Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 1: you know. This is a compiletion 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 gonna be nothing new here for you. But you
Speaker 1: can make your own decisions. If I know one thing
Speaker 1: about diseases, it's that their home bodies. Now, it's fine,
Speaker 1: we make it. They just want to netflix and chill.
Speaker 1: You just line up the entire population of the US
Speaker 1: in a line across the US. We shoot any deer
Speaker 1: that tries across the line. I think we should do
Speaker 1: the reverse and have deer shoot people who tried across
Speaker 1: the line. It's the only thing that can protect us
Speaker 1: from the dangerous east. No, no, no, that look look well,
Speaker 1: I guess it worse in east and in the west.
Speaker 1: We have to maintain the right to arm bears. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm of the opinion, given how dry it is
Speaker 1: in New Mexico, that we need to sink every part
Speaker 1: of the country east of New Mexico to give it
Speaker 1: a coast that can that can keep it moist. I
Speaker 1: wonder how much of this is going to get in
Speaker 1: the final cut. Well, if you live east of New Mexico,
Speaker 1: welcome to the ocean. That's my suggestion. Um, speaking of
Speaker 1: people east of New Mexico, this is it could happen
Speaker 1: here a podcast where some of the listeners are east
Speaker 1: of New Mexico, even though I don't recommend that. Um,
Speaker 1: I'm Robert Evans. On the call with me is Christopher Wong,
Speaker 1: Garrison Davis, Sharene Lonnie Units, and then our producers Sophie.
Speaker 1: Today we're talking about terrorism. Yeah, we do it in
Speaker 1: a little NPR voice. So uh. Recently, the same week
Speaker 1: as the Supreme Court leaked a document stating that they
Speaker 1: would be taking out Roe v. Wade and ushering in
Speaker 1: an era of theocratic fascism in a number of states. Uh,
Speaker 1: an individual or individuals unknown in Wisconsin attacked Anti Choice
Speaker 1: headquarters building with a Molotov cocktail and spray painted graffiti
Speaker 1: on the side saying if abortion isn't safe, then you
Speaker 1: aren't either. That same group or individuals claiming to be
Speaker 1: from them, later reached out to me through an intermediary
Speaker 1: and sent a manifesto of sorts about the attack, promising
Speaker 1: follow up attacks within thirty days. But they wrote, but
Speaker 1: they wrote in cursive, So who can say, Who can
Speaker 1: say if this actually happened. So we'll talk first. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna just go over first what what happened in like
Speaker 1: factual terms, and then we'll talk about the discourse around it.
Speaker 1: So basically, there's this attack on this UM anti choice
Speaker 1: like advocacy organizations headquarters in fucking Wisconsin. UM it was
Speaker 1: seemed to be a pretty good molotov and that, like Garrison,
Speaker 1: you and I have watched a number of people failed
Speaker 1: to properly utilize. I watched a few people get watched
Speaker 1: one get ignited by him altop, I've seen a couple
Speaker 1: of not cops get ignited by mollotsovs um they're they're
Speaker 1: they're not like people can suck them up easily. Whoever
Speaker 1: did this did not suck them up. It was seemed
Speaker 1: to be at the moment. No one has been arrested.
Speaker 1: Now it's possible by the time this drops, Wisconsin police
Speaker 1: will be like, oh no, there was totally surveillance footage
Speaker 1: and they fucked up and we just caught them, UM,
Speaker 1: But at the moment, it doesn't look like that's the case.
Speaker 1: So it looks like this is somebody who carried out
Speaker 1: or some buddies, because it's entirely possible is multiple people,
Speaker 1: but carried out UM a very effective like action that
Speaker 1: did material damage to UM, part of kind of the
Speaker 1: physical infrastructure of the anti choice movement UM and ended
Speaker 1: without anyone getting caught. So that's the fact of the
Speaker 1: actual attack itself. UM. A person who claiming to be
Speaker 1: affiliated with the individuals or group who did this reached
Speaker 1: out to a source of mine who I'm keeping anonymous,
Speaker 1: but somebody who I've known for a while with a
Speaker 1: very good track record of being accurate, and said, hey,
Speaker 1: these individual slash individuals have a communic A they would
Speaker 1: like put out UM. And I was sent on a
Speaker 1: non files link, which is a link. If you view
Speaker 1: it in a normal browser you'll get some fucked up ship.
Speaker 1: Don't put it in a normal browser. I specified it's
Speaker 1: like you're supposed to. If you put it in tour,
Speaker 1: it will download a text file right UM. And the
Speaker 1: text file is the communic A. So using the Tour
Speaker 1: browser for that link, you can get a text file
Speaker 1: in which they lay out number one. They named themselves UM,
Speaker 1: and the name they've chosen for their group is Jane's Revenge,
Speaker 1: which is a reference to the Jaine Collective UM, which
Speaker 1: was a pro choice group in the late sixties early
Speaker 1: seventies that UM provided women with access to contraception and
Speaker 1: abortion illegally. A bunch of them went to jail. Uh,
Speaker 1: they were pardoned after Roe v. Wade. If I'm not
Speaker 1: mistaken or at least other one more about it, send
Speaker 1: the market the k click. Yeah, yeah, very well timed. UM.
Speaker 1: So they're calling themselves Jamee's Revenge, and they basically said, hey,
Speaker 1: if you are an organization in the anti choice movement,
Speaker 1: you have thirty days to close down your operations otherwise
Speaker 1: there will be follow up attacks. They specifically noted the
Speaker 1: long and it's at this point like a forty years
Speaker 1: long history of terrorist attacks from the anti choice movement,
Speaker 1: many of which have assassinated doctors, something like sixteen people
Speaker 1: have been killed, UM, dozens of bombs and bombing attempts,
Speaker 1: something like a hundred acid attacks. So they made a
Speaker 1: note of all that and said that like, basically we
Speaker 1: will be UM, we will be responding in kind and
Speaker 1: UH attacks after this initial attack will be correspondingly more severe. UM.
Speaker 1: They also claim to have a pretty wide geographic reach,
Speaker 1: said they had folks in a number of cities, UM,
Speaker 1: and that yeah, there's going to be follow up attacks UM,
Speaker 1: and they're prepared to defend their bodily autonomy with violence.
Speaker 1: So that's that's the gist of what was claimed in
Speaker 1: the communic a UM. In terms of what I think
Speaker 1: about its legitimacy, UM, I don't have any reason to
Speaker 1: believe they're not representing the individual or individuals who carried
Speaker 1: out that attack in Wisconsin, based on the timing of
Speaker 1: when the communic was made, and based on the fact
Speaker 1: that the communicate is pretty consistent with what we saw
Speaker 1: from the actual action. Right. So, among other things that
Speaker 1: you can tell from the physical action that was taken
Speaker 1: is that, UM, the individual or individuals who did this
Speaker 1: were pretty well organized. They carried out a competent action,
Speaker 1: and they thought there was a value in very clear
Speaker 1: messaging because there's clear messaging surrounding the attack. The communicate
Speaker 1: is very clear messaging. It does not sound like a
Speaker 1: right winger writing up a fake communicate. It's very UM.
Speaker 1: It takes great pains to both connect itself to history,
Speaker 1: to frame its violence within the context of the violence
Speaker 1: perpetuated by the anti choice movement for decades UM, and
Speaker 1: just in general, it's the communication seems consistent with the
Speaker 1: action that we saw in Wisconsin. Now cannot say, we
Speaker 1: cannot say, I cannot say to a statement of certainty
Speaker 1: whether or not it's legitimate. One helpful thing they did
Speaker 1: is place state that there would be another more attacks
Speaker 1: in thirty days, So we're kind of waiting. If thirty
Speaker 1: days pass and there's never any kind of follow up
Speaker 1: attacks by this group, then we can probably assume that
Speaker 1: this was either somebody bullshitting or that the heat got
Speaker 1: to too much for them and they decided not to
Speaker 1: carry out follow up attacks. UM. But we're all kind
Speaker 1: of in this holding pattern now to see what happens.
Speaker 1: My personal speculation is that UM, they were exaggerating a
Speaker 1: number of things. UM. I think that the their claims
Speaker 1: about having members in a number of states in a
Speaker 1: capacity to strike in a number of states was more
Speaker 1: aspirational than literal UM. In that I suspect the people
Speaker 1: behind this attack, in this communicate are hoping that by
Speaker 1: UM carrying out attacks. They can inspire other people to
Speaker 1: carry out attacks and credit it to the same organization, right,
Speaker 1: which is not an uncommon tactic in the history of terrorism.
Speaker 1: And again, this is terrorism. Like that doesn't mean I
Speaker 1: don't think, uh, they have a point or that it's
Speaker 1: like fundamentally unjust. Terrorism is just like a set of
Speaker 1: tactics that different groups can use, and it can be
Speaker 1: ethical or unethical depending on how you you choose to
Speaker 1: do that. You can attack purely infrastructure, UM in a
Speaker 1: terrorist manner, and I don't think that's necessarily unethical. And
Speaker 1: you can also attack civilians, UM in a terrorist manner,
Speaker 1: and I think that is unethical. At this moment, these
Speaker 1: people have not done anything I view as inherently unethical.
Speaker 1: They burned a building, UM, which I think is often
Speaker 1: justified and is in this case justified. So that's that's
Speaker 1: my opinion on the matter. Let's open it up on
Speaker 1: the point you kind of closed with. I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: they showed effective direct action. They did a physical thing.
Speaker 1: Malta's are not the best way to do like to
Speaker 1: like arsenal building, but they are good for a very
Speaker 1: quick attack. Um. It caused this whole media thing, right,
Speaker 1: there's a lot a lot of people talking about it,
Speaker 1: then releasing the communicate through someone who can give it
Speaker 1: a lot of visibility. Uh, and then by by doing
Speaker 1: it with this with this name Jane's revenge and saying
Speaker 1: in thirty days there will be more attacks in different
Speaker 1: cities the messages that, Yeah, like you can. One way
Speaker 1: to look at this is if if they don't have
Speaker 1: tons of like you know, members are allies that they
Speaker 1: know across different cities. Is that and anyone can do this,
Speaker 1: Like anyone can do this and call themselves by that
Speaker 1: name and be a part of this larger thing like
Speaker 1: it's you if you if you spread it around, then
Speaker 1: that it can become like this, this thing that anyone
Speaker 1: can gloam onto. It doesn't need to be you don't
Speaker 1: need to be a part of a member of a
Speaker 1: specific group. You can just do stuff and release communicates
Speaker 1: safely and add add on to the to the to
Speaker 1: the specter. Yeah. Um, it's not hard to set up
Speaker 1: like a text drop in the same manner that did
Speaker 1: they did. It is relatively secure. Like there's no perfect
Speaker 1: if you are committing terrorism, there is no perfect manner
Speaker 1: to issue a statement. Um, but of the different things
Speaker 1: they could have chosen. This is relatively secure, especially doing
Speaker 1: it through an intermediary. I haven't had direct contact with
Speaker 1: these people, but UM, we should probably note that there's
Speaker 1: a huge discourse that started before the communic A came
Speaker 1: out arguing that this is like a false flag attack. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's yes, that in a long line of calling a
Speaker 1: pretty pretty well planned out direct action. When it actually happens,
Speaker 1: people will defalse to calling it an OP. We're calling
Speaker 1: it a false flag from a very people like that.
Speaker 1: There's there's like there's like libs who say, oh, this
Speaker 1: is a stage thing to make our movement look bad.
Speaker 1: There's tank kys who think it's like the CIA planning something.
Speaker 1: There's random other folks who are like, hey, I don't
Speaker 1: know if it's legit. I think maybe it's like some
Speaker 1: it's a lot of people get very various justifications for
Speaker 1: calling pretty effective acts of direct action UM and questioning
Speaker 1: questioning their legitimacy. I think some of this comes from
Speaker 1: because there's obviously there's the bad faith elements of this UM,
Speaker 1: but I think the good faith folks who questioned it,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of learned helplessness there. This idea that
Speaker 1: because somebody did carry out a pretty successful direct action
Speaker 1: attack that kind of did what its intention was, then
Speaker 1: it has to have been the FBI or whoever, right,
Speaker 1: because obviously the left could never have pulled off something
Speaker 1: as as cunning as throwing a single molotov at a
Speaker 1: building and spray painting the side of it, you know. Um,
Speaker 1: and I do think that that's a problem. Whether or
Speaker 1: not you think the solution to issues like the right
Speaker 1: wing attack on reproductive healthcare come from direct action, the
Speaker 1: fact that folks almost can't conceive of effective action being
Speaker 1: taken by the left without the FEDS being involved is
Speaker 1: really an issue. Yeah, this was a huge thing during
Speaker 1: one of the things that we saw there. There were
Speaker 1: so many just weird conspiracy theories, and then the everything
Speaker 1: that happened very quickly was people became convinced almost immediately
Speaker 1: that anyone doing anything was it was a federal infiltrator.
Speaker 1: And you've got people, you got crowds turning people over
Speaker 1: to police. You got people on Twitter like trying to
Speaker 1: track down, um, like who was throwing malltops and videos
Speaker 1: and like one of the people they caught and they
Speaker 1: turned over the police. It turned out had been had been.
Speaker 1: The girlfriend is someone who got killed by the cops,
Speaker 1: and so I mean this stuff, this stuff has has
Speaker 1: The stuff has real world consequences. It has already like
Speaker 1: sent people to jail, it has it has this normost
Speaker 1: demobilizing effect of me. I don't remember people two people
Speaker 1: remember the okay, the two two two big Okay, the
Speaker 1: two big Twitter conspiracies were um bricks bricks and who yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: There's hoping that people like people would see a major
Speaker 1: right next to a to a construction site, They'll be like,
Speaker 1: how are all these pallets of bricks showing up this
Speaker 1: there's like a construction site of block away. You're like, okay,
Speaker 1: who's distributing the fireworks? How do these fireworks get here?
Speaker 1: Never mind June. The history of like like the FBI,
Speaker 1: some people will mistakenly like throw the CIA in there.
Speaker 1: The CIA doesn't really tend to do like the domestic
Speaker 1: facory um, they're international fay. But like, if you look
Speaker 1: at the history of the FBI fucking with left wing
Speaker 1: social movements, it's not by handing out brick palates. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but that's not what they do. We have a lot
Speaker 1: of documentation about what they do and it's not bricks.
Speaker 1: And if there is some secret group who's maliciously giving
Speaker 1: out bricks so people attack, throw them through windows, or
Speaker 1: throw them at cop cars, like who cares? Like bricks
Speaker 1: are getting throw a cop cars. It doesn't matter where
Speaker 1: they come from. Like people are still choosing to do action. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the best example of this is is the Russian Revolution n. No. Five.
Speaker 1: The Russian Revolution of n. Five was started by a
Speaker 1: guy who was a police agent. Like his whole thing
Speaker 1: is he was he was he was working to create
Speaker 1: like unions that could be controlled by the state, and
Speaker 1: he marched a bunch of people into a square and
Speaker 1: the police shot them. And that's how and that's how.
Speaker 1: That's literally how the Russian Revolution started. Like it doesn't.
Speaker 1: It doesn't like there's there's a there's a point, Okay,
Speaker 1: they're they're like, there's two layers of this. One is
Speaker 1: that like there there almost is never a conspiracy going
Speaker 1: on into if the conspiracy is we want to push
Speaker 1: people towards doing things. It almost it doesn't. There's a
Speaker 1: point at which it stops mattering because a lot a
Speaker 1: lot of people forget about acams rights. There when you're
Speaker 1: talking about these types of things. Usually, the more simple
Speaker 1: the answer, the more likely it is. The more the
Speaker 1: less involved parties, the more likely the more likely it is.
Speaker 1: So if there's a choice between rad people fucking up
Speaker 1: an anti choice headquarters versus a government conspiracy to do
Speaker 1: false flag operations to make the antichos to make the
Speaker 1: abortion movement look bad, like, one of those is much
Speaker 1: more simple and much more likely. And it's people just
Speaker 1: deciding to do stuff because guess what you can You
Speaker 1: can actually do that. You don't need to allow these
Speaker 1: these weird narratives to to like to justify your uncomfortableness
Speaker 1: at like at forms of radical direct action, because it's
Speaker 1: it's people use that false flag idea, so so they
Speaker 1: don't need to actually engage with what direct action will mean.
Speaker 1: And if it is someone's moral imperative to physically attack
Speaker 1: like physical manifestations of these sources of oppression, yeah, I
Speaker 1: think you're right on the money there. I think one
Speaker 1: of the things that's most frustrating to me about this
Speaker 1: is it kind of suggests that a sizeable chunk of
Speaker 1: people who ostensibly consider themselves on the left are like
Speaker 1: focusing their time not on doing anything and not on
Speaker 1: taking any action to materially change the conditions. They're angry
Speaker 1: at um, but are instead looking for reasons to disavow
Speaker 1: other folks on the left, and that that's like the
Speaker 1: primary which is if you again, if you like look
Speaker 1: at what we know Herbert Herbert Hoover was saying about
Speaker 1: the FBI's co Intel pro program was the goal of
Speaker 1: co Intel pro right, That's what That's exactly what I
Speaker 1: was thinking. I'm just like, I feel like this promotes
Speaker 1: I don't know, a morality like race or like just
Speaker 1: like competition, where the only thing it does is just
Speaker 1: promote infighting. When you have this, like you're on your
Speaker 1: morality horse. But I think if you actually support real change,
Speaker 1: you have to come to terms with like you have
Speaker 1: to do illegal things and like holding on too, like
Speaker 1: these made up laws that someone made up about like
Speaker 1: how to achieve change is useless. And there's i mean,
Speaker 1: like dividing up a side that's supposed to be going
Speaker 1: for the same thing. Like that's exactly yeah, it's just
Speaker 1: it's missing the point and people don't really Yeah, if
Speaker 1: you look at the right, you've got all these folks
Speaker 1: who were like legal and and whatnot, Uh, proponents of
Speaker 1: of ending reproductive health care access and any of the
Speaker 1: folks who were doing repeated acts of terrorism. And the
Speaker 1: folks who were on the legal side of things didn't
Speaker 1: disavow those people. They were often affiliated with churches that
Speaker 1: did shoot like auction off the possessions of like extremists
Speaker 1: who had murdered doctors and ship like they were like
Speaker 1: even the most they would do is just not directly
Speaker 1: talk about those people. They didn't disavow them, they didn't
Speaker 1: like attack it because they understood that a diversity of
Speaker 1: tactics was going to be how they achieved their goals.
Speaker 1: That it was a mix of pushing for these legal
Speaker 1: changes and carrying out so many terroristic attacks that it
Speaker 1: frightened people away from supporting UM abortion service providers and
Speaker 1: other kind of reproductive healthcare service providers. UM difference between
Speaker 1: the right and the left, though, Like Democratic Republicans are
Speaker 1: really good at uniting on this big picture, and I
Speaker 1: feel like Democrats are not. I feel like they just uh,
Speaker 1: I don't know, it's too there's too much in fighting,
Speaker 1: and that's why it's always fractured. Part of it is
Speaker 1: that on the Republican side, you have Republicans and you
Speaker 1: have the far right who are also Republicans. And even
Speaker 1: though a lot of folks on the far right bitch
Speaker 1: about the centrists in their upboard, like the folks who
Speaker 1: are closer to the center, they all get in line
Speaker 1: for really radical stuff, Like the center of the Republican
Speaker 1: Party always yields to the radicals, whereas Democrats do not
Speaker 1: acknowledge leftists as having anything to do with with the
Speaker 1: Democratic Party or democratic politics other than the yell at
Speaker 1: them when they don't vote. Um. And on the other
Speaker 1: hand of things, there's a lot of folks on the
Speaker 1: left who hate liberals more than they hate fascists, you know. Um,
Speaker 1: And it's it's I think one of those is a
Speaker 1: bigger problem than the other. I think that the failure
Speaker 1: of the democratic establishment to like deal with the left
Speaker 1: at all, um, or make any kind of progress that
Speaker 1: could be seen as as actually left. Actually yeah, but
Speaker 1: but I think I think there's they're there. I think
Speaker 1: there's structural reasons for that too, Which is okay, if
Speaker 1: if you look at what is the basis of conservative alliance, Right,
Speaker 1: if you're a conservative, you know, okay, if you're from
Speaker 1: the sort of like moderate business wing, get the party
Speaker 1: if you're from the fascist wing, get the party right,
Speaker 1: you can have one judge who gives both of you
Speaker 1: the things that you want right, because if you're if
Speaker 1: you're like the Koke Brothers, the thing that you want
Speaker 1: is the regulation. Right, you want to be able to
Speaker 1: just like dump poison into the environments. If you're on,
Speaker 1: if you're on, if you're an evangelical, the thing that
Speaker 1: you want is uh, you know, to no one can
Speaker 1: ever have an abortion again. And you know, if if
Speaker 1: if you're like a fascist, I don't know, maybe you
Speaker 1: want like we don't give food to immigrant children anymore,
Speaker 1: so they start to death. And one judge can give
Speaker 1: you all of those same things because the the sort
Speaker 1: of the the class and social issues of the Republican
Speaker 1: base can all be fused together without harboring each other.
Speaker 1: But the problem with with with this with the Democratic
Speaker 1: Party is that like the Democratic Party's basis is like
Speaker 1: what's left of the Union movement, but then also like
Speaker 1: a bunch of corporations and banks and like weapons manufacturers
Speaker 1: and stuff, but then also like a bunch of angry
Speaker 1: students and also like a bunch of people from different
Speaker 1: minority groups, and all of these people like have different
Speaker 1: interests and you know, in the Democratic Party, ultimately like
Speaker 1: the thing, the thing that they care about is keeping
Speaker 1: capitalism going. And you know if if they have to
Speaker 1: like if that means that, yeah, I mean well okay,
Speaker 1: if if if your things you want to keep capitalis
Speaker 1: and going, like of course you're just gonna throw your
Speaker 1: left wing out to the wolves, right like it. It
Speaker 1: makes sense for them to do this because because the
Speaker 1: part of their base that actually matters isn't like the
Speaker 1: labor movement, it's like it's Goldman Sachs. I think that
Speaker 1: one of the other things that that causes people to
Speaker 1: have this like immediately anyhow someone does someone does. Like
Speaker 1: people remember like when and Nancy Pelosi's driveway got graffiti,
Speaker 1: like that was like that's never never, that's horrible. Don't
Speaker 1: graffiti Nancy Pelosi's driveway. That's evil. Yeah, like it's an
Speaker 1: isis you did nicest there? Yeah? Everyone lost their mind
Speaker 1: and was like, oh, this is obviously a false flag,
Speaker 1: and it's like what you know, But the reason they
Speaker 1: do this is because they have they have like Democrat
Speaker 1: optics brain were like I said, if anything being about politics,
Speaker 1: every everything is just about optics. And optics and how
Speaker 1: does it look? How does it look? How does it look?
Speaker 1: Like the only people who care about this are like
Speaker 1: weird pundits, but because because because everyone's so sort of
Speaker 1: absorbed in like the Twitter media's fear, like they think
Speaker 1: that like the actual general public cares about the things
Speaker 1: that pundits care about because the only thing they're seeing
Speaker 1: is pundits writing angry articles. But like nobody cared like
Speaker 1: zero people, especially the graffiti thing, because man, people like
Speaker 1: dissect how someone sprayed an anarchist a. It's like if
Speaker 1: you're not aware, like a big chunk of the discord,
Speaker 1: are e it being a false flag or whatever? Was that?
