Speaker 1: A media Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted
Speaker 1: to let you know this is a compilation episode. So
Speaker 1: every episode of the week that just happened is here
Speaker 1: in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for
Speaker 1: you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.
Speaker 1: If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 1: you can make your own decisions.
Speaker 2: This is it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. The
Speaker 2: past few years, we have regularly covered the rise of
Speaker 2: legislation that restricts access to public space and medical care
Speaker 2: for trans people in the United States, as well as
Speaker 2: attempts by politicians, lobbying groups, and media personalities to drum
Speaker 2: up transphobia in hopes of quote unquote eliminating transgenderism from
Speaker 2: our society and culture. The quest to eliminate transgenderism includes harassment,
Speaker 2: care campaigns targeted against specific individuals, boycotting companies that feature
Speaker 2: trans people in their marketing, and banning queer books, media,
Speaker 2: and art from libraries across the country. The conservative right
Speaker 2: has decided that the boogeyman of gender ideology and the
Speaker 2: woke mind virus is one of the most pressing threats
Speaker 2: to Western civilization. This brand of transphobic militancy opposes any
Speaker 2: form of visible queerness, viewing it as an ideology that
Speaker 2: acts as a viral cultural contagion. That's why they spend
Speaker 2: so much time trying to ban drag shows and art
Speaker 2: featuring queer people. They know they're losing the cultural battle
Speaker 2: and that really scares them. As trans people have been
Speaker 2: trying to weather this huge wave of organized transphobia, Trans
Speaker 2: and queer artists continue to push forward, with multiple hit
Speaker 2: films coming out this year from trans directors and transactors
Speaker 2: and actresses are taking more and more high profile roles.
Speaker 2: Last episode, I interviewed comedian Ella Yerman and filmmaker Ver
Speaker 2: Drew on the process of creating independent queer media. This
Speaker 2: episode will focus on why we are seeing this new
Speaker 2: wave of queer art, why mere representation isn't enough, and
Speaker 2: attempts to go beyond the online media ecosystem. Ellie Yerman
Speaker 2: is the host of Late Stage Lives, a Queer gen
Speaker 2: Z public access late night show on Brooklyn Public Access
Speaker 2: and YouTube. The format of late night comedy is almost
Speaker 2: wholly dominated by old white, sis straight men. Late Stage
Speaker 2: Live attempts to deconstruct the genre in which it aligns
Speaker 2: itself with, utilizing sketches, correspondence segments, and original reporting, but
Speaker 2: for a younger, queerer, more politically radical audience. The show
Speaker 2: is not just made for gen Z queers. It's also
Speaker 2: made by an entire team of young, queer and trans people,
Speaker 2: which gives it a very unique feel compared to literally
Speaker 2: all of its competition. The show itself feels queer and
Speaker 2: highlights the massive gap between simple queer representation and queer art,
Speaker 2: or in this case, queer late night comedy. There's a
Speaker 2: palpable distinction between hiring a gay person to work on
Speaker 2: seth Myers versus having a late night show that is
Speaker 2: built on queerness. On that note, here's a clip from
Speaker 2: my interview with Ella Yeerman, host of Late Stage Live.
Speaker 3: There's like a huge difference between like the token queer
Speaker 3: writer and like a show that centers queerness and transness.
Speaker 3: And I'm really proud of of that. As in terms
Speaker 3: of our show, like, I think that's one of its
Speaker 3: main drives is how queer focused. It is something we
Speaker 3: talk about in every episode, in every piece. Reid loves
Speaker 3: to hammer this home is sort of the question of
Speaker 3: why us. It's the first question we ask when anyone
Speaker 3: pitches any segment or piece or story of the question
Speaker 3: is like, what's the game, what's the perspective? And then
Speaker 3: why is it us delivering this perspective? Because anyone can
Speaker 3: write a piece of political analysis, lots of people do,
Speaker 3: but like, what about this story is uniquely coming from us,
Speaker 3: uniquely coming from the host ella, from the writer's room.
Speaker 3: And I think we found it most strongly in the
Speaker 3: last two pieces, the Lives of Stickock piece, and then
Speaker 3: the episode before that, we did a segment on the
Speaker 3: Alliance Defending Freedom, which is a spooky, evil conservative cabal
Speaker 3: that trains lawyers to overturn Scotis cases. And I think
Speaker 3: those both found felt really focused in on sort of
Speaker 3: us as young queer people. And I think the gen
Speaker 3: Z part is also really relevant for us. A lot
Speaker 3: of Late Night is hosted by old men, and as
Speaker 3: much as I love John Stewart, he is an old man,
Speaker 3: an old sis, white man, an old sis, as far
Speaker 3: as I know, heterosexual white man.
Speaker 2: Who already left the job ten years ago.
Speaker 3: And he already left it right, and he's back now,
Speaker 3: but like what does that say about anything?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah, and everyone talking about politics is like old white guys,
Speaker 3: and everyone in Congress is old white guys or George Santos,
Speaker 3: And there's like this sense of like the world is ending,
Speaker 3: as you probably know on this show that bills itself
Speaker 3: as like amidst the collapse or whatever your tagline is.
Speaker 5: But like gen Z is so.
Speaker 3: Uniquely affected by political goings on in a way that
Speaker 3: I say this is true of every general, every youngest generation,
Speaker 3: that like all of the decisions are impacting us most,
Speaker 3: but it feels more urgent these days because the world
Speaker 3: is ending with climate change and with the encroaching you know,
Speaker 3: global fascism, and with the decay of late stage capitalism,
Speaker 3: that it feels so important now more than ever to
Speaker 3: like center those experiences and look at how the world
Speaker 3: and the news and politics impacts these groups of people.
Speaker 3: And the way we achieve that is, Yeah, we don't
Speaker 3: just have one token queer writer.
Speaker 6: We are.
Speaker 3: Our room is all queer, largely trans About half of
Speaker 3: our writer's room is non one, and as we grow,
Speaker 3: that number will either stay the same or get bigger,
Speaker 3: certainly not smaller. Yeah, At the end of the day,
Speaker 3: I think the fact that the room is completely queer
Speaker 3: and predominantly trans and non white and all young, it
Speaker 3: just like sort of happens, And the fact that it
Speaker 3: started that way and has been built from the ground
Speaker 3: up that way, I think gives us a huge edge.
Speaker 3: Even if the daily shows fired all of their writers
Speaker 3: and hired only trans people, I think it would be
Speaker 3: a hard pivot to get the show to suddenly be
Speaker 3: doing what we're doing, just because the whole structure is
Speaker 3: built differently.
Speaker 2: In Vera Drew's new movie The People's Joker, an autobiographical
Speaker 2: transgender coming of age parody set in the Batman universe,
Speaker 2: the shallowness of queer representation is actually one of the
Speaker 2: core themes of the film. In the movie, the main
Speaker 2: character is not satisfied by simply being a token diversity
Speaker 2: higher for a late night comedy show, and instead hijacks
Speaker 2: the airwaves and charts her own path. This plotline, like
Speaker 2: many others, mirrors the director's own life, and the movie
Speaker 2: itself is a perfect example of how creating a piece
Speaker 2: of art inherently built on a multimedia experience of queerness
Speaker 2: will produce a wildly different result. Than simply having a
Speaker 2: gay person in the writer's room. Here's a clip from
Speaker 2: my interview with Vera Drew. It's not even that I
Speaker 2: feel like queer representation is like too straight or cist.
Speaker 2: It's just not even like an accurate reflection of queer reality.
Speaker 2: You know, Like every gay couple I know is nothing
Speaker 2: like a straight couple. I mean some of them are,
Speaker 2: but like those those gay couples always break up, like
Speaker 2: it's like they're just they're just in you know, reenacting
Speaker 2: cycles and thousands and thousands of years of patriarchal bullshit
Speaker 2: on each other when they could just be having hot
Speaker 2: gay sacks with each other. And like that to me
Speaker 2: is like the biggest tragedy of like representation. And it's
Speaker 2: like is also why I think people lash out at
Speaker 2: us so much. Like I on one level, I understand
Speaker 2: the idea of like this is getting shoved down our throats,
Speaker 2: you know, because like it kind of is that's coming
Speaker 2: from a place that I sort of agree with, because
Speaker 2: they're getting sold this like propaganda that it's like they're
Speaker 2: just like us, you know, and like to me, it's
Speaker 2: like my experience is so specific to me and so
Speaker 2: specific to you know, like the experience of a trans woman.
Speaker 2: There are things about my life that are similar to
Speaker 2: that of assis woman but not certainly not identical. So
Speaker 2: like I never want to see art that is that.
Speaker 2: I also, I'm like really over trans people being used
Speaker 2: in a way that they're either I mean, it doesn't
Speaker 2: really happen anymore where they're like treated like freaks, but
Speaker 2: like it's kind of the tragedy porn or kind of
Speaker 2: pedestalizing us. I guess, like I hate that, like my
Speaker 2: identity is inherently political, like just because I I this
Speaker 2: is who I am, Like I it's not a pleasant
Speaker 2: situation to deal with. So I think with joker, Yeah,
Speaker 2: I want people joker, I really wanted to talk about
Speaker 2: representation in a way that also just wasn't annoying because
Speaker 2: like I also, it's not even that I'm tired of
Speaker 2: having this conversation. It's just sad that people like us
Speaker 2: keep men having to have this kind of conversation because
Speaker 2: like I've also heard it now within our own community
Speaker 2: that like you know, I've heard other trans filmmakers say
Speaker 2: like we should only be telling happy stories, we should
Speaker 2: only be spreading queer joy or what absolutely not No, absolutely,
Speaker 2: not like it's that's embarrassing. Yeah, I want I want
Speaker 2: to spread queer panic. I want to it's not even panic,
Speaker 2: just like queer existential uh horror, I suppose I don't know.
Speaker 7: Well, I mean for me, it's like I don't know,
Speaker 7: like because I've gotten shipped to not I haven't gotten
Speaker 7: a lot. And now honestly that I've started mentioning in
Speaker 7: the press, people have said it to me as much
Speaker 7: just good, but like I was getting a little bit
Speaker 7: of the like how oh making the joker a murderous
Speaker 7: trans woman?
Speaker 8: Okay, you know please?
Speaker 7: First of all, like villains are queer coded the history
Speaker 7: of film, Oh, almost all of the bad villains are
Speaker 7: queer coded except completely, And like why can't so why
Speaker 7: can't a why can't we do it like not in
Speaker 7: a subtext way? Why can't we just do it directly?
