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Speaker 1: here a podcast about things falling apart, how they came
Speaker 1: to be that way. I'm your host, Christopher Wong, and
Speaker 1: today we're doing part three of our series of Neoliberalism.
Speaker 1: We're gonna start today with one of the most famous
Speaker 1: episodes in history of neoliberalism, September eleventh coup against Salvator
Speaker 1: Allende was a democratic socialist of a type that has
Speaker 1: broadly ceased to exist today. A committed Marxist to believe
Speaker 1: that a class of society could be created by means
Speaker 1: of electoral democracy, he embarked on a campaign drastically more
Speaker 1: radical than any modern socialist politician has done, more than
Speaker 1: dream of mass nationalizations, in an attempt to develop a
Speaker 1: technical system that would allow the government to democratically plan
Speaker 1: as much of the economy as humanly possible. In part,
Speaker 1: his hand was forced by Chile's workers, who had embarked
Speaker 1: on their own unsancitioned campaign of takeovers of minds and factories,
Speaker 1: which I Andy disapproved of and now sought to bring
Speaker 1: under the national planning scheme. To do this, he brought
Speaker 1: in British cybernetics theorist Stanford Beer, who embarked on an
Speaker 1: operation called Project Cybersen to collect and coordinate information between
Speaker 1: various factories and allow democratic planning at the ground level
Speaker 1: in a way that would allow stantaneous reaction to crises
Speaker 1: and immediate changes in production levels and conditions inside the
Speaker 1: factories themselves to deal with them. All End for all
Speaker 1: of s Barker's credentials was fiercely critical of the bureaucratization
Speaker 1: of the U. S s R, and, in particular in
Speaker 1: the economic sphere, the way its planning systems were essentially
Speaker 1: unable to react to local changes quickly in a context
Speaker 1: where plans were only created every five years. Cybersen would
Speaker 1: solve these problems by workers participle patient at the factory
Speaker 1: level and constant updated data flows to the planning office.
Speaker 1: As the project went on, Beer became progressively more radical.
Speaker 1: Strike by right wing truck workers backed by capitalists in
Speaker 1: the CIA in nineteen two threatened to grind the nation
Speaker 1: to a halt. In response, workers formed enormous coodonas industrialities
Speaker 1: or industrial belts to help self organized production and bypass
Speaker 1: the striking right wing workers in coordination with the Andia's
Speaker 1: government and a new cybers in control room. They were
Speaker 1: able to outmaneuver the strike and maintain production and distribution
Speaker 1: and nearly full capacity by tracking where goods were going
Speaker 1: and where they needed to go along what roots. Beer
Speaker 1: rapidly became convinced that quote the basic answer of cybernetics.
Speaker 1: The question of how the system should be organized, is
Speaker 1: that it ought to organize itself, in essence, that cybersen
Speaker 1: should be used to eliminate the bureaucracy in the state
Speaker 1: entirely and allow workers to directly organize production themselves. Now,
Speaker 1: Cybersen in theory is what the neillerbles claim, at least
Speaker 1: in public, to want, is an anti bureaucratic system that
Speaker 1: uses the centralized control over the means of production to
Speaker 1: combat totalitarianism and ensure that the state respects individual rights
Speaker 1: and liberties. In fact, as if Vengi Monuos put it,
Speaker 1: Pierre and Hayek knew each other. As Beer noted in
Speaker 1: his diary, Hayek even complimented him on his vision for
Speaker 1: the cybernetic factory after Beer presented at a conference in
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixty in Illinois. So, naturally, when the system
Speaker 1: was actually implemented, at least in part Chile. The new
Speaker 1: liberal position was that every single person involved in the
Speaker 1: entire economic exparment needed to be killed. Chile was put
Speaker 1: under economic blockade by the US and multinational corporations with
Speaker 1: full neilerable support, an ironic position given Milton Friedman, Hayek
Speaker 1: and Rope case pure and absolute opposition to economic blockades
Speaker 1: of South Africa Rhodesia to its eternal shame. The a
Speaker 1: f L c i O's American Institute for Free Labor
Speaker 1: Development provided training and funds to the right wing unions
Speaker 1: that opposed the leftist government and others across Latin America.
Speaker 1: In Chile, working directly with the CIA, the a f
Speaker 1: L c i OS organizations to train the right wing
Speaker 1: truckers whose nineteen seventy two strike we've already discussed and
Speaker 1: whose nineteen seventy three strike would pave the way for
Speaker 1: Pinochet's coup. In many cases, organized labor, especially in the US,
Speaker 1: but also in places like Italy, spent the seventies battling
Speaker 1: their own left flank in defensive capital. Their reward for
Speaker 1: their service as was capital turning around and dutting them
Speaker 1: like a fish in the eighties, Allen two fought a
Speaker 1: series of battles with this left flank, disarming the mass
Speaker 1: workers assemblies that had formed in nineteen seventy two and
Speaker 1: could have saved him from the coup. The results was
Speaker 1: the Other nine eleven, on which day in nineteen seventy three,
Speaker 1: the military overthrew Allende and a coup, and Allende shot
Speaker 1: himself in the presidential palace. The man who would emerge
Speaker 1: on the top of the power struggle in the military
Speaker 1: at the end of the coup was one Augusto Pinochet. Now.
Speaker 1: Pinochet from the beginning had the support of Chile's own
Speaker 1: domestic neo liberals, of which they were a fairly large number.
Speaker 1: Upon taking power, he carried out what would become the
Speaker 1: standard neo liberal program, returning nationalized industries to the capitalists,
Speaker 1: eliminating price controls, and increasing interest rates, But full scale
Speaker 1: neoliberalism didn't come immediately. Inflation, which Pinochet had nominally in
Speaker 1: large part taken power to control, continued unabated, and in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy four Milton Friedman arrived in Chile to argue
Speaker 1: for neoliberal shock therapy, but it wasn't until Pinochet's desperation
Speaker 1: from money drove him to the I m F that
Speaker 1: he would fully embrace neoliberalism. Most of the world had
Speaker 1: refused to do business with new dictatorial regime, with the
Speaker 1: exception of the U S and oddly enough Mao's China,
Speaker 1: which poured money into the regime and Pinochet's personal pockets.
Speaker 1: But that money was insufficient, and the I m F
Speaker 1: was the only remaining body who would actually lend money
Speaker 1: to Pinochet without any requirements on improving Chile's At this
Speaker 1: point of Bismo human rights record, much of the full
Speaker 1: neoliberal turn that hit Chile in ninety five came from
Speaker 1: demands from the I m F itself, who demanded Conian
Speaker 1: measures to control inflay. Here, Pinochet was aided by the
Speaker 1: supporter of the neoliberals, whose legitimacy and academic standing allowed
Speaker 1: them to negotiate and secure favor from the I m F,
Speaker 1: which they had already begun to infiltrate. At this point,
Speaker 1: the infamous Chicago Boys, economist trains at the University of
Speaker 1: Chicago by Milton Freeman, were put in charge of the economy.
Speaker 1: University of Chicago trained economist Sergio di Castro, known as
Speaker 1: the Pinochet of the Economy was put in charge of
Speaker 1: the Ministry of Economics. To Castro, privatized an enormous portion
Speaker 1: of the remaining profitable state industries, eliminated tariffs and implemented
Speaker 1: free trade policies, deregulated the finance sector, and eliminated any
Speaker 1: remaining price controls. Chicago Boys would go on to do
Speaker 1: things like privatizing the entire Chilean pension system with the
Speaker 1: exception of the military, which is a good education of
Speaker 1: any as to what the regime thought the actual effects
Speaker 1: of privatization would be. In ninety eight, Pinochet declared something
Speaker 1: called the Seven Modernizations, with quote reforms in labor, education, health,
Speaker 1: regional decentralization, agriculture, and justice policy. The goal of these
Speaker 1: reforms was to introduce the market into literally every aspect
Speaker 1: of society. Now in episode one, I've very briefly mentioned
Speaker 1: the Virginia School as one of the major schools of
Speaker 1: deal liberalism. The Virginia School the people behind public choice theory.
Speaker 1: Their thing is essentially taking the absolutely absurd set of
Speaker 1: beliefs Chicago School holds about people. Humans are all knowing, rational,
Speaker 1: calculating gods, optimizing their behavior to get the most of
Speaker 1: every single interaction to maximize the utility, and then applying
Speaker 1: it to political science and then literally every other field.
Speaker 1: If you've ever heard someone say there's no rational reason
Speaker 1: to vote, because if you're a rational, self interested person,
Speaker 1: the cost of voting outwighs that benefit because your vote
Speaker 1: only matters if a deciding one. Therefore, it's against your
Speaker 1: interest to vote. That's the Virginia School and their public
Speaker 1: choice theory bullshit at work. Pinochet's Seven Modernizations was an
Speaker 1: application of Virginia School doctrine to the entire Chilean state
Speaker 1: and as much as the siety he is humanly possible,
Speaker 1: with the goal of transforming it into a market. I'm
Speaker 1: going to read a section from the Road to Mount
Speaker 1: Pelion describing Virginia School titan James M. Buchanan's work. Quote
Speaker 1: Ineffectual consequences in the political market place were blamed solely
Speaker 1: on the fallacies of political decision making. We can summarize
Speaker 1: public choice as a theory of government failure end quote.
Speaker 1: Buchanan delivered a highly abstract paper titled limited or Untitled
Speaker 1: Democracy to the Montpellion Society in Vina del Mar in Chile,
Speaker 1: which some constructed as a critique of the host country's
Speaker 1: mobilization for action history. Buchanan stated that if limited democracy
Speaker 1: was a polity predisposed to disable a political market that
Speaker 1: would otherwise promote the most efficient allocation of resources, the
Speaker 1: only meaningful task of the government would be to deprive
Speaker 1: the polity of its ability to do so. Public choice
Speaker 1: theory thus sought to limit democracy and deep politicize the
Speaker 1: state in order to enable unconstrained market forces to guide
Speaker 1: human into action. Since the Pinochet regime was committed to
Speaker 1: using its governmental powers in precisely this manner, Buchanan's paper
Speaker 1: provided theoretical support for the regime, even if it did
Speaker 1: not openly endorsed the authoritarian rule. Buchanan, of course, would
Speaker 1: spend a bunch of time doing lectures in Chile throughout
Speaker 1: Pinochet's icatorship, but he was not that regime's most vociferous
Speaker 1: neoliberal supporter. That award goes to Frederick Hyak Chris Hiek
Speaker 1: when asked about Chile, which had been to ninety eight
Speaker 1: and that blessed with his approval, aedicatorship can restrict itself
Speaker 1: in a educatorship which deliberately is restricting itself can be
Speaker 1: more liberal in its politics than a democratic assembly, which
Speaker 1: has due limits. Chile's nineteen eighty constitution was drafted in
Speaker 1: part by one of Hiak's friends. He has wrote Road
Speaker 1: Abount Pelion Again. The constitution was not only named after
Speaker 1: hias book The Constitution of Liberty, but also incorporated significant
Speaker 1: elements of hias thinking. Above all, the Constitution placed a
Speaker 1: strong emphasis on a neoliberal understanding of freedom. Guzman version
Speaker 1: of freedom is intrinsically connected to private property, free enterprise,
Speaker 1: and individual rights. Individual freedom, in his interpretation, can only
Speaker 1: evolve in a radical market order. The Constitution was dedicated
Speaker 1: to guarantee such an order without constraining any economic activities.
Speaker 1: In order to protect free market conditions and individual freedoms
Speaker 1: against totalitarian attacks or democratic interventions, the Constitution stipulated a
Speaker 1: necessity of a strong central state authority to guarantee the
Speaker 1: established rule of law, and thus, above all else is
Speaker 1: hampered in the application of discretionary government power. Exempted were
Speaker 1: measures to uphold the status quo, inasmuch as Goose Bond
Speaker 1: aggressively supported continuing the state of emergency, which legalized the
Speaker 1: use of whatever discretionary powers were deemed necessary. Quial opposition
Speaker 1: that Folks is a high achi in constitution used the
Speaker 1: state to murder any one wants democracy or God help them,
Speaker 1: wants to control the production their forced to serve every day.
Speaker 1: Chile is near liberals voltron By combinding the power of
Speaker 1: all four major schools of neoliberalism Chicago School Monetary and
Speaker 1: Economic policy, Austrian School Constitutional order order, liberal reliance on
Speaker 1: the international bureaucracy and legal institutions like the I m
Speaker 1: F in order to promote a market economy, and Virginia
Speaker 1: School public choice theory running the state, you get a neoliberal,
Speaker 1: right wing military dictatorship. Now most conventional accounts of neoliberalism
Speaker 1: will move from Chile to Reagan and Thatcher and next
Speaker 1: episode will cover the neoliberal kind of revolution in the
Speaker 1: angle sphere. But focusing on purely national events gives a
Speaker 1: skewed perception of how neoliberalism actually spreads, and in order
Speaker 1: to correct that, we're going to look at Venezuela. I'm
Speaker 1: going to be drawing heavily here from the work of
Speaker 1: the legendary Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando core and Neil in his
Speaker 1: book The Magical State, which I highly recommend as one
Speaker 1: of the best things that are written about oil and
Speaker 1: the Venezuelan state, so readers be warned. Chapter one is
Speaker 1: an absolute slow dog that, on the one hand, is
Speaker 1: one of the most interesting explanations of what oiler rents
Speaker 1: are have ever encountered, but also features coroneal inventing a
Speaker 1: new trielectic and then stubbornly refusing to explain what it
Speaker 1: is or literally anything about how it works. So read
Speaker 1: the Magical State skip chapter one now. The guiding principles
Speaker 1: of the new mass capitalists, democratic parties and posted katorship.
Speaker 1: Venezuela since the nineties sixties had been developing sovereignty by
Speaker 1: economic independence. The keystone of this project was an attempt
Speaker 1: to use the power of the state in new oil
Speaker 1: rents to develop an automotive industry. The project has sort
Speaker 1: of stalled out from its origins in the sixties until
Speaker 1: the rise of the G seventy seven Opeque Alliance in
Speaker 1: ninet nineteen seventy four that we discussed last episode. In
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy five, Venezuela's Assembly passed a law that granted
Speaker 1: the president's special powers to speed up the developments of
Speaker 1: the auto industry. Corn the auto industry in Venezuela. Corneal
Speaker 1: described it thus quote, The central goal was to have
Speaker 1: the vehicle value, including the drive train, produced locally. By
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty five. Major components would be produced by enterprises
Speaker 1: having at least fifty one percent of their capital from
Speaker 1: local private sources. Existing foreign companies would have to become
Speaker 1: mixed or national firms in accord within day impact regulations
Speaker 1: if they wanted to benefit from the common market. Now,
Speaker 1: this plan is what's called industrial import substitution. Developing countries
Speaker 1: would attempt to develop industries, in this case auto manufacturers
Speaker 1: inside of a country to produce cars for internal consumption
Speaker 1: instead of importing them from other countries. The other key
Speaker 1: of this plan is the end Impact, an association of Bolivia, Columbia, Ecuador,
Speaker 1: Peru and Chile that was collaborating to develop a regional
Speaker 1: industrial economy, that we use local resources to build a
Speaker 1: local industrial economy producing industrial goods made entirely inside of
Speaker 1: the countries themselves from their resources. Now, Venezuela joins the
Speaker 1: pack in nineteen seventy three and Pinochet notably leaves in
Speaker 1: ninety seven. The key sticking points in this joint and
Speaker 1: day impact Venezuela attempt to build an auto industry was
Speaker 1: that Venezuela needed technology held by multinational corporations in order
Speaker 1: to actually produce the vehicles. Multinational car companies were willing
Speaker 1: to go ahead with the project to build cars in
Speaker 1: Venezuela in the short term because they were hurting from
Speaker 1: the oil shock and thus were willing to help national
Speaker 1: plans develop cars as long as they could use the
Speaker 1: parts to build their own cars with parts source from
Speaker 1: around the world. And this is where the neoliberal defensive
Speaker 1: intellectual property rights becomes extremely important, because the companies who
Speaker 1: held the patents for the drive trains essentially had a
Speaker 1: technological strangleholder for car development. Now, Venezuela conducted an extensive
Speaker 1: bidding process for companies to make cars in Venezuela, but
Speaker 1: the car companies essentially sabotaged it by submitting designs that
Speaker 1: failed specs. The result was a kind of political war
Speaker 1: inside Venezuela and particularly inside the Venezuelan ruling class, between
Speaker 1: national developments and international profits. The Venezuelan developmentalists needed a breakthrough.
Speaker 1: What they needed, in essence, was new international economic order
Speaker 1: and its corporate regulations. Debt relief and technology transfers. Without them,
Speaker 1: even a third World country like Venezuela, flush with oil
Speaker 1: money was incapable of developing an industrial economy. But the
Speaker 1: new international economic order never came. All the G seven
Speaker 1: had to do in order to stop it was stall
Speaker 1: the G seventy seven out until commodity power faded. The
Speaker 1: G seventy seven had to fundamentally change the structure of
Speaker 1: the economy in order to allow them to industrialize before
Speaker 1: the sort of damocles hanging over all their heads the
Speaker 1: mounting Third World debt fell and decapitated them. The G
Speaker 1: seven strategy to outlast the seventy seven was to pull
Speaker 1: the various factions in the seventy seven apart, in particular
Speaker 1: pulling the moderate governments away from the radical wing OPEC
Speaker 1: and the African Socialists. They attacked OPEC by using Saudi
Speaker 1: Arabia to undermine its unity, and attempted to peel the
Speaker 1: so called less developed countries away from their alliance with
Speaker 1: OPEC with a promise of aid to patch up the
Speaker 1: damage dealt by increased prices. Neither worked incredibly well, but
Speaker 1: when combined with the US essentially shutting the U N
Speaker 1: down by refusing to let any business get done, refusing
Speaker 1: to vote for or even vetoing routine matters. The stalling worked,
Speaker 1: no new international economic order was forthcoming. Instead, the world
Speaker 1: would get neoliberalism. Neoliberalism arrived on the world stage in
Speaker 1: the form of the Vulcar Shock. In nineteen seventy nine,
Speaker 1: Jimmy Carter appointed Paul Vulcar as the Chairman of the
Speaker 1: Federal Reserve for the broad mandate to do whatever he
Speaker 1: wanted to reduce inflation. Vulcar had become a disciple of monitorism,
Speaker 1: a Freedman Night Chicago School belief about the role of
Speaker 1: the money supply in the economy, considered to be absolutely
Speaker 1: crank even by modern neoliberals. His solution, which became known
Speaker 1: as the Vulcar Shock, was to increase interest rate. This
Speaker 1: essentially blew a crater in the American economy and immediately
Speaker 1: sent it into recession. And we'll get to Vulcar at
Speaker 1: Reagan's efforts to destroy American labor in the next episode.
Speaker 1: But the damage to the Third World was even worse.
Speaker 1: G seventy seven, governments had for decades taking on adjustable
Speaker 1: rate loans pegged to something called the libor rate. When
Speaker 1: they took the loans out, interest rates were virtually negative,
Speaker 1: but when the Vulgar shock hit, the skyrocketed. Now, as
Speaker 1: we talked about the last episode, a major part of
Speaker 1: the crisis of the seventies was enormous piles of oil money,
Speaker 1: mostly from the Gulf States, floating around that nobody could
Speaker 1: actually get returns on because of declining manufacturing profit rates.
Speaker 1: This money wound up flowing back into the American finance system.
Speaker 1: When capital controls are lifted nineteen seventy five, the banks
Speaker 1: through the money at loans in the Third World. Now,
Speaker 1: some of that money had been put into industrial development
Speaker 1: that had yet to pay off. Some of the money
Speaker 1: had simply been put directly into dictator's bank accounts. But
Speaker 1: the bank's essentially didn't care if the loans they were
Speaker 1: making had little to no chance of being repaid without
Speaker 1: some kind of structure reformed. Because in envy, control of
Speaker 1: the I m F fell to an arch neo liberal
Speaker 1: name Jacquis de la Rossier. I really don't know if
Speaker 1: that's how he pronounce his name, but he is evil.
Speaker 1: So neo liberals further took control of the World Bank
Speaker 1: in nine from the I M f and the World Bank.
Speaker 1: A secession of neo liberals enshrined the key principle of
Speaker 1: the new neoliberal order. Debtors must always pay back their debts.
Speaker 1: Creditors would no longer assume risk for their loans. Instead,
Speaker 1: loans would be repaid at gunpoint. This was no mere
Speaker 1: rhetorical slogan, as the G seventy seven imploded as a
Speaker 1: political body under the weight of hundreds of billions of
Speaker 1: dollars of debt now with interest. Thomas Sankara, the socialist
Speaker 1: president of Burkina Fosso, attempted to rally its remains into
Speaker 1: collectively negotiate debt relief. Sakara was promptly shot by a
Speaker 1: former ally who accused him of threatening Burkina Fossil's relationship
Speaker 1: with France. With all resistance slaughtered, entire nations were reduced
Speaker 1: to debt servicing machines, as tax dollars were directed from health, education,
Speaker 1: and social security programs into the coffers of international banks,
Speaker 1: which used the newly neo liberal controlled International Monetary Fund
Speaker 1: as their enforcer. The anthropologist David Graeber described the consequence
Speaker 1: of one such I m F austerity program in debt
Speaker 1: the first five thousand years quote. For almost two years
Speaker 1: I had lived in the highlands of Madagascar. Shortly before
Speaker 1: I arrived, there had been an outbreak of malaria. It
Speaker 1: was a particularly virulent outbreak because malaria had been wiped
Speaker 1: out in Highlight Madagascar many years before, so that after
Speaker 1: a couple of generations, most people had lost their immunity.
Speaker 1: The problem was it took money to maintain those mosquito
Speaker 1: radication programs, since there had to be periodic tests to
Speaker 1: make sure mosquitoes weren't starting to breed again, and spraying
Speaker 1: campaigns if it was discovered that they were not a
Speaker 1: lot of money. But owing to IMF and post austerity programs,
Speaker 1: the government had to cut the monitoring program. Ten thousand
Speaker 1: people died. I met young mothers grieving for lost children.
Speaker 1: One might think it would be hard to make a
Speaker 1: case that the loss of ten thou human lives is
Speaker 1: really justified in order to ensure that City Bank wouldn't
Speaker 1: have to cut his losses on one irresponsible loan that
Speaker 1: wasn't particularly important to its balance sheet anyways. Following the
Speaker 1: old old or liberal dream of a legal framework to
Speaker 1: ensure neoliberal market economies, the new generation of neoliberals used
Speaker 1: the I m F, World Bank and other bureacratic institutions
Speaker 1: to act as dead enforcers and the imposed neoliberal policies
Speaker 1: from above, without anything so petty as democracy interfering with it.
Speaker 1: In fact, one of the first neo liberal structural adjustments,
Speaker 1: one of a bewildering new array of terms for I
Speaker 1: m F and force austerity programs, was implemented by the
Speaker 1: Jamaican socialist Michael Manly in nineteen seventy seven, which in
Speaker 1: a single year wiped out every gain in education in
Speaker 1: public health that Madly had spent his first term building up.
Speaker 1: Similar faith would befall health, education, and justice programs across
Speaker 1: the world. The death toll remains unknown. Venezuela would fall
Speaker 1: victim to a similar fate. Without the new international Economic order,
Speaker 1: Venezuela's industrial policy imploded as post Volcra shock government debt
Speaker 1: skyrocketed in the nineteen eighties, the government began to impose
Speaker 1: ims structural adjustments. Carlos Andres Perez, the man who led
Speaker 1: the industrial push in the Nite and seven ins, was
Speaker 1: elected a second time in nineteen eighty nine, running a
Speaker 1: campaign that I've seen euphemistically described as quote against liberalization policy.
Speaker 1: It was somewhat more extreme than that, featuring lines such
Speaker 1: as calling the I m F quote a bomb that
Speaker 1: only kills people. But Perez was negotiating with the I
Speaker 1: m F behind the scenes and imposed even harsher I
Speaker 1: m F Asteria measures upon winning the election, leading to
Speaker 1: a mass uprising in nineteen eighty nine that was suppressed
Speaker 1: in a bath of blood, with hundreds killed by the army.
Speaker 1: But even more structural adjustments were imposed after Perez was
Speaker 1: deposed for corruption n implemented ironically by the founder of
Speaker 1: the Movement towards Socialism, Teodoro Petkof, the head of Venezuela's
Speaker 1: planning agency in nineteen ninety six. All of Venezuela's economic
Speaker 1: crisis from the nineteen eighties until now stem from the
Speaker 1: failures of nineteen seventies industrialization. Without any kind of industrial economy,
Speaker 1: even the socialists that took power in the nine A
Speaker 1: national level were reduced to shuffling oil and surround and
Speaker 1: with the market economy still in place, the economy is
Speaker 1: simply imploded again when the royal prices fell. This is
Speaker 1: how neoliberalism comes to most countries not as policies implemented
Speaker 1: by anything even remotely resembling the will of the people,
Speaker 1: but enforced by the international economic system itself and the
Speaker 1: bureaucrats the I m F, the World Bank, and the
Speaker 1: World Trade Organization. It is imposed by enormous states at gunpoints,
Speaker 1: constituted by the mass looting of the population in order
Speaker 1: to pay corporate debt. Masters new liberals have effectively achieved
Speaker 1: their goal and transcendent democratic politics entirely from their purchase
Speaker 1: in the international bureaucracy. They can dictate policy to even
Speaker 1: hostile leaders. But tomorrow we'll see what happens when they
Speaker 1: take power domestically. As we would conclude our Neoliberalism series
Speaker 1: with a man rotting in Hell with Paul Walker Ronald
Speaker 1: Reagan when P. T. Barnum's Great American Museum burned to
Speaker 1: the ground and eighteen six five what rose from its
Speaker 1: ashes would change the world. Welcome to Grim and Mild
Speaker 1: presents an ongoing journey into the strange, the unusual, and
Speaker 1: the fascinating. For our inaugural season, we'll be giving you
Speaker 1: a backstage tour of the always complex and often misunderstood
Speaker 1: cultural artifact that is the American side show, So come
Speaker 1: along as we visit the shadowy corners of the stage
Speaker 1: and learn about the people who were at the center
Speaker 1: of it all in a place where spectacle was king.
Speaker 1: We will soon discover there's always more to the story
Speaker 1: than meets the eye. So step right up and get
Speaker 1: in line. Listen to Grim and Mile Presents now on
Speaker 1: the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: listen to podcasts. Learn more over at Grim and Mild
Speaker 1: dot com Slash Presents. I'm Jake Calbern, host of deep Cover.
Speaker 1: Our new season is about a lawyer who helped the
Speaker 1: mob run Chicago. We control the courts, We controlled absolutely everything.
Speaker 1: He brobed judges and even helped a hit man walk free,
Speaker 1: until one day when he started talking with the FBI
Speaker 1: and promised that he could take the mob down. I've
Speaker 1: spent the past year trying to figure out why he
Speaker 1: flipped and what he was really after. From my perspective,
Speaker 1: Bob was too good to be true. There's got to
Speaker 1: be something wrong with this. I wouldn't trust that guy.
Speaker 1: He looks like a little scum, big liar, stool pidgeon.
Speaker 1: He looked like what he was or at I can
Speaker 1: say with all certainty. I think he's a hero because
Speaker 1: he didn't have to do what he did, and he
Speaker 1: did it anyway. The moment I put the wire around
Speaker 1: the first time, my life was over. If it ever
Speaker 1: got out, they would kill me in a heartbeat. Listen
Speaker 1: to deep Cover on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Colleen with joined
Speaker 1: me the host of Eating Will Broke podcast. While I
Speaker 1: Eat a meal created by self made entrepreneurs, influencers and
Speaker 1: celebrities over a meal they once ate when they were broke.
Speaker 1: Today I have the lovely aj Crimson, the official Princess
Speaker 1: of compon, Asia Kidning and Assia. This is the professor.
Speaker 1: We're here on Eating While Broke and today I'm gonna
Speaker 1: break down my meal that got me through a time
Speaker 1: when I was broken. Listen to Eating While Broke on
Speaker 1: the I Heart Radio app, on Apple podcast or wherever
Speaker 1: you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here
Speaker 1: a show about things falling apart and is for one
Speaker 1: final time this week about why and how things have
Speaker 1: fallen apart in this specific way. Um, I'm I'm I'm
Speaker 1: your host Christopher and Today with Me, I have Garrison, Garrison, HELLU,
Speaker 1: how you doing. I'm doing fine. We're gonna talk about
Speaker 1: something that's not fine. It's not fine at all, is
Speaker 1: in fact extremely grim and bad, which is part four
Speaker 1: of our series of deal Liberalism, i e. All of
Speaker 1: the bad things happened at once, so in in in
Speaker 1: in all last episode we talked about how throughout throughout
Speaker 1: most of the Third World or you know what was
Speaker 1: at the time known as the Third World, new liberalism
Speaker 1: is not really imposed by people voting for it. It's
Speaker 1: mostly imposed by either external forces via coup or by
Speaker 1: just the I m F going okay, just we're running
Speaker 1: the country now, um, but this this, yeah, we're we're
Speaker 1: gonna shift our focus a bit this episode with the
Speaker 1: people who were I don't know, unfortunate enough, misguided enough,
Speaker 1: decided that they hated each other enough to actually choose
Speaker 1: neoliberalism for themselves. Now, one of the sort of stories
Speaker 1: we've been tracing here on sort of a very broad
Speaker 1: arc is the reaction by ne liberals to kind of
Speaker 1: kind of compromise it had been worked out between labor
Speaker 1: and capital, particularly the US after sort of the open
Speaker 1: class warfare in the reteen thirties, and you know, there's
Speaker 1: essentially this there's a kind of deal that's set up informally,
Speaker 1: which is so the we're working class will stop literally
Speaker 1: constantly going on strike and showing up the strikes with
Speaker 1: like enormous numbers of guns and shooting at people, and
Speaker 1: they will you know, stop trying to overshow the government
Speaker 1: in exchange, the state gives you welfare programs, the state
Speaker 1: will give you a house. And this is this is
Speaker 1: particularly after what we're too the Americans say it just
Speaker 1: you know, does this massive homeownersial campaign. And you know,
Speaker 1: if if you're if you're if you're you know, a
Speaker 1: union worker, particularly if you're a white man like this, this,
Speaker 1: you know, working working, working one of these union jobs
Speaker 1: will put you into the middle class. You can take vacations,
Speaker 1: you can have a house, um, you can get pensions.
