Rev Left Radio - Redneck Revolt and the John Brown Gun Club

Episode Date: December 6, 2018

Redneck Revolt was founded in 2016 as an anti-racist, anti-fascist community defense formation.  Mathias and Pooja from Redneck Revolt / John Brown Gun Club join Breht and Dr. Bones (from The Conjure House, Gods and Radicals, and The Guillotine) to discuss counter-recruitment, leftist gun culture, building feminism into the fabric of an organization, arming and training marginalized people, and much more!  Find, learn more about, and support Redneck Revolt here: https://www.redneckrevolt.org In-Show Music includes: "Us" by Ruby Ibarra featuring: Rocky Rivera, Klassy, and Faith Santilla https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUfNeCozJBw "Save the Day" by Atmosphere Find and support them here: https://rhymesayers.com/artists/atmosphere Outro Song: "On Ballots and Barricades" by Ramshackle Glory. Find and support them here: https://ramshackleglory.bandcamp.com ------------- NEW LOGO from BARB, a communist graphic design collective! You can find them on twitter or insta @Barbaradical. Please reach out to them if you are in need of any graphic design work for your leftist projects!  Intro music by Captain Planet. You can find and support his wonderful music here:  https://djcaptainplanet.bandcamp.com Make a one time donation to our PayPal at: PayPal.me/RevLeft Please Rate and Review our show on iTunes or whatever podcast app you use. This dramatically helps increase our reach. Support the Show and get access to bonus content on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center. Join the SRA here: https://www.socialistra.org/ Our official spin-off podcasts are Black Banner Magic and Hammer & Camera. Find them on twitter, Patreon, Libsyn, and anywhere else where quality podcasts are hosted!  

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. Today we have an unlocked episode. So this was an episode we technically recorded for our guillotine Patreon members, but we decided to release it publicly on both guillotine and Rev Left Radio because it's just a cool interview. And again, it's with Redneck Revolt and the John Brown Gun Club. So we talk a lot about counter recruitment, about gun culture on the left, basically stuff that we didn't get to with our SRA interview, we got to here. Because it's guillotine, it's me and my co-host for that show, Bones,

doing a double interview with two members from Redneck Revolt slash John Brown Gun Club. But it's a really good episode. It's not very long. We really appreciate the comrades from Redneck Revolt and John Brown Gun Club coming on and talking about these important issues. And if you stick around to the very end, after the outro music, there's a little bonus content for you. Anyways, with that said, here's the interview. My name's Matthias. I'm from Phoenix John Brown Gun Club, and I've been a member there since May of 2017.

I'm Pooja. I'm a member of San Diego Redneck Revolt. I think I've been a member for like a year and a half now. Awesome. Now, before we get into the questions, what is the relationship between Redneck? Neck Revolt and the John Brown Gun Club? Well, it's two different names for the same organization, the same network.

There's a tendency for a gun club to be a little bit more firearms focused, but that's not necessarily like a rule. It just depends on whatever the chapter chooses. I see. Did they kind of grow out of the same organization, or did one come first, and they just sort of combined? How did that work exactly? Yeah, the network kind of started, I believe it was in Denver, and started just from doing gun shows, basically, and talking to, like, militia folks. So I think then it was mostly John Brown gun club, and then Rednecabble, I think, was a Blas.

It just kind of grew from there. I think both of the names have been around since the beginning. Well, cool. Well, thank you both for coming on. We're really excited about this. You know, Bones and I on the guillotine and me on Rev Left Radio, we're constantly advocating that people on the left, especially marginalized or otherwise vulnerable people in our society, should take firearms seriously and arm and train ourselves and all these wonderful organizations

popping up to help us do just that is absolutely essential. I guess the first question I want to ask, can you talk about counter recruitment and what it means in practice and maybe even how it's largely misunderstood on the left broadly? So just first and foremost, you know, we're not counter recruiting in the sense we're not trying to recruit white supremacists or anything like that. Like the product boom from talking to militias about anti-racism and just from like anti-racist practice and the people who founded it, they were rural working class people who are armed, gentlemen militia culture.

It's a way of just trying to find common ground with people who might be on the right, but not alt-right or right-to-previces, but who are, like, trying to be cajoled or courted by those groups into joining them. Just trying to find common ground with people who are on the fence, who are apolitical even sometimes, with, like, their mistrust of the government,

their mistrust of the elites, and a common dedication to just liberty for all people. Counter recruitment is a political strategy that is centered on countering the recruitment of the far right. So like Pooja said, we're not trying to bring three percenters and people into our organization and turn them into members. We're just engaging with other people to talk to them about and help them unpack far right rhetoric

and talk to them about their relationship to the state and how the state uses racism as a tool for dividing the working class. and it's called counter recruitment because we're countering the recruitment of the far right and we're not trying to turn anybody into leftists. We're not trying to get them to see the light of Karl Marx or anything like that and turn them into anarchists. We're trying to get them to just not be fascist. Yeah, I mean, that's incredibly important and dangerous work, but it is essential.

And sadly, like, part of building up a left gun culture is to go to these sites of already existing gun culture and sadly much of them are reactionary in nature but to see the people there that might not be hyper-invested in far right-wing ideology but are just sort of you know inculcated with the ambient sort of centrist or right-wing ideology of their community and bring them leftward even if that's just you know away from fascism and more towards the center it's still a victory overall because the least amount of people going over to the fascist right the better i think that's important oh yeah i got a question you're kind of a two-parter One, something you just said that I find really, really interesting, this whole counter recruitment thing.

You know, for this added bonus for the fans of the guillotine, we like to bring in real world practical advice that they can utilize. So what are some specific strategies you've seen work in this counter recruitment? And also to just piggyback on that real quick, just how is the John Brown Gun Club and Redneck Revolte organized? for the sake of counter recruitment? Yeah, I mean, is that something that's taken up on an individual level? Is that something inside the org? Do you guys have like maybe a program that's rolled out to members? What's your winning strategy here that you think other people could really utilize?

Okay. As for the first part of the question, I'm really glad that you asked that because some people struggle with counter recruitment because they're afraid to talk to people that they disagree with politically. So the first piece of advice is do not be afraid to talk to your community members. They're people who share interests with you. They're people who live near you. They're people that you might work with.

They're people that you live around. So don't be afraid to like sully your precious political purity by exposing yourself to people you don't agree with. And the second thing is, and this is really important, especially for like cracking that shell that they might have for sort of getting past the, the, barriers that people put up is try really, really hard to not use lefty jargon. Don't use, don't use, like, anarchist speak, don't use communist buzzwords, don't use SJW talk. Try to use more neutral language, or if you can, try to learn to use more right-wing language, like gun culture language.

That way, that shows them that you are not an alien, you're not an outsider, you're not a George Soros drone. You're not a Democrat. You're somebody who shares an interest with them and lives near them and might work with them and so on. Right. And a lot of the times when we're talking about jargon, a lot of the concepts that we have on the left are things that they already have a concept of. They just say it in different words. So it's not so much that you're like trying to like hide yourself or anything. And in a way, you're actually trying to like reveal the commonality between the two of you because you know, you share a, you share interest, you share class interest, you share material interest, because, you know,

we're all in the same position regardless of, I mean, you know, there's other things that intersect with their, like, race and gender. But in the end of the day, like, you know, we're coming at a place that we're not the elite. So sometimes it can be as simple as just saying working folks instead of working class, because working class sounds like comedy talk, but working folks, it rolls off the tongue better. Yeah. You know, in my experience, living in Nebraska, which there's plenty of white people and there's plenty of reactionary politics or culture, I've talked to, you know, people all across the political spectrum in my entire life.

And working people, you know, members of the proletariat, they intuitively understand the issues in play here when it comes to class, when it comes to the elites, when it comes to, you know, class domination, how the wealthy and the rich, you know, live vampire-like off the labor of others. They understand that. And if you can just put that into words

that they're culturally sympathetic to, then they'll respond to the underlying concepts, which are completely, you know, radical left-wing stuff. It's just the matter of how you talk to them, what words you use to talk to them, and how you sort of lay it out for them. That's a talent in and of itself, but if you can cultivate it as an organizer, it'll really do you and your organizing work a lot of good. No left-splaining. Yeah, for sure. So I guess the next question I have, and it really centers around this concept of community defense, and there's a lot of talk on the left these days with the insurgents of fascism and sort of the decay of capitalism globally and just the chaos

that that's creating. There's a lot of talk about community self-defense. Sometimes, though, I fear like it can just be pushed into the realm of just another buzzword. So can you talk about how your organization puts the concept of community defense into action and what it actually looks like on the ground? So community defense is like most of the time things that support and preserve our community. So that's like a broad umbrella. Sometimes it means we take up arms.

