle, the distributional conflict that some of the kind of traditional cost push theorists always talk about between capital and labor over what to do with these rising markups in firms. Now, they would say that's why the inflation happened. I think I would say, and I think Steve would be in agreement with this, that it's what happens after inflation. An inflationary crisis kicks in, and then there's a battle between capital and labor

over who gets screwed as a result. I think that that's kind of the way that we should think about a lot of the labor struggles that have taken place since COVID. Yeah. I'd also like to add that there's kind of like a distinction that needs to be drawn between companies, typically small and medium-sized ones, who exist within larger supply chains, who are doing what they must, versus large corporations, often multinational, who there's documented evidence that, yes, there's some opportunistic price increases

that they're administering at the same time. So there's a mixture, I would say, bias towards the former group, those who have to do what they have to do in order to socially provision themselves. But there's a mixture of them. And so you have to look at who are the price leaders and are they opportunistically raising prices and are people copying that yes sometimes but as far as like the progenitor price increase that we keep talking about you know in our pieces like that very often like and this is borne out in the surveys like when they were asked like for their reasoning as to why they raised prices it was typically like for the for reasons like that are quote-unquote socially

acceptable at least to say and for the most part they were just defending their margins like they they were in at risk of going under. Right. Yeah. And so you have to weigh, there's a dynamic, there's an interplay between that group and then the opportunistic group. And so it really doesn't reduce neatly into the greedflation, sort of like bastardization of Weber's otherwise really excellent piece that goes through some like interesting input output analysis. Yeah. And I think that like,

this is a really important thing for listeners because I think a lot of left-wing listeners, they, if, if they ask what's inflation and a left-wing economist tells them because of corporate greed, there'll be like, yeah,

but, and, and, and they might listen to us and be like, well, it looks like you're, it sounds like you're defending corporations. And I would argue no, we're not. We're trying to understand the actual causes for things, and we think that this can actually help you.

So if a company – let's say that you're in a company that is part of this wave of unionizations where let's say you're a Starbucks worker and people want to start up a Starbucks union. Maybe one of the ways that management is trying to kind of like screw over your union is to tell people who are on the fence, well, like the reason why there's so much inflation is because of these unions. Like we have to all stick together, and the company has got your best interests at heart. So don't join this union that's going to be pushing for wages that are ultimately just going to get eaten up by inflation. Let management figure out what's best because otherwise you'll just end up screwing up the whole economy, which is not unheard of. It might be something they'll fall back on in negotiations or in their anti-union propaganda. If you know that the actual cause of the inflation has to do with disrupted supply chains and that really the question is who's going to be screwed over and who's not within the company, you can go back and say, hey, wages are always chasing cost of living increases.

The cost of living increases happened before the big unionization wave kicked off. And we can tell that it's specific causes in logistics and it's specific causes in chips and specific causes in agriculture that are causing the price of this, that, and the other thing. You can even map out your company's supply chain and maybe point out certain cost increases that caused it. And you can say, okay, so we're going to have to raise our prices, but where's that money going to go? Not all of this should go to management. Some of this should go to us. So this is what a materialist understanding of how the actual causes of the thing worked out can help you in organizing your workplace and in pushing back against the kinds of things that your boss might try to tell you.

So that's what I would say to somebody who's like, well, you're just defending corporations. No, I'm absolutely not. But I don't think that we can actually have power. We can actually kind of like take direct actions that really matter because they're actually going to make life better for us and our friends and our loved ones.

Like, I don't think that we can actually do that unless we understand how the world works. And sometimes the world works in a way that doesn't necessarily look like we would most expect it to or most wish it to. But nevertheless, you have to kind of see how it works so that you can then figure out what's the best intervention that I can make into it, given where I'm at, the institutions that I work through, the coalitions that I can put together and that kind of thing. through the the the coalitions that i can put together and that kind of thing yeah and i think this is this is a kind of like left field like take on this too but like there are lots of sort of you know if if you go through like an economic price history or like an economic history of like the socialist period in china right like you will find them having to deal with like basically exactly the same shit where they have these like massive inflation will find them having to deal with like basically exactly the same shit where they have these like massive inflationary spikes that have to do with

like basically these i mean for them it was less supply chain bottle like supply chain breakdowns it's like you know they'd get these supply chain bottlenecks they just like didn't have a way through them and like people fucking that up like there was a like there was a decent argument that like that's part of what caused the great leap forward was people not fucking understanding that like not quite understanding how to like deal with their supply chain stuff and seeing this kind of like inflation

like issue kicking in and being like fuck it were to do something that's completely nuts and you know that went like about as badly as like any attempt anyone has ever tried to do something that's completely nuts and you know that went like about as badly as like any attempt anyone has ever tried to do like to fix any problem has ever gone and the larger the number of people who actually understand how this stuff works even in sort of like you know even even on a kind of like not enormously granular level the more likely you are to have someone who's in an internet has the ability to

make a decision where this stuff matters and you know it and like yeah you could be like oh well like the the odds that we're ever going to be in a place where this matters is like directly you're going to be the one making decisions pretty low but like you know it's not zero it's happened to people before and them not knowing about it was like a really apocryphal disaster. And we can, you know, avoid doing stuff like that by having a better understanding of like how our supply chains function and what effect that has on sort of economic distribution and stuff like that. And so, yeah, that's that's one of my two pitches. And my other pitch on this is I don't know how – it's hard to actually gauge the influence of discourse on policymakers, especially when they're as opaque as like the chairman of the Federal Reserve. But it is worth noting that we didn't get a like volcker style 15 percent like interest rate increase and i i think there's a there's a non-zero argument the fact that there were other

alternative explanations to inflation like around and then enough people were pushing them like is a reason why we didn't get one of these like a volcker style thing which would have pushed employment to like unemployment to like 25 percent destroyed the entire global economy and that you know like we can count that as a fucking w because as as as bad as things are right now like the world the world where jerome powell pulls the trigger and hits the like hey i i'm now a monetarist like i'm gonna i'm gonna decrease the money supply button and jacks the interest rate up to 50%. That world is so much worse than this one. It is difficult to imagine.

Yeah, I think we dodged a bullet of the 12% federal funds rate this time. Yeah. We've surpassed monetarism to an extent anyway. They're still doing some quantitative tightening. Yeah. But I don't know at least as like a mortgage industry professional i'm kind of hoping he keeps it under six for the federal funds right yeah i mean we'll see what happens there but it hasn't been we haven't gotten the apocalyptic reaction that like we very very easily could have like to the extent that like i i i'm i'm pretty sure if this had if this had happened under obama we'd be in like a recession that would have made 2008 look

like a joke right now so yeah okay i i think that there's a lot more to discuss about it because – and it seems like we're going to probably have a part two to this at some point. So we can probably get into it there because we have actually an essay that we published about interest rates, which had an even bigger influence than this – than these early essays that we're talking about. But, you know, like, at the end of the day, I think that what's important, what's most important about what we've discussed is this for me, like, having this model, which we developed, you know, obviously, like Steve developed it out of as an expansion of the logic of Fred Lee's work. And Fred Lee was not actually particularly original. He just synthesized a whole bunch of stuff that existed previously, like these pricing studies by Gardner Means in the 30s and pricing studies over the next hundred years from all sorts of different people, you know, into his post-Keynesian price theory and stuff like that, the cost plus markup stuff.

But like, like having a theory that's developed by looking at the world, and building your abstractions up out of things that you can see, particularly in a field like economics, that's so complex, that you have to kind of start with like, observable relations between actual institutions that exist in the world that empowered us you know that allowed us who really were just like four weirdos started a magazine right like four anarchistish weirdos but that allowed us to see earlier than like most people including a lot of like credentialed professionals what was going to happen in the future at least the near future like you know the next like like like two to five years from from that vantage point which credentialed professionals what was going to happen in the future, at least the near future,

like, you know, the next like, like, like two to five years from from that vantage point, which was like 2021. That is really incredible. And I'm not saying that to brag, like, although it is certainly something that I that I take a sick pleasure in. It's also informative, because think about all the things about which we don't have that concrete material picture. The question of how we're going to get fossil fuels out of agricultural production without causing famines, right? The question of what do you do now that we have the internet? How do you govern that? Because it's clearly not working under these giant vertically integrated media oligopolies with the platforms but it's also not going to work

if we put it under the government so what the hell do we do about it you know it's like like there's all these key questions that we just don't have even like working models of like of like what the world is even like right now much less like know, what could plausibly be done with it, right, to make it a better place. And obviously, like, you know, some of this sounds like stuff that the government should do. But a lot of this is actually stuff that social movements need. If you think the rent is too damn high in your city, and you organize a tenants union that has real political muscle, and you actually like have the ability to do stoppages or other actions that can really like bully the local city government. Okay. But what do you ask for? What do you demand? Or what do you try to put into place yourself using your own money?

Like, what do you do if the rent is too damn high? How do you get it lower? And it's like, oh, well, there shouldn't be rent. We should abolish it. Okay. How do you do that? You know, you need models of the world. And that's what we've been trying to kind of build in the magazine more than anything else, especially in our econ coverage. So, so there's a lot more that happened after this. We'll probably have a part two, but I just to wrap up the story up to then. So we did launch the magazine. We did put out Steve's essay, but then a really remarkable thing happened, which is that we started getting like all magazines do people who came in, into the slush pile who were inspired by Steve's work.

And we're like, this makes the most sense of anything that I've heard. And I want to build on it too. So we started publishing other essays that were kind of building on the research program that, that, that were kind of building on the research program that Steve kind of got us started on. And although our sort of influence was difficult to calculate in terms of like, you know, how much we influence the discussion, you know, in these early stages before the magazine was even up and running. Afterwards, after we kind of publish the people that I'm talking about, some of those pieces have actually definitely influenced the conversation in really exciting ways.

And I think that we can talk about some of that next time. Yeah, so that will be at some point in the future. I don't know. I'm not going to put down a definitive date when it happens because, I don't know, the world is chaos and this – yeah. But, however, comma, this story will continue in part two dot dot dot dot dot yeah so steve jmc uh thank you both so much for joining me and yeah do you have uh where can people go to find the magazine and youtube if they want to find you oh you can go to strange matters dot coop That's our main website.

If you want to subscribe, we have digital subscriptions starting at $5. And print monthly is $7.99. There are also annual subscriptions, too. Yeah, and please do consider subscribing or donating. You can actually donate any amount of money to us. We're not a nonprofit, so it's not tax deductible, but it would be a really helpful donation because any dollar that we get that doesn't go to our capitalist overlords

for the services that we have to use to keep the magazine going, all of that goes right now to our writers. And we try to pay our writers above market rate for magazines of our size. And to do that is very difficult. We need to... So if you want to support worker-controlled media production, and to do that is very difficult. We need to – so if you want to support worker-controlled media production that's financially independent, we don't have any big foundations

like telling us what to write or things like that. It's all like basically small donations and subscriptions. Like if you want to keep that kind of media alive and keep this kind of economic analysis alive, along with our cultural philosophy, philosophical, historical, anthropological, literary stuff, um, then, uh, then please consider it because, uh, we, we could really use the support. Yeah. So, uh, go do that.

Uh, yeah. And go read some of the, some of the work work that you all have done on inflation because it's really good and yeah this is a bit of a rapid here you can find us in the usual places and yes go go go into the world and cause mischief Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

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It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. This summer has been a critical junction in the fight against Cop City, the Atlanta Police Foundation's massive proposed training facility in DeKalb County, which is slated to begin construction

later this very month. The last week of action, in March of 2023, drew in over a thousand people against Cop City and saw hundreds of forest defenders attack in mass the construction equipment and police infrastructure stored on the site, in a pretty successful action. The police repression came down hard, but the militancy of the forest defenders left a pretty impressionable mark. Later that month, DeKalb County closed and barricaded Entrenchment Creek Park, citing public safety concerns and allegedly found booby traps. Police did an exhaustive sweep of the forest and established a relatively firm control of the territory.

After a year and a half of there being a nearly continuous presence in the Wolani by forest defenders, now the police began a forest occupation of their own. During the month that followed, the Atlanta Police Foundation, or the APF, rushed to clear-cut around 90 acres of the Wolani Forest, seemingly in a ploy to show investors and the city that they are committed to the project and to crush the spirits of those who spent years opposing the facility and defending the forest. People then set their sights on the Atlanta City Council, who in early June was to vote on whether or not to provide taxpayer funding for the APF's project. Over 23 hours of public comment across multiple days, almost universally against Cop City, culminated at the June 5th City Council meeting, which lasted into the early hours of the next morning.

council meeting, which lasted into the early hours of the next morning. Despite the record-breaking turnout opposing the facility, in the early morning of Tuesday, June 6th, the Atlanta City Council voted 11-4 in favor of the $67 million funding package to build Cop City. The next day, a group of community organizers announced a referendum campaign to collect tens of thousands of petition signatures from Atlanta voters to put the Cop City land lease on the upcoming ballot. City Council approving public funds for Cop City was certainly disappointing, but not quite unexpected, because another week of action to stop Cop City was already planned for later that same month. This is It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis. In this three-part series, I'll be talking about what's been happening in Atlanta this summer to stop Cop City. If you want to hear more about the background of this movement, in the month of May, we put out a five-part series on the week of

action from that spring, along with the few other previous Defend the Forest and Stop Cop City miniseries published over the course of the last year and a half. With much of the forest already destroyed and no easy access to Entrenchment Creek Park, this Week of Action in June was set to be very unlike any that had come before. June was set to be very unlike any that had come before. The kickoff rally was to begin on Saturday, June 24th at Brownwood Park in East Atlanta. I made my way there and met up with Matt from the Atlantic Community Press Collective. My first feeling walking in is like it felt very Society of the Spectacle.

