It Could Happen Here - Refuse Dystopia

Episode Date: August 20, 2021

If we're going to build a better future, we have to believe things can improve. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee 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. Episode 5. Refuse Dystopia. In the end, the state failed in more places than it succeeded. It was a matter of sheer logistics. After more than a century of taking the United States for granted as a concept, the men, women, and jackbooted thugs at the top were reminded of just how big this country is. In response to a government crackdown, wildcat strikes sparked up all across the big cities.

Many were crushed by police, and arrested activists were often forced back into their old service industry jobs as prison labor. But some of the strikes succeeded. With interstate commerce breaking down, police in many urban areas weren't able to maintain their supplies of riot munitions and ammunition. In your own area, a spirited alliance with some of the rural communities nearby allowed you to move like water when the cops came in force, while choking their access to supplies from the central government. Eventually, they broke and left.

That story, more or less, was repeated in hundreds of communities across the country. Eventually, the feds gave up. There were attempts to impose demands on the government, and some of those demands even went through. But most of the old state's power devolved into a loose association of local communities. What's going on in some of those communities sounds pretty scary. You've heard awful stories from other states. But where you live, things are looking up. No one pays rent now in your neighborhood. People own the property they're willing to maintain. There are more houses than people still, as there have always been,

so the biggest logistical hurdle has been organizing training and skill sharing across the city and nearby towns to ensure everything stays maintained. For the most part, it does. Power is almost as reliable as it used to be, before things fell apart, and the hybrid solar-wind setup you and your community put together works better than the old system did by the end. You all have to be more careful about your power use. No leaving things plugged in, fewer personal appliances, and more shared ones. During the summer, you run your AC at the heat of the day and keep your homes properly sealed so it stays cool at night. The food situation got bad at a couple points. During the worst days, you learned what it feels like to be truly hungry. But between the people who died and the people who fled, including most of the old money types, the overall caloric need in your

area dropped substantially. You all got better at aquaponics, building greenhouses, learning how to cultivate and survive off plants native to your area. Now chickens and even a few cows graze free in every neighborhood. You and your next-door neighbor keep goats and make cheese. You trade for eggs every couple of weeks. You no longer own a car. Or rather, your car is no longer just your car. It was new enough that one of the mechanic collectives was able to modify it into a purely electric vehicle, and now it runs off the same solar grid as everything else. Every block has a couple of vehicles just like this in common. They're used for hauling produce, transporting small groups on occasional jaunts across town, and even the odd

joyride. There's a sign-up sheet for that. There are times when you miss the old days, but then you think about the people who died in those last terrible convulsions of a broken system. You think about the friends you had who didn't make it through the months of hunger, or who died to gunfire by the police or from vigilantes. The new world you've helped to build isn't perfect, but you know it will never turn into the kind of monster that brought you here. You owe it to the dead to make sure of that. On Thursday, June 24th, at approximately 1.25 a.m., the 12-story Champlain Tower South Complex in Miami, Florida, collapsed. Dozens of people were buried in the rubble. 98 would ultimately die, crushed to death by their own homes.

It took weeks for rescuers to search through more than 14,000 pounds of rubble, and was just over a month before the final victim was definitively identified. The story of how and why the Champlain Towers collapsed and killed so many of its residents is a perfect example of how social democracy can fail when confronted with an existential threat. See, in a condo complex like the Champlain Towers, all the residents own part of the building. They elect representatives, a condo board, to Champlain Towers, all the residents own part of the building. They elect representatives, a condo board, to make decisions about things like when to make repairs and how much to spend on those repairs. In many ways, this is a better situation for the residents than, say,

living in an apartment complex. Your home is your own property. You don't live at the dictates of a landlord. But if one or a few of you recognize a major problem with the larger building, you have to get everyone else on board in order to fund repairs. The Champlain Towers condo board met repeatedly in the years that led up to the collapse. Many on the board pushed their fellow residents to pony up the cash, tens of thousands of dollars apiece, to fix the very obvious damage and structural failures of their building. People don't like to spend huge amounts of money to fix problems they're pretty sure they can ignore. So the repairs kept getting put off. People would demand more inspections, which took more time,

and put off further votes on the millions in desperately needed repairs. With every year that went by, the damage deepened, and the price of repair increased, from $9 million to $15 million. For the people who accepted the severity of the problem, this delay was intolerable. In 2019, the president of the condo board, Annette Goldstein, resigned in protest. In a letter to the condo association, she wrote, We work for months to go in one direction and at the very last minute objections are raised that should have been discussed and resolved right in the beginning. This pattern has repeated itself over and over.