Speaker 1: The incursive? Yeah, and that they did. They did as
Speaker 1: they did like um, the anarchy a inside the inside
Speaker 1: the circle. Um. And it's wild because I mean, spray
Speaker 1: painting what they said, like if if abortions aren't safe,
Speaker 1: then you are either in cursive is a genius move.
Speaker 1: It's great because if you're spray painted in some like
Speaker 1: random punk fond that's easy to be ignored like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's just people doing like whatever, people prey any stuff.
Speaker 1: But doing it like methodically in cursive is is actually
Speaker 1: a really good choice because you're like, oh, it's like
Speaker 1: we're dealing with adults. It's like like the type of
Speaker 1: things that people will go through their minds when they
Speaker 1: look at it is great. Um, and it's just a
Speaker 1: weird denial to assume that no one who takes radical
Speaker 1: direct action whatever write in cursive. It's just it's like
Speaker 1: the most the most brainworms thing. And it's also like
Speaker 1: it's also very clear, like like okay, so I am
Speaker 1: very bad at spray painting, right, but like I have
Speaker 1: I have used a spray paint can, and well, this
Speaker 1: is an aged I was. I was, I was making
Speaker 1: I was making banners for stuff, So this wasn't even
Speaker 1: like this wasn't even cryings, but this is just like
Speaker 1: regular spray painting. It's like that is hard, Like writing
Speaker 1: that incursive and having it look that nice with the
Speaker 1: spray pain can is like difficult, which you know, if
Speaker 1: if you think about this about five seconds, this makes
Speaker 1: it more likely that it's actually left just doing this
Speaker 1: because it's like, what, okay, hold on, So the anti
Speaker 1: abortion people have one person who's really really good at graffiti,
Speaker 1: and this person that they've decided yeah, theist school and
Speaker 1: secret like learning. It's like it's nonsense, but it's like
Speaker 1: people people just people want everything to sort of like
Speaker 1: like and I think this is the other angle of
Speaker 1: this is that people think that like have this wild
Speaker 1: overassessment of the capacity of the state. Yeah, and they
Speaker 1: think that anytime something looks slightly weird, it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: it must be the state. Like like one of the
Speaker 1: one of the things that happened with with the Brooklyn
Speaker 1: shooting tube was like you had all these people that
Speaker 1: there's a tweet going around that was like, oh, like
Speaker 1: the cameras just happened. All all the cameras, all the
Speaker 1: cameras in New York were working except the exact one
Speaker 1: that would have caught the shooter. And this is this
Speaker 1: is like everyone circled around this and everyone was like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, this is a false flag. And then
Speaker 1: know it turned out that like the guy had literally
Speaker 1: called the police, but the police were so incompetent that
Speaker 1: like other people like saw him on the street and
Speaker 1: got to him before like the cops did. And and
Speaker 1: like the camera it turned out wasn't even like the
Speaker 1: camera that was out wasn't even the camera that like
Speaker 1: like they had him on camera. It was a different camera,
Speaker 1: but it was like everyone everyone just immediately has this
Speaker 1: like conspiracy brain thing where they see like one thing
Speaker 1: out of context that looks slightly weird and they go,
Speaker 1: oh my god. This whole thing is is is a
Speaker 1: state like c a like depressing. It's so depressing because
Speaker 1: it's such it's so depowering your specific you're like it
Speaker 1: ties into the learned helpless, this thing that Robert mentioned,
Speaker 1: like you're convincing yourself that we don't have power to
Speaker 1: change things, that we cannot take any physical action to
Speaker 1: change things. Um. And that's not great mentality to have
Speaker 1: if you want to improve the world or if you
Speaker 1: want to if you want to destroy the things that
Speaker 1: harve you, Um, you do. You don't want to fall
Speaker 1: into that that specific like I don't have any power
Speaker 1: mindset because you turns out you can do stuff. Things happened,
Speaker 1: you can. People threw a ball off and broke windows
Speaker 1: and cool people sometimes do cool things, yes, just like
Speaker 1: the people stuff. Yes. The Sophie Sophie Sophie, Sophie Sophie
Speaker 1: one of the things that's interesting to me, and it
Speaker 1: it might hold some lessons for folks thinking about radical
Speaker 1: direct action. And what gets attention and what doesn't. So
Speaker 1: obviously this attack has garnered a lot of national attention,
Speaker 1: right the fact that I think because there was both
Speaker 1: an attack and a message, there was another attack. And
Speaker 1: it's not a p that this had anything to do
Speaker 1: with the pro choice movement, UM, but I suspect it does.
Speaker 1: The Attorney General Virginia Jason Miarez UM, on the tenth
Speaker 1: of May, there was a somewhat shot into his office,
Speaker 1: like a bullet was found in the office. UM. It
Speaker 1: was probably fired when no one was there. We don't
Speaker 1: really know more than that. It is unclear as to
Speaker 1: whether or not this is involved with things. But three
Speaker 1: days before the shot was fired into his office, he
Speaker 1: had basically Catholic groups had been planning big masses to
Speaker 1: celebrate the leaked draft opinion, and protesters had been organizing
Speaker 1: to protest the Catholic masses, and he had threatened to
Speaker 1: charge people who protested masses. UM, because he believes the
Speaker 1: right to freedom of religion trump's the right of free speech.
Speaker 1: So it's kind of like a fucked up situation. People
Speaker 1: got angry at me ares UM, and it seems kind
Speaker 1: of noteworthy that someone shot into his office three days
Speaker 1: after this. I mean also, I mean there's been a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff like on on May eight, there was
Speaker 1: an attack on the organ Rights to Life building. Yes, yes, yes,
Speaker 1: there was certainly appro choice. Yeah yeah, there was there,
Speaker 1: there was there was at least two multop cocktails throne
Speaker 1: and there was a break and inside. So it's like
Speaker 1: you can do things. You don't have no power like
Speaker 1: you can physical you can interact with the politics in
Speaker 1: a physical way. Um, people do interact with politics in
Speaker 1: a physical way. Yeah. And and people people have this
Speaker 1: assumption that like this is going to be incredibly unpopular.
Speaker 1: And again I want to point out burning the third Precinct.
Speaker 1: How to higher approve of rating that both presidential candidates,
Speaker 1: which I mean I I again tend to advocate in
Speaker 1: we should elect the burning of the third Precinct in
Speaker 1: Minneapolis as president. Look every look, the way that works
Speaker 1: is the burning of the precinct takes off this and
Speaker 1: then every day you burn another precinct. So that's so
Speaker 1: that you can actually have a president. Well that is
Speaker 1: how you fill the cabinet. Yeah, there needs to yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you have to eat well, yeah, all all all the
Speaker 1: staff positions filled with the Health and the Health and
Speaker 1: Human Services Secretary will be the West Los Angeles Police
Speaker 1: station and so forth. Yes, I'm really excited to see
Speaker 1: which one gets picked for the Housing Secretary. I am
Speaker 1: just on my on my toes. Just's exciting, exciting. Democracy
Speaker 1: can be quite far. Electoralism has some has some really cool,
Speaker 1: really cool points. Yeah, hey, you you too could go
Speaker 1: in front of the National Labor Relations Board and the
Speaker 1: National Labor Relations Board is just seven? Is just seven?
Speaker 1: On fire police stations? Charred really win? So yeah, we
Speaker 1: just we just want we wanted to at least talk
Speaker 1: about this because if whenever a cool thing happens and
Speaker 1: a large swath of of of people who are ostensibly
Speaker 1: leftists or even or even anarchists default to calling anything
Speaker 1: cool a false flag or notp it's like, well, like
Speaker 1: what do you want? Like you want people just to
Speaker 1: stay at home all the time and not do anything? Like,
Speaker 1: what's what's the end goal here? If you're calling everything
Speaker 1: that happens enough. Yeah, and also just like if you're
Speaker 1: going to if you're worried about ops and thinking of
Speaker 1: suggesting that something might be what is your line? Is
Speaker 1: it just that people broke a law? Are you saying
Speaker 1: that if people do illegal things, that's always like a
Speaker 1: government op because that doesn't seem like yourself an anarchist,
Speaker 1: doesn't seem like a good strategy. Yeah, especially when it
Speaker 1: comes to reproductive rights, like you're gonna have to do
Speaker 1: illegal things, if people are gonna have to break exactly
Speaker 1: pick and choose. I'm a hundred percent convinced that like
Speaker 1: all of these people, if they'd seen John Brown, would
Speaker 1: have been completely convinced the John Brown. Oh, John Brown
Speaker 1: was for sure the FBI, he founded it, the original
Speaker 1: op John Brown. I think that there's an aspect there
Speaker 1: of also like okay, if if if you're on Twitter
Speaker 1: right mostly or not doing politics, and the thing that
Speaker 1: you're actually doing on Twitter is trying to feel smarter
Speaker 1: for everyone else, and if you're the person that's like,
Speaker 1: oh hey, look all these people believe that this thing
Speaker 1: wasn't an op or like oh I A yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like it's like, yeah, okay, you you very quickly like
Speaker 1: spiral into just like every all all the all the
Speaker 1: sheeople to smart fight this suspicious like it's it's like
Speaker 1: it's it's just a bad like looking at an element
Speaker 1: of event and going oh, this is weird, but in
Speaker 1: a way that is oh hauh, isn't this weird? It
Speaker 1: must be the government, Like that's that's just a bad
Speaker 1: way of thinking. Like in in the mirror hours, in
Speaker 1: the mirror minutes after anonymous people broke into the Portland
Speaker 1: Police Association headquarters back in I think was July, just
Speaker 1: mirror hours, people were calling it a false flag that
Speaker 1: the police were dressed to the black block the people
Speaker 1: and started protesting. The Feds. Yes, they alleged that this
Speaker 1: was like I guess the FBI or Homeland Security trying
Speaker 1: to get protesters angry at the cops again, which is
Speaker 1: I mean, for one thing, if actually happened, if there
Speaker 1: were to be a point where the left wing had
Speaker 1: the FBI fighting or the FBI or Homeland Security whatever
Speaker 1: fighting with local police over who was getting protested, that's
Speaker 1: a win. That's a that's a big, solid capital dub
Speaker 1: for the But people like the FBI is a block
Speaker 1: breaking into the police union building and trying to light
Speaker 1: it on fire, you're like, well, doing doing less physical,
Speaker 1: let's be honest, doing less damage to that police union
Speaker 1: building that I have seen my friends do when attempting
Speaker 1: to deep fry French Fries. Like I have watched people
Speaker 1: do more damage to their living rooms than that protested.
Speaker 1: The people's astonishing because like there was so many people
Speaker 1: at that action, and so many, so many people using
Speaker 1: the moment to to actually gain like physical political power
Speaker 1: for a brief a brief moment um, and to take
Speaker 1: that away from them is just as a bizarre impulse.
Speaker 1: And I would like to see it end, especially as
Speaker 1: we're going to see hopefully see that people will realize
Speaker 1: that that that direct action is going to become more
Speaker 1: and more important for securing your personal rights and securing
Speaker 1: your personal freedom. And also I would say these people, Okay,
Speaker 1: if you want to be completely sure if that something
Speaker 1: is happening is not an off, do it yourself. Stop
Speaker 1: yelling about it on Twitter. Do it yourself. Then you'll
Speaker 1: know it's not an off as a general rule. As
Speaker 1: a general rule, look at France. What do the French
Speaker 1: do whenever something they consider a right gets taken away
Speaker 1: from them? They burn downtown Paris down, They light banks
Speaker 1: on fire. They like Paris. Everyone who has gets select
Speaker 1: did to a position of power in France knows that
Speaker 1: if they cross certain lines, the capital will be ungovernable UM,
Speaker 1: and there's a reason why French people have such quality healthcare.
Speaker 1: Well with with with that note, I mean, I can't
Speaker 1: believe we're ending on the note be be like the French.
Speaker 1: I just is that is the friendship made a lot
Speaker 1: of good calls, a lot of bad ones to not
Speaker 1: trying to whitewash France, but there's a there's a number
Speaker 1: of things they got spot on. Anyway, we will we
Speaker 1: will be counting down the days until that thirty day marker,
Speaker 1: and who knows, maybe other attacks will happen with people
Speaker 1: also calling themselves Jane's revenge because and obviously this is
Speaker 1: something that we as journalists have no opinion on one
Speaker 1: way or the other. We're just reporting, just pure reporting. Anyway,
Speaker 1: Listen to listen to people who did cool stuff, to
Speaker 1: to hear about the Jane collective, and maybe also recreationally
Speaker 1: read about what different civilian groups are doing in Ukraine
Speaker 1: and the degree to which a wide variety of incredibly
Speaker 1: available tools UM can can be repurposed in neat ways.
Speaker 1: All right, I think I think that I think e'spisode
Speaker 1: that's a good sude. Hey, everybody welcome to it could
Speaker 1: happen here, and it continues to happen here. UM. I'm
Speaker 1: Robert Evans. This is a podcast about things falling apart
Speaker 1: and what to do after that happens. And we are
Speaker 1: all currently dealing with the falling apart of several decades
Speaker 1: of progress on reproductive justice. UM. The Supreme Court leaking
Speaker 1: that UM they are coming for Roe v. Wade and UM. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Today I'm here with Christopher Wong and Sharine Launie Unice
Speaker 1: UM and my producer Sophie. We have two guests from
Speaker 1: the bridget Alliance in the Midwest Access Coalition. We're going
Speaker 1: to talk more about what they do in a second.
Speaker 1: Broadly speaking, both seek to UM attach people who are
Speaker 1: looking for reproductive healthcare and abortion access UM but cannot
Speaker 1: get it easily in their area UM with clinics and
Speaker 1: the things that they need in order to get to
Speaker 1: the clinics, including transit and you know, time and hotels whatnot, UM,
Speaker 1: in order to make it easier to get access to
Speaker 1: that kind of healthcare in places like the Midwest, where
Speaker 1: folks have been spending decades making it much more difficult
Speaker 1: even prior to this recent ruling to get that kind
Speaker 1: of healthcare. So I'm gonna let our guests introduce themselves. UM,
Speaker 1: you've got the floor. Well, Hi, I am O'Dell Shelley.
Speaker 1: I am the executive director at Deep Bridget Alliance, and
Speaker 1: I'm gonna introduce my counterpart here. I'm Diana Parker trusta
Speaker 1: from the executive director of the Midwest Access Coalition. And yeah,
Speaker 1: so you'll have been in some ways kind of dealing
Speaker 1: with elements of the post row world because obviously, like
Speaker 1: you know, we're all focused on the Supreme Court decision
Speaker 1: that's in the pipeline, but um, anti choice activists have
Speaker 1: been working very hard to essentially create a post row
Speaker 1: world in chunks of the United States prior to this point.
Speaker 1: So you all have been kind of dealing with the
Speaker 1: reality that a larger number of people are going to
Speaker 1: be living under for a while, right. Yeah. Yeah, MRURI
Speaker 1: has been able to effectively bad abortion state for years now.
Speaker 1: I think, Uh, there's maybe a handful of abortions that
Speaker 1: the one clinic there are able to do because of
Speaker 1: all of the trap laws, um, which is the targeted
Speaker 1: restrictions for abortion providers, uh, and the waiting period so
Speaker 1: people have to go to another state. Kansas Iowa or Illinois, Missouri. Um,
Speaker 1: and we've been helping those books for years, and UM,
Speaker 1: I'm going to guess this. I mean, just because you've
Speaker 1: been living in with this for a while, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: guess the announcement last week did not come as a
Speaker 1: total surprise. The timing of it certainly did, which for
Speaker 1: Diana and I came at the heels of a conference
Speaker 1: that we were at thankfully together, which is was kind
Speaker 1: of just pure luck for us so we could actually
Speaker 1: commiserate together. But no, ultimately this is not a huge surprise.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think we're all still waiting to see
Speaker 1: what actually happens in June. That the writing has been
Speaker 1: on the wall for months, in years, if not longer.
Speaker 1: And you know, as you were just pointing it out, essentially,
Speaker 1: for organizations like the bridget Alliance and the Midwest Exist Coalition,
Speaker 1: we have been existing already because the protections of ROW
Speaker 1: are insufficient to actually secure abortion access for all in
Speaker 1: this country. So this has been our lived experience, and
Speaker 1: preparing for this moment has um It has been a
Speaker 1: long time coming, and I'm sure there have been a
Speaker 1: number of conversations that have been going on about what
Speaker 1: to do and how to prepare for this right because
Speaker 1: the primary change is going to be, at least initially
Speaker 1: until some they make some sort of federal push that
Speaker 1: states that have some sort of functional access to abortion
Speaker 1: are going to be flooded with an even higher number
Speaker 1: of people in need of care. Um, could you kind
Speaker 1: of walk us through what sort of steps have been
Speaker 1: taken to in order to kind of brace for that impact,
Speaker 1: so to speak. Yeah, So I think a couple of things.
Speaker 1: And and the first to sort of pull back on
Speaker 1: that for a second is to say that part of
Speaker 1: preparing for what's to come has been our orgs in
Speaker 1: the community that we exist in. This this incredible expansive
Speaker 1: landscape of different types of organizations that have existed for
Speaker 1: decades to secure abortion access where the laws were insufficient,
Speaker 1: where um people were faced with barriers like income and
Speaker 1: equity and geographic inequity and the unavailability of providers. UM.
Speaker 1: This network, though, has existed largely unseen, and so a
Speaker 1: lot of preparing for what is to come is really
Speaker 1: embracing our existence, feeling affirmed in that and in our value,
Speaker 1: not shying away from the expertise within this community which
Speaker 1: is held book by volunteers as well as staff UM,
Speaker 1: and so I think a lot of the last couple
Speaker 1: of years has been focusing on really trying to harness
Speaker 1: that expertise and that knowledge and compassion and the fact
Speaker 1: that many of the people who are leading a lot
Speaker 1: of the efforts in the reproductive justice movement are people
Speaker 1: who have had abortions themselves, which is a enormous and
Speaker 1: valuable part of how this movement moves and hopefully will
Speaker 1: continue to center the people most impacted by the fall
Speaker 1: of row UM. I think, more specifically for Bridget and
Speaker 1: or its like MAC preparation means deepening our relationships with
Speaker 1: the clinics that we work with. They are critical, of course,
Speaker 1: and their sanity is critical to abortion access. Is making
Speaker 1: sure that we have the sufficient funding to continue to
Speaker 1: staff train that volunteers systematically and mindfully UM, and ideally
Speaker 1: do so in a sustainable way so that we're not
Speaker 1: all overwhelming ourselves with the sudden surge of need and
Speaker 1: the sudden surge of impact UM. And then you know,
Speaker 1: for Diana and I even personally, it means deepening the
Speaker 1: relationships that US practical support organizations have with one another,
Speaker 1: because no one organization is going to be able to
Speaker 1: help every single abortion seeker who will need to travel.
Speaker 1: It will rely upon really strong and transparent collaboration. So
Speaker 1: those are some of the things that you've been focusing on.
Speaker 1: One of the things that strikes me as a problem
Speaker 1: that's going to be, if not immediate, been pretty imminent
Speaker 1: for y'all is we've already seen threats and promises from
Speaker 1: legislators in some states to attempt to criminalize leaving a
Speaker 1: state where abortion is illegal in order to get access
Speaker 1: to healthcare. How what what kind of preparation is even
Speaker 1: possible for that sort of world, because it does seem
Speaker 1: like we're staring down the barrel of that. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think the only preparation we can have right now is
Speaker 1: to expect that the corners will allow them to do that. Um.
Speaker 1: They're very creative now that they've seen a going to
Speaker 1: effect and hold on as the law of the land,
Speaker 1: even though it's in direct violation of federal law. UM
Speaker 1: scode us the highest code court of our country, UH
Speaker 1: is the one that has been allowing that to happen.
Speaker 1: And so that sends a huge message to all these
Speaker 1: UH force birth legislators that you know, bring us your
Speaker 1: worst take on the law. We will find a way
Speaker 1: to let you keep it. UM. We're we're working with
Speaker 1: you on this, and UM, you just need to get
Speaker 1: bolder and bolder and see what you can get away with.
Speaker 1: So we can't really predict how they're going to do that,
Speaker 1: although Missouri has indicated that they're going to consider an
Speaker 1: a guessing as it's fertilized a resident and um, a
Speaker 1: resident of the state, that they have, you know, responsibility
Speaker 1: for protecting um completely ignoring the fact that it's growing
Speaker 1: inside a complete human being that has rights. UM. But
Speaker 1: that's that's the latest that I've heard of them figuring
Speaker 1: out how to restrict someone's someone's travel um M. But
Speaker 1: it would require a significant shift in how we understand
Speaker 1: constitutional law and um the basis for our legal system. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that that seems like something that I don't know,
Speaker 1: like really genuinely seems to be on the table in
Speaker 1: this moment. I mean, we have I think it's Louisiana
Speaker 1: who's trying to like part part part of their bill
Speaker 1: is that they like literally it says that they can
Speaker 1: disobey the federal government, which we had a civil war
Speaker 1: about that. We had we had a nullification crisis about
Speaker 1: that we like, so, yeah, I guess I'm wondering what
Speaker 1: your impression is on like how far this can go?