In terms of like the ratio of cameras to participants was the most extreme that I've really ever seen for a week of action. Outside of a press conference. Yeah. And it felt like there were so many cameras looming around. And it's like there's so many people trying to make a simulacrum of the movements to sell back to other people at this point in time. And that's just a very large, pervasive feeling, and that combined with the more liberalization of certain aspects. Again, compared to the last week of action,

which felt there was a strong militant contingent there. And even the liberal contingent was still chanting, if you build it, we will burn it. And that's not the vibe here. Those are not the vibes. That's not the vibe here. There's definitely the vibes. That's not the vibe here. There's definitely a big separation in terms of what types of people are at what side of the park right now. There's a more forested section of the park with a creek on the south side, which is where people are setting up some camping sites.

They have a kitchen. That's where the welcome tent is. And then there's the other side of the park that has the rec center and the playground, which seems more like family-friendly stuff. Yeah, there are kids there. There's the popcorn set up. There that has like the rec center and the playground which seems more like family friendly stuff yeah there are kids there there's the popcorn setup it's more like bouncy house there is a bouncy house which is great return return to the bouncy house they couldn't they couldn't keep this moving down uh i won't i won't rest until until every is destroyed until the cops destroy every bouncy castle is all in Atlanta. Until every bouncy castle is deflated.

That is the new movement, so good. In contrast to the last kickoff rally at Gresham Park, which felt very unified, this time there was a noticeable separation in terms of what types of people are on the two sides of the park. People wearing camouflage and masks were more situated on the two sides of the park. People wearing camouflage and masks were more situated on the south side of the park, where tents were being set up, versus people by the playground who were going around with the referendum sign-up sheet and where all the food was being handed out. It's so separated. You can't even see. No. The two groups cannot see each other. And even like people like... There's a each other. There's a metaphor there.

Turnout seemed to be a bit lower than some people expected, and it was definitely much lower compared to the previous few weeks of action, and overall the rally was very muted and lacked a sense of energy or focus. The rally was supposed to start at 11, kind of just like nothing happened. Like it just, it felt very directionless. Felt like people did not quite know why they were there at this point in time. It was almost noon before anyone really spoke on the bullhorn and the music didn't start until noon.

And then, what was it, like a half hour ago? So like 1230 probably when the first speaker said anything. Yeah, from the Faith Coalition. I don't know. So far, the rally kind of feels like a microcosm of the entire movement at this point. Just not quite sure where to direct the energy to. There's a feeling that people should do something, but they don't quite know how to. They haven't decided how that

should be directed yet and so it's like there's some people showing up but it's just like it feels kind of stagnant and like there's this there's this need to evolve right now and i don't know i think maybe people got burnt out from the city council things there's a lot of energy being pumped into that yeah and then i guess some people and that was like three weeks of pushing energy and that was that and that was only like three weeks of pushing energy. And that was only like two weeks ago. That's still very recent. It still feels very raw.

Walking down the pathway on the south side of Brownwood, you can see people setting up tents, carrying camping supplies, and big jugs of water. Other people were assembling a makeshift kitchen in the tree line. And all of that was physically reminiscent of the last week of action. But being four miles away from the forest at Brownwood Park, instead of the Wolani, impacted the feeling on the ground.

We're both, we're so far away from the forest, there's like that separation of space. Like it feels so distant and... Distant even more than Gresham Park. Even more than Gresham. If this were happening in Gresham Park, I think that might even be a different feeling. Because at least you're attached to the Wailani. There was more determination on the south side of the park. You could feel like people want at

least people want to do something physically and they were but it's even still unclear how it's going to get directed towards like like what is this doing to stockpile city right now like that is that's the big thing is like people are trying to figure that out and there's people here but like what are what are people actually going to be doing like That's the question that is going to be unanswered at least today, I would say. The last week of action in March was very important in terms of setting the stage for what the next few months would look like. The direct action that happened on Sunday during the music festival was very important and successful,

but also carried large ramifications for how the rest of the movement would be shaped in terms of the police repression and increased police presence in the forest. The weeks of action definitely have this ability to affect how the movement as a whole evolves in the subsequent months. On Saturday, there were worries that if things were simply going to continue to be like this kickoff rally, that wouldn't be a positive direction and would be a bad sign. It's just so, I mean, it's hard not to compare this to the last week of action kickoff rally at Gresham, which just felt so different. Like that, there was like almost 10 times as many people, there was like a feeling of as many people there was like a feeling of like motion there was a feeling of like we can we have we have to go do a thing and we're going to do it

no matter what like we we don't know it's gonna be on the other side of the tunnel but we're we're going there to do it anyway we're gonna find out together and there was a there was a lot of determination and there was a lot of like there was like a pointedness like they knew where they were going and this does not it lacks that pointedness um it feels like people aren't quite sure why they're here or what to do at this point in time and if the movement wants to be able to continue in its goals it has to find some way to evolve in these next two months as construction is going to ramp up and i guess this this week will be kind of will the bellwether either well either a bellwether or a learning experience.

Like it... Yeah. It might not be any sort of death knell, but it will have to be a learning experience probably. Yeah, that's kind of most of my thoughts so far based on walking through both places. There's just not much else to talk about because there's not much else happening.

Soon enough, however, other things did start happening, thanks to the Atlanta Police Department. But throughout that afternoon, things remained mostly low-key, and as the day went on, the gathering at Brownwood Park turned into a community barbecue, and people started to get a much more clear idea of what the expectations for that day were. As people settled into the park, there ceased to be any big anticipation for what everyone was going to be doing that first day. There was supposed to be a vigil for Tortuguita in the park that evening, which was interrupted by Atlanta police officers who swept through the park,

issuing a quote-unquote friendly reminder that the park closed at 11 p.m. All right, it's around 8 30. About 40 police officers just walked through Brownwood Park, telling people that are gathered here that the park closes at 11, and everyone's basically anticipating that police are going to try to sweep the entirety of the park, including the sections where people are trying to camp out around 11 p.m. The cops were walking south through the park as the crowd was walking and chanting along the way as well. Cops left under the heels of maybe 75 to 100 people who were chanting along the south side of Brownwood. They've been staging around Brownwood Park and Portland Avenue

for the past hour or so. They've been staging around Brownwood Park and Portland Avenue for the past hour or so. They had like 20, 30 cars, around 40, 50 officers. People decided they did not wish to stand their ground and fight off a possible police raid at Brownwood Park. So they spent the next few hours packing up all the supplies and equipment that they just spent all day setting up and then evacuated from the area. Okay, it is 11.10pm. It seems like the cops essentially just did what I'm referring to as advanced bluffing. So they walked through around 8.30 warning people,

hey, park close is at 11, which very much indicating that, hey, we're going to sweep through and fuck with your shit if you're still here. So the next few hours people spent time, you know, packing up, breaking down the tents of leaving, heading to other locations. And then at 11, we kind of just expected police to do a standard sweep through, you know, destroy anything they find. If they find people, tell them to leave or else get arrested, standard stuff.

At this point, there's about seven or eight police cruisers staged around the south side of the park, but they're not actually sweeping through because it's pretty clear that there's like no one actually in the park at this point. It's just very clearly like empty and quiet. So I don't even, I don't even think cops are going to sweep through it. It's been already like 10,

15 minutes. We expected them to kind of sweep on the hour, but they just like, don't need to. It's very clear that no one's in the park. So they just kind of like successfully bluffed themselves into getting everyone to leave um i mean if there were people still here in a visible capacity i'm sure police would sweep through but there's really there's no one visible in the park from any of like the perimeters around

so they're just not even going to bother sweeping through but yeah looks like this is the end of brownwood day one and the uh the very kind of low-key kickoff rally. Still, the week definitely is lacking a sense of direction. There's been DeKalb SWAT doing perimeter sweeps around the Walani Forest and around Gresham Park. There's some future events planned. We will see how that plays out in these next few days. we will see how that plays out in these next few days. It certainly seemed like police wanted to make some show of force early on in the week to stifle the week of action. The threat of a raid the very first night was indeed disruptive to the

logistics for the week, but ultimately people were able to band together to keep each other safe and cared for. During this current general sense of directionlessness, there were a lot of questions on how the movement will change during this turning point, with little in the way of obvious answers or new paths of resistance. The following Sunday and Monday of the week continued to be mostly low-key. People used those days to facilitate workshops and discussions to work through the shift the movement was going through. At the end of the week, I sat down with Matt in East Atlanta Village to talk about the week as a whole and compare notes. Here's a bit of our conversation

talking about the discussions that started happening during those first few days. This was a week of discussions. It was. It really was. There was a lot of meetings. There was a lot of discussions happening. People figuring out what do we do? Like if we actually want to stop Cobb City and it's going to get built in these next few months, like now is the time to figure out what the fuck to do next. So people have been having those discussions this week. And if anything, the week of action has been useful in this sense that it's brought a lot of people together so that they can have these generative conversations. And there was a lot more conversations during this week than last week. There was one on like

what the state of the movement is now, especially with the referendum, taking up more visibility, how are radicals going to navigate this space and this movement with a lot of things in flux. And I think that that was definitely my first read. Even on the kickoff rally, I felt like there was a lot of people not sure what to do. It was very directionless. People were asking a lot of questions. And more questions were being asked all throughout the week. There was a lot of discussions, a lot of meetings about what do we do now?

If construction is going to start in the next two months, what is this movement going to do? People can chant, if you build it, we will burn it, but chanting it and doing it, two different things. And the movement is, it's going to go through a period of evolution in these next few months. And with all those questions being asked, I feel like the answer to those questions is going to be the actions people do take in these next few months. In the aftermath of the clear-cutting, it felt like in some ways that the window of possibility for this movement was closing. As options seemed to be getting smaller,

more people started pursuing the referendum as a potential means of stopping Cop City. But those in the more militant anarchist wing of the movement were left questioning. After two years of employing a diversity of tactics largely led by direct action, if it's the right move to switch to an electoral strategy now when the situation is approaching its most dire. But since it is happening, whether they like it or not, anarchists were wondering, what can people do so that the referendum doesn't completely dominate

the narrative of the movement or disincentivize other evolutions of the struggle. Now, obviously, a group of people pursuing a referendum does not prohibit other people from engaging in direct action, but there still were worries that the referendum could become a sort of release mechanism for the movement, both in terms of new people's involvement being pushed toward this more liberalized electoral strategy instead of radical action, or if the petition or even potential ballot vote fails, then that being used as an indicator that most people in the city actually do want cop city. But through all this, what anarchists can do, and what they typically do, is to encourage radical autonomy and

self-determination, regardless of electoral strategies or outcomes. Whether or not a petition gets 60-some thousand signatures does not affect a burning construction vehicle. Just as these sort of discussions were happening, it's kind of fitting that on Monday, June 26th, we saw the first communique in months claiming responsibility for equipment sabotage. After the last week of action in March and subsequent police raids on the forest, increased security, the rapid clear-cutting, and big push for city council public comment followed by the start of the referendum, throughout that series of events, there really hadn't been much in the way of nocturnal direct action sabotage happening in Atlanta or across the country in solidarity.

Once a core component of this movement was seriously lacking in the months leading up to this summer. And then suddenly, after the June Week of Action's mostly uneventful start, a post went up on the sketchy website scenes.noblogs.org claiming that a group of anonymous individuals snuck into a subcontractor's machine storage lot and poured hydrochloric acid into the oil tanks of three vehicles. The target was Brent Scarborough and Company, a Georgia-based subcontractor who was hired to clear cut the Wallani Forest and was currently engaged in mass land grading on the site. I drove by the site on Monday and I saw like over 20 machines like actively working on the land. Very Avatar. Yes. Or Fern Gully.

Or Fern Gully, the superior film. But no, like it's like the site's being very actively worked on. I've never seen that many machines doing active work, like all moving at the same time. Early Monday morning, the Stop Cop City referendum put out a strong statement of solidarity with, quote, all tactics on the road to collective liberation, unquote, and openly rejected the state's framing of, quote, unquote,

violent and non-violent resistance. To briefly quote a few of the last sentences of the statement, quote, the COP city vote referendum campaign is grounded in the values of abolitionist organizing and racial and environmental justice. We also recognize our chosen tactic is a single intervention in a wide rainbow of fighting state repression. We seek to use the Cop City referendum to leverage local power, educate and activate our communities, and build networks that can strengthen our city and future mobilizations. The referendum is one piece of a vibrant, multifaceted movement, one that defies respectable categorization as well as state violence and repression. The Cop City Vote Referendum Coalition stands in solidarity and full support of the Stop Cop City Week of Action,

the larger movement, and abolitionist organizers and activists across the city. Unquote. Unintentionally, these two things coincided. There was the release of the scenes, like the first sabotage in months, things coincided. There was the release of the scenes, like the first sabotage in months, and then the referendum released that same day, this solidarity statement for all actions taken to stop Cop City. I just think that needs, the statement itself needs to be highlighted. And I think it seems like they're going to stick to that. The solidarity statement was widely applauded and seen as a good sign regarding the referendum's place in the larger fight against Cop City and how it was not intending to take space away from other aspects of the movement. Tuesday morning, there was a small protest outside the DeKalb County Board of Commissioners building to call for the

reopening of Entrenchment Creek Park. The park was a common gathering spot for the movement and where many people camped during previous weeks of action. An executive order from DeKalb CEO Michael Thurmond closed the park late last March as the police geared up to fortify Wolani and speed run all of the tree felling. So I sat in the board of commissioners meeting and it's different than a city council meeting where like anybody who signs up to

do public comment can do public comment. They only allot 30 minutes of public comment. So about that amounts to 10 speakers. And I think about six of them were actually there for, you know, to talk about opening the park. And then the rally, I think it was something like 30, 30 people. It was a student-organized rally. And they did a couple speakers, and then that was it.

