It Could Happen Here - Port Militarization Resistance

Episode Date: November 30, 2021

We're joined by Brendan Maslauskas Dunn and Julianna Neuhouser to discuss Port Militarization Resistance, a little known chapter in the anti-war movement, and how a relatively small number of people drew down the wrath of the American security state Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Alright, welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart, and also sometimes about how things have been falling apart for a while now. And today we're going to talk about how things were also bad in falling apart in the 2000s, which are a profoundly cursed time period. And specifically, we're going to talk about, I think, a part of the anti-war movement that does not get much attention, which is the Port Militarization Resistance that happened sort of 2006 2007 and with us today to talk about this is two people who were part of this movement uh we have juliana newhauser hello hello and brendan maslowskis dunn yeah both of whom were organizers and activists while this was going on

yeah and i think thank you thank you both for being here. Yeah, thanks for having us. So, yeah, as I was saying a bit in the intro, I think this is a part of the anti-war movement that is not very well known. I think a lot of people know about the initial stuff that happened in 2003, and people might know about some of the

stuff that was happening against the war in Afghanistan right when it started but i don't think most people know that it like you know even after 2003 sort of doesn't work that it continues and it continues sort of in forms that are that are very interesting and so i guess i want you to to start out i want to ask how we sort of got from the early part of the anti-war movement into this and how you two got involved. I would say that there's this narrative about the movement against the war in Iraq, that there is the largest protests in human history, at least at that point, I don't know if it's still true, against the invasion. And then it didn't work.

And everyone kind of went home and ended there and to a certain extent that's true but like you said the people that didn't go home went in interesting directions and um so at the time there were direct action was not as acceptable as it is now. The protest movement was largely dominated either by big liberal coalitions or PSL front groups that were basically indistinguishable in what they actually did,

which was basically nothing. And in the best of cases, and in the worst of cases and in the worst of cases counter insurgency um but then there were small groups of people that that when we saw that it didn't work and we saw that these giant peaceful marches from one part of town to another, or voting for John Kerry or whatever didn't work, that we started to look for other options. Yeah, and, you know, I got involved, you know, I'd say with the anti-war movement, that idea of how war is unjust was really taught to me from a very young age.

I mean, my parents were, you know, children of the 60s, and they had family members fighting in Vietnam and, you know, friends dying in Vietnam and were against the protests back then. So I grew up hearing these stories and and of course, stories from family members, particularly one of my grandfathers, both of them were veterans in World War II. One of them was a Marine in the Pacific theater and still into his seventies, eighties and nineties until his final days was just dealing with horrific PTSD and had always taught me from young age, never to get involved. So I, you know, and I remember when the very clearly, you know, I'm sure it's on everyone's minds now, when the invasion of Afghanistan started,

when the invasion of Iraq started, I was at that massive demonstration in Washington, D.C. that Juliana just mentioned. And, you know, I ended up, I'm from Utica, New York. I went to a rural high school just outside of Utica, you know, Rust Belt, generally speaking, impoverished and also very conservative area of New York. And, you know, I had the recruiters bothering me, military recruiters in high school, recruiting my friends, and they were just everywhere in the hallways. So it was very present with me. When I was younger, I moved out to

Olympia, Washington in 2006. And that's when a new student activist group, Students for a Democratic Society was launched. That's how juliana and i first met we were both in separate chapters of that new organization in the pacific northwest and the port protests started just just a few months after i moved out there in in olympia in 2006 so wait to clarify this for a second because I've never quite been clear on this history. So there was a second SD, like Students for Democracy, that was like unrelated to the first one? Yeah, it was reborn briefly at the end of the Bush administration.

That explains a lot of things that were otherwise very baffling. We're not that old. Yeah, we were definitely in the in the second uh you know the rebirth of it um so you know i think it it took on some things in spirit um you know but also was i'd say different in many ways and and it was very active to me at least it was very exciting to be a member of that the new stDS because they're over a dozen chapters in the Pacific Northwest, and it was a great way to connect with young activists all over the US. So SDS is emerging in this time period. One of the other things I was interested about is

something you were talking about in the early part of this, which has to do with the way that these giant, both the sort of Answer coalition psl frank group and i guess the iso was still around back then uh coalitions work versus how like anything else worked i'm interested so so what was was sds sort of like consciously set up in in opposition to those groups i don't think it was conscious but there was just like i mean these days i mean like there's a lot of controversy around psl with like anarchist versus tanky politics. None of that mattered at that time. Like none of that mattered.