Speaker 7: And then also like I live in a country that
Speaker 7: villainizes trans people, so like why can't I process that
Speaker 7: very thing by making myself a queer villain in a
Speaker 7: in a movie that I made? And and I don't know,
Speaker 7: it's like I think what I hate about the queer
Speaker 7: joy thing and the like the people's Joker is like
Speaker 7: a very funny movie. It's very pel it's very campy,
Speaker 7: but it's also like devastating, you know, like it's it's
Speaker 7: got a very serious message to it that I think
Speaker 7: it brings up a lot of emotion in people when
Speaker 7: they watch it, both SIS people and trans people, And
Speaker 7: you know, I think that speaks to something else, just
Speaker 7: like about representation is like I told this story that
Speaker 7: was so specific to my experience, and like trans people
Speaker 7: are identifying with it and relating to it, but so
Speaker 7: are CIS people, you know, Like yes, like you know,
Speaker 7: we should be telling stories that portray the trans experience
Speaker 7: honestly or the queer experience honestly and specifically. And if
Speaker 7: we do that, like if we do that effectively, that
Speaker 7: is still art that a SIS person can consume because
Speaker 7: SIS people also go through transitions. SIS people also have
Speaker 7: to die and be reborn sometimes, and like I think
Speaker 7: just everybody kind of comes of age. It's just like
Speaker 7: trans people and we were people kind of have to
Speaker 7: do it more visibly and publicly and externally a lot
Speaker 7: of the times. And and uh, I don't know, for me,
Speaker 7: it's like that was like another reason too of like
Speaker 7: of just being like no, like we're gonna get this
Speaker 7: out into theaters and and you know, like make this
Speaker 7: kind of theatrical experience before anything else. You know, it
Speaker 7: was always made made to be like viewed, I think
Speaker 7: with like a crowd of people like yeah, yeah, kind
Speaker 7: of like a midnight movie vibe.
Speaker 2: I guess when you think about it, Jesus and the
Speaker 2: Joker I do have a lot in common in terms
Speaker 2: of getting baptized, getting bored again. It's it's really very
Speaker 2: similar characters.
Speaker 7: Absolutely, And I mean that's why, uh, because I think
Speaker 7: this was something while Brie and I were writing the
Speaker 7: movie that she was constantly every step of the way
Speaker 7: like what are you doing, like why are you bringing
Speaker 7: this much like gnostic Christianity to this?
Speaker 8: Absolutely?
Speaker 7: Uh? Like I I remember, you know, there's this like
Speaker 7: French song that's in the movie called I'll Be Your
Speaker 7: Joker that's composed and performed by Emily Sloan, and the
Speaker 7: lyrics to that are a poem that I wrote that
Speaker 7: are just.
Speaker 8: You never like it's not in anywhere in the movie.
Speaker 7: It's just in that song. But it's like this, it's
Speaker 7: the people's joker prophecy, Like I actually wrote it in
Speaker 7: this like kind of Gnostic Bible structure, and then we
Speaker 7: translated it to French and recorded it as a song
Speaker 7: and like that was like really kind of coming from
Speaker 7: that place of like just really I love I mean,
Speaker 7: I'm obsessed with Jesus uh, and I kind of just
Speaker 7: always have have been, Like I was raised Catholic and
Speaker 7: I just I'm I'm not Christian, but I have a
Speaker 7: lot of Jesus stuff around my house. Like I'm I'm
Speaker 7: just obsessed with like the iconography and really love it
Speaker 7: the story itself as like a myth and like the
Speaker 7: mythic understanding of of death and rebirth, and also just
Speaker 7: thinking of it as like another example of like the
Speaker 7: hero's journey. And I don't know, like it's somebody asked
Speaker 7: me at a Q and A like how basically like
Speaker 7: how do you have the balls to like cause by
Speaker 7: the end of the People's Joker, like you basically find
Speaker 7: out it's like cut it is like Dune. There's like
Speaker 7: a weird Messiah story happening, And that partially just comes
Speaker 7: from like I think for me, queerness is inherently like
Speaker 7: a very spiritual experience. It just has been for me,
Speaker 7: and I think a lot of trans people actually deal
Speaker 7: with Messiah complexes. I think it's something that I feel
Speaker 7: safe saying I have, and I also really wanted to
Speaker 7: unpack that just idea of the like Joseph Campbell White
Speaker 7: Savior Hero's journey thing.
Speaker 2: It could happen here. We'll return after these messages we
Speaker 2: now return to it could happen here. During my interview
Speaker 2: with Vera Drew, she mentioned it something about not just
Speaker 2: wanting to throw the movie up on YouTube when the
Speaker 2: film is dealing with legal issues resulting in uncertainty around
Speaker 2: how the film would be released, And that got me
Speaker 2: thinking about queer people's relationship to platforms like YouTube as
Speaker 2: the sort of default way of sharing video art. A
Speaker 2: big reason why is simply because the platform is so
Speaker 2: accessible without many of the hurdles and roadblocks of more
Speaker 2: traditional distribution models. But sometimes I worry that it's become
Speaker 2: so default that our reliance on YouTube has actually become
Speaker 2: a self limiting factor that overdetermines the scope of our
Speaker 2: own art. Let's return to my interview with Vera Drew
Speaker 2: to continue this topic. Queer people, specifically trans people have
Speaker 2: kind of been stuck with a lot of their art
Speaker 2: or video art just becoming this thing that you throw
Speaker 2: up on YouTube. We've done a good job in making
Speaker 2: like a community there, I suppose, but at certain points
Speaker 2: it feels very like insular, like we've created this little
Speaker 2: tiny bubble that everything is just trapped inside of. Because
Speaker 2: obviously we can't like rely on like big studios to
Speaker 2: make our own stuff or distribute our own stuff like that.
Speaker 2: That's not happening either. But I feel like we're kind
Speaker 2: of kicking ourselves in the foot if our only artistic
Speaker 2: output is like techno music and YouTube video essays, both
Speaker 2: of which can be good, both of which can be art.
Speaker 2: But there's a whole other world out there that I
Speaker 2: feel like we have closed ourselves off from, and so
Speaker 2: I'm kind of interested, like like on that choice to
Speaker 2: like not put it on YouTube and actually like ride
Speaker 2: this thing out as like a movie.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean that is Uh, it's it's such a
Speaker 7: relief to hear you talk about it in that way, because, yeah,
Speaker 7: I never want to be dismissive of online creators.
Speaker 8: Sure, Like I worked in TV.
Speaker 7: For ten years as a editor, and I was very
Speaker 7: fortunate to work on a lot of really cool shit,
Speaker 7: Like I worked on my first job was I was
Speaker 7: an intern on The Eric Andre Show, and like then
Speaker 7: my job immediately after that was on Nathan for You,
Speaker 7: So I really got to work with like all these
Speaker 7: really amazing comedians, many geniuses, and in that process like
Speaker 7: always knew I had wanted to make film, Like my
Speaker 7: earliest memories are are wanting to make films. Like right
Speaker 7: around the time I saw Batman Forever, I was like,
Speaker 7: I want to be a director, and I came up
Speaker 7: in post production just because like a lot of editors
Speaker 7: end up sort of following, you know, a lot of
Speaker 7: editors are really just direct like frustrated directors. So I
Speaker 7: was kind of like, here's a place where I could
Speaker 7: like sort of learn my craft. And I've always loved
Speaker 7: experimental animation and visual effects and stuff and also just
Speaker 7: like incorporate that as well into like my career. And
Speaker 7: it's good. I'm so glad I had it as like
Speaker 7: an incubation period for me to kind of find my
Speaker 7: voice and my aesthetic and and learn a lot from
Speaker 7: these like super talented people. But there was always this
Speaker 7: frustration that I had because when I would take stuff
Speaker 7: out to pitch or anything that was like my own story,
Speaker 7: like you can't really get trans art made in any
Speaker 7: sort of mainstream space. I think that's one of the
Speaker 7: things that's most frustrating about the whole like woke culture bullshit,
Speaker 7: just because it's like they act like we're some sort
Speaker 7: of like elite class that's like favored by the media,
Speaker 7: which it's like I can just tell you, like that's
Speaker 7: I'm on my press week right now. Like the media
Speaker 7: is certainly enamored with trans people, but like I don't
Speaker 7: think it's like coming from a place of like we're
Speaker 7: trying to change and put everything and you know, make
Speaker 7: these people in charge. It's just uh, you know, it's
Speaker 7: it's click baity and it gets people, it keeps people
Speaker 7: arguing online. So it's very hard just to even break
Speaker 7: through as a director too. Like I mean I was
Speaker 7: at that, you know, forget pitching shows that I've written
Speaker 7: or whatever, like just trying to get episodic TV work.
Speaker 7: I just couldn't do it, like once I changed my pronouns,
Speaker 7: Like I was literally up for jobs that went away
Speaker 7: after I came out. So I just reached this point
Speaker 7: of like I think, maximum frustration and kind of like
Speaker 7: wanted to whatever I did, you know, I don't want
Speaker 7: to say like I was ready to walk away from
Speaker 7: like working in the industry in twenty nineteen, but I
Speaker 7: kind of was like I was kind of just at
Speaker 7: this point where I was like, I need to make
Speaker 7: a fucking movie or something on my own and kind
Speaker 7: of just put all I have into that, and that's
Speaker 7: going to be the way people will either finally take
Speaker 7: me seriously as a director, or like I'll at least
Speaker 7: have made a movie and then I can just be
Speaker 7: in debt and I'll have a movie I made. So
Speaker 7: to me, it was always about not necessarily like finally
Speaker 7: being taken seriously by my indus, but just like kind
Speaker 7: of making this giant piece of art that is not
Speaker 7: only like a big like look what I can do,
Speaker 7: you know style thing, but like is also just about
Speaker 7: all of that about the frustration of being allowed in
Speaker 7: but only being allowed in in these certain ways, like
Speaker 7: whether it's on like a diversity cast or like, you
Speaker 7: know whatever. Like I was, I worked on the show.
Speaker 7: I can't really talk about it because it's like NDA
Speaker 7: stuff and I don't think the show will ever come out.
Speaker 7: But I was in the writer's room on a cartoon
Speaker 7: that was being rebooted and it was one of my
Speaker 7: favorite cartoons of all time. But I had a day
Speaker 7: where I was like just sitting in the writer's room
Speaker 7: and I was like looking around at my coworkers and
Speaker 7: it was I was like, oh, wait a minute, it's
Speaker 7: all girls, and I'm I'm a girl, and I'm a
Speaker 7: trans girl. We're all just being brought in to rehabilitate
Speaker 7: this like problematic piece of art, you know. And it
Speaker 7: was like this crazy moment of having like like also
Speaker 7: have had lost jobs because of my identity and now
Speaker 7: in this place where it's like my identity is like
Speaker 7: this bargaining chip. So anyway, how does this connect to
Speaker 7: the online art conversation? Like I've always kind of had
Speaker 7: to also play in like online spaces, Like I started
Speaker 7: a public access station with my friends a few years
Speaker 7: ago called Highland Park TV. A few years ago. I
Speaker 7: was like ten years ago now, but that's still going
Speaker 7: on today. And it was basically just this space for
Speaker 7: us where we could like just record whatever. You know.
Speaker 7: We'd meet up one week and come with like some
Speaker 7: pretty simple sketches and shoot it on our public access
Speaker 7: set and throw it up online. And you know, like
Speaker 7: twelve people would watch it and that was it and
Speaker 7: that but that was cool, like you know, you'd build
Speaker 7: like little followings and communities that way, and I had
Speaker 7: always just wanted to break out of that, you know,
Speaker 7: because I think my sensibilities are pretty me and edgy
Speaker 7: and weird. But like I'm really kind of a basic bitch,
Speaker 7: like when it got to the stuff I like, like,
Speaker 7: I really like my taste is very college dorm room.
Speaker 7: I have a back to the future tattoo. Like I'm
Speaker 7: very influenced by like genre film, and you know, like
Speaker 7: I love David Lynch, I love experimental film and stuff too.
Speaker 7: But like I've always like really felt like I.
Speaker 8: Could do it.
