Rev Left Radio - Community Organizing: Advice & Ideas w/ The Nebraska Left Coalition

Episode Date: March 5, 2018

Brett sits down with his fellow-organizer, friend, and comrade to discuss their experience organizing as the Nebraska Left Coalition. The point of this episode is to talk about our programs, our experiences, and some ideas about how to get started organizing in your community. We also take questions from listeners on Twitter. Follow and support The Nebraska Left Coalition on FB here: https://www.facebook.com/TheNebraskaLeftCoalition/ Donate to The Nebraska Left Coalition here: https://www.paypal.me/neleftcoalition   You can find No Thanks new album The Trial here: https://no-thanks.bandcamp.com Reach us at: [e-mail] follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio Follow us on FB at "Revolutionary Left Radio" Intro Music by The String-Bo String Duo. You can listen and support their music here: https://tsbsd.bandcamp.com/track/red-black This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, and the Omaha GDC. Check out Nebraska IWW's new website here: https://www.nebraskaiww.org

Hey, everyone, before we start the show, I just wanted to say that the guest on this episode is a friend and comrade of mine, and he is part of not only the organization, the Nebraska Left Coalition, but the music that we're going to be playing throughout this episode is a band that he is in with other members of NLC and Omaha musicians, and that band is called No Thanks. They just released their album. Our sound engineer Dave had a hand in helping them record that album, and so all the music you're going to hear in this episode, out of the Omaha DIY scene and the Omaha organizing scene. So with that said, let's get to the episode.

Wake up saying Welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host and Comrade, Brett O'Shea, and with me today is Mike Henney from Nebraska Left Coalition. Me and Mike are part of an organization here in Omaha called the Nebraska Left Coalition. We do a lot of organizing. We have a lot of programs. We've just recently expanded to two chapters, one in Omaha, one in Lincoln, and we're even thinking about expanding into Council Bluffs for a third chapter.

So we thought that it might be worthwhile for us to just talk about our experiences here in Omaha, which is a medium-sized city, and we had no real revolutionary left-wing infrastructure in place when we started organizing. So we basically had absolutely nothing. And I know a lot of people are in similar situations where they live in small to meet, medium-sized cities, and they're just kind of lost as to how to get started because there's no ready-made organizations to join. So we really want to speak to those people. We want to talk about what we do here, what we've learned over the past year or two in organizing, and

hopefully folks can draw from our experience and apply it to their own situations. Now, if you're a veteran organizer and you live in L.A. or New York or Chicago, this might not be as interesting to you. You might be curious, and if you do listen, we'd love to hear feedback. We'd love other organizers who have been in the game longer than us to give us feedback so you know we can learn more but you know we're not pretending to be experts at all but we just want to talk about our experiences here and hopefully it helps folks coming up to organize does that sound about right sounds right all right um i think yeah just to like kind of give people an idea if they don't know what omaha is i think we're like the 40th biggest city in america 40th 41st we're like 55 are you

are you sure oh yeah okay look it up and mike's wrong he's never coming back but it's something like that so we're kind of yeah not tiny but but not huge um so yeah we're just going to go through our program our programs as the nebraska left coalition and see what people take out of it um so let's go ahead and start with education um this is a really important part of organizing um and i think i want to start with study groups because study groups can be overdone like if it's all that you're doing and it's just three people showing up to a study group week after week you might want to think about expanding. But study groups are a really good way to consolidate information,

to build consciousness among comrades, and to work out, you know, theoretical lines that can be applied to organizing and practice. Do you have anything to say, Mike, about study groups specifically and what can be gained from them? Yeah, I mean, the most important part about a study group is that you're, you know,

you're learning your way as you read your way through it, you know. You nailed one of the more, critical problems with study groups, which is if you just end up stuck in a room all the time, then you're not out organizing. But if you don't study, then you're not going to, you're going to run into more problems than you need to run into. You know, you have to be willing to dive deep into some shit that probably sucks to read sometimes because you have to, you have to be willing to understand the mistakes that happen before you so that you don't just repeat them over and over again. You know, the capitalists are learning from our

mistakes and will punish us, you know, in however many ways they see fit if we're not studying our history and theory and all that. Exactly. Yeah, you don't want to have to reinvent the wheel. You know, people have done this work. People have thought about a lot of these issues. So going into that literature and really building it up in your own mind as an organization and then going out and putting it to practice is super important.

So that's a good place to start. And even if you just have a couple friends that you know are leftist in your area, you know, and you really haven't gotten beyond that point, maybe that is. where you want to start. You want to sit down with your friends on a weekly basis and start getting into the literature. And then you can expand from there. You can pick up ideas from there and move forward. So actually revolutionary left radio since we're talking about education, you know, this whole podcast came out of organizing. This was an idea that we had in some of our very first meetings. I think our first meeting ever, like five or six of us met in the dark

in a park. We didn't even really know each other. So we were kind of on edge like who's this motherfucker who's this dude but you know soon we became very good friends and we started organizing and the idea for a podcast came up and we have some musicians in our collective and there's some you know my sound engineer over here david was a musician so he had some of the technical equipment to record and so revolutionary left radio was really a byproduct of organizing in the early days and we were really surprised that it took off so much pleasantly surprised and now we're trying to turn it back around it and pay it forward by talking about our experiences. Did you want to say anything about newspaper specifically? Because I know that you're really spearheading this attempt here in Omaha to

get a newspaper off the ground. What are some of the benefits of a newspaper? Why is a newspaper worth the time and energy to put into it? Yeah. Well, I'll tell you, this isn't the first thing that we did, and that's for a reason, right? If we were a few people and we were trying to, you know, make a regular publication that was all we were ever going to do and we would run into a lot of problems like that you know you just end up burning yourself out if you know some of these production schedules can be hard so but the reason why newspapers or something like them is so important is because you have to be able to give people a common basis that they're working from and in omaha and in lincoln we don't have a common basis that isn't capitalists.

The only sources for news that many of us have that deal with local issues are run by Warren Buffett, the third richest person who on the planet owns our, he lives in Omaha and he owns the newspaper. So how can you trust almost anything that comes out of there? for example you know the neighborhood where I live the World Herald which is the name of the newspaper has published they published three puff pieces of this one little intersection well all within a week talking about how it's the up and coming whatever intersection oh yeah yeah and uh you know but they're saying well it just needs to get rid of the you know those scary homeless people right the you know back in the day it was in current still it's full of prostitutes and it's just like you know man these people have obviously never been there right not that there's anything wrong with homeless people or prostitutes like I know a couple but it's like they're just selling this image of shit that isn't real to just to justify to people who don't know what the capitalists are going to do right so we have to

build alternative news sources that tell the other side of the story because it's easy to be you know when you're a rich person you can go to the newspaper and they love everything you say. You're a business leader. You're a community icon. But if you're, you know, if you're one of those scary dudes living in the, you know, weekly apartments, they don't care at all what you have to say. So our job is to find those other stories, the other side and give it that way.

