It Could Happen Here - Protesting Matt Walsh in Iowa

Episode Date: May 2, 2023

Robert sits down to talk about a successful protest against anti-trans bigot Matt Walsh. featuring a very successful has of combat marbles.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season 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. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody, This is Robert Evans. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and occasionally about how to stop things from falling apart.

Today, we're doing one of those latter episodes. I'm happy to say we've actually got kind of something that's overall uplifting to talk about. If you are someone who pays much attention to the right wing and particularly to the current right wing campaign against trans people to limit their rights to transition, to push laws that criminalize their existing in public spaces. He's a real piece of shit, one of the worst people in the country presently. And like all terrible people, he has been going around in a series of speeches invited generally by local student body Republican organizations at universities. It's not the only people who invite him to speak, but that's what we're talking about today. Oliver Weiline is a local community activist who showed up at one of these events and who

recorded what was happening, the reaction to Matt Walsh being invited to speak at a college in Iowa City. And yeah, Oliver, welcome to the program first off. Yeah, thank you so much for having me on. And yeah, I just kind of wanted you to start with, how did you become aware of what was happening and decide, you know, to show up and do what you did? Because I became aware of you just reading your thread, which was a mix of, you know, Twitter posts on what was happening and some videos of what had been happening on the ground.

what was happening and some videos of what had been happening on the ground. Yeah. So, um, I am a townie here in Iowa city. I'm not a student, but I have, you know, uh, I'm, I'm very close both physically and, you know, just personally with lots of activists on campus at Iowa city, lots of young activists, um, particularly organizations like the YDSA. They have a couple immigrants rights associations, some LGBTQIA associations and everything. So when this was made public that the YAF, the Young Americans Foundation, that's what it stands for. Right. I think, um, but they announced, um, that Matt Walsh was indeed going to be speaking, um, in April. And of course, you know, lots of people just started sending me things like, wow, I can't believe these motherfuckers are bringing Matt Walsh out of everybody, even though it wasn't very surprising because um

they love to have the yaf here loves to bring um people to speak that are objectively terrible people they just recently had alan west um oh great yeah i'm sure you know all about oh no yeah he's yeah yeah playing the hits with alan dubs. Yep. So, yeah, the reaction was, you know, just kind of like a general, we should do something about this, that Matt Walsh has come to campus or is going to come to campus. So, you know, there was lots of flyering campaigns, lots of calls online. There was a petition circulating trying to get the university to not allow Matt Walsh on campus. But here in Iowa, the board of regents is all just appointed by a Republican governor, Kim Reynolds. So, you know, there's no way that they would do that. And yeah, so that's way that they would do that. And yeah,

so that's how everybody found out about it. And, you know, it was just a lot of the YF would put up flyers and then they would instantly get torn down and they would cry about it. Yeah. That was a lot of the buildup to this event. Yeah.

That's how I knew. And one of the things, I mean, the thing that, cause obviously there are different right wing shitheads speaking in various places and protests against them, you know, every day that,

that go a variety of ways. Uh, one of the reasons I was interested in what you had to say, and I think that this is a worthwhile one to talk to people about is that I think the young America's Americans foundation kids who invited him wound up demoralized at the end of this. That was my take on this. This is not not an event that seems to have gone well to them.

So I want you to walk through kind of what happened that night, both in terms of what you saw from the folks showing up to see Walsh and what you saw kind of from the response to him. Yeah, I would say it's a fair assumption that the yaf people were demoralized after this so the protest it was last wednesday the 19th and the protest was very you know there was no leader it was very decentralized you know just lots of people showing up and instantly when everybody showed up like at four o'clock when the documentary was showing before Matt Walsh was going to speak his, you know, shitty documentary, what is a woman showed beforehand? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It was like a joyous occasion. Almost people just were trickling in on the park right across the street from the IMU. hundreds of people came, you know, not just students, but like people from Iowa city and Cedar Rapids and, you know, just Eastern Iowa in general that were just like, we do not, you know, we're, we're feeling really bad that this absolute fucking shithead is in our state right now. You know, the air smells bad. So we, you know, so it was, it was very joyous. And then and then people were like okay the documentary is about to get out and the way this event was set up was the documentary was being shown in a theater that's in

the imu the memorial union um just a student hangout spot basically and then all the people that were in the documentary were going to then file into the main lounge where he was speaking. And so when the documentary got let out, all the activists or just the people that came to protest him were just like, all right, we're going inside. We're not going to just stand out here. We're going to make sure that they know every second that this is bullshit that you came to see this guy speak and especially in iowa city this isn't going to fly you know without some type of resistance so everybody that lined up for the

matt walsh speaking event and who came out of the uh theater after watching his documentary had to wait in line and be screamed at by protesters for like an hour at least and it was so funny just these people like they started out at first you know for a few minutes being like haha look at all these triggered libs but then after like 20 minutes they were just kind of like thousand yards staring, you know? Yeah, that's really interesting to me, because obviously, like, one of the particularly with the younger right, right? You know, I think there is sort of a dividing line, both in my head and physical behavior between kind of like, older, and maybe even less radical Republicans who are really tied to this idea of the silent majority and get a degree of emotional comfort from the idea that

most people do think like them, they just don't want to talk about it. And then there's sort of not an entirely separate, but certainly much more common attitude among the younger right-wing activists, people who were raised online in places like 4chan, about where a lot of their focus is on the joy of triggering the left, which they see as controlling the culture to a large degree. And so it's interesting to me, that's something that these people like to talk about a lot. they like to at least portray themselves as sort of above uh caring but very few people are capable of like just being screamed at by a crowd uh of people and and not feeling shitty after a while that makes a lot of sense to me yeah i mean it

was definitely breaking through to a lot of them i could tell and i even heard some conversations amongst them like very taken aback and like in shock you know like voice shaking when talking about it just like why are they doing this you know i mean like putting two and two together like it was very fascinating to hear to eavesdrop on these conversations and it was a lot of that and it was also well one thing that happened is i don't know if they oversold tickets or just didn't track like how many people were going to be there but half of the people that showed up to see matt walsh i would estimate about half half of them were not able to go see him they were told they were keeping track of how many people were going into the main lounge and then just randomly they were just like all right that's it you know the cops there and the staff and matt walsh's private security which i will say there was more private

security or there was more security there in general than when mike pence spoke at the exact same place at least more you know obvious security with pinch you do more obvious yeah more obvious security yeah um yeah and you know they had bomb sniffing dogs and everything oh wow that's interesting yep do you know how full the actual theater was the yaf claims 700 people uh-huh and what's capacity for them i don't exactly know okay but they said that 700 people were able to see matt walsh and then so i would say more people came to see matt walsh like maybe a thousand or something that's another number that the yaf threw out there yeah but i would say there was at least an equal amount of protesters there at its peak too yeah and i will also say that there were people keeping track of the cars leaving when they were

able to leave and there was a considerable amount of out-of-state plates and out-of-county plates people traveled pretty far to see matt wall speak is kind and there were people that showed up that you know the right wing weirdos that i know that live in des moines which is like two hours away and even some in omaha that came that i recognized personally so yeah people came pretty far for this and a bunch of those people that came pretty far were not able to see matt wall speak and they were extremely pissed and so I was watching a lot of these people yell at staff and trying to bargain with police officers like come on we drove like let us in and everything the cops were just not having it and so the mood turned pretty angry at that point, I would say.

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. 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. brushes with supernatural creatures.

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

Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. I'm interested in sort of, are you aware kind of like who was organizing the counter response and how that was people were like informed that there was going to be something? Because, you know, it's not usually a simple matter to get that folks, many folks to show up around a thousand for a counter protest. Yeah, I think mainly there were multiple student orgs. I think I named them a little bit earlier that, you know, there was the graduates union,

COGS union, the graduate students union. They put out a statement inviting you know not only their members to come but everybody to come they do a lot of good work around the university um the ydsa the young democratic socialists of america they have a chapter here and they were organizing they did heavy flyering campaigns around town not just campus but around iowa city itself and on top of that i would say just sharing flyers and word of mouth like on the internet too people know that matt walsh is kind of public enemy number one when it comes to the lgbtq, specifically the trans community.

So I think a lot of people were just extremely pissed that he was here in this town in Iowa City. People call Iowa City a gayer town than San Francisco. People have referred to Iowa City as that. I don't know if I believe it. It's a high bar. It is. San Francisco is a very gay town. Yeah.

Well, if you Iowa City, people call it Little San Francisco for that reason. That's sweet. I don't think I've actually been to gay town. Yeah. Well, if you, Iowa City, people call it Little San Francisco for that reason. That's sweet. I don't think I've actually been to Iowa City. Yeah. I mean, it is definitely the place in Iowa where it is, you know, Eastern Iowa, it's considered the lib part of Iowa, but specifically Iowa City, people call it the People's Republic of Iowa City because like the right wingers think it's so left wing here. But in reality, it's our city council is run by like Pete Buttigieg supporters.