Speaker 1: Like do do we get to the point where states
Speaker 1: can just like tell the federal government no, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that's what the architect of the st law
Speaker 1: essentially told The part is that they don't have jurisdiction
Speaker 1: and all the law is that they have passed in
Speaker 1: the eight hundreds are actually um enforceable, and the federal
Speaker 1: government has no authority to stop them, and uh they
Speaker 1: are the fifth district An Scotus has indicated that maybe
Speaker 1: you are right, maybe that is the correct way to
Speaker 1: interpret our constitution. Um. So I feel like all of that,
Speaker 1: all of our decades centuries of um figuring out what
Speaker 1: the law means for this country is just up in
Speaker 1: the air, and we may be looking at laws now
Speaker 1: that are just more and more buzzarre. Um. As long
Speaker 1: as you know the GOP and the Right have control
Speaker 1: over so many bodies of our government. You it really is,
Speaker 1: I can't even fathom. I don't think we can predict
Speaker 1: what's going to come honestly, UM, I mean I'm also
Speaker 1: wondering to put it crudely will legislators in states that
Speaker 1: are currently committing because we have seen a number of states,
Speaker 1: California kind of leading the pack committing to maintain um
Speaker 1: access to to to abortion and other forms of reproductive
Speaker 1: health care, they are being threatened right now. Do do
Speaker 1: you like, do you feel like you have a good
Speaker 1: chance that they are going to back you, especially in
Speaker 1: the event of, you know, laws that would potentially open
Speaker 1: people like you up to criminal charges just for trying
Speaker 1: to support people in getting you know, reproductive health care
Speaker 1: outside of their state. Is your question? Do you do
Speaker 1: we think that elected officials that are pro choice are
Speaker 1: going to back us? Yeah? Yeah, yeah? Do you like
Speaker 1: it's entirely possible that we're going to see some sort
Speaker 1: of federal law that not just criminalizes abortion or even
Speaker 1: like prior to that criminalizes aiding people in seeking a
Speaker 1: ortion outside of states that have banned it, right, Like,
Speaker 1: that's on the table. How does that change the landscape
Speaker 1: for it? Do you suspect that, like in kind of
Speaker 1: a similar way to how some of these some of
Speaker 1: the legislators and states trying to ban abortion and said,
Speaker 1: like we're just going to ignore federal law. If that
Speaker 1: contradicts our state law. Do you think that, um? Do
Speaker 1: you think that pro choice legislators in states you know,
Speaker 1: like California are going to be willing to go to
Speaker 1: the mat and protect you? Or are are we? I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess I I know this is kind of an unknown,
Speaker 1: but I'm kind of these must be conversations that y'all
Speaker 1: are having, right, I mean, I really freaking hope that
Speaker 1: they are. And if they're listening, please please prepare to
Speaker 1: do so. And it's been really heartening to see states
Speaker 1: like California and Oregon, in Illinois and New York and
Speaker 1: Connecticut for instance, UM, come up with really clear language
Speaker 1: around their support of not just choice, which was the
Speaker 1: language of the past, but abortion and are saying that
Speaker 1: and are starting to invest in things like abortion funding
Speaker 1: and travel to themselves actually, you know, put forth their
Speaker 1: own efforts to contribute to people who will need to
Speaker 1: travel into their states. UM. And you know, Diana was
Speaker 1: just speaking the other day with a bunch of elected
Speaker 1: officials in Chicago. So I think I think this is
Speaker 1: also why what I was talking about earlier in terms
Speaker 1: of orgs like ours coming coming into the light is
Speaker 1: so important. Is that we were going to need those
Speaker 1: relationships with those politicians. We're gonna need them to know
Speaker 1: us and see us and understand that we're a critical
Speaker 1: part of how we're going to serve their constituents and that, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're going to need them to back us. Will they
Speaker 1: I can't say definitively, but I really freaking hope. So yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and hopefully those you know, as O'Dell said just now,
Speaker 1: I was UM in a press conference yesterday, the city
Speaker 1: the Mayor's office announced this fun to support abortion procedure
Speaker 1: funding and practical support. And my hope is with UM,
Speaker 1: municipalities will talk to each other and give each other
Speaker 1: the models for doing UH this protective, preemptive UH support
Speaker 1: for people traveling to our states for abortion care. And
Speaker 1: UM yeah, I'm in with talks with the a c
Speaker 1: l U in Illinois to talk about potential UM bills
Speaker 1: that are floating around to even further protect UH puption
Speaker 1: in this state. Specifically, I know of one that wants
Speaker 1: to explicitly protect providers from being extradited or sued or
Speaker 1: shut down by prosecutors in other states that want to
Speaker 1: claim that they have to jurisdiction because like like I said,
Speaker 1: they figured out a way to give residency status to
Speaker 1: fertilize eggs or something. Yeah, it's just completely fun that
Speaker 1: that's kind of what we're staring at right like that
Speaker 1: that's the thing that you have to be concerned with,
Speaker 1: is like out of state law enforcement. I don't know,
Speaker 1: like and and that's the thing. No one knows what
Speaker 1: it's going to look like, right Like we know that
Speaker 1: they have a vested kind of interest already in doing
Speaker 1: parts of this through bounties, which is kind of like
Speaker 1: the thing that I'm worried about. Are we going to
Speaker 1: see like out of state law enforcement bounty hunting people
Speaker 1: trying to folks up with reproductive healthcare? And I guess
Speaker 1: that's just kind of an unknown at this point, but
Speaker 1: it's right, and it really depends on like our local
Speaker 1: protected state juristics, Like how far are they going to
Speaker 1: go to protect us from those entities that are going
Speaker 1: to try to come in for us? Um. Just just today,
Speaker 1: one of our staff members tweeted about practical support funds
Speaker 1: and who to support throughout the country that provides the
Speaker 1: sort of travel logistics for people, and they got followed
Speaker 1: by a sheriff department in Missouri Yeah, so they're already
Speaker 1: out targeting and surveilling uh, abortion seekers and that people
Speaker 1: who support them. Yeah, and of course I'm sure that
Speaker 1: there's a degree to which some of these folks are
Speaker 1: working with um, shall we say, like nonstate actors in
Speaker 1: order to like, I know they've been prepping with that
Speaker 1: for a while as well. Um, what is I mean
Speaker 1: one of the things that I know because I've been
Speaker 1: having some conversations with friends of mine who are and
Speaker 1: like I guess we could say adjacently adjacent organizations to
Speaker 1: to where y'all work and who are at in some
Speaker 1: cases the convention you were at, who are concerned that
Speaker 1: as providing people with reproductive healthcare becomes illegal. Um, there's
Speaker 1: going to be a lot of fair weather friends kind
Speaker 1: of revealed and I I am interested, like, is this
Speaker 1: a thing that in order to be engaged in providing
Speaker 1: people with reproductive health care you have to be willing
Speaker 1: to engage in illegalism at this point? Like is that
Speaker 1: where we are? That's really interesting question. Yeah, as as
Speaker 1: members like as bribing C threes, uh, you know looked
Speaker 1: at by our state governments are federal governments. We can't
Speaker 1: engage in anything that's legal UM. But people have forever
Speaker 1: on their own dumb things that the state has considered
Speaker 1: illegal in order to have bodily autonomy. UM. There are
Speaker 1: people who can't afford it. There are people who are
Speaker 1: just so far from the nearest clinic that they can't
Speaker 1: even fathom how to make that trip. Uh. They're undocumented folks. UH.
Speaker 1: There are people near the borders that can't even physically
Speaker 1: move past a border trick point because they're just trapped
Speaker 1: there and can't get care UM in other parts of
Speaker 1: their state where it's available. UM. So they're that that
Speaker 1: will be a thing. I think that is going to increase,
Speaker 1: because the need will not decrease UM. And I do not,
Speaker 1: like my organization can't really see anything about that. But
Speaker 1: you know, personally, I'm like, you do whatever it takes
Speaker 1: to live your life and thrive. UM laws are made
Speaker 1: up especially now. Yeah, that is nice to hear, because I,
Speaker 1: you know, I try to keep abreast of the sides
Speaker 1: of this fight that are you know, working through five
Speaker 1: o one ses and and the like, and and engaging
Speaker 1: in electoralism. The people who are you know, doing stuff
Speaker 1: like trying to figure out ways to UM provide access
Speaker 1: to like miss pills and whatnot to people. UM, because
Speaker 1: that's just where we are. We've talked about the degree
Speaker 1: to which you guys have already been living in some
Speaker 1: people's future, you know, just because of the specific nature
Speaker 1: of what your organizations have been doing. UM, and the
Speaker 1: degree to which you know you knew some of this
Speaker 1: is coming. What has surprised you outside of just like
Speaker 1: the fact that it got leaked ahead of time about
Speaker 1: kind of what we've seen in the last weekend change.
Speaker 1: Mm hmmm, mm hmm. I think I am. I'm not
Speaker 1: so much surprised by the response from folks. UM, I'm
Speaker 1: a little frustrated that it took this moment for people
Speaker 1: to realize what has been happening in this country for
Speaker 1: the past decade, few decades. Honestly, this is this is
Speaker 1: a very long game, uh for the antis. But ever
Speaker 1: since Trump was put into office and started just flooding
Speaker 1: the federal courts with very young, very anti conservative judges, UM,
Speaker 1: and SPA was a huge flag. UM. But I think
Speaker 1: I was surprised that there was a mass amount of
Speaker 1: people that we're going to step up when the decision
Speaker 1: came out. UM, it's it gives me hope I hope
Speaker 1: it's sustained for the many many years we're going to
Speaker 1: need uh practical support and abortion funds while we fight
Speaker 1: for legal rights. Um. Yeah, so I guess the surprise
Speaker 1: is a mixed it's a box bad for me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was gonna say something similar that I think I've
Speaker 1: been pleasantly surprised at how well educated and informed a
Speaker 1: lot of our supporters and newer supporters are about. As
Speaker 1: Diana mentioned, the existence of abortion funds and practical support organizations.
Speaker 1: That practical support is and being talked about is huge.
Speaker 1: We couldn't get this conversation into the media a couple
Speaker 1: of years ago, So like, this is really remarkable and important.
Speaker 1: But what's more, there seems to be also like a
Speaker 1: different understanding of why we have to exist. Um, it
Speaker 1: doesn't seem to be shocking people quite as much. A
Speaker 1: but there certainly are still tons of people who are
Speaker 1: shocked by this, But for many they're not shocked that
Speaker 1: for some abortion has simply been inaccessible and what those
Speaker 1: reasons are. Um. And you know, that's thanks obviously to
Speaker 1: a lot of the really hard, important conversations that have
Speaker 1: been had over the last couple of years about racial justice,
Speaker 1: and I think that, you know, it's a silver lining
Speaker 1: for sure, but I'm I'm grateful to find that the
Speaker 1: depth of the conversations is there now and hopefully that
Speaker 1: means that the commitment is going to be sustained in
Speaker 1: long term, because this is a little bit of deja
Speaker 1: vu for us in the sense that we've had little
Speaker 1: moments like these ever since our organized aations existed. Um,
Speaker 1: when a single band goes into place or is threatened
Speaker 1: to go into place, this like swell occurs using my
Speaker 1: hands a lot, which obviously you can't see if you're
Speaker 1: listening to me right now, So I'm gonna put my
Speaker 1: hands down, um, and you know, and that and that
Speaker 1: brings out a lot of really incredible donors and a
Speaker 1: lot of really incredible offers for volunteers, and and then
Speaker 1: they tend to go away. Um. And especially when when
Speaker 1: Biden was you know, elected, and there was definitely this
Speaker 1: like moment where everyone was like, Okay, we're cool, right,
Speaker 1: which this guy hasn't said the word abortion, but we're
Speaker 1: still fine, and we're not we're like the furthest from fine.
Speaker 1: So yeah, again, like pleasantly surprised that people seem to
Speaker 1: have um, a sense of why we're here. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: just wanted to bring up the website. Did Biden say
Speaker 1: abortion yet or its like it's so unfortunately hilarious to me, um,
Speaker 1: but I'm just really glad it exists. Um. And then
Speaker 1: they someone reached out to the someone in the Biden
Speaker 1: administration to make a comment on this when the when
Speaker 1: the the draft was leaked, and they said, well, we
Speaker 1: tweeted it or like whatever it's and it's like it's
Speaker 1: he said it once in a tweet and like once
Speaker 1: in like a statement or something. So I just think
Speaker 1: it's there, you go. I don't know what more we want,
Speaker 1: but like, I just think it's important to what you
Speaker 1: were saying earlier. Um, how legislators in Oregon or California,
Speaker 1: like it's so important they're saying the word abortion, not
Speaker 1: just pro choice, because I think a lot of people
Speaker 1: are a lot of people are scared about that word
Speaker 1: for some reason or it sounds scary to them if
Speaker 1: they're not that educated about what pro choice means or
Speaker 1: what abortion means. So I think I have a little
Speaker 1: bit more hope seeing more people even saying that word, um,
Speaker 1: because it really has pro choice. Yeah. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: the statistics is something like the antis have been using
Speaker 1: the word abortion three times as much as we have,
Speaker 1: and that is why it's so stigmatized and difficult to
Speaker 1: talk about. And I definitely try to encourage people to
Speaker 1: say the word abortion, to talk about abortion with everyone
Speaker 1: they know, just so we can stop hiding. I guess
Speaker 1: kind of the last thing I'd like to ask, and
Speaker 1: we can we can cut this bit if this winds
Speaker 1: up not being something you want to get into. But
Speaker 1: have you have you felt an additional need to worry
Speaker 1: about given how public you are in your advocacy personal
Speaker 1: protection UM as things kind of have heated up, you know,
Speaker 1: we were we were recently at the conference that you
Speaker 1: mentioned before, UM, and it definitely with all of my
Speaker 1: colleagues in one place, it definitely made me feel a
Speaker 1: little vulnerable for myself and them. But honestly, the people
Speaker 1: who are targeted or the providers by far UM, I'm
Speaker 1: not worried about my physical safety. UM. I'm worried about
Speaker 1: the physical safety ever of our providers and the fact
Speaker 1: that our government is responding to peaceful protesters outside kavanas
Speaker 1: Um House and talking and and asked for I think
Speaker 1: Susan Collins on the sidewalk outside her residents results in
Speaker 1: legislation being immediately they all somehow got together for once
Speaker 1: in their lives to do something about the terrorists who
Speaker 1: chalked sidewalks by legislators home. Um uh is it's it's
Speaker 1: really demoralizing. Um because we have our providers have seen
Speaker 1: violence and um yeah, they've seen violence on this every day, murders,
Speaker 1: asset attacks, bombings. Um. Yeah, Chris Sharine, do you have
Speaker 1: anything else you wanted to get into. Yeah, I wanted
Speaker 1: to ask one thing, so, you know, Okay, seeing this
Speaker 1: sort of increasing fectlessness or politicians even by their standards,
Speaker 1: and you know, the response to this being let's give
Speaker 1: more power to the U. S. Marshals, which is great idea,
Speaker 1: the worst idea I've ever seen. But what can just
Speaker 1: people do about this in it? You know, I mean
Speaker 1: we've talked about like giving to abortion funds, but like
Speaker 1: what how how can people get involved and how can
Speaker 1: people get involved in a way that's sustainable of the
Speaker 1: long term. Yeah, I mean, definitely give to abortion funds,
Speaker 1: give to practical support organizations like the Midwest Access Coalition
Speaker 1: and the bridget Alliance. Um. If you are interested in volunteering,
Speaker 1: reach out to your local organization. UM. There are a
Speaker 1: couple of really great resources for lists of those organizations
Speaker 1: and where they are, like the National Network of Abortion
Speaker 1: Funds UM. And you do bear with all of us
Speaker 1: because we are handling a flurry of emails and that's incredible,
Speaker 1: But we won't be able to plug you in immediately. UM.
Speaker 1: It might even take a little bit of time. But
Speaker 1: then I think that you know, voting is still critical,
Speaker 1: especially in local UM, in any local elections, especially if
Speaker 1: we're thinking about how we're going to prevent the possible
Speaker 1: criminalization of abortion seekers and of abortion providers, we need
Speaker 1: to make sure that we've got the judges and good
Speaker 1: local elected officials at the very least, So do not
Speaker 1: stop doing that. UM. Yeah, I think those would be
Speaker 1: the things that I would say, focus on and the
Speaker 1: thing that I always say, which is just like talk
Speaker 1: about it. Like I am totally that person who is
Speaker 1: like the downer at the dinner party talking about abortion,
Speaker 1: But be that person and go and talk about it
Speaker 1: and share why it's important and how it's not just
Speaker 1: about abortion, and it's not just about women, it's about families,
Speaker 1: it's about parents, it's about queer folks, it's it's about immigrants,
Speaker 1: it's about miners. Um, You've got a lot to be
Speaker 1: worried about right now, So don't stop talking, listening, reading,
Speaker 1: consuming whatever you can. Yeah, And just to jump off that,
Speaker 1: if you are in a safe state, you're not going
Speaker 1: You're not going to be safe forever. Uh, They're gonna
Speaker 1: come after us. They're going to come after the legislators.
Speaker 1: The supreme courts of those states. They're usually a thin margin,
Speaker 1: um as far as conservative versus progressive judges on state
Speaker 1: supreme courts. So find out who your local org is
Speaker 1: that is leading that voter turnout to make sure that
Speaker 1: people are voting for the right judges go in. Um.
Speaker 1: And also I wanna lift up escorts. Escorts are on
Speaker 1: the ground many days of the week. They will put
Speaker 1: you to work and they're going to be needed more
Speaker 1: and more. UM. Yeah, I think that's that's all very
Speaker 1: important and a good note to end on. Does anyone
Speaker 1: else have anything else? Or are we um? Should we should?
Speaker 1: We Let y'all get back to your very important work. UM,
Speaker 1: And thank you again for for making the time for us, absolutely,
Speaker 1: thank you for covering us and talking about it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: happy to do so we'll be we'll be continuing to
Speaker 1: to do that. And I hope you all, um, um, jeez,
Speaker 1: I don't even know what to say. Like, I hope you.
Speaker 1: I hope you function up for the people who are
Speaker 1: sucking shut up, you know. But I hope the support
Speaker 1: doesn't like dissipate as like the trend goes away or whatever.
Speaker 1: You know. I think that's so disheartening if that happens.
Speaker 1: And like, hopefully the flood of emails but not necessarily
Speaker 1: remains a flood for you. But like, I hope that
Speaker 1: people are actually serious about doing something. And um, I
Speaker 1: think this time they might be just because I keep
Speaker 1: being surprised about little things, so I'm not gonna expect
Speaker 1: anything anymore. Maybe people were surprising, But I really appreciate
Speaker 1: the work you do. Um, So thanks for coming out
Speaker 1: to talk to us. Thank you for us talk to
Speaker 1: your zoom h six about crack cocaine abuse. Some amount
Speaker 1: of crack cocaine is perfectly normal for recording device you
Speaker 1: to use. It is part of the recording industry. But
Speaker 1: everyone can overdo it. And if your zoom h six
Speaker 1: starts not reading cards or for example, stealing from you
Speaker 1: in ordered upon your stuff to buy more crack cocaine.
Speaker 1: You might need to do an intervention. This has been
Speaker 1: Robert Evans and a public service. And now about the
Speaker 1: zoom h six handhold recorder? How's that? Are we good?
Speaker 1: Is that a good way to introduce a podcast? What
Speaker 1: depends an That's a great question, Sophie. Scholars have debated
Speaker 1: for decades which show this is. But personally it is
Speaker 1: the opinion of myself, uh and a large body of
Speaker 1: researchers at Oxford and Cambridge that this is It could
Speaker 1: happen here a podcast about how things are falling apart
Speaker 1: and how maybe put them back together one of these
Speaker 1: days figure it out. I'm here with Garrison and Chris.
Speaker 1: How are you guys? How are y'all doing? Just just
Speaker 1: absolutely splendid. I'm extremely excited that every time I leave
Speaker 1: Twitter as a new mass shooting there's there was, Like
Speaker 1: this has been weekend. There have been quite a few
Speaker 1: mass shootings in the last forty eight hours, and there's
Speaker 1: a non zero chance there's been at least one between
Speaker 1: when we record this podcast and when you listen to it.
Speaker 1: I'm not trying to be flippant. That's just a reality. UM.
Speaker 1: So I think we're going to talk about the two
Speaker 1: most recent ones, one of which UM was the mass
Speaker 1: shooting in Buffalo, New York by a four chan motherfucking
Speaker 1: white supremacist very much patterned after the twenty nineteen eight
Speaker 1: Chan shootings, particularly the christ Church massacre UM, and then
Speaker 1: the day after. I guess it's not technically a mass
Speaker 1: shooting because only one person was killed, thankfully, UM. But
Speaker 1: there was a shooting that was certainly an attempt to
Speaker 1: be a mass shooting because he attempted to close the
Speaker 1: exit and stop people from leaving at a Taiwanese church
Speaker 1: UM in southern California, UM, which was stopped by the
Speaker 1: congregation before nearly as many people could get killed. UM.
Speaker 1: It appears to be it's just come out, UM, motivated
Speaker 1: by nationalist hatred of Taiwan by a Chinese man. UM.
Speaker 1: That's the broad understanding of both. Its complicated. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: sure we'll get into that that, but we should probably
Speaker 1: deal with them chronologically. UM. The Buffalo shooting is it's
Speaker 1: one of those things I made a big chunk of
Speaker 1: my bones as a journalist in the field that I
Speaker 1: used to spend most of my time reporting and covering
Speaker 1: the eight Chan shootings, and after every one of those
Speaker 1: in twenty nineteen, I had an article within about two hours.
Speaker 1: I haven't written anything about this one. I don't plan
Speaker 1: to because there's not much to say. It is what
Speaker 1: we've seen before. UM. I know there's some debate over
Speaker 1: how much of the man as there should be, over
Speaker 1: like how much of the manifesto you can take at
Speaker 1: face value, which is none of it, um and, as
Speaker 1: to whether or not there might be something more going
Speaker 1: on here. But it is kind of my opinion from
Speaker 1: the information we have, that this is the kind of
Speaker 1: attack we've seen before and the kind of attack we
Speaker 1: will probably see again more than once before the years over.
Speaker 1: You know, this is someone who was radicalized primarily against uh,
Speaker 1: the immigration or the existence really of people who are
Speaker 1: not white in the United States um and believes that
Speaker 1: the best way to cleanse the country of people who
Speaker 1: are not white is to carry out mass shootings that
Speaker 1: will radicalize other people and that will lead further to
Speaker 1: the breakdown of civil society in the United States by
Speaker 1: pushing it kind of like hot button issues like gun control,
Speaker 1: UM in order to further you know, it's an accelerationist
Speaker 1: sort of attack. Um. So yeah, that's that's what I'm
Speaker 1: seeing here. Yep. I mean it's yeah, like like we said,
Speaker 1: it's very very much riffing off of christ Church. I
Speaker 1: mean at least over half of his manifesto was like
Speaker 1: specifically richized manifesto, which, of course that manifesto itself was
Speaker 1: was ripped from a lot of other manifestoes. It's kind
Speaker 1: of just just a series of like launching the medic
Speaker 1: language from one shooting to another, just kind of compiling
Speaker 1: into this massive conglomerate that's all based on trying to
Speaker 1: convince more people to do the same act. Um. That's
Speaker 1: really that's that's why when people are like talking about
Speaker 1: this and people try to limit the attention on the
Speaker 1: manifestos and that kind of stuff, because it's it's all
Speaker 1: crafted specifically to get other people to do the exact
Speaker 1: same thing. Um. It's it's filled with themes, filmed with
Speaker 1: filled filled with in jokes, full of like in grip
Speaker 1: up group stuff to convince people to kind of go
Speaker 1: down a similar path, and all of it's carefully crafted
Speaker 1: that way. The one really interesting thing about this is
Speaker 1: that there's not only manifesto, but also like unless seven
Speaker 1: hundred pages of diaries that he posted as well, um
Speaker 1: and logs from from like over like like like from
Speaker 1: a long, long, long time, tracking his inner thoughts. But
Speaker 1: also like again, he posted it and he knew he
Speaker 1: was gonna do this, So there's no telling how how
Speaker 1: accurate that is. It's all it's all in this package
Speaker 1: that he wants to present to people. So a lot
Speaker 1: of the navvy gritty are is not even worth talking
Speaker 1: about in a lot of a lot of cases. No,
Speaker 1: and I'm not I think there's broadly speaking, things you
Speaker 1: can learn. And I'm also to be clear, I'm not
Speaker 1: against searchers studying, and I think it should be absolutely
Speaker 1: I am against just finding a thing in there and
Speaker 1: like posting it like when I when I made my post,
Speaker 1: I was pretty careful to note a couple of things
Speaker 1: that seemed consistent based on other aspects of the like
Speaker 1: things that he claimed about his radicalization that seemed consistent
Speaker 1: with what we were seeing, Like he noted that he
Speaker 1: was primarily radicalized online. That seems plausible to me because
Speaker 1: of how fucking online the manifesto is. Um like and
Speaker 1: and it's one of those folks are not entirely wrongfully
Speaker 1: bringing up the fact that the great Replacement White genocide
Speaker 1: sort of conspiracy theory that seems to have motivated this
Speaker 1: fellow is basically identical to Ship Tucker Carlson says, that's
Speaker 1: not not that that's not what radicalized him though, but
Speaker 1: that's not what radicalized Yes, this is not a dude
Speaker 1: who was watching Fox right. That's something I've been frustrated
Speaker 1: by looking at the discourse because yes, obviously Tucker shouldn't
Speaker 1: be talking about this because he's normalizing this very rhetoric
Speaker 1: that you find in these manifestos, but he did. He
Speaker 1: did not find this from Tucker. This is like it's
Speaker 1: it's it's a whole whole different ball game. Um. And
Speaker 1: when there's that conflation, I do find it to be
Speaker 1: slightly frustrating. Yeah, And some of the problem with discussing
Speaker 1: this is the problem with discussing basically any of these attacks,
Speaker 1: is that the mass media coverage of it is nearly
Speaker 1: always going to flatten it to a degree that works
Speaker 1: in the favor of the people who are using this
Speaker 1: as propaganda of the deed. And we can talk about
Speaker 1: maybe are there ways to detern that you know, I've
Speaker 1: I've definitely that's something that I've spent a decent amount
Speaker 1: of my career kind of struggling with. It's it's a
Speaker 1: tough thing to do because, um, one of the things
Speaker 1: that's very frustrating that we've we've seen in the wake
Speaker 1: of this attack, and that we see in the wake
Speaker 1: of basically every politically motivated attack is a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of people from a whole different bunch of belief systems,
Speaker 1: insides immediately trying to spin it in order to push
Speaker 1: the narrative if they think is useful for the attack
Speaker 1: to have, and some of them believe legitimately what they're saying.