The only thing that mattered was the answer, which was the PSL front group was completely fucking useless. Like they completely indistinguishable from any peace police um liberal democratic front group there was literally no difference just in terms of their aesthetics maybe like is there a donkey or a hammer and sickle on something that's the only difference we saw so i don't i don't think there was it wasn't there wasn't like a conscious like political opposition to it it was just like they're not doing anything and and so we had to look in another direction actually you know it's hard to keep track of the alphabet soup of authoritarian communist groups at times but this was actually answer for those who don't recall it was a front group for the workers world World Party, the WWP. Which, yeah, I mean, it's hard to keep track, right?

Yeah, it's the same thing. I think, so, okay, so for people who are sort of unaware of this, there's a network of connected but sometimes feuding, like, weird Stalinist cults that kind of, like, they hold on to, like, the 80s and 90s and they start sort of rebuilding again around the anti-war movements in that period that that's the psl swdp that's answer like and and i think there's like most like modern anti-war groups are also still these people which is incredibly depressing so they want to talk a bit about it towards the end of this but

yeah just for people who have not spent like the last half decade in the in the trenches of extremely weird uh anti-war politics so yeah so so i think we should get into how the sort of the first action starts in Olympia. Yeah. So, and there were actually a couple actions that happened in the year preceding that, you know, before I moved out to Olympia in 2006,

it was not yet under the banner of PMR, Port Militarization Resistance. That was a name that was officially coined in, you know, in May and June of 2006. So just to give you an idea, Olympia, it's a college town or the Evergreen State College is there. It's also the capital of Washington State. So you have that going on. It's also a military town.

It's a little over 20 miles south of what we called Fort Lewis. It's now called JBLM, JBLM, or Joint Base Lewis-McChord. It's an Army and Air Force base. Now it's one base. So you had all these, you know, different kind of elements in, you know, in tandem in that town. And the public port, the Port of Olympia, is one of about 70 or so public ports in the state of Washington, some of which are, I mean, they're used for all kinds of things, you know, for commercial, private industry, but also the military and the U.S. government. I heard from someone, I don't even remember who, that the military was sending a ship to the port of Olympia in late May of 2006. And this happened for 10 or so days. And it was just kind of a natural instinct for a whole bunch of us to go down to the port of Olympia. It was the war machine in our backyard. And the idea was to just block the vehicles. It started out with just like less than 10 people, a number

of folks getting arrested. And that very rapidly culminated into larger protests every single day, an act of blockades. People, those of us like Juliana, myself, and other folks using civil disobedience or what we prefer to call civil resistance to try and stop or at the very least slow down these striker vehicles. And to give folks an idea of what a striker vehicle is, you can look it up online, but it's kind of halfway between a tank and a Humvee. It doesn't have the slats, you know, that a tank would have. It's, you know, and they were being used in both Iraq and Afghanistan for raids of residential areas. They were really on the front lines of the war in both

those countries. And that's what we were trying to stop. I only got involved later because I wasn't living in Olympia at the time. I was in another SDS chapter, but my roommate was from Olympia and he had been involved in that first round of protests in Olympia before moving up to Bellingham. And so like hearing his story, it's got me very excited because it's like finally someone's someone's doing something like someone's they're not just like you know it's like everything else was just so liberal like whether it's marching from one place to another or writing to your

congress people or occupying their office it was like asking someone else to do something which you knew from the beginning they were never going to do yeah and finally this was finally someone was like actually getting into it um i think the first one of the things things that happened here was that um they started to avoid um that there's there's kind of a geographical thing that i think um for people who either don't know washington or because they're normal people don't know like the port areas of these cities very well because it's like like unless you're a longshoreman, why would you go down to the port of Tacoma? There's nothing there. Yeah, no.

But they kept moving it around because Ompia is also not very big. And so it's there's really only two roads into the port, which is very small. And so it was, it's very easy to block it.

