It Could Happen Here - The Cato institute Guns, and the Left

Episode Date: October 20, 2022

Robert and James are joined  by Steven Monacelli and Snow from Yellow Peril Tactical to discuss a recent Cato Institute panel on armed groups, and the history of armed resistance to white supremacy ��  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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on a recording, Robert. It's okay. It's with a president, so it can't be that bad. Shouldn't have done that to Jimmy Carter, dude. Well. He's never recovered, man. Yeah, you can see it in his eyes when he tries to rebuild those houses.

Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the podcast where one of us committed a crime against Jimmy Carter, former president of the United States. That might actually get us in trouble with the Secret Service, but you know what? It's happening. It's happening, James. They're going to have to figure out which one it was.

Yes. And that, of course, second voice, James Stout, who might wind up in Guantanamo for this because he's not a U.S. citizen. But I feel pretty safe, and I feel like our guest for today is pretty safe. And I would like to introduce Stephen Monticelli. Stephen, you work for and are an editor at Protean Magazine. You've written for the Rolling Stone. You've written for a bunch of people, Dallas Voice, a number of different news websites, magazines.

um, news websites, uh, magazines, and you have been spending a big chunk of the last year or so in the streets in Dallas reporting on the escalating series of, well, hopefully not escalating. I guess time will tell on that, but the series of right-wing, um, I don't even want to, I don't want to dignify them by calling them protests, but right-wing organized attempts to intimidate and spark violence at LGBT events in the DFW area. And some of the left-wing protests counter against that, which has involved groups like the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, who we've had on the show a few times, and has involved groups of armed leftists kind of in opposition to groups of armed right-wingers. Now, Stephen, the specific reason we're talking today is you were just the other day part of a panel put on by the Cato Institute, which is a libertarian think tank titled Domestic Extremism and Political Violence, the Threat to Liberty. Your fellow panelists were Mike German. Mike is a former FBI agent who went undercover against the far right and now works for the

Brennan Center. And Christopher Viles, who is a professor of English and a director of American studies at the University of Connecticut and wrote the U.S. Anti-Fascism Reader. Now, this was interesting for a number of reasons. Kind of in the lead up to this event, the Cato Institute published a graphic that showed a number of domestic armed organizations. And so in the same graphic,

you had groups like the Proud Boys and Patriot Front, as well as groups like Yellow Peril Tactical and the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club and the Socialist Rifle Association. Prior to the event, this sparked a bit of frustration from the left and some people suspecting that this was going to be kind of geared towards attacking left-wing armed groups and smearing them as violent extremists in the same way that the Proud Boys are. That is not what happened.

And I'm going to open the floor up to you, Stephen. Thank you for being on the show. Hey, thanks for having me. And I'm glad that this is not sort of a criticism session that I'm going to be sitting with y'all on in terms of my participation with a, I hesitate to even use the word libertarian because of the historical definition of the term but yeah you know conservative libertarian uh yeah whatever big l versus small l i don't yeah we we could call them a right libertarian think tank they're rothbardists right like literally founded by rothbard yeah they they love them some rothbard um didn't they like excommunicate him or something though at some point okay i i couldn't i'm not deep on the lore one thing if you're doing my favorite meme with the two hands meeting in the middle middle left libertarians and right libertarians have excommunicating members

murray rothbard is on an island in exile murray rothbard and murray bookchin united in cancellation so yeah i guess i'm not being canceled which is is good um and so yeah they had reached out to me uh in september about being on this panel and i had mentioned um the other guests and frankly i was intrigued because uh you know if people want to pay attention to the growing threat of fascism i think that's pretty neat yes and it seemed like an opportunity to do the thing that glenn greenwald claims that he does when he goes on tucker carlson which is like reaching out to an audience that doesn't already agree with the things that i think um because he just goes on because they're pals and they already all agree so um i digress uh i thought

it was maybe an interesting forum and and i was really interested to hear um from the other panelists in particular um because i had looked at what Mike German had written after his service in the FBI, and as well as the author of the Anti-Fascist Handbook. And I thought, well, if Cato has invited all three of us, it's not going to go too off the rails in terms of, you know, sort of the false equivalency problems, or it just becoming a session to bash on groups that aren't really the part of the problem interestingly enough the primary amount of bashing that went on was mike german former fbi agent repeatedly viciously criticizing the police and the fbi for their complicity with far right street movements yeah mike's been pretty consistent