But most of the time it means we're creating or plugging into like support projects, community support projects, harm reductions, migrant support, food distribution, and also firearms classes. Just basically things that defend the community. Just taking the words to what they mean is really the way I'd explain it early. Matthias? It's really important to us that we are invested and engaged with our communities. So a lot of times what we do is instead of trying to always have our own thing like Redneck Revolt, harm, reduction, redneck revolt, migrant support. We like to plug in to groups that already exist. So for example, Pooja and I are both in southwestern chapters close to the border. So instead of

having redneck revolt migrant support, we get plugged into migrant support networks that already exist. And this has a lot of benefits. The first is that there's already these programs that are up and running. So we don't have to waste time and energy making something from nothing. And the second benefit is that it builds a broader, more vibrant network where we have more people who we can turn to and these organizations know of and trust Redneck Revolve and John Brown Gun Club because we're solid. We're in the trenches with them. They know our faces and they know that we're doing the work with them.

Right. I mean, it might be a little bit of a segue with something else, but like approaching people as community members, approaching people as who you are, I think is really important to how we like carry out our practice or carry out like what we do. You know, we don't mask up, that kind of thing because we want people to know that we are members of the community who are there to help as members of the community. Yeah. I think like masking up or going out in Black Block is a tactic. It's not an organizational approach, you know. It's one thing you do in one specific circumstance, but it can't be what you do when you're trying to do this broad mass work. And I know here in Omaha, one thing that we've done, which is sort of echoing what you've done is go out to events. that aren't necessarily ours, even liberal events, and do security for them.

So there was one big event after Charlottesville, where there's like 700 to 1,000 people, pretty liberal, but still, you know, left-wing sympathetic people in this big public space. And what we did as an organization is just, you know, no masks, nothing scary. We just used walkie-talkies. We made a plan, and we basically did our own security for the event. We didn't depend on police. We had eyes all over from every side of the event. and if we saw something suspicious, we'd walkie-talkied over to our comrades, we'd have, you know, mechanisms

ready to come in and address a threat if anybody came up. And at the end of the protest, when everybody was walking home, I gave a speech to everybody and I mentioned this, that you can reach out to an organization, we'll walk you to your car. And just simple stuff like that, making people feel safer and know that these people, even though they're to the left of me, aren't something to be scared of. They're here to protect us and make sure we get home safely. And that speaks way more than any Facebook post or any, you know, scary protest. could speak to regular people.

Oh, it really does. It's walking the walk and not just talking to talk. You have to show that you're serious about what you're saying by doing it. Absolutely. And speaking of, I know you sort of lightly touched on it, but I'd love to give you guys an opportunity to go a little bit more depth into some of the border work you're involved in, because I really think that what we're seeing with the overwhelming majority,

I think it's something like 92% of immigrant detention centers, are for-profit prisons. Obviously, they've become the new scapegoat for the rise of the ultra-right in the United States. So this really, in my mind, the immigration battle and the seemingly disregard for human life for seeing build up along the border, I think this is a crucial, crucial fight that the left is going to face. So if you could go into a little bit more detail, what is the Redneck Revolt doing on the border? What are some things that you can share with other leftists who might be?

even be interested in doing something similar. Right now, Phoenix Branch is heavily involved with a few different organizations who receive people who are being released from ICE detention and help them navigate the transportation system and help them navigate the courts. Because when people show up to the ports of entry and surrender, they get taken to the detention facility where their process is started. And then ICE basically just turns them loose on the streets and says, okay, here you go. Now show up to court on this date.