Yeah, it's really about meeting people where they are. And for a lot of millennials, you know, podcast is a great medium. People are online. People are engaged in that in that medium. But for older generations, they can stand. to benefit from these narratives. They can stand to benefit from the reframing of their experiences through the left-wing lens, but they're not going to be tuning into iTunes and rating our podcast and downloading our apps. They just don't operate on that level a lot of time. So a

newspaper is a way, if you can get it onto stands in progressive, even business places, and you can get it in front of people, you never know who's going to pick that up and read that article and think, oh, wow. And it reframes an issue that they've thought about a million times, but haven't had the sort of framing to think about it in an explicitly left-wing way. So if you care about making YouTube videos, you care about making podcasts, that's amazing, do it, but also let's think about the people that that misses. And that misses everybody that's not only technologically inept, but it also misses people that don't have the financial resources to have consistent access to a computer,

for example. Yeah. I mean, we're just, we're legit just going to be handing these out to people on the street. You know, high school is going to get out, and we're just going to be. throwing it at them. You know, it's a, it's free. We want them to read it. Here, just take it, you know. If, if they read one article and throw it away, you know, I wish you read two, but at least they read the one. Right. You know, so putting it in front of people is, is essential. And it's, it's fun to write the articles. I know recently for a magazine that

we're releasing, uh, you kind of had me write an article on an old streetcar strike in Omaha from 1935. And I had never even heard about it. But I was like, that's an assignment. I'm on it. Yeah. I went and I learned about it. it fascinating history there. And so much, especially in Omaha, but I assume it's true for other places, so much of that radical history exists in all of our localities, but it's never discussed. We kind of are cut off from history in the way the media from the newspapers to the local news channels frame events. It's devoid of historicity. And bringing that historical context to people in and of itself can be an extremely enlightening process. I mean, history

for me is what I recommend for people like, how do I get in to understanding the different differences in left-wing tendencies or how do I get, you know, what's the difference between all these different ideas? If you read history, that shit gets laid bare for you. If you read real good history, not these, you know, mythologized bullshit versions of history. So, yeah, you know, anything from online things to newspapers and magazines to zines, I mean, anything to get, you should be attacking on all fronts, I guess, is a way to say it. Let's go ahead and move on to another segment of this beyond education, which is actually meeting people's needs. Now, this involves producing, distributing goods and services that the capitalist economy puts a price tag on.

And when people are systematically prevented from certain things, they start to internalize that as they don't deserve those things or their poverty is a manifestation of their lack of character. I mean, these is the messaging that we get from our society. So we have a plethora of programs where we're really trying and as best as we can to go into communities and, help them out. Some of the foundation, before we get into like feed the people as a program, the foundation for that is an organization called grass. So Mike, what is grass if you can kind of lay out, you know, what it is as a program? Grass is basically like a large gardening cooperative. It's just a bunch of people who got a big plot of land and like garden it, essentially. somebody hey can we garden here they said yeah and now there's a huge garden there's it's a crew of

volunteers and they uh teach classes on gardening and there's one about using worms to fertilize which is really cool just like you know whatever all all this about gardening and then they use it as a way to talk about capitalism like you said you know why why do we have to pay for like our most base necessities you know why uh why this why that and then uh uh They also give away a lot of their produce at their location, which is kind of in like the near southern part of town. And it's more and more relevant when you have a right wing government like the Trump government in because Trump has been talking about reorganizing SNAP, reorganizing the food stamp program and taking literally, they're arguing now to take fresh fruits and vegetables out of the scenario and to just give canned fruits or vegetables. This is weird and funny because they also want to argue that all these people on food stamps just buy Red Bull and candy and Snickers bars.

They should be buying fresh fruit and produce if they really care about health. Okay, then we start buying fresh produce. Oh, no, no, let's take that away and give them fucking cans of military rationed food. So being able to sort of build up alternative ways of producing and distributing healthy food especially is so important. And an organization like Grass does that. Now, can you talk a little bit about the concept of guerrilla? gardening and how people in other

localities can kind of put that thought into action? Yes. Gorilla gardening isn't my specialty, but essentially guerrilla gardening is you just go garden somewhere without asking and you just kind of do it anyway. One that's pretty popular is I think they call them seed bombs

and essentially anywhere that there's green space that's not being used to better somebody's life. You know, the grass on the side of a parking lot or something you know you can just throw a bunch of seeds out there and then it turns into flowers or one that I've seen before is like technically the strip between the sidewalk and the edge of the street in a lot of places is a city property but if you garden there you know you're not supposed to do that but you're using it in a way that's more beneficial to the people around you than just being forced to mow it you know because the city tells you to you know they're going to find you if you don't so again i'm guerrilla gardening not my huge thing but that's that's the gist just ways to kind of get in there and think about turning monocultured areas

into areas of yeah environmental diversity yeah reclaiming the space from you know an afterthought of some capitalists to something that is beneficial to the people who actually live in the area exactly now let's move on to one of the you know crowning jewels of our organizing Now, it's not necessarily strictly NLC program, but NLC helps with, what is the organization? Feed the People. Yeah. Is it Red Plains Revolutionary Group? Yeah, it's a lot of different groups.

Yeah, we all kind of help. Yeah. It's not clear cut. It's not like one organization runs it. But can you go ahead and talk about what Feed the People is and what is happening on that front? So Feed the People is, it's essentially like a giant free produce grocery. store where you know

we're giving away fresh produce and using that similarly to grass to like talk about the weaknesses of capitalism but feed the people goes a little bit further because it also gives away

you know hygiene products like tampons paper towels diapers diapers yeah diapers fly off shells and then it's so expensive yeah they are and then but you know

it gives away books clothing, all sorts of stuff. So it's, it's again, asking that question of, you know, why does all this cost money? Why am I in this situation where I'm forced to work for somebody else to sustain myself? You know, what put is here? And Feed the People has its own list of demands that I don't have in front of me right now, but it's Feed the People and Grass and some other groups. groups around town are working on consolidating into what I like to call the food network.