But, you know, to them, that's communism. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think just the spirit of Iowa City in general, like everybody was just pissed that this guy was coming to town and everybody found out one way or another. And yeah, people showed up and showed out for sure. When it comes to like kind of confrontations and stuff, how would you describe sort of the the general mood there action sort of taken beyond like the yelling or was it kind of like mostly focused on demoralization and providing kind of a visual show of how much resistance there is to Walsh and his ideas? Well, after a lot of them were denied entry, I think a lot of them were extremely pissed off. And that point i saw a bunch of old

like not a bunch i would say a handful of almost scuffles breaking out the couple i saw were definitely the fault and instigated by matt walsh attendees because you know they probably drove really far and weren't able to get in and now you got all these people with trans flags screaming at you and calling you a Nazi and a fascist and that you're a piece of shit, you know. And so. But there was a lot of people and a lot of cops that were really, really, really wanting to make sure that that didn't happen. So after these people weren't allowed in they were being escorted towards the back entrance where they came in and so they all went back towards the back entrance and that is when somebody or some people i didn't see it i only heard it dumped thousands and thousands of marbles by that exit yeah that was my favorite thing that i saw

on your thread yeah so then the cops were like well shit sorry guys you can't come this way so you have to go back through the gauntlet of screaming protesters to get out of that yeah area denial taking it yeah area denial and also kind of rerouting them uh from an area that's going to force them to confront the least pleasant aspect of it yeah that, that's very smart. Exactly. And then even after that, lots of people were going to, like the way the IMU is set up, there's a park by it and there's also a parking garage right across the street from it. And there's a one way out of the parking garage.

So there's one way out if you parked in the parking garage. out of the parking garage. So there's one way out if you parked in the parking garage. And towards the end of his talk, and when everybody was filing out of the Matt Walsh event, protesters had completely taken over that street. So there was no way any of these people were getting out. They just kind of like came out in a giant like horde of people and then they slowly started realizing you know since all these people were blocking the street and there is a pet band in the middle of the street playing you know yeah they were starting to understand that oh shit we're not gonna be able to leave so a lot of them were really mad about that and they started going up to police officers and staff saying like you got to get these people out of here i'm trying to leave you know and the cops there's only like outside i would say there was only like seven

police officers and there is no way like the cops tried to get people to move out of the street they even put their hands on some people to try to move them but then 40 more people would just get in the street and so they realized that that wasn't going to happen so after going through a gauntlet of protesters and stepping over marbles you know these people are then also not able to leave the event when they want to and i would say the road was blocked probably for like an hour hour 15 minutes until the police were finally able to kind of like wedge a way out for these people and that's when one confrontation that i know happened where one of the matt walsh attendees started shining a strobe light in people's faces and someone put a sign in front of it to stop them from doing that and then that person grabbed the other person and there was kind of a fight that happened.

But that was the only physical confrontation that I saw the entire night, besides cops putting their hands on protesters, trying to get them out of the street at one point. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip

and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows in 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. Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas,

the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them.

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So what would you say were kind of the main takeaways from this for people? So what would you say were kind of the main takeaways from this for people? You know, this is going to continue to be a thing if folks are looking at participating in or organizing responses to events like this in the future. What were your kind of big takeaways? My takeaways is that. Marbles, obviously. Great idea. Marbles.

Yes, marbles are a great idea, you know. But also what I think is kind of worth taking from that is that, like,'s not enough. We often see this when like different tactics go viral. Don't like do the cargo cult version of it, right? The reason why the marbles were effective wasn't just that like it made an exit inaccessible. It's that because it made, it was in a situation where it rerouted people back through that screaming gauntlet of counter protesters, which was demoralizing. So strategy is also like worth taking into account when you're adopting new tactics yeah certainly and from how it seemed to me is that that was intentional that it was meant to block that exit so they had to go back through the screaming people to get out um yeah yeah definitely you know

marbles are funny but it was deployed in such a way where it was even more funny and effective. A takeaway that I had was that, you know, there's always going to be risk with this type of thing, risk of, you know, risk of anything really, you know, physical harm, emotional harm, people getting in trouble at school or something. But I think these kids and a lot of these attendees went there expecting to own the libs and then walked away really demoralized, you know? And so I think it was definitely worth it to put our bodies on the line and everything and put ourselves on the line to just send that message and also make it clear that other people can do this too. And Matt Walsh speaks, you know, just make it miserable. You know, you don't even necessarily have to prevent him from speaking, even though that would be pretty cool. But even though he did speak, like no one's talking about that. No one's and no one's talking about what he said. People are talking about how all the Matt Walsh people got stranded and how there were marbles that blocked their exit and how the pep band came and played to a cadence of fuck Matt Walsh, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, is there anything else you want to talk about before we roll out? I'd say that about does it for me, unless you have any more questions about specifics of the night. No, thank you for coming on Oliver. Is there any sort of plugs you've got for anything you want to direct listeners towards before we end? Yeah. There's an organization around here called Iowa Trans Mutual Aid that does a lot of really, really, really good work for people

in the state of Iowa that currently has, is experiencing like so much of the country, really, really, really bad anti-trans legislation. So if you find it in your heart or have the means to donate to such an Iowa trans mutual aid, I really, I really can't recommend it enough. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Oliver. And a big thank you to everybody who showed up that night in Iowa city. That is it for us today. Everybody have a great rest of your day. All right.

Thank you so much. It could happen here as a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media, visit our website, cool zone media.com or check us out on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here. Up 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 riot. 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 Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Off your podcast. the belly 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. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.