Oh, and also it's in Tennessee and you're in Phoenix. Wow. So some of the groups that we get involved in help them get bus tickets and figure out how they're going to get there, help them make arrangements for lodgings, and help them figure out how the courts work so that they're not just completely defeated by the complexity of the system. because if they can comply with what the courts are asking them, then their asylum applications will just be thrown out the window. That's something that Phoenix John Brown is heavily involved in. And we also have members who kind of branch out into other types of projects. Like we have

some members in Phoenix John Brown who go down to the actual border and help with humanitarian aid. For example, there's a group down there called Humane Borders that maintains a network of water tanks. And John Brown just kind of lends bodies to these other organizations. You know, one thing that's really important, especially for people who are maybe new to organizing or trying to find their way in their own organizing circles, is that this is a good example of, you know, your organization not needing to be able to do everything. There are organizations out there that have specific goals and focuses, and instead of trying to do a million things kind of okay, they do one or two things really, really well. And when those organizations can hook up with other organizations,

who are hyper-focused and do one or two things really, really well, you start building this network of talent and skills and knowledge that you can extend and be way more effective than one group trying to do it all. So I really love that, and I think it's incredibly important and situated as you are across the border, that's going to come more into play. But we've talked with like the SRA and they've talked about doing disaster relief work on the eastern seaboard and the hurricane damage that causes over there. Do you guys do any disaster relief work or are you interested in doing any of that?

How do you view that project because it's becoming increasingly important for everybody on the left to take that more and more seriously? Right. I know that especially after like some of the stuff that happened in the East, a lot of the chapters had started coming up with like preparation for those kinds of things. We're thinking of building structures and like networks, gathering supplies and resources for disaster preparedness as well. I'm not, we're not as involved in that kind of thing because, you know, we didn't have like all the storms. Yeah, we don't have it, Patrick. Right, right. A little dryer over there, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

So I know there has been talk about building survival skills, especially given, you know, the whole climate change stuff, basically. That's definitely something that a lot of our Eastern chapters are focusing on. That's awesome. So I guess the next question, and this is something that is close to my heart, this is something we talk about a lot on the guillotine, and this is something that you guys have gone out of your way to make sure is a major part of your organization

and that's, you know, feminism, that's LGBTQ comrades. So what priority do you place on making sure that women, LGBTQ people and other marginalized or vulnerable people are into your organization and are getting taught these skills? And how do you weed out patriarchy inside your own org? Or how do you attempt to cut off that problem inside your own org actively? Right. We are very vocal about the fact that we extend trainings specifically to marginalized people, like a program where it's pretty much just for people who would typically be shut out from mainstream gun culture.

So we try to make make it very clear and known that we are making this knowledge and training available. Yeah, we've been, I know that a few chapters have been doing a kind of women transcend like shooting range day. So that that's like something that's very focused on like spreading out those skills with people who aren't necessarily. When you talk about gun culture, you're talking about something that's very, In a lot of ways, it's very patriarchal, and that can be kind of a barrier. I know that, like, a lot of, like, my women and femme presenting comrades have been kind of deterred in a way at the beginning because of it. And it really helps to have people who aren't, like, non-men, basically, who are there, like, not just there as, like, presence as bodies, but, like, also present as, like, instructors, present to, like, help each other out. And I know that that also applies to, like, people of color, just to, like, diversify the space.

and like make it so that the not the skill sharing is something that isn't just coming from a bunch of white guys so I think that's something that we want to focus on and that we tried to we've been trying to amp that up because yeah you know we're we're just an organization where we haven't like defeated patriarchy or racism within our organization because that's just something that's a societal problem but I'm I'm kind of glad that I'm in an organization that prioritizes it and like it is so um built around like self-reflection and like in a way to like actively look for where we can be improving and that sort of culture needs to be put into every left-wing organizing space but especially as you say when it comes to gun culture and you

have the history of patriarchy and machismo and masculine posturing when it comes to that specifically that that challenge although it's always present and all of our organizing becomes even more pronounced. And so trying to find ways systematically to root that out and to create these spaces where people feel that they can be included and comfortable is absolutely essential, especially when it comes around firearms and being able to defend ourselves. Also with the organization, too, there is a lot of members of our network who have been very insistent on making sure that the load of labor for the organizing, like making calls and responding to emails and following up on things, is.

