It Could Happen Here - Understanding the Response to the Tyre Nichols Video

Episode Date: February 10, 2023

We talk about the state of street resistance against the police in the wake of the footage of police murdering Tyre Nichols.   EARTHQUAKE DONATION LINKS: The White Helmets whitehelmets.org/en/ The Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS) Foundation sams-usa.net Doctors Without Borders doctorswithoutborders.org Kurdish Red Crescent heyvasoruk.orgSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hi, everyone. It's me, James. And just before we start today, we're going to discuss in quite some detail the being to death of Tyree nichols by the police in memphis and if you don't want to hear that detail that's totally fine but we wanted to let you know now so that you didn't get uh surprised by it in your morning commute or whatever so if you want to skip this one if you don't listen to that one then we are trying to give you that warning ahead of time. Discourse. Discourse.

Discourse is about podcast. I don't know. It could happen here is the podcast that you're listening to. If you came here looking for another podcast, then you fucked up. But you fucked up in a good way because that podcast was trash. Thank you for being here with us today. Who's here? Who are you people?

We're a little unsure. Yeah, I'm Mia Wong. I'm here. Wow. I'm James. I'm a little unsure about who I am beyond that, but that's who I am. It's okay. I'm Garrison Davis, and I'm here to engage in discourse.

There's nothing I love more than discourse. Speaking of discourse, today we're going to be talking about, well, I don't know. It's not really discourse. But today we're going to be talking about the reaction to the video of the Memphis police murdering Tyree Nichols. And particularly, we're going to be talking about the way in which kind of the left responded to this, both online and kind of public channels and actually in the streets. Because I think there's some interesting stuff here. And actually in the streets, because I think there's some interesting stuff here. And I think it's kind of worth analyzing outside of, you know, the broader conversation about police violence and, you know, that sort of thing. Because I think there's some interesting sort of tactical stuff to kind of talk about here. And yeah, that's that's that's what we're going to be doing today. Um, and I, yeah, that's, that's, that's what we're going to be doing today.

Um, I, in case you've been kind of stuck under a rock, uh, you should probably be aware that on January 7th, 2023 police from the Memphis PD Scorpion unit, which was a unit with a very sinister name that existed, uh, to effectively over police, um, a chunk of the city of Memphis. Yeah. Pulled over Tyree Nichols, a 29 year old black man. Tyree was an amateur photographer. He liked skating. He had Crohn's disease.

He was just driving around that night. And the encounter, as we would later see on the video, went pretty much immediately violent on behalf of the police. Nichols was beaten very badly and he died in the hospital three days later. And for the first few days after the killing, obviously, you know, this happened, the police did this, and then rumors started kind of spreading in the immediate wake of the beating. But very little was known for certain about like what had happened,

in the immediate wake of the beating, but very little was known for certain about like what had happened, um, about, you know, what, why this had, had gotten escalated so quickly. Um,

one of the first kind of signs that this was going to become a thing on the national, uh, uh, in terms of like the national attention span was when the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and the U S department of justice independently opened investigations into the beating. After reviewing body camera footage from multiple officers on scene, five Memphis PD officers were dismissed on January 20th.

Three days later, an autopsy commissioned by Tyree's family found extensive bleeding caused by a severe beating. Outrage around the killing grew rapidly, and it was announced by the Memphis police that body camera footage of the stop and of the beating would be released to the public. This started the rumor mill really churning up. There was kind of a couple of leaks from people who had seen the footage, I think, who were close to the case, and they all sort of described it as uniquely bad. The term that I heard a lot was that it's worse than the Rodney King beating. This is just the way in which people started talking about it. And as more details filtered out, there were conversations around the country, particularly folks on the activist left, who started talking about the need to prepare for what they suspected would be the aftermath of the video's release.

the video's release. And one of the things that was kind of worth discussing here is that in the immediate, like immediately before the video came out, a lot of the conversations that people on the left were having and that people in law enforcement were having kind of focused around the same expectations, which was that there would be widespread protests and rioting as a result of the release of this video. Police departments around the country entered high alert, riot squads were prepped. And then kind of on the other side of things and sort of open channels on Twitter and Mastodon and in person in a number of different cases, leftists and people, you know, who claim to be that online talked about their expectations too. I heard variations of the phrase, you know, it's going to be a really hot year. This is going to like lead into a particularly aggressive summer on the ground.