i spoke with him for like a couple of years, and I'm sure you people are probably aware of his presence by now. But he's been pretty consistent on bashing the feds for failing to act on white supremacy for decades. And it's fair. There's a number of reasons this is interesting that we'll be getting back into. But I really do recommend people take a listen to this conversation between y'all, among other things. There's some good history in there. We'll talk about a couple of things that got introduced that I don't 100% agree with, but there's some good history in there. And I think more to the point, you get a lot of updates from your reporting in Dallas and a lot of kind of

summaries of that, which I find very valuable and think will be valuable to people who have maybe been following it less. And then also, it's really interesting to get Mike's perspective as someone, he was in, it was late 80s, early 90s. He was doing a lot of undercover stuff in the West Coast and in neo-Nazi movements. And so hearing him discuss the way in which the FBI's programs targeted at the far right work and don't work was really interesting to me. Oh, absolutely. That was the sort of the side of the story that I knew the least about. Christopher Viles, the professor, the guy who wrote the handbook, you know, I think

he provided a very important set of historical information that kind of helped iron out some of the issues in terms of the framing, perhaps. Yes. And some of the inconsistencies, which I think we can dive into a little bit, or rather inaccuracies that kind of got slipped by and we weren't really able to address in the course of the conversation. But hearing him just put it so bluntly kind of took the wind out of me in a good way where I was like, I don't, I don't have anything else to add here. Uh, no notes. Um, because he really made the point that yes, uh, some of these organizations were canned in glove with police officers at the local level, even at the federal level. He's witnessed it. He has a number of experiences that he cited where the FBI is basically saying, do not talk about your cases involving white

supremacists and these similar type of groups because there are people in the agency who are sympathetic. And I think that's kind of why I ended up on the panel because in part uh the story that i've been covering around here with this harassment campaign over the past few months of lgbtq groups and events uh part of the story is that policing has not really done anything to prevent uh you know this incitement and harassment from continuing and occasionally turning violent not in the sense of uh weapons being used other than bear mace so far but in the sense of physical violence and uh you know slurs and violent threats being hurled at people um so i i think that mike's points were really timely and well said. And frankly,

he's the kind of person that they needed to come from, because otherwise they just kind of get smacked away as a leftist talking point by people who probably have some internal biases or prejudices that prevent them from engaging with it when it comes from the wrong person in the wrong way. And there were a number of interesting kind of discussions happening. One thing that I was happy about is that while the initial framing, I think there was a lot of fear that all of these left wing groups are going to get lumped in with groups that have, to put it bluntly, tried to overthrow democracy. Right. We should point out that that's how the FBI does do it, right?

Like, for instance, they'll group white supremacists with, like, black identity groups as racial identity extremists and report statistics that way. Like, that's how the feds see this. But, yeah, they didn't, which is good. It's like a form of obfuscation to do, to do so. And, um, you know, why would they do that? Well, maybe there's a few reasons they might do that. Uh, especially if you ask someone like, uh, Mike, um, and you know, it's such a blind spot, uh, for obvious ideological reasons for so many people involved. Yeah. And it, it's Yeah. And it was interesting because there was

this bit in the middle of it where Mike, being a former Fed, walked through kind of like, well, it makes sense to me given the fact that law enforcement is not able to be trusted in a lot of instances and often is working hand in glove with these far right groups that want to harm marginalized people that they would seek to arm themselves. And that prompted from the fellow who was actually kind of the organizing the event, Patrick Eddington, who's a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, him to point out, and he was, I would have to say, broadly fair. And generally, he seemed a little bit kind of, he had this attitude you get sometimes around libertarians where he was like, there was a moment where he was like, well, I'm

glad some on the left have finally started accepting the Second Amendment and stuff like that. Second Amendment and stuff like that. But he had a moment where he expressed a concern, which was his fear about the possibility that if you keep having these events, at some point you're going to have two groups of people who are armed shoot at each other. Yeah. Which is, we've been right up to that line. You have had exchanges of fire. Just thinking in Portland, you had a moment where a single right-wing individual with a handgun fired into a group of people. Thankfully, it didn't hit any.