shared more equally because it has that is one thing that our network is kind of struggled with is making sure that it's not just women who are making the phone calls and returning to emails thankfully some of those members have been very upfront about trying to get more men to jump in on that sort of like behind the stage type of organizing work so so that it's not just women doing all of the footwork will the men get to go out in the street and play with guns and do the sexy stuff. Isn't that so interesting? It's like you don't even, because that's something that I've seen in organizations myself is not even like this conscious thing and even everybody's well-intentioned in the organization and trying to just do something good. But the legwork,

the day-to-day grinding work of, you know, doing that work of calling, sending emails, organizing, that does seem to disproportionately fall on the shoulders of women. People need to wake up to that and we're like, why is that? Well, of course, this sort of natural manifestation of the ambient patriarchy that, you know, inculcates all of us and surrounds all of us and, you know, it was replicated even in liberation-based organizing efforts. So being conscious of that and trying to weed that out is incredibly important. I'd urge everybody listening to be very hyper-vigilant and very hyper-aware, not only in your own mind, but in your own organizing circles of how that sort of more, those subtle aspects of patriarchy leak into the shit that we do.

Right. And I want to give a big shout out to front-range John Brown Gun Club, because there some specific members in that branch that are very very sure to not let us be slacking off in that regard absolutely you got to uh shoot the macho asshole in your head that's right Fuck a story arc if it don't involve no matriarch some mothers work on the ground Up they craft an air like ATR with the butterfly's leaves like Filipina If I can't say, my ban on ta'i bala Wog, don't make taka if I'm gonna'u'll come up.

But we put in a heart into darkness They put in these figs in the office Or you think and you're schooling but you've held a loss cause you best you best your boss while at this But look at my eye that she's moving so cold Can't hold a can't handle to her when she glow Flick at the earl she hold Pandago in the Ilao she's dripping in gold

We pullin' up and achieve me All of my soldiers greet me Hammy bad dan is and pull back my helmet It's warfare when you see me Evil plans of the devil's hands But I don't pray because I organize They got new ways to impose strength But I teach mine how to mobilize

We don't fight for the money For the greedy for the white man All we want is our freedom And the right to live on our motherland Island Woman Rise Walang Makakatig Brown, Brown Woman Rise Alamin'am Young Ucot

Let me ask you folks a question here, and you can either, if you disagree with the entire premise of it, I'd love to hear why. I like to throw this at people that I know that are involved with firearms, because, you know, here are the facts. The majority of the firearms in this country are owned by a very small amount of the population. They are overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly right-leaning. and again the right has been sort of at this for a much much longer time than we have so if you could throw a number on this and again obviously this is not scientific this is a ballpark go with your gut feeling here i'm interested to hear you say why you go with this number or if you again disagree totally with the premise where do you think the left is in regards to arming themselves

training, how much of a year difference do you think the right has on us? How many, how much ground do we really have to cover before we can be on an equal footing? Do you think we're five years behind? Do you think we're 10 years? Do you think we aren't behind at all? What, what do you see in the field? I don't know if I could give any specific numbers, but I do think I agree with you that gun ownership has for the longest time been sort of a thing that the right wing has more domain over, which isn't to say that no lefties have guns, because that's one thing that Redneck Revolt has discovered since we started organizing is that there's a lot of armed people who are left wing, but they keep it like on the DL for whatever reason. So a lot of people have

kind of been coming out of the woodwork since armed leftist organizations like John Brown Gun Club and SRA have kind of come out on the scene, but I still think that there is a disparity. There's a gap that the left needs to meet. And also another thing, this is kind of a funny thing that we've discovered by accident is that even though most gun owners are right wing and most guns are owned by right wingers, they're not necessarily better with guns or better trained. We've discovered that we, yeah, we've discovered that they may have a lot of guns, but they kind of treat them like toys or like sexual fetish items or something. And a lot of them are just kind of bad at guns. left-wingers, there might not be as many of us, but we tend to take it more seriously. Right.