People are going to make the burning of that precinct in Minneapolis look tame, you know, get your gear together, check in with your friends. Everything's about to go off. There was a lot of chatter kind of along those lines. And I don't know, I didn't really speak up too much about this, but my kind of thinking as folks were sort of anticipating the reaction to this was I suspected that the actual reaction on a mass scale to the video's release was going to be more muted and law abiding than people were expecting at the time. at the time. And I guess the primary reason that I felt this way was simply that kind of the vibes were off. It just didn't feel like folks were ready for that kind of a response. But I do kind of have a fact-based reason for why I was anticipating that as well. On January 26th, two days before the video's release, five Memphis PD officers were arrested and charged with murder, kidnapping, assault, a bevy of very serious charges. Immediately after that, three firefighters, two EMTs, and a police lieutenant who'd been on scene after the beating were fired for failing to assess and provide emergency care to Nichols on

scene. And there's a couple of ways to view what happened here. I think the less optimistic one is that the state simply made a pragmatic decision to throw these guys onto the bus. That's definitely what happened. The more optimistic way to look at this is that because people had rioted so hard for so long in the wake of George Floyd's murder, the state felt like it had to throw these guys under the bus rather than, you know, risk another year of rage. And this is also correct. I think both of these things are pretty accurate ways to look at what happened. The idea that the release of the footage of Tyree's murder would lead to massive protests was not quite universal,

but I did notice that a lot of the people who felt similarly to me expressed the belief that if people didn't riot over what had happened to Tyree, that was due to a mix of liberal cowardice and racism, since most of the officers who beat Tyree to death were themselves Black. And I think this is kind of a short-sighted and unfair take, and I'll talk about why shortly. On January 27th of Friday, the Tyree Nichols videos were released by the Memphis Police Department. Along with a lot of you, I watched them all immediately. And you can find, there's a description on my Twitter page, it's currently pinned to my profile of the video, if you haven't seen it but want to know what happened there. To kind of summarize it in brief, it's very ugly. Tyree is immediately calm as he's pulled over and taken from his car.

The police are not calm. He attempts to de-escalate them. They accuse him falsely of resisting. Then they mace him and themselves. I think in general that the inciting incident for the beating was the incompetent use of mace by these officers. They hurt themselves, they got pissed, and then they beat Tyree because they were angry at themselves for macing themselves. It's also kind of worth noting that a white officer who's since been fired as well also deployed his taser on the young man. There's been some kind of this was kind of left out of a lot of the initial summaries of what had happened. That guy has now been fired. And yeah, it's it's bad. The video is is very unpleasant and very brutal. Watching it, though,

I think kind of the thing that struck me most was how much like a normal traffic stop a lot of this was. I think that if, you that if they had gone a little bit less hard and beaten him a little less badly and he had survived, they probably would have charged him with resisting arrest and assault on a police officer. And who knows how the case would have gone. You can hear the police preparing for this eventuality in the footage. One officer claims that Tyree went for his gun. There's no evidence of this in the footage. And you can kind of hear them all working to get their story straight after they beat Tyree for the inevitable court case. More officers and emergency personnel arrive on scene as he's just kind of laying there. And none of them seem to find what's happened

peculiar or noteworthy, which is interesting because immediately prior to the video's release, police departments around the country all issued statements that were basically identical, condemning the officers who had beaten Nichols, saying basically this behavior is unacceptable. These men are bad apples. This is like an extreme example that does not represent policing values. And there's a couple of things that are interesting about this. One of them is that the actual way in which emergency responders on scene treated the beating kind of puts the lie to that because nobody acts as if anything outside of the normal has occurred. And the other thing that is noteworthy is the uniformity of these messages by police departments around the country. I have not actually seen that