And so then I think the first time that I got involved was in 2007 when they had moved it because they kept moving it around to try and switch things up. Wait, they're moving the ship around is that no it's like it's time they had to make a military shipment they would it's like like once the ship was in the port they would just have to

go through with it but then you know it's like every six months or so, they had to make another military shipment. And they would change the port, usually each time, to try and let, basically to avoid us. It doesn't seem like this is

normal practice. The first time I had gone down was in Tacoma, which is a much, much, much more industrialized port than Olympia. It's like a big port. A more normal port, I guess. And that one was honestly pretty crazy. Because you're just trapped in this giant industrial maze

basically at the mercy of the riot cops. The best success we had was definitely at the port of Olympia. I think in the, in 2007 in Olympia was definitely, I guess like the glory moment, which was when people were able to on and off, like actually hold the port and control its entrances and exits. Yeah. And I want to, you know, just emphasize that, like the one,

the military changing their approach, right, to avoid us. So jumping from port to port with these different shipments, they actually went so far because we were so successful as a movement in the Pacific Northwest to ship striker vehicles by rail out of the Pacific Northwest and even going so far as to ports in Texas. But one thing that we did is that we built up contacts with other activists, with longshore workers all up and down the West Coast in California. There are other activists we're connected with in Texas, Hawaii, New Jersey, and New York.

There is a desire in the anti-war movement. And, you know, in some extent, maybe it's like it was small, but some folks in the labor movement, especially in Oakland where the ILWU, the, you know, longshore workers union is a lot more militant than, say, in a place like Olympia. But yeah, I mean, people wanted to replicate this model because, as Juliana said, we were successful in 2007. We shut down the port of Olympia for a total of,

it was essentially two days. They were not shipping anything in or out. We set up blockades. We were willing to throw down not shipping anything in or out. We set up blockades. We're willing to throw down with the police in the street. And one of the things that was cool about that blockade is that one of the, there's two entrances, like I said, and one was completely blockaded. And then the other one, we had like a moving, I don't really even know what it was,

but something with wheels that we could move in and out to open it up. And so then we could allow like civilian cargo to move in and out. But then like we feel it back in place to block military shipments. So were you able to actually like stop them from like while in that one? And to be able to actually like stop them from moving this off altogether? Would you eventually get cleared up by the police and they moved it? We would eventually get cleared out by the police. It's like we were never able to...

It's like we held it for two days. Those protests took place over a series of two weeks or more or less. We were only able to fully hold it for two days before eventually they would clear us out.

But one of the things is that it did create problems for the army. Because when you work with a port, you know, it's like you've got like a certain time frame that you've contracted with the port to do whatever it is you're going to do and it's not too happy if you take longer than you said you would or yeah yeah and the other thing i want to add is you know i think the other really important element with this whole movement going on is the pacific northwest was um, is specifically Western Washington where the two of us were living. It was, it was, uh, you know, the center and in a sense, it was the heart of the anti-war movement in the country at that time. One, because of this militant direct action that we were, you know, we were, uh, building up in the streets and trying to throw a wrench in the gears

of the war machine to at the very least slow it down, which in some ways we did, but we were up against so much. But the other added element, of course, is the GI resistance and the soldiers who are resisting. Ivor, also known as Iraq Veterans Against the War, was very active there. They set up a GI coffee house across, you know, literally across the street, you know, the gates for one of the entrances for Fort Lewis. There are a whole bunch of soldiers that were going AWOL. We had friends who were active duty soldiers who had fought in, you know, Iraq and Afghanistan that were AWOL and they were hiding, you know, refusing to go back into the striker brigades that joined us in port militarization resistance. There were a whole,

you know, long list of soldiers that were very publicly saying, you know, I'm refusing that were very publicly saying, you know, I'm refusing to fight in Iraq or Afghanistan for, you know, various reasons. And so we are very much connected with this movement too. And I think the higher ups in the military, they're hyper aware of that. They studied us very well, you know, to the point of actually spying on us. So that's like a whole other element of the story too. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter

Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. with supernatural creatures.

I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone

from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking.

It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hola mi gente, it's Honey German and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again. The podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities,

artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories.

Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. One of the things that I've heard from talking to other people who were involved in this was that

during these protests, like the level of police militarization just like skyrocketed. And like, I remember I was like, if you go back and look at like old System of a Down videos, you know, they'll have these things. Yeah, you'll see these you see these riot police and like you look at them and it's like these people they look so much less armored than like the people that we have now and one of the things that i thought was interesting about this was that like this is i think one of the points where you start getting the modern riot police showing up that are just like you know completely concaved and like armor and yeah i want to talk about just like the police response to this because i think that's that's another thing i think i think there's there's a kind

of a tendency to sort of project back what the police look like in 2021 just onto the whole history of police and i think it's like it's it's it's gotten worse even in the last 20 years yeah i mean so i live downtown in Olympia and probably just like a six minute walk away from the port of Olympia. And also very conveniently, just a few blocks away from the police station. So lucky us.

So we actually saw, you know, we could see from the front of, down on the road, down on the sidewalk, from the front of our house, some of the military shipments going by. And we did see that, absolutely. And at times, it was terrifying. I mean, I lived in an activist house we jokingly called HQ, because that's just, you know, where because of its proximity to the port, that's where a number of us were having meetings around these protests early on in 2006. And yeah, I mean, they look like RoboCop.

And it's something I had, you know, I hadn't, like I had been to like mass marches and demonstrations, like the RNC protests and DNC protests in Boston, New York, and like in Washington, DC. And so I would see these like riot cops, but they were, I mean, ubiquitous in these port protests. It was like a whole army of them that was sent out. I mean, when Giuliana said that things got kind of crazy at the Port of Tacoma protests. I mean, there was like a police riot, you know, like the cops went absolutely nuts. They're shooting people with tear gas and pepper balls and brutalizing people. I had never before witnessed anything like that. And it got to the point in, you know, in Olympia where we kind of knew early on that we were being traced by the police to the extent where, you know, one friend of ours was followed from our house to the bus station to take a bus to school by the police

and then was stopped and essentially assaulted by them on the street. And we had another fellow activist and, you know, a roommate of mine who is going out to driving out with a few friends uh a few fellow activists from olympia to aberdeen about an hour's drive so aberdeen there's a port of gray's harbor there pretty conservative small town it's where kirk cobain is from home of the famous uh kirk cobain themed McDonald's. They served billions and billions served in that one McDonald's and Kurt Cobain's McDonald's. But yeah, I mean the, you know, they, they were, they were following, they had orders, you know, the Washington state patrol to you know,

pull over a car full of known anarchists. There was a lurk gone on to all the police departments. They pulled him over. They made him walk the line. He wasn't drinking, had no drugs, like nothing in his system. But he was driving under like one mile per hour under the speed limit. They arrested him for DWI, you know, eventually fought the charges, sued them, and, you know, won a big settlement out of all that. But that's just one example of many of the lengths that the police would go to.

It was pretty severe. Even there's a house of a bunch of anarchists, younger anarchists, called Pitch Pipe Info Shop in Tacoma. And that was also a big target. The police were swarming around them all the time. They had cameras set up specifically just outside the info shop. There weren't surveillance cameras there before, but then it was like, oh, we'll just conveniently put them on this one specific street corner. Yeah, I think that was one of the things I was reading about this, is you have that stuff.

And then also, I think one of the scariest parts of this is that like army intelligence gets involved. And yeah, do you want to talk about the man named quote unquote, John Jacob, who was in fact not that? Yeah. So, you know, I'm curious what what memories you have of our good dear friend, John Jacob Giuliano. I don't think I ever actually knew him in person but he was the moderator of the listserv, wasn't he? Yes, he was one of the moderators of our listserv. Now that I look back on it, I'm like the Port Militization Resistance listserv was always

just like this dramatic shitshow and it's like looking back on it, I was like, oh it was moderated by a cop that did nothing did absolutely nothing to like establish order or huh i wonder if that was on purpose yeah so i think there's definitely some things that happen like you know looking back uh from our vantage point today it, okay, things make a little more sense at the time, though. And we're in this movement, right? And so that means like meeting people where they're at, we find all kinds of people that would like want to join the movement, like I, like I said earlier, like active duty soldiers that were joining. joining. So I met this guy named John Jacob and he sent an email out to me. I was one of the contacts for the Olympia SDS group. And it's like, Hey, you know, there's kind of like a parent organization that some old, like elder activists are in to kind of mentor us called movement for

