Speaker 1: Whole Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to Cool People did Cool Stuff show
Speaker 2: that comes through your headphones while you're walking the dog.
Speaker 2: I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and my guest today is
Speaker 2: Sarah Marshall. Hy Sarah, Hello, I'm.
Speaker 3: So happy to be here, especially as someone who grew
Speaker 3: up as a tween ignorant about all of this but
Speaker 3: wanting to find an excuse to live in a tree
Speaker 3: for over a year.
Speaker 2: Earthworce would have been the better group than the Earth
Speaker 2: Liberation Front the thing that you can live in for
Speaker 2: a year, as the Earth Liberation Front of solitary confined.
Speaker 3: Oh god, I our producer, you're getting straight in it's
Speaker 3: me Hy Sophie. Sophie.
Speaker 2: Sophie's kind of a big deal around here.
Speaker 1: That was really that was really funny.
Speaker 2: Funny list than the audience listeners.
Speaker 1: I won't know why it's really funny, but just know
Speaker 1: it's really funny.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And that's what's fun is having inside jokes that.
Speaker 2: Oh wait, the whole point of a podcast doesn't make
Speaker 2: the listener think that they're part of the end whatever. No,
Speaker 2: the point of the podcast is education and entertainment and
Speaker 2: helping us do that is our audio engineer danel Hi
Speaker 2: danel Hi, dannelh. Danel Our theme music was written for
Speaker 2: Spyon Women and this is part two in a two
Speaker 2: part are about the Earth Liberation Front, a group, a
Speaker 2: leaderless group that did an awful lot of damage to
Speaker 2: Earth destroyers that was very contentious at the time. It's
Speaker 2: probably very contentious still. But it's kind of interesting to
Speaker 2: watch the way that mainstream media talks about it these days,
Speaker 2: because it's a little like, well, maybe we're all about
Speaker 2: to die and we should do this, you know, Like
Speaker 2: even like mainstream media's was just a little bit like,
Speaker 2: this is probably not the right way to go about it.
Speaker 2: I'm running out of my is like that's they could
Speaker 2: see the facade crack. I don't know, I'm grinning while
Speaker 2: I say this, maybe because it's.
Speaker 3: Kind of funny. Yeah, I mean, the question of who
Speaker 3: gets called an extremist in American media is very interesting,
Speaker 3: right because it's clearly all about what kind of an
Speaker 3: extremist you are, and they're like certain extremists who were
Speaker 3: in favor.
Speaker 2: Right now yeah, no, totally, And there's like all this
Speaker 2: the FEDS who are currently leading and I'm completely ill
Speaker 2: to get to that at the end all right, where
Speaker 2: we last left our heroes, they were being hippies tagging
Speaker 2: we don't like America on rest stops. They were tagging
Speaker 2: five hundred and four years of genocide around Columbus Day,
Speaker 2: and then burned down a truck, and so they hadn't
Speaker 2: really done much yet, but they were starting to. The
Speaker 2: fires at the Ranger Station were started by people from Warner,
Speaker 2: and soon they expanded into the largest and most prolific
Speaker 2: cell of the ELF in the US and possibly the world.
Speaker 2: But I'm not entirely certain about that, and I've seen
Speaker 2: an awful lot of narratives about exactly who did this,
Speaker 2: or rather who was behind it. On some level, we
Speaker 2: like kind of know, right because almost everyone involved has
Speaker 2: pled guilty, But some of them have basically said I
Speaker 2: pled guilty to some shit I did and some shit
Speaker 2: I didn't do, because they're like, hm, I was going
Speaker 2: to go to prison for the rest of my life
Speaker 2: unless I said I did it, including things that I
Speaker 2: didn't do. And that's a whole separate thing about the
Speaker 2: way that the judicial system makes people lie. But in
Speaker 2: the end, there are almost twenty people arrested in connection
Speaker 2: to this particular cell of the Earth Liberation Front most
Speaker 2: about ten years later, and every narrative picks a different
Speaker 2: sort of like ring leader or whoever to blame, partly
Speaker 2: because they're all like, who's the leader, who he was
Speaker 2: in charge? Because people can't wrap their fucking head around anarchists.
Speaker 2: It's hilarious. The narrative I find most convincing is that
Speaker 2: this cell started from late night talks at Warner Creek
Speaker 2: and about what was happening to the planet and what
Speaker 2: needed to be done. That's the one I've been going with.
Speaker 2: But I've heard a lot of narratives around this, And
Speaker 2: in that narrative, there's this punk guy, Jacob Ferguson. Sometimes
Speaker 2: he's called the leader. He was. Certainly it's undoing, so
Speaker 2: if that's how we define leader, we can go to that.
Speaker 3: But generally.
Speaker 2: He was a quiet man and sort of a bad boy.
Speaker 2: He did drugs and he played punk rock, and he
Speaker 2: was angry, and he had like a lip ring and
Speaker 2: septim ring and stuff. Imagine a bad kid, white kid
Speaker 2: from a rough background in the nineteen nineties, and you
Speaker 2: have successfully pictured Jacob Ferguson.
Speaker 3: All right, yeah, I see him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And supposedly it all started when basic. It was like,
Speaker 2: y'all talk a lot of shit, but are we gonna
Speaker 2: do anything? And his nickname was a donut.
Speaker 3: Why I don't know, because cops can always find him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it should have been a sign to everyone all along.
Speaker 3: Oh no.
Speaker 2: And then there was this older hippie anarchist. His name
Speaker 2: was William Rogers, also known as Avalon. I think his
Speaker 2: name is face, yeah, right.
Speaker 3: Like because it was his favorite Brian Faerie song Avalon.
Speaker 2: I actually don't know that reference. But Avalon is a
Speaker 2: mythical island lost in the fog. Sometimes uses like a
Speaker 2: shorthand for the old ways, for the pagan world before
Speaker 2: Rome civilized England and start all the fucking nonsense we're
Speaker 2: dealing with today. And I I like it. I don't know,
Speaker 2: because I'm a sucker for mythology and magic and shit,
Speaker 2: and I'm really good at blaming everything on England. But
Speaker 2: I'm going to go a step further and blame everything
Speaker 2: on the Roman Empire.
Speaker 3: Fair enough.
Speaker 2: Just look at him, I know, look at them. Avalon
Speaker 2: was a venerable old man. He was thirty years old
Speaker 2: in nineteen ninety five. All the media is always like
Speaker 2: the old guy who led it, because he's the one
Speaker 2: who gets pegged as the leader of everything because he's
Speaker 2: older than everyone. He was thirty years old in nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety five when Warner Creek started. He'd already been involved
Speaker 2: in Earth First for a few years. He'd been living
Speaker 2: out of his truck, going from protest to protest to organize,
Speaker 2: and at one point he lived in a snow cave
Speaker 2: with three other people in Idaho as part of an
Speaker 2: Earth First encampment shortly before Warner Creek. So he was
Speaker 2: one of the more experienced people who showed up to
Speaker 2: Warner Creek. He gets called the mastermind of the whole
Speaker 2: thing by the government. It's possible. We don't know. And
Speaker 2: one reason we don't know is because everyone well, cause
Speaker 2: there's assatual limitations on terrorism, and even the people who've
Speaker 2: confessed are a little tight LittD about some shit. But
Speaker 2: after his arrest, Avalon kills himself in jail, and so
Speaker 2: we don't know his position on a lot of things.
Speaker 2: The government, they're pretty old fashioned, and I've seen the
Speaker 2: oldest white male be assumed to be the leader before.
Speaker 2: It Just you know, there's a group of people, you're like,
Speaker 2: who's in charge?
Speaker 1: And you just like I was gonna say, it's like
Speaker 1: when you're at dinner and people get like, give give
Speaker 1: the oldest man there the check, when it's when it's me,
Speaker 1: the tiny blonde person.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely don't.
Speaker 1: They don't even like look at the name on the
Speaker 1: credit card. They just they just automatically assume it's like
Speaker 1: the eldest white man there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like hello, mister Sophie.
Speaker 1: I like that.
Speaker 2: And in this case, it's kind of interesting because like,
Speaker 2: if I die, don't do that. You can blame anything
Speaker 2: that I would consider ethical on me. You can just
Speaker 2: like whether or not I did it. Like I have
Speaker 2: a friend who once got convicted of like doing all
Speaker 2: of the black block destruction at this protest that probably
Speaker 2: like thirty people where I'm making this number up. I
Speaker 2: wasn't there, but probably it would have taken a lot
Speaker 2: of people to do that much damage. And one one
Speaker 2: person got convicted of all of it, and he's just like, yeah, sure,
Speaker 2: totally I did all of it. I'll take I'll take
Speaker 2: the social capital. I already did the jail time, you know.
Speaker 2: Christ Yeah, anyway, avalon the government, you know, decides this,
Speaker 2: probably him, but I don't know. However, the cell started.
Speaker 2: It started. They burned up a truck at a ranger
Speaker 2: station because they didn't like the forest services complicity and
Speaker 2: old growth logging, and that was their first fiery thing. Right.
Speaker 2: Soon enough, this group gets called the family, and there
Speaker 2: are almost no references to the actual people in this
Speaker 2: cell referring to it as the family. This is what
Speaker 2: the Feds and the media refer to it as it is.