happen before. There was kind of a version of this that occurred in the wake of the George Floyd video, but it was much more cohesive prior to the release of the Tyree Nichols video. That said, there were no widespread riots or acts of property destruction after the video was released. There were protests in a number of cities, most notably in Memphis. But compared to 2020, things were very subdued. There was not kind of widespread property destruction or rioting. In Portland, which was obviously the site of intense radical street actions in 2020, there were two fairly small marches. I'm not going to delve into this in tremendous detail, but there were kind of allegations from one of the marches that the larger and less radical of the two was an op

designed to take numbers and energy away from the radical march. There were confrontations between members of both groups. And while the overall story, again, is not worth spending time on, the gist of it is that very little happened. Now, this is not kind of limited to Portland. Atlanta, Georgia is probably the city in the U.S. today that's been the center of the most effective radical protests against law enforcement. And the history of attempts to stop and sabotage the construction of Cop City, which is obviously a massive police training compound in Atlanta's largest urban forest, has been well documented by Garrison Davis, as well as a number of other reporters. I do think it's worth noting that days before the

Nichols video was released, Atlanta police shot and killed a forest defender, Tortugita, and a moderately large protest followed, with protesters smashing windows and lighting one cop car on fire. This was the kind of action that I think most of the activists I observed expected in the wake of the Nichols video as well, but we simply didn't see that. I'm just going to butt in here for a little bit, and you'll hear more about that riot slash protest in Atlanta next week. I'm putting together a series on it that'll be out soon. But definitely one of the things that was talked about a lot in Atlanta was the upcoming release of this video

and the potentiality of this video getting released shortly after the death of Tortugita at the hands of police. Both of these things feeding off each other into a into a similar like 2020 level um uprising and this was like no one was like for sure about this like no one was like saying this is absolutely definitely going to happen but it was something that was definitely thought about uh it was something that was definitely considered i think honestly if the the video was set to come out originally on like the monday or tuesday following the big uh uh downtown protest in atlanta um it was supposed to come out just a few days later and that that didn't happen it was delayed once again for further further into the

week um i think if it came out sooner, I think that could have fed off momentum in a pretty considerable way. I think a few things happened both in Atlanta in the next few days that kind of stunted possible further protest. National Guard was deployed. Police in Savannah were ordered to start arresting people and shutting down

gatherings of over 15 uh specifically for like including vigils and in atlanta obviously there was people getting really pretty pretty uh inflated uh high level felonies and domestic terrorism charges yeah simply for being simply for being present at a protest um so i think those those things kind of all in all impacted people's ability to like prepare for you know a sequence of protests which there was some in there was some in la for for like a day or two the ones in memphis were pretty big but i think they the the timeline in which they released the video is definitely should be considered in terms of when they chose to release it um to like yeah in terms of like the the state's goal of preventing you know yeah large large-scale

protests but that was definitely something that was talked about a lot uh during during uh like the a little over a week that i was that i was in atlanta's because everyone was getting ready for this like everyone heard that this is going to be like the worst video that we've seen since rodney king like that that that was the way it was it was thought up of like on the ground you know just like word of mouth being being passed. And people were definitely like preparing for like preparing themselves for it, like like like thinking like thinking about like what's going to happen if this is like if this really is the most horrific thing. What is the appropriate response to that? What is the appropriate response to that?