Speaker 1: Your unions are legal now, which is the thing that
Speaker 1: like you know, hadn't happened before. And this is essentially
Speaker 1: you know, this is essentially a kind of insurgency tool. Um.
Speaker 1: The goal of this is to stop people from you know,
Speaker 1: doing the kinds of revolts. So we're happening in at
Speaker 1: the dirties, but by the nineteen seventies, it's becoming very
Speaker 1: clear that this sort of the like can't it can't
Speaker 1: really be maintained because it's too expensive for sort of
Speaker 1: the capital states to maintain and trying to maintain both well.
Speaker 1: And you know, the secondary thing here is is, you know, okay,
Speaker 1: so this deal specifically goes out to white men right now.
Speaker 1: Throughout the sixties and seventies, you get a bunch of
Speaker 1: other people who are not white men attempting to enter
Speaker 1: the workplace, attempting you get the same bargain, and you know,
Speaker 1: they're in a lot of ways significantly were militants. And
Speaker 1: this causes normal sponseimentional strife. You get you know, the
Speaker 1: US is murdering the black panthers. You get similar stuff
Speaker 1: in the UK. And the neoliberals basically are the people
Speaker 1: who just fully called this to tants off and are
Speaker 1: you know, essentially going to return to full scale class war.
Speaker 1: And so now now we are, we are finally getting
Speaker 1: to Reagan and Thatcher. And one day we will do
Speaker 1: a full episode about how Ronald Reagan, in a weird,
Speaker 1: shadowy cabal of Italian intelligence services, rigged the nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: election by planting fake stories about Jimmy Carter's brother and
Speaker 1: the press, which is if you hear the story, Garrison, No,
Speaker 1: but it sounds like regular media manipulation that happens all
Speaker 1: the time. Now. Yeah, yeah, it's it's yeah, there, there's, there's,
Speaker 1: there's there's there's a whole three line there because you
Speaker 1: know a lot of those like same kind of intelligence
Speaker 1: tactics are gonna be used SOUTHI Iraq war, and there's
Speaker 1: there's this whole sort of thing. Then you know, there's
Speaker 1: also the specific Italian angle of uh yeah, the Italian
Speaker 1: States being run by this rogue Masonic lodge led by
Speaker 1: a fascist and it's it's a time this is all
Speaker 1: going on there. But that's you know, I'm just I'm
Speaker 1: just thinking like Hunter Biden laptop and all of that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah stuff. It's like, oh so that's just the same playbook. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's the same thing, except like they were like
Speaker 1: actual intelligence people running it instead of just sort of
Speaker 1: like whatever Tucker carloson Tucker Carlos said in Glenn Greenwaal
Speaker 1: trying to get people like care about this thing that
Speaker 1: just nobody gives a single ship about. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: it was, it was, but the E's version of it
Speaker 1: was significantly more effective. And you know, the product of
Speaker 1: this is that Reagan sort of Reagan finds like the
Speaker 1: secret sauce for right wing politics, which is kind of
Speaker 1: you know, in in in in some ways, and Nixon
Speaker 1: had been trying to develop it hadn't quite gotten right,
Speaker 1: which is no, yeah, yeah, yeah. He he figures out
Speaker 1: that you know, if if you want to do nei liberalism,
Speaker 1: if you want to stroy the unions, you want to
Speaker 1: stroy the welfare state, the way you do it is
Speaker 1: basically a combination of racist tax and welfare recipients, and
Speaker 1: you mobilize new religious right. And this is extremely effective
Speaker 1: and it's but I think it's also interesting and worth
Speaker 1: noting that, you know, if if you got all the
Speaker 1: back to episode one, like this is this is rope
Speaker 1: keys like white nationalism, like sure German white nationalism. Thing
Speaker 1: is this is explicitly what Ropeky sort of strategy for
Speaker 1: implenting new liberalism was. The problem is he was German
Speaker 1: and Catholic, which meant that like it could never work
Speaker 1: in the US. But you know, you get Reagan, suddenly
Speaker 1: you get the American version of it, that is, you know,
Speaker 1: white but Erican and then also works off the sort
Speaker 1: of of off of the sort of mass Protestantism in
Speaker 1: the US, and this becomes a force that is responsible
Speaker 1: for like almost every bad thing that exists today in
Speaker 1: some form or another. Lot of them. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: not not often, but you know, I think thing things
Speaker 1: go extremely badly. And so Reagan wins this election, and
Speaker 1: then almost exactly the same time, Margaret Thatcher wins the
Speaker 1: wins her election in in the UK, and that the
Speaker 1: combination of those two things, and also, as you talked
Speaker 1: about last episode, the Vulcar shock, where Vulcar raises the
Speaker 1: interest rates, just raised defendation become so Vulcar is installed
Speaker 1: weirdly not by Ronald Reagan but by Jimmy Carter, but
Speaker 1: is given this sort of mandate to just do whatever,
Speaker 1: literally do whatever you have to to to get inflation
Speaker 1: under control. The thing that he decides to do is
Speaker 1: just literally nuke the entire world economy, you know when
Speaker 1: we talked about the effects of this hat on sort
Speaker 1: of the world in the last episode. But in the
Speaker 1: US this sets off a recession at last basically from
Speaker 1: like nineteen seventy nine to Night two at the height
Speaker 1: of it. It's like it's I think we finally got
Speaker 1: more people unemployed during the pandemic, but I'm like sure
Speaker 1: that between World War Two and the pandemic, that was
Speaker 1: the single largest number of people who have been unemployed
Speaker 1: in the US, which just yeah, it was just apocle,
Speaker 1: just apocle devastation. And you know, there's there's there's a
Speaker 1: whole thing here where the head of the a f
Speaker 1: l C. I OH is literally begging Vulcar like, please
Speaker 1: don't do this, like we can get inflation under control after,
Speaker 1: you know, after the economy recovers, and vocals just like no.
Speaker 1: The consequence of this is that you have you have
Speaker 1: an economy in which is no more number people unemployed,
Speaker 1: and the unions are weak, and both Reagan and Thatcher
Speaker 1: sort of see this. Now the unions in the UK
Speaker 1: are in a snifful better position of the American unions.
Speaker 1: Reagan is able to sort of smashed the American unions
Speaker 1: very quickly. There's there's the you know, the famous air
Speaker 1: traffic control strike where a bunch of American air traffic
Speaker 1: controllers go on strike technically illegally, and Reagan just has
Speaker 1: literally every single one of them fired and replaces them
Speaker 1: with just like like like people from flight school, like
Speaker 1: people who just just like ap literally anyone he can
Speaker 1: just like pull off the street who sort of kind
Speaker 1: of knows how to how to land an aircraft, like
Speaker 1: they put on people from the military. It's it's just
Speaker 1: like this absolutely wild sort of feet of strike breaking.
Speaker 1: And then you know, and when when when that falls,
Speaker 1: and that that strike fails, you know, the air traffic controllers, well, okay,
Speaker 1: funnily so, the air traff controllers had actually backed Reagan.
Speaker 1: They were like the only union that backed Reagan in
Speaker 1: the election, and they immediately just get you know, they
Speaker 1: get gutted for it, which, like I have mixed feelings
Speaker 1: about because like on the one hand, like, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: that's that's what you get. But on the other hand,
Speaker 1: this is basically what the stories this dis is the
Speaker 1: consequences that this is basically what the stories like trade
Speaker 1: unions in the US because at this at this point,
Speaker 1: everyone realizes that the unions a week and they just start,
Speaker 1: you know, there's uet to the point where employers are
Speaker 1: deliberately provoking strikes so that they can just fire all
Speaker 1: the unionized employees. And it's extremely effective. In in Britain,
Speaker 1: the fight is a lot more intense um in in
Speaker 1: in Ninity four, Thatcher cuts cold, like basically Thatchery wants
Speaker 1: to provoke a fight with with the coal unions, and
Speaker 1: so she basically wants to shut down a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of coal production and fire like twenty miners, and the
Speaker 1: miners go on strike, and they go on strike for
Speaker 1: over a year. But Thatcher had basically stockpiled enough cold
Speaker 1: to stay off the worst effects of the strike. And
Speaker 1: then she makes these incredibly elaborate network of deals with
Speaker 1: like She's like this this whole scab driver like union,
Speaker 1: like basicallyically this whole network of scab drivers, like make
Speaker 1: sure you can move the coal around while the strike's
Speaker 1: going on. There there's all of this stuff, and you know,
Speaker 1: and and she eventually is able to crust the coal strike.
Speaker 1: And this also just just completely annihilates, like the British
Speaker 1: trade union movement, I mean union participation, I think dreaming
Speaker 1: Thatcher's term alone falls and it's gotten way worse since then.
Speaker 1: So so with with those two incidents, the air traffic
Speaker 1: control and the coal did did those just kind of
Speaker 1: make people be disillusioned or did that just like pave
Speaker 1: the way for similar tactics to be acceptable for every
Speaker 1: other union that tried to do the same thing both
Speaker 1: and then the ever thing was fear because you know,
Speaker 1: so with the air traffic controllers, right, the air traffic
Speaker 1: controllers are you know, these are the most highly skilled
Speaker 1: like people people in there there. These are a bunch
Speaker 1: of people who are incredibly highly skilled, and they're in there,
Speaker 1: in there in a logistic industry, right, So you know,
Speaker 1: in theory, these are the people who have like the
Speaker 1: maximum amount of impact if they would go on strike.
Speaker 1: And when Reagan shows that you can literally just fire
Speaker 1: twenty four thousand people of like the most highly skilled
Speaker 1: sort of workers in the in the US, you can
Speaker 1: fire them and just break the strike and nothing will happen,
Speaker 1: and you know, the result is total defeat and none
Speaker 1: of these people ever work again. That basically spreads this
Speaker 1: massive wave of fear through the union movements because you know,
Speaker 1: if they can fire those guys, that can fire anyone,
Speaker 1: and then you know, the the employers should start doing it.
Speaker 1: And the other thing that's been happening here is that
Speaker 1: for really since the end of the forties, the unions
Speaker 1: have kind of so we'll we'll talk about this more
Speaker 1: in in in an interview that's gonna come out probably
Speaker 1: next week about sort of the history American union movements,
Speaker 1: but American unions basically so American, like the union movement
Speaker 1: was built by radical organizers and in the forties and
Speaker 1: sort of moving on from there, all these people get
Speaker 1: expelled from labor movement, and labor fights this basically incredibly
Speaker 1: intense battle against its own left flank, and you have
Speaker 1: you know, like, for example, in in there's this thing
Speaker 1: called the Dodge Revolutionary Movement, right, which is a bunch
Speaker 1: of mostly black workers in Detroit who are you know,
Speaker 1: they're they're they're they're forming unions, they're going on strike,
Speaker 1: but they're also fighting against the the u a W
Speaker 1: because the U a W is cooperating too closer but
Speaker 1: the bosses etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And there's there's there's these
Speaker 1: you know, there's there's basically this battle between like not
Speaker 1: even just basically between the unions ranked and file and
Speaker 1: the radicals and the sort of business union management. And
Speaker 1: in fighting that battle, the unions had basically like massively
Speaker 1: weakened themselves. And then you know, by by by by
Speaker 1: the time you hit the eighties, especially in the US,
Speaker 1: the unions are just sort of a shell out their
Speaker 1: former selves and and Reagan just sort of like smashes
Speaker 1: them aside. And Thatcher the British unions are much stronger,
Speaker 1: but you know, I mean that Thatcher is preparing to
Speaker 1: like like there she she has plans to, like the
Speaker 1: army is going to come in and suppress the strike.
Speaker 1: There's these and especially there's there's just, I mean just
Speaker 1: an absolutely incredible amount of police violence. Um that's you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, this is this is something that had like
Speaker 1: happened before dream strikes, but the the the the level
Speaker 1: of intensity of it is just like massively increased. And
Speaker 1: there's also another thing that's happening basically at the same
Speaker 1: time of this, which is squeezing the units from the
Speaker 1: other side, which is there's this I guess you could
Speaker 1: call it like an internal class war inside the ruling
Speaker 1: class between well specifically inside inside of the sort of
Speaker 1: corporate management between the sort of traditional like manager CEO
Speaker 1: class and the sort of like I guess you could
Speaker 1: call them, I don't know, the sort of Wall Street
Speaker 1: finance bank types and so so yeah, so One of
Speaker 1: the other things that that happens at the end of
Speaker 1: you know, basically after the war is the sort of
Speaker 1: class compromise was talking about like this, this happens inside
Speaker 1: of the company too, and people start to see the
Speaker 1: corporation as like a social institution. It has you know,
Speaker 1: it's like, well, okay, so there's this alliance between middle
Speaker 1: management and the workers. And I was like, okay, so
Speaker 1: we we both worked with each other, and you know,
Speaker 1: the compromises that you guys got to have unions, but
Speaker 1: the unions won't sort of disrupt production, will all work
Speaker 1: together and we'll just make like I don't know, we'll
Speaker 1: we'll make really really good ballpoint pens together. And so yeah,
Speaker 1: you have this lince between sort of middle managements and
Speaker 1: and these unions. You know, and this this is embedded
Speaker 1: into the structure of the corporation because you know, you
Speaker 1: not you not only have the unions, but you have
Speaker 1: corporations paying pensions. One of the things that that Reagan
Speaker 1: does is that Reagan starts, you know, Reagan does this
Speaker 1: massive series of financial deregulations, and the other part of
Speaker 1: this agreement basically had been that like the high level
Speaker 1: of finance class has sort of stayed out of the
Speaker 1: way of management, and so management kind of like you know,
Speaker 1: the the you get this like this independent sort of
Speaker 1: CEO class that that's that's a distinct thing that you
Speaker 1: know that there people who come up through the company
Speaker 1: who managers and worked away at the top. And this
Speaker 1: is a distinct thing from sort of the finance people
Speaker 1: who are like they're not supposed to be allowed, like
Speaker 1: you know, the touch production. But in the nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: the finance people start to look at this and go, wait,
Speaker 1: hold on, why are we not running things? And the
Speaker 1: finance people have because they have are two things on
Speaker 1: their side. One they have a sort of neoliberal ideology,
Speaker 1: and the second thing they have is so Michael Milken
Speaker 1: he figures out how to do this thing called a
Speaker 1: leverage buyout option. It's it's it's a it's a kind
Speaker 1: of complicated financial instrument. The short and simple explanation of
Speaker 1: what it is is he figures out a way too
Speaker 1: basically go into a bunch of debt, and he gets
Speaker 1: he gets people to givehim a bunch of money, like
Speaker 1: in the form of these bonds, and then he uses
Speaker 1: it just buy out entire companies he buys one of
Speaker 1: the company. And if you own fits of the company,
Speaker 1: now you control, you have controlling interest. And so he
Speaker 1: goes in and she just she just raises the stock
Speaker 1: prices of all these companies. And now you know, but
Speaker 1: I mean, now he's gone into an enormous amount of
Speaker 1: debts right in order to buy, in order to buy
Speaker 1: this company, and so you know, in order to pay
Speaker 1: off that debt, he just starts strip money in the company.
Speaker 1: And so he starts, you know, anything that can be
Speaker 1: sold for money that he can put in his pocket
Speaker 1: to pay off his debt starts getting sold. And you know,
Speaker 1: every anything the corporate that the company is doing, it
Speaker 1: doesn't immediately make money or doesn't immediately raise the stock
Speaker 1: price gets cut. And so you know, there there, there,
Speaker 1: there are. There are two major things that a company
Speaker 1: has that don't immediately make money and don't raise the
Speaker 1: stock price, and that is pensions and research and development.
Speaker 1: And this this has you know, this, this this this
Speaker 1: this becomes known as the sort of this is the
Speaker 1: hustle takeover waves. It gets rebranded as mergers and acquisitions
Speaker 1: in the nineties, but it's it's this huge sort of
Speaker 1: wave those these corporate scrips corporate America, and it turns
Speaker 1: the corporation from this kind of social body where it's like, well,
Speaker 1: everyone's cooperating and companies sort of have this responsibility to
Speaker 1: like provide for their workers and provide sort of for
Speaker 1: like the social good into literally the only like the
Speaker 1: single entire your purpose of any company is to raise
Speaker 1: the stock price. And this yeah, this is really bad. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and and you know, the part about it that's
Speaker 1: awful is that, you know, okay, so all all literally
Speaker 1: all a corporate rad has to do in order to
Speaker 1: buy out one of these companies is be able to
Speaker 1: is be able to offer a price for the stock
Speaker 1: that's higher from the stock price of the company now.
Speaker 1: And this means even so they're they're they're there's a
Speaker 1: very famous series of battles they buy out. An enormous
Speaker 1: number of companies get bought out into strip minds like this,
Speaker 1: and you know, and everything and again these are these
Speaker 1: are very very profitable companies, right, These are companies with
Speaker 1: large research development budget. These are companies that are making
Speaker 1: enormous amounts of money, and they're just completely destroyed in
Speaker 1: order to sort of just like satiate these just like
Speaker 1: absolute Google, corporate like vulture Rader people. This is you know,
Speaker 1: if you remember, might be too young for this, but
Speaker 1: Romney's campaign for so yeah. One of one of the
Speaker 1: reasons why Romney loses is that like he's one of
Speaker 1: these guys like he's he's like he's the big bang
Speaker 1: capital guy, and everyone's kind of looked at him and
Speaker 1: goes like, you're the reason we'd like guide to this
Speaker 1: mess in the first place. But the problem, the problem
Speaker 1: is that these people who have enough money and they
Speaker 1: have enough power, they were able to do this and
Speaker 1: in order to stop them, so either there there there's
Speaker 1: a massive there's a massive fight. A bunch of people
Speaker 1: try to take over good Year, who you know, they
Speaker 1: make the tires, they have the blimps, and Goodyear CEO
Speaker 1: is like fanatically opposed to all of this because you know,
Speaker 1: he's he's from the old ceo crop who's like, wow, okay,
Speaker 1: we're here to like make things instead of you know,
Speaker 1: increased stock prices. But the problem is the only way
Speaker 1: he can save off the raiders is by increasing a
Speaker 1: stock price. And the only way to increase stock prices
Speaker 1: is by doing the things the corporate raiders already doing
Speaker 1: so he starts slashing ptations. He starts slashing with your
Speaker 1: development budgets. Yeah, and this and this, this sort of
Speaker 1: cycles because now you have you know, there's there, there's
Speaker 1: it's it's it's you're not only having pressure for you know,
Speaker 1: like the government that's that's anti union. The corporations themselves
Speaker 1: are being forced to become more anti union because they're
Speaker 1: you know, they now have this pressure on them from
Speaker 1: the top down, from from these sort of these sort
Speaker 1: of finance schools, and the finance schools in a lot
Speaker 1: of ways just the perfect nilable subjects, right, because they
Speaker 1: only see the world in money. They see everything as
Speaker 1: a market that they literally think that like they they
Speaker 1: are like these like shamans if if if there's a
Speaker 1: really good ethnography that I've plugged before on here called
Speaker 1: liquidated and an ethnography and void yet liquidated in Ethnography
Speaker 1: of Wall Street where an anthropologist goes onto Wall Street
Speaker 1: and works there for a while and then you cannot
Speaker 1: a bunch of interviews, doesn't it does endthpological stuff. And
Speaker 1: the way they talk about the market, they they literally
Speaker 1: talk about as if they're channeling it, right, like it's
Speaker 1: like something and they're like, these are yea, these are
Speaker 1: these are that's that's one of the new gods of
Speaker 1: of our world. That yeah, that's I mean, that's that's
Speaker 1: not an uncommon term of phrase to describe stuff like this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and what what what what I think is they
Speaker 1: just think about it though, is that you know that
Speaker 1: conception of the market of like every person is just
Speaker 1: like a peer like completely socially unbounds like thing of
Speaker 1: capital that you oh, well, okay, if you lose your
Speaker 1: job here, you can just moved to another firm, right,
Speaker 1: So this makes sense inside of the context of Wall
Speaker 1: Street because these people like like these Wall Street firms
Speaker 1: they have they have like like thirty pc and turn
Speaker 1: over a year, and so all these people are constantly
Speaker 1: being fired and shuffle onto the next job, and fired
Speaker 1: and shuffle on to the next job. And so you know,
Speaker 1: they so they they do they do this very common
Speaker 1: sort of fallacy thing where they assume that because this
Speaker 1: is the way that it works for them, but this
Speaker 1: is the way it's gonna work for everyone else, And
Speaker 1: then they genuine and a lot of these people genuinely
Speaker 1: believe this. They're like, well, Okay, So the things we're
Speaker 1: gonna with, things that we're about to do, like, you know,
Speaker 1: when we destroy these workers entire lives, when we be
Speaker 1: you know, when we close their factories, when we take
Speaker 1: their pensions, when we literally destroyed like every community and
Speaker 1: every like thing that's every just in your lives, they're like, oh,
Speaker 1: they'll just pick themselves up and go to another place
Speaker 1: and they'll be fine, because you know, if you're you're
Speaker 1: you know, a Wall Street finance school, like, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: that's what happens when you get fired every three months.
Speaker 1: And so these people, these people basically take control of
Speaker 1: the entire corporate sector. They do. They do this very
Speaker 1: quickly by you know, they start this in the sort
Speaker 1: of early eighties. And uh, Milliken, the guy who comes
Speaker 1: up with the junk bonds leveraged buyout scheme, like he
Speaker 1: he goes to jail for I think securities fraud. They
Speaker 1: get him for fraud. But it doesn't it a lot
Speaker 1: of those guys, yea, all of these people like again,
Speaker 1: all of these people are just doing crime. Like now, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's how finance standards, this is how this is how
Speaker 1: the Action Park guy got kicked out. You got kicked
Speaker 1: out doing in all the same stuff. And again I
Speaker 1: want to put this out, like the stuff they're doing
Speaker 1: is so illegal that like even the Reagan administration was like, no,
Speaker 1: we have to prosecute you. Like it's like this is
Speaker 1: the this is the Ronald Reagan Justice Departments, and they're
Speaker 1: like it was it was so much grib Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's really bad. And and you know the result of
Speaker 1: this is just basically the total visceration of of the
Speaker 1: working class just like as a movement. And you know,
Speaker 1: all the left wing parties are sort of shaped by this,
Speaker 1: and you know, and you know, we we've been focusing
Speaker 1: on on the US and UH and the UK here,
Speaker 1: but this is not the only place this happens. And
Speaker 1: you know, so one of the you know, like this,
Speaker 1: this happens, this, this also starts happening like in socialist states.
Speaker 1: Um and we talked about this in more detail in
Speaker 1: our interview with Arnessa Kusutra about Bosnia. But one of
Speaker 1: the big things that Miloshevik is doing in Yugoslavia and
Speaker 1: when when he takes power and he starts like actually
Speaker 1: being a real political force in think in eighties, is
Speaker 1: he starts doing basically all of the same stuff that
Speaker 1: that that Reagan attacherent doing. He starts, he starts implemented
Speaker 1: shocked dooction, he starts privatization, he starts um like marketization,
Speaker 1: he starts cutting studying, cutting price controls, he starts sort
Speaker 1: of he starts doing I don't know if decollectivization is
Speaker 1: quite the right word, because Yugoslavia's economic system is complicated
Speaker 1: and weirder than uh, the USSRS. But you know, he
Speaker 1: does this, and this is one of the things that
Speaker 1: starts Yugoslavia's death spiral, because you know, you have this
Speaker 1: enormous economic devastation from the increase in oil prices for
Speaker 1: the oil shock, and then that gets paired with, you know,
Speaker 1: the the economic devastation from everyone losing their benefits, people
Speaker 1: losing de pensions, the state own industries going under and
Speaker 1: getting privatized, um the sort of like collective ownership structures, imploading.
Speaker 1: And the product of this is that, you know, Melosvik
Speaker 1: looks at this and it's like, Okay, how can I
Speaker 1: stay in power? And his answer is just genocide on that.
Speaker 1: It's just genocide on nationalism. And this sort of collapse
Speaker 1: or sort of state in social life is you know,
Speaker 1: and and the leaders at the top realizing that they
Speaker 1: can weaponize sort of nationalism is one of the things
Speaker 1: at least directly to the Boston and genocide. Now towards
Speaker 1: the end of the eighties, the whole Soviet block starts
Speaker 1: coming apart. Um. Yeah, you know, the Berlin Wall falls
Speaker 1: and eventually, you know, the Soviet Union dissolves, and the
Speaker 1: people who are trying to end the Soviet Union, the
Speaker 1: things that they want basically are like freedom of speech, uh,
Speaker 1: the ability to like leave the country and basically like
Speaker 1: Scandinavian style social democracy. And it was like reasonable from
Speaker 1: the Soviet Union. Yeah yeah, and you know, I mean
Speaker 1: these these people like you know, this is these you know,
Speaker 1: like they they they wanted to live in Scandinavia and
Speaker 1: instead they got, hey, welcome to the US. But like
Speaker 1: even worse. Yeah and so yeah yeah, yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: really bad. And you know what what they get said
Speaker 1: is just these this normous wave of privatizations the worldfaret
Speaker 1: stage just vanishes, and you know this this causes basically
Speaker 1: like total societal collapse. Um. Like one of my one
Speaker 1: of my professors, and this this happens basically across the
Speaker 1: whole Soviet block one of professions in college, and I
Speaker 1: think she was fumble gary. Um. She she told me
Speaker 1: about how dream the nineties like when she when she
Speaker 1: was growing up, like she and her family would just
Speaker 1: the only thing they had to eat was raw millet
Speaker 1: because there's no food. There's there's literally no food anywhere.
Speaker 1: The entire economy is collapsed. Nobody has any money, and
Speaker 1: so you know, I was like, well, okay, everyone's eating
Speaker 1: raw grain because you know that that's what that's that's
Speaker 1: the only thing you can you can you have to survive.
Speaker 1: And you know, it's this it's it's literally so bad
Speaker 1: that in Russia it causes the single largest life expectancy
Speaker 1: drop in post World War Europe. It's like like it's
Speaker 1: the life expected to decrease is about like four years
Speaker 1: because so many people die from this. Um you know,
Speaker 1: and on one of the one of the ways this
Speaker 1: happens is that there's so the way either they're going
Speaker 1: to deal with like the state owned industry thing is
Speaker 1: they they okay, And I've never been able to figure
Speaker 1: this figure out if it was like they they actually
Speaker 1: took Murray Rothbard's plan for this or if they just
Speaker 1: independently developed were a Rothbar's plan for for for dissolving
Speaker 1: state own the industries, which is give like everyone who
Speaker 1: worked in it a share of the company. And so
Speaker 1: they do this right, and everyone has these shares, but
Speaker 1: these shares are just like paper, and you can't eat
Speaker 1: this paper. So a bunch of sort of like organized
Speaker 1: crime guys and the people who have been you know,
Speaker 1: like like the sort of the people who've been richer
Speaker 1: or like had been sort of connected party people who
Speaker 1: were just like I'm just gonna cash out start, you know,
Speaker 1: just just going through cities and they're they'll, you know,
Speaker 1: they'll be like, okay, we'll give you a pair of gene,
Speaker 1: like we'll give you some food if you give us
Speaker 1: their share, and you know, everyone people just give up
Speaker 1: their shares. And the result of this is that like
Speaker 1: just every industry at Russia immediately falls under the control
Speaker 1: of just just like absolutely psychotic oligarchs. And you know,
Speaker 1: the the West definitely sharing this on that this this
Speaker 1: whole process is engineered by just a bunch of just
Speaker 1: like pure neoliberal ghoul like Harvards, like weird Harvard grads
Speaker 1: who gets sent into Russia and who are like, oh,
Speaker 1: we're gonna we're gonna run the Russian economy and we're
Speaker 1: gonna like fix everything, and they just just absolutely destroy it.
Speaker 1: And you know, the West has the thing they're they're
Speaker 1: you know, they're they're they're cheering on this whole process.
Speaker 1: They have this thing about how like everyone has to
Speaker 1: do belt tightening and it's you're gonna suffer for a
Speaker 1: bit and it'll all be worth it. And meanwhile, Boris
Speaker 1: Jelson is just completely drunk off his asked like shelling
Speaker 1: the parliament with tanks, while like the U. S. Press
Speaker 1: is cheering, and you know there's the sort of like
Speaker 1: you know, the tragedy this is like it's not really
Speaker 1: like Russia got like more free, you know, like they
Speaker 1: still they still torture and disappeared anarchists and secret prisons
Speaker 1: like you know they're there. They still just like randomly
Speaker 1: assassinate political dissidence with through increasingly bizarre like poison bullshit.