Speaker 2: It's possible that they occasionally call themselves the family, but
Speaker 2: like in all the discovery, there's not a lot of that.
Speaker 3: And do you think that's because the media knows that
Speaker 3: something sounds more sinister if you call it by something
Speaker 3: that in the recent past has been preceded by the
Speaker 3: word manson.
Speaker 2: Yes, I genuinely think that that is what's going on.
Speaker 2: There's this whole thing later where some of the defendants
Speaker 2: like are just being edge lords and start playing into
Speaker 2: that when they're like already in prison. But whatever. So
Speaker 2: they are the most successful cell, their liberation front, and
Speaker 2: their security culture is top notch. They took their shit
Speaker 2: serious across dozens of fires and actions. There wasn't a
Speaker 2: single bit of DNA evidence that was ever brought back.
Speaker 2: They wore socks over their shoes to disguise their footprints.
Speaker 2: They wipe down everything for their fingerprints. In order to
Speaker 2: assemble what they needed. They'd build these clean rooms like
Speaker 2: they'd rent a hotel room and then put a tent
Speaker 2: inside the hotel room, and then put on painter suits
Speaker 2: and then go into the tent.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: They took their work very seriously. Someone probably avalon the
Speaker 2: government alleges as much. And I see no reason why
Speaker 2: to let anyone else take the credit or blame for
Speaker 2: this rode. A zine called It's very evocative title setting
Speaker 2: fires with electrical timers, which I.
Speaker 3: Love because that could also be like somebody's MFA the
Speaker 3: asso say uva yeah totally, and like movement, yeah totally.
Speaker 2: And so this zne was a modern dance masterpiece, and
Speaker 2: it talked about some dance moves that I am one
Speaker 2: hundred percent not going to talk about on air, and
Speaker 2: that I have avoided even reading the zine. The zine
Speaker 2: came out and suddenly it was harder for the government
Speaker 2: to map out which cells did which action because they
Speaker 2: all used the same technology. They also didn't all know
Speaker 2: each other, or they didn't see each other very much.
Speaker 2: Most of them dropped out of the movement to avoid
Speaker 2: putting anyone else at risk and avoid drawing attention to themselves,
Speaker 2: and it was a lonely life. They passed notes to
Speaker 2: each other by all getting the same book and then
Speaker 2: like building ciphers that are like open the dispossessed and
Speaker 2: turned a page blah blah blah, line number word, blah
Speaker 2: blah blah.
Speaker 3: You know. Wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they were early adopters of encrypted email. They used PGP,
Speaker 2: but more than that, they would leave notes for each
Speaker 2: other in the drafts folder of a shared email address
Speaker 2: that they would log into only at public libraries.
Speaker 3: This is real, like mission impossible type stuff.
Speaker 2: Oh. Absolutely, they're one of these people who was on
Speaker 2: the run for twelve years has like some wild shit.
Speaker 2: We're going to get to one of them at least
Speaker 2: lived in Canada the entire time, and we just sneak
Speaker 2: across the border for actions and then sneak back home,
Speaker 2: which is probably a good like alibi. I wasn't even
Speaker 2: in the country. It is a pretty strong.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: In all their actions, no one was killed or harmed.
Speaker 2: They went through elaborate efforts to make sure of that.
Speaker 2: And on Beltane nineteen ninety seven, pretty early on They
Speaker 2: released their sort of inaugural communicae, and I'm going to
Speaker 2: read it. Welcome to the struggle of all species to
Speaker 2: be free. We are the burning rage of this dying planet.
Speaker 2: The war of greed ravages the earth, and species die out.
Speaker 2: Every day. ELF works to speed up the collapse of industry,
Speaker 2: to scare the rich, and to undermine the foundations of
Speaker 2: the state. We embrace social and deep ecology as a
Speaker 2: practical resistance movement. We have to show the enemy that
Speaker 2: we are serious about defending is sacred. Together, we have
Speaker 2: teeth and claws to match our dreams. Our greatest weapons
Speaker 2: are imagination and the ability to strike when least expected.
Speaker 2: Since nineteen ninety two, a series of Earth Nights and
Speaker 2: Halloween smashes as mushroomed around the world. Thousands of bulldozers,
Speaker 2: power lines, computer systems, buildings and valuable equipment have been composted.
Speaker 2: Many ELF actions have been censored to prevent our bravery
Speaker 2: from inciting others to take action. We take inspiration from
Speaker 2: the Luddites, levelers, diggers, the autonom squatter movement, the alf,
Speaker 2: the Zapatistas, and the little people. Those mischievous elves of
Speaker 2: lore authorities can't see us because they don't believe in elves.
Speaker 2: We are practically invisible. We have no command structure, no spokespersons,
Speaker 2: no office, just many small groups working separately, seeking vulnerable
Speaker 2: targets and practicing our craft. Many elves are moving to
Speaker 2: the Pacific Northwest in other sacred areas. Some elves will
Speaker 2: surprises as they go. Find your family, and let's dance
Speaker 2: as we make ruins of the corporate money system.
Speaker 3: What I love about that is how it, you know,
Speaker 3: brings in the legacy of you know, the we folk
Speaker 3: and the fairies of.
Speaker 2: Avalon.
Speaker 3: I guess really where we have this, you know, contemporary
Speaker 3: idea of fairies is like very cute and feminine, and
Speaker 3: I guess, you know tinker Bell is part of some
Speaker 3: kind of heredity because she'll kill a bitch. But that really,
Speaker 3: like the legacy of the magical creatures that folklore told
Speaker 3: of was that they were part of nature and if
Speaker 3: you turned your back on them at the wrong moment,
Speaker 3: they could destroy if they felt like it, and that
Speaker 3: that was part of their mischief. And I don't know,
Speaker 3: I love that. I mean, I feel like the earth
Speaker 3: needs protectors, but sort of showing where you are in
Speaker 3: the legacy of that not that not that the goal
Speaker 3: is to convince the people who are trying to arrest
Speaker 3: you of the righteousness of what you're doing. But it's
Speaker 3: it's it's convincing. It's literature. I think, you.
Speaker 2: Know, it's really well written. Yeah, yeah, that's beautiful. I
Speaker 2: really actually when you're saying, how like, you know, fairies
Speaker 2: in such a scene as like feminine? Now right, but
Speaker 2: one of the really the more I read medieval history,
Speaker 2: the more I realize that the feminine was terrifying to
Speaker 2: the medieval year of mind. It was the feminine claims
Speaker 2: a lot wildness. It was unpredictability and violence, and like
Speaker 2: you know, it was cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And the other thing I love about this is they
Speaker 2: specifically say we have no command structure. The FEDS spend
Speaker 2: They're still trying to wrap their head around who is
Speaker 2: in charge.
Speaker 3: Augh, I love it.
Speaker 2: In nineteen ninety seven, the ELF moved on to not
Speaker 2: what they're most famous for, but what they're best at,
Speaker 2: the thing that you can point and say they accomplish
Speaker 2: their strategic goals. Here, the Elf saved horses. You see,
Speaker 2: thank god. Yeah, there are these wild horses living all
Speaker 2: over the US. Especially out west in Nevada and Wyoming
Speaker 2: in particular, and kind of like eastern California, like all
Speaker 2: the high, dryish parts of the country that are kind
Speaker 2: of flat. And I've read eighty two thousand horses currently.
Speaker 2: I've read two hundred thousand horses currently, probably the answers
Speaker 2: in between those I don't know. And this population of
Speaker 2: horses is under management of the Bureau of Land Management,
Speaker 2: which is not my favorite governmental institution. Their population is
Speaker 2: managed by them being rounded up and theoretically adopted out
Speaker 2: to loving homes, right, because there's only so many wild
Speaker 2: horses that can live in the planes and stuff, right,
Speaker 2: so they you know, the nice version of the story,
Speaker 2: the version of the story that's like, oh, they plant
Speaker 2: six trees for everyone they cut down, is that they
Speaker 2: round up these horses, the extra ones, and they adopt
Speaker 2: they find adoptees, and they you know, the government's like, oh,
Speaker 2: we make them do all this paperwork. We show up
Speaker 2: like three times before they can resell, like you know,
Speaker 2: ah blah blah blah.
Speaker 3: They go to a nice farm up state.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what was actually happening, according to an awful
Speaker 2: lot of journalism, but not according to the BLM. What
Speaker 2: was happening was that they were basically being adopted and
Speaker 2: then turn around and sold to slaughterhouses. Yeah, mostly they
Speaker 2: were being sold to one slaughterhouse because there was more
Speaker 2: or less only one operating in the US at the time.
Speaker 2: It was called Cavel West. Horse meat is not served
Speaker 2: in the US Traditionally, it is outright banned and a
Speaker 2: ton of states. This didn't stop slaughterhouses from slaughtering horses
Speaker 2: and selling the meat internationally. Even though there was no
Speaker 2: national you couldn't sell the meat nationally. Eventually, this was
Speaker 2: officially stopped in two thousand and seven. It wasn't actually
Speaker 2: technically banned, but what happened was all the slaughterhouses had
Speaker 2: to be inspected, and the government didn't put money aside
Speaker 2: to inspect the hot orse slaughter houses, so it was
Speaker 2: effectively banned.
Speaker 3: That's interesting.
Speaker 2: So what happens now is that tens of thousands of
Speaker 2: horses that are exported alive to slaughterhouses in other countries.
Speaker 3: But oh okay, so wait are like are French people
Speaker 3: eating wild caught American horses? Not to pin it all
Speaker 3: on the French.
Speaker 2: But American horse meat is often considered a delicacy in
Speaker 2: countries that eat horses.
Speaker 3: It feels kind of wrong when it happens to us.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's fine for Americans to plunder other countries
Speaker 3: because that's a natural order.
Speaker 2: Go to war against France.
Speaker 1: Let they know that all the things put in American foods,
Speaker 1: I don't think. I don't think you want. I can't
Speaker 1: even imagine what's an American horse food.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the wild cut, that's the thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they've gorged themselves on soda cans and.
Speaker 1: And all the things we put in our soil that
Speaker 1: we're not supposed to put it in our soil.
Speaker 2: And you know what, they don't gorge themselves on because
Speaker 2: all of these things are carefully constrained and don't litter.
Speaker 2: All of them are totally an Yeah. But I'm also
Speaker 2: lying because we have no knowledge of whether or not
Speaker 2: they're environmentally sustainable. The things that we're about to.
Speaker 4: Talk about, no idea, but here they are anyway.
Speaker 2: And we're back. So overall, the US shares the English
Speaker 2: language country taboo on horse meat. However you feel about
Speaker 2: horse meat, it's still fucked up that people are opting
Speaker 2: these horses just to sell them to slaughter houses. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and if you're only judge for moralities. Legality, Well, it's
Speaker 2: also not legal to do so. The FBI put together
Speaker 2: a team of three hundred agents working around the clock
Speaker 2: to get to the bottom of the corruption within the
Speaker 2: BLM and their complicity and the illegal horse slaughter programs.
Speaker 2: Just kidding. In the end, they put three hundred agents
Speaker 2: together to arrest the people who stopped the illegal horse
Speaker 2: slaughter program, the Earth Liberation Front. They decided to address
Speaker 2: this problem directly. On July twenty first, nineteen ninety seven,
Speaker 2: the elves went to Redmond, Oregon, to the only West
Speaker 2: Coast horse slaughterhouse I've also read the only one in
Speaker 2: the country, I'm not certain, and they burned it to
Speaker 2: the ground. No horses or people were injured in the process.
Speaker 2: This slaughterhouse was never rebuilt. On November twenty ninth, nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety seven, elves led about five hundred horses and fifty burrows,
Speaker 2: which were donkeys for US East Coast people let them
Speaker 2: free at a BLM wild Horse Corral and Oregon in
Speaker 2: the fittingly named town of Burns, Oregon, and then they
Speaker 2: burned that corral to the ground. A Syrian American software
Speaker 2: engineer named Joseph Dibbi designed and planned the incendiary that
Speaker 2: destroyed the wildhorse slaughterhouse, and later in two thousand and one,
Speaker 2: he would burn another BLM wildhorse facility or he only
Speaker 2: did the one, and he's one of the people who
Speaker 2: later pled guilty that says that he did some of
Speaker 2: the things that he pled guilty to. And yeah, across
Speaker 2: the West, the ELF set wild horses free in direct
Speaker 2: response to the slaughterhouse pipeline. I've read a few different
Speaker 2: accounts that claim that these actions forced the national conversation
Speaker 2: on the issue and led to the two thousand and
Speaker 2: seven ban. That might be true, but I also know
Speaker 2: that they specifically and directly saved thousands of wild horses
Speaker 2: lives and stopped the only place that people were selling
Speaker 2: their wild horses to illegally. And then then they did
Speaker 2: the thing that got them famous. Yes, if you've ever
Speaker 2: thought about the Earth Liberation Front a radical environmentalists, and
Speaker 2: you picture a picture of building on fire, there is
Speaker 2: a photo from Veil that is the picture that you're
Speaker 2: thinking of. They burned down a huge chunk of veil,
Speaker 2: the busiest ski resort in the country. Oh wow, Yeah,
Speaker 2: without hurting anyone that's impressive. Yeah, this is their big one.
Speaker 2: This is their biggest is twelve million dollars fire. Most
Speaker 2: of their fires willow half a million million.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: In nineteen ninety eight, Veil was set to expand eight
Speaker 2: hundred or two thousand acres. I've read both into Lynx habitat,
Speaker 2: and there was this huge movement against it all the
Speaker 2: like grassroots local people like getting together to be like, hey,
Speaker 2: don't you think your ski resort's big enough and maybe
Speaker 2: the links and the natural world get a little bit
Speaker 2: of stuff. And they were like, we don't think that,
Speaker 2: and so environmentalists sued and they lost. The court sided with.
Speaker 3: They were like, white people love almost dying, so yeah,
Speaker 3: you know.
Speaker 2: And then Robert came in and was like, well what
Speaker 2: if they actually die sometimes and then just make it
Speaker 2: slightly more dangerous self correcting problem. But on October sixteenth
Speaker 2: they start cutting. On October eighteenth, smelves arrived. They actually
Speaker 2: I think this one they actually showed up earlier and
Speaker 2: tried to do it, I think probably on the sixteenth,
Speaker 2: but they didn't succeed for one reason or the other
Speaker 2: and had to go back down the island and then
Speaker 2: come back later on October eighteenth, Samelves arrived. They got
Speaker 2: snuck in a snowstorm, but regardless, they made their way
Speaker 2: up the mountain in the middle of a fucking snowstorm
Speaker 2: and they burned twelve million dollars of buildings.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: Two hunters had been sleeping in a free standing restroom
Speaker 2: on the property Avalon, according to the Denver Post, opened
Speaker 2: the bathroom door to check to see if anyone was inside.
Speaker 2: He saw the hunter, So they didn't burn that building,
Speaker 2: which implies that they checked every building for people. The
Speaker 2: fire absolutely could have spread and killed those two men,
Speaker 2: but it was also the night of a wild snowstorm
Speaker 2: and none of the fires spread at all, And so
Speaker 2: a lot of the allegations by the government, which are understandable,
Speaker 2: is that fire is notoriously uncontrollable in some ways, right,
Speaker 2: and it absolutely could have spread. However, there are thousands
Speaker 2: of actions over the years that this is happening in
Speaker 2: which no one was injured, So I think it's not
Speaker 2: a coincidence. Yeah, the first responders knew it was arson
Speaker 2: because these were individual fires that were not connected to
Speaker 2: each other. There was not one big fire that destroyed
Speaker 2: everything was very carefully done. The only evidence that they
Speaker 2: left it all was some quickly melting footprints, and they
Speaker 2: probably had socks over the shoes, and they sent a
Speaker 2: communicate the next day from a Denver library. However, this
Speaker 2: fire did not stop Vale's expansion. What it did stop
Speaker 2: up was the local environmentalist movement that was working to
Speaker 2: fight veil. There were people planning civil disobedience on the
Speaker 2: mountain that night, according to one thing I read, And
Speaker 2: it never happened, right because the buildings caught fire, and
Speaker 2: the local environmentalists had their houses raided, and everyone got
Speaker 2: paranoid and divided and just did it fucked things up,
Speaker 2: and the family and the elf attacked timber companies and
Speaker 2: paper mills, they attacked genetic engineering research facilities, they attacked
Speaker 2: suv dealerships and logging machines. Other cells across the country,
Speaker 2: burned subdivisions under construction and like McDonald's and shit like that.
Speaker 2: All the while, the anarchist movement in the Northwest is
Speaker 2: ramping up, and then it kind of kicked off onto
Speaker 2: the world stage with the World Trade Organization protests in
Speaker 2: Seattle November nineteen ninety nine. And at these one day,
Speaker 2: I'm going to do a hole thing on WTO and
Speaker 2: the anti globalization movement. But today's not that day, but
Speaker 2: environmentalist teamsters, hippies, punks, and everyone descended on the city
Speaker 2: of Seattle to stop world leaders from carving up the
Speaker 2: world to exploit basically these free trade agreements that are
Speaker 2: basically like, how do we avoid economic protections and developing
Speaker 2: nations so that the developed nations can more effectively extract
Speaker 2: their resources, which is a thing that has a direct
Speaker 2: and calculable body count. And I think that's worth understanding
Speaker 2: because then, like what ends up happening, right is the
Speaker 2: infamous Black Bloc entered the American stage, anarchists wearing all
Speaker 2: black and masks directly attacked corporate property, smashing at McDonald's
Speaker 2: and shit like that. And before that.
Speaker 3: When Americans pictured an anarchist, that they just have a
Speaker 3: mental image of Sacho and Vanzetti.
Speaker 2: I think so. I think that the overall assumption about
Speaker 2: what an anarchist is was like mad Bomber until nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety nine when it became punk in a throwing a
Speaker 2: brick at a Starbucks.
Speaker 3: When it became day to night.
Speaker 2: Look, yeah, and both are things that anarchists do. Both
Speaker 2: are tiny portions of like like anarchists back in the
Speaker 2: day would be like, I have killed a king who
Speaker 2: had personally overseen three hundred of my friends shot in
Speaker 2: the streets, which is why Katano Breshi went and killed
Speaker 2: King Mberto too, one one of the amberdos.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: It was like and so people are like this violent anarchists,
Speaker 2: and you're like, the man who killed a king who
Speaker 2: had just killed three hundred of this man's friends. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's where the violence is, is the anyway?
Speaker 1: Whatever?
Speaker 3: Well, and you know, and then they are the anarchists
Speaker 3: who are just filling in potholes because the city of
Speaker 3: Portland doesn't feel like doing it.
Speaker 2: When I think of the average anarchist activity, it is food,
Speaker 2: not bombs. That is the activity that I can say
Speaker 2: more anarchists have done than anything else is give free
Speaker 2: food to people who need food, which is, to be fair,
Speaker 2: something the American government treats is incredibly dangerous, inexplicably, but
Speaker 2: it's true. I was reading that in Houston they're having
Speaker 2: trouble with the court cases against the food nut Bumbs
Speaker 2: defendants because they can't find enough jurors who think that
Speaker 2: arresting the food nut Bumbs people with made any sense.
Speaker 3: Well that's exciting.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So the wto protests, some people wearing all blacks
Speaker 2: through some bricks, through some windows of corporations that were
Speaker 2: killing people in other countries. And plenty of current and
Speaker 2: future elves were at these protests. Some of them met
Speaker 2: in the streets and fell in love. A bunch of
Speaker 2: them grew and sold weed to finance all the arson
Speaker 2: So if you're wondering, the only thing I found about
Speaker 2: how they financed the arsen Some of them were like
Speaker 2: software engineers, and some of them were like growing and
Speaker 2: selling weed. One activist who got involved around this time
Speaker 2: was Daniel McGowan. He's one of the more famous elves
Speaker 2: because a camera crew followed him as he awaited his trial.
Speaker 2: So there's this documentary called If a Tree Falls from
Speaker 2: twenty eleven that tells his life story. In the year
Speaker 2: two thousand, they reached their peak. It seems like in
Speaker 2: terms of membership and or actions, I count fifteen actions
Speaker 2: by one list across the country. Only some of them,
Speaker 2: maybe most of them were the family, but I'll run
Speaker 2: through some of the other folks. At least some of
Speaker 2: the other folks who were caught a lot of people
Speaker 2: who did this stuff just were never caught. There's a
Speaker 2: man named Trey Arrow. Did you ever hear about Trey
Speaker 2: Arrow in Portland as a kid. No, let me talk
Speaker 2: you about this local celebrity from twenty years ago.
Speaker 1: It's our cool name.
Speaker 2: Though I know he legally changed his name to Trey Arrow.
Speaker 2: He chose it.
Speaker 1: That's even cooler.
Speaker 2: He chose it. And then like as he would get
Speaker 2: in court, they would keep being like, whatever his old
Speaker 2: name is, and he kept being like, I have already
Speaker 2: done all the legal paperwork. My name is Trey Arrow.
Speaker 2: Like the legal entity you're referring to is not on
Speaker 2: trial anyway. East he was famous for three things, at
Speaker 2: least famous in Portland. In July two thousand, there was
Speaker 2: this protest downtown outside the US four Service office trying
Speaker 2: to stop logging at a place called Eagle Creek, And
Speaker 2: so Trey just free climbed the building with no ropes
Speaker 2: or anything, on the spur of the moment, and then
Speaker 2: lived for eleven days on a nine inch ledge on
Speaker 2: the building. What.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the LEGE party is shocking to me. The climbing.
Speaker 3: I'm like, yeah, people do that sometimes. Why not have fun?
Speaker 3: The LEGE is stressing me out?
Speaker 2: Yeah? No, I think in the end people like got
Speaker 2: him ropes and stuff, but I'm I actually don't. I
Speaker 2: don't know, okay, that feel. But I moved it town
Speaker 2: shortly after all this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, Well it's funny because in the end I
Speaker 3: was yeah, oh, I was just gonna say it. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's funny because I was born here and then we
Speaker 3: lived in Honolulu and came back here in the summer
Speaker 3: of two thousand and one, so there's this like five
Speaker 3: year blank spot where I don't know, but it yeah,
Speaker 3: I guess remember coming in like anyone cool was living
Speaker 3: on a lege. I know that was how I got
Speaker 3: out of my uh my, my, my, my service.
Speaker 2: But no, you have this is just your all aspect.
Speaker 3: For someone who wants to live on a lege. Yeah yeah, really,
Speaker 3: I was sneaking back and I'm the one who rides
Speaker 3: the containers back and forth across the Pacific. It's not
Speaker 3: for sex trafficking victims. It's for people who need an alibi.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so you you got out of
Speaker 2: your service, but but other people didn't. And Eagle Creek
Speaker 2: was saved not by him alone, but his actions did
Speaker 2: draw fuck ton tent of attention to the cause like
Speaker 2: every day's newspaper was like, is the hippie with no
Speaker 2: shoes still on the ledge? Yes, he's still on the ledge.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 2: The next thing that he was famous for is that
Speaker 2: cops dropped him out of a tree sit in October
Speaker 2: two thousand and one. He was tree sitting. I've talked
Speaker 2: to some people who knew him, and he wasn't up
Speaker 2: there with like ropes. He was like, oh shit, this
Speaker 2: tree needs saving. I'm running up this tree. And then
Speaker 2: he's like jumping from tree to tree as people like
Speaker 2: try and cut down these trees and stuff, and they
Speaker 2: would like blast shitty music and stuff at him to
Speaker 2: keep him from sleeping. And he fell sixty feet and
Speaker 2: he survived. He broke his pelvis in his ribs.
Speaker 3: Yeah God.
Speaker 2: And then he became famous for a third thing that
Speaker 2: wound up overshadowing the other ones. He and three other
Speaker 2: people burned some logging trucks and claimed it for the
Speaker 2: Earth Liberation Front. One of them got caught and snitched
Speaker 2: out the other three. Two of those remaining three got
Speaker 2: caught and then Trey Arrow I think was like a
Speaker 2: broken pelvis, but I'm not sure the timeline here. He
Speaker 2: fucked off up to Canada and lived on the right.
Speaker 2: He was on the run for more than two years.
Speaker 2: But then he I guess he just couldn't help himself.
Speaker 2: He saw injustice and he had to do something. So
Speaker 2: he got arrested in Canada while shoplifting bolt cutters. And look,
Speaker 2: if you're on the run, gets someone else's shoplift your
Speaker 2: bolt cutters.
Speaker 1: I mean, and why didn't he already have bolt cutters?
Speaker 2: I think you, I think you get rid of them
Speaker 2: after each action. Ah, and then you can't buy them
Speaker 2: because then there's a record of them havn't been bought.
Speaker 2: But yeah, I know you think that this man is
Speaker 2: just made of bolt cutters.
Speaker 1: He he gives big bolt cutter energy. Yeah, totally, Like
Speaker 1: come on.
Speaker 2: And so he was arrested and he was eventually extradited.
Speaker 2: There's a big fight. He was like, I'm not going
Speaker 2: to get a fair trial in the US. What are
Speaker 2: you talking about? And they were like, we're sending you
Speaker 2: to the US for Canada. We don't give a shit.
Speaker 2: And he spent a year in federal prison.
Speaker 3: Oh god, which from what I understand, can be even
Speaker 3: worse than the regular kind.
Speaker 2: Another arson case was more Eugene tree Sitters, Critter, and
Speaker 2: Free were their names. I don't think they legally changed
Speaker 2: their names to these. And they burned some trucks at
Speaker 2: an oil company and some SUVs at a dealership in
Speaker 2: the year two thousand, but cops were surveilling them already
Speaker 2: and caught them right off. Critter got five and a
Speaker 2: half years in prison. Free got for doing some damage
Speaker 2: at a dealership, got twenty two years and eight months
Speaker 2: in prison.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this made almost no one happy. Like, people weren't like,
Speaker 2: we love this punk anarchist kid who sets things on
Speaker 2: fire that he doesn't like very p people were of
Speaker 2: that point of view, and awful lot of people were
Speaker 2: of the point of view of like, twenty three years
Speaker 2: in prison for this, you know. So there was an
Speaker 2: eight year campaign and in two thou eight his sentence
Speaker 2: was reduced to ten years, and in December two thousand
Speaker 2: and nine he was released. God there are more cases
Speaker 2: like that, but that's just to give some sense of it.
Speaker 2: The family was the biggest sell, but it wasn't the
Speaker 2: only one.
Speaker 3: I feel like it's ridiculous to act like there's very
Speaker 3: much rhyme or reason to overly harsh sentencing a lot
Speaker 3: of the time. But is the idea that like, if
Speaker 3: we crack down on suv dealership crimes, then we can
Speaker 3: stop them from doing anything more impactful than that.
Speaker 2: I think, So like this is around, Well we're gonna
Speaker 2: talk a little bit about the cases against them, but basically,
Speaker 2: like the whole thing was the government was like, this
Speaker 2: is the biggest deal in the country. Within a couple
Speaker 2: of years, the FBI is going to say outright that
Speaker 2: the ALF and the ELF are the biggest domestic terrorist
Speaker 2: threat in the country. And this is like shortly after
Speaker 2: nine to eleven. The not free. He was arrested before then,
Speaker 2: but like they come out and say, our biggest terror
Speaker 2: domestic terror threat is the ELF. That's never heard anyone,
Speaker 2: and like everyone who like lives in New York City
Speaker 2: is like, I just saw people jumping out of a building.