And this is kind of a lot of what I wanted to talk around, because you have sort of Georgia law enforcement. There's this this riot. And the response to that, as well as the response to the tree set, is a series of domestic terrorism charges. And then this video comes out and there's not a mass like radical street response to it. And it seems to me, and Garrison, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but a big part of that is people in Atlanta were kind of not willing to throw more lives and bodies at the police without kind of more of a cohesive plan of what to do, given the severity of the repression that that was being engaged in i mean i obviously can't comment on people's yeah motivations or like plans for for for stuff because that's not something that i would be would be privy to privy to yeah um so i i i don't know

there's there's there's a lot of stuff i mean like I think a big part of why I heard a lot about it in Atlanta was, one, because a friend of a lot of people who were involved in the forced defense got killed by police a few days earlier. And two, Memphis is only a few hours away from Atlanta. Like, it's not that far. And a big part of the stuff in Atlanta is like solidarity with struggles that are not just in your immediate vicinity. And you could argue that Memphis really is in the immediate vicinity of Georgia. But like that type of cross-state solidarity is a big part. But yeah, I cannot comment on why people did

or did not choose to do specific things. I think that's up for people themselves. Yeah. I wouldn't want to put words into anyone's mouth, but it was kind of interesting because I paid attention a lot to the reaction and there were a lot of folks talking about how disheartening it was that there were

not more of the kind of radical actions that they wanted to see in the wake of the video coming out. And that's kind of the thing I wanted sort of to talk most around, because I feel very mixed around this. But broadly speaking, I guess I'm glad that we didn't see a repeat of the part of 2020 that was folks standing up in front of cop shops until riot police came in and getting charges against them. Because I just don't think that that works right now. I don't think it works is functional anymore. the state because the reaction, like there was a period of time early in 2020, those first couple of months in particular, where you could see the police were off balance, obviously, in like Minneapolis with the burning of the third precinct was this kind of sea change moment. But you could see it in a number of cities that like they didn't really know what was going on,

and they were themselves concerned with how out of control the situation had gotten and then it kind of morphed later in the year to i think a situation they could control very well where there were these acts of fairly minor property destruction and then a bunch of people would get picked up and charged and i i think that while i understand like the desire to react that way and to do something kind of very firm and radical in response to state violence like this, I'm also like deeply concerned about people not throwing away months and years of their lives fighting charges. Yeah. I mean, a big part of it is people learning that treating protesters as disposable meat bags to throw against the wall of the state is kind of a bad idea. Yeah. And there's, I think, this is something that was talked about in conversations, just like regarding like, hey, this video is going to come out.

What do you think is going to happen? Like there's just a lot of like casual conversations. But like there was a lot to make 2020 happened. A lot of things contributed to the intensity and the length of those protests. I think COVID being a pretty big part. This was a few months into the pandemic. People have been stuck in their homes now for a few months and not really like prepared for that. Like at this point, we're kind of we're all kind of used to being in our house a lot more now.

But back then it was it was new for a lot of people. So I think the opportunity to get out of the house for what seemed like an important reason, I think, was a really big part of 2020. Yeah. People being out of a lot of work was a really big part of 2020 because a lot of people did not have the types of jobs that they might have now, did not have the jobs they had in the months before. Maybe because I can't really think of another example like this from history. Obviously, a lot of uprisings occur when people are suddenly out of work. But this was a mix of people are suddenly out of work and they all have cash. Like that, which contributed in a lot of ways, because like that that was, I think, what funded a lot of, you know, people bringing in food and people bringing in like pallets of water and getting gas masks and stuff as they had these sort of checks for, you know, as a result of like COVID relief, which was an interesting situation as well that hasn't been replicated since.

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that doesn't get talked about that much, which is just the weather. Like, if you go back and look at when the largest police, like, largest anti-police protests in the U.S. have happened, right? They either start, like, late spring, early fall, or just the middle of the summer. And the reason, yeah, and this is, I think, another, this was a thing up in Chicago, right? It was just really fucking cold. And, I mean, this affects activist circles too, but it's like you can't get the critical mass of just regular people in the streets when it's like 20 fucking degrees. I think the other side of that is just summer vacation. A lot of the people who go the hardest at these protests are people in high school.