Two people in the anti-fascist side fired back and forced him to flee. moment earlier this year in Portland where a right winger shot into a group of unarmed people doing traffic security, killed a 61-year-old woman, wounded, I think, five other people, and then was shot and stopped by a leftist. You obviously had a proud boy, well, a member of Patriot Prayer shot and killed during an altercation, but not an exchange of fire. The only person who fired was the person who killed that individual. So none of those are quite two groups of people with guns exchanging fire, you know, in a sustained way. None of those even entirely approach kind of what happened at like Greensville,

but they're all on that spectrum. And while I think this guy, there's a degree to which he's kind of spooked at seeing leftists with guns. I do think that that's a reasonable thing to be concerned with because when and if we hit that point, it's going to be an inflection moment for, I think, the entire country. country right right i i think the reality is that most normal people whatever you want to use the word to describe them people who aren't brain poisoned and plugged into the internet and right about all these things uh or or having to deal with them and are affected by them in real life uh they might see these groups and just cast them all under the same umbrella um you know there's a good meme i chuckled at that came out afterwards where it had the They might see these groups and just cast them all under the same umbrella. There's a good meme I chuckled at that came out afterwards where it had the slide showing all the groups, the right-wing groups and the left-wing groups, sort of armed groups in the United States and then replacing them all with just domestic cleaning products. Like, yes, they all have something in common. They have weapons and they're armed to some degree. But beyond that, they all have a good reason to, given all of these things. He was basically writing the lyrics to Rage Against the Machine song.

And I was a little astonished by that. And he made a very clear point to say, like, yeah, there are people who are aggressors and there are people who aren't. We can find a distinction in that. And if we're just now getting concerned about this violence, well, maybe we should ask why we've had such a big blind spot for so long. And he got right to the core of it. It's these ideologies deeply baked into our institutions of white supremacy, right supremacy, basically all the way back to colonization. all the way back to colonization and uh you know dealing with that is necessary for us to deal with the broader problem and i think he he was very clear to say like the things that were required to get to that point of like a potential shootout would be a total breakdown in policing yes and so he played place the blame at the feet of the police basically said it's their goddamn fault that people feel the need to do this because if they just focused on

the crimes that proud boys commit in the dallas area uh you know basically minor assaults and stuff they would trace it back to the people that are committing them and they would cut down on these escalations. Yeah. Because the same people are the ones that show up to these events time and time again. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me as the fire and dare enter? Benitrejo, 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 Nocturnne Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's worth it, Robert.

You were talking about an inflection point, right? And we spoke about failures in policing too I think part of the reason that we see things are super duper exceptional right now is the way that we teach history in schools here and part of the things we don't teach are like this has happened before right like the battle of Hayes Pond being a paramount example uh if we look at look at the standoff at Wounded Knee or the Second Battle of Wounded Knee or whatever you want to call it. And throughout the civil rights movement, right?

There's a book by Rob Williams, a contemporary book about the use of firearms in the civil rights movement that people can read. All of this stuff did happen then. And this same tension that we're feeling now about a society pulling itself apart and will it lead to a civil war also happened then and people felt this then too and we we well the progress was made at that time we didn't fix everything right like that's why we're having this discussion now but like i think the fact that we've removed so much of that specifically

the violence and the use of guns from our discussion of the civil rights movement sometimes leads us to see what's happening now is like really particularly exceptional and it's not like yeah it's always been the case that marginalized folks have resorted to the same tools that are used to oppress them to defend themselves and why wouldn't they right like like mike said like steve said there's a very good and clear reason for oppressed people to want to defend themselves and their communities the only analog that we were able to bring up in the conversation is like the pink um pink panthers pink panther patrol which was you know something that a lot of people don't know about and we did get a little bit of opportunity to discuss you know the black panthers and how community defense is a different set of reasons for arming yourself and having knowledge of the Second Amendment and all those sorts of things.

Then, you know, going outside another event hosted by an organization you have no interest in belonging to, wearing your guns on your body to send a message. That's a very menacing form of free speech. And I think another good moment to bring up when we talk about this would be the Red Summer of 1919, which was a series of race riots targeting Black people in the United States that also involved large groups and communities, particularly in cities of Black Americans taking up arms and defending themselves, and was fairly particularly in cities of black Americans taking up arms and defending themselves. And it was fairly enormous in its death toll. Hundreds and hundreds of people were killed. It's really a pretty nightmarish moment in history. But it's the thing when you

have groups, and we're about to have someone on from Yellow Apparel Tactical, when you have groups that are specifically organizing and saying like, we are organizing, we are teaching skills for people to become armed because we are afraid that we and people like us will be victimized. It's stuff like the Red Summer that they're directly looking at. It's not theoretical, you know? Yeah. Your friend Carl from InRangeTV has some good videos about a lot of these different things if people are interested in looking them up. Yeah. And I think probably we should bring on our next guest for tonight,

and Stephen will be staying on as well. Snow from Yellow Peril Tactical. Snow, do you want to introduce yourself and your organization for folks who may not be as familiar with this stuff as we are? We briefly covered y'all a little bit earlier in this, but yeah. Yeah, thanks for having me. My name is Snow. My pronouns are she or they, and I am one of the many members of Yellow Peril Tactical. We are a collective of leftist Asian Americans under the shared ideology of being anti-authoritarian.