Speaker 7: I could be like just like a genre filmmaker. But
Speaker 7: when we had the controversy at TIFF, I had a
Speaker 7: lot of pressure on me to just kind of put
Speaker 7: the movie out there, and I could never articulate to
Speaker 7: people why it was important to me to not do
Speaker 7: that and to hold out. It wasn't just like financial,
Speaker 7: it really was. I mean, I mean, maybe it's ego thing,
Speaker 7: but it's also just like I've been doing this long
Speaker 7: enough to know like the movie was gonna always find
Speaker 7: its audience, but there needed to kind of be a
Speaker 7: plan in place so that like I could actually put
Speaker 7: it towards having a career that the career that I've
Speaker 7: wanted my whole life. You know, Like, I think it's
Speaker 7: ridiculous that we live in a culture now where every artist,
Speaker 7: even the ones like me who have had a trade
Speaker 7: in this industry, Like in an industry like that, we
Speaker 7: have to really carve our own path in online spaces
Speaker 7: or on Twitter or YouTube or whatever. It just keeps
Speaker 7: us all in cycles of poverty. It like, like I
Speaker 7: fucking hate posting to Twitter. I do it still just
Speaker 7: because it's the easiest way to get the word out,
Speaker 7: But every single time I send a tweet, I'm like,
Speaker 7: this sucks. Like I'm supporting one of the worst people
Speaker 7: alive right now just by still using this site, somebody
Speaker 7: who hates me and people like me so much that
Speaker 7: he literally won't talk to his own child. Yeah. Like,
Speaker 7: I really just wanted to kick the door down for
Speaker 7: myself and hopefully for some people that come after me.
Speaker 7: And you know, I really don't want to be the
Speaker 7: type of filmmaker and the type of queer filmmaker who
Speaker 7: like holds the ladder up behind them, like it's not
Speaker 7: even that I have integrity, it's just that like this
Speaker 7: movie is that to me, this movie is such like
Speaker 7: it's a gospel on how we need to be making
Speaker 7: art more ethically and more for ourselves and from a
Speaker 7: place of care. And yeah, that's just I want to
Speaker 7: hopefully change my little corner of the industry as much
Speaker 7: as I can toward that.
Speaker 2: I mean, it definitely feels like we're getting more and
Speaker 2: more people are embracing this idea of independent queer cinema,
Speaker 2: and more people are are deciding instead of putting whatever
Speaker 2: short film they want on YouTube, try to do a
Speaker 2: festival circuit.
Speaker 6: And it's it.
Speaker 2: That was one of the things that I think I
Speaker 2: really respected after what happened at TIFF. What I really
Speaker 2: respected at your insistence to like, no, like we're going
Speaker 2: to find a distributor, Like we're we're not just gonna
Speaker 2: throw it up online and call it a day. It's
Speaker 2: not just gonna be like a fan film. It's like,
Speaker 2: this is an actual, like expressive piece that we're gonna
Speaker 2: It might mean that you won't see it for another
Speaker 2: two years, but it shows like a level of like
Speaker 2: actual artistic commitment that I found gave gave the project
Speaker 2: a real sense of like wait, oh, thank you. The
Speaker 2: notion of this comfortable YouTube bubble we've created is perhaps
Speaker 2: why I find the public Access TV side of la
Speaker 2: Yeerman's Late Stage Live so compelling. A lot of queer
Speaker 2: people around my age grew up with the transgender video
Speaker 2: essay as the primary form of our artistic video output,
Speaker 2: and there's a lot of good video essays out there,
Speaker 2: but at a certain point it started to feel like
Speaker 2: the main way a young, radical queer person could engage
Speaker 2: with the art form. It's gotten to feel so insular
Speaker 2: and a bit restrictive, like we're enforcing our own bubble.
Speaker 2: On top of this self limiting aspect, I'm not even
Speaker 2: sure how much growth the format even has Anymore. Recently,
Speaker 2: I've begun to see more queer artists specifically trying to
Speaker 2: make things outside the strict video essay framework. Even some
Speaker 2: of the most popular trans video essay creators have been
Speaker 2: trying to move into documentary and narrative film making. I
Speaker 2: asked Ella about moving beyond the video essay bubble because
Speaker 2: although Late Stage Live does it air on YouTube as
Speaker 2: well as Brooklyn Public Access, the format is not just
Speaker 2: your average transgender video essay.
Speaker 3: We don't have any pink lighting at all. Yeah, it's
Speaker 3: definitely something I've been thinking about a lot, both like
Speaker 3: in my own personal career and for the show. A
Speaker 3: lot of my bylines in the last few years are
Speaker 3: all YouTube based with late stage and some more news,
Speaker 3: and it's frustrating that even as YouTube has seen so
Speaker 3: much growth, and like celebrities come from YouTube all the
Speaker 3: time and some of the biggest names in the world.
Speaker 5: Are Internet stars.
Speaker 3: Now, there's still like the sense of illegitimacy to be
Speaker 3: doing a project on YouTube, and like when I try
Speaker 3: and get published in like more legitimate journalism magazines every
Speaker 3: so often, I'm always looking at my resume and being like,
Speaker 3: I wish I had like a byline in a magazine
Speaker 3: instead of three years of writing for a YouTube show
Speaker 3: that I love so much and think is doing better
Speaker 3: works than most of these magazines, but like that I
Speaker 3: know won't get treated the same. So there's definitely an
Speaker 3: aspect to that that I think. Yeah, like it's partly
Speaker 3: YouTube is so accessible anyone can post on YouTube that
Speaker 3: I understand why queer people have sort of relegated themselves
Speaker 3: to this bubble. Trans people wrote like why we've ended
Speaker 3: up with like you know, the trans video essay scene,
Speaker 3: thank you Mother Natalie. But it makes it hard to
Speaker 3: sort of break into this like final frontier of legitimacy,
Speaker 3: I think, and I think by like, yeah, like not
Speaker 3: fully committing ourselves to being a YouTube show from the
Speaker 3: get go, we do sort of leave doors open to
Speaker 3: be considered like a more legitimate television production, which is
Speaker 3: exciting for like growth opportunities. I think the live studio
Speaker 3: audience also really pushes us out of that zone. We
Speaker 3: get a lot of accusations from people who are mean
Speaker 3: on the Internet of using a laugh track, and I
Speaker 3: just want to say, and I will say it till
Speaker 3: the day I die, It would be so much easier
Speaker 3: if we were.
Speaker 2: I could totally tell when there's gay people laughing the
Speaker 2: background versus a laugh track. It's a very clear difference. Absolutely.
Speaker 3: It would be so easy if I was just plugging
Speaker 3: that in in posts.
Speaker 6: But no.
Speaker 3: We bring in thirty thirty five Gaze every month just
Speaker 3: to laugh at my jokes, and sometimes they don't. And
Speaker 3: you can see that too when they don't laugh at
Speaker 3: my jokes. But I think that is something I was
Speaker 3: really excited to do. That is different from a lot
Speaker 3: of the other video essay sphere because it also brings
Speaker 3: in aspects of live performance that I love as a
Speaker 3: stand up and as a theater artist. And also like, yeah,
Speaker 3: just pulls it into like a slightly different genre of
Speaker 3: thing that we're making, and I think certainly in terms
Speaker 3: of like growth and audience building and like the potential
Speaker 3: of being picked up by some larger organization. It definitely
Speaker 3: puts us in like a different It makes us look
Speaker 3: slightly different than like a YouTube show, even if we
Speaker 3: can all like sort of quietly acknowledge, like, well, what
Speaker 3: all of our growth is happening on YouTube and Instagram?
Speaker 3: But like, as you said, like Real Late Night is
Speaker 3: huge on YouTube now too, and there's all these other
Speaker 3: extra correlating factors of like monetization on YouTube sort of
Speaker 3: died a few years ago after the ad apocalypse or whatever,
Speaker 3: and you have to go through crowdfunding sources like Patreon
Speaker 3: or sponsorships or x Otherwise, like there's not like you can't.
Speaker 2: Nebula or whatever new streaming service for YouTube pops up.
Speaker 3: Yeah, right, you can't just rely on ad sense anymore,
Speaker 3: and that's frustrating in its own degree. But I think
Speaker 3: even beyond that, Yeah, like not relegating ourselves to being
Speaker 3: a YouTube show, both thematically and like concretely in terms
Speaker 3: of content and form is like really exciting. And I
Speaker 3: think like, even as we grow and gain a budget
Speaker 3: and are able to buy nicer cameras, we want to
Speaker 3: like keep the aesthetics and vibe of like edgy radical
Speaker 3: public access because it's like a part of the voice
Speaker 3: of the show along with sort of the practicalities.
Speaker 2: Yeah, having background ketamine jokes, I think really is right
Speaker 2: sets you apart the quote.
Speaker 3: Unquote VHS cleaner that sits on the desk every episode.
Speaker 3: I don't own a VHS.
Speaker 2: We will return to it could happen here after these
Speaker 2: messag we now return to It could happen here. To me,
Speaker 2: the most exciting thing about the idea of a new
Speaker 2: wave of independent trans cinema is that we'll get to
Speaker 2: see a whole bunch of trans films that otherwise would
Speaker 2: never get made by the big studios. After trans filmmaker
Speaker 2: Jane Shanbron's successful festival run of her small scale future
Speaker 2: debut titled We're All Going to the World's Fair back
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty one, Her next film, called I Saw
Speaker 2: the TV Glow, got picked up by Emma Stone's production
Speaker 2: company and a twenty four The film is now coming
Speaker 2: out later this month. In the case of the People's Joker,
Speaker 2: it dares to take Warner Brothers and Disney at their
Speaker 2: word that their privately owned intellectual property is in fact
Speaker 2: our culture's version of mythology, our very own Greek gods.
Speaker 2: And so if these characters really are the cultural icon
Speaker 2: that the monopolized companies who own them claim them to be,
Speaker 2: what happens when we actually do treat them like mythology
Speaker 2: and use these characters to artistically mythologize our own lives
Speaker 2: By skillfully sidestepping copyright law via effective legal parody, we
Speaker 2: get to have a Batman film through the lens of
Speaker 2: transgender chaos magic, which I'm afraid would simply never happen
Speaker 2: under Warner Brothers Discovery, as they can't even stop deleting
Speaker 2: their own finished films to get tax write offs. A
Speaker 2: few weeks ago, I showed my it could happen here
Speaker 2: co host Mia Wong the People's Joker, and afterwards we
Speaker 2: talked about what makes it feel so special and it's
Speaker 2: placed within the pantheon of queer cinema.
Speaker 8: One of my dear friends, Vicky Asturweil, is writing a
Speaker 8: book called The Extended Universe about sort of copyright law
Speaker 8: and what's done to film and specifically focusing on on
Speaker 8: Disney and the thing that's different about The People's Joker. Right,
Speaker 8: if you want to know why the People's Joker is
Speaker 8: you know why specifically you couldn't make this. It's partially
Speaker 8: because it's trans and it's partially because it's actually a movie. Yes,
Speaker 8: because and then this is this is this is this
Speaker 8: is Vicky's argument, you know, and this is this is
Speaker 8: the hidden truth about the film industry is that movies
Speaker 8: are not designed to sell movies.
Speaker 2: No, they're designed to send copyright.
Speaker 5: No.
