Speaker 1: Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 1: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 1: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 1: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 1: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 1: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's gotta be nothing new here for you. But you
Speaker 1: can make your own decisions.
Speaker 2: It's another mass shooting. There's no I don't, I don't.
Speaker 2: I don't have a good way to start this episode. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but welcome jac it appen here a podcast that is
Speaker 2: also just about mass shootings now because yeah, great great
Speaker 2: world we live in with me is Gare and Robert Hello.
Speaker 3: Hello, Yeah, so a Nazi killed a whole bunch of
Speaker 3: people again.
Speaker 1: Yeah, in case there's been another one, we are we
Speaker 1: are talking about the specific as shooting in Allen, Texas
Speaker 1: with the guy who was covered in swastika tattoos that
Speaker 1: certain people are claiming as a fed. Yeah.
Speaker 3: That happened on Sunday, May seventh. So I think I
Speaker 3: think MIA has some details about what actually happened to
Speaker 3: kind of put together, but for the majority that we're
Speaker 3: actually going to be talking about people's reaction to this,
Speaker 3: including some of the most influential people on the planet.
Speaker 3: And the level of reality denial that is, it has
Speaker 3: been bad before, it's just extra visible right now, and
Speaker 3: it's visible to a degree that is that is pretty worrying,
Speaker 3: and we felt it was it was worth talking about
Speaker 3: just because of you know, whenever a reality fracture is
Speaker 3: big enough to be like this this noticeable, that is
Speaker 3: always always an interesting sign of where we are at
Speaker 3: as a culture.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think so before we fully dive into that,
Speaker 2: there's something that I do want to talk about like
Speaker 2: briefly with this, which is that so like this is
Speaker 2: you know, in the sort of mold of like white
Speaker 2: premises killings, is like, this is very very targeted and
Speaker 2: non white people. So he shot one white guy who
Speaker 2: was a security guard, and then he shot like three
Speaker 2: Latino people and then four Asian people. And I don't know,
Speaker 2: I wanted to just sort of like remind people that
Speaker 2: anti Asian violence is still like a thing because everyone
Speaker 2: seems to have forgotten about it, and you know, this
Speaker 2: is like I mean, I think if you exclude the
Speaker 2: if you exclude the three in California that were like
Speaker 2: also committed by Asian people, says like the fourth mass
Speaker 2: shooting in two years that's been at least half the
Speaker 2: victims of an Asian It fucking sucks, I you know.
Speaker 2: I mean, we've talked about antias violence a decent amount
Speaker 2: on this show. None of the things we've ever talked
Speaker 2: about have gotten any better. The only sort of actual
Speaker 2: instrument the results of any of this is that like
Speaker 2: violence against Asian people get used as a rhetorical cudgel
Speaker 2: to justify killing black people, which is fucking abhorrent. And yeah,
Speaker 2: I just wanted to get this in because the media
Speaker 2: has collectively forgotten that that was the whole thing, and
Speaker 2: no one really talks about the shooting in that framing,
Speaker 2: and I think it's important to do so at least
Speaker 2: for a little bit.
Speaker 3: I think the other thing to kind of just talk
Speaker 3: about it at the top here. Latino white supremacists and
Speaker 3: Latino Nazis are not They are not an uncommon thing.
Speaker 3: This is actually quite common. Two of the most famous
Speaker 3: fascists in the world right now, Nick Fuentes and Enrique Tario,
Speaker 3: are not white.
Speaker 4: No.
Speaker 1: I mean, just like, think about think about where I mean,
Speaker 1: think about the fact that prior to World War Two,
Speaker 1: Argentina spent a significant chunk of their defense budget bringing
Speaker 1: over Nazis to train their military, which is a big
Speaker 1: part of why so many Nazis escaped there via rat lines.
Speaker 1: You know, we just did a series of episodes on
Speaker 1: Alfredo Stressner, the fascist dictator of Paraguay who put up
Speaker 1: and hid Joseph Mengola along with a bunch of other
Speaker 1: Nazis for a while. Mangola had citizenship in both Argentina
Speaker 1: and in Paraguay. Like, this is it's not uncommon. This
Speaker 1: is not like a new thing. We're not It's not
Speaker 1: like some sudden shift in the way that fascism works.
Speaker 3: Even the shooter himself like posted memes about being a
Speaker 3: Latino white supremacist, Like it is a subculture big enough
Speaker 3: that it has its own like meme of vortex. So
Speaker 3: and this shooter was actively engaged in in said like
Speaker 3: a me medic culture.
Speaker 1: No, And it's also worth noting that a lot of
Speaker 1: the same things that we talk about when we talk
Speaker 1: about Nazi mass shooter culture in the United States, the
Speaker 1: fact that a lot of shootings are kind of incited
Speaker 1: on eight Chan and four chan and similar boards. This
Speaker 1: happens in Latin America. Brazil in particular has a website
Speaker 1: called degola chan that has spawned at least a couple
Speaker 1: of shootings. In the last year, They've had several more
Speaker 1: mass shootings that are political in nature, that are kind
Speaker 1: of driven by online fascists. Like this is not the
Speaker 1: only place that this happened. Serbia just had a couple
Speaker 1: as well. But like, what what what? What this guy's
Speaker 1: doing is very much just as the christ shooting was
Speaker 1: very much something that occurred within the broader envelope of
Speaker 1: a transnational accelerationist fascist movement, you know, the Allen shooting,
Speaker 1: as far as we can tell what the information we
Speaker 1: have available, seems to fit very well into that schema.
Speaker 5: Okay, we should talk about the shooter a bit.
Speaker 2: So there's there's a sort of I don't know, there's
Speaker 2: like a after every mass shooting, there's this sort of
Speaker 2: like identification cycle thing that happens, where like a bunch
Speaker 2: of musations us AN organizations still trying to figure out
Speaker 2: who the shooter was.
Speaker 5: So I think like the day after, very very very
Speaker 5: like pretty.
Speaker 2: Soon after the shooting, there's the new York Times runs
Speaker 2: an article that reveals that the shooter has this like
Speaker 2: has an account on like a kind of weird Russian
Speaker 2: social media site. And from from that information, uh Eric Toler,
Speaker 2: who's a bell researcher, a belling cat like, tracks down
Speaker 2: the site and he finds a bunch of wild stuff.
Speaker 2: He finds like, I mean, obviously the shooter is like
Speaker 2: he finds it the shooter is a Nazi. He has
Speaker 2: like a swastika tattoo. He has also has an SS
Speaker 2: tattoo from the shooting. He's wearing like a right wing
Speaker 2: desk squad patches. Like it's just like a whole thing
Speaker 2: that the Proud Boys also do. It's like a patch
Speaker 2: that says like rw.
Speaker 1: D, Yeah, they sell our WDS patches. I mean, I
Speaker 1: think a lot of it kind of comes out of
Speaker 1: some of the discourse around Pinochet that goes back a
Speaker 1: few decades, but at this point it's a much broader
Speaker 1: thing than that. I've got a bunch of photos of
Speaker 1: Jeremy Brederimo I think is his now who is one
Speaker 1: of the Proud Boys. I believe he's the guy who
Speaker 1: got stabbed prior to January sixth during one of the
Speaker 1: big riots in DC after the twenty twenty election, but
Speaker 1: with the big RWDS patch on his chest. And you
Speaker 1: can find like Tasitala Tozy, who is an inveterate rioter
Speaker 1: with a Patriot prayer up in Portland, would wear them
Speaker 1: all the time. They're a common piece of fascism merch.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you know, and this and also you know
Speaker 2: the other thing that's kind of important that gets found
Speaker 2: on this like social media site, which okay, I wish
Speaker 2: you it's a kind of weird thing, like he doesn't
Speaker 2: I don't know the social media site. Seems like he
Speaker 2: was basically using as like a journal, Like he doesn't
Speaker 2: like follow people or like have followers, so he's just
Speaker 2: sort of posting this stuff. He also finds a bunch
Speaker 2: of clips of like Timpoole videos, and so this immediately
Speaker 2: sends the entire right into like you know, full on
Speaker 2: defense mode, right. You know, it turns out it's it's
Speaker 2: not great for your brand with like the sort of
Speaker 2: general array of people if it's being associated with a
Speaker 2: guy who just did a mass shooting. So Tim Poole
Speaker 2: responds to the other thing is there's there's like a
Speaker 2: manifesto on it, and Tim Poole responds to this by
Speaker 2: I think I think what actually, like legitimately what happened
Speaker 2: is he read the manifesto and there's a thing in
Speaker 2: the manifesto like talking about the Nashville shooter being trans
Speaker 2: or like specifically about the Nashville shooter. And I think
Speaker 2: I think specifically he read that and was like, oh shit,
Speaker 2: this is my out. I can go back and talking
Speaker 2: about the Nashville shooter. Sure, And so he starts, he
Speaker 2: starts this. There's this whole sort of train of like
Speaker 2: right wing stuff about how all of this is fake.
Speaker 2: So he starts arguing that, like this isn't the guy's
Speaker 2: social media account. This this sort of very very rapidly
Speaker 2: morphs into i mean, just like full on like Sandy
Speaker 2: hook shit, what if his employees like tweets? Why is
Speaker 2: the corporate press so threatened by people questioning the authenticity
Speaker 2: of a Mexican neo nazi's Russian social media account uncovered
Speaker 2: by state funded media? And this because this immediately becomes
Speaker 2: the mainline right state funded media things. They're talking about
Speaker 2: Belling Cat, which.
Speaker 3: They're they're hopping on all of the Tanky conspiracies.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, running with it.
Speaker 3: Because Twitter is a is a cultic milieu of conspiracy,
Speaker 3: and you can latch onto one talking point to make
Speaker 3: you feel okay about denying an entire like facet of
Speaker 3: reality and then it becomes an easy out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and we're gonna we're gonna circle back to like
Speaker 2: specifically the tanking people getting involved in this because they do.
Speaker 1: What they're doing is a little bit of like and
Speaker 1: uh an evolution from what what's what? Folks kind of
Speaker 1: in the debating Christians about evolution and shit called the
Speaker 1: Gish gallop, where the the the original idea of the
Speaker 1: Gish gallop was when you're arguing from a creationist perspective
Speaker 1: about stuff like, you know, the age of the world,
Speaker 1: you bring up so many different kind of topics, you know,
Speaker 1: from different very niche issues you have a carbon dating to,
Speaker 1: you know, specific problems you have with like the way
Speaker 1: scientists are interpreting specific fossils, and it's just too much
Speaker 1: detail for somebody in like an ad hoc public argument
Speaker 1: to really like counter at once. And kind of the
Speaker 1: evolution of it is when you're dealing with something like
Speaker 1: this rather than deal with the broader picture, which is
Speaker 1: there's just a tremendous amount of evidence that this guy
Speaker 1: was a Nazi, that this guy was motivated and kind
Speaker 1: of brought into the community by a lot of content
Speaker 1: that guys like Tim Poole make. Instead you focus on,
Speaker 1: you pull up one single thing that you can kind
Speaker 1: of like try to get people to latch onto, and
Speaker 1: if you can get them arguing about that thing, you
Speaker 1: can get them to ignore the bigger picture, like at
Speaker 1: least you can distract attention from it.
Speaker 7: And it works.
Speaker 1: It works for a lot of people. It's especially effective
Speaker 1: on social media.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and unfortunately the social media platform that this is
Speaker 2: mainly happening on his Twitter, which Elon Musk owns, and
Speaker 2: Elon Musk immediately like decides that he's just fully in
Speaker 2: on this shit, and he is, I mean she is, like,
Speaker 2: like Elon Musk is is just actively promoting the sort
Speaker 2: of weird conspiracy that basically what the sort of right
Speaker 2: wing story about this becomes is that like, okay, Belling
Speaker 2: Cat is is the CIA, and they're being paid to
Speaker 2: create a like a false flag thing that okay, they're
Speaker 2: they're they're being paid to create a false flag to
Speaker 2: to make this guy look like a Nazi and a
Speaker 2: timpoole fan to distract people from the Nashville shooting, which
Speaker 2: is just like.
Speaker 5: The absolute nonsense.
Speaker 2: But you know, you you immediately get into like that
Speaker 2: that Tim Pool employee again, like it like starts doing
Speaker 2: this whole like we are enshrined with liberty to freely
Speaker 2: scrutinize every claim, just as the sanctity of like every
Speaker 2: human being in America like has the right to question stuff.
Speaker 2: It's like this is like literally like literally word for
Speaker 2: word stuff Alex Jones was saying in the Sandy Hook trial.
Speaker 2: But we've gotten to the point where you just you know,
Speaker 2: like the sort of mainstream of the right just does
Speaker 2: this about every time it's a writing mass shooting, and
Speaker 2: this this particular time, it's been just everywhere.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're we're, we're gonna there's no no, no smooth
Speaker 1: way to break to ads in an episode about a
Speaker 1: mass shooting, but that's what we're doing.
Speaker 7: We are back.
Speaker 3: I want to talk now a little bit more about
Speaker 3: the actual exchanges that Musk was involved in and how
Speaker 3: this narrative of like a syop and this whole narrative
Speaker 3: around the shooting being a syeop, how that viewpoint got
Speaker 3: inflated on Twitter because must controls where all of the
Speaker 3: interactions go for tweets and actually like specifically get into
Speaker 3: how this specific conspiracy is is a demonstration of how
Speaker 3: much of just a separation from reality that people like
Speaker 3: Musk are like actively actively working towards. One of the
Speaker 3: main accounts that Musk was kind of like riffing off
Speaker 3: of in this and who was like trying to like
Speaker 3: feed Musk this type of stuff was the redheaded libertarian
Speaker 3: who works for Timpoole. She created a bunch of memes
Speaker 3: about this shooting talking about how how this the guy
Speaker 3: can't can't be a Nazi and he because he's Latino.
Speaker 3: You know, why would someone use a Russian social media site?
Speaker 3: Even tho it's actually very common for American notaptries to
Speaker 3: use Russian social media.
Speaker 1: We used to do an exercise at a trainings that
Speaker 1: I did for Bellancat where people would go through and
Speaker 1: use v Contacta, which is a Russian like kind of
Speaker 1: Facebook clone, and you would kind of use geographical search
Speaker 1: to find of like KKK members and shit in the
Speaker 1: American South, because it was really common with them because
Speaker 1: it didn't have any kind of content moderation.
Speaker 3: So yeah, so the types of like right wing content
Speaker 3: creators who are within Musk's Twitter orbit start pumping out
Speaker 3: all of this stuff, right, and this is where Musk
Speaker 3: gets all of his information from. So he starts he
Speaker 3: starts like just questioning the validity of this story, but
Speaker 3: then also specifically targeting belling Cat, saying that didn't didn't
Speaker 3: didn't this story come from Bellingat, which literally specializes in
Speaker 3: psychological operations, which, first of all, is just a wild
Speaker 3: thing to say when you're talking about is specifically like
Speaker 3: an open source journalism website, Like it's the most the
Speaker 3: most honest way you could do journalism because it's given
Speaker 3: people the tools to literally check all of the work themselves.
Speaker 5: Like it's yeah, I mean this is.
Speaker 2: Kind of like a minor aside, but one of the
Speaker 2: things that happens here constantly with all these people is
Speaker 2: they're like absolutely astounded, like like how how how did
Speaker 2: belling get possibly find this? It's like, well, it's not
Speaker 2: that hard, it's really easy. The thing is the thing
Speaker 2: is right if if so, Like, I am not a journalist, right,
Speaker 2: I learned everything I know about this from gare in
Speaker 2: like one night, and like I have tracked down like
Speaker 2: mass you too social media accounts and like before the
Speaker 2: police got them, Like it's not that hard.
Speaker 6: But the thing is it requires you to even like just.
Speaker 5: A tiny tiny bit be a journalist.
Speaker 2: And not a single one of these writing people has
Speaker 2: ever like done journalism ever, and so like just like
Speaker 2: the tiniest bit of journalism just like destroys their brains
Speaker 2: and they're like they are physically incapable of comprehending how
Speaker 2: someone could have done a journalism and then they use
Speaker 2: this to sort of feed their base because their base
Speaker 2: also just doesn't understand how someone could do a journalism
Speaker 2: and this this, this, this lets you do this like
Speaker 2: cycle of like how could they possibly have found this?
Speaker 2: They must have been given it by the government.
Speaker 3: It's just like No, all that really comes down to
Speaker 3: is is who has who is on their computer at
Speaker 3: the right time when this thing happens. Yeah, whenever I
Speaker 3: find out or whenever I can id people, it's always
Speaker 3: just like coincidence that the thing happens as I'm already
Speaker 3: at my computer, so now I can look into this thing, right,
Speaker 3: it is It is just who has access to the
Speaker 3: internet at the right time is the way that we
Speaker 3: figure out like, who's gonna end up iding somebody?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's a mix of that, and it's a
Speaker 1: mix of just who has the patience and the motivation
Speaker 1: to sit and comb through shit for hours and days,
Speaker 1: which is the same thing that like, it's the same
Speaker 1: thing at anti fascist activists have been doing for years,
Speaker 1: you know, especially since Charlottesville, where you're just like, I'm
Speaker 1: going to watch the same videos of the same event
Speaker 1: and find new ones and I'm going to spend three
Speaker 1: years doing that, and eventually I will catch a tattoo
Speaker 1: or a shirt with a logo and that will let
Speaker 1: me id somebody, because you know, of the of the
Speaker 1: different social media shit that I've been pulling up, like
Speaker 1: it's it's it's not it doesn't take like spice satellites.
Speaker 1: It just takes motivation, being in the right place at
Speaker 1: the right time and having nothing else to do.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So eventually they started just kind of harping on this
Speaker 3: term syop, so sich obviously means psychological operation. But what
Speaker 3: what they mean when they say syop is that they
Speaker 3: mean this was like a government, This is a false
Speaker 3: like a manufactured government planned operation. That's what they actually mean, right,
Speaker 3: Like in in the conspiracy space, syop is is more
Speaker 3: like a loaded term they don't actually refer to like
Speaker 3: actual syops that get doning like against like you know,
Speaker 3: you can look at like co Intel pro right, you
Speaker 3: can look at you can look at various ways that
Speaker 3: the FBI of the army has done syops. But what
Speaker 3: they mean when they say syop is this is like
Speaker 3: this is a government conspiracy theory and it's a false
Speaker 3: narrative that's been crafted to like change public opinions. So
Speaker 3: I guess, I guess these people mea you mentioned how
Speaker 3: they're making it sound like this was this was created
Speaker 3: to distract from the Nashville shooting or just just they
Speaker 3: have various like motivations for why they want to but
Speaker 3: it the important part is that they could use this
Speaker 3: word to just easily deny reality, and that is that
Speaker 3: it is kind of beyond like whatever motivations they have.
Speaker 3: It's just easy for them and their ideology to just
Speaker 3: block off this section of reality so that they don't
Speaker 3: have to Like people who are like actually libertarians don't
Speaker 3: need to like confront what the extent of their ideology
Speaker 3: actually means. Right, you know, there's certainly people who are
Speaker 3: like okay with mass shootings happening, or you know, are
Speaker 3: totally fine with with with with like non white people
Speaker 3: getting killed in mass shootings. But there probably are certain
Speaker 3: libertarians who don't actually like mass shootings. They don't actually
Speaker 3: like when fascists go kill tons of people, and it's
Speaker 3: easier for them sometimes just to block off this section
Speaker 3: and ignore it than actually confront what their ideology means.
Speaker 3: So some must kept saying this is either the weirdest
Speaker 3: story ever or a very bad syop. The answer is neither.
Speaker 3: This story is not super weird. It's actually very very
Speaker 3: explainable if you understand the mechanisms at play here, and
Speaker 3: even just not a bad SI Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean it's not even like it's not on it's
Speaker 1: like on the whole. It's not a particularly complicated story
Speaker 1: like there are. It is not an uncommon thing. I mean,
Speaker 1: the biggest, most recent one before this was that that
Speaker 1: shooting in New York at the grocery store that was
Speaker 1: like a directly inspired Nazi attack. Like this kind of
Speaker 1: shit happens constantly in the United States. It doesn't require
Speaker 1: nobody has to be secretly armed by the Feds. There's
Speaker 1: an AR fifteen behind every bush in this country. It's
Speaker 1: not hard for this kind of this kind of shit,
Speaker 1: It's not hard to see where this like originates from.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it's I mean, Muska just kept kept replying
Speaker 3: to both Timpoole employee tweets tweets from the very blatantly
Speaker 3: fascist account to end Wokeness, which Musk has been replying
Speaker 3: to quite a quite often recently. So this and I
Speaker 3: think the reason why we wanted to just talk about
Speaker 3: this specifically is just because of you. Like, all of
Speaker 3: these Musk tweets are getting like millions and millions of views,
Speaker 3: if the view counter is any is anything to go by.
Speaker 3: At the very least, he's in the top three accounts
Speaker 3: with the highest engagement on Twitter. So these these types
Speaker 3: of conspiracy theories are getting inflated to extremely high degrees
Speaker 3: at least online, and the separation of reality online is
Speaker 3: inflated for these mass shootings in a way that I
Speaker 3: have not seen in quite a while. I have not
Speaker 3: seen this much just denial of like information regarding mass
Speaker 3: shootings in quite a long time. And the combination of
Speaker 3: the stuff like the stuff with Belling Cat coming from
Speaker 3: the tankies and how those conspiracies have now mashed with
Speaker 3: all of these like neo fascist shit. It's a combination
Speaker 3: of reality denial that is absolutely worrying for like future
Speaker 3: mass shootings as well.