Ego battles, undermining the roles of fellow board members, circulation of gossip and mistruths. I am not presenting a very pretty picture of the functioning of our board and many before us, but it describes a board that works very hard but cannot, for the reasons above, accomplish the goals we set out to accomplish. Residents signed a petition against an assessment that pegged the price of repair at between $80,000 and $200,000 per condo. People balked that the cost was akin to taking out a second mortgage. Dozens of them then died in their homes, lives over but bank accounts fuller. They died alongside residents who saw the problem and supported taking action, but failed to force the issue. Like the residents of the Champlain Towers,

we are stuck in a problem of collective action. We cannot fix anything without getting a hell of a lot of our fellow humans on board a solution. And if we fail, opting out of the system, moving to the woods or whatever, won't stop us from burning from the same wildfires that scorched the homes of climate deniers. I tend to think that, among the people who see the true scope of the problems facing us, you have two broad categories of response. There are the optimists, always at work trying to mitigate harm and wake people up, and there are the nihilists. The nihilists also break into two broad chunks. One chunk of us want to go hide in the woods or drop out in other ways. These are the dark

mountain types. They accept the situation as fucked beyond unfucking and try to enjoy what time they have left. On the other side are people who decide the best thing they can do is light fires and break things. Over a billion sea creatures died on the northwest coast when the Pacific heat dome hit in early summer 2021. New research indicates that in recent years, global insect populations have declined by as much as 75%. 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, which we absolutely will hit in the very near future, will kill an additional 150 million people per year from air pollution alone. When you put the facts together and really force yourself to look at them, it is hard not to

at least consider terrorism as a legitimate response to climate change. I would go so far as to say that, on a moral level, violence against the individuals, institutions, and governments most responsible for our shared catastrophe is very much justified. Again, we're looking at roughly 14 holocausts per year of additional dead people, and that's just from the air pollution caused by one and a half degrees Celsius of warming. There are people, individual human beings, who were warned about this decades ago and made the decision to devote great wealth and power towards ensuring nothing was done. There are people who recognize the reality of the situation and chose to deny it for the sake of their own political and media careers. In the wake of the Second World War, with tens of millions dead, the victorious allies held a

great trial at Nuremberg to punish those most responsible. You could probably get quite a few people on board the idea of holding a climate Nuremberg. And if that's justified, why isn't some sort of insurgency? Today we celebrate the French resistance, the brave partisans from Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, and Russia who struck hopeless blows against the Nazis despite the certainty of their own doom. It is probable that the people of the future will feel similarly about our modern-day eco-terrorists, many of whom are currently rotting away in federal penitentiaries. Most people outside of activist circles have not heard of the Green Scare. It's a term that refers to a concerted campaign by federal law enforcement and the federal government, both Republicans and Democrats, to crack down severely on the

activist wing of the environmental movement. The culprits were people who had burnt down construction sites for housing developments, destroyed SUVs and car dealership lots, spiked logging or mining equipment, and, in one case, set fire to a McDonald's. Despite the fact that these activists did not kill human beings, they were treated by law enforcement as terrorists, a tactic that has become increasingly common in the years since. Earlier this year, Jessica Reznezek, a Catholic environmentalist activist, was sentenced to eight years in prison for damaging heavy construction equipment meant for use on the Dakota Access

Pipeline. Reznezek was prosecuted as a terrorist. The judge who sentenced her said that domestic terrorism charges were warranted because Jessica sought not only to stop the flow of oil through a pipeline, but to prevent government approval of pipelines like DAPL in the future. Now, it is possible that the damage Jessica helped do to that construction equipment delayed the construction of the pipeline. That is certainly a claim the government made. The Dakota Access Pipeline was completed, though, and has gone on to leak several times. In July of this year, a Department of Transportation regulator issued a notice against the company that runs the pipeline, alleging multiple serious safety violations. If Jessica really did delay construction, it's possible she reduced the harm caused by the pipeline. But if so, the overall impact was sadly

minimal. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil still flow through the Dakota Access Pipeline every day. The company behind it suffered a few million in damages, but Jessica Reznezek suffered much more. She will spend almost a decade behind bars, another three years under probation, and she owes more than $3 million in restitution, ensuring she will never be able to lead more than an economically marginal life in the future. That is, of course, the government's strategy here. When you come at people like the hammer of God whenever they consider environmental direct action, you reduce the chances of something like that going viral. Think of the way direct action got briefly picked up by liberals nationwide