a democratic society. It's very small, never really took off, but it's like, I'm interested in getting involved. We met up in public and he seemed like an all right guy. I mean, he was, um, you know, 40 ish, early forties. Uh, he told me he had like, you know, been in the military for years and he actually still worked at Fort Lewis. So he was always open about that, but it only went that far. He didn't ever tell us what he actually did there. And it wasn't abnormal for, you know, we had many folks that worked active duty, you know, on base and civilian roles or soldiers, as I mentioned, that were in port militarization resistance. So he gets involved

and he gets really involved with port militarization resistance. He goes to protests. He gets pretty close with this group of anarchists I mentioned who lived in Tacoma. And he seemed like a really solid guy to, to most of us. And, you know, things happen as, as we progress and, you know, as the military responded to our, you know, how effective we were in the anti-war movement and the GI resistance movement by changing their tactics, we noticed that, okay, when we first started the protests, we had the ability to catch the police by surprise by setting up, you know, a blockade here or having a surprise action there at this time or this port etc etc and as time progressed we found out that you know we were having these making these decisions for tactics

in our strategy we thought that we're in private and then for whatever reason the police kind of knew about where we were going to be before we even showed up. And I remember that clearly happening in 2007 in the Port of Olympia. Yeah. In Tacoma, there's a lot of things like that. There was one time when there were some people who had a meeting in a closed room.

They had taken the batteries out of their cell phones. They had simply written on the whiteboard the time and place they were going to have their next meeting, which is going to be in a diner near the port. And so that way, if for any reason the room was bugged, they wouldn't be caught up because it was just written on a board. And then it was like a small meeting, too. And then when they got to that diner,

there was like full of cops and like clearly waiting for them like at that point it's like it was very clear there was some some level of infiltration involved yeah and i think we from early on like you know we we knew our history i mean you know one of our fellow activists in pmR and a friend of ours, Peter Bomer is a professor at the Evergreen State College. He was in the original SDS back in the sixties. And, you know, he was essentially a political prisoner for a couple of years in both Massachusetts and California. I mean, the feds essentially tried to assassinate him back in, in the seventies when he was active in the anti-war movement

in San Diego. Like we knew, you know, former Black Panthers and we read our history. So we knew about the history of COINTELPRO, the counterintelligence program of the 60s and 70s and the war on the anti-war and civil rights and Black Power, American Indian movements, et cetera. So we knew, you know, just intuitively early on. But there was one thing that happened in particular, which prompted some of us to file for a public records request with the city of Olympia. And another activist walking down the street in Olympia, I'm a member of the Wobblies Industrial Workers of the World Union. And we had like one of those metal newspaper boxes downtown downtown and it was locked to a pole,

you know, with a bike lock and there are some city workers there with a pickup truck and they're cutting the lock to this newspaper box and they threw it in their pickup truck. And so our, you know, this friend of ours was there and was like, well,

what the hell, what are you doing? What's going on? And one of the workers just kind of shrugged and was like, I don't know, the police told us to do this. And they drove off, like they stole, you know, our essentially like our union property or whatever. So we had, you know, our lawyer friend, Larry Hildes and the National Lawyers Guild, you know, call and kind of threaten the city. And, and then a number of us got together like, hey, you know, let's do like a public records request anarchists, the IWW, Students for a Democratic Society. And their initial search that the city clerk did yielded something like 30,000 responses.

So she's like, OK, I got to narrow this down. And I don't know, I was working on the request at the time. and I don't know I was working on the request at the time and for some reason like I don't know we're poor protests we're near a military base communications between the army not thinking anything and so the initial responses we actually got um you know maybe a hundred a hundred thirty or so different documents just copies of emails cetera, that were little puzzle pieces for this massive puzzle. And it was just a few of them. And it was, you know, there was an email talking about our guy in the Navy going to a PMR meeting to get some intel. There's, you know, all kinds of things like that. There are a few emails in particular. And the email address was something like John, John J.