And during winter, fall, spring, kids are in school. During summer, people under the age of 18 have a lot more free time on their hands. So I think that is another contributing factor. contributing factor um and i think there's there's there's one other aspect which is very sinister um and but i think is is worth talking about in terms of how of how the state may have been trying to frame this to like to to frame the release of this video um to kind of like curtail the the the the intensity of any type of like um of a protest revolt or uprising now obviously there was like the fucked up nature of like making this feel like a world premiere of like a snuff film yeah it was it was it was like a weird bizarre a weird aspect which i think it encouraged the video to be something that is consumed versus something that's actually watched and like, oh, this is a fucked up thing that we need to do something about.

Instead, it turned it into this element of consumption. like people who have thrown down in the streets before, people who have seen fucked up shit, is that the intensity, what was the violence depicted on this video was framed as being extremely horrific, being a very unusual, a very uncommon, but horrifying display of violence and display of brutality by the police.

This is what police departments were framing it as. This is what the president of the United States was framing this as. Like, this is a case of a few bad actors who did an egregious but, you know, uncommon thing. And I think when a lot of people who've thrown down watched this video, it just

reminded you of stuff that you've seen before like yeah they they saw a thing they had seen yeah it wasn't it was not shocking in the same way that it was getting framed as because what separates this from most of the arrests that happened in portland during 2020 is very little like one or two punches that were that were thrown just a little bit too hard is all that separates this from most like violent police arrests like this was not an uncommon display of violence this was an ordinary an ordinary encounter that just a few things were pushed just barely over the edge and i think a lot of people watched, like my first reaction was like, oh, like this, this is not as bad as what I thought.

Like this and that, that should be like a condemnation of the police's actions. Well, that's why I think one of the most important things to watch is how the other cops who were not present for the beating, but who show up immediately after

or at the end of it, because some of them did watch the others beat him, how they react, because they're just kind of like around they're chilling yeah it's remarkable to them even the emts right who turn up oh yeah this has happened well we we we do a stand back when this happens right it's a normal ground we're not concerned like it was not a you could you could slowly watch because like a lot of this video was not of the actual beating. It was of the aftermath.

And you could watch these cops slowly start to realize that maybe they went a little too hard. Just very slowly, over the course of 30 minutes. But for most of the time they're on the ground, they're making jokes. They are talking about how fun it was to beat up this person that is they're complaining about macing each other yeah that is most of the video i think it's worth noting like a couple things one like it's extremely long like i i'm not in the in the way that the george floyd video like fits into the attention span of stuff we consume on our telephones at a time consuming

but it's been it versus eight minutes versus like an hour of footage right yeah if tyree nichols had just been seriously disabled have life-altering injuries been charged with resisting arrest all the things that very plausibly could have happened if a couple of punches had handed in a different place this body camera footage would have been denied under the investigative exemption right they'd have said no we're investigating his resistance of arrest you can't you can't see it and none of this shit would have happened and and like the yeah the the normalcy of so much other than the outcome i don't know if that that stripped some of the rage away but it it's important context i

think a few things i mean and this is again one of the things that I think you can see from this that is evidence of sort of a positive long-term result to, and it's a very mixed bag when I say it's positive, but that is kind of a positive sign is that they acted so quickly to throw all of these guys. They are firing and charging a lot of city employees over this. It's going to be between all of the people fired and all of the people charged, more than a dozen people by the time this is all done, which I can't think of another time when that has happened this quickly over an incident of police violence. And they did that not because

it's the right thing to do but because they were scared and again i i do i want to emphasize here the thing that they're scared of is not that like radical left-wing protesters will take to the street it's that liberals and more or less apolitical yeah like they know that the consequence of of the cops beating someone to death is that like someone's soccer mom will fucking abandon her minivan and swing a sledgehammer into your cop shop if you don't fucking do this. Do like give a scapegoat, right?