Not much from DeKalb. DeKalb only came out to make sure that they weren't blocking a pathway, and it was kind of hands-off. I did get a parking ticket. That was my fault. You did? Yeah, I let my parking expire for 12 minutes. Illegalist Matt Scott at the ACPC.

Wow. And yeah, the minute I do something illegal, I get a traffic ticket. Previously in June, the DeKalb CEO proposed a $1.8 million construction plan necessary to reopen the park, but no clear date on when that would happen. One county commissioner has been trying to fast track reopening the park, but their resolution has repeatedly been deferred by the county board. The soonest it will be reconsidered is October 10th. Meanwhile, the park will remain indefinitely closed. Throughout the first few days of the week of action, there was something kind of looming over everyone's heads. There was a march planned from Gresham Park towards Wolani

that was to take place on the evening of Wednesday, June 28th. The police response to this action was primed to be the most intense out of the week. The path to Entrenchment Creek Park is a pretty closed-in bike path, with a tunnel going under an overpass where police have been staging to prevent people from entering the forest. No, I definitely felt like on Monday and Tuesday, everyone was still thinking about what would happen on Wednesday, what would happen on the march from Gresham Park. That was the big unknown, that was the big danger. Like very palpable concern about how that was going to play out. Yeah.

That probably, I mean, all the way back to Saturday, that was probably like playing through people's minds and causing some of that uncertainty. Police were setting up perimeters around the forest in an increased capacity than the usual detail. Police were setting up perimeters around the forest in an increased capacity than the usual detail. Pretty early on in the day, there was a DeKalb County SWAT mobile command center posted up in a school parking lot next to the tunnel and bike path leading from Gresham to Wolani. Kind of as expected, this entire section of South Atlanta was crawling with police. Before people even gathered at Gresham Park, the day began with an unfortunately rocky start and the first arrest of the week outside Cadence Bank in Midtown. The protest was calling on the bank to cancel their $20 million construction loan given to the Atlanta Police Foundation. So there was this action at Cadence Bank that they specifically didn't want media. And so none of us were there.

Yep. And that was early in the morning. I think we found out about it like noon or something. Like after I woke up. Yeah. I think it was like they said 30 people, kind of like we saw the other day. On Friday, yeah.

On Friday. But as they were walking away, somebody gets, well, multiple. They try to arrest multiple people. Police start chasing people. Someone gets grabbed and arrested. Another person gets detained and then let go. Seemed like a pretty chaotic scene.

That's not a great way to start off the day where you have your most stressful action planned for later. You wake up, you get chased by cops, and you're expecting to go do a march in a few hours. Yeah. In the most heavily policed area of Atlanta right now. The march was to take place on the same bike path from Gresham Park to Entrenchment Creek Park that people took during the kickoff rally at the last week of action. But much has changed on the ground since then.

As people started to gather at Gresham Park on Wednesday evening, the numbers were quite small. As the night progressed, around 150 people eventually amassed, but it was still a small fraction of the number of people at the previous Gresham Park march, and with a much greater police presence. The exact plan for the night was heavily dependent on a lot of factors that it was impossible to explicitly know beforehand, like how many people would show up and what they would feel comfortable doing based on the police response. All right, this is Wednesday, June 28th.

Me and Matt from the Community Press Collective are gathered at Gresham Park. Overhead, you can hear the DeKalb helicopter circling. Our favorite sound. Our favorite sound, yes. There's about, I don't know, maybe 75... No, we're more. We might be over 100 now. Close to 100 people gathered here in Gresham Park, and people have plans to march towards Wolani,

or at least to the tunnel, and then what happens after that is kind of a big mystery. Definitely very different than the last time we were gathered in Gresham Park with a crowd of people. We're missing the music, we're missing the Diwali paint clouds, we're missing the kids, we're missing maybe the vibes just in general. Another 800 people or so. But, I mean, people are sending out signs and some banners. Police have a decent presence around the tunnel

or like the overpass over the tunnel and around Wilani right now. Yeah, all around the Wilani Triangle. There are APD and DeKalb County police just hanging out more than usual. And at the fire station, there was more cops than I've seen since March 5th. Since the last week of action. Yeah. Earlier this morning,

I saw a DeKalb County SWAT mobile command unit at the school next to the tunnel overpass. But I do not know where that is now. It was not parked there last time we drove by about half an hour ago. So, yeah, just that is the update as of 6.30. So I'm guessing this crowd will start moving the next 30 minutes to 40 minutes. Probably a half hour. Yeah. All right. Right as the crowd was about to set off, someone made an announcement that due to small numbers and large police presence, there was to be a change of plans.

Instead of going all the way to Entrenchment Creek Park or even the tunnel, they were going to march one third of the way and stop on the bike path. All right. It's around 7.20 p.m. About 150 people are leaving Gresham Park, and they announced they're going to be going to hold a small vigil near one of the felled trees on the bike path. For a little while, the march was getting along fine. There was music and chanting,

when suddenly, police made an early appearance. Okay, so it's what, 740, 750? 741. 741 on Wednesday, June 28th. We are walking on the bike path and staged... 25 minutes into the walk, and here we come upon our first police presence of the day uh along our path so two looks like decap county yeah two decap county uh suvs parked side by side along the path but they're not out of their vehicles no um so i think the crowd will disperse the order

they might try to give a dispersal order because there's too many people. Yeah. I didn't think they would try to fuck with it this soon. I thought they would wait till the tunnel. A small number of police were posted up right before the first bridge on the bike path, roughly about halfway to the tunnel. If they wanted to, the crowd could have marched past the police, as they were not blocking the path. The two cop cars couldn't even follow behind,

because there was big metal bulgeards preventing vehicles from going on the wooden bridge. But the visible police caused the group to pause. There was that one speech that we need to touch on from that night, and that was, the speaker said, in order to win, we have to let go of the idea of losing while looking good. Yep. In order to win, we have to let go of the idea of losing while looking good. Yeah. And that, I think, is going to inform whatever the direct action side of things are for the next, this next phase of the movement. While paused in front of the police cruisers, the crowd deliberated on what they wanted to do and what they thought they could accomplish. After a few minutes of discussion, they decided

that they were not prepared to unnecessarily sacrifice themselves. One of the people from the crowd spoke briefly not only on this decision, but also how it fits in to the difficult situation the movement has found itself in right now. I'm going to quote a little bit from this impromptu speech. Quote, we shouldn't come away from this feeling demoralized. We should feel clarity because we believe we set out to participate in a movement to obstruct the construction of a police militarization site. But that is not being allowed to happen. The people we're fighting against believe we are a domestic insurgency. They are treating us like an insurgency.

The state is using militaristic language like denying anarchists operating space. And so we're going to great lengths to be safe, to play it safe and to go slow and to proceed rationally and defend one another. But we're coming under constant attack. Everything we do, we're under attack, unquote. Just earlier that morning, people were attacked by the state and arrested as they stood on the sidewalk outside of a bank. Those who work to bail activists out of jail are attacked. People doing on the ground jail support are physically attacked and face police intimidation. Quote, we don't want to be engaged in a failing struggle. Our enemy is treating us like terrorists.

That's what they're calling us. And that's what they believe we are. It's not just a rhetorical trick. That's how they're treating the movement. And so we have to figure out how we're going to win because we intend to win. But you can't just only defend yourself. The safest thing for us to do is to never go to a protest about this movement again. If our top priority is safety, everyone who's not currently facing charges should move away,

should not go to events or actions. But if we have a higher priority than safety alone, we're going to have to figure out what we're going to do to achieve that, which is going to require going on the offense when we're able and how we're able. This movement has been very creative, and we're going to have to continue to be more and more creative. And we're going to have to continue to deploy all available means in order to have this kind of offensive, victorious, and strong movement that we all deserve. When we fight, when we attack the enemy, when we have our offensive actions, we have to follow through with them. We have to go all the way with them. We have to be willing to believe in ourselves

to believe that we can win. And so I believe that we are going to win this movement. And I think you guys believe that we're going to win this movement, but that's going to require us to abandon the idea of looking good while losing. We can't look good losing. So are we going to require us to abandon the idea of looking good while losing. We can't look good losing. So are we going to look good losing or are we going to win? Unquote. All right, it is eight o'clock. The crowd sat in the middle of the trail behind the first bridge where two DeKalb County vehicles were parked.

They deliberated for a little bit, and then a few people spoke, and now the crowd has turned around at a marching back to Gresham Park. Marching back, no arrests. We do have two helicopters now hanging over us. That's my favorite thing in the world. And a lot of other DeKalb on the ground and other parts of the bike path and the trails. Yeah, they would have walked directly into what looked like a full SWAT team above the trails. Yeah, they would have walked directly into what looked like a full SWAT team

above the bridge. So they made the right choice is what it seems like to me. Yeah, and they talked about their intentionality of the decision and how it's important to not just keep losing while trying to

look cool and throw yourself at a line of police. Yeah, and that hopefully, I mean, what does that look like in practice? I guess we'll see over the next three days. Three days to two months, yeah. Three days to several months. But it does sound like there's some attempt now at directionality that wasn't, that I wasn't seeing until maybe this. This is the exact same march people tried to do back in March, and they did it, and they are trying to do it here again in June, and it doesn't work.

It doesn't work the first time, it doesn't work the second time. It worked the first time, it doesn't work the second time, so now it's time to change something. Change tactics. Yeah. It doesn't ring a second time, so now it's time to change something. Change tactics. Yeah. On the walk back to Gresham Park, we got clear photos of the amount of riot police waiting for us at the tunnel.

And it was a great many. Oh, yeah, there is a lot. Yeah, that's a lot of riot police. Yeah, and that was one of the vans posted above the tunnel. Yeah. Is that a trailer? Yeah, that's where they bring all their riot shields in. Yeah, okay. Yeah, that would have they bring all their riot shields in. Yeah, okay.

Yeah, that would have sucked. That would not have been fun. No, that would have gone very poorly. Would have been tear gas, though. And I do miss being tear gassed. I can, like, spray you with pepper spray if you want. It's not the same as tear gas. I can spray you right now if you want.

Matt ultimately declined to be pepper sprayed. Tortuguita's mother, Belkis Taran, came to Gresham Park to also join the march. So what we had was 150 people and Belkis Taran. And I think that that plays a role in how this goes on. No, having Belkis very visibly present, walking up to everybody there and greeting them just having her presence there affects what people like want to do and it reminds you of what's actually like the actual stakes at hand so you're you're caring for everyone around you in a much more like conscious capacity belkis spoke a few other people spoke, and then they turned around and headed back to Gresham. And that was the decision that was made. And no one was hurt. No one was arrested. People got back to Gresham Park. Some people had ice cream.

Two people in particular had ice cream and they were very happy about it. Very excited. Definitely wasn't. Maybe it was us. Other people also had ice cream. Other people did have ice cream. I don't think they were quite as excited as we were. Slightly overpriced ice cream. Throughout the week, you could tell that people were really wanting to be back in the forest and Wolani People's Park.

People made do gathering at Brownwood Park, but it wasn't the same. There was an undeniable distance between where people were gathered this week of action and the site of all the previous battles in the Wolani. The fact that so much of the forest had already been destroyed loomed heavily over the week, and that's something that people are still processing and are still comprehending. Another big aspect of the week, like, this is the first week of action where people haven't, like, gone in the Wolani.

Yeah, there's no action in the Wolani. Well, we should say in the triangle, because, you know, the Wolani forest yeah there's no action which feels weird well in in in we should say in the triangle because you know the walani forest obviously goes through but like yeah the site like this is the first time that people haven't been like in the forest and that's a new thing to navigate that's a new feeling to navigate like there's there's a different there's a different sense um multiple chance there's multiple chance being being like, don't cut down the trees. And the trees are gone. The site's been cleared.

And I think people are still catching up to that and it's still something that people are processing. And they're going to have to process that if they want to continue. They have to look at the situation being like, we have to accept what has happened so then we can choose what to do. Yeah.

Because you can't act as- You can't deny what the reality is. No, and you can't act as if the trees are still there because that's going to change the types of, like, actions you do. Like, you can't tree set in the trees. It's changing the actual actions people are going to take to try to stop Cop City. Yeah. I think the Wednesday action almost needed to happen. So many people still dream about, what if we could reoccupy Wolani?

People are still caught in that headspace because they got so used to that over the course of almost two years. So inevitably, there was going to be an attempt where a few hundred people try to reenter Wolani People's Park. There almost needed to be an attempt just to see what would happen. And we saw what would happen. And now people can use that action as reference when making future plans and decisions about actions.

Because you can point back to this and demonstrate what the police response will be when people march to Wolani. Massive amounts of SWAT, riot police waiting for you, SWAT mobile command centers, heavily armed police staged on roads, overpasses, entrances, and all around the forest, specifically waiting for people to try to cross over or through the tunnel. So now people know what will happen if they try and do the same thing again. In some ways, it kind of needed to not just be theoretical speculation, but actually happen so that people can now truly allow themselves to

evolve so that you don't have this question in the back of your head. Because now that question has been answered, you would be throwing yourself at a wall of SWAT in Riot Gear. And now everyone can let themselves evolve and start figuring out what new things can be fostered and imagined. We'll hear more about those evolutions and conclude my coverage of the Week of Action in the next episode. See you on the other side. Welcome, I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters. 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. the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network,

available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? you get your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how 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 to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis. This is part two of my mini series about what's been happening this summer in Atlanta to stop Cop City. Last episode, we left off with the attempted march from Gresham Park to Entrenchment Creek Park, which some might say was a disappointment, but it also gave everyone

more clarity about the current state of these types of direct action marches in Atlanta and the necessity for evolution. The main event on Thursday, June 29th, was a protest outside the Home Depot in the upscale retail district off of Ponce de Leon Avenue. Home Depot is one of the Atlanta Police Foundation's financial backers. There had been a rumor that Home Depot was going to close earlier in the day. I got there at 4.30. It wasn't closed, so i didn't see any signage uh so i went and parked my car and and came back um and like i think i got there at 4 50 and people

were starting to line up along the road like uh there's a starbucks and they were lining up along pons next to the starbucks and you know i'm i'm talking to them watching this they're chanting they're they're pulling out banners and and we get a call that they are arresting Lorraine Fontana so Lorraine Fontana is a 76 year old activist in Atlanta um and she's great like she she pops up everywhere she's beloved by everyone and so we we get this call that Lorraine Fontana is being arrested and I bolt as far as my little legs will take me and then I have to stop and catch my breath like right before I get there but Lorraine and one other person were arrested in the parking lot right outside the Home Depot. It's a store but Home Depot corporate is here. They did not want anybody protesting in the store.