Speaker 8: No, it's it's worse than that. Like, a superhero movie
Speaker 8: does not make money on the movie, right, The movie
Speaker 8: theater is not making money on the movie. The movie
Speaker 8: theater is making money on food the company itself. That's
Speaker 8: not where the money comes from. The money comes from
Speaker 8: toy sales, yeah, and sales of stuff afterwards. Right, So
Speaker 8: what you're actually seeing when you're seeing a superhero movie
Speaker 8: is just an ad And this is Yeah, and this
Speaker 8: is part of what the people's joker is that makes
Speaker 8: it different, right, And you know, and it's because, like specifically,
Speaker 8: because it is trans and because of the way that
Speaker 8: is trans this makes it impossible for its being made
Speaker 8: by corporation, and because trans people fought to make it,
Speaker 8: it gets to be an actual movie and not a
Speaker 8: fucking toy sales thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because they're not going to be making a toy
Speaker 2: of mustache pedophile batman.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Right, And this is incredibly important for the genre of
Speaker 8: film because you know, I mean, there is a world
Speaker 8: that is not too far off where we are the
Speaker 8: last people making actual fucking films and not advertisements.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 8: To use this sort of like only semi ironically, using
Speaker 8: this sort of lofty like Marxist language is like, yeah,
Speaker 8: like we kind of also have been given the historical
Speaker 8: task of saving film from its complete annihilation by these
Speaker 8: fucking capitalist copyright gouals. It's a pleasure to see. It's
Speaker 8: a joy to see. I think I was reading an
Speaker 8: interesting article recently that talked about how trans media's orientation
Speaker 8: has been very referential. It's been very much based on
Speaker 8: experiences that trans people have as kids, engaging with media,
Speaker 8: whether that's with something like Buffy the Vampires Layer, whether
Speaker 8: that's with DC comics, and it's because transness is so
Speaker 8: much about recontextualizing your whole life and identity. A lot
Speaker 8: of trans media has also been about this form of recontextualization,
Speaker 8: both with I think The People's Joker is a great
Speaker 8: example also, uh uh, the upcoming film I Saw The
Speaker 8: TV Glow, which is very much based on like Buffy
Speaker 8: and other and other kind of like Monster of the
Speaker 8: Week title TV shows. It's combining all of that kind
Speaker 8: of stuff with a lot of lynching influences, both both
Speaker 8: in these cases, both in The People's Joker and in
Speaker 8: I Saw The TV Glow to create this like fever
Speaker 8: dream of self identity in this referential format, and that's
Speaker 8: been an interesting trend to watch in trans cinema, and
Speaker 8: I think that's that's something that's something to look I
Speaker 8: think that's something to look for when you're engaging with
Speaker 8: future trans cinema projects, seeing if those kind of things
Speaker 8: pop up and if and if they don't, why is
Speaker 8: that what else is actually happening instead? I think those
Speaker 8: are gonna be some interesting interesting ways to uh engage
Speaker 8: with our own diy art in the next decade here,
Speaker 8: because as much as like everything we talk about is
Speaker 8: so like depressing, like on this show, like about how
Speaker 8: everything dealing with like trends stuff is about how everyone's
Speaker 8: trying to like kill us and restrict our medical care,
Speaker 8: that does not actually stop us from becoming people who
Speaker 8: actually engage with culture in any real sense. I think
Speaker 8: despite everything that's targeted against trans people, it does not
Speaker 8: stop us from actually having a cultural output. And the
Speaker 8: thing a lot of conservatives are afraid of is our
Speaker 8: cultural output. The fact that trans people keep being actually
Speaker 8: really compelling artists and really really compelling people in general
Speaker 8: makes conservatives service. I don't think it's impossible for conservatives
Speaker 8: to make art.
Speaker 2: I think there is conservative art that actually can be
Speaker 2: seen as like okay art, But they certainly are afraid
Speaker 2: at how good trans people are at making music and
Speaker 2: now making movies. When I was talking with me, she
Speaker 2: brought up a good point that all paraphrase here. Part
Speaker 2: of why we're seeing this new wave of independent transcinema
Speaker 2: is the result of a combination of two things. One
Speaker 2: is that trans and queer artists have been and continue
Speaker 2: to be chewed up and spat out by the traditional
Speaker 2: media machine, and two, the traditional media machine itself is
Speaker 2: slowly rotting from the inside, which can be a tricky
Speaker 2: situation to navigate for a lot of queer artists. But simultaneously,
Speaker 2: it also means that we're in this position, we're having
Speaker 2: been spat out, we have full rain to go make
Speaker 2: our own, massive, grotesque, degenerate queer art on our own,
Speaker 2: because there simply is no artistic alternative. Trans people need
Speaker 2: to be submitting to film festivals regardless of whether or
Speaker 2: not CIS viewers and critics will understand the work. Filmmaking
Speaker 2: is one of those art forms that you can't really
Speaker 2: do all by yourself, but that doesn't need to be
Speaker 2: a limitation. That can be an asset. Gay people are
Speaker 2: good at a lot of different things, and filmmaking integrates
Speaker 2: so many different artistic areas and skills, and as we've seen,
Speaker 2: a movie made by a community of queers can create
Speaker 2: such a unique result. When talking with Vera Drew, she
Speaker 2: mentioned that having a whole team of artists help her
Speaker 2: complete the movie is also in part what ensured that
Speaker 2: she would find a way for the film to be
Speaker 2: distributed the right way so that it's seen up on
Speaker 2: the big screen and not just published online for free.
Speaker 7: You know. That was another thing that really kind of
Speaker 7: kept me from doing anything irrational with the film, like
Speaker 7: posting it on Google Drive with contribution to like a
Speaker 7: donation link or whatever. It was like like I have
Speaker 7: all these artists that just worked on this movie with
Speaker 7: me for two and a half years, and like, no,
Speaker 7: we're gonna fucking do this, Like I said I would
Speaker 7: do this, and I'm gonna do this cause like I
Speaker 7: can't just like feed this back into the incubator and
Speaker 7: the fucking feedback loop of trans Twitter and like cool
Speaker 7: underground circles that I totally love to be a part of,
Speaker 7: but we're all trying to, you know, get more visibility
Speaker 7: outside of those things. So yeah, I always really just
Speaker 7: wanted to honor that, honor the team and make everybody
Speaker 7: feel valued, and you know, I paid as many people
Speaker 7: as I could, and you know, was very str forward
Speaker 7: about what I could afford, and a lot of people
Speaker 7: worked in ways that they just felt compensated and that
Speaker 7: was very appreciated. You know, I think in general, like
Speaker 7: everybody on this was very underpaid, but like it was
Speaker 7: such a labor of love and such like a a
Speaker 7: personal thing for for all of us that everybody just
Speaker 7: like showed up and really rallied around each other and
Speaker 7: really just kept saying yes and to everything, and it's
Speaker 7: so cool. I don't I don't know how I'll ever
Speaker 7: really be able to replicate. I don't think I should either,
Speaker 7: just because it's it was it was quite a Gargantiouan task,
Speaker 7: but you know, it was. It was literally the best
Speaker 7: time of my life was was making this movie. Like
Speaker 7: I think it really it taught me just how to
Speaker 7: be a human being and how to love and how
Speaker 7: to like finally feel connected to my to my queer community,
Speaker 7: because I think like the People's Jokers really more than anything,
Speaker 7: it's really about nuance and like relationships and family and politics,
Speaker 7: and it talks about nuance by really leaning into these
Speaker 7: like extremes, which I think just is also inherently queer,
Speaker 7: and I don't know, I mean, that's to me, is
Speaker 7: like another thing. It's just like I hope and there's
Speaker 7: a lot of trance filmmakers that are like starting to
Speaker 7: pop up in the genre space, but like I hope
Speaker 7: we see more of it, just because like we all
Speaker 7: grew up on the same movies that Sis people did,
Speaker 7: so like, why can't we make similar art, you know,
Speaker 7: and tell our stories in the process, and also do
Speaker 7: it in a way that's like not hiding in the shadows.
Speaker 2: The People's Joker is slowly ending. It's us theatrical run,
Speaker 2: but you can still look for tickets and show times
Speaker 2: at The People's Joker dot com and you can find
Speaker 2: Vera Drew online at Vera Drew twenty two. Late Stage
Speaker 2: Live just released their sixth episode and I'm really excited
Speaker 2: to see how the show will grow and evolve over time.
Speaker 3: And we've actually recently hit an inflection point with the
Speaker 3: show where like the sort of organic, haphazard growth is
Speaker 3: no longer sustainable for us. We've been having a lot
Speaker 3: of really exciting and scary conversations behind the scenes about
Speaker 3: like formalizing our production process and kicking our shit up
Speaker 3: a notch so that we have the potential to make
Speaker 3: this bigger and better and more polished. But it is
Speaker 3: at its core still like a production born out of
Speaker 3: community and like mutual respect. I'm Ella Yeerman. You can
Speaker 3: find me on Instagram at La dot Yeerman, on x
Speaker 3: dot com at Ella Yeerman. I think I'm on Blue Sky. Also,
Speaker 3: though I don't do anything there. You can find Late
Speaker 3: Stage Live as Late Sailers Live on all platforms. That's Instagram,
Speaker 3: x YouTube, TikTok probably also Blue Sky, but those are
Speaker 3: the big ones. And then if you're interested in finding
Speaker 3: my stand up show, we're at T four T Comedy
Speaker 3: on Instagram and x oh. And then most specifically, if
Speaker 3: you're interested in helping fun blade stage and make us
Speaker 3: bigger and better and shinier, you can go to patreon
Speaker 3: dot com slash Late Stage Live, where we post. Yeah,
Speaker 3: we have a behind the scenes photos and videos, and
Speaker 3: we make a semi frequent podcast where my head writer
Speaker 3: and I talk about the news and shoot the ship
Speaker 3: and talk about the process and a lot more detail
Speaker 3: episode by episode. And we're so grateful for our current
Speaker 3: patrons and for opportunities like this, and we're excited to
Speaker 3: see where the show.
Speaker 2: Goes that doesn't for us, and it could happen here.
Speaker 2: I hope you enjoyed my Transformers and g I Joe
Speaker 2: ad Break references, and if not, you can send any
Speaker 2: complaints to the President of Columbia University. Solidarity to everyone
Speaker 2: across the country who's been out the past few weeks,
Speaker 2: see you on the other side.
Speaker 8: Welcome to take it up. And here a podcast that
Speaker 8: is I don't know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna. I'm gonna
Speaker 8: speak for the rest of my hosts who aren't here
Speaker 8: so they can't stop me and say that this is
Speaker 8: a podcast normally opposed to brunch. I'm your host, Mia Wong,
Speaker 8: and today we are talking about some that we kind
Speaker 8: of haven't been covered, we haven't covered as much as
Speaker 8: I think we should have, which is unionization in small businesses.
Speaker 8: We've talked a lot about unization and sort of larger things.
Speaker 8: We've talked about sort of mid mid sized chains. But
Speaker 8: today we're talking about the unionization of a place called
Speaker 8: Friday Egg I'm in Love in Portland's which it's it's
Speaker 8: if you sort of imagine the platonic ideal of what
Speaker 8: do you think a place called Friday Egg I'm in
Speaker 8: Love is going to be? Like it is in fact
Speaker 8: that And with me to talk about this is Soul
Speaker 8: and Janey from the Friday Egg Workers Union. Yeah, both
Speaker 8: of you, welcome to the show.
Speaker 9: Thank you so much.