Towery, you know, army.us, whatever the email address was. So there's a crew of activists that got together, put their heads together, did some research quietly for a few months and eventually found out by publicly accessible information like voter registration records and also finding out something about like a motorcycle club called like the, I don't know, like the Brown Butte Club or the Brown Butt Club or something. And like found out that this John Towery guy that was in this motorcycle club and had his, you know, was registered to vote outside of Tacoma in this town there. It was actually John Jacob. It was this guy that we thought was a fellow activist, an anarchist, and a friend. You know, I thought he was a personal friend of mine. Turns out he was actually essentially an army intelligence officer working for something called a force protection unit at uh at joint face uh joint base lewis mccord and also working with a whole list of different agencies and what

turned out to be like a massive surveillance network that was national in scope this guy was sent by the army along with many others to infiltraterate us, to spy on us, and to disrupt us. It was huge. Welcome. I'm Danny Threl. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola mi gente, it's Honey German and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again. The podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game.

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

and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse

and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts.

Check out betteroffline.com. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking.

It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Yeah, and that's one of the things that have always always really intrigued us so like i i learned about poor militarization resistance basically because i was like poking around the history of like informants and i ran into this and i was like what because and that was what i thought one of the things i thought was really interesting about this is that like like i think this chapter the anti-war movement is even on the left is like not very well known but like the seriousness with which the army seems to

have taken it is like is really remarkable yeah i'm wondering what you do think about that one thing we have to emphasize is is that we were not a large group of people yeah like um the number of people who are actively involved in port militarization resistance at its peak was how many people do you think it was brandon well it depends i mean i'd say they're probably like at its peak maybe uh probably 40 to 50 people that would like consistently show up to things you know maybe a slightly smaller very core group but we would have demonstrations with like and then like 400 people you know yeah and like that would be like the max

like there was it's like there was peaceful like kind of like support actions you know you'd get like a couple hundred people and then like for the stuff like where it's like the

first night that that the part of the entrance to the part of Olympia was occupied, it would be like 40 to 50 people. These were not very large groups of people. I feel like, and like I said, it's like one thing that we need to keep in mind was that the peace police were much stronger back then than they are now. the peace police were much stronger back then than they are now. Nowadays, as we saw last year, it's like people in the U.S. have learned

to throw down, but that was not the case at the time. And so this is a very, very small group of people. And I think we accomplished a lot with how small it was. If it had been larger, it would have accomplished way more.

But even that small core of 40 to 50 people with maybe expanding out to a larger group of a couple hundred had them that scared that they went that far to try and disrupt it yeah and and this is one of the things i've been thinking about a lot recently of this seems to be a very consistent thing which is that like the the the the two things that are guaranteed to like just have a hammer drop on you if you touch them

is pipelines and ports and that was that was something you know we've talked a lot on here about pipeline protests um but i was interested in what you two think about because yeah this this is like a very particular moment right now in which you're dealing with all these logistics chain failures and i was wondering if you do think there's anything that we can learn from how your versions of the sort of of port demonstrations worked for potentially trying to leverage that in the future especially with like contract negotiations for the port workers in oakland coming up next year yeah that's a great question you know there's this old saying and in the iww direct action gets the goods right and i think it really boils down to that it's building up uh you know mass movements movements and social movements from below that rely on direct action, that rely

on civil resistance, civil disobedience. Yeah, and the pipeline protests that have been ongoing where Indigenous people have been on the front lines of that for many, many years now, I mean, the kind of repression and surveillance that we face really pales in comparison to the kinds of, you know, surveillance of repression that folks were facing at Standing Rock, for example. is that it was primarily the military, you know, with us, right, that was surveilling us because this is very specifically, you know, a war issue and a military issue. But yeah, I mean, I think, you know, like, I think there's a big questions like, what do we have to do that's new? And to me, I say, you you know for both that kind of militant action but also for the labor movement it's like what's not you know we don't have to reinvent the wheel there are things that have a tried and true track record of getting the goods

and that is you know these more disruptive kind of actions and and movements. And so one of them would be, you know, I guess my suggestion would be to like, go back to the basics. And even like, I would say now, you know, this, remember, this is at a time when, like Facebook was around, right? Like, but we weren't really using that for our organizing, we really relied on like face-to-face meetings, you know, phone calls and building up trust with people and building up our capacity to like take actions and make change. You know, I think I'm not saying throw out everything that, you know, at least some of the good that social media has to offer. But like, I think going beyond that and going back to these older tactics and then for the labor movement like the big thing is you know and it's just like a bigger question for for mainstream unions in particular I mean they're the whole idea of like union contracts is that workers also lose a lot yeah they get some things

but business owners and bosses have rights carved out in, in those contracts. And with the longshore workers, I mean, the difficult thing with that, of course, is like, there would be some symbolic strikes that of course, like longshore workers have done and continue to do, you know,

around like the war in Iraq, historically supported Mumia Abu Jamal, Mayday, et cetera, like in Oakland. But they have some things for that written into their contracts. And, you know, for all these other like unions, it's like, well, you know, we can't strike it all for the next two years or next three years,

whatever the life of the contract is. Like, I think it's a bigger question and challenge for the labor movement to move beyond that and not be put in this straight jacket of contracts like that. Yeah, I think that the no-strike clause part of contracts, I think, is an interesting thing because it, I don't know, there's not, I mean, there are some unions that will actually do stuff around fighting it, but mostly people just sort of don't care. And I think you wind up in a situation

where it seems like you kind of have to plan your tactics around when contract negotiations are happening because otherwise you can't actually get people to do anything more than like a one-day symbolic strike. Yeah, or the challenge is like, we have this great American tradition that's not unique to the US. It's universal, really. And it's one that resonates with me, breaking the law, right? And like, we're, you know, we're like civil disobedience. That is that what we are doing in the streets and blocking the ports, we were breaking the law, and we knew it. And that's what the civil rights movement, the Black Freedom Movement did in the 1960s. But like, we have recent examples of workers breaking the law en masse, like the West Virginia teacher strikes that happened a few years ago. Like, teachers in every single county in that

state went on strike, they broke the law, and they won something out of that and i think that's what we really need to encourage people is this idea of breaking out of like the norm and and breaking the laws which you know the laws that are in place which are not there to you know expand our freedom they're there to contract it yeah one of my friends had a joke about what was the exact line it was uh it's it's only illegal if you get caught and it only matters if you lose which i think is a good way of thinking about uh both drinking the law and yeah and you know yeah i think it's also like it's worth mentioning that like the other sides the law doesn't matter to them at all like they just tear it up and like light it on fire constantly so don't don't bind yourself

if you can if you can not get caught and not like go to prison for the rest of your life don't bind yourself by a bunch of like paper that the other side just doesn't care about yeah and that's an excellent point because that's the big thing, you know, with the army and law enforcement in general, like surveillance of us, they were, and the police, just their actions, their brazen actions on the street,

like the riot police, they were just breaking the law all the time. They absolutely have a deep visceral hatred of the Bill of Rights, of civil rights and civil liberties. And so there were a number of, you know, court cases that sprung out of, you know, this movement. There was a case called Panagakis v. Tauri. Another, Juliana Panagakis was another PMR member, co-plaintiff in that case. And, you know, it was a case against the army that, you know, we waged and brought up to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and, you know, eventually lost and could have brought

it to the Supreme Court, but didn't. But, you know, like the other thing is like the violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. It was a whole other thing. You know, we don't have to get like so tied up into like the legalistic uh thing but like the point your point is valid like they don't care about the laws that are already there they'll they'll just intentionally break them break their own laws that they have set up and you know they'll just get a slap on the wrist because that's really all that's all that happens to them i think i think i think that's a good note to end on uh break the law it's fake it's also bad um do you two have anything

you want to plug other than that other than you know encouraging people to break the law placate your local port yeah uh yeah i mean i i think it's you know i i guess just encourage people to do as you know it sounds like what you're doing by having us on the show and like there are some in our very recent history um you know movements and wins that we all as activists today can still learn from and i think part of that you know, I don't want to call us elders because we're not that old, but like one part of that is like making sure like our movements are still like multi generational and like we learn from each other. And also as Juliana and I did, like I mentioned earlier, like we learned from the movements of the past, SDS, the Black Panthers, the Black Freedom Movement, etc. But there's a lot that, you know, these struggles, I think, have to offer us today.

All right. Well, thank you. Thank you both for coming on and talking with us. Thank you for having us. Thank you. both for coming on and talking with us. Thank you for having us. Thank you. This has been It Could Happen Here. Find us at HappenHerePod on Twitter and Instagram.

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or check us out on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for it could happenen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast digging into tech's elite and how they've 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 brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.