You're way too happy with yourself for that. And basically it's a network of gardens, you know, small gardens across the city that are all going to put into these free groceries so that we don't have to buy anything. One of the problems with some of these things that have happened before, for instance, like the the panthers when they did it is they were reliant they didn't have you know farms they didn't have a way to replicate it they're walking cities yeah yeah and you know i mean i'm not saying that everyone in oakland should have been you know comes with the farm right but it's just like you can't you have to break away from buying things because otherwise when your money runs out it's over and you need to be able to be self-sustaining right so these

programs coming together, you know, little people, just wherever, if you're growing two tomato plants on your balcony, you know, uh, you're doing great. You bring it to the free grocery, you know, and you've contributed. You've made a major difference in someone's life because, you know, I don't know. Tomatoes are too expensive, man. I'll tell you that, those hot house ones. But it's like, if we have people across the city and somebody's growing tomatoes and somebody's growing, you know, collard greens and somebody's growing potatoes and somebody's got radishes and someone else has carrots. And then we've got a system, you know, like grass has their garden. NLC is building a new garden once it warms up around here. And it's going to be

like 12 beds, right? So we've got those 12 beds. The idea is that every month we build more and more towards not having to buy anything at all that like food wise you know we don't have a paper towel factory we don't have a diaper assembly line so you know we can't do that yet but the food part is one of the most expensive parts and that's you know it's the name of the program feed to people so the idea is that we make it as self-sustaining as possible right and for you know members of the organization that happen to have backyards instead of mowing your grass you could set off at least a big segment of your backyard to grow the produce and then bring it into this collective fund and then go around and turn it into a Feed the People program.

Now, one of the problems that people criticize programs like Feed the People is that sometimes they can be fly by night, meaning they can come in, they do it for a couple weeks or even a couple months, and then things fall apart and they just disappear. You don't want to invade other communities and have this complex that we're coming in to just replicate charity models. So a couple ways to avoid that is to work in your own communities. And especially at NLC, the areas that they do feed the people programs, a lot of members of NLC come from those neighborhoods. And they're poor working class neighborhoods, neighborhoods that are either at risk of being gentrified or have a lot at large immigrant communities. But the NLC members are of that community.

And that helps with legitimacy. And that also helps with not falling out of the community. You literally can't. You're in it and of it. And so if at all possible, do it in your own community, especially communities that need help. And then the second thing that NLC and Feed the People are doing with this program is that they're trying to get away from just distributing the goods to getting the community members involved in the production of those goods. Can you talk a little bit about how they're moving forward on that front? Yeah. So like you said, I mean, one of the main pitfalls is that you come in and, you know, you're, you know,

you're a bunch of people from somewhere else in town that nobody knows and then you just you disappear so feed the people part of this this uh food network right is getting the people who go to feed the people and who are you know receiving the goods right to become active contributors and to build links between everybody that's in there uh one of the things that the main feed the people organizer likes to say all the time is solidarity not charity right we're working together to get the things that we all deserve right you know uh to each you know from you know what i'm saying so like everybody always gets that wrong when they try to say it to each according to their from who but right so you know it's not we started and people live in this area like it is of

the community but you know when you first start you're not going to be it's not going to be the whole neighborhood right you know you got to take a couple of people who are willing to like Take the extra mile, right? But the idea is that you get the whole community around doing this on their own. And then, you know, you don't need somebody else to come in and do whatever because the community is building its own power by not having to rely on somebody else to bring food in, you know? Say there's like, I mean, this is a hypothetical, but say there's some kind of, you know, weird food shortage and the grocery stores are all empty. Well, you know, lucky for us in a way, because we've been putting. landing this citywide food network for you know this whole time you know we're growing our

own way to handle our own shit you know and not be reliant on uh corporate systems of distribution yeah or or you know or the government i mean we we help people find like the best ways to use snap and i mean snap is awesome while it's still around you know but like uh it's not it's not all about that you know it's it's trying to build power and building the connections between the community to take care of itself and not just you know a lot of a lot of problems in today's world are because we're just completely isolated from each other and we don't have any relationship with the people that live next to us you know like i i remember one time a while ago i lived in a in a duplex and i never knew any of my neighbors around me

lived i probably lived next to like 200 people i didn't know any of them you know there were apartment buildings on any side of me but doing something like this feed the people is you know you're connecting with the people around you and those are essential steps for all sorts of uh issues like you know police issues and just all sorts of anything you know you need to have that face-to-face bonding with people that live next to you yep yeah the overcoming of alienation by getting a community to produce its own goods is really interesting. And when we're talking about building alternative forms of power inside the belly of the beast, what is more crucial, what is more fundamental than controlling your own food production and distribution? That is an

absolutely essential mode of building that power. And without that, without access to clean food and clean water, other forms of alternative powers can crumble when that card is taken out of the deck. So building from the bottom up from the most basic of material human needs. It opens up a whole range of other organizing. And then when you're in the community and you're talking to these people, people, I think I've heard you say this at meetings before, people can come forward and say, hey, I'm having an issue with my landlord. Or, hey, this boss is engaging in wage theft. When you start talking to people, issues come up. And then those issues now present new opportunities for the organization to go and grow in different

directions. Exactly. And also planning like a simple Mayday event. When you're in the community, you can say, hey, you know, we're always here, we're always talking, we're having this Mayday event. And that's more fun. People can just come and relax, hang out, also get to know each other, also build those community bonds. So the Feed the People program is so essential and so foundational and so beautiful, relatively easy to start. Just try to just try to be hyper aware of some of the pitfalls and avoid them at all costs because you don't want to, you don't want to fall into sort of failures that have been replicated over and over again. Yeah. And one that I would warn people about is, you know, this is a pretty expensive program. You can't, it's not a, it's not something,

you need a lot of people to help with this kind of thing. It's, it's, it's a lot of work. So if you're, if you're, if you're one of those really small groups of people, three or four of you, you know, find some help before you dive into this big shit. And one of the first things you can start doing is some of the more foundational grass work. Some of the, some of the growing of the food, getting good at doing that. You know, maybe that's a first step, and then you can eventually lead into a Feed the People program, just some sorts of things to think about. Now, I did mention tenant organizing, and I know this has a special place in your heart, because you live in a community that's not only has a lot of sort of tenant issues,

shitty landlords, slumlords, but also an area of town that is targeted for gentrification, which comes into play with landlords and tenant organizing. So can you talk about some of the steps that NLC is taking to address those concerns and what a tenant organizing movement can look like in other cities? Yeah, that's a good question. Let me kind of, I'm going to come into this kind of roundabout. Okay. Okay.

I live under a landlord that is fairly notorious in Omaha for being an absentee landlord. And sometimes that's not a big problem, you know. If you're a handyman or something, you can fix your own shit. But sometimes it is a big problem. Like, some of my neighbors have been using their oven to heat their apartment in the middle of winter in Nebraska, which if you've ever been here, is not fun. This landlord is known throughout the city by, you know, we're talking to just various different groups, you know, like refugee groups. There's one, there's a group called Omaha together, one community that does. a lot of stuff for immigrants and things like that, right?

They all know him. Everybody knows this guy. And the World Herald did a puff piece on him not too long ago. Fucking World Herald. Yeah, I know it. But there's a problem where a lot of people don't realize two things. They don't realize that they have the power to get what they want done, right, if they organize together with the other tenants.

and they don't realize that they have the right to do that they don't realize that they even are like legally protected in doing some of this stuff right for my landlord I know that if we had everybody together working to demand something

you know he's I haven't even seen this guy in years plus the last time the last time I saw a repair guy was when I withheld rent for a month because water was leaking straight on through the center through my light fixture in my bedroom straight onto my bed the only carpeted room in the apartment right and i said i'm not paying rent you know until you fix this fucking roof right and it was just like this and he caved i bet right

he was like oh shit you know and they redid the entire roof and that was just me wow that was just me. Now you get, you know, a whole building together. And you say, you know, we want this, we want this, we want this. And we're going to, we're not paying rent until you do it. Or, you know, we're going to go tell everyone in your mama that, you know, you're just being a shitty landlord. And he's, he's in an interesting position because he works for a religious organization in town. And he likes to consider himself as, you know, hero in a way. But here he is. leaving people in frankly dangerous conditions and just refusing to fix stuff all the time so and this happens to you know tenants across you know tenants everywhere yeah all over the world everywhere

and without organizing the tenants to resist those problems they'll just continue to do it and you mentioned gentrification as gentrification comes in you know like I said earlier my neighborhood is kind of in the middle of this they're building hotels we don't need and all sorts of shit and I know that sooner or later my rent is going to go up because of some hotels across the street that I wish I didn't build

right that nobody fucking needs we don't need a hotel what's the hotel for they're building two caddy corner like this point we don't need this anyway so without organizing these people it's just not going to happen right

and we think that landlords just shouldn't exist that's that's probably if you're going to cut anything out of this landlords should not exist is the main idea we don't need them if we got rid of the landlord right we could easily afford to fix all this shit ourselves we don't need them what's he doing he's we're paying we're paying rent to somebody who literally does nothing like they barely even mow the lawn you know what what are we receiving from this guy the only reason that we have to pay him is because

he bought the building and now he hasn't you know he probably hasn't thought about this building in years you know he hasn't given a shit about it and how long so it's like what what is the why are they even there and that's the core of the question that we want to get to when we organize uh tenants you know you have to fight back against unjust evictions you have to fight against these fucking garbage rent hikes that are happening in different parts of the city from you know different landlords but it's all over you know we all know we all know that landlords are ridiculous. We all know that we don't really need landlords because they don't do that much for a lot of us. Yeah, I want to drill down on that real quick because I know a lot of

people probably already know this argument, but it's worth just reframing for people who might be like, okay, landlords are bad. I've heard that, but what does that really mean? Well, if you think about it, landlords are kind of analogous to capitalists, and that they, just by virtue of having money and property, can then indefinitely profit off of that property. So if you just buy a building, even when the prices are very low, it's got, you know, prices increase over time. You can continually extract money from people who are poor and don't have any other options

and put it in your pocket in the form of profit. And you can live a life of luxury. You can pay off all your bills just from the hard labor of other people going to work every day and paying rent, which for most of us, including myself, rent is the primary chunk of money that you have to pay out every month.

It is the most important and it's the biggest chunk. and you're going to work for most of your day at work to make sure that you pay rent and really what you're doing when you have a landlord is you're giving a significant chunk of that money that you're working on to him for no other reason that he happened to own the property

a lot of these fucking people are born rich they have every advantage in life so they can just spend money on buying up property and then profit off that property indefinitely it is the exact same relationship that a capitalist has to a worker the landlord has to a tenant but a capitalist can more easily say you're fired and find somebody else to work your job,

it's not as easy to get an entire family to move the fuck out of a building, especially when that family has neighbors and friends all over that building, and they're willing to stand up and say, fuck you, no, you know? And you said earlier, we could pay for these things ourselves.

They, landlords, just like capitalist with profit, they increase the wage, right? So they need to be taking in more money than they're spending and maintaining that building. So that chunk of money, instead of going to that landlord, could go into something like a collective ten, pot that we can all tap into when we need collective maintenance done on the building.

So getting into the organizing, helping people not only fight their very real material fights, but use that as a point of injection to talk about the absurdity of landlordism in the first place is a crucial sort of left-wing movement and thing that we should always be thinking about. Yeah, I kind of got into some, like, abstract stuff. So I want to give something a little more concrete. So our plan is essentially this, right? We know the landlords that we want to go after.

They're infamous in town. So we're flying around their buildings. We're trying to talk to the people who live there and get them to tell us, you know, what are the major problems with this building? You know, we're here to help you fix it. Like, I live right over there, you know, that kind of stuff. And we're going to turn it over time into a bigger and bigger organization that will eventually, after we've run through this Solidarity Network in a few different places,

hopefully the idea is that all of these places stay organized, right? And then once they're all organized, at some point in the future, they turn into a tenancy union, right? And then once you have a tenant's union, you can do, you know, everything, right? If somebody moves into the area,

you all just, you know, oh, I'm not paying this month, you know? I don't want to. The tenancy union's on strike. There's no rent. you know like it's not happening and we can just cripple these landlords like this and they're you know the way it should be because why are they there for in the first place so you know you you have to find the problem you go out and you dig hard as hell and you make a lot of connections with people you you win your fight don't pick on fights that you're

going to lose because it's one it's demoralizing two it just it sucks it takes a lot of time and energy yeah you know as much as i'd like to there's a another one in town that is something like 900 property, something crazy like that. As much as I'd like to fight that guy, we just can't do it right now. You have to build on the little stuff first. And one of the things, an easy way to get into this sort of stuff is fliring saying, if you and a few comrades are wanting to get together and do something like this, fliring at bus stops or at buildings and saying, hey, if you have a problem with a landlord,

if they're refusing to do such and such work on your house or whatever, call us and we can help. And then one of the things you were alluding to earlier is embarrassing. these people. You don't need to get into legal battles. You don't need to go break anybody's knees. You go in and you can humiliate people because a lot of these people are rich. They're quote-unquote high society. They have reputations to maintain. And if you go outside of their house and you start shaming them to their neighbors, I've heard of people doing where they go to a shitty landlord's neighborhood and they go to every house. And you can do a bunch of things at that point. You can be like, hey, just so you know your neighbor owns a bunch of properties and he's

doing this and this. Or there's something that really unique have. I think it was Seattle's Solidarity Network where they with his shitty landlord they went to his nice gated community and then went to all of his neighbors and they pretended or they asked to collect money for him and his family because they said this landlord can't afford to do basic maintenance on these properties he owns he's really struggling um can we have some money to go help and give to his family that fucking humiliated him and he did the shit he needed to do so you can get really really creative you don't need to break any laws it does not need to be dangerous high stake situations but you can do direct action in ways that really bring about concrete

material benefits to people. Yeah. And if you are interested in doing that, you should look up the Seattle Solidarity Network handbook. It's like 30 pages. It'll tell you all sorts of shit, really, really valuable. And that's what you guys have really learned from and helped you guys up. Yeah, that helps a lot.

I mean, another one that we've been looking at is the Philly Tenants Union. They've been doing a lot of good work over there. They just got something called just cause past, which is you need to have like a reason to evict somebody. It can't just be, you know, oh, we're going to raise the rent 100% and then, you know, fuck them, you're out. That's a form of eviction. Right. Yeah, yeah.

A form of unfair eviction. Right. So, and that's what this just cause, uh, shit is going towards. You know, they had to build, they had to win other shit before they could get everybody together to go and get this kind of shit done, you know, so you have to build power slowly. Yeah, like the common thread through all this is collective power, you know, by, by, if we're just individuals, you know, in most cases, we're impotent. We can't do shit about anything.

When we come together, we can really make things happen. And when people start winning fights, when people start joining these collective movements and winning, they get inspired, they get radicalized, they get emboldened, and you can get bigger fights. Now, something that it runs through all of this is fundraising. And fundraising can be another area of being really creative with how you bring in funds.

I know right here in Omaha, there's lots of connections with the DIY music scene, and we use music venues and bands that are sympathetic to our cause as ways of bringing in revenue. What are some ways including that that you can elaborate on that organizations, small organizations can bring in fundraising

to help get some of these programs off the ground? Yeah, I mean, if you know musicians, concerts are a really good way to go. But we've done a bunch of stuff. We used to do, and we still do, one called Comrade Karaoke, where, you know, you just, yeah, it's awesome. We rented a spot out

and had a, like, a shitty little PA and charge people five bucks at the door and we all just sang whatever songs. We all brought our own beer and snacks. Yep, it was a great time. Another one that feed the people did recently was a chili cookoff, which was awesome. We headed at a community center and, you know,

they raised like $300. People just brought chili. I mean, what kind of, you make, it's crazy. So you get a bunch of people to bring chili to a place. Everybody eats the chili. And then you made money to buy food for other people. It's just crazy. It's awesome.

Like, it's a great way to spend a day. Yeah. Another one that we're doing it, we've borrowed from somebody. This hasn't happened yet, but we're planning one called promunism. It's like, you know. The puns speaks for yourself. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I don't know how much I need to tell you.

But, yeah, that's going to be great. We're going to have spike punch, but I believe it. Yeah. And another thing, like, here at NLC, or here at Reve Left Radio, we take a portion of our Patreon donations, which all of our content is free. You can donate if you want to, but all of our stuff is free

on the same principles that the newspaper is free. But we take money from Revolutionary Left Radio donations and we funnel it back into NLC. So it's really been an amazing way to kind of donate to these organizations. So if you are donating to Rev. Left Radio already, you are in an indirect way helping these programs and sustaining them

and we're pumping more and more money every time we get more and more donations. So it's really a wonderful feedback mechanism that we've developed here. And it's replicable, maybe not the exact podcast model is not replicable, but all these other things are replicable. And leftists are always mired in music scenes. So there's always something there that you can do. Before we end on this, I do want to touch on anti-fascist organizing, because anytime you're in any sort of left-wing organization, part of that is going to have to be fighting the far right in any way you can.

It's not always dressing in all black and getting in fist fights with Nazis. But there's lots of other things that you can do as local organizations. to identify and out fascists in your area? Can you talk about some of those tactics and some of the things people can do if they, let's say they identified a local Nazi? What are some things that they can do to bring that to the community's awareness?

Well, probably the easiest way is to do something like a community warning type flyer and you go put it all over wherever you know this Nazi dude is, right? We're lucky at NLC because we have a fairly decent social media following in Nebraska. So when we post about a Nazi going to, what specifically

happened was there's a Nazi organizer who's not very good at it, but he's trying his darnest, the poor thing. And he is at the biggest college in the state. So us and some students from down there and, you know, just community members and everybody,

no one wants a Nazi in their town. We were all pumping out together these warnings about his name's Dan Cleve we were warning everybody about this and social media is a great way to do it but if you don't have access to that or if you're nervous about

somehow getting traced or something you know just putting going and taping up a flyer is effective you know if put it in a restaurant put it on a light pole put it at you know if he's on the college campus put it on college campus

you know there there are a lot of ways that you can tell people that are easy and won't cause you a lot of trouble right absolutely and you know you can always just vocally support movements um that also does help like we can't underestimate regular people talking to their families and friends and saying hey i i i support anti-fascists i support antifa look what these nazis are clarifying what fascism is to to your friends and family is a good start um when you see nazi stickers um around town peeling them off, papering over them. You know, these little sort of optic battles, they seem very minor and small, but they're not. They are important parts of a much broader united front against fascism because nobody likes

fascists except fascists, you know, everybody hates them. Liberal, centrists, even center-right moderates, my dad is like a Fox News guy and he voted for Trump, but he fucking hates Nazis. He's like, they're fucking trash. Most people feel that way. They really do. You just got to make it very clear to them, and you've got to help them see Antifa and anti-fascist organizing as just being decent human beings. It's not some secret shadowy

organization of radicals. It's just regular people saying this is fucking disgusting and we won't have it. You know, we have Jewish friends. We have LGBTQ friends. We have people of color that are friends, that are family members, you know, and we're not going to stand for it. And most people are open to that. So never be shy about that. You know, with the rise of Nazism in the U.S., you also see this amazing rise of people that say, fuck you, you know, and we got to ride that, we got to widen that and make it as clear as possible that these fuckers can't peacefully coexist with us because they don't want to peacefully coexist with anybody, you know. So those are just some ideas.

Again, we're not pretending to be experts. We're not pretending to be grizzled veterans working 30 years and organizing. We just stumbled with no infrastructure here in Omaha. We've built up all of this. And we did it just through hard work. We did it through trial and error. And we're growing and growing and growing. More people as the center of American politics falls out and becomes delegitimized.

people are looking for alternatives. People are looking for things that actually affect their real lives. People are looking for visions that can better this world because people are sick of this. And if we don't speak to them, the far right will.

If we don't organize in their interest, the far right might. They're not as good organizers as us on the left. But, you know, we can't leave it to chance. We have to be in these communities. We have to be doing this work. And you'll learn a lot just by trying.

You're going to fail. You're going to hit hiccups. You're going to have infighting. Do you want to, before we end, do you want to talk a little bit about some of the, clashes that leftists can come up when it comes to liberals and liberal organizations because we've dealt with that a lot yeah i mean it's important to talk about failure because you will

fail i mean failing is a lot there's been a lot of failing going on you know throughout the years of the american left right so it's not it's not a surprise you know you're going to fail at something or other and the whole point is to take that failure and then figure out what you did wrong and do it right the next time right uh with regards to liberals you know they are just terrible a lot of the time because you know you run into problems for instance i want to i'll talk a little bit more about uh dan cleave here we were helping a group that uh organized like a rally on the campus where he goes and we got a lot of shit from a lot of people and some of it was you know okay we could have done better on that which is fair you know and some of it was just that kind of

shit where it's like oh you know you're giving him a platform and people who wanted to be in the limelight of it you know they wanted this they wanted this this Nazi outing to be about them somehow that's that's liberalism i don't know what is more liberal than that like taking a pro taking a fucking nazi and like making it about you somehow but like you know they're they're gonna they're gonna tell you you're doing shit wrong all the time they're gonna assume stuff that isn't true and then blame you for stuff that you didn't do and you know run with it forever uh some some things you know are are fair you know you have to address uh like white supremacy you have to address you know a lot it's just a truth that a lot of leftists

are white people and that's like especially in nebraska it's like 91 percent white or something like graphics in the whole yeah it's just that's just how it is you know so we have to work extra hard to consider these these other positions but there are people out there who are going to be gunning for you no matter what you do and you need to know that you need to understand that the The position that you hold as a leftist is not the position of, you know, helping liberals. So it hurts sometimes. It comes as a surprise because we think, you know, oh, you know, the liberals are closest to us. They'll be on our team, but that's not how it works.

They recognize when somebody is going off script, you know, and they will come at you. So you're in a, you're fighting not just the right, but you're also fighting the center because you are going further. than a lot of people are aware of being even an option. So they will find things to attack you on that are just complete garbage. And you have to be strong enough to keep going anyway. Even in the moment, it seems like just completely ridiculous. You have to stick to your guns a lot of the time. Yeah, when we're talking about bourgeois individualism,

liberalism just because it's much bigger than leftism, has more organizations. It has more individual. who are interested in careerism. A lot of liberal organizations have people in them that they make this sort of their thing, their career as an individual. It's not a collective effort for them.

It's like, where can I speak? You know, where can I get my two cents in? What can I do? And when you start organizing as a leftist, you're inevitably going to step on some of those liberal toes. And the moments you do, you're going to have a whole range of backlash, ranging from, you know, constructive criticism

to just outright bullshit that you just gives you a headache. It mires down. You're organizing. it makes you focus your time and energy on these petty motherfuckers instead of doing the real work that needs to be done. So it's hard. But that's also not to say

that all liberals are always going to be your enemy. We have had some success picking off liberals that we've gone to sort of rallies that are spearheaded by liberals and we've made a concerted effort to take those over in a sort of subtle way. Like we're not going in there

be like, get the fuck out, this is our shit. But we go in there and we present our options and we say, hey, we don't actually agree with that. You know, we think this. And you'll start picking up people like that and you'll find certain subsets of liberals that are willing to work with you, even if they stay liberal. Around the anti-fascist organizing, especially, we need all hands on deck. We need as many people organizing on as many different levels as you can. So if we can, and this is

something we've done at NLC is, go to specifically liberal organizations and talk about what fascism is, help define it, talk about what anti-fascism is, make these distinctions extremely clear for these people. And you'll see more times than not, liberals are not willing to dress in black and march down the street, but they're willing to pitch in in whatever way they seem, they deem fit for their liberal sort of orientation. And that's good. We need all hands on deck. So it's not all bad, but you're going to bump up against liberals eventually. Yeah, I don't, I don't want to, you know, I don't want to just like shit on millions of people here. That's not what I'm trying to do. I'm just saying, you know, you will run into problems and you need to be prepared.

So be prepared. To stand up for yourself. Exactly. All right, so now we're going to move on to some questions. I tweeted out that we're doing this episode, and a lot of people got some really good questions at us. Now, some of the questions asked, first of all, we're not going to be able to address them all. Secondly, some of the questions asked, we already answered just in the process of going about talking about fundraising and talking about other aspects of bumping up against liberals and stuff like that. So we're just going to kind of rapid fire some of these questions. I'm just going to scroll through the Twitter feed. I'm going to read it, and then me and you can just go back and forth and answer as best we can. The first one is, what are some tips on keeping a motion?

emotionally healthy romantic partnerships while organizing. Now, this is specifically something I've had to deal with. Obviously, I have a fiancé, I have two children, and when I really started getting heavy into organizing, there was a lot of problems. A lot of my time that would have been spent at home was all of a sudden spent at meetings and spent doing podcasts and spent hitting the streets.

There's even some situations where I was arrested, and my family had to come and help bail me out or give me right home. And so those things can really weigh down on, partnerships and relationships. The best thing you can do is try to be as communicative and as healthy a way as possible. Say, hey, I think if your partner says, I think you're spending a little too much time doing this, you should say, how can we figure out a way to parse out our time better? You know, maybe I'll only go to two meetings a month instead of five. Maybe I won't go to every single event that are calling me to go to. Try to just keep open communication. And if you

have a partner and you have good communication, you can overcome a lot of these things. And if you're honest about, hey, this is taking up more of my time. Before I was organizing, I didn't have to deal with all this stuff. You should be honest about that. Self-critique a little bit. I mean, you know, your first primary responsibility is your family. If you care about your family, you got to take care of them. What would you say? Well, for me, I'm pretty lucky because my girlfriend's also a socialist and she just thinks it's awesome. You know, I'm lucky that she loves me and lets me do whatever I want a lot of the time. That's not as much of a problem for me. Yeah, and luckily, you know, my fiance is also politically active at times, like go to protest and stuff together, but especially with

children, it becomes, you know, if I'm out at a meeting or I'm out at an action, she's with the kids, and now that is an extra burden on her. So that does matter, and we should just be as conscientious about that as possible because we love our partners and we don't want a bunch of broken people organize it um how do i find other radical people in my small city especially because not everyone is active on social media do you have thoughts yeah this one is uh this one is pretty tough i mean depending on where you're at in life you know it can be really hard uh if you're lucky enough or unlucky depending how you look at it i guess if you're in school somehow uh school is a great way to meet a lot of people the internet is really important these days but to get around that

is not the hardest thing in the world. I think you'd be surprised how many people out there are leftists, but our problem is that we're all hidden away because we don't know where each other are. You know, it's something that happens to me a lot. Before the election, I had no idea that there was like, I thought it was me and my one friend. And we were the only, you know, he was a communist

and I was a socialist and that was it. And everyone, you know, it was over, you know. But nope, I was wrong. Meanwhile, me and you worked at the same place. Yeah. And we didn't even know that we... That's so strange. Yeah, it's crazy.

Yeah, I fucking looked at this guy. I was like, he's just over there scrolling Facebook. Meanwhile, I'm angrily typing out communist propaganda. If you could only see this side of the screen. But yeah, meeting people is hard. I mean, one of the... Just in a lot of ways, I mean, even just meeting people to be friends with is hard. And a lot of times without, like, social media.

But, you know, try and go to anything that you... you think there might be a communist at, you know, if you're at college, try the sociology clubs. That's a really good one. Posting flyers, we talked about study groups in the beginning. This is a really good way to meet people in the first place, is you just set up like, you know, we're going to read this or whatever. And then you all have something to talk about already. And you all have, like, you know, an excuse if it really sucks and everyone else sucks.

You know, it's a very easy way to get involved with this is to say, you know, let's all meet here and talk about Marx. you're going to find the people who want to talk about marks. Exactly. Because if you open the room to people to talk about marks, someone will come and blather on about marks. It'll happen. So don't try that, you know. Yeah.

And I would also add, once you start getting connections, you get connections with connection. So when I first started organizing, I felt much the same way you did. I didn't know anybody. I thought like I'm the only person in Omaha that feels this way. But a few people through mutual friends like, hey, I met you at a protest once, why don't you come meet up?

I met up all of a sudden there's three other people there. Now, they all have friends and they know one or two people. I know some people at our organization met at a party. They were just talking about communist bullshit, and two other people overheard them and walked over and said, hey, we're communist too. And all of a sudden we have a goddamn organization out of it. So you'll be surprised at how quickly social relations multiply

just by reaching out and getting involved, even at small numbers. It really does, you know, connections open up. So, yeah, good luck with that. I hope you can find it. if your city is anything like Omaha, I'm confident you can. Another question. What are the most successful ways

of reaching out to the unconverted in your town, those who are not already radical leftist? I would just say you've got to meet people where they are. You got to, at work is a huge place. At work, you're going to have coworkers

that are in the same material position as you, your coworkers, more times earning the same wage as you're earning, going through the same bullshit you're going through. And when the boss is shitty or you're overworked or you don't get that time off

or your coworker doesn't get it, that's an opportunity to just reframe that experience for them. We're taught to take those experiences as individual failures or we're taught to feel powerless in the face of those forces. So the first time that somebody walks up to you

and says, hey, that's kind of fucked up that you've worked here for so long, this is your family's vacation and you can't go because the boss needs you to work. Isn't that bullshit? That opens up a conversation. You're meeting somebody where they are

and you're reframing the situation for them. It's not always going to be successful. But you can't go in talking about, I always say, you can't go in talking about dialectical materialism on the first conversation. Ease your way in. Be socially conscious of who you're talking to and try your best to meet them where they are. Yeah. Talking to people really is the best way.

You know, it's not easy all the time, but it's the only way that you're going to get people who are going to stick around is you have to speak to their life and you have to, you know, be convincing. And the only ways, you know, you're not going to do that through a meme necessarily. You can get a lot of friends through memes, but talking to somebody face-to-face is the best way. Yeah. Next question. How does one deal with skepticism towards these forms of organizing, as in creating and thinking

it as more than just, quote, unquote, another group in avoiding sectarianism? It's very powerful feeling amongst my friends and peers and difficult to deal with. Well, here in Omaha, with reference to sectarian groups and just another group popping off, I don't know, it might be different in bigger cities, but here, because of them, of the size and scale that we have to operate on, we don't have the luxury of breaking off into a bunch of little tendency groups. So we work, we have Maoists, we have Leninists, we have anarchists, we have left comms, we have people that are sympathetic to Trotskyism. Why are you laughing? There's a lot of words to say Trotskyists, Brett.

People who are sympathetic to. But so here it hasn't been a problem. And when you're actually out and out organizing and doing materially meaningful, things, a lot of those differences don't come into play. Now, at meetings, we sometimes do go back and forth in a comradly way. I disagree with this, or when it comes to how you want to organize your group, there might be some differences between your local Leninist and your local anarchist. And sometimes those differences are irreconcilable. And we've seen in other cities that are comparable to our size that we've talked to and engaged with, they have bigger sectarian problems than we do. But speaking from Omaha, if you're really doing stuff consistently, that has

not been as big of a issue for us as it has for others. Yeah, I'm not sure if it's a unique position, but I doubt it. We're in a city where there was essentially no leftist organizing at all. You know, we don't have unions that are out making a big fuss. You know, we don't have like, you know, nobody. Nobody. We don't have anybody. You know, our DSA chapters are brand new. you know in some places on the coasts you've had stuff that's been around for i heard dsa was like 90 years old or something you know like that's probably not true no i said out loud but like who knows but we don't you know we don't have we never had workers world party we never had the working families shit you know we don't have the fight for 15 we don't have you not here

we don't have any of that nothing so we're just we're making shit up as we go and the only way that we're going to be effective while we do that is if we put aside a lot of the shit from the old sectarian arguments and we focus on the things that we want to do now because if you put aside a lot of that sectarian shit you're going to find that your goals are are rather similar and it's you know whether you do like the Maoist way of organizing or it's all like mass orgs split off from the center or whether you just like only build the one you know however you do it isn't going to be that important in the beginning, you know. You need to get your foot in the door first.

Right. And a big thing with people that haven't organized yet and just have really been developed politically by online activity, the internet is really skewed. It shows you a very skewed version of, it exaggerates sectarianism. Just the medium of the internet, when you can hide behind a profile and have no immediate social consequences, it's not just leftists. It's all interactions online. Go to any comment thread of your local newspaper.

papers, Facebook page, and it's horrible people saying horrible shit. And so when you're in left-wing groups, it's not any different. You're going to have, like, exaggerated hatred, like, I'm a Leninist, fuck Maoist. I'm a Maoist, fuck Troskiist. And it's like, okay, if that's all your experience of the left is, it's going to seem like this is fucking impossible to get us to work together. But it actually on the ground, when you're getting into actual organizing, a lot of those problems fall away.