When they start reading out the letter, I asked them to go ahead and exit the premises. At that time, I also issued them a criminal trespass warning telling them that Home Depot did not want their business or them inside the store. After protesters left the store, they stood by a corner in the parking lot holding signs, where they were then approached by APD officers, who then arrested two people without warning. It does kind of just show APD, like, basically doing exactly what they would with anyone, except in this case, it's a 76-year-old woman who's like, five, or four-eleven or something like that like yeah yeah no i mean it was a lot of people were like surprised that this happened um be like how could the police do this i think others were like not as surprised being like no it's the apd they like it was a good demonstration

for people being like showing that they do not care they don't care if you're a 77-year-old woman or if you're a 19-year-old eco-terrorist. They're going to treat you roughly the same. Yep. After Lorraine's arrest, more and more people began showing up across the street from Home Depot, calling for their divestment from the Atlanta Police Foundation. It got up to like 30, maybe 40 people.

Mostly just like chanting on the sidewalk. Mostly chanting on the sidewalk. But then they started to like walk back and forth when the crosswalk was like there. Yeah. And they were pushing the limit, like seeing what they could get. But there was also my favorite part was the APD officer who was sitting in his... I'm sorry. My favorite part was, fuck, I got to do this without breaking down in the middle. I did hear a little bit about this. All right, take three. Take three.

There was the APD officer that was sitting in his Ford Explorer on Ponce, and at one point he calls out on his, you know, loudspeaker, I'm not an idiot. I swear, I'm not an idiot. While he's backing up on ponds with his lights on, just like, what are you doing? I'm not an idiot. I promise. I'm not an idiot.

A lot of times. Oh, I'm not an idiot. Okay. People are asking a lot of questions. Already answered by my shirt. I'm not an idiot shirt. Oh, it was great. So I caught

the briefest snippet of that audio, thankfully. That's funny. On Thursday night after the Home Depot rally, there was a jail vigil around 10pm for Lorraine at the Rice Street Fulton County Jail. So there are two jails.

There's Atlanta City Detention Center and then there's Fulton County Jail, which we just call Rice Street because it's off Rice Street. So when you get charged with criminal trespass, it's like a misdemeanor charge. And typically you would go to Atlanta City Detention Center, which still a jail, still terrible, but relatively better. Fulton County J is, you know, atrocious. It is, uh, you know,

the Sean Thompson, of course, the, the, the guy who was eaten alive in his, uh, in his cell by bugs because of neglect. That is rice street jail.

That's the Fulton County jail. That's the Fulton County jail. So we get word that Lorraine is at Fulton County jail and not ACDC, which, uh, which is pretty striking. So everybody goes down to do a jail vigil and noise demo. For context, last September, LaShawn Thompson, a 35-year-old man, was found dead after spending three months in an infested Fulton County Jail psychiatric cell. in an infested Fulton County Jail psychiatric cell. His body was covered in a thousand bug bites,

and insects were found in his mouth, ears, nose, and all across his body. Such inhumane incidents are not an irregularity in Fulton County Jail. Just earlier this month, a 35-year-old named Christopher Smith died in Fulton County Jail. He had been held in custody since October 6th, 2019, without bond on several unspecified felony and misdemeanor charges, according to the county sheriff's office. Last month, a 19-year-old girl died in Fulton County custody after being arrested on a minor misdemeanor charge. This past year alone, six people have died in the Fulton County Jail system. People in Atlanta have been doing jail vigils and noise demos for years,

and it's never really been a problem. Cops might tell people to move off to the side if the crowd gets to a certain size, but they have typically gone on without issue. But this time, Fulton County deputies came out and declared that people are not allowed to protest outside the jail, and ordered everyone to completely leave the parking lot and go all the way to the other side of this big hill off of Rice Street jail property in order to continue protesting, which no one was really keen on doing. So this kind of game of chicken began. They eventually they pull in a bunch more

sheriff's deputies and threaten arrests. So people start making their way up the hill, linking arms, and they get to the top of the hill and they're met with another group of protesters who had tried to come down, but they were stopped by police at the top of the hill. So now the crowd size, like essentially doubled. Yeah. And the energy just goes through the roof. You know, both sides are just going back and forth. This this deputy is like completely overmatched, doesn't really. It didn't seem like Fulton County had a plan. You know, usually APD or DeKalb, they have some sort of protest plan.

Fulton was flying by the seat of their pants. And so all of our cars were down at the bottom of the hill they were back in the rice street parking lot and this this becomes like an issue because some of the protesters cars are there all of the media cars are there like down at the bottom of this hill and um they're not letting anyone go down there and this woman shows up to like put i think money on her son's commissary card and they don't let her down geez like they're just shutting down jail nobody's allowed yeah exactly so they finally first they're like we're gonna let you go down

one by one and everyone's like hell no like we're not trusting you. Yeah, sure. Sure. Sure, buddy. Let's go. Let's isolate it. Move through this police fortress in an isolated manner. Nothing could go wrong here. So then they're like, okay, you can go as a group.

Yeah, okay. As long as you have your vehicles down there, you can go as a group. So they slowly start to make their way down. Do not proceed in the next five minutes. We're going to start doing what we have to do. They get all the way to the bottom hill. They're in the parking lot and just like on the edge of where the cars are and they kind of stop moving. And the sheriff's deputy is like, y'all got to keep moving. And so they start moving again and then stop again. And then the sheriff's deputy says, all right, get him. And so then the deputies start moving in to make arrests, and quickly, you know, this march kind of becomes this backward-moving thing.

Yeah. Can't say that I'm moving my hands to showcase it, but it becomes this backward-moving thing up the hill. That's the bottom line. You're in the street. You will be taken in for custody. Get out the street. Get out the street. You're in the street, you will be taken in. The crowd was able to leave before anyone was detained, but it was a quite tense situation. The sort of dynamic we saw at the jail vigil and Home Depot protest led directly into the

next event on Friday morning, a previously announced second protest outside of Cadence Bank in Midtown, calling on Cadence Bank to cancel the Atlanta Police Foundation's $20 million construction loan. All right, people at a protest on Friday morning at Cadence Bank in Midtown Atlanta. There's maybe like around a dozen people here chanting outside of the building. Also about a dozen APD officers walking down from up the street preparing to meet the crowd. They're moving in closer. They're walking in. Again, people still, I don't think anyone's even touched the glass door. Most of the people are just standing here on the sidewalk.

You know that game you play with your cats where they come at you, but they stop when you're watching them? Yeah, yeah. That's the game we're playing right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We turn away, the cops advance. This is also like half of the Looney Tunes gags. They're doing a Michelin frog.

They're now on the Cadence Bank property. They're starting to advance. Police were yelling at people that they couldn't touch any of the steps leading up to the bank entrance and that you weren't allowed to lean against any handrails

because the metal pole was bank property. So So once again, we got this little game of back and forth, except one side has guns and the power to arrest you. You get off the pole! What's the ordinance? What law? What law? What's the law that prevents us from being on steps, huh? Criminal trespass. This cop said that the crowd's trying to incite a riot.

It feels very much like what you saw, I guess, in Portland. Obviously, I wasn't there. There's an object that becomes the sacred goal. And then you're battling over the thing because the thing has now been elevated. You've given something, like actual physical presence, and

that is the thing that you are now fighting for. It becomes a symbolic... It's steps in front of a building that don't matter, but the police gave it significance. But because the police turn it into this symbolic thing, it now means more than it just being steps. So So uh there was this camera guy who like kept kind of stepping up and like pushing the envelope. And eventually more activists put one foot on the steps being like okay if you're gonna come after us for putting a foot on the bank steps, fine. Come at us like

call call the bluff. Yeah so there was like people yelling at the cop's face for like 45 minutes maybe, maybe longer. Time always stretches during these sorts of things. It's hard to keep a sense of temporal stability. Even during weeks of action in general, it's always hard to keep a sense of temporal stability. The sense of time warps around. Days blend into each other. A day feels like a week. A week feels like a day.

It gets very fuzzy. It gets incredibly trippy. And the exhaustion, right? It just compounds all of that. There's a lot of things that feed into it. Despite about a dozen people putting their foot on the sacred steps, the police did not decide to arrest anyone at this protest. And after about an hour of disruption, the crowd departed.

The week of action ended, much like the last one, with the final rally being the Youth March back at Brownwood Park. Lorraine just got out on bail and spoke about the jail conditions to the crowd of 100 or so people gathered in the park on the morning of July 1st. And I don't want people to forget that our movement is connected with lots of other stuff, one of which is prison abolition. And the idea that our so-called criminal justice system is such that people get just shoved behind bars. We don't want to see them. We don't care what happens to them.

And even if they're not, haven't gone to trial yet, and they're in a jail awaiting hearing or awaiting a trial, they're treated like they already are the people that, they're criminals. We don't have to care as much about them. They're kind of the other, the bad people. Lorraine said that she was in a crowded holding cell with 22 other women and just a few metal benches, nothing else. This is where nearly two dozen people had to sleep, had to eat, use the bathroom, all in one place for days on end. Women were trying to sit or sleep on either of the hard benches or the floor.

Some were attempting to use menstrual pads in place of a mattress. If they were lucky enough to be asleep, they were woken up at 2 a.m. for breakfast, and then again at 4 a.m. for head counting. They were so full, they didn't have room for the people that were being arrested. So they were in this holding cell. Some of them had been there three days. It was something like 18 feet by six feet across. The last six feet were behind a divider that had

a toilet, a single toilet. So it was even less room. The prison system is every day doing these kind of in-union treatments to people that get arrested are not yet guilty of anything. Student organizers and parents also briefly spoke on why people are fighting against Cop City. I don't want to live in a city. I don't want to live in a country, in a world that prioritizes the protection of private property through murder and state violence over the fundamental building blocks of life okay i think we we need to be focusing on giving people places to live giving people food to eat water to drink not on giving the police playgrounds where they can blow up bombs and shoot their guns and that's why all

of us together here need to come together be as one here in beautiful community with children with elders everything in between, doing this amazing community building. I love being out here with y'all. It's so much fun to just like be working the popcorn machines and all that. And that's why we're all here together because we know that community is the key

for us to stop Cop City. Stop Cop City! Stop Cop City! And so as we fight to stop Cop City, we are fighting for investment in the things that make families thrive in this city. We tell them Andre Dickens, we tell them the Atlanta Police Foundation, that we demand that money be reinvested into housing for the people, childcare for the people, education for the people, healthcare for the people,

because those are the things that make our communities truly safe. And if they won't give it to us, we're going to build those networks of care in our communities ourselves. That is what makes days like today so beautiful. The fact that the people have the capacity to feed the people.

The people have the capacity to make sure that people stay hydrated. People have the capacity to give each other medical care. And as we build out those networks of care, we make the government irrelevant. They can try to tell us what to do all day long. But if we continue to build people's power, well, they have to say, don't even matter. So are you ready to build that kind of world? As people got ready to depart, the energy was noticeably higher than most other events that week.

All right, it is Saturday morning on July 1st. This is the last day of the sixth week of action. The youth rally just left Brownwood Park and is now marching through East Atlanta Village. Shortly before the youth rally, news started to circulate that early, early that morning, just after midnight, several Atlanta police motorcycles and cop cars suffered mysterious damages, which possibly could have contributed to the more bolsterous energy among some of the radical attendees. more bolsterous energy among some of the radical attendees.

People are driving by and honking in support as about 75 people, maybe 100, are marching. As about 75 or 100 people are marching next to Metropolitan Avenue. You think a fire truck would pull their air horn? I don't know. The fire trucks were kind of busy last night, actually. I'm not sure. The fire trucks were busy doing what, Garrison? Well, it seems like a lot of police motorcycles

were found to be set on fire at the site of the old police training academy. It sounded like some police cruisers were wrecked somewhere else in the city, too. On Memorial Drive Southeast, it sounded like three cop cars were also smashed up. Do you think there's something going around? Is it contagious? So, yeah, the fire crews were a little bit busy last night. Spontaneous vehicle vandalism. Yeah.

That's certainly one way to end this week of action. I believe we will stop cops in it! This definitely feels like the most positive part of the week of action so far. Yeah. People have been marching for about 20 minutes now. The march has now turned down Glenwood and is heading back towards Brownwood Park. No police presence at all so far. There was just complete...

I've not seen a single cop car in this section of town. There's also three less cop cars in Atlanta than there usually is, so that might have something to do with it. It was from this zone too. The second one where the cop cars are it was uh like a mile and a half away yeah it's very very close but yeah very different than uh what we saw on last saturday yes where i like even on my way in i saw apd here every every, you know, 20 feet. Yeah. And to not see a single APD vehicle is notable. The youth rally that closed the last week of action in March kind of felt like the end of an era. This one on July 1st felt very different, much more like a beginning of a new era.