Speaker 1: It's a pivot in the kind of reality that's being denied.
Speaker 1: You know, not we have nothing to do with these
Speaker 1: Nazis who are parroting some of the things that we
Speaker 1: say about immigration. It's this is fundamentally not the attack
Speaker 1: that you think it is. This is our enemies creating
Speaker 1: an attack to try to make us look bad. Like
Speaker 1: the fact that that you've always seen and pieces of that.
Speaker 1: The fact that it's being parroted by the wealthiest man
Speaker 1: on the planet using one of the biggest information fire
Speaker 1: hoses that exists is completely novel.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because I mean a lot of these same conspiracy
Speaker 3: theories that specifically about like Eric Toler, we saw we
Speaker 3: saw leftists and tankies bringing up the same stuff during
Speaker 3: the UH, during the stuff with the Nazi National guardsmen
Speaker 3: a month ago. So we have a lot of this
Speaker 3: stuff has kind of been writing on the back of
Speaker 3: that and just continued and accelerating UH since then. It
Speaker 3: appears there's a few outlets like Business Insider and Blank
Speaker 3: at themselves reporting that they are they are receiving basically
Speaker 3: shadow bands on Twitter right now, with their with their
Speaker 3: with their account and their posts having a very limited reach.
Speaker 1: An interesting shadow band too, because it's not like it.
Speaker 1: It appears, at least from what I've seen, that what
Speaker 1: they're doing is they're making it so that when people
Speaker 1: type belling Cat into the search bar, nothing comes up,
Speaker 1: as opposed to like throttling the reach of the actual
Speaker 1: posts themselves, trying to make it deliberately difficult for people
Speaker 1: to actually look up information, which is interesting to me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I guess I guess it's worth saying that
Speaker 3: the police and Texas have confirmed everything about about the
Speaker 3: shooters political beliefs and his new Nazi ties, and he
Speaker 3: has a neo Nazi shit in his apartment. Obviously his
Speaker 3: body is covered with neuo Nazi tattoos. One of the
Speaker 3: things that some of the kind of right wing content
Speaker 3: creators were trying to do is that they were trying
Speaker 3: to say that the specific pictures of the individual that
Speaker 3: belling Cat found online, that that these pictures were not
Speaker 3: this person. They in fact that they were saying, they
Speaker 3: were saying that the shooter is just somebody else, which
Speaker 3: was also proven rob but yeah, they also.
Speaker 2: They also they did another classic right wing thing, which
Speaker 2: is that they misidentified the shooter. Yes, I thought it
Speaker 2: was another guy with the same name, because.
Speaker 1: Like and they misidentify the shooter, and they misidentified the
Speaker 1: non Nazi tattoo that he had, yes, because he had
Speaker 1: he had weirdly enough, like the city of Dallas's seal
Speaker 1: tattooed on his hands.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the Texas tattoo on his shoulder.
Speaker 1: Yeah. They they like definitely, like there were a lot
Speaker 1: of conspiracy theories about that, and a lot of them
Speaker 1: related to the fact that, like the first photos we
Speaker 1: got of the guy were like the kind of photos
Speaker 1: you get of a dead man at a mass shooting
Speaker 1: that someone takes through a window while sheltering, So it
Speaker 1: wasn't clear. So they would take a picture of like
Speaker 1: a social media picture of the tattoo on his hand,
Speaker 1: and then a picture of him dead, and like the
Speaker 1: tattoo on his hand in the picture of him dead
Speaker 1: was like blurrier, and they were like, look, the lines
Speaker 1: aren't straight. They're straight in the picture on his social
Speaker 1: media and it's like, well, yeah, because those were taken
Speaker 1: by very different cameras in very different situations. Like you
Speaker 1: know how cameras work, you know how this this is
Speaker 1: of what.
Speaker 3: Of the funnier ones that one of these content creators
Speaker 3: was doing was they were they were posting the the
Speaker 3: photos of of the Nazi tattoos that the shooter himself
Speaker 3: posted online, being like, look how fresh these tattoos are.
Speaker 6: How can.
Speaker 3: If he had these tattoos for years, why do they
Speaker 3: look so fresh at these photos?
Speaker 6: Because the photos were from right after.
Speaker 1: Him, like you do when you get a tattoo. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's like I have tattoos pictures of me getting tattoos
Speaker 1: from like fifteen years ago somewhere on my Facebook. Like
Speaker 1: you could do the same thing, suspicious Robert.
Speaker 3: One of the interesting things is that like we see
Speaker 3: the same thing with all of like all of the
Speaker 3: worries around like deep faking stuff, like all of all
Speaker 3: of the like weaponized on reality stuff. It doesn't need
Speaker 3: to actually be convincing. It it doesn't need to be
Speaker 3: good like like deep fakes don't need to be good quality.
Speaker 3: You can you can post a meme of like a
Speaker 3: picture of Biden's face and some text on it with
Speaker 3: a quotation mark post on Facebook and millions of people
Speaker 3: will believe that's just true. Like it doesn't need to
Speaker 3: be real or convincing in order for it to have
Speaker 3: it like an effect.
Speaker 1: And it's also it's not just about I think it's
Speaker 1: it's thinking, Like, it's not just about convincing people. It's
Speaker 1: not about making them believe it. This is like, this
Speaker 1: is the thing that I tried to talk about years
Speaker 1: ago during the Eight Chance shooting. It's shit posting. Part
Speaker 1: of the goal is just to disrupt conversation. It's to
Speaker 1: make people engage with the fake stuff. It's to make
Speaker 1: people break kind of the lines of reasoning that they
Speaker 1: are going in with, Like it's to make people distract
Speaker 1: people from the stuff that is really clear and obvious
Speaker 1: and just kind of fracture the conversation. Because the more
Speaker 1: that you do that kind of the weaker you make
Speaker 1: the response to what's happened, and the more kind of
Speaker 1: that you can distract people from the degree of complicity
Speaker 1: that the people in kind of the media sphere on
Speaker 1: the right have for all of this shit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I think that's why it's like specifically going
Speaker 2: after the Billin Cat stuff has been really effective with
Speaker 2: UP because like like there are like people who I
Speaker 2: am friends with in real life who like are convinced
Speaker 2: that billing cares as a CIA si op, Like this
Speaker 2: is like a like they like really not insignificant portions
Speaker 2: of the left believe this, yep. And that means that
Speaker 2: it's you know, unbelievably difficult to form any kind of
Speaker 2: coherent response when like half of the people who would
Speaker 2: normally be doing this stuff are like, oh, well they
Speaker 2: are actually CIA, So.
Speaker 3: Like, yes, the the Netherlands based CIA unit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like yeah there. I mean like at least
Speaker 1: in the time I was there, the primary people funding
Speaker 1: us was the Dutch post code lottery, Like it's it's
Speaker 1: it's I don't know, like.
Speaker 3: Like almost every news organization they take grants where yeah,
Speaker 3: where they can get them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And like I want to specifically talk about the
Speaker 2: NYDA a tiny bit because people like, so the main
Speaker 2: conspiracy is about like they like at one point they
Speaker 2: took they took a grant for the National Talent for
Speaker 2: Democracy and like, yeah, those people do weird shit sometimes,
Speaker 2: but they also for example, like if okay, so if
Speaker 2: you're gonna have the line that every single person who's
Speaker 2: taking money for the n D is a CIA thing,
Speaker 2: Like you have to accept that. For example, like the
Speaker 2: pro Beijing Electoral Party in Hong Kong is a CIA
Speaker 2: op because they also got a shit ton of any
Speaker 2: D money, right, Like, like any just gives money to
Speaker 2: a shit ton of people.
Speaker 3: It's definitely worth emphasizing that, like the initial groups that
Speaker 3: are pushing the Bellingkt conspiracies were all gray zone people
Speaker 3: that are specifically specifically paid by the Russian government, like
Speaker 3: because Russia was mad at Bellinkat for exposing their war crimes. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and like that's where all of this stuff starts.
Speaker 1: There's I don't know how much point there is in
Speaker 1: like laying into this specific thing too much. Would I
Speaker 1: would remind you at all times when you are like
Speaker 1: dealing with breaking news like this and there's a bunch
Speaker 1: of different and there's a bunch of different kind of
Speaker 1: like conflicting arguments about what's actually happening. Okham's raiser isn't
Speaker 1: one hundred percent of the time the way to go.
Speaker 1: But in a situation like this, you have two possibilities.
Speaker 1: One is that a Nazi went on a killing spree,
Speaker 1: as happens constantly, as has been happening since the Nazis
Speaker 1: became a thing. The other possibility is that the federal government,
Speaker 1: for unclear reasons, convinced a man to cover his body
Speaker 1: in swastika tattoos and shoot random people at a mall
Speaker 1: for gun control. That's not going to get passed in
Speaker 1: the state of Texas. I don't know, like which of
Speaker 1: those seems likely to you.
Speaker 2: I did this thing like very deliberately to myself, like
Speaker 2: about a year ago, where I was like, I was
Speaker 2: very deliberate, like I'm going to like un conspiracy theory
Speaker 2: my brain, because you know, like there is a lot
Speaker 2: of like like the kind of reasoning you get in
Speaker 2: this stuff, which is like, hey, here's a thing that like,
Speaker 2: quote unquote looks weird, so this whole thing must be suspect,
Speaker 2: so it must be an op is like a really
Speaker 2: really kind of like it's a really common kind of
Speaker 2: reasoning now that just like a lot of people across
Speaker 2: the entire poetic conpectionum have and it's not actually a
Speaker 2: good way to understand the worlds like it's it simply
Speaker 2: is not.
Speaker 3: We live in an increasingly absurd world where every single
Speaker 3: weird thing is more and more visible because of the Internet,
Speaker 3: so we're more aware of how much weird shit happens
Speaker 3: all the time, and stuff that and stuff that may
Speaker 3: not not necessarily be weird, because like everything, there is
Speaker 3: an expert in every field who can explain to you
Speaker 3: why this thing actually makes perfect sense. And it's just
Speaker 3: people being exposed to things that they're not usually that
Speaker 3: they're not used to. I think one of the interesting
Speaker 3: one of the last things I think we should like
Speaker 3: mention about this is just the influx of how militant
Speaker 3: like neo Nazism or like visible ne Nazism has just
Speaker 3: been People have just been saying it's Feds in an
Speaker 3: increasingly concerning way, like like I think, like a last month,
Speaker 3: there was this viral video of a whole bunch of
Speaker 3: Nazis stressed in red and black, I think, protesting something.
Speaker 3: I forget the exact circumstances at the moment.
Speaker 6: I think it was.
Speaker 3: I think it was some drag related protests, but yeah,
Speaker 3: there was this group of Nazis dressed in red and
Speaker 3: black doing Nazi shit, And when you looked at any
Speaker 3: of the videos on Twitter, you saw hundreds of replies
Speaker 3: from people with blue check marks just calling them Feds,
Speaker 3: saying oh, Wow, look at all these Feds. Well, oh,
Speaker 3: I can't believe the FEDS are so busy today. Blah
Speaker 3: blah blah blah blah. You know, it's it's like the
Speaker 3: one hundred person NPC meme with them all wearing the
Speaker 3: blue check mark on the forehead saying it's the FEDS
Speaker 3: just because it's it's once we get to the point
Speaker 3: where we have more Nazis doing mass shootings again, the
Speaker 3: same way like there was an influx between like twenty
Speaker 3: seventeen to twenty nineteen than twenty twenty, there was kind
Speaker 3: of a dip because all all crime kind of had
Speaker 3: a dip. As we're gonna go into the next next
Speaker 3: election cycle, as things are gonna start looping again, when
Speaker 3: more and more Nazis start doing shit, just how there's
Speaker 3: gonna be a bigger swath of the population who just
Speaker 3: denies that's what's happening, and that is gonna make make
Speaker 3: the problem of Nazis probably a bit harder to deal with.
Speaker 3: I mean, there's there will still be anti fascists doing
Speaker 3: their work to like docs and I D people and
Speaker 3: and and and all that stuff, but the amount of
Speaker 3: like visibility and the amount of traction that that this
Speaker 3: level of reality denial is getting around, like militant in
Speaker 3: neo Nazism and around Nazi killings, will be a kind
Speaker 3: of a new thing to navigate, or not a new thing,
Speaker 3: but like it's a the problem will be bigger than
Speaker 3: what it used to be.
Speaker 1: I wanted to kind of note one thing on a
Speaker 1: on the other side of the ideological spectrum and uh
Speaker 1: and and not to equate the two. But there has
Speaker 1: been something kind of concerning that I've been seeing crop
Speaker 1: up in liberal circles. You may have noticed, kind of
Speaker 1: as a response to all of the mass shootings and
Speaker 1: the generally consistent Republican line that there's nothing to do
Speaker 1: except for be shittier to marginalize people. That that there's
Speaker 1: been kind of this like focus in a lot of
Speaker 1: mainstream liberal media on articles and the idea that you
Speaker 1: should spread pictures of victims of shootings, and a focus
Speaker 1: on the amount of damage that like a weapon like
Speaker 1: an AR fifteen does to a human body. People can
Speaker 1: have their own opinion on like whether or not this
Speaker 1: is a helpful idea, but I have noticed in sort
Speaker 1: of arguments I've been having with people a troubling trend,
Speaker 1: which is when I talk about the importance of doing
Speaker 1: stuff like taking stop the bleed training, carrying things like tourniquets.
Speaker 1: I've gotten responses from a couple of people that are
Speaker 1: like AR fifteens are so powerful the wounds are not survivable,
Speaker 1: there's no point in doing this. That is not the case.
Speaker 1: I have known dozens of people who have been shot
Speaker 1: by AR fifteens, in some cases in AR style weapons,
Speaker 1: in some cases multiple times, and larger weapons, and lived.
Speaker 1: It is always worthwhile to have stopped the bleed training
Speaker 1: and to carry equipment. If you hear anyone saying that,
Speaker 1: please please correct them, Because whatever you think about gun control,
Speaker 1: it is very important for people to know how to
Speaker 1: deal with those kind of injuries, and it is important
Speaker 1: in the immediate wake of an attack. One of the
Speaker 1: things that was really unsettling is in the immediate way
Speaker 1: of the Allen attack, after the shooter was down, there
Speaker 1: was a couple of people who ran in to try
Speaker 1: to provide life saving aid, and a bunch more who
Speaker 1: took photos of the people who had been wounded and killed.
Speaker 1: And it's possible that if more of the people taking
Speaker 1: photos had gotten in an attempted to provide aid. Some
Speaker 1: of the people who were injured might have survived, no
Speaker 1: way to know, but always worth having that training. That's
Speaker 1: just something I've noticed. Not to put it in the
Speaker 1: same moral universe as trying to pretend your calls for
Speaker 1: violence aren't calls for violence, but it is something that
Speaker 1: concerned me and that people should maybe keep an eye on.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I that was the case with the
Speaker 3: Rittenhouse shootings. There was someone who basically had most of
Speaker 3: their arm, yeah, blown off, but they did not die. Yeah,
Speaker 3: So yeah, that is that is not true. And I've
Speaker 3: watched a lot of the Rittenhouse footage and yeah, it is.
Speaker 7: It is.
Speaker 3: It is nasty. Yeah, but no, that is that is
Speaker 3: a good thing to note.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and also like.
Speaker 2: On just a fundamental human level, like do do not
Speaker 2: let yourself be consumed by the algorithm so much that
Speaker 2: your first reaction to seeing someone get shot is you
Speaker 2: try to film them, Like, yeah, we need to be
Speaker 2: better than this, Like we have watched people die because
Speaker 2: of this, Like like this, this is not a thing
Speaker 2: as society that we can continue to be doing. Like
Speaker 2: we simply cannot. We simply have to act and not
Speaker 2: like become part of a sort of like mass media
Speaker 2: spectacle instead of doing something.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the footage of things is not going to change it,
Speaker 3: especially with mass shootings. Footage and mass shootings usually actually
Speaker 3: make the problem worse, and it's mostly used by people
Speaker 3: who want to be mass shooters.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm I that may be a conversation we should, uh,
Speaker 1: we should expand on it a later date. But you know,
Speaker 1: don't don't let the bastards grind you down. Take a
Speaker 1: stop the bleed course, you know, bring a tourniquet with
Speaker 1: you out in the world. These are these are action
Speaker 1: items that that that you can do that might in
Speaker 1: fact help. So that's going to be it for us today.
Speaker 1: It could happen here until next time, you know, keep
Speaker 1: your head on this wivel.
Speaker 8: Hello and welcome to another episode of It Could Happen
Speaker 8: Here with me Andrew of the YouTube channel Andrewism. Today,
Speaker 8: I'm joined by Mia and today we're going to be
Speaker 8: discussing another leading figure in the black radical tradition. If
Speaker 8: you've heard the episodes on Quasi Ba Lagoon, you know
Speaker 8: exactly what's up today. I've got the first part in
Speaker 8: a two parter about Lorenzo kembo Iven and his vision
Speaker 8: for revolution. Even's life has been one of resistance, resilience,
Speaker 8: and radicalism. These contributions the anarchist movement, especially his work
Speaker 8: on black anarchism, even to this day with his ongoing podcast,
Speaker 8: continues to inspire activists around the world, myself included. So, Mia,
Speaker 8: what are your what has your experience been with the
Speaker 8: Rinzo Combo Irvin and his work.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I've read Anarchist in the Black Revolution, which
Speaker 2: I really enjoy. I've listened to not all of but
Speaker 2: like a pretty good amount of the Black Autonomy podcasts
Speaker 2: that he runs, which is great, and so yeah, I'm
Speaker 2: excited to talk about him.
Speaker 8: Awesome. Yeah, he really is a fantastic and necessary figure
Speaker 8: in this you know, broader movement, especially now for those
Speaker 8: who don't know, the Rnzo Combo Irven was one of
Speaker 8: the earliest founders of the black anarchist movement, which was
Speaker 8: a distinct tradition born out of the history of black
Speaker 8: radical politics in nineteen seventies. Black anarchism is not just
Speaker 8: h we are thrown on an adjective onto anarchism. There's
Speaker 8: a history behind it and there's a distinct tradition that
Speaker 8: accompanies it. There were anarchists historically who were black, who
Speaker 8: were not part of this black anarchist tradition, and well,
Speaker 8: of course black anarchists who weren't part of those earlier movements.
Speaker 8: I think one of the most notable sort of go
Speaker 8: to examples is Lucy Parsons was a very important anarchist
Speaker 8: figure in the sort of the peak of the movement,
Speaker 8: at least in the US in the twentieth century. But
Speaker 8: although she was Black, her contributions don't necessarily contribute to
Speaker 8: that sort of black anarchist lineage. So let's get into
Speaker 8: earthIn right. Nineteen forty seven. By the time he was twelve,
Speaker 8: Lorenzo Kobertuvin had joined the NAACP youth group and participated
Speaker 8: in sit in protests that helped to end racial segregation
Speaker 8: in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He was later drafted during the Vietnam
Speaker 8: War and served in the army for two years, where
Speaker 8: he eventually became an anti war activist. And in nineteen
Speaker 8: twenty seven, when he was twenty years old, after his
Speaker 8: involvement with the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee, Lorentzo kumbo
Speaker 8: Uven joined the Black Panther Party as a rank and
Speaker 8: file member. Two years later, he hijacked a plane and
Speaker 8: fled to Cuba. While he was on the run for
Speaker 8: attempting to kill a Ku Klux Klan member, But instead
Speaker 8: of receiving support as some black radicals had received when
Speaker 8: fleeing to Cuba, Cune authorities had jailed him, deported him,
Speaker 8: deported him to Czechoslovakia, and eventually he escaped from Czechoslovakia
Speaker 8: to each before eventually being caught, tortured, and brought back
Speaker 8: to the United States, and then after being drugged during
Speaker 8: his trial, he was handled two life sentences by an
Speaker 8: all white jury in a redneck town. Tough prick as
Speaker 8: you can imagine, Irvin had very quickly become disillusioned with
Speaker 8: the dictatorship he had experienced in Cuba and the socialist
Speaker 8: countries he visited, and during his time in prison, he
Speaker 8: reflected on his life and found an alternative method for
Speaker 8: black revolution, distinct from the form he found the Panther Party.
Speaker 8: Now even wasn't the first person to criticize the Black
Speaker 8: Panther Party's style of organization. One of the splits between
Speaker 8: the East Coast and West Coast Panthers was on what
Speaker 8: form of organization they would take. I discussed that a
Speaker 8: bit in the Quasi Battagoon episodes, and then of course
Speaker 8: there were other figures who came out to the Black
Speaker 8: Panther Party with their own criticisms, including if I remember correctly,
Speaker 8: Asata Shakur and also Don Cox. While in prison, Iuven,
Speaker 8: had you gone receiving anarchist literature? And he also signed
Speaker 8: to pick up what another Black anarchist who he was
Speaker 8: briefly imprisoned with at the time, Martin Sostra, was putting down.