Speaker 5: Yeah, thanks for having us.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I'm excited to talk about this partially, you know,
Speaker 8: I mean as as we've sort of discussed a little bit,
Speaker 8: because I want to get into a bit later the
Speaker 8: specific dynamics of sort of small business union stuff. But
Speaker 8: first things first, I wanted to sort of talk about what, actually,
Speaker 8: you know, how did you all decide to unionize, because
Speaker 8: I think this is a bit different story than the
Speaker 8: kind of thing we usually get on this show.
Speaker 9: Absolutely well, I've been at this particular restaurant since twenty
Speaker 9: nineteen and it's been something that's come up every now
Speaker 9: and then. I think we're just a very queer workplace.
Speaker 9: We're a very leftist workplace, and we tend to have
Speaker 9: a lot of common ideals. And I feel like what
Speaker 9: makes our unionization effort unique or maybe not unique, but
Speaker 9: just different than a lot of like we need to
Speaker 9: start a union right now kind of efforts is there
Speaker 9: wasn't a thing that caused it. We were all, like
Speaker 9: me and five other people were just sitting around a
Speaker 9: table and decided, Hey, we should just start a union,
Speaker 9: and so we kind of looked into what that looks
Speaker 9: like and the snowball started rolling downhill.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and this is something I think is really interesting
Speaker 8: because you know, I mean one of the things you
Speaker 8: get really commonly in sort of like anti new propaganda.
Speaker 8: You see this, like I so a lot of my
Speaker 8: family were engineers, right, and engineers do this all the
Speaker 8: time where they're like, oh, we don't need a union.
Speaker 8: We're like happy, we're well paid, everything's great. And then
Speaker 8: you know, you look at you, you look at what
Speaker 8: happens to them, and it's like, oh, well now you
Speaker 8: have boeing Right, It's like, well, you you will, you will,
Speaker 8: you will never organize, you no longer have any power,
Speaker 8: and your planes are like falling from the sky. So yeah,
Speaker 8: this this is a I'm gonna I'm taking this, taking
Speaker 8: my soapbox moment to be like you two out there,
Speaker 8: even if your job is good, at some point it's
Speaker 8: going to not be and you should unionize first before
Speaker 8: they I don't know, like be google and decide that
Speaker 8: I don't be evil actually constrains them from making money
Speaker 8: and decide to be evil, So get get out ahead
Speaker 8: of them before.
Speaker 9: Couldn't agree more absolutely, this has felt very, very proactive.
Speaker 10: I haven't been there nearly nearly as long as some
Speaker 10: of my comrades, but the general like consensus is that
Speaker 10: like things are pretty good. So instead of letting things
Speaker 10: go bad, let's let's make you know, major steps to
Speaker 10: protect what we have, especially as like you kind of
Speaker 10: notice how this small business is slowly, slowly starting to
Speaker 10: operate like not a small business mm hm.
Speaker 9: And we had a one of our food carts was
Speaker 9: upgraded to a brick and mortar at the beginning of
Speaker 9: this year, and pretty much in that in that moment
Speaker 9: that that started operating as a real restaurant, it things
Speaker 9: really clearly I think started setting in that like that
Speaker 9: this is a bigger operation than it used to be,
Speaker 9: and they very like the owner very much still has
Speaker 9: the intention of making it as good of a place
Speaker 9: to work as he can, which is to be appreciated.
Speaker 9: But it's also understandable that as things start to grow,
Speaker 9: it's a lot better if it's a collaborative process in
Speaker 9: terms of making it the best place to work that
Speaker 9: it can be. And I think getting a seat at
Speaker 9: the table is something that we have to make for ourselves,
Speaker 9: but it doesn't necessarily have to be a threat or
Speaker 9: a retaliation.
Speaker 8: This is something I think is kind of important with unionizing,
Speaker 8: especially places that are kind of you know, like or
Speaker 8: you know, we're even where the sort of the boss
Speaker 8: is legitimately trying to like do the right thing, which
Speaker 8: like it's kind of true of like my work, right,
Speaker 8: like you know, like the people above my bosses are
Speaker 8: kind of a fiasco, but like my immediate like bosses
Speaker 8: are like you know, it's Robert and Sophie, right, Like
Speaker 8: they're pretty chill. But you know, like one of the
Speaker 8: dynamics that sets in is like you know, it's not
Speaker 8: what the actual conditions are, isn't necessarily always going to
Speaker 8: be under their control, even if you know, like even
Speaker 8: if they want to do the right thing, and the
Speaker 8: demands of things like scale and you know, the demands
Speaker 8: of sort of market competition have this sort of disciplining
Speaker 8: effect on what, you know, like what what your working
Speaker 8: conditions can be if you're going to sort of compete
Speaker 8: with like I don't know, you're your like doughnut shop
Speaker 8: that like torches is union workers.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 8: You know for example, Yeah, yeah, pure purely abstract.
Speaker 10: Purely abstract. Yeah, absolutely, you know, seeing a shop of
Speaker 10: you know, twelve become you know, two shops, a food
Speaker 10: cart and a commissary kitchen of thirty five. But definitely,
Speaker 10: you know, it's just pushing the business in a direction
Speaker 10: very naturally. It feels very much like a part of
Speaker 10: how systems work, even if our even if your owner
Speaker 10: has really good intentions, just the nature of how capitalism
Speaker 10: works is starts to change things as Yeah at scale
Speaker 10: for sure.
Speaker 8: Yeah, And that that gets into something else that I'm
Speaker 8: sort of interested in how the sort of unionizing process went,
Speaker 8: because this is a very I mean, I guess going
Speaker 8: from twelve to thirty five is a big increase in
Speaker 8: the number of people, but that's still a very small shop.
Speaker 8: So can you talk a bit about what it's been
Speaker 8: like kind of organizing in you know, I mean organizing
Speaker 8: a number of people that you can very easily fit
Speaker 8: into a room.
Speaker 9: It's been interesting and it's been exciting in that way
Speaker 9: because we are able to cram into a room and
Speaker 9: the energy is very palpable and so like inspiring momentum
Speaker 9: to get shit done in each other has been really
Speaker 9: really wonderful in that way. But I think also it's
Speaker 9: it makes it easy for us to be very tactical
Speaker 9: with how we are handling this process, where we're making
Speaker 9: sure that at all four locations there's a majority, if
Speaker 9: not unanimous approval and support and membership in the union.
Speaker 9: And the more that the more that I'm meeting union
Speaker 9: organizers and union reps and people from IWW, the more
Speaker 9: that I'm realizing we're in a situation where we can
Speaker 9: establish some really lovely precedent for similar workplaces who want
Speaker 9: to start a union, who are about the same size
Speaker 9: as us, or even like neighbors in our like on
Speaker 9: the on the streets that are locations are at where
Speaker 9: we can do things like there's not enough precedent in
Speaker 9: the IWW for a service industry in general, but particularly
Speaker 9: it's it's very common to be in the negotiating process
Speaker 9: and one of the things that will be offered to
Speaker 9: the employer in exchange for whatever you're negotiating on is
Speaker 9: like a no strike clause, like okay, we'll just we'll
Speaker 9: give this to you of like we're just not gonna
Speaker 9: be able just to strike for the duration of our contract,
Speaker 9: and so in exchange we can get some other stuff
Speaker 9: that we're asking for. But because we have such a
Speaker 9: strong majority, and in all four locations we have a
Speaker 9: strong majority, I think we're currently planning on keeping the
Speaker 9: right to strike. Hell yeah, and you know we're not
Speaker 9: planning on it. I hope that we don't ever have
Speaker 9: to do that, but just having that as precedent I
Speaker 9: think will help our community and other similar unions.
Speaker 8: Yeah, absolutely, I think. You know, this is something that
Speaker 8: going back to if you look at the sort of
Speaker 8: heyday of American unionism, if you look at like the
Speaker 8: fifties sixty seventies, like those contracts didn't have no strike
Speaker 8: clauses in them. Some of them did, so sometimes it
Speaker 8: was like a federal thing. But the thing about no
Speaker 8: strike clauses is that it makes you know, we've talked
Speaker 8: about this a bit before on the show, but one
Speaker 8: of the sort of issues when you have a union
Speaker 8: is like, okay, see, even if you get a contract right,
Speaker 8: and that usually takes that takes a long time, takes
Speaker 8: a lot of fighting, the company is immediately going to
Speaker 8: start trying to violate the contract. And so you know,
Speaker 8: your contract is only as strong as your ability to
Speaker 8: enforce it. And you know, one of a really really
Speaker 8: good way to enforce it is by being able to
Speaker 8: go on strike. But normally, like yeah, people aren't organized
Speaker 8: enough to actually like fight their employers on it, and
Speaker 8: so it just ends up being a kind of standard
Speaker 8: part of contracts, And yeah, it's really exciting that y'all
Speaker 8: are committing to fight for that from the beginning, because
Speaker 8: it's it's it's hard, it's it's not it's not an
Speaker 8: easy thing to do.
Speaker 9: Now, the more I learn about how unions operate, the
Speaker 9: more I'm realizing that, you know, it doesn't necessarily stop
Speaker 9: people from getting fired, it doesn't necessarily stop people from having,
Speaker 9: you know, injustice happened upon them. But it just gives
Speaker 9: you the ability to fight in the first place. And
Speaker 9: I think a lot of employers who are facing a
Speaker 9: workplace who are wanting to unionize like recognizing that it's
Speaker 9: it's it's not like a threat. It's not like, Okay,
Speaker 9: we're uh, we're going to have this union and everyone's
Speaker 9: going to go on strike the next day and our
Speaker 9: business is going to tank.
Speaker 7: But it's they're just.
Speaker 9: Asking for the right to to have a better negotiating seat.
Speaker 8: Yeah, this is something I actually think it's really interesting
Speaker 8: about this campaign where there's this really kind of I
Speaker 8: don't know, I think if you're able to build a
Speaker 8: precedent of being able to negotiate a contract that doesn't
Speaker 8: have no strike clause, that allows you to go on
Speaker 8: strike whatever you know, whenever you want is something that
Speaker 8: is like characteristic of liking of you know, of a
Speaker 8: of an incredibly militant shop. But I think if you can,
Speaker 8: if you can actually get the precedent of you know,
Speaker 8: having companies treat this as normal, because it's something that
Speaker 8: should be normal, right like this, this is how a
Speaker 8: lot of the US used to work, right it used
Speaker 8: to be. If you were on like an auto line
Speaker 8: assembly line, there'd be there be a guy in a
Speaker 8: back with a whistle. And if and if you know,
Speaker 8: if a contract violation happened, or like you know, if
Speaker 8: if the company is asking you to do something that
Speaker 8: you aren't you know that you're not like contractually obligated
Speaker 8: to do, the person would you know, the union person
Speaker 8: would blow the whistle, immediate strike, the entire assembly line
Speaker 8: goes down, and you know it turns out you actually
Speaker 8: can run a completely functional like economy like this. But
Speaker 8: the kind of the mentality of the people who own
Speaker 8: who own businesses right now is that you should never
Speaker 8: at any point, like you know, you should never at
Speaker 8: any point let your workers do anything at all. You
Speaker 8: should immediately fight them at the moment they try to
Speaker 8: unionize and I think you know, having a president of
Speaker 8: like you know, of of being able to get this
Speaker 8: kind of stuff without immediately having to launch like you know,
Speaker 8: like I immediately kick off a series of stricture with
Speaker 8: your employer. Is is a good one? Is a good
Speaker 8: one to set.