After a very scattered week, the movement finally started to feel like it had multiple directions to grow. This week definitely started on, I would say, a muted note, and it's ended with a bit more directionality for the future and a bit more positivity, I think. I think people were able to think of ways that the movement can evolve and grow from here and recognize the necessity for that. For change. Yeah, recognize the necessity for change,

and people are ready to continue and evolve as the situation on the ground is also changing. Adaptability was a part of the movement from the get-go. It's just I think the movement got very tied to certain modes of operation that are not available anymore. Yep. You know, for the past, like, few months, people have been,

it felt like people have been playing on the police's, like, board. Like, they've been following that. And both of the action last night and the sort of talks that are happening throughout the city, I think that is probably going to change. All right, we are about a block away from Brownwood Park on Portland Avenue and Gresham Avenue.

Where there is pizza and water waiting. I'm excited for water. I don't think I can have hot pizza right now. I think I would just faint. But cold water is certainly, certainly enticing. Certainly the ideal. Yep. And there's music back here in Brownwood.

Tables set up, giving out literature, giving out food, water, lots of bubbles. Earlier, earlier at the, earlier at the rally before the march, there was a water balloon fight, which was very dangerous. Yeah, I left. I don't know why you stayed around the water balloon fight. I took my laptop and left. There was a few very close moments there. But yeah, no, there's food.

There's lots of signs, banners. A lot of Little Caesars pizza. There was much more energy here compared to the kickoff rally, which happened in the very same park exactly a week beforehand, which felt sort of reversed from the previous week of action this past March. Which is interesting because last week of action, the kickoff rally was the biggest energy point,

and the youth rally was kind of the more muted close. And this has kind of been inversed. Which, honestly, for when you're looking at what has happened over the last few months, maybe leading out with a high note is the ideal. We're also ending with a bouncy castle

which is very important. You know what? Yeah. For the full flip, we have to end with the bouncy castle. Although we should move the bouncy castle to 890 Memorial Drive Southeast. Oh my God, stop. After the youth rally, Matt and I got some coffee in East Atlanta Village and talked about the broad strokes of the week and the general state of the movement.

Like I said, I think this week started with a lot of questions being had, and it's ended with some of those questions being answered and people figuring out that to answer some of those other questions, the answer will take the form of actions that happen in these next few months. And I feel like it's ended with a bit more directionality than what it began, which is interesting for a week of action. It was needed, though. It was absolutely needed, like 100%.

The first rally just felt so weird. The first kickoff rally, the first day, the first few days felt just very, very scattered. It was unclear how what was happening was related to stopping Cop City. And in some ways, this week of action feels like the reverse of the last week of action. Where the last week of action, it started with a point of directionality. Like, we are going to retake Wolani. And they did. And then they were like, we are going to do an action to physically stop the construction of cop city and they did like it was doing all these things and I think that week ended with more questions than what it started with um because because the police did the

raid of the forest there was a lot of there was more uncertainty by the end of the week because there was so much over policing there was a lot of a lot of changes throughout throughout that week um and I think this week started in like an inverse. People started this week with a directionless sense and they had a lot of questions going into this week. And I feel like some people have started to kind of figure out how the movement will evolve in these next few months. And it feels like people have a better idea of how they are going to move forward in these next three months six months and like the the month and a half when construction is slated to begin in August. Slated to begin and you know this

referendum is looking like it's doing pretty well so hopefully that that does delay but yeah of course we also ended with bouncy castle yes we can't do an episode without acknowledging the importance of Bouncy Castles to this movement, or at least to Garrison and I. Yes. I think the other thing that makes it interesting in terms of this week being an inverse of the last week is that, you know, on the last week, day two, there was this very fiery action with vehicles being smashed. And then on the second to last day, which is like late last night,

either like late Friday night to early Saturday morning at like 1 a.m., 2 a.m., there was three Atlanta police cars smashed by Reynolds Town, I believe. Yeah, just right, like a mile and a half away from Brownwood Park. And closer to the airport at the old police training academy, there was a, it looks like a good fleet of Atlanta police motorcycles. Yeah, that's where the motorcycle, like that's where the moto headquarters is. It's like the storage is. It's 180 Southside. And those motorcycles are going to be no longer functioning because they are all charred to a crisp.

With like incendiary devices found there. Yeah. One of the most noticeable differences about this week of action compared to the previous one was the turnout. Out-of-state support did not show up in similar numbers as to the last week of action in March. There's a lot of potential reasons for this. This week may have simply happened too soon. It coincided with other events across the country.

Its messaging may not have reflected an adequate level of planning. There was probably some demoralization from the 90 acres of trees cut down. And with Entrenchment Creek Park closed and under police occupation, lodging options in Atlanta was more of a mystery for those coming from outside the city. More time away from the death of Tortuguita is probably also a factor. People in Atlanta may have to reconcile that the movement may not have as much widespread national support and on-the-ground numbers as it did last March. This is the smallest week of action we've had in over a year.

In recent memory, this is the smallest one i've i've reported on right yeah you know i i think it might have even been comparable to the first week of action like it was around there but it also felt more local it did feel way more local once you go from like something so big as the last week of action to something more constrained that is that sets a vibe shift that I think you've got to kind of come to terms with. And it's one of those moments where you're like, okay, we are in a different paradigm. Yeah. Fewer numbers is not necessarily a bad thing. A group of five to 10 people can sometimes be much more effective at doing certain things than a crowd of 200 or even 1,000. You just have to specifically prepare for the numbers that you know that you'll have.

For such a long time, I felt like this movement was extremely effective in delaying construction. Extremely effective? A year and a half? Deadlines kept getting pushed back, every single thing. The occupation was very good at doing what it attempted to do. And at a certain point that became no longer viable and things are now changing gears. Yeah. And you have to allow yourself that evolution.

The same way people started occupying the forest in October after the city council stuff in September of 2021. Like as the things change, you have to change your tactics with it. And as, I mean, as revolutionary strategy goes, that's just, that should be a baseline. It's adapting to what the situation is and not what the situation, what you want it to be. Yeah. And I think more people are talking about that this week and realizing that like, more people are talking about that this week and realizing that like, maybe even another week of action does not make sense for this new paradigm that we're existing in in Atlanta. I've talked about the possibility of changing the week of action structure before in previous episodes. And I really only brought that up because that's what people were conveying to me at the time.

And this has continued to be a topic of debate both during and since June. What do you do with the week of action format? And I know that we kind of talked about this during the last recap episode, where you brought up that that might have been the last week of action, but it wasn't. It wasn't because as I was making these episodes, this week of action was announced. I've heard more people say that they don't think the week of action format is applicable anymore. I've heard more people say that than I did last week. What if Atlanta has kind of outgrown this format?

This format's proved to be very useful in these past few years. There's been very positive parts, there's been very negative parts. And what if it's time for something completely new? Something that the police don't know how to respond to something that matches the new paradigm yeah because that's the that's the other thing it's like people have been doing this for like two years now like not only have people gotten used to a pattern but like police have gotten used to a pattern like police have gotten very good at repressing the week of action like they have they have had two years to practice. They know how to do this now.

So why keep playing on their battlefield? Why keep doing what APD is expecting you to do? That's part of what's interesting about this resurgence of these nocturnal hit-and-run sabotages that are unannounced, that we saw the ones earlier in this week with the Brent Scarborough's machines, then we saw the APD vehicles get hit last night. So perhaps there will be more of that. Perhaps

there'll be just new things that we can't even predict. Like there's so many other avenues that things could go. Even during the youth march, Matt and I were wondering if this new spike in sabotage actions would break the spell and we'd see a return of this type of action happening more frequently. You know, it's the sort of direct action that has really been missing over the last several months. Yeah, and no, we've been talking about a lot this past week, we've been talking about how there's been a lack of these sorts of nocturnal hit-and-run direct actions. And late last night, it seems like there was a resurgence.

So we'll see how that continues, you know, after the week of action, if it continues or if it was a week of action inspired element. But I have a feeling we'll see some of those continue to crop up. Absolutely. And this did indeed turn out to be the case. Alright, I will do my best to go over a short list of the claimed attacks against contractors building Cop City

and corporations that fund the Atlanta Police Foundation from after this week of action. On July 1st, over half a dozen Bank of America buildings in the Bay Area were vandalized and a dozen or so ATMs were smashed. In late June to early July, a group of friends visited the home of Cop City architect Anthony Kenney in Norcross, Georgia, while another group paid a visit to

Ambrish Basilwala, a member of the Board of Trustees for the Atlanta Police Foundation. People painted messages around their homes and tires were slashed. On the night of July 2nd, Keith Johnson, the eastern regional president for Brassfield & Gorey, the contracting firm who broadly oversaw the destruction of the forest and who has decided to physically build Cop City, also received a mysterious visit. Late in the night, an unknown number of people evaded security guards and spread blood-red paint around his pool and left a message reading, Cop City will never be built, drop the contract, and you can't hide. According to an online

communique, rotten fish and dirty motor oil were left hidden somewhere on the property. Part of the communique addressed to Keith reads, quote, We know things haven't been feeling great in the office. You're losing money. Subcontractors are upset. There are fractures everywhere in the Cop City project, and all of that weight and precarity is on your fragile shoulders. Each time you think of us or see the reminders we left you, remember this is your own doing. You can make all of this stop by dropping the Cop City contract, unquote. On July 4th, in lieu of fireworks, people claimed to have set two Brent Scarborough machines on fire in broad daylight due to the lack of security

during daytime. Scarborough is the subcontractor who physically leveled the 90-some acres of forest in the Wolani. The same day in Michigan, Chase Bank ATMs were sabotaged with glue and the bank was vandalized with messages of resistance. Chase Bank's head of regional investment banking serves on the board of the Atlanta Police Foundation. And on July 8th, a Bank of America in Berkeley was vandalized with stop cop city slogans and three ATMs were smashed. During the start of this little wave of actions, the mayor's office and APD were none too happy. So on July 5th, Mayor Andre Dickens and Atlanta Police Chief Darren Shearbaum put on a press conference with the ATS, Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and FBI to discuss the recent surge of direct actions.

Our public safety facilities and property were the target of an extremely violent and dangerous attack on Saturday, July 1st. And there were several other destructive acts of extreme vandalism on public and private property that occurred that we have reason to believe are related to the construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center in DeKalb County. The current Atlanta Police Training Center at 180 Southside Industrial Parkway was set ablaze in the early morning hours of Saturday, July 1st. The targeted attack utilized extremely dangerous homemade incendiary devices to set a fire to the building and completely destroyed eight police motorcycles. As shocking as this is, this was not an isolated incident of violence.

This group actually took credit for these incidents and they stated, as I quote, we are vengeful wingnuts with nothing left to lose. Prior to that, about one hour prior to the event at Wendy's Southside Industrial, we had another precinct that was targeted in the city. This is our Path Force Precinct, Memorial Drive, in the 800 block of Memorial. These officers patrol the Beltline, which many of you all visit frequently. At that location, we had multiple windows broken on police vehicles. We believe the intent was to set those vehicles on fire as well. The photograph of the red Fusee on the ground, that has been used by this group in the past to set police vehicles on fire. That was dropped when a citizen observed the criminal acts in progress and actually interrupted the crimes that were occurring there.

So we believe that the fire attack that was planned on Memorial Drive was thwarted by an observant citizen. A short time later, about an hour, we had the fire at our facility on Southside Industrial. Our training center is housed there most recently, and then our special operations precinct is there. The intent was for all 40 to be destroyed. And had all those 40 vehicles caught on fire, that police facility would have been gravely damaged if not destroyed in the fire. And we are thankful for our police officers that saw this unfolding and likely interrupted that plan from being able to play out and unfold us. There's indications that this was likely committed by the exact same individuals. We will let and see where the facts take us. According to Chief Shearbaum and Mayor

Dickens, the actions against Atlanta police on July 1st, over the course of just a few hours, equaled over $300,000 in damages. It's way around $35,000. And then once you outfit us a little bit more, so do that times eight, that's going to put you in the ballpark. Yeah. And that's not even including the rest of the smoke and damage and other things. And the broken windows on the police car, etc. So the group that struck this weekend is a dedicated group of professional anarchists. And I know that may seem a contradiction in terms.

So this is a group of individuals who don't play by any rules and will go to any lengths they need to to carry out. And this is their words. We will wage a campaign of violence and destruction. And so what we saw this weekend was part of that campaign. It's always funny when police make anarchists sound very cool and scary. But Chief Schierbaum also pretty clearly explained the reasoned methodology behind the pressure campaigns targeting contractors and APF financial sponsors. We know from the postings of this group, their intent to stop the Public Safety Training Center has left the democratic process of the city council and is now moving to intimidate and force out contractors that are committed to building the Public Safety Training Center. This weekend during the week of action, three

different locations, private residences were targeted. Tires were flattened on a contractor's home. A home of an executive for Brassic Del Gorey was significantly vandalized in another jurisdiction. And then we had another location where graffiti was used to intimidate. Yesterday morning, slightly after 7 o'clock in the morning, a location at 418 McDonough Boulevard, belonging to Brent Scarborough's company, which is a key provider of work on this training center, was also targeted and attacked, and equipment was set on fire at that location. across the country that are using violence and fear and intimidation to stop a public safety training center. And this group cannot hide behind the dark of night or the home address and feel that they are not going to be held accountable. I have standing at this podium with me today, representatives from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the ATF, and we are also

partnered with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. These agencies are working together to determine where federal laws violated this weekend and ensure that the full expertise of American law enforcement is present right here in Atlanta to stop this group, stop this group across the region, stop their ability to impact the public safety network of Atlanta, and hold them accountable. Despite continued threats from law enforcement, the only arrests that have happened so far in relation to this movement are from daytime protests, forest raids, and bail fund organizers. We've yet to see anyone arrested in Atlanta for doing a specific one of these nocturnal night sabotage actions. That has not happened. I mean, the scariest indictments everyone's

expecting are going to come in these next few years after you give the FBI two, three, four years to investigate, after you interview more people who've been arrested, see if anyone snitches, see if anyone turns state's witness. But so far, it's been safer to do nocturnal sabotage actions than it has been to attend a public protest. And that is an interesting paradigm as well, is that no one's actually got arrested for lighting cop cars on fire in the middle of the night. No one's been

arrested for sabotaging equipment in the middle of the night. All of the arrests that are being tied to violent crime are from daytime protests, which is an interesting factor about this movement. from like daytime protests, which is an interesting factor about this movement. Direct action in the most surveilled city in America can be tricky, and even just managing cell phones and internet search data is a huge factor. But as much real security there is out in the world, the amount of security theater is arguably a stronger aspect in getting people to not go out and do direct action. The implicit threat of the panopticon is often enough to stifle people's potential action. But these things are beatable. Guides for how to do it exist either at your local anarchist book fair or online,

as long as the computer is running Tor browser and a reputable VPN. running Tor browser and a reputable VPN. The internet's a fun place. That's, there is a lot of no-blog sites and the zines that tell you how to do that. I don't know. I mean, people always make mistakes. People get caught sometimes. People do make mistakes.