Speaker 8: Martin Sostra is what I believe one of the first
Speaker 8: major black anarchist figures in that sort of nineteen sixties
Speaker 8: nineteen seventies period, and so him being in prison with
Speaker 8: Sostra at the same time sort of really helped even
Speaker 8: to understand exactly what anarchism meant and how it would
Speaker 8: applied to a specifically black experience in black context. Ivin
Speaker 8: was also inspired by Peter Kropotkin, Everyone's favorite Russian and
Speaker 8: former prince, and ultimately even adopted the ideology of anarchist.
Speaker 8: His case was soon taken up by the anarchist Black
Speaker 8: Cross and the Helper Prisoner Oppose Torture Organizing Committee, which
Speaker 8: led to an international campaign the petition for his release.
Speaker 8: Evan's writings on Anarchism of the Black Revolution, which was
Speaker 8: written in prison, gained immense popularity, and so he was
Speaker 8: released in nineteen eighty three after serving nearly fifteen years.
Speaker 8: In his book, he emphasized that anarchism is the most democratic,
Speaker 8: effective and radical way to obtain freedom for the black community,
Speaker 8: but the black people must be free to design their
Speaker 8: movements without the approval of North American anarchists. Do you
Speaker 8: believe that black people and other people of color would
Speaker 8: be the backbone of the American anarchist movement of the future.
Speaker 8: The first edition of Anarchism the Black Revolution was published
Speaker 8: quite a while ago. It's still the addition that is
Speaker 8: available on the Anarchist Library you can check out, but
Speaker 8: it is I would consider it to be a sort
Speaker 8: of a rough early edition. There are certainly some typos
Speaker 8: and editorial mistakes and stuff that were addressed in the
Speaker 8: most recent edition that was published and I believe twenty
Speaker 8: twenty one and edited with some help from William C. Anderson,
Speaker 8: who also is another leading figure in the modern black
Speaker 8: anarchist movement, having written works like Nation or nomap Irvin
Speaker 8: took and still takes a principal stance against capitalism, white supremacy, imperialism,
Speaker 8: colonial oppression, patriarchy, queerphobia, and the state, recognizing the government
Speaker 8: is one of the worst forms of modern oppression. His
Speaker 8: emphasis on intersectionality has played a crucial role in the
Speaker 8: shift away from class exclusive analysis in the American anarchist movement,
Speaker 8: and today he remains active, as I said recording a
Speaker 8: podcast called Black Autonomy with his wife and fellow forma
Speaker 8: panther Jonina. So today we drawn from Even's book Actism
Speaker 8: of the Black Revolution to delve into his picture of
Speaker 8: revolution in North America and beyond. I think one of
Speaker 8: the strongest strategies for the development of the Black Revolution
Speaker 8: would be a Black labor federation. As Even discusseds in
Speaker 8: his book, black labor has been a critical economic fact
Speaker 8: in America since the country's inception, and it was through
Speaker 8: the toil of black labor, beginning with slave labor in
Speaker 8: the Old South and extending to share cropping, farm labor
Speaker 8: and migration to the North for factory jobs, that the
Speaker 8: foundations of the American nation were built. However, as is obvious,
Speaker 8: black workers have been routinely excluded from that share of
Speaker 8: the wealth of the American nation and routinely excluded from
Speaker 8: the trade unions that struggled to regain some of that wealth, like,
Speaker 8: for example, the American Federation of Labor, the Dash Colored
Speaker 8: Labor Union, the National Colored Farmers Alliance, and the Brotherhood
Speaker 8: of Sleeping Car Porters, as well as the League of
Speaker 8: Black Revolutionary Workers, and other unions and associations of black
Speaker 8: workers were then formed to represent these interests that were
Speaker 8: being left out and not at all brought to the table.
Speaker 8: Black workers were very much instrumental in the Congress of
Speaker 8: Industrial Organizations, campaign of strikes and sit downs and other
Speaker 8: protests to organize unskilled industrial workers, but they didn't get
Speaker 8: to enjoy the benefits of their pivotal role. Most of
Speaker 8: the Black population is working class, and black industrial and
Speaker 8: clerical workers still hold significant potential power and the struggle
Speaker 8: for black liberation. A lot of these workers have already
Speaker 8: been organized and to defend their righted work and advocate
Speaker 8: for their interests, even if union leadership is conservative, even
Speaker 8: if they weren't challenge management, even if they're not even unionized.
Speaker 8: We see as well in modern times a lot of
Speaker 8: black figures stepping up to organize these unions. The first
Speaker 8: union to be organized in Amazon was spearheaded by a
Speaker 8: black worker, Chris Smaws, and workers black workers across history
Speaker 8: have already been creating union caucuses and creating independently of
Speaker 8: unions were necessary to push for their specific interests because,
Speaker 8: I mean, the unity of black workers and the rest
Speaker 8: of the working class is essential to combat and overthrow capitalism.
Speaker 8: But there needs to be a recognition within that unity
Speaker 8: of distinctly black interests and a distinctly black history, which
Speaker 8: is why black caucuses within unions are able to take
Speaker 8: up demand to the struggles that unions have turned the
Speaker 8: blind eye to, such as discriminatory hiring, firing, and promotion practices,
Speaker 8: and you know, lack of equal treatment. I think these
Speaker 8: caucuses could even go further as even also argues to
Speaker 8: democratize their unions, to eliminate some of these discriminatory practices,
Speaker 8: and to really push for the radical fighting spirit that
Speaker 8: has been lost in some of these sort of reformist
Speaker 8: union structures. The black aucuss and also the workers more
Speaker 8: generally should be stepping up to demand democratic control the union,
Speaker 8: to demand equal treatments, demand of firmative action, demand full
Speaker 8: employment demand, shorter work weeks, to demand, the right to strike,
Speaker 8: the demand to social security, and an employment compensation demand
Speaker 8: for liverable minimum wages. Of course, all of these accomplishments
Speaker 8: or demands already sort of short term benefits that would
Speaker 8: still retain a COPITALSS structure, but they're necessary nonetheless, especially
Speaker 8: when unionize the is are an all time low historically.
Speaker 8: One of the things that even also advocates for, which
Speaker 8: I'll get into more in the future, is this idea
Speaker 8: of unions advocating for companies to put aside funds specifically
Speaker 8: for programs to rebuild in a city communities and provide
Speaker 8: work for black workers and your stocks, about worker self
Speaker 8: management of industry by factory committees and workers councils, and
Speaker 8: elections by workers themselves. But the main idea that he's
Speaker 8: pushing for, at least in terms of the black working
Speaker 8: class and black labor, is, as I mentioned, a Black
Speaker 8: labor federation, both in a national level and on an
Speaker 8: international level, a national workers association with serves both a
Speaker 8: revolutionary union movement for a place organizing and a mass
Speaker 8: social movement for community organizing, combining tactics from both the
Speaker 8: labor and the black liberation movements to multiply their numbers
Speaker 8: and build their strength and tilling the unions into these
Speaker 8: militant class struggle instruments. An example that we can see
Speaker 8: in history during the late nineteen sixties was the League
Speaker 8: of Revolutionary Black Workers, which is organizing black auto workers
Speaker 8: out of the out of the Dodge Revolutionary Movement. Sorry
Speaker 8: to me, let me rephrase that. One example of that
Speaker 8: type of organization could be found in the League of
Speaker 8: Revolutionary Black Workers, which organized black auto workers during the
Speaker 8: late nineteen sixties. The League had grown out of a
Speaker 8: major affiliate of it out of a major affiliate, the
Speaker 8: Dodge Revolutionary Movement, and it was a black labor federation
Speaker 8: that existed as an organized alternative to the United Auto Workers,
Speaker 8: which have been excluding black workers. League was also a
Speaker 8: very major force on the streets, as it was in
Speaker 8: addition to organizing its workplaces organized in college campuses and
Speaker 8: black inner city areas. But its potential was stifled, unfortunately
Speaker 8: by political faction fights among leadership. There was a division
Speaker 8: between those who wanted to take a more Marxist Leninist
Speaker 8: approach to the organization compared to those who want to
Speaker 8: take more democratic approach the organization. There was a lack
Speaker 8: of a solid enough organized based in the factories, there
Speaker 8: was significant company and United Auto Workers, and state repression.
Speaker 8: Of course, organized racism, a lack of cooperation among white workers,
Speaker 8: and other reasons that eventually led to the league splitting
Speaker 8: into mutually hostile factions that would die after less than
Speaker 8: five years of existence. Classic organized and history story. I
Speaker 8: don't think that you should look at these failures and
Speaker 8: use them as an opportunity to give up. I think
Speaker 8: we look at these failures and we use them as
Speaker 8: learning opportunities, use them as opportunities to recognize, oh, we
Speaker 8: can do something like this, but not exactly like this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and make sure that Bob Avankian is never involved
Speaker 2: at any point in the process.
Speaker 8: Exactly exactly. I mean, we still need these sorts of
Speaker 8: labor organizations and associations and unions. We still need black
Speaker 8: workers pay aheading these sort of organizations to organize other
Speaker 8: black workers in their communities to support the strike. Sim
Speaker 8: workplace organized. It will be necessary for significant changes, and
Speaker 8: of course we need the groups we established to avoid
Speaker 8: the pitfalls and ideological scruples of Marxism. Len this up.
Speaker 8: But you're just the sort of American approach, because in
Speaker 8: case those of you who don't know, I'm not living
Speaker 8: in America, I'm not an American, which is why, and also
Speaker 8: addresses and advocates for an international Black Labor Federation to
Speaker 8: wield the collective power of black workers globally that have
Speaker 8: been universally oppressed and exploited around the world as a
Speaker 8: racial group, Black workers have been oppressed as workers and
Speaker 8: as people, and this dual form for pressure is really
Speaker 8: what emphasizes that need to organize for old rights and
Speaker 8: our own liberation. In African and Caribbean countries, including trant Tobigo,
Speaker 8: there are labor federations and labor unions, but a lot
Speaker 8: of them are reformists, a lot of them are government control,
Speaker 8: and there's a lack of militancy. There's a lot of
Speaker 8: collaboration with the government and with companies they're supposed to
Speaker 8: be organizing against. As it's necessary to have an organization
Speaker 8: with an internationalist scope that is pushing for solidarity, that
Speaker 8: is pushing for radical change. And so I think that's
Speaker 8: that's the real strength of an international Black Labor Federation.
Speaker 8: You know, that idea of increased solidarity across several countries,
Speaker 8: uh the idea of strengthening our collective bargaining power and
Speaker 8: ability to organize this better work and conditions. Of course,
Speaker 8: we'd also have the benefit of shared resources and the
Speaker 8: benefit of greater visibility to these issues that we are
Speaker 8: facing in the workplace and in society. And then of
Speaker 8: course there will also be the ability to exert using
Speaker 8: that visibility and resources and solidarity to exert greater political influence. However,
Speaker 8: you know, an international Black federation, we still struggle with
Speaker 8: political barriers, particularly in countries that are actively hostile to
Speaker 8: that sort of organizing. Of course, the power would be
Speaker 8: will do everything in their power to keep such a
Speaker 8: struggle from being able to attain and maintain any kind
Speaker 8: of momentum or power. The construs rains of time and
Speaker 8: energy and resources and engagement also prevent such a federation
Speaker 8: from gaining crown. But I still think of all those
Speaker 8: are issues that we should keep in mind. If well developed,
Speaker 8: I think that national, regional and international caucuses can do
Speaker 8: a lot to implement significant changes. In fact, one strategy
Speaker 8: that even advocates for is something that I believe an
Speaker 8: international Black Labor federation or any kind of International Labor
Speaker 8: Federation will be necessary to help to organize, and that
Speaker 8: would be a general strike because the vast majority of
Speaker 8: the Black community consists of working class people in the US,
Speaker 8: because many of them are engaged in manufacturing and medical
Speaker 8: service and communications and food production and retail, h a
Speaker 8: lot of blue collar work that really makes the country
Speaker 8: go around. It really makes them an essential component to
Speaker 8: the Capital's economy and of the American economy. I think
Speaker 8: it positions them as really really key players in any
Speaker 8: sort of protest campaign that would involve first racism and
Speaker 8: class oppression, and it could go even further into beyond
Speaker 8: just stepping up and striking for demands in the workplace,
Speaker 8: control over the workplace. It could also go step further
Speaker 8: and accomplish it and accomplish in even more revolutionary goals.
Speaker 8: And I would of course involve using tactics like industrial
Speaker 8: sabotage and factory occupations and sit ins and slowdowns and
Speaker 8: wildcat strikes and other work stoppages that would help to
Speaker 8: reassuit our collective power. Of course, as I'm always really
Speaker 8: careful to emphasize when I bring up general strikes, they're
Speaker 8: not easy to organize. A friend of mine Alkie. He
Speaker 8: has a video on his YouTube channel about general strikes
Speaker 8: and how they work, and some of the history is
Speaker 8: some past general strikes. So that's I think that's required
Speaker 8: reading code good reading to definitely check out. But yeah,
Speaker 8: general strikes are not easy to organize. They're not something
Speaker 8: that you could just call for on Reddit or Twitter
Speaker 8: or Facebook or whatever.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 8: It takes serious community and workplace mobilization. It takes significant planning.
Speaker 8: It takes strike committees and support committees because and even
Speaker 8: defense committees when employers maybe trying to retaliate against strike
Speaker 8: cod workers or blacklist or fire workers.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And I would also say like something that I think people, okay,
Speaker 2: there's not a delegate way to say this, Like, look,
Speaker 2: if you're gonna be engaged in like a long term,
Speaker 2: serious general strike, you're gonna have to do things like
Speaker 2: you're gonna have to start seizing stuff, Like you're going
Speaker 2: to have to start committing theft in order to make
Speaker 2: sure that people can like eat, Yeah, exactly, Like you're
Speaker 2: gonna have to start appropriating stuff.
Speaker 8: Yeah, exactly. It's not just standing around in a picket line,
Speaker 8: you know, Like the general strike is an extra extremely
Speaker 8: involved and invested. You don't get usually you don't get
Speaker 8: two chances to do a general strike, you know, like
Speaker 8: you have that chance, and after that they're usually if
Speaker 8: you feel you usually introduce legislation or put things in
Speaker 8: place to ensure that something like that never happens again.
Speaker 2: Yeah, or you get like there was a thing that
Speaker 2: used to happen back when, you know, back in like
Speaker 2: the early nineteen hundreds of these, and a lot was
Speaker 2: you would get these general strikes, but you know they
Speaker 2: would kind of they would be like like two days long.
Speaker 2: And there's this great Melo testa quote from Oheen nineteen
Speaker 2: twenty four, I think where he's talking about how he's
Speaker 2: talking about the factory occupations that started in Italy in
Speaker 2: the like during the two Red Years, and he has
Speaker 2: this line that goes, general strikes a protests no longer
Speaker 2: upset anyone, neither those who take part in them, nor
Speaker 2: those against whom they are directed. If only the police
Speaker 2: had the intelligence to avoid being provocative, they would pass
Speaker 2: off as a public as any public holiday. One must
Speaker 2: seek something else. We put forward an idea, the takeover of.
Speaker 8: Factories exactly exactly like you have to step beyond or
Speaker 8: is this legal? It is this legal and looking too
Speaker 8: Oh what can we make possible? You know, yeah, I
Speaker 8: mean I don't mean to be flippant, you know, like
Speaker 8: it's difficult. It takes so much organization of a lot
Speaker 8: and coordination of a large group of people. There's always
Speaker 8: put the sea of scabs.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 8: It could have significant consequences for workers who depend on
Speaker 8: their wages to survive and to support their families. It
Speaker 8: can have a lot of ripple effects, and it could
Speaker 8: also involve you know, workers end up going to jail
Speaker 8: or just losing their jobs. But still it's it's a
Speaker 8: powerful tool that if we can recognize, if we could
Speaker 8: start working towards if when people were calling for strikes
Speaker 8: back in twenty sixteen and twenty seventeen and twenty eighteen,
Speaker 8: twenty nineteen and twenty twenty one and two, if all
Speaker 8: those years so we spent calling for general strikes actually
Speaker 8: more effort was being put in to actually put the
Speaker 8: foundation in place for general strike to occur, then twenty
Speaker 8: twenty three we would be prepared to support a general
Speaker 8: strike in a long term way, in a way that
Speaker 8: would actually signify, you know, revolutionary change in our lifetimes
Speaker 8: I mean they'll be discertened. Dear listener, They're still potential
Speaker 8: for such a thing to occur. It just takes preparation
Speaker 8: and organization. Speaking of things that take preparation organization, and
Speaker 8: one of Irven's tactics is a mass tax boycott. You know,
Speaker 8: people should refuse to pay any form of taxes to
Speaker 8: the government, be it federal, income, estate, or state taxes
Speaker 8: while they continue to be exploited. Because, as he would argue,
Speaker 8: you know, wealthy and their corporations paying next to no taxes,
Speaker 8: while the poor and workers be a brunch of taxation
Speaker 8: and do not receive any benefits in return. You know,
Speaker 8: all these taxes on income and goods and services, but
Speaker 8: communities are still suffering, and that money ends up going
Speaker 8: to fund the Pentagon and defense contractors and consultants who
Speaker 8: get to you know, loot the government for their own game.
Speaker 8: So part of a black radical movement or the Black revolutions,
Speaker 8: if an arguseful, is a mass tax resistance movement to
Speaker 8: boycott taxes, similar to the peace movements, war tax resistance,
Speaker 8: taking people all the taxes that would have gone into
Speaker 8: personal property, all the taxes that wo have been reaped
Speaker 8: from personal property and income tax and stocks and bonds,
Speaker 8: and funneling that towards community development, find that towards going
Speaker 8: to projects and organizations. As with any evolution reaction, significant
Speaker 8: legal consequences would be involved in that. Of course, you know,
Speaker 8: I think such a tactic needs some serious mass support
Speaker 8: and backend behind it to succeed. And even then, I
Speaker 8: don't believe it should be the backboone of any movement.
Speaker 8: I think it's more so like an accessory and event
Speaker 8: of media rupture, a single tool in a broader arsenal,
Speaker 8: Like I don't think the entire movement should be built
Speaker 8: off of tax avoidance. They're just going to get a
Speaker 8: bunch of people throw into prison. They ask a lot
Speaker 8: more to it than that. I look at the sort
Speaker 8: of cost benefit analysis, like, yeah, it'll get a lot
Speaker 8: of federal attention, but if it's not properly implemented, I
Speaker 8: don't really see any immediate benefits for the long term
Speaker 8: goals of the movement. I mean, I could be wrong,
Speaker 8: but it's not a tactic that I would personally feelful
Speaker 8: unless such a struggle is already in existence and in
Speaker 8: its later stages another type of boycott that's even references is,
Speaker 8: of course the irregular, conventional, unconventional sort of boycotts used
Speaker 8: during the Civil Rights movement. A lot of black consumers
Speaker 8: with boycott, particular moochents public services refusing to treat with
Speaker 8: moochents who would allow for reach of discrimination and use
Speaker 8: that loss of revenue to force them to make concessions. Today,
Speaker 8: black consumers in the US spend hundreds of billions a
Speaker 8: year in the campus economy. Of course, not all of
Speaker 8: those consumers are workers, and all those workers are able
Speaker 8: to boycott. But I think boycotts are still a potential
Speaker 8: to the arsenal again to wage you know, warfare, economic
Speaker 8: warfare against the corporate structures. I mean it could be
Speaker 8: expanded from anything. It can be expanded to cover everything
Speaker 8: from specific products to entire industries. Right. Dr Martin Luther
Speaker 8: King Junior himself recognized the potential of a national black boycott.
Speaker 8: Doctor Martin Luther King Junior himself recognized the potential of
Speaker 8: a national black boycott for America's major corporations. Shortly after
Speaker 8: he was assassinated, he established such an initiative called Operation
Speaker 8: bread Basket, which aimed, among other things, to force corporations
Speaker 8: to pour money into national black community development projects for
Speaker 8: poor communities. I think, you know, podcasts have a way
Speaker 8: to put economic pressure, but they I also believe a
Speaker 8: little bit less effective in our modern globalized world due
Speaker 8: to the fact that you know, a lot of these
Speaker 8: companies are owned by the same like three corporations. They
Speaker 8: usually have ways to mitigate economic losses in one market
Speaker 8: by targeting other alternative markets. Or even if they experienced
Speaker 8: a dip in demand in one sector, they may still
Speaker 8: enjoy demand in another sector and another part of the world.
Speaker 8: And on top of that, company is can of also
Speaker 8: use that it as an opportunity to sort of get
Speaker 8: people off the movement. For example, boycott is taking place,
Speaker 8: they could say, oh, you're trying to boycott, well, we
Speaker 8: just put a sale out fifty sixty percent of wild
Speaker 8: stocks last and then you have people sort of, you know,
Speaker 8: breaking off of the movement. And I mean, of course,
Speaker 8: not everybody will do that, some people are principled, but
Speaker 8: that is still a tactic that you see some companies
Speaker 8: using when they're starting to experience that sort of economic pressure,
Speaker 8: they try to fragment the movement quote unquote votes in
Speaker 8: with your wallet, even mass coordinated in my opinion, is
Speaker 8: limited in its ability to challenge the courses.