Speaker 2: What are you trying to tell me is terrorism right now?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: And there's actually there's actually some interviews with FBI agents.
Speaker 2: There's one FBI agent who is a big part of
Speaker 2: doing their case in particular, was on this podcast series
Speaker 2: called burn Wild that the BBC did, and she talks
Speaker 2: about how it was politically motivated. The sentencing and the
Speaker 2: whole thing, just like how much attention was put into it,
Speaker 2: And there's other people who are saying like, yeah, like
Speaker 2: it was industry lobbying. Basically, infrastructure is the stuff that
Speaker 2: is like we don't realize how much of a fence
Speaker 2: they put around it, Like we don't realize how much
Speaker 2: you're not, Like, I mean, we see it a lot
Speaker 2: with what's happening right now with pipeline protests, right and
Speaker 2: the the crazy sentencing that people are facing for civil
Speaker 2: disobedience to try and stop fossil fuel infrastructure that is
Speaker 2: literally killing us all. But the oil must flow is
Speaker 2: like the foundation of the American state.
Speaker 3: Yeah, apparently, which I as a little kid, you learn
Speaker 3: all this stuff that you're like, I guess grown ups,
Speaker 3: no more complicated stuff, And then you grow up and
Speaker 3: you're like, no, they don't. They just ignore it. Right,
Speaker 3: there's a finite number of dead dinosaurs, but let's not worry.
Speaker 2: About it totally. And that is what all of this
Speaker 2: is around, is like people trying to grapple with whether
Speaker 2: or not they're taking seriously. Like if we sit there
Speaker 2: and say this is happening, global warming is real, what
Speaker 2: can be done and this is not necessarily the answer. Like,
Speaker 2: one of the reasons I wanted this episode is to
Speaker 2: talk about what did and didn't work, about what they did,
Speaker 2: what they did and didn't accomplish, how it did and
Speaker 2: didn't impact different things. But considering like, the thing that
Speaker 2: we are up against is apathy slash like sticking your
Speaker 2: head in the sand. But the only way to save
Speaker 2: the planet is to buy things from advertisers.
Speaker 1: God, it's going to be something horrible. I just know it.
Speaker 1: I just know it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I hope it's an ad for buying a new car.
Speaker 2: Here you go, and we're back from cynically engaging in
Speaker 2: the thing that pretty much everyone does, which is whatever.
Speaker 2: In two thousand and one, the family hit two more
Speaker 2: targets on the same night in two states, and then
Speaker 2: they stopped. They called it quits, not because they got caught.
Speaker 2: They quit because, as best as I can understand it,
Speaker 2: they fucked up. They still never hurt anybody, not physically,
Speaker 2: but they weren't all happy with what they had done.
Speaker 2: On May twenty first, two thousand and one, the Elf
Speaker 2: burned an office and thirteen trucks at a tree farm
Speaker 2: in Oregon because they believed that that farm was growing
Speaker 2: genetically engineered poplar trees. They were wrong. That had been
Speaker 2: the previous owners. The current owners used traditional methods. They
Speaker 2: also burned down the office of a genetic engineering researcher
Speaker 2: at the University of Washington. The fire spread and destroyed
Speaker 2: an entire and unrelated research library. Burning libraries and terrorizing
Speaker 2: random tree farmers was not on their agenda. Everyone is
Speaker 2: a bit cagy about exactly how it went when they
Speaker 2: met up to talk, right, because everyone wants to only
Speaker 2: say what they say and not what other people said,
Speaker 2: because people have decent security culture.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: But near as I can tell, the group was split.
Speaker 2: Some folks wanted to keep going, maybe even escalate, and
Speaker 2: other people threw in the towel and the group disbanded.
Speaker 2: In the end, about twenty people had done about forty
Speaker 2: five million dollars in sabotage wow and destroyed the only
Speaker 2: horse packing plant on at least the West Coast. Other
Speaker 2: cells and individuals carried on for years across the country,
Speaker 2: but the peak had passed before September eleventh, and before
Speaker 2: the crackdown against them. Pretty much the FBI didn't forget
Speaker 2: about them their elephantine that way, they announced that the
Speaker 2: ELF and the ALF were the number one domestic terrorist
Speaker 2: threat in the country. Terrorism. Of course, this is shortly
Speaker 2: after nine to eleven is the biggest boogeyman word in
Speaker 2: the English language. Funding for anti terrorism is at an
Speaker 2: all time high. So by labeling this terrorism, two things happened.
Speaker 2: One they got a fuck ton more money, and two
Speaker 2: they had to show results. And now you might think, oh,
Speaker 2: I don't know, the far right movement that I just
Speaker 2: killed one hundred and sixty eight people in Oklahoma City
Speaker 2: in nineteen ninety five might be a place of direction
Speaker 2: some energy, or the anti abortion extremists who were killing doctors. No, okay,
Speaker 2: well hear me out. Those are all Republican types I know. Okay,
Speaker 2: but what about environmental arson like the nine thousand acres
Speaker 2: of old growth that had just been burned. Nah, No,
Speaker 2: it was aimed at the anarchist group that had never
Speaker 2: heard anyone and had already stopped.
Speaker 3: Well, I guess if you have to show results, it's
Speaker 3: ideal to pick people who aren't currently doing anything, because
Speaker 3: then you can allege that you were the reason for that.
Speaker 2: Totally God. The FEDS called this operation Operation Backfire. The
Speaker 2: activist called it the Green Scare a period of heightened
Speaker 2: and almost cartoonishly evil repression of environmental and animal rights
Speaker 2: activists that absolutely filtered out to like those of us
Speaker 2: in the above ground environmental movement.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: For example, there's this alf guy, Animal Libration front guy.
Speaker 2: He's an Indigenous man named Rod Coronado. He'd sunk some
Speaker 2: whaling chips in the eighties. He'd fire bombed a ton
Speaker 2: of shit and spent five years in prison in the
Speaker 2: nineties for it. So he'd done it, you know, and
Speaker 2: then he kept doing it. He sabotaged a lion hunt
Speaker 2: in two thousand and four and did eight months for it.
Speaker 2: And in two thousand and three he was giving a talk.
Speaker 2: Someone from the audience asked him how he'd built the
Speaker 2: incendiary devices that he had used, that he had already
Speaker 2: been convicted of and served time for. Is the kind
Speaker 2: of thing you're supposed to be able to talk about
Speaker 2: once you've done the time, you're allowed to talk about
Speaker 2: the crime. That's why it rhymes. He answered the question.
Speaker 2: Three years later, in two thousand and six, during the
Speaker 2: height of the Green Scare, he was arrested for having
Speaker 2: answered a question from the audience. In two thousand and
Speaker 2: three and he spent a year in prison for it. What,
Speaker 2: which is why I'm not going to talk about how
Speaker 2: they did any.
Speaker 3: Of the shit they did.
Speaker 2: Yeah, God, later this man will spend four months in
Speaker 2: prison because he accepted a friend request on Facebook from
Speaker 2: Mike Rozell, one of the founders of Earth First.
Speaker 3: This would also be a great thing for people freaking
Speaker 3: out about the First Amendment to focus on, but obviously
Speaker 3: instead they're bothered by their nieces disliking their Facebook posts.
Speaker 2: Right totally. One kid, Chris McIntosh did five thousand dollars
Speaker 2: of damage to McDonald's by like lighting the roof on fire,
Speaker 2: and he was given eight years in prison for five
Speaker 2: thousand dollars with a damage.
Speaker 3: Well that McDonald's. You know, there are our culture's most
Speaker 3: vulnerable subjects.
Speaker 2: Di Irish they said, I hate crime, and then there's
Speaker 2: this other group of people who are a story in
Speaker 2: and of themselves that I'm not gonna The short version
Speaker 2: is the FEDS put an infiltrator into the anarchist movement
Speaker 2: who built up her own cell of the Elf. They
Speaker 2: never did anything. She bullied them into making plans to
Speaker 2: blow up a dam. Over the course of years, and
Speaker 2: you can see in all of the transcripts that come
Speaker 2: out because she's tapping everything right, She's like basically like,
Speaker 2: come on, don't be a pussy, and everyone's like, we
Speaker 2: actually don't want to do this, and she's like, you're
Speaker 2: gonna do it. They're all arrested. One of them, Eric McDavid,
Speaker 2: was sentenced to twenty years in prison. He had literally
Speaker 2: not done anything. After nine years in prison, his conviction
Speaker 2: was overturned when it was revealed that the FBI had
Speaker 2: withheld thousands of pages of evidence from the trial that
Speaker 2: would have potentially been like, hey, this is clearly a
Speaker 2: frame up. You know.
Speaker 3: I do not claim to have a nuanced understanding of this,
Speaker 3: but the way conspiracy chargers work in this country feels
Speaker 3: very counter toed sort of the basic facts of human nature,
Speaker 3: which is how a lot of our law operates, you know,
Speaker 3: but the right because like the basics are that, like
Speaker 3: from the second that a criminal conspiracy becomes like from
Speaker 3: the second you become implicitly part of it. Like if
Speaker 3: I'm in a room, if you and me and Sophie
Speaker 3: are like, let's j walk, yeah, yeah, if so, if
Speaker 3: Sophie's like, I want to make a run for it
Speaker 3: to cross the street, and.
Speaker 1: I am from Los Angeles.