Speaker 10: That we have so many people that are super interested
Speaker 10: in like being a part of this organizing effort because
Speaker 10: because we all like being there, like is I think
Speaker 10: is huge in comparison to like lots of stories that
Speaker 10: we hear about and yeah, really wanting to like bring
Speaker 10: that to the restaurant industry because yeah, that's unions are
Speaker 10: you know, criminally under recognized within service work. Yeah, and
Speaker 10: arguably an industry that needs it the most.
Speaker 5: Yep, yep.
Speaker 8: Well, and that's the other exciting thing about this shop
Speaker 8: is that you know, you're talking about sort of like
Speaker 8: they're not being enough service organizing with it with the IWW.
Speaker 8: And that's true of like basically all unions because and
Speaker 8: especially shops at your scale, because you know, a lot
Speaker 8: of these unions are using like a very kind of
Speaker 8: crude cross cost benefit analysis and their their assessment is like, well,
Speaker 8: why should we bother to organize like this shop that
Speaker 8: has thirty five people at it, because you know, this
Speaker 8: is going to like where we're like the amount of
Speaker 8: dues money we're going to get out of it is
Speaker 8: like not you know, is not is not worth the effort.
Speaker 8: But on the other hand, you know, like do you
Speaker 8: know how many workers there are, like how many of
Speaker 8: these like how many of these tiny shops across the
Speaker 8: there are across the entire country that if you know,
Speaker 8: and if everyone just refuses to organize them, then you're
Speaker 8: leaving like tens of millions of workers just sort of
Speaker 8: like screwed.
Speaker 10: Yeah. I can't speak for all IWW, but I know,
Speaker 10: like talking with like the Portland branch, it definitely mirrors
Speaker 10: our shop and at like how queer and leftist it is.
Speaker 10: And is that surprising that they're working with the IWW
Speaker 10: or with the Coalition of Independent Unions which is a
Speaker 10: Pacific Northwest like union for unions kind of thing. It's
Speaker 10: not surprising that like our values are aligned and it's
Speaker 10: like making making for something like really fun and like
Speaker 10: you know, setting a new kind of industry standard for
Speaker 10: service industry.
Speaker 8: Yeah, unfortunately, speaking of industry standards, I have to go
Speaker 8: to an ad break. It's in my contract somewhere, probably,
Speaker 8: though I don't think my employers have read my contract
Speaker 8: in a long time. But you know, such are the
Speaker 8: dictates of a podcast that you're that your senior bosses
Speaker 8: don't listen to. Yeah, we will return in however long
Speaker 8: the ads are and we are back, so.
Speaker 7: Okay.
Speaker 11: Another thing that I kind of wanted to talk about
Speaker 11: is what has it sort of been like in terms
Speaker 11: of like, you know, so like, how has you know,
Speaker 11: in a shop that's like this small, how has the
Speaker 11: sort of like organizing conversations gone right, Like is everyone
Speaker 11: just sort of close enough that you know, you were
Speaker 11: able to kind of do this organically, or was there
Speaker 11: still sort of a like mapping process for all of
Speaker 11: the shops or.
Speaker 9: Well, luckily it has gone pretty smoothly. But we were
Speaker 9: advised early on to create an interest map where we
Speaker 9: go through the list of every coworker that we have
Speaker 9: and talk about like how well do we know them?
Speaker 9: Do we think they would be down? Like, well, this
Speaker 9: person would obviously be down. This person, I guess we'll
Speaker 9: just have to talk to them and see and apart
Speaker 9: from a few cases, it has been very successful and
Speaker 9: easy so far. It's really lucky that almost all of
Speaker 9: our coworkers are comrades.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 10: I think like our first like conversation was I think
Speaker 10: about ten people at like a bar close to like
Speaker 10: the main Hawthorn shop, and like once we had like
Speaker 10: that get together. Yeah, it really became about like, you know,
Speaker 10: how do we get our satellite locations, you know, on
Speaker 10: this on the same page, you know, with like a
Speaker 10: super majority at one shop, you know, then just moving
Speaker 10: on to you know our little you know, the Pioneer
Speaker 10: food cart and then our Commissary kitchen and then the
Speaker 10: Mississippi location. That was just you know, hiring a whole
Speaker 10: new staff for and you know, getting them in, you know,
Speaker 10: collecting them into the fold. And yeah, iww was very
Speaker 10: helpful and like how to like kind of create those
Speaker 10: processes to like ensure that you know, we were approaching
Speaker 10: people in the right way. And yeah, have it getting
Speaker 10: a proper headcount?
Speaker 8: Yeah that can be a disaster. Yeah, oh god, Like
Speaker 8: my union, we're still trying to hash out whether some
Speaker 8: people are in the union or not, and like people
Speaker 8: will leave the company. Then this happens all the time, right,
Speaker 8: Like one of the things you discovered really quickly when
Speaker 8: you need a union organizing is that your like management
Speaker 8: doesn't actually know how anything works, or like even who's
Speaker 8: working for them and what they do. They have absolutely
Speaker 8: no idea, and so you have to do their job
Speaker 8: and figure out what everyone does.
Speaker 10: What management would be so mad at you for saying blasphemy.
Speaker 8: You know, look if they if they did, if they
Speaker 8: didn't want me to talk negatively about they should pay
Speaker 8: me more. They simply do not pay any of us enough.
Speaker 8: That's not the universal from time to time. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 8: but I think that you know what's interesting about this
Speaker 8: shop too, is it really seems like y'all just sort
Speaker 8: of speed ran doing a good campaign, Like you're doing
Speaker 8: all of the things that you gif of good organizers.
Speaker 8: But then you know, every once in a while you
Speaker 8: just get a shop where it's just kind of everything
Speaker 8: just clicks and goes.
Speaker 9: It has been five months start to finish, which I
Speaker 9: feel like is significantly faster than most. Yeah, most of
Speaker 9: that is just down to that there aren't very many
Speaker 9: of us, and so talking to everyone hasn't been that
Speaker 9: crazy of an endeavor.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but.
Speaker 9: I think probably in the first meeting or two, we
Speaker 9: just crunch the numbers and realized, Okay, we're not going
Speaker 9: to have any trouble having a majority, but we have to.
Speaker 9: And so the focus of our work went into making
Speaker 9: sure we do it right, and learning to inoculate people
Speaker 9: and talk to people we haven't talked to yet and
Speaker 9: people for whom it would be a little more sensitive
Speaker 9: or more like in depth conversation, and educating ourselves on
Speaker 9: what starting a union actually looks like. And i WW
Speaker 9: has been very helpful providing these little trainings that I've
Speaker 9: been able to go to. It's funny is that they're
Speaker 9: on Sunday afternoons, and so I'm pretty sure I'm the
Speaker 9: only person at our brunch restaurant who doesn't work Sunday afternoons,
Speaker 9: so I've been going to those.
Speaker 8: But yeah, this is something that like, I don't know,
Speaker 8: I feel like it should be a thing that so
Speaker 8: I was at this will I guess we'll have come
Speaker 8: out after the Labor Dights episode that I'm doing. But
Speaker 8: something that I feel like I don't hear much discussion
Speaker 8: of in union organizing that I feel like there should
Speaker 8: be is like fighting management on scheduling and like trying
Speaker 8: to fight for you know, people actually a having consistent
Speaker 8: schedules and b not just having like I don't know,
Speaker 8: Like I know a lot of people who find out
Speaker 8: their schedule on Facebook, like four hours before they have
Speaker 8: to go in, right, Like, that's insane. That is that
Speaker 8: is not a way for industrial process to function.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 10: No, thankfully that has not been one of our issues
Speaker 10: at least at least not systemically at Ridick.
Speaker 8: Yeah, but but it does make it hard to do
Speaker 8: intro organizational trainings because it's like everyone has weird scheduling
Speaker 8: stuff going on, so it's it's hard to like, I
Speaker 8: don't know, I feel like it's it's an underrated barrier
Speaker 8: to getting a lot of people from different unions to
Speaker 8: work together. Is that no one is ever off at
Speaker 8: the same time.
Speaker 9: That's real.
Speaker 10: Yeah, absolutely, I know it's been it weird. I think
Speaker 10: they're a huge aspect of our success I think is
Speaker 10: that we have been able to like I think the
Speaker 10: unique part about the breakfast Place is that it's not
Speaker 10: open from you know, am to PM. It's not open
Speaker 10: from ten am to eleven pm, like like a restaurant
Speaker 10: could potentially be open. We are open for breakfast. We're
Speaker 10: done at too on the weekdays and adding in a
Speaker 10: standing union meeting at four pm once a week was
Speaker 10: very easy to add to everybody's schedule, I think, I
Speaker 10: think and the nature of the breakfast place led to
Speaker 10: that working very very easily.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and our coworkers that maybe need a little more
Speaker 9: persuasion that like, hey, no, don't worry this is this
Speaker 9: is really happening, and you can be a part of it,
Speaker 9: even if you know that their pro union. Kind of
Speaker 9: getting the ball rolling with people sometimes takes a meeting
Speaker 9: or two and being able to have the peer pressure
Speaker 9: of like, hey, we're going into a meeting right now.
Speaker 9: I know you're not doing anything after this, and I'll
Speaker 9: give you a ride helps a lot because then they
Speaker 9: go to their meeting and they're like, wow, that was awesome.
Speaker 9: I never knew I could take control of my life
Speaker 9: in any way.
Speaker 8: Yeah, that rules. There really is nothing like just being
Speaker 8: in a place with a bunch of people who all
Speaker 8: are trying to like actually do the thing, like you know,
Speaker 8: I mean, I think this is why you know, like
Speaker 8: as we're recording this, like a bunch of campus occupations
Speaker 8: are going right, and I mean, I don't know, God,
Speaker 8: hopefully by the time this comes out, they won't have
Speaker 8: all died horribly because this is getting recorded on what
Speaker 8: day is it that April twenty eighth, so this is
Speaker 8: being released into like hell world. But yeah, you know,
Speaker 8: I mean, I think one of one of the aspects
Speaker 8: of of of those camps is that like just there
Speaker 8: with a bunch of people who you get to talk
Speaker 8: to and organize with. And it turns out that actually
Speaker 8: being there face to face with a bunch of people
Speaker 8: is just great. And that's that's the thing. That's the thing.
Speaker 8: You can also like that you knows, as much as
Speaker 8: like union work can just can be work, right, it
Speaker 8: can be you sitting in front of a spreadsheet and going,
Speaker 8: oh my god, what this person responds like it's also
Speaker 8: I don't know, it's it's also like it could be
Speaker 8: really great and I don't know, you should you, dear
Speaker 8: listeners should experience it because it rules.
Speaker 9: I couldn't recommend it more. It is the best feeling
Speaker 9: in the world and soul and I are addicted to
Speaker 9: it to feel like you're actually doing anything real. Hell, yeah,
Speaker 9: it's incredible.
Speaker 10: That's yeah. Something we heard from IW or IWW friends
Speaker 10: is that like this, like, especially with how early in
Speaker 10: the process we are like how exciting that is to
Speaker 10: like skitter everybody but everybody in a room and I
Speaker 10: feel like we're all working towards the same thing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and that.
Speaker 10: You do get addicted to it. And that's often where
Speaker 10: the union organizers came from, was like starting their own
Speaker 10: and they're like, oh, I need to keep doing this.
Speaker 12: Yeah.