So there's a few things that are coming to mind with that. Yeah, there's like a much more right-wing pull in gun culture in the U.S., and it's been there for decades. I do also think that gun culture being something that's sequestered to the right, like if you talk about the whole of American history, it's something that's kind of more recent. There was a time when the NRA wasn't as shitty, right? He had the Black Panthers. The history of guns in the culture is, like, varied. And given that, yeah, the push for, like, militia is, like, yeah, they have a couple decades on any, like, non-right-wing people.

But I don't think it's something that can't be overcome. I think the entry point for people who are, like, not super right-wing into gun culture is probably lower than people expect. because a lot of it comes down to people not having talked to each other to some extent. And there's a lot more permeability to gun culture than people might be expecting. But not like a lot necessarily. Like we can't just like go in and like going wearing a Ushanka into like a gun show or something like that. No, definitely not. But both of you would agree that the lead that is out there that, you know, a lot of leftists worry about.

Because, you know, sometimes you see this argument. I've seen it on the more pacifist side of the left. where they say, oh, well, you know, these people, they're so far ahead of us, there's no point or this, that, and the other. So from what you folks have seen, you know, it's really not that big of an apocalyptic divide, you know, that there is a lot of breathing room and there's a lot of opportunity for the left to grow. Right. Like, a lot of gun culture is, in fact, more, like, libertarian focus. And there is some, especially with, like, a good chunk of the left, there's, like, common ground with that. They don't like the state, we don't like the state, you know?

and that's like something that's very present in like say the militia movement for instance where it's not so much about like how close are they to being fascists it's more like who's going to talk to them first kind of thing exactly i mean broadly if we talk about like broad right wing people anybody to the right of the liberal center then sure that number does look pretty damn scary and disproportionate but if you think about the amount of people who are like hardcore dedicated fascists compared to just the sort of milieu of right-leaning libertarian to or the people that just sort of like get off my lawn sort of people, those people are probably make up way more of the faction of the amount of people who have guns than the hardcore dedicated ideological far right. And the counter recruitment, the going out in your community and talking to people, winning over sympathies is an important part of laying the groundwork for possible future affiliation with those people if push comes to shove. And if push does comes to shove and people are forced to take out guns and take actions in the

street. Well, it's not, it's not an automatic given that the people who are libertarian or centrist will side with the fascists. They very well might side with us if we have the organizing groundwork already put in the place. If we meet them where they are and we talk to them and we show them, hey, we're not this scary Antifa super soldiers that Fox News claims we are. We're regular people who have families who want a better future for everybody. And we're not fucking racist and sexist assholes. And I think you can win a lot of people over who are ostensibly on the quote unquote right but aren't dedicated to the far fascist right and the second thing I'd say is there's also this huge strata of society known as the lump in proletariat right

the people who are forced to survive under capitalism by resorting to illegal means who also have a gun culture and it might be toxic and it might be horrifying and of course it's a product of capitalism and imperialism instead of colonialism but it's there and there's something that if we're reaching out to the right in this way or at least the centrist or the the libertarians, we can certainly reach out to the lump in proletary, those people who are disproportionately of marginalized identities and could see the project that we see far more sympathetic than people to the right, you know? Yeah.

And we really hope that if it ever came down to it, people would just side with themselves. They'd side with their neighborhoods over the powers of the state or with any reactionary wave that might come along. Like, for example, you remember the Baltimore uprising? Yeah. It happened a couple years ago. there was news articles talking about how street gangs were calling truces with each other so that they could unite against the police so they could unite against the state and when push comes to shove we just hope that people will not be so confused by the Kool-Aid that they'll at least side with their own communities over the state hell yeah amen the far right especially you know the left is better at grassroots organizing there's more people on the populist left and there's more people who are

dedicated organizers that have been doing this work for decades on the left, and there are on the far right. And we see that when they try to get together and they try to pull off actions, all the infighting, all the absurdity, the factional infighting, the dissolving of huge organizations on the far right. They can't maintain anything. They don't really have mass support. It's just driven by hate and anger and why that makes them incredibly and disproportionately dangerous. It also means that we have a huge advantage when it comes to our decades and decades of organizing and being able to draw from that history and that knowledge and be more effective at it than them. Yeah, their cause is not as strong. They're not organizing for freedom or for like

the physical safety of their families. They're just organizing for a future in which they don't have to face accountability for anything. And that's a really weak motivator. Yep. Absolutely. Well, as we're kind of zoning in towards the end of this conversation, is there any last words? We're going to ask about where people can find you in a second. But is there anything else you really wanted to say while you have the platform, anything you want to get out, you want people to know about. Could I actually give a shout out to some organizations that some people could send money to? It sounds kind of weird because usually leftists and anarchists especially are like, you know, charity is stupid, giving donations is stupid, you need to do direct action, blah, blah, blah.