Speaker 3: Well I'm thinking of like that's.
Speaker 1: I'm like, I'm like, I'm from lah.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: That sounds like.
Speaker 3: Right, It's like it's it's fine. Yeah, But like say
Speaker 3: that we go on a on a road trip with
Speaker 3: our scariest friend who starts talking about, you know, a
Speaker 3: plan to rob a bank, and we're doing the thing
Speaker 3: that human beings do where you like don't necess really
Speaker 3: take something seriously, or you look out for yourself and
Speaker 3: are like, maybe you're going to do that, but I'm
Speaker 3: not going to be a part of that, or maybe
Speaker 3: this will blow over. I don't know, but we don't
Speaker 3: affirmatively remove ourselves from the potential conspiracy. And then if
Speaker 3: they rob a bank all by themselves, then we can
Speaker 3: be co conspirators in that, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, or even if you take legal actions that would
Speaker 2: be otherwise legal in furtherance of that, Like if I
Speaker 2: was like, h hey, wouldn't it be cool if we
Speaker 2: reached up into vending machines and took the soda out,
Speaker 2: you know, and then like later you become a vending
Speaker 2: machine repair person and you look up a schematic, you know,
Speaker 2: you can, you can combine two acts of free speech
Speaker 2: and create a conspiracy. Not a lawyer, but I have
Speaker 2: done a lot of research about this particular thing for
Speaker 2: some reason, Like I was around during the goddamn Green Scare.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well yeah, right, And and that's probably a more
Speaker 3: a better working understanding of the law than you could
Speaker 3: get in a lot of law schools. Yeah, it's actually
Speaker 3: news you can use.
Speaker 2: Yeah totally. But yeah, so this had happened to Eric McDavid.
Speaker 2: Eventually his conviction is overturned and he's released after what
Speaker 2: nine years in prison and all of that started happening. Well,
Speaker 2: actually the infiltrator joined in two thousand and three, but
Speaker 2: the two thousand and six is the arrest, which is
Speaker 2: after the family case is cracked. But just to paint
Speaker 2: a picture of the Green Scare, the family, though, is
Speaker 2: who the Feds really really wanted. They had no idea
Speaker 2: how to find them, they had no evidence, and they
Speaker 2: started out with about a dozen agents on the case
Speaker 2: and is ramped up to three hundred agents working on
Speaker 2: this case. People were refusing to testify in front of
Speaker 2: grand jury and spending months in jailer as a result.
Speaker 2: Someday I'm going to cover grand juries on this and
Speaker 2: it'll be one of the most infuriating episodes. In two
Speaker 2: thousand and one, in March, a punk show in Portland
Speaker 2: was raided and the attendees were arrested and questioned about
Speaker 2: the elf. Some of them were like charged initially with
Speaker 2: kidnapping an officer because of like I think they tried
Speaker 2: to keep the cop out, or someone closed the door
Speaker 2: after the cop came in, or like some fucking nonsense.
Speaker 2: That case fell apart.
Speaker 3: Cops can't open doors. Everyone knows that.
Speaker 2: No, they need help.
Speaker 3: They're very fragile.
Speaker 2: Punks in Portland in two thousand and one were being
Speaker 2: harassed in some case attacked by cops while walking around
Speaker 2: the street. Cops would be like, are you an anarchist
Speaker 2: from like their patrol cars, and then like Jesus, sometimes
Speaker 2: jump them. But the Feds had nothing. Nothing was going
Speaker 2: to happen unless one of the arsonists snitched. One of
Speaker 2: them snitches. It was Donut the bad Boy. The Feds
Speaker 2: had a suspicion he was involved, and he'd been arrested
Speaker 2: for car theft on one of the nights of one
Speaker 2: of the arsons that wasn't him, Like one of the
Speaker 2: I think one of the arsons that Free and Critter
Speaker 2: had done. And so they brought in Jake, mister Donut himself,
Speaker 2: and they lied to him. Cops and feds lie, it
Speaker 2: is literally their job. It is probable that the arsonists
Speaker 2: would have been caught if everyone had remembered that cops
Speaker 2: are lying to you if they're talking. They listed off
Speaker 2: all this stuff they had evidence against him about, like
Speaker 2: the car theft and drugs and stuff he did hard drugs,
Speaker 2: and then at the end they were like, and the arsons,
Speaker 2: you will spend the rest of your life in prison
Speaker 2: if you don't tell us about the arsens, which we
Speaker 2: totally already know about, and you have to wear a
Speaker 2: wire and go around to all your old friends and
Speaker 2: get them to confess to.
Speaker 3: It.
Speaker 2: Took him twenty minutes to decide, and he gave in.
Speaker 3: I think there's something very statistic about, you know, a
Speaker 3: country where you know, the FBI sort of law enforcement agencies. Generally,
Speaker 3: the culture and or cult of masculinity that we have
Speaker 3: is so obsessed with solidarity and not betraying your buddies,
Speaker 3: and then when you know, when they've decided to marginalize
Speaker 3: a group of people, as less than a human. The
Speaker 3: first thing they do is, you know, basically make it
Speaker 3: impossible for people to not betray each other's trust. No,
Speaker 3: that's a something quite evil about it. Yeah, and they're
Speaker 3: like proud of it.
Speaker 2: In a tree falls, you can watch one of the
Speaker 2: FEDS who is involved in this. He has a shit
Speaker 2: eating grin on his face as he's talking about what
Speaker 2: he did. He thinks he is so clever, and he
Speaker 2: was like he succeeded, right, But it's yeah, it's just
Speaker 2: so interesting to me that like pretty big into honesty
Speaker 2: as like an ethical concern, because I think that everyone
Speaker 2: needs to be able to make decisions with the best
Speaker 2: available information. And we have completely accepted not just that
Speaker 2: police use violence obviously that is a contentious issue, but
Speaker 2: how much it is a crime to lie to cops
Speaker 2: and it is not a crime for cops to lie
Speaker 2: to you, and that's just like normal and accepted that
Speaker 2: the state is constantly lying to us like it's his job.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, and that is the kind of thing
Speaker 3: that if you accept that as part of a functioning society,
Speaker 3: then you can accept a lot of other things. You know,
Speaker 3: totally none of it good. Yeah, So they put a
Speaker 3: wire in his baseball cap, and they send them around
Speaker 3: the country to talk to old friends, and he gets
Speaker 3: them to talk about the crimes. He's less like, hey man,
Speaker 3: what do you think we did on the night of
Speaker 3: you know, blah blah blah nineteen ninety seven. He's like, oh, man,
Speaker 3: I got a hangover almost as bad as the night
Speaker 3: the morning after the night of July seventh, nineteen ninety seven.
Speaker 2: What were we doing in that night? Yeah, what were
Speaker 2: we doing? Instead he did it kind of like he
Speaker 2: was like he would just get people to say things like, hey,
Speaker 2: stop worrying. They don't have any DNA connecting us to anything.
Speaker 2: The only way that we'll go down is if someone talks.
Speaker 2: So he gets them to confess. But not like I
Speaker 2: carried the jug up that hill or whatever the fuck
Speaker 2: I mean. I haven't read all the transcripts. I've read
Speaker 2: like bits of them, but that's what I pulled out
Speaker 2: of it. M On December seventh, two thousand and five,
Speaker 2: six of them were arrested across the country all at once.
Speaker 2: It soon was thirteen indictments, six women and seven men.
Speaker 2: A bunch of people fled avalon the supposed leader. He
Speaker 2: was arrested. He was also the first to get out
Speaker 2: of prison because on December twenty first, the solstice, he
Speaker 2: wrote a note and then put a plastic bag over
Speaker 2: his head, and his note read to my friends and
Speaker 2: supporters to help them make sense of all these events
Speaker 2: that have happened so quickly. Certain human cultures have been
Speaker 2: waging war against the Earth for millennia. I chose to
Speaker 2: fight on the side of bears, mountain lions, skunks, bats, cigarros,
Speaker 2: cliff rose, and all things wild. I am just the
Speaker 2: most recent casualty in that war. But tonight I have
Speaker 2: made a jail break. I am returning home to the Earth,
Speaker 2: to the place of my origins. Bill twelve, twenty one
Speaker 2: oh five, the Winter Solstice. I almost did that without crying.
Speaker 2: Of the ten initial defendants, six took cooperating plea deals.
Speaker 2: They snitched each other out. Four of them did not.
Speaker 2: Nathaniel Block, Daniel McGowan, Jonathan Paul, and Johanna Zacher all
Speaker 2: refused to cooperate, or rather, they took non cooperating plea deals.
Speaker 2: They didn't take it to court. They said, yes, I
Speaker 2: did it, and I will tell you everything that I did,
Speaker 2: and I will not tell you anything that anyone else did.
Speaker 2: And here's the thing about cops line. The ones who
Speaker 2: turned on each other for later sentences did not receive
Speaker 2: later sentences. There is an excellent analysis in a proper
Speaker 2: spreadsheet form available from the publisher Crime Think, in an
Speaker 2: essay called Green Scared that's worth checking out, and just
Speaker 2: google Green Scared Crime Think and you'll get it. The
Speaker 2: non cooperating defendants got an average of almost seven years
Speaker 2: in prison. The cooperating defendants got an average of seven
Speaker 2: and a half years and they had to do those
Speaker 2: years in prison without the support of the movement that
Speaker 2: they had sold out. In essence, they sold their souls,
Speaker 2: but not for pennies, but for checks that bounced. Suzanne Savoy,
Speaker 2: one of the cooperators, later told a doctor documentary team,
Speaker 2: I never in my life thought I'd be cooperating with
Speaker 2: the FBI. I always thought I would be able to
Speaker 2: stay strong and stay true to my values and beliefs.