And we talk about all sorts of things, but particularly how to develop firearm skills and also community defense and the occasional shitpost. And first question, just because we're talking about this Cato Institute thing that Stephen was on on have you had a chance to listen to that yet since y'all i watched it twice and i have four pages of notes oh yeah let's go yeah why don't we start here yeah go off you know okay like the chat was lit when we first saw that we were mentioned we were like wow we fucking made it because originally we started as a shitpost account and then we were like oh people actually care um and this is just one of those moments where uh i don't know it felt like really surreal that kato would even give a fuck about us uh because we do all of this in our free time you know this is like nobody pays us right um and so we had a lot of skepticism going into it um and in a sense

uh we're a bit on the defensive kind of preparing for a lot of false equivalence rhetoric and a lot of just like, I don't know, maybe like Orientalism as well, just given the history of how like Westerners have viewed Asian culture. But ultimately, like the consensus has been that we were pleasantly surprised of how balanced it was. I thought overall it was very intriguing and I got some good, some good quotes written down, but I don't know if you want to go into those now or later or what. Can we start with having, I really want to like anchor this and having you explain what community

defense means, like, so people can understand why. And then we can go from what people said on you. Yeah. So earlier y'all were talking about like the 1919 riots and actually reminded me of like the Pacific Coast race riots of 1907. Oh, God. Yeah. A bunch of communities were like murdering and committing violence against Asian people. Right. And 1907 was not that long ago. And in a sense, it never has gone away. sense it never has gone away um and you know i think um chris vile said it like put it nicely when he was like you know in the backdrop of a lot of anti-asian violence um it's just that it's been a lot more prevalent um among asians specifically that doesn't stop you know like boba liberalism identity politics from happening where there's not like a grand vision of like what's going on at large.

But we know that like our communities are under attack and the cops don't give a fuck about us. And if anything, they just make it worse most of the time. And so it's truly up to us because, you know, cops don't prevent crime. They come after and they fuck it up. And it's not something that has come easily to me personally. I've been in denial about it for a lot of years around thinking like, if I just avoid going out late at night, if I am always walking with a buddy, if I just, you know, spend 20 minutes looking for a closer parking spot, it'll prevent me from being harmed. And ultimately, like, that's just me being in denial. And part of it, another realization is like being strapped.

I conceal carry every day. That's not going to deter someone from attacking me because of how I look without doxing myself. I just look alternative. Right. And knowing that that puts me at risk has never deterred me from wanting to express myself with how I look, but I know the risks and that doesn't stop people from me. But part of it

is like, I'm not going down without a fucking fight. Like my ancestors have come too fucking far. We kicked out the French, we kicked out the U S right. Uh, and now I'm in their turf. I've infiltrated the wire. Um, but that doesn't mean, but you know, it, it doesn't mean that it's going to stop them from harming us. And, you know, we know that we can't live in a fever dream where every single fascist on this planet will be gone. But at the very least, like my life goal is to make them think twice. I'm scared a little bit. It's interesting because you bring up sort of what I think is a really good point,

which is that like, even if you're in your day-to-day life, the fact that you're carrying a gun isn't gonna stop somebody from starting, you know, an interaction with you that could turn violent because you just look the way that you look. I do wanna talk a little bit about what's kind of the opposite thing. And it's sort of part of why I think folks were a little on edge when this event got announced. And, you know, that graphic came out that had, as we've discussed, Yellow Peril