Speaker 1: Yeah they sure do. Yeah, but you know the big
Speaker 1: difference is that a bunch of Harvard grads made an
Speaker 1: indescribable amount of money. You now, no one has any
Speaker 1: pensions um and there's there's this is great, like this
Speaker 1: is a great Russian joke from this period that goes
Speaker 1: he's talking about the communists. Everything they ever told us
Speaker 1: about communism was alive, but everything they ever told us
Speaker 1: about capitalism was absolutely true. Yeah, that's that seems to
Speaker 1: be roughly accurate. Yeah, it's it's basically true. And you know,
Speaker 1: and and the product is sort of neoliberalism coming to
Speaker 1: Russia is that by by by the end of the nineties,
Speaker 1: Russia is just literally controlled by the mob and these
Speaker 1: sort of monsters oligarchs. And Putin's campaign is like I
Speaker 1: am better than the mob, and I will bring them.
Speaker 1: I will bring the mob and the oligarchs under control.
Speaker 1: And this is you know that, this is how Putin
Speaker 1: takes power because and he has failed to hold up
Speaker 1: to that probless to be fair, to be fair, the
Speaker 1: you are significantly less likely to just like randomly be
Speaker 1: kidnapped and ransoms. Not me. Oh I have I have
Speaker 1: wrote for a website. He does not like I could.
Speaker 1: That's true, that's true. Yeah, if yeah, if you kiss
Speaker 1: off Putin, you might be held for ransom. But it's like,
Speaker 1: you know the number of random people who don't do
Speaker 1: anything political who are just like randomly held for ransom.
Speaker 1: Did kind of go down a bit, and like that's
Speaker 1: I mean, all right, all right, you gotta hand it
Speaker 1: to Putin, Okay, I give him. Yeah, well okay. The
Speaker 1: thing on hand to Putin is that he restored the
Speaker 1: state's monopoly on violence. Now that's not a good thing now,
Speaker 1: but he did it. Yeah, he well he did it.
Speaker 1: And you know this, this was the basis of sort
Speaker 1: of because his power and political support was that and
Speaker 1: sort of nationalism. And this is like you know, and
Speaker 1: and there's always just the sort of liberal line on
Speaker 1: on on Putin. He's like, oh, he's an SKGB guy,
Speaker 1: and like oh, it's still communism again. And it's like no,
Speaker 1: like no, no, and and that this this brings me
Speaker 1: back to the single thing that I I need everyone
Speaker 1: to understand about, need to listen, which is that near
Speaker 1: liberalism does not decrease the size of the state. Like
Speaker 1: there there were more there were more bureaucrats now in
Speaker 1: the Russian State than there were under the Soviet Union. No,
Speaker 1: And it definitely and in order for it to operate,
Speaker 1: it definitely extends drastically that like the hands of the
Speaker 1: state in terms of like like like military police, law enforcement,
Speaker 1: like all those things. In order to keep this weird
Speaker 1: market driven thing alive, you need to have a lot
Speaker 1: of like enforcement on people who don't have but both
Speaker 1: both people who like actually make money and then but
Speaker 1: most of the people who don't make very much money.
Speaker 1: So it increases not only like the bureaucratic state, but
Speaker 1: also like the enforcement armor of the state. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I think there's there's there's there's there's two interesting ways
Speaker 1: this happens. One is that, well, okay, there's three ways happens.
Speaker 1: One is that anytime someone says they're gonna they're gonna
Speaker 1: do deregulation, like deregulation does not mean that they're going
Speaker 1: to decrease the number of regulations there are. What it
Speaker 1: means is that the regulations are bad for this company,
Speaker 1: and so they're they're going they're going to they're going
Speaker 1: to add more regulations in a way that is good
Speaker 1: for this company. And the thing is that this actually
Speaker 1: this you know, this net increases the size of the state.
Speaker 1: Right there. They're not like they're not like they're not
Speaker 1: decreasing the number of laws or whatever. They're you know,
Speaker 1: they're they're they're they're they're writing like incredibly like absolutely
Speaker 1: incomprehensible banking legislation that like, let's banks charge like interest
Speaker 1: rates that previously only organized crime could do. And then
Speaker 1: there's there's another aspect of this, which is that, you know,
Speaker 1: so the the welfare that remains right, you know, it
Speaker 1: becomes means tested, and you know that means that there's
Speaker 1: so you have the bureaucracy right that like gives you things,
Speaker 1: and then you have another bureaucracy on top of that
Speaker 1: that decides whether or not you should be allowed to
Speaker 1: do the thing it puts you know, there's this this
Speaker 1: is just just this like process of abject humiliation that
Speaker 1: you have to go to to receive anything, yeah, from
Speaker 1: the state. And it's like and that sucks. And then
Speaker 1: because that is so awful, there's another layer of bureaucracy,
Speaker 1: which is like social workers and stuff, whose job it is,
Speaker 1: in large part, is to help you bypass the second
Speaker 1: layer of bureaucracy. So that creates another layer. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: there's there's there's so much. Yeah it is, and but
Speaker 1: but this is you know this, this this is one
Speaker 1: of the things in the liberals do, which is okay,
Speaker 1: so you know, you you have you have, you have
Speaker 1: your two doctrines. Right, you have the thing they actually believe,
Speaker 1: which is enormous, bureaucratic, military state, and then you have
Speaker 1: the thing they claim to believe, which is, oh, the
Speaker 1: state needs to be smaller, state needs to be decentralized,
Speaker 1: the state shouldn't it you fear in the market. And
Speaker 1: so whenever, whenever, like the things that they do get
Speaker 1: too bad, they have this other thing that can turn
Speaker 1: to you to go, oh, yeah, the reason there's too
Speaker 1: much bureaucracy is because the state's getting involved too much.
Speaker 1: Elect us and we will get rid of the bureaucracy.
Speaker 1: And then you elect them and they make the state bigger,
Speaker 1: and you know, you get this started perpetual cycle. I
Speaker 1: think the reason people get confused by this is that
Speaker 1: when when people when most people think of the state, right,
Speaker 1: they think of the state is something that provide services.
Speaker 1: You know that the quintessential thing of state does is
Speaker 1: build roads roads. Yeah, you know, you know when we
Speaker 1: can talk about how like the US building roads probably
Speaker 1: doomed the entire earth climate change. Oh yeah, no, like
Speaker 1: the way that we've done roads around cars and the
Speaker 1: type of things we make roads. Yeah it's horrible, but
Speaker 1: yeah it's awful. Yeah, but but there there's there's there's
Speaker 1: another thing about roads which is interesting, which is that
Speaker 1: roads are you know, so the original reason why states
Speaker 1: built roads was they can move armies around and and
Speaker 1: this comes back to the core of what a state is. Right,
Speaker 1: there is nothing in the actual core definition of a state,
Speaker 1: which is basically it's a hierarch couple of localized monopoly
Speaker 1: on violence. Right, there's nothing in that that has that
Speaker 1: like says at all the state has to do anything
Speaker 1: for you, right, like if if you know, if two
Speaker 1: guys with guns show up and sees a place, right,
Speaker 1: they can create a state. They don't have to give
Speaker 1: you anything. The state is the fundamental core of the
Speaker 1: state is just a bunch of armed people who can
Speaker 1: order people around and you know, people people sort of
Speaker 1: can people sort of confuse the two. And the neoliberalisms
Speaker 1: entire thing is increasing the increasing the military, you know
Speaker 1: that the part of the state that takes things from
Speaker 1: you at gunpoint and decreasing the part of the states
Speaker 1: that like gives you things. And you know, one of
Speaker 1: one of the there's one of one of the other
Speaker 1: things that that happens in this period is that labor
Speaker 1: increasingly stops being about making or doing anything and just
Speaker 1: becomes pure guard labor. So, you know, the the the
Speaker 1: last big neliberal project that doesn't really get talked about
Speaker 1: as a deliberal project ever, is that mass incarceration is
Speaker 1: a deliberal project. It started under under Nixon and under Carter.
Speaker 1: But you know, so when when Reagan takes office that
Speaker 1: the American prison population is about three thousand. When he
Speaker 1: leaves office, he has basically doubled it to uh six
Speaker 1: seven thousand. We have now more than doubled it again.
Speaker 1: And you know it it basically it You know when
Speaker 1: whenever you get a large near liiberal administration that they
Speaker 1: you know, they double it, right, it basically doubles again
Speaker 1: dreamed between the Clinton administration, you know, it keeps accelerating
Speaker 1: and you know this is this is this is the
Speaker 1: other thing that that neoliberalism brings in, which is that okay,
Speaker 1: so near liberals and produces this enormous population of people
Speaker 1: who don't have any jobs, have no opportunities whatsoever, are
Speaker 1: just screwed. So what do you do with them? And
Speaker 1: the answer is slavery and basically everywhere that you stay
Speaker 1: using neoliberalism, you see massive increases into prison population. Espect
Speaker 1: like the US is by far the worst example of this,
Speaker 1: but this happens. You know that the seven is basically
Speaker 1: across the world and what what what you see is
Speaker 1: in place of you know, it's this is this one
Speaker 1: of the things that dries politics in sort of in
Speaker 1: real reasons in the US, which is that you have
Speaker 1: these places that used to sort of have industry is used,
Speaker 1: particularly like coal mining, things like that, and it gets
Speaker 1: replaced by prison because prisons, you know, having a prison
Speaker 1: in your sort of rural town is is the only
Speaker 1: way to sort of ensure that you have a large
Speaker 1: economic base. And so you know, like local local city
Speaker 1: councils are you know, incredibly pro prison because it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: well the president would bring your jobs and you know
Speaker 1: this means that okay, so so so the people a
Speaker 1: lot of people who are prison guards are just you know, fascists.
Speaker 1: But there's also people who are prison guards who normally
Speaker 1: would just be workers. Yeah no, absolutely, yeah, who have
Speaker 1: just been sort of but you know, there's nothing left
Speaker 1: right and they they're fighting, Uh Mike Davis talks about this,
Speaker 1: that they're fighting this just incredibly desperate, ferocious struggle to
Speaker 1: like stay in the places they love and stay with
Speaker 1: their families, and stay with their friends, stay with their communities.
Speaker 1: And the only way they can do this is, you know,
Speaker 1: by becoming part of this like just the neo liberal
Speaker 1: health state. And you know, they don't like it either,
Speaker 1: but that's you know, that's what the liberalism is, right,
Speaker 1: is you no longer have a job. The only job
Speaker 1: available to you is picking up a gun and pointing
Speaker 1: it at someone who is exactly the same as you,
Speaker 1: except you know, they've been thrown into the slavery part
Speaker 1: of the system instead of the people holding the guns
Speaker 1: at the slavery part of the system. And one of
Speaker 1: the things that that happens a lot of people just
Speaker 1: really conflate about what neoliberalism is is they can use
Speaker 1: it libertarianism, yes, and they're not the same thing. And
Speaker 1: and this, this is a condus is a very confusing
Speaker 1: problem because well, a, the term nea liberals don't get
Speaker 1: used in the US all that much. When people use it,
Speaker 1: they usually use it to mean something bad. And that's
Speaker 1: just about it. Yeah, yeah, and and you know, and
Speaker 1: and also another part of the problem is that even
Speaker 1: if you go into like the Montpellion Society, right, which
Speaker 1: you know this is this is this is the arch
Speaker 1: de liberal institution, and it's just like basically like a
Speaker 1: think tank generator. There are there are libertarians in there.
Speaker 1: There there are there are narco capitalists in the Montpellion Society,
Speaker 1: and the one Pillion Society is fighting this sort of
Speaker 1: constant internal battle between the people who actually believe the
Speaker 1: things that they say publicly, like you actually believe you
Speaker 1: should have a small state blah bla blah blah blah,
Speaker 1: and the people who understand that all the small states
Speaker 1: stuff is just like stuff you tell the masses in
Speaker 1: order to get them to like slash welfare things, while
Speaker 1: you just hire more cops. And probably the single biggest
Speaker 1: distinction between the libertarians and and the New Liberals is
Speaker 1: about border control. Now, if if you listen to New
Speaker 1: Liberals on Twitter, or you listen to Neil or you
Speaker 1: listen to libertarians, right, capitalism is supposed to have open borders,
Speaker 1: is supposed to be free movement to people, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Um,
Speaker 1: if you look at literally everything every neo liberal government
Speaker 1: has ever done, it's exactly the opposite. They don't like that. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they hit it. And and you know, the this whole
Speaker 1: thing about like oh you need workers to uh yeah,
Speaker 1: if if you, if you, if you let workers from
Speaker 1: other countries go into into the US, like oh they'll
Speaker 1: they'll they'll decreased wages, blah blah blah blah. So the
Speaker 1: the period in which the US like had strong unions
Speaker 1: and strong wages and stuff, with the period where there
Speaker 1: was like basically no militarization on the Mexican border. I mean,
Speaker 1: there were some and you know there there's there's there's
Speaker 1: a build up sort of dream the Vietnam War and
Speaker 1: they're they're they're sort of been one back like around
Speaker 1: election revolution era. But you know it's it's nothing. It's
Speaker 1: literally nothing like it is today today. The US border
Speaker 1: is this just absolute hellscape. Um. I mean just like
Speaker 1: there's there's there's this enormous perimeter of the U. S
Speaker 1: border where just the Constitution doesn't apply, where like the
Speaker 1: Bill of Rights just doesn't exist. If if if you're
Speaker 1: if you're if you're close enough to the border, it's
Speaker 1: just it's all suspended. Uh, it's not entirely supended, but
Speaker 1: like basically the border patrol can just do whatever the
Speaker 1: funk they want to you, and you know, like this, this,
Speaker 1: this is this is how the border patrol was able
Speaker 1: to be deployed in Portland, right because Portland's technically on
Speaker 1: the border and the border patrol has increased power is
Speaker 1: there and the actual goal is so people people are
Speaker 1: always going to move right, And what with the New
Speaker 1: Labels figured out was that you know, these these these
Speaker 1: enormous miket labor populations, the best way you could exploit
Speaker 1: them as if they're just absolutely terrorized by just this,
Speaker 1: you know, an incredible sort of ferociously hostile, murderous just
Speaker 1: border regime run by fascists. And it works, like they kill,
Speaker 1: they kill enormous numbers of people, They do horrible things,
Speaker 1: They put people with concentration camps, They sterilize people they like,
Speaker 1: they sexually assault children, they disappear people they like, still
Speaker 1: people's babies. And this is you know, this is what
Speaker 1: neoliberalism is, right, This, this is what it actually is
Speaker 1: in practice. This is you know, like, this is the
Speaker 1: this is the this is the policy that is imposed
Speaker 1: by they liberal states. And I think I want to
Speaker 1: end on that and I want to end on a
Speaker 1: note about what the quintessential sort of figure of neoliberalism is,
Speaker 1: because I think, you know, in the neil liberal's mind, right,
Speaker 1: the quintessential neo liberal figure is like the small entrepreneur
Speaker 1: who's like guy who's you know, turned their own creativity
Speaker 1: and like harnessed it into like the ability to create value,
Speaker 1: and you know, they're creating things in the world and
Speaker 1: they're reaching themselves. And I think a lot of leftists
Speaker 1: think of it as like the quintessial the liberal is
Speaker 1: you know, a Chicago, Chicago School of Economics person. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I want to suggest that they quit. The single
Speaker 1: quintessential like neo liberal figure is a riot cop, and
Speaker 1: specifically specifically that the you know, if if you know,
Speaker 1: if every everyone by now knows what a riot cop
Speaker 1: looks like, right, I want everyone to go back and
Speaker 1: even even from from like two thousand one, look at
Speaker 1: what a riot police officer looks like in two thousand
Speaker 1: one versus what they look like now. And then go
Speaker 1: back to even like the nineteen sixties and look look
Speaker 1: at look at what the those guys look like. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, looking at the footage from the sixties and
Speaker 1: riot cops is like really depressing because they're like, I
Speaker 1: could take these guys. Yeah, they're they're just wearing T shirts.
Speaker 1: They're just guys. It's it's way more of a fair fight.
Speaker 1: They have T shirts and sticks. We could have T
Speaker 1: shirts and sticks. That is that it's like the a
Speaker 1: riot of the sixties. It sounds like now they also
Speaker 1: in some cases will be much more willing just to
Speaker 1: murder tons of people. Now there is that exception, but
Speaker 1: in like a big street brawl, it is it is
Speaker 1: generally a bit of a fair fight. I mean, I
Speaker 1: will say also sixties police love love dogs. They love
Speaker 1: like sicking dogs people, which is really bad. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: I'm looking at the looking at at the two thousand
Speaker 1: one riot cops, and yeah, they are not nearly as
Speaker 1: robo copy. That's what they are now. Drin the Tin
Speaker 1: Chilean uprising in I was talking to someone in Chile
Speaker 1: and they were talking about how like they were describing
Speaker 1: it as like the cop we're just like like something
Speaker 1: had a change, beating Ninja turtles like it was like
Speaker 1: fighting the shredder. There's even even even the L. A. P. D.
Speaker 1: Riot cops for the nineteen two riots. They're also still
Speaker 1: just wearing like shirts like they just have they just
Speaker 1: have colored shirts and one stick. Yeah and now versus
Speaker 1: now they're wearing there whatever dumb armor they have. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But you know, and this is this is you know
Speaker 1: and this this is this is if if you want
Speaker 1: to trace the path in near liberalism, it's this. It's
Speaker 1: a lot of the army surplus stuff that like the
Speaker 1: police have gotten a lot of. It's really scary. A
Speaker 1: lot of it also sucks, like a lot of those
Speaker 1: a t v S. Every like everyone who's ever had
Speaker 1: the drive them hates them. But you know, like like
Speaker 1: my my like absolutely tiny dinky town has a bear
Speaker 1: cat and that shouldn't that shouldn't be. And I know
Speaker 1: where it is too, I know where the bear cat is.
Speaker 1: It's like, there shouldn't be a bear cat. My town
Speaker 1: is a tax cutout, like it's it's literally a tax
Speaker 1: carve out like that that's the reason, that's the really
Speaker 1: reason it exists. And it has a bear cat, And like,
Speaker 1: you know, this is this is sort of the this
Speaker 1: is the consequence of of of what neoliberalism, isn't it.
Speaker 1: Vicky usta Well talked about this on on on the
Speaker 1: Occupy episode it's it's the cops become more like, become
Speaker 1: more like the army. The army becomes more like the cops.
Speaker 1: And you know, the the result is this sort of
Speaker 1: pent opticn surveillance states where like if you and seven
Speaker 1: people stand on a sidewalk, sixteen cops will show up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they've they've really uh excelled in making the capitalist realism
Speaker 1: Dumer philosophy be almost like the base philosophy for anyone
Speaker 1: who takes two seconds to think about the world that
Speaker 1: they live in. And you know, and this has been
Speaker 1: really effective in a lot of ways. But you know,
Speaker 1: David Graeber point had pointed this out, which is that
Speaker 1: the problem with doing this is that, you know, okay,
Speaker 1: so like the the norm was some amount of guard labor, right,
Speaker 1: the enormous amount of sort of prison guards. Like that's
Speaker 1: all unproductive labor, right. You know, you you you make
Speaker 1: you make some of that money back off that the
Speaker 1: companies make some of the money back off the slave labor. Right.
Speaker 1: But like, but that in general there the guards aren't
Speaker 1: adding anything. They're not they're not they're not producing any
Speaker 1: goods um and not really much service either. No, and
Speaker 1: and and this is you know this this this is
Speaker 1: a problem, right because because neoliberalism is profit driven, and
Speaker 1: so you know, what you have is is that the
Speaker 1: system has a choice between either it functioning or it
Speaker 1: making it appear as if it's the only system. And
Speaker 1: that's the thing is that it's it's it's kind of
Speaker 1: profit driven. But honestly, the more that I the more
Speaker 1: that you've been talking like, no, it's just about eliminating
Speaker 1: any alternative. So it's not not even profit driven. It's
Speaker 1: that it's forcing itself to be the only acceptable option. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's how it gets so much of its power. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but but you know, the the problem with this is
Speaker 1: that all of that sort of ideological coercion only last
Speaker 1: as long as the police can hold the streets, which
Speaker 1: is which is they're good at it there, They're sometimes
Speaker 1: they're decent. You know. One of the story I want
Speaker 1: to end on is so there's you know, there has
Speaker 1: been in some with more varying degrees of success, there
Speaker 1: has actually been resistance in neoliberalism. And there are places
Speaker 1: where people have won the people. There are places where
Speaker 1: people have run the I m f out those people.
Speaker 1: There's places where people have you know, defeated coups where
Speaker 1: they've like you know, where they've where they've they've they've
Speaker 1: successfully sort of taken over the state. There's places where
Speaker 1: you know, I mean there's there's there's places like you know,
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk about couple of things in Mexico, but yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean there's there's the Appetittas who have you know,
Speaker 1: are constantly besieged, but have carved out a territory in
Speaker 1: which they have you know, like totally defeated the Mexican
Speaker 1: almost really defeated the Mexican state. And I think one
Speaker 1: of the sort of forgotten incidents in in the two
Speaker 1: thousands is this uprising in Wahaka where the yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a there's an enormous sort of a bunch of
Speaker 1: teachers are going on strike. And you know, Wahawka's teaching
Speaker 1: unions are enormously powerful, incredibly radical, and so you know
Speaker 1: that they one of the things they do is that
Speaker 1: they go into the city and they have these like
Speaker 1: these giants start of protest tents that they showed up
Speaker 1: and they have these like giant camps and she just
Speaker 1: in six the police attack them, and so they start
Speaker 1: attacking and and the teachers fight back, and so you
Speaker 1: have there this you know this, this this massive battle
Speaker 1: erupts um just in this city and you know this
Speaker 1: is this is all the police attack at like three
Speaker 1: in the morning, right, but they they there's not enough
Speaker 1: of in the clear teachers out and the teachers hold
Speaker 1: and they hold and they hold, and the city of
Speaker 1: Wahaka wakes up to this just enormous battle in the
Speaker 1: streets between a bunch of like teachers and the cops.
Speaker 1: And when Wahawka wakes up, they are just like what
Speaker 1: the fuck is this? And you know, they joined the
Speaker 1: teachers and they go fight the cops and they they
Speaker 1: they're largely successful in like like they beat them, they drive,
Speaker 1: they drive the police from the city and you know,
Speaker 1: and and for for for for for several months, the
Speaker 1: city is basically under the control of these like direct
Speaker 1: democratic councils and like they're there are these there are
Speaker 1: these things they call the mega marshes, which just a
Speaker 1: million people will do a march to the streets and
Speaker 1: the police there's the police just can't stop them because
Speaker 1: you know, there's a million people and yeah, that's that's
Speaker 1: the only way that I've seen that be successful, whether
Speaker 1: it be you know, just to sure sheer massive people
Speaker 1: driving cops out of a police station, or you know,
Speaker 1: an entire city rallying behind people like in in in
Speaker 1: Portland when the fence came, it's like you need to
Speaker 1: have like everybody to show up because they could fight
Speaker 1: two hundred like twin canarchists. They're pretty easily you usually, um,
Speaker 1: but when you have like all of the moms and
Speaker 1: dads and regular people come up, that is much more
Speaker 1: of a complicated of fight on like on on their end,
Speaker 1: because yeah, we'll still have the teenage front liners throwing
Speaker 1: at the cops, but when you have like regular people
Speaker 1: behind them, that creates the whole media narrative to be
Speaker 1: something totally different. And it got the feds to back
Speaker 1: down in Portland when Trump really wanted to not happen.
Speaker 1: And I think also the thing, the thing that that
Speaker 1: was increding incredible hawky is it wasn't just people sort
Speaker 1: of like standing behind them, like maybe like tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of people just joined the fight in in in
Speaker 1: a way that you know it like if you know,
Speaker 1: if if there's like fifty thou people in a city
Speaker 1: throwing bricks at you like you you either have to
Speaker 1: start shooting into the crowd or try to hold them.
Speaker 1: Can't you can't. And even when he start shooting into
Speaker 1: the crowd, Yeah, they tried it and it made it
Speaker 1: made even people the crowds were larger, and like, you know,
Speaker 1: one of the things that happens is that the revolutionaries
Speaker 1: try to like you know, they go to the radio
Speaker 1: station or like okay, well you broadcast this. The radio
Speaker 1: station says no, and so they start seizing radio stations
Speaker 1: all over all over the city. Yeah, and they yeah,
Speaker 1: and then you know, and then they had they had
Speaker 1: these they had these like bonfire at the edge of
Speaker 1: the city where if one's at the meets and like
Speaker 1: they're there's they're they're sending their they're they're sending radio
Speaker 1: like messages like over the radio stations they've taken over
Speaker 1: from like barricade to barricade, and you know, eventually the
Speaker 1: police and like the like the Mexican Army shows up
Speaker 1: and at that point they're able to sort of retake
Speaker 1: the city. And there's a couple of other things happening
Speaker 1: in Mexico at this point that are sort of this
Speaker 1: is giants sort of left wing tide, and the way
Speaker 1: that it gets stopped is that the Mexican army basically
Speaker 1: fully kicks off the drug war and they kill I mean,
Speaker 1: I've seen numbers up to like eight hundred thousand people
Speaker 1: in ten years. They just they basic they basically genocides
Speaker 1: the indigenous population of of of Mexico. And you know,
Speaker 1: I think I think that's that's that's sort of a
Speaker 1: place to leave it because more hopeful note to end
Speaker 1: to the show on. Yeah, but I mean I think
Speaker 1: I think it is it is worth it is you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's it's worth thinking about. Is one. It
Speaker 1: is possible to beat the police too. The ruling class
Speaker 1: will literally bathe the entire country in blood, like they
Speaker 1: will destroy their own country. Is different the way I
Speaker 1: mean this gets discussed and sell happen here, But like
Speaker 1: the way the American military works, I think it will
Speaker 1: be less likely to do that. Yeah, well, I mean,
Speaker 1: and I want I want to put this o. Like
Speaker 1: so the thing that the army doesn't directly murder people
Speaker 1: what they do is but what they do is basically
Speaker 1: like they they set off a bunch of fighting between
Speaker 1: the cartels and then and the cartels fucking murder enormous
Speaker 1: members people you know it will happily murder each other.
Speaker 1: But yeah, yeah, well and also you know, I mean
Speaker 1: it's it's also this is this is you know, it's
Speaker 1: the thing with the MYSIC and state. It's it's very,
Speaker 1: very difficult to tell where the Gartels stop and where
Speaker 1: the Mexican Army begins because a lot of them are
Speaker 1: the same thing. And like you know that there's yeah,
Speaker 1: that's hopeful. Note to end on and just but just
Speaker 1: to make the ending a bit better, I do want
Speaker 1: to say I'm no longer going to call anyone, uh neoliberal.
Speaker 1: I made this joke in the group chat yesterday and
Speaker 1: nobody responded to it, so it was set. So I'll
Speaker 1: say it now. I'm only going to call them Thomas
Speaker 1: Anderson liberals. That that that that that's that is what
Speaker 1: I'm calling them now. Um, and I'll make everyone wait
Speaker 1: two seconds to understand what's going on and then sigh
Speaker 1: and then motion to get me out of the room.
Speaker 1: So thank you Chris for talking about the prom and
Speaker 1: thank thank thank thank you all for joining us. That
Speaker 1: this this has been NI could happen here. Um. You
Speaker 1: can find us on Instagram and Twitter. If you so desire,
Speaker 1: if you want to get, if you want, if you
Speaker 1: want people to know that you follow us, create a
Speaker 1: whole network of surveillance based so everyone knows what you're
Speaker 1: watching and what you're listening to, to create a better
Speaker 1: picture for you are online so you can get better advertisements. Yeah,
Speaker 1: follow us online. Yeah, joined the Panopticon. Throw bricks at it.
Speaker 1: It is pretty funny how they tricked everyone into carrying
Speaker 1: around gps is wherever they go. It's it's pretty funny. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's amazing. It's like, oh, everyone, everyone, everyone in
Speaker 1: my town is like, oh, we can't get the vaccine.
Speaker 1: They have micro trips and it's like you have a phone.
Speaker 1: It's hilarious. They tricked us into carry around speakers, cameras
Speaker 1: and gps is everywhere we go. It is really funny.
Speaker 1: It's amazing, all right. Well, by Funny Fye. I'm Evrodsky,
Speaker 1: author of the New York Times bestseller fair Play and
Speaker 1: Find Your Unicorn Space, activists on the gender division of labor,
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Speaker 1: Against the Chronicles podcast and my Heart Radio app or
Speaker 1: wherever you get your podcast. Welcome to it could happen here. Um.
Speaker 1: The show that is normally introduced by me shouting a tonally,
Speaker 1: but today I did like a professional because today myself
Speaker 1: and my colleagues Garrison and Christopher are talking to someone.
Speaker 1: I'm very excited to chat with Mr Corey. Doctor. Oh Corey,
Speaker 1: Well the show. Thank you very much. It is my
Speaker 1: pleasure to be on it. It's great to meet you
Speaker 1: all and to be talking to you today. Corey. You
Speaker 1: do a lot of writing about kind of technology and
Speaker 1: surveillance and cultural issues around those. You're also an author.
Speaker 1: You've written some great fiction. I think today will probably
Speaker 1: talk most around books like Attack Service and walk Away,
Speaker 1: but you've written a lot of wonderful stuff. Um, and
Speaker 1: you've also worked with the e f F for years
Speaker 1: and years. Um, so you you you're coming at what
Speaker 1: I love about. I mean, we're gonna be talking today
Speaker 1: broadly about surveillance and kind of the future of of
Speaker 1: the Internet, will probably talk about some metaverse e stuff.
Speaker 1: What I love about the way in which you think
Speaker 1: and write about the future is that you're kind of
Speaker 1: coming about it from a number of angles, both as
Speaker 1: like a tech industry journalist, as a fiction writer imagining
Speaker 1: the future, and as somebody who's kind of weighted in
Speaker 1: as an activist to this. And UM, I'm kind of
Speaker 1: wondering where do you see like the greatest potential for
Speaker 1: actual like change? Um? Is it? Is it in kind
Speaker 1: of is it in lobbying and engaging as an activist
Speaker 1: or is it in sort of imagining as a as
Speaker 1: a as a fiction writer? What might be? So I
Speaker 1: I see them as adjuncts uh, you know, diversity of
Speaker 1: tactics and all that stuff. Um. The thing is that
Speaker 1: tech policy arguments are often very abstract, uh, and they
Speaker 1: are only visceral for the people who would provide the
Speaker 1: kind of political will to do something about them. Usually
Speaker 1: that that comes when it's too late, right, People people
Speaker 1: care about tech monopolies once the web is turned into
Speaker 1: five giant websites stilled with screenshots of text from the
Speaker 1: other four. But not when Yahoo is on a buying
Speaker 1: spree of tech companies. And we're saying, oh, that's how
Speaker 1: tech companies grow, and all tech companies will grow in
Speaker 1: the future by buying all their nascent competitors and rolling
Speaker 1: them up into a big vertically integrated monopoly, which is
Speaker 1: kind of how we got Facebook and Google and the
Speaker 1: rest of it. And um, you need to be able
Speaker 1: to make policy arguments to policy people, but you also
Speaker 1: need to be able to put uh, some some sinew
Speaker 1: and muscle on the bone of that highly abstract kind
Speaker 1: of argument. And and that's where fiction comes in. It's
Speaker 1: kind of a like a fly through of like an
Speaker 1: emotional architects rendering of what things might look like if
Speaker 1: we get it wrong or if we change it. It
Speaker 1: preserves the sense of possibility, you know. I think one
Speaker 1: of the great enemies of change is the inevitable is
Speaker 1: um of capitalist realism and the idea that there is
Speaker 1: no alternative. So if you can make people believe in
Speaker 1: an alternative, then they might work for one. And certainly
Speaker 1: the opposite is true. If people don't believe there is
Speaker 1: any alternative possible, they won't work for one, why why
Speaker 1: would you? Uh? And so all of that together, I
Speaker 1: think is part of how you mobilize people to care
Speaker 1: about stuff. Yeah, I mean that makes that makes total sense,
Speaker 1: and it is. It's difficult, I think because I first
Speaker 1: came into technology as a journalist, and it's very difficult
Speaker 1: to get people to care about stuff. And I think
Speaker 1: in particular privacy, which there was, it has been one
Speaker 1: of the most interesting cases of like the kind of
Speaker 1: thought leaders in in an industry freaking out over something
Speaker 1: and people not really having an issue with it because
Speaker 1: we kind of all agreed to hand over all of
Speaker 1: our data to a number of big side not all,
Speaker 1: but I don't know. I'm interested in your thoughts on that.
Speaker 1: I understand the idea that like fiction is um is
Speaker 1: a much better way to try to get people to
Speaker 1: care about these things because it makes them feel as
Speaker 1: opposed to kind of reporting on I think people can
Speaker 1: get kind of lost in the weeds of acquisitions and
Speaker 1: like uh, pivots and you know, tech companies acquiring each
Speaker 1: other and whatnot. Well, look, I think that the part
Speaker 1: of the problem with privacy. The reason that we we're
Speaker 1: late to wake up and do something about it is
Speaker 1: because it was obfuscated. You know, if you've ever seen
Speaker 1: the maps of like how an ad tech stock works,
Speaker 1: the flow diagrams. Uh. And there are some things that
Speaker 1: are complicated because um, there are some things that are
Speaker 1: hard to understand because they're complicated. And then there are
Speaker 1: some things that are made complicated so they will be
Speaker 1: hard to understand. And I think in the case of
Speaker 1: the surveillance industry, the latter is true. And it wasn't
Speaker 1: just that they were trying to play us for suckers.
Speaker 1: They were also playing their customers for suckers. Right. One
Speaker 1: of the reasons that the ad tex st act is
Speaker 1: such a snarled hair ball is so that the people
Speaker 1: who buy ads and the publishers who run ads can't
Speaker 1: tell how badly they're being ripped off by their intermediaries.
Speaker 1: But this also has the side effect of making it
Speaker 1: very hard for us to know as the as the
Speaker 1: kind of inputs to that system, how our own dignity
Speaker 1: and private lives and safety and integrity are being put
Speaker 1: to risk by these systems as well. Um, And you know,
Speaker 1: it may be that people if they had been well
Speaker 1: informed about what was going on, they might have been
Speaker 1: indifferent as well. But I think that when most people
Speaker 1: were very poorly informed, right when all there was was
Speaker 1: this kind of that privacy discourse was just like stuff
Speaker 1: as being your personal information is being siphoned up, but
Speaker 1: no kind of specifics on how that was being used
Speaker 1: and how that was being done and how it might
Speaker 1: bring you to harm. Um, it's not clear that that
Speaker 1: you can say that that the reason they were indifferent
Speaker 1: is because they were fully informed and didn't care if
Speaker 1: you know that they weren't fully informed, if you know
Speaker 1: that they were barely informed. Mhm. I mean yeah, I
Speaker 1: think you're absolutely right. Because when the Cambridge analytic Is
Speaker 1: scandal broke, which was I think one of the first
Speaker 1: times that there was a really huge international story that
Speaker 1: made it clear some of the consequences of all this,
Speaker 1: like it did provoke a lot of a lot of anger.
Speaker 1: Um I I do you worry at all that, Like
Speaker 1: there's a degree to which because it because people got
Speaker 1: tricked or whatever you want to frame it, and it's
Speaker 1: glow the the kind of um financialization of people's private data,
Speaker 1: of people's like personal information, because that has gone so far,
Speaker 1: there's a risk that people are just kind of inured
Speaker 1: to it. Um. Yeah, well, well, I mean that kind
Speaker 1: of gets to my theory change here, which is that
Speaker 1: there is always going to be uh a point of
Speaker 1: maximum and difference peak in difference. You know, Um, if
Speaker 1: you think about something like being a smoker, the likelihood
Speaker 1: that you care about cancer goes up the longer you
Speaker 1: smoke and the more health effects you feel. And certainly
Speaker 1: there will come a point in your life when you
Speaker 1: will only ever grow more worried about the effects of
Speaker 1: smoking on your life. But there's also a point of
Speaker 1: no return. Right if the point at which you you're
Speaker 1: you're concern reaches the point where you're actually going to
Speaker 1: do something about smoking is the day you get diagnosed
Speaker 1: with stage four on cancer, then that, um, denialism can
Speaker 1: slide into nihilism. You can say, why bother, right, it's
Speaker 1: too late. It's like if if we spend years arguing
Speaker 1: about the crashing population of rhinos and then finally there's
Speaker 1: only one left, and you say you're right, there was
Speaker 1: a problem. You might as well say, like, why don't
Speaker 1: we eat him and find out what he tastes like?
Speaker 1: It's not like the rhinos are ever going to come back, right,
Speaker 1: And so for me, so much of the work is
Speaker 1: about shifting the point of peak indifference to the left
Speaker 1: of the point of no return on the timeline, so
Speaker 1: that people actually start to care earlier, because it's it's
Speaker 1: it's if you haven't a genuine problem, right, like the
Speaker 1: overcollection of our private data, the mishandling of it, the
Speaker 1: abuse of it, that genuine problem will eventually produce tangible
Speaker 1: effects that are undeniable, right that the the our ability
Speaker 1: to ignore it just goes monotonically down. It's the thing
Speaker 1: about the climate emergency. You know, even if Shell had
Speaker 1: not our Exxon had not hidden the data had had
Speaker 1: on the role that it's products were playing in climate
Speaker 1: change in the seventies, it would have been hard to
Speaker 1: muster a sense of urgency in the seventies, right because
Speaker 1: the story is that in fifty years something bad's going
Speaker 1: to happen. But here we are fifty years on, something
Speaker 1: bad is really happening, and a lot of people are
Speaker 1: caring about it. They still don't seem to care about
Speaker 1: it enough, or maybe they've slid into nihilism. There's certainly,
Speaker 1: I think on the part of the elites, a kind
Speaker 1: of nihilistic sense that maybe they can all retreat to
Speaker 1: like mountaintops and build fortresses and breathe their children by
Speaker 1: harrier jet you know, and and and you know that nihilism,
Speaker 1: I think is is what you get when the point
Speaker 1: of no return has passed before peak denial. Uh and
Speaker 1: the privacy um catastrophe that is looming in our future
Speaker 1: that we haven't quite reached yet. I mean, we've just
Speaker 1: had the first kind of trickles of the dam breaking
Speaker 1: that's in our future. It hasn't been enough yet to
Speaker 1: shift people away from it. But but we might be
Speaker 1: getting there, right, We might We might eventually be able
Speaker 1: to do something about it. And one of the things
Speaker 1: that will hasten that moment is UM restoring competition to
Speaker 1: those industries that one of the reasons that uh, the
Speaker 1: industry that spies on us is able to foster denial
Speaker 1: and indifference is because it is a monopolized industry. To
Speaker 1: companies control eighty percent of the ad market, Google and Facebook,
Speaker 1: and as as monopolists, they're able to extract huge monopoly rents.
Speaker 1: They're among the most profitable companies in the history of
Speaker 1: the world. And some of those monopoly rents, rather than
Speaker 1: being returned to shareholders, can be mobilized to distort policy,
Speaker 1: to to make us think that there's nothing wrong with
Speaker 1: the way that they collect data and use it to
Speaker 1: forestall regulation, to pay Nick Clegg four million a year
Speaker 1: to go around Europe and the world and say, as
Speaker 1: the former Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, I'm
Speaker 1: here to tell you that Facebook is the friend of
Speaker 1: the democratic regimes of the world. And and you know,
Speaker 1: if if the anti monopoly movement, which is a thing
Speaker 1: I've become very involved with, is able to go from
Speaker 1: strength to strength it's surging now, then one of the
Speaker 1: things that we might do is is destroy the ammunition
Speaker 1: that's being used by these large monopolistic firms to distort
Speaker 1: our policy and harm us in these ways with impunity.
Speaker 1: And and then maybe we can actually take the the
Speaker 1: nascent and natural alarm that people do feel about the
Speaker 1: invasions of their privacy and and actually turn that into
Speaker 1: privacy policy that is meaningful in respect of these big
Speaker 1: companies that actually reigns them in. Yeah, and I think
Speaker 1: I like that you frame it as a privacy catastrophe
Speaker 1: because I think I mean, what I just exhibit it
Speaker 1: earlier in this episode, is this this tendency that I
Speaker 1: certainly see in myself and I see in other people
Speaker 1: to get kind of beaten down by the continued um
Speaker 1: excesses of this industry and the continued kind of failure
Speaker 1: of anything to be done to curb it. And I
Speaker 1: think you're right. It has to be viewed as um
Speaker 1: as a calamity and I and nothing I think makes
Speaker 1: that clearer than some of watching some of the stuff
Speaker 1: Facebook in particular has put out about their plans for
Speaker 1: the metaverse, and kind of thinking back from all of
Speaker 1: these sensors they want to store in your house, all
Speaker 1: of the ways in which they want to map everything
Speaker 1: around you, um, they never you know. They they kind
Speaker 1: of advertise as like you'll be able to play basketball
Speaker 1: with somebody who's in a different state, But really what
Speaker 1: it is is you're giving Facebook access to every measurement
Speaker 1: of your body and you know, the pulse of the
Speaker 1: beat of your heart and all this this stuff that like,
Speaker 1: maybe we don't quite know what it would be useful
Speaker 1: for from financialization standpoint, but they it's unsettling to think
Speaker 1: that they'll have to find a way because they'll have it.
Speaker 1: You know, I don't know, I don't know what is
Speaker 1: be done about that other than, as you say, kind
Speaker 1: of breaking up these monopolies. Well and and I mean
Speaker 1: breaking up is like one of the things we can
Speaker 1: do to monopolies. And and it takes a long time,
Speaker 1: you know, um A T and T. The first enforcement
Speaker 1: action against it happened sixty nine years before it was
Speaker 1: broken up in nineteen two. I don't think we can
Speaker 1: wait that long. But there's a lot of intermediate steps,
Speaker 1: right Like we can force them to do interoperability, we
Speaker 1: can block them from from predatory acquisitions. We can force
Speaker 1: them to divest of companies and engage in structural separation.
Speaker 1: We can do all kinds of things. It actually looks
Speaker 1: like the United Kingdom is going to stop them from
Speaker 1: buying Giffee, which might seem trivial after all, it's just
Speaker 1: like animated jifts, but um, what it actually is a
Speaker 1: surveillance beacons in every social media application, right because if
Speaker 1: you're hosting a Jeff from Giffee in your message to
Speaker 1: someone else, Facebook has telemetry about that message. Um. And
Speaker 1: so the the the not the i c O. The competition,
Speaker 1: competition and Markets Authority in the UK was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is just gonna strengthen your market power. That's why
Speaker 1: you're buying this company. You have too much market power already.
Speaker 1: We're not gonna let you do it. Um. It was
Speaker 1: almost the case that the Fitbit merger was blocked Google's
Speaker 1: Fitbit merger. I think it's still not too late to
Speaker 1: roll it back. And Lena Cohn, who's the new fire
Speaker 1: breathing dragon in charge of the FTC, who is an
Speaker 1: astonishing person who was a law student three years ago. Uh,
Speaker 1: she has said, oh, yeah, this this like one point
Speaker 1: three trillion dollars worth of mergers and acquisitions that you're
Speaker 1: doing right now to get in under the wire before
Speaker 1: we started enforcing. Guess what, We're gonna unwind those fucking
Speaker 1: mergers if it looks like they were anti competitive. And
Speaker 1: not only are you going to lose all the money
Speaker 1: you spent on the M and A due diligence and
Speaker 1: the paperwork and the corporate stuff, but all that integration
Speaker 1: you're going to do between now and then, you're gonna
Speaker 1: have to de integrate those companies. When we tell you
Speaker 1: that you don't have uh, you don't have merger approval
Speaker 1: and you're on notice. You can't come and complain later, right,
Speaker 1: Like you can either get in line and wait for
Speaker 1: us to tell you whether or not your merger is legal,
Speaker 1: or you can roll the dice. But I tell you what,
Speaker 1: if you come up sneak, guys, you are fucked. And
Speaker 1: that is amazing, right, that is a powerful change in
Speaker 1: American industrial policy that really makes a difference. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean that is a beautiful thing to think of being
Speaker 1: in place and actually hitting as hard as it could. Obviously,
Speaker 1: the concern is that, like who will be you know,
Speaker 1: picking the head of the FTC in three years in change?
Speaker 1: And like how how how much influence is Peter Teal
Speaker 1: going to have their in the like um, yeah, well,
Speaker 1: and Peter til of course love's monopolies. He says, competition
Speaker 1: is for losers. So you're right. I mean, obviously elections
Speaker 1: have consequences, but you know, one of the ways that
Speaker 1: you win elections is by making material differences in people's lives,
Speaker 1: and so you know, if people are policy, then uh.
Speaker 1: One of the most important policies by to set so
Speaker 1: far is hiring Lena Khan and her colleagues canter at
Speaker 1: the d R j and Tim Wu and the White House. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I would. I would love nothing more than
Speaker 1: to see particularly like Facebook reigned in at this point
Speaker 1: because I'm one of the casualties of the of the
Speaker 1: of the the ad market like crash of started in
Speaker 1: like two sixteen seventeen. It feels like the odds of
Speaker 1: them being able to, like, I don't know, we we've
Speaker 1: got three years where we know, you know, theoretically these
Speaker 1: policies will be in place, and and I don't know,
Speaker 1: I'm hopeful, like when I when I because the Republicans
Speaker 1: are talking a lot about regulating social media too, about
Speaker 1: even breaking up these companies, but they often tend to
Speaker 1: be talking about it in a very different way and
Speaker 1: with a very different kind of end goal in mind.
Speaker 1: Um And I guess you know, obviously they know that,
Speaker 1: right and Facebook they are well aware that like this
Speaker 1: might be a way out the clock situation for them,
Speaker 1: and they have some arrows in that quiver. I mean
Speaker 1: that may be so, but also remember that Facebook's users
Speaker 1: are outside of the US, and that even a change
Speaker 1: administration here won't won't UM put Margueritte vest Dagger, who's
Speaker 1: the Competition Commissioner in the EU back in the bottle,
Speaker 1: and she's another fire breather, right, She's another amazing person.
Speaker 1: And so you know I wouldn't be too quick to
Speaker 1: write that off. I mean Facebook needs its foreign markets. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's u S customers are worth more to anyone else
Speaker 1: because we have the most primitive privacy frameworks, so it
Speaker 1: can extract a lot more data for like we're the
Speaker 1: we're the richest people with a worse privacy. So that's
Speaker 1: that's UM. You know, it's a real home court advantage
Speaker 1: for Facebook, but it needs that other eighty percent of
Speaker 1: its users. It wouldn't be what it is without them,
Speaker 1: and that makes it subject to their jurisdiction. And you know,
Speaker 1: one of the things about ad driven firms like Facebook,
Speaker 1: UM is that they really need sales offices in country.
Speaker 1: Uh so you know, even before we we had the
Speaker 1: proliferation national firewalls, which don't get me wrong, I don't
Speaker 1: think it's a good thing. UM. These large global firms
Speaker 1: that operated UM sales offices in country, in every territory
Speaker 1: they worked in, were vulnerable to regulation because if you
Speaker 1: have staff in a country, then you have someone that
Speaker 1: can be arrested, right, and so it's not like they
Speaker 1: can just be like I don't know, like the Tour Project,
Speaker 1: which just you know, it has people um who who
Speaker 1: sit and hack on tour who are close to lawyers
Speaker 1: who can defend people who sit on hack and on tour. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, if the Tour Project had to have staff
Speaker 1: full time in Turkey and China and Russia and Syria
Speaker 1: in order to operate, it would be a very different project.
Speaker 1: But you know, Facebook and Twitter and Google, they all
Speaker 1: have staff in those countries and it makes them vulnerable
Speaker 1: to regulation. And so, you know, China is really interesting
Speaker 1: because because m j and Ping, for his own reasons
Speaker 1: which are not my reasons and stink from the Democrats
Speaker 1: and the Republicans reasons, is doing stuff to rein in
Speaker 1: big tech in China. And it's actually quite interesting because
Speaker 1: you know the argument that Nick Legg makes when he
Speaker 1: says why we shouldn't break up Facebook, as he says, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, China is coming for your UM, for your
Speaker 1: I P and for your industrial competitiveness with its big
Speaker 1: tech giants that it treats as national champions that projects
Speaker 1: soft power around the world. Meanwhile, China is like these
Speaker 1: tech giants, we hate these tech giants. They present a
Speaker 1: countervailing force to the hedgemony of the the Communist Party
Speaker 1: and the and the executive branch that she should bring
Speaker 1: sets at the top of we're gonna neuter them, and
Speaker 1: we're gonna we're gonna disappear their founders, like Jack Mont
Speaker 1: to fucking Googlogs right Like, they're like, we don't want
Speaker 1: national champions because the nation that you know, we Bow
Speaker 1: and Ali Baba is the champion four is we Bow
Speaker 1: and Ali Baba and ten Cent they're not. They're not
Speaker 1: champions for China by any stretch of the imagination. They
Speaker 1: don't give a shit about China. And so you know,
Speaker 1: they're all of these companies are going to face regulatory pressure,
Speaker 1: anti monopoly regulatory pressure all over the world, and you're
Speaker 1: you're so much more um optimistic. I guess about about
Speaker 1: the potential for that to bite than a lot of
Speaker 1: people I talked to, and I think more knowledgeable as well.
Speaker 1: And I kind of wonder because there's this very strong,
Speaker 1: obviously influenced by decades of cyberpunk attitude that like, we're
Speaker 1: in this age of mega corporations whose power is you know,
Speaker 1: there's nothing that can stop Amazon from doing what Amazon
Speaker 1: wants to do. Right, Facebook is going to keep doing
Speaker 1: whatever they want to do forever. You you clearly don't
Speaker 1: believe that. And I you know you, you clearly know
Speaker 1: your stuff. I'm wondering why you think that that image
Speaker 1: is still persist so persistent that like attitude in our heads,
Speaker 1: of these these these are kind of monolithic forces in
Speaker 1: our society that um just have to be endured. So
Speaker 1: I think it's a belief in the great forces of history, right, um,
Speaker 1: and the great man theory. You know that the the
Speaker 1: these um. Uh, you know that these rich people are
Speaker 1: driving history. Yeah, these these these powerful figures are driving history.
Speaker 1: They're in charge there in the driver's seat. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's kind of what's behind Trump arrangement syndrome, right, the
Speaker 1: idea that Trump is uniquely powerful and talented demagogue as
Speaker 1: opposed to just like a demagogue shaped puzzle piece that
Speaker 1: fit in the demagogue shaped hold that was left by
Speaker 1: the collapse of credibility of capitalism. Uh. And you know,
Speaker 1: a man who is clearly too stupid to be a
Speaker 1: cause of anything and will only ever be the effect
Speaker 1: of something. And uh, you know, the for me, the
Speaker 1: theory of of history and how it goes was really
Speaker 1: transformed by an exercise that my friend Ada Palmer does. So.
Speaker 1: Aida is a science fiction novelist. She's she's just published
Speaker 1: the fourth book of her Terra Ignota series, her debut series.
Speaker 1: It's an incredible series of books. But she's a real
Speaker 1: like kind of multi talented, multi threat. So she's a
Speaker 1: librettiston singer who has produced album length operas based on
Speaker 1: the Norse mythos. She's also a tenured history of um
Speaker 1: a tenured professor of Renaissance history in Florence at the
Speaker 1: University of Chicago, where she studies heterodox information, pornography, homosexuality, witchcraft,
Speaker 1: and so on. During the inquisitions and every year with
Speaker 1: her undergrads, she reenacts through a four week long live
Speaker 1: action role playing game, the Election of the Medici's Pope,
Speaker 1: and each of her students takes on the role of
Speaker 1: a cardinal from a great family and the in the
Speaker 1: actual election of the I forget what year was, uh,
Speaker 1: fourteen ninety or something, I forget, but they each take
Speaker 1: on this role and they have a character sheet and
Speaker 1: has motivations like a dinner party, murder mystery. But for
Speaker 1: four weeks they make a alliances break, alliances stab each
Speaker 1: other in the back UH stage surprise reversals, And at
Speaker 1: the end of the four weeks there's a u faux
Speaker 1: Gothic cathedral on campus and they dress up in costume.
Speaker 1: Aida has a a Google alert for theater companies that
Speaker 1: are getting rid of their costumes, so she clothes them
Speaker 1: in the garb of the Medici's cardinals, and they gather
Speaker 1: and they go into a room, and then a puff
Speaker 1: of smoke emerges, and you get the new Pope. And
Speaker 1: every year, four of the final candidates UH there are
Speaker 1: four final candidates rather and two of them are always
Speaker 1: the same, because the great forces of history bear down
Speaker 1: on that moment to say those people will absolutely be
Speaker 1: in the running for the for the papacy, and two
Speaker 1: of them have never once been the same, because human
Speaker 1: action still has space to alter the outcomes that are
Speaker 1: prefigured by the great forces of history. And so for me,
Speaker 1: the idea of being an optimist or a pessimist has
Speaker 1: always felt very fatalistic. It's this either way, this idea
Speaker 1: that the great forces of history have determined the outcome
Speaker 1: and human action has no bearing on it. And I
Speaker 1: think that rather than optimism or pessimism, we can be hopeful,
Speaker 1: And that's the word you use before. Hope is the
Speaker 1: idea not that you can see a path from here
Speaker 1: to the place you want to get to, but rather
Speaker 1: that you haven't run out of things that you can
Speaker 1: do to advance your your goal, right, Because if you
Speaker 1: can take a step to advance your goal, you can
Speaker 1: ascend the gradient towards the peak that you are trying
Speaker 1: to reach, then you will attain a new vantage point,
Speaker 1: and from that vantage point, you may have revealed to
Speaker 1: you courses of action that you didn't suspect before you
Speaker 1: took that step. So, so long as the step is available,
Speaker 1: there's always another step lurking in the wings that you
Speaker 1: can't see from where you are. And the reason I'm
Speaker 1: hopeful about this is I can think of like fifty
Speaker 1: things that could improve the monopoly picture that we're living
Speaker 1: in now, and it's up from thirty things last year.
Speaker 1: And so even though I don't know how we get
Speaker 1: from here to a better future, and even though I
Speaker 1: absolutely see the blockers you're talking about Trump landslide, uh
Speaker 1: losing Congress because they let Joe Mansion and Christmas Cinema
Speaker 1: Newter the build back better, Bill, Um, you know, all
Speaker 1: of those things that can happen. I have hope, you know,
Speaker 1: which is not the same as optimism or a belief
Speaker 1: that things will be great or even even like a
Speaker 1: sense a lack of a sense of foreboding. I have
Speaker 1: that in spades. But I have hoped that when the
Speaker 1: next phase of the fight begins, that we will have
Speaker 1: many UM vulnerable spots we can strike at, and that
Speaker 1: we can capitalize on whichever victories we attain to find
Speaker 1: more vulnerabilities and move on. I think that's so important,
Speaker 1: and I think it goes in line with to bring
Speaker 1: up climate change again, the idea that like one of
Speaker 1: the most toxic things you can think are e climate
Speaker 1: change is that they're nothing to do. We're already past
Speaker 1: every point of no return and there's no there's no
Speaker 1: positive action because it just leads you to doing the
Speaker 1: same thing as the people who deny it. UM. And
Speaker 1: it's Yeah, I think it's it's very important to UM
Speaker 1: recognized that like, not only are there things you can do,
Speaker 1: but when you do those things, you start taking those steps,
Speaker 1: other steps reveal themselves. Yeah, And you know what, if
Speaker 1: you're feeling nihilistic about about climate. I'm nearly through Saul
Speaker 1: Griffith's book Electrify Uh. Saul's an old friend of mine.
Speaker 1: He's MacArthur Winner's electrical engineer, and he's just done the
Speaker 1: He's it's a popular engineering book. It's one of my
Speaker 1: favorite genres. They're like popular science books, except instead of
Speaker 1: telling you about how science works, they tell you about
Speaker 1: how engineering works. And he's basically like, here is why
Speaker 1: all the estimates of how much renewable as we need
Speaker 1: are hugely overestimated. And it's basically that like keeping uh
Speaker 1: fossil fuel power online requires a lot of fossil fuel, right,
Speaker 1: something like of that estimate is just it's the energy
Speaker 1: that we need to make the energy, and it's not
Speaker 1: present in electrical models. Here's how we can manufacture it.
Speaker 1: Here's how we can distribute it. Here is basically how
Speaker 1: if we can figure out the financing, Americans can UH
Speaker 1: spend less money every year than they do now to
Speaker 1: get more stuff that they love every year. That we
Speaker 1: can do this without hair shirts. It's a spectacular book. Um,
Speaker 1: And you know, I don't agree with everything Saul says
Speaker 1: every all the time, but he is very careful about
Speaker 1: his technical facts. There aren't technical errors in this. There
Speaker 1: might be assumptions that we disagree with, but as a
Speaker 1: technical matter, he's basically written a piece of design fiction
Speaker 1: in which, over the next fifteen years, using clever finance
Speaker 1: and and solid engineering, we really actually do avert the
Speaker 1: climate emergency. And Yeah, as always, kind of the main
Speaker 1: barriers to doing the best version of the thing is
Speaker 1: the political realities on the ground. You know, you have
Speaker 1: to but I think that's the that's the value of
Speaker 1: at least trying to make it clear that there are options.
Speaker 1: I wanted to shift for a moment um. I was
Speaker 1: thinking recently about I think probably the earliest back book
Speaker 1: of yours that I've read, Pirate Cinema, which is heavily involved.
Speaker 1: I think I'm gonna you know, if you're one of
Speaker 1: the folks like me who was on the Internet back
Speaker 1: when you know, file sharing sites, when that was a
Speaker 1: huge topic of discussion, when the r i A Was
Speaker 1: going after people, when like copyright was kind of a
Speaker 1: a much more prevalent part of kind of the online discourse. Um,
Speaker 1: it deals a lot in that and these kind of
Speaker 1: I think there's elements of it that kind of prefigured
Speaker 1: what Disney has done buying up every imaginable fictional property
Speaker 1: in the world. And that's kind of the the elements
Speaker 1: of dystopia that book deals with is is, you know,
Speaker 1: the attempts of these this, these giant multinational entertainment corporations
Speaker 1: to shut down the free tape trading of ideas, remixing
Speaker 1: and all that stuff. And then kind of thinking about
Speaker 1: the difference between the focus of that and the focus
Speaker 1: of books like Attack Surface, where you're really delving more into,
Speaker 1: you know, I the fictional versions of real life companies
Speaker 1: like Tiger Swan that do it, uh the surveillance on
Speaker 1: protesters and all around the world, and that are kind
Speaker 1: of using tactics that were pioneered by other contractors and
Speaker 1: like Iraq and Afghanistan years earlier. I guess kind of
Speaker 1: the things that I find interesting about that as as
Speaker 1: I can remember, when I was first on the Internet,
Speaker 1: the big social kind of crusades online with the people
Speaker 1: that that I paid attention to at least, was all
Speaker 1: around copyright. It was about not just you know, the
Speaker 1: attempts to stop people from remixing and sharing copyrighted work,
Speaker 1: but about um attempts to like buy up copyrights and
Speaker 1: like into these these ever kind of larger uh agglomerations,
Speaker 1: and and that's kind of hit. It seems to have
Speaker 1: hit like a terminal point with the you know, movies
Speaker 1: like Ready Player one and kind of a lot of
Speaker 1: the stuff we're seeing in Marble where everything is showing
Speaker 1: up everywhere Space Jam two. UM. I guess the part
Speaker 1: of it that feels less dystopian the days attempts to
Speaker 1: crack down on file sharing, which I don't think went
Speaker 1: kind of in the worst case scenario. I'm interested actually
Speaker 1: in your thoughts on that, um, because I can remember,
Speaker 1: you know, when the r I A would be threatening
Speaker 1: people with years in jail and whatnot over sharing stuff
Speaker 1: on kaza we seem to be I don't know. Is
Speaker 1: it just that it gets less like I'm interested in
Speaker 1: your in your thoughts on that. Is it just that
Speaker 1: it's less publicized when they cracked down on people, or
Speaker 1: has kind of the nature of their response to that
Speaker 1: really changed. Well. I think that what's happened with the
Speaker 1: kind of steady state of the copyright wars has been
Speaker 1: the introduction of um brittleness and fragility into our speech
Speaker 1: platforms like Twitter, UH and and Facebook and YouTube, where
Speaker 1: it's very easy to get material removed by by making
Speaker 1: copyright claims UM. And you know, we see that with
Speaker 1: the sleazier side of the reputation management industry, where they
Speaker 1: use bogus copyright claims to take down criticisms. You know,
Speaker 1: there was a group of leftists who are really celebrating
Speaker 1: the idea that if you if Nazis were marching in
Speaker 1: your town, you could stop them from uploading their videos
Speaker 1: by playing copyrighted music in the background. And I was like,
Speaker 1: you have no idea, what a terrible fucking idea that is.
Speaker 1: And you know, within a couple of years, cops and
Speaker 1: Beverly Hills were doing it. Whenever people tried to film
Speaker 1: the police there, they would just turn on some Taylor
Speaker 1: Swift to try and stop uploading UM. You know, the
Speaker 1: thing about the copyright wars is that the real action
Speaker 1: turned out to be in UM wage theft through monopolization. So,
Speaker 1: you know, the neutering and destruction of label independent music
Speaker 1: distribution platforms like Khazah or grow Ster or Napster, and
Speaker 1: the Supreme Court decision, the Groster decision that supported that
Speaker 1: meant that the only UM way that you could launch
Speaker 1: a service like that was in cooperation with the big labels,
Speaker 1: and the you know, most successful one is Spotify. Spotify
Speaker 1: is actually partially owned by the labels, and the labels
Speaker 1: use that ownership stake to negotiate a kind of formalized
Speaker 1: wage theft where they allowed for a lower purse stream
Speaker 1: rate because when they get royalties for a stream, part
Speaker 1: of that money goes to their musicians, and that meant
Speaker 1: that the firm Spotify retain more profits which it returned
Speaker 1: to it in the form of higher dividends, and dividends
Speaker 1: go just straight to their shareholders. They don't that there's
Speaker 1: no claim that musicians can make on this. And because
Speaker 1: they set the benchmark rate, it meant that everyone, irrespective
Speaker 1: of whether you were assigned to one of the big
Speaker 1: three labels, ended up getting the same perse stream eight
Speaker 1: as as Universal's artists. So they were able to structure
Speaker 1: the whole market. In the meantime, in the industrial side,
Speaker 1: UH copyright laws, notably Section twelve of one of the
Speaker 1: Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which is a law past that
Speaker 1: makes it a felony to remove DRM to bypass a
Speaker 1: technical protection measure UM that has become the go to
Speaker 1: system for blocking repair interoperability UH and to prevent third
Speaker 1: parties from um UH from from creating services or add
Speaker 1: ons that accomplish positive ends like improved accessibility, improved security,
Speaker 1: um AD blocking and privacy and so on. They just say, well,
Speaker 1: you know, we we put a one molecule thick layer
Speaker 1: of DRM around say YouTube, and when you make a
Speaker 1: YouTube downloader for archival purposes or whatever, UM, you you
Speaker 1: just create a um A UH, you bypass our technical
Speaker 1: protection measure. And so you're committing a elmy and you
Speaker 1: can go to prison for five years and and pay
Speaker 1: a five dollar fine. And so you have this like
Speaker 1: relentless monotonic expansion of DRM into like automotive tractors. Medtronic
Speaker 1: uses it to block people from fixing ventilators. UM. So
Speaker 1: you know, this, this UM assault on the ability to
Speaker 1: reconfigure a technology that is ever more prevalent in our
Speaker 1: lives and that increasingly holds our lives in its in
Speaker 1: its hands right its choices determine whether we live or die,
Speaker 1: has been really consequential. And I know, we don't really
Speaker 1: think of it as a copyright problem. We think of
Speaker 1: it as right to repair. We think of a security
Speaker 1: auditing our accessibility. But the rule that is being used
Speaker 1: to block into operability is a copyright law. It's what
Speaker 1: printer companies used to stop you from buying third party
Speaker 1: inc um. It's what Apple uses to stop you from
Speaker 1: installing a third party app store. And you know the
Speaker 1: absence of a third party app store is why when
Speaker 1: Apple removed all the working VPNs in China, Chinese users
Speaker 1: couldn't just switch to another app store that had working
Speaker 1: VPNs in it. And so you know that this um
Speaker 1: endgame of the copyright wars is I think a lot
Speaker 1: more dystopian than merely suing college kids. Uh, it's it's
Speaker 1: actually really screwed us in ways that are that are
Speaker 1: hard to fathom. Yeah, it's a fascinating example of kind
Speaker 1: of dystopic creep because, at least kind of from my
Speaker 1: more more ignorant position. When I was nineteen, I was
Speaker 1: like worried that all of these these people remixing music
Speaker 1: and movies that I liked, like we're going to get
Speaker 1: cracked down on or have their stuff pulled um, and
Speaker 1: the the kind of thing that I didn't I don't
Speaker 1: think a lot of people saw coming until it hit.
Speaker 1: I certainly didn't was what you were just talking about
Speaker 1: the fact that kind of the logic of how these
Speaker 1: these entertainment companies were looking at like an album or
Speaker 1: you know, a movie, and and cutting up pieces of
Speaker 1: that they've they've applied to like a tractor, you know,
Speaker 1: and now you can't like repair your John Deer or
Speaker 1: modify your John Deer so it works better. And then
Speaker 1: you know, you get situations like we just kind of
Speaker 1: averted with the John Deere strike, where there was a
Speaker 1: very real possibility that we wouldn't be able to get
Speaker 1: a large chunk of a harvest because there wouldn't be
Speaker 1: parts and you can't put your own in. And that's
Speaker 1: to think that that the thought process that led us
Speaker 1: there started with like trying to protect Metallica. In some ways,
Speaker 1: it's kind of funny. And this is why the anti
Speaker 1: monopoly critique is great because it shows you that there's
Speaker 1: cause for solidarity between John Deere tractor owners and John
Speaker 1: Deere tractor UH makers the workers who work there, because
Speaker 1: the same force that has allowed John Deere to cram
Speaker 1: down its workforce for forty years is the is the
Speaker 1: force that allows it to um UH take away the
Speaker 1: agency and economic liberties of farmers who own John Deer tractors,
Speaker 1: and it's it's the it's the political power that comes
Speaker 1: with monopoly. And so you know, if John Deere were
Speaker 1: a smaller, weaker firm, it would be less able to
Speaker 1: resist both the claims of its workforce and the claims
Speaker 1: of its um uh customers. Mhm yeah, I mean that
Speaker 1: makes that makes sense, And it is like I like
Speaker 1: that idea of of because it's not just kind of
Speaker 1: solidarity between John Deere purchasers UM and and the people
Speaker 1: who work in the factories. It's also there's kind of
Speaker 1: solidarity between a wide like anyone concerned with UM copyright.
Speaker 1: It's a much broader base of solidarity than just people
Speaker 1: who are worried about you know, what's happening uh to
Speaker 1: fiction or like what Disney is doing to like copyrights
Speaker 1: around Mickey Mouse or whatever. Like it's it. You can
Speaker 1: you can draw in concerns UM from right to repair
Speaker 1: to a bunch of other things, which potentially means there's
Speaker 1: there's a greater body of people available for action if
Speaker 1: you can make them see kind of UM converging interests there,
Speaker 1: which is I think is an interesting idea. Well, I
Speaker 1: think you're getting something really important. And this is um
Speaker 1: This comes from James Boyle, who's a copyright scholar at
Speaker 1: Duke University and was really involved and found in creative
Speaker 1: commons and in those early copyright fights. And and Jamie
Speaker 1: makes an analogy to the coining of the term ecology.
Speaker 1: And he says that before the term ecology came along,
Speaker 1: you know, someone us cared about owls and someone us
Speaker 1: cared about the ozone layer. But it wasn't really clear
Speaker 1: that we were on the same side. You know, it's
Speaker 1: not clear if you're Martian looking through a telescope, you
Speaker 1: might be hard pressed to explain why. You know, the
Speaker 1: destiny of charismatic charismatic nocturnal birds and the gaseous composition
Speaker 1: of the upper atmosphere were the same issue. Right in
Speaker 1: the term ecology. Let all these people who cared about
Speaker 1: different things find a single point to rally around. It
Speaker 1: turned a thousand issues into one movement. And I think
Speaker 1: that in the in the course of resisting corporate power,
Speaker 1: which is to say, resisting monopoly, we have the potential
Speaker 1: to weld together people from very diverse fields. You know,
Speaker 1: farmers and and people who make tractors. Sure, but you know,
Speaker 1: if you grew up watching professional wrestling and now you're
Speaker 1: aghast that the wrestlers that you loved are begging on
Speaker 1: go fund me for pennies to die with dignity. You know,
Speaker 1: once someone explains to the reason that that's happening is
Speaker 1: that thirty wrestling leagues became one wrestling league that was
Speaker 1: able to practice worker's classification, turn those performers into contractors,
Speaker 1: take away their health insurance, and leave them to die.
Speaker 1: Then suddenly you're on the same side of the people
Speaker 1: who were worried about big tech and big tractor, and
Speaker 1: the people are worried about the fact that there's only
Speaker 1: one manufacturer of cheerleading uniform uniforms, and two manufacturers of
Speaker 1: athletic shoes, and two manufacturers of spirits, and two manufacturers
Speaker 1: of beer, one manufacturer of eyewear that also owns all
Speaker 1: the eye wear stores and the eyewear ensure. You know
Speaker 1: that Duff Beer thing from the early Simpsons, where there's
Speaker 1: like Duff Beer, Rispberry thing, Dulci Gabana, Oliver, People's Boushan,
Speaker 1: Loam Versaci. Every eyewear brand you've ever heard of is
Speaker 1: one company coach all of them and They also own
Speaker 1: Sunglass Hut and uh Target Optical and Sears Optical and
Speaker 1: lens Crafters and spec Savers and every other eyewear story
Speaker 1: you've ever heard of. And they bought all the labs
Speaker 1: that make the lenses, so more than half the lenses
Speaker 1: in the world come from them. A division called and
Speaker 1: they bought imed, which is the company that bought all
Speaker 1: the insurance companies that ensure I Wear, and so they're
Speaker 1: also the company that's ensuring your glasses, your your eyes
Speaker 1: one company, and I Wear costs a thousand percent more
Speaker 1: than it did a decade ago. They stole our fucking eyes, right,
Speaker 1: So people who care about that have common cause with
Speaker 1: people who care about wrestlers and people who care about
Speaker 1: beer and big tech and the fact that there's four
Speaker 1: shipping companies and they have no competitive pressure and so
Speaker 1: they just keep building bigger ships that gets stuck in
Speaker 1: the fucking Suez canal Right, we're all on the same side. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I I like the idea that I like. I
Speaker 1: like hoping that that kind of inherent solidarity, if you
Speaker 1: can point it out to people, is potentially an antidote
Speaker 1: to or at least a partial antidote to the level
Speaker 1: of the layer of politicization that's fallen down over everything, um,
Speaker 1: that stops people from actually considering matters but instead considering
Speaker 1: like I don't know, is this owning the libs right?
Speaker 1: Like if you if they if if you can get
Speaker 1: them to see that, like, yeah, their favorite wrestler is
Speaker 1: like dying because he couldn't afford insulin, and that that
Speaker 1: that's tied to the issue of like the reason his
Speaker 1: dad can't get tractor parts this year or whatever, um,
Speaker 1: And that that's tied to other issues that are maybe
Speaker 1: championed by people he would reflexively dismiss. But like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I I I find that really inspiring. It's still a
Speaker 1: significant there's a significant challenge for people who are trying
Speaker 1: to make those connections, for folks who are who are
Speaker 1: trying to like inform them of that state. I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true. And you know, like Steve Bannon will tell
Speaker 1: you that the reason to do cultural world culture culture
Speaker 1: war bullshit is because politics are down downstream from culture,
Speaker 1: and there's probably an element of truth to that. But
Speaker 1: I also think the reason that people find culture war
Speaker 1: bullshits so attractive is because they got nothing else. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think we we talked about that a lot within
Speaker 1: the context of conservative for politics. I grew up very conservative,
Speaker 1: and I do remember how the tenor of things I
Speaker 1: was hearing through the bush ears changed from advocation of
Speaker 1: policies to just all culture war all the time, all
Speaker 1: all striking the dims all the time, and it was
Speaker 1: the kind of um it and that's not the only
Speaker 1: place that's happen. You see it on the left to
Speaker 1: absolutely like it's it's endemic. Now it's it's a poison
Speaker 1: and kind of the discourse. But I think that there's
Speaker 1: a lot that needs to be I think there's a
Speaker 1: lot to be discovered still for like how to break
Speaker 1: people out of that. I'm kind of bullish when we
Speaker 1: talk about these issues like you were bringing up with
Speaker 1: sort of the monopolization of these industries you wouldn't expect
Speaker 1: to be monopolized. I'm hopeful about the future that stuff
Speaker 1: like three deep printing presents for that. We have an
Speaker 1: organization in Portland that does kind of three D printing glasses,
Speaker 1: frames and stuff and is helping people with that sort
Speaker 1: of stuff. And I'm in conversations with like the four Thieves,
Speaker 1: Vinegar collective. I think it's called. UM. Yeah, some of
Speaker 1: the folks doing like trying to do working on pharmaceutical
Speaker 1: hacking making at the moment like lower cost uh kind
Speaker 1: of home scratch brood versions of like different aids medications,
Speaker 1: and the Holy Grail is doing that with um insulin effectively.
Speaker 1: UM And I think it is. And I do think
Speaker 1: one of the things that's exciting about that is because
Speaker 1: the way in which the way in which collaboration on
Speaker 1: three D printing works, in the way in which actually spreading,
Speaker 1: like the ability to do stuff works. I think it's
Speaker 1: synergizes nicely with the ability of people to kind of
Speaker 1: reach other folks through writing or other forms of content,
Speaker 1: because they can both spread through the same You can
Speaker 1: have a video or a story, and you can have
Speaker 1: like kind of embedded guides on how to do that.
Speaker 1: UM I I I don't know that I've I've runned
Speaker 1: into a lot of your writings on kind of the
Speaker 1: potential of three D printing in this space, But I'm interested,
Speaker 1: like to what do you do. Are you looking at
Speaker 1: that as kind of an area of hope or do
Speaker 1: you see that still is kind of too two niche
Speaker 1: and labor focus to really actually take off in the
Speaker 1: way that it would need to to crack some of
Speaker 1: these nuts. This is where I do my my woody Allen,
Speaker 1: you know nothing of my work stick because I had
Speaker 1: this novel Maker Makers in two thousand and eight. It's
Speaker 1: it's why uh Bree Pettis went out and founded Maker
Speaker 1: Bought uh and it's you know, credited with like kickstarting
Speaker 1: the homebrew three D printed revolution blah blah blah blah
Speaker 1: blah and um and it was a very bullish novel
Speaker 1: about three D printing. I um, you know, the reality
Speaker 1: hasn't lived up to the hype yet. It may just
Speaker 1: be that we're in the long trough of despair, as
Speaker 1: the Gardner hype cycle model has it. Uh. But you know,
Speaker 1: I think the problem with three D printing was that
Speaker 1: the patents had been concentrated into the hands of two
Speaker 1: large firms that had bought all their competitors, including Maker
Speaker 1: Bought and UM. When those patents finally expired. The big
Speaker 1: one was the laser centering of of powder patent expired.
Speaker 1: There just wasn't a big bang. And I think it's
Speaker 1: because the supply chain for it still had a lot
Speaker 1: of proprietary elements and so producing the powder and producing
Speaker 1: the components that allowed for that powder printing remained a
Speaker 1: very high bar, and so we just didn't see the
Speaker 1: kind of new industry emerged that we would have hoped for.
Speaker 1: And you know, it's like seven years since those patents expired.
Speaker 1: Five years since those patent expired. Now we're seeing a
Speaker 1: few more of those powder printers. You get a lot
Speaker 1: more like UVY cured epoxy printers because those came off
Speaker 1: patent earlier and they have a less complicated supply chain. Um.
Speaker 1: But still, I mean mostly when we talked about printers,
Speaker 1: we're talking about filament, and just filaments just not a
Speaker 1: great technology. It's been pushed in ways that you wouldn't
Speaker 1: even believe, and people have figured out how to do
Speaker 1: absolutely incredible things with it. But it's not it's not
Speaker 1: something that you would make aerospace components for, you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's something that you make, um novelty dungeons
Speaker 1: and dragons dice, which is an important industry to disrupt.
Speaker 1: Don't get me wrong, but I'm with you, with you.
Speaker 1: I can remember paying thirty bucks for a set of
Speaker 1: dice as a kid and thinking somebody's gotta fix this scam.
Speaker 1: I can put you something for Christmas, Robert, Thank you Garrison.
Speaker 1: And you know now I I own a I bought
Speaker 1: a comic con a couple of years ago. I bought
Speaker 1: a tiny little D twenty made out of meteoric or
Speaker 1: I have a sky metal D twenty. Oh now that's yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's classy. Um. I'm curious. We've got a little
Speaker 1: bit of time left, and I wanted to ask in
Speaker 1: your your novel Attack Surface. I know it was released
Speaker 1: right October if I'm not mistaken, um, And obviously a
Speaker 1: lot of that deals with again these kind of like
Speaker 1: corporations that have been contractors for the D O D
Speaker 1: doing like fucked up surveillance shit in Iraq and Afghanistan,
Speaker 1: bringing that technology to crack down on like US uh,
Speaker 1: sort of dissident left wing political movements. It comes out
Speaker 1: the year that we have a nationwide kind of uprising.
Speaker 1: Um that a lot of fucked up surveillance ship that
Speaker 1: had been kind of demoed state side around it like
Speaker 1: Standing Rock and whatnot, gets gets really put into its
Speaker 1: own How much of that was written before ship went down?
Speaker 1: And I and I'm assuming like I don't know exactly
Speaker 1: how your process works, but I'm wondering, like I assume
Speaker 1: you started the project before everything went the way it
Speaker 1: did last summer. How much did kind of what happened
Speaker 1: last summer affect the way you imagined that technology in
Speaker 1: those tactics functioning in that book. Yeah, the the timeline
Speaker 1: goes the other direction. I wrote that book before the
Speaker 1: are uprising, um long, long, long long before that, and
Speaker 1: I wrote it about things like, um, the surveillance technology
Speaker 1: we saw in Belarus and chev and also at Occupy
Speaker 1: and Standing Rock and at other Black Lives Matter demonstrations
Speaker 1: and uprisings in Americans. Yeah, and if you you know,
Speaker 1: also the monotonic expansion of surveillance leagues right where you know,
Speaker 1: first we learned about MC catchers, and then we learned
Speaker 1: about dirt boxes, which are MC catchers on airplanes, and
Speaker 1: you know, like we just all of that stuff leaked
Speaker 1: like crazy because you know, these surveillance giants are are
Speaker 1: not good at what they do, right, which isn't a
Speaker 1: reason we should be hopeful. A company that's bad at
Speaker 1: what it does is in some ways even worse because
Speaker 1: one of the ways that they're incompetence expresses itself is
Speaker 1: that they often gather a bunch of data on innocent
Speaker 1: people and then leak it. Yeah, right, not deliciously, just
Speaker 1: through incompetence. Um. And so you know, the this expansion
Speaker 1: of surveillance has like been on my mind for a
Speaker 1: long time, and I've been writing about it, well at
Speaker 1: least since Little Brother, Right, So two thousand and six,
Speaker 1: I wrote that novel, and I've had my finger in that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I've had my finger in that for all that time,
Speaker 1: and and working with the f F it's impossible to miss. Sure.
Speaker 1: Was there a degree to which, um, I don't know,
Speaker 1: I guess we're you surprised by anything that happened last time?
Speaker 1: Or did it just kind of comprehensively feel like these
Speaker 1: are everything slotting into place that I knew was heading
Speaker 1: in this direction? Because yeah, I mean you're right, I
Speaker 1: did like there was like everything was kind of presaged
Speaker 1: um years before. I'm yeah, I I'm wondering if if
Speaker 1: there was anything that kind of surprised you, um, or
Speaker 1: was it was it all just sort of what you've
Speaker 1: been braced for. Yeah, I don't feel like there were
Speaker 1: any kind of surveillance surprises. I mean the reverse the
Speaker 1: use of reverse warrants. I think we all kind of
Speaker 1: assumed was going on. There had been hints of it
Speaker 1: in Google's warrant canarias beforehand. But you know, those defense warrants,
Speaker 1: which again, if you're like sitting there going oh gofense,
Speaker 1: warrants are awesome because they're catching the one six rioters, Like, dude,
Speaker 1: you are going to be so disappointed, Holy sh it,
Speaker 1: that's not where they're going to keep using this. Yeah. Um, So,
Speaker 1: you know, learning more about those reverse warrants I think
Speaker 1: was was interesting. Um, but I don't feel like, I
Speaker 1: don't well, off the top of my head, I can't
Speaker 1: say that there was any new technical stuff that emerged.
Speaker 1: You know. I I am kickstarted the audio book for
Speaker 1: Attack Surface. Uh, and I offered as like the top
Speaker 1: tier you could commission short stories in the Little Brother universe,
Speaker 1: and there were three of those and I just finished
Speaker 1: the first of them, and it's about um future pipeline
Speaker 1: protests and uh. You know, I spent a lot of
Speaker 1: time in my research looking at the survey that was
Speaker 1: done on the pipeline protests, and a lot of it
Speaker 1: was provocateurs and undercovers who were just terrible at their jobs, right,
Speaker 1: like the intercepts, long publication of of uh, you know,
Speaker 1: long documents about how those operators worked. They just like
Speaker 1: showed up in military haircuts and combat boots. And then
Speaker 1: we're like, hey, I'm from Portland and I'm here because
Speaker 1: we're gonna funk up some bad guys. Let's go do it.
Speaker 1: Let's go do violence and save Indian country. And like
Speaker 1: everyone was like you and like does anyone want to
Speaker 1: buy drugs? And and the actual protesters were like, you're
Speaker 1: a provocateur, like go away, you know, like they could tell.
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess you know, there are a lot
Speaker 1: more effective in the UK in infiltrating the climate movement.
Speaker 1: You know, they impregnated several protesters, so you know, and
Speaker 1: had long term relationships with them and raised kids with them.
Speaker 1: So there is that. But here stories yeah, here, it
Speaker 1: was not that we didn't just didn't see that incredible efficacy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I do think it. That's I think kind of
Speaker 1: the message I took out of it because I I
Speaker 1: was I started reporting on like dirt boxes back during
Speaker 1: Standing Rock, just having them like it explained to me
Speaker 1: by people who were on the ground when I showed
Speaker 1: up that like, yeah, there's this your like phones don't
Speaker 1: work the same out here, and like we're trying to
Speaker 1: figure out what's going on, but like everything is is
Speaker 1: and it's not just that we're out in the sticks
Speaker 1: or anything. And I think the only surprise, the big
Speaker 1: surprise for me last year was how I think how
Speaker 1: little the technology accomplished for them and how much it
Speaker 1: just it just wound up back down to violence. Was
Speaker 1: like that was kind of the for all of the
Speaker 1: toys they had. The toys that actually made the most
Speaker 1: difference was gassing and beating people and violence and like
Speaker 1: old fashioned informants that was that was the stuff, and
Speaker 1: just having a dude there. Yeah, they were really relied on.
Speaker 1: And the fact that you that that you, Corey, weren't
Speaker 1: super surprised, But anything last year I think kind of
Speaker 1: just more shows kind of the strength of your work
Speaker 1: in terms of how you're very good at seeing the
Speaker 1: trends that are already happening but taking them to their
Speaker 1: next logical place. Um and it's a really great way
Speaker 1: to kind of get a sense of what is something,
Speaker 1: what what will something maybe look like in the next
Speaker 1: decade or so, because it's it's all based on already
Speaker 1: existing stuff, just in different kind of original ways. So
Speaker 1: that's why I think it's it's so useful to look
Speaker 1: at your books as as an activist, specifically around like
Speaker 1: surveillance and stuff, because it's it's just really it's it's
Speaker 1: really good for kind of keeping keeping an eye on,
Speaker 1: keeping your head, yeah, and and keeping an eye on
Speaker 1: what's keeping an eye on you, um and all that
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. This was a really lovely conversation. Was
Speaker 1: a lovely last thing to do in my home office
Speaker 1: in because I leave tomorrow and won't be back until
Speaker 1: the next year, and then I'm actually gonna be offline
Speaker 1: for a month after a joint replacement. So it was
Speaker 1: it was really lovely to meet you all on to
Speaker 1: chat with you. Thanks so much for chatting with us today, Glory,
Speaker 1: what's up? Guys? Have a shop Aloud and I am
Speaker 1: Troy Millions and we are the host of the Earnier
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Speaker 1: app or wherever you get your podcasts. The art world
Speaker 1: it is essentially a money laundering business. The best fakes
Speaker 1: are still hanging on people's walls. You know, they don't
Speaker 1: even know or suspect that they're fakes. I'm Alec Baldwin
Speaker 1: and this is a podcast about deception, greed and forgery
Speaker 1: in the art world. You knew the painting was fake?
Speaker 1: Um Listen to Art Fraud starting Bory fet on the
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get
Speaker 1: your podcasts. You know what, I think it's time to
Speaker 1: do a podcast. All right, I did it, Sophie. This
Speaker 1: is it could happen here a podcast that's begun. We
Speaker 1: talk about how things are falling apart, and occasionally, when
Speaker 1: we're feeling good, how to maybe how to maybe put
Speaker 1: them back together a little bit. But today we're more
Speaker 1: talking about the growing consensus that things in the US
Speaker 1: culture wars are heating up to an unacceptable level and
Speaker 1: and maybe people are going to start doing some non
Speaker 1: culture type wars here in the near future, like civil
Speaker 1: type war here in the near future. Those of you
Speaker 1: who know me, which why would you be listening to
Speaker 1: this podcast if you if you don't know, like the
Speaker 1: earlier seasons of this exact show, uh know that I
Speaker 1: talk a lot about the potential of a mass civil
Speaker 1: conflict in the United States. I've been kind of trying
Speaker 1: to warn about it for a while, and today we're
Speaker 1: gonna do an episode about some of the more mainstream
Speaker 1: sources that have started to kind of accept this as
Speaker 1: a possibility, um and get concerned about it. Garrison, You've
Speaker 1: presented us with three articles, one from NBC News, one
Speaker 1: from The Independent, and one from the Brookings Institute, all
Speaker 1: kind of fiddling around this idea that certain unnamed journalists
Speaker 1: have spent years discussing. So, yeah, we're gonna we're gonna
Speaker 1: get into it. Garrison. Yeah, So it is that the
Speaker 1: past the past few months, we have well I've I've
Speaker 1: been watching to see how how this idea has been
Speaker 1: slowly kind of eating in popularity. Of course, there was
Speaker 1: like a spike in this around like January six, but
Speaker 1: then stuff kind of settled down, and now we're kind
Speaker 1: of seeing it come back up against we had these
Speaker 1: these three pieces, all published within like a month of
Speaker 1: each other, um all kind of on this topic, and specifically,
Speaker 1: like the pieces themselves are definitely going coming out this
Speaker 1: from a more like liberal perspective. But the thing that
Speaker 1: made them interesting is that they did have a decent
Speaker 1: number of like of of polls and uh and and
Speaker 1: surveys in them based on like what who who what
Speaker 1: types of people think are like are thinking about this
Speaker 1: and think it's more more of a possibility. One survey
Speaker 1: published on November one, they've said eighteen percent of Americans
Speaker 1: believe that quote unquote patriots might have to resort to
Speaker 1: violence to quote save the country. Um so. And then
Speaker 1: that included a thirty percent of Republicans um so, but
Speaker 1: eighteen percent of all of of of of Americans in
Speaker 1: general of republic and so using that very specifically turn
Speaker 1: of phrase is definitely uh notable. And then another pole
Speaker 1: from are there in the Air found that forty six
Speaker 1: percent of people thought the country was somewhat or very
Speaker 1: likely to have another type of civil war. And that's
Speaker 1: the plurality of the people pulled in that because only
Speaker 1: like said unlikely, So the majority of people are not
Speaker 1: the majority of people pulled, but like the most common
Speaker 1: leaned on, yes, it is, I think we're going to
Speaker 1: have us a war, yeah, which is not great. The
Speaker 1: one that uh NBC published included in their article had
Speaker 1: but like thirty three percent of people saying no, it's
Speaker 1: it's probably not gonna happen, kind of on the maybe
Speaker 1: and and and and forty seven leaning on yeah this, maybe,
Speaker 1: this is, this is probably gonna happen at some point soon. YEP.