during the George Floyd protests. For the first time maybe ever, you had large numbers of normal people, the kind of folks the cops can't brutalize without creating an outcry, either doing or physically supporting people doing damage to police infrastructure. This terrified the people in power, both liberal and conservative, and as a result, they've spent the last half year or so pushing a raft of new laws to criminalize protest. And as a result, they've spent the last half year or so pushing a raft of new laws to criminalize protest. More than that, we've seen cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis deploy wildly excessive police and sometimes military forces at the start of new protest movements. The goal is to scare away all but the most committed activists,

to avoid letting any protest reach the critical mass of numbers that makes crackdowns dangerous. When considering this topic, I found a lot of wisdom in something J.R.R. Tolkien wrote to his son, Christopher, in the dark days of 1943, concerning the global plague of industrialization. There is only one bright spot, and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men dynamiting factories and power stations. I hope that, encouraged now as patriotism, may remain a habit, but it won't do any good if it is not universal. And that is more or less the truth. Ecological direct action as an occasional fringe burst of fury does little besides make a statement. It may be many things,

but it is not a path forward for us if we care about more than just finting our rage against industrial society. I know that it can be extremely tempting to take the attitude that, the situation is already fucked, we might as well just burn it all down. But that attitude isolates you, and while you are offering people nothing but a sense of doom, the fascist is promising them that, with enough state violence, they and their families can at least be protected. Leviathan is coming to them and saying, hand over power to the state, and we can bring back some version of the good times. Every bad actor out there is coming with promises

that they can improve people's material conditions. If we want a better future, and not just revenge, we're going to have to be able to offer that, too. 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. 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. There is a line from the book Climate Leviathan I find quite stirring. It's written in response to Roy Scranton, a climate change philosopher and author of the book, We're Doomed, Now What?

Commenting on his claim that nobody has real answers and the problem is us, Wainwright and Mann say, They go on to note that, not unmanageable. It is already here, already being managed by liberal capitalism, if rather badly. Indeed, the very manageability of the crisis is part of the problem we face. To address it, we do not need to learn to die, but to live, think, and rebel. I tend to agree with this assessment, and I think that, faced with the ultimate failure of older attempts at rebellion, we need to be open-minded in our search for a new rebellion. We may find that, in a society built to facilitate mass death, learning how to survive and keep others alive is the most effective method of revolt. Do I have suggestions for that beyond, start cooperative kitchens with your neighbors and hand out supplies after disasters? Yes. But before we get into that, I want to make the case

for why I think mutual aid is a viable path towards revolt. Earlier in the series, I laid out what I see as the most likely route towards radical change. A general strike with a list of demands supported by a massive national, and ideally international, mutual aid campaign. There is a tendency among some radicals on the left to write mutual aid off as charity dressed up to look like revolution, but the evidence suggests that the state and the far right consistently see effective mutual aid programs as what they are, a serious threat. In January of 1969, the Black Panther Party held their first free-for-children breakfast program at St. Augustine Episcopal Church.

They fed 11 children. They kept going, though, every day, and by the end of the week they had fed 135 kids. Billy X. Jennings was one of the Panthers there at the very beginning. He recalled to the Guardian, every office was required to send two people to learn how it ran so you can open one in your area. In a matter of weeks, the breakfast program had expanded to 23 locations around Oakland. By the end of 1969, the program had been incorporated into one of the Black Panther Party's survival programs and regularly fed 20,000 people in 19 cities. On the surface, this was just cooking breakfast for poor kids. It certainly looked less radical than, say, the armed patrols the Black Panthers carried out to monitor police officers in Black neighborhoods. But J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, considered the breakfast program an existential threat. The program

represents the best and most influential activity going for the BPP, and as such is potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for. Hoover recognized that the Panthers were engaged in the most crucial task for any insurgent movement, winning hearts and minds. The Maoist-Marxist beliefs of many Panthers were a lot easier to spread to folks who saw them as the people feeding their damn children. Because, at the end of the day, for almost everyone, the basic needs of your loved ones trump specific ideology every day of the week. That's why the FBI targeted the free breakfast program specifically. At one rate in Chicago, agents smashed and urinated on all the food that had been collected for the next day's meal. In some cities, agents were sent door to door,

visiting parents in their homes and claiming the Panthers were using breakfast clubs to teach children to be racist against white people and to urge them to riot in school. Historian Franziska Meister says that, in San Francisco, quote, to believing that the food the Panthers were serving had been infected with venereal disease. 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. 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. Mutual aid is just as frightening to our enemies today as it was to J. Edgar Hoover. The Center for Security Policy is a far-right, anti-Muslim, anti-communist think tank founded by former Reagan administration official Frank Gaffney Jr. Earlier this year, they released