It's risky. And there are cameras everywhere in the city. Some of them don't work, but it's like, do you really want to play Russian roulette? No, that's a part of when people like plan these nocturnal actions is like just because it's nighttime doesn't mean you're not getting watched or you're not like it's there's a lot of things that go into that um there's a lot of ways to get got whether you're like buying supplies and you keep a receipt and people please find a receipt they track back they find

security camera of you purchasing things and then they're like, oh, this bottle was bought at this place because you have this receipt in your house and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like there's lots of ways that that stuff happens. So like, I'm not gonna give a guide on how to do it right now. But like, anarchists have been doing this for a long time.

After you do that crime, you've never done that crime. Like it's not something that you do as a person. after you do that crime you've never done that crime like it's it's not something that you do as a person like you cease to become a person you you become like you are that action is subsumed into into the action and then and then it's not actually you never talk about it ever again it's gone or else you end up going to prison yep and risking like not just your safety the safety everyone's safety of everyone. Everyone's safety. Just by remembering that you did it.

No, you know, like these become standards in anarchist communities. Like you never brag about something. You never allude to anything. Like it's it's it's not it's not a game.

Like you're it's not a game. You're you're it is your your life and other people's lives on the line when when you're doing stuff like this. And it's, yeah, you never do it to, like, be cool. You never do it to brag about it.

Like, that's just not how this works. Which is why there's, like, kind of a much more, like, kind of insular culture around some anarchists, especially anarchists who, like, identify as, like, illegalists or, like, the types of, like, green nihilists or green anarchists that kind of pioneered identify as like illegalists or like the types of like uh like green nihilists or green anarchists that kind of pioneered the militancy of this movement uh both slightly even slightly before the first city council vote and then definitely after the first city council vote where we saw a massive explosion no pun intended um in the number of night time sabotages happening in the walani forest yeah um which i think drew a lot of

anarchists to come to atlanta because it was like oh they're doing the thing that they're doing a thing that has been missing since the end of the green scare yeah no this is like the thing that i believe in this is like this is my politics now there's a spot where i can do my politics um and still no one's been caught for that and i I think that was a big part of why Atlanta got so big last year, was that people had the ability to live free in the forest and then do crazy shit at night. You live in this autonomous zone during the day, whether you have housing instability, whether you just want an escape from horrible police state living like where in whatever wherever city you're in you can go live in the walani forest you can live in a tent you can have

friends you can defend this forest during the day and then you can do crazy crazy shit at night and that drew a lot of people to atlanta um and now with the forest not being there that also changes the that changes the type of people who are come who want to come to the city. Because that was a big draw for people. And now that that's no longer an option, you can't really sleep in the Wolani Forest as easily anymore. That changes the types of people who want to come to Atlanta and who are going to do crazy shit. Because that's just how... And for their own safety, they're not here. Yeah, no, absolutely. As the referendum is hoping to stop Cop City by having Atlanta residents vote on whether to cancel the land lease, others in the diverse

movement have continued their efforts to pressure contractors and funders to drop out of the Cop City project. This tactic has already demonstrated its ability to succeed, with Reeves Young Construction dropping out of the project in April of 2022, and some material suppliers have since cut ties with Cop City. This is something that APD chief Darren Sheerbaum certainly seems worried about. This effort of fear was not going to succeed, and the coalition of law enforcement from the GBI to the FBI to the ATF, the Atlanta Police Department, and a slew of regional agencies is going to stop that campaign so it doesn't happen and individuals do not leave the project. On July 2nd, protesters in Minnesota visited the homes of Atlas Technical Consultants employees. daylight, people marched around the neighborhoods with instruments and banners, knocked on doors,

talked with neighbors, and left a letter of demands to drop the contract and cut ties with the Atlanta Police Foundation. The project manager for Atlas Technical Consultants engaged with protesters in the street and told them that Atlas had indeed already dropped out of the project due to mounting pressure. broke all our fucking windows. So thank you. Oh yeah. No, I don't care what you want to say. But you guys show up to my fucking house and knock on my door and do this shit. My company is not involved in this. So get the fuck away from me. That's great. I'm glad.

We'll leave you alone. Get the fuck out of here. All right, take care. A few days later, Atlas and Long Engineering released an official statement saying that they would no longer be working on the Cop City project. Anarchists and those on the left in general seem to have a hard time calling wins. But I'm not sure if it gets any more definitive than that audio clip in showing that this type of direct action can absolutely work in getting businesses to leave the project. In the next episode, we'll talk more about the referendum,

the city's attempts to divide the movement, and the growing PR battle over the fate of Cop City. See you on the other side. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis, and this is the last episode in my trilogy covering what's been happening this summer in Atlanta to stop Cop City. Last episode, we covered the end of the Week of Action, the resurgence of nighttime sabotage, and Atlas Long Engineering dropping out of the Cop City project. A relatively new big aspect of the movement that I've really only mentioned peripherally is the Cop City Vote Referendum. that I've really only mentioned peripherally, is the Cop City Vote Referendum. The goal of the referendum is to let the people of Atlanta vote on whether to repeal an ordinance authorizing the land lease of 381 acres of forest in DeKalb County that was given to the Atlanta

Police Foundation in 2021 to use the land for the construction of Cop City. In order to get the referendum on an upcoming ballot, the petition had to gather 60,000 signatures in 60 days. Every signature must be from an Atlanta resident who was registered to vote in 2021, and initially those who gathered signatures had to also be Atlanta residents. 60,000 signatures in 60 days was a lofty goal, but volunteers around the city were being increasingly mobilized during and after the week of action. For the first few weeks of the referendum, the city stayed mostly quiet.

But then, on the July 5th APD press conference, Mayor Andre Dickens addressed the referendum. Mayor, some of the protesters and opposers of the training center have begun collecting signatures in the hope of having a referendum put in the November ballot. What's your reaction to that? What's your comment on that? Will you allow them to do what they're doing right now and possibly have this in the referendum? Yeah, absolutely. The referendum process is one that's legally documented. It's in the city code and anybody can attempt to get the petition going and get the necessary signatures. We ask that they do so with honesty and truth,

collect the signatures from real people with sharing the truth about what they are looking to do. And so I don't personally believe they're going to be successful. I believe that based on what we know about the citizens of Atlanta, they are supportive of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. We know that this is going to be unsuccessful if it's done honestly. And so we're making sure that we continue to monitor the process. This statement by the Democrat mayor of Atlanta, I don't think has been highlighted enough. The mayor is trying to frame a successful referendum as a fraudulent one. Dickens is priming propaganda channels and testing the waters for blatant election fraud-style messaging in the future

by very clearly insinuating that if you win this, that means you're cheating. The referendum kept popping up throughout the week of action. It wasn't taking up space. It was never the focus. It was always just like on the sidelines. Yeah. But it was everywhere. Like every, I think every event, the referendum was in some way, shape or form, you know, there, like, uh, the, the home Depot rally and people walking by, they were talking about the referendum and talking about the week of action, collecting signatures. It did not feel like it was taking space away from any of the other aspects of the movement. I think some people were definitely worried about that.

People worried that the referendum might act as a release valve for both the movement and the people who are outside the movement and still looking at Cop City, being like, how can you get involved in this thing? And you see this very above-board electoral strategy of signing stuff. Like what if people's efforts just get funneled into that and they miss out on the other much more expansive aspects of the movement? One of the few more referendum focused events during the week of action was a community town hall discussion put on by the Hip Hop Caucus at the Gathering Spot on the evening of Friday, June 30th. Before the panel discussion, myself and Matt from the Atlantic Community Press Collective

talked with two members of the Hip Hop Caucus about the event and their hopes for the referendum. This is Brandi Williams, an organizer with the Hip Hop Caucus. So the Hip Hop Caucus is a national nonpartisan nonprofit organization that uses hip hop culture to connect people to the civic and political process. And essentially we do that in four areas. We do that with, I think, 100% climate and environmental justice work. We were founded as a voting and democracy organization out of the voter die movement. So we still do that work under our Respect My Vote platform.

We also have our Good Trouble civil and human rights work. It's our multi-issue platform, and we look at it as the justice department for hip hop. So we do it. We work on everything from police reform to education and health care, and then our Justice Paid in Full, which is our economic justice platform. So how do we achieve economic justice? We actually started our activation like on the ground work in L.A. last week during BET weekend. So we did a similar event in L.A. We're doing this one here and we are planning to be here in Atlanta and through the referendum and through the election. We also talked with Yonajah Lone Wolf, an Atlanta resident and national community organizer.

Recently, she had been working to spread awareness across the country about what's been going on in Atlanta. Myself, Hip Hop Caucus, Movement for Black Lives Until Freedom, community movement builders, we all came up with this idea to create this photo shoot campaign, similar to voter die or anything, you know, where you have a nice shirt or a sticker and you're taking and just being there in solidarity. So we did it during LA BET Awards weekend last weekend. We had a nice turnout of folks that came. I was in LA for the Hollywood Climate Summit. I spoke on a panel with Jane Fonda. So there was a lot of people from Hollywood that came and said, oh, my God, that's what's happening in Georgia. We have to be we cannot sign for on the referendum, but we stand with you all because what we are also educating people at is that if Cop City is built,

what we are also educating people at is that if cop city is built they already having contracts with police nationally to come here this will be the largest police training facility in the united states i went to universal studios hollywood universal studios roller coasters it's huge it's nice it's 400 acres that's 50 acres less will be cop city and then you know and i'm like that's an amusement park of nothing but real real gunfire real bombs real real everything it's not going to be fake it's not amusement park in that way but this is their call of duty in real life. And it's in the middle of a residential neighborhood. They're not here to protect and serve. They're here to shoot, to kill. And so

police from all across this nation will be coming here to Georgia for this militarized police training. And that's a problem for me. And the turnout in California showed that that's a problem for them too. So we had a lot of people that came for that. And today we're doing the same thing. And we're having a community town hall discussion. Because I think there's a lot of people that don't understand. Why is Cop City? Because I want to meet the mayor's publicist.

Because the way that this whole thing has been spin on his side that no it would be great for the EMT and the firefighters and and and they're pushing EMT firefighters more than the police part but the police part is a huge part I think these type of conversations need to be talked about and so that's what this community town hall is all about as well for those that are kind of wavering neutral maybe don't know maybe they know it a lot you know because the number one thing that we've been seeing like I was on V103 yesterday on the radio station and um and I also been doing a couple of other media and and call-ins and a lot of people don't understand like they a lot of people don't understand like why is this a bad thing you know know, you can move it somewhere else, they say.

But even if it's moved somewhere else, I'm still going to fight against Cop City. You know, just because I have, this hits home for me. Too many of my friends and family have been murdered by the hands of radical, power-hungry, gun-happy, trigger-happy police officers. And I feel that there is, and then also another thing too, there is answers, you know, in regards to, we don't need more police. We need resources. They shut down our hospital. They shut down the shelters. It's not like they don't know, right? Like we tell them, we need more jobs, not just any job, good quality jobs. We need pristine health care, not just affordable health care.

And then most importantly, our unsheltered friends, to see that they put bulldozers, this administration, this city continues to ignore, ignore the people. We have the hugest, the biggest wealth gap in the nation. And they call it Wakanda, the blackest city. But this is how you treat us? Our people need resources. That's where this $67 million should be going. It should not be going towards more

police. We don't need more police. Because when you go to Cobb County, when you go over to Alpharetta, they don't have a lot of police. They don't have a lot of, why would they need a lot of police? Because they already got the resources. On top of the community town hall discussion, there were a few other things to do at the event that Unajah talked about. A Stop Cop City photo campaign. So everyone, you come and take your photo. And just showing that you stand in solidarity. And then most importantly is to get some signatures as well.

Throughout the referendum process, it's been interesting how many people, even in Atlanta, are just now learning about Cop City. When did you first hear about Cop City? Honestly, earlier this year. And like a lot of the people that I am talking to now, I was also kind of confused about the issue. I wasn't really sure why, you know, they were... I was also kind of confused about the issue. I wasn't really sure why they were so opposed

until I started learning a little more about what actually was going to happen at this training facility. So the idea of building a mini city with a helicopter landing pad, with a shooting range or a firing range, military grade, in a community. So this is not on the outskirts. This is in a community, and then in a community of color. And you're bringing police from around the country in to learn military tactics, tactics that we use in foreign countries to protect citizens.

We should not be thinking about our citizens, our residents, as people who need to be protected from themselves, if I'm making sense. You know what I mean? Sort of like enemy combatants in your own... In your own backyard. But you're training them up in a black community. So I can only imagine that some of that many-city is going to spill over into the communities. Then you're bringing police officers from around the country here, so they're taking that back.

The specific community where the Atlanta Police Foundation is trying to build Cop City has already been traumatized by the violence of the state for hundreds of years now. This whole area was violently stolen from Muskogee Creek. Then it became a slave plantation. And then part of it was sold to the city of Atlanta, and then it became a prison farm. Since then, the land has been home to two landfills and three detention facilities. This is the history of just this neighborhood

for the last few hundred years. Now the carceral violence inflicted on this land, it's attempting to be exported as police will soon come from around the country and even the world to train at Cop City. No one wants it in their community, but you're going to continue to burden this particular community with the same thing over

and over and over again the people of that community for generations have experienced all kinds of harm at the hands of the people that they you know supposedly are electing to represent and protect them from these types of things and they're actually the ones doing it to them you were elected by people to represent them and they've told you for two years, we don't want this, and you are ignoring their voice. On the day of the Hip Hop Caucus panel, an air quality alert was issued due to incoming smoke from wildfires up north. In Atlanta, the AQI reached 150. The ocean, these fish, these birds, they're screaming at us right now. What we are doing to Mother Earth right now is we are, from cutting down the trees, fossil fuels, everything, this is, and especially this being the lungs of Atlanta.

Today, I'm wearing my mask because on my weather advisory, it said the air quality is not good today for sensitive people. And that is just with the trees. And they keep on cutting down these trees. I moved here because of the trees. I'm from Arizona, so I needed trees. That was nothing but desert. But I moved here because of these trees, because I love the life force that trees give us, even when we see a tree. The earth is talking back to us, saying, stop doing what you're doing. The dolphins, the orcas, the whales, they all migrate. They're like, the ocean is hot right now. So they're yelling at us and we're not listening. And in my native way, our elders, our chiefs have said that we plan for seven

generations from now. I am a mother of two sons. And what this administration is doing and what these corporations are doing, they're not looking at seven generations from now. They're not looking at how this is going to affect us on the long run. And I love the fact of everyone that is standing firm and saying, stop Cop City, because we see the vision. We know what this Uchimaka, this Mother Earth is going to look like seven generations from now. And we're fighting to our death because of the fact that we want to make sure that our children's children's children's children could still live here and be in a peaceful, safe place and environment to live. Since being elected as the progressive candidate in 2021, there's been an ever-growing animosity towards Mayor Dickens from all of his unfulfilled promises. When talking with Yonashaha, she expressed that she felt disappointed that herself and this big block of people helped Andre get

elected. And now Mayor Dickens is fully committed to the Cop City project and is even having conversations with other Black leaders in the city to bring them on board and prevent them from opposing Cop City. that we got during Freedom Summer 2020. He used the social justice, the civil rights organizations and activists and voices to get him in the position that he used them and said, y'all help me. I'm going to be there for you all. And it's all a slap in the face. So I don't like hypocrisy, and I see hypocrites all throughout this and on this administration side, from the governor all the way down.

Even when we try to help our unsheltered friends, in December, when it was so cold out here, I went on social media, I raised $5,000 in two hours. I went and went, me and my friends went and got them all tents, tents, sleeping bags, everything. The mayor called my comrade, Mayor Andre called my comrade and was all like, why are you saying that they don't have no heating stations? And I set up a heating station. Not everyone wants to go there. Because so is there, where is your mental health services?

because so is there where is your mental health services where's the transitioning team that you should have on the ground to help transition them don't just open up a temporary heating shelter where's the transition team to go and talk to the people saying hey let me walk you in to go get heated there was none of that you're just expecting people to just go in there or they knew where it was at. So we went to the cab. We went to the cab and we also went down to Atlanta. We gave them tents. The police went down there. The Atlanta PD went down there and put holes all in their tents. They slide. They used a knife and put and sliced their tents open so it wouldn't they can even stay in it. While it was still below freezing. Yes, while it was still below freezing. This is all under the administration of Mayor Andre.

So no, we can't trust them. Do you feel betrayed by Andre? Yes, because I voted for him. I voted for him. I voted for him because I think I voted for him like every other person voted for him. I voted for him because I think I voted for him like every other person voted for someone, is that they're charismatic, they talk an amazing game,

and on top of it, my friends that were close with him, voted for him. My friends in the movement, activists, people that I look up to as mentorship, they said, man, Andre, he's going to fund a lot of the things that we're doing. Yoan Aja Ha spoke about how Mayor Dickens worked to build mutually beneficial relationships between the city and non-governmental, quote unquote, progressive organizations. progressive organizations. So while some NGOs have received money from the city, now many of these big quote-unquote civil rights orgs are scared of jeopardizing potential funding and are now currently refusing to speak out against Cop City. Yeah, when I talk to the same people that have spoken to Andre,

all the same people, I'm like, why aren't you involved? And they're just like, I think it's going to be built, and at least I'm at the table. A lot of them think that way. They were like, I was there at the beginning fighting. I had to sit down with the mayor. I believe this is going to be built, so since this is going to be built, let me figure, at least I'm at the table in the community, and there's community engagement.

At least there's some type of bridging happening. That's their angle. Anyone that said Black Lives Matter was on the front line with us in 2020, that was horrified by the videos that they saw. We are at prime time. This is the epicenter of police terrorism being built. This is the epicenter of police terrorism being built. This is it. This is it. This is not each individual. We're trying to prevent more families.

Because if they build this, it's going to be a lot more families that's going to be crying and saying they killed my baby. So we're at the epicenter of a cop city and you are silent? You're silent? But you was there for these families? You was there posting Black Lives Matter? You was there saying stop police terrorism? But they're building a terrorist headquarters. And you don't have nothing to say? You're a hypocrite. You're a hypocrite, period, point blank. Brandy also talked about the hypocrisy of pushing forward Cop City after the George Floyd uprising in 2020. You know, three years ago, just in May, all these companies were sending out these emails saying that Black Lives Matter after George Floyd, they were pouring money into the community to show their support for Black lives. But some of those same communities, Home Depot, Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, Waffle House, you guys are, I'm sure, sent those emails out and now you're putting money into something that does not respect Black lives. So I think there's just this huge contradiction in who these companies say they are, how they're showing up. Part of the growing propaganda battle over Cobb City is an attempt to frame this state-of-the-art militarized police training facility as a quote-unquote public safety training center, embodying the call for police reform that liberals

protested for in 2020. Not only does this erase the abolitionist core of the 2020 uprising, but it also obfuscates the fact that Cop City is indeed a direct response to 2020, not in terms of police reform, but in the aftermath of the neoliberal police state being under genuine threat, corporate America and police have made this pact to maintain each other's legitimacy, as one cannot survive without the other. Cop City is to ensure that what happened in 2020 will never happen again. After the clear-cutting of around 80 acres in the Wolani Forest, there's been more of a focus on the Stop Cop City wing of the movement than defend the forest. Sure, there are still 300 acres to defend and 80 acres to restore,

but as construction is getting more imminent, the specific Cop City focus has taken center stage in messaging. When it was initially talked about, it was all about the environment. They're tearing down the forest. And as marginalized, poor people, if I am hearing that, I'm not seeing it as important. I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to pay my rent, how I'm going to feed my kids, how I'm going to pay my bills, how I'm getting to and from work. And so those things, I think, made it difficult to break into the household of people who really need to be paying attention.

And I would dare to say even the people in the community, I watched some of the testimony from the city council meeting several weeks ago. from the city council meeting several weeks ago, and the state representative that spoke first talked about how the church right next door to the facility didn't even know what was happening next door to them. So for the city of Atlanta to say, oh, we've done outreach, people in the community know, that's not true, right? But part of that is the way that the narrative has started. And I think they were like, okay, that ain't got nothing to do with me. And then also the fact that the faces that they saw on TV, they're thinking this is a white-led, white problem, it's not our problem. So they haven't engaged.

So I think those are all things that we have to consider and let people know this is a diverse problem. It impacts everybody. It's going to impact people of color and poor and marginalized communities more than anybody else just because of the nature of how policing is done in America and the problems that we still have with that. The program is from Red Dogs to Cop City, the Dirty South's history of over-policing Atlanta. So helping them understand how this is just a new iteration of what's been happening. So the Red Dog unit was, some call it a gang, within Atlanta PD for many years. It was disbanded in 2011, but they were terrorizing low, poor communities of color.

And so Cop City, in the way that they're thinking about training these officers, would be just a new iteration of that. So helping them understand that just because we have come far with the civil rights, with our civil rights, and I'm not even talking specifically about the 60s movement, but civil rights for people of color, women, LGBTQIA plus communities, just because we've come far doesn't mean we can't go back. Atlanta's Red Dogs inspired the Scorpion Unit in Memphis that killed Tyree Nichols this past January. And the current iteration of the Red Dogs in Atlanta is the Apex Unit, who have been very active in suppressing Stop Cop City protests. I'm going to play three brief clips from the panel discussion. The first is from Mariah Parker, a local activist and former Georgia County Commissioner. This is a war on the uprising of 2020. This is in the aftermath of the largest uprisings in North America.

The Atlanta Police Foundation, who is the main driver and the main funder, and actually the owner of Cop City. I keep forgetting the fact that this is not actually going to be on the website, the Atlanta Police Foundation trying to reassert their control over black communities at a time when people are starting to understand that communities are made safer by affordable housing and healthcare and childcare and education, and where their supremacy in the public safety apparatus has been challenged. Their dominance has been challenged. And so in response to that uprising, they seized hold of a narrative that more police training, more diversity in our officers

would be the magic key to heal all the wounds in our communities and to actually deliver a style of policing that serves the people. And so with that, they were able to make arguments that Cop City would be the answer to allegedly rising crime rates, heal these divides, et cetera, et cetera. At the end of the day, it's a form of counterinsurgency. The people rose up, and so this is the police rising up in response to reassert their dominance.

Next is K.J. Henson, an Atlanta local, an organizer with Black Men Build and Black Male Initiative Georgia. We're clear that the police are not our protectors, right? We suffer at the hands of the system on a daily basis, right? The system was built on our backs, literally. So we see that we've been discarded, we've been abused by the system, and that's the point. It's not that we're disengaged because we don't care,

we're disengaged because we do care, right? Every election cycle, it's black voters to the rescue. We're the folks that are most impacted by the decisions of the same elected officials that beg us to put them in position. We suffer because these people come to us and beg for votes, for canvassers, for money, and they turn around and they sell us out

the first chance they get. So it's, we're disengaged of a matter of I can't get what I need from these people that say that they're for me, right? The very means of the people are at risk. Cop City threatens our very right to protest, right? Cop City threatens the right for us to stand in the street and use our voice as a means of building collective power as a vehicle for making societal change. You become a domestic terrorist. You get jailed without bail, without bond. You won't have a court date. I've been there myself. Not for domestic terrorism. It just was a court date. won't have a court date. I've been there myself.

Not for domestic terrorism, it just for some court dates. So we're seeing the rise of fascism in a very real way. Say that. Like in the realest of ways. Cop City, like you said, is ground zero for what will become a very popular trend, not just in America, but across the world, right? So it's on us to make sure that we do

everything that's in our power to make sure that this thing is stopped. Cop City is giving police the training and ability to have urban warfare and suppression tactics at their will to be used against the people. Urban warfare and suppression, not unlike what we see in other countries, in other cities with organized resistance everywhere. Lastly, we have Reverend Keanu Jones, member of the Faith Coalition to Stop Cop City,

whom we've heard from on this show before. I want every Black Atlanter to think about what you don't have. If you don't have affordable housing, it's because they put the money in the cop's seat. If you can't pay your life bill, it's because that assistance got given back to the federal government, but they're paying for cop's seat. If there are no policing alternatives and diversion initiatives in your community, it's because they're giving the mind about sick if you fell into that Oh, I'm still here

It's because they give it the money to top city if you can walk out of your door and briefly Because they'd rather get to top city. So Andre Dickens does not care about Black people I'm gonna do a Kanye West right now Don't care about black people. And Andre Dickens ain't no different than nobody else. And some of those other council people up there who have those so-called legacy names ain't doing nothing for black people.

So once again, what is Andre Dickens doing for you? If he is willing to take police and make sure that they got slot tanks to roll around in, they walking around in the ARs in your neighborhood, your children walking out the house to hearing gunshots constantly, what do Andre Dickens care about you? Does his children hear that? No.

Okay. No, they do not. They do not. No, they do not. No, they do not. It is important to mention the venue that this panel took place in, because this is very much like a... It feels like a Black Excellence type of space.

It is. That is the space that it is. It is a private club. It holds an amount of respect there. Cultural significance. And on this panel, at the gathering spot, the panelists were talking about how why is the mayor, who many of these people helped get elected because he had promises about helping out the community, giving millions of dollars to affordable housing. Why is he using now like 60, 70 million dollars that could go to affordable housing that could go towards supporting black people in atlanta funneling all of that money into the police

and and into not even like the police department a private police foundation like funding funding the apfs project not a city project i think it was keanu who said that andre dickens does not care about black people yeah and having that be said at the gathering spot, I think actually is very important and is worth talking about. As the referendum was progressing and people from across all sides of the movement were working in conjunction to spread awareness of Cop City and engage in action, the mayor was making attempts to divide the movement. Criminals are hiding in the middle of peaceful protests, and sometimes they are doing their own separate acts of violence. Some of them are career arsonists and vandals from across the nation. Local activists have been alerted to this numerous times.