Speaker 1: I mean a lot of a lot a lot of
Speaker 1: what these articles are talking about is just like kind
Speaker 1: of the increased increased threats against like elected officials and
Speaker 1: then increased almost like militancy or performative militancy of elected
Speaker 1: officials types of like like you know, like a performatively
Speaker 1: bringing your gun into Congress and that type of thing.
Speaker 1: And it lays out like a list of a list
Speaker 1: of like of of of threats or stuff enacted against governors, congressmen,
Speaker 1: all that kind of stuff in in the past, in
Speaker 1: the past, like a year year mainly. Yeah. One of
Speaker 1: the things I really disagree about the Brookings because Brookings
Speaker 1: is the one who kind of is analyzing that made
Speaker 1: that big poll and talking about it, has a list
Speaker 1: of reasons why we might have a civil war and
Speaker 1: a list of reasons why it's unlikely. And one of
Speaker 1: the reasons why it's unlikely is quote most of the
Speaker 1: organizations talking about civil war or private not public entities, um.
Speaker 1: And note that when Southern States seceded in eighteen sixty,
Speaker 1: they had police forces, military organizations, and state sponsored militias.
Speaker 1: The rights of that now, Yeah, Like there's a ton
Speaker 1: of signal posting from guys like Jim Jordan's uh Hawthorne um,
Speaker 1: Gates Bobert um, a ton of signal posting of Gostre
Speaker 1: from elected Republican leaders, from governors, from state level elected officials,
Speaker 1: and like regular street cops. Yeah, and like regular street
Speaker 1: cops that are like civil war adjacent, um, if not
Speaker 1: directly advocating for internet scene violence. So I think that
Speaker 1: that I don't think Brookings, I don't think they're analysis
Speaker 1: is spot on with this. And I think there's just
Speaker 1: one of every thing that's interesting about that, which is
Speaker 1: I think it was one of those are these our
Speaker 1: sles arguing that it was like, well, the Pentagon's not
Speaker 1: particularly civil Like, well, the Pentagon doesn't want a civil war,
Speaker 1: They're not gonna step into it. But but I think
Speaker 1: it is also important to note that, like, like if
Speaker 1: remember what happened last summer, there's a lot of FEDS
Speaker 1: who are just like you know, like when like yeah,
Speaker 1: so's you know, the army kind of doesn't want Trump
Speaker 1: to like send the army against protesters, but like you know,
Speaker 1: like Bortach for example, like was just like absolutely hyped
Speaker 1: up to just like absolutely just go disappear a bunch
Speaker 1: of people, and they were very excited about that part. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they love they love this stuff, and it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: the notion that it's less likely because it doesn't have
Speaker 1: like formal police backing is really silly because if you
Speaker 1: spend any time monitoring these type of militia groups, you
Speaker 1: know that a good portion of them are also members
Speaker 1: of some type of law enforcement or have like family
Speaker 1: connections to member. There have been a bunch of cases
Speaker 1: of weapons being stolen stolen from forts UM, particularly in
Speaker 1: like the West Coast right now, Like, yeah, there's a
Speaker 1: ton of connections to the and a ton of like
Speaker 1: members in common. It's like at the Capital riot that
Speaker 1: were like thirty something active duty police officers involved. UM.
Speaker 1: To say that there's not direct connections with law enforcement
Speaker 1: is nonsense. And it's true that, like our military leadership
Speaker 1: remains pretty much a political and very like committed to
Speaker 1: being a political in the sense that like in the
Speaker 1: within the like US partisan context, right, Like they don't
Speaker 1: come in to prop up the Democrats of the Republicans,
Speaker 1: and I don't think that's immediately likely. But police forces
Speaker 1: in the United States are extremely politicized and have more
Speaker 1: than enough power to carry out a counterinsurgency campaign nationwide.
Speaker 1: And as long as the US military didn't step in,
Speaker 1: and why would they, Like the cops are willing and
Speaker 1: able to do the civil warring for the government. Why
Speaker 1: do you think they have all those tanks? You know?
Speaker 1: So yeah, like there is there is a lot of
Speaker 1: backing um, at least performatively among certain types of writing
Speaker 1: politicians and of course police. But I think a lot
Speaker 1: of what the politicians are trying to do is more
Speaker 1: like encourage regular folks or people in like civilian militias
Speaker 1: to just start doing violence against other elected leaders. That
Speaker 1: it seems to be like like like Bobart and that,
Speaker 1: and those types aren't they They're not like telling police
Speaker 1: to go do this. They're speaking to like regular people um.
Speaker 1: And I think one one one decent point the actually
Speaker 1: the nbc PS actually puts out it says, all of
Speaker 1: this kind of like divisive um and and more violent
Speaker 1: rhetoric and behavior displayed by and towards some of our
Speaker 1: elected officials does not necessarily mean another like civil war
Speaker 1: in terms of like a military conduct contest between states. Um.
Speaker 1: It just does not mean that it's inevitable or even
Speaker 1: probable or even like probable. A more likely scenario is
Speaker 1: a turbulent era of civil disturbances, armed confrontations, standoffs, threats,
Speaker 1: assassination attempts, and other acts of political violence. In other words,
Speaker 1: one that's a lot like the last two years of
Speaker 1: American history, which I feel like, yeah, in terms of
Speaker 1: in terms of the likelihood of there being like a
Speaker 1: more formally declared kind of conflict versus just first just
Speaker 1: like increasingly increasingly normalizing extreme violence against uh you know,
Speaker 1: quote unquote fellow countrymen. I think is is a yeah,
Speaker 1: like there's we are going to be more likely to
Speaker 1: be just moving in that direction slowly, and at the
Speaker 1: point when there's like frequent enough exchange of the fire,
Speaker 1: that's when we say, yeah, we're basically in a civil war.
Speaker 1: We're just not calling it that, um, which is you know,
Speaker 1: that's the points that you Robert, you have made a
Speaker 1: lot in the in the past. Yeah, I mean, and
Speaker 1: there's I I'm I think a lot of this is
Speaker 1: just a failure of kind of imagination and ability to
Speaker 1: accept from a group like Brookings, who I know has
Speaker 1: paid some attention to the Syrian Civil War, that like
Speaker 1: civil conflicts in the United States or in the in
Speaker 1: the twenty one century often don't like there's no clear
Speaker 1: regional split. Like you look at a lot of what
Speaker 1: was happening in Syria. You had cities divided up by
Speaker 1: neighborhoods between like who who was in charge? Um, you
Speaker 1: know that that's very much what we see here. And
Speaker 1: you do see like clear regional split between urban and
Speaker 1: rural divides. And it's not like they say, within specific states,
Speaker 1: but like I would say, it's very specific and limited
Speaker 1: states that don't have huge urban rural divides. Um, Like
Speaker 1: that's that is the norm everywhere in this country that
Speaker 1: I've been. Maybe it's different in fucking Vermont or New Hampshire,
Speaker 1: but I don't trust those places. Um. Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: guess I think they're overly optimistic based on kind of
Speaker 1: a fundamental misunderstanding of how these sorts of conflicts occur.
Speaker 1: Um that said, I don't know, like it's it's one
Speaker 1: of those things. I think the number one the number
Speaker 1: one thing you should be looking at in terms of
Speaker 1: whether or not a civil war is likely is the
Speaker 1: number of people who respond in polls with things like, yes,
Speaker 1: I think we need to use violence to restore the
Speaker 1: nation or what ever. Um That it's not just enough,
Speaker 1: like I I it's not just enough to think that
Speaker 1: a civil war is likely, because a lot of that's
Speaker 1: just based on people who don't want one, but are
Speaker 1: paying attention to the same media as everybody else and
Speaker 1: are watching the same stuff we're watching, and they're like, well,
Speaker 1: this seems sketchy. I think that the main indicator is
Speaker 1: the number of people who respond, yeah, I think it
Speaker 1: would be awesome to use violence as a like in
Speaker 1: order to make America more like what I wanted to be. Um.
Speaker 1: And again, that doesn't mean we'll we'll creep over the point.
Speaker 1: There's a number of interesting things that have happened. UM
Speaker 1: on kind of the we're headed towards the civil war side.
Speaker 1: The number one thing that I've seen recently is the
Speaker 1: use of paramilitary organizations UM to kind of choke uh,
Speaker 1: local civil institutions, um, like school boards. I see that
Speaker 1: as very concerning and as kind of prelude to the
Speaker 1: sort of armed mobilizations that you would see a unlocalized
Speaker 1: areas in any kind of civil conflict. It's it's the
Speaker 1: precursors to death squads. So that's the that's the thing
Speaker 1: that I see on the ground that worries me most,
Speaker 1: um in terms of the thing that I'm I'm less
Speaker 1: certain about honestly, Like one of the things they note
Speaker 1: in here in the Brookings article that like the sheer
Speaker 1: number of guns in the United States is a reason
Speaker 1: why we might have a civil war, and I agree
Speaker 1: with that entirely. When you have four million weapons in
Speaker 1: private hands, it increases the odds that they'll be used
Speaker 1: in some sort of scale. Um. We've also seen historic
Speaker 1: numbers of non white people of of of like folks
Speaker 1: who are from marginalized communities, UM, not just buying up
Speaker 1: weapons that unprecedented rates, but organizing with them. And I'm
Speaker 1: not really sure how to think of that. There's certainly
Speaker 1: a way it could certainly be a very negative development,
Speaker 1: but it could also be. I think a big part
Speaker 1: of what I've seen from the right lately is the
Speaker 1: sense of impede unity. UM. And I think the feeling
Speaker 1: of being matched in arms is an end to impunity potentially. UM.
Speaker 1: Then the big question is like, well what about the police,
Speaker 1: and like, well if the police side with the riot
Speaker 1: against you know, there's there's still a number of questions
Speaker 1: there and we don't have any clean answers. But um,
Speaker 1: I don't know that. I I think that on the
Speaker 1: whole I'm more worried than I was two years ago
Speaker 1: when I wrote it could happen here. Um. But it's
Speaker 1: not clean, and I think in some to some extent,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm a little more worried about something like the
Speaker 1: years of lead in Italy than I am about Syria
Speaker 1: right now, if that makes sense. I will say one
Speaker 1: thing about the years of lead, which because a lot
Speaker 1: of people talk about the years of less that the
Speaker 1: years a letter, this kind of like a roughly ten
Speaker 1: year period in Italy of I don't know, mass herostic
Speaker 1: escalating political violence with effigant body counts in a way
Speaker 1: that stood out from the years around it. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I mean you know, the years of Lead has and
Speaker 1: the use at Also there's there's a bunch of intelligence
Speaker 1: agents involved. There's a lot of four kind false flag
Speaker 1: false flag bombings, like hundred hundreds of people are being
Speaker 1: killed in bombings. And I think there's one absolutely crucial
Speaker 1: difference between now in the years of let. I mean, well, okay,
Speaker 1: so partially it's that unlike Italy, we don't have seventeen
Speaker 1: thousand intelligence agenci is operating in the US and like
Speaker 1: trying to kidnap and kill the foreign prime minister. But
Speaker 1: the the other thing that's very important is that unlike
Speaker 1: unlike the Italian left, and you know, really unlike the
Speaker 1: whole global left of the seventies and eighties, there is
Speaker 1: no American like left wing like left wing. I guess
Speaker 1: you could call like there's there's no left wing terrorist tradition,
Speaker 1: right like the like the left doesn't do suside bombings,
Speaker 1: The left doesn't kidnap people like like the modern American
Speaker 1: leftis doesn't do that, And that a big part of
Speaker 1: of what was happening in the years of Lead was that,
Speaker 1: you know, sometimes the left was doing this. A lot
Speaker 1: of times it was the state pretending to be the
Speaker 1: left carrying up bombings, and that isn't really something that
Speaker 1: is happening right now because there's just like the like,
Speaker 1: the the left is not in a place where everyone
Speaker 1: is going, we need to do armed urban guerrilla movements
Speaker 1: and yeah. So and then that that makes it harder
Speaker 1: to sort of pin things like pin actual urban guerrilla
Speaker 1: movement stuff on the left because there's just none of that.
Speaker 1: But I don't think and I agree years of Left
Speaker 1: is kind of like a broad Strokes comparison, because what
Speaker 1: I see is more likely is what we're what we're
Speaker 1: already witnessing on the ground with these right wing militant
Speaker 1: groups increases, and they moved to the point of kidnapping
Speaker 1: and executing and potentially in concert with law enforcement, like
Speaker 1: doing stuff like in states that have issued harsh laws,
Speaker 1: you know, banning certain books you have in a town,
Speaker 1: local law enforcement and militias like go after and grab
Speaker 1: individual leftists and either kill or im a is in them,
Speaker 1: and conflicts over that, and you have the left increasingly
Speaker 1: organized an arm um as a defense against that, and
Speaker 1: then a number of armed conflicts you know, as a
Speaker 1: result of that, which maybe then proceed to bombings and
Speaker 1: stuff that that's terrorism or proceed to just more kind
Speaker 1: of skirmishes that the FEDS have a minimal response to,
Speaker 1: and local or state law enforcement kind of tacitly allows.
Speaker 1: Um like that. That's that's kind of obviously that's not
Speaker 1: a direct comparison to what happened in Italy, but of
Speaker 1: course we're a different country. But that's kind of that's
Speaker 1: kind of the the kind of brush fire conflict I
Speaker 1: could see cropping up in the very near future in
Speaker 1: this country. You know what else will start a series
Speaker 1: of armed gunfights between left and right in American towns.
Speaker 1: The products and services they they're they're working on it
Speaker 1: every day. The products and services that support this podcast
Speaker 1: urged violence on the streets of the United States. That's
Speaker 1: behind the bastards. Guarantee, Sophie, we're not doing behind the bastards?
Speaker 1: What what show are we? Who are we? Anyway? Here's ads?
Speaker 1: All right? Oh my gosh, uh we're back. Yeah, what
Speaker 1: a great ad. I really nailed that transition. Um, just
Speaker 1: absolutely so. The next thing that I want to talk about, UM,
Speaker 1: something that I think has some some backing behind it,
Speaker 1: and something that I think is kind of more silly,
Speaker 1: is that one of one of the reasons that this
Speaker 1: uh NBC piece by what's his name, uh, Brian Brian
Speaker 1: Michael Jenkins is uh. He says. One of one of
Speaker 1: the reasons that we're kind of getting more okay with,
Speaker 1: you know, uh, killing or hurting our neighbors essentially is
Speaker 1: um quote, Americans do fewer things together. Church attendance is declining.
Speaker 1: Membership and civic organizations and lodges have been decreasing for decades.
Speaker 1: PTA membership has dropped by nearly half from what it
Speaker 1: was in nineteen sixties, Bowling leagues have almost disappeared, and
Speaker 1: a shared national experience of military service disintegrated with the
Speaker 1: abolition of conscription in nineteen seventy three. Meanwhile, self proclaimed
Speaker 1: citizen militia's driven mainly by far right conspiracy theories, have
Speaker 1: surged since to US and eight, especially in the past
Speaker 1: five years. So he is wrong, but he's yes, militias
Speaker 1: have leagues, militias have risen. But is that due to
Speaker 1: bowling leagues. Yeah, I don't think it's due to a
Speaker 1: drop in bowling leagues. I think it's due to the
Speaker 1: fact that all these guys are terminally online now and
Speaker 1: we're watching Fox news for twenty years before that. That
Speaker 1: that is the thing is that like, I don't think
Speaker 1: this guy, Brian Michael Chickens understands how the Internet intersects
Speaker 1: with extremism because he's he's doing this from a very
Speaker 1: like like he's he's acting like we're still in the
Speaker 1: seventies and he like like that's not how the world works,
Speaker 1: and how like people spend their time. No, people aren't
Speaker 1: doing bowling leagues, but yeah, whoman young men are spending
Speaker 1: and and you know middle aged men are spending time online,
Speaker 1: whether that be discord in a terrorist group chat, or
Speaker 1: that be a Facebook group that's for a militia, and
Speaker 1: that's where that socialization is happening. And because the Internet
Speaker 1: rewards extremism and the hottest take, it's moving in that
Speaker 1: direction even with people who would ordinarily just have historically
Speaker 1: the past joined bowling leagues. I guess, but it very
Speaker 1: it's it's correlation doesn't equal causation. Ship it's wow, less
Speaker 1: people are in bowling leagues and going to church and
Speaker 1: militias have grown wildly, wildly, Um, this one must cause
Speaker 1: the other. And it's like, well, no, they're both both
Speaker 1: of those things may have some causes in common. There
Speaker 1: may be similar factors that are driving both of those things,
Speaker 1: but they are not caused like that, they don't necessary
Speaker 1: one doesn't necessarily cause the other. UM. And if you like, again,
Speaker 1: the smart person version of this would be to say, hey,
Speaker 1: people are doing less things together out in the world.
Speaker 1: People are reporting because you can find statistic backup for this.
Speaker 1: People seem to be lonelier than ever. UM. People are
Speaker 1: more depressed than ever. Suicide rates have risen, and while
Speaker 1: this is happening, militias and extremist groups have grown. Perhaps
Speaker 1: there's something about these organizations UM that makes them particularly
Speaker 1: attractive when folks are vulnerable due to these things, and like,
Speaker 1: let's look at you know, the failure of our political
Speaker 1: system to confront these issues further feeds into the desire
Speaker 1: amongst some chunk of the populace for some sort of
Speaker 1: nihilistic cleansing violence. And again, pieces of all the pieces
Speaker 1: of this article could be could be reassembled into something
Speaker 1: with um some insight, but I I don't think Brian
Speaker 1: Michael Jenkins has much. I think it's also an interesting
Speaker 1: thing to note here about because so the last thing
Speaker 1: he talks about this oh is the thing that formed
Speaker 1: the common sort of national identity was shared universal military service.
Speaker 1: And it's like, okay, the reason shared universal military service
Speaker 1: went away was that everyone kept murdering literally just blowing
Speaker 1: their officers up in Vietnam like that. And you know,
Speaker 1: if if you want to talk about I think like
Speaker 1: incredibly high levels of political polarization and like mass violence
Speaker 1: between Americans, I mean, the army basically fighting a civil
Speaker 1: war against itself in Vietnam is you know, in an
Speaker 1: enormously important part of this. And then simultaneously the sort
Speaker 1: of right wing vets returning home and you know, going
Speaker 1: Louis Beam and stuff like that that you know, he's
Speaker 1: relying on this kind of mythos of this. So there
Speaker 1: was a time when you know, it's it's it's basically
Speaker 1: made it make America great again. But sort of like, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's a liberal. This this type of rhetoric is
Speaker 1: actually very similar to like the return return to tradition stuff,
Speaker 1: being like the solution to our extremism need to be
Speaker 1: going to church church again, being part of civil organizations,
Speaker 1: joining bowling leagues, and conscript conscripted military service. That's like
Speaker 1: that is that that is just the same that that
Speaker 1: is very similar to like the make American grade again,
Speaker 1: return to tradition sect because those are those are also
Speaker 1: their goals, except that they're just willing to use violence
Speaker 1: to achieve those goals, whereas this guy just wants people
Speaker 1: to start doing that again. I guess, um, I don't know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like in terms of like military service not leading to extremism,
Speaker 1: I mean, like Oklahoma City bombing, I don't, I don't,
Speaker 1: I don't really there is other stuff going on there,
Speaker 1: But like in terms of terms of that being like
Speaker 1: an example, it is, it is very silly because a
Speaker 1: lot of a lot of a lot of the guys
Speaker 1: even inside you know, are are current like three per
Speaker 1: centers and stuff. A lot of them have former military service.
Speaker 1: That I mean. But like, yeah, citizen Militia's in terms
Speaker 1: of gaining popularity, but specifically due to um kind of
Speaker 1: overall distrust of the federal government and the type of
Speaker 1: socialization that being online too much results in, has yes,
Speaker 1: grown grown grown the militia movement a lot um and
Speaker 1: and I just don't see how Bowling is going to
Speaker 1: solve that issue in terms of in terms of how
Speaker 1: do we mean to trust the federal government solve that issue, Garrison.
Speaker 1: But but you've never watched The Big Lebowski, so you
Speaker 1: wouldn't you wouldn't understand. I've not watched The Big Lebowski,
Speaker 1: So I'm kind of I'm kind of I'm kind of
Speaker 1: done with the kind of done with the NBC piece there.
Speaker 1: I know there was there was something Brian Michael Jenkins.
Speaker 1: The other thing on on the Brookings thing that I
Speaker 1: have a decent issue with is that they're one of
Speaker 1: the reasons they give for and and this is actually
Speaker 1: something that Brian Michael Junkins also brings up with the
Speaker 1: NBC piece, is that one of the reasons why they
Speaker 1: believe the civil war is not as inevitable is because
Speaker 1: there is no clear regional split like a North South divide,
Speaker 1: and they, for some reason think this means that there
Speaker 1: is less likely to be civil conflict. Um. They they
Speaker 1: recognized there is an urban rule divide in most states,
Speaker 1: but because there is no large, kind of obvious North
Speaker 1: South divide, they think this is going to make a
Speaker 1: civil war less likely. Well, the map would really be
Speaker 1: a pain in the ass, so it probably won't happen, right, Like,
Speaker 1: That's that's the thing they're thinking, is like, oh, if
Speaker 1: I was gonna if I have to map this out,
Speaker 1: it's gonna be too complicated. When I read that, I
Speaker 1: had flashbacks to my first trip to a war zone
Speaker 1: in Ukraine, where we were like taking Google Maps up
Speaker 1: to a certain point and then we had to use
Speaker 1: like hand drawn notes because he was like, well the
Speaker 1: different like the different chunks of this air next like
Speaker 1: twenty acres that are owned by the separatists as opposed
Speaker 1: to the government, or like, you can't use Google it'll
Speaker 1: send you into enemy territories because it's not a clean
Speaker 1: break because you had literally suburbs of cities fighting each
Speaker 1: other and you still do. Yeah, this is a this
Speaker 1: is you know, I think personally, this this this is
Speaker 1: a sort of peak American brain thing because you know,
Speaker 1: there's there's been like five ever civil wars that are
Speaker 1: broken like this, and the problem is that there's American
Speaker 1: civil war and then we also fought in both Vietnam
Speaker 1: and North Korea, but like, well, yeah, yeah, but we
Speaker 1: just really civil war. Yeah yeah, yeah, that's that's there
Speaker 1: was fighting between two halves of the country that it
Speaker 1: was a proxy for two others. Several other kind of yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's yeah, and that's and that's the thing that like,
Speaker 1: it's the combination of the American Civil War was very
Speaker 1: unique civil war and then the other major things that
Speaker 1: we think of as like quote unquote civil wars were
Speaker 1: you know, we're basically cold war stuff, and I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, like that, there there are a couple other
Speaker 1: like yeah, I mean there have been other examples of
Speaker 1: like secessionist stuff like that, as like I mean, in
Speaker 1: in in any civil there's a lot of other countries
Speaker 1: that get involved. In the US Civil War, there was
Speaker 1: a significant amount of that sort of and even even
Speaker 1: even even in the US Civil War, like there are
Speaker 1: just like towns in the middle of like Confederate Territory
Speaker 1: they're like, no, funk this, we're not going over. But
Speaker 1: everyone but people have this just like incredibly myopic view
Speaker 1: of what a civil war is. And it's like every
Speaker 1: other civil war that's been fought in the last like
Speaker 1: fifty years has been just seven thousand factions like neighborhood
Speaker 1: fighting each other. I don't know, it's just incredibly frustrating
Speaker 1: to watch these people not understand this. It's very America
Speaker 1: brained and it's very sad because I'm going to read
Speaker 1: a quote that's gonna make us want to purge our ears.
Speaker 1: There are urban rule differences within specific states, with progressives
Speaker 1: dominating the city as while conservatives reside in rural communities,
Speaker 1: but that is a far different geographic divide than when
Speaker 1: one region could wage war on another. The lack of
Speaker 1: a distinctive or uniform geographic division limits the ability to
Speaker 1: confront other areas organized supply chains and mobilize the population.
Speaker 1: There can be local skirmaches between different forces, but not
Speaker 1: a situation where one state or region attacks another, which
Speaker 1: is complete nonsense. And that's not how like it's like
Speaker 1: they don't understand that guerrilla fighting exists, and they don't
Speaker 1: understand how the whole, the whole, the whole part about
Speaker 1: organizing supply chains and mobilized population like that is just
Speaker 1: another way to fight a war is by exploiting that
Speaker 1: specific thing like the fact that cities are so isolated
Speaker 1: um and lack and and and lack of home wage resources,
Speaker 1: and the fact that rural areas are isolated in a
Speaker 1: different way and lack separate resources. That is not something
Speaker 1: that makes a civil war less likely. That just makes
Speaker 1: it more complicated and makes it more fighting over Amazon
Speaker 1: fulfillment centers and the like. Yeah, like it's it's the
Speaker 1: it is it is ridiculous, um saying that, Yeah, saying
Speaker 1: that the uh that that it's it's far different from
Speaker 1: a geographic divide that one reacher could wage one another.
Speaker 1: Is like that. No that you're you're just saying something
Speaker 1: that is just completely wrong and like you have not
Speaker 1: studied any type of like urban conflict whatsoever. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: I think there's important thing in here, which is that
Speaker 1: regions mostly it's not that region's wage warning. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: not people don't do the fighting. Yeah, Like regions aren't
Speaker 1: the things that are fighting. It's the people in areas
Speaker 1: and people can move around and people can block off
Speaker 1: access to areas, and like it's it's this, it's a
Speaker 1: weird it's a it's super weird way to think about things.
Speaker 1: And it's the fact that if if this is something
Speaker 1: that like the Brooking Institution, um is, if this is
Speaker 1: what they think on this topic, that's pretty sad indicator
Speaker 1: for what a lot of people how they how like
Speaker 1: a lot of mainstream levels are going to view the
Speaker 1: possibility of any type of civil conflict. And I don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe they feel very secure in their cities um, which
Speaker 1: which is a weird thing. I've I've not felt that
Speaker 1: in years. Yeah. And I think the other thing that's
Speaker 1: very weird about this is that because so a lot
Speaker 1: of people writing about this are x are um like
Speaker 1: kind are like kind of terrorism people, right, and the
Speaker 1: kind of terrorism kind of insurgence people. It's weird because
Speaker 1: they used to understand this, like, you know, like a
Speaker 1: lot of like you know, because like in in you know,
Speaker 1: in in the twentieth century and in even sort of
Speaker 1: the early century, like the the sort of the sort
Speaker 1: of standard like grilling insurgency doctrine was you know, it's
Speaker 1: some some some some variation on the like maoists fish
Speaker 1: in the sea, like surround the cities where we're like
Speaker 1: real areas, etcetera, etcet etcetera, and like and you you
Speaker 1: even see versions of this, you know, in things that
Speaker 1: are quite civil wars but are kind of like what
Speaker 1: happened like the water and gas wars and Oblivi and
Speaker 1: the the two thousands were like you know what, what what? Yeah,
Speaker 1: you have kind of an urban real divide without they
Speaker 1: have allies in the cities, but the sort of you know,
Speaker 1: like that the you have a bunch of rural indigenous
Speaker 1: groups that literally just you know, they blockade every road
Speaker 1: in the country and then start of the cities out right.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is this, this is this is just
Speaker 1: a thing that happened in It's just like yeah, that
Speaker 1: is like, yeah, that is that. That is going to
Speaker 1: happen sooner than later, whether that be caused by accident,
Speaker 1: by some type of climate natural disaster, or on purpose
Speaker 1: by a militia like that. It's just a matter of
Speaker 1: time until we have to deal with this massive problem. Yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: And it's like I've been reading recently about um Uruguay
Speaker 1: and what happened with them, and like the seventies when
Speaker 1: their dictatorship took over and they had a left wing
Speaker 1: group that was like very much engaged in kind of
Speaker 1: a lot of acts of poetic terrorism, like you know,
Speaker 1: robbing banks to steal paperwork that they would then hand
Speaker 1: over to like somebody to reveal malfeasance within a company,
Speaker 1: or like stealing trucks of food going to like some
Speaker 1: big wealthy Christmas party and redistributing it in poor neighborhoods.