But there's a lot of people in this country who are not close enough to the border to where that they could actually be here in person, but there's organizations down here that are and are doing work. And if there's people in sort of the middle of the country who would like to support these efforts, we'd like to encourage them to send cash, like literally put their money where their mouth is. So could we name drop some of these organizations? Please do. So in Arizona, there is the Kino Border Initiative, which is in Tucson, or they operate in the Tucson area, and I think in Nogales as well. And then there is the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project. And these organizations do some of the things we were discussing earlier how they help asylum seekers navigate

the legal system and navigate sort of how this whole thing works. And especially the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, they set people up with legal representation, which is a big deal. Yeah. And it requires money. Oh, and there's also an organization in Phoenix called Trans Queer Pueblo, TQP. And they do all of that stuff, but they focus specifically on people from south of the border who are queer or trans and they can they can be the most marginalized people so they can benefit from additional resources so trans queer pueblo is also a good group of course there's no mass meertes or no more deaths which a lot of people have heard of they're an organization that goes down into the borderlands and provides material aid to people who are crossing the

border they they can benefit from some cash and then there is a somewhat newer organization called the Arizona-Palestine Solidarity Alliance. They do research into the connection between the border situation in the U.S. and the border situation in Palestine. There isn't really a lot of other people who are doing that, and they've already turned up a lot of interesting stuff. Like, for example, the same tech companies are profiting off of both borders. Like the same group of tech companies are selling surveillance equipment.

they're dispensing training programs to both the United States Border Patrol and to the Israeli Defense Force. The pain and suffering of both of these regions is benefiting the same group of tech moguls. That's just an example of the kind of stuff that APSA is doing. So they're another organization that can benefit

from some resources. I guess I could also signal boosters or that we kind of go back. and forth with is like in an inland empire harm reduction they're up in inland empire area east of los angeles so that's like also another thing that we're plugged into is like harm reduction work in our kind of distribution that kind of thing absolutely um before we let you go would you like to say where listeners can find you online your organization online and how they can get involved with redneck revolt or the john brown gun club sure um do you want to say the name of the website at

the same time okay three two one redneck Redneckregold.org.org. There's a little lag in the Skype call, but yeah, we get it. Redneck revolt.org. Yes. And people can go there. They can sign up to become individual members and open chapters, or how does that work? To be a member, you have to be a part of a branch.

Our focus so much is on, like, the local. You have to be a part of a branch to be a member. There's a map on there that shows where all of our branches are. We tend to keep that relatively updated. So there's that. You can also, like, look for us on Facebook, on social. Twitter at Redneck Revolt. And there's like a list of branches. You can also start a branch if you're interested. Like you'll have to be vetted and everything like that. But

course. Yeah, it's a process. As it should be. Yeah. And we assure everybody that this process is for the best because it really helps maintain the integrity of our operations. 100% co-intel pro was a real real fucking thing. Yeah. There are still people rotting in prison cells because of the work the FBI is done against leftists. Yep. We don't want to join those people. We don't want to get. Hell no. No. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah, when leftists are getting armed in any context, that brings increased heat. That brings increased cracking down by the state

or try to infiltration attempts from the far right. So safety in all fronts is absolutely paramount. As we pick up guns and start educating one another on how to use them properly. From the fifth floor, I schedule my meeting with the moon. Stress, let it go so it don't completely consume. When the vegetables bite back in the grass starts to sting, I yell up to heaven to get me the hell out of this dream.

I fell out of my stream of self-consciousness, and I got welds on my mind. to signify all my accomplishments. No matter whose math you used to count the dead. Progress will never rest in the hand that has no head. I dip my brush into the what I've rapped for and wonder out loud as I can how long I've slept for. I should rob a pet store.