Speaker 6: Of oppression in equality.
Speaker 8: I would think it brings us any closer to anarchist
Speaker 8: I think it only weakens the current world. So I
Speaker 8: think it's another tactic that really cannot act alone. And
Speaker 8: then we got another tool in Yos. Now we could
Speaker 8: call it a rent boycott. We can call it a
Speaker 8: rent strike. It's a way to achieve certain legislative changes,
Speaker 8: or so we to achieve certain more radical changes if
Speaker 8: you get into sort of occupation and squatn and that
Speaker 8: kind of thing. In Harlem, in New York City, rent
Speaker 8: boycotts were so successful the decreation of rent control legislation,
Speaker 8: which prevented evictions, unjustified price increases, and required reasonable upkeep
Speaker 8: by property owners and management companies. There is a track
Speaker 8: record of Rench strikes providing some benefits, you know, allowing
Speaker 8: tenants to negotiate with landlords and to bring some issues
Speaker 8: to light. And I could also bring about, of course,
Speaker 8: certain policy changes and push for or highlight further the
Speaker 8: need for affordable and accessible houses. But again, Rench strikes
Speaker 8: legally risky. They can also be difficult to coordinate, especially
Speaker 8: for those who are really kind of risk eviction. I mean,
Speaker 8: nobody can really risk eviction, right, But that's where the
Speaker 8: risk sort of comes in. And then if there's a
Speaker 8: lack of support, if the land world has significant resources
Speaker 8: behind them, there are also you know, ways that it
Speaker 8: could go wrong. I don't want to mislead like I
Speaker 8: want people to be aware of the reality of how
Speaker 8: difficult this sort of organized effort is. All these organizing
Speaker 8: efforts are. It's not a walk in the park. It's
Speaker 8: not you know, like acts the end of Act three
Speaker 8: and some revolution story movie where the good guys are
Speaker 8: able to win with the power of friendship, with that
Speaker 8: kind of thing. It's tough work and we have to
Speaker 8: be aware of the risks even as we engage in
Speaker 8: such actions. Even also advocates for you know, squatting in
Speaker 8: tandem with rent strikes. So, in addition to withholding rent
Speaker 8: payments from exploitsive landlords and banks, also movements to engage
Speaker 8: in urban squating, to seize housen to seize empty plots
Speaker 8: of land, to seize unoccupied and abandoned buildings, and to
Speaker 8: redirect payments that would have gone towards rent towards necessary
Speaker 8: repairs to improve living conditions and to claim our cities
Speaker 8: for ourselves. But again, while squating does provided immediate housing
Speaker 8: solution for those in need, while draws attentions the issue
Speaker 8: of hosting inequality, while creates a sense of collective ownership,
Speaker 8: and while it can help to improve all these neglected
Speaker 8: areas and urban environments, it's also legal cross involved in
Speaker 8: effection and arrest. A lot of squatting conditions can be
Speaker 8: fairly unsafe, while unsanitary, particularly if a property is not
Speaker 8: up to a particular standard. And then of course squating
Speaker 8: is also sort of temporary as a solution. It doesn't
Speaker 8: really address the root courses of housing. It is really
Speaker 8: a precurious position to keep people in. And it's another
Speaker 8: case where without mass defense and support we got a
Speaker 8: mass movement backing it up, it's going to be very
Speaker 8: easy to dislodge any games that might be made in
Speaker 8: the short term. Family even also argues for the establishment
Speaker 8: of the commune as a staging ground for Black revolutionary struggle.
Speaker 8: The concept of the community is basically like a dual
Speaker 8: power structure, an institution meant to compete with government power,
Speaker 8: to preserve as a comment to government power in order
Speaker 8: to assert collective community power foreman and unify and various
Speaker 8: organizations as struggle taking control of existing communities and institutions
Speaker 8: and work at a fight against economic and political and
Speaker 8: cultural discrimination, expertiation and servitude in this capitalist society. And
Speaker 8: he goes in to talk about inner city communes as
Speaker 8: centers of black counterpower and social revolertionary culture to say,
Speaker 8: as sort of a living example of what revolution could
Speaker 8: look like. I think this is a case where at
Speaker 8: the time he didn't have the word for it, but
Speaker 8: we do now, and that would be prefigurative politics, the
Speaker 8: idea of you know, establishing these sort of institutions and
Speaker 8: the here and now that would be able to prefigure
Speaker 8: the world that we want to see in the future.
Speaker 8: Another component of these sort of communes is to provide
Speaker 8: a count narrative to sort of black capitalism and responsibility politics.
Speaker 8: It gets pushed out as a dominant narrative within black
Speaker 8: communities in the US. The commune and the Black communey specifically,
Speaker 8: you can say as a place for a new society
Speaker 8: and a new culture to emerge that rejects the internalization
Speaker 8: of oppression under this system. And so when you want
Speaker 8: to get into sort of how the sort of community
Speaker 8: be established, even talks about establishing community councils the world
Speaker 8: govern and even talks about establishing community councils to allow
Speaker 8: for collective governance and be composed of workers from various
Speaker 8: industries and neighborhoods and delegates to organized communities on a
Speaker 8: block by block basis. He also emphasizes they need to
Speaker 8: reject black politicians, bureaucrats, and mayors from sort of co
Speaker 8: opting these efforts and ensuring that the community on the
Speaker 8: ground actually retains control over the institutions that they establish
Speaker 8: and develop and take control over to ensure that the
Speaker 8: community's needs and desires are met. One example that he
Speaker 8: uses is in the case of schools right where the
Speaker 8: community would organize parents, students, teachers, and community like to
Speaker 8: cooperatively administer the schools. I think we see a lot
Speaker 8: of efforts by right wing parents right now organize and
Speaker 8: sort of run things in a lot of public schools,
Speaker 8: But that does mean it's similar efforts can't be taken
Speaker 8: by radicals to push for the same. Of course, it
Speaker 8: wouldn't be as easy because they aim to see the
Speaker 8: status school, whereas we aim to change things.
Speaker 2: I think it is sort of important to note too
Speaker 2: that it's like, it's not like this sort of like
Speaker 2: right wing school stuff came out of nowhere. Like part
Speaker 2: of the reason this was happening was that like there
Speaker 2: had been movements inside the like inside.
Speaker 5: Sorry, let me if I say.
Speaker 2: There have been movements from teachers and from like inside
Speaker 2: the education system trying to sort of like, you know,
Speaker 2: we do things I teach black history, right, and you know,
Speaker 2: like part like these are these are things that like,
Speaker 2: these are kinds of movements that people really tend to
Speaker 2: ignore and really tend to sort of not think about
Speaker 2: the significance of. But yeah, I mean it's it's it's
Speaker 2: not like these sort of like right wing versions of this.
Speaker 5: Came out of know where.
Speaker 2: They were reaction to people, you know, doing a sort
Speaker 2: of more moderate version of the strategy.
Speaker 8: Yeah, that's true. That is true, And so now we
Speaker 8: have to push even harder to counter their counter efforts
Speaker 8: and really assuite that sort of transformation in the education
Speaker 8: space and beyond just the education space. What Even talks
Speaker 8: about is ensuring that these councils encompass a variety of organizations,
Speaker 8: not just blocking neighborhood communities, but also labor union, student groups,
Speaker 8: social activist groups and even specialists you or single issue
Speaker 8: campaigns and issues. The idea is, of course, to continuously
Speaker 8: promote self rule, to continuously develop people's powers and drives
Speaker 8: and consciousness towards liberation, and to continuously offer an alternative
Speaker 8: to this pervasive sense that all this is is all
Speaker 8: they can ever be. It's necessary to sort of incubate
Speaker 8: this sort of embryo of a revolutionary society, this micro
Speaker 8: cause of a new lifestyle, and to highlight the necessity
Speaker 8: of struggle against you know, these systems. And when I
Speaker 8: speak of consciousness, I'm also speaking of specifically Black consciousness.
Speaker 8: Speaking of consciousness rais and sessions to ensure that black history,
Speaker 8: black culture is accessible and available and understood by the
Speaker 8: black community. To ensure that newly liberates and like social
Speaker 8: ideas and values are distributed within the community, to ensure
Speaker 8: that counselinine therapy are available, rooted, and of course a
Speaker 8: black revolutionary perspective tell people to realize that this disunity
Speaker 8: and distrust and violence and oppression, that because due to
Speaker 8: this legacy end of this system does not have to
Speaker 8: continue to be so. But that's it for me and
Speaker 8: for Irvin. For now you can join us for part
Speaker 8: two where we can dive into the day to day aspects.
Speaker 8: So there's viable programs that Irvin describes to build black
Speaker 8: resilience in the air. And now if you're looking for
Speaker 8: me on the internet, you can find me on YouTube
Speaker 8: dot com slash andeurism and you can support on patuon
Speaker 8: dot com slash saying Peace. And welcome back to another
Speaker 8: episode of It Could Happen here with myself Andrew of
Speaker 8: the YouTube channel Andewism if you're joining us. From the
Speaker 8: previous episode, we touched on the life of Lorenzo Cambo
Speaker 8: Irvin who he was as a leading figure in the
Speaker 8: black anarchist movement, how he ended up in that position,
Speaker 8: sort of his life story and how he ended up
Speaker 8: writing Anarchism the Black Revolution and sort of breaking down
Speaker 8: that vision of a Black revolution, including tactics like communes, squats,
Speaker 8: French strikes, tax strikes, boycotts, general strikes, and of course
Speaker 8: a Black labor federation. But that's not all that Uven
Speaker 8: has explored in his work, and today we're going to
Speaker 8: dive into his vision for survival programs, things to agitate
Speaker 8: for and actions the black community can take to survive
Speaker 8: under the current system now. Historically, black communities have been
Speaker 8: subjected to economic exploitation, with businesses and financial institutions often
Speaker 8: taken profits out of the community without investing in its
Speaker 8: growth and development, and this of course has led to disinvestment, poverty,
Speaker 8: lack of resources of community members, and of course persistent
Speaker 8: relative deprivation. So the demand for community control of businesses
Speaker 8: and financial institutions that even outlines, is something that seeks
Speaker 8: to shift power and resources back into the hands of
Speaker 8: the community. By place and control in the hands community
Speaker 8: members provides an opportunity to build economic power and to
Speaker 8: ensure that businesses and financial institutions work for communities rather
Speaker 8: than vice versa, because such institution and businesses would be
Speaker 8: under the control of the workers themselves. So in a
Speaker 8: cooperative model, members work together to achieve common goals and
Speaker 8: share the benefits and risks of a business equally. The
Speaker 8: covenant structure for cooperative typically involves board of directors who
Speaker 8: might elected by members to make strategic decisions on behalf
Speaker 8: of the cooperative, but there of course other ways of
Speaker 8: organizer and including horizontal consensus. All members of a cooperative
Speaker 8: have an equal say in these decisions, with each member
Speaker 8: typically having one food and the board of directors is
Speaker 8: meant to just be accountable to members and act in
Speaker 8: the best interest of the cooperative. Now cooperatives already exist,
Speaker 8: they operate in various industries, and they can operate in
Speaker 8: various industries including agriculture, retail, finance, housing, healthcare, and more.
Speaker 8: For example, in a cooperative agriculture model, farmers can prove
Speaker 8: resources to purchas seeds, fertilizers, and equipment lower cost, and
Speaker 8: then sell their crops collectively to increase bargaining power and
Speaker 8: reduce costs. In a retail cooperative, members can buy products
Speaker 8: at a discount and how a saying the type of
Speaker 8: products offered, while in a financial cooperative, members can access
Speaker 8: banking services and share in the profits they're generated by
Speaker 8: the cooperative. Cooperatives also often provide mutual aid and support
Speaker 8: to their members, with surplus profits from the businesses reinvested
Speaker 8: either in the businesses or distributed as dividends to members,
Speaker 8: which ensures that the benefit to the business are shared
Speaker 8: equatively and members have a stake in the success of
Speaker 8: a cooperative. Like I mentioned, corporators already exist, which means
Speaker 8: they are capable of operating within capitalism, but within a
Speaker 8: broader program of social revolution. They're meant to build our
Speaker 8: alternative power in a dual power struggle to eventually enable
Speaker 8: us to assert our independent from this system as it will.
Speaker 8: But even here now, it is necessary to survive under
Speaker 8: this system, and I think cooperatives offer a more humane
Speaker 8: and more empowering model. Another example of that sort of
Speaker 8: cooperative structure could be found in mutual lead banking societies,
Speaker 8: again owned and controlled by the members, and are created
Speaker 8: specifically to provide access to financial services and support to
Speaker 8: individuals and communities that have been traditionally excluded or marginalized
Speaker 8: from a lot of traditional banking systems. So they function
Speaker 8: to provide low interest loans to members for various purposes
Speaker 8: including you know, starts and businesses, purchasing homes, covering unexpected expenses,
Speaker 8: and members are required to you know, put in a
Speaker 8: certain amount each month to fund these sorts of loans,
Speaker 8: and in addition to providing financial services sort of societies
Speaker 8: can also provide education and support, help with financial planning,
Speaker 8: help with budgeting, help with financial literacy to enable members
Speaker 8: to better survive within their current financial situation under capitalism.
Speaker 8: And so that's one aspect of the survival program, right,
Speaker 8: and emphasis on survival it existed now in this system.
Speaker 8: So that's one aspect of pushing for community controller businesses
Speaker 8: and financial institutions and creating community cooperatives and mutual aid
Speaker 8: banking societies. Another aspect of that survival program that open
Speaker 8: outlines is achieving community controlled housing to help address is
Speaker 8: to use of gentrification, displacement, and lack of affordable housing
Speaker 8: through legal and legal means such as then strikes and demonstrations,
Speaker 8: arn't actions, open squad in, drive landlords out and take
Speaker 8: over the property. Those are more precarious approaches, right, and
Speaker 8: then they're also be above the board methods. I spoke
Speaker 8: about those approaches. Some of those approaches in the first
Speaker 8: part the quote unquote above the board methods would be
Speaker 8: establishing things like community land trusts or colts. A CLT
Speaker 8: is essentially a nonprofit organization that owns and manages land
Speaker 8: for the benefit of a community. The CLT can acquire
Speaker 8: land and then lease it to developers or residents who
Speaker 8: agree to use the land for affordable house which allows
Speaker 8: them to retain control of the land and ensure there's
Speaker 8: been used for their good rather than being solo off
Speaker 8: the private developers for the sake of profit. In a
Speaker 8: situation under a CLT where a homeowner wants to sell
Speaker 8: wants to move, they can only sell the building that
Speaker 8: they occupy. They can't sell the land itself because the
Speaker 8: community land Trust retains control of the land. The Community
Speaker 8: land Trust also retains the right of first refusal to
Speaker 8: purchase the buildings, which basically means before you can try
Speaker 8: and sell the building to anyone else, you have to
Speaker 8: give the Community land Trust, the community itself an opportunity
Speaker 8: to buy the building back, and that would enable them
Speaker 8: to also make sure that people aren't coming into just
Speaker 8: profit off of such affordable holes in and they're also
Speaker 8: doing it so that the house in stay is affordable,
Speaker 8: so they can ensure that they can resell the building
Speaker 8: to somebody who's also seeking that, you know, affordable housing.
Speaker 8: And by providing that sort of house in, community land
Speaker 8: trusts can stabilize communities and prevent displacement in the long term.
Speaker 8: They can help to revitalize distress neighborhoods, and they can
Speaker 8: also invest into things like community facilities like pools, and
Speaker 8: laundromats and gyms and that sort of thing. In terms
Speaker 8: of how you actually create a colt, laws of course
Speaker 8: vary from place to place, but essentially you form a
Speaker 8: nonprofit organization, obtain tax exam status, acquire the land either
Speaker 8: through purchase or donation, and then begin developing affordable house
Speaker 8: or community facilities on the land. In addition to that,
Speaker 8: a community an trust would need to guidelines in place
Speaker 8: for leasing the land home owners and to maintain the
Speaker 8: affordability of the land over time. And of course, community
Speaker 8: an trust requires a system of governance and decision making
Speaker 8: to engage in that sort of ongoing effort of involving
Speaker 8: the residents themselves and ensuring that they are educated, and
Speaker 8: how comuntland trusts work, and how this model could be
Speaker 8: expanded to other communities. For the start, abolition such a
Speaker 8: thing requires significant resources. Another approach to community controlled housing
Speaker 8: that also takes some resources is through limited equity housing cooperatives.
Speaker 8: So in this model, residents own and manage the house development.
Speaker 8: Each have a same decision making process to run democratically.
Speaker 8: They each have a share in the cooperative, which gives
Speaker 8: them the right to occupy a unit in development. The
Speaker 8: share price, however, is set at a fixed rate, which
Speaker 8: means the unit can only be sold back to the
Speaker 8: cooperative at the same price, which again helps to make
Speaker 8: sure that the housing remains affordable in the long term. So,
Speaker 8: unlike with the community land trust where you own the
Speaker 8: building but you don't own the land, in an LHC
Speaker 8: or limited equity housing cooperative, you don't own the building
Speaker 8: or the land, You own a share and the cooperative
Speaker 8: owns the property itself. You're also required, of course, to
Speaker 8: contribute a down payment and to pay monthly fees, which
Speaker 8: helps to maintain and manage the property. You know, it's
Speaker 8: difficult to organize things, as anyone with some experience organizing
Speaker 8: can tell you, and something as high investment as housing
Speaker 8: is no different, right. It's a challenge. It's a challenge
Speaker 8: in fundraising, it's a challenge in organizing people. It's a
Speaker 8: challenge and insurance that such efforts are defended and able
Speaker 8: to establish themselves in the long term. But it's still
Speaker 8: a promising model I believe for survival because of its
Speaker 8: priority on community ownership and control. It really relieves that
Speaker 8: one major stress in a lot of people's lives in
Speaker 8: terms of affordable housing. Of course, the long term ors
Speaker 8: and should be decommodified entirely, but that is the future.
Speaker 8: The survival program is for the heir now. Another aspect
Speaker 8: of this fiber program that even talks about is food autonomy,
Speaker 8: the establishments of black community controlled food systems to establish
Speaker 8: self sufficiency, to control the production, distribution of foods, and
Speaker 8: should basic needs to met to ensure that Black communities
Speaker 8: are no longer at the mouseea of food deserts and
Speaker 8: other systemic barriers to accessing healthy, affordable food. By creating
Speaker 8: trucking networks and warehouses and community farms, farmers cooperatives, food cooperatives,
Speaker 8: agricultural unions, and other collective associations, black communities can ensure
Speaker 8: that healthy and essential foods are readily available. Rather than
Speaker 8: just treating the symptom, such institutions would treat the root
Speaker 8: cause of food and security, which is a lack of
Speaker 8: control over our food chains and food networks. So, for example,
Speaker 8: a trucking network would be used to transport food from
Speaker 8: communal farms to warehouses which could serve as clecterly owned
Speaker 8: distribution centers for the food in a sort of a
Speaker 8: library economy set in the waite houses can also save
Speaker 8: us storage facilities for other non perishable food items, to
Speaker 8: bank seeds to distribute those seeds and other items and
Speaker 8: tools to community gardens and food cooperatives, and such community
Speaker 8: gardens could be established on vacant lots, on rooftops and
Speaker 8: unused spaces within the city, particularly in areas where access
Speaker 8: to fresh produce is limited, and all these efforts would
Speaker 8: involve members of the community who would be responsible for
Speaker 8: each step in the process and ensuring that such things
Speaker 8: are accessible equatively. Food cooperatives within communities could for example,
Speaker 8: be organized through sort of a share structure where each
Speaker 8: household or each individual has a share in the cooperative
Speaker 8: that entitles them to sit down to food each week.
Speaker 8: Or you could have in a sort of a library
Speaker 8: structure that a lot of different ways that you can organize it.
Speaker 8: You could even have as well. Agricultural unions provide support
Speaker 8: and training and education unsustainable farming practices, access to tools
Speaker 8: and equipment, financial systems for farmers in need. All these
Speaker 8: efforts would establish the foundation necessary for food or autonomy
Speaker 8: under this sort of survival program that Eve has developed,
Speaker 8: and as I mentioned in the previous episode, even also
Speaker 8: talks about under the survival programs, developing autonomous education, ensuring
Speaker 8: the community has control over every aspect of the educational system,
Speaker 8: from the curriculum, textbooks, to the hiring and training of teachers, administrators,
Speaker 8: And as I spoke about in the previous episode, you know,
Speaker 8: the same way the reactionary is fighting advocate for control
Speaker 8: of educations, the same way that we can do the same.
Speaker 8: It won't be as easy, but we have to counter
Speaker 8: their efforts because they've already been countering hours the minimal
Speaker 8: gains we've made, and for example, ensuring that an accurate
Speaker 8: account of history is told in schools is already being
Speaker 8: fought against, so we need to go even further. Community
Speaker 8: controlled schools would not only reflect community values, culture and history.