Tactical alongside, you know, these other groups. And there's one of the things that kind of results from the way gun culture works is that there's a very recognizable kind of uniform that you see particularly, you've seen it with the Boogaloo Boys, you see it with groups like the Proud Boys. It's the thing where you've got a plate carrier, a belt, an AR, some other kind of long gun helmets, and usually other tactical gear on it. And this outfit, so to speak, has kind of evolved over time. It really is a result of the war on terror. And it's both an aesthetic choice, and there's a huge number of companies that exist, particularly on the right to provide people with aesthetic options for kind of having all of this gear that are sort of ideologically

simpatico with them. But it's also just actually a – well, some of this stuff is less practical than others, but the basics of the getup exist because it's what worked, right? One of the things people noted when the Taliban took back over in Afghanistan is that all of their special operations guys were dressed the same way that us fighters dress, because it's just what works. You see the same outfits on Ukrainian and Russian spec ops guys. And one of the things when we, when we're looking at kind of domestically,

when you have people who are organizing and going out in the world, armed as part of a public event, is that to people who are not familiar with what's going on, it can be hard to tell them apart sometimes. And that is, that strikes me as the thing that the left particularly needs to deal with because both in kind of in the media and also out in the field, you don't want to be mistaken for groups like the Proud Boys. And Stephen, I want to start kind of with you here, because I think your reporting has always done a really good job of kind of making that difference clear, if you kind of have any thoughts on that. And then we'll go back to you, Snow. um, aesthetics and the ideological sort of turn in the production of weaponry and

accessories. I mean, there's like a goddamn tactical 88. Oh yeah. Franchises, which is making me lose my mind for a number of reasons. Yeah. Um,

and that is, is a, is a real distinct thing that I see all the time around here. And, and I think there's subtle things that groups do to try to distinguish themselves, obviously are patches, but in order to see a patch, you have to be close enough to someone in order to even find it legible. So then, okay, you have flags, but then you also have to know what these flags are. Something that some groups around here have done when they're, all of these sort of semiotic markers of who they are and what they're doing.

Because if they have a different set of those things, it can be a very different set of conclusions that you can walk away from if you identify them. And in Texas, the right does love carrying these flags and wearing these patches. So it makes it very clear who has consistently shown up to these events. But like the reaction of normal people, if a group of armed people are leading a protest is to kind of be like, what the heck heck double take, maybe they won't start filming it because it's the craziest thing that they've seen that week. And ultimately,

you know, they have to kind of know some contextual clues in order to even make these distinctions. Particularly when you're talking about groups like, you know, John Brown clubs or a yellow perilil, where there's concerns around OPSEC or InfoSec, and you don't want to necessarily reveal your identities because you're already a part of a group that's facing violence at a disproportionate rate, like the former FBI officer, interestingly noted during the Cato conversation, that yeah, you may have an even harder time sort of distinguishing yourself and making it known who you are.

So it's an interesting challenge. I don't know if I have sort of any lessons from it other than that, you know, these classic signifiers also seem to work sometimes they're kind of kitschy or um you know seem ridiculous but it's kind of the same thing like you said about the spec ops stuff like it's been used for centuries yeah um stuff like this has been used for a long time because it works because you immediately can comprehend is this person with a gun here to kill me or to protect me yeah yeah that's that's really interesting because i i obviously i have a complicated history with flags but there's few

better ways to to inform other people about what a group of folks is doing than having one um yeah as long as you're not conducting an ambush and that's an offensive maneuver and then suddenly you know it's like as long as you're cool with being like we're here yeah and this is what we're doing a flag is exactly the thing that you might want welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter nocturnal tales, 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. So one of the things I've always paid attention to and appreciated about Yellow Peril is the way in which y'all's social media and y'all's kind of forward face is both unapologetically focused on firearms, focused on training, and also feels completely different from any of the sort of right wing kind of groups that focus on some of the same. Even when're doing stuff, that's like videos of people shooting and training. Do you want to talk?

I mean, it just anything in general on this subject that you you've felt, but that's something I've always particularly noticed about y'all. Yeah. So thank you. We try really hard. You should see the group chat. But it's it's something that, you know, when historically Asian Asians represented in firearms culture tend to be conservative folks who fit within the norm or, you know, proximity to whiteness. And that's something that we are not at all interested in. And that's something that we are not at all interested in. And we know that comes at a risk. That's why one of the reasons why our identifiable tattoos or clothing and our faces are always blurred.

One, because we don't know, buffered sense of legitimacy just because they have cool, you know, video editing. They have like the nicest guns. They have a lot of guns. And our thing is like you don't need all that. What you do need is to train with what you got. And our target audience are folks who don't know shit about firearms or just getting into it and need somewhere reputable to go. And we take that very seriously. Because I only got into firearms like two years ago. And so that is fresh in my memory. And I know very well what that's like and how intimidating it could be. So a lot of our work is to try to demystify it and really break it down to a way that like, it doesn't like, we don't make people feel like they have to be at a certain level already to even enter into the firearms world. Like we want to meet people where they're at and encourage people.