Let the dogs wild. I should close all the schools just to make the kids smile. Seize the limit. Let the sky be the moment. Put the key to the ignition. I'm a ride these donuts. And when it breaks, lock the door, walk away. It won't be nothing else to talk about.

Nothing else to say. I'm just waiting for the moment. I can break away The only reason that I say So I can save the day There was a question that phones asked We kind of skipped over Phones asked about

Sort of our organizational structure And how that helps us And Pooja, I remember when we were on the phone You kind of said it really well About how our horizontal Bottom-up organizational structure benefits our work Right, yeah

You know, we have a bottom-up structure any member of any branch is able to do anything in the org with the right know-how and everything so it's fluid in that sense we maintain a certain amount of fluidity people voluntarily take on that work-wide tasks and roles you can be from any chapter

whatever you have experience in or whatever you want to build experience in you can plug into be coached into it we're a big tent we have people who are not just anarchists or socialist we have libertarians conservatives liberals in the org does that ever does that ever cause a problem or do they know that to be a part of this org means there's a certain standard of you know speech and behavior that you have to live up to i mean has that been a problem thus far or do you see it being a problem in the future i don't say problem but we do kind of have to police ourselves sometimes especially when it comes to sectarian like internal sectarian disagreements which is why we talk about okra so much

i'm about to say like anarchist and marxist can already be kind of snipey but once you get a liberal or conservative in there jesus yeah I mean that's like the whole the whole idea I think comes from like that we share we share a practice rather than sharing an ideology so we're coming at it from like our kind of like slogan is kind of like what we need is action right so yeah so the when it comes to ideological like congruence the the big thing we ask people is just that they agree with our 10 principles and you can come at them from whatever way you can wherever you can wherever you come from but at the end of the day like what we care about is like are you putting the work in are you going to are you willing to like do what needs to be done thank you for all the wonderful work you're doing we really encourage our listeners to go out and get involved in one of these organizations and you know really think about what it means to defend yourself your loved ones and your community what it means to talk to people and meet them where they are and try to be a force for good in the world even as the world burns down all around us so thank you both for coming on

we really, really appreciate all your work and for coming on and sharing that with our listeners. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Solidarity. I got Arizona residency one day too late to vote on this election day

and every year before I've been too drunk to register I'd say that I don't believe in it anyway. I still shake my head at ballots cast for elephants. I shake my head at ballots cast for donkeys. Because I swear to God our leaders They will be the death of us There's a ballad we can cast To set us free

But there's no brick we can throw And we'll end poverty You can't blow up as be 1070 Things will never be as simple as When I was 12 years old Reading Karl Marx in my bedroom alone And since there have been laws There have been criminals

There have been thieves Since there's been property And the day will come again when none of those things are around. I just hope it's before people go extinct. So vote November 2nd if it seems right to you. Don't vote if you think it just holds us down. Just tell me what we're gonna do on November 3rd to make sure there's no government left to elect two years from now.

Just tell me what we're gonna do on November 3rd to make sure there's no government left to elect two years from now. to elect two years from now Would you get one of those raps For the AR-15 I don't know if you've seen this But people do wraps for their AR-15s With like

Like that's what? Yeah I guess it's like a plastic wrap or something But they've got like I would never do it But I might paint my AR to look like an Adidas AR I mean that would be pretty cool I saw someone someone modded one out to look like a whole Jurassic Park thing Like that's pretty fucking cool That's cool

A dragon ball Z rap for my oh my god oh my god you have to say kamea maya before you shoot every time can you imagine murk and somebody with that like their last thing is they're like is that go-coop talk about a move oh my god do you prefer cowboy bebop or outlaw star I've only seen part of cowboy beepop that's fair I haven't seen none of outlaw star I don't know which one that is so I think probably cowboy bop All right, that's fair. That's fair. My housemate would hate me for this.

My housemate would absolutely be furious with me over this, but I got to go with Cowboy Bebop over Outlaw Star. It's a classic. It's a classic. You can't get a masterpiece. You can't get a masterpiece. You can't get a nice.