Speaker 1: Like the folks, I think most of the people who
Speaker 1: are like this is you know, Tucker Carlson's doing are
Speaker 1: generally just folks who have not spent as much time
Speaker 1: in the fever swamps as we have. And see, oh,
Speaker 1: Tucker Carlson's talking about this this guy carried out of shooting.
Speaker 1: They must be related, right. I don't think that's like,
Speaker 1: that's wrong, but I don't think that's malicious. And then
Speaker 1: you get folks who are malicious with it, right, like
Speaker 1: you have stuff the folks right one of the one
Speaker 1: of the narratives we've seen form, particularly from what I
Speaker 1: like to call the ship head left. Um is folks
Speaker 1: being like, well, there was a sun and rod, the
Speaker 1: black sun. It's a Nazi a culti symbol. People who
Speaker 1: are more nerds about Nazis will even quipped that, but
Speaker 1: that's that's the broad strokes of what it is, um.
Speaker 1: And it's it's a symbol that's definitely on some as
Speaker 1: of gear. It's also on a has been on a
Speaker 1: bunch of ships well before there was an as. It's
Speaker 1: all over the place. And um, the reason he did it,
Speaker 1: the reason he had a black sun on some ship
Speaker 1: was not because of the as of but allien um it.
Speaker 1: In fact, he talked about wanting to break up NATO
Speaker 1: a bunch, but it was because the son and rad
Speaker 1: was on the chest of the plate carrier of the
Speaker 1: christ Church Shooter. Yes, but there's always a big fan
Speaker 1: of the christ Church Shooter. There's all of these people
Speaker 1: who are like, yeah, authoritarian left or whatever, who are
Speaker 1: being like, oh, how can Americans condemn this attack when
Speaker 1: this guy is using as of imagery and there there's
Speaker 1: no telling how genuine they are with this, Like there's
Speaker 1: there's no telling if if they actually know what they're doing,
Speaker 1: or if they're just or if they're just being like
Speaker 1: if they're purposely misinformed, or what's going on. It's like
Speaker 1: he doesn't mind, it doesn't matter. But yeah, my my
Speaker 1: assumption with those folks is that they are doing it
Speaker 1: because if you are a competent, paid propagandist, you want
Speaker 1: to always be pushing the narrative in a way that
Speaker 1: furthers whatever it is your job to push. And if
Speaker 1: your job is connecting Ukraine to every bad thing that happens,
Speaker 1: and a mass shooting that has nothing to fucking do
Speaker 1: with with Ukraine or the Ukrainian government, um, if you
Speaker 1: can connect it back to them, then you're back in
Speaker 1: your wheelhouse, right, Because maybe you're not so strong talking
Speaker 1: about the fact that you and some of the people
Speaker 1: around you have been friendly with fucking Tucker Carlson. Uh
Speaker 1: and he pushes a similar narrative to the one this
Speaker 1: mass shooter used. Maybe that's uncomfortable. What is comfortable is saying, no,
Speaker 1: this guy who did this bad thing is tied to
Speaker 1: these other bad people who are tied to this group
Speaker 1: that my entire career is about attacking. That's a much
Speaker 1: stronger position to be in, you know, if you're you know,
Speaker 1: a propagandist. It's just like you see folks on the
Speaker 1: right who don't want to grapple with the fact that
Speaker 1: this was a right wing or who carried out a
Speaker 1: terrorist attack, um, based on an ideology that even motherfucking
Speaker 1: Ben Shapiro has pushed elements of. Um, you don't want
Speaker 1: to deal with that, So you call him a leftist
Speaker 1: because we saw the same thing with christ Turn he
Speaker 1: could Yeah, he made a couple of vague he's not
Speaker 1: a leftist. He repeatedly identified himself as right wing and
Speaker 1: as a fascist, as a Nazi, UM, as an ethno nationalist, UM.
Speaker 1: But he made like a couple of vague comments that
Speaker 1: they're taking out of context and being like, see, he
Speaker 1: was on the left, but she wanted to happen what
Speaker 1: he wanted to happen. That's why he put it in there. Right,
Speaker 1: It's like it is like it is all part of
Speaker 1: the bit, it's all this, it's it's it's it's all
Speaker 1: of this like like irony poisoned thing that they do
Speaker 1: on purpose to give any one a propaganda out or
Speaker 1: give anyone a propaganda. It's all yeah, if you'll remember
Speaker 1: it before, it's not it's not new, but it's frustrating yea.
Speaker 1: In the christ Church Manifesto, tarrant Um said that he'd
Speaker 1: been radicalized by Candice Owens, who's like a person who
Speaker 1: says a bunch of shitty, fucked up stuff. I don't
Speaker 1: like Candace Owens, but like had nothing to do with
Speaker 1: that guy's radicalization, right, Like, that's not that's not where
Speaker 1: he's fucking coming from. Um. But he did it because
Speaker 1: he wanted to, because because it's sucking. It's ship posting,
Speaker 1: you know, it's to muddy the water. It's to get
Speaker 1: people like it's too it's to reduce the ability of
Speaker 1: people trying to grapple with what has happened, to accurately
Speaker 1: see what has happened and accurately identify the problem and
Speaker 1: respond to A big, big motive for this stuff is
Speaker 1: to cause this kind of social and discourse chaos. Right.
Speaker 1: They want people, they want everyone to be confused, and
Speaker 1: they want everyone to be fighting each other and distance
Speaker 1: agreeing on basic terms, right, and the whole the whole
Speaker 1: point of this is to encourage gun control legislation, which
Speaker 1: we'll get the right match to cause people to be
Speaker 1: more willing to do mass shootings or to do a
Speaker 1: tax against government. Right, it's it's it's all part of
Speaker 1: the very basic accelerationist like talking points and tactics. So,
Speaker 1: and the confusion is not accidental, it's all it's it's
Speaker 1: all in if you, I think a good way to
Speaker 1: look at this, if you like fighter planes and helicopters
Speaker 1: in a combat zone will have a type of countermeasure
Speaker 1: they will launch if someone shooting a missile that's like
Speaker 1: a tracking missile, heat seeking or whatever at them. It's
Speaker 1: called chaff, and it basically it looks to the missile
Speaker 1: the same as a helicopter does. So you shoot a
Speaker 1: bunch of these out and the missile goes and hits
Speaker 1: something that's not the fucking hell copter, but to its
Speaker 1: sensors looks like a helicopter. That's what they're doing. They're
Speaker 1: shooting out chaff. They're getting you to like about box
Speaker 1: with shadows rather than potentially landing a blow against like
Speaker 1: the central problem. And the central problem is not an
Speaker 1: easy one to grapple with without all that stuff around it, right,
Speaker 1: because the the issue here is how the way in
Speaker 1: which the Internet enables radicalization, the way in which online
Speaker 1: communities are prone to radicalization, UM, the way in which, uh,
Speaker 1: the conservative media and aspects of like just basic American
Speaker 1: history play into this specific people who want to do
Speaker 1: violence in this way for this reason, UM, which is
Speaker 1: why the cops don't notice them even when they're on
Speaker 1: their radar, which is why that like the warning signs
Speaker 1: don't get spotted. Um. And the ways in which, I think,
Speaker 1: more than anything, the ways in which the Internet has
Speaker 1: created a perfect incubation chamber for radical violence. And that
Speaker 1: is one of the stories here right. UM. You know
Speaker 1: people are focusing on gun control, um, which this guy
Speaker 1: bought his gun in the state of New York, which
Speaker 1: has the most restrictive gun laws in the country. UM.
Speaker 1: Was more relevant even if you're on that end, is
Speaker 1: this guy was deeply involved in like tactical Reddit. This
Speaker 1: guy was heavily involved in in tactical videos and training
Speaker 1: videos and talking with other people about the best weapons,
Speaker 1: the best ways to use them. And if you watch
Speaker 1: the I don't watch the video. But he was competent,
Speaker 1: he engaged, competently, he did he maximized his ability to
Speaker 1: do damage he took out somebody, um with a gun
Speaker 1: who was attempting to stop him. Um, that ship, the
Speaker 1: stuff that he did to prepare tactically worked, and the
Speaker 1: kind of tactical chunks of of of reddit of the
Speaker 1: Internet which are not all right wing, but a hell
Speaker 1: of a lot of them are, and a hell of
Speaker 1: a lot of them have gone in very scary directions
Speaker 1: in the last couple of years. Um. Not only do
Speaker 1: I suspect contributed to his radicalization, but I can say
Speaker 1: certainly contributed to his ability to effectively kill people. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean he had like over five pages just on
Speaker 1: what helmet he picked out. He had pages on what
Speaker 1: socks he was wearing, which is not which is for
Speaker 1: multiple reasons. It's one to make the actual act more effective.
Speaker 1: It's two to inspire not like discourse like this, but
Speaker 1: also to to get people to replicate what he did. Right.
Speaker 1: It's crafting all of these symbols that people can be like,
Speaker 1: oh he picked out these socks. I mean, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: these socks. It's it's it's all this branding thing. Um,
Speaker 1: we should take we should take a break, and then
Speaker 1: I want to come back and talk about some me
Speaker 1: medical language stuff. You know who else can give you
Speaker 1: good advice on socks? Oh all right, here's ads okay. Um,
Speaker 1: I want to talk about some medical language stuff because
Speaker 1: this was all heavily riffing and I specifically use the
Speaker 1: term riffing um off of the christ Church shooting, uh,
Speaker 1: which itself was riffing with other stuff. Right, but he
Speaker 1: went so far. I mean, the the christ Church shooting
Speaker 1: was a copycat shooting of the Anders Breddock shooting, or
Speaker 1: at least descendant of whatever term you want to use.
Speaker 1: But that's what inspired the christ Church shooting. And it's
Speaker 1: I mean, he was for for the Buffalo shooting. He
Speaker 1: was testing on different live streaming platforms. He was doing
Speaker 1: all the stuff to craft a very specific image, and
Speaker 1: like images are very very very powerful. We've talked about
Speaker 1: like me magic before if we want to get silly
Speaker 1: about it. Um, but he was very very much involved
Speaker 1: in crafting these things that could be replicated visually. Um.
Speaker 1: That's that's why he wanted to live stream. It's so bad.
Speaker 1: It's that you just the same way, the same way
Speaker 1: of christ Church was And this is like really important
Speaker 1: for why we don't share this type of stuff and
Speaker 1: why we why we specifically clamped down on this, on this,
Speaker 1: on this style of propaganda, and why we really encourage
Speaker 1: people not to share it, not to look at it,
Speaker 1: not to do that stuff. Because he he does in
Speaker 1: the few parts of the manifest that that he did right, Um,
Speaker 1: he does. He did say like watching the christ Church
Speaker 1: video was very impactful for him, which I don't disagree with.
Speaker 1: I'm sure, I'm sure it was. He he did even
Speaker 1: and he did great links to recreate um. And this
Speaker 1: is why we people who are like researchers and people
Speaker 1: who kind of hand try to handle this kind of
Speaker 1: stuff um in like in their time on Earth, uh,
Speaker 1: are so particular about this. Like a a thing last year,
Speaker 1: like a year and a half ago, there was this
Speaker 1: film company based in New Zealand who wanted to make
Speaker 1: a christ Church film. Uh. And they want they were
Speaker 1: going to film a recreation of the shooting. But they said, like, oh,
Speaker 1: but it's too to show the horror and to show
Speaker 1: the impact on the victims. Doesn't fucking matter, it matter,
Speaker 1: It matters zero amount, because once you put that language
Speaker 1: into cinematography, you are giving them basically ammunition to help
Speaker 1: create propaganda and will get more more people killed. This
Speaker 1: is why the same thing we see the same thing
Speaker 1: on fucking um roadblocks, we see people recreate the christ
Speaker 1: Church shooting on roadblocks. There's actually a major problem, like
Speaker 1: a year ago, specifically, it was a huge problem people
Speaker 1: recreating the footage inside this game engine. And it's it's specifically,
Speaker 1: it's it's very it's a very powerful tool that they
Speaker 1: used to spread around. It's targeted specifically people ages twelve
Speaker 1: to eight teen. This this guy was eighteen years old. Um,
Speaker 1: it's he was heavily involved online gaming. He was really
Speaker 1: heavy Reddit user, specifically, um, he loved Discord. So it's
Speaker 1: these are the places where where it spreads even more
Speaker 1: so than a now to Yeah, and I would say
Speaker 1: we know. And that called him like a four chance
Speaker 1: shooter because number one he definitely was familiar with with
Speaker 1: Pole and number was there he announced his livestream there.
Speaker 1: I do agree with you read it was a bigger
Speaker 1: part of his radicalization. I suspect and in a lot
Speaker 1: of and Discord probably, and I suspect he did purposefully
Speaker 1: minimize the extent to which conversations on Discord were part
Speaker 1: of his radicalization journey. In particular, that would be my
Speaker 1: assumption at the moment, but for countering this type of rhetoric,
Speaker 1: in this type of propaganda, right, because they're they're trying
Speaker 1: to make themselves look cool, they're trying to make themselves
Speaker 1: look tactical. They're trying to look they're trying to make
Speaker 1: themselves they look like they're in a video game. They
Speaker 1: make it look like they're in a movie. Right, they're
Speaker 1: trying to be cinematic. He was, he was testing on
Speaker 1: different cameras. Um, he tested like a GoPro, he just said,
Speaker 1: he tested out his phone camera, right, trying to get
Speaker 1: this specific look. And we just we just talked about
Speaker 1: how he was tactically proficient in some ways, but in
Speaker 1: handling this type of thing. We have to when we're
Speaker 1: crafting counter stuff to make this, to make this thing
Speaker 1: less likely, we need to not even focus on that.
Speaker 1: We need to make them look stupid, make them look juvenile,
Speaker 1: make them look like they're pathetic, make them look like
Speaker 1: they're stupid and silly, like they're Larper's. That's one of
Speaker 1: the things that saved god knows how many lives. At
Speaker 1: kind of the high point of the eight Chance shootings
Speaker 1: in nineteen was that fucker in Hall, Germany, tried to
Speaker 1: carry one out and got the piss beat out of
Speaker 1: him by a dude at a mosque um and was
Speaker 1: photographed the next day in court just covered. It's like
Speaker 1: beat two ship um. That image probably save some lives.
Speaker 1: They want to be cool, they want to be mimic,
Speaker 1: they want to be spread around as a symbol. And
Speaker 1: we need, like culturally, need to. Yes, this is obviously
Speaker 1: very scarce, this is a very real threat for many
Speaker 1: for many people, many people of color, many black people,
Speaker 1: many many Muslims, people of different religions, Jewish people, queer people.
Speaker 1: But we need to when when specifically crafting rhetoric and
Speaker 1: propaganda against these things, we need to make them look pathetic,
Speaker 1: right that that that that's what it needs to be
Speaker 1: framed as, because if you make them look scary and competent,
Speaker 1: that's actually gonna make these things worse because they love that,
Speaker 1: right Like as if you film the Christ, if you
Speaker 1: do any kind of like movie about the Christ shooting,
Speaker 1: no matter how you shoot it, they're gonna love it.
Speaker 1: If you're shooting people in pain, they they want that.
Speaker 1: They want that. It's that's that's what they're looking for.
Speaker 1: You need to specifically frame this as these people larning
Speaker 1: and these people being pathetic and people being terminally online
Speaker 1: um and having bad social skills like you need you need,
Speaker 1: you need to frame it in this way that makes
Speaker 1: them look not desirable because their whole point is to
Speaker 1: craft is desirable and visually stunning propaganda. Um. And I think, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's that's I've been thinking about this for the
Speaker 1: past because it's just been so much. But like I
Speaker 1: identify these people, isn't the problem? Right? Like this guy
Speaker 1: he was he was talked to you by by counselors
Speaker 1: last year because they were for he was them to
Speaker 1: do a school shooting. Um, Like there was a lot
Speaker 1: of the red flags and stuff. And like he was
Speaker 1: he was taught, he was talked to you by people
Speaker 1: before this happened. Like he wasn't an unknown factor, He
Speaker 1: wasn't an unknown of the vector to make to make this,
Speaker 1: to make you know, to be this a person that
Speaker 1: can do this. But there's there's no way. People are
Speaker 1: very people are good at finding these people before they
Speaker 1: do it, but we're bad at actually stopping them from
Speaker 1: doing it once we found Once we find them, Uh,
Speaker 1: there's there's really no power to stop it um and
Speaker 1: interrupting any kind of radicals Asian pipeline. It's really hard,
Speaker 1: so it's more about laying the groundwork to make the
Speaker 1: pipeline look pathetic so it's harder to happen again. But
Speaker 1: always counting this stuff is frustrating because if there's a
Speaker 1: good strategy and wouldn't be here, be be deeply I
Speaker 1: want to move on to the tent in California, but
Speaker 1: at the at the end of this to close out,
Speaker 1: be deeply suspicious, if not outright contemptuous of anyone who
Speaker 1: posits a simple solution to these shootings, whether that solution
Speaker 1: is gun control, whether it's expanded police powers, whether it's
Speaker 1: fucking arming everybody so that they can shoot shooters, anyone
Speaker 1: who proposes a simple solution this, This is a deeply
Speaker 1: complicated problem, um, because we let a number of horrible,
Speaker 1: horrible obvious problems go on for way too long, and
Speaker 1: the solution to this will be painfully agonizing lee difficult
Speaker 1: and will take time, and there is there is not
Speaker 1: a simple, all encompassing way to deal with this. Um.
Speaker 1: One of the things that you can do right now
Speaker 1: to better prepare yourself to potentially deal with this problem
Speaker 1: is take a stop the bleed course, carry an iPad
Speaker 1: I fact and a gunshot wound kit um as often
Speaker 1: as possible. And that continues to be my best immediate
Speaker 1: advice to people, um, because that there's no downsides to
Speaker 1: doing that and it could and does save lives and
Speaker 1: other shootings. All right, let's move on in other dudes,
Speaker 1: in other news. The next shooting. Yeah, hooray, Yeah, Okay,
Speaker 1: this is a weird one, UM, and I think the
Speaker 1: thing we need to make clear of front is that
Speaker 1: this happened yesterday. Um a recording still yeah, a top
Speaker 1: of recording. Details are still emerging, and it's weird. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of potential to so so for people who
Speaker 1: don't know, Um, a Presbyterian church in California was attacked
Speaker 1: by a Chinese guy. This is this is a time
Speaker 1: when East Church, Um, it's mostly senior citizens. And okay,
Speaker 1: so there's there's a few important things up fronts that
Speaker 1: people should probably understand about. This one is that Okay,
Speaker 1: so Taiwan. Taiwan is ruled by military dictatorship. But for
Speaker 1: like basically the better part of of the post World
Speaker 1: War two period, it is ruled by military dictatorship run
Speaker 1: by the Nationalist Party of the CAMPT. The cam T
Speaker 1: is extraordinary in this period. It is extraordinarily violent. They
Speaker 1: they assassinate people all over the place. They kill people
Speaker 1: on American soil. They killed they trained death squads in
Speaker 1: Latin America, and you know, they're they're they're known for
Speaker 1: the sort of humanity communism, but eventually they're sort of
Speaker 1: toppled by revolution isn't quite the right word. But as
Speaker 1: you know, the CAMPT as a party is still around
Speaker 1: today and as one of the two sort of major
Speaker 1: like Towny's political parties. But they're not like the sort
Speaker 1: of desk they're not exactly the sort of des squad
Speaker 1: mafia party that they were through most of the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: Um the sort of the sort of progressive forces that
Speaker 1: work to overthrow the dictatorship. A lot of them coalesced
Speaker 1: into a party called the d d P. And one
Speaker 1: of the things about the d DP is, and there's
Speaker 1: a lot of sort of complicated Towny's political stuff here,
Speaker 1: but they are very very closely connect connected to the
Speaker 1: Presbyterian Church in a lot of ways. And this I
Speaker 1: don't know the specifics about this church, but there is
Speaker 1: there is a very strong connection between and then the
Speaker 1: d d P are Okay, pro independence is putting it
Speaker 1: too strongly. But if you're a pro independent, like you
Speaker 1: want to want to be an independent country and you
Speaker 1: don't want them to sort of like either continue, Well, okay,
Speaker 1: this is the problem with town these politics. It's enormously convoluted. Uh,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of stuff going on something at any time,
Speaker 1: and these people are gonna get mad at you if
Speaker 1: the supplications they're making. But yeah, the short version of
Speaker 1: the story is that the sort of anti CCP pro
Speaker 1: independence e forces are and the sort of like progressive
Speaker 1: movement is sort of lumped into the d DP and
Speaker 1: those are the people who are getting shot like because yeah,
Speaker 1: because again there's there's a very strong connection between Restbyterian
Speaker 1: Church and the p UM and the KMT who again,
Speaker 1: I mean, okay, they've had an extremely complicated relationship with
Speaker 1: the Communist Party over the last hundred years. It's incredibly baffling.
Speaker 1: But they've basically swung around towards being more favorable to China.