Speaker 8: Not only would they be designed to meet the specific
Speaker 8: needs of the children within them. Not only do they
Speaker 8: provide us safe and a nutrient environment, encourage creativity, critical thinking,
Speaker 8: and problem solving skills, but they would also provide a space,
Speaker 8: an additional space for the development of people's powers and
Speaker 8: drives and consciousness towards liberation at any age. I mean,
Speaker 8: in addition to primary and secondary education, Woven also talks
Speaker 8: about free higher education programs, remedial training programs, reading programs,
Speaker 8: trade programs, all these things to help develop people's skills
Speaker 8: and education knowledge that would helped equip them to address social, political,
Speaker 8: and economic issues. If it also calls for a system
Speaker 8: of community based self defense to defend ourselves against various
Speaker 8: forms of violence, including police brutality, heat crimes, and vigilanty attacks,
Speaker 8: without relying on government or law enforcement agencies to defend
Speaker 8: or set else, they had several components to this. Of course,
Speaker 8: you'll involved organizing and mobilizing community members to participate in
Speaker 8: self defense training programs. It would involve weapons training, It
Speaker 8: would involve tactics for de escalation. It would involve a
Speaker 8: network that can coordate responses to incidents of violence, establishing
Speaker 8: community channels to quickly disseminate information, enabling restorative and transformative
Speaker 8: justice practices to be included to keep the state out
Speaker 8: of resolving the conflicts between people in communities. And then,
Speaker 8: of course, unlike a lot of these law enforcement systems
Speaker 8: and structures, a community based self defense program or system
Speaker 8: would also be involved in the prevention of such incidents
Speaker 8: of violence and harm and conflict from recurrent. It will
Speaker 8: be involved in continuously evaluating interchange in circumstances, to analyze
Speaker 8: in the patterns of violence and gaps that are taking
Speaker 8: place in training or in resources, and to continuously refine
Speaker 8: tactics and strategies and approaches to see to the long
Speaker 8: term healing of the communities and the interruption of cycles
Speaker 8: of violence and generational trauma in the long term. Another
Speaker 8: component of these survival programs would involve medical training, large
Speaker 8: scale medical training programs in black communities providing individuals with
Speaker 8: the knowledge and skills needed to understand and address health issues.
Speaker 8: Black communities, especially those from low income backgrounds in the US,
Speaker 8: often face significant barriers to access in quality healthcare. It's
Speaker 8: due to systemic racism and oppression. So it's due to
Speaker 8: inaccessibility and an affordability of healthcare just generally, and also
Speaker 8: the quality and resources af felable within certain communities specifically,
Speaker 8: and also the ways that health outcomes are worse if
Speaker 8: you are black. Black mothers are, or rather the black
Speaker 8: maternal death rate is one particularly heavy example of these
Speaker 8: sorts of disparities. And so that's why we need community
Speaker 8: based medical clinics and training programs and workshops and seminars
Speaker 8: led by black medical professionals, public health experts, public health experts,
Speaker 8: and community organizers who are versed in the social sernants
Speaker 8: of health and impacts of systemic racism and health outcomes,
Speaker 8: and invested in seeing that changed. Such a program would
Speaker 8: involve medical including dental training, empower individuals to provide basic
Speaker 8: health care services and support their communities. You would involve
Speaker 8: trading in first aid. You involve healthcare screenings, health education,
Speaker 8: because underrepresentation in health matters, lack of education in one's
Speaker 8: own personal health matters, and two people losing their lives
Speaker 8: as a result of that racial blind spot and as
Speaker 8: a result of that inequality, and so survival program in
Speaker 8: the here and now needs to account for that. Even
Speaker 8: also calls for the release of black political prisoners as
Speaker 8: part of a broader abolitionist struggle rooted in the recognition
Speaker 8: that the criminal justice system in the US has been
Speaker 8: used as a tool for political repression against black people
Speaker 8: and the martialized communities. You're speaking here from experience, of course,
Speaker 8: he wrote this when he was in prison. Mass and
Speaker 8: conceration of black people has been deliberate and systemic effort
Speaker 8: to silence and dissent, to silence dissent and maintain the
Speaker 8: statusco of white supremacy and white supremacist capitalism. Here and now,
Speaker 8: survival programs should be involved in the release of black
Speaker 8: political prisoners, especially to investigate and review the cases of
Speaker 8: those who have been unjustly imprisoned, to address the use
Speaker 8: of cost confessions, falsified evidence, and other forms of prosecutorial
Speaker 8: misconduct there has led to wrongful convictions that has led
Speaker 8: to people rotten away in jail cells for decades with
Speaker 8: no sort of justice. I mean, these people are often
Speaker 8: so of the most committed and dedicated revolutionaries and their
Speaker 8: continued imprisonment has been a craving justice. Some of them
Speaker 8: unfortunately passed before they're even released if they have released
Speaker 8: a tool and by demanding their release, by fighting for
Speaker 8: their freedom, by writing to them and supporting them even now,
Speaker 8: by showing our solidarity with those who have sacrificed so
Speaker 8: much in the struggle for liberation and ensuring that their
Speaker 8: voices are heard, not only can we aid in their survival,
Speaker 8: but we can also aid in our own. Lastly, even
Speaker 8: calls for the ever contentious big payback reparations. You have
Speaker 8: then challenges us to build a mass movement in our
Speaker 8: communities to compel the government and the rich to provide
Speaker 8: the means for our community is redevelopment at the centuries
Speaker 8: of slavery and of abuse, and of robbery and of discrimination,
Speaker 8: demanding those reparations in the form of community development funds
Speaker 8: to be placed in credit unions, cooperatives and not the
Speaker 8: mutual aid institutions in the black community, so we can
Speaker 8: start to obtaining some measure of economic self sufficiency. But
Speaker 8: of course from the question of who pays, to how
Speaker 8: we force them to pay, to how we determine how
Speaker 8: much they pay, how that pay is distributed or implemented,
Speaker 8: if the pay is even in cash. You know, there's
Speaker 8: a lot of tensions surrounding that topic and pro reparation.
Speaker 8: It's not just for Black America, with the entire diaspora.
Speaker 8: I mean, I've seen the US made sure to get
Speaker 8: reparations for itself and its allies after World War Two.
Speaker 8: The victims of various atrustees have received reparations for the injustices.
Speaker 8: But as soon as Black people demand their do demand
Speaker 8: their do everybody, you know, they want us to forget
Speaker 8: about it. But yeah, everybody knows, and I think part
Speaker 8: of that is because everybody knows that they can't actually
Speaker 8: afford it. You know, if we were paid exactly what
Speaker 8: we would do, they would not have the wealth that
Speaker 8: they have. And so my stance has always been I
Speaker 8: don't think reparations will come by ballot. I don't want
Speaker 8: it to come by ballot. I don't want to receive
Speaker 8: some check in the mail it says, okay, now be happy,
Speaker 8: get over it, but let me not get myself in
Speaker 8: any more trouble. Even at that, I don't think it
Speaker 8: will come by a ballot.
Speaker 5: There's a lot of things that's reasonable.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I've already said so much in these past two episodes.
Speaker 8: I mean, there are a lot of arms to this
Speaker 8: survival program. Then bring things to a close a bit.
Speaker 8: There as a lot of areas of struggle that we
Speaker 8: can pick up, a lot of things that can be applied.
Speaker 8: Of course, most of these things I think could be
Speaker 8: applied beyond the black community. But there's a reason that
Speaker 8: the black community specifically was Urban's focus, because of his
Speaker 8: life experience, because of the need to address black communities
Speaker 8: specifically in uh in an anarchist text, something that was
Speaker 8: really lacking prior to the resurgence of you know, the
Speaker 8: black radical tradition, the black anarchist specific tradition in the seventies.
Speaker 8: So it's necessary. But I just hope, you know, people
Speaker 8: who are listening who on that black didn't just you know,
Speaker 8: click off, that I still hear that these ideas and stuff,
Speaker 8: these programs are applicable more broadly. I hope that I
Speaker 8: can see and contribute to these changes in my lifetime,
Speaker 8: and as I consistently borrow from Ashanti Alston, another black
Speaker 8: anarchist figure who I actually hope at some point we
Speaker 8: could bring on or power to all the people.
Speaker 5: Peace.
Speaker 7: Hello podcast fans, and welcome to it could happen here
Speaker 7: A podcast Today is hosted by me James Down and
Speaker 7: Mia Wong Hi May. Hello, Hi, So what we're going
Speaker 7: to talk about today is situation on the border. We're
Speaker 7: working on a scripted episode which will take away because
Speaker 7: they always do, and you know, if we want that
Speaker 7: to be nice and sort of polished for youse. But
Speaker 7: I did want to update everyone because I think that
Speaker 7: what's happening it has a sense of urgency to it,
Speaker 7: and certainly like some of the mutual aid requests have
Speaker 7: a real sense of urgency to them, and folks who
Speaker 7: follow me on Twitter dot com and ll have noticed that,
Speaker 7: like in between the ship posts, I've been down at
Speaker 7: the US Mexico border for most of the tail end
Speaker 7: of last week and the start of this week, sort
Speaker 7: of depicting what's going on there, along with my friend
Speaker 7: Joe Joe Ariyama's who's a freelancer who we're going to
Speaker 7: be working with on the scripted series. And people can
Speaker 7: find Joe at Joe or Ori e photo on Twitter.
Speaker 7: Joe's got some really good photos if you want to
Speaker 7: see kind of what's going on. But the longer than
Speaker 7: the short of it is that title forty two ended
Speaker 7: on well to begin with, exactly the moment that it
Speaker 7: ended was a subject of some contention, right, we knew
Speaker 7: it was going to end on the eleventh of May.
Speaker 7: Title thirty two, if folks don't remember, is a emergency
Speaker 7: public health measure. It's part of the United States Public
Speaker 7: Health Law, the United States Code Public Health something something
Speaker 7: then allows border patrol to expel people from the United
Speaker 7: States without giving them their due process, their asylum here. Basically,
Speaker 7: they bounce them straight back to Mexico, right, And this
Speaker 7: has been in place since March of twenty twenty. We
Speaker 7: now know that the Trump administration pressured the CDC, So
Speaker 7: in theory it was it came through the CDC, right
Speaker 7: the Center for Disease Control under pressure from Drug administration,
Speaker 7: direct pressure from Pence, and Stephen Miller was yeah.
Speaker 2: Probably this was a Stephen Miller like, yeah, supremacy special.
Speaker 7: Yeah, bubblehead looking racist motherfucker has once again done something terrible.
Speaker 7: Not that some of his policies. As we'll get onto
Speaker 7: this in descripted episode, the Biden administration has like copy
Speaker 7: pasted some steep, some straight up Stephen Miller stuff in
Speaker 7: its transit bounds and is absolutely liable for I don't
Speaker 7: want to use the word chaos at our border because
Speaker 7: that plays into this Fox use narrative. There is a
Speaker 7: very concerted plan to make people suffer more than is
Speaker 7: necessary at our border, and it would have been very
Speaker 7: easy to avoid this. So title forty two basically, there
Speaker 7: are no consequences for crossing, but it's also very hard
Speaker 7: to get asylum. The CBP officer can like spontaneously decide
Speaker 7: to give you your rights. Basically, if you're like, come on, bro,
Speaker 7: I'm going to get killed if I go home, then
Speaker 7: that person can decide to allow you to be processed
Speaker 7: for asylum, which is what a lot of the Ukrainian
Speaker 7: folks got surprise, surprise.
Speaker 2: And I feel like we should we should also mention
Speaker 2: that under like multiple legal frameworks, you have the right
Speaker 2: to request asylum. This is this is something that supposedly
Speaker 2: is inviolable, Like you have the right as a human
Speaker 2: being to request asylum in a country.
Speaker 7: Yes, and it doesn't matter where you've been before, and
Speaker 7: it doesn't matter how you got there, and you don't
Speaker 7: have to do it at a port of entry. It
Speaker 7: doesn't matter how you enter the country or where you
Speaker 7: entered the country. Yes, yeah, and yeah, under multiple different
Speaker 7: international frameworks you have the right to do this. But
Speaker 7: the USA has been denying that to people for three
Speaker 7: and a eight years now, right, three years and stuff
Speaker 7: like that, and you know what I mean.
Speaker 2: I also could just want to briefly mention this because
Speaker 2: I feel like there's this way in which people people
Speaker 2: people will talk about like one border regime and then
Speaker 2: never connect the dots between this one and the other ones.
Speaker 2: But like, for example, like this is something that happens
Speaker 2: all over the world world. Yes, I mean like part
Speaker 2: part of like part of the sort of like crisis
Speaker 2: that is going on into Dan right now is about
Speaker 2: like a ship ton of money. But the end this
Speaker 2: is actually happened in Libya too. It's the Italian government
Speaker 2: paying the Libyan and sort of Sudanese parabilitaries a ship
Speaker 2: ton of money to like keep refugees like basically like
Speaker 2: trap to something, to enslave them in camps, to cute
Speaker 2: them from like getting to Italy to try to request asylum.
Speaker 2: So yeah, so this is a yeah, like Fredecks does
Speaker 2: this like this, This is sort of like a global.
Speaker 5: Yeah, terrible regime.
Speaker 7: The border like industrial complex is every bit as bad,
Speaker 7: if not worse than the defense industrial complex. So we're
Speaker 7: more familiar with, like border policing is something that really
Speaker 7: came post nine to eleven, right with the creation of
Speaker 7: DHS and the United States, but we have exported that
Speaker 7: shit everywhere. And like our Border Patrol Agents r CBP
Speaker 7: has an office in lots of embassies or like they
Speaker 7: train Dominican border agents the border with Haiti, for instance,
Speaker 7: and are trained by our CBP people. CBP agents were
Speaker 7: deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan. Yeah, this is a global thing. Yeah,
Speaker 7: And like where I guess where I am now, where
Speaker 7: I've been for a while, is the place where that
Speaker 7: all began, right, and where we continue to see CBP
Speaker 7: innovating new and exciting ways to fucking take some of
Speaker 7: the most desperate people in the world and make them
Speaker 7: suffer and spend a shit ton of money and preventing
Speaker 7: them from accessing their legal right to asylum or detaining
Speaker 7: them while they do it. And so what has happened
Speaker 7: is so Title forty two was supposed to end on
Speaker 7: the eleventh of May, right, that was when the federal
Speaker 7: COVID emergency ended, So there was no reason for it
Speaker 7: to exist anymore. There wasn't a reason for it to
Speaker 7: exist to begin with.
Speaker 2: But yeah, any like, don't don't don't think too hard
Speaker 2: about the fact that like that was the last that
Speaker 2: was basically the last COVID policy that was still in place.
Speaker 7: Yeah, Like there were not vaccine mandates for the people
Speaker 7: meeting the migrants at the fucking border, Yeah, right, Like.
Speaker 2: This was this was this was never about public health,
Speaker 2: Like no, you know, I mean, and in so far
Speaker 2: as you can extricate sort of like the sort of
Speaker 2: imperial estates public health measures from social cleansing stuff, which
Speaker 2: has been happening for generations and generations. But yeah, like
Speaker 2: this was this was not about that, like this, Yeah,
Speaker 2: this was just an immigration ban.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and it became a sort of albatross by an
Speaker 7: administration who didn't want to be hit on border stuff.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 7: They didn't want to They didn't want to drop it
Speaker 7: before the midterms. They initially band to drop it in
Speaker 7: December twenty twenty two, which is obviously right after the
Speaker 7: mid terms. They didn't we here we are in May.
Speaker 7: There was a complicated legal challenge, which there always is,
Speaker 7: and it doesn't matter because here we are right and
Speaker 7: it's supposed to drop in the to me, so we're
Speaker 7: all thinking, right, midnight on the tenth of May, we'll
Speaker 7: be out there. We'll see what goes down. They announced
Speaker 7: the day before that it is dropping on midnight on
Speaker 7: the eleventh, So they're going to ring every minute knit
Speaker 7: out of it. And so in the days before, a
Speaker 7: number of migrants have told me that they understood that
Speaker 7: they basically had to get across before the end of
Speaker 7: Title forty two, because it was their understanding that if
Speaker 7: they crossed under Title eight they would be ejected, and
Speaker 7: they wouldn't be allowed to return for five years and
Speaker 7: they would face felony charges. So they did this. I
Speaker 7: don't quite know often these this information spreads about like
Speaker 7: WhatsApp in camps, right, or sort of like like a
Speaker 7: game of Telephone in camps. So I don't quite know
Speaker 7: where this information came from, but it closely parallels something
Speaker 7: that majorcus Is, a Secretary of Home lanun Security, said
Speaker 7: in press conference where he mischaracterized international immigration law. And
Speaker 7: he's done this multiple times. Right, He himself, someone who
Speaker 7: is a migrant to this country who apparently family left
Speaker 7: Cuba when he was one year old, has just some
Speaker 7: of the most dogshit statements on the record, and I've
Speaker 7: depicted some of those in the scripted episode. Folks up
Speaker 7: my piece I wrote for NBC a couple of years
Speaker 7: ago about the Biden administration's policy towards Haiti if they
Speaker 7: they want to see more of the dogshit stuff that
Speaker 7: he and Biden have said. And so in the days
Speaker 7: before the end of Title forty two, a lot of
Speaker 7: folks started to try to cross right because of this
Speaker 7: information that they had. They ended up at least where
Speaker 7: I am, which is in southern California, right, the sort
Speaker 7: of extreme southwestern border in the United States, literally the
Speaker 7: end of the wall. Folks were crossing like around the
Speaker 7: end of the wall right at low tide and turning
Speaker 7: themselves into border patrol asking to make their case for
Speaker 7: their right to asylum. And I think sometimes when we
Speaker 7: think about migrants, you know, we made me think about
Speaker 7: people from South America or Central America, every single continent,
Speaker 7: maybe not any like Australasians, but like just in it.
Speaker 7: In a day at one camp, I spoke to someone
Speaker 7: from Angola. I spoke to someone from Congo. I spoke
Speaker 7: to someone from Sudan. I spoke to a Kurdish guy.
Speaker 7: I spoke to people certainly from all over South America, Russians,
Speaker 7: Tagik people, Jamaican people, and like. For instance, just to
Speaker 7: give you a sense of like how global it is,
Speaker 7: I spoke to a Jamaican lady who was caring for
Speaker 7: a sixteen or seventeen year old pair of Tagiq siblings
Speaker 7: who didn't speak any of the relevant languages for communication
Speaker 7: with border patroller with other people in the camp, so
Speaker 7: she would use her phone to call their mother, who
Speaker 7: spoke some English, give information to the mother who would
Speaker 7: translate it. Back to these two young children, and all
Speaker 7: of these people had presented like there were a lot
Speaker 7: of Afghan people too. Probably should have mentioned that up top,
Speaker 7: But these are the people who we fucking abandoned once
Speaker 7: and now we're trapping, trapping them in between little fences.
Speaker 7: And it's hot in the day, right like I slept
Speaker 7: out in the desert last night and it was above
Speaker 7: one Hundred's not that hot in San Diego, but in
Speaker 7: her Cumber where they're also holding people, it's absolutely getting
Speaker 7: into triple digits every day, and it's cold at night,
Speaker 7: and it's a really inhospitable environment for people. So folks
Speaker 7: were held there, you know, up to a week in
Speaker 7: some cases, and are now I think being processed by
Speaker 7: a border patrol. There was a ruling by a Florida judge.
Speaker 7: I'm not exactly clear on when because I was down
Speaker 7: at the border and my phone didn't work very well,
Speaker 7: but at some point right before Title forty two drop
Speaker 7: that they could have been released on humanitarian parole, which
Speaker 7: means in theory they have to be released with a
Speaker 7: court date, right with a court date to appear for
Speaker 7: their asylum hearing, which will slow down the process of
Speaker 7: releasing them, right, And so I've heard of court dates.
Speaker 7: I've heard of folks being released already kind of with
Speaker 7: court dates in twenty twenty seven, which this whole thing
Speaker 7: has just been like a disaster in terms of the
Speaker 7: federal response, right like, and in just the cruelest possible way.
Speaker 3: It was.
Speaker 7: Everyone could see this coming, right that there will be
Speaker 7: more people trying to cross. There are sixteen thousand people
Speaker 7: give or take in Tijuana alone, So it's just across
Speaker 7: from where I live, waiting to come to the United
Speaker 7: States because they've been denied that right for three years,
Speaker 7: because they need somewhere safe to go, and because they're
Speaker 7: not safe there. And the best estimate we got for
Speaker 7: how many they could process from border patrol was two
Speaker 7: hundred a day at the Tijuana porta Ventry or Sunny
Speaker 7: Cedro port of entry, really, but we don't know. There's
Speaker 7: no clear I don't know how many people they're processing
Speaker 7: every day, right, But these people who do come in
Speaker 7: now have to have a hearing date before they can
Speaker 7: be released. When if they get through, So I spoke
Speaker 7: to a young man and his son who I'd spoken
Speaker 7: to at the border, and he had been released into
Speaker 7: the United States where a charity in San Diego will
Speaker 7: provide him with two nights, what like two nights of accommodation, right,
Speaker 7: and then it can't quite work out what then, like
Speaker 7: he's out on his own, you know, Like I guess
Speaker 7: we'll find out tonight. But he has to find a sponsor.