a report analyzing the mutual aid efforts of a number of Texas-based leftist organizations, including the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club and the DFW chapter of the Socialist Rifle Association. From the Center for Security Policy. But mutual aid must not be understood as simply volunteerism. As its proponents explicitly note, its true purpose is to build up capability for dual power, a kind of shadow governance, as much as avowed anarchists might hate the term, to be exercised by a network of anarcho-communist and autonomous groups. As a result, the likelihood that mutual aid will also involve the presence of community-armed self-defense groups, like the John Brown Gun Club and other Antifa groups, is high.

Such groups do not make a distinction between providing basic aid, such as providing water, emergency meal and motel rentals, and direct clashes with law enforcement and others who they perceive as threatening their agenda. Local and state officials dealing with natural disasters should urge citizens to avoid contributing to unknown or suspect mutual aid organizations and encourage support instead to traditional registered charities. They should likewise respond to an increase in protest and activism activity generated by autonomous groups seeking to use the disaster for propaganda purposes. Finally, they should develop a comprehensive understanding of the extremist groups operating in their areas of responsibility.

The think tank is, of course, wrong when they attempt to cast the DFWSRA and John Brown Gun Club, neither of which have been tied to terrorism, as violent extremists. But they are broadly right about the purpose of mutual aid. as violent extremists. But they are broadly right about the purpose of mutual aid. One thing that sets it apart from simple charity is that the goal of mutual aid is to build power. Not hierarchical power, not a shadow governance put in the hands of a leader or a politburo, but the power of a community to meet its own needs and thus resist domination. This is why mutual aid frightens those in power. It's why, in a 2006 lecture at the University of Texas School of Law, the FBI supervisory senior resident listed Food Not

Bombs as an organization on the local terrorist watch list in Austin. In 2020, writing for Bellingcat, I analyzed the chat logs of Patriot Coalition, a group of several hundred armed far right extremists in the Pacific Northwest. They looked forward to the potential of fights with Antifa, but they were terrified when, during the wildfires, Portland's anti-fascists put together and distributed thousands of pounds of aid supplies to people who'd been displaced. If we judge the efficacy of resistance tactics by who they scare, mutual aid ranks highly indeed. This is, of course, not the whole answer to the question, how do we pull ourselves up out of the tailspin?

I would be an arrogant man indeed if I pretended to know that, or tried to put myself forward as someone with the ultimate solution to our problems. How would a national network of mutual aid collectives organize to handle the manufacture and distribution of more complex necessities, like insulin? How would a general strike movement reach some kind of agreement on an actual list of demands without becoming bogged down in debate and negotiations, like a doomed condo board? How would we protect such a movement from the kind of threats that food, medicine, and good intentions can't defeat? Over the coming days and months, we're going to try and find the answers to all of those

questions together. I'm going to bring on people much smarter than me, and we're going to hear their answers. I'm going to bring on activists and organizers from around the world who have answered versions of those questions themselves, and we'll see what we can learn from their struggles. Together, with a lot of help from our friends, I'm hoping we can come to some conclusions. But before we conclude this first week of episodes, I'm hoping we can come to some conclusions. But before we conclude this first week of episodes, I want to take a look at the future we could have, or at least elements of it. Because when you tell people the world needs to change very quickly or we're fucked, it kind of behooves you to provide them with a vision of the future you'd like to make instead. The people of the Navajo Nation have been enduring the

consequences of capitalism for a very long time. Decades of U.S. government neglect has led to a situation in which 30 to 40 percent of their people lack access to clean water. Climate change, drought, and reduced rainfall have further strained their access to water, making farming and simple survival much more difficult. Cameron So, who lives in the Navajo Nation, told an interviewer, Some of them have to drive an hour and a half one way to town to get drinking water. People say, well, water is not expensive. Sure, if you have access to the store, it's around the corner, yes. But for us, the reality is that just going to the town of Flagstaff,

you're spending maybe $50 on gas and other things when you go buy water in town. A case of bottled water is actually costing you around $60, $80. But while climate change has strained the Navajos' access to water, it has provided them with additional reserves of another resource, sunlight. This has led many in the nation to embrace solar businesses, especially after, in 2019, they voted against continuing to operate a coal power plant that employed some 800 people. At this moment, some Navajo entrepreneurs are working with a company called Source Water to install hundreds of hydro panels on isolated homes. The hydro panel is a