So like, you know, do our drill of the month and like tell us your score and then do it next month and tell us how you did better. And so it's really encouraging people to get better on an individual basis. We encourage people to go out with their friends, but we also try to throw in like community international solidarity with our fundraisers in there too. So it's, we try to do a lot of different things, but at the end of the day, like if we help just even a handful of shooters get

better at defending themselves or their community, like it's all worth it. Thank you. Now, I want to ask next, and I'll ask you both again, kind of same question. Where do you see the armed left moving, particularly in this next year as we kind of get through our last or start go through our last blessed year before the 2024 election? What are some things that that are on your radar? What are some things that you're sort of expecting to see what are some things that you're worried about seeing a lot um it's a big quiet trying to keep it to a year right yeah but yeah you know i like i i worry a lot i try not to get too caught up in it because life will surprise you, you know. But I think ultimately, like where I live, we are facing down a really tight governor race in which if the Republican candidate wins, a lot of work that has been put to, you know, codify abortion rights, workers rights, things like that will be reversed by this governor. workers' rights, things like that will be reversed by this governor.

And it's something that a lot of people are worried about, myself included. And where I live, even within city limits, there are white supremacist flags, Confederate flags, even just like a couple miles from my house. And so there's a lot of fear around that becoming even more emboldened, even though we managed to fight back a lot and deterred. It doesn't mean that they're not taking this moment, the right, the fast, right, to restrategize and to recalibrate what they want to do next. And so it kind of feels like we're in the calm before the storm. Oh man. Not like the J6 storm. That's not what I mean, but like genuinely what it will actually look like. Cause I don't think it's going to be, I don't think there's going to be like,

you know, we meet at the football field and we have like our drummers out and like our little pipe players out. And then we have a bottle it's gonna be like urban like warfare is what i think um and a lot of other people think that too and you just throw in climate change as a treat like we don't know what the literal climate is gonna be like um and so it really just feels like there's multiple fronts right now but it seems like climate change or the fascists will kill me before my smoking habit will. And a lot of people think that too. Yeah. I mean, I do anecdotally know a lot of people who justify their cigarette use with like, look, there's wildfires all around my house. I'm not worried about the Marlboros.

There's wildfires all around my house. I'm not worried about the Marlboros. It is October and the city of Portland is blanketed in smoke. I don't know if the cigarettes are going to get me. Steven, did you want to go next? Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, the fact that a shitposting account gained some traction, maybe there's hope yet um i don't know but shit posting will save us in the end yeah it's it's another one on the board for shit posting let's put it that way so looking forward to uh what are we dealing with well texas is uh deep in it right now um we're one of the sort of laboratories of fascism

in the united states at the moment sort of a spear tip of a lot of really bad stuff uh really just like you know codifying in the state oppressive things uh things that they just talk about in other states. And so, yeah, if our governor's race, basically, it doesn't either, you know, kind of split things because our lieutenant governor runs independently of the governor and, you know, the House is a whole other thing. Yeah, if it goes far right, which a ton of money has been spent, billions and billions from people in the industry that's primarily responsible for destroying the planet are pushing that to make it happen. Some seriously bad laws, really bad state-sponsored violence, a variety of forms. And people are already thinking to themselves, like, do I want to live in this state anymore? But that's also basically what the extreme people on the right want is to either just get rid of these people one way or another. And so some people don't want that.

Obviously, some people don't have a choice to leave because it's expensive to move and they may be tied to their families and other sorts of things. So I don't like to predict the future because history is, we keep pumping shells into it and it keeps getting back up and it's just going to happen. And I don't really know exactly. I just am very thankful that there are people in groups in my state that are trying to protect vulnerable people and people working to hopefully make it not super bad um so i think like the optimistic view is that it won't be all totally terrible horrible but it'll be still kind of same same yeah um you know yeah yeah that's kind of like how i see broad speaking you know the big projection cone otherwise um i'm not sure yeah shit's gonna be fucked up but at least we'll have friends