Like do the fair, the bare minimum. And so the positive, the thing that I can say that is probably positive about this is that it does show there's still some fear there on their behalf. The thing that's negative is that like, well, it worked because I will say on a moral level, I think a wide variety of radical actions are morally justified by what was done to Tyree Nichols. Now that said, like back to sort of the point we were making at the start of this,

I don't particularly urge or encourage that just because like, I don't like seeing people get arrested and charged and spend years of their life fighting shit in court for the chance to like, let's say carry out minor acts of property destruction on a cop shop. I don't think like that sort of activism works right now. It certainly doesn't work without the, without the critical mass of like liberals sort of behind it without enough people saying like,

we, again, you look at like the fact that the burning of the third precinct in Minneapolis is still one of the most popular things in modern American politics, but that was the product of a fairly unique moment. And I just don't, I see some positives in like the lingering fear of that moment. But I also don't see the material conditions that make me think it something like that is coming again in the immediate future.

And especially because this, the situation around this video demonstrates how much more effort the state's putting into trying to prevent things from happening before they start. There was a lot of interagency work put into having all of these local police departments release statements, having the FBI release statements, having the president release statements and it's it it is all made slightly more bizarre considering that the contents of the video are not the on on the level of like uncommon or like rare rare displays of violence that the police do like this is this is this is relatively standard um and that that kind of one thing i've been thinking about is like why did they choose this video like why did they why did they make this one like what were they afraid of like for this video because like other other other videos have come out in the past few years like other like other police killings have happened like there's police killings all the fucking time but they they they

did a lot of work on this one specifically um and it's kind it's kind of interesting that like why why they chose this specific video to to dedicate all of this work into because not not only did they like you know deny and stuff but they also they like they like hyped it up they're like using this as like an example yeah like using this as an example like here this is what bad cops look like watch us punish these bad cops well but i i think i think i think there's a rate i think there's a huge racial aspect of this right which is that like you know like the the cops were getting prosecuted are only the black cops who were involved in this right and i and i i think that's a huge part of this entire strategy i think

that's why they framed this as exceptional violence is to play on people's racism right i think i think that's what part of why this is allowed to happen which was that yeah you can it is like even inside the police it is a lot easier to throw black cops under the bus than it is to throw white cops under the bus that's just how the system works and it doesn't trigger that same like visceral response right that that we all had to seeing the george floyd video i don't think quite like like there is an age-old tradition of white men doing violence to black men on behalf of the state and yeah i think also it's it's also easier politically inside of the police departments because i think i think there would have been a lot

more pushback from in like the police department like there hasn't been much that I've seen like internal pushback like from inside of police departments because I I think if it had been five white cops I think this would be a huge fight and I think you would have had like the fucking police union like calling Biden like an anti-cop like whatever but I I think I think these were people who they were like we could throw these people under the bus and it doesn't fucking matter because who cares? Yeah. Solidarity isn't there for them. I think those are,

I mean, that's certainly like a significant aspect of why like this was the one they focused on. But I also think a major aspect of it is that it shows and records the reaction of other city employees to this. And you can see in real time, the police putting together a story. Like it's, there's,

I think a few things about this that are really unique, but even, I don't know. The, it's relatively unusual to have an angle, which is not like the body camera right which really i think the violence in this was was captured and depicted in a way which was more explicit than you would get from any individual cops body camera and like the fact

that they most of the time when cops kill people they do it with guns right or maybe with a taser or something like that the fact that they took minutes you know like several minutes to beat a man to death is it is just it should we've we've said like how this isn't unusual and it's not but it doesn't mean it's not repulsive no no no it's not fucking disgusted by it it's it's nightmarish uh yeah i just want to make sure yeah it's it's it's even more nightmarish considering how common this is because yes they did spend a few minutes doing this, but it was really only, I think one or two punches that threw it right over the edge.