Speaker 8: I think I think that's a pretty good doe to
Speaker 8: end on, unless you do have anything else that you
Speaker 8: want to make sure we get you first.
Speaker 10: Yeah, with like how early in the process we are
Speaker 10: after this comes out, like we will have like dropped
Speaker 10: our authorization cards and like actually started like the formal process.
Speaker 10: Like we're still pretty early on, but we already have
Speaker 10: a fundraiser setup with like a local beer bar. We're
Speaker 10: at Workers Sat. Hell Yeah, and that's super exciting. And
Speaker 10: we're building our socials and probably have a go fundme
Speaker 10: for strike fundraiser. So yeah, early days, but very exciting,
Speaker 10: very purposeful days.
Speaker 9: It's gonna be a big week.
Speaker 8: Hell yeah. Yeah. Where where can people go to find
Speaker 8: the union and go to support you all?
Speaker 9: Well, our socials are not live.
Speaker 8: Yet, but all right, so yeah, this is this, this
Speaker 8: is being recorded before things go live. We will we
Speaker 8: will have the links down there.
Speaker 10: Yeah, we I think we're settling on the tag the
Speaker 10: user name fried egg w U, which we are saying
Speaker 10: foo woo about because you know, you gotta you gotta,
Speaker 10: you gotta make you gotta.
Speaker 5: Make this fun. But yes, we will be. Yeah, we
Speaker 5: will be sharing that with you.
Speaker 9: I'm glad you knew because I wasn't sure if if
Speaker 9: we had a handle agreed upon yet. Yeah, well find
Speaker 9: us on the socials fried egg.
Speaker 10: W U with it being early days and like us
Speaker 10: not even being public yet. I've built those accounts, but
Speaker 10: they're not like not ready to go. So there's that,
Speaker 10: like we're in this dead zone period where we've built
Speaker 10: the infrastructure for a proper you know, the proper election,
Speaker 10: even though we are very hopeful that our owner will
Speaker 10: recognize us with you know, the majority that we have.
Speaker 10: But yeah, we're our zero day is May Day, a
Speaker 10: couple of days from now, and we are very excited
Speaker 10: for that very much.
Speaker 8: So hell yeah, hopefully it goes well. It will be
Speaker 8: in the past by time this comes out, But good
Speaker 8: luck to both of you, and thank you both so
Speaker 8: much for coming on now.
Speaker 9: The pleasure belongs to us. We're both fans than for
Speaker 9: having us on.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and yeah does this has been naked happen here?
Speaker 8: You too can go experience the joys of organizing your workplace.
Speaker 8: So go go do that or go to a student occupation,
Speaker 8: do both.
Speaker 5: I don't know. There's a lot going on that.
Speaker 8: There are many places for you to experience the shory
Speaker 8: of organizing with other people, so go go do that.
Speaker 8: And yeah, you can find us in the usual places.
Speaker 5: I don't know.
Speaker 8: Sophie will probably be on it in about one second.
Speaker 8: This ad pivot not whatever this is got completely off
Speaker 8: the rails.
Speaker 10: I have not had it off sleep, no sleep for organizing.
Speaker 5: Welcome, take it happen here. I'm Andrew Sage of the
Speaker 5: YouTube channel andrasm and I'm here with James.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's me and andre again.
Speaker 5: Yes, once again. So I recently dropped a video on states,
Speaker 5: or more pointedly, a video that's sorts of define the
Speaker 5: state and its functions, synthesize its critique by anarchists, and
Speaker 5: basically understand the ways that states feel both society and nature.
Speaker 5: So we can let goose states, inevitabilit and think outside
Speaker 5: of it to realize the freedom and power of all
Speaker 5: the people most people aren't anarchists, unfortunately, but I've noticed
Speaker 5: that generally speaking, some folks are more receptive to anarchist
Speaker 5: ideas and others just seem to shut down without engaging
Speaker 5: with it earnestly or meaningfully. You get a mix of
Speaker 5: those reactions in my comments, so overwhelmingly toward the receptive side,
Speaker 5: because I mean, that's the kind of intellectual curiosity I
Speaker 5: tried to attract my space, But the more hostile reactions
Speaker 5: had me thinking about a book that I read many
Speaker 5: years ago and their video on years after that was
Speaker 5: called The Authoritarians by Bob Altemeyer. So once take another
Speaker 5: look at the ideas in that book, because even though
Speaker 5: Ultimid doesn't land in any truly radical conclusions, his scholarship,
Speaker 5: in my opinion, gets us closer to understanding the psychology
Speaker 5: of both authoritarian followers and authoritarian leaders. Also rest in Peace.
Speaker 5: I found that he died when I was preparing this,
Speaker 5: just this year in February, but that aside. We'll be
Speaker 5: talking about the former first, and that is what's up
Speaker 5: with authoritarian followers. Let's get into it first. We need
Speaker 5: some context. So in the wake of World War two,
Speaker 5: social scientists sought an explanation for the evils perpetuated by
Speaker 5: the Nazi government during the war. Theodore W. A'dno Els,
Speaker 5: Frankel Brunswick, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sandford published The Authoritarian
Speaker 5: Personality in nineteen fifty, proposing a personality type for the
Speaker 5: fascist follower ranked on an F scale. They particularly concentrated
Speaker 5: on prejudice within the psychoanalytic and psychosocial frameworks of Freudian
Speaker 5: and Fromian theories. Their work was highly critiqued, but it
Speaker 5: was also highly influential in laying the groundwork for our
Speaker 5: understanding of authoritarian personalities. In the aftermath of Adorno and
Speaker 5: Company's book, social scientists will continue to tweak, develop and
Speaker 5: expand our understanding of authoritarian psychology. Most notably, the concept
Speaker 5: will be refined by Bob Altemeyer, a Canadian American psychology professor,
Speaker 5: proposed the right wing authoritarian personality in nineteen eighty one.
Speaker 5: After numerous studies, Altimyer presented his findings in his free
Speaker 5: book The Authoritarians in two thousand and six. I had
Speaker 5: to clarify, though right wing here is not being used
Speaker 5: in the context of the political spectrum, which is a
Speaker 5: concept thats to n scrutiny. In this context, Ultimaya uses
Speaker 5: the word right in the sense of the old English
Speaker 5: writ an adjective for lawful and proper. Aultimia defines authoritarianism
Speaker 5: as quote, something authoritarian followers and authoritarian leaders cook up
Speaker 5: between themselves. It happens when the followers submit too much
Speaker 5: to the leaders, trust them too much, and get them
Speaker 5: too much leeway to do whatever they want, which often
Speaker 5: is something undemocratic, tyrannical, and brutal unquote. I find this
Speaker 5: definition of authoritarianism lacking, but a monarchist so of course
Speaker 5: I would to me, if authority is defined as the
Speaker 5: record is right above others in a social relationship to
Speaker 5: give commands, make decisions, and enforce obedience, then I would
Speaker 5: define authoritarianism as a matter of degree to which you
Speaker 5: uphold the principle of authority. I think many people are
Speaker 5: at least authoritarian light because that's the status go unfortunately.
Speaker 5: But more specifically, I think the people we call authoritarians
Speaker 5: are those which are especially invested in the enforcement or
Speaker 5: advocacy of strict obedience to authority at the expense of
Speaker 5: freedom and plurality. So right, being authoritarian followers or RWAs
Speaker 5: are those which overwhelmingly support the established authorities in their society,
Speaker 5: like government officials, arms of the state, and traditional religious leaders.
Speaker 5: In North America and elsewhere, r was tend to be
Speaker 5: or other. I should say high r WA is because
Speaker 5: the RWA thing is a scale, but the high art
Speaker 5: ws tend to be political conservatives. However, that doesn't mean
Speaker 5: the authority and personality is exclusive to conservatives, no, as
Speaker 5: exclusive to North America, but the scale is definitely tailored
Speaker 5: to a North American and English speaking audience, lendin to
Speaker 5: its documented issues that translate into other regions, But with effort,
Speaker 5: I could definitely see it being adapted to other cultural
Speaker 5: contexts as well. And as also my argues, the concept
Speaker 5: of the right wing authoritarian could equally apply to society
Speaker 5: with the established authorities claimed to be represent in the left.
Speaker 5: So what defines the right wing authority and personality? Psychologically speaking?
Speaker 5: They feature three primary traits or attitudes. For one, a
Speaker 5: high degree of submission to authorities were perceived to be
Speaker 5: established and legitimate in the society in which one lives. Two,
Speaker 5: a general aggressiveness directed against various persons that is perceived
Speaker 5: to be sanctioned by established authorities, and three a high
Speaker 5: degree of adherence to the social conventions that are perceived
Speaker 5: to be endorsed by society and its establish authorities. These
Speaker 5: traits are measured with the Right Wing Authoritarianism Scale or
Speaker 5: RWA scale for short. It's readily accessible online, so I'm
Speaker 5: not going to go through the entire scale point by point,
Speaker 5: but basically includes a mixed series of statements that folks
Speaker 5: can indicate their level of agreement or disagreement with. Statements
Speaker 5: like our country will be great if we on other
Speaker 5: ways of our forefathers, do the authorities tell us to
Speaker 5: do and get rid of the rotten apples who are
Speaker 5: ruining everything, or what our country really needs is a strong,
Speaker 5: de tillman leader who will crush evil and take us
Speaker 5: back to our true path. And just to mix things up.
Speaker 5: A woman's place should be wherever she wants to be.
Speaker 5: The days when women were submissive to their husbands and
Speaker 5: social conventions belong strictly in the past. As you could imagine,
Speaker 5: the degree to which you agree or disagree with these
Speaker 5: statements would place you somewhere along the scale. The lowest
Speaker 5: total possible score and ultimized version of the test would
Speaker 5: be twenty and the highest one hundred and eighty, but
Speaker 5: most people low hit either extreme. A sample of one
Speaker 5: thousand Americans in two thousand and five found that the
Speaker 5: average score was ninety. Technically speaking, high RWAs are just
Speaker 5: people who score higher than the average population, so it's
Speaker 5: really a relative to Also another disclaimer, in the context
Speaker 5: of psychological studies, personality tests can definitely make mistakes about individuals,
Speaker 5: so it's not a diagnostic tool for individuals to determine
Speaker 5: if they make a good storm trooper. However, the scale
Speaker 5: can reliably identify levels of authoritarianism in groups. Also, keep
Speaker 5: in mind that stuff like the interpretation of wording and
Speaker 5: fore knowledge of what the test is trying to measure
Speaker 5: can definitely influence results. Still, this tool has been used
Speaker 5: for most of Altimayer's research and authoritarianism, so it's good
Speaker 5: to be familiar with it. So now you may be
Speaker 5: wondering how well does the RWA skills measurement of submission, aggression,
Speaker 5: and conventionalism map onto people's reality. So for submission, higher
Speaker 5: RWAs tend to believe that people should submit authority in
Speaker 5: almost all circumstances, so they put a lot of trust
Speaker 5: in the law and the authorities. Maybe not all authorities
Speaker 5: and every single circumstance, but they definitely bought into the
Speaker 5: concept itself. They're the types who trusted Nixon during and
Speaker 5: even after the Watergate crisis, likely the ones in Germany
Speaker 5: in nineteen forty five who refused to believe that Hitler
Speaker 5: was responsible for the Holocaust, the type to rapidly support
Speaker 5: anti terrorist initiatives, no matter how invasive. Throughout his research,
Speaker 5: Altimhere found that high ars are far more likely to
Speaker 5: tolerate police burglaries, drug rades without warrants, police crackdowns on
Speaker 5: peaceful protests, subversion via Ajan's provocateurs, and so on, as
Speaker 5: far as they're concerned, Father knows best. Their favorite authorities
Speaker 5: are above the law, But like I said, they don't
Speaker 5: always submit. Their blind support can be trumped by other concerns,
Speaker 5: but most times they're not big fans of holding officials
Speaker 5: accountable for their actions. They really don't care if a
Speaker 5: cop kill someone in broad daylight or someone drives through
Speaker 5: a crowd of protesters on the street. In terms of aggression,
Speaker 5: higher w is aggress when they believe right and might
Speaker 5: on their side. Right meaning their hostility is authority approved
Speaker 5: might meaning they have a physical, tactical, or numerical advantage
Speaker 5: over their target. They don't fight far, and just like
Speaker 5: they go easy on authorities who commit crimes, they go
Speaker 5: easy on anyone who attacks people they're prejudiced against. But
Speaker 5: they definitely don't go easy on the people they hate.