Speaker 1: Pretty rad stuff, and one of the ways in which
Speaker 1: the new incoming dictatorial regime cracked down to them as
Speaker 1: they deputized like ten thousand chuds and gave them guns
Speaker 1: and sent them in with the army. Um. And I
Speaker 1: was like, yeah, I could absolutely see could that happen? Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like if there was some sort of uprising in a
Speaker 1: in a liberal city, there's rual areas around them filled
Speaker 1: with chuds there, and there is precedent, There is precedent
Speaker 1: for police doing that. Um, they have done it within
Speaker 1: your r I shot garrison like on small scales. So
Speaker 1: I think we'll have one more break and come back
Speaker 1: and talk about a talk about a hedge fund. Oh
Speaker 1: funk I love hedge funds. Let me get Let me
Speaker 1: get my hedge funds. Shared out the shirt that I
Speaker 1: wear when talking about hedge funds. All right, I have
Speaker 1: my hedge fund shirt on UM. As you can all see,
Speaker 1: it's a picture of Ringo star filating himself. I don't
Speaker 1: know why that's my head fun shirt. I don't know either,
Speaker 1: but I love the beach Boys. Um. Anyway, so thank
Speaker 1: you perfect nailed it. Uh. We should we talk about
Speaker 1: this hedge fund guy? Yes, I do want to talk
Speaker 1: with this hedge fund guy, because this is when something
Speaker 1: with this much money is talking about this one just
Speaker 1: for fun, right, he's doing this just for ship funds. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's doing it for ships and giggles. And he wrote
Speaker 1: a book kind of on this topic and he proposed
Speaker 1: one one solution. He came up with one thing that
Speaker 1: will prevent us from entering a civil war. Um, which
Speaker 1: shows how smart these hedge fund people are. Um. But first, uh,
Speaker 1: I Chris would love to I would love for you
Speaker 1: to explain who who this? Who this dude is? Okay,
Speaker 1: So Rae Dao is a hedge fund manager and he
Speaker 1: is so he runs Bridge Bridge Water Social allegedly the
Speaker 1: world's largest hedge fund firm. Yeah, and it depends how
Speaker 1: you de find everything. But yeah, it's a very large fund.
Speaker 1: And this guy, this guy is weird by like venture
Speaker 1: capital standards. So the Bridgewaters whole thing is that everyone
Speaker 1: in the company is constantly surveiled at all times, and
Speaker 1: anyone else when the company could look at when anyone
Speaker 1: else is doing. It's supposed to be like it was
Speaker 1: like total transparency, and what what it actually means again,
Speaker 1: is it like you can you can look at like
Speaker 1: fucking what any of your colleagues, like also working at
Speaker 1: this place, is doing just sucking at their day job.
Speaker 1: You can see all their records, you can see everything
Speaker 1: they're looking at. And the other thing that he's known
Speaker 1: for is that he doesn't trust anyone else to like
Speaker 1: run the hedge fund after he retires. Your dies, So
Speaker 1: he's trying to build like like a cybernetic version of
Speaker 1: his brain to keep running the hedge funds. The like
Speaker 1: other hedge fund weirdos think this guy is fucking wild.
Speaker 1: And yeah, he's he's a time and he runs one
Speaker 1: of the worlds or just has funds. It's great, it's
Speaker 1: we it's it's amazing and good we give there's people
Speaker 1: this much money to control. So I will say, when
Speaker 1: it comes to his actual analysis of like whether or
Speaker 1: not it's likely, I don't particularly disagree with anything. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's it's broadly reasonable. Yeah, his looking Yeah for what,
Speaker 1: he's just doing this because because he thinks it's fun.
Speaker 1: He has enough money he's gonna survive whatever. Um. But yeah,
Speaker 1: he's also I mean, part of why this is fairly
Speaker 1: credible is he's I mean, if you're if you're good
Speaker 1: at this, it means that you have one actual talent,
Speaker 1: which is is judging risk. Um, and I think he's
Speaker 1: probably pretty good at judging risk. Yeah. So he he
Speaker 1: he said that he believes there's like a high likely
Speaker 1: could that a civil war or something resembling it will
Speaker 1: break out within the decade. Um is the number he gives.
Speaker 1: He's the number he gives and then he, um, yeah, wait,
Speaker 1: let's see. Yeah he said there's also he have a
Speaker 1: quality says it's a we're we're in a we're in
Speaker 1: a high risk position right now. Um. And yeah. He
Speaker 1: talks about the different kind of reasons why he believes
Speaker 1: so in this book, most of which are like pretty reasonable,
Speaker 1: um in terms of like uh, in terms of like
Speaker 1: looking at a population and how much how like you know,
Speaker 1: the various like polarization between politics and culture and all
Speaker 1: this kind of stuff. Um. But the solution that he
Speaker 1: gives to this is that, um, we should make a
Speaker 1: formal judgment for quote unquote close elections and have the
Speaker 1: losers respect the outcomes, and then once that happens, the
Speaker 1: order is going to be like restored and respected, and
Speaker 1: then we will avert a civil war. So he he
Speaker 1: thinks that a civil will will probably be like enacted
Speaker 1: by some type of election dispute, which that is actually
Speaker 1: very reasonable in terms of what happened in our last election.
Speaker 1: If there's like a big if there's a big election dispute,
Speaker 1: that could absolutely spark some type of conflict. But the
Speaker 1: idea that we can avert a civil war by just
Speaker 1: having an organization to judge close elections is like, but
Speaker 1: that's not gonna solve, Like, that's not gonna if you
Speaker 1: do that, that's not gonna solve the close election problem.
Speaker 1: That doesn't even if you do it, that won't be
Speaker 1: a solution, you know, And I I will say, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: lexcuse some saying credit credit where minor credit is due.
Speaker 1: Radalio is in fact right that the difference between two thousands,
Speaker 1: which is when the last time someone actually literally stole
Speaker 1: an election happened, where yeah, but Bush Bush openly rigs
Speaker 1: the election. It's incredibly obvious, like there's like six ways
Speaker 1: he does this. Everyone knows it's happening. And the reaction
Speaker 1: is everyone just kind of shrugs because they're like, oh,
Speaker 1: this dream courts legitimate compared to both, which yeah, that
Speaker 1: that's you know, that's that's that's there there's been an
Speaker 1: actual break there. It's just that I don't know, Maybe
Speaker 1: I think it's it's almost just like a lip brained
Speaker 1: thing where it's like you think that if if you
Speaker 1: have an institution that sets down rules this, this will
Speaker 1: make everything okay because everyone will obey it. And that's
Speaker 1: just not where we are anymore. Yeah, I mean, there
Speaker 1: was just a poll that came out recently. It should
Speaker 1: like Americans trust in the military has fallen to its
Speaker 1: lowest level ever registered, and like that was kind of
Speaker 1: the one thing left that most people felt positively about.
Speaker 1: Not to say that that's even a good thing, but
Speaker 1: just like the there is such a complete fucking lack
Speaker 1: of faith in institutions across the spectrum in the United States.
Speaker 1: But it's like, how unless you're hiring I don't know,
Speaker 1: um fucking no. I would say Tom Hanks, but Tom
Speaker 1: Hanks has even gotten politicized even because believes in viruses.
Speaker 1: So yeah, there's no one they could pick to get
Speaker 1: do this job that people would feel good about if
Speaker 1: they Yeah, I mean, I'm sure if they brought Mr
Speaker 1: Rodgers back from the dead, half the country would call
Speaker 1: him a cuck. So I don't I don't know what what,
Speaker 1: I don't know who Dahio thinks is going to like
Speaker 1: get everybody on board. So maybe maybe maybe um Danny DeVito,
Speaker 1: Danny DeVito might be able to do it. Well. I
Speaker 1: think if if we put all of our hope in
Speaker 1: Danny DeVito, that is a better solution than what any
Speaker 1: of these articles and the court. It beats it beats
Speaker 1: every other quote solution the articles posited. I mean Odin
Speaker 1: Kirk brought Twitter together that one week. Maybe, yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: with with this practice in court, if you just picked
Speaker 1: twelve random people off the street and we're like you,
Speaker 1: that's that's the thing. It's like, I am, I am
Speaker 1: all for It's the term isn't the term isn't a democracy. Um,
Speaker 1: it's it's I forget the other yes of of almost
Speaker 1: I forget exactly, but it's it's when a government is
Speaker 1: not composed of elected leaders, composed of a random selected
Speaker 1: a random selection of people, and the decisions and then
Speaker 1: the decisions over then we then we get a new selection.
Speaker 1: I'm all for that model of government over almost any other.
Speaker 1: It sounds way better than what we have. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So that that is, that is the three pieces I
Speaker 1: want to talk about the independent piece on the Hedge Fund,
Speaker 1: Brooking Institution on the Civil War. And then uh, Brian wentno,
Speaker 1: not not Brian, yes, um Brian Michael Jenkins Um, senior
Speaker 1: advisor to the president of RAND Who who who wrote who?
Speaker 1: Who wrote the thing for NBC. So yeah, that is
Speaker 1: just the terms of in terms of you know, people
Speaker 1: in institutions talking about the topic more generally and sometimes
Speaker 1: decent ways, oftentimes not decent ways. That is, that is
Speaker 1: the stuff from like the just the past between the
Speaker 1: past week two months of people with big salaries talking
Speaker 1: about the Civil War yea, or in terms of the
Speaker 1: in terms of the Hedge Fund guy, not a salary,
Speaker 1: just billions of dollars, Yeah, just billions of dollars and
Speaker 1: thinking it's neat. Um. I don't know. You know, every
Speaker 1: time one these comes out, I get tagged by a
Speaker 1: bunch of people, um saying like, Robbert is the thing
Speaker 1: you were talking about? Other people are talking about it,
Speaker 1: and um, I don't know, I don't like that this
Speaker 1: is the thing other people are talking about that I've
Speaker 1: been talking about as opposed to mass Zeppelin, transit or
Speaker 1: something more fun. Yeah, these people could dedicate the resources
Speaker 1: into something more manageable for them, and because they don't
Speaker 1: have a good grasp, especially that Brian Michael guys has
Speaker 1: no grasp on how extremism works. Um, and it would
Speaker 1: be better if they dedicate the resources to something else.
Speaker 1: But this is the world we live in. It would
Speaker 1: be better if perhaps Brian Michael Jenkins dedicated his his
Speaker 1: efforts and his platform at NBC to looking into Mr
Speaker 1: Dario and whatever the funk he's been up to. Um,
Speaker 1: that might that might do more. Very man, he just
Speaker 1: get plan them on. He would absolutely Brian Michael Jenkins
Speaker 1: would get PanAm on so fucking quick. Al Right, Well,
Speaker 1: the hannimnious motherfucker in journalism just just like not even
Speaker 1: not even downtime before that car gets bombed as he's
Speaker 1: talking on air. The Okay, Brian Michael Jakins is seventy
Speaker 1: nine years old, so it won't it wouldn't be hard.
Speaker 1: H I just that that that's like a ten minute job.
Speaker 1: I'm just I'm just thinking like Brian Michael Jakins, he's
Speaker 1: a quote unquote an American expert on terrorism and transportation
Speaker 1: security with four neckets of analysis. This is why he
Speaker 1: doesn't understand modern extremism. It's because yeah, he's still thinking
Speaker 1: in the seventies mode. That's sure. I'm sure of his
Speaker 1: thoughts on terrorism are just him rehashing opinions about like
Speaker 1: Hezbollah in the eighties. Yeah, all of all of his
Speaker 1: stuff is superdated. So that's that's why I said that previously,
Speaker 1: is that he still views terrorism as like as it
Speaker 1: was in the seventies. And yeah, this is this is why.
Speaker 1: Um So that's great, guy, that's that's him. Um, anyway,
Speaker 1: that wraps up our show. Um, yeah, watch out for
Speaker 1: the one. The one Brian Michael Jenkins prediction I do
Speaker 1: think will happen is that there's a decent chance we
Speaker 1: might be back in an assassination territory, because it is,
Speaker 1: but it has been a long time since that has happened.
Speaker 1: It's it has been a hot minute and definitely leagues
Speaker 1: when it keeps happening in the UK. Yeah, I was
Speaker 1: meaning specifically in in in America and yeah, that's what
Speaker 1: I'm saying. We're we're not that far away from them
Speaker 1: in terms of like things happening, so that I'm kind
Speaker 1: of surprised it hasn't had. I think it's probably just
Speaker 1: because maybe American legislators are all much more concerned about
Speaker 1: assassination because guns, so people like our elected leaders take
Speaker 1: more precautions than British ones. Did. I don't know. Maybe
Speaker 1: I don't know either. Well, speaking of assassinations, you can
Speaker 1: follow us on Twitter and Instagram. That happened here particles
Speaker 1: on media. If we go missing it was great. If
Speaker 1: we go think it was Radaldio co Hi. Everybody, This
Speaker 1: is Roxanne Gay, host of The Roxanne Gay Agenda, The
Speaker 1: Bad Rominast podcast of Your Dreams. Now, what is the
Speaker 1: Roxanne Gay Agenda, you might ask. It's a podcast where
Speaker 1: I'm going to speak my mind about what's on my mind,
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Speaker 1: in conversation with an interesting person who has something to say.
Speaker 1: We're going to talk about feminism, race, writing in books,
Speaker 1: and art, food, pop culture, and yes, politics. I started
Speaker 1: show with a recommendation. Really, I'm just going to share
Speaker 1: with you a movie or a book, or maybe some
Speaker 1: music or a comedy set, something that I really want
Speaker 1: you to be aware of and maybe engage with as well.
Speaker 1: Listen to the Luminary original podcast The Roxanne Gay Agenda,
Speaker 1: The Bad Cominist podcast of your dream every Tuesday on
Speaker 1: the I Heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: get your podcast. Here's to the great American settlers. The
Speaker 1: millions of you have settled for unsatisfying jobs because they
Speaker 1: pay the bills, and you just kind of fell into it,
Speaker 1: and you know, it's like totally fine, just another few
Speaker 1: decades or so and then you can enjoy yourself. Of course,
Speaker 1: there is something else you could do. If you've got
Speaker 1: something to say, you could, I don't know, start up
Speaker 1: podcast with Spreaker from my heart and unleash your creative
Speaker 1: freedom and spend all day researching and talking about stuff
Speaker 1: you love and maybe even earn enough money to one
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Speaker 1: off into the sunset. Hey I'm no settler, I'm an explorer.
Speaker 1: Spreaker dot com. That's spr e a k E R.
Speaker 1: Hustle on over Today, Welcome to it could happen here
Speaker 1: talk podcast YEP. I could say it a podcast. That's
Speaker 1: what we're doing, and it's about it's about how things
Speaker 1: are kind of kind of kind of falling apart sometimes,
Speaker 1: or at least it feels like it, and I don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe we can do some things to help make it better,
Speaker 1: like what happened recently in terms of forests. So, hey,
Speaker 1: a good news episode. Whoa rare rare rare episode drop
Speaker 1: for us? Uh, we got some good news. So I'm
Speaker 1: gonna be talking with Sam, who was on a previous
Speaker 1: episode discussing a forest defense, about an update on on
Speaker 1: all of the things that we were talking about a
Speaker 1: few weeks ago. Um. So yeah, I think we can.
Speaker 1: We can pretty much get into it, and then then
Speaker 1: we'll talk about some other stuff around kind of forests
Speaker 1: in general. So Hello, Sam, Thank thank you for joining
Speaker 1: me again to talk about trees, one of one of
Speaker 1: our favorite topics. Hello, my pleasure always. So I think
Speaker 1: it was like a day or two after we dropped
Speaker 1: the episode or something, or I think I think it was.
Speaker 1: Actually it was maybe maybe even like right like right before, Um,
Speaker 1: we got some extra extra news about all about the
Speaker 1: post about the postfire logging um near the bright Bush Watershed. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: what happened there? Yeah, yeah, it was pretty wild. Actually
Speaker 1: it was really serendipitous timing too. Um. We as I
Speaker 1: think we mentioned in the last podcast, we were awaiting
Speaker 1: the first hearing for the court case essentially, you know,
Speaker 1: we believed that the plan to log in that area
Speaker 1: for myriad reasons was not only unethical but also illegal. Um.
Speaker 1: And so it was going to court and we were
Speaker 1: awaiting a hearing that happened on December three, Friday, And
Speaker 1: typically the judge does not rule from the bench and
Speaker 1: these sorts of hearings, and so we did not expect
Speaker 1: the decision on that day. UM. But sure enough the
Speaker 1: judge felt uh strongly enough about this case and sure
Speaker 1: enough about her decision that she did rule from the
Speaker 1: bench and ruled in our favor. And so yeah, victories. UM.
Speaker 1: Now we have um a preliminary injunction in place, meaning
Speaker 1: that no logging can happen there um at least until
Speaker 1: this uh timber sale has its real day in court,
Speaker 1: or until the Fourth Service just drops this shenanigan entirely,
Speaker 1: which hopefully they will do, but we'll see. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: they they blocked, they blocked the posts part logging and
Speaker 1: the the the basically started start starting to clear cut
Speaker 1: these areas without without actual like public and putting, without
Speaker 1: actually going through the process as flawed as the process.
Speaker 1: Maybe they were just skipping it entirely so that that
Speaker 1: was that was that was blocked by this, by by
Speaker 1: this legal case. Um, what was I guess Yeah, what
Speaker 1: what was what was the h what? What was what?
Speaker 1: What was the reaction like in in in the room
Speaker 1: and in the various signal chats when this happened. Yeah,
Speaker 1: in the ether spheres, Um, the reaction was super awesome.
Speaker 1: I mean, so many people love this place and that
Speaker 1: was kind of the whole point of what we were
Speaker 1: trying to do when we did the direct action out
Speaker 1: there a number of years ago. It was just demonstrate
Speaker 1: how many people love this place and how the four
Speaker 1: Service wasn't going to get away with what they're planning
Speaker 1: to do. UM because people, as we promised, would be
Speaker 1: back if they tried to log it and move forward
Speaker 1: with that logging, which, as you pointed out, and as
Speaker 1: we said last time, was super sketchy, not only because
Speaker 1: it was a terrible plan that they were planning to
Speaker 1: do UM in this beloved for us, but also because
Speaker 1: it was behind locked gates that in the public wasn't
Speaker 1: allowed into and so UM it was just this you know,
Speaker 1: travesty that was about to happen. And when we found out, um,
Speaker 1: and when we heard the judges incredibly strong ruling. Um.
Speaker 1: We you know, we're absolutely overjoyed. Um. The news spread,
Speaker 1: you know, like wildfire, excuse the pun it do it um,
Speaker 1: and just you know, all the signal threads were popping.
Speaker 1: People were putting it on Twitter. People were reposting the
Speaker 1: sexy photos of the blockade with the giant slash pile
Speaker 1: and the fire truck and the band on top of
Speaker 1: the fire truck. And I just wish that we all
Speaker 1: could have hung out again and had another dance party
Speaker 1: because it was the best that doesn't incredibly incredibly rad
Speaker 1: um was was like your this is this is this
Speaker 1: is something I don't I don't don't actually know, but
Speaker 1: it was like the documentation that was taking place by
Speaker 1: by going to these places and showing hey, this is
Speaker 1: where they're cutting. Was that brought up in the court
Speaker 1: case in terms of like, hey, this is we actually
Speaker 1: went and saw what's actually happening. So it was was
Speaker 1: that type of evidence used and did it, in your mind,
Speaker 1: like um um uh kind of be a small part
Speaker 1: of like the result of the ruling. Yeah, it definitely was.
Speaker 1: And that is such an important point and I really
Speaker 1: hope that everyone who's listening can just like put that
Speaker 1: in their minds for later. How important it is for
Speaker 1: people to be UM field surveying or sometimes we call
Speaker 1: it ground true thing UM these places and actually collecting
Speaker 1: documentation photographic evidence. UM. A lot of folks do kind
Speaker 1: of like what we call community surveying and collect um
Speaker 1: some site specific UM kind of like uh, community science
Speaker 1: sort of stuff. But all of that was used in
Speaker 1: court and it was super awesome. UM. I actually was
Speaker 1: one of the standing declarence, so I got to submit
Speaker 1: a lot of evidence from my many years of traveling
Speaker 1: that place. UM, and that all of that was referenced
Speaker 1: in court. So so so important. UM. Even you know,
Speaker 1: when the forest services essentially trying to kick everyone out
Speaker 1: and keep everyone out of these places, it's really important
Speaker 1: to go um and see them. Anyways. Obviously, you know,
Speaker 1: everyone needs to consider how they do that and their
Speaker 1: own security and safety UM, and it's becoming difficult UM,
Speaker 1: but certainly putting eyes on threatened places is one of
Speaker 1: the best tools we have to save them. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: just think that's really important to really focus on that
Speaker 1: as like a thing, because like, yeah, stuff that people
Speaker 1: did actually had an impact on this not happening right now. UM.
Speaker 1: And yeah, but by going out there and documenting and
Speaker 1: then talking about it, um, it has like an actual
Speaker 1: like causal relation, which is very hard to It's it's
Speaker 1: it's hard to get direct causal stuff to happen in
Speaker 1: like the general umbrella of activism. Um. And it's I
Speaker 1: think it's it's just really exciting that that that this happened. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's so true. It does feel in the general umbrellaive
Speaker 1: activism really hard to point to things that we do
Speaker 1: that are actually making an effect, and this is totally
Speaker 1: one of them. I mean, wh and uh if and
Speaker 1: when this case does have its day in court, um,
Speaker 1: you know, outside of the preliminary injunction itself. UM, I
Speaker 1: am sure that so much of that evidence from all
Speaker 1: the folks who've been traveling there, um and documenting it
Speaker 1: will be used. We documented, you know, so many green
Speaker 1: living trees and places the Four Service that were dead. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, so many like unused roads in places the
Speaker 1: Forest Service said they needed to log alongside these roads
Speaker 1: because they're so trafficed and they're posing a safety hazard.
Speaker 1: And so it's basically like, you know, the best way
Speaker 1: to expose their gas lighting and lies is to just
Speaker 1: go document what's there. Yeah, because a big part of
Speaker 1: their ability to do this is utilizing deception in terms
Speaker 1: of like and and and utilizing like non information, Like
Speaker 1: they're just not talking about the stuff that's actually happening,
Speaker 1: or they're doing like white lies to make it sound better.
Speaker 1: So they're just they're they're lying about the type of
Speaker 1: like um uh, the type of sales that they're doing
Speaker 1: with these with these treets, and how they're classifying the
Speaker 1: trees that they're logging to like get it past all
Speaker 1: of the loopholes. But they're not actually like that, that's
Speaker 1: not actually reality. They're just changing the terms to make
Speaker 1: it fit what they want. So like as as soon
Speaker 1: as you start looking into this stuff, it gets all
Speaker 1: it gets very sketchy because it is they're just lying
Speaker 1: about a lot of this stuff. Like if you're like
Speaker 1: listening and be like, oh, you know, be these people
Speaker 1: just love trees, Like yes, we do love trees, but
Speaker 1: like the actual thing that's going on is like they're
Speaker 1: lying about the types of damage that's being done. They're
Speaker 1: lying about what areas this is happening in all to
Speaker 1: just rack up more timber sales like that that that
Speaker 1: is that that that is what's actually happening. Um. And
Speaker 1: that's so so important to say, like loudly and clearly,
Speaker 1: because the Forest Service and other management agencies are experts
Speaker 1: in making the public feel dumb and wrong and misinformed.
Speaker 1: And right now, even we sound a little wing nutty
Speaker 1: being like yeah, you know, but like let us be clear,
Speaker 1: a federal judge agree with us, Yeah, yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: like we're not the ones who are wrong here, and
Speaker 1: I think you're totally right. You know, they're using a
Speaker 1: mixture of blatant lies, um, but also euphemisms like we
Speaker 1: no one's they don't they don't use the word clear
Speaker 1: cut anymore. They're using all of these euphemisms, you know, regeneration, harvest,
Speaker 1: I ship you not a lot of and a lot
Speaker 1: of this stuff that they're deciding to do is like
Speaker 1: not open to the public. You need to do like
Speaker 1: fully requests to to to actually learn what they're doing,
Speaker 1: because they don't talk about it like that. It is all.
Speaker 1: It is all extremely sketchy and yeah, like the fact
Speaker 1: that like a federal a federal judge agreed with like
Speaker 1: green activists is not a sentence you here often so
Speaker 1: like it's like yeah, like this is actually a thing,
Speaker 1: and it's it's important to remember, like you are not
Speaker 1: immune to propaganda, like all a lot of this stuff
Speaker 1: is uh is has people who want a lot of
Speaker 1: money are vested in making people believe things about about
Speaker 1: about like force management, all this kind of stuff. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know it may it may sound crazy when we're
Speaker 1: talking about you know, the secret illuminati of the Force Service.
Speaker 1: But like, no, like it acts like it's it is
Speaker 1: a it is a governmental organization. All governmental organizations are
Speaker 1: kind of sketchy, especially when their sole purpose is to
Speaker 1: one of their purposes is to make money or assistant
Speaker 1: like sales of something like yeah, it's it's gonna have
Speaker 1: some sketchy stuff. Um. Absolutely, and also you know in
Speaker 1: the realm of just like the propaganda machine. Um we
Speaker 1: you know. Just the other day, UM, a hilarious response
Speaker 1: piece came out from the timber industry and organization called
Speaker 1: Federal Forest Resource Coalition, which is just a coalition of loggers.
Speaker 1: UM put out this hilarious little mini video responding directly
Speaker 1: to the line that we've been using in forest events,
Speaker 1: which is worth more standing. Our forests are worth more standing.
Speaker 1: And they put out a hilarious response that is essentially
Speaker 1: you know, pushing this timber sale, this logging propaganda, saying well, actually,
Speaker 1: our forests aren't worth anything standing after they've been burned,
Speaker 1: and their contry a beating to the climate crisis, and
Speaker 1: they're destructive and you know in all these things, and
Speaker 1: so totally, I mean, even people who see it with
Speaker 1: their eyes can be convinced by these voices that they're
Speaker 1: wrong because they're so good, so good at making us
Speaker 1: feel just like we're the wrong ones, but we're not.
Speaker 1: We got this, yeah, in terms of like this the
Speaker 1: secretive kind of decision making and stuff behind the scenes,
Speaker 1: in terms of like the types of like terms they're
Speaker 1: using to to you know, do like restoration, thinning, um
Speaker 1: and all this stuff around around trying to like basically
Speaker 1: just just take as many trees from the Bright britsh
Speaker 1: Watershed as they can. And the judge said that she
Speaker 1: was quote disappointed in the agency, uh for for all
Speaker 1: of their silly behind the scenes trench coat meat in
Speaker 1: the dark alley way to pass off information type of thing, um,
Speaker 1: which is yeah, like so what what what is what
Speaker 1: is some of the other kind of stuff that the
Speaker 1: four Service and the related organizations were trying to we're
Speaker 1: trying to hide like what like what what what? What? What?
Speaker 1: What was the stuff that like came out um via
Speaker 1: this legal process that was like yeah, what was it
Speaker 1: was the what's a few of the actual things that
Speaker 1: they were that they were trying to do that eventually
Speaker 1: like came to light. M h. The major thing is
Speaker 1: that they were trying to get away with changing the
Speaker 1: logging contracts without doing any additional environmental analysis or public
Speaker 1: engagement process. And so there were before there were there
Speaker 1: was a plan to do what they what we had
Speaker 1: fought them so hard to get them to agree to do,
Speaker 1: which was not log a bunch of these this older
Speaker 1: stands protect tree. They had a diameter limit on trees
Speaker 1: that they were going to log. So we basically like
Speaker 1: slapped their hands off of all of these trees and
Speaker 1: finally were like, okay, we won't sue you if you
Speaker 1: move forward with the plan as stated, and it had
Speaker 1: very strong side bore words and you know, even local
Speaker 1: folks were like, okay, go do this. And then the
Speaker 1: fires came through and so what they were trying to
Speaker 1: do was just change the plans. They turned it all
Speaker 1: into clear cuts in the forest. That we slapped their
Speaker 1: hands off of and they were trying to argue that
Speaker 1: they didn't need to do any an additional analysis and
Speaker 1: they didn't need to engage the public, and even in court,
Speaker 1: you know, that's what they were arguing. Um they are
Speaker 1: they're doing some stupid magic math and you know, somersaults,
Speaker 1: um to try and explain how they had already done
Speaker 1: an analysis that accounted somehow for the fires that no
Speaker 1: one could have ever predicted before. A yeah. So the
Speaker 1: judge was like just you know, she was just roundly like,
Speaker 1: y'all couldn't have predicted. I like to give her, you know,
Speaker 1: Southern accident, y'all, I couldn't have predicted, Judge Akins still
Speaker 1: the South. No, Uh, you couldn't have predicted. Uh, you
Speaker 1: know that the fires were going to burn through and
Speaker 1: so there's no way you could have done analysis for
Speaker 1: fire that you didn't know what's going to happen. Here
Speaker 1: used silly little beasts. But she did talk to them, um,
Speaker 1: you know, as if they were just naughty little children,
Speaker 1: which I loved to hear. You know, the disappointed in
Speaker 1: the Forest Service was a major move. And I think
Speaker 1: the other one that came up is just you know,
Speaker 1: the Forest Service was arguing that they needed quote need
Speaker 1: to do this logging um, for restoration, for economic recovery, um,
Speaker 1: and to prevent future wildfires from severely burning in the area.