These are the actions of blatantly outrageous, dangerous, and violent criminals. How are arsonists, vandals, violent actors able to be alongside peaceful protesters? You have individuals that will burn up construction equipment, light a fire to police vehicles, and then have a bouncy house party the next day with, you know, peaceful protesters at a park. So they will go to a park by day and then by night they're burning up police equipment or setting fires or trying to destroy construction equipment. So these individuals are trying to use the guise of peaceful protests that maybe some local Atlantans may actually be engaged in desired conversation about their views on public safety. But these individuals have different views than those folks. These individuals are anarchists. They want to destroy. So these individuals are alongside, these arsonists,

these criminals are alongside peaceful protesters. And sometimes the peaceful protesters are aware of it and sometimes they are not. We have made it clear to local activists that we know and individuals that tend to be peaceful, we're letting them know that we are aware that there are individuals that are in our city that we are aware that there are individuals that are in our city that have committed crimes across the nation and that they are on your social media or in your network saying they're coming to your event to do the same. Mayor Dickens went further and essentially threatened that if you are a so-called activist and you don't snitch, then the APD will treat you the same as a violent criminal.

So when we give you that heads up as a local organizer, you should take that heads up and also see something, say something as we're asking any other citizen to do. When peaceful protesters, when organizers are not, you know, utilizing their best judgment, then bad things can happen with them being alongside them. And it makes it real tough for APD to know who was the one with the dirty hands, so to speak. And so that's what the message that we want to get out to the public is that these individuals mean harm and you don't want to be around them or associated with them. When you are, it makes it difficult to tell who's who. The city wants the various wings of the fight to stop Cop City to turn on

each other, to resent each other, to sow distrust and undermine any collective power. That's why the referendum's statement of solidarity, explicitly rejecting respectability politics and the framing of violent and nonviolent resistance was so important. An online communique claiming responsibility for torching police motorcycles on the last day of the week of action addressed this dynamic. Quote, we took action after non-combative demonstrations at Cadence Bank and Home Depot. The police attacked those demonstrations with no cause, as they do wherever and however the movement gathers. There can be no separation of time and space for tactics when police have turned society into a

war zone. Despite this, we dispersed our activity as much as possible across their area of control. We encourage those who are pursuing a strategy of referendum to continue supporting all methods to stop Cop City. Unquote. If you defy the state's unilateral authority in any way, you will be seen as a valid target. As demonstrated throughout the history of this movement, including during this last week of action, police will treat you like a violent criminal, whether you're holding a sign in a parking lot, bailing activists out of jail, or smashing a cop car. On July 6th, a group of activists in unincorporated DeKalb County, near the potential site of Cop City, filed a lawsuit against the city of Atlanta and the state of Georgia,

claiming the requirement that signature gatherers must themselves be Atlanta residents violated their First Amendment right to free speech and petition the government. Due to the potential constitutional violation, the lawsuit also requested the court reset the 60-day clock for gathering signatures while still counting the signatures that were already gathered. In mid-July, the city of Atlanta filed a reply in federal court arguing that the cop city referendum was wholly invalid since it seeks to revoke a land lease that has already been signed. The filing reads in part, quote, repeal of a years-old ordinance cannot retroactively revoke authorization to do something The city also argued that if the court does deem the Atlanta residency requirement for gathering

signatures unconstitutional, then the entire referendum should be deemed unlawful. A rebuttal by the plaintiffs said that the city did not provide factual or legal evidence for its claims and misread the cited precedents. According to the plaintiffs, the land lease contract is ongoing, not an irreversible quote-unquote one-time event. And since the city authorized and issued the petition form, they skipped their chance to argue that the referendum is somehow invalid by already approving the language of the petition and letting the referendum process begin. the referendum process begin. Near the end of July, U.S. District Court Judge Mark Cohen ruled in favor of the cop city referendum, allowing non-Atlanta residents to collect signatures and reset the 60-day clock to collect the roughly 60,000 signatures needed to put the land lease on the ballot. In his ruling, Judge Mark Cohen said, quote, requiring signature gatherers to be residents of the city imposes a severe burden on core political speech and does little to protect

the city's interest in self-governance, unquote. Mary Hooks, the tactical lead of the Referendum Coalition, reacted to the ruling saying, quote, we are thrilled by Judge Cohen's ruling and the expansion of democracy to include our deKalb neighbors and level the playing field for our The city quickly filed for an appeal, which was subsequently denied on August 14th, with the judge stating, The city's real concern may be that, now that non-residents have the ability to gather signatures on the petition for the entire time that they would have been permitted to do so had their initial request been granted, there is an increased possibility that a sufficient number of valid signatures could be obtained. Unquote.

As liberals cheered on the Fulton County District Attorney in Atlanta for indicting Trump and co-conspirators for election tampering under RICO charges, Trump, and co-conspirators for election tampering under RICO charges, the same exact sort of charges that this office has used against young black rappers and have been wielded against the Stop Cop City movement, the city of Atlanta's own election interference by repressing the referendum has been largely ignored. Fulton County Court set Trump's bond for $200,000 for attempting to overthrow a federal election. The same court set bond at $355,000 each for multiple protesters arrested for being merely present at a protest after Georgia State Patrol killed force defender Tortugita in January of this year. During all of the glowing press for District Attorney Fannie Willis and the City of Atlanta, it was revealed that on August 11th, the Atlanta Police Department killed a 62-year-old

unarmed black man named Johnny Holman while responding to a minor traffic accident. Both Holman and the unnamed second driver called 911 after the accident. Holman told 911 operators, quote, somebody ran into my truck, unquote. After waiting for over an hour for police to arrive, 23-year-old officer Kieran Kimbrough responded to the scene. Kimbrough joined APD in March of 2021 and currently has an open complaint for, quote, sexual misconduct non-criminal, unquote. Johnny Holman, who served as a deacon in his church, called his kids to listen to how the officer was escalating the situation. And then an unknown witness helped this APD officer wrestle 62-year-old Johnny Holman to the ground and put him in handcuffs

as the officer used his taser. To quote the Atlantic Community Press Collective, quote, the children listened for 17 minutes as they drove to the scene of the accident, hearing their father call for help after Officer Kimbrough tased him. When they arrived on scene, they found officers giving chest compressions to their father, unquote. Johnny Holman was then pronounced dead at Grady Hospital. A week after APD killed Holman, another person incarcerated at Fulton County Jail died while being held on $5,000 bond after being denied signature bond for shoplifting less than $500 of goods. The city of Atlanta's own alleged voter suppression has continued. Initially,

the Cop City vote referendum hoped to not have to use the extra days granted by the judge and submit the collected signatures on August 21st, with the intention of getting them verified in time to put the cop city vote on the upcoming November ballot. Come Monday, August 21st, the referendum put out a statement that despite collecting over 100,000 signatures, that they are delaying submitting the petition due to concerns that the city was going to employ voter suppression tactics during the validation process. The statement reads in part, quote, In recent days, we began to hear from reporters and sources inside City Hall that the city of Atlanta is planning to argue for a higher than previously reported

legal minimum signature count for ballot access. More concerning were reports that they also plan to utilize signature match in their verification process, an archaic and widely abandoned tool of voter suppression that has been widely condemned across the political spectrum, including by the Republican-controlled Georgia state legislator. Unquote. Signature matching is a subjective form of vote validation, which uses election workers to visually match signatures on a ballot, or in this case a petition, to a previous signature on their driver's license or voter registration card. Hours after the referendum's statement, the city of Atlanta

officially announced their intention to use signature matching for the cop city vote referendum. Back in 2018, a federal judge in Georgia ruled that signature matching did not serve any legitimate interest and disenfranchised black and brown voters disproportionately. For years, the ACLU has advocated against and won multiple court cases against discriminatory signature matching processes. Fair Fight Action, a Georgia-based voting rights organization founded by Stacey Abrams, responded to the news Atlanta would be using signature matching with a statement saying, quote, signature matching is a tool of voter suppression that litigated extensively in Georgia and removed from the mail-in ballot process because of its harm to voters resulting

in mass disenfranchisement. Using the discredited process of signature matching is unacceptable and risks unfairly rejecting thousands of valid petitions. Signature verification is notoriously subjective, disproportionately impacts voters of color, and is biased against disabled and elderly voters. There is extensive precedent in Georgia showing the harms of this process. It must be relegated to the past. Fair Fight calls on the city of Atlanta to rescind their intent to use this process and to enact steps that fairly evaluate these petitions, unquote. Facing the city of Atlanta's, quote, open and ongoing hostility to the cop city vote referendum,

the coalition has decided to use the time extension granted by federal judge Mark Cohen to continue collecting signatures to, quote, leave no doubt as to the will of Atlanta voters, unquote. They now plan to submit petition signatures on September 23rd. They now plan to submit petition signatures on September 23rd. The city council will then have 50 days to validate the signatures, which means that if successful, and assuming the city doesn't further interfere, the referendum would get put on the ballot during the March primary election in 2024. The vote being pushed into March adds a few complications. The vote being pushed into March adds a few complications. Turnout may skew more Republican,

as it's unlikely there will be a Democratic presidential primary, and the vote being seven months away disrupts the momentum that the campaign has been gaining over the past couple of months. People who signed the petition back in June would have to wait almost a whole year to vote on the ballot. The few extra months does give more time to educate the public about Cop City during the lead up to the election, but that goes both ways, which means that after two years of this movement mostly taking form as a ground war over territory, now for the time being, much of the fight to stop Cop City will change into a PR war in the public sphere. This shift from a physical offense to a metaphysical offense was something that I already felt coming back during the week of action. In terms of cameras and spectacle, the big feeling I had on the Saturday kickoff rally was like this just feels like society of

the spectacle like there's such a performance it was very performative but it was like almost like with all of the cameras looking at everything all the time it was like are people trying to make a facsimile of this movement for the cameras like is that that has become almost more important or like it felt that way. This is a conversation that people have. Like, is it worth creating moments where we expect the police to lash out violently? Like, is that effective as a propaganda tactic? And that comes with losing while looking good.

It does. Yeah, that is like that is losing while looking good. But also, I don't think that's nearly as effective as people think it is. I think after 2020, I think people are kind of desensitized to a lot of police violence at protests. The visuals of police hurting protesters, I don't think is nearly as impactful as it was even three years ago.

So I think people are also realizing that and realizing that, hey, the sacrifice inherent in setting up actions where you know that you're probably going to get fucked up by police, that's not worth it. That one, it treats people as like tools, it treats people as disposable, which is, you know, that's not great if you want to build a long lasting movement. And it's not even very effective. As the public relations battle over the fate of Cop City intensifies in the lead-up to the vote, with the city of Atlanta undoubtedly ready to run a full election propaganda campaign,

strategies of resistance cannot overlook the physical construction of the facility. Pre-construction has been active and ongoing for a few months now, mostly in the form of tree clearing and land grading. Just a few days ago, the Atlanta Police Foundation updated their construction timeline, saying that they had just began installing a stone base for the main roadway, that irrigation and site lighting is now underway, and full-on construction is set to, quote, begin in the next week or so, unquote. That now may be out of date, but based on the progress being made on the site, it's clear that construction is now imminent. And with the threat of the referendum, the APF will try to get as much

built as quickly as possible to help with the pro-Cop City side of election messaging. One of the original goals of the referendum was to try to place an injunction on further construction until the ballot vote, but it's unknown if or when that would happen. when that would happen. In the meantime, activists may take a cue from Earth First, and instead of trying to occupy the site, instead they might find creative ways to make the construction site hard to work on. Also, with the increased element of spectacle placing a lot of extra eyes on pre-announced public demonstrations, more secretive actions may start becoming more common.

There's other actions that can happen more covertly, like if you're doing sabotage, where you don't need to invite a camera crew to film you do crimes. Wise move, not to invite a camera crew when you do crimes. But no, also like... As a rule. Like why... That's the other thing is like so many of these events during these weeks of action are pre-planned.

That not only gives media a heads up on, like, we're going to film this and that's going to change the actions that happen while this is happening because everyone knows they're being watched. It also gives police a heads up to shut down the path to your intrudgment career. So I think that comes with the week of action format because there's people coming in

from out of town. They don't know where to go. If they're not already tied in with the movement, they don't know what exactly to do. So that's another thing that I think could change during future actions that may not be part of the week of action is more covert, less pre-planned, pre-announced actions that are maybe a little bit more mischievous. In their recent statement on voter suppression, the referendum also announced, quote, the coalition will consider using upcoming opportunities for nonviolent direct actions to direct the people's frustration with the city council's obstruction of the democratic process, unquote. Kamau Franklin of Community Movement Builders added, quote, if the city needs to see

a demonstration of the people's commitment to the issue. We're happy to provide one, unquote. Police intentionally denying anarchists operating space by occupying the Wolani themselves may shift the more liberal side of the movement to now focus on rallies and events around the construction site, which could also inadvertently draw eyeballs away and open up other territory across the city that might be more vulnerable to attack by small groups. To quote the Direct Action Communique claiming responsibility for torching the police motorcade on July 1st, quote, while signatures are collected, the police are still killing. We cannot wait.

If the referendum fails, actions like ours and Boulder will be the only means available, unquote. With construction imminent, subcontractor tensions increasing, and the city of Atlanta gambling with voter suppression, right now the movement really cannot afford to alienate the green anarchists that pioneered the early legitimacy of this movement with bold direct action. The Atlanta Police Foundation is trying to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. What happens in the next few months may push Atlanta to a dangerous tipping point. No matter the end point of this particular struggle, victory or defeat cannot be imagined as the end. The fight against Cop City is one large battle in an ongoing war, a war of police militarization, racism, environmental

justice, and against the incestuous neoliberal police state in its Leviathan-like formation. Based on what happens here in Atlanta, similar police project proposals will be recalibrated. As the South goes, so goes the nation. Capitalist realism posits that history is over, that it's a literal thing of the past. But it turns out you're living through it right now. So what will you do to create it? You can read more about the fight to stop Cop City at atlpresscollective.com

and donate to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund at atlsolidarity.org. See you on the other side. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media,

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