Like it wasn't just punches. The thing that I think, one of the things that I saw that I think was probably critical in why he died. No, it was when they tackled him, his head bounced against the ground with a significant amount of force there's a number of like a perfect storm of factors right that went into making this the

incident that they talked about and like this the incident that didn't start 2020 part two i guess like it's no one particular thing it's all these things that led to it and i do think also like we have joe biden as president right like uh a lot of the same bullshit it's still happening like we've covered right like we're talking about the cops talking about the border talking about all this stuff but it's not being shoved in people's faces by uh legacy media outlets liberal folks have not been getting gradually angrier and more upset at like the appearance of vulgarity from the white house and yeah and that's also a big aspect of why things went the way they did in 2020 is you had four years of pent-up frustration on behalf

of a large group of liberals as well although i do again i i don't like pushing kind of the simple narrative here because i i see that on the left a lot that like oh the libs they stopped coming out because biden won and they never really cared and i think that like that's there's certainly like a decent chunk of people who who showed up because it was the thing to do and were not committed but i i also think the folks who are just like um you know people stopped coming out because they suck. That's a little bit of a reductive summary of the take. But I think that that broad idea leaves out a lot. One of the things that leaves out is that a lot of those libs and moderates who showed up in 2020 got the shit beaten out of them and got pretty traumatized and are probably would be willing to get back out again, but are going

to need to feel like there's a an actual chance of doing something because they understand the consequences of showing up in the street better. And they're like, well, I don't want to do the same thing that I just got my ass kicked and there's still cops. There is a decent amount of evidence that for kind of the long-term positive impact of getting all those people out in the street and of the fact that so 2014 to 2023, confidence that police treat black and white people equally fell from 52% where it was in 2014 to 39% among Americans. Fucking hell. Yeah, and confidence that police- 39 is still a lot, man. It's certainly too high, but that's a significant change.

And confidence that police were adequately trained to avoid use of excessive force fell from 54% to 41%. And confidence in both of these things fell twice as fast from 2020 to 2023 as it did from 2014 to 2020. And that

30-something percent number is just that is also just close to the number of people who are actively hardcore racist. About 40% of the country are bigots. I don't think the election was real.

I don't think that... 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

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Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Texa Lee has turned Silicon Valley your podcast. from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things

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that some of those liberal folks as well, like this is not, we don't do shitting on the lips or whatever, it's useless and it doesn't help, but a lot of those folks have been out doing other shit too. I've seen folks who I haven't seen since 2020 trying to protect trans kids, trying to stop bigots shouting at little children going to a pantomime or some shit.

They've been doing stuff and that contributes, of course, to people being fatigued from other actions. Yeah. A large part of what i'm seeing people not being willing to do anymore is like the same shit that they did in 2020 that stopped working right it didn't continue to be effective yeah no yeah and i and i think also like and this this also you know there's some aspects like the weather like the stuff that was happening in the very, very, like the first week where like, I don't know, like the cops lost control of like the center of Chicago, right? Like that, the kind of people who did that stuff, like aren't really like that, those aren't those, those, that was not being done by people who were sort of like political

liberals or whatever that was being done by people who like had like very very tiny very tenuous connection to politics at all under normal circumstances and you know like eventually eventually you'll get we'll see something like that again i don't know i mean it took like six six five or six years between like ferguson and 2020 yeah yeah like that that will happen again but that kind of that that kind of stuff doesn't happen that like those those the kind of people who actually riot very significantly who are not in the sort of like cadre of like hardcore left organizers like they don't throw in that often and a lot of political conditions have to like converge exactly correctly for it to happen and it's just not going to happen most of the time and that's depressing in a lot of ways but like you like that's just that's just

what reality is yeah i don't think there's been enough time between cycles in order for things to really pick up because yeah it does require a lot of people to forget to forget the brutality of what the cops did to people and like yeah and and and and just like material conditions and like recovering from burnout and it creates it like one thing that's been so incredible about atlanta is the level of resiliency because they've not they've not really stopped since 2020 like they're very impressive like they've they've kind of they've they've kept going in a very particular way that both encourages people to take care of themselves and not to be treated as disposable. And I think a big part of that is having a multi-pronged movement.