uh hopefully it'll be wavy and it'll be about the friends that we make along the way yeah i was gonna make that joke um okay do either of you have anything else you'd like to to talk about or or or bring up or say before we kind of uh bring this to a close i i guess i'm just like i was kind of surprised how uh decent that the panel went um you know the anti-fascist coalition can be broad because it is a sort of anti thing it's not necessarily positivist but you know maybe that's another episode to describe you know why it's important to also perhaps have a positivist message yeah along with what you're trying to do in response to fascism um and you know like more discussions like this hopefully will happen and i think they could be improved by like not all four panelists being white dudes that would probably be helpful um as a thought

yeah uh well anything else yeah that that was actually the first thing i wrote on my my note page is that it was for for I do. I should have said that earlier. So wow, you know, never too late. I'm just playing. But I think one thing I want to add is like, similar to what you were saying, Stephen was kind of like, what is the pro positive thing? And ultimately, like, to me, it's like the city that I live in, there's a lot of decentralized mutual aid groups that got a lot of people through the pandemic and still provide daily relief to people consistently. Like I'm in like a million fucking signal chats where people post a need and it gets met eventually.

And it's like, I'm pro that mutual aid. And like, it's something that, I mean mean maybe it's the only thing that will really get us through whatever's to come um and that's just like pro community building um and coalition building whatever that looks like in your community maybe if we want to talk about mutual aid you can i know you guys do a lot of fundraisers i think that's a really cool thing certainly distinguishes you from a lot of other gun clubs um so maybe do you want to talk about a couple of those maybe plug those you know i would plug our forward patches but we just sold out of the second batch um it's it is we didn't think people would care that much um especially the first round and so the second round we only ordered 100 and it's sold out in a

day those are supporting the resistance in myanmar right yes yes people are getting them by donating directly to liberate myanmar and then someone sends them a cool forward patch um and it's one of many fundraisers we've done we We recently have done a couple for folks in Ukraine. We helped them fund an ambulance out there. I can't remember the Instagram handle right now. We've also done a bunch for like a group in Portland, for example, Black and Beyond the Binary. I think we've done two actually for Liberate Myanmar. But it's just something that, you know, we don't do this for

money. And we also want to support other groups doing things that we support, especially like popular fronts that are fighting back against authoritarian regimes. And hoping that, you know, if shit hits the fan here, that people will do that for us too. Because we really value international solidarity. And, you know, as corny as it is, we're, you know, we're like, we got us, you know, we fund us, not George Soros. But, you know, it's something that brings us joy to be able to help.

And as mostly anarchists, we really believe that, like, we are all that we have and we can't wait for someone else to set to you know a benefactor to come and save us because that shit's just not gonna happen yeah it's great where can folks find you on the interweb they want to follow along you can find us on instagram at yellow dot peril dot. You have to spell it out, I think, because I think we're shadow banned right now. Our Twitter, regrettably, is YPTActual.

We also have a website, just yellowperiltactical.com. We just took it so no one else could. But that's where you can mainly find us. We are primarily on Instagram. But most of our are primarily on Instagram. Um, but most of our stuff is on Twitter. If you really want to see a shit post, go on Twitter.

Uh, we recently got into it with this person in Oregon over the gun control measure. Um, and let me tell you, yeah, it was a hoot, um,

but also a little like maddening. Cause this guy yeah this guy actually ties into how we opened the episode because he was he's a local liberal uh thought leader guy who uh saw two pictures of people with guns one of them being fascists and one of them being one of y'all and was like, clearly these are the same thing. It was a good time. Vote no on one 14, in my opinion, if you're in the state of Oregon,

but we'll talk about that at a later point, Steven, you want to plug your first off, obviously really good work on the panel. I want to plug that for folks because I think it is really worth a listen. As everyone is here, he said, there's a lot of good historical information in there and,

and, and your contributions are invaluable. So folks can check that out. If you just Google Cato Institute, domestic extremism and political violence, you'll find it. And how else can people find you, Stephen? You can also find me on Twitter. I will make sure that my handle is there. It's at Steve Vanzetti, S-T-E Vanzetti, as in the,

you know, one of the two that got killed by the state unjustly um because it's anti-italian discrimination so um i digress um the you can find me there uh protean is obviously something that i work with and i would say check that out as well it's at protean mag uh that has a website proteanmag.com, and anything else that you want to know about me, you can either find, uh, on Twitter or Google. There's really only like two guys named Steven Monticelli in the entire state, United States, and the other one's like a CPA in his sixties. So that's just not that one. Um, and yeah, you can find me there. Excellent. Um, well, I'm glad we got to end on a Sacco and Vanzetti reference and, uh, yeah, everybody

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