Speaker 7: I don't quite understand how he was released without a sponsor,
Speaker 7: but it seems like the system is kind of bungling
Speaker 7: things up, and these folks have to fund their own
Speaker 7: flights to wherever it is. A sponsor is right, so
Speaker 7: they have family or community, they're having to work out
Speaker 7: how to get to that family and community, so be
Speaker 7: there the greyhound or a plane or a train. So
Speaker 7: it all in all a giant classifuck with very human consequences.
Speaker 7: Like I can't stress enough how like every possible demographic
Speaker 7: is represented, old people, little tiny children, right, Like I
Speaker 7: was talking to a little Afga and girl, not really
Speaker 7: talking to we don't share any languages, but I was
Speaker 7: more just like making funny faces for a while and
Speaker 7: sort of pointing at things.
Speaker 4: And.
Speaker 7: Like it just breaks my heart that there are little
Speaker 7: children who like especially you know, she's a little girl,
Speaker 7: she's from Afghanistan. We told her shit ton of lies
Speaker 7: about Afghan women to justify twenty years of killing people,
Speaker 7: of certain people making money from killing people, and like
Speaker 7: this was supposedly they're like canard was that this was
Speaker 7: for Afghan girls and women, Right, And here's an Afghan
Speaker 7: girl sleeping in the fucking dirt, like twenty twenty minutes
Speaker 7: from where I live. And I can't even give this
Speaker 7: kid like hot meal because I can't fit it through
Speaker 7: the bars of the fence. Like everything that goes across
Speaker 7: to these people has to go through the bars of
Speaker 7: the fence. Right, someone worked out that pizza, pizza could
Speaker 7: fit through because flat right, people have been getting pizza.
Speaker 7: But other than that, they're getting you know, bottles of water,
Speaker 7: granola bars, you know things that fit through a fence,
Speaker 7: beef jerky. And they've been there for days in some cases.
Speaker 7: And that's a camp that's relatively accessible, right, I can
Speaker 7: pull off the interstate, drive down a dirt road and
Speaker 7: be there in like I say, twenty minutes. The camps
Speaker 7: are less accessible. We've heard the conditions are much worse.
Speaker 7: A couple of Jamaican guys told me that there was
Speaker 7: another camp that we we tried to get access to it,
Speaker 7: weren't able to get access to that was further west
Speaker 7: from where we were, where people were hungry. They're getting
Speaker 7: this is all just from that source. I have reached
Speaker 7: out a border patrol, but as of today, they haven't
Speaker 7: got back to me, saying that they were getting a
Speaker 7: bottle of water and a granola bar every day, and
Speaker 7: that like some of these other folks had taken it
Speaker 7: upon themselves to like walk over there to try and
Speaker 7: get them food, right, people who already not in the
Speaker 7: great situation themselves, and they kept asking why couldn't we
Speaker 7: go there, Why couldn't we help them? Like it was
Speaker 7: very admirable right to see folks who are in a
Speaker 7: pretty bad way be like, hey, these people need help
Speaker 7: more than we do. So, yeah, that's a situation. I
Speaker 7: think we should take a break for advertising then sorry,
Speaker 7: I ye, yeah, hopefully not for a drone or some shit.
Speaker 7: All right, we're back, and this is another happy and
Speaker 7: exciting episode in which I tell you things that will
Speaker 7: brighten your day. So something I wanted to talk about
Speaker 7: because I think it's important is the mutual aid response
Speaker 7: to this, and it's been really really impressive, you know,
Speaker 7: I live in a place where the Democrats are absolute
Speaker 7: dog shit. Well we'll do It's America, right, but like
Speaker 7: just the particularly cringe like cast real liberalism of San
Speaker 7: Diego Democrats is like as always on display.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 7: I saw one of them tweeting today how CBS, DHS
Speaker 7: and CBP are doing a great job and keeping us safe,
Speaker 7: and like my like it makes me want to say
Speaker 7: things I shouldn't say on the podcast, I guess. But
Speaker 7: what that means is that, like, our government isn't going
Speaker 7: to do shit, right, Like, it is entirely on us
Speaker 7: to look after each other. And people have done that.
Speaker 7: The groups like American Friends Service Committee, which is a
Speaker 7: great organization which has really good stuff on the boarder,
Speaker 7: have been down there every single day, right, Like there
Speaker 7: have been days when I've left at one am there's
Speaker 7: still someone there. They've been giving people water, giving people food.
Speaker 7: A huge need that people have is to charge their phones.
Speaker 7: And the way that migrants interact with CBP, at least
Speaker 7: in theory, the way you get an asylum appointment is
Speaker 7: booking it through an app called CBP one. We've talked
Speaker 7: about this on the podcast before, but CBP one is terrible.
Speaker 7: It is a terrible app that doesn't work. And that's
Speaker 7: for people who have phones and Wi Fi. Right, if
Speaker 7: you are stuck in between two fences and a dusty
Speaker 7: piece of ground, how the hell are you supposed to
Speaker 7: charge your phone? You don't have Wi Fi, right, you
Speaker 7: may not have a data plan that works in that area.
Speaker 7: So a huge unmet need was charging charging phone. So
Speaker 7: we were able to get some donations from the team
Speaker 7: and buy a big charger. Other folks turned up with charges.
Speaker 7: Even all the news orgs I see to include, like
Speaker 7: like Fox National weren't there, which is a good thing,
Speaker 7: but like we could talk about that actually as well.
Speaker 7: My goods will specifically ask which news network you're with,
Speaker 7: which I think is that. I think that's good. I
Speaker 7: think it's good they tell Fox News to fuck off, because, yeah,
Speaker 7: someone who participates in your dehumanization doesn't also deserve to
Speaker 7: make money from your trauma. And so every news network
Speaker 7: that was there, right or the called folks from San
Speaker 7: Diego were just constantly shuttling back and forth to their bands,
Speaker 7: charging phones constantly, constantly, constantly, and it became a bit
Speaker 7: of a cluster because obviously there's literally just hundreds of
Speaker 7: people in this small area, dozens of hands reaching to
Speaker 7: a defense, Charge my phone? Can I have my phone back?
Speaker 7: Charge my phone? And in the English and Spanish and
Speaker 7: French and command Gye and Vietnamese and all these other languages, right,
Speaker 7: So it was very hard to organize that. So folks
Speaker 7: came down, Folks from San Diego, from different sort of
Speaker 7: mutual aid groups came down and they organized the system. Right.
Speaker 7: They got Painter's tape, the names of the people on
Speaker 7: the back of the phone. We had this huge ash
Speaker 7: battery that we were able to get and that they
Speaker 7: were able to charge people's phones, get them their phones
Speaker 7: back to them. And that is a crucial thing, right
Speaker 7: in that scenario. Not only is it your only way
Speaker 7: to communicate with border patrol, it's your only way to
Speaker 7: communicate with your family.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 7: Like one guy had lost his phone, and so I
Speaker 7: just bought him a burner phone or you know, one
Speaker 7: of those warm artphones so that he could call his
Speaker 7: family because the family didn't know where he was. Right
Speaker 7: last they'd heard he was in Mexico or maybe even
Speaker 7: further south. And so the phones are super important. Other
Speaker 7: mutual ad groups have been getting blankets, right, And I
Speaker 7: saw an Afghan family turn up and had they had
Speaker 7: crayons for the Afghan kids who were there, right, and
Speaker 7: like coloring books and things for children to do, because
Speaker 7: it's probably boring being a kid, and it's probably scary
Speaker 7: being a kid, where like every day men with guns
Speaker 7: and camouflage gear turn up and they speak a language
Speaker 7: you don't understand, and then you don't know what they say,
Speaker 7: and then you stay there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I want to kind of just there are
Speaker 2: lots of things that could get called camps that are
Speaker 2: like not camps, right, Like this is like this this
Speaker 2: is not a camp in the sense of like there
Speaker 2: are buildings that you go into or even like there
Speaker 2: are ten it's just like, oh yeah, no, yeah, I
Speaker 2: think that's.
Speaker 7: A very good I think that I haven't mentioned, thank you.
Speaker 5: Yes.
Speaker 7: This is people lying on the dirt. Occasionally, they have
Speaker 7: a my last space blanket. Occasionally they have a top.
Speaker 7: If they want to make any form of shelter they
Speaker 7: have to use the only thing they have to use
Speaker 7: is the wall itself. Right, So up against the wall,
Speaker 7: people have made like a lean to kind of situation
Speaker 7: with the top, right, But no, this is by no
Speaker 7: means suitable shelter. Literally, people are lying on the dirt.
Speaker 5: Like it's just a fucking cage like in a desert.
Speaker 2: Like it's yeah, it's it's, it's, it's, it's it's it's
Speaker 2: the kind of thing that like, like you it's the
Speaker 2: kind of thing you would put it in a Poclyst movement.
Speaker 5: People will be like, oh, no, one would ever do that. Shit.
Speaker 2: It's like no, no, Like this is just sort of yeah,
Speaker 2: this is what US border policy is.
Speaker 5: It's these like just these open air cages.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's you wouldn't like, you know, I go to
Speaker 7: the zoo in San Diego and the animals much better
Speaker 7: conditions than that. There's no running water. There was one
Speaker 7: porterloo toilet for five hundred people. Yeah, it's terrible. It
Speaker 7: is awful. It's little. It's people wrapping their babies in
Speaker 7: my love blankets and trying to get them to sleep
Speaker 7: at night, you know. And that's the same as several
Speaker 7: places up and down the border. Right they're starting to
Speaker 7: clear them out now, So sort of Tuesday Monday, So
Speaker 7: some people got there a week ago, I think, and
Speaker 7: so they've been staying there for a long time. And yeah,
Speaker 7: like it's no point does there seem to have been
Speaker 7: any consideration for even giving people shade or shelter or like, Yeah,
Speaker 7: the very basics, and like I should reinforce it. In
Speaker 7: twenty eighteen, when Trump blocked a large group of migrants
Speaker 7: from entering the United States, the government of Mexico did
Speaker 7: considerably better than this. It was by no means a
Speaker 7: good situation for those children at all, but they did
Speaker 7: better than this. Which it's aventally extremely low bar to clear,
Speaker 7: but we have failed to clear it completely as a country.
Speaker 7: And that's kind of to our eternal shame, I think.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think and everything worth emphasizing about this
Speaker 2: is that it hasn't always been like this. There's there's
Speaker 2: this sort of image that's been constructed that this is
Speaker 2: always what the US border has been. No, I mean
Speaker 2: it's not like it's not it's not like American border
Speaker 2: policy has always been like good.
Speaker 5: But I mean, like in my lifetime, it wasn't likely.
Speaker 7: Yes, in the mid nineties there were four thousand border
Speaker 7: patrol agents. Yeah, it's increased by a factor of ten,
Speaker 7: and its budget probably by more than that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And you know the consequences of this is just
Speaker 2: basically in order to appease a bunch of just sort
Speaker 2: of like fucking like turbo racist baked dipshits like who
Speaker 2: live in the suburbs and you know, have no have
Speaker 2: like never experienced a single hardship and their entire lives
Speaker 2: like fucking like untold numbers of people are put through
Speaker 2: just in human suffering and for fucking nothing, just just
Speaker 2: like for for nothing, for like just dog shit electoral pandering.
Speaker 7: Yeah, by people who have never seen what goes on
Speaker 7: at the border. They've never experienced where these people come from.
Speaker 7: And yeah, it's they're just numbers to people in DC, right,
Speaker 7: And I would really urge people to not read immigration coverage,
Speaker 7: or watch immigration coverage, or listen to immigration coverage that
Speaker 7: isn't written by people at the border, because this isn't
Speaker 7: a fucking issue about numbers. Like every single one of
Speaker 7: those numbers is a person who has people they love
Speaker 7: and things that they've done and choices that they've made
Speaker 7: that got them there, and every single one of them
Speaker 7: is someone who deserves compassion and empathy. And it's not
Speaker 7: just another you know, like a number in an Excel chart,
Speaker 7: which is how it's treated. And yeah, it has always
Speaker 7: been this way This is a very recent innovation, and
Speaker 7: it's I mean we've talked about this before as well,
Speaker 7: but right, this is the proving ground for state surveillance,
Speaker 7: state violence, fascism, all these things. Right, the reason that
Speaker 7: you got surveilled by a drone if you went to
Speaker 7: a George Floyd protest in Minneapolis is because the Border
Speaker 7: Patrol already had one. The reason that cops listened into
Speaker 7: your phone if you went to some protest in twenty
Speaker 7: twenty is because of border patrol technology. Right, they have
Speaker 7: these sting ray towers all up and down the border.
Speaker 7: Robert and I have seen him in Mexico, sorry, in
Speaker 7: Texas even.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I mean, you know, even even stuff like this,
Speaker 2: this is the sort of recent laws in places like
Speaker 2: Florida and Texas that are you know, led the state
Speaker 2: steel trans kids, right like that. That's also stuff that
Speaker 2: was sort of like, yeah, like the prototype of that
Speaker 2: came from the I mean like it came from the border.
Speaker 2: There's it's also something that came from sort of like
Speaker 2: like anti black bullshit that like is sort of deeply
Speaker 2: rooted in like American family planning bullshit. But like, yeah,
Speaker 2: like that that's also another one of the places where
Speaker 2: like that stuff was tested.
Speaker 7: And with indigenous folks, like we've ripped Indigenous children for
Speaker 7: their families for decades. But yeah, we it's a deeply
Speaker 7: baked white supremacist system that always does its experimenting on
Speaker 7: marginized people are very often at the border. But yeah,
Speaker 7: if you if you're worried about the government intercepting your
Speaker 7: communications with an abortion care provider, that has happened because
Speaker 7: at some point they've been allowed to do stuff to
Speaker 7: migrants that was equally bad, if not worse, And and
Speaker 7: like this will hurt you even if you are like
Speaker 7: Kathy the liberal in Minnesota, like when we let the
Speaker 7: state have these powers, they don't just use them benevolently,
Speaker 7: and that they weren't using them benevolently in the first place.
Speaker 7: Read like they say innocent people who've done nothing wrong.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that's that's the thing about state power
Speaker 2: is and any any power the state has, inevitably they
Speaker 2: will wonder you it on you. And so you can't
Speaker 2: let them take shit like this because you know they will.
Speaker 2: They will turn your entire society into a sort of
Speaker 2: hell Garrison state.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and it's just I don't know that the inhumanity
Speaker 7: that your taxes pay for for listening to this in
Speaker 7: America is abhorrent. It's disgusting, and yeah, you should do
Speaker 7: everything you can to stop it. And like, this probably
Speaker 7: is one of the instances where like you may be
Speaker 7: able to do something of some value by writing to
Speaker 7: a politician. It's certainly one of the instances where if
Speaker 7: you live near the border, you can show up and
Speaker 7: make a very meaningful difference to someone's whole experience. Right,
Speaker 7: Like myself and Joe were down there when this this
Speaker 7: guy had lost his phone, and like, you know, it
Speaker 7: wasn't that expensive to buy this guy a phone. Other
Speaker 7: like people will remember Mandy and people will remember Alex,
Speaker 7: who are two guests I've had on different San Diego
Speaker 7: episodes that they've both been down there. I know Alex
Speaker 7: gave his EpiPen to someone who needed an epipenn, like
Speaker 7: we acutely needed an EpiPen. Like things like that, you
Speaker 7: can maybe save someone's life, maybe just make someone's day
Speaker 7: a little bit less shit. You know, maybe you can
Speaker 7: let a kid kick a football and you'd have to
Speaker 7: deflate the football to get it through the defense early,
Speaker 7: but like, you know, you can give a doll to
Speaker 7: a little kid so they can play with it or something.
Speaker 7: Do somethink that will for a moment take them out
Speaker 7: of the utterly miserable place that we force them into.
Speaker 7: And if folks want to support that, I know I'd
Speaker 7: posted Mandy's cash app and Venmo and I think some
Speaker 7: people very generously did contribute, which is great. If you're
Speaker 7: not at the border, look at Border Kindness, which is
Speaker 7: a group out of San Diego who I know are
Speaker 7: doing aid runs to Cucumber. I think the Houcumber Hotel
Speaker 7: Hukumba for those not familiar, Jacu Mba the Hookumber Hotel
Speaker 7: was housing folks and providing it there a huge amount
Speaker 7: of water and shelter to people this morning. People can
Speaker 7: look at the American French Service Committee that I wrote about,
Speaker 7: and I know that Joe and myself have shared some
Speaker 7: Amazon wish lists that people have and that kind of thing.
Speaker 7: But it's it's a massive task, but it's not one
Speaker 7: that's like insurmountable. The amount of people I've seen show
Speaker 7: up to include like and you know, I'm not a
Speaker 7: religious person and I'm not a person who particularly cares
Speaker 7: for organized religion either, but it does make me happy
Speaker 7: when I see like old church ladies in high heels
Speaker 7: with perms coming out and like giving water to children,
Speaker 7: charging phones and seeing I think it's like, certainly I've
Speaker 7: lived on the border for fifteen years. It's been a
Speaker 7: fundamentally radicalizing experience for me. Like I think you're supposed
Speaker 7: to grow old and grow out of your anarchist politics
Speaker 7: or whatever. But I don't know how anyone could live
Speaker 7: here and think that like police state good it's and
Speaker 7: I think anybody who can get down here should it's
Speaker 7: good for you too, Like and I always think about
Speaker 7: how oscoor why child has this thing about like how
Speaker 7: seeing people living on the streets like not only undermind
Speaker 7: stare humanity, but also his humanity, because like seeing someone
Speaker 7: else suffering should make us feel bad, and so like
Speaker 7: he benefits when he helps someone, and like you know,
Speaker 7: we're all lifted up, right, Like I I guess one
Speaker 7: of the things I struggle with most of the journalist
Speaker 7: is that like that like feeling of living in comfort
Speaker 7: while other people can't, especially when it's such like it's
Speaker 7: one thing if I if I go somewhere, right, if
Speaker 7: I'm in Myanmar and I'm aware that things are difficult
Speaker 7: and scary, and then I get on a plane and
Speaker 7: it takes two days when I come back. But just
Speaker 7: from like a personal like mental health perspective, seeing a
Speaker 7: little child sleep in the dirt, right, or someone asking
Speaker 7: me for fucking bin back so they can keep their
Speaker 7: baby out of the rain like a trash back, or
Speaker 7: a kid without shoes, you know, and then going home
Speaker 7: to my relatively comfortable existence is really hard. And I
Speaker 7: think we should all have to face up to that
Speaker 7: because it's what it's what our government is responsible for.
Speaker 7: And supposed we've got the best sucking option in twenty twenty, right,
Speaker 7: this is the this is this is the good choice
Speaker 7: of the two. But it doesn't make any meaningful difference
Speaker 7: whether you choose Trump or Biden to these people, right,
Speaker 7: because the best treat them like ship.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like the kids are still in cages. And yes,
Speaker 2: you know, until until until the entire system that enables
Speaker 2: the ship is destroyed and it can be right like,
Speaker 2: and this isn't even this, this isn't even on the
Speaker 2: on the level of sort of like you know of
Speaker 2: sort of anarchist politics, right like this, none of this
Speaker 2: ship existed twenty years ago, right, like this is this
Speaker 2: is like wow, okay, I guess it's twenty FOI three
Speaker 2: twenty five years ago.
Speaker 5: None of this ship existed even.
Speaker 2: Within like the framework of the nation state, right, Like,
Speaker 2: this is not a thing that you that we have
Speaker 2: to do, which we simply do.
Speaker 5: Not have to you.
Speaker 7: You could share politics with Bill Clinton and still.
Speaker 2: Ronald read was better on the fucking border than any
Speaker 2: than any president who has been alive in my fucking lifetime.
Speaker 5: Right, Yeah, fucking Reagan.
Speaker 7: Dwight Eisenhower would have had serious concerns about the industrial
Speaker 7: complex we're building at the border.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like this is not like this, this, this isn't
Speaker 2: this isn't like a particularly radical political thing, right, It's
Speaker 2: just that we've we've become sort of a nerd to
Speaker 2: this death state that's built up around us, and you know,
Speaker 2: doesn't it doesn't keep anyone safe. It just fucking inflicts
Speaker 2: untold human misery. So fucking Greg Abbott can win an election.
Speaker 7: Yeah yeah, and it costs us a lot of money. Right, Like,
Speaker 7: your universal healthcare is an unmandrone flying over some children
Speaker 7: run across a desert in Arizona. Right now, Your free
Speaker 7: university education is a border patrol smart camera in the
Speaker 7: desert that goes off every time a fucking deer walks past.
Speaker 7: How it rains like it. This stuff is expensive and like,
Speaker 7: if you're in the US, you are paying for it. Yeah.
Speaker 7: I think the most sort of soft of liberals can
Speaker 7: see that this is right. And they did see that
Speaker 7: this ship was wrong in the Trump administration, and they
Speaker 7: do see this is wrong when they come right, Like
Speaker 7: I've some of the best mutual aid groups I've worked
Speaker 7: with are like middle aged folks from churches who have
Speaker 7: time and the means to help and just didn't realize
Speaker 7: that it was like no one was coming and we
Speaker 7: had to do it ourselves. And when they did that,
Speaker 7: they were very effective. And so I would encourage folks
Speaker 7: who are in border communities near the border. Near the
Speaker 7: border means a different thing of your border patrol because
Speaker 7: their jurisdiction applies one hundred miles.