The movement isn't built around a singular thing like going out and breaking windows or even just camping in the forest. The movement isn't just those things. There's a lot of other various aspects so when you're exhausted from one single thing you can move on to one of the other many aspects and like do that as like as your recovery um and and have having that i think has contributed to the level of resiliency that we've seen um but i don't think the rest of the states has those types of practices like Like people in Portland are definitely still extremely burnt out from, from 2020. And I assume a lot of,

a lot of other cities are dealing with similar levels of fatigue. One thing I do want to address really quickly is the horse shit framing of this by legacy media. Again, like the very fucking people who like on the day that derek chauvin went to jail retweeted that initial statement where minneapolis pd like basically said george floyd died of a heart attack i think we had a cardiac condition or something um the very same people who retweeted that statement said never again are we going to be conned by this shit and now out there fucking

just carrying water for the cops like Like CNN saying that Tyree Nichols had an encounter with the police. Like, I don't understand what it fucking takes for these people to understand. Like, and I've been like, I was on NBC this year trying to persuade other NBC journalists to maybe critically assess the claims of the police. And like, here we are again, doing the same shit again.

And we should probably close out here soon but one kind of final thought that i've had is the other another kind of crucial difference between how this was treated as opposed to uh the george floyd video is that the person who recorded the george floyd video was like a bystander like they they were just there and they posted that on their own accord, and it was able to grow traction over the course of a few weeks, kind of slowly in underground communities, people who are much more aware of police violence, and then that slowly seeped out into the mainstream.

I think there's a difference in having that type of natural growth of people learning about like, Hey, did you see this fucked up thing that my friend sent me? We're like, right. Did you like, like there's that level of like,

Oh, we found this thing that is really fucked up and people need to care about this versus the framing of the police and how they used this as like a world premiere of this, like of this, of this like snuff film it's it's like there was like a fucking countdown to to to to to to watch the video and that that immediately frames this as something to be consumed that immediately frames this as something like

the way to engage with this is to sit down and watch it and then you're done like that that that that is the like they're they're they're framing this the same way that you would watch like a movie or like a music video drop like that is that is the style of engagement because this video is being published by the police like they are they are they are from the very start they're controlling the way that information is distributed they're controlling what information is distributed It like creates this scenario where the consumption of the video itself like is the event as opposed to any type of like follow up action or protest or direct action. the action event the action event is just the consumption of the video based on how it was hyped up as as this thing that was to be like officially released and you like count down for it and then you watch it and you're like okay that was it that was the thing um and i think that does

just really impact it when it's like this like sanctioned premiere versus this thing that's spread by regular people um yeah i think you're right i think it kind of became this act of penance like you watch the video you say holy fuck that's disgusting and then like the thing is already done right like the cops are already fired so you just do your penance you go through the painful thing rather than the george floyd thing which was like nothing has been done about this i've got this organically for my friend and I'm fucking furious. Oh yeah. Yeah.

I think you're right. I think it's very different. Yep. All right. Well, I think that's probably going to do it for us today. Um, until next time,

uh, I don't know. Don't, don't let your city name a police elite unit Scorpion or anything else. Chicago's SOS. Yeah.

You can tell this is not going to go great. Yeah, don't have special police units. What if no cops? I would prefer no cops if you're going to have a special police unit. Maybe call it like the Barney Fife battalion or something like that. At least, at least try not to hype them up to be scorpions.

Yeah. Anyway, that, that, that, that, that fuck. Hi everyone.

It's James again, bookending the episode. And I'm just here to ask you again to donate if you have the means, if you're able to, to relief for people in Syria who are obviously experiencing terrible consequences from this earthquake. The news cycle kind of moves on, but people's lives don't, and they still need your help. So a couple of places you can donate are the White Helmets.

That's whitehelmets.org slash EN for English. Syrian American Medical Society Foundation. That's sams-usa.net. Médecins Sans Frontières, Doctors Without Borders. That's doctorswithoutborders.org. And the Kurdish Requestion,

h-e-y-v-a-s-o-R-U-K dot O-R-G. Those are all great places and we'd love it if you could spare a little money to help people out. Thanks. Bye. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. the shadow join me danny trails and step into the flames of right an anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lords of latin america listen to nocturnal on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. 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,

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