Speaker 1: All of that to BS. Like. One thing that the
Speaker 1: judge said that was super strong, UM was that she
Speaker 1: sees and obviously on paraphrasing here, um, but she she
Speaker 1: sees that the community loves this place. It's obvious that
Speaker 1: this is like a beloved place, and she, you know,
Speaker 1: essentially understands that the forest is worth more standing. She
Speaker 1: said that she wanted she thinks that the forest needs
Speaker 1: an opportunity to recover from the fires, and so basically
Speaker 1: just called the BS on the Forest Service for their hilarious,
Speaker 1: you know, justifications for logging. All the we're gonna save
Speaker 1: the forest by logging. It is just not it's not right,
Speaker 1: not accurate, and the judge agrees. Yeah. I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: very very excited about about this ruling and what it
Speaker 1: means for the future and at least at least at
Speaker 1: least postponing this until um if if if the if
Speaker 1: if the lawsuit is going going to go through or
Speaker 1: if or if they're just going to drop this, which
Speaker 1: they also very well, maybe they might decide to focus
Speaker 1: on another part that is that they just don't tell
Speaker 1: anybody about and start doing it there and then you know,
Speaker 1: we'll we'll start we'll start this again. But for this
Speaker 1: particular area, UM, that is that is very exciting, and yeah,
Speaker 1: it is. It is rare for a federal judge to
Speaker 1: agree with people on this topic. UM. And now I
Speaker 1: want want to talk about a few other kind of
Speaker 1: stuff around like forests, um and how and how these
Speaker 1: kind of types of things work. I I didn't get
Speaker 1: an interesting comment which I totally agree with in terms
Speaker 1: of like how propaganda works in this department, um. And
Speaker 1: how like how like logging towns operate, or how like
Speaker 1: towns became logging towns. How like they're basically able to
Speaker 1: convince local populations that logging is is like good because
Speaker 1: like yeah, like they're they're gonna they're gonna move into
Speaker 1: this town, they're gonna restore the town because they're gonna
Speaker 1: bring in new money through like a logging industry. UM.
Speaker 1: And yeah, this is a very like, very like a
Speaker 1: typical move, whether it be for like you know, coal mining,
Speaker 1: whether it be for pipelines, in terms of like big
Speaker 1: companies going into small towns to be like, hey, we
Speaker 1: can promise you economic growth if you can like assist
Speaker 1: in this you know, extractive process, and they'll be able
Speaker 1: to convince them with you know, misleading statistics on and
Speaker 1: you know all that kind of stuff. In terms of
Speaker 1: logging industry is getting getting really good at radicalizing rule
Speaker 1: populations to have them believe that it's one not it's
Speaker 1: it's not like economically destructive to take down trees. They
Speaker 1: might even say it's like good, um and all all
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff has have Has there been like
Speaker 1: any outreach in terms of kind of addressing addressing people
Speaker 1: in small towns who like maybe used to like you know,
Speaker 1: rely on unlogging or something and how does how does
Speaker 1: that works? I know, like they'll be like, oh, but
Speaker 1: you people come from the city and now you're coming
Speaker 1: out here into like the woods where I live, and
Speaker 1: I think it's good that they're chopping down these trees. Right.
Speaker 1: There's there's there's there's like that kind of that that
Speaker 1: kind of disconnection because again, no one, no one's immune
Speaker 1: to propaganda. You can you just you just just have
Speaker 1: to find the specific one. Um. See I'm just curious about,
Speaker 1: like in terms of in terms of like forest defense,
Speaker 1: how often this comes up and how and how you
Speaker 1: kind of yeah, I don't know what's what steps to
Speaker 1: make to to be like to tell people, hey, maybe
Speaker 1: you're believe these things because timber industries told you them,
Speaker 1: Like how how? How how do you start that conversation
Speaker 1: with people? Yeah, this is like actually the heart of
Speaker 1: the forest defense work ahead, what you're talking about right now,
Speaker 1: the heart of our work ahead, um. And I would
Speaker 1: also say, you know, there's a there's certainly, um, a
Speaker 1: dichotomy that the media especially likes to present between the
Speaker 1: rural logging communities and you know, Portland or city based
Speaker 1: in batimentalists and the hippie environmentalists to come in and
Speaker 1: yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, And everyone's familiar with that,
Speaker 1: and there's of course some truth um to that, but
Speaker 1: I want to say, like super clearly, there are so
Speaker 1: many rural folks who do not support the logging industry,
Speaker 1: and so that's like a false dichotomy that gets presented
Speaker 1: to us right off the bat, and a lot of
Speaker 1: those you know, for in the in um the work
Speaker 1: that I've been doing on forest forest defense, Essentially, we're
Speaker 1: always connecting with folks on the ground in literally the
Speaker 1: backyards of these logging proposals, and many of them are
Speaker 1: super uninterested in having their backyards clear cut. And so
Speaker 1: we you know, the we we pushed directly against that
Speaker 1: mythology that you know, it's just environmentalists coming in from Portland,
Speaker 1: because we work directly with people, including for Brighton Bush,
Speaker 1: but with every single thing that we work on directly
Speaker 1: with people who are literally on the front lines of
Speaker 1: that logging. That said, there is absolutely um a huge
Speaker 1: pole um. You know, Oregon specifically as you know, famous
Speaker 1: for logging. Like we talked about last time, there's a
Speaker 1: logger on top of the capitol. UM. You know, are
Speaker 1: the mayor of Portland's logging money It's in Oregon's Oregonians blood. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and for rural Oregonians, UM, there are economic realities where
Speaker 1: in some cases some counties benefit from um logging in
Speaker 1: their total from the logging industry, their school you know,
Speaker 1: schools are tied to logging money. UM. And there's you know,
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways a narrative that is not
Speaker 1: really accurate anymore, but has like an element of nostalgia
Speaker 1: to it. Like you know, logging towns and um this
Speaker 1: old story about how things used to work with small,
Speaker 1: small family logging. That's not how it is anymore. But
Speaker 1: that narrative that like nostalgic narrative, carries on into a
Speaker 1: lot of communities. And so what the way that I
Speaker 1: like to cut through that um for people is by
Speaker 1: makeing it really clear that there's a difference between small
Speaker 1: you know, family loggers of lore um and and you
Speaker 1: know of you know, people's what people are attached to
Speaker 1: and the kinds of what we're seeing today is we're
Speaker 1: looking at Wall Street logging. We're looking at Wall Street
Speaker 1: invested UM invested, huge you know, corporate industries who owned
Speaker 1: who can who still own like you know, huge percentages
Speaker 1: of our drinking water sheds, of our um communities. Some
Speaker 1: some of the communities on the coast are owned primarily
Speaker 1: by private industrial Wall Street funded UM logging corporations. And
Speaker 1: that's you know, those aren't mom and pop. They're not
Speaker 1: living in the community. They're living often not even on
Speaker 1: the Pacific Northwest. These are rich ass assholes who are
Speaker 1: destroying our bioregion. And you know, I think that making
Speaker 1: it clear that those aren't those folks are not like us.
Speaker 1: You know, those are not like rural Aragonians, your those
Speaker 1: are not your friends. Those are not you know, your
Speaker 1: pals or your neighbors. And just cutting through that narrative
Speaker 1: that like, oh, you know logging communities, Um, you know
Speaker 1: loggers are your friendly neighbor. Actually, no, loggers are Wall Street, Um,
Speaker 1: you know, investment corporations, rich money people who are doing
Speaker 1: this destruction. And just kind of like breaking that I guess,
Speaker 1: like that um, that attachment that people have to this idea,
Speaker 1: that's just not a reality anymore. The reality is that
Speaker 1: people who are for logging in rural communities are they
Speaker 1: have a lot more common with those of us who
Speaker 1: are fighting logging than the actual people doing the logging,
Speaker 1: if that makes sense. Like there's a lack of understanding
Speaker 1: of what the logging industry actually is. It's like back
Speaker 1: to that nostalgia, Like people who are against logging in
Speaker 1: rural communities, um, you know often genuinely do not realize
Speaker 1: that this is Wall Street and like who's doing this logging.
Speaker 1: They're still thinking it's their you know, neighbor or their
Speaker 1: friend and it's you know, these stories. But you know
Speaker 1: the reality is that you know, this is corporate timber
Speaker 1: owners who are maximizing their financial gain by buying out
Speaker 1: small landowners all over the place, um ensuring that they
Speaker 1: aren't taxed by lobbying heavily in the government, so they
Speaker 1: don't you know, have any sort of taxation that then
Speaker 1: goes back to benefit our communities. Don't even get me
Speaker 1: started about how many taxes the timber industry skips out
Speaker 1: on that could actually benefit our communities and our schools
Speaker 1: and our libraries and our fire departments but aren't. UM.
Speaker 1: And then they're adopting exploitative labor practices. Basically, you know,
Speaker 1: the contracted workers who are in the logging industry right now,
Speaker 1: who are doing the logging and hauling UM and reforestation
Speaker 1: so called reforestation planting of mono crop plantations, they are
Speaker 1: experiencing flat wages and declining work quality conditions um. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: while the corporate timber forms are expanding their profits um
Speaker 1: and you know, getting more wealthy investors. So that is
Speaker 1: the reality of the timber industry. These are not you know,
Speaker 1: your friendly neighborhood loggers anymore. So. A few other points
Speaker 1: I wanted to bring up, kind of on force itself
Speaker 1: someone someone said something about how we talked about like
Speaker 1: old growth, and and I guess they think that we
Speaker 1: said that all forests in this area is old growth,
Speaker 1: and that's not something we actually said. Old growth is
Speaker 1: a specific term that means a specific thing. And yeah,
Speaker 1: regardless of it being old growth or not, they still
Speaker 1: shouldn't be cut down. I don't know, So I'm not
Speaker 1: sure why this point was really raised, because we didn't
Speaker 1: I did. I don't think we did, uh say that
Speaker 1: every that every tree there is is old growth. Um.
Speaker 1: A lot of them were planted in the past few
Speaker 1: hundred years, UM, But that that doesn't mean like they're
Speaker 1: like much less important. It's like, just because they're not
Speaker 1: old growth doesn't mean we shouldn't be preserving this particular
Speaker 1: watershed in this particular environment and not be clear cutting
Speaker 1: all of it. Yeah, old growth is like like the
Speaker 1: term old growth is just like become fetishized to me,
Speaker 1: and this like this thing that you know. This also,
Speaker 1: let's be clear, that's not an agreement on what old
Speaker 1: growth actually means across the board, even between agencies, Like
Speaker 1: there's an arbitrary date cut off that the federal government
Speaker 1: uses to define old growth. UM. But obviously if you
Speaker 1: walk into a forest stand, this a healthy you know,
Speaker 1: a healthy old growth stand is complex in terms of
Speaker 1: age diversity. There's going to be old growth individual trees,
Speaker 1: there's going to be a lot of younger trees. Is
Speaker 1: gonna be horizontal and vertical diversification, Like old growth is complicated,
Speaker 1: it's messy, But the whole point is like you're right,
Speaker 1: Like it doesn't actually matter if it's like quote in
Speaker 1: the CAD, the small narrow category of what the Forest
Speaker 1: Service would define as old growth, if it's a forest
Speaker 1: that's been around for you know, a hundred years or
Speaker 1: even you know, I would argue, if it's a forest
Speaker 1: that's over like seventy or eighty years old, what are
Speaker 1: we doing cutting that down? Especially now you know that's
Speaker 1: storing so much carbon safely in the ground. And also
Speaker 1: by that age, it's had the opportunity, you know, to
Speaker 1: to become more diverse than these like monocrop plantations that
Speaker 1: we're seeing younger forests. So I would argue any forest
Speaker 1: that's not a monocrop plantation, a young monocrop plantation should
Speaker 1: absolutely not be clear cut. It's just an inappropriate activity
Speaker 1: to do in native forest and speaking of a clear cut,
Speaker 1: there was another Another comment was about how clear cutting
Speaker 1: can sometimes be good because it creates new environments for
Speaker 1: other animals and living things to exist in. And I
Speaker 1: find this to be a really weird comment to make. Um,
Speaker 1: I don't, I don't quite understand this, this kind of idea,
Speaker 1: because yes, of course, if you cut down a forest,
Speaker 1: you are creating a new environment, but that's not where
Speaker 1: that environment should be, nor is it where it is.
Speaker 1: It's like if you if you erect a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of concrete skyscrapers where a force used to be. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're also making a new environment. But I would say
Speaker 1: we probably shouldn't do that, though I don't. That's not
Speaker 1: that's not a good thing. The same thing with like
Speaker 1: the people obsessed with like putting solar panels in the desert,
Speaker 1: Like the desert is an actual environment, like it has
Speaker 1: There is reasons for why deserts need to exist and
Speaker 1: that have this whole like a whole like a whole
Speaker 1: whole environment and a whole um I forget the word,
Speaker 1: but like and it has an entire system of living
Speaker 1: things that exist there that should Um, we we don't
Speaker 1: need to terraform everything. I don't think that's like, I
Speaker 1: don't we shouldn't. I think preserving the environment in general,
Speaker 1: preserving the environments that are existing and who are creating
Speaker 1: like ecosystems, is a good thing. I think generally, the
Speaker 1: less terraforming probably probably the better, at least right now,
Speaker 1: when we're dealing with a massive like looming climate crisis
Speaker 1: that's caused by us terraforming the earth. Um, maybe we
Speaker 1: should not do that as much. Yeah, we could call
Speaker 1: a bout a general role like no more terraforming, You'll
Speaker 1: just leave it. Let's just let's just leave let's leave
Speaker 1: us for a bit. We just addressed the other things.
Speaker 1: But for real, though, whoever wrote that comment, I mean,
Speaker 1: that is a timber industry talking point that at the
Speaker 1: time it's literally, that is literally and whether they meant
Speaker 1: it or not, you know, this is how the timber
Speaker 1: industry gets us. They're real good at this. This is there,
Speaker 1: you know, nice sounding talking points that we rebut all
Speaker 1: the time, um, you know, not just in media but
Speaker 1: also in court. Um. And the talking point is clear
Speaker 1: cuts mimic natural disasters like severe fires by replacing it.
Speaker 1: And it's part totally don't clear cut, go look at
Speaker 1: a fire. It's a completely different experience than I could
Speaker 1: go down that rabbit hole all day on fire ecology
Speaker 1: another time maybe, but suffice it's to say, you know,
Speaker 1: what they're arguing is that they're creating young forest or
Speaker 1: quote early several habitat by clear cutting an old forest.
Speaker 1: But what they're actually doing is DeForest station. They're replacing
Speaker 1: an old forest with something that's not forest, A young
Speaker 1: mono crop plantation is a crop. It is not a forest,
Speaker 1: and so they are deforesting, and um, it is ecosystem.
Speaker 1: It is ecoside, and um, yeah it is. It is egoside.
Speaker 1: And I think, yeah, the insistence that like it's it's
Speaker 1: good because it will allow some species to exist in
Speaker 1: this new environment, like, yeah, but there's other environments where
Speaker 1: they can't exist, and we don't we don't need to
Speaker 1: be destroying the ones that are already kind of important
Speaker 1: and doing good stuff to make room for other ones
Speaker 1: that aren't already there. And they argue that the deer
Speaker 1: and the butterflies love the clear cuts, and so just
Speaker 1: call that out as bullshit next time you'all hear that.
Speaker 1: It's you know, spread the word that is some timber
Speaker 1: industry bs. They're tricksy, but don't let them get you.
Speaker 1: And the last thing I want to mention is why
Speaker 1: blocking off access to these areas is bad. Um, because
Speaker 1: I got someone someone said something like, um, you know,
Speaker 1: because fires are human caused, closing off public lands is
Speaker 1: it can be good because then fires wone gets hurt
Speaker 1: in those areas, And this really just misunderstands why fires
Speaker 1: get started. And also it's just a bad thing to
Speaker 1: do anyway, because like fire if you look at like
Speaker 1: the map of where wildfires start, um, almost all of
Speaker 1: them are on the path of highways. UM. Specifically in
Speaker 1: California that when when the fires are really there. There
Speaker 1: was a firefighter who who who made a great video
Speaker 1: about like why the fire line was all next to
Speaker 1: the highway and there was like conspiracy theories of like
Speaker 1: including the Antifa's driving down highways and setting the forest
Speaker 1: on fire, which was which was an actual popular talking
Speaker 1: point because we live in the hell world. Um. But
Speaker 1: like you know, he's explained like the reason why, like
Speaker 1: they are like human caused, but they're not, like a
Speaker 1: lot of them aren't intentionally caused. It's because that's where
Speaker 1: power lines run. And this is where a lot of
Speaker 1: sparks can ignite stuff on the edges of of of
Speaker 1: highways that will then take out a part of the forest. Now,
Speaker 1: every once in a while there's a gender reveal party
Speaker 1: that goes horribly wrong and does and and does ignite it.
Speaker 1: That is true, and I think the solution to that
Speaker 1: is not closing down the forest. It's not having gender
Speaker 1: reveal parties that we stopped selling uh on Amazon. I'm
Speaker 1: all thor Tanna right as an idea, But how about
Speaker 1: let's stop selling blue and pink Tanna right packets to
Speaker 1: people who don't know how to use explosives genuinely don't know,
Speaker 1: because yeah, like they're not they're not actually using Tanna
Speaker 1: right for what it's meant for, and they're not using
Speaker 1: it to do like like training. Um, they're using it
Speaker 1: to say that they're having a baby. And this has
Speaker 1: caused a lot of wildfire death. So how how about
Speaker 1: we just stopped selling uh the gender reveal party bombs.
Speaker 1: I think that'd be a better solution than closing down
Speaker 1: massive swaths of public land. And how about our power
Speaker 1: line companies get their ship together and stop Yeah, do
Speaker 1: actually have a plan for planned power shut offs. And actually,
Speaker 1: you know, we know now actually Pacific Corps is in
Speaker 1: court right now because they started the Santiam fires. Their
Speaker 1: power lines started the stand Inspires and the Archie Creek
Speaker 1: fires and probably more. And so yeah, how about the
Speaker 1: powerline companies get their ship together. But I feel like
Speaker 1: the other huge thing here is that, you know, the
Speaker 1: suggestion that we should close off these forests to the
Speaker 1: public to me is just like more uh you know,
Speaker 1: it's you know, blatantly it's racist, um, and it's you know,
Speaker 1: I think it's wrong because these lands, these belong to
Speaker 1: indigenous people. We should be giving these lands back to
Speaker 1: indigenous people. And you know, when we're talking about like
Speaker 1: rural communities too in adjust transition, like rural community members
Speaker 1: should actually have more say in what happens in their backyard.
Speaker 1: Forests should be able to be more engaged, um in
Speaker 1: you know, the forests that literally provide them with their
Speaker 1: drinking water, um, and you know all of the things
Speaker 1: that they need, um to survive. So we should not
Speaker 1: be you know, locking off these lands and keeping humans out.
Speaker 1: Humans have a place in these lands. I've always had
Speaker 1: a place in a role in these lands, and um,
Speaker 1: if we take leadership from the right folks, and we
Speaker 1: could totally live in a much more reasonable way than
Speaker 1: the gender revealed party path. Yeah, and like I don't
Speaker 1: know if you know this, but like being in the
Speaker 1: forest is great. It's like it is great to be
Speaker 1: surrounded by giant trees. It makes you feel awesome. The
Speaker 1: last thing I want to talk about is um you
Speaker 1: mentioned before, like getting people who live in these rural
Speaker 1: areas who used to rely on logging, getting them are
Speaker 1: involved and doing a just transition, because this is a
Speaker 1: topic that comes out that comes up on climate change
Speaker 1: like everywhere in terms of like you know, like countries
Speaker 1: that are still developing not being able to have access
Speaker 1: to the same amount of fossil fuels that countries like
Speaker 1: the States you know had when they when when they
Speaker 1: were developing, and like how is that fair? Right? This
Speaker 1: is this is like this is a very common thing
Speaker 1: of in terms of countries that are better off. UM
Speaker 1: need will you know have kind of kind of like
Speaker 1: a duty to assist assist countries that are trying to
Speaker 1: develop and trying to get better standards of living. Um,
Speaker 1: because we profited off the fossil fuels and now they
Speaker 1: won't have the same opportunity if we're trying to you know,
Speaker 1: get to a carbon neutral world. Um So, in terms
Speaker 1: of like a just just transition, this is something like
Speaker 1: you know, a COP twenty six. There was supposed to
Speaker 1: be funding for adaptation efforts in in the developing countries.
Speaker 1: Now that failed because of course it's COP twenty six.
Speaker 1: But in terms of like, in terms of like this
Speaker 1: this idea of a just transition, how do you see
Speaker 1: this like locally in the rural environment within the States
Speaker 1: and for for like these types of areas, because like, yeah,
Speaker 1: because it's similar to like coal mining, the town's similar
Speaker 1: to you know, logging towns. How how does how how
Speaker 1: do you see this working? Yeah? This is something I
Speaker 1: think about so much. Um And we actually put out
Speaker 1: a platform called a Green New Deal for our Forests
Speaker 1: in the Pacific Northwest that talks like all about what
Speaker 1: a just transition could look like for communities. But I mean,
Speaker 1: this is a dream and I think it's like a
Speaker 1: really inspiring, uh inspiring path forward because what it means
Speaker 1: is that you know, we're not saying to end logging
Speaker 1: and we're not saying that rural communities basically need to
Speaker 1: like stop existing and getting funding from lodge. And what
Speaker 1: we're saying is that rural community members, what we that
Speaker 1: nostalgic dream that are that people are playing to, we
Speaker 1: actually want to have something in that regard. We would
Speaker 1: like people to you know, engage with and interact with
Speaker 1: their local forests. Now that shouldn't look like clear cutting them,
Speaker 1: because um, that's irresponsible and that doesn't benefit local communities
Speaker 1: or you know, of the benefit of future. But that
Speaker 1: could look like restoring these young mono crop plantations into complex,
Speaker 1: healthy forests. It could be looked like bringing fire back
Speaker 1: onto the landscape with prescribed fire and cultural burning, taking
Speaker 1: lessons from indigenous folks who are doing network UM. It
Speaker 1: could look like education and recreation and so many things
Speaker 1: of like you know, hands on engagement with backyard forests
Speaker 1: that surround us UM. And you know that that could
Speaker 1: look like basically firing the freddies and uh taking this
Speaker 1: land and giving it to local communities with UM you know,
Speaker 1: the with with conservation goals, but also goals to economic
Speaker 1: support by all of those ways you know, jobs but
Speaker 1: also jobs and recreation UM economically support local communities. So
Speaker 1: basically giving the land back to the local communities who
Speaker 1: rely on them and giving them power and control um
Speaker 1: to care for them in ways that makes sense because
Speaker 1: right now wall streets caring for our forests, and really
Speaker 1: it should be us. And I think one other thing
Speaker 1: on this topic, for like how how well propagando works
Speaker 1: when I was um at the stop plane three purchase
Speaker 1: camps last summer in terms of like how do corporations
Speaker 1: get towns to start supporting these ideas and how do
Speaker 1: they like foster this hatred of environmentalism um, despite you know,
Speaker 1: these areas often being the worst impact one of the
Speaker 1: worst impacted ones by these like effort efforts. Right uh,
Speaker 1: you know, you're they're chopping down forests near where this
Speaker 1: town is. Pipeline is going next to the town. If
Speaker 1: it leaks, it's going to cause all this problem to
Speaker 1: like their water splant and stuff. But like how they do.
Speaker 1: It's like the day of the direct action to block
Speaker 1: the pipeline, Enbridge was sponsoring like a town fair in
Speaker 1: like the little downtown area, and it's like this super
Speaker 1: surreal moment of being like, oh, this is like I've
Speaker 1: read this happened in like comics before, like and this
Speaker 1: this is like this is like one of Lex Luthor's
Speaker 1: favorite things to do. Like hell, like go into this
Speaker 1: like small town. Who's gonna start like this evil you
Speaker 1: know evil like a like lab at and he'll like
Speaker 1: fund like this small town event thing and like I've
Speaker 1: seen this before in so many superhero comics. Like I've
Speaker 1: seen this trope and that I'm just like living it.
Speaker 1: You're just like watching it happen. You're like driving past
Speaker 1: the town to go block up pipeline and then you
Speaker 1: see like Enbridge with like a little stage and like
Speaker 1: a little like fair and like everyone in the towns
Speaker 1: like dancing and they're giving up like free drinks and
Speaker 1: like oh no, like this is yeah, like you're like
Speaker 1: living the things like you know, a lot of it.
Speaker 1: It's about like this idea of like rein like reinvigorating
Speaker 1: like like you know like the the like the spirit
Speaker 1: of the town and injecting injecting new life into it.
Speaker 1: So like you know, this this is like a new
Speaker 1: one for like they're they're putting a pipeline down, but
Speaker 1: like you know, it's the same thing for like you
Speaker 1: know old like old coal towns, old logging towns, and
Speaker 1: these corporations will come in you know, make the town
Speaker 1: more active again, start putting on events, make it feel
Speaker 1: like more of a place, and then that that gets
Speaker 1: so the company gets associated with positive changes. Right, so
Speaker 1: then people who live in the towns like, oh yeah,
Speaker 1: and we're just doing all these good things for my town.
Speaker 1: That must mean they actually, you know, are gonna care
Speaker 1: about us here and then help and help us out. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: these people from all around the country are driving through
Speaker 1: and trying to block the pipeline and the police are
Speaker 1: driving everywhere. Now it's all this chaos, right, these stupid environmentalists,
Speaker 1: they don't understand how this is gonna you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's we're creating so many jobs here, which actually didn't.
Speaker 1: Enbridge outsourced most of the jobs out of state, but
Speaker 1: they lied about the type of job creation. You know,
Speaker 1: all all all all this type of stuff. And this
Speaker 1: is a very very common thing totally, and like timber
Speaker 1: unity is like delivering would to people when the when
Speaker 1: when the snow storm happened and everyone was cold and
Speaker 1: didn't have power and they were you know, going door
Speaker 1: to door with mutual aid support. Um. But that is
Speaker 1: why you know, a remember how everyone should remember how
Speaker 1: how tricks e and how dishonest these folks are, but
Speaker 1: also be why um, those of us who want to
Speaker 1: see a different way need to be doing mutual aid too,
Speaker 1: Like we actually need to be out there in our
Speaker 1: communities and making friends and building trust and not just
Speaker 1: showing up to function up when it's time to function up.
Speaker 1: And I think that kind of like circles back to
Speaker 1: the point we talked about earlier, which is like building
Speaker 1: relationships with people on the front lines. Um. Looks like
Speaker 1: so much more than just like the defense of a
Speaker 1: bad thing in their backyards. It looks like, you know,
Speaker 1: mutual aid because the industry is doing it, um, and
Speaker 1: they're they're good at it, and we need to be better. Um.
Speaker 1: I think that wrops up for us today. What one
Speaker 1: thing I want, like, what what is going to happen
Speaker 1: going forward now after this, after this legal victory. What's
Speaker 1: kind of just to just just just just as so
Speaker 1: people know, like what is like the next steps that
Speaker 1: are going to be taken on the legal process that
Speaker 1: will kind of determine what what happens um with like
Speaker 1: you know, direct actions and going to see the forest
Speaker 1: in like in the future. Yeah, Um, well, basically we're
Speaker 1: waiting um for a date for this court case. UM.
Speaker 1: And so that will hopefully be scheduled if it if
Speaker 1: it ends up having to go through, which it might not. UM.
Speaker 1: Obviously there's going to be an effort made on behalf
Speaker 1: of lawyers UM to try and get the Forest Service
Speaker 1: to just stop, to just drop this shenanigan UM and
Speaker 1: walk away UM while they're you know where they're at, UM,
Speaker 1: because we we do think we have a really strong
Speaker 1: case UM that will win in court if it goes
Speaker 1: to court. So that's kind of like the legal avenue UM.
Speaker 1: Same story as what I said with the last time
Speaker 1: we talked. You know, if if logging is going to
Speaker 1: move forward in that area, whether that be because UM
Speaker 1: it happens in the future or because somehow this legal
Speaker 1: case is lost, direct action will happen. People will be
Speaker 1: out there in the way of logging. There's no way
Speaker 1: people are going to let that go down in the
Speaker 1: Brighton Bush community. UM. So right now we're kind of
Speaker 1: in a waiting game. We're watching and waiting UM. But
Speaker 1: you know, I hope the Forest Service knows now that
Speaker 1: they can't just get get away with stuff like this.
Speaker 1: People are watching. People are going to file public records request.
Speaker 1: We're documenting this and um, hopefully you know, we won't
Speaker 1: be seeing more of this, but because we live in
Speaker 1: the real world, the real sad world, we will be
Speaker 1: seeing more of this, and so, um, you know, we'll
Speaker 1: be out there again when the next forest is on
Speaker 1: the chopping block, which is probably going to be you know, today, tomorrow. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's kind of always the thing. Um. Well, thank thank
Speaker 1: you so much for coming on to talk about this
Speaker 1: and the uh rare rare good news episode of Hey,
Speaker 1: something good happening. Thank you. In any other sources people
Speaker 1: can kind of follow along on the fight that the
Speaker 1: people can find online. Yeah, make sure to follow Cascadia
Speaker 1: Forest Offenders and Portland Rising tide Um, who will be
Speaker 1: definitely tracking and posting. You can also follow Cascadia Wildlands,
Speaker 1: who um was the lead nonprofit on the lawsuit and
Speaker 1: they've been posting about it too. Great. All right, thanks
Speaker 1: everybody for listening. Uh go see a tree, Touch Tree. Hey,
Speaker 1: We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from
Speaker 1: now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen.
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