Speaker 2: But I guess sometimes you aren't as strong as you think.
Speaker 2: And I say these things because I'm not trying to
Speaker 2: point a finger at her and be like, see she's weak,
Speaker 2: she sucks, Like am I right? Rather, she's right when
Speaker 2: she says that when no one knows what they would
Speaker 2: do in that situation. It's the classic George Orwell, rats
Speaker 2: in a cage on your face situation. And that's why
Speaker 2: it's worth pointing out cops are lying. The deal they
Speaker 2: are offering you is not the deal they are offering you.
Speaker 2: They'll say they'll take the rats in the cage off
Speaker 2: your face if you just talk. They don't. The thing
Speaker 2: that gets the rats in the cage off of your
Speaker 2: face is movement support, prison support and movement lawyers, the
Speaker 2: kinds of people who don't tend to work with people
Speaker 2: who have cooperated with an investigation. Daniel McGowan was sent
Speaker 2: to a special terrorist prison, a communications Management unit or CMU,
Speaker 2: and he was He was convicted of being like a
Speaker 2: lookout twice. That was his big thing, you know. So
Speaker 2: he sent a special terrorist prison and in special terror
Speaker 2: prison you get one fifteen minute call per week and
Speaker 2: you get one visit per month behind class. Later he
Speaker 2: got out and he was in a halfway house and
Speaker 2: he wrote an article for the Huffington Post about CMU's
Speaker 2: about contact communications management units, and he was arrested for it.
Speaker 2: Political pressure got him released the next day later. In
Speaker 2: two thousand and nine, Justin Salons was arrested in China
Speaker 2: for making hash out of wild marijuana. He was like,
Speaker 2: on a family trip to Italy and he was like, shit,
Speaker 2: I'm going to come back to the States where doesn't
Speaker 2: like the US, And so he went to China. But
Speaker 2: you know, a boy's got to eat. So he was
Speaker 2: making hash and wild marijuana and selling it. He spent
Speaker 2: two years in Chinese prison before he was extradited to
Speaker 2: the US and then he served the sentence.
Speaker 3: Better than making hash out of wild horses.
Speaker 2: That's right, that's right. Rebecca Rubin self surrendered in twenty
Speaker 2: twelve from where she'd fled to in Canada. Both took
Speaker 2: plea deals, but neither informed on anyone. Both took that
Speaker 2: non cooperating and I'll tell you what I did. And
Speaker 2: then Joseph Dibby, he's the most recent arrestee. He's actually
Speaker 2: out again too. Though he told his father what he
Speaker 2: was facing, right, He was like that I think him
Speaker 2: in trouble, and his father was like, well, it's time
Speaker 2: to go home. So he went to Syria, which had
Speaker 2: no extradition treaty to the US, and in order to
Speaker 2: get out, he fucking mission impossible, this shit. He gave
Speaker 2: his cell phone to someone to drive to Canada with,
Speaker 2: and he like got in another cart. I think he
Speaker 2: had more than one car as a software engineer. And
Speaker 2: he got in another car and then like took off
Speaker 2: and I think like had to like lose a tail
Speaker 2: by like driving. He says, he was like, look, I
Speaker 2: was a piece of delivery driver. I know how to drive,
Speaker 2: you know. He like loses a tail and gets himself
Speaker 2: to Mexico and I think crosses on foot into Mexico,
Speaker 2: and ugh. He boards a plane to Syria. He lives
Speaker 2: in Syria and he's doing all this environmental engineering work.
Speaker 2: He does amazing work and like biodiesel and this all
Speaker 2: this stuff right, and then the Syrian Civil War breaks
Speaker 2: out and he's like, this is not safe. I will
Speaker 2: die if I stay here, and so he goes to
Speaker 2: Russia to wait out the war. But the war in
Speaker 2: Syria keeps not ending. In Russia, he did environmental work.
Speaker 2: He wound up married, but then at one point he
Speaker 2: leaves the country. He like flies to South America for
Speaker 2: business I think, to help like a worker cooperative of
Speaker 2: some kind. And then on the way back through Cuba,
Speaker 2: flying back to Russia in twenty eighteen, biometrics pick him
Speaker 2: up and the Cuban authorities arrest him, oh God, torture
Speaker 2: him just like almost kill him from dehydration, and then
Speaker 2: hand him over to the US, where while he was
Speaker 2: in jail, a white supremacist broke his jaw and permanently
Speaker 2: disfigured him. In the end, Joseph he wound up sentenced
Speaker 2: to time served in November twenty twenty two, and he
Speaker 2: never informed on anybody, and he the judge's speech about
Speaker 2: it is actually really interesting and it's kind of like, hey,
Speaker 2: like fire is not the solution, but mass incarceration is
Speaker 2: pretty bad. And also you're doing all this like work
Speaker 2: where like he was developing these carbon capturing KELP buoys
Speaker 2: in coordination within indigenous communities in Alaska. He's a fucking
Speaker 2: cool guy as far as I can tell him.
Speaker 4: Never met him.
Speaker 2: And there's one woman, Josephine's Sunshine Overacre, who is still
Speaker 2: on the run the fedes of no clue where she is.
Speaker 2: Her mother once helped host fugitives in Canada, men who
Speaker 2: are escaping the draft from the US, and her mother
Speaker 2: is proud of her or wherever she is. Jake mister
Speaker 2: Donut didn't do any time for the arsons. Instead, in
Speaker 2: twenty eleven, he was arrested for possession and manufacture of
Speaker 2: heroin and sentenced for five years. And I haven't mentioned
Speaker 2: all of the non family prisoners, but there's one ELF
Speaker 2: prisoner that I'm aware of who's still in jail in
Speaker 2: the United States, and he's a trans man named Marius Mason.
Speaker 2: He was I believe the first person to transition in
Speaker 2: federal custody, or at least the first man to transition
Speaker 2: in federal custody. He was arrested for arsons in Michigan
Speaker 2: when his husband, with whom he'd done those arsons, snitched
Speaker 2: him out. She was married to this man named Frank Ambrose,
Speaker 2: who was caught disposed evidence in a dumpster and he
Speaker 2: rolled right away on his spouse. There's an active support
Speaker 2: campaign for Marius that's worth checking out. Long term prisoners
Speaker 2: are often forgotten, and they should not be. Most of
Speaker 2: his support comes from the anarchist community, which makes sense,
Speaker 2: but I would argue, at the end of the day,
Speaker 2: all of us live on planet Earth and it is
Speaker 2: getting hotter, and there's an awful lot of people who've
Speaker 2: tried to address that in whatever ways.
Speaker 3: They know how.
Speaker 2: A lot of people have given up everything in the
Speaker 2: fight for the earth, and they deserve our support, whether
Speaker 2: or not we specifically think that their tactics are what
Speaker 2: should be emulated. But I would argue, right now, no
Speaker 2: one knows what the fuck will work. Yeah, that's my
Speaker 2: rousing conclusion.
Speaker 3: I feel like if we knew, we would be doing it. Yeah,
Speaker 3: this is like a very random citation, but you know
Speaker 3: how things get stuck in your head, especially if you
Speaker 3: encounter them around her before the age like twenty one. Yeah,
Speaker 3: there's the movie The Constant Gardner. Okay, it has a
Speaker 3: dedication I know, has a dedication in the credits, which
Speaker 3: you know has been long enough that I forget who
Speaker 3: this is about or why, although I once knew, But
Speaker 3: it goes for a Vett Peter Powley, who lived and
Speaker 3: died giving a damn, And that like has stuck in
Speaker 3: my brain, is like the idea of like living and
Speaker 3: dying giving a damn, and that you know, if we're
Speaker 3: talking about activism of whatever kind, it's always about or
Speaker 3: it should always be about giving a damn, And that
Speaker 3: it feels like you know, whatever that means to you
Speaker 3: that we are currently in some kind of ideological war
Speaker 3: between giving a damn and not yeah, which is maybe
Speaker 3: overly simplistic but feels true to me.