Speaker 5: From the border.
Speaker 7: That's the other thing, right, the border will come to you.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Statistically, odds are that you are the border already has
Speaker 2: come to you.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 7: Two thirds of people in the United States are in
Speaker 7: the border patrol in for Smith Zone.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm in it, and I'm in like fucking Chicago, right.
Speaker 7: Oh yeah, like yeah, I think yes, people who would
Speaker 7: not think of themselves as bored as well as the
Speaker 7: border affects you. If you go to other communities in
Speaker 7: your city, you might realize border patroller around there, Ice
Speaker 7: are around there. So yeah, it's it's pretty bleak. We're
Speaker 7: working on some scripted stuff, but I want to get
Speaker 7: into a bit of the history of border patrol and
Speaker 7: rereading Border Patrol Nation, which is a great book if
Speaker 7: people haven't read it, and I want The other thing
Speaker 7: I should say about border reporting is if people don't
Speaker 7: center migrants and they're reporting about migration, then you shouldn't
Speaker 7: be reading that reporting. Like sometimes it can be hard.
Speaker 7: One other thing I guess I do want to say
Speaker 7: is you're seeing my photos and you're seeing Joe's photos,
Speaker 7: You're not going to see many faces. And that's because
Speaker 7: people have legitimate fears for their wellbeing. That's why they
Speaker 7: are fucking here. Yeah, and not obtaining consent before taking
Speaker 7: photographs is making a terrible situation worse, And like that's
Speaker 7: something that we can work on as a media, right,
Speaker 7: like something I will continue to call out when I
Speaker 7: see it. But if you don't speak the language, find
Speaker 7: someone who does it. Don't take the goddamn photo. You'll
Speaker 7: see some face in the mind. Like I like to
Speaker 7: pass my camera through the fence and give it to
Speaker 7: like teenage kids so they can run around and take
Speaker 7: photos and have fun. And like so when they take
Speaker 7: like goofy selfies, I'll post those. They get concerned from
Speaker 7: them or their parents, and the parents are around it,
Speaker 7: and that's fine. But yeah, when you're looking at border coverage,
Speaker 7: always understand that these are people and if we don't
Speaker 7: center those people and their stories, then we're doing it wrong.
Speaker 2: If you can physically get to these places, like you should,
Speaker 2: like the the the this is this is one of
Speaker 2: the like the situations where like the amount of good
Speaker 2: that like a very small number of people could do
Speaker 2: is enormous and the cost is not that high.
Speaker 7: No, but for instance, I some of my friends had
Speaker 7: just gone to Costco right and just loaded up one
Speaker 7: of those big Costco trolleys and like that that makes
Speaker 7: a meaningful difference to hundreds of people, And so you should.
Speaker 7: There will probably be mutual aid networks on the ground
Speaker 7: at almost every border area. By now, reach out to them,
Speaker 7: see if they need the money. If you can get
Speaker 7: there and help organize, that's better. If you have skills, right,
Speaker 7: if you have language skills yours, like there are people
Speaker 7: I met a guy who spoke Commanji, like the Kurdish
Speaker 7: dialect of North and East Syria, right, people who speak
Speaker 7: Vietnamese almost every language you can conceive of.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 7: Those people really struggle to get information and they just
Speaker 7: can't talk to anyone because there's no one else to
Speaker 7: talk to and their phone, you know, the phone charges
Speaker 7: is a precious commodity and it's cost a lot of
Speaker 7: money to dial into Nashley. So those people could just
Speaker 7: be lonely. So if you have those language skills, go.
Speaker 7: Someone broke their finger in San Diegore getting crushed up
Speaker 7: against the fence. If you know there was a medic
Speaker 7: there to help them. If they hadn't been, that could
Speaker 7: have been worse for them. And you know, sometimes the
Speaker 7: ambulance can come in and take people out. But there
Speaker 7: are valuable, meaningful things that you could do if you
Speaker 7: have the time, if not, if you have the money,
Speaker 7: there are really important places to donate, and there's just
Speaker 7: a couple of them. Will highlight a couple more as
Speaker 7: we go forward. And one more thing I did want
Speaker 7: to plug is miles for migrants where if you have
Speaker 7: if you don't have money, but you do have airline miles.
Speaker 7: Like I was speaking to this guy today who got across.
Speaker 7: He has two days and he has to get himself
Speaker 7: in New York where he has family. I don't have
Speaker 7: the means to buy four airline tickets or it would,
Speaker 7: but if you have air miles and you want to
Speaker 7: donate them, you can.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And then this is the thing, like you know,
Speaker 2: like I have family who, for example, like work at
Speaker 2: Hong Kong, right, and they have like you know, and
Speaker 2: they're like there are people like that who could are like,
Speaker 2: you know, not radicals, but are sort of you know,
Speaker 2: like you.
Speaker 5: Could like like there are people in.
Speaker 2: This world who have a shit of miles like built
Speaker 2: up because you know, for like work or some shit,
Speaker 2: right that's just sitting there, and that that's something that
Speaker 2: you know, like you can you can like like you you.
Speaker 5: May not have it. You might know people who do.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, you might know someone who does a weird
Speaker 7: credit card flipping thing, you know, where they like get
Speaker 7: air miles in and make it their whole personality to
Speaker 7: to get air miles. But like whatever, if those people
Speaker 7: can help, yeah, you don't need to turn them into
Speaker 7: like Macnavists overnight. Like like, nobody wants to see a
Speaker 7: little baby sleep in the dirt, and anybody who could
Speaker 7: be there physically would be appalled by it. And I
Speaker 7: think if you can convey to those folks that now
Speaker 7: at the time when something that costs them nothing materially, Yeah, right,
Speaker 7: Like I know tons of people have more miles that
Speaker 7: they can use because they fly at the time for work.
Speaker 7: You don't want to fly. When you're done flying, you
Speaker 7: want to stay at home. So that's another way that
Speaker 7: people can help. And yeah, just I guess it's a
Speaker 7: crisis that will continue unabated because the cruelty is the
Speaker 7: point and it's for once. Like you know, we can't
Speaker 7: stop all the climate change and all this bad shit,
Speaker 7: but this is something that it is within our power
Speaker 7: to a bet, can't We can't make it go away yet.
Speaker 7: But like we spoke to the people who are doing
Speaker 7: border drops on the border, there are meaningful things that
Speaker 7: every single one of us can do to help.
Speaker 2: Yeah, go into the world. Do not let the violence
Speaker 2: done in our name be who we are.
Speaker 7: Yeah, sure, people, you're better than this.
Speaker 1: I guess, hey everyone, Robert here. Before we get into it,
Speaker 1: I want to note my internet was terrible during this call.
Speaker 1: We tried to have the guest record locally, but there
Speaker 1: is kind of a technical glitch there, and Zoom glitched
Speaker 1: a little on the audio. In order to make it listenable.
Speaker 1: There are going to be like three or four points
Speaker 1: here where I pop in and just say what he
Speaker 1: was trying to say or what he said, and the
Speaker 1: Internet then garbled up so that you can understand what's
Speaker 1: actually being said in the conversation. So when my voice
Speaker 1: pops in and I read a line, it's me reading
Speaker 1: something that he said that got kind of distorted. I
Speaker 1: do apologize. Ah, welcome to it could happen here. A
Speaker 1: podcast about things falling apart and occasionally about the quest
Speaker 1: to build a better world. Today, we've got an episode
Speaker 1: that is in the latter category about the struggle to
Speaker 1: make the United Kingdom less I don't know, in the
Speaker 1: thrall of a monarchy and an aristocratic class, and to
Speaker 1: build a more equitable society. And our guest today is
Speaker 1: somebody who is attempting to through that cause and did
Speaker 1: so last year by attempting to huck several eggs at
Speaker 1: the current King of England, Charles the I forget the number, Patrick, Well,
Speaker 1: how are you doing today? Hi?
Speaker 6: Yeah, I'm good. Thanks.
Speaker 4: Yeah. It was five eggs. Five eggs and he's the
Speaker 4: third king, the third k far more than three unfortunately.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you guys have had a few. Was one of
Speaker 1: the one she'll killed to Charles?
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, that was the last one.
Speaker 1: That was the last one. Well, I would say, yeah.
Speaker 1: So let's start by talking about this is in a
Speaker 1: twenty about a year ago at a he was doing
Speaker 1: a They called it a walkabout, which I guess is
Speaker 1: when the king shows up in a city in the video.
Speaker 1: I watched the video of this and like, there's a
Speaker 1: bunch of people dressed in all sorts of fun costumes,
Speaker 1: and some ladies got a massive sword, like a sword,
Speaker 1: a sword of the size that I know for a
Speaker 1: fact that man cannot lift above his head.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's funny.
Speaker 4: He comes out of his little car and I know,
Speaker 4: all the little trumpets go and everyone starts, you know,
Speaker 4: waving their flags on queue and.
Speaker 6: Going like, look there he is. There.
Speaker 4: He is pretty unhinged, to be honest. It's it's it's
Speaker 4: quite embarrassing.
Speaker 1: But yeah, there's like the the American chauvinist in me
Speaker 1: that like wants to wants to laugh more about the monarchy.
Speaker 1: But I'm just finished reading an article about Diane Feinstein
Speaker 1: where the journalist interviewing her was like, so, you've missed
Speaker 1: a bunch of votes over the last three months, and
Speaker 1: she's like, no, I haven't. I've been working the whole time.
Speaker 1: So I guess we're all kind of enthrall to the
Speaker 1: corpses of of of our past.
Speaker 6: It's hierarchy. Hierarchy everywhere is the problem.
Speaker 1: So you decide to show up when you kind of
Speaker 1: find out that the king is going to be showing
Speaker 1: up here, and what kind of leads you to decide,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna I'm gonna throw some eggs in my pocket
Speaker 1: and take my shot.
Speaker 4: So I actually found out that he was coming to
Speaker 4: York about three days with a megaphone and you know,
Speaker 4: shout some cause obviously.
Speaker 6: The queen had died.
Speaker 4: About a month or so before, and during the funeral
Speaker 4: processions there was you know, several people were arrested for
Speaker 4: someone shouted at you know, Prince Andrew, you know, in
Speaker 4: Scotland's they were like, oh, you're a sick old man,
Speaker 4: and they did, and that was probably my inspiration. But
Speaker 4: then on the morning when he came to York, my
Speaker 4: megaphone was just like busted. So I was just like, oh, okay,
Speaker 4: I'm gonna gonna go get some eggs then.
Speaker 1: And white eggs. What what kind of led to that decision?
Speaker 6: Man? Everyone asked that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I guess like I was into the assumption that
Speaker 4: we all just knew that you throw eggs at people,
Speaker 4: you don't like maybe it's a British thing.
Speaker 1: But I think it may just be that in the
Speaker 1: US because of the gun stuff, people are like a
Speaker 1: lot more hesitant to huck stuff just for fun, right,
Speaker 1: if you're throwing stuff and somebody it's serious.
Speaker 6: Although someone someone threw a beer at.
Speaker 5: Ted Cruz.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they sure did. That was good. That was good.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I think, you know, I actually had a lot of
Speaker 4: time to think about before my trial about why eggs
Speaker 4: and stuff, and I think they're just funny, you know,
Speaker 4: like there's a lot of egg puns that came out
Speaker 4: of it that that that you know, not to get
Speaker 4: too philosophical about it, but they're kind of you know
Speaker 4: they're they're really harmless, you know, but inherently humiliating as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, it's hard to argue attempted murder from an egg,
Speaker 1: but at the same time getting it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well exactly.
Speaker 4: And I think there's there's something to be said for
Speaker 4: contrasting the violence of the state yea, with what's obviously
Speaker 4: like very low level violence. And yeah, I'm the one
Speaker 4: standing trial for it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it. It is like the language that
Speaker 1: got used by the state kind of in the proceedings
Speaker 1: against you was was amusing. Like I know that it
Speaker 1: was a pain in the ash you had to go through,
Speaker 1: but like the kind of the framing that they they
Speaker 1: put with it to make it seem like this was
Speaker 1: this was such a like serious offense against public order
Speaker 1: was was was quite funny. And I think it's beyond
Speaker 1: me to know what was going on in the now
Speaker 1: King's head at the time, but you got quite close.
Speaker 1: You can see right after it hit there's goop on
Speaker 1: the ground directly in front of his foot, and his
Speaker 1: shoulders slump a little and he looks down, and I
Speaker 1: wonder if it made him feel bad. I hope it did,
Speaker 1: you know. I can't get inside the man's head. Maybe
Speaker 1: he's not capable of that, but I wonder.
Speaker 4: So, Yeah, I mean through five, and I will say
Speaker 4: it for the record that one of them did bounce
Speaker 4: off his arm, but he does have a force field,
Speaker 4: so it's not my fault that it didn't didn't get
Speaker 4: the full impact. But yeah, I honestly think he didn't
Speaker 4: have a clue what's going on. He's pretty pretty seen,
Speaker 4: how to be honest. Yeah, but you know, monarchists were like,
Speaker 4: so like, wow, look at how stoic he is.
Speaker 6: He just doesn't even care. He just shrugged it off.
Speaker 4: He's such a badass, and it's like he's just been
Speaker 4: guided through this series of bizarre public opinions where he's
Speaker 4: got to pretend that he you know, smiles and waves
Speaker 4: at normal people and he doesn't think that we're all plebs.
Speaker 1: But yeah, yeah, And it was the crowd reaction around
Speaker 1: you was pretty intense from what I understand. I mean,
Speaker 1: like people came after you when they realized what had happened.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I think in some ways that spoke more
Speaker 4: more itself than like anything that I could have done.
Speaker 4: You know, the reaction to the video, you know, people
Speaker 4: immediately just start like pulling my hair out in chunks
Speaker 4: and just like screaming, like you know, like.
Speaker 6: Just killing him, like stick his head on a spike,
Speaker 6: kick him to death, you know.
Speaker 4: And it really I think maybe that kind of rhetoric
Speaker 4: is perhaps more like, you know that the overt violence
Speaker 4: is more prevalent in American politics. But yeah, you know,
Speaker 4: it exposed that you know, these people are essentially fascists,
Speaker 4: you know.
Speaker 6: And that they yeah, they're very, very violent people.
Speaker 1: And I think this is something people have are starting
Speaker 1: to recognize a little bit more about kind of politics
Speaker 1: in the UK. I mean, we're looking right now. The
Speaker 1: Public Order Act of twenty twenty three is kind of
Speaker 1: the most recent law that's gone through Parliament that effectively
Speaker 1: like expands the ability of the police to crack down
Speaker 1: on protests. Some people will argue, and I think this seems,
Speaker 1: based on what I've read, pretty credible that it basically
Speaker 1: makes it possible for the police to arrest anyone for
Speaker 1: almost any kind of activism. And that kind of was
Speaker 1: was exhibited during the coronation when a group of kind
Speaker 1: of of anti monarchist protesters who are more on the
Speaker 1: liberal side of things, and you're kind of approaching this
Speaker 1: as an anarchist, but a fairly large group of protesters
Speaker 1: with signs that were saying stuff like not my king,
Speaker 1: attempted to rally doing so. I believe their their goal,
Speaker 1: from what I can tell, was to comply with the
Speaker 1: law as they understood it, and that did not protect
Speaker 1: them from the police.
Speaker 4: No. So you know, the context is in the wake
Speaker 4: of the police there was a police officer, you know,
Speaker 4: last year who murdered a woman, Sarah Everard. Yeah, and
Speaker 4: in the wake of that, they passed the Police, Courts,
Speaker 4: Sentencing and Crime Bill, and that that bill was really like,
Speaker 4: you know, the most over crackdown on protest.
Speaker 6: It banned.
Speaker 4: It allowed the police to arrest, the discretion of an officer,
Speaker 4: any protest that was deemed potentially annoying, like that's the
Speaker 4: specific language, is any any any action that could be
Speaker 4: loud or annoying. So, you know, there was a there
Speaker 4: was a lot of protests against that at the time.
Speaker 4: That obviously came to nothing, and they passed the bill anyway,
Speaker 4: and then and then so the Public Order Bill just
Speaker 4: goes that step further by allowing them to preemptively arrest
Speaker 4: anyone who might be about to do something that's loud
Speaker 4: or annoying, and including this new thing called a serious
Speaker 4: Disruption Prevention Order, which is something that they can apply
Speaker 4: to someone who's considered an aggravated activist.
Speaker 1: He's saying, which is someone who has been arrested more
Speaker 1: than twice for protest related offenses.
Speaker 4: Essentially, it bans, you know, use of the internet to
Speaker 4: communicate about your ideas, basically stop you from attending protests
Speaker 4: in the first place.
Speaker 6: And a rest the train station.
Speaker 4: And yeah, we saw that in play with with the Republic,
Speaker 4: that this organization that had been extensively liaising with the police,
Speaker 4: and you know, it just seemed quite like Pikachu face
Speaker 4: when suddenly they were all just rounded up and yeah,
Speaker 4: but for literally, you know, no pretext. It was they
Speaker 4: had they had like twelve thousand pounds worth of signs
Speaker 4: in a van and they were they were all wrapped
Speaker 4: up in yeah, just like rope rope, and the pretext
Speaker 4: for the arrest was that the rope was a lock
Speaker 4: on device that could be used to you know, I
Speaker 4: don't know, like jump in front of the procession and
Speaker 4: tie yourself with rope to the road.
Speaker 6: I really don't know.
Speaker 1: Like, yeah, from what I could tell just from the
Speaker 1: coverage I've read, if their protest had gone the way
Speaker 1: they planned it, it would have been like a show,
Speaker 1: a visible show that there were people who didn't like
Speaker 1: the monarchy, but it would not have caused it like
Speaker 1: they would not have this. These people were not planning
Speaker 1: to like burn down any public buildings or you know,
Speaker 1: smash car windows or stop a road. Not that I'm
Speaker 1: specifically condemning that behavior, but I'm just stating this. This
Speaker 1: was not the state cracking down on people because they
Speaker 1: were afraid of a riot. This was the state cracking
Speaker 1: down on people because they didn't want the display of
Speaker 1: any kind of descent to exist.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and you know, that's where we're at in this country.
Speaker 4: And to be honest, the arrest of those organizers was
Speaker 4: the best thing that could have happened for the movement,
Speaker 4: because you know, what it really did was just shine
Speaker 4: a light that it was impossible to ignore and in
Speaker 4: some ways kind of over shadowed the coronation. Really was
Speaker 4: far more than any speech that Graham Smith you know,
Speaker 4: was planning to give, you know, just so overtly that
Speaker 4: that there is no acceptable form of descent. Now, the
Speaker 4: very concept is so distasteful to Yeah, our aristocracy that
Speaker 4: it's banned.
Speaker 1: And I really appreciate your ability to kind of see
Speaker 1: the upside, the tactical upside in that, because I think
Speaker 1: it is true. I doubt I would have heard about
Speaker 1: that protest if it had gone as the organizer's plan, right,
Speaker 1: because it would have just been Yeah, there's some people
Speaker 1: who don't like the monarchy in the UK. That doesn't
Speaker 1: surprise me at all, but seeing it was like everywhere
Speaker 1: all over my social media. I got sent it by
Speaker 1: multiple friends, by a family member because the state decided
Speaker 1: to go after these people, And I do think I
Speaker 1: think it's also from just a standpoint when you're talking
Speaker 1: about a struggle with as long odds as kind of
Speaker 1: struggling against the monarchy in the United Kingdom, which is
Speaker 1: you are talking about like the most entrenched power structure
Speaker 1: outside of the Vatican, right, Basically, Yeah, when you're talking
Speaker 1: about that, it is so important to be able to
Speaker 1: look at moments like this and see the upside on
Speaker 1: them rather than just rather than just kind of feel
Speaker 1: the boot all the time. Otherwise you're not going to
Speaker 1: have the endurance to keep fighting.
Speaker 6: You know, for me with specifically with the eggs.
Speaker 4: I was I've been conscious the whole time that the
Speaker 4: backlash and the you know, disproportionate state reaction would speak
Speaker 4: more than my own actions. So, for example, one of
Speaker 4: the reasons why I think, you know, it went pretty
Speaker 4: viral when I when I threw the eggs in the
Speaker 4: first place, I was a bit surprised by by how
Speaker 4: it went kind of quite internationally. But but but you know,
Speaker 4: so the fact, so my bail conditions were between between
Speaker 4: my arrest and my trial were that I wasn't allowed
Speaker 4: to carry eggs in public. Yeah, I know. And so
Speaker 4: that is in itself like so absurd that it's like, right.
Speaker 1: I gotta know, is there like a provision for if
Speaker 1: you're going home from the store or are you just
Speaker 1: are you just.
Speaker 4: So so So the copper who was literally just like
Speaker 4: making this up at the station says like, okay, so
Speaker 4: your bail condition is you're not allowed within five hundred
Speaker 4: meters of the king, you're not allowed to carry eggs
Speaker 4: in public. And then he goes like, oh, actually, like
Speaker 4: what was if he wants to buy some eggs And
Speaker 4: they're like okay, So they changed it so it's you're
Speaker 4: allowed to carry eggs as long as you're going home
Speaker 4: from the shops and you've got the receipt. And I
Speaker 4: think that was a more viral than me actually doing it,
Speaker 4: you know what I mean, Like people were like, you know,
Speaker 4: that's that's that's Britain for you.