And when you're face-to-face with somebody, you're not going to tell them, hey, fuck you, you know, because there's social consequences for that. And so that solves a lot of problems, just being face to face with people. So try to get into face-to-face situations as quickly and as early in you're organizing as you possibly can, and it'll help build that foundation. And are you in good faith? Sure. When you, well, it's important to say because, you know, you have to think about, when

you're going into this discussion, you have to think, do I want to lead to the right, you know, do I want to lead to the best answer for everyone or do I just want to be right? So you have to engage in good faith. And if one of your comrades or fellow organizers has a bad take, assume they're, assume the best. Don't assume the worst. It's easy to just be like, this person is being shitty and they're always going to be shitty. Fuck them. But no, if you know them, they're not a terrible person.

They just need a little correction here or there. I know damn well I've needed it. I've had mentors before I got into organizing, especially where I had bad takes. I said problematic shit and I was, my heart was in the right place, but I was fucking wrong. and instead of just straight attacking and shitting on me I've had some older comrades that helped me along hey don't say it like this this word I know you think you're being progressive

but it actually means this and this and has these connotations don't say it and that helped me evolve so try to be that for other people try to help them develop don't just go for the throat every time somebody says something a little wrong what is the best way

to get a place to meet this is a problem this is a problem yeah places to meet for us actually have been fairly hard. We had some trouble early on with, like, the police were asking librarians to spy on us and all sorts of weird shit. You know, they wanted to know when we were there.

So we didn't go there for a long time. Your library for a lot of people, though, is a good option. I know a lot of groups meet at the library because it's free. You know, you don't really need anything special to book it most of the time. You just, you know, you go in and there's plenty of seating and whatever. So that's nice. But if you have to, we started in a house, you know. Well, when we started, it was on a park bench.

You know, I mean, we all just stood around for like an hour. You know, we didn't have anything. In the dark, we didn't have flashlights. Yeah. And, yeah, you know, meeting in a house is not bad. You need somebody who has enough space to meet there, but meeting in a house is great. Eventually, you do have to find places, you know, either music venues or like community centers or something like that. but just asking we'll get you a long way when it comes to those places.

They're usually pretty friendly to most people. Yeah, absolutely. When you do organize, you are going to bump up not only against liberals and not only against the far right but against cops. I know when we try to do our May Day rally and really just unacceptable amount of police showed up. They flooded it. They had a police van.

They had like 12 squad cars. And we walked over to, we had our kids there. We had dogs there, you know. We walked over to him like, what are you doing? And they were like, well, we just want to make sure those people and all black clothes don't show us. up. I was like, I don't know what you're talking about. We're trying to just have a good family event and celebrate working class history. I know some pigs were like looking into my

truck, you know, because we were across the park. So those are problems. And when you meet in public places, those problems are going to manifest over time. So finding a home is awesome. Finding a location that's sympathetic to your cause, maybe a bookstore, maybe a local bar, maybe a brewery that has left-leaning views. And they say, yeah, you can meet here every Tuesday or something. Those are ways to go about it. And I know a long-term goal of ours is to build a community center, not build it, personally build it, but rent one out or buy one so we can have a tangible physical space in the community where we can reliably meet and operate our programs out of. So a long-term goal of organizing when you get a lot of people and you get your funding

right, you know, looking to, starting to create physical spaces in the community where leftists can reliably meet up should be the ultimate goal of organizing in that sense. So that's something to think about long-term why you're dealing with the short-term problems. So I think that's going to be it for today. Thank you everyone who asked questions. We really appreciate it. Hope we answered them relatively well. For the people that asked questions we didn't answer, we passed those up because we thought that we more or less touched on them in the bulk of the interview. So if you have any other questions after listening to this episode, feel free to tweet at us. We'll try to answer them the best we can. You can even email me at brett, B-R-E-T-T-R-E-Leforadio at Protonmail.com.

and if you want to have a more extended discussion and you want some advice, we're always willing to help you out there. You can reach Nebraska Left Coalition on Facebook, and if you message us there, somebody will get back to you. So we'll do the best to help you. And if you're a veteran organizer and you have some other ideas, some other tips, some other advice, you want to elaborate on something we said,

or hell, you want to correct something we said, please feel free to go about those same vehicles to reach us and correct us, and we will absorb that and get better organizers ourselves. always don't have an ego you know that's a big thing whether you're dealing with individuals dealing with other organizations try to keep your ego to a minimum keep humble and and think about the long-term goal which is to make a better world for all people it's not about you and your feelings all the time you know it's about building a better world so try to keep your individual ego in check when you're going about this or you're going to have a much much harder

time having said that do you have any last words before we go if you live in nebraska or eastern Iowa, please reach out to us. We want to help you. If you are one of the people listening to this asking the question of what can I do in my community, please get in touch with us. We will help you do shit out there. We will find out something for you. We're happy to drive across the state to help somebody in the middle of nowhere. If you're listening to this and you're one of a town of 50 or something, you know, we'll chat with you. We want to know you. We want to find a way our reach, the power of the working class. And to do that, you have to start small in a lot of areas. You know, it can all just be in the cities, midsize or small or whatever. It can all be

cities. You've got to get rural people. So if you're, you know, if you live out in Karnie or you're in like alliance or Grand Island, wherever, wherever, it doesn't matter. Get in touch with us. We would love to talk to you and meet with you. Please, please, please. I know that you're out there listening to Brett's podcast. I know at least some of you live in Nebraska. So please get in touch with us. It would be our honor to speak with you. You know, a lot of times it feels like you're reaching out in the dark. If somebody else has been there before, then you've got to listen to them.

Absolutely. Well, thank you, Mark, for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. I'll see you at the next meeting, and we'll drink after this. Cheers. Everybody else, solidarity, and good luck with your struggles and your localities. And talk to you guys soon. She'll speak the same for the likes of you

who stare with greeny eyes clutch with grasping hands and hold nothing corrosive corrosive corrosive What keeps you poor up? bad as more

Lightning Nets Red woman in a river Ray Woman in a river Fray Riot waste a lip of Ray Right

Weiss a liver Right Women in a Mipper Right Please a river Freight Right Please the Lipper

Freight Right please the Lever Oh Aure Oh Oh Oh Oh

Who knew the risks, sought no reward from the likes of us hold on for dear life, tenacious. Red, women in the river, right, woman in a river, a friend, right? Please remember. Right, please remember right? Women in a bridge are right, woman in a brick right? Woman in a criminal, right? Please remember.

Right, please remember.