Speaker 2: No, because I think we're it's sometimes we want to
Speaker 2: not give a damn, partly because we don't know. There's
Speaker 2: the things that we think might work but are dangerous,
Speaker 2: and then there's the things. But then on some level
Speaker 2: we're also like, we just don't know, we don't know
Speaker 2: what will work.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: There is one way of looking at these folks is
Speaker 2: like the only reason it didn't work is that it
Speaker 2: didn't keep going. There's another way of looking at it
Speaker 2: as saying this disrupted and broke up a growing radical
Speaker 2: environmental movement, you know, or a grassroots environmental movement like
Speaker 2: what happened with Veil. But on the other hand, you
Speaker 2: could also it just it galaxy brains up and up
Speaker 2: and up and keeps flipping back and forth, and you know,
Speaker 2: because you're like, oh, well, it disrupted the environmental movement
Speaker 2: in Veil, and then you're like, well, yeah, but that
Speaker 2: movement didn't succeed. It had already lost and the cutting
Speaker 2: had started. And then you're like, yeah, but this didn't
Speaker 2: succeed either, you know. And the thing that is a
Speaker 2: no brainer for me is not playing into the division
Speaker 2: between above ground and underground movements. The people who deserve
Speaker 2: the blame for environmental destruction are the people who are
Speaker 2: destroying the planet, not people who are fighting against that destruction,
Speaker 2: even though some of those people are fighting against it
Speaker 2: in ways that we don't approve of. And that goes
Speaker 2: in all directions. You know, that's the part that I
Speaker 2: feel clear on. But I absolutely, I mean one, never
Speaker 2: get your advice about strategy from fucking talking head in
Speaker 2: your ears. I'm very aware of how parasocial, Like, of
Speaker 2: all of the I have avoided talking about shit that's
Speaker 2: happened in the past twenty or thirty years. I usually
Speaker 2: talk about things that happened a long time ago. And
Speaker 2: one of the reasons is that I don't want people
Speaker 2: to think that they listen to a podcast and know
Speaker 2: what to do, you know, yeah, oh yeah. But I
Speaker 2: chose to do this episode because I think that it
Speaker 2: is the kind of thing that is like, it's worth
Speaker 2: people thinking about what is necessary to try and address
Speaker 2: the problems we're facing.
Speaker 3: But I don't know, yeah, or or you know, or
Speaker 3: to question the assumptions we have about what does and
Speaker 3: doesn't work, because yeah, you know, I think that the
Speaker 3: time has passed for looking for a single answer because
Speaker 3: we don't have a single problem totally.
Speaker 2: And I mean, in some ways it's also just how
Speaker 2: do we want to live? How do we what was
Speaker 2: the constant gardener living and acting like you give a
Speaker 2: damn yeah?
Speaker 3: Live, living and dying giving a damn yeah.
Speaker 2: And I think overall, the slow hard work of day
Speaker 2: in and day out movement building and the slow hard
Speaker 2: work of I think that overall, that is what I choose,
Speaker 2: and I just I want to not choose to condemn
Speaker 2: people who pick differently as long as people are living
Speaker 2: and dying like they give a damn, they get it wrong.
Speaker 3: Right, And that's you know, I mean, that's the thing
Speaker 3: that if we fall into the sort of FBI versus
Speaker 3: activists quote unquote legal versus quote unquote illegal mindset, then
Speaker 3: suddenly it becomes respectability versus caring totally.
Speaker 2: And then yet, like you know, people like no one's
Speaker 2: no one's an angel in these stories, you know, like
Speaker 2: people are doing things like don't burn libraries down, you know, yeah,
Speaker 2: they knew it too, but they knew it too late.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't know. And yet, you know, you compare
Speaker 3: that to somebody like the Weathermen, who I feel like
Speaker 3: blew up quite a few people, and it's like, you know,
Speaker 3: that's intentionality is still very important.
Speaker 2: I think the Weathermen only ended up blowing up themselves.
Speaker 3: Okay, see, I'm just my history here is very casual.
Speaker 3: I'm sure you're right. I know you're right.
Speaker 2: I'm only eighty percent on this, but I believe that
Speaker 2: the only I get.
Speaker 3: My history from Forrest Gump.
Speaker 2: So yeah, now, I'm like, this is the kind of
Speaker 2: thing I, of all people, should know off the top
Speaker 2: of my head.
Speaker 3: But but it's it's definitely there's more all over your
Speaker 3: head than in my.
Speaker 2: But they certainly were less directly caring about Like the
Speaker 2: social movement that they came out of had far less
Speaker 2: of a problem with armed violence than the social movement
Speaker 2: that their celebration front came out of. But it's also like,
Speaker 2: I don't know, I could talk about this all day. Yeah,
Speaker 2: what is dead we should talk about? Is you wrong about?
Speaker 1: What?
Speaker 2: A segue? Thanks?
Speaker 3: Yeah, you're wrong about I hope is sometimes about cool
Speaker 3: people and sometimes about people who tried, and sometimes about
Speaker 3: people who you just don't know what they were thinking,
Speaker 3: but they had to have been thinking something, and so
Speaker 3: I'm like in an overly philosophical frame, So I'm like,
Speaker 3: what is your wrong about? But yeah, I do a
Speaker 3: podcast calls You're wrong about. It's a show where I
Speaker 3: have rotating guests where every couple weeks somebody comes on
Speaker 3: and tells me about a chapter in history that is
Speaker 3: commonly misunderstood, or I tell them about a chapter in
Speaker 3: history that is commonly misunderstood and that I have stayed
Speaker 3: up late too many nights thinking about. And it is
Speaker 3: very preoccupied with the question of how do we live
Speaker 3: and die? Giving a damn? And I feel like my
Speaker 3: answer is that, or one of my answers is that
Speaker 3: we study history because the questions were trying to answer
Speaker 3: now are the same questions often that have bothered people
Speaker 3: for as long as we have a written record of
Speaker 3: people being bothered by questions. And one of the other
Speaker 3: themes is that you don't have to be smart to
Speaker 3: deserve a nice life, which is a thing that we
Speaker 3: don't realize we believe in America until you argue against it.
Speaker 3: I think, and then I have a show called You
Speaker 3: Are Good, where we talk about movies and the feelings
Speaker 3: they give us and how we learn how to define
Speaker 3: ourselves by watching whatever we could find on VHS or
Speaker 3: on a random streaming service, and how we shape ourselves
Speaker 3: with little bits of culture like a hermit crab. Those
Speaker 3: are my shows.
Speaker 2: I love that concept and I think about that all
Speaker 2: the time, about the way that we see who we
Speaker 2: can be based on the heroes that we see in
Speaker 2: media and how they define us and how we become
Speaker 2: them as we age. And yeah, that's cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, And I feel like you know, there is
Speaker 3: it's nerve wracking to make media and want people to
Speaker 3: hear what you're saying and also not put too much
Speaker 3: stock in it and to find, you know, answer their
Speaker 3: own questions and not act like any one person talking
Speaker 3: in their ear has the answers. But yeah, yeah, you're
Speaker 3: making that media that can help people find the people
Speaker 3: that they can model themselves after on the show. So
Speaker 3: it's so nice to come visit and be a part
Speaker 3: of it a little bit.
Speaker 2: Well, you should listen to the person whispering in your
Speaker 2: ear when she tells you to go listen to Well,
Speaker 2: if you like this, podcast. You'll like Sarah's podcasts, and
Speaker 2: you should also give all of your money to our animals,
Speaker 2: not animals as like a general concept, but specifically the
Speaker 2: three of us, just our pets.
Speaker 3: I've been influenced by this YouTuber who's giving like chicken
Speaker 3: hearts and freeze dried muscles to her cat, and I
Speaker 3: really feel like my cats have probably been suffering in
Speaker 3: silence on their mediocre diet. So yeah, it's very true.
Speaker 3: It's an issue facing our country.
Speaker 2: My dog eats the fanciest kibble that's still kibble that
Speaker 2: I can still buy in the town I live in,
Speaker 2: and is really picky about it, and it's like, really
Speaker 2: the fancy kibble again. And I told the vet that
Speaker 2: he doesn't like his food all that much, and she's like,
Speaker 2: what do you give him? And I was like the
Speaker 2: following that I'm not being paid to advertise, I'm not
Speaker 2: going to say. And she's like, but that's the good stuff,
Speaker 2: and I was like, I know, I can't even get
Speaker 2: it at the grocery store. I have to go to
Speaker 2: tractor supply. I've probably told this story on this podcast before,
Speaker 2: but I think about it all the time because I
Speaker 2: feed him every day. And every day is like maybe
Speaker 2: later when I'm hungry.
Speaker 1: So funny, but if.
Speaker 2: You want to hear me write about my life, and
Speaker 2: I actually, for example, I did a substack post a
Speaker 2: couple weeks ago as you are looking for this, called
Speaker 2: how can we Stare at the Sun or how to
Speaker 2: confront the Unimaginable? And it's about, you know, it's the
Speaker 2: stuff that I try not I try to keep it
Speaker 2: mostly like history focused when I talk about this, whereas
Speaker 2: this is an essay where I talk more about how
Speaker 2: do we look at mourning the death of winter and
Speaker 2: how do we look at what actions we feel are
Speaker 2: appropriate to take? So you can check that out on
Speaker 2: my substack that's free. Half of my posts are free.
Speaker 2: The other half you have to give me food with
Speaker 2: which to buy dog food for my dog, and those
Speaker 2: are the ones that are more personal. And then I'll
Speaker 2: also say you should listen to Hood Politics with prop
Speaker 2: which is on cool Zone Media and is one of
Speaker 2: my favorite news shows because cool Zone Media doesn't miss
Speaker 2: and they don't pay me to say that. Well, I
Speaker 2: guess they on some level pay me because I am
Speaker 2: hired by cool Zone Media, but I just actually genuinely
Speaker 2: like the shows that we produce and I'm proud to
Speaker 2: be part of it. So if you guys think to
Speaker 2: plug that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, that time's too perfect.
Speaker 2: We'll see you next Monday. Bye, Ronye.
Speaker 1: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
Speaker 1: cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool Zone Media,
Speaker 1: visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
Speaker 1: on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
Speaker 1: your podcasts.