Speaker 6: Have you got a license for those eggs?
Speaker 1: You know, I'm imagining you like sliding down an alleyway
Speaker 1: with like a like a like a nineteen forty style
Speaker 1: shoulder holster, but with just like eggs under each year.
Speaker 4: Yeah and so and so you know when I so, so,
Speaker 4: I had my trial, you know, which was for yeah,
Speaker 4: threatening behavior that made someone fear imminent violence. In the
Speaker 4: wake of that, like I was convicted, I narrowly avoided
Speaker 4: six months in prison, which is the sentence that I
Speaker 4: thought I was gone, yeah, yeah, and so, so you know,
Speaker 4: in my trial, you know, I had the option to
Speaker 4: either downplay what I as being like, oh, it's not.
Speaker 6: Really violence, it's just an egg.
Speaker 4: But then of course, you know, legally it was you know,
Speaker 4: that could just councel as a soul. But then I
Speaker 4: chose it instead to say, okay, yeah, it was violence,
Speaker 4: but it was legitimate violence because it was necessary to
Speaker 4: resist the far greater violence of the British state, you know,
Speaker 4: citing the historic impact of colonialism.
Speaker 1: He's saying current foreign policy like the King personally negotiating
Speaker 1: weapons deals with Saudi Arabia.
Speaker 4: And then also you know, climate breakdown and the way
Speaker 4: in which by continuing to invest in fossil fuels global
Speaker 4: South like intentionally, and so therefore, you know, I was
Speaker 4: basically defending the right of you know, acting in defense
Speaker 4: of others with violence. I'm glad I did it, and
Speaker 4: I don't done much worse. So in the end, actually
Speaker 4: I got one hundred hours. I got one hundred hours
Speaker 4: of community service, which was extreme, you know, getting away
Speaker 4: with it essentially.
Speaker 1: So, yeah, did you get us? I wondered, was it
Speaker 1: just a situation? Did you just get lucky with a
Speaker 1: judge or like, because that's surprising. I'm surprised that like
Speaker 1: that that worked as well as it did in a
Speaker 1: positive way.
Speaker 6: I think, yeah, yeah, me too.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: I mean I had a big bag.
Speaker 4: With me with all my light undies in because I
Speaker 4: thought I was going down, you know, And I think
Speaker 4: there was partly, yes, getting lucky with the judge. Partly
Speaker 4: I think they were in a really difficult position and
Speaker 4: this is what I wanted to put them in essentially,
Speaker 4: which is that following all of that the money, you know,
Speaker 4: in the lead up to the coronation, there was a
Speaker 4: lot of negative press around around the king and the monarchy,
Speaker 4: and they had a choice between either sending me to
Speaker 4: prison and looking extremely authoritarian and blowing out proportion, or
Speaker 4: letting me get away with it. And you know, I
Speaker 4: think they chose to minimize the negative press. You know,
Speaker 4: I mean, obviously, supposedly there's an independent judiciary and there
Speaker 4: would have been no conversations with the palace and the
Speaker 4: police about the charging procedures.
Speaker 6: But that's that's a lot of rubbish.
Speaker 4: But you know, yeah, and so but I think I
Speaker 4: wanted to put them in that difficult position because I
Speaker 4: knew that, like I said, their backlash would look worse
Speaker 4: than what I did. And so so when I chose
Speaker 4: to go to the coronation following following my conviction, you know,
Speaker 4: I had to tell my probation officer, look, I'm going
Speaker 4: to the coronation. I am going I'm going to peacefully protest.
Speaker 4: I'm just going to be there. Deal with it, you know,
Speaker 4: And basically he told me that the counter Terrorism Department
Speaker 4: had was seeking an injunction from the courts to stop
Speaker 4: me attending, but then the court had ruled that no,
Speaker 4: I was allowed to attend. I'd already been given my
Speaker 4: punishment and he wasn't going to put any further conditions
Speaker 4: on me, not be allowing allowed to go.
Speaker 6: So so but I knew that if I.
Speaker 4: Went to the coronation they would arrest me anyway and
Speaker 4: it would make them look bad, you know. And then
Speaker 4: they they did. You know, I was as well as
Speaker 4: well as all of the organizers. I was there, you know,
Speaker 4: just not my king blah blah blah. And then and
Speaker 4: then and then I look up and there's a little
Speaker 4: watchtower that they had erected in the center of Trafalgarscoo,
Speaker 4: and I just saw that there was about seven police
Speaker 4: officers just all like staring at me and filming me
Speaker 4: from you know, like two hundred meters away. And I
Speaker 4: was like, oh, okay, they're gonna arrest me now. So yeah,
Speaker 4: I gave my phone and well it's to my brother
Speaker 4: and then smile. And then within seconds, within seconds, they
Speaker 4: were just dragging me out, like you know, in handcuffs
Speaker 4: from the center of a of a crowd of about,
Speaker 4: you know, twenty thousand people, and I honestly couldn't have
Speaker 4: looked like more like overtly fascist if they tried, and
Speaker 4: and that was kind of the point, really is.
Speaker 1: Man? I uh, such a wild story, but I'm glad
Speaker 1: you did what you did. I'm impressed by the amount
Speaker 1: of thought that kind of went into the optics of it,
Speaker 1: because it's it's really the only way to turn an
Speaker 1: egg into an effective weapon, right is by very careful planning.
Speaker 1: I'm kind of curious where do you see what do
Speaker 1: you see the route forward for both not just kind
Speaker 1: of opposing the monarchy in your country, but sort of
Speaker 1: opposing the overreach by the police. This is a problem
Speaker 1: in more places than the United Kingdom, but y'all are
Speaker 1: kind of on one of the cutting edges of sort
Speaker 1: of global attempts by law enforcement and its supporters in
Speaker 1: the state to effectively make dissent impossible ahead of what
Speaker 1: everyone knows is going to be kind of a heightening
Speaker 1: period of climate based activism.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and so with the climate activist movement in the UK,
Speaker 4: you know, we've seen extinction rebellion active since like twenty eighteen,
Speaker 4: and I've been you know, arrested multiple times with them
Speaker 4: at different actions.
Speaker 5: You know, the.
Speaker 4: Part of their strategy was that mass arrests, you know,
Speaker 4: blocking roads, nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience would force
Speaker 4: the government to take action. And I think really we're
Speaker 4: seeing that strategy like having run its course. And and
Speaker 4: and I think for a while now that's been evident
Speaker 4: that it wasn't working because they've just banned the types
Speaker 4: of protests that we were doing. And also it was
Speaker 4: essentially quite naive to believe that, yeah, oh, you know,
Speaker 4: if we cause enough disruption, they're just going to put
Speaker 4: aside all of the you know, lobbying interests and their
Speaker 4: literal role in upholding capitalism to just go, oh, no, okay,
Speaker 4: fair enough that they're blocked and roads, we are going
Speaker 4: to like radically transform society to deal with climate breakdown.
Speaker 6: That was never going to work, you know, realistically. And
Speaker 6: so so.
Speaker 4: Even though you know, we've seen every time they passed
Speaker 4: these these new legislation, there are there's a there's a backlash,
Speaker 4: there's some marches, there's some protests that fizzle out, and
Speaker 4: the state just keep consolidating more and more power, and
Speaker 4: people keep getting more and more dis illusioned with.
Speaker 1: He says, with what an effective strategy of resistance looks like.
Speaker 1: And so for me personally, it's something I've been thinking
Speaker 1: about for a while.
Speaker 4: Now but recently have is that, you know, we have
Speaker 4: to stop asking politicians through direct democracy at the local
Speaker 4: level and essentially you know, using like democratic confederalism, you know,
Speaker 4: as they're doing Rajava, to to look.
Speaker 6: At creating a national.
Speaker 4: Network of people's assemblies that builds dual power outside of
Speaker 4: the state.
Speaker 6: Because because, because I think a lot of the problem with.
Speaker 4: These direct action movements is that they don't have the
Speaker 4: legitimacy of a democratic mandate, so that even whilst the
Speaker 4: tactics might be like in some way effective, you know,
Speaker 4: Extinction Rebellion has always said our message is to say
Speaker 4: that climate change is a serious threat, but we cannot
Speaker 4: propose the solutions because we don't have a democratic mandate.
Speaker 4: But the way to you know, work around that is
Speaker 4: to build a democratic mandate through holding people's assemblies, creating
Speaker 4: forums where people can create their own vision, and then
Speaker 4: direct action can then be used in service of those
Speaker 4: aims rather than putting the cart before the horse, if
Speaker 4: that makes sense.
Speaker 1: No, yeah, I think that that's certainly like one of
Speaker 1: the more pragmatic ways forward that I think I've seen.
Speaker 1: You know, we're we're we're always talking about an uphill
Speaker 1: battle here, and I think kind of the inherent difficulty
Speaker 1: of fixing any of these bigger problems, particularly fixing the
Speaker 1: and what we mean is dismantling the systems that are
Speaker 1: causing climate destruction, like that is such a lopsided battle
Speaker 1: that I think whenever, whenever you have you present an
Speaker 1: option to people, because it sounds hard, there's this there's
Speaker 1: this tendency to just be like, well, you know, we
Speaker 1: have to go by the thing that we know, which
Speaker 1: is just kind of like trying to vote in better people.
Speaker 1: If we can take a lesson out of the last
Speaker 1: thirty years, it's that the standard electoral methods cannot provide
Speaker 1: the solution to climate change, like they simply aren't going
Speaker 1: to do it. And I think the police in a
Speaker 1: lot of kind I mean in the United States right
Speaker 1: here in one of my old hometown's, Austin, Texas, they
Speaker 1: just voted on a police accountability bill that the police
Speaker 1: have basically said we're not going to abide by. Like
Speaker 1: this is and you can find stories like that all
Speaker 1: over the United States and other parts of the world,
Speaker 1: Like the kind of the hope that you can just
Speaker 1: sort of like put in your however long it takes
Speaker 1: you to do voting in your country or city or whatever,
Speaker 1: and that that's the method forward. It's it seems more
Speaker 1: realistic because it's more familiar. But I think the vision
Speaker 1: you're putting forward, not to say that it's as simple
Speaker 1: that simple, but like it's effortful. And I think that
Speaker 1: whenever someone's positing something like that that requires that kind
Speaker 1: of like effort from a large enough segment of the population,
Speaker 1: I see that as inherently more realistic than hoping that
Speaker 1: we can just all kind of keep putting our twenty
Speaker 1: minutes of voting a year towards solving the problem and
Speaker 1: expect it to get better.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And it's like one of those things with you know,
Speaker 4: like the idea that imagining prison abolition, you have to
Speaker 4: imagine a world where that's possible, and that requires changing everything, right,
Speaker 4: And I think that applies to tackling climate change and
Speaker 4: implementing direct democracy. So you know, if you're talking about
Speaker 4: a system where people can turn it to a forum
Speaker 4: in a local community center, or you know, church or
Speaker 4: whatever once a week. Then people say, well that's not
Speaker 4: going to be accessible, you know, because so it's like, well,
Speaker 4: you're right, we'll probably have to set up a system
Speaker 4: of mutual aid that supports you know, working class people
Speaker 4: to be able to attend those kind of events.
Speaker 6: And you know, yeah, it's like, how are you going
Speaker 6: to pay for it?
Speaker 4: And it's like, well, you're right, we're probably going to
Speaker 4: have to, you know, set up a solidarity economy where
Speaker 4: you know, if we decide, for example, that we want
Speaker 4: free public transport then and and bus drivers to be
Speaker 4: paid paid a fair wage, you know, then you're going
Speaker 4: to have to look at a whole system whereby people
Speaker 4: are potentially getting free housing in return for being a
Speaker 4: bus driver, free food that comes from the local food cooperative.
Speaker 4: And you're like, I say, building dual power rather than
Speaker 4: attacking the system head on, because in a battle, in
Speaker 4: a pitch street battle in this country, at least between
Speaker 4: us and the police, we're going to lose. And I
Speaker 4: think that, you know, we need to think smarter because
Speaker 4: at this point they haven't yet made organizing public meetings illegal,
Speaker 4: but you know they probably will at some point.
Speaker 6: And then it's.
Speaker 4: The only way we'll be able to resist that is
Speaker 4: if we've had some public meetings to decide how we're
Speaker 4: going to do it, because at the moment, we haven't
Speaker 4: even had the meeting to decide what our collective strategies
Speaker 4: because there is so much atomization between between these different
Speaker 4: like you know, left wing social movements and civil society
Speaker 4: organizations and so much. Sometimes at heart just depresses me
Speaker 4: to think about how many people are working for environmental
Speaker 4: charities or whatever, where all of their work and their
Speaker 4: research is going towards creating policy proposals for politicians to ignore.
Speaker 4: It's like if you were putting that amount of energy
Speaker 4: and your enthusiasm in service of the vision that's been
Speaker 4: created democratically by the people, then we don't need to
Speaker 4: petition anyone to make the changes we need because we'll
Speaker 4: have organized effectively enough to do the things that will
Speaker 4: really challenge state power, for example, like a mass rent
Speaker 4: strike and a general strike.
Speaker 1: Or if those efforts that are currently going towards putting
Speaker 1: policy papers on desks where there'll be ignored or neutered,
Speaker 1: was going towards putting forth policy that is then being
Speaker 1: backed by a movement that is carrying out rent strikes,
Speaker 1: that is putting out together work stoppages, that is blocking roads,
Speaker 1: that's able to actually throttle some of the life support
Speaker 1: system of the state. Well, then suddenly you're not looking
Speaker 1: at a recommendation a white paper that's going to wind
Speaker 1: up on some bloodless bureaucrats desk, or that that's going
Speaker 1: to wind up getting cut to pieces in Parliament. You
Speaker 1: have something that has teeth behind it, right, the kind
Speaker 1: of force that might be able to make change. I
Speaker 1: don't know. Again, when you talk about this kind of stuff,
Speaker 1: you have to contrast it with what we've been trying
Speaker 1: so far, which is nothing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and you know, diversity of tactics is huge, and
Speaker 4: so you know a lot of these dark action groups
Speaker 4: in the UK, like just Stop Oil that have been
Speaker 4: blocking motorways and stuff, have received like you know, huge criticism,
Speaker 4: especially from people who you know, really ought to be
Speaker 4: allies and at least recognize the the that this action
Speaker 4: is coming out of a place of desperation because people
Speaker 4: cannot see a better way. Yeah, and you know there
Speaker 4: was a there's someone from just Stop Oil who just
Speaker 4: got three years in prison for blocking a motorway and
Speaker 4: and that's that's insane, you know, and you know on
Speaker 4: some level that person is it is a martyr, and
Speaker 4: you've got to hold your take your hat off, and
Speaker 4: say what that has done is shine a spotlight again
Speaker 4: on state authority in a way that you know, if
Speaker 4: they have these laws on the books, but they never
Speaker 4: have to use them, then it's easy to forget that
Speaker 4: they exist and have that power.
Speaker 1: Do you want to talk a little bit about cooperation?
Speaker 8: U K.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, So so you know, for me, I'm I'm
Speaker 4: a democratic confederalist, you know, I mean or like you know,
Speaker 4: the Rajarvant project using direct markcracy, but also confederating that
Speaker 4: up to sort of replace the state with a form
Speaker 4: of governance that's democratic. And you know, I also I'm
Speaker 4: a big believer in cosmocracy, right, which is the proper
Speaker 4: name for global democracy.
Speaker 1: He says, essentially, you know, I wrote about this while
Speaker 1: I was doing my masters.
Speaker 4: And that is how potentially, if we were implementing this
Speaker 4: system world, we can use the internet to confederate to
Speaker 4: a global level, you know, and really start to tackle
Speaker 4: the issues that we collectively face as humanity, which is
Speaker 4: like the fact that our separation from nature and the
Speaker 4: rise of fascism, is is threatening angers with extinction, and
Speaker 4: so yeah, I'm a citizen of Earth and.
Speaker 6: You know that's what motivates a lot of my actions.
Speaker 4: But you know, in some ways I've been kind of
Speaker 4: stewing on these ideas alone, and so recently I met
Speaker 4: a group called Cooperation UK, who are you know, connecting.
Speaker 4: I can often get bogged down in abstract theory about
Speaker 4: like how you know, changing the whole world and never
Speaker 4: actually doing anything practical.
Speaker 6: That's my downfall.
Speaker 4: But you know, you need to start a movement like
Speaker 4: that locally, and and so they're copying Cooperation Jackson, you know,
Speaker 4: who have been incredibly effective, you know, setting up people's assemblies,
Speaker 4: mutual aid economy in Jackson and also like a community
Speaker 4: land trust.
Speaker 6: You know, they own.
Speaker 4: Like like fifty different buildings, you know, that are used
Speaker 4: collectively by the community. And this group are planning to
Speaker 4: set that up in Hull, which is just a city
Speaker 4: in the Northeast that's incredibly deprived. It's got like the
Speaker 4: lowest voter turnout in the UK, but it also has
Speaker 4: a thriving network of food banks and you know cooperatives
Speaker 4: and mutual aid groups.
Speaker 6: And I think the next step for me is when
Speaker 6: those those groups send delegates to me, eat together and
Speaker 6: decide on collective strategy, right, like, because there are so
Speaker 6: many people doing so much good work, but there's almost
Speaker 6: like no faith in our own vision, which is that
Speaker 6: if we're the people you know who are say a
Speaker 6: union for nurses, then you know, we should be deciding
Speaker 6: the conditions that exist in healthcare, you know, because who
Speaker 6: better besides patients and like staff is that to decide
Speaker 6: the conditions that they that they operate in.
Speaker 4: And and so yeah, cooperation UK there there are there's
Speaker 4: a group of us that are moving to Whull.
Speaker 6: I'm moving.
Speaker 4: I'm moving next week. I'm really excited about it. And yeah,
Speaker 4: we're planning to set up lots of local neighborhood assemblies
Speaker 4: with the intention of within a year holding a citywide
Speaker 4: people's assembly that can create a shared vision and then
Speaker 4: and then potentially you know, standing candidates for local council
Speaker 4: but whose only policy is we will enact.
Speaker 6: We will give.
Speaker 4: Power to the people's assemblies and then they can use
Speaker 4: the you know, financial power of existing institutions to support
Speaker 4: the transition to a new model.
Speaker 6: And whilst they're doing that in Hull, you know.
Speaker 4: The work that I hope to be doing is document
Speaker 4: in that process the learning, you know, so people can
Speaker 4: learn from the mistakes and that, you know, and hopefully
Speaker 4: we can set them up in every city well across
Speaker 4: the UK, because there are already people who think very
Speaker 4: similarly and that we're at a time now where that's
Speaker 4: coalescing into the you know, people are recognizing the need
Speaker 4: for this new movement with a new strategy that's based
Speaker 4: around democracy rather than just activism.
Speaker 6: And yeah, it's really exciting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, that's I think that's a worthwhile idea.
Speaker 1: I think it's it's it's bold and something that I'm
Speaker 1: I'm glad to see being attempted. Well, it's been really
Speaker 1: great talking with you today. Did you have anywhere you
Speaker 1: wanted to direct listeners in order to help if they're
Speaker 1: interested in what Cooperation UK is doing.
Speaker 6: Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 4: So there's there's a crowdfunder that I think there'll be.
Speaker 6: I believe there'll be a link that you guys can act.
Speaker 1: He says, and we'll be using that money to set
Speaker 1: up the People's Assembly and mutual aid networks, but also
Speaker 1: to create resources that anyone anywhere can use in their
Speaker 1: local community.
Speaker 4: And I hope is that, you know, as these groups proliferate,
Speaker 4: you know, we're going to start reaching out to each other,
Speaker 4: forming an international solidarity network that is capable of providing
Speaker 4: like the mutual aid that we that we need to
Speaker 4: support each other, you know, for example, you know, if
Speaker 4: we're talking about Palestine or Iran, to provide real, meaningful solidarities,
Speaker 4: you know, liberation groups will require more organization than just
Speaker 4: like thoughts and prayers.
Speaker 1: Really and yeah, yeah, well, thank you so much, Patrick,
Speaker 1: It has been great talking with you. Good luck as
Speaker 1: you continue moving forward.
Speaker 7: And yeah, yeah, thanks very much.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I guess I should also say I'm on I'm bizarrely,
Speaker 4: I'm on TikTok.
Speaker 6: That's the medium I'm using at the moment. I wish
Speaker 6: it wasn't.
Speaker 4: I'll probably want to start making more YouTube videos discussing
Speaker 4: these ideas, so maybe I'll send you a link that
Speaker 4: you can put in them.
Speaker 6: This isn't a both show. It's my YouTube channel.
Speaker 1: Excellent well Patrick tellwell Citizen of Earth YouTube channel and
Speaker 1: we'll have your TikTok and the description. Thanks again for
Speaker 1: coming on the show. Everybody go out and you know,
Speaker 1: acquire eggs. Hey, We'll be back Monday, with more episodes
Speaker 1: every week from now until the heat death of the Universe.
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