Speaker 1: And there are there are some fact extremist factions of
Speaker 1: it that are that support unific like just unification Um,
Speaker 1: what seems to have happened here is okay, So this
Speaker 1: the shooters families seems to have been like deported from
Speaker 1: China to Taiwan, and he like did not like it
Speaker 1: in Taiwan. And and this is where it starts to
Speaker 1: get very murky. Um. The police statement we have says
Speaker 1: that you know, it's about sort of racial like it's
Speaker 1: it's it's it's an anti Taiwanese animus, but that can
Speaker 1: mean a lot of things. And yeah, and then this
Speaker 1: this again, I keep saying it's murky, and it's because
Speaker 1: it's it's genuinely murky. There's a chance that this is
Speaker 1: one of one of the things that's been happening since
Speaker 1: the Hong Kong protests. He is a solidification in mainland
Speaker 1: China sort of anti of anti Tiwanese sentiment has sort
Speaker 1: of lumped in in this sort of like nationalist anti
Speaker 1: Hong Kong thing. There was there was a hardening of
Speaker 1: rhetoric against Taiwan, but also there's a lot of there's
Speaker 1: a lot of people in Taiwan, like like especially canti
Speaker 1: hardliners on the hard right who like really really really
Speaker 1: intensely hate like the sort of like the sort of progressive,
Speaker 1: anti CCP, pro independence people. And you know, and this
Speaker 1: is something we don't we don't know what his affiliation is.
Speaker 1: He was like like he was like into like his sixties, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: well and and this is this, this is this is
Speaker 1: weird because there's a lot of things that that could
Speaker 1: be true about this because of how old he is,
Speaker 1: like again, you know, I mean he is around when
Speaker 1: the KMT is is straight up with Deska Party, right,
Speaker 1: so it could be that it could be she's sort
Speaker 1: of like independently radicalized. There's been some like rumors might
Speaker 1: be too weak of a word, but there there there
Speaker 1: have been some kind of sketchy reporting that like his
Speaker 1: ex was leaving for Taiwan and that that may have
Speaker 1: played a part in it. But you know, violence between
Speaker 1: the KMT and people who don't like the KMT is
Speaker 1: a the that there wasn't a There was a very
Speaker 1: large amount of in the US for a lot of reasons.
Speaker 1: And even though the CAMT is sort of like I mean,
Speaker 1: the their alignment that China has like flipped in the
Speaker 1: past about forty years, I I don't know, I'm really
Speaker 1: really desperately hoping that that's this isn't going to set
Speaker 1: off because I mean there's already been a lot of
Speaker 1: especially around Hong Kong, there's been a lot of physical violence,
Speaker 1: like people attack each other at protests about between for example,
Speaker 1: people who's prot their Hong Kong protests and Chinese like
Speaker 1: CCP nationalists. But this is something different, very weird, very
Speaker 1: embedded in the time in these context and I don't
Speaker 1: think we fully understand what's going on here. Um, the
Speaker 1: everything again is like this guy like he lived in
Speaker 1: times one, like he was speaking Taiwanese, like when when
Speaker 1: he was essentially like going into this church to infiltrate
Speaker 1: before we shot everyone. So like he this isn't like this.
Speaker 1: This this is and I think people are reporting it
Speaker 1: like this because they don't know what's going on. But
Speaker 1: like this, this isn't a case of like a guy
Speaker 1: who is from mainland China who like decided that he
Speaker 1: hated to time when these people like this, he he
Speaker 1: was there, he like he speaks, he speaks time when
Speaker 1: he's he like understands the time when he's political situation
Speaker 1: very in depth, which presumably is why he targeted the
Speaker 1: specific church. But other than that, it's it's the motives
Speaker 1: are still kind of murky. And this is the other
Speaker 1: problem with it, which is that like the sheriff's like
Speaker 1: there's no way that the sheriffs have any idea what
Speaker 1: they're looking at, like that they're apparently reading his personal notes,
Speaker 1: and it's like, I don't trust their analysis of it.
Speaker 1: Good lord, no, yeah, like these if you weren't here,
Speaker 1: we would have to find someone else who understands that
Speaker 1: conflict in order to talk about it. I don't feel
Speaker 1: comfortable like trying to figure out or analyze that guy's notes.
Speaker 1: I sure as ship don't trust some fucking sheriff's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: this I don't know, And I think that that's I
Speaker 1: don't know. I will say like this, I think was
Speaker 1: like the worst possible scenario for what that shooting is about,
Speaker 1: because this is a kind of this is a kind
Speaker 1: of violence that was really intense, like right after World
Speaker 1: War Two and sort of like and you know, there
Speaker 1: there's been periods where like, yeah, I mean people have
Speaker 1: been like people have gotten killed here, but it hasn't
Speaker 1: been that violent in a long time. And I don't know,
Speaker 1: I'm hoping this is just one guy who had a
Speaker 1: particular grievance who I don't know, like was it was
Speaker 1: pushed by sort of external factors. But if this is
Speaker 1: a sign of like if this is a sign of
Speaker 1: sort of anti Tiwanese like nationally, well, okay, so there's
Speaker 1: one other thing that that we need to talk about
Speaker 1: because that's unclear because there's two kinds of potential right
Speaker 1: when Chinese actually lizab met play here, and it's unclear
Speaker 1: which one is happening because there are there are people
Speaker 1: who are right wing Chinese nationalists who are like pro
Speaker 1: CCP right, but there's also a kind of like a
Speaker 1: kind of like it shifted, but there's also like a
Speaker 1: a like a KMG nationalist based right wing Chinese nationalism
Speaker 1: which favors sort of like reunification with China, but is
Speaker 1: is not the same thing as as the sort of
Speaker 1: mainland nationalism and has its own particular, like very local
Speaker 1: political grudges like with with the d DP and with
Speaker 1: the sort of like progressive movements in time one and
Speaker 1: I don't know and anything beyond that is kind of
Speaker 1: like trying to figure out which one it is, like
Speaker 1: we just don't know unless the police, unless the police
Speaker 1: actually decide to like show us this guy's notes or
Speaker 1: like give us recordings of what he's been saying. Uh,
Speaker 1: we're not gonna know. And maybe maybe by the time
Speaker 1: this is out, like they will be more stuff. But
Speaker 1: right now it's very muddled, very bad. The fact that
Speaker 1: this guy also I think was an American citizen but
Speaker 1: was born in China has gotten every like even even
Speaker 1: the Chinese media outlets are saying extremely weird stuff because
Speaker 1: they're confused by it. So it is a it is
Speaker 1: a muddled is a muddled mess, I mean, and everything
Speaker 1: about this last weekend's been uddled. There's been so many
Speaker 1: different mass shootings this weekend, there's been people being paranoid
Speaker 1: about copycat mass shootings. And now yesterday there was reporting
Speaker 1: that a gunman entered a church in Buffalo. Um. That
Speaker 1: was not actually true. It's someone someone in the church yelled, um,
Speaker 1: like there's a gunman or something or like or like
Speaker 1: get the gun down or something, um, and it caused
Speaker 1: people to create this this kind of rumor, but that
Speaker 1: there wasn't actually someone with a gun. It was it
Speaker 1: was this someone was like reacting to the sermon that
Speaker 1: was that that was being had. Um. But yeah, everyone's
Speaker 1: been super paranoid about every stuff and all this kind
Speaker 1: of stuff as as they should be. So sorting through
Speaker 1: sorting through all this stuff is very complicated and uh,
Speaker 1: not a great time because it's not it's not fun um,
Speaker 1: and we shouldn't have to do it, but it sucks.
Speaker 1: Do you think it's also worth noting that the police
Speaker 1: did not stop uh, I know, specifically they did not
Speaker 1: stop the one in the church, the past pastor, a
Speaker 1: pastor hit the hit him with a hit him chair,
Speaker 1: and then they hog tied him with an extension toward
Speaker 1: and then the police came, which is so um. I'm
Speaker 1: sorry they were ever in that position. They should never
Speaker 1: have to be in that position, but it's turned out
Speaker 1: more and more people are having to do because it's
Speaker 1: not also the first time that a mass shooter has
Speaker 1: been stopped by someone hitting them with a chair. If
Speaker 1: I'm not mistaken, that's how the Gifford shooter was stopped eventually,
Speaker 1: or part of how he was stopped to somebody fucking
Speaker 1: decked him with a chair. Yeah, it's it's really useful
Speaker 1: to have something beyond just your limbs. If someone is
Speaker 1: trying to shoot you with a gun, ideally you get
Speaker 1: away but if you can't get away, trying to hit
Speaker 1: them in the face with something heavy is certainly a
Speaker 1: choice that has saved a number of people's lives. God what,
Speaker 1: what an absolutely dogshit country. It's not a great time.
Speaker 1: And when I you know, I noted earlier anyone trying
Speaker 1: to sell you like simple solutions, and I mentioned gun
Speaker 1: control on that, which is not to say that like
Speaker 1: the outrageously easy, how how ridiculously easy it is to
Speaker 1: get any kind of gun in this country. Obviously that's
Speaker 1: a factor in these shootings. My my um hesitance to
Speaker 1: take gun control as a if you'll forgive the term
Speaker 1: magic bullet to fix any of this is number one,
Speaker 1: the sheer number of guns that are already propagated. Number two,
Speaker 1: the fact that a lot of gun control measures boiled
Speaker 1: down to making it harder for poor people to get guns,
Speaker 1: and neither of these shootings seem to have been poor
Speaker 1: people shooting up um folks. And uh just also the
Speaker 1: fact that while some states are capable of passing additional
Speaker 1: gun control. Number one, New York's basically done everything it's
Speaker 1: constitutional to do are e restricting gun ownership um and federally,
Speaker 1: Biden and their Dems can't protect Roe v. Wade. There's
Speaker 1: sure a ship not gonna pass any federal people want
Speaker 1: as well, Like they're specifically doing this to get this
Speaker 1: stuff started so that it increases plays. Whether or not
Speaker 1: to agree with my fundamental claim, you don't have to.
Speaker 1: You can believe that if gun control were to be passed,
Speaker 1: it could be the solution, but it's not gonna be.
Speaker 1: And so like as as regards those of us trying
Speaker 1: to survive, um, we have have to look in other
Speaker 1: directions because you're not going to get an assault weapon
Speaker 1: span it's just not happening. Yeah, I mean the one
Speaker 1: good I don't I don't say good thing. But it
Speaker 1: has been nice to see people slowly uh dropping the
Speaker 1: whole like load wolf terminology, that is a positive development
Speaker 1: because these are not not a load wolf. It's it's
Speaker 1: part of a very it's part of an intentional effort
Speaker 1: to cause these things to happen. Part the groups may
Speaker 1: be decentralized, but they are not anything they are but
Speaker 1: they Yeah, they are decentralized in acephalis, but they are deeply,
Speaker 1: deeply sophisticated and connected, just not in a way you
Speaker 1: can drone strike easily. Well, yeah, and I think I
Speaker 1: would have some target suggestions anyway, get knifefac, do stop,
Speaker 1: and don't don't feed into their propaganda in the way
Speaker 1: their propaganda um organized with folks in your neighborhood. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: well kids, adults, boys and girls, and individuals of non
Speaker 1: binary or other gender identities. Uh. Cats who happened to
Speaker 1: be listening in um Airwolf the helicopter if you're listening
Speaker 1: in everybody, every sentient creature listening. You know, I do
Speaker 1: believe that things can get better. So part of that
Speaker 1: is not letting the crimes that these the things that
Speaker 1: these people do, Like, part of the purpose of an
Speaker 1: attack like this is to make people feel hopeless and overwhelmed.
Speaker 1: It's to blackpill you, you know, to to to utilize
Speaker 1: some of their terminology. So the way to fight against
Speaker 1: it is, among other things, if you're talking about immediate
Speaker 1: things you can and do, go out and do something
Speaker 1: nice to help people. Yeah, and you know, I would
Speaker 1: say like as as a sort of like one brief
Speaker 1: last note, like, yeah, like in Taiwan, they overtow the
Speaker 1: dictatorship and oh hey, it turns out people stop getting
Speaker 1: assassinated by the knteen American soil. So, you know, over
Speaker 1: overthrow your governments, and you too can make peace with
Speaker 1: your enemies. Yeah, overthrow your government, overthrow another government. You know,
Speaker 1: it's all good. It's all good baby. Hello everyone, welcome
Speaker 1: to It could happen here at the podcast about things
Speaker 1: falling apart and sometimes have you come put them back together.
Speaker 1: Today it's me Garrison, Chris, our producer, Sophie and Uh.
Speaker 1: Andrew joins us. Once again. I love that guy. Oh
Speaker 1: me too, me too, Hi everyone us another episode of
Speaker 1: Andrew talking about whatever he feels like talking about. Okay,
Speaker 1: today's episode, Um, I am happy to announce that I
Speaker 1: finally finally finished Don't Have Everything by gradually. It took
Speaker 1: it took a while, you know, there was some points
Speaker 1: in time, some weeks it just went by. Why I
Speaker 1: didn't even like make a dent um. You know, life
Speaker 1: got in the way and stuff. But I finally finally
Speaker 1: finished it and I get to talk about it and say,
Speaker 1: you know, with some authority that I've read Don't Have Everything.
Speaker 1: You know, Yeah, it's a very dense book, but it
Speaker 1: was worth it. I mean, there are some critiques that
Speaker 1: I've been taking into by some authors in the field. UM,
Speaker 1: And so I highly reco when people look for critiques
Speaker 1: as well, not just you know, taking it and consuming
Speaker 1: who will sale, but in addition to those critiques like
Speaker 1: on with those critiques, um, such as by people like um,
Speaker 1: what is politics on YouTube? And also a couple of
Speaker 1: academic writers as well, I think you could get a
Speaker 1: lot out of the book, and I certainly have. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is it. This is a this is a very
Speaker 1: good book. And I'm excited to talk about it because
Speaker 1: I read it like it was a while ago now
Speaker 1: like it's like five months ago or something. Didn't talk
Speaker 1: about it. I've been like waiting for I've been trying.
Speaker 1: I've been I've been picking up bits and pieces of it,
Speaker 1: but unfortunately my book list to get through is way
Speaker 1: too long at the moment, so I've not been able
Speaker 1: to actually dive fully into the text itself. Um. But
Speaker 1: it is definitely on my lest after I get through
Speaker 1: my twenty other books I need to read for my job. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a lot, it's a lot. Um. At least we
Speaker 1: got to read books for a living. It was something
Speaker 1: adjacent to that. Um. And I mean it is a
Speaker 1: difficult book. I would say to like discussing its entirety,
Speaker 1: and I didn't. I don't tend to not to read
Speaker 1: any parator or anything, Chris, but I don't tend to
Speaker 1: talk about the entire book, you know, because that's like
Speaker 1: several hundred pages. Yeah, you know, and each chapter covers
Speaker 1: like so so much UM. But I actually wanted to
Speaker 1: talk about chapter four in particular, UM, where the authors
Speaker 1: explore the concept and the origins in a sense of cultures, UM.
Speaker 1: In one particular segment, I mean a lot of mysteries
Speaker 1: of the upper pyliarithic that we don't know, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: that's why the mysteries, um. But you know, we've come
Speaker 1: to learn, you know, through the course of the book
Speaker 1: that this assumption that everything was just these small tight
Speaker 1: nic bands, um, and that was just the entirety of
Speaker 1: the human social arrangement into the States. You know, at
Speaker 1: least it's new to the layman to realize that this
Speaker 1: is not necessarily the case. You know, UM, that there
Speaker 1: is a lot more political structural, you know, dibuicity in
Speaker 1: that time period. We don't know at that point in time,
Speaker 1: you know, what languages pe who were speaking. You know,
Speaker 1: of course linguists have been able to like reconstruct like
Speaker 1: proto languages and stuff. And I mean, I'm just a
Speaker 1: hobby Linquist, just like I'm a hobby everything else. But
Speaker 1: I think it's been really cool to see how linguish
Speaker 1: is just able to do that. Like, can we just
Speaker 1: take a second to realize that, like linguists able to
Speaker 1: take scraps of existing languages and just kind of piece
Speaker 1: them together to get a sense of like how they're related,
Speaker 1: Like how do you all do that? Um? But there's
Speaker 1: a lot we don't know, right, We don't know about
Speaker 1: their language and know about their myths, you know, um,
Speaker 1: their conceptions of the soul, what their favorite foods were,
Speaker 1: even know they ate, but we don't know what like
Speaker 1: Joe Skeleton thoughts about his breakfast that morning. But what
Speaker 1: we do know is that, you know, from the Swiss
Speaker 1: Alps to out Mongolia in the Upper Polithic people were
Speaker 1: using a lot of the same tools, um, playing a
Speaker 1: lot of similar musical instruments, carving similar rather interesting female figurines, um,
Speaker 1: wearing similar ornaments, and conducting similar funeral rites. And there's
Speaker 1: also reason to believe that people actually traveled a lot
Speaker 1: more than we would expect them to do, and tra
Speaker 1: actually traveled longer distances than we would expect for that
Speaker 1: time period. I mean we don't have they didn't have
Speaker 1: rather you know, like cars or or chariots or trains
Speaker 1: or planes or anything like that. So to think that
Speaker 1: these long distance um journeys were occurring, you know, places
Speaker 1: like Australia or in like North America is just really
Speaker 1: interesting to think about. Yeah, I was one of your
Speaker 1: fing talked about like one of the things I thought
Speaker 1: was really interesting about this is the way that they
Speaker 1: talk about culture areas where you have these like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you have these like very large I mean like almost
Speaker 1: like like half continent sized areas where people are speaking
Speaker 1: similar languages, like the same language, and you have these
Speaker 1: like you have like these clan structures that are like
Speaker 1: you know, you you you you can go from like
Speaker 1: and go from like Missouri, and you can end up
Speaker 1: in like Mississippi, and you'll be in a place where
Speaker 1: they still have like you know, the sort of like
Speaker 1: four basic like plan lodges are still the same, and
Speaker 1: you'll beat people who are like from your clan. And
Speaker 1: he has this really interesting line about how like sort
Speaker 1: of kind of intuitively like the world's gotten like the world,
Speaker 1: like even even when there was like people spread over
Speaker 1: geographic distance, like the world sort of got larger as
Speaker 1: technology you progress, and not sort of like smaller in
Speaker 1: the way that people sort of think about it, because
Speaker 1: like I don't know, instead of there being these sort
Speaker 1: of like mega like culture areas, you can go from
Speaker 1: one place to another and you'll there'll be people who
Speaker 1: speak the same language and you can sort of slot
Speaker 1: into the like systems that are there. You suddenly have
Speaker 1: this incredible diversity of stuff, right right, So I mean
Speaker 1: specific to like North America. You know, um, we had
Speaker 1: all these different clan structures. We usually tend to think of, um,
Speaker 1: you know, these groups says and you know, especially like
Speaker 1: your immediate relations with people that you know, it's like
Speaker 1: clue skin family, that kind of thing. Um. But there's actually,
Speaker 1: at least in some studies of hunt together as, there's
Speaker 1: some suggestion that their composition can be quite cosmopolitan. So,
Speaker 1: you know, you have these groups and biological relations might
Speaker 1: only make up a small percentage of like total membership.
Speaker 1: They're actually drawn from a wide pool of individuals of
Speaker 1: a larger stretch of area, and you know, not all
Speaker 1: of them even speak necessarily the same first language. UM.
Speaker 1: This is YouTuber Indigenous NICs YouTuber named twin Rabbit, and
Speaker 1: he had this excellent, excellent video. I need to rewatch
Speaker 1: it on planes sign language, which is this um method
Speaker 1: of communication that Indigenous Americans UM used across you know,
Speaker 1: the plans to conduct trade and diplomacy and discussions even
Speaker 1: if they didn't share the same language. Um. In Aboriginal Australia,
Speaker 1: people were able to travel halfway across the continent, moving
Speaker 1: across people who spoke entirely different languages and still find
Speaker 1: you know, camps that had people of you know, their
Speaker 1: same to atomic mighty you know, and those people were
Speaker 1: we treated like their brothers and sisters, you know, so
Speaker 1: like no hanky panky, but you know they had this
Speaker 1: this you know, cross continental bond of like hospitality. From
Speaker 1: the Great Lakes you know, to Louisiana Bayous, you can
Speaker 1: find settlements of people speaking entirely, entirely separate languages, unrelated
Speaker 1: to their own. And yet still you will find you know,
Speaker 1: bear clans or elk clans or beaver clans that we're
Speaker 1: obliged to host and feed them, you know. UM, And
Speaker 1: we could only really guess as to like what kind
Speaker 1: of systems were like and how those systems might have
Speaker 1: worked for eight years ago, you know, in the upper pyioithic.
Speaker 1: But what we do see with the you know, similarities
Speaker 1: and material um uniformities and stuff of these different tools
Speaker 1: and musical instruments and stuff suggests that there might be
Speaker 1: a bit of a similar system in place at that time.
Speaker 1: Roughly around like twelve BC, we start seeing like new pottery,
Speaker 1: you know, getting dropped. We started to see the outlines
Speaker 1: of more specific cultures and specific areas, new stone grinding tools,
Speaker 1: new ways of preparing and eating wild grains and roots
Speaker 1: and the vegetables, um, different ways of chopping, slicing, creating, grinding,
Speaker 1: silk and training, boiling and storing, smoking and preserving meats,
Speaker 1: plant foods and fish. And so when we start to
Speaker 1: see something that really brings people together, and that is
Speaker 1: cuisine and cuisine you know, being the birth of cuisine,
Speaker 1: being the booth of like really more specific cultures um,
Speaker 1: you know, the kinds of soups and porridges and stews
Speaker 1: and broths. And basically what they were talking about was
Speaker 1: the way that people who like wake up and eat
Speaker 1: fish stews every morning tend to, you know, develop a
Speaker 1: different center themselves relation to their world, compared people who
Speaker 1: might wake up in the morning and eat some porridge
Speaker 1: with like berries and wild oats, you know, and then
Speaker 1: from there they start to develop different tastes and including
Speaker 1: you know, in in dancing and drugs and hair styles.
Speaker 1: I remember last are on the book um the David's
Speaker 1: point out that some addigenous um Nat American groups who
Speaker 1: actually known for specific hair styles. And I kind of
Speaker 1: knew that based on the fact that, you know, we
Speaker 1: tend to associate mohawks with people, you know, mohawke cair
Speaker 1: style mohawk people, but I didn't realize that, you know,
Speaker 1: other groups also had their own kind of like culturally
Speaker 1: specific hair styles, right. And there's also like courtship rituals
Speaker 1: and forms of kinship and styles of rhetoric, and so
Speaker 1: of course you still have these large cultural areas in
Speaker 1: the Mesolithic, larger than some nation states. But he's starting
Speaker 1: to see a bit more specificity, in a bit more
Speaker 1: diversity in shorter um spans of area. If we look
Speaker 1: at now, for example, where you know, we have in
Speaker 1: the Amazon all these different languages and cultures that co
Speaker 1: exist merely kilometers from each other. I think the overall
Speaker 1: trend of human cultures, you know, the past tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of years, has been the opposite of marginalization. And
Speaker 1: it makes me think a bit about the whole concept
Speaker 1: of the nation states and how it tries to like
Speaker 1: bring people together to this like one narrow conception of
Speaker 1: what it means to be you know, X, y Z,
Speaker 1: and how humanity naturally seems to like resist that and
Speaker 1: naturally seems to like split all from that. Like, even
Speaker 1: when you have situations with the forceful spread of English
Speaker 1: in you know, the Caribbean colonies, you still see like
Speaker 1: a diversity springing up with a bunch of different unique
Speaker 1: creoles and dialects making the language something different. You know what,
Speaker 1: if not for the enforcement of language satidization through the
Speaker 1: school system, I think you would actually see an even
Speaker 1: more rapid um explosion of you know, linguistic diversity developing
Speaker 1: out of these creoles and dialects. You know, like a
Speaker 1: couple of centuries from now, you know, Patua and and
Speaker 1: Creole and British English maybe entirely incompatible. Even in Britain itself.
Speaker 1: You know, you might have a case where London English
Speaker 1: and I don't know, Sussex English or whatever starts to
Speaker 1: sound like entirely different, and I we already have that
Speaker 1: with accents. But just to see how, you know, even
Speaker 1: in short spaces of time, a short as a century
Speaker 1: or two, because for example, trend add Um was not
Speaker 1: always an English speaking colony. Um, we actually spoke French
Speaker 1: creel for the most of our history and only in
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century did we have that period of Anglicization
Speaker 1: where English was you know, brought in Um. And to
Speaker 1: see that in that short space of time and that
Speaker 1: handful of centuries that you know, you're not already has
Speaker 1: its own unique English based creel, you always just fascinating
Speaker 1: to see. Um. There's something really interesting to me about
Speaker 1: the way this process plays out because it's it's it's
Speaker 1: almost like because you have this sort of like like
Speaker 1: you have this period in the Mesolithic, all the period
Speaker 1: names are blanking out I had, but like like you say, yeah,
Speaker 1: like you have this period where you have kind of
Speaker 1: like you have a lot of cultural standardization, like spread
Speaker 1: across a long period like a bunch of places, and
Speaker 1: it's used sort of as a mutual aid thing. It
Speaker 1: allows people to travel because you can go a place
Speaker 1: and know that like there will be people who are
Speaker 1: like you there and they will take care of you.
Speaker 1: And it's interesting to me. It's like, Okay, so this
Speaker 1: breaks apart as sort of like these these new cultures,
Speaker 1: like as people develop local cultures around like food and
Speaker 1: around just like Graver has this thing that he loves
Speaker 1: talking about. These were talking about for ages called scisolo genesis,
Speaker 1: which is like you have two people, you know, it's
Speaker 1: like I think I think they're his ositional examples. Like
Speaker 1: if you people who are arguing with each other and
Speaker 1: they like disagree minor ly over like one thing, and
Speaker 1: then by the end of the argument, like they're they've
Speaker 1: they've taken like completely mutually opposed identities to each other
Speaker 1: based on an incredibly minor disagreement, and you get this
Speaker 1: with yeah, like you get cultures to sort of like
Speaker 1: define themselves against each other and like they have things
Speaker 1: that they like and things that they don't like. It's
Speaker 1: interesting to me that that you see you see the
Speaker 1: state trying to sort of like reimpose that kind of
Speaker 1: like like forty year old cultural commogity on all of
Speaker 1: these places that are like incredibly not homogeneous but they're
Speaker 1: doing it for like the opposite reason. They're doing it
Speaker 1: because they need senatorization in order to sort of like
Speaker 1: make their make their bureaucratic like systems work better and
Speaker 1: make their sort of like seeing like a stage kind
Speaker 1: of thing. Yeah. Yeah, And also like, like I mean,
Speaker 1: this is a huge thing. Everyone in the in the
Speaker 1: like the early the late nineties and early two thousands
Speaker 1: thought that like the extent of capitalism on the around
Speaker 1: the globe was going to make everything exactly the same,
Speaker 1: there's only one culture, and that like kind of really
Speaker 1: didn't happen. But there was this real sort of I
Speaker 1: don't know, like that there was this real sort of
Speaker 1: fear that that it wasn't just gonna be the nation
Speaker 1: state spreading like homoganization, but like capitalism was going to
Speaker 1: sort of like spread imoganization. And I guess I guess
Speaker 1: the thing that they round up doing againstead was like
Speaker 1: figuring out that you could just sell everyone into their
Speaker 1: individual cultural niche, which to some extent, yeah, because like
Speaker 1: we see McDonald's in the US and the McDonald's in
Speaker 1: Bangladesh and McDonald's in Japan, and they sell all of
Speaker 1: the same McDonald's stuff, but they've also like sort of
Speaker 1: specified to the you know, specific country. Yeah, we have
Speaker 1: the worst version. The US is the worst version of it,
Speaker 1: by the the the like Taiwan has one that has
Speaker 1: like they have like rice sticky rice patties. It's it's
Speaker 1: so much better than Yeah, I mean, I will say
Speaker 1: that if I did end up traveling to Taiwan, McDonald
Speaker 1: is probably be the last place I would want to go. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean we wanted beating there and we we were
Speaker 1: we had to catch a plane, so we wound up
Speaker 1: eating like Taiwanese McDonald's airport food because we had like
Speaker 1: five minutes. It was a you know what they say,
Speaker 1: what airplane food? Um, but yeah, that's exactly us. Well,
Speaker 1: to get into actually the whole idea of cultural differentiation,
Speaker 1: you know, um, and this this tendency of humans have
Speaker 1: to subdivide and to distinguish themselves from the near buzz.
Speaker 1: And I mean it's not to assume that, you know,
Speaker 1: this differentiation comes from like differences and like language, you know,
Speaker 1: with you know, language splitting off over the centuries and
Speaker 1: people associating with their native language and ethnicity. But that
Speaker 1: really tell the full story, you know, Like for example,
Speaker 1: in northern California in the early century. The Ethno linguistic
Speaker 1: map had really a jumble of languages that drew from
Speaker 1: entirely different language families, you know, as distant from one another,
Speaker 1: as like Arabic and Tamil and Portuguese. And yet these
Speaker 1: groups still shared you know, broad similarities. You know, how
Speaker 1: they went about gathering and processing food, you know their
Speaker 1: most important religious rituals, how they organized their political life. Um.
Speaker 1: And they also managed to keep themselves distinct. You know,
Speaker 1: you have the Iroque and the Hoop and the Karak
Speaker 1: and so forth. And I mean, to some extent, these
Speaker 1: identities did map once linguistic differences, but their neighbors, we
Speaker 1: spoke different languages, still had more common with them than
Speaker 1: people who came from their same language family in another
Speaker 1: part of North America. Of course, you know, European colonization
Speaker 1: had like a severe impact on like how neat Americans
Speaker 1: were distributed. Um. But we still tend to see this
Speaker 1: trend of how like these modern nation states they went
Speaker 1: around at the time to you know, or the population.
Speaker 1: Since these neat Ethno linguistic groups, you know, this idea
Speaker 1: that the world should be divided into these like homogeneous
Speaker 1: units to their own history and everyone has a claim
Speaker 1: to like a certain territory and all that. It's I mean,
Speaker 1: it's really a concept that is born onto this mythology
Speaker 1: of the nation state. And you know, of course we
Speaker 1: have to be real careful before we project those kind
Speaker 1: of uniformities back in time. Yeah, it's definitely really like
Speaker 1: two years old, like it it's pretty young, yeah, exactly exactly.
Speaker 1: But um, there are some concerns, you know, with the
Speaker 1: concept of culture areas because that whole notion of culture
Speaker 1: areas came out of North American museums who wanted to
Speaker 1: arrange their stolen artifacts to illustrate their theories of the
Speaker 1: different stages of human adaptation, you know, like Colover's lower
Speaker 1: savagery and upper savagery and lower lower barbaris sum and
Speaker 1: so on. And so they hadd to in whether they
Speaker 1: were an organized these artifacts based on like language, family
Speaker 1: or regional clusters um or some sort of like traced
Speaker 1: history of of of regional of ancient migrations. Right. Eventually
Speaker 1: they realized that you know, this way of organizing into
Speaker 1: regional clusters seemed to work best the art and technology
Speaker 1: of different Eastern Woodlands tribes had some very similar um
Speaker 1: things in common compared to like trying to group people
Speaker 1: be sturn like say the Athabascan language or all the
Speaker 1: people who relied on fishing or all people cultivate to
Speaker 1: me is um. And they were able to find similar
Speaker 1: patterns in the Neolithic villages of Central Europe, you know,
Speaker 1: finding these regional clusters of domestic life and art and
Speaker 1: ritual and so like. This whole cultural area concept was
Speaker 1: kind of a way of pushing back against this way
Speaker 1: of you know, talking about humanistry that like ranked populations
Speaker 1: into higher or lower anything. You know, this this idea
Speaker 1: of of claiming that you know, people were of a
Speaker 1: certain superior genetic stock and viciouslynd fance level of technological
Speaker 1: evolution and so rather this there's been there was a
Speaker 1: shift in anthropological focus to look at the diffusion of
Speaker 1: more cultural treats like ceramics and sweat lodges and you know,
Speaker 1: the treatment of young men or certain sports um as.
Speaker 1: They wanted to try to understand how these different tribes
Speaker 1: of certain region came to share this mesh of culture traits.
Speaker 1: So one of the people who were thinking on this,
Speaker 1: you know, whole culture traits cluster idea. Um, it was
Speaker 1: guy named bous right, and he wanted to figure out
Speaker 1: why is that, like geography seemed to define the circulation
Speaker 1: of ideas, you know, with like mountains and dests form
Speaker 1: these natural barriers, and how basically the diffusion within those
Speaker 1: regions was basically historical accident, a legal hypothesizing that there
Speaker 1: was some sort of like way to eventually develop a
Speaker 1: kind of a natural science, developing how and even predicting
Speaker 1: the ebb and floor styles, habits and social forms. And
Speaker 1: eventually muscle Mouse pulls up, you know, and he's basically
Speaker 1: taught obviously, like right, bunch of essays on nationalism and civilization,
Speaker 1: and he says it's basically, this whole idea of cultural
Speaker 1: the fusion is nonsense because it's based on a false assumption.
Speaker 1: And the false assumption is that the movement of people, technologies,
Speaker 1: and ideas is some sort of rarity, something unusual. Instead,
Speaker 1: Mouse argues that like people in past times traveled even
Speaker 1: more than people do today, and it's just that when
Speaker 1: these people interact with people of other cultures and they
Speaker 1: see their cultural traits, they reflect on that and find
Speaker 1: a way to relate that to their own cultures, right,
Speaker 1: so that people who are traveling back then, obviously all
Speaker 1: of them, you know, we're aware of basketry, you know,
Speaker 1: or or or feather works or whatever the case may
Speaker 1: be that other people were use in a couple of
Speaker 1: miles away, seemed to be said for like certain drum rhythms,
Speaker 1: or certain you know, games, or like For example, he
Speaker 1: spent some time focusing on the distribution of the ball
Speaker 1: games around the Pacific Ocean, around the Pacific Rim from
Speaker 1: Japan's New Zealand to California, and what he realized is
Speaker 1: that while people pick up certain ideas cittain traits from
Speaker 1: other cultures comes down to how they'd want to be
Speaker 1: defined against their neighbors, against their closest neighbors. The question
Speaker 1: becomes less about why certain culture traits spread, but why
Speaker 1: other culture traits didn't. Because if you were aware of
Speaker 1: all the things that your neighbors and stuff are doing,
Speaker 1: all these foreign customs and arts and technologies. I mean,
Speaker 1: we know that the Silk Road, for example, when we
Speaker 1: talk about the Silk Road, you know we had a
Speaker 1: silk road going from China all the way into Europe
Speaker 1: and all across the Silk roop all across Central Asia
Speaker 1: and West Asia. And despite that constant you know, sharing
Speaker 1: of ideas, not every idea that you know came from
Speaker 1: China or came from Pussia or I don't know if
Speaker 1: Pusia was arounding the Silk Crew. But you know what
Speaker 1: I'm saying, Like, not every idea that was along the
Speaker 1: Silk Crew everyone necessarily picked up on, even if it
Speaker 1: was a technology that might have benefited them, because cultures
Speaker 1: effectively structures of refusal. So for example, um, there's this
Speaker 1: guy on YouTube Religion for Breakfast. He did a video
Speaker 1: recently on the pork taboo in certain cultures and certain religions, right,
Speaker 1: and one of the things he pointed out was that
Speaker 1: the taboo tends to be strengthened in times of like
Speaker 1: repression so for example, or in times of cultural um definition.
Speaker 1: So for example, he is pointing out that in the
Speaker 1: period of Roman conquest, the Jewish people were more inclined
Speaker 1: to define themselves as you know, against the consumption of pork,
Speaker 1: compared to the Romans. You know, for example, the Chinese
Speaker 1: are the people who use chopsticks, you know, they don't
Speaker 1: use knives and forks, So you're the tie the people
Speaker 1: who use spoons and so on. You know, it could
Speaker 1: just be said said that, you know, it's like aesthetics,
Speaker 1: like styles of art or music or tim man and
Speaker 1: is of course those things won't differ. But even like
Speaker 1: technologies that have like an adaptive or utilitarian benefits might
Speaker 1: still be risk, might still be refused by people who
Speaker 1: might even benefit from them. For example, the Athabaskans in
Speaker 1: Alaska refused to use Inuit kayaks despite the fact that
Speaker 1: there are a lot better to suited for the environment
Speaker 1: and their own boots, and the Inuit, for example, don't
Speaker 1: use Athabaskan snow shoes um at least in the time
Speaker 1: that Master Mouse is writing. And then, of course this
Speaker 1: is a self conscious process, you know, this is a
Speaker 1: process where a debate and discussion of all these different
Speaker 1: customs would have been occurring. You know, for example, in
Speaker 1: the Chinese courts when different foreign styles and customs would
Speaker 1: you come into the lands, there will be debates and
Speaker 1: arguments put forward by you know, the kings and the
Speaker 1: advisors and their vassals, you know, discussing, you know, whether
Speaker 1: they would ride the horses or drive chariots, or adopt
Speaker 1: like the man chew dress codes and customs, and so
Speaker 1: society's mouth said lived by borrowing from each other. They
Speaker 1: define themselves by the refusal of borring than by its acceptance.
Speaker 1: The question of how culture areas form and how culture
Speaker 1: has split off is definitely a political one. The decision
Speaker 1: to adopt a certain form of agriculture, or to cultivate
Speaker 1: a certain crop more specifically, or to adopt a certain
Speaker 1: style of dress. It's not just like a matter of
Speaker 1: like mere utility of maya or caloric advantage or material efficiency,
Speaker 1: or it's also a reflection and questioning of the values
Speaker 1: that that group of people holds or purport to hold,
Speaker 1: who they consider themselves to be. And I to think
Speaker 1: about the development of cultures, you know, I'd like to
Speaker 1: think about how our ancestors are, distant ancestors even consider themselves.
Speaker 1: You know, it's easy to just fall into this trap
Speaker 1: because it's a very common cultural troop that you know,
Speaker 1: once you go before the invention of writing or whatever,
Speaker 1: all of all ancestors are just like boga boogle cave
Speaker 1: men kind of thing. But to think of them as
Speaker 1: self conscious and politically um conscious, politically considerate, thoughtful actors,
Speaker 1: not you know, static or passive props um. It's just
Speaker 1: I think it's it's I think it's just very cool.
Speaker 1: I think it's very cool, and I think we should
Speaker 1: keep you know, these developments, these this recognition in mind
Speaker 1: as we you know, in the modern time look to
Speaker 1: try to transform the cultures we live under and to
Speaker 1: try to develop new values, new values of like anti
Speaker 1: authorityanism and anti capitalism and of you know, agree to
Speaker 1: priority on mutual aid and on egalitarian and social relations. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think there's a lot of very interesting political consequences
Speaker 1: of of thinking about this, because like, I think that
Speaker 1: there's there's sort of like two tendencies that that we
Speaker 1: sort of get stuck in when we think about like
Speaker 1: our social structures, which is there's there's there's one which
Speaker 1: is the sort of like I guess it's called capitalist realism,
Speaker 1: which is the assumption that like nothing else could possibly like,
Speaker 1: this is the only system that works, nothing else can
Speaker 1: possibly exist, and that's unproductive. You know, you go back
Speaker 1: and you look at like any other culture society, and
Speaker 1: it's like, well, no, like there's unbelievably nearly infinite number
Speaker 1: of ways you can organize your society. But then I
Speaker 1: think I think the second one is that, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: if you look at this sort of cultural diffusion and
Speaker 1: cultural refusal stuff, you see a lot of examples of
Speaker 1: people doing stuff that like under sort of like classical
Speaker 1: economic or like sociological laws, they shouldn't be doing, right, Like,
Speaker 1: there there's no reason why you shouldn't using more efficient
Speaker 1: canoe if you're in a place of the part of
Speaker 1: the world that's like extremely hard to surviving, right. And
Speaker 1: I think that there's this tendency to sort of like
Speaker 1: reduced culture and reduced just all of the ways that
Speaker 1: our social and political systems function to these sort of
Speaker 1: like oh, the the product of these like abstract historical
Speaker 1: forces and like it's all like tech, it's all determined
Speaker 1: by technology, and like how you farm and stuff like
Speaker 1: that's just not true. Yeah, I mean not the material
Speaker 1: conditions on you know, very important and understanding um, you know,
Speaker 1: how these cultures develop, and that's one part of um
Speaker 1: don't Everything that I found was a bit lacking. I
Speaker 1: think that not all the time those thoughts were clearly connected. Oh,
Speaker 1: I'd see, But I do think people put too much
Speaker 1: stock in solely material materialist um explanations and that kind
Speaker 1: of ends up precluding or leaving out the more messy
Speaker 1: human round of explanation. Yeah, And I think I think
Speaker 1: part of why this happens is that, like it's much
Speaker 1: if you assume everyone he's like behaving a quality to
Speaker 1: historical forces or like the thing that they're trying to
Speaker 1: do is like maximize, um, they're trying to maximize their
Speaker 1: utility and they're trying to like maximize the amount of
Speaker 1: calories they have. It that that's a very easy thing
Speaker 1: to like you like think about numerically, right, Like it's
Speaker 1: a very easy thing to refuse the numbers. It's extremely
Speaker 1: difficult to refuse the numbers, like to do to reduce
Speaker 1: two numbers. A society that is like I'm going to
Speaker 1: I'm going to intentionally make my life harder for myself
Speaker 1: because this is the way we do things, and we've
Speaker 1: decided we don't want to do things like other people.
Speaker 1: We've decided that we have some kind of political value
Speaker 1: that we have that makes it such that we're going
Speaker 1: to like induce difficulty into our lives and like that,
Speaker 1: I don't know, like that that kind of stuff. The
Speaker 1: the fact that culture is not just a sort of
Speaker 1: like superstructure that gets that's like a product of like
Speaker 1: some kind of economic base like that that is very
Speaker 1: important and something that gets ignored or downplayed constantly that
Speaker 1: I think I don't like. I think like, yeah, I
Speaker 1: think I think you can argue that everything like maybe
Speaker 1: goes too far in the other direction. But I'm I'm
Speaker 1: sort of okay with that, just because we've been so
Speaker 1: far on the side of like everything is historical forces
Speaker 1: for so long that you need something to remind people that, like,
Speaker 1: societies make conscious political choices, and not only have they
Speaker 1: made conscious political choices for like times of thousands of years,
Speaker 1: I like, we also can make conscious political choices that
Speaker 1: are not just sort of like pure reflections of like
Speaker 1: however many tons of iron have been extracted, and like
Speaker 1: what percentage of like workers are currently working in hospitals
Speaker 1: versus like making cookies or something. Right, Thank you for
Speaker 1: that ooh analysis, Chris, I agree that that's a joke,
Speaker 1: Like twelve people will get I I love you if
Speaker 1: you if you understand that joke. Also, I'm sorry, yes,
Speaker 1: so you can wrap it up. Carson Um. All of
Speaker 1: this has been very fascinating. What what I've learned the
Speaker 1: most is that I need to finished reading all my
Speaker 1: books as that I can read the Dawn and everything. Um,
Speaker 1: I know I like, I like got it from my
Speaker 1: dad for Christmas because um, because I knew that it
Speaker 1: would be uh at least I think I did. My
Speaker 1: memory could be I could actually be wrong. I could
Speaker 1: have only intended to get my dad for Christmas and
Speaker 1: forgotten to actually get it. But I've been reading it
Speaker 1: to I've been meeting to both buy it for myself
Speaker 1: and get it for other people because I've heard a
Speaker 1: lot of interesting things about the book. So it is
Speaker 1: definitely on my list. It's been a pleasure listening to. Uh,
Speaker 1: you'll discuss it, um Andrew. Where can if people want
Speaker 1: to check out more of your your work? Where could
Speaker 1: where could they go about that? Right? So you can
Speaker 1: still find me on Twitter and underscore see and Drew
Speaker 1: when I'm not um hiding, And you could also find
Speaker 1: me on YouTube andreism YouTube dot com, slash andreism, where
Speaker 1: I post radios about also stuff, random stuff. You know
Speaker 1: that I'm thinking about politics, history, Well that jazz. A
Speaker 1: few days ago, as the time of recording, um Andrew
Speaker 1: put out a wonderful video on a solar punk stuff. Um,
Speaker 1: I have no idea what this episode will air, so
Speaker 1: that it's probably been like a month or two or something.
Speaker 1: But definitely check out the Andrewism channel. It's one of
Speaker 1: my favorite spots too. Uh watch something. When I feel
Speaker 1: like I can't put any words on the page, I
Speaker 1: go watch your things because it's very helpful. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that doesn't for us Today. You can find us
Speaker 1: that Twitter and on Twitter and Instagram at happened here
Speaker 1: pod coos out Media. You can find me posting about
Speaker 1: hyper objects and liminal spaces at Hungry bow Tie And
Speaker 1: I heard that you have a Twitter, Chris. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: at mc h R three. You can find me mostly
Speaker 1: complaining about other people who are doing mean isn't wrong?
Speaker 1: I guess that's most of what I post about. Love
Speaker 1: that for you, you two will be able to differentiate
Speaker 1: between the sixteen different For exceit, it's not even there.
Speaker 1: Used to be long ago into galaxy, far far away,
Speaker 1: and made a decision, and that was that I was
Speaker 1: going to sacrifice my brain to understand the different kinds
Speaker 1: of maoism. And if you two want to understand why
Speaker 1: it still exists in all twenty varieties of them, yeah,
Speaker 1: go there. If you don't want to do that. Do not,
Speaker 1: You'll be happier. Well, what a ringing endorsement. Uh? Good bye?
Speaker 1: Everyone go I don't know, should we should? Should we
Speaker 1: plug up people at the other shows? Yeah? I guess
Speaker 1: everyone's tune dead at this point. I hope they've all
Speaker 1: stopped at the podcast player. I think I think, Uh, yes,
Speaker 1: go outside and be free there, I can you can
Speaker 1: you can edit that into something that is more concise. Sorry,
Speaker 1: Daniel Slash, I don't care. Yeah, it's well, it is
Speaker 1: the podcast. It could happen here, but for once, it
Speaker 1: is not about the world falling apart. It is entirely
Speaker 1: about putting it back together again. Uh. And and joining
Speaker 1: me to talk about putting it back together again is
Speaker 1: zero of the other people who are normally on this podcast.
Speaker 1: But I'm joined by Shannon and John Horonomus, who are
Speaker 1: part of the team of Organized Is working on the
Speaker 1: Dual Power Gathering. Shannon, John, Welcome, Welcome to the show. Hi,
Speaker 1: thank you, hey. So, I guess the first part of
Speaker 1: the Dual Power Gathering is dual power, and I think
Speaker 1: we should walk through what actually that is, in what
Speaker 1: our sort of visions for it look like, because Man,
Speaker 1: I know we've talked about this on the show before,
Speaker 1: but that was a very very long time ago, but
Speaker 1: which I mean like probably only like seven months, but
Speaker 1: you know, it feels like ancient history. So yeah, I
Speaker 1: guess do you two want to talk about what dual
Speaker 1: power is and how how do you do? Yeah? Sure,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna stop trying to think about what happened seven
Speaker 1: months ago and trying to Okay, you said that. I
Speaker 1: was just like, oh wow, Okay, no, never mind. Um So,
Speaker 1: dual power, John, how about I go ahead and share
Speaker 1: with our audience what is sort of the poetic language
Speaker 1: that we have up on the website from the the organizers,
Speaker 1: and then we can kind of like break it down
Speaker 1: and talk about it. Um yeah, that works for me,
Speaker 1: all right. So of the website texts such dual power
Speaker 1: is a way to imagine the moment just before our
Speaker 1: movements converge, as the possible becomes the actual, when the
Speaker 1: seeds of social transfer nation we have sown for generations bloom,
Speaker 1: when the old world begins to wither and new worlds
Speaker 1: can be born. Is a way of thinking about how
Speaker 1: we got to that moment and beyond it. Dual power
Speaker 1: is the project of building self determination, mutual aid, solidarity,
Speaker 1: and direct democracy in our communities by creating spaces that
Speaker 1: empower us all and from which new and mansipatory institutions
Speaker 1: can emerge. It's a pretty So what does that mean?
Speaker 1: So what does that mean? UM? First off, I want
Speaker 1: to say like a shout out to a lot of
Speaker 1: people have been working on this vision of what dual
Speaker 1: power is for years and years now, and that includes UH,
Speaker 1: A lot of groups UM that we are either in
Speaker 1: conversation with or have been taking inspiration from. UM. One
Speaker 1: of the biggest, I think most developed groups that's doing
Speaker 1: that work is Cooperation Jackson and Jackson Jacks Mississippi, UM
Speaker 1: and UH. I think the goal is people went up.
Speaker 1: Oftentimes when people do like here dual power, if they
Speaker 1: don't have any other UM context for it, but they
Speaker 1: are maybe from the left. They've heard about this moment
Speaker 1: in the Russian Revolution when there were these two competing
Speaker 1: like uh, you know, basis of power in like Russian
Speaker 1: society while they're undergoing this revolutionary change, and uh Lenin
Speaker 1: wrote like a pamphlet about it, calling it the dual
Speaker 1: power and looked at it as like a thing that
Speaker 1: needed to be like overcome by you know, workers in
Speaker 1: Russia UM, to like establish a workers state UM, which
Speaker 1: they kind of outlined in a book called State and Revolution.
Speaker 1: And but when we look at like they were describing,
Speaker 1: we kind of look at this as I think that
Speaker 1: emerges in any time when there's a social revolution and
Speaker 1: kind of unfolding in a society where you have various
Speaker 1: classes who are like changing like social relations, workers, peasants, UM,
Speaker 1: different groups of people who like have like a class
Speaker 1: they have come together around a class interest and overthrowing
Speaker 1: their oppression, and they have to go through stages of
Speaker 1: building their collective power their collective identity there, and they're
Speaker 1: kind of like overall strategic movement in a particular direction UM,
Speaker 1: and they create this tension between the existing state order
Speaker 1: and a newly emerging like uh, like social revolution that's
Speaker 1: like overthrown, challenging uh and overthrowing that like UM power.
Speaker 1: So that being said, we want to ground that. We
Speaker 1: want to ground that a little bit in a like
Speaker 1: less historicized context or whatever. We could say maybe that's
Speaker 1: the work that we're doing to build up the institutions
Speaker 1: and relational structures that we need to care for ourselves
Speaker 1: in each other UM as we moved through uh sort
Speaker 1: of like different states of like institutional organization in the society. Right.
Speaker 1: So when we're thinking about how do we meet our
Speaker 1: basic needs together in ways that are not dependent on
Speaker 1: the oppressive institutions that we're trying to overthrow, we're talking
Speaker 1: about dual power. Yeah, it's like any time working class folks,
Speaker 1: And it's like in a broad definition, communities, people who
Speaker 1: aren't necessarily working but like depend on like taking care
Speaker 1: of each other or who do the work of reproducing
Speaker 1: every you know society, UM basically build their own independent
Speaker 1: power like uh to like to be able to fight
Speaker 1: back and to challenge the you know, the status quo. So,
Speaker 1: like there's a lot of things they're kind of percolating
Speaker 1: that we've been like that have been happening in North
Speaker 1: America that takes inspiration from areas of the global South, UM,
Speaker 1: but also our homeown, homegrown like traditions, UM. So that
Speaker 1: could be in anything from like your local mutual aid
Speaker 1: network to uh, your local tenant union to like a
Speaker 1: rank and file UM union of like Amazon workers or
Speaker 1: teachers or care workers, um, you know whose existence puts
Speaker 1: them in conflict with the state capital um and like patriarchy,
Speaker 1: settler colonial relations um, you know, like indigenous protectors um,
Speaker 1: folks who are building up places where the more developed
Speaker 1: it becomes, the more it kind of built its own momentum.
Speaker 1: And you have spaces that are like autonomous, fully like
Speaker 1: autonomous regions from like state power and to begin to
Speaker 1: like pick apart at capital and like reconfigure are like
Speaker 1: relations of like how we make things, to do things
Speaker 1: and take care of each other in like fundamental ways.
Speaker 1: And we have lots of beautiful examples of this from
Speaker 1: the like organizing history not even that long ago. And
Speaker 1: people will be familiar with some of the Black Panther
Speaker 1: programs or some of the programs that were integrated into
Speaker 1: the farm workers movement, and some of the programs that
Speaker 1: were put together by the anarchi feminists who were trying
Speaker 1: to support women's bodily autonomy and secure abortion rights through
Speaker 1: thing like mutual aid healthcare and and things like that.
Speaker 1: So we'll see there's like a lot of really beautiful
Speaker 1: examples of this work happening over time around successful organizing movements.
Speaker 1: And we're all really excited about what's going on now
Speaker 1: and we want to see that just to sort of
Speaker 1: come together and flourish. I think it's important to think
Speaker 1: about dual power or something that's like, I don't know,
Speaker 1: like I I think there's a lot of people who
Speaker 1: look at it as sort of like dual power is
Speaker 1: planting a garden. It's like, I mean sort of, yes,
Speaker 1: but like there's you know, they're there. There's there's sort
Speaker 1: of two components of it, right, There's there's this sort
Speaker 1: of there's a defensive component and an offensive component. There's
Speaker 1: a component that's about taking care of each other, and
Speaker 1: there is a component that is attack. Right, there's there's
Speaker 1: there's a component that is the people who are preventing
Speaker 1: us and taking care of each other need to be
Speaker 1: stopped from doing that. And so yeah, I think I
Speaker 1: think it's important to, yeah, think about different kinds of
Speaker 1: like different kinds of institutions that you would not normally
Speaker 1: think of as doing the same thing, as being part
Speaker 1: of the same struggle. And yeah, I guess that brings
Speaker 1: us to what YouTube and a lot of other people
Speaker 1: have been working on. For god, it has been this
Speaker 1: is this has been in the work for a long time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which which which is the which is the this? Uh,
Speaker 1: dual power gathering. And yeah, I guess you want to
Speaker 1: talk about what what that is because yeah, yeah, well,
Speaker 1: you know, we've all been sitting around the past couple
Speaker 1: of years dreaming about being together, and so I think
Speaker 1: this is kind of the fruit of that dream. Right
Speaker 1: coming up at the end of July, UH, we're inviting
Speaker 1: everyone out to the Indiana Dunes for a camping trip.
Speaker 1: UH and during that time, we're hoping to see a
Speaker 1: collaboratively produced event that incorporates everything that the participants can
Speaker 1: bring to it, which we know far exceeds the uh
Speaker 1: sort of even the scope and vision of the Orangizing Body.
Speaker 1: So we're really trying to, um, just create a space
Speaker 1: for people to come together who are interested in these ideas,
Speaker 1: who have various levels of experience working with it. That
Speaker 1: will be valuable to everybody, from people who are brand
Speaker 1: new to this stuff and just want to learn more
Speaker 1: about it, to people who have have been doing it
Speaker 1: for years, for decades even UM. And yeah, that's sort
Speaker 1: of sort of the the underlying ambition of it is
Speaker 1: to get people together in space. You know, a lot
Speaker 1: of us have been to these kinds of events before
Speaker 1: and felt like the most important thing that we got
Speaker 1: out of that was the relationships that we were able
Speaker 1: to build and the people that we were able to
Speaker 1: meet that we could then carry on ongoing dialogues with,
Speaker 1: and that we could find inspiration uh in in those
Speaker 1: dialogues and in those connections that would birth new projects
Speaker 1: that you know, we don't yet know are even possible.
Speaker 1: And so this is kind of, at least for me,
Speaker 1: like that's the really important ending sighting force of the
Speaker 1: of the plan. Yeah. Yeah, I think that, like they're
Speaker 1: the some of the things about this I think are
Speaker 1: really like it's been like really a collaborative effort to
Speaker 1: come up with this thing. Like we had the discussions
Speaker 1: about this is a thing that needs that we thought
Speaker 1: need to happen because at the end of like by
Speaker 1: the end of the middle of one, we're like, look, clearly,
Speaker 1: we've all been through so many different experiences over the
Speaker 1: last ten, fifteen, twenty years. At this point some of
Speaker 1: us are getting to be elders, and um, we uh
Speaker 1: and we need to like, um, it feels like it's
Speaker 1: now is an excellent a really great time to have
Speaker 1: like a actual conversation about where we where we're coming,
Speaker 1: where we are, where we're coming from and where we're going,
Speaker 1: and how do we translate these experiences into like networks
Speaker 1: of like trusting relationships and sharing, um sharing of all
Speaker 1: this knowledge is like we need to debrief like the
Speaker 1: like the past five years I think in particular, have
Speaker 1: been like it's like crammed. It feels like, you know,
Speaker 1: the whole saying like some some years nothing happens, and
Speaker 1: some you know, in some months decades happen or phrasing
Speaker 1: or whatever, and it's like so much stuff has come.
Speaker 1: We've all gone through so many things and come to
Speaker 1: like uh, and we're seeing people who didn't have like
Speaker 1: maybe a stance on various political things or are like
Speaker 1: seeing their communities torn apart by like the real lived
Speaker 1: experience of like climate change and wants to and need
Speaker 1: to do something about it. That sort of thing like
Speaker 1: bringing in people who have lots of experience with people
Speaker 1: who have maybe are just now figuring things out and
Speaker 1: really kind of like musing and taking this as an
Speaker 1: opportunity to maybe to generate new knowledge so that we're
Speaker 1: going to be like kind of like clarifying what we've
Speaker 1: gone through and where we're heading, and um get people
Speaker 1: like in the same space who like might as a
Speaker 1: like I do a lot of union ship, So I'm
Speaker 1: always thinking about how do I get like rank and
Speaker 1: file union radicals in the same space as like a
Speaker 1: like a neighborhood abolitionist or a tenant union organizer or
Speaker 1: a community land trust and getting all these like different
Speaker 1: groups because together and then like thinking about how they
Speaker 1: overlap in support and build off of each other because
Speaker 1: we I think the operating theory of many of people
Speaker 1: who are involved in this is that every context is
Speaker 1: different where we're organizing, but many there are many kind
Speaker 1: of principles that can kind of translate across context, but
Speaker 1: the context will shape very like like the I was
Speaker 1: just talking with one of the organizers who's like twenty
Speaker 1: minutes away over in northwest Indiana, and you're like in Gary,
Speaker 1: and you know, those areas and their contexts for building
Speaker 1: something like a an ecosystem too power organizations is going
Speaker 1: to be very different from my context where I am
Speaker 1: like down the street from this big global center of
Speaker 1: capital that's like University of Chicago and like, and it's
Speaker 1: doing all in my neighborhoods being gentrified by two billion
Speaker 1: dollar corporations. And I've got a big nurse union, whereas
Speaker 1: they're in the middle of like a neighbor community that's
Speaker 1: being actively divested and destroyed, like just like eating away
Speaker 1: at by like because capital just pulling out and has
Speaker 1: been doing that for basically as long as you've all been.
Speaker 1: At the same time, y'all are dealing with the same
Speaker 1: like biosphere complications and climate change implications, and so yeah,
Speaker 1: we're thinking about the ways in which like the kinds
Speaker 1: of affiliations that makes sense for us to be successful
Speaker 1: in our projects are like, you know, they're not just
Speaker 1: they're not just local, they're not just national, they're not
Speaker 1: just continental. There's like a lot of different things that
Speaker 1: are going on there. And that's the only way for
Speaker 1: us to really like sort out who we need to
Speaker 1: be in coaligion with on any particular issue is to
Speaker 1: know everybody, uh and to try to understand better there
Speaker 1: they're specific contexts and their specific experiences. And I think
Speaker 1: there's like, you know, I think, you know, to to
Speaker 1: John's point about you know, how much has changed in
Speaker 1: the last two, you know, handful of years or whatever,
Speaker 1: I think one thing that we've all come away from
Speaker 1: the pace of change is pretty humbling. You know, um,
Speaker 1: I think we definitely all we gotta we got. We
Speaker 1: took in a bit of the humility around around that
Speaker 1: what is it that we actually need to do? We
Speaker 1: are definitely not prepared for it, you know, And it
Speaker 1: doesn't matter how many decades we've been doing this organizing work.
Speaker 1: We just are not ready for how quickly things are
Speaker 1: changing right now. And the only way for us to
Speaker 1: get ready is to make sure that we shore up
Speaker 1: and strengthen the networks of people that we can rely
Speaker 1: on to produce kind of positive interdependence um as we
Speaker 1: move forward with the continued chaos that is the contemporary world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean. And then part of this is also like
Speaker 1: thinking about because the way this is structured, this isn't
Speaker 1: just like a series of panel discussions where we've like
Speaker 1: the organizers have curated like you're gonna listen to you know, uh,
Speaker 1: so and so who's like you know, a prominent tenant
Speaker 1: organizer so and so. It is like a prominent like
Speaker 1: uh like in like climate change direct action work. Like
Speaker 1: the goal is is that we like specifically chose a
Speaker 1: format and officially it's called like like an unconference. But
Speaker 1: the way I think of it is it's like which
Speaker 1: which comes out of tech, which I find kind of irritating,
Speaker 1: But that doesn't. But the core of the idea of
Speaker 1: the thing is is that we're coming into this space
Speaker 1: in generating new knowledge, not necessarily sitting there and receiving
Speaker 1: a bunch of knowledge from people who designate as like
Speaker 1: movement leaders or experts. That doesn't mean that people who
Speaker 1: don't have a lot of experience and a lot of
Speaker 1: like skills aren't going to be there. It just means
Speaker 1: that we're going to be. Because one of my things
Speaker 1: is popular education coming from the tradition of like pala
Speaker 1: Frere and like um everybody learning together is like it's
Speaker 1: like taking those principles and kind of like doing them
Speaker 1: in parallel in various circles. Where there will be a
Speaker 1: circle here of like cooperative organizers or people who want
Speaker 1: to get coops off the ground. Will be a circle
Speaker 1: here of people doing land us work. Will be a
Speaker 1: circle here of like unionists. There will be a circle
Speaker 1: here of people doing like abolition work, and or interest
Speaker 1: are people who are interested in all those things are
Speaker 1: getting those sorts of things off the ground, and as
Speaker 1: they work through like a like they present tell stories
Speaker 1: share ideas, do debriefs on like the various things that
Speaker 1: we've all been going through over you know whatever. How
Speaker 1: far back our timeline is depending on how far which
Speaker 1: elders decided to attend UM, but then taking that knowledge
Speaker 1: with our facilitators and then being like, you know what,
Speaker 1: I think that these two conversations are happening kind of
Speaker 1: like in parallel would be better if they were merged
Speaker 1: together and beginning to kind of like build that sort
Speaker 1: of like and so the idea isn't necessarily come away
Speaker 1: with like a pre like we're not setting up like
Speaker 1: a like a predetermined set of conclusions for people we
Speaker 1: believe and based off of we've been having monthly community
Speaker 1: calls for people who are going to be attending. All
Speaker 1: the different groups of folks who will be coming to
Speaker 1: this is going to be I think like the depth
Speaker 1: of experience is going to be really phenomenal UM and
Speaker 1: people coming from We definitely have people confirmed who are
Speaker 1: coming from Canada, people who we may be having folks
Speaker 1: with experience the indigenous communities is uh in Mexico, we
Speaker 1: maybe have We're fairly confident we're gonna have people who
Speaker 1: are like just come from areas like northern Syria and
Speaker 1: iraq Um and taking all these different ideas and experiences
Speaker 1: and then generating next like coming to new conclusions, maybe
Speaker 1: unexpected conclusions or things that we didn't quite that we
Speaker 1: weren't anticipating, but maybe asking new questions. Right Like, this
Speaker 1: is a kind of intended to be a prefigure of
Speaker 1: space for engaging with things where we don't know what
Speaker 1: the right answer is. And I think we all need
Speaker 1: to release sit with the fact that we do not
Speaker 1: have like a clear right solution into the problems that
Speaker 1: we're facing right now. Like I've been kind of pulling
Speaker 1: on the slogan a little. It's like no gods, no masters,
Speaker 1: no right answers, you know, just like get used to it.
Speaker 1: We need to be more creative and we need to
Speaker 1: be more open to experimentation. And you know, there's just
Speaker 1: a lot of there's a lot of stuff that's going
Speaker 1: to be coming at us fast, and you know, this
Speaker 1: is a we we we hope this can be a
Speaker 1: space where we can kind of take some time to
Speaker 1: slowly get square with what it is we're going to
Speaker 1: have to be thinking about, even if we don't know
Speaker 1: what to do exactly yet. So I had I had
Speaker 1: a really good experience where I was listening to like
Speaker 1: one of the like a person who came out of
Speaker 1: Act Up giving a talk in my neighborhood, and she
Speaker 1: was saying, because we had had questions, is this going
Speaker 1: to be about a lot of theory? Are we gonna
Speaker 1: be talking about of abstract stuff? And um, this organizer
Speaker 1: was like, you know, Actup had no theory, right they did.
Speaker 1: They took action, and the theory followed afterwards. And so
Speaker 1: the idea that we're like necessarily having coming to this
Speaker 1: with like the right answers already figured out is just
Speaker 1: not like something that I think it's going to be
Speaker 1: a super generative discussion. The idea of coming up with
Speaker 1: like coming up with orientations and thinking about like where
Speaker 1: we are heading kind of in a general sense, and
Speaker 1: then seeing how that unfolds and builds is I think
Speaker 1: a big, key, key aspect of what we're trying to
Speaker 1: do when we come together. We're just not to say yeah,
Speaker 1: which is not to say that there won't be theory,
Speaker 1: because that's not up to us. That's up to y'all.
Speaker 1: So you know, um, I probably don't know like what
Speaker 1: I'm really interested in is having conversations about like doing
Speaker 1: mental health care, you know, and like, for me, the
Speaker 1: theory is less interesting than you know, like talking about
Speaker 1: what we actually need in the spaces that we work in.
Speaker 1: But that's you know, that's where I'm coming from, and
Speaker 1: everybody else is coming at this from their own perspective too,
Speaker 1: So I'm really excited to see what people bring to
Speaker 1: that space and what we can get out of it.
Speaker 1: Um by just thinking that we all are contributing something
Speaker 1: constructive to that conversation. And then also there's gonna be
Speaker 1: a lot of discussion about like literal practical skills, like
Speaker 1: here's how you like, here's how you uh. This has
Speaker 1: always been the perennial thing. This is how you pick
Speaker 1: a lot, This is how you uh, this is how
Speaker 1: you organize comms at like at like a like on
Speaker 1: a picket line. This is how you pull together uh
Speaker 1: a demand letter for like a list for like tenants,
Speaker 1: like you know, these are the sorts of things that
Speaker 1: like we're gonna be talking, We're going to be doing
Speaker 1: concrete skill shares. Plus these discussions about our experience is
Speaker 1: and sharing our stories and you know, hopefully we're gonna
Speaker 1: come away from this. A big goal of it is
Speaker 1: to um come up with a lot of like different
Speaker 1: like um, just like content. We're going to be recording
Speaker 1: videos and uh like uh audio and like also and
Speaker 1: then transcribing things and writing things up. And we're hoping
Speaker 1: that once we're then we're gonna have a big report
Speaker 1: that we can share out with people who can't attend. Yeah,
Speaker 1: privacy concerns obviously considered. So yeah, for sure, Yeah, there
Speaker 1: is Consent is a big is a big thing with
Speaker 1: us as organizers. She should help. So yeah, you would think,
Speaker 1: but you know, not everyone is down as you would imagine. Okay,
Speaker 1: so basically we're building a perfect little utopia for like
Speaker 1: four days and you'll come out because we're going to
Speaker 1: fix the revolution. So kidding obviously on on on kind
Speaker 1: of crete level, Like what does like a day here
Speaker 1: look like? Like what do what are what? What what
Speaker 1: are we doing? Oh that's fun, that's a fun question.
Speaker 1: Uh if I may, John, Yeah, yeah, go for it. Um.
Speaker 1: What we're thinking right now, basically, is it a day.
Speaker 1: It looks like we get up in the morning, we
Speaker 1: drink coffee, we have breakfast, and we have a little
Speaker 1: assembly check in to see how things are going, if
Speaker 1: we need to make any major adjustments, and we put
Speaker 1: up a uh sort of schedule for the afternoon's events
Speaker 1: that was populated from the conversation that was happening in
Speaker 1: the evening the night before, and anything that anybody wants
Speaker 1: to bring up to that schedule that happened between yesterday
Speaker 1: and this morning. Uh, then we're gonna roll off into
Speaker 1: um basically what would be some of the kind of
Speaker 1: like things we already know for sure that we wanted
Speaker 1: to see happening that we could get on a on
Speaker 1: a sort of schedule ahead of time. So some of
Speaker 1: these skill shares that were planned that would require kind
Speaker 1: of like replanning or maybe some discussions that people reached
Speaker 1: out ahead of time that they definitely wanted to have
Speaker 1: so that stuff would be happening earlier in the day.
Speaker 1: Um that you know, we're we're talking about having sort
Speaker 1: of just like sandwich bars and you know, make your
Speaker 1: own lunch kind of situations going on. There should be
Speaker 1: a lot of different things happening in different geographical locations
Speaker 1: on the site, so you kind of get get a
Speaker 1: choice of where you want to go. It's not like
Speaker 1: there's one big event. Um, we're going to try to
Speaker 1: group things that are sort of thematically similar in so
Speaker 1: that they're nearby each other in case you want to
Speaker 1: go around and see, um what the different kind of
Speaker 1: stuff is going to be. And then in the afternoon
Speaker 1: it's going to be like I mean, okay, of course
Speaker 1: this is like how we're intending right now. The afternoon
Speaker 1: would be the discussions and skill shares and events and
Speaker 1: circles and spaces that um, we're generated out of the
Speaker 1: conversations that have been happening in space so that people
Speaker 1: came and thought, you know, we had this conversation yesterday
Speaker 1: that really inspired me. Let's talk about this, and I'm
Speaker 1: going to make space for that. So we're gonna have
Speaker 1: big map where you figure out where you want to go,
Speaker 1: and you're gonna be able to wander around and meet people.
Speaker 1: Were trying to incorporate a lot of events that make
Speaker 1: it easier to meet other people that you don't know yet. Um.
Speaker 1: Where there's gonna be tables where you can do arts
Speaker 1: and crafts. There's gonna be game space for whatever kind
Speaker 1: of games you want to play. There's gonna be places
Speaker 1: for kids to hang out. There's gonna be a quiet
Speaker 1: tent where you can take some contemplation time. You know,
Speaker 1: at some point we want to do it like a
Speaker 1: kind of brief circle for people to deal with what
Speaker 1: they've been kind of going through in the world. And
Speaker 1: you know some uh you know, utopia, envisioning arts space,
Speaker 1: you know, these kinds of things like where um, you know,
Speaker 1: somebody wants to teach someone else a dance. Like that's
Speaker 1: the kind of thing that we're really hoping can go on.
Speaker 1: In the afternoon. Uh, then we would be feeding everybody dinner,
Speaker 1: and we kind of had this idea we've been playing
Speaker 1: with that we would have two campfires after dinner, and
Speaker 1: one campfire will have kind of an open forum where
Speaker 1: anybody can talk for like ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, you
Speaker 1: know whatever however long people need who are there, depending
Speaker 1: on how popular that is, and just kind of air
Speaker 1: everything that's in their head. And we'll have a note
Speaker 1: taker so we can try to incorporate what comes out
Speaker 1: of those discussions into the next days agenda. Um. And
Speaker 1: so that's sort of like what we were what we
Speaker 1: were envisioning. And then for the other campfire, because people
Speaker 1: who don't don't forget this, the other the other the
Speaker 1: other camp fire for people who are like done with talk,
Speaker 1: I need to just sit and stare at and flames
Speaker 1: for a little bit. Yeah, I imagine I'll be going
Speaker 1: back and forth between the fires, so you know, that's
Speaker 1: also an option. But the idea is to get kind
Speaker 1: of like somewhere between I think when we were calling
Speaker 1: us like somewhere between a conference and a music festival,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, Like there where you're able
Speaker 1: to sort of move around and you don't have to
Speaker 1: go and sit in one place and do like, okay
Speaker 1: for this hour, this is where you know, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's meant to be a bit more informal, um and
Speaker 1: we're hoping that that makes a lot more space for
Speaker 1: people to sort of explore and people to meet other
Speaker 1: people that they don't already know. Because I don't know
Speaker 1: if that if that, if that sums up sort of
Speaker 1: like what I'm imagining, because that's like, you know, that's
Speaker 1: the spirit. So I think if that's the question, like
Speaker 1: what does the date look like, well, hopefully it's fun.
Speaker 1: You know, that's kind of the main the main thing
Speaker 1: we're thinking here, So make it sort of low stress
Speaker 1: and low stakes place that we can talk about some
Speaker 1: of the highest stress and highest stakes questions that we
Speaker 1: have to deal with. So yeah, and like that being said,
Speaker 1: like because we're modeling it this way specifically based on
Speaker 1: people's experience with like the Symbiosish Federations founding conference, that
Speaker 1: sort of thing where there were a lot of stakes
Speaker 1: and people were trying to kind of like funnel different
Speaker 1: discussions through different ways. And this is not a necessarily
Speaker 1: critique of how that all went down. It's just like
Speaker 1: based on our experience and our experiences with those sorts
Speaker 1: of things. The goal is too for this to be
Speaker 1: if it's successful the first of many of these sorts
Speaker 1: of things, UM, many of these kind of gatherings and discussions,
Speaker 1: and to provide a model for how it could happen.
Speaker 1: But to keep um, we deliberately decided that this we're
Speaker 1: not going to make like a bit We're not going
Speaker 1: to have big points of unity debate and discussion and
Speaker 1: voting on assembly sort of thing. We will use assemblies
Speaker 1: for you know, certain things like setting up like our
Speaker 1: community agreements and that sort of stuff, and kind of
Speaker 1: like getting the days rolling and kind of getting the
Speaker 1: days closed. But the goal is like to not is
Speaker 1: to bring people into conversation who haven't who maybe don't
Speaker 1: have the basis of trust for those bigger collective like
Speaker 1: discussions yet, but maybe they will later. But the goal
Speaker 1: is for now is we're getting We're building and expanding
Speaker 1: our networks. We're building, expanding our trust with different people
Speaker 1: and building expanding our knowledge so that we can go
Speaker 1: out and do kind of work that we think we
Speaker 1: need to do to I don't know survives as a
Speaker 1: species on this planet. So um, that's one of the
Speaker 1: reasons why if there are some people are like, oh,
Speaker 1: I don't know, it seems really kind of wishy washy.
Speaker 1: It's very that was a very deliberate decision based on
Speaker 1: previous experience from organizers who have been to these sorts
Speaker 1: of things. And the goal is really too, to have
Speaker 1: a place where we can have discussions about high stakes
Speaker 1: issues without being so invested in it that we feel
Speaker 1: like if our concept of how to solve that problem
Speaker 1: doesn't come out as the like solution, that we've somehow failed.
Speaker 1: So it's like, yeah, I was to say that I
Speaker 1: think one of the one of these things that you
Speaker 1: that you brought up there, that's really important. It's like
Speaker 1: not even just in these previous conferences or congresses or
Speaker 1: gatherings that we've been to have we seen to be
Speaker 1: a problem. But basically, at least I can speak for
Speaker 1: myself in a lot of organizing spaces that I've been
Speaker 1: in over the past, you know, like fifteen years that
Speaker 1: I've been pretty active in in the organizing universe. Um,
Speaker 1: basically that one of the main problems that we have
Speaker 1: with this kind of like space of trust that we
Speaker 1: definitely know that we need to be able to work
Speaker 1: together and moving forward, is that we don't really have
Speaker 1: shared language a lot of the time. And we think
Speaker 1: we do because we use the same words, but we
Speaker 1: often use them to mean different things, or we often
Speaker 1: use different words to mean the same things as well.
Speaker 1: And then we come from kind of different organizing cultures
Speaker 1: and a lot of different places like that some are
Speaker 1: more are less. We should say that maybe that there
Speaker 1: there are different places where you show solidarity in a
Speaker 1: different way, you show good faith, and you show that
Speaker 1: you're committed in a different way. What it means to
Speaker 1: be democratic in a space seems different depending on this
Speaker 1: on the tradition that you that you may be come from.
Speaker 1: So what we're really hoping to do is kind of
Speaker 1: makes space to incorporate all of that. So we were
Speaker 1: was joking it was a camping trip, where many camping
Speaker 1: trips fit, you know that like that there should be
Speaker 1: an opportunity for people to kind of like learn to
Speaker 1: talk past those those barriers that we might have to
Speaker 1: understanding each other, and like that success would really look
Speaker 1: like people coming away believing in other people's commitment to
Speaker 1: get this done and with the kind of contacts that
Speaker 1: they need to support each other moving forward as things
Speaker 1: come up in different places, as opposed to just like
Speaker 1: here's a solution, like here's a blueprint for how to
Speaker 1: get this done. You know that relationship that you have
Speaker 1: with a person who has had that experience in the
Speaker 1: past is going to be way more valuable than any
Speaker 1: document they give you based on their experience, because you're
Speaker 1: gonna be able to say, well, ship, I wasn't expecting
Speaker 1: this to happen, Like what do we do? And then
Speaker 1: you can talk through that with them, and like that's
Speaker 1: really I think that's really the foundation of our being
Speaker 1: able to share this knowledge with each other is that
Speaker 1: we have the opportunity to kind of engage in these
Speaker 1: ways that are more focused on the kind of just
Speaker 1: the sort of dynamism of the of the challenges that
Speaker 1: we're dealing with right now. So emergence is a big thing.
Speaker 1: Things are always gonna like things that are always going
Speaker 1: to be changing, Like, uh, we are we need to
Speaker 1: be prepared to deal with a world that's gonna be
Speaker 1: throwing challenges at us that like we haven't like we
Speaker 1: haven't had solutions for and like because we're going through
Speaker 1: that's like really kind of like catastrophic like uh the
Speaker 1: moments of like uh climate change and um, I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't know how else to say it, but like
Speaker 1: and and so it's it's like engendering the idea, the
Speaker 1: idea that we're constantly evaluating what's happening around us, both
Speaker 1: like at our local level and across the regions and
Speaker 1: global and then taking new knowledge in and coming up
Speaker 1: with new solutions um in a real like in like
Speaker 1: a truly experimental way, like thinking about things is like experiments,
Speaker 1: and how we're going to like come up with new
Speaker 1: solutions to these problems because it's just well, like as
Speaker 1: we kept telling people, because when we're out there trying
Speaker 1: to bring groups in everyone's selling us our capacity. This
Speaker 1: sounds great. Our capacity is incredibly low. Uh. And that
Speaker 1: has just been across the entire spectrum of organizations, and
Speaker 1: that includes huge, big, put together organizations like you know
Speaker 1: unions versus little mutual a groups. Everybody is dealing with
Speaker 1: this like feeling of exhaustioning like capacity. Our goal is
Speaker 1: to get people together so that they can build capacity
Speaker 1: UM through these discussions and to be prepared for things,
Speaker 1: because capacity is always going to be an issue. And
Speaker 1: our goal is to get people to this point where
Speaker 1: because they're um, their mindset is okay, new challenge, Let's
Speaker 1: think about it critically and come up with solutions that
Speaker 1: fit this moment as supposed to keep trying to force
Speaker 1: things into UM preset like easy. I mean, I don't
Speaker 1: want to say easy, but like I think that sometimes
Speaker 1: like everyone's trying to mind history for the like the
Speaker 1: one weird trick to solve all these problems. And I
Speaker 1: think that the one weird trick is that human beings
Speaker 1: are creative, critical thinking machines. Like our our brain is
Speaker 1: like this thing for taking in information and generating new
Speaker 1: new thought and action, and we need to embrace that
Speaker 1: UM because if we don't. I don't think we're going
Speaker 1: to be very successful certainly. And the yeah, and these
Speaker 1: times of just increasing uncertainty, that kind of humility and
Speaker 1: flexibility and like continue building of comfort with that uncertainty
Speaker 1: is going to be super essential to our being able
Speaker 1: to maintain even sort of like the basic ability to
Speaker 1: take action. And I think so we're going to have
Speaker 1: to like continue to like to lean into that uncertainty
Speaker 1: and to sort of I think, you know, kind of
Speaker 1: historically the being comfortable with things changing and being comfortable
Speaker 1: with uncertainty is actually one of our great strengths, right
Speaker 1: because we can actually start to get moving while everybody
Speaker 1: else is still going, what the hell? You know? And
Speaker 1: so I think, you know, that's going to definitely be
Speaker 1: something that's going to serve us. And Yeah, anyway, I
Speaker 1: have I have one last I question on an extremely
Speaker 1: practical level, which is like what is the like facility
Speaker 1: situation here? Like how what what are what are people
Speaker 1: sleeping in? Uh? So, like right now where we like
Speaker 1: we have camp space reserved for people, um, and so
Speaker 1: we understand the camping is not always super accessible, but
Speaker 1: we are very fortunate that like the National Lake Shore
Speaker 1: has specific accessible facilities UM for folks, and we do
Speaker 1: have disabled like UH comrades coming to this event, and
Speaker 1: we're working on making sure that those UH that their
Speaker 1: particular needs don't keep them from participating fully in the events.
Speaker 1: There's UM the discussions and circles themselves will be UM
Speaker 1: at like shelter space UM a bit away from where
Speaker 1: the camping is happening, so we're organizing transport between us
Speaker 1: to split those spaces UM. For people who cannot camp,
Speaker 1: we are working organizing some hotel space for folks UM,
Speaker 1: and then for people who can camp but don't have
Speaker 1: any equipment. Our goal is to work going to UM
Speaker 1: basically acquire like enough camping equipment for a sizeable chunk
Speaker 1: of folks to come. And UH. It's like literally today
Speaker 1: walking through a Walmart with my daughter looking at their
Speaker 1: camp equipment in pricing out things like sleeping bags and
Speaker 1: camp like sleeping mattresses, intense that sort of thing. So yeah,
Speaker 1: if people have have stuff they want to donate to
Speaker 1: the cause to like, I think we should be able
Speaker 1: to take some of that in. I think we were
Speaker 1: just talking yesterday about the possibility of having like camp
Speaker 1: gear repair zone. So if you have things that you
Speaker 1: find at the thrift store that like a tour intent
Speaker 1: or something like that will help you fix it. You know,
Speaker 1: we just want to make sure that everybody has these
Speaker 1: supplies as well, because they're they're broadly useful. I know
Speaker 1: I've used my camping gear in uh some politically motivated
Speaker 1: ways in the best I think that it's not bad
Speaker 1: for people to have it if you need it. Also,
Speaker 1: you know, the camping aspect of it is also it's
Speaker 1: more of a feature than a bug. Like there's like
Speaker 1: a like so to so to speak, like the pandemic
Speaker 1: is not over yet, as we're like seeing right UM
Speaker 1: in spite of everything that like a ruling class is
Speaker 1: desperately trying to get us to agree to and so
Speaker 1: having um the accommodations outside and doing the doing the
Speaker 1: actual events like out of doors where there's lots of ventilatation.
Speaker 1: We think it is like right now one of these
Speaker 1: events so that we're not going to get so that
Speaker 1: people aren't going to come away from this UM getting sick,
Speaker 1: which is really important m from I mean as a
Speaker 1: person who's recovering from COVID COVID rounds two UM and
Speaker 1: as a healthcare worker. That was one of our big
Speaker 1: concerns because when we started making these plans, we really
Speaker 1: weren't sure what was going to be happening in terms
Speaker 1: of the pandemic, and having it out of doors was
Speaker 1: just like a sure fireway that we knew that we
Speaker 1: could at the very least, we can minimize the chances
Speaker 1: that people would be getting sick from just showing up
Speaker 1: and being s space together absolutely, and we're definitely encouraging
Speaker 1: people who are coming together with friends and comrades and
Speaker 1: little groups to self organize their camps as much as
Speaker 1: they would like to do that UM to sort of
Speaker 1: make plans together to limit the UM you know, the
Speaker 1: need for spaces. You know, we're sharing up tents and
Speaker 1: all this kind of stuff to the extent that people
Speaker 1: are comfortable with that that you know, people, if you
Speaker 1: need to get in touch with people from around you,
Speaker 1: if you don't know anybody, you can reach out to us.
Speaker 1: If we know anybody else who's looking for somebody to
Speaker 1: try to coordinate with, will definitely put you in touch to.
Speaker 1: Something we want to be able to do is like
Speaker 1: offer some of these connective services to help people UM
Speaker 1: to link up with people who are coming from from
Speaker 1: their areas or people who are interested in the same
Speaker 1: kinds of things. UM. And so we're kind of thinking
Speaker 1: of ourselves in the organizing body is facilitators of those
Speaker 1: connections and trying to imagine how what we do will
Speaker 1: make those connections most likely to happen. UM. So in
Speaker 1: terms of the of the facilities as well, I think
Speaker 1: we we've talked about trying to get some camp stoves
Speaker 1: together for people who need to use sort of a
Speaker 1: kitchen space to try to limit the amount of things
Speaker 1: that people need to bring for that, but definitely feel free,
Speaker 1: uh to bring bring your own stuff and and and
Speaker 1: set up whatever whatever you need and let us know
Speaker 1: if you need help from us. Well, we'll do our
Speaker 1: best to accommodate. And people are getting fed, like so
Speaker 1: we're playing and having meals arranged and that will be
Speaker 1: vegan and uh with the caveat that Folks who want
Speaker 1: to have separate food, like do their own self organized
Speaker 1: like cooking with that other thing, they that they're really
Speaker 1: committed to. UM. And we're playing and having like all
Speaker 1: the necessities of like lots of water, make sure that
Speaker 1: like we've got first aid lined up. There's gonna be
Speaker 1: street credics who are participating in the work of organizing
Speaker 1: all that harm reduction UM and just generally like like
Speaker 1: some of the other things that didn't really mentioned, Like
Speaker 1: we know that we're bringing a bunch of people with
Speaker 1: a lot of big ideas and big personalities together, and
Speaker 1: that means we're probably gonna have to deal with some conflict.
Speaker 1: Maybe I don't know, so having UM conflicts, uh, like
Speaker 1: people who are good at media and conflict. We're going
Speaker 1: to have a crew of people who do that. We're
Speaker 1: working on child watch training because this is going to
Speaker 1: be the family from space, making sure that we know
Speaker 1: how to take care of each other in case like
Speaker 1: shady people from outside trying to do something like whatever.
Speaker 1: Like our goal is to just make sure that like
Speaker 1: this is UM as safe as it can be, bringing
Speaker 1: people together as successful as it can be. Understanding implementations
Speaker 1: of who's gonna be You're gonna be outside, so there
Speaker 1: might be you know, all the some of the fun
Speaker 1: of having like a collective group of people all outside together,
Speaker 1: which can be a lot of fun. Like I'm I'm
Speaker 1: waiting for karaoke and for UM like our open mic
Speaker 1: and people bringing out like instruments and like just having
Speaker 1: like you know, we're people discussing like, um, you know
Speaker 1: some soccer uh potentially being a thing, um determining like
Speaker 1: placing bets on who's going to be more into soccer
Speaker 1: based on various ideological fin views and past experience, and yeah,
Speaker 1: hit us up if you want to play some music,
Speaker 1: if you've got an idea for something fun that sounds
Speaker 1: cool to do. And just to come to circle back
Speaker 1: to this, I think, like with the point about conflict mediation,
Speaker 1: I just want to make that like super clear. Just
Speaker 1: because we're not going to spend half a day trying
Speaker 1: to come up with community with the points of unity
Speaker 1: does not mean we don't have expectations about how you
Speaker 1: act in this space. So our plan is basically to say, like,
Speaker 1: don't be an asshole. And then that means you know,
Speaker 1: like in all the ways that we know, uh that
Speaker 1: those things can happen. And then if somebody accidentally is
Speaker 1: being an asshole, where somebody's are accidentally being an asshole
Speaker 1: like that, those are things we can we can manage
Speaker 1: because we all know what it is that we're doing here. Um,
Speaker 1: So it's definitely not a free for all you know
Speaker 1: it's a this is a space where the normal things
Speaker 1: we would expect in space are expected, you know, explicitly. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Oh well man, I'm excited. Yeah, I'm looking forward to people.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't actually know how widespread bonfires
Speaker 1: are in the US, but we do a lot in
Speaker 1: the Midwest and bonfires are a great time. I'm excited
Speaker 1: people to experience that. It's it's good. Um. Yes, so
Speaker 1: I guess, um do you you if anything closing that
Speaker 1: you want to say? And also where can people find
Speaker 1: this and attempt to go to it? Also when is
Speaker 1: it happening, because that's another important It's going to be
Speaker 1: July UH twenty nine one UM, and attendance is free,
Speaker 1: there's no there's no charge, but we are soliciting donations.
Speaker 1: So we're doing a fundraiser UM through Open Collectives UM
Speaker 1: and we spend very generously given UH an offer of
Speaker 1: matching donations from one of the organizers who got like
Speaker 1: I got a little bit of a chunk of change
Speaker 1: to kind of contribute to that sort of thing. We're
Speaker 1: very I'm excited about that. So if you go on
Speaker 1: to you can follow us on Twitter, and I believe
Speaker 1: that's at Dual Power. Uh to let me tell the chat.
Speaker 1: I think it's at Dual Power. Gathering is our Twitter
Speaker 1: and um the website is dual dual power dot org. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: um yeah. If you go on the website, you'll find
Speaker 1: the links to everything you need to know. You can
Speaker 1: get in touch with us. You can like, you know,
Speaker 1: give us your your feedback, if you love it, if
Speaker 1: you hate it, if you've you know whatever. We're We're
Speaker 1: probably not going to change the whole thing right now,
Speaker 1: but show up and we can change it at the time.
Speaker 1: I'll also say we do have like an organizing discord
Speaker 1: and people who are like serious about like getting involved
Speaker 1: in want to have things like I want to come
Speaker 1: to this and with things that they have specific visions
Speaker 1: for now. It's like absolutely time to get engaged with
Speaker 1: that because we're like we're working towards making getting people
Speaker 1: into the like who are the participants to really own
Speaker 1: the event itself, So that'll be like that's something we have.
Speaker 1: I believe We're gonna probably two more community calls wanted
Speaker 1: June and one in July. Every one of those calls
Speaker 1: has been really amazing, lots of great people, um, and
Speaker 1: during those calls are gonna be doing some training on
Speaker 1: because you've got to do some prep work when you're
Speaker 1: doing this kind of like generative discussion like popular education,
Speaker 1: like unconfidence style. UM events like coming to them with
Speaker 1: a little bit of un understanding of what that looks
Speaker 1: like is really key to being successful. So um, we
Speaker 1: encourage people who want to come get signed up, and
Speaker 1: then we'll get into our mailing list, and our mailing
Speaker 1: lists is where we disseminate like when those calls are happening,
Speaker 1: and also pomping our discord as long as you're cool
Speaker 1: and agree your community very manol like bring you in
Speaker 1: and get all sorts of shipped together. We're very excited
Speaker 1: for people. There's still a third number of thoughts open
Speaker 1: for the events itself, were like almost half way full.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I mean definitely, we're We've been trying to
Speaker 1: think about this as an event that we would want
Speaker 1: to go to, and we wanted to be an event
Speaker 1: that you want to come to also, so help us
Speaker 1: make it. So yeah, yeah, that's that's yeah, this is
Speaker 1: really exciting. I'm god be going to it. Yeah. So yeah,
Speaker 1: thank thank thank you, thank you to you both for
Speaker 1: joining us, for talking about this, and I'm excited too.
Speaker 1: I'm excited to see lots of people there. Hey, hey,
Speaker 1: I mean we've all been wanting to see each other
Speaker 1: for two and a half years, right, So I miss you.
Speaker 1: I missing your face with dimension. Yea, I'm sick of
Speaker 1: you're flat face. Yeah, thanks so much for having us
Speaker 1: on to talk about it. Really looking forward to it.
Speaker 1: I mean, we're getting closer and closer. It's just like
Speaker 1: it just gets more exciting and also a little nerve wracking.
Speaker 1: But thankfully a lot of people have been stepping up
Speaker 1: on a very I'm confident that's gonna be really like
Speaker 1: a really great thing. Yeah, and we will we we
Speaker 1: will have links to everything in the show notes. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this has just make it happen here. You can find
Speaker 1: us in the usual places happen to your pot and stuff. Alright, goodbye,
Speaker 1: have fun. Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes
Speaker 1: every week from now until the heat death of the universe.
Speaker 1: It could happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 1: cool zone media dot com, or check us out on
Speaker 1: the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: listen to podcasts, you can find sore Sayspher It could
Speaker 1: happen here, Updated monthly at cool Zone Media dot com
Speaker 1: slash sources. Thanks for listening.