solar-powered water generator. It condenses clean water out of the atmosphere. A standard two-panel array can make 4 to 10 liters of water per day, even in fairly dry conditions. This is a small solution in the grand scheme of things, but it is a solution. At the moment, 15 Navajo families have access to regular clean water because of these panels. 500 more homes should receive panels in the near future. The technology is still very new and as a result not particularly cheap. This is not a Norman Borlaug style mass solution to our problems. But it is a good development and it provides us with some texture to how our futures might look once we've adapted to the inevitable new normal. Solar stills and atmospheric condensers glittering atop roofs and alongside gardens, and all the places

where useless lawns once sucked up water. And, speaking of the Navajo, our hopeful future will have to involve a hell of a lot more input from indigenous peoples. This isn't woke politics, it's our best hope for reversing some of the damage already done to our ecosystems. In 2007, the Swinomish tribe, located in Washington's northwest coast, published a climate proclamation that declared climate adaptation a top priority in securing their long-term future. In 2010, while every government on earth dithered, they published an action plan that ensured their people's food security under climate change. They began to build rock walls to expand the intertidal zone that clams call home and boost

shellfish numbers to compensate for die-offs and overfishing. I want to quote from a write-up by Yale School of the Environment. Quote, to protect salmon runs, the tribe is working on the Skagit River to create better spawning beds and is planting trees to provide shade and reduce river temperatures. In addition, the tribe is fighting to block mining operations in the headwaters of the Skagit and British Columbia, which could impact waters downstream. Across North America, other indigenous communities are stepping up to formulate and enact climate action plans to protect their way of life. In 2019, the Karak tribe of Northern California released its climate adaptation plan with a recommendation to return to prescribed burning, an old idea that might help to ease California's wildfire problems. The Tulalip tribes of Washington state are

relocating nuisance beavers from urban areas back to traditional watersheds to help lower river temperatures and aid salmon populations. They are also redirecting agricultural runoff for electricity generation. The Jamestown Sklalom tribe in Washington is removing invasive butterfly bushes from the banks of the Dungeness River to help protect its salmon. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes of Montana are gathering and planting seedlings of the whitebark pine that are more resistant to warming-related diseases, such as blister rust. Alaskan tribes are using microscopy to identify harmful algae blooms spurred by warming waters. The list goes on. Now these are all examples of direct action, most of which, not all of which,

won't land anyone in prison, and all of which will help mitigate the onrushing catastrophe in real ways. Alone, indigenous peoples cannot pull us out of the mess we've gotten ourselves into. But if we can develop a political situation which gives them back control of their land, we can institute measures like this on a much wider scale, and it will benefit every single person on the planet. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's recent reports have noted that they have high confidence that global adaptation efforts will benefit from including indigenous knowledge. Mead Crosby, a conservation biologist with the University of Washington, notes, one of the things that comes across really clearly is

that indigenous people are by far the most effective stewards of biodiversity. They do the best job. One recent study showed that deforestation rates in the Amazon, the world's largest carbon sink, were two to three times lower in indigenous-held lands. At present, indigenous peoples hold or manage about 28% of the planet's land, but more than 40% of its protected wildlife areas. Some 80% of the world's biodiversity exists under their stewardship. It is so very easy to lose hope when all you consume is a daily drumbeat of bad news, ocean die-offs and wildfires and crooked corporate deals to piss more poison into the atmosphere. Those stories are important and you should be angry. But bad news is not the only news. Indigenous peoples have been fighting for

generations in the face of genocide and relentless oppression to reverse the damage unchecked greed has done to our climate. What excuse do the rest of us have to give in to doom when they could really fucking use our help? This may sound silly to you. There is a good chance you just had a visceral gut reaction to the idea of a hopeful, solar-powered future driven by hard-earned knowledge of indigenous custodians. This is because all of us, left and right, have spent most of the last 20 years ingesting a steady diet of apocalyptic fantasies. Even Star Trek, meant to be a utopian vision of possibility, tends to focus more on war and violence these days. We're one to compare the

science fiction of 50 years ago with today. They might think we'd lost our ability to hope. And so at the end of all this, I'd like to provide you, the ongoing listeners of It Could Happen Here, with a promise. This is a show about hope as much as it is a show about collapse. I believe firmly that the ability to build a better world starts with being able to imagine one. So as we dive into the muck and grime of a system on the brink, let's accept that with hard work, and above all else, love, it's still possible to turn this shit around. you should probably keep your lights on for nocturnal tales from the shadow

join me danny trail 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 iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast