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Speaker 1: Forest Service and the AD Council. Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here,
Speaker 1: and I wanted to let you know. This is a
Speaker 1: compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just
Speaker 1: happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less
Speaker 1: ads package for you to listen to in a long
Speaker 1: stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the
Speaker 1: episodes every day this week, there's gonna be nothing new
Speaker 1: here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm Robert Evans. They have said that already. I don't know,
Speaker 1: Like I said, too many mother fucking podcasts. But this
Speaker 1: is the last week episode, um and and with me
Speaker 1: actually in the office right now. Maskless is a protest
Speaker 1: against the mask man. Garrison. David, it's fine, it's fine, Garrison.
Speaker 1: I understand that that you don't believe in health mandates. Okay,
Speaker 1: we have to respect each other's differences. No, I have
Speaker 1: magic to protect myself. That's right, that's fine. You use
Speaker 1: chaos magic to protect yourself from COVID. Garrison, what do
Speaker 1: you got for me. We're doing We're doing the first
Speaker 1: it could happen here Daily book episode excellent, um sexy
Speaker 1: and so irotic. We were looking for for spooky content
Speaker 1: for Spooky Week and around Halloween, and I wanted to
Speaker 1: find a book written by an unhinged like Christian writer
Speaker 1: about what they think Halloween is. And I found I
Speaker 1: found one with very very little browsing. It took It
Speaker 1: was very quick. It took me like five minutes. It
Speaker 1: used to be you were too well, no, because you
Speaker 1: did grow up in the cold, but you were tooting
Speaker 1: to remember this being a super mainstream I mean, I
Speaker 1: wasn't like we had no Halloween. I was a kid.
Speaker 1: We couldn't get treating. We had like we had, like
Speaker 1: we had like a we had like a harvest party
Speaker 1: the church put off, but like we had we had.
Speaker 1: I couldn't. I didn't. The first time I went trick
Speaker 1: or treating was when I was like twelve and I
Speaker 1: moved to Portland. No, I was like thirteen, was the
Speaker 1: first time I went trick or treating? Yeah, it's um,
Speaker 1: I mean it used to be like it used to
Speaker 1: be something that got more mainstream play, the like anti
Speaker 1: Halloween thing. Um kind of tied in with a Satanic panic.
Speaker 1: I remember the early nineties, that's what this book is
Speaker 1: going to be about. Angry about it, but man, it
Speaker 1: just is like it's it's it almost feels like homey
Speaker 1: and comforting. Thinking that this book has been oddly comforting
Speaker 1: because it just reminds people with childhood was like, because
Speaker 1: that's just all the same stuff. Yeah, I want you,
Speaker 1: I want you to read the title and the author
Speaker 1: of this amazing book. Okay, so this is wow. The
Speaker 1: cover is honestly just looks like a normal jack It
Speaker 1: looks like a regular a bat into a jackal lanard,
Speaker 1: but it's got like spooky white smoke coming out of it.
Speaker 1: The title is Helloween Satan's New Year, by doctor Billy Dimily.
Speaker 1: It's not a real name. Is not a real name,
Speaker 1: Billy Billy like it's I swear to God listeners, b
Speaker 1: I L L y E. That is not a name.
Speaker 1: And the name it is certainly not Billy, that's Billy,
Speaker 1: but the last name it was just as bad. Dimily. Yeah,
Speaker 1: d y M A L L y dim ally ally
Speaker 1: nonsense nonsense. So we have whenever you find a Christian
Speaker 1: book written by someone with doctor and from their first name,
Speaker 1: you know, you know it's gonna be good. You gotta
Speaker 1: figure out what kind of doctor. Guess what? Guess what
Speaker 1: kind of doctor. So, first of all, for the maybe
Speaker 1: so Billy dim Ley, the author earned Billy earned a
Speaker 1: theological doctorate of ministry in the mid eighties at the
Speaker 1: Honolulu extension of the of the Western Conservative Baptist Theological
Speaker 1: Seminary headquartered in Portland, Oregon. So that's fine. The Honolulu
Speaker 1: one headquarters. The branch was in Hollelululu, but the headquarters
Speaker 1: was apparently in Portland, Oregon in the eighties, and that
Speaker 1: makes sense muchure if it's still here. But you know,
Speaker 1: sister cities Portland and Honolulu. She wrote at least fifteen
Speaker 1: original manuscripts her word manuscript um on a wide range
Speaker 1: of biblical doctrines. And I believe so, I mean it
Speaker 1: has she her pronounces, I got, I can't continue, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna look this up. So yeah, Billy. So then the
Speaker 1: book that we're looking at is is one one of
Speaker 1: her fifteen manuscripts um self published by Infinity Publishing. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this was in the publish in two thousand six. That
Speaker 1: and if that's her actual picture on the front. She
Speaker 1: just kind of looks like a looks like a white lady,
Speaker 1: like a white lady. So yeah. So one of my
Speaker 1: favorite parts of the book so far is right when
Speaker 1: you opened up to the title page, it says Halloween
Speaker 1: satans know you're the titled the book, and then as
Speaker 1: a as a brief description of what the book is,
Speaker 1: it says, a systematic compilation and narrative of paraphrased Bible scriptures. Oh, whoa, No,
Speaker 1: that is not her on the cover, because she is
Speaker 1: not a white lady, is she not? So that's her? Oh?
Speaker 1: She she's like a black conservative bath Yeah, just like
Speaker 1: she looks like kind of like a judge. She does
Speaker 1: look a lot like a strong judge, does judge energy? Yeah? Okay,
Speaker 1: well I I do. I do love the systematic compilation
Speaker 1: narrative of paraphrased Bible scriptures, not actual Bibles. Not actual
Speaker 1: Bible scriptures. Wow, God Garrison, Uh huh. You want to
Speaker 1: guess what she has as her as her place of
Speaker 1: employment on Facebook? Well, let me think, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna read it verbatim works at in and this
Speaker 1: is all caps now the service of God. Alright, she
Speaker 1: works at in the service of she does work at
Speaker 1: the service who doesn't work at in the service of God?
Speaker 1: Am I right fucking incredible? Based on this book, I'm
Speaker 1: guessing she got real, real into Q and on. But
Speaker 1: that's just based on what I read. I think she
Speaker 1: may have died. Oh really well, her last post is
Speaker 1: in February. Oh, I wonder what happening around in February.
Speaker 1: Maybe she's just not super into Facebook but just posting
Speaker 1: quite a lot. I think she's not. She's actually not
Speaker 1: super He's a decent chance COVID got her. Yeah, maybe
Speaker 1: she just doesn't use a lot of social media. That's fine, Okay,
Speaker 1: continue please, So yeah, I do like that She describes
Speaker 1: the book as paraphrase Bible scriptures, not actual par paraphrase
Speaker 1: and and Bible paraphrase Bible scriptures on the doctrines of
Speaker 1: good and evil, including an expose on the practice of witchcraft, magic, occultism, divination,
Speaker 1: and Satan worship, so that that is how she describes
Speaker 1: the book. Now, the book is like almost The book
Speaker 1: is two pages long, and it is mostly the same
Speaker 1: sentence rewritten in like twelve ways. It's all saying about
Speaker 1: how good Jesus is and how evil Satan is and
Speaker 1: how people using magic our servants of Satan. Basically it's
Speaker 1: just that for for two hundred pages, and she includes
Speaker 1: like a lot of a lot of like again paraphrase
Speaker 1: Bible scriptures about you know, basically like really classic evangelical
Speaker 1: kind of conservative Baptist Christianity type stuff. Um so that's
Speaker 1: how most of the book is. There's there's not much
Speaker 1: Halloween content in this Halloween book. That doesn't surprise. That's
Speaker 1: often the case with these weird life Yeah, it's just
Speaker 1: it's they've got some bizarre theological gripe that's only potentially
Speaker 1: related to the culture ward stuff. I'm like, like they
Speaker 1: have like stuff on like Zionism and the Holy Spirit.
Speaker 1: I bet she's got great takes on sacred books, Baptism.
Speaker 1: Like it's a whole bunch of a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: just like regular kind of conservaive Christian stuff. Except there
Speaker 1: is one chapter that is pure gold. It's called the
Speaker 1: Witch of Endor and it is this is this is
Speaker 1: the explos day on witchcraft and Halloween. I'm very excited
Speaker 1: it is. It is the best part of the book.
Speaker 1: And um hand, it's it's like at least like thirty pages.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna we can't read the whole thing because honestly,
Speaker 1: again it is mostly the same kind of sentences. But
Speaker 1: I have highlighted a few a few key passages from
Speaker 1: the Witches of endor Um to to distill out to us.
Speaker 1: So first the first thing, That first thing for when
Speaker 1: when a billy billy, billy billy. So in the section
Speaker 1: called what is a witch? Uh, he says, which is
Speaker 1: a sorcerer, Which is a Satanist, which is worship ancient
Speaker 1: false gods and practice magic. Magic is the divinely forbidden
Speaker 1: black heart of bringing about the results beyond the human
Speaker 1: power by use of evil spirits and including the devil
Speaker 1: and his demons. Magic always brings Satan's diabolical power into play.
Speaker 1: So it's it's it's really good, um. She She goes on.
Speaker 1: She goes on to to describe the practice of witchcraft
Speaker 1: using like a cult, formulations, incantations, magical mutterings, peeping and chirping.
Speaker 1: No it says, it says chirping parenthesis, criminal hypnosis parenthesis.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, that's chirping, that's exactually, clear up. That's what
Speaker 1: makes a good writer is when you you you anticipate
Speaker 1: the questions chirping criminal hypnosis. Yeah, that writer would have
Speaker 1: further explained, is that hypnosis that is itself criminal? It
Speaker 1: is that is hypnosis on a criminal? Has it hypnosis
Speaker 1: that makes you criminal? It does not give you any
Speaker 1: indication real mystery. Yeah. So she she she basically rounds
Speaker 1: up all all different types of of kind of magic
Speaker 1: and a cultism into this, into this banner of witchcraft. Um.
Speaker 1: She said that there's there's no distinction to be made
Speaker 1: between witchcraft and sorcery, despite the erroneous claims that sorcery
Speaker 1: is diabolical and witchcraft is creative art. Both are diabolical
Speaker 1: and devilish. Yeah, I mean, I guess I I do
Speaker 1: agree with her that I don't feel like there's a
Speaker 1: meaningful distinction between craft and sorcery, um, in that they're
Speaker 1: both things from from from your books that you read
Speaker 1: as a kid. But so, the first thing she gets
Speaker 1: into in witchcraft, I think is this. It is a
Speaker 1: weird intro, but I guess it makes sense from like
Speaker 1: her perspective is demon possession. So this is the first
Speaker 1: the first like technique that she gets into demon demon
Speaker 1: possession is a result of which is of richcraft incantation
Speaker 1: in diabolical whipchcraft, the which voluntarily invites the devil and
Speaker 1: his and his demon spirits, who are sometimes referred to
Speaker 1: as the goddess or god of, or the host of
Speaker 1: a particular names of a particular deity for each society. However,
Speaker 1: there's a difference between demon possession through deliberate invocation than
Speaker 1: demon possession by demonic internal attack upon helpless and often
Speaker 1: unsuspecting suspects. Possession is often a common aftermath of certain illness,
Speaker 1: of certain forms of certain illnesses, such as strokes. So
Speaker 1: she says that the most one of the easiest ways
Speaker 1: to figure out if you're possessed is if you have
Speaker 1: a stroke, also if you have if you have eppele
Speaker 1: s or coma. This is really you know, my my, my,
Speaker 1: my grandpa was pretty hard into demonology there at the end,
Speaker 1: she's oh man. And one of the fun things about
Speaker 1: this book though, is that she really tries to hammer
Speaker 1: down and all of like the biblical examples of witchcraft,
Speaker 1: which there is like a few, Yeah, it's the Bible.
Speaker 1: There's lots of wacky magic, and she really tries to
Speaker 1: convince like her Christian readers that witchcraft is a current
Speaker 1: problem to be worried with, um, because she is. She's
Speaker 1: kind of upset that people view it as like a
Speaker 1: fake thing. She's like, no, it's real. It's in the Bible.
Speaker 1: You have to be scared of it. Um. The God's
Speaker 1: word authenticates the reality witchcraft. Therefore it is not mere superstition.
Speaker 1: So a lot of a lot of this is her
Speaker 1: trying to her trying to scare people into believing that
Speaker 1: witchcraft is actually is a is an ongoing problem. Yeah.
Speaker 1: She says that the familiar spirits of which is spoken
Speaker 1: of in the Bible are referred to in folk history
Speaker 1: is dwarves, fairies, trolls. I don't know where this one is.
Speaker 1: What's was this? Was this? You don't know what? Don't Well,
Speaker 1: they're usually like a cr one or less, little monster,
Speaker 1: little bit of reptilian things often found in dungeons. If
Speaker 1: you got a low level party you want to bring
Speaker 1: them up against. I mean, cobalds are one of the
Speaker 1: things that you could have them go up against person.
Speaker 1: I have not encountered them. Weird games. Yeah, they're they're
Speaker 1: little little, little little lizard type type goblin things. So
Speaker 1: those guys dwarves, fairies, trolls, and other small spirits of
Speaker 1: northern folklore. They can be friendly, mischievous, or malignant. In folklore,
Speaker 1: they were purported as nature spirits. This is the other
Speaker 1: thing she really hammers down on is that if you
Speaker 1: like nature, that means that you're actually a Satanist. That
Speaker 1: scans which is that that does remind me of my
Speaker 1: explore Nature Hail Satan shirt, which is my favorite shirt. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that is mean that that you do. That is a
Speaker 1: very good shirt. It's pretty good. So she she traces
Speaker 1: back the origin of magic to the fall of man
Speaker 1: at the beginning of human history, as as said in
Speaker 1: the book, is that where we got magic. That's what
Speaker 1: she says. Um, she says, so basically, the way she
Speaker 1: explains it is that you know magic and this is
Speaker 1: something actually kind of a group. It's like magic is
Speaker 1: the idea of like that you are kind of on
Speaker 1: your way to become God in some way. Um, this
Speaker 1: is and in terms of like in terms of like
Speaker 1: in terms of like chaos magic it's like you're trying
Speaker 1: to like increase your own ability to have power over you,
Speaker 1: like your own life and that of the idea. So
Speaker 1: what she says, is that basically in the fall of
Speaker 1: in Genesis, when Eve tried to eat the try to
Speaker 1: eat the fruit fruit of the knowledge of of good
Speaker 1: and evil. This was her attention, Like, this was her
Speaker 1: attemption to like gain god like power. God can see
Speaker 1: good and evil. At the time, man could only see good.
Speaker 1: So when Eve ate the fruit, she was trying to
Speaker 1: become like God. She was taking agency over her existence
Speaker 1: and her fact eating the fruit to gave her the
Speaker 1: magic power to see good and evil, right, which what
Speaker 1: we have now. So this is how this is how
Speaker 1: she tricks back the origin of magic. She's a biblical
Speaker 1: she's obviously because you know she's a conservative Baptist. She's
Speaker 1: a biblical literalist. She reads The Garden of Bean as
Speaker 1: a literal historical tale, not as like a piece of
Speaker 1: poetry or art men to like symbolize things and culture
Speaker 1: like it was obviously written as Um okay, I mean yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of a lot of misogyny in this book. Um, sorry, Billy, sorry,
Speaker 1: there is a lot she rails against feminism later on,
Speaker 1: and there's a lot of hatred because like Eve was
Speaker 1: the one that ate the fruit, so the woman's fault
Speaker 1: like the woman is like the tempter of man. It's
Speaker 1: always their fault. That's that's very well tread evangelical ground,
Speaker 1: although it is extra fun when it's a woman who
Speaker 1: is hating on Yeah, and it's it's easier because this
Speaker 1: whole chapter is about witches and which is are typically feminine. Um.
Speaker 1: But she she does say that there's like wizards and warlocks,
Speaker 1: but she just kind of ripped them all together. I
Speaker 1: searched a second ago and I couldn't find any evidence
Speaker 1: that she wrote books about Harry Potter. M So this
Speaker 1: was written to us in six So from what I've read,
Speaker 1: I have not seen Harry Potter mentioned in this. So
Speaker 1: far fascinating, is boy that piste off a lot of
Speaker 1: people who are otherwise very similar to Yeah, I sure did. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So yeah, let's see she is. She she is very
Speaker 1: concerned that that Satanism and witchcraft is basically a re
Speaker 1: re invention of paganism um. And she finds this to
Speaker 1: be incredibly disturbing and tying into a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: like all like the woo woo spiritual stuff of the nineties.
Speaker 1: It is also very concerned about She says millions are
Speaker 1: now involved in some manner of ancient magical practice and rights,
Speaker 1: ranging from walking on hot coals with no ill effect,
Speaker 1: spooking knives through flesh without creating wounds, to reading from
Speaker 1: blind eye sockets or from sighted eyes which have been masks,
Speaker 1: to magically filling the cade teeth with gold, which I
Speaker 1: don't know is that is that just dentistry? What is
Speaker 1: she referring to? I have parents who have like gold fillings.
Speaker 1: A lot of people that doesn't, um that's witchcraft. I
Speaker 1: don't think that is witchcraft in a way that it
Speaker 1: it makes money disappear. Also, it's I would I would
Speaker 1: compare most dentistry to more like armed robbery. But sure
Speaker 1: I haven't had great dentist experiences. Yeah, I mean I'm
Speaker 1: not a big dentist. Dentists are bastards, would be my contention.
Speaker 1: So yeah, she she She says that basically the sign
Speaker 1: of the of the new uptick and magic around this
Speaker 1: is a round to us and six is right up
Speaker 1: to the panic was the sign of the end times.
Speaker 1: Magic is the colossal revolt against God, whose satanic purpose
Speaker 1: is to instill in fallen man the desire to be
Speaker 1: a god. Did I say cool? That sounds rast. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that is that's also the Mormon faith. More
Speaker 1: or less, I'm sure she has opinions about more. We're
Speaker 1: gonna get to her opinions on the Irish Lader so good,
Speaker 1: oh good, oh fantastic. Yeah, she has a lot of it.
Speaker 1: That she's real, real punchy towards the Papists. So she
Speaker 1: does down the difference that she she sees between black magic,
Speaker 1: white magic, and what she calls a neutral magic. Um.
Speaker 1: She says that the term black magic refers to the
Speaker 1: direct league with Satan himself, often involving an actual blood
Speaker 1: pact of allegiance, so that she she thinks that the
Speaker 1: black magic is when you directly involve Satan, and white
Speaker 1: magic is merely black magic in a in a in
Speaker 1: a mask. It may it may deceptively employ the names
Speaker 1: of Jesus, Christ, Got the Father, and the Holy Spirit magically,
Speaker 1: along with other Bible phrases and the Christian terminology, but
Speaker 1: this facade is covering its demonic character, so she thinks
Speaker 1: that even though they may use this is interesting. Like
Speaker 1: she she complains here that white magic uses the names
Speaker 1: of God and Jesus and in its magic, but later
Speaker 1: on in in the book, she complains that no magic
Speaker 1: uses God's name, so that's a fun thing that we'll
Speaker 1: talk about in the book. Um. And then and then
Speaker 1: for neutral magic, um, she says, the devil shrouds himself
Speaker 1: with nature. He is referred to he is. Oh boy,
Speaker 1: he's that. That's that's her take on Wicca. Huh. He's
Speaker 1: he's revered as mother nature and worship and a door
Speaker 1: by which is under this deluding guy's neutral magic. Satan
Speaker 1: just dresses up as leaves and it's how Yeah that
Speaker 1: makes sense. Yeah, Wika only gets one mention in this actually, yeah,
Speaker 1: but she's clearly like that's what she's talking about. I mean,
Speaker 1: she talks about a lot of like she she uses
Speaker 1: these terms very loose. She's got a lot of gradients. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot of gradients. Yeah. Uh. She has a small
Speaker 1: section on magical ceremonies and symbolism and kind of actually
Speaker 1: lays out kind of how magic works in terms of
Speaker 1: like using like like like this, like symbolic objects and
Speaker 1: incantation and like calling upon powers, which is more like
Speaker 1: traditional magic. Um. I find it more fun to call
Speaker 1: on fake characters because it's very silly, which is more
Speaker 1: of a more of a chaos magic thing. Yeah, um,
Speaker 1: because the more silly again, I think, the more fun
Speaker 1: it is. Then she does have a nice section on initiation,
Speaker 1: rites and rituals, which gets into the really good Satanic
Speaker 1: panic stuff. So she she she describes the you know,
Speaker 1: a covid of of which is coming together to have
Speaker 1: sex with the devil um usually maybe like symbolically with
Speaker 1: like a male leader of a cult or something. But
Speaker 1: then she says, when the initiation has been completed, the
Speaker 1: devil worshiper takes part in a parody of the sacrament,
Speaker 1: many times bringing in the bodies of children who who
Speaker 1: whom they have murdered. Good. Yeah, that's the good ship.
Speaker 1: That's the good ship. In America alone, there are over
Speaker 1: one million missing children at any time. Many of these
Speaker 1: children who are never found or seen again are victims
Speaker 1: of satanically controlled perverts who do the grossest forms of evil,
Speaker 1: but many more are the victims of witchcraft and incantations
Speaker 1: and other rights. Oh that's great. These children who are
Speaker 1: being stolen at an astonishingly at an astonishing rate each day,
Speaker 1: maybe stolen from unbelievers homes, or they maybe children conceived
Speaker 1: by the witches, themselves at regularly held sexual orgies, which
Speaker 1: is there that that's an old one, that whiches are
Speaker 1: having orgy babies and like not reporting them to Yeah,
Speaker 1: the children are often offered up a sacrifice to the devil,
Speaker 1: and some ceremonies that which has may boil the children's bodies,
Speaker 1: mix them with lobes and substances, or they may consume
Speaker 1: the children's bodies in the blood ritual parody of the
Speaker 1: Lord's supper. So that's fun. And I do like that
Speaker 1: this idea never went anywhere and is not and there's
Speaker 1: not an important part of the USS politics now No, no, no,
Speaker 1: of course not nope. Um, yeah, to hear it. That's
Speaker 1: pretty good. That is that is that is fun. She
Speaker 1: she does have a small section on a pagan music, magic, religion,
Speaker 1: and sorcery are some of the means used by the
Speaker 1: devil for the purpose of luring men away from the
Speaker 1: Christian truth. The heavy metal, punk, hip hop and other
Speaker 1: such abuse than confinding the Western European world. Okay, yeah, no, no, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't remember when it's actually gets quite more racist,
Speaker 1: I'm not. It's counterpart of the hypnotic traits inducing inducing
Speaker 1: drum rhythms employed throughout the whole world by the African
Speaker 1: nations through the millions, which the insidious and evil mstr
Speaker 1: the devil and setting them to sexual lust in Satan worship.
Speaker 1: It is incredible that in two thousand six she's doing
Speaker 1: the black people music is the Devil and she is
Speaker 1: also like black which is very safe. It's incredible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's uh yeah, unfortunate would be a word for it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well I is it? Is it time for an ad break?
Speaker 1: I'm not looking at the close. Yeah, it's probably about
Speaker 1: time for an ad break. Speaking of oh oh boy, yeah,
Speaker 1: speaking of millions of missing children. Maybe some of them
Speaker 1: are in these ads. We're back putting more children in
Speaker 1: the cauldron. Oh we're recording. Sorry, anyway, back to back
Speaker 1: to reading this magnificent two hundred page book by dr
Speaker 1: I've read the first hundred pages because after that it's
Speaker 1: just the same words, rewritten it again and again in
Speaker 1: different in different combinations. Like it's just it's just the
Speaker 1: same stuff. Um. So the next section is this is
Speaker 1: this is and again I'm skipping over a lot of stuff,
Speaker 1: but this is like the rough this is the most
Speaker 1: fun sections of her stuff on magic and which is um.
Speaker 1: Now we have her section called Halloween Satan's New Year. Um. She.
Speaker 1: She starts by explanning, which is celebrate eight major festivals
Speaker 1: or Sabbats each year. Halloween is the primary annual festival
Speaker 1: commemorating Satan's New Year. Yeah. She then goes on to
Speaker 1: explain that the Sabbat is a parody of the holy
Speaker 1: Sabbath of God. Now, this is actually really interesting kind
Speaker 1: of historical tidbits. So, yes, the words Sabbat in terms
Speaker 1: of which is does come from does come from like
Speaker 1: the Sabbath? Yeah, this actually probably comes from, uh, the
Speaker 1: persecution of witches being heavily tied to anti Semitism in
Speaker 1: the Middle Ages. So the first witch hunting book was
Speaker 1: called The Hammer of the Witches um and it is Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it is large port large portions of which are
Speaker 1: plagiarized from a previous book called Hammer of the Jews.
Speaker 1: The entire sections are copying, pasted, They just change the
Speaker 1: word Jews to which you really had to put the
Speaker 1: effort into plagiarism back then because your hand had not
Speaker 1: like know, you're doing the whole thing yourself. This is
Speaker 1: also where like a lot of like the pointy hat,
Speaker 1: which stuff a lot of like the big nose with
Speaker 1: like like like a really big nose, green oily skin like.
Speaker 1: All the stuff kind of comes from anti Semitic tropes
Speaker 1: because the persecution of Jews and the Semitism was heavily
Speaker 1: tied to the persecusion of which is often one of
Speaker 1: the same things. So when they would do so, then
Speaker 1: when they would do Sabbath, they would they would say,
Speaker 1: like they're doing like a Sabbat, they're going to they're
Speaker 1: going to basically do like blood libel with children and
Speaker 1: with the devil, which is what which is what a
Speaker 1: lot of witches are about, like finding children and stuff,
Speaker 1: because that it actually is tied to all the stuff. Now,
Speaker 1: I'm not saying we have to cancel witchcraft, which is
Speaker 1: totally fine. You could do all this stuff. It is
Speaker 1: really cool, but the or a lot of the origins
Speaker 1: of which hunting is tied to these antis anti Semitic tropes. Um.
Speaker 1: So anyway, she she goes to describe different like pagan
Speaker 1: like festivals throughout the years um with like like Yule
Speaker 1: and all this kind of stuff, Midsummer blah blah blah
Speaker 1: blah blah. And the last one, the eighth one is
Speaker 1: October three one, or Halloween, because she calls the the
Speaker 1: unholy Satanic New year. Um. She says that the rights
Speaker 1: and ceremonies and which Halloween was originally observed, had their
Speaker 1: origin among the Druids. In the course of time, there
Speaker 1: were added to them some of the rights, particular to
Speaker 1: the Roman festival of Panama, which is which presided over
Speaker 1: their harvests. November first among the Druids was the beginning
Speaker 1: of the year and the festival of the Sun God.
Speaker 1: They lighted fires in honor of their false god. They
Speaker 1: believe that October thirty one the end of the old year.
Speaker 1: The Lord of Death, which she puts in apprent this
Speaker 1: is the devil. Oh good, I'm really, I'm really again
Speaker 1: very appreciative of how of how clear her writing is.
Speaker 1: So the Lord of Death gather gathered together all the
Speaker 1: souls of the dead who had been allowed to enter
Speaker 1: the body of another human being. The belief is that
Speaker 1: the root this belief is the root of the false
Speaker 1: belief and reincarnation. Now I did not fact fact check
Speaker 1: any of this, so I have no idea how how
Speaker 1: accurate these these claims are. For what she views as
Speaker 1: the origin of Halloween. But I think they're pretty funny. Um,
Speaker 1: I know, like there is Halloween, like Halloween kind of
Speaker 1: traditions are are There is like stuff around this time
Speaker 1: through a lot of like old pagan stuff. Like the
Speaker 1: modern notion of Halloween is pretty pretty modern, like the
Speaker 1: whole like tricker treating thing and all. Like the way
Speaker 1: we modernly think of Halloween is pretty it's pretty new,
Speaker 1: because I mean there was of course, like all Hallow's
Speaker 1: Day or like All Saints Day and the evil which
Speaker 1: other people would do Shenanigans, which is what we currently
Speaker 1: have as Halloweens. That's the day before All Saints Day.
Speaker 1: All Saints Day is November one. Um, Like, you know,
Speaker 1: the modern notion of Halloween is not it's not super old.
Speaker 1: So I'm not quite sure how tied these old harvest
Speaker 1: festivals really are to our modern Halloween. That's something I
Speaker 1: could look into later, but I just picked up this
Speaker 1: book and I'm reading right from it because that's easier.
Speaker 1: So yeah, So she views Halloween now as like as
Speaker 1: a pagan the pagan holiday. Um, this pagan festival, Halloween
Speaker 1: is it broadly celebrated throughout the Christian nations as a
Speaker 1: major holiday in America, Halloween has become a kind of
Speaker 1: saturnalia for children, a night in which of the rules
Speaker 1: are suspended and children venture out to demand streets and
Speaker 1: certain reprisals against this dingy. Yeah, okay, I mean that
Speaker 1: is a cooler way of looking at Halloween. If it
Speaker 1: were literally the saturnality a children would actually take the
Speaker 1: role of the parents and make decisions for the family
Speaker 1: and demand Yeah, I mean parents would have to go
Speaker 1: to school, kids would have to go to work. That
Speaker 1: would actually be an incredible that would be. That would
Speaker 1: be so many people would die in plane crash. It
Speaker 1: would be especially if you enforced it, like you don't
Speaker 1: have a choice your you are piloting the plane today
Speaker 1: and a bunch of other kids are getting on it
Speaker 1: to go on work. So the kids on air traffic
Speaker 1: control they don't know what they're doing either. Forcing all
Speaker 1: of the soldiers out of the various countries we've put
Speaker 1: them in and having like the children of Special Forces
Speaker 1: guys conduct raids. In the media, it is pretty easy
Speaker 1: for a kid to use an a K, so I
Speaker 1: think it is a rs even easier. Yeah, it would
Speaker 1: be funny. Yeah, A lot of people are not going
Speaker 1: to have very successful heart surgeries that but it will
Speaker 1: be very funny in like a cosmic sense. Increasingly and alarmingly,
Speaker 1: this celebration is assuming dreadful expressions of evil and harmful
Speaker 1: acts are perpetuated against the children themselves. In serious proportions.
Speaker 1: The treats are increasingly found to contain drugs, poisons, razor blades,
Speaker 1: and needles, ground grass, many other harms. Maybe she meant
Speaker 1: weed or something. Oh yeah, I didn't. I didn't even
Speaker 1: think of that, because that's like needles and grass. Yeah,
Speaker 1: oh no, grass, So yeah, she she, she does seem really,
Speaker 1: really really thrilled with this idea that the people are
Speaker 1: giving out drugs, which, man, what a dream I wish um. Halloween,
Speaker 1: like Christmas, is also highly commercialized and it's part of
Speaker 1: a major money making event for the merchants, okay breaking
Speaker 1: in at the present time, second only to Christmas in
Speaker 1: that vein. Halloween is the Satanic New Year, and as
Speaker 1: a celebration of the devil and is he's using the
Speaker 1: world today to gain greater acceptance of the perversity as
Speaker 1: he continues to proclamate his doctrine of demons, so that
Speaker 1: that is fun um. Then She has a very small
Speaker 1: section on Old World Halloween traditions, which I'm not going
Speaker 1: to read tons of because again I don't know how
Speaker 1: verified these things are, but I am going to read
Speaker 1: like and she goes on to talk about like how
Speaker 1: like the laws against witchcraft and like the six dres
Speaker 1: and other stuff. Um she was, she was, but I do.
Speaker 1: I will read just the first sentence of the Old
Speaker 1: World Halloween Traditions section, Irish Traditions Devilition Origin. Yeah, here
Speaker 1: that Irish We're coming for you. I don't bring it
Speaker 1: on various methods of finding the future and Halloween we're
Speaker 1: accepted as a tradition. So that that's really all I'm
Speaker 1: gonna say, because I just love the line Irish Traditions
Speaker 1: Devilish in Richard. Yeah, I mean that's I think every
Speaker 1: Irish person I know would agree with that. That's really
Speaker 1: all you gotta say. Yeah, oh man, it is it is. Wow,
Speaker 1: what a what a book. It just keeps going on.
Speaker 1: So she talks about like the basically like the people's
Speaker 1: different Honestly, this section is not even tons about Halloween
Speaker 1: and more about different people's belief in witchcraft. So like
Speaker 1: she goes through like all the laws against witchcraft in Britain.
Speaker 1: She goes against like she goes she she talks around
Speaker 1: the witch trials in America, um saying that there were witches.
Speaker 1: She doesn't talk about all the like, come on you coward. Yeah, uh,
Speaker 1: it's it's pretty she she has. It's a little bit
Speaker 1: of I I am actually gonna read some of the
Speaker 1: stuff on on on America. Belief in witchcraft was common
Speaker 1: to the early settlers in America. But which is we're
Speaker 1: charged with to make king wex and images of their
Speaker 1: victims and causing their illnesses by sticking pins in the image,
Speaker 1: or making by sticking pins in the image, or making
Speaker 1: them waste away by melting the images before the fire.
Speaker 1: This belief is held by the peoples of Africa as
Speaker 1: well as other pagan people in a and widely varieting
Speaker 1: in widely varying civilizations and localities. The early settlers do
Speaker 1: not initiate this belief in America, but found it already
Speaker 1: to be believed in the American Indians who populated this country.
Speaker 1: So that that's her little section on that which is
Speaker 1: I don't know, hashtag problematic, Yeah, would I would call
Speaker 1: that slightly problemat I would call it slightly problems You
Speaker 1: know what's not problematic, Garrison, the products and services that
Speaker 1: are gonna hopefully sell candy to kids. We we guarantee
Speaker 1: that less than a third of them are responsible for
Speaker 1: the disappearance of a million children, million children. That's the
Speaker 1: behind the bastards guaranteed less than a third of our
Speaker 1: sponsors who are undocumented too, well, yeah, but which is
Speaker 1: making them much more. It's likely much more. But anyway,
Speaker 1: here's the ads, here's the ads. Ah, we're back, we
Speaker 1: are all right. Bring it home, Garrison, bring it home.
Speaker 1: So yeah, she she does mention that the devil likes
Speaker 1: to withhold the fact of existence of witchcraft, like the
Speaker 1: devil likes to height. So most people kind of live
Speaker 1: in the dark. Um, she says. Although the imps which
Speaker 1: frolic on Halloween now are small children raping on doors
Speaker 1: and gleefully receiving treats. Rapping on doors, wrapping doors, not
Speaker 1: raping on doors. That's a very different, very different holiday. Well,
Speaker 1: who knows, that might be Canadian things. That's Canadian Halloween,
Speaker 1: the night which was formally accepted as the time when
Speaker 1: witches met and demons in the form of ghosts and
Speaker 1: ghouls who were likely to wander about has come to
Speaker 1: be regarded a's a time of merrymaking and frolic. The
Speaker 1: majority of people are so engaged and are unaware of
Speaker 1: they satanic consultation of the magic oracles and the Covin's
Speaker 1: and groves on this night. So consay, that's not how
Speaker 1: you say it, Well, that's how I say. You just
Speaker 1: you just got COVID on the brain. COVID is what
Speaker 1: you call a coven that meets during COVID because they're
Speaker 1: not properly socially distancing. All right, there we go. But
Speaker 1: basically she thinks that basically these all of the witches
Speaker 1: and magic doors are meeting, all these ghouls and Halloween
Speaker 1: and people are unaware of this, extremely concerned that children
Speaker 1: might like walk in on a ceremony and it didn't
Speaker 1: get murdered. Very funny when you realize like how isolated
Speaker 1: these people are from the real world because they've never
Speaker 1: just like stepped outside during Halloween, not really like especially
Speaker 1: I mean Halloween the two that's in six. I was
Speaker 1: eighteen then, so maybe I'm wrong, but I think there was.
Speaker 1: It wasn't huge then, Like it's gotten kind of smaller
Speaker 1: every year. The biggest fear back then was like traffic accidents. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's always the biggest. That's like the number one thing
Speaker 1: every year. Thinking back on it, my parents shouldn't have
Speaker 1: let me be a ninja as often as they did,
Speaker 1: But I made it through. Yeah, it's like we're saying
Speaker 1: so many the same words again that the most of
Speaker 1: the book is. But Halloween Satan's New Year. Halloween has
Speaker 1: a long and dark history of devilish traditions, which has
Speaker 1: survived both Christianity and the science for two thousand years,
Speaker 1: is to be considered the chief festival for the worship
Speaker 1: of the devil, which begins his new year. Halloween and witchcraft,
Speaker 1: or the means by which the devil seeks to reintroduce
Speaker 1: the worship of old false gods by synthesis of polytheism
Speaker 1: and feminism. Yeah, that's what Halloween issos and feminism, two
Speaker 1: sides of the same devil coin. I love to worship
Speaker 1: multiple gods and respect women. Just really, that is my
Speaker 1: that's my way to spend a night with my ghoul friends. Incredible,
Speaker 1: there's also a real here's a real here's a real
Speaker 1: good quote. Um, there is no question of the existence
Speaker 1: of modern witchcraft. It has been admitted. It has been
Speaker 1: admitted of by thousands upon thousands worldwide and growing rapidly
Speaker 1: in the Western countries, particularly America. The word of God
Speaker 1: makes it undeniably clear that witchcraft is a real It
Speaker 1: has existed at least six thousand years, and it still
Speaker 1: exists today. Oh good, Yeah, that's good. Six thousand years
Speaker 1: going good. Good for happy six thousands. I just like that,
Speaker 1: she add so that it's a better around for all
Speaker 1: these six happy six thousands, six six thousand years witchcraft on.
Speaker 1: I'm guessing because it's the new year, this is also
Speaker 1: the birthday of witchcraft. I mean also just the birthday
Speaker 1: of the world. Because if the world as we know
Speaker 1: was if if the world as we know it was
Speaker 1: born when Eve ate the fruit and was Adam and
Speaker 1: Eve went into the greater world, if that's like the
Speaker 1: birth of Dawn, which has been here since the very beginning,
Speaker 1: well since the beginning of like the fallen world, because
Speaker 1: you have to assume that they had a hundred years
Speaker 1: or so beforehand. It's real unclear this it depends on
Speaker 1: what It depends on what denomination you're in and what
Speaker 1: kind of theological viewpoint you have on whether there were
Speaker 1: people outside the garden there as people who believe that
Speaker 1: some people just don't um. That is up for debate
Speaker 1: among different congregations. Yeah. So, and and the other thing
Speaker 1: that she's really concerned with is that witchcraft is making
Speaker 1: more people have sex because she she thinks that most
Speaker 1: of witchcraft is practicing sexual orgies on quote every continent
Speaker 1: of the world. Um. And that's what that's what that's
Speaker 1: that's what black masses to her, So she is she
Speaker 1: is very concerned. I mean, there's are in sometimes in
Speaker 1: Black masses sexual elements to them that I hope. So
Speaker 1: that is that it does sound much better. But she
Speaker 1: she thinks that as another one of the main catalysts
Speaker 1: of her being fearful of of paganism and witchcraft is
Speaker 1: that is making more people have sex. Um. And again
Speaker 1: she reiterates that this is just a new form of paganism,
Speaker 1: saying that Satan's current day revival of paganism it's a
Speaker 1: sure sign of Christ's second coming, and it's it's pretty good.
Speaker 1: And this this is the section where she where she
Speaker 1: complains that magic doesn't use the Bible, even though previously
Speaker 1: she said that white magic does because some magic, some
Speaker 1: which is drawn other false religions such as the Kabbala,
Speaker 1: uh Sufism, or various Eastern religions, but never the Holy Bible,
Speaker 1: the Word of God, or is employed in their beliefs
Speaker 1: or practices, except in a paradoxical counterfeit imaginative magic, rites
Speaker 1: and rituals performed in the in the Covin's in the
Speaker 1: initiation of the converts and their celebrations of Halloween and
Speaker 1: other Satanic spots. So that's that's that's that's what she
Speaker 1: thinks I mean. But honestly, I'm pretty sure it's it's
Speaker 1: like the Shabbas. It's the Sabbath, it's the Sabba. I've
Speaker 1: I've heard Covin and Sabbat in the starr. Alright, alright,
Speaker 1: let's have let's have a debate everyone everyone at no,
Speaker 1: don't don't do that. Um. She also claims that this
Speaker 1: is this is this is very exciting. Several universities in
Speaker 1: America offer a bachelor's degree in magic. I was unaware. Oh,
Speaker 1: I would love a bat unaware of because this will
Speaker 1: read now, well, this will make me consider going to college.
Speaker 1: Now a bachelor's degree? Is that A a B A
Speaker 1: or is that a BS like? Is that like is
Speaker 1: it a Bachelor of Arts or of science? And really
Speaker 1: that's a that's a key question about the school match
Speaker 1: match magic is both in our na science. So yeah,
Speaker 1: well that's why I'm wondering. And she doesn't say, she
Speaker 1: doesn't say what university she claims does this. I mean,
Speaker 1: I've always wanted to open a witchcraft store, so I
Speaker 1: may go back to get a b A in or
Speaker 1: a BS in witchcraft along with my m F A M.
Speaker 1: What's the business thing? What they don't I don't want
Speaker 1: to fill it in with the acronym from the business degree.
Speaker 1: Whatever you get. I don't know. We I dropped out
Speaker 1: of college. Garrison hasn't gone. Yeah, I went. I went
Speaker 1: to film school. That doesn't count though it doesn't. It
Speaker 1: absolutely does not. Um. Yeah. And then in this last
Speaker 1: section she really ties modern witchcraft to the rise of
Speaker 1: feminism UM, specifically starting in the sixties. She says the
Speaker 1: pre eminence of the goddess and witchcraft hasn't made an
Speaker 1: attractive to some feminists. In ninety eight, which the woman's
Speaker 1: International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell as an incredible acronym great
Speaker 1: acronym Amazing was founded as a political protist group who
Speaker 1: who per purport, who purportedly justified their name as mere
Speaker 1: jest ah. It is what a what a good name
Speaker 1: which women international quite an exciting, quite an exciting back
Speaker 1: when we could have fun and activism. That does sound amazing.
Speaker 1: Many of the members of this feminist movement are unaware
Speaker 1: of the cultural movement within the political and many are
Speaker 1: are more and many more are entirely unaware of the
Speaker 1: spiritualist movement within the cultural moment. So a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of weird stuff around, how which is are using political
Speaker 1: feminism to inject cultural feminism, to inject cultural witchcraft into
Speaker 1: the mainstream. This is all what the goal of feminism is,
Speaker 1: um so yeah, and she has this whole whole pair
Speaker 1: of feminist feminist witches. Feminist witchcraft is at present the
Speaker 1: most rapidly growing segment in the Witchcraft revival. And it
Speaker 1: is from the spiritual core at the heart of the
Speaker 1: feminist movement that the political and philosophical women's rights tenants
Speaker 1: as a whole emerge. To name what to name one
Speaker 1: such tenant the rights to abortion, or more correctly phrased,
Speaker 1: the might the rights to murdered children not yet born.
Speaker 1: This this coincides with the which is present ritual practice
Speaker 1: of murdering children already born. So she thinks that abortion
Speaker 1: is just a way for which is to speed up
Speaker 1: the ritual process. Yeah, that is what that is her
Speaker 1: that that's her main bomb at the That sounds that
Speaker 1: sounds accurate. Yeah, um, she doesn't. Just have a great
Speaker 1: section describing the different tools which is used. Um, and
Speaker 1: and an athlete. A phallic penis symbol of the liberated, unbridled,
Speaker 1: unlawful sex represents the power of self will. It's pretty
Speaker 1: pretty good. Sexual symbols are common in witchcraft, and which is,
Speaker 1: are unrepressed by God's mortal law in their sexuality. Their
Speaker 1: use of sex symbols is rooted in paganism. So again,
Speaker 1: she's very scared that people are having sex and enjoying it,
Speaker 1: specifically women. She's very scared that women are having sex
Speaker 1: and enjoying That sounds right. I hate it when the
Speaker 1: people pushing this line are themselves women, But it does.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's a huge part of the evangelical propaganda movement. Yeah,
Speaker 1: see a bunch of ship, Margaret Atwood wrote. You know,
Speaker 1: now she gets to describe some some of the coolest
Speaker 1: parts here. A typical which is Sabbath celebration will have
Speaker 1: a sky clad parenthesis, nude penthis which is gathered in
Speaker 1: an isolated place, a grove of trees, if possible, around
Speaker 1: an altar which holds an icon or statuary of a
Speaker 1: false goddess and or God's, and candles for fire, a
Speaker 1: child's for water or wine, a container of salt and
Speaker 1: a container for earth rather than the bread, and a
Speaker 1: sword or a wand which sounds amazing to just have
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of naked which is in the forest
Speaker 1: around a ritual altar fire. This sounds like the best
Speaker 1: best time ever. It does sound like a good Saturday night.
Speaker 1: This does sound like it goes who knows, we can?
Speaker 1: We can, we can get wild? So yeah. She goes
Speaker 1: in to describe what she thinks magical rituals are and
Speaker 1: different things that she could do again. She is very concerned.
Speaker 1: Ritual sex is engaged into intensify the magical power raised
Speaker 1: in the cone of power Wheels of the coffin Witches
Speaker 1: is symbolized with the code shaped hats see the typical
Speaker 1: pictures of which is in literature. Are you fucking kidding me?
Speaker 1: Because nobody wearing one of those hats has ever gotten fucked.
Speaker 1: I feel confident say I wear that hat. All right,
Speaker 1: Let's let's move forward, Garrison. That's not fair, allegedly, let's
Speaker 1: move forward. The Cone of Power. M hmm. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: Cone of Power is incredible after raising, and it is phallic,
Speaker 1: so it must be for fucking after the raising and
Speaker 1: release of the Code of Power, a ritual COVID communication
Speaker 1: with cakes and wine which the priestess or priest has
Speaker 1: consecrated by dipping into the childe touching the cakes with
Speaker 1: other unholy tools are passed on from a kiss from
Speaker 1: the priestess to the priest. Um. Basically, this just sounds
Speaker 1: like a fun time. Um. Yeah, but I do love
Speaker 1: the Cone of Power, which I have not read in
Speaker 1: any other magic book. No, I have not ever heard of.
Speaker 1: I've read a decent amount and I've never heard of
Speaker 1: the Cone of Power. Yeah, that feels like pure her.
Speaker 1: That feels like somebody who's deeply sexually frustrated. It's kind
Speaker 1: of shape like a dick and being like, that's got
Speaker 1: to be push poor lady for her. Then she she
Speaker 1: has a small section on Satanism, particularly like the iron
Speaker 1: Ran the version of Satanism. So I'm not even gonna
Speaker 1: get into that. I find that boring and it doesn't matter,
Speaker 1: and and and and she even says that these Satanists
Speaker 1: don't believe in an actual devil a little. They just evil.
Speaker 1: So I'm not even gonna bother with this section because
Speaker 1: it's just talking about the dumb iron Rand version of Satanism.
Speaker 1: And I don't care about that. Um, if you like it,
Speaker 1: I mean whatever. It has anarchistic stuff kind of, but
Speaker 1: it's also very randy and and it has it has
Speaker 1: a lot of like, not great stuff either. I don't
Speaker 1: I it's fine and all it all is more effort
Speaker 1: than I want to put into thinking about the universe.
Speaker 1: And then I think, I think this this could be.
Speaker 1: I think this is our last, our last paragraph favorite.
Speaker 1: This section is called titled the End of the Witches, Witches,
Speaker 1: our children of the Devil, the end of the Witches. Sorry,
Speaker 1: there's the witches, definitely before their adulterous altars, at their
Speaker 1: depraved spots where they eat and drink and play their
Speaker 1: gross music and sing and dance, naked and shameless and corrupt,
Speaker 1: and defile themselves and desecrate God's holy Sabbath, shall surely
Speaker 1: be accomplished by God, who will put them, who'll put
Speaker 1: them to death and cut off their souls forever among
Speaker 1: his children. So that's that's the end of the Witches. Everybody,
Speaker 1: we're gonna be dancing naked shamelessly, like having like an
Speaker 1: undeniably good time being able to dance naked and listening
Speaker 1: to gross music and singing, what a time. Sounds like
Speaker 1: the ideal weekend and then and then God will put
Speaker 1: us to death and then does sound a little bit
Speaker 1: like our last weekend. But it was very cold, so
Speaker 1: people were wearing Yeah, so very happy with the weather.
Speaker 1: That is that is that is most of that is
Speaker 1: most of the good parts of the book. Again, it
Speaker 1: gets two hundred pages. Yeah, it's a nice breezy read.
Speaker 1: Grab it you know this weekend. It's only ten bucks
Speaker 1: on Amazon. What a deal? What a steal? Yeah, And
Speaker 1: it is fun that she she does, Um, there is
Speaker 1: one there is one section where she like outlines what
Speaker 1: all she thinks like magic is like all like all
Speaker 1: of like the different groups. She puts them into a
Speaker 1: really nice little package. But I don't think I can
Speaker 1: find that because again there's two hundred pages and I
Speaker 1: did not mark off that section. But I think I
Speaker 1: think we decently got the gist of the main main
Speaker 1: parts of this book. Um. Again, most of it is
Speaker 1: just her talking about Jesus. Yeah, that sounds right, and
Speaker 1: and and the Christian soul. Um. But the one which
Speaker 1: which is of indoor section is pretty good and honestly
Speaker 1: worth the read. So that is my first book report
Speaker 1: for it could happen here. All of you Satan's New
Speaker 1: Year beloved children, enjoyed this this this book and are
Speaker 1: are properly warned about the dangers of witchcraft which is
Speaker 1: coming to make your children have a pretty red time.
Speaker 1: You're gonna dance in the woods listening to gross music.
Speaker 1: So I hope everyone on this Halloween danced in the
Speaker 1: woods listening to gross music. I hope those of you
Speaker 1: who climactically could did so naked. Um. I hope none
Speaker 1: of you got hit by cars while dressed as Ninja's
Speaker 1: and I I also hope that most of you weren't
Speaker 1: out trick or treating, because I think the average age
Speaker 1: of our listeners is sometime in the mid twenties. That
Speaker 1: would be a little bit of a little awkward, a
Speaker 1: little bit weird, but hey whatever, it's your life, your thing,
Speaker 1: do you think. Hello everyone, Garrison here just going to
Speaker 1: be adding in one quick correction for our Halloween Satan's
Speaker 1: New Year episode. So towards the end we made some
Speaker 1: assumptions about the the Code of Power which were apparently incorrect.
Speaker 1: So the Code of Power does actually seem to be
Speaker 1: a thing inside ritual magic Um, but particularly Wicka. So
Speaker 1: I'm not super familiar with Wicka. This is not this
Speaker 1: is not my system of choice, so I was unaware
Speaker 1: that this is actually a thing. But apparently apparently it is.
Speaker 1: It is. It is a method for centering or directing
Speaker 1: or like raising energy. Um, well it is. It is
Speaker 1: less tied to the witches had though, so that part
Speaker 1: is is more um made up. I cannot find much
Speaker 1: tying the Cone of Power directly to like the cone shape,
Speaker 1: which is hats. This is mainly an invention of of
Speaker 1: of Doctor Billy from at least from from what I
Speaker 1: can tell. But apologies for assuming that the Cone of
Speaker 1: Power was completely made up and when in fact it
Speaker 1: is a part of Wicka. So so sorry, sorry to
Speaker 1: the Wickans and the more proper witches. For that, for that,
Speaker 1: for that gross assumption on mine and Robert's part. Anyway,
Speaker 1: this wraps up our Spooky week of content. I hope
Speaker 1: you had a good Halloween. This episode should be releasing
Speaker 1: on Halloween itself, so I hope you are having or
Speaker 1: had a good time, and hopefully you were able to
Speaker 1: celebrate Halloween Satan style just like it was designed to.
Speaker 1: So goodbye everybody, see you on the other side, and
Speaker 1: hopefully we can do Spooky Week again next year. Good Bye.
Speaker 1: After thirty years, it's time to return to the halls
Speaker 1: of West Beverly High and hang out at the peach pit.
Speaker 1: On the podcast nine O two one, OMG joined Jenny
Speaker 1: Garth and Tori Spelling for a rewatch of the hit
Speaker 1: series Beverly Hills nine O two one oh. From the
Speaker 1: very beginning, we get to tell the fans all of
Speaker 1: the behind the scenes stories to actually happen, so they
Speaker 1: know what happened on camera obviously, but we can tell
Speaker 1: them all the good stuff that happened off camera. Get
Speaker 1: all the juicy details of every episode that you've been
Speaker 1: wondering about for decades. As nine O two one oh,
Speaker 1: super Fan and radio host Sissany sits in with Jenny
Speaker 1: and Tory too reminisce, reflect and relive each moment, from
Speaker 1: Brandon and Kelly's first kiss to shouting Donna Martin graduates,
Speaker 1: you have an amazing memory. You remember everything about the
Speaker 1: entire ten years that we filmed that show, and you
Speaker 1: remember absolutely nothing of the ten years that we filmed
Speaker 1: that show. Listen to nine O two one OMG on
Speaker 1: the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: get your podcasts. I call the Union Hall as his
Speaker 1: male life and death. I thank these people of planning
Speaker 1: to kill Dr King. On April four, Dr Martin Luther
Speaker 1: King was shot and killed in Memphis. A petty criminal
Speaker 1: named James Earl Ray was arrested. He pled guilty to
Speaker 1: the crime and spent the rest of his life in prison.
Speaker 1: Case closed right, James hyl Ray was upon for the
Speaker 1: official story. The authorities would parade all we found a gun,
Speaker 1: the James old raybald in Birmingham that killed Dr King,
Speaker 1: Except it wasn't the gun that killed Dr. King. One
Speaker 1: of the problems that came out when I got the
Speaker 1: Ray case was that some of the evidence, as far
Speaker 1: as I was concerned did not match the circumstances. This
Speaker 1: is the MLK Tapes. The first episodes are available now.
Speaker 1: Listen on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or
Speaker 1: wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Colleen with joined me
Speaker 1: the host of Eating Wall Broke podcast While I eat
Speaker 1: a meal created by self made entrepreneurs, influencers and celebrities
Speaker 1: over a meal they once eight when they were broke.
Speaker 1: Today I have the lovely aj Crimson, the official Princess
Speaker 1: of comfin Asia kinnik and Asia. This is the professor.
Speaker 1: We're here on Eating Wall Broke and today I'm gonna
Speaker 1: break down my meal that got me through the time
Speaker 1: when I was broke. Listen to Eating While Broke on
Speaker 1: the I Heart Radio app, on Apple podcast or wherever
Speaker 1: you get your podcasts. Welcome to it could happen here
Speaker 1: a podcast about well, mostly it's about how things are bad,
Speaker 1: but it is also sometimes about what you can do
Speaker 1: about it. And today we have two people who are
Speaker 1: in fact doing things about it. So with me, we
Speaker 1: have a Bro and Janine who are part of the
Speaker 1: Common Humanity Collective, which is a mutual a group out
Speaker 1: of California um clogen Club. Bro how how are how
Speaker 1: are you t doing today? Doing well? Thank you? Doing
Speaker 1: pretty good? Thank you. So yeah, we wanted to have
Speaker 1: you too on to talk about basically your mutual aid
Speaker 1: work and then also the sort of political aspect of
Speaker 1: that because I know about something YouTube and wanting to
Speaker 1: talk about that. I've ever read the media coverage of it,
Speaker 1: in it does not ever make it into the interviews.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I guess, I guess to start. So you
Speaker 1: two started doing mutual aid stuff with with this group,
Speaker 1: specifically around the beginning of the pandemic, as I understand,
Speaker 1: you know what, can you walk us through how it
Speaker 1: started and what you guys are up to? Absolutely, and
Speaker 1: I think it's interesting to trace out the different stages
Speaker 1: of this work because it's very much bean a kind
Speaker 1: of evolution. So let me go back to the very
Speaker 1: very early days, and this is really the first day
Speaker 1: of lockdown UM in the Bay area where we live.
Speaker 1: I'm a PhD student at UC Berkeley and UM. As
Speaker 1: COVID was spreading from the east coast to the west,
Speaker 1: we knew that things would quickly get shut down in California,
Speaker 1: UM and there was someone in my lab, a good
Speaker 1: friend named h Yvonne and she and I just quickly
Speaker 1: realized that this pandemic was going to hit UM. Given
Speaker 1: the sort of crumbling public health infrastructure, the poorest among us,
Speaker 1: the elderly, this possessed UM, these people would be vulnerable.
Speaker 1: And as PPE just completely disappeared from store shelves, these
Speaker 1: people UM, especially those living in cramped housing conditions, those
Speaker 1: with essential work, UH, those in nursing homes just would
Speaker 1: not have access to UM the tools they needed to
Speaker 1: protect themselves from this disease. UM. And in the very
Speaker 1: early days, when we thought that the stuff was transmitted
Speaker 1: via surfaces, UM, all of the attention was focused on
Speaker 1: handwashing hand sanitizer. The problem was you couldn't even find
Speaker 1: hand sanitizer anywhere. So here we were in our labs
Speaker 1: and UM, you know, our few moths weren't being used
Speaker 1: and everyone was getting sent home. UM and UH we
Speaker 1: realized that we could pull ethanol from the scientific re
Speaker 1: agent supply chains and stir up some hand sanitizer ourselves
Speaker 1: in lab and distribute it UM just two homeless shelters
Speaker 1: to people who needed it in the city, etcetera. UM.
Speaker 1: So this began as a very sort of low key
Speaker 1: quiet under the cover UM effort and UM. You know,
Speaker 1: we didn't have a name. We didn't even know what
Speaker 1: mutual aid was. I think we were just following our
Speaker 1: basic instincts UM. And fast forward a week or two
Speaker 1: and suddenly a whole lot of people got involved. UM.
Speaker 1: We had this elaborate distribution infrastructure which started sort of
Speaker 1: self assembling. UM. Lots of people came to find ways
Speaker 1: of getting the sanitizer to everyone who needed it. In
Speaker 1: the meantime, we realized that as the demand was enormous,
Speaker 1: we need to come up with ways of procuring the
Speaker 1: supplies UM and mixing it at scales that we didn't
Speaker 1: have to turn anyone down. So we called upon lots
Speaker 1: of different labs on campus and asked him if they
Speaker 1: could do this, if they could shift some of their
Speaker 1: discretionary funds towards getting these chemicals. UM. And you know again,
Speaker 1: within a few weeks after that, we were mixing hundreds
Speaker 1: of gallons of hand sanitizer and delivering it to absolutely
Speaker 1: everyone who needed it. My phone was just getting UH
Speaker 1: called NonStop from the moment I woke up to when
Speaker 1: I went to sleep, But I was forgetting to eat.
Speaker 1: I was barely sleeping. UM, just responding to these cries
Speaker 1: for help from all over the Bay area UM, and
Speaker 1: in that time we met so many people UM and
Speaker 1: we figured out how to do this work efficiently and effectively.
Speaker 1: But also UM as the attention shifted from surface transmission
Speaker 1: to aerosol transmission UM, everyone started realizing that, in fact,
Speaker 1: masks were probably the primary way in which we protect
Speaker 1: ourselves from the coronavirus UM. And that's when a good
Speaker 1: friend of ours, Chris, who was a PhD student and
Speaker 1: he's now a post a brilliant, brilliant creative guy, came
Speaker 1: up with ways of actually making sub mic on masks
Speaker 1: out of just UH supply chains that weren't getting tapped UM.
Speaker 1: So initially these were shop towels, and then he started
Speaker 1: looking at NANI fiber material UM and he found ways
Speaker 1: of for around sixty cents making a mass that was
Speaker 1: basically the quality of an N ninety five mass that
Speaker 1: could be made in just a few minutes at home. UM.
Speaker 1: And so we suddenly just integrated that whole effort into
Speaker 1: our own and started just recruiting volunteers, sharing all of
Speaker 1: our resources and UM this large assembly network of these
Speaker 1: little pods situated all across the Bay Area, each of
Speaker 1: them with the team lead, with a little army, a
Speaker 1: battalion of assembly volunteers and dedicated drivers were just making
Speaker 1: thousands of these mass every week, which we were then
Speaker 1: distributing through the the distribution infrastructure that we had uh,
Speaker 1: sort of put together earlier on in the pandemic. And
Speaker 1: so we found ourselves and this was still very much
Speaker 1: at a time when you couldn't even find cloth masks
Speaker 1: or surgical masks and shops, we found ourselves astonishingly being
Speaker 1: the primary source of this essential ppe for tens and
Speaker 1: tens of thousands of people in the Bay Area. And
Speaker 1: as we werecovered in the early days by the Chronicle
Speaker 1: in the l A Times, loads of people started joining
Speaker 1: the volunteer network, we started getting donations, and uh, that
Speaker 1: was the earlier stage of what we did, and I'll
Speaker 1: pass it on to Jinine to talk about what we
Speaker 1: did next. Yeah, So, kind of, as UM Common Humanity
Speaker 1: Collective was working on this project, m up Bar, myself
Speaker 1: and a couple other folks started adopting kind of a
Speaker 1: Democratic Socialists of America or East by d S a
Speaker 1: side of what was happening UM. And through this project,
Speaker 1: our intent was to UM, have a little bit more
Speaker 1: political education and think really critically about how we could
Speaker 1: make this true mutual aid, whichever and I have learned
Speaker 1: is really really difficult to do offecially under capitalism. UM.
Speaker 1: And so, because we started this project around December, so
Speaker 1: kind of the height of the pandemic, we wanted to
Speaker 1: make it accessible for people who were really COVID cautious UM.
Speaker 1: And so we would assemble kits of masks in a
Speaker 1: park with a couple of folks outside, and then we
Speaker 1: would drive these kits to people's homes and get on
Speaker 1: zoom UM. And we would have a breakout room for
Speaker 1: people to learn how to make masks. UM. People oftentimes
Speaker 1: people who had only come to the build a couple
Speaker 1: of times started teaching new folks how to build these masks.
Speaker 1: And in the other room, we were doing readings. UM.
Speaker 1: We were reading you know, Pannic Cook and Jane macklew
Speaker 1: e side by side talking about you know, trade unions
Speaker 1: and solidarity unionism. We were reading about tenant organizing. UM
Speaker 1: A bar do you want to talk about Rosa Luxemburg
Speaker 1: a little bit? Yeah, I mean it was an amazing thing.
Speaker 1: We were trying to sort of expand our own political consciousness,
Speaker 1: and we did things like host a three part series
Speaker 1: just discussing, examining, analyzing the political theory of Rosa Luxembourg UM.
Speaker 1: And we had huge participation. And this was at a
Speaker 1: time where in our d SA chapter UM and many
Speaker 1: of the different committees, people were panicking because no one
Speaker 1: was showing up UM. And yet we found an enormous
Speaker 1: number of people joining our effort in these discussions were
Speaker 1: so energetic and so enthusiastic UM. And you know, this
Speaker 1: was a lonely time. It was a difficult time, and
Speaker 1: people seemed to find something and what we were doing.
Speaker 1: What do you think about that, Jim? Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: think you know, not only were people coming and participating, right,
Speaker 1: we had high school students, We had people who had
Speaker 1: dedicated the pandemic to reading political theory, right, and so
Speaker 1: you have this huge breath of knowledge. We have more
Speaker 1: liberal people joining. We have like anarchists and communists right,
Speaker 1: like all in this space that are actually talking together.
Speaker 1: And what was so empowering to me was everyone felt
Speaker 1: like they could speak. We had people that were really
Speaker 1: introverted UM then in the beginning didn't talk at all,
Speaker 1: slowly start to open up. We had high schoolers asking
Speaker 1: really incredible questions, right, like is revolution even possible right now? Um?
Speaker 1: And kind of getting into some of this. And I
Speaker 1: think one of the most impactful things was that we
Speaker 1: had these calls from seven to nine at night, and
Speaker 1: after that we had what we called late night, where
Speaker 1: folks would stay on till like twelve at night and
Speaker 1: talk to each other. And in this time of like
Speaker 1: isolation and depression, I don't think anyone that I know
Speaker 1: at least was having a good time in December, January, February, right,
Speaker 1: people were coming together on Zoom and actually staying on
Speaker 1: Zoom after what we were doing to feel some type
Speaker 1: of camaraderie, to feel like they were part of a community, um.
Speaker 1: And we were able to actually create that space. And
Speaker 1: I think that that was something that to me was
Speaker 1: really incredible. UM. And I think, you know, framing this
Speaker 1: also from the George Floyd protests that happened over the
Speaker 1: summer and thinking you know, more about abolition, right, thinking
Speaker 1: more about community building. I don't think you can truly
Speaker 1: or I can't imagine the future without the prison industrial
Speaker 1: complex that doesn't involve communities of care, that doesn't involve
Speaker 1: giving people both the resources and the like love that
Speaker 1: they need to be able to not be pushed into
Speaker 1: situations where they have to commit crimes, and also having
Speaker 1: accountability amongst each other. Um. Not to mention, right, this
Speaker 1: work is really really hard. People burn out. Like we
Speaker 1: are exhausted to be able to create a space where
Speaker 1: everyone cares for each other. We're checking in with each
Speaker 1: other where you know, in the beginning of this virtual
Speaker 1: Mask Builds, I think, you know, a bar, myself and
Speaker 1: a couple other folks were doing the majority of the
Speaker 1: work and by the end we were doing none of it.
Speaker 1: We had like been able to reallocate those tasks, we
Speaker 1: had been able to develop leaders, and we had essentially
Speaker 1: organized ourselves out of a job, which to me is
Speaker 1: like the organizer's dream, right, Like that's what you really
Speaker 1: want to see happen um. And so that's kind of
Speaker 1: what was happening on the production side of the Mask Builds.
Speaker 1: On the distribution side, again, we're thinking, how can we
Speaker 1: actually make this true mutual aid um And so we
Speaker 1: started to partner with Tank Tenant and Neighborhood Councils, which
Speaker 1: is one of the main tenant groups in the Bay
Speaker 1: Area UM and working with them to go to food
Speaker 1: banks right, places where people are generally low income, where
Speaker 1: they might not be able to have the resources to
Speaker 1: get masks, and we're distributing masks asking them, are you
Speaker 1: having trouble with your rent or your landlord? Right? The
Speaker 1: goal in this is to give people the tools to
Speaker 1: organize around issues that are deeply pertinent and urgent to them,
Speaker 1: especially with an impending fiction moratorium right. And so UM
Speaker 1: we learned a lot through this. We went to a
Speaker 1: lot of different food banks we found um you know,
Speaker 1: some of them were places where people primarily spoke Cantonese
Speaker 1: and Mandarin, and so we you know, used our networks
Speaker 1: again that we had created through this project, these relationships
Speaker 1: of trust to find people that spoke Mandarin and we're
Speaker 1: willing to come out um and talk with folks. UM.
Speaker 1: We found people that spoke Spanish that we're willing to
Speaker 1: come out and talk with folks. And we started to
Speaker 1: develop relationships at these food banks where we were able
Speaker 1: to distribute masks to people, talk to them, understand what
Speaker 1: issues they were having, UM, and invite them to come
Speaker 1: to meetings where they could actually get their resources to
Speaker 1: try and tackle some of these issues that they're facing abroad.
Speaker 1: You have more to add on the mass project. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it's worth saying that. Um, we're all very busy.
Speaker 1: I'm a PhD student. While we were doing this work, Um,
Speaker 1: you know, in d s A, I was teaching a
Speaker 1: class and I was doing research, and Janine is a
Speaker 1: extremely busy union organizer. Um. And normally, you know, we'd
Speaker 1: come home after work and be absolutely exhausted. Um. And
Speaker 1: this was very tiring, but we felt somehow energized, We
Speaker 1: felt driven to do this, and we found that lots
Speaker 1: of the other people who participated were also busy with
Speaker 1: their jobs and yet would make time to do this.
Speaker 1: And Um, in terms of our actual practice, in terms
Speaker 1: of trying to develop the political dimension of the distribution
Speaker 1: aspect of our mutual aid, there was a con an
Speaker 1: interplay between what we were reading and what we were practicing.
Speaker 1: So as we began working with this Radical Tenant Organizing
Speaker 1: Group tank that Jinin mentioned, whose aim is to give
Speaker 1: tenants the tools to form tenant councils and tenant unions
Speaker 1: in order to use tools such as rent strikes to
Speaker 1: rebalance power between themselves and their landlords and real estate companies, etcetera. UM.
Speaker 1: During that time, during our mask builds, we would then
Speaker 1: go and read articles in newspaper clippings from you know,
Speaker 1: early twentieth century, when there were examples of you know,
Speaker 1: twenty year old factory girls in Lower Manhattan organizing groups
Speaker 1: of apartment buildings to go on rent strike, you know,
Speaker 1: ten thousand families in one case, to go on rent strike.
Speaker 1: These incredible, deeply inspiring stories UM where people uh suddenly
Speaker 1: became uh subjects of history and not merely objects. And
Speaker 1: I think part of what sustained our own work in
Speaker 1: this group was some uh similar feeling and UM at
Speaker 1: the same time when we were trying to imagine future
Speaker 1: beyond capitalism, we were looking at moments when that future
Speaker 1: seemed within reach, and so we were studying, for example,
Speaker 1: Paris in ninety, which is a moment within many people's
Speaker 1: living memory, all although not our own, UM, and studying
Speaker 1: how it was that these protests began with the student
Speaker 1: movement and then spilled out into these massive strikes and
Speaker 1: all the sort of self activity that emerged from that,
Speaker 1: and there was such a wide, wide breath of people
Speaker 1: who came to these builds. There were people as young
Speaker 1: as high schoolers, were also much older people in their
Speaker 1: seventies and eighties. And when we were having this discussion,
Speaker 1: someone who lived through the sixties and witnessed these things
Speaker 1: very up close came to talk about Paris in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty eight and shared the wealth of his own experience.
Speaker 1: And again, all of this was driving what we were
Speaker 1: actually doing with our hands, what we were doing on
Speaker 1: the streets, what we were doing at these food bank lines, UM.
Speaker 1: And so it was very critical that everything we were
Speaker 1: reading was somehow feeding into our practice. Yeah, and I think,
Speaker 1: you know, we had over a hundred people participate in
Speaker 1: these masks builds, and I think one of the things
Speaker 1: that I really took away from this is again, people
Speaker 1: were craving that community, They were craving relationships, and people
Speaker 1: came back because they felt that in this group UM.
Speaker 1: And that translated also as we transitioned, right, we had
Speaker 1: built a culture of friendship and of caring for each
Speaker 1: other that people wanted to continue working on this, They
Speaker 1: wanted to continue to be a part of this project.
Speaker 1: As we transitioned UM to building air purifiers, right as
Speaker 1: the UM you know, vaccines became more prevalent masks were
Speaker 1: still being worn, but to a lesser degree UM and
Speaker 1: we started turning to fire season UM as these disasters
Speaker 1: right continued to strike with actually with climate change only
Speaker 1: getting worse and worse. One of the things that I
Speaker 1: think is really powerful about mutual aid and is really
Speaker 1: powerful about communities is that these disasters have been happening
Speaker 1: and continue to happen at a greater and greater frequency.
Speaker 1: And I think what I've learned from looking at you know,
Speaker 1: the heat waves that recently took many lives across the
Speaker 1: Pacific Northwest, the um really really freezing temperatures that happened
Speaker 1: in Texas about a year ago, and especially COVID, is
Speaker 1: that you know, the government, local or federal is not
Speaker 1: stepping in to help people. Billionaires are not really stepping
Speaker 1: in to help people. It's really only communities and networks
Speaker 1: of relationships that are keeping people alive. And the only
Speaker 1: way you know, that we're going to get through this
Speaker 1: is through having those relationships, through understanding where people need support.
Speaker 1: And we started to do this with the distribution of masks,
Speaker 1: right is build relationships with community members in you know,
Speaker 1: fruit Vale and Oakland, which is not a large not
Speaker 1: a place that many people from d s A or
Speaker 1: from TANK are living currently, right and starting to build
Speaker 1: relationships with people that do need these resources in times
Speaker 1: of crisis, UM, so that we know where we can
Speaker 1: plug in and also build relationships amongst our fellow organizers
Speaker 1: so that we can support each other through these disasters. UM.
Speaker 1: And so as we transitioned to the air purifiers, we started,
Speaker 1: you know, thinking about everything we have learned from the
Speaker 1: Mass project and kind of making that even bigger and better.
Speaker 1: And how can we you know, continue to take what
Speaker 1: we've learned and change it and turn it into something
Speaker 1: really really incredible. And UM, we you know Chris who
Speaker 1: Abar mentioned before, who came up with the masks, came
Speaker 1: up with a really incredible way to make air purifiers
Speaker 1: that like ridiculously efficient. UM. Is really really useful, especially
Speaker 1: for wildfire smoke, but also for just people with asthma.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of environmental pollution in the Bay area, right.
Speaker 1: These things can be used UM year round. And we
Speaker 1: began to build these air purifiers out of you know,
Speaker 1: box fans and he a filters UM with a shroud
Speaker 1: with weather stripping right to make the air like only
Speaker 1: go through the fan to make it extremely efficient, and
Speaker 1: UM started to think about how can we make this
Speaker 1: like community aspect even bigger at least this is what
Speaker 1: I was thinking of because I had started to realize,
Speaker 1: right I think the only thing that we can rely
Speaker 1: on is each other right now, especially UM. And so
Speaker 1: we started bringing in a bunch of different groups to
Speaker 1: come to these builds. So we have you know, east
Speaker 1: By d s A. We started working really closely with
Speaker 1: Sunrise and developed a level of trust and reciprocity in
Speaker 1: that relationship that has you know, continued to be really
Speaker 1: beneficial to us UM and really helpful. We met amazing
Speaker 1: people that came out. You know, they've helped fundraise for
Speaker 1: US as our funding has gotten really really low because
Speaker 1: these air purifiers are not cheap those they are much
Speaker 1: cheaper than commercially available, but we're you know, giving them
Speaker 1: to folks for free because we want this to be
Speaker 1: mutual aid UM and so working with Sunrise, we're working
Speaker 1: with Asians for Black Lives UM, Berkeley, Mutual Aid MASK
Speaker 1: Oakland UM who both came out to our builds but
Speaker 1: also helped us distribute air purifiers to Reno and to
Speaker 1: places that had you know, a qu I s of
Speaker 1: five hundred right when fire season was so bad, when
Speaker 1: the smoke there was just like unlivable. UM. We were
Speaker 1: able to work with them to distribute these air purifiers
Speaker 1: where people really needed them most. UM. We were able
Speaker 1: to you know, continue to work with tank UM. Some
Speaker 1: folks from the i w W came out. We were
Speaker 1: able to distribute these air purifiers to the Sagorata Land Trust,
Speaker 1: which is UM a land trust that is run by
Speaker 1: Indigenous women UM and is working on essentially giving indigenous
Speaker 1: land back to Indigenous people. We were able to distribute
Speaker 1: with critical resistance and amazing abolitionist groups started by Ruth
Speaker 1: Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis in Oakland were to distribute
Speaker 1: UM to s r oh UM, a group that is
Speaker 1: working with UM low income Chinese immigrants in San Francisco
Speaker 1: who are generally living in single family homes right with
Speaker 1: really bad air quality. UM and work with like all
Speaker 1: of these different groups, you know, Berkeley Mutual Aid. We're
Speaker 1: pulling in people from just countless networks to come and
Speaker 1: build air purifiers together. UM. And we had you know,
Speaker 1: an ex black panther talking to someone from Sunrise from
Speaker 1: San Francisco, right, Like these just wild connections, um that
Speaker 1: are happening at these builds of people who are deeply
Speaker 1: political and people who are barely understanding, um, you know,
Speaker 1: what socialism means, but are wanting to come out and
Speaker 1: do something for their community. Um. And through these relationships
Speaker 1: and networks again, like we're able to hang out after
Speaker 1: the builds, people are able to enjoy themselves. Everyone said
Speaker 1: they were having a really fun time. Even though we
Speaker 1: were like literally doing work on a Saturday, people were
Speaker 1: still like, this is so fun. We had you know,
Speaker 1: people baking bread and like fruit tarts and cheesecakes and
Speaker 1: bringing it. We had so we had music. It was
Speaker 1: like a very fun atmosphere and environment. And despite the
Speaker 1: fact that you know, it was physical labor and it
Speaker 1: was taxing and a lot of times it was on
Speaker 1: hot days. Um, people stayed for you know, four hours
Speaker 1: to help do this and to do this work because
Speaker 1: they cared, because they wanted to see, um, you know,
Speaker 1: what they could be able to do. And they also
Speaker 1: I think started to build relationships. UM. I know, you know,
Speaker 1: countless people talked to a bra and I and had
Speaker 1: no idea you know, we've known each other for less
Speaker 1: than a year now, UM, and they thought we'd known
Speaker 1: each other our whole lives. And I think that that
Speaker 1: really speaks, right. I think that speaks so much to
Speaker 1: the relationships that we've been able to build through this.
Speaker 1: And you know, I think a Bra and I have
Speaker 1: met countless people and have developed like an incredible community
Speaker 1: through this work. UM. That definitely helps me keep going.
Speaker 1: I would definitely not be able to continue to do
Speaker 1: this work if I couldn't, you know, call Librara. But
Speaker 1: nine PM and we talked for three hours and we complain,
Speaker 1: but we also talked through like what are we doing
Speaker 1: and how can it be better? And how can we,
Speaker 1: you know, get through this roadblock UM. And I saw
Speaker 1: that in countless places UM. As we moved to our
Speaker 1: own distribution, so we're partnering with these organizations, but we're
Speaker 1: also doing our own distribution UM, which I think is
Speaker 1: like a huge experiment and how to actually do mutual aid,
Speaker 1: which UM is something that you know, when we talked
Speaker 1: to the organizers in our circles, we weren't finding answers too,
Speaker 1: and so we kind of realized like we just have
Speaker 1: to kind of try and figure this out. But we
Speaker 1: would go out and do these distributions and afterwards, you know,
Speaker 1: have lunch with people and talk to each other, like
Speaker 1: what could we do better? What are we doing wrong?
Speaker 1: Is this mutual aid? Like these are questions we're having
Speaker 1: right after we've been standing in the sun talking to
Speaker 1: people for three hours. Like the dedication of the people
Speaker 1: involved in this like of our said, most of us
Speaker 1: are working forty fifty sixty hour weeks and yet we're
Speaker 1: dedicating constant time during the week and at least one
Speaker 1: day every weekend to either distribut U Shoan or a
Speaker 1: build UM is incredible. I feel like incredibly honored to
Speaker 1: be able to work with the people that we've been
Speaker 1: working with UM. But in our distribution, we started thinking about,
Speaker 1: you know, how can we invite some of these people
Speaker 1: to come to our builds. Maybe that's the reciprocity. I
Speaker 1: think true mutual aid is really about believing that the
Speaker 1: people that were distributing to can also give back to us,
Speaker 1: rather than seeing them as like helpless UM. And so
Speaker 1: we continue to do some of our distributions with tank
Speaker 1: Um and actually we were able to do some of
Speaker 1: these distributions in a way that helped new buildings who
Speaker 1: are just starting to form tenant councils UM, you know,
Speaker 1: use the air purifiers as a way to open up
Speaker 1: conversation with some of these people and say, hey, you're
Speaker 1: building is being organized. Remember how the fire season was
Speaker 1: last year, right, Like, this is something that you can use,
Speaker 1: and let's talk more about other tools that we can
Speaker 1: use coming together to really fight for changes that we
Speaker 1: can't necessarily make on our own. UM. So that was happening,
Speaker 1: and then we also decide to look at data around
Speaker 1: where in Oakland or asthma rates really high, where in
Speaker 1: Oakland is air pollution really bad? And where in Oakland
Speaker 1: is it primarily lower income folks? Right? We want to
Speaker 1: be giving these air purifiers to people who can't generally
Speaker 1: afford a hundred to two hundred dollar air purifier. UM.
Speaker 1: And so East Oakland was one of those places. And
Speaker 1: again through this network that we had built through the
Speaker 1: Mask build, we had a connection in East Oakland someone
Speaker 1: that had UM that is part of East Bay ds A, right,
Speaker 1: that had done a lot of community organizing, and someone
Speaker 1: that was actually able to, you know, send out an
Speaker 1: email to her neighborhood and say, hey, we have air
Speaker 1: purifiers and so we had people posting up at her house. UM.
Speaker 1: So you know, we were coming into a neighborhood that
Speaker 1: was not our own, which in some ways, UM, you know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of complications to that. UM. But we
Speaker 1: were also able to do it at someone's house that
Speaker 1: we knew. UM. And our goal in this was to
Speaker 1: get people to come to our builds to make air
Speaker 1: purifiers for themselves and for their family, their community, their friends,
Speaker 1: so that we then don't have to go into those neighborhoods, right,
Speaker 1: so that they can then start to own that distribution
Speaker 1: and own this project and like feel an autonomy over it. Um.
Speaker 1: And so we also kind of door knocked around the
Speaker 1: neighborhood talking to people about the air purifiers, about wildfire smoke,
Speaker 1: about coming out to a build, you know, about why
Speaker 1: this is really important, um, why we need people to
Speaker 1: engage in this project. UM. And we distributed almost a
Speaker 1: hundred air purifiers that day, I think folks in that
Speaker 1: community and after that that week UM, so we distributed
Speaker 1: on Sunday and then um, a week later on Saturday,
Speaker 1: we would have a build. So within that week, right,
Speaker 1: we're calling everyone that we distributed to saying, hey, how
Speaker 1: is your air porifier working. Can you come out to
Speaker 1: a build. It's really really valuable that you come out
Speaker 1: to a build so that you can make sure that
Speaker 1: your community has clean air to breathe, especially during fire season. Um.
Speaker 1: And through these calls, right, I talked to someone who
Speaker 1: lived in East Oakland for an hour, um in this
Speaker 1: person just started opening up and was so touched that
Speaker 1: we had done this and basically said, you know, no
Speaker 1: one has ever cared for my community like this, No
Speaker 1: one has ever even thought about us, right. And you see,
Speaker 1: like there are nonprofits right California was giving out air
Speaker 1: purifiers to certain people, like there's a semblance of the structure.
Speaker 1: And yet we were actually interfacing with these people who
Speaker 1: seemed to have no idea that any of this was
Speaker 1: happening right there, saying, you know, no one else has
Speaker 1: been able to do this, um. And we're starting to
Speaker 1: form relationships and develop connections in these neighborhoods and make
Speaker 1: people feel cared for and follow up. Um. And despite
Speaker 1: all of this work, right, no one shows up to
Speaker 1: our bill that week. UM And I think Obar and
Speaker 1: I both felt pretty defeated, right, Like, is mutually possible?
Speaker 1: What are we're doing wrong clearly, Like class and racial
Speaker 1: barriers are really hard to overcome in this UM. And
Speaker 1: you know, we're talking to our ex black panther friend
Speaker 1: that has continued to be a huge part of this project,
Speaker 1: and he was like, you're you know, you have to
Speaker 1: keep trying. You're doing the right things. And so we
Speaker 1: went to West Oakland again where we had a connection
Speaker 1: from our MASS project that helped us set up in
Speaker 1: front of this corner next to UM, a vegan cafe
Speaker 1: that serves trans poc for free UM and has really
Speaker 1: wonderful food. We're able to talk with them give them
Speaker 1: air purifier as they allowed us to UM kind of
Speaker 1: set up shop in front of their store. And there's
Speaker 1: also like a liquor store on this corner. It's like
Speaker 1: a very busy corner in West Oakland. UM and kind
Speaker 1: of did the same thing. We're handing out air purifiers,
Speaker 1: talking to people about the build, talking to people about UM,
Speaker 1: you know why this is important. And we're also door
Speaker 1: knocking in the neighborhood, talking to folks UM at their homes,
Speaker 1: UM asking people, you know, who needs an air purifier? Right,
Speaker 1: Like these communities generally know each other really well, and
Speaker 1: we're able to talk to people who are like, oh
Speaker 1: my gosh, you know, like my aunt lives over there
Speaker 1: and her kid has asthma, and like you should go
Speaker 1: talk with her. UM. And so we start to develop
Speaker 1: these connections and kind of map out the neighborhood and
Speaker 1: you know, again we're following up. We're talking to these
Speaker 1: people on the phone, We're asking them to come out
Speaker 1: to the build. And we went out to this neighborhood again.
Speaker 1: So the second time we went out, UM, I started
Speaker 1: to recognize people right, and I started to be able
Speaker 1: to talk with people, and UM, through I was kind
Speaker 1: of like door knocking, UM. While people were posted up
Speaker 1: by the liquor store and this Beacon cafe and uh,
Speaker 1: there was like a church service going on and I
Speaker 1: recognized one of the people there, and he recognized me,
Speaker 1: and we were able to talk and he was really
Speaker 1: grateful for the work that we were doing. And he
Speaker 1: started calling his friends over and be like, hey, you know,
Speaker 1: do you all need an air purifier? Remember how a
Speaker 1: bad fire season was last year, And also like we
Speaker 1: should all go to this build next time. UM, you know,
Speaker 1: we should actually be showing up and helping out. UM.
Speaker 1: And words spread so quickly, like these communities are so
Speaker 1: deeply connected. UM, at least from what I like witnessed
Speaker 1: and UM that week again, right, we called everyone. We said, like,
Speaker 1: you know, we really think it's valuable for you all
Speaker 1: to come out to a build. We want to give
Speaker 1: you like ownership an autonomy over this in a world
Speaker 1: where I think so often you feel so little autonomy
Speaker 1: um and so little power when everything feels like it's crumbling.
Speaker 1: Right to have some semblance of ownership and autonomy, to
Speaker 1: be able to um do something that is immediately like
Speaker 1: visible and real UM feels really powerful. Right when sometimes
Speaker 1: you know, uh, talking to elected officials is moving too
Speaker 1: slowly because disasters are happening so quickly. There is a
Speaker 1: need to balance immediate need and system change, right, and
Speaker 1: I think you have to constantly hold both. Um. But
Speaker 1: you know, we're talking to these folks, were asking them
Speaker 1: to come to the build and UM we actually had
Speaker 1: a couple of people come out to our build from
Speaker 1: our distribution people that had a really amazing time. People
Speaker 1: that you know said they enjoyed being there um and
Speaker 1: took air purifiers back and gave them out to their
Speaker 1: friends and family. UM. And we're able to say, you know,
Speaker 1: I made this right, Like this is something valuable, but
Speaker 1: also I understand how it works. And I talked to
Speaker 1: one of these people, are Xt build is actually on
Speaker 1: his birthday, and he was like, I really want to
Speaker 1: come out on my birthday. I really want to come
Speaker 1: out and help people and do this thing that has
Speaker 1: been enjoyable. UM. And it is also like helping people,
Speaker 1: And that to me was right, Like that someone wants
Speaker 1: to come on their birthday to like build air purifiers
Speaker 1: on a Saturday, when most of these people are you know,
Speaker 1: working forty two however many hours a week, that they're
Speaker 1: willing to continue to even work on a Saturday, I
Speaker 1: think is a huge feat UM. And it is something
Speaker 1: that's definitely felt really really powerful in this Yeah. I
Speaker 1: think something that Janine brings out is really important, which
Speaker 1: is that UM, at every stage, we've been sort of
Speaker 1: interrogating and examining the work we're doing and asking whether
Speaker 1: we are truly drawing out the full political potential of
Speaker 1: our work. So in the earlier days when we were
Speaker 1: just stirring up that sanitizer and getting out these masks,
Speaker 1: you know, we did a lot and you know, this
Speaker 1: network of volunteers comprised well over two hundred people, and
Speaker 1: it was sort of consuming all of our time. But
Speaker 1: eventually we realized that to a large degree, we were
Speaker 1: basically just acting as a stop gap measure for government austerity,
Speaker 1: for the big gaps left behind by this extremely problematic
Speaker 1: nonprofit industrial complex. And the work we were doing then
Speaker 1: we realized was sort of susceptible to co optation UM,
Speaker 1: and it didn't necessarily represent too much of a threat
Speaker 1: to capitalist hegemony and UM. At that point, you know,
Speaker 1: we shifted into d s A and we started bringing
Speaker 1: in a very sort of explicit political education component and
Speaker 1: started associating with an organization like Tank, which is already
Speaker 1: been doing um, really incredible radical organizing in the Bay Area.
Speaker 1: But eventually we ran up against the limits of that
Speaker 1: as well. And you know, d Essay is an organization
Speaker 1: where a lot of us initially learned our politics, but
Speaker 1: you know, in its current sort of stage, it's characterized
Speaker 1: by a strong degree in our chapter of sort of
Speaker 1: democratic centralism, and most of the effort is being put
Speaker 1: toward electoral work and reform work, and everything that we
Speaker 1: were reading about seemed to point towards the extreme limits
Speaker 1: of that form of organizing, and how these forms of
Speaker 1: organizing in fact represented sometimes the more reactionary elements of
Speaker 1: the left in earlier moments in history, and we wanted
Speaker 1: to go beyond that. And so we realized that we
Speaker 1: were spending a lot of time having to just sort
Speaker 1: of defend the work that we were doing. So eventually
Speaker 1: we just decided to uh sort of reassert our autonomy.
Speaker 1: And as we shifted into the Air Purifier chapter of
Speaker 1: our work, that's what we were doing, and UM our
Speaker 1: inspirations are manifold. And as we were reading about these
Speaker 1: earlier moments in history, something which UM had an extraordinary
Speaker 1: effect on me was studying the example of the Spanish
Speaker 1: Revolution in six and suddenly I was reading about this
Speaker 1: moment in history that's been more or less erased from
Speaker 1: most of our textbooks are presented UM in a very
Speaker 1: kind of dishonest form. UM. And what these workers and
Speaker 1: peasants had done in the midst of fascist takeover was
Speaker 1: create on an enormous scale, UM the perhaps the most
Speaker 1: egalitarian society that I've ever read about, which truly represented
Speaker 1: UM a sort of liberatory, radical, early form of anti
Speaker 1: authoritarian socialism that stands in tremendous contrast to the much
Speaker 1: uglier uh forms of so called socialism that we've seen
Speaker 1: appear in the twentieth century. And what I noticed was
Speaker 1: that this society in Spain in six was absolutely replete
Speaker 1: with mutual aid, and these kind of anarchist tendencies had
Speaker 1: um sort of penetrated the consciousness of many of the
Speaker 1: workers and peasants in Spain, you know, sixty years before
Speaker 1: the revolution, after um Bakunin in the First International sent
Speaker 1: out an emissary to start spreading these ideas, and they
Speaker 1: took whole like wildfire and spread across the country. I think,
Speaker 1: I think one of one of the most incredible things
Speaker 1: about that story is the the guy they gets sent
Speaker 1: from Italy, like from as as the representative and now
Speaker 1: the cause. Yeah, he doesn't speak Spanish, right, he only
Speaker 1: speaks Italian, and he he he should just look at
Speaker 1: this place, right, and he's he's he's such a sort
Speaker 1: of brilliant order and and the sort of like the
Speaker 1: power of the ideas that he has is so strong
Speaker 1: that you know it it breaks through the language barrier,
Speaker 1: and it's it's this sort of I think it's just
Speaker 1: this incredible moments that you know, I think, I think
Speaker 1: comes into a lot of a lot of what the
Speaker 1: two were running into with, you know, I mean, we
Speaker 1: still live in a place that's you know, incredibly defined
Speaker 1: by language bears, and just the ability to break through
Speaker 1: that becomes it gives you this just incredible potential of
Speaker 1: power and organization. Yeah, Chris, you don't know how much
Speaker 1: it means to me to hear someone who's as familiar
Speaker 1: with this as most of the time when I talked
Speaker 1: about it's just total blank faces, even among my friends
Speaker 1: and comrades on the left. And unfortunately, but yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean reading about Finelli, who didn't speak a word of
Speaker 1: Spanish and he just went and with his wild gesticulations
Speaker 1: and his passionate rhetoric was able to basically inspire people
Speaker 1: with the radical politics that he came there to represent,
Speaker 1: and it somehow then took on a life of its own.
Speaker 1: Is kind of an extraordinary thing. And what I would
Speaker 1: do to take a time machine back and just see
Speaker 1: what this guy, you know, on trains and basically lived
Speaker 1: as a rant as he went from village to village,
Speaker 1: spreading the word what what this looked like? What was
Speaker 1: he doing? Um? And yet these ideas took hold in
Speaker 1: a the only deep way. And UM. These notions of solidarity,
Speaker 1: mutual aid, cooperation, free association existed by the time of
Speaker 1: the Spanish Revolution in nineteen thirty six. So these sort
Speaker 1: of dual power counter institutions were more or less in place.
Speaker 1: And these are the things which UM were the basis
Speaker 1: the precondition for this sweeping egalitarian social revolution that then unfolded,
Speaker 1: which was unfortunately destroyed by force. UM. But this was
Speaker 1: the sort of society that I imagined I might actually
Speaker 1: want to live UM and and uh and and what
Speaker 1: you see is that there is a deep element to UM,
Speaker 1: a sort of shared consciousness that existed at that time.
Speaker 1: And it was quite an effort for people to bring
Speaker 1: that consciousness from sort of the countryside where took hold
Speaker 1: more nash naturally into sort of the industrial UM centers,
Speaker 1: the metropolitan areas where people working in factories were UM,
Speaker 1: you know, found it a lot more difficult to sort
Speaker 1: of exercise these UM values because these things are effectively
Speaker 1: bled out of them as they work on the factory floor.
Speaker 1: And UM. That brought a whole different meaning to the
Speaker 1: work that we were doing now. And we wondered, what
Speaker 1: can we do to uh inculcate, to nurture this kind
Speaker 1: of consciousness among the people with whom we're interacting, as
Speaker 1: we do our mutual aid, as we do our distributions,
Speaker 1: as we hold these builds that you know, even though
Speaker 1: we had trouble getting initially a few of the people
Speaker 1: from our distributions to show up, there were still you know,
Speaker 1: sixty seventy people showing up every other weekend. And now
Speaker 1: we finally started having the people that were distributing extraordinarily
Speaker 1: surprising and and exciting, and yeah, this has been it
Speaker 1: could happen here. Join us tomorrow for part two of
Speaker 1: this interview, where we'll go more in death in the
Speaker 1: political side, common humanity collectives work. Meanwhile, you can find
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Speaker 1: sex and intimacy issues, and yes, I despise every minute
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Speaker 1: could Happen here podcast about things falling apart and about
Speaker 1: how we can put them back together in a way
Speaker 1: better than they originally were. And today we're going to
Speaker 1: continue our interview with Janina Aprar from the Comedy Humanity Collective.
Speaker 1: We've been talking about their work. We've been talking about
Speaker 1: the origin of the mutual A products. We've been talking
Speaker 1: specifically about the political aspect of their work and how
Speaker 1: they're reading this sort of anarchists. The history of anarchist
Speaker 1: struggle in Spain and particularly mtual Agree in the Spanish
Speaker 1: Civil War helped impact and shape the politics and work
Speaker 1: that they've been doing. One thing I want I wanted
Speaker 1: to sort of circle back all the way too from
Speaker 1: the beginning, was the stuff you've got you were doing
Speaker 1: at the very beginning of the pandemic. Because I think
Speaker 1: that this is I've talked about this before on here,
Speaker 1: but you know the difference between a country like the US,
Speaker 1: where what seven hundreds and hundrefifty people are dead and
Speaker 1: places with that didn't happen was the degree your community mobilization.
Speaker 1: And I talked about this with the Chinese example, is
Speaker 1: that like, yeah, I mean like that the reason that
Speaker 1: China the pandemic sort of got contained there, it wasn't
Speaker 1: because the state stepped in and was like, we're going
Speaker 1: to do this. It was because hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 1: ordinary people just took to the streets and we're like, okay,
Speaker 1: we're doing the lockdown now. And you know, and it
Speaker 1: takes a different form in China because you know, there's
Speaker 1: there's a lot of different sort of things going on there,
Speaker 1: but that kind of mass community mobilization in the beginning
Speaker 1: of it's just like it. It didn't happen that much
Speaker 1: in the US. And I think, like, you know, the
Speaker 1: world where we don't all die in the pandemic, right
Speaker 1: is the one where the things that you all were
Speaker 1: doing happened. I mean, one the way the things I
Speaker 1: remember my sister is a bio grad student, and she
Speaker 1: was telling me about how, you know, so so the
Speaker 1: you know, one of one of the things, one of
Speaker 1: the bottlenecks beginning of a pandemic, and it's still kind
Speaker 1: of a bottleneck was it was about being able to
Speaker 1: being able to do COVID tests and you know, biograd
Speaker 1: students can do PCR tests like it's easy. This is
Speaker 1: you know, this is one of the first things they
Speaker 1: teach you. And that capacity just was never used. It
Speaker 1: just it was just sort of left and like sat
Speaker 1: there and rotted. And it sat there and rotted because
Speaker 1: you know, the actual pandemic response was run by a
Speaker 1: state that just didn't care and a bureaucracy that, even
Speaker 1: when it did care, was sort of you know, I
Speaker 1: didn't have this capacity to mobilize. You know, it's it's
Speaker 1: its entire existence. It's about making sure that sort of
Speaker 1: the capacity for a ton's mobilization never happens. And I
Speaker 1: think that that was one of the most interesting and
Speaker 1: powerful parts of what y'all were doing, was that you
Speaker 1: just did it and it just it kept spreading. Yeah, No,
Speaker 1: I think it's a that's a really good and important
Speaker 1: point you're bringing up. And I should mention that before
Speaker 1: we started doing any of this stuff with PPE, I
Speaker 1: was actually you know, as word as as as the
Speaker 1: um uh, the fear of the pandemic started spreading, and
Speaker 1: we finally had a picture of what the US would
Speaker 1: soon look like. I remember going to a union meeting
Speaker 1: among my fellow grad student workers and talking some people
Speaker 1: afterwards and saying like, hey, um, I don't think that
Speaker 1: we have anywhere near the kind of testing infrastructure that
Speaker 1: we're going to need to prevent the spread of this stuff,
Speaker 1: Like why don't we just is there any way that
Speaker 1: we can just take PCR machines and set up these
Speaker 1: little guerrilla operators and start testing people for free? And unfortunately,
Speaker 1: one of the things I noticed was that people, you know,
Speaker 1: we're just very confused by this idea. They had much
Speaker 1: more faith in the state's ability to um assemble these infrastructures,
Speaker 1: and I just realized that was not the way in
Speaker 1: which I was going to be able to help out.
Speaker 1: And so it's it's unfortunate, but a lot of people
Speaker 1: have even though they have these instincts for sort of
Speaker 1: mutual aid and for this kind of autonomous organized this
Speaker 1: stuff lies just below the surface US, often they don't
Speaker 1: feel actually capable of it. And I think more than anything,
Speaker 1: what we've done with this project is we've created a
Speaker 1: context in atmosphere in which things which people typically feel
Speaker 1: like they cannot do they suddenly realize they can do again.
Speaker 1: It's just to come back to that idea that most
Speaker 1: of us, you know, we live our lives, we sell
Speaker 1: our labor for wages. A few people who own the
Speaker 1: means of production, you know, accumulate profits and use them
Speaker 1: to manipulate the state for their own purposes. Um. And
Speaker 1: this has an effect on us. I mean, this has
Speaker 1: an effect on dulling our consciousness um. And it's an
Speaker 1: extraordinary transformation in our social relations, in our sense of
Speaker 1: our own individuality when we do realize in these moments
Speaker 1: that we can be um subjects. And so unfortunately my
Speaker 1: initial to try to stimulate some of this activity around
Speaker 1: testing didn't work out. Um. But yeah, it just presents
Speaker 1: this recurring problem, which is that people are not used
Speaker 1: to doing this kind of work. And Janine and I
Speaker 1: have found many many times that you know, people are
Speaker 1: willing to come and use their hands and build something
Speaker 1: for a few hours. But then what we try to
Speaker 1: do is get them involved. We say, come to the meetings.
Speaker 1: You have decision making power. You can determine the trajectory
Speaker 1: of this work. And that's always a very very difficult
Speaker 1: thing to be doing. Now, given the way that sort
Speaker 1: of people have been conditioned UM right now, and I
Speaker 1: think that's something which is concerning because these uh traits
Speaker 1: of subservience and sort of submission, I think are incompatible.
Speaker 1: If there were a moment of revolutionary rupture, I'm not
Speaker 1: sure that that would necessarily lead to any better sort
Speaker 1: of society. So I think this stuff is deeply, deeply
Speaker 1: important to get people involved in this kind of work.
Speaker 1: I just want to go back to one of the
Speaker 1: things you said, Like you mentioned the community asked act
Speaker 1: and like those relationships, and I think that I know
Speaker 1: I've said this so many times, both in like my
Speaker 1: organizing space and even on this podcast today, but I
Speaker 1: truly have felt like building community is one of the
Speaker 1: most powerful ways to organize. And I think so many
Speaker 1: people in leftist spaces right now see organizing as like
Speaker 1: a place where you just do work UM, and I
Speaker 1: actually think that that's a really terrible way to organize.
Speaker 1: I don't think that you're gonna have people come back
Speaker 1: right like. I don't think that um, anyone is going
Speaker 1: to feel empowered. And you know, kind of through talking
Speaker 1: to a bra I've started reading this book on the
Speaker 1: freewomen of Spain and like thinking more about this also,
Speaker 1: right and thinking about how they're talking about community building
Speaker 1: and how they're talking about like community is believing in
Speaker 1: each other and like helping each other realize their full
Speaker 1: potential UM and as a way to actually find equity
Speaker 1: and equality through like horizontalist structures, through allowing people to
Speaker 1: reach their full potential UM And I think, you know,
Speaker 1: these are some of the politics that have informed what
Speaker 1: we're doing, that have informed how we're trying to allow
Speaker 1: people to grow. And so many people have come to
Speaker 1: us and said, you know, these mass builds or these
Speaker 1: air purifier builds are like the highlight of my week
Speaker 1: or the highlight of my month UM or I'm thinking
Speaker 1: about the like the way that you're structuring UM your
Speaker 1: distributions and thinking about how I can implement that into
Speaker 1: the work that we're doing UM And I think that
Speaker 1: those things are so powerful when you're able to create
Speaker 1: these spaces again where people care for each other, and
Speaker 1: like you're saying, that goes a long way towards being
Speaker 1: able to mobilize UM when there are disasters, to being
Speaker 1: able to mobilize around protests, to being able to mobilize
Speaker 1: around these ruptures because you have solidarity that's built through relationships,
Speaker 1: and that is allowing you to build power. One of
Speaker 1: the things that that YouTube sort of getting it is
Speaker 1: that you know, if there's it's hard in a lot
Speaker 1: of ways, because yeah, I mean, the US has and
Speaker 1: you baked into just to every single part of your
Speaker 1: life is there's going to be someone who is above you,
Speaker 1: who can order you and tell you what to do.
Speaker 1: And that's you know, that's that's that's that's the defining
Speaker 1: characteristic of life in the United States. And the second
Speaker 1: defining characteristic is if you don't do what they tell you,
Speaker 1: a person with the gun shows up and either beats
Speaker 1: you or hauls you away and enslaves you. And you
Speaker 1: know that that that has these enormous sort of psychological
Speaker 1: consequences that you know, create creates this culture where people
Speaker 1: you know, I mean, and that this goes along with
Speaker 1: there's there's this whole the skilling process that's that's been
Speaker 1: a sort of part of the broad arch of capitalism
Speaker 1: that you all trying to reverse. But even even yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, it's talking about even the people who have
Speaker 1: the skills just don't sort of they don't believe in
Speaker 1: their own autonomy. In a way and that and that
Speaker 1: that becomes this incredibly powerful, you know, tool of keeping
Speaker 1: people in line. But when that breaks and when when
Speaker 1: people start to see it, it can take time. But yeah,
Speaker 1: you know that the the kinds of power in the
Speaker 1: depth of the sort of organization that you build isn't
Speaker 1: from that is incredible. And I think it's only anything
Speaker 1: about the Spanish example that people tend to forget, which
Speaker 1: is that you know, okay, so that the c n
Speaker 1: T which is the sort of giant c n T
Speaker 1: f A eyes that the giants sort of h Annachrist,
Speaker 1: the union that's that's running a lot of this stuff.
Speaker 1: You know, they're almost completely destroyed at the drink, like
Speaker 1: over the course of the Spanis civil war, and they're
Speaker 1: you know, distruber the stalents, distruber with the fascist and
Speaker 1: at the end, by the end of the war, you
Speaker 1: know that the fascist control Spain for about forty years.
Speaker 1: But even that, you know, I mean, they kill hundreds
Speaker 1: of thousands of people, they like, there's massacres is you know,
Speaker 1: it turns into literally a fascist police state. But the
Speaker 1: moment that the moment the fascist a tatorship collapses, the
Speaker 1: CNT reappears. And they even even in you know, in
Speaker 1: in seventies Spain, in a place that is in a
Speaker 1: lot of ways the industrialized, they still almost overthrow the
Speaker 1: government one more time. And you know, I mean they're
Speaker 1: they're still around the sort of much reduced form to
Speaker 1: this day. But I mean, once once you build that
Speaker 1: kind of power, right, even you know, even footy yours
Speaker 1: fascistctatorship was enough to completely destroy it. It was you know,
Speaker 1: it was it was still there, sort of waiting underground,
Speaker 1: and then the moment there was a rupture reappears. This
Speaker 1: is a really important thing that you're bringing up, Chris,
Speaker 1: because I think it has um a lot to do
Speaker 1: with how we just measure and talk about success on
Speaker 1: the left. Um, what you're describing, which you know, Spain
Speaker 1: is typically by many people on the left described as
Speaker 1: kind of a failed experiment. Oh it was nice, but
Speaker 1: it ultimately failed. So let's look at Russia, you know. Um,
Speaker 1: but uh, some people have argued, and I think very correctly,
Speaker 1: that you can't put the genie back in the bottle.
Speaker 1: Once something like this happens. It's there. Those energies are there,
Speaker 1: They are not forgotten, they're not lost, and there's you know,
Speaker 1: a very vigorous sort of left wing radical anarchist movement
Speaker 1: that's resonant um uh and very sort of consistent with
Speaker 1: with the earlier movement during the thirties. And UM, I
Speaker 1: think that's that's an extraordinarily important thing to think about.
Speaker 1: We tend to measure these projects in these very sort
Speaker 1: of linear, sort of status terms, and we discovered, especially
Speaker 1: when we were doing work in d say, that a
Speaker 1: lot of people were trying to frame our own project
Speaker 1: in that way. You know, what are the demands that
Speaker 1: you're making, what are the what pressure are you exerting
Speaker 1: on the state? Um? And so there's these criteria that
Speaker 1: people use to evaluate kind of the efficacy or success
Speaker 1: of projects like these, And the Spanish example tells you,
Speaker 1: UM that the way that these things work is in
Speaker 1: fact much more complicated and much more interesting UM. And
Speaker 1: that by assembling these structures, these organizations, even if at
Speaker 1: some time or another they don't necessarily exist anymore, all
Speaker 1: of those people who participated in them are transformed, and
Speaker 1: the people that they interact with might then also be transformed.
Speaker 1: And so something like the c n T, which is
Speaker 1: you know, an extraordinary organization the f ai is what
Speaker 1: you know, really gave it the kind of anarcho syndicalist
Speaker 1: content that defined the quality of that revolution. Um, that
Speaker 1: never got lost, that never went away, even when it
Speaker 1: seems to have disappeared. Um. And so I think we
Speaker 1: have to learn to think about success and failure um,
Speaker 1: you know, as we very simplistically use these terms very
Speaker 1: very um differently. And this is something which informs our
Speaker 1: own work when we're asking was this successful? Was this
Speaker 1: not successful? Um? I think that's a much more difficult
Speaker 1: and complicated question than we often make it out to be. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think there's something very specific about you know,
Speaker 1: if we can go into sort of d s A
Speaker 1: factional politics for a little bit, but like I think
Speaker 1: like in some ways you see the shallowness of a
Speaker 1: lot of the approaches that was happening in the d
Speaker 1: s A where you know, like if if you if
Speaker 1: you look at a lot of how the sort of
Speaker 1: Medica for All stuff went or a lot of how
Speaker 1: the sort of Bernie campaign stuff went right, it was okay.
Speaker 1: You know, you have these you have these organizations that
Speaker 1: are like a mile wide and inch deep, and it's like, okay,
Speaker 1: they're their capable of mobilizing people devote one time, but
Speaker 1: you know, then they lose the election, and then what right,
Speaker 1: so that they don't they don't don't they don't have
Speaker 1: you know, there's they're supposed to be this whole thing
Speaker 1: of like Bernie being an organizer in chief and this
Speaker 1: whole sort of plan to use the sort of lists
Speaker 1: he developers organized anything. It's never happened, and you know,
Speaker 1: it didn't happen in a lot of ways because it
Speaker 1: was just sort of they they treated the whole process
Speaker 1: of building power as essentially a beocratic exercise. Right, it's
Speaker 1: how many people are on this list? How many people
Speaker 1: are showing up to the the state, like you know, and
Speaker 1: like how how many how many how many doors have
Speaker 1: we knocked on? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, it's it's just you know,
Speaker 1: and that's the and that's the other thing you're talking
Speaker 1: about with the fact that organizing spaces have to be
Speaker 1: more than just another just another place you go to work,
Speaker 1: right is if you know, if if all you're doing
Speaker 1: is just replicating these sort of bereocratic things, you're you're
Speaker 1: going to watch them fail exactly the same way the
Speaker 1: burocracies do, except you know, you're you're you're not the
Speaker 1: American State, you're not a a Democratic Party. You don't have
Speaker 1: an infinite amount of money or the ability to sort
Speaker 1: of you know, you don't you don't have the ability
Speaker 1: to call an army to enforce what you need to do, right,
Speaker 1: You don't. You don't have you don't have the fallback
Speaker 1: of bad methods of organizing, which is violence. And when
Speaker 1: that happens, you know, and and suddenly and you can't
Speaker 1: confront your own failures because you're stuck in this, things
Speaker 1: just start to sort of implode, and you start to
Speaker 1: lose people, and you start to sort of you know,
Speaker 1: you see this sort of stagnation and decline that I think,
Speaker 1: you know, talking about, Yeah, we're getting exactly too much
Speaker 1: into what's going on in East Bay, Like that's that that,
Speaker 1: that's been everything I've seen out of it. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: I think to go kind of off of what a
Speaker 1: bro was talking about to kind of put this into
Speaker 1: terms of the work that we've been doing, right, you know,
Speaker 1: through the Mask builds um as they were winding down,
Speaker 1: we weren't quite sure what our next project was, and
Speaker 1: you know, we talked a lot about like how do
Speaker 1: we keep this energy going like, we don't want to
Speaker 1: just lose this. And I also felt, you know, a
Speaker 1: certain amount of social obligation to you know, keep this
Speaker 1: community together that had formed during the pandemic. And so
Speaker 1: we started did a book group kind of in the
Speaker 1: interim reading How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney, and
Speaker 1: you know, had around thirty people show up to that
Speaker 1: UM And I think, as you know, you're talking about
Speaker 1: the importance of once you know, these relationships are formed,
Speaker 1: once these ideologies start to percolate, that they don't just
Speaker 1: go away, right. These people that we you know, brought
Speaker 1: into d s A and a lot of ways the
Speaker 1: d s A came to join this book group and
Speaker 1: later came to join the Air Purifier project despite the
Speaker 1: fact that it was more outside of d s A.
Speaker 1: A lot of these people, because of you know, what
Speaker 1: we had built and what we had created, continued to
Speaker 1: be such a huge part and take on incredible leadership
Speaker 1: roles UM and you know, facilitate this project in a
Speaker 1: way that it would not at all look like what
Speaker 1: it does without you know, these people dedicating so much
Speaker 1: of their time and energy to this project. Kind of
Speaker 1: throughout the process, Yeah, and Chris, I'm going back to
Speaker 1: what you're saying earlier. I think, um m hm, I've
Speaker 1: I've seen a very interesting, um a kind of reflection
Speaker 1: come out of some of these organizations, and you see
Speaker 1: these different splits and sort of uh wings developing. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I Janine is a very sort of organic,
Speaker 1: radical and revolutionary who I've learned an enormous amount from.
Speaker 1: But I think my own trajectory was much more characteristic
Speaker 1: of what you described earlier, which is that you know,
Speaker 1: I put all my eggs in this basket. I thought, Okay,
Speaker 1: Bernie Sanders, like, that's that is, that is the that
Speaker 1: is the beginning of how we undergo a sort of
Speaker 1: democratic socialist transformation. And then, you know, in a few
Speaker 1: snaps of the finger, even though I had spent just
Speaker 1: like hundreds of hours just knocking doors and promising all
Speaker 1: these things to people who might you know, vote for
Speaker 1: him at their door, and and all this stuff that
Speaker 1: and and and just sort of regurgitating all the slogans
Speaker 1: and and talking you know, rapturously about these welfare programs.
Speaker 1: Um I saw all that dissolved in a moment, and
Speaker 1: I realized that I didn't leave anything behind, And there
Speaker 1: was you know, in D. S A and our chapter,
Speaker 1: you saw that there was a large group of people
Speaker 1: who just wanted to keep that flame burning and just
Speaker 1: say we'll do better next time, you know, we'll do
Speaker 1: more work at the local level to elect representatives. But
Speaker 1: then there was another group of people. It was much
Speaker 1: more disillusioned UM and really started wondering is this what
Speaker 1: we should be doing, or at least is this all
Speaker 1: that we should be doing UM. And you see the
Speaker 1: same thing coming out of a group like Sunrise, which
Speaker 1: whose primary sort of mandate is to just put pressure
Speaker 1: onto Congress UM to urge the necessity of a green
Speaker 1: new deal or whatever. And nevertheless, out of Sunrise, we've
Speaker 1: met people who, after the George Floyd protests, after the
Speaker 1: dissolution of the Bernie campaign, had and lead down the
Speaker 1: same radical path as as some of us UM found
Speaker 1: ourselves traveling UM in in East by D. S A.
Speaker 1: And they're the ones who have now come to help
Speaker 1: our project and you know, using whatever autonomy they have
Speaker 1: at the sort of um hub level in Sunrise, because
Speaker 1: even though it's an organization with sort of paid staff
Speaker 1: and something of this bureaucracy right now in this moment,
Speaker 1: the individual little local hubs actually have a surprising amount
Speaker 1: of autonomy, and I really hope they're going to fight
Speaker 1: for protect that autonomy. So they've been able to use
Speaker 1: that autonomy to actually put a lot of effort toward
Speaker 1: raise money thousands of dollars for our work at c
Speaker 1: h C and come to our organizer meetings, become a
Speaker 1: part of the effort, and urge upon their own um
Speaker 1: friends and co organizers and and people they know in
Speaker 1: Sunrise to shift the direction of their work of their
Speaker 1: branches towards doing more work like this. So there are
Speaker 1: of these kind of interesting different uh splinterings that you
Speaker 1: see happening, which give me some hope that we're not
Speaker 1: just going to keep running the same tape over and
Speaker 1: over again. So one of the other interviews we did
Speaker 1: on this show was with a bunch of people who
Speaker 1: were working with the basically this giant effort in Atlanta
Speaker 1: to stop this like just atrocious sort of destruct this
Speaker 1: destruction of a bunch of forests to create this like
Speaker 1: weird teaching cops. How did you kind of terrorism enormous
Speaker 1: academy thing that's being funded by like a bunch of
Speaker 1: the Logic Corporations in Atlanta, and they were describing you know,
Speaker 1: they didn't talk about sort of the exacting process of solution,
Speaker 1: but you know, you saw they were like, you know,
Speaker 1: one of the people with the hair was from Sunrise
Speaker 1: and they were also talking about how they pulled together.
Speaker 1: That's just like enormous coalition of bunch of community groups
Speaker 1: that was, you know, and like the their their initial
Speaker 1: goal was they're trying to pressure the city council into
Speaker 1: stopping the into you know, not proving it and that
Speaker 1: doesn't work. But you know, you know, some of some
Speaker 1: of the other groups that were that were involved in this,
Speaker 1: we're talking about like okay, well you know that they're
Speaker 1: planning is like if this fails, we're gonna go stop
Speaker 1: it ourselves. And I think that pivot right is one
Speaker 1: of the most crucial things that is happening right now,
Speaker 1: because you know, okay, if if you, if you you know,
Speaker 1: if if you, if you you, you pull out your
Speaker 1: like poll your policy like policy space diagrams right like
Speaker 1: it's it's the United States. The policy that's enacted is
Speaker 1: the one that is the policy is decided about the
Speaker 1: sixtieth Senator and it's like Okay, so you know, even
Speaker 1: even if if even if you're gonna try to do
Speaker 1: an electoral thing, right, you need six you need sixty votes.
Speaker 1: In the Senate, there is one arguably socialist senator and
Speaker 1: we've never elected another one, so you know, and you're
Speaker 1: just looking at this, right and it's like, okay, like
Speaker 1: you know, we we elect like to maybe three socialists
Speaker 1: in in the House every year, and if you know,
Speaker 1: if you continue at the same rate, they'll be like
Speaker 1: what like like two hundred years if we have a
Speaker 1: majority there, And it's like yeah, you know, and at
Speaker 1: a certain points like yeah, I mean, we're like we're
Speaker 1: not gonna be around because we'll be dead, but like
Speaker 1: most of most most of the stuff on earth will
Speaker 1: also not be around because it will have been obliteral
Speaker 1: bla climate change there. And you know, and at some
Speaker 1: point you have to get to we're gonna have to
Speaker 1: do it ourselves because no one, no one else is
Speaker 1: going to do it for us. And I think that
Speaker 1: the work YouTube have been doing is just incredible, is
Speaker 1: just an incredible example of how that can actually happen
Speaker 1: and what what that looks like. Thank you. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think that it is so important, and I think that
Speaker 1: that's one of the reasons that to me, it was
Speaker 1: also so important to get all of these groups at
Speaker 1: these air purifier pims because I think oftentimes organizing is
Speaker 1: so siloed and it really frustrates me, and people seem
Speaker 1: very like loyal at least I've found this in East
Speaker 1: by d s A to like their particular organization, any
Speaker 1: other organization they don't even really want to talk about
Speaker 1: or they don't even know still exist um. And to me, like,
Speaker 1: if we can give people the tools to organize, I
Speaker 1: don't care who they're organizing, UM, but if we can
Speaker 1: also like have these groups communicate with each other, right,
Speaker 1: Like different groups are doing exactly the same thing. Right.
Speaker 1: We have the Ecosocialist Group UM in d s A. Right,
Speaker 1: you have Sunrise, you have the i w W, and
Speaker 1: then you have the Labor Committee of d s A.
Speaker 1: And it's like sometimes there is cross communication, right, But
Speaker 1: to me, it never feels like it's quite enough. It
Speaker 1: never feels like we're really all working on this or
Speaker 1: we're really all in it together. And I think we
Speaker 1: really should be, because like you're saying, like there's kind
Speaker 1: of a ticking cloth. We only have a certain amount
Speaker 1: of time to actually make the changes that we want
Speaker 1: to see. And when we're not willing to actually work
Speaker 1: with each other and communicate with each other, things are
Speaker 1: not going to happen as quickly. UM. And so being
Speaker 1: able to have, like, you know, a table of people
Speaker 1: assembling purifiers from d S a Sunrise tank, right, and
Speaker 1: they're all talking about the organizing work that they're doing
Speaker 1: and sharing stories and strategies, so that we're not all
Speaker 1: consly reinventing the wheel. That actually working together on this
Speaker 1: I think is so so valuable. And this is something
Speaker 1: that we've seen. You know, one of our friends who's
Speaker 1: helping lead one of the tank locals, has come to
Speaker 1: a number of our events and was telling us how
Speaker 1: he's actually tried to bring things that he's seen that
Speaker 1: we're doing into his own local and we've heard this
Speaker 1: in other contexts as well. So things spread, and that's
Speaker 1: I think a really important thing that um, you know,
Speaker 1: especially because of Janine's um you know, just just uh
Speaker 1: attempts to try to get all these groups together into
Speaker 1: one place to communicate, to build relationships. UM. We're now
Speaker 1: seeing what we've built sort of emanating elsewhere and we're
Speaker 1: also learning a lot from all these different people in
Speaker 1: groups who come to our builds and then become organizers
Speaker 1: in the effort. And you know, to mention someone like
Speaker 1: you know, Gerald Jannine referred to earlier, who is this
Speaker 1: uh wonderful full um cantankerous h ex black panther, you know,
Speaker 1: who has such an enormous history of experience. For him
Speaker 1: to give us that historical perspective for everything that we're doing,
Speaker 1: um has been an enormous boost of confidence, and it's
Speaker 1: allowed us to focus and you know, just to reiterate
Speaker 1: what she said earlier, we were really depressed when we
Speaker 1: went out and we were talking to people in West
Speaker 1: Oakland and East Oakland, and everyone was telling us we're
Speaker 1: gonna come, Yeah, we'll show up, we'll be there. And then,
Speaker 1: you know, while many other people showed up from Sunrise, DSA, C,
Speaker 1: HC elsewhere, none of those people showed up. And we said, Gerald,
Speaker 1: they're not coming. What's going on? And he said, you know,
Speaker 1: keep going, keep trying, keep doing it, do not give up.
Speaker 1: Do not judge from that one experience. This is really
Speaker 1: hard work. And these people have had the door shot
Speaker 1: on them over and over and over again, and they're tired,
Speaker 1: and it's the weekend, but you keep doing it and
Speaker 1: they will come, and then next time they came. We
Speaker 1: may not have gone there again had it not been
Speaker 1: for Gerald bringing in this enormous um breath of experience
Speaker 1: to share with us. You know, at the end of
Speaker 1: our previous bill there there's this there's this quote that
Speaker 1: I remember from every who was it was one of
Speaker 1: the one of the people who've been heavily involved in
Speaker 1: the Egyptian Revolution thousand eleven, had this quote and she's
Speaker 1: talking about, you know, I whould be doing this for decades, right,
Speaker 1: And she's like, yeah, because you've a protest and if
Speaker 1: if if a hundred if people show up, you're happy,
Speaker 1: and if a hundred people show up, you're depressed. And
Speaker 1: then one day, eight hundred thousand people show up and
Speaker 1: you kind of just forgot that could happen. And yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that that is something that you know, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're like organizing is not easy. That you're you're gonna
Speaker 1: spend a lot of time like not winning, You're gonna
Speaker 1: spend a lot of time feeling like you're barely treading water.
Speaker 1: There's gonna be a lot of time where you know,
Speaker 1: nothing works and everything seems to be falling apart. But
Speaker 1: you know, if you keep pushing, thousand people show up
Speaker 1: and you know, and suddenly the regime is like taking
Speaker 1: like you know, try trying to catch planes out of
Speaker 1: the country and yeah, and you know, and you get
Speaker 1: to that that CLR. James line about how the ruling
Speaker 1: classes not defeeding until's ruling until it's running for its lives.
Speaker 1: But you know they do run for their lives. This
Speaker 1: is the thing that happens. Yeah, and you know, if
Speaker 1: if we do this together, we can get there totally.
Speaker 1: And I think, you know, what a bar saying is
Speaker 1: so true. And we also, you know, in doing these distributions,
Speaker 1: talk to people and I literally would say, like what,
Speaker 1: we'll get people to show up, right, there's kind of
Speaker 1: like honesty in these conversations of like, you know, this
Speaker 1: is what we're trying to do, Like there's a reciprocal
Speaker 1: relationship here again, like help us understand also like what
Speaker 1: we need to do in order to make sure that
Speaker 1: the reciprocal relationship is actually realized and actually happening. Um.
Speaker 1: And I think that that was kind of an exciting
Speaker 1: moment of like having people have some autonomy and like say,
Speaker 1: and like you know, they know this community better than
Speaker 1: we do, right, they know like how people are going
Speaker 1: to show up and how maybe they won't. But Chris, Uh,
Speaker 1: just to bring it back to what you were saying,
Speaker 1: I think describing the kind of nonlinear trajectory of uh
Speaker 1: popular movements in history is something that we try to
Speaker 1: keep always in our minds. Um, things may begin, small,
Speaker 1: things may seem small, even when you study the examples
Speaker 1: in Spain of sort of the groups of people who
Speaker 1: formed sort of the early f AI who were just
Speaker 1: sort of discussing these ideas around to fire before they
Speaker 1: tried to sort of infiltrate the CNT, and then this
Speaker 1: became the sort of predominant um mood and sort of
Speaker 1: ideology that that that that characterized the c NT, which
Speaker 1: then you know, spread out and sort of characterize the
Speaker 1: Spanish Revolution at large and massive numbers millions of people,
Speaker 1: you know, um, And and just seeing what happened with
Speaker 1: the George Floyd protests and studying the examples of you know,
Speaker 1: Paris in eight where it at first just seems like
Speaker 1: small groups of students and then you know, just a
Speaker 1: few days and weeks later, you know, there's thousands and
Speaker 1: thousands and thousands and thousands of workers, um, you know,
Speaker 1: who are out literally just pulling out cobblestones from the street,
Speaker 1: you know, up against the police. And and the way
Speaker 1: that these things happen is very unpredictable. And I think
Speaker 1: that's also a very important thing to keep in mind
Speaker 1: as we're trying to evaluate, you know, what we're doing
Speaker 1: in a given moment. Yeah, I think I think I
Speaker 1: think that's that's that's a very good note to end on.
Speaker 1: It's you know, every the the struggle we have embarked
Speaker 1: in is an incredibly difficult one, and we're not going
Speaker 1: to know how it ends for a long long time.
Speaker 1: But that doesn't Yeah, you know, that doesn't necessarily means
Speaker 1: it ends badly. And the kind of resiliency we can
Speaker 1: build is incredibly deep and incredibly powerful. Okay, plugs time,
Speaker 1: Where do you too want people to go? What do
Speaker 1: you want people to know? And yeah, we can we
Speaker 1: can link stuff if you want to send it to
Speaker 1: us in the in the in the chat chat we can.
Speaker 1: We can, we can link stuff. We can, we can,
Speaker 1: we can link stuff. In the description of this episode,
Speaker 1: this is why we have editors think yeah, UM, I
Speaker 1: think definitely. Like our social media so Twitter and Instagram
Speaker 1: is see Humanity, see UM for folks to be able
Speaker 1: to donate UM, to visit our website, to be able
Speaker 1: to plug in. If they are in the Bay area
Speaker 1: and want to get involved, they can find ways to
Speaker 1: do that through those social media channels. You know, they
Speaker 1: can message us UM and then our fundraiser a bar.
Speaker 1: I don't know if we should just send the link
Speaker 1: or what The best way to do that is if
Speaker 1: you go to a common Humanity collective dot org, there's
Speaker 1: a donate button which leads to the fundraisers. You can
Speaker 1: find it. Also also if you if you go there,
Speaker 1: you can see how they you can see instructions how
Speaker 1: to make the fans and they are so cool, like
Speaker 1: they're awesome, it's it's sweet, it's so go do go
Speaker 1: do that too because it's sick. And there's also instructions
Speaker 1: or how you can make them as well. And we
Speaker 1: hope people do this elsewhere. Please reach out to us.
Speaker 1: We want to not be the only ones doing and
Speaker 1: so this is why we've tried to just put everything
Speaker 1: online that others can replicate this model and this is
Speaker 1: why we're coming on a show like this and going
Speaker 1: into so much detail into our history just that uh,
Speaker 1: you know, we don't have to keep reinventing the wheel.
Speaker 1: I think, you know, a bar and I have learned
Speaker 1: so much from this project, UM, and a lot of
Speaker 1: it really did feel like reinventing the wheel, which is
Speaker 1: unfortunate because I know that, you know, mutual aid has
Speaker 1: been done elsewhere, but with the organizers that we were
Speaker 1: talking to, a lot of the things that we were doing,
Speaker 1: we were having to kind of start from scratch. And
Speaker 1: at least my goal is like we're both very accessible people,
Speaker 1: like if there are questions, you know, to be able
Speaker 1: to reach out so that we can you know, explain
Speaker 1: our experience to other folks, UM and talk through you know.
Speaker 1: Our relationship with Sunrise started because they heard about the
Speaker 1: mutual aid work that we were doing and they said
Speaker 1: we want to do that also, and we're like great,
Speaker 1: and you know a bra are co organizer, Joe and
Speaker 1: I and this woman from Sunrise met in a park
Speaker 1: and eat dinner and just talked about music late, you know,
Speaker 1: the pitfalls that had happened and what went well and
Speaker 1: how we could do it in the future and then
Speaker 1: like this beautiful collaboration began like a bar was talking
Speaker 1: about so um, I think you know, we're really happy
Speaker 1: to talk about where things have gone awry and what
Speaker 1: we've learned from this project and thankfully at this point
Speaker 1: to like what successes we've had. So yeah, go go everyone,
Speaker 1: go go go go find them, go out of your communities,
Speaker 1: go do this theirselves, and yeah, go go go get
Speaker 1: us another Spanish revolution. We need another one. Yeah, thank you,
Speaker 1: thank thank you to you so much for joining us.
Speaker 1: I sagreat Chris. This has been such an huge pleasure
Speaker 1: for talking to you. We've we've been covered by a
Speaker 1: lot of places, but never quite like Yeah, just thank
Speaker 1: you so much for doing this, and thank you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: such an honor to be here and so much fun
Speaker 1: to talk with you both. Thank you so much for
Speaker 1: having us. Yeah. Yeah, so this this has been it
Speaker 1: could Happen Here pod. You can find us at Happened
Speaker 1: Here Pod on Twitter, Instagram and at cool Zone for
Speaker 1: just the rest of the stuff that we do. Alright
Speaker 1: by everyone. Executive producer Paris Hilton brings back the hit
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Speaker 1: What's critical my race Theories? UM? Well, all right, that's
Speaker 1: not a great introduction, but it's not a great time
Speaker 1: in America. I'm Robert Evans. This is it could happen
Speaker 1: here with me tonight as often but not always is
Speaker 1: Garrison Davis uh and our good friend Christopher Wong Uh.
Speaker 1: We're here to talk about UM a bunch of stuff. Largely,
Speaker 1: we're talking about the increasing and escalating attacks on school
Speaker 1: boards and attempts to take over and dominate school boards
Speaker 1: by far right activists. And a lot of this is
Speaker 1: centered around critical race theory, a lot of it centered
Speaker 1: around vaccine mandates. It all kind of blends together like
Speaker 1: a good gumbo um or like fascist syncretism. UM. One
Speaker 1: of the things that I would say, that's that's kind
Speaker 1: of most relevant right now as we're recording this. I
Speaker 1: don't think the race has been officially called. But it's
Speaker 1: become an increasingly obvious that UH Terry mccauliffe has lost
Speaker 1: his re election bid and the uh new governor of
Speaker 1: Virginia will be a Republican who, among other things, as
Speaker 1: like promised and based a huge amount of his campaign
Speaker 1: on banning critical race theory and specifically like banning books
Speaker 1: and ship from being taught in Virginia schools. UM. And
Speaker 1: this is all the result of a pretty far reaching
Speaker 1: UM and and complex and honestly pretty pretty scary campaign.
Speaker 1: And we're gonna talk about that tonight, Garrison. Do you
Speaker 1: wanna do you wanna take it from here? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll do it little bit, then we can move over
Speaker 1: to telegram. But yeah, so this is your drum solo time. Yeah.
Speaker 1: We we decided we needed to do an episode on
Speaker 1: this scen and later when a few weeks ago a
Speaker 1: large number of of of anti vacts and anti mask
Speaker 1: protesters UM took over a school board meeting in UH Portland.
Speaker 1: And the reason why that is special in it of
Speaker 1: itself because this has been happening across the country for
Speaker 1: a long time. But that but the fact that they
Speaker 1: were able to overwhelm and shut down an entire school
Speaker 1: board meeting with hundreds of people, like invading this building,
Speaker 1: um and shutting this down with just the essurement of
Speaker 1: like power that the people had there was it was
Speaker 1: it's notable because it's like it's it's a liberal ish city, right,
Speaker 1: It's that's generally how people view it as. And you know,
Speaker 1: we're used to this happening, you know, more like southern
Speaker 1: states and states that are more like overwhelmingly conservative. But
Speaker 1: when like a Portland school board meet to get shut down,
Speaker 1: people were like, oh wow, this is like extra important
Speaker 1: because this is showing that it's not this isn't isolated
Speaker 1: to like quote unquote red states, right, this can this
Speaker 1: can spread out everywhere now, you know. With Portland it
Speaker 1: was it was a mix of like hippie types who
Speaker 1: are like anti vax but there was a good deal
Speaker 1: of like actual proud boys there as well. Yes, And
Speaker 1: it was partly organized through an organization run by the
Speaker 1: Bundies UM and there were some direct ties and they
Speaker 1: helped to advertise it. So it's there's a lot of um.
Speaker 1: I mean, one of the things that was so unsettling
Speaker 1: is that a lot of these people were not Portland's residents,
Speaker 1: but they were showing up and we're able to effectively
Speaker 1: like take over and dominate a Portland's school board meeting
Speaker 1: um in part because law enforcement is never ever willing
Speaker 1: to do anything against There's there's a there's a lot
Speaker 1: of a lot of points here, so like, yeah, one
Speaker 1: of it being is like these like these big mobs
Speaker 1: are definitely able to benefit from being you know, white,
Speaker 1: mostly middle class like parents and stuff, or maybe not
Speaker 1: maybe not not even parents. They're gonna be white, middle class, um,
Speaker 1: which means they can like storm buildings and shut stuff
Speaker 1: down without any real consequence because police aren't police and
Speaker 1: security aren't really going to get involved that much, and
Speaker 1: the like the Libs are not gonna like really be
Speaker 1: pushing back on this in any kind of me They'll
Speaker 1: just make fun of these people if they misspell something
Speaker 1: on a sign. Yeah. So, like basically the idea for
Speaker 1: this episode as we want to talk about why and
Speaker 1: how school boards have become kind of the new front
Speaker 1: lines for pushing far right stuff into the culturals, like guys,
Speaker 1: because they've really become the new the new, the new
Speaker 1: like space that people on the right are able to
Speaker 1: push things that are that are more that are more
Speaker 1: extreme and push things that are gonna you know, hurt
Speaker 1: you know kids mostly m hm. So looking for this,
Speaker 1: we put together a decent amount of stuff from organizing
Speaker 1: chats for how basically the right is talking about these
Speaker 1: things and how they're trying to organize it. UM. And
Speaker 1: one really interesting kind of thing of not which will
Speaker 1: come up later in the telegram stuff is that in
Speaker 1: I think it was when was it it was late September, UM,
Speaker 1: the National school Boards associations like the National school Board
Speaker 1: Union UM put in a request for federal assistance to
Speaker 1: stop ongoing threats and acts of violence against UH school
Speaker 1: boards like meeting members and people president at school boards
Speaker 1: because this has been ramping up. You know this that
Speaker 1: this was happening the last last school season as well,
Speaker 1: but really the past few months, the the prevalence and
Speaker 1: the number of these types of like mobs bas overtaking
Speaker 1: these school boards has become so much more common UM
Speaker 1: that the school Board Union put in, like sent like
Speaker 1: a letter directly to the president saying, hey, we kind
Speaker 1: of need help here. UM. So it's it's not just
Speaker 1: it's this is this is a problem that's recognized widely,
Speaker 1: even among people like on school boards, because yeah, they're
Speaker 1: getting carasped, they're getting death threats. Um. This is becoming
Speaker 1: like unsafe to hold school board meetings. Um. And whether
Speaker 1: or not you like our modern school system or not,
Speaker 1: the resulting effect of this is that it's going to
Speaker 1: be hurting like kids. Like, Like it's a good whether
Speaker 1: it be through like COVID, whether it be through teaching
Speaker 1: them racist like curriculums, or whether it be to you know,
Speaker 1: making trans kids have make their lives a whole lot harder. Right,
Speaker 1: all of this kind of stuff is gonna be worse
Speaker 1: by this happening. So it is something definitely worth caring about. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's worth caring about all. Like, it's clearly an attempt
Speaker 1: in order to to to arrest the kind of progressive
Speaker 1: tilt that that society has gone through. All of this
Speaker 1: is a reaction both too. I mean, the religious right
Speaker 1: was initially, more than anything, a reaction to desegregation and
Speaker 1: the women's liberation movement. Um. And what we're seeing now
Speaker 1: is a reaction to primarily the gains that LGBT people
Speaker 1: have made in the lad us like twenty years, including
Speaker 1: the legalization of gay marriage, um. And so the ultimate
Speaker 1: goal of all of this is to stop progress towards
Speaker 1: racial justice, to roll back gay rights, UM, to enshrine
Speaker 1: white supremacy using violence. And that's why, that's why all
Speaker 1: of these different school board meetings, like the the threat
Speaker 1: of violence from these people is a constant factor. Um.
Speaker 1: There's regular discussion of it. There's like, I mean, that's
Speaker 1: why the Proud Boys are showing up. Is to be
Speaker 1: a of like is to be a death squad. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, a little precursor death squad. They're not quite
Speaker 1: willing to start start pulling triggers yet, but they want
Speaker 1: people to know that it's possible. They want to scare
Speaker 1: people away from getting involved in local politics unless they
Speaker 1: adhere to a very specific far right political ideas. It's
Speaker 1: working because a lot of these school boards are getting
Speaker 1: these school meanings are just getting shut down, like they
Speaker 1: just can't have them in person or sometimes not at
Speaker 1: all because they'll just they'll like zoom bam. Like it's
Speaker 1: not like they're just shutting down so they cannot place
Speaker 1: or at school by members are afraid to go out
Speaker 1: in public because these people are are going to hurt them. Um.
Speaker 1: And this is like a lot of people involved in
Speaker 1: this are maybe not themselves like proud boys like they
Speaker 1: they're they're they're they're not super like they're individually, are
Speaker 1: more kind of regular Republicans in these states. But the
Speaker 1: reason why it gets so extreme and it accelted so
Speaker 1: quickly is mostly because of how these organizing efforts take place,
Speaker 1: and also because of stuff like Fox News and news
Speaker 1: Max and on it and O A n like pushing
Speaker 1: people further right in the past few years, but like
Speaker 1: specifically the method of organizing on apps like Telegram and
Speaker 1: Facebook groups. This this is, this is the thing common
Speaker 1: on the Internet, but like it rewards accelerationism, it rewards
Speaker 1: the most extreme takes. Those are ones to get shared
Speaker 1: the most. So even if you know this is just
Speaker 1: some mom and her forties who's not a proud boy
Speaker 1: by any means she's she still poses a threat in
Speaker 1: this in this way because she's who boosting this same
Speaker 1: rhetoric and as part of these same organizing channels that
Speaker 1: are full of like actual fascists. Uh. There's a decent
Speaker 1: amount of very popular posts from very popular channels I
Speaker 1: pulled that talks about the Jews and the school boards
Speaker 1: and we'll we'll get to that kind of stuff shortly. Um.
Speaker 1: So there, Robert, do you wanna start on the telegram
Speaker 1: with the whole the whole school board Telegram channel that
Speaker 1: is popped up by no means the most popular Telegram
Speaker 1: channel for organizing, but it is specifically dedicated to school boards.
Speaker 1: Because of how Telegram works, this channel gets shared around
Speaker 1: a lot in other much bigger channels. Yeah, and and
Speaker 1: just so you know, So the way Telegram works, if
Speaker 1: you're a decent person, um, and you don't live in
Speaker 1: a country where Telegram is a legitimately good choice for you,
Speaker 1: there's some areas where it's perfectly normal social media network,
Speaker 1: but for the most part in the United States it's
Speaker 1: used by fascists and weirdos. Um. So, if you're fortunate
Speaker 1: enough to not use Telegram, the way it works is
Speaker 1: you have open groups and closed groups. Open groups are
Speaker 1: anyone can view them, Uh, you don't expose yourself by
Speaker 1: looking at them, and people largely just kind of post images, memes,
Speaker 1: videos and then can comment on them. And a lot
Speaker 1: of what's posted in any given Telegram channel is shared
Speaker 1: from another Telegram channel. So for people like Garrison and
Speaker 1: I who research extremism. One of the uses of telegram
Speaker 1: is that by looking at what's being shared in one
Speaker 1: group from other groups, you can actually start to build
Speaker 1: networks and see, oh, there's affinity between these two groups,
Speaker 1: because this group may claim that they're just concerned conservatives,
Speaker 1: but they're sharing all of this all of this content
Speaker 1: from this far right, you know, PEP a group that's
Speaker 1: also sharing a lot of neo Nazi content, and you
Speaker 1: can see there's a lot of affinity between the other
Speaker 1: thing that happens is that these channels that are getting
Speaker 1: big and being you and you are being used for
Speaker 1: this kind of like right wing organizing who present themselves
Speaker 1: as more just like regular conservative channels. If you I've
Speaker 1: been in this channel for like years at this point,
Speaker 1: and this channel used to be a like Proud Boy channel.
Speaker 1: They just changed their name. Like It's like that happens
Speaker 1: all the time, where a lot of the big organizing
Speaker 1: channels used to be like openly violent organizing, like for
Speaker 1: different mobs to go beat up people, and now they've
Speaker 1: rebranded to make them appeal more to like just regular
Speaker 1: Trump voters. That is the other thing that happens all
Speaker 1: the time, and one of the main channels that we're
Speaker 1: talking about today is one of these one of these
Speaker 1: channels that used to be a proud boy thing and
Speaker 1: is now just kind of right wing organizing a general Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's um, I don't know, I'm just gonna get
Speaker 1: into it. So actually, you know what I'm going to
Speaker 1: get into before I start talking about fascists on telegram
Speaker 1: trying to destroy the concept of democracy. You know what
Speaker 1: else is trying to destroy the concept of democracy. That's right, Chris,
Speaker 1: products and services, that's right. Oh my god, we are
Speaker 1: just having a great time here. So let's talk about
Speaker 1: Stand for Students, which is a telegram channel that Garrison
Speaker 1: pointed out to me. And I spent more time than
Speaker 1: I really wanted to. Yeah, that's never, never, never a
Speaker 1: good idea. So the stuff in here, this is number one,
Speaker 1: on the surface, a much more moderate group. These people
Speaker 1: are not ranting about like Jews destroying civilization or the
Speaker 1: need to like execute uh black people or something like that. Um,
Speaker 1: the stuff in here runs the gamut from like one
Speaker 1: of the first things I found was a clip from
Speaker 1: Jesse Ventura, wrestler, predator star and former governor once had
Speaker 1: a conspiracy TV show. There's a popular clip in anti
Speaker 1: vaccine circles from it where he's talking with Alex Jones
Speaker 1: about the Builderberg group and stuff. So I found that
Speaker 1: in there, which is like pretty garden variety, like early
Speaker 1: two thousands conspiracy nonsense. Definitely like, oh yeah, these are
Speaker 1: like older people, like I don't think mostly boomers, but
Speaker 1: definitely gen X and stuff, like folks who were in
Speaker 1: like their forties and fifties. Um, this is the kind
Speaker 1: of ship that they would have been like exposed to
Speaker 1: in their late twenties and whatnot. Um. One of the
Speaker 1: posters I found commenting on that video said, quote aired
Speaker 1: onto TV in two that's a nine about a plan
Speaker 1: for depopulation through a virus and injections. Too much of
Speaker 1: a coincidence, And another responded to this. I was never
Speaker 1: a huge Alex Jones fan, but he was right all along.
Speaker 1: My kids were born in the early eighties and I
Speaker 1: refused their vaxes way back then. Unfortunately, one of them
Speaker 1: is now a late thirties CNN jabbed zombie and has
Speaker 1: infected my grandkids with this inspiric experimental treatment. I'm done, um,
Speaker 1: which is silly, but it also keeps you and like,
Speaker 1: these are it's it's what you see a lot with
Speaker 1: Q and on right, it's these folks who are getting
Speaker 1: brought in onto telegraph. Yeah, it's great. It's terrible that
Speaker 1: this person, this lady who has to be what in
Speaker 1: her fifties sixties on my parents age, the boomer um
Speaker 1: is on telegram, which two years ago even was the
Speaker 1: only Americans you were would find were like extremely online
Speaker 1: nazi weirdos. Um. Yeah, I remember doing like old training
Speaker 1: is like, yeah, it was like over over two years ago,
Speaker 1: and Telegram was nowhere near this prevalm for like regular organizing.
Speaker 1: And this is a result of of the d platforming
Speaker 1: of folks in the wake of the capital attack. But anyway,
Speaker 1: we don't need to get too much into that right now.
Speaker 1: So I want to talk a little bit more about
Speaker 1: some of the things folks are sharing in this in
Speaker 1: this channel, which is again kind of like I'm gonna
Speaker 1: guess everyone here is kind of late thirties to maybe sixties,
Speaker 1: fifties sixties. There's one local story that it was actually
Speaker 1: very popular among a lot of like lefty folks on
Speaker 1: Twitter of this like group of dads who showed up
Speaker 1: to stop there's like an epidemic of fighting in their
Speaker 1: school or something, and they showed up to do like
Speaker 1: a community policing or a community self defense sort of thing.
Speaker 1: It was celebrated by a lot of folks because it
Speaker 1: was like, oh, hey, this is you know, a way
Speaker 1: that communities can protect themselves without cops, YadA, YadA YadA,
Speaker 1: which is a nice thing to see. It was also
Speaker 1: celebrated um by these people, um, by by people in
Speaker 1: this channel, and specifically the clip of the news story
Speaker 1: covering this I found was from the Pepe Lives Matter channel,
Speaker 1: which is, um, you know, an alt right channel like it. Again,
Speaker 1: as we were talking about earlier, the Pepe Lives isn't
Speaker 1: all like the way full Nazi pilled stuff, um, but
Speaker 1: it shares a lot of stuff from the channels that
Speaker 1: are straight up Nazis, And so you can you can
Speaker 1: see already this like lady in her sixties who's probably
Speaker 1: with some pretty normal boomer three years ago, is now
Speaker 1: two steps away from Adam often type motherfucker's that's just
Speaker 1: the way telegram works, um, and they're all kind of
Speaker 1: bonding over again, this is not a bad story what
Speaker 1: these local dads did, but it very much ties into
Speaker 1: this idea of like, we gotta get all these parents
Speaker 1: together and take action in the real world, like and
Speaker 1: that's gonna that's gonna go towards taking action against the
Speaker 1: people you don't want showing up in your school, meaning
Speaker 1: like black children and like children. Yes, yes, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Community self defense is great, but also it really depends
Speaker 1: on what community is defending itself from what. UM So
Speaker 1: that's uh, we'll probably we'll have to talk about that
Speaker 1: more at some point in the future. But yeah. Another
Speaker 1: thing I found on that channel was video this This
Speaker 1: I dug into a bit. So there was this video
Speaker 1: that was claimed to be an ad. It was, in
Speaker 1: fact an ad that Comcast had refused to air. UM
Speaker 1: and the video this, this unaired ad claimed that it
Speaker 1: was about. It was telling the story of a thirteen
Speaker 1: year old girl, Maddie de garay Um, who was vaccinated.
Speaker 1: She was part of a FASER trial and had, she claims,
Speaker 1: like a disastrously bad reaction. UM an ad about her
Speaker 1: situation was rejected by Comcast. UM and this girl like
Speaker 1: has done the whole right wing in her I'm I'm
Speaker 1: guessing her parents are the driver's done the whole right
Speaker 1: wing media kind of circuit at this point. Um, the
Speaker 1: fact that Comcast banned the ad is what the people
Speaker 1: in this telegram channel were yelling about. UM. And I
Speaker 1: want to actually quote from the an article about why
Speaker 1: Comcast rejected it, because it makes clear what's actually happening here.
Speaker 1: Comcast is said to have told the ads buyer it
Speaker 1: was rejected because it needed substantiation and all graphic images
Speaker 1: needed to be removed. Documents reportedly submitted for substantiation included
Speaker 1: the girls complete medical records, which are said to have
Speaker 1: outlined symptoms such as erratic blood pressure and pulse, muscle spasms,
Speaker 1: muscle tremors, headaches, brain fog, mixing up words, and the
Speaker 1: inability to walk and cough. Um. So you've got this
Speaker 1: case where number one there's graphic images, um, and number
Speaker 1: two there's documentations that this girl has symptoms, but there's
Speaker 1: not documentation that they're tied in any way to the vaccine,
Speaker 1: Like it's just one of these the Comcast is being
Speaker 1: careful to not spread unsubstantiated shit about vaccine reactions and stuff. Um.
Speaker 1: But within the telegram channel, the focus is entirely on
Speaker 1: like how this is evidence of this conspiracy there suppressing
Speaker 1: information suppressing information. Um. One response was why in Heaven's
Speaker 1: name don't these parents do their research before having their
Speaker 1: kids vaccinated. My heart goes out to the precious child
Speaker 1: and family. What a lesson to learn for so many parents.
Speaker 1: Never too late to educate yourselves people. Um. Also, I
Speaker 1: want to point it just that the spelling and they
Speaker 1: are incredible. There's an upsetting amount of emojis that. Yeah, honestly,
Speaker 1: I couldn't never never two with one oh late to
Speaker 1: educate your space selves. Uh, it's just again and now
Speaker 1: I'm doing the doing the thing. I'm doing the thing
Speaker 1: I tried not to. I did try to give it
Speaker 1: a straight read through. You can be challenging when it's
Speaker 1: like it's very funny content. It's it's very funny. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but but but I think you know this. This is
Speaker 1: this goes back to the who point about how this
Speaker 1: pradicalization works, right, which is, you know you have, especially
Speaker 1: with anti vax stuff that has this sort of larger
Speaker 1: base from just like regular peer like hard right nazi stuff.
Speaker 1: You get to see people who you know otherwise probably
Speaker 1: would be a vaguely normal and very very quickly get
Speaker 1: all this stuff and very quickly just go off the
Speaker 1: deep end. They're not. Yeah, it's these It is it's
Speaker 1: hard to like say, like, these are all extremists because
Speaker 1: like they are themselves aren't extremists. There's surrounded by so
Speaker 1: much content that is made by extremists that it's making
Speaker 1: them do these things, which is how which is how
Speaker 1: extremism works, right, But it's it's challenging because like when
Speaker 1: you try to explain this to someone, you're like, no,
Speaker 1: this is obviously just like a regular grandma or something, right,
Speaker 1: And it's hard to explain to them how fast this
Speaker 1: thing can move to the point where they're showing up
Speaker 1: at a school board with their grand children yelling at
Speaker 1: like teachers and stuff. Yeah, and it's not that this
Speaker 1: lady is a Nazi. It's that this lady can be,
Speaker 1: through the process you just outlined, convinced to stand up
Speaker 1: next to a Nazi and like, uh, defend his his
Speaker 1: right to do violence to people she has been convinced
Speaker 1: are president a threat to the lives of her her grandchildren,
Speaker 1: which is people may say like the whole like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's not worth parsing out that much if you're standing
Speaker 1: next to a Nazi or a Nazi, But like I
Speaker 1: would argue, no, what's actually the logistics of what is
Speaker 1: happening here are much more dangerous than a grandma got
Speaker 1: radicalized into national socialism. Anyway, another meme I found it
Speaker 1: was a screen grab from fucking um Shawshank Redemption with
Speaker 1: Morgan Freeman and I don't know whatever one of the
Speaker 1: white dudes in that movie in prison jumpsuits sitting next
Speaker 1: to each other, and it's the text on it is
Speaker 1: what are you in for? I spoke of at a
Speaker 1: school board meeting, which you she see a lot of
Speaker 1: stuff like this, this idea that they're going to jail,
Speaker 1: they're going to get rated by the FBI because they're
Speaker 1: like showing up at school boards to protest vaccine mandates
Speaker 1: and mask mandates. Um. And then like in the middle
Speaker 1: of all this stuff mostly talking about like anti vac shit,
Speaker 1: there's also this post talking about how this post that's
Speaker 1: a video of a woman at a school board talking
Speaker 1: about how a book needed to be banned and she's
Speaker 1: reading the book she's reading is a queer memoir. Um.
Speaker 1: And I'll talk about this more are at the end,
Speaker 1: but you can definitely mention it here because it gets
Speaker 1: up a lot it's it's a gay it's a gay
Speaker 1: coming of age story, right, And as a result, there's
Speaker 1: a couple of semi graphic scenes in it, and she
Speaker 1: like gets up in front of the school board and
Speaker 1: reads this and argues that it's basically like pornography their children.
Speaker 1: They think it's child pornography. Yeah, that's what they're marching
Speaker 1: mistaken what child pornography is. They're trying to they're trying
Speaker 1: to get all the people at the school board either
Speaker 1: killed or arrested over this. That is that is their goal.
Speaker 1: And I'll talk about this specific instance later because it
Speaker 1: keeps coming up with all of these channels, and it's
Speaker 1: one of the main things that links someone from like
Speaker 1: a sodden red channel to a channel like this. This
Speaker 1: is like one of the main things they've been using
Speaker 1: the past few weeks as this is the current, this
Speaker 1: is like the past, and and this is this though,
Speaker 1: has been going on for a while. You've seen a
Speaker 1: lot of like a libertarian right wing, a lot of
Speaker 1: like kill your local pedophile shirts because who's gonna a
Speaker 1: lot most people don't think, like who's going to defend
Speaker 1: a pedophile pedophiles? Yeah, the proud boy at the Portland
Speaker 1: School Board who was standing and ready to fight the
Speaker 1: ready to fight scurity guards and stuff. He was wearing
Speaker 1: a kill your local pedophile. Uh, it's this is this
Speaker 1: is the thing. This is the thing the right wing
Speaker 1: figured out. And if they figured this out a long
Speaker 1: time ago, which is that Okay, if if you want
Speaker 1: to get a bunch of people who are vaguely normal
Speaker 1: to do like absolutely horrible violence, the way you do
Speaker 1: it is to tell them that they're threatening kids and
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter what work. So well yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and you know, and this once and once you've convinced
Speaker 1: you know, like this, this is this is just a
Speaker 1: very I think a very important thing about media messaging
Speaker 1: in general is that the literally the instant someone says
Speaker 1: think of the children, you need to stop and you
Speaker 1: need to disregard everything they're about to say after that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like of the time that person is like about to
Speaker 1: try to convince you that like you need to like
Speaker 1: we need to murder the gauge or something like that.
Speaker 1: Like That's that. That's the thing that follows from I
Speaker 1: feel confident saying no one has ever advocated thinking of
Speaker 1: the children and meant anything, But I want to kill
Speaker 1: this specific group of people. Um, just like I that's
Speaker 1: not even really hyperbole. It's it's a a trite and
Speaker 1: true organizing tactic for these people. And it's part of
Speaker 1: the reason why, like the famous white nationalist catchphrase is
Speaker 1: focused around, we need to secure a future for white children, right, Like,
Speaker 1: that's what they're always talking about with all of this
Speaker 1: ship and it's it's about being able to demonize a
Speaker 1: group in a way that they can't be defended. It's
Speaker 1: about ending any sort of debate or conversation, and it's
Speaker 1: about justifying thoughtless violence because it's you're protecting children. Um.
Speaker 1: You know who else protects children, Robert definitely not the
Speaker 1: advertisers of this show, um, because we are sponsored by
Speaker 1: raytheon brand. School bus seeking missiles the only missiles that
Speaker 1: only seek school buses. You cannot shoot them at a tank,
Speaker 1: at a at a technical at a at a terrorist
Speaker 1: training camp. They go right for school buses no matter
Speaker 1: where you aim them. So in that way, there are
Speaker 1: a fire and forget kind of weapon as long as
Speaker 1: you're willing to forget anything but hitting a child's school
Speaker 1: bus with a with a missile. Okay, here's here's the
Speaker 1: check it out. All right, well we're back still talking
Speaker 1: about this. Uh so last segment for this episode. As
Speaker 1: we as we as I was talking about, there's a
Speaker 1: post and in the post is a video of a
Speaker 1: woman from a different school board meeting reading out a
Speaker 1: graphics graphic ish sex scene from this queer memoir and
Speaker 1: ranting about how it's it's child pornography. Comments include fucking
Speaker 1: monsters running these schools, satanic and disgusting an elementary school. Unreal.
Speaker 1: Why aren't charges brought against the school for distributing pornography
Speaker 1: to minors? It's not even read they can It's just
Speaker 1: available from some other library, like because you can request
Speaker 1: a lot of books at libraries in all caps. Where's
Speaker 1: the sheriffs? Where are the city, county, state and federal
Speaker 1: task forces? And uh yeah, it's I'll talk about this
Speaker 1: more in the next episode. Tied to the overarching anti
Speaker 1: anti queer, anti trans, anti gay school board side of things,
Speaker 1: and of course other things I found there's like video
Speaker 1: of them celebrating capital rioters, celebrating Josh Holly for defending
Speaker 1: capital rioters. Um. I went into some other channels that
Speaker 1: were adjacent that I saw shared, you know, in this channel.
Speaker 1: One of them was Oscar's Midnight Writer Patriot Post channel,
Speaker 1: which actually thousands and thousands of followers. Average post would
Speaker 1: get two to three thousand views. Um, here's one. I'm
Speaker 1: considered a domestic terrorist if I tell a school board
Speaker 1: that I don't want my eight year old daughter watching
Speaker 1: sex videos in her third grade classroom. Um, and that
Speaker 1: post was right above this post. The constitution actually says
Speaker 1: you can legally overthrow your government if they are tyrannical.
Speaker 1: And that post was right above this post, which was
Speaker 1: a screen which was a screen grab from a Twitter
Speaker 1: account for a guy who calls himself Murray Rothbard's seventeen
Speaker 1: seventy six. The FBI didn't rate Epstein islander protect hundreds
Speaker 1: of young female gymnasts from being sexually assaulted for years,
Speaker 1: But they'll raid your PTA meetings when you questioned the
Speaker 1: curriculum and on scientific mask mandates and their indoctrination camps,
Speaker 1: I mean public schools. And of course this from Twitter
Speaker 1: user named Emerald Robinson. And again this is all shared
Speaker 1: in that channel. It's like a screen grab from Twitter.
Speaker 1: When the FBI starts arresting parents at school board meetings,
Speaker 1: just remember the GOP senators who made it happen by
Speaker 1: confirming Merritt Gardland as Attorney General. And then it's a
Speaker 1: list of Republican u Emerald Eard Robinson is the White
Speaker 1: House correspondent for News Max. Oh right, Oh my god, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're right. Uh huh great great. So I don't know,
Speaker 1: that's probably all I should get into. Well, no, there's
Speaker 1: a we can one more things. So Oscar's Midnight Writer,
Speaker 1: which was shared in in that uh that school board
Speaker 1: channel took me to the Western Chauvinist school Board Channel,
Speaker 1: which took me to a post which with a video
Speaker 1: UM with a link to a video. The text with
Speaker 1: the video was woman it's cool board meeting calls out
Speaker 1: Jewish power by name. Um and it's a woman ranting
Speaker 1: about how the Jews are behind all of the critical
Speaker 1: race theory in schools. Um. So again not hard to
Speaker 1: get to this kind of ship. Another post was it
Speaker 1: was in the Western Chauvinist Telegram. It was sharing a
Speaker 1: post from the Murder the Media Telegram, who were part
Speaker 1: of the Capital riot. UM. That post from Murder the
Speaker 1: Media was National school Board Association apology letter for calling
Speaker 1: you domestic terrorists. It was we'll talk about this later,
Speaker 1: but the comment in the Western Chauvinist was like, we
Speaker 1: don't apologize for being like for being domestic terrorists, Like
Speaker 1: we're yeah, we we think it's rad that they called
Speaker 1: us domestic terrorists. Because the Chavinist channel, by the way,
Speaker 1: has over fifty subscribers UM and used to be a
Speaker 1: Proud Boy channel, which is now just a general kind
Speaker 1: of farther right wing organizing channel that it's probably it's
Speaker 1: one of the most shared Telegram channels in this whole network. UM.
Speaker 1: And they are really good at creating propaganda that appeals
Speaker 1: to Trump voter while slipping in a lot of accelerationist
Speaker 1: talking points UM to slowly lead people on that redcrumb
Speaker 1: trail to make them be okay with mass silence. There
Speaker 1: was a comment in there, forwarded from another from the
Speaker 1: telegram account of a guy named Eric Striker UM, and
Speaker 1: this was a post Striker made commenting on a video
Speaker 1: of a father being dragged out of a quote woke
Speaker 1: school board meeting. UM for uh complaining of complaining about
Speaker 1: this kind of ship UM. The post from Eric Striker
Speaker 1: I think is worth reading, and I'm going to read
Speaker 1: it now for now, all we can do is impotently
Speaker 1: watch injustices like this unfold. This is really upsetting. We
Speaker 1: must build our political organization to the point where we
Speaker 1: can rapidly mobilize to defend this man, including physical demonstrations,
Speaker 1: sent him free legal support, and make people realize that
Speaker 1: the time of fucking with whites is over. We need
Speaker 1: our own media, civil society groups and activists. We need
Speaker 1: money and volunteers. It's not the Republican Party or anything
Speaker 1: in the conservative movement. It never will be. We need
Speaker 1: to build it from scrap. We are well underway National
Speaker 1: Justice Party. We must quietly and patiently build. Eventually we
Speaker 1: will have the capacity to come on the scene when
Speaker 1: they at least expect it and will be and we
Speaker 1: will be too powerful to stop. And that's probably where
Speaker 1: we should end for today. Yep. That that's a good
Speaker 1: part on good sad intro into the current problem of
Speaker 1: schoolboary meetings. We'll get into a lot more like accelerating
Speaker 1: rhetoric in the next bit and then talk about kind
Speaker 1: of where the stuff originated from and the other other
Speaker 1: side of things beyond, just like the CRT and UH
Speaker 1: and and mask stuff, because it branches out into a
Speaker 1: lot of other kind of adjacent cultural war bullshit issues. Um, anyway, yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll do that tomorrow. Um you can all the show
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Speaker 1: which I don't know why you would. Yeah, don't be
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Speaker 1: That's what I plan to do. Getting off Twitter and
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Speaker 1: a spr e a k E R. Hustle on over Today.
Speaker 1: What second? My part of this episode on right Wing
Speaker 1: attempts to attack and dominate school board meetings in order
Speaker 1: to further their ability to do violence on marginalized groups
Speaker 1: and also erode democratic institutions from the ground. Uh stage title, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that'll that'll click. Well Ah, I'm so glad we don't
Speaker 1: have to worry about clicking and titles. And that took
Speaker 1: up a lot of my mind back in the day, Garrison,
Speaker 1: back when, back when the internet was different. Now we
Speaker 1: don't have to worry about that anymore, but we do
Speaker 1: have to worry about our moms of fascists attacking school
Speaker 1: board meetings. Happens every week, keeps happening more often. School
Speaker 1: boards are calling for assistance. That they seem pretty, they
Speaker 1: seem pretty not thrilled. Yeah, they seem not psyched about. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So where where where? When we left off, I was
Speaker 1: talking about some things I found on the gram Telegram. Uh, Garrison,
Speaker 1: what's next. I'll go into my preliminary research on Telegram
Speaker 1: and particularly response. Basically, I looked through every single Telegram
Speaker 1: post and all of the main fascist channels I lurk
Speaker 1: on that mentioned school boards from like the past two weeks. Um,
Speaker 1: so like, yeah, this is like current current stuff on ongoing. Um,
Speaker 1: I got to a lot of the channels I was
Speaker 1: already familiar with, like you know, the Western Shovinist channel,
Speaker 1: which is uh subs um, the Standard Students channel, which
Speaker 1: was a when I was less familiar with, specifically dedicated
Speaker 1: to this school board issue. UM. One of one of
Speaker 1: the posts we have on there is U says, your
Speaker 1: enemy isn't some far off ship whole country. Your enemy
Speaker 1: is just down the street at your local school board meeting,
Speaker 1: teaching your kids to hate their ancestors, you and themselves.
Speaker 1: So like again, that is a very much white supremacist
Speaker 1: dog whistle just right there, um talking about producing Hollywood
Speaker 1: movies writing there No, basically it's basically just a whistle. UM.
Speaker 1: So yeah, they then they, you know, the same post
Speaker 1: talks about you know, masks and shot down businesses and
Speaker 1: the vaccines and stuff and saying the fight is here
Speaker 1: and the fight is now. So just in terms of like, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're really wanting to hype people up for doing this
Speaker 1: thing at school boards. They're trying to really hammer down
Speaker 1: the school board points. So like I found this, I
Speaker 1: found this post. This is this is a post from
Speaker 1: the Standford Students channel UM and I saw this one
Speaker 1: re shared in a lot of different channels. One of
Speaker 1: the other first ones that I saw pop off was
Speaker 1: from Ron watkins channel like Code monkey z. He is
Speaker 1: one of the one of the architects or one of
Speaker 1: the you know people who really pushed went on stuff
Speaker 1: into He's the guy who ran like the physical infrastructure
Speaker 1: of Chan chan in eight Coon for years. Yeah. He
Speaker 1: and he's trying to pivot into being like having his
Speaker 1: just his face be like a kind of alternative right
Speaker 1: wing figure right now. He's gonna be running for office
Speaker 1: in Arizona, I believe. Anyway, he has a very popular
Speaker 1: Telegram channel. Um, and he made he made this post
Speaker 1: that had over a thousand, over a thousand comments on it,
Speaker 1: which is a lot for telegram. A thousand comments on
Speaker 1: telegram post, especially telegram post of of code mackezs size
Speaker 1: in't see how many substance So Ron just his context.
Speaker 1: Ron Watkins has four hundred and thirty two thousand subscribers
Speaker 1: on his on his Telegram channel. So yeah. Anyway, uh
Speaker 1: CRT is being rebranded as s e L a Social
Speaker 1: Emotional learning. If you are attending school board meetings, as
Speaker 1: you should be, do what you can to make you
Speaker 1: stop both s e L and CRT and keep them
Speaker 1: and make sure that they are banned in your school districts.
Speaker 1: So again, just direct calls to action for getting people
Speaker 1: to show up to these school boards. And also, social
Speaker 1: emotional learning is not CRT, and of course security is
Speaker 1: not even taught in schools. I think everyone who listens
Speaker 1: to this podcast knows that sr TY, actually critical theory
Speaker 1: isn't taught in schools. This isn't an actual thing, it's
Speaker 1: it is like a legal theory. We'll get into more
Speaker 1: of how this gout like pushed towards the end. I
Speaker 1: think Chris has some stuff prepared on that. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's again these none of these things are actually real.
Speaker 1: It's a complex legal theory. What they're really mad about
Speaker 1: is their people are teaching that racism is like an
Speaker 1: issue that's built into a lot of American institutions and
Speaker 1: it's an ongoing thing. It's not a thing of the past.
Speaker 1: That's what they're actually mad about, and they just call
Speaker 1: that CRT. Some some of the comments from the Ron
Speaker 1: Wapkins post, stuff like these snowflakes are so annoying, I'm
Speaker 1: about to start cutting power to any school in my
Speaker 1: community that teaches this. Um so yeah or again that's
Speaker 1: just a direct, a direct threat of doing terrorism shouting,
Speaker 1: I mean, less of a threat and more of a promise.
Speaker 1: Yeah do that it be no, sure it doesn't. All right,
Speaker 1: Well I don't understand things the same way you zoomers do.
Speaker 1: Please continue. Yeah, a lot of a lot of posts
Speaker 1: being a shipped around from channel to channel, including this
Speaker 1: full Nazi channels were like trying to trying to of course,
Speaker 1: like lots of Nazis are actually you know, I thought
Speaker 1: it was pretty funny that that the school board union
Speaker 1: put in a call to assistance to the federal government
Speaker 1: to deal with this issue. They of course they thought
Speaker 1: that was funny. But they're gonna use this to like
Speaker 1: spread networks to be like, hey, the government wants to
Speaker 1: stop you. They're calling you a terrorist. You like regular
Speaker 1: folk are being called terrorists because you're showing up with
Speaker 1: school boards, Right, that's the kind of message that they're
Speaker 1: going to shoot out. So they a lot of Nazi
Speaker 1: channels crafted a lot of posts like that that got
Speaker 1: shared around a lot. Yeah, in trying to basically all
Speaker 1: time critical race theory and if you approached against critical
Speaker 1: race theory. They're calling you a domestic terrorist, that that
Speaker 1: type of thing. And this got this got shared in
Speaker 1: like the school Boards channel, and a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: whole bunch of other stuff being being talking about how
Speaker 1: if you, if you stand up, you're gonna be a
Speaker 1: domestic terrorist. You have to be brave and do this.
Speaker 1: A few days after the school board uh not a
Speaker 1: few days, I guess this. This was this was in
Speaker 1: like in October um the school Association retracted some of
Speaker 1: the some of the words that they used in their
Speaker 1: letter because of this backlash that was created. And this
Speaker 1: was also shared in shared in uh lots of fascist channels.
Speaker 1: The main one who was shared in that I saw
Speaker 1: was the Honk Pills channel UM, which is just another
Speaker 1: type of Peppe meme um, one of the other one
Speaker 1: of the other big, big kind of groups active in
Speaker 1: this in this whole sphere. And this this has been
Speaker 1: a group going on for a while and we haven't
Speaker 1: talked about on the pod, but we probably should do
Speaker 1: something eventually. Is this group called White Rose, so this
Speaker 1: is a White Rose is a COVID conspiracy group that
Speaker 1: has been very uh successful in creating on the ground
Speaker 1: organizers who are regular people. They do a lot of
Speaker 1: like sticker bombs and lots of neighborhoods. If you have
Speaker 1: if you ever seen anti like COVID or COVID conspiracy
Speaker 1: stickers in your neighborhood, it was probably a white Road sticker. UM.
Speaker 1: These are all over the States and basically everything. As
Speaker 1: a quick heads up, the original White Rose was a
Speaker 1: student protest organization that existed in Nazi Germany UM and
Speaker 1: protested illegally, and its organizers were executed by the Nazis.
Speaker 1: And I think it was the mid forty I mean
Speaker 1: it would be like like forty three, maybe maybe forty four. Um.
Speaker 1: Sophie Shoal was the person most associated with them. So
Speaker 1: they've they're they're they've taken the names of these these heroes,
Speaker 1: UM in order to it's just disgusting. It's very gross.
Speaker 1: There's there's a decent amount of decent amount of researchers
Speaker 1: in this field. Thinks that there's like actual bad people
Speaker 1: behind White Rose. Of course, with like bad people because
Speaker 1: they're spending COVID stuff, but like wait, like like more
Speaker 1: like bad actors used by the astroturfing this thing. But
Speaker 1: at White roasters of its own piece later. But because
Speaker 1: they have such a big following on Telegram, they are
Speaker 1: of course using using this to using the school board
Speaker 1: thing to gain more support. They have about subscribers to
Speaker 1: their specific telegram channel. They should have post a few
Speaker 1: weeks ago saying thank you to all the brave parents
Speaker 1: going out to their school boards and standing up for
Speaker 1: the children. UM. And they try that, you know, get
Speaker 1: people to do sticker bombs and stuff, but the fact
Speaker 1: that there's like specifically calling out people in school boards
Speaker 1: is like an extra step of like beyond just putting
Speaker 1: stickers up in your neighborhood. UM. Another another another white
Speaker 1: right Rose post. They shared a shared a video UM
Speaker 1: that was captioned as concerned parent absolutely destroys school board
Speaker 1: with facts The school boards are the battlefield of our time.
Speaker 1: This is how it's done. And just the increasing rhetoric
Speaker 1: around like battle fields, this is where like the fight
Speaker 1: is at all that kind of stuff. Um. There was
Speaker 1: another another uh, the White White Chauvinist channel shared a
Speaker 1: video from Fox News. UM and they they the Western
Speaker 1: Chauvinist channel, which is again it's one of the most
Speaker 1: shared ones in this whole network. They captioned as saying
Speaker 1: parents and Virginia are trying to fight back against the
Speaker 1: school board that is anti white. Um, every every school
Speaker 1: district in America needs to have an anti mandate pro
Speaker 1: right parents running for the school board. So that's just
Speaker 1: the It's this type of stuff all over and this
Speaker 1: this this post was got it has like an eleven
Speaker 1: eleven thousand, eleven thousand views. Um. So these things are
Speaker 1: spreading to a lot of a lot of these specific networks.
Speaker 1: And I mean, I I have so many of this
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. I'm not going to go through every
Speaker 1: single one in detail. There's ones that are way more
Speaker 1: like openly anti Semitic, uh, you know, saying, you know
Speaker 1: the Jews that run you know, ex school board, um
Speaker 1: are trying to force vaccinations on every student over twelve. Um.
Speaker 1: Other another there's this fake this is this this fake
Speaker 1: Clint Eastwood channel on Telegram that's pretty popular. Someone who's
Speaker 1: pretending to be Clint Eastwood. That spread all right stuff. Um.
Speaker 1: He had a post that was shared a lot that
Speaker 1: started by saying, starts taking over school boards, start taking
Speaker 1: over city council, start taking over city boards, um, start
Speaker 1: to start being poll watchers, start being poll workers, start
Speaker 1: taking over sheriff's departments. It's not enough just to vote.
Speaker 1: So this, this is the other thing that we're going
Speaker 1: to see a lot more of, is rhetoric around voting.
Speaker 1: Isn't enough, you need to start doing more things. Um,
Speaker 1: there is one of it. Yeah, here, here's here's one.
Speaker 1: This is gonna this is a referencing some of the
Speaker 1: trans stuff. I'll discussing a bit. I just want to
Speaker 1: tie it in now. A post from the Western Chavenist
Speaker 1: channel saying there is no political solution, which is a
Speaker 1: direct Nazi, a direct Nazi lie. I mean that. That's
Speaker 1: what I did an article early this year on Riley Williams,
Speaker 1: the Nazi who stole Pelosi's laptop during the Capitol riot,
Speaker 1: and then, like the video that we were able to
Speaker 1: I did to fire her as a sig hiling Nazi,
Speaker 1: and that's how she opened her quote, there is no
Speaker 1: political solution. It's a very common catchphrase among like the
Speaker 1: the fast right. Yeah. So there's been a lot of
Speaker 1: stuff around harassing like specific school board members, harassing specific teachers.
Speaker 1: There was this teacher in uh I think in California
Speaker 1: that was trying to like introduced like like anti fascist
Speaker 1: type rhetoric and talking about how fascism is a modern thing.
Speaker 1: They got absolutely bashed um and like docs um, and
Speaker 1: they got it, I think fired because there was like
Speaker 1: hundreds of parents organizing on on apps like telegram to
Speaker 1: harass this one teacher at school board's like you know,
Speaker 1: they took over massive school board meetings and just talked
Speaker 1: about this one teacher endlessly um. And it was even
Speaker 1: It's interesting because like all the parents were like, yeah, Mike,
Speaker 1: my I got worried because my student actually really like
Speaker 1: liked the teacher and said that they were doing like
Speaker 1: giving really interesting points about like systemic issues. And the
Speaker 1: parents were like and they like brought their kids to
Speaker 1: the school board meeting and there's the kids are standing
Speaker 1: in the back as their parents are ranting about this
Speaker 1: and talking about how the kids actually, like I thought
Speaker 1: they were learning things about systemic issues. And then that
Speaker 1: got people mad. So you know what else gets people mad? Uh?
Speaker 1: This is a advertisements. Yeah, and we're bad. We're gonna
Speaker 1: we're gonna touch on the uh, the specifics, like all
Speaker 1: the stuff we've been talking about. Most of the modern
Speaker 1: most most of like the current organizing is a lot
Speaker 1: of it's around like mask mandates and vaccine mandates. Um.
Speaker 1: Like all of this called like you know, the the
Speaker 1: the stool board channel. All of this kind of stuff
Speaker 1: is usually around vaccine, vaccines and mask stuff. Uh, of
Speaker 1: course there's critic Royce theory was the way more popular
Speaker 1: thing a few months ago. Right now is the vaccine thing.
Speaker 1: The other kind of like ever present thing is being
Speaker 1: upset that trans kids exist and being very fearful that
Speaker 1: that there are trans kids around your kids. Uh. This
Speaker 1: is a thing that's been, you know, a thing for
Speaker 1: years that people have been fighting against. And since the
Speaker 1: school board thing is becoming more popular, people are are
Speaker 1: starting to uh bring Laiceally do these kind of flash
Speaker 1: mobs specifically around trans issues. Um. One of like the
Speaker 1: more like astro turf type things was people getting mad
Speaker 1: that there were like two specific books available in certain
Speaker 1: high school and some middle school libraries. Um that one
Speaker 1: of it was like a like one of it was
Speaker 1: the memoir that Robert mentioned. The other one was like
Speaker 1: a graphic novel memorial about someone realizing their gender queer.
Speaker 1: So these are books that are not in curriculums. These
Speaker 1: are just books that are available at the library. Um.
Speaker 1: And basically there was people who just who found these
Speaker 1: out and got turned it into like like a meme
Speaker 1: on telegram essentially, like people like sharing information about this.
Speaker 1: Then you like look it up, see if it's in
Speaker 1: your library. So then we have all of these like
Speaker 1: coordinated attacks on school boards by these mobs of people
Speaker 1: all but these same two books. Um, and the goals
Speaker 1: to not only just get the books like banned, but
Speaker 1: they're also trying to like fire or arrest the teachers
Speaker 1: and school bar members for allowing these books to happen.
Speaker 1: There has been school boy members who have like stepped
Speaker 1: down because of just how much harassment is about these things.
Speaker 1: Quote from the Western Chavinist channel, Jesus Christ straight up
Speaker 1: pedophile books in our children's schools. Once again, the Jewish
Speaker 1: school board member gets mad and trying to shut them down.
Speaker 1: How can you not connect the dots here? There's no
Speaker 1: political solution. Voting will not remove these people. Um. There
Speaker 1: was the mayor of Houston, uh so in the mayor
Speaker 1: of Houston, Ohio heard about this, and he went to
Speaker 1: a school board meeting and instructed all of them, all
Speaker 1: of the board members to resign um quoting the quoting
Speaker 1: the Proud Boy right wing organizing channel Western Chavenista. This
Speaker 1: comes after some of the degenerate parasites in the system
Speaker 1: called educators, instructed kids to describe a sex scene that
Speaker 1: they wouldn't show their mom. Of course this didn't happen.
Speaker 1: This is this is they these these things are not
Speaker 1: are not These books are not used in any kind
Speaker 1: of curriculum anyway. So even even if they were that that,
Speaker 1: we were not even we're not even in that reality.
Speaker 1: Um So the mayor of this town basically got these instructed,
Speaker 1: these instructed all of these people to resign. Um earlier,
Speaker 1: I think in mark No. In August of this year,
Speaker 1: pride flags were banned at a at a school school
Speaker 1: district inside south west Oregon. Um, I think around I
Speaker 1: think around Newburg. The Newberg school district banned but banded
Speaker 1: pride flegs. So all this kind of stuff and and
Speaker 1: of course that is in a lot of states. But
Speaker 1: the yeah, the fact that it's in like Oregon, a
Speaker 1: blue state, is people got made like you know, there's
Speaker 1: like you know, NBC articles about it because it's it's Oregon.
Speaker 1: It's not it's it's it's not it's it's not a
Speaker 1: red state. So it's all big, it's all Portland, it's
Speaker 1: all Antifa, right yeah, yeah, so again the stuff is
Speaker 1: not not not like contained to one thing. And like yeah,
Speaker 1: if you google the stuff around these books, if you
Speaker 1: google like j under queer book, uh school boards, you'll
Speaker 1: find this in so many school districts. You'll see just
Speaker 1: mobs of people lined up yelling and screaming um and
Speaker 1: like like printing out giant, like giant cardboard prints of
Speaker 1: of this comic book showing like like with like you know,
Speaker 1: there's like a dick on it, Like there's like a
Speaker 1: drawn a drawn dick, because that's what human bodies look like.
Speaker 1: Like you can look at like a lot of like yeah,
Speaker 1: like what are you gonna banned the statue of David
Speaker 1: because he has his dick outs too, like like come on.
Speaker 1: And also, these are the same people who talk about
Speaker 1: like oh, they're you know, banning books, burning books. You know,
Speaker 1: right there was that there was that tweet from like
Speaker 1: James Woods about like these are the books that people
Speaker 1: want banned. That means they're the most important ones. But
Speaker 1: these people love. These people love like burning books. These
Speaker 1: people love banning books. They love canceler culture. That the
Speaker 1: cultures that I was that I was in as a kid,
Speaker 1: they would have like massive like book and like c
Speaker 1: D and DVD burnings for like unlike unholy and sinful
Speaker 1: media that you would like bring in and like throw
Speaker 1: like your sinful music onto this giant fire. Like these
Speaker 1: people love love burning books, they love they love banning stuff,
Speaker 1: they love cancel culture. Um, but they just like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So that was that was most of my stuff around
Speaker 1: the kind of the ongoing queer and trans stuff. Of course,
Speaker 1: you know, this ties into the bathroom stuff as well,
Speaker 1: with the people showing up to school board meetings to
Speaker 1: scream about you know, kids going ship in the bathroom
Speaker 1: that they want to and feel comfortable in. Um. You know.
Speaker 1: And again like it doesn't it's not gonna stop with
Speaker 1: trans people either. Right as soon as they ban trans people,
Speaker 1: the next thing is going to be oh, gay students. Right,
Speaker 1: it says it never it's never stops, it always keeps going. Um.
Speaker 1: And it's just an ever present problem that it's gonna
Speaker 1: require a lot more, a lot more dealing with. And
Speaker 1: again with all of these flash mobs, like no one,
Speaker 1: no one's gonna stop them because they're like the people
Speaker 1: in power. They're the people that have all of the privilege.
Speaker 1: There's no really effective counter organizing for these school board
Speaker 1: meetings right now. Um, the cops aren't gonna do ship.
Speaker 1: Security guards aren't gonna do ship. Uh and regular libs
Speaker 1: and regular regular people aren't gonna do it either. And
Speaker 1: it's hard to figure out how to actually combat this
Speaker 1: because there's a lot of times that the people in
Speaker 1: school boards were like, no, we don't want this to
Speaker 1: turn into a giant like fistfights, Like, don't don't come
Speaker 1: in mass to start fistfighting them. But there needs to
Speaker 1: be something to combat, whether that be you know, running
Speaker 1: running for school boards, just showing up outside school boards,
Speaker 1: having just more people there in, having more presence there, uh,
Speaker 1: so that it's not as overwhelmed by like a mob
Speaker 1: of two hundred anti mask people showing up. Right, there
Speaker 1: needs to be some type of thing happening because no
Speaker 1: one else needs to be countered and yeah, you know what,
Speaker 1: they might need to get the ship kicked out of them.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, but like I don't, like I don't think
Speaker 1: that would actually help in this instance, probably, but like
Speaker 1: there needs to be fucking something like they they are.
Speaker 1: The level of boldness that they have is evidence that
Speaker 1: they they feel, they are confident that there is no
Speaker 1: counter to what they're is going to be done. And
Speaker 1: perhaps if they were being met by a wall of
Speaker 1: people in the community who were willing, if they tried
Speaker 1: to force their way into fucking throw down, you know,
Speaker 1: to say, you're not entering this building without a goddamn mask,
Speaker 1: You're not shutting down this meeting. Um. I don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe that would do something. I don't actually know what
Speaker 1: would do something. If it was people just as regular people,
Speaker 1: I think that would be. Yeah, it's certainly not going
Speaker 1: to help of its antifa. Um, for the love of God,
Speaker 1: don't show up in fucking black block at a school
Speaker 1: board meeting. Um, Like what would work is a bunch
Speaker 1: of other middle aged parents showing up and being willing
Speaker 1: to confront these people if and like, everything that is
Speaker 1: worth mentioning is that a lot of the people at
Speaker 1: these protests like are not parents at all. Like they're
Speaker 1: not they're not there, not even from the same school district.
Speaker 1: They're just sort of like this This is just how
Speaker 1: this is just how this sort of right wing outrage
Speaker 1: machine has worked and this is where they're drawing people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean and again like it's it's a lot of
Speaker 1: the people and there there's gonna be big dudes who
Speaker 1: want to fight, but a lot of the people like
Speaker 1: screaming are are like you know, middle aged women. The
Speaker 1: people who are like really like leading the charge on
Speaker 1: this because they're able to use their privilege because like
Speaker 1: no one's gonna stop them, right, So that that's like
Speaker 1: when they're leading the charge of two people who are
Speaker 1: gonna like scream and harass and chase out black security guards,
Speaker 1: chase out, chase out the all this all the school
Speaker 1: remembers no one's they're they're very effective at using their
Speaker 1: privilege to gain political ground by just like doing stuff
Speaker 1: on the ground. It's like, you know, it's like this
Speaker 1: is like the January six thing. It's like the January
Speaker 1: six thing. This is the new future of political action
Speaker 1: is just showing up in mass two places where no
Speaker 1: one's gonna stop you because you're like you're the you know,
Speaker 1: the good, relatable you know every day Yeah you're anyway,
Speaker 1: That's that's the stuff I had. Will probably have an
Speaker 1: ad break and then talk about maybe some of how
Speaker 1: the stuff start speaking of using your privilege, you know,
Speaker 1: what is the greatest privilege being able to purchase the
Speaker 1: products that Yeah, that's exactly right. There's no privilege higher
Speaker 1: than being able to engage with these consumables. And we're back,
Speaker 1: all right, Chris, you want to close this out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So the last thing I want to talk about that
Speaker 1: is interesting about this whole thing is, you know, we
Speaker 1: we've we've been mostly been focusing on the very furthest
Speaker 1: right elements of this, but a lot of the school
Speaker 1: board stuff is tied to i mean just straight a
Speaker 1: Republican party operatives and people who work in this sort
Speaker 1: of you know, I mean there's there's literally a bunch
Speaker 1: of people who work for the the Publican parties we'll get into.
Speaker 1: And then there's also this sort of network of of
Speaker 1: Republican think tanks, Republicans sort of yea dark money dumps.
Speaker 1: That's a lot of a lot of AstroTurf groups and
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff. Yeah, And and so I want
Speaker 1: to talk about a few of these people because I
Speaker 1: think they're interesting. Um, I think we can start with
Speaker 1: Nicole Nelly, who's an interesting person. She's so she she
Speaker 1: most recently founded Parents Defending Education who are They're They're
Speaker 1: one of the big groups to sort of like spreads
Speaker 1: this this sort of attack on school board stuff over
Speaker 1: the country. They have chapters, they organize people, and they
Speaker 1: also you know, they do this thing where they collect
Speaker 1: incident reports from from school districts that they you know,
Speaker 1: just distribute to all these people and they put them online.
Speaker 1: They have all of these they they they have a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff they do. They do a lot of
Speaker 1: anti mask mandate stuff. So they have these like template letters,
Speaker 1: like template like fakely performing letter things that you can
Speaker 1: send to schools that if you don't want to wear
Speaker 1: a masks. That's the staple of this type of organizing. Now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and the interesting thing about Nicolenelly is that so
Speaker 1: this is not like her first organ like three years
Speaker 1: eighteen back in the Halcyon days of of you know,
Speaker 1: I I'm not quite going to say it was before
Speaker 1: mask fully came off, but it was well the mask
Speaker 1: was like a little bit more on. She she previously
Speaker 1: founded a speech first. Yeah you might remember, yeah, as
Speaker 1: republic speech was the big talking point, yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And so she ran that for a while. Now she's
Speaker 1: you know, organizing with the Holy people who just wants
Speaker 1: to Yeah, they just move on, They move on to
Speaker 1: the new things. It was. It was free speech, it
Speaker 1: was christ theory. Right now it's anti mask stuff. Next
Speaker 1: up it is gonna be trans stuff going real hard.
Speaker 1: Just today we had the fucking person who BBC platforms,
Speaker 1: the fucking lincum. Yeah, Lily K, the rapist Lily k
Speaker 1: manifesto where she details which specific trans women she wants
Speaker 1: to personally kill. Yeah, I used to know Lily Um.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah yeah, uh real dark turned Um, I
Speaker 1: don't know. I guess it's not super surprising. She was
Speaker 1: definitely interviewed her for a documentary and it was she
Speaker 1: was a bit off putting. Uh, didn't realize this was
Speaker 1: going on. I mean yeah, there's just a lot of
Speaker 1: a lot a lot of reports of people in like
Speaker 1: the sex book industry of talking about her, like raping
Speaker 1: people in bathrooms, which again it's like, yeah, the people
Speaker 1: it's always can screaming about oh no trans woman or
Speaker 1: in bathrooms. Yet the people the person screaming about this
Speaker 1: is an actual rapist, Like like when when we say
Speaker 1: rapists here, like she she she raped so many people
Speaker 1: that like on Twitter, like I was scrolling through my feet,
Speaker 1: and I saw multiple people who were like, oh I
Speaker 1: know this person she assaulted me. Yeah, it's really bad.
Speaker 1: The people who the turfs are like pushing Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is the BBC was platform. So like, yeah, like trans
Speaker 1: stuff is as soon as as soon as the anti
Speaker 1: mask anti back stuff like dies down in the next
Speaker 1: five months or whatever. Uh I I foresee a massive
Speaker 1: pivot towards specifically anti anti trans antiqueer antique stuff, because
Speaker 1: that's gonna be the new thing. Yep, and and and
Speaker 1: and I think it's it's worth bearing in mind that
Speaker 1: this stuff. Yeah, and you know, with with the cold
Speaker 1: NAILI specifically, so she she worked she like worked at
Speaker 1: the Cato Institute, which is like Murray Rothbart and Charles Cokes.
Speaker 1: Now it's it's yeah, it's it's it's basic. It's basically
Speaker 1: this is a slight oversupplication, but it's basically one of
Speaker 1: the Cokes sort of like money laundering like money operation things.
Speaker 1: She also worked at Freedom Works, who yeah, yeah this
Speaker 1: is great. So um this is this is one of
Speaker 1: the fun parts of this, which is that so Freedom
Speaker 1: Works is another one of the Coke's sort of dark
Speaker 1: money laundering machine things and freedom Works are basically the
Speaker 1: people who created the Tea Party. Like there are the
Speaker 1: people who turned the Tea Party from like a bunch
Speaker 1: of weird guys, like like six weirdos into like, you know,
Speaker 1: the basically the the the the entirety of the pre
Speaker 1: Trumps conservative political machine who like built a publican party
Speaker 1: after it was like completely discredited um in the the
Speaker 1: two thousand's. And this is true of a lot of
Speaker 1: the people who are in charge of these big organs
Speaker 1: have connections like this, um the person you found in
Speaker 1: No Left Turn, which is No Left Turn you knowe
Speaker 1: for an education. They're they're they're They're not one of
Speaker 1: these big sort of anti school board things. I mean
Speaker 1: they they're the people. They're one of people who like
Speaker 1: they have a list of books on their website that
Speaker 1: they want banned. Wow, yeah, it's great. And their founder
Speaker 1: rights for the heritage foundations like magazine. So they're there.
Speaker 1: There's there's all of this stuff. And I think maybe
Speaker 1: the most implematic one is this guy is Mark Ruffo
Speaker 1: who Rufo. Yeah, so so he's he's the guy who
Speaker 1: just created the whole critical race theory thing out of nothing.
Speaker 1: He like threw together a bunch of like in just
Speaker 1: like these incredibly tenuous connections, Like there's a bunch of
Speaker 1: sort of old cultural Marxism conspiracy stuff in there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a lot of like Frankfurt's school type ship. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And and but but what I think is interesting about him,
Speaker 1: it's less his ideas, which are just pseudo intellectual. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he doesn't he's not actually super smart in what he
Speaker 1: says that there's a lot of videos of him talking
Speaker 1: to actual philosopher is getting schooled about what race theory is.
Speaker 1: Like he's he's actually not that intelligent in this, in
Speaker 1: this side of things. But but you know that the
Speaker 1: thing is that there's nothing more dangerous than an idiot
Speaker 1: with a trick up his sleeve exactly. And you know,
Speaker 1: and then the trick basically is Fox News. And you know,
Speaker 1: the reason the reason this whole thing exists is that
Speaker 1: this was you know, Mark Ruffo, He's very very explicit
Speaker 1: about this, that this this this was his solution to
Speaker 1: the George Floyd uprising was that, oh, we we need
Speaker 1: we need to we need to find this thing to
Speaker 1: stop the medicinum of this uprising. And this is this
Speaker 1: is who Tucker Carlson brings On and starts bring onwy
Speaker 1: and this blows up, and he immediately gets hired by
Speaker 1: the Manhattan Institute, which is a very not that old
Speaker 1: but they're from the eighties, but a very an old,
Speaker 1: extremely powerful conservative thing tank that I don't think. I
Speaker 1: think it's less known than things like the Heritage Foundation
Speaker 1: or the kid who wants to Yeah, I would say so, yeah,
Speaker 1: but he gets They hired him like immediately because you know,
Speaker 1: the sort of mainline at the Republican Party very quickly
Speaker 1: is like this is the thing that we can use
Speaker 1: as like a hammer, right, And so the Manhattan Institute
Speaker 1: publishes this group of work for them. Now I can't
Speaker 1: I'm not actually sure if you I don't know if
Speaker 1: he specifically wrote this or he was just involved in it.
Speaker 1: I think it's it's the Bye line is just the
Speaker 1: Manhattan Institute. But had they have this incredibly detailed tool
Speaker 1: kit explaining how you know, both both explaining what the
Speaker 1: sort of right wing like line on critical race theory is,
Speaker 1: and they have like a bunch of explainers, have like
Speaker 1: list of terms I have you ever seen yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's actually yeah, if you've ever seen like list of
Speaker 1: terms of people want band like it's all just pulled
Speaker 1: from this document, right, so that add stuff. Um. But
Speaker 1: but the interesting part of about this is the other
Speaker 1: thing is this this is an organizing manual, right, It's
Speaker 1: it's a specific thing that tells you how to go
Speaker 1: and how to find other people, like other other people.
Speaker 1: You know, if if you're like an incensed right wing
Speaker 1: like freaking one of these school districts, it's like, okay,
Speaker 1: well here's here's how you like talk to other people
Speaker 1: in your districts. Here's here's a list of options of
Speaker 1: like things you can do going public. And then there's
Speaker 1: a very interesting thing part of this that that I
Speaker 1: think is really disturbing and outlines like really what's going
Speaker 1: on here, which is there's this whole like freak out
Speaker 1: thing about this thing called minority rule, where like, oh,
Speaker 1: the left has this like they have this like militant
Speaker 1: minority that that will compel the majority to follow them
Speaker 1: by because they keep on showing up, they keep on
Speaker 1: doing things. And if if this minority like it keeps
Speaker 1: keep keeps you know, being more in transient than everyone else,
Speaker 1: then they will inevitably win. And this the three quarters
Speaker 1: of this section is this like weird fear mongering thing
Speaker 1: about it. But then the last part of it is
Speaker 1: a bunch is the thing that's saying, oh, we need
Speaker 1: to do this ourselves, right, this is how we win.
Speaker 1: We win by being more in transient, win more often
Speaker 1: of course. Yeah, and you know, and this is this
Speaker 1: is the other thing is this is from like last year.
Speaker 1: I think this is like this summer. So yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: that's sorry. This is this is this is really this ship.
Speaker 1: But it's interesting because it's like this is the sort
Speaker 1: of you know, this, this is this is the Republican
Speaker 1: Party essentially, I mean the institute, very very mainstre Republican Party. This. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is how the effective in person organizing. We we
Speaker 1: talked about this a bit in our episodes um about
Speaker 1: the like in the aftermath of the abortion ruling in
Speaker 1: Texas and how and how like the religious right ring
Speaker 1: organizing has worked in local districts. Yeah, this this is
Speaker 1: how they are able to get things done, which is
Speaker 1: why there's been so many school by members who either
Speaker 1: get fired, who have had to step down, who have
Speaker 1: been harassed off the job and are now there's people,
Speaker 1: you know, a lot of a lot of like people
Speaker 1: I would describe as people holding very extreme views are
Speaker 1: now running and taking these spots. Um because if you
Speaker 1: can do if you can do this type of like again,
Speaker 1: it's not grassroots, but it's it's it is it is
Speaker 1: like astroturp, so like it appears grassroots. But if can
Speaker 1: do this type of like faux grassroots organizing, you can
Speaker 1: gain a lot of power over specific areas and make
Speaker 1: a lot of people's lives a lot more miserable. And
Speaker 1: that's that's that's what the goal is, right, The goal
Speaker 1: is to make the trans kids lives miserable. The goals
Speaker 1: to get people to not wear masks and dive COVID
Speaker 1: like that those are the results of these actions. Well,
Speaker 1: I think I think there's an interesting interplace here, so
Speaker 1: because I think because so freedom works, like like even
Speaker 1: even a lot of the specific protests that are happening,
Speaker 1: and this is especially true of of the very earlier,
Speaker 1: earliest ones. I think, like when when like the very
Speaker 1: first school board protests that were happening, Yeah, like like
Speaker 1: a lot of these similar to follow was when they
Speaker 1: started to start up. Yeah, and and those a lot
Speaker 1: of those were directly organized by by people who work
Speaker 1: for Freedom Works. And and this is this is what
Speaker 1: a lot of the RT ones Yeah yeah, yeah, they
Speaker 1: see the R T one are ever very specifically freedom Works.
Speaker 1: And this is what I think is interesting about this
Speaker 1: is that you know, okay, freedom Works. It's like, okay,
Speaker 1: so what does freedom Works out of this? Freedom Works
Speaker 1: wants the T party again, right, because you know that
Speaker 1: this is this is what freedom Works does. Right there.
Speaker 1: They're they're they're basically the group that comes in when
Speaker 1: when the Republicans start losing election cycles. They're like, okay,
Speaker 1: well now we need to get the balance of power back.
Speaker 1: We need to bring drawn the Democrats out. So they're
Speaker 1: they're they're largely trying to build a sort of electoral base.
Speaker 1: And and again like this, this this will look familiar
Speaker 1: to people who remember two thousand and ten because it's
Speaker 1: the same thing except and this is the thing that
Speaker 1: I I I this is the part where I genuine
Speaker 1: and they can't tell whether the Freedom Works people, whether
Speaker 1: the Cokes, whether that whether this sort of dark whening
Speaker 1: network either I don't I can't tell whether they understand
Speaker 1: what they're doing and like it or they're just incredibly naive.
Speaker 1: But you know, this is not two thousand ten, right,
Speaker 1: you can't when when you start mobilizing people, like mobilizing
Speaker 1: people on the right wing to go to a place,
Speaker 1: they don't just like sit there and hold signs anymore.
Speaker 1: You cannot you cannot contain them at this point. You
Speaker 1: cannot control the spread like you have once you've you've
Speaker 1: opened this can, and there's no way of putting them
Speaker 1: back in because as soon as they start organizing on
Speaker 1: opposite telegram, they're one step away from skull masks. And
Speaker 1: then they're being okay with cheering around people that are
Speaker 1: going to go beat up that are going to go
Speaker 1: beat up people in these meetings. Yeah, and this is
Speaker 1: this is this is really the thing that I think
Speaker 1: it's not just January six that we live in the
Speaker 1: shadow January six, but it's also about you know, if
Speaker 1: you look at how how the anti lockdown protest went in, right,
Speaker 1: you a bunch people showing up with the capitals and
Speaker 1: that stuff was extremely effective. And that in the conformation
Speaker 1: between that in January six has you know, it's open
Speaker 1: the floodgates and now that was that was six being possible.
Speaker 1: Is the more and more protests around capitals of people
Speaker 1: showing up in mass to overwhelm anyone. And because they're
Speaker 1: all white, and because they're all like middle class conservatives,
Speaker 1: no one's gonna stop them. Yeah, and and you know,
Speaker 1: and this is the thing, right, you know, the Cokes.
Speaker 1: I I genuinely don't know what the Cokes want out
Speaker 1: of this. My guess is that the thing that they
Speaker 1: want is is a new based Republican voters. But that's
Speaker 1: not what they're creating. The thing that they're creating is
Speaker 1: a new core fascist street fighters. And ye, you know it.
Speaker 1: At some point, it doesn't it literally doesn't matter whether
Speaker 1: or not this is what the Cokes are trying to
Speaker 1: do or like not trying to do, because they're in
Speaker 1: the end it's it's just pushing people towards thinking there's
Speaker 1: no political solution. It's still only only violence and overwhelming
Speaker 1: people in mass is the only way to get the
Speaker 1: change that they want. The change they want is to
Speaker 1: have trans kids not exists. And yeah, just more more
Speaker 1: and more like fecistic policies. Um, whether that be you know,
Speaker 1: banning books that mentioned gay people existing or what it's
Speaker 1: like to be a gay person, whether that be teaching
Speaker 1: people that racism is still an actual thing that exists,
Speaker 1: or that be putting a masculine so you don't kill
Speaker 1: your grandma or whatever. Yep. Well, and you know, and
Speaker 1: I think I think one last thing, right, you know,
Speaker 1: we saw what happened last time they were in power, right,
Speaker 1: and it was you know, and like you can you
Speaker 1: can talk about how a lot of the worst stuff
Speaker 1: is still happening. Was like, yeah, they put a bunch
Speaker 1: of people in concentration camps, right, and if they if
Speaker 1: they take back power again, and there's a good chance
Speaker 1: that they're going to because you know, the Democrats are
Speaker 1: being they you know, the Democrats never want to be
Speaker 1: in power. The thing, they want to be a minority
Speaker 1: oppositions they can do fundraising, right and if you know,
Speaker 1: when when when these people, if these people take power again,
Speaker 1: it's going to be even worse than it was last time. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The thing looking at looking at the Virginia election, the
Speaker 1: night of recording is a great example of that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Uh in terms of yeah, it turns out when democrats
Speaker 1: just do nothing and just sit around in office, you
Speaker 1: don't convince young people to want to vote for them
Speaker 1: because they're not actually doing anything. So then they just
Speaker 1: sit out then the Republicans actually do vote in people.
Speaker 1: Then we get uh we anti CRT person elected to
Speaker 1: be the governor of Virginia. And that's the episode. Good Times. Well,
Speaker 1: I hope everybody's optimistic feeling nice. Well, um, we'll be
Speaker 1: back with something else. Research your school boards, who is
Speaker 1: in it, and just protests around it and maybe show
Speaker 1: up with some of your I don't know buddies with
Speaker 1: your lattes and stand in front of the building and
Speaker 1: be like, no, we don't want you, we don't want
Speaker 1: you to shut stuff down because no one else is
Speaker 1: going to stop them. It has to be just like
Speaker 1: regular people. You can't it's not going to be any
Speaker 1: elected Democrats, and like, you can't rely on teens and
Speaker 1: black block to do this. That this isn't this isn't
Speaker 1: what they need to be doing. It should be like yeah,
Speaker 1: it'd be like millennials and Gen X need to be like, hey, no,
Speaker 1: we're not gonna We're not gonna have you doing this. Well,
Speaker 1: that's the that's the episode. That's the episode. Hey, we'll
Speaker 1: be back Monday with more episodes every week from now
Speaker 1: until the heat death of the Universe. It could happen.
Speaker 1: Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more
Speaker 1: podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone
Speaker 1: media dot com or check us out on the I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1: You can find sources for It could happen here. Updated
Speaker 1: monthly at cool zone media dot com slash sources. Thanks
Speaker 1: for listening. The art world it is essentially a money
Speaker 1: laundering business. The best fakes still hanging on people's walls.
Speaker 1: You know they don't even know or suspect that their faces.
Speaker 1: I'm Alec Baldwin and this is a podcast about deception,
Speaker 1: greed and forgery in the art world. I just walked
Speaker 1: in and saw this bright red painting presuming to be
Speaker 1: a rothco. Of course, art forgeries only happen because there's
Speaker 1: money to be made, a lot of money. I'm listening
Speaker 1: to how what they're paying for these things. It was
Speaker 1: an incredible mans of money. You knew the painting was fake.
Speaker 1: Um Listen to Art Fraud starting February one on the
Speaker 1: I Heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get
Speaker 1: your podcasts. From Cavalry Audio comes the new true crime podcast,
Speaker 1: The Shadow Girls. I grew up near the banks of
Speaker 1: the Green River and in the Shadow of the Killer
Speaker 1: that bears its name. Prosecutors described him as a serial killer. Survived,
Speaker 1: but this podcast isn't only about tracking down the killer.
Speaker 1: It's about the victims. We stayed in the woods. He
Speaker 1: always liked to go in the woods. Listen to The
Speaker 1: Shadow Girls on the I Heart Radio app, on Apple
Speaker 1: podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Colleen with
Speaker 1: Join me the host of Eating Will Broke podcast. While
Speaker 1: I Eat a meal created by self made entrepreneurs, influencers,
Speaker 1: and celebrities over a meal they once ate when they
Speaker 1: were broke. Today I have the lovely aj Crimson, the
Speaker 1: official Princess of comfin Asia, Kidding and Asia. This is
Speaker 1: the professor. We're here on Eating While Broken. Today, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna break down my meal that got me through a
Speaker 1: time when I was broken. Listen to Eating While Broke
Speaker 1: on the I Heart Radio app, on Apple podcast or
Speaker 1: wherever you get your podcasts.