Speaker 5: They seek to sentence criminals to longer terms than average,
Speaker 5: and as some of the loudest supporters of capital punishment.
Speaker 5: And if they hate one group, bet your bottom dollar
Speaker 5: they probably hate other groups too. You could call them
Speaker 5: equal opportunity bigots. Chances are if they hate immigrants or
Speaker 5: trans people, those are not going to be the only
Speaker 5: targets of their ire. Their pressures has more to do
Speaker 5: with their own personality than their targets actual attributes. Still,
Speaker 5: they don't always aggress when they think the proper authorities approve,
Speaker 5: just that they don't always submit. They are always more
Speaker 5: factors that play in any given situation, including a fear
Speaker 5: of counter aggression or consequences that may hold their hostilities.
Speaker 5: Regarding conventionalism, higher ws believe that everyone should live by
Speaker 5: the norms that their authorities have decreed. Whilst like culturalism, plurality, diversity.
Speaker 5: Those things clash with what they consider correct and what
Speaker 5: they consider wrong. They usually get their ideas from fundamentalists religions,
Speaker 5: so you'll find that higher WA's are strong advocates for
Speaker 5: the traditional family structure, with patriarchal husbands, submissive wives, and
Speaker 5: obedient children. They're also far more likely to support their
Speaker 5: governments patriotic version of various historical narratives. Most interestingly, their
Speaker 5: conventionalism even influences their response to the high r W
Speaker 5: test itself. If they were totally average response for a
Speaker 5: statement on the test, they were far more likely to
Speaker 5: adjust their answers to the mean than most. When asked
Speaker 5: what they would like their own RWA score to be,
Speaker 5: low rbs said they would like to be low rw's,
Speaker 5: middle or w is said they'd like to be lower w's,
Speaker 5: but higher ws said they want to be middles, not
Speaker 5: lows or highs. Why because they tend to rank being
Speaker 5: normal very highly in values tests. Also, just because they
Speaker 5: want to be normal, let's mean they don't want to
Speaker 5: be richer or smarter than others. Not doesn't mean they're
Speaker 5: necessarily going to drop their prejudices. They may get tugged slightly,
Speaker 5: like with there's somewhat decrease in prejudice against gay people
Speaker 5: after the legalization of gay marriage. But their normal is
Speaker 5: often a measure of what's normal in their in group.
Speaker 5: So if it's still normal in their in group to
Speaker 5: be violently homophobic, more than likely they will still be
Speaker 5: violently homophobic.
Speaker 4: Their conformity is the value rather than specific bigotry or
Speaker 4: what have you. Yeah, talking of conformed Andrew, we have
Speaker 4: to conform to the needs of sponsors of this show
Speaker 4: right now, and we're back.
Speaker 5: Yes, so, Alse my husband lightly critiqued for rendering r
Speaker 5: W as the dominant psychological account of authoritarianism. Of course,
Speaker 5: it makes sense that has been the focus, considering the
Speaker 5: study of authoritarian personality was born out of post World
Speaker 5: War two studies of fascists. Right wing authoritarians often fever
Speaker 5: established absolutist forms of government and weaponize that presently dominate
Speaker 5: in hierarchy to facilitate said absolutism. But there are authoritarians
Speaker 5: who also favor absolutist forms of government with slight differences,
Speaker 5: believe n that the presently dominated in hierarchy should be
Speaker 5: overthrown and replaced with their own. These have potentially been
Speaker 5: called left wing authoritarians, even though the right and right
Speaker 5: wing authoritarians didn't have anything to do with the political spectrum.
Speaker 5: Let's keep pushing. In chapter nine of The Authoritarian Inspector,
Speaker 5: Altemeyer conceptualizes left wing authoritarianism or LWA as also composed
Speaker 5: of submission, aggression, and conventionalism, so essentially LWA is a
Speaker 5: subcategory of RWAs. He's also quick to point out not
Speaker 5: all leftists are LAS, but as he describes them, l
Speaker 5: WA's are revolutionaries who one submit to movement leaders who
Speaker 5: must be obeyed aka submission, two have enemies who must
Speaker 5: be ruined from capitalists to counter revolutionaries aka aggression, and
Speaker 5: three have rules and party discipline that must be followed
Speaker 5: aka conventionalism. In essence, authoritarianism is psychological. R WAS support
Speaker 5: the established authorities, LAS oppose them in favor of their own,
Speaker 5: but the underlying positional core is still authoritarianism. But the
Speaker 5: focus is on AR debays in general here concerning these
Speaker 5: traits submission, aggression, and conventionalism, it's clear that people with
Speaker 5: right wing and thworitaring and personalities are rather dangerous. They
Speaker 5: find it easier to bully harass, punish, name, torture, eliminate,
Speaker 5: and exterminate their victims than most people do. They're more
Speaker 5: willing to join mobs and militias, more likely to blame
Speaker 5: victims for their misfortune, and more likely to condemn common
Speaker 5: criminals to long brutal sentences in jail. They seem to
Speaker 5: have a lot of hostility boiling away inside them that
Speaker 5: their authorities can easily unleash. So we have to ask
Speaker 5: what causes this? Why are they like this? According to
Speaker 5: Albert Bandura's social learning theory of aggression, aggression occurs after
Speaker 5: two conditions are met. Firstly, some feelings like anger or
Speaker 5: envy lead us to a hostility. Secondly, inhibitions or content
Speaker 5: actual restraints against release in that hostility would have to
Speaker 5: be overcome. Only then can the aggression erupt and flow.
Speaker 5: So let's discuss the instigator and releaser of authoritarian aggression.
Speaker 5: High days are highly motivated by fear, like they have
Speaker 5: an extra dose of fair response in their genes more
Speaker 5: than most people. They probably learn to be fearful from
Speaker 5: their parents about all kinds of things. You know, radicals, atheists, kidnappers,
Speaker 5: queer people, et cetera, et cetera. They grew up in
Speaker 5: a scarier world than most, which is probably why they
Speaker 5: tend to score so highly on the Dangerous World Scale.
Speaker 5: That scale, like previous scales, provides statements and measures levels
Speaker 5: of agreement or disagreement with stuff like quote, If our
Speaker 5: society keeps degenerating the way it has been lately, it's
Speaker 5: liable to collapse like a rotten dog, and everything will
Speaker 5: be chaos and quote any day now, chaos and anarchy
Speaker 5: could erupt around us. All the signs are pointed to it,
Speaker 5: and cou everything to them is a sign of the times,
Speaker 5: a perversion corrupt in society in peaceful times and in
Speaker 5: generally dangerous ones. Higher ways feel threatened. But what releases
Speaker 5: that aggressive impulse to act? Also, I have found, more
Speaker 5: than anything else self righteousness. Of course, almost everyone thinks
Speaker 5: they're a bit more moral than average, but higher ways
Speaker 5: they tend to think they're the holy ones, the chosen,
Speaker 5: the righteous. That empowers them to isolate, segregate, humiliate, persecute, harass, beat,
Speaker 5: and kill. That self righteousness, combined with their high scores
Speaker 5: on the Dangerous World scale, is what empowers their prejudice,
Speaker 5: their heavy handedness, their means spiritedness and their eagerness to
Speaker 5: crusade against the other. So how do highs become higher WA's?
Speaker 5: Are they born that way? Possibly? Do their parents make
Speaker 5: them that way somewhat but not completely? See no one
Speaker 5: as a complete carbon copy of their parents. So what
Speaker 5: determines a person's position on the art of experience? Our
Speaker 5: life experiences teach us lessons that our parents and payers
Speaker 5: may not, or experiences with authorities shape or perception of authority.
Speaker 5: Especially when someone hits adolescens, they tend to chafe against authority,
Speaker 5: even if they submitted to authority as children, those hormonal urges,
Speaker 5: desires for austronomy, and new experiences could shake up their
Speaker 5: early lessons completely. Experiences could either end up reinforcing the
Speaker 5: authorities teachings or contradicting them entirely. Naturally, it's easier for
Speaker 5: kids from authoritarian homes to remain authoritarian and vice versa.
Speaker 5: But ultimately experiences do most of the shape middle or
Speaker 5: ways have some mix of experiences and upbringing that keep
Speaker 5: them in the middle. When it comes to higher was,
Speaker 5: their experiences were probably very controlled. Authoritarian followers usually live
Speaker 5: in a homogeneous bubble of patriotic, traditional people an echo
Speaker 5: chamber apart from the evils of the world, safely kept
Speaker 5: on a short leash for most of their lives. But
Speaker 5: I just hope yet. Automid's research has shown that higher
Speaker 5: ws can change if they have some important life experiences.
Speaker 5: That's why university can be such a game change of people.
Speaker 5: It's just meeting new people, leaving that small, enclosed world
Speaker 5: and developing relationships with people of different walks of life,
Speaker 5: and that makes a big difference. There are a couple
Speaker 5: of traits that make higher ws such good followers for
Speaker 5: would be dictators. In short, those traits are illogical thinking,
Speaker 5: highly compartmentalized minds, double standards, hypocrisy, a lack of self awareness, ethnocentrism, dogmatism.
Speaker 5: In long well, consider syllogism. All fish live in the sea.
Speaker 5: Sharks live in the sea, therefore sharks are fish. Logically speaking,
Speaker 5: the conclusion doesn't follow. Even if sharks are fish, and
Speaker 5: they are the premises don't support the conclusion. But if
Speaker 5: higher WA's were asked if the reasoning was correct, they
Speaker 5: were more likely than most to say that it was.
Speaker 5: When asked why they'd answer because sharks are fish. In essence,
Speaker 5: because they agreed with the conclusion, they assumed the reasoning
Speaker 5: was right. That simple test shows that if authority and
Speaker 5: followers like the conclusion, the logic involved is fairly irrelevant.
Speaker 5: Reasoning is what should justify the conclusion, but as far
Speaker 5: as they're concerned, the conclusion valuates the reasoning. Of course,
Speaker 5: let me not overstate a lot of people have trouble
Speaker 5: with so logistic reasoning. Higher w has just happen to
Speaker 5: be slightly more likely to make such mistakes, but higher
Speaker 5: de wus generally have more trouble than most people do
Speaker 5: realize in a conclusion as faults, they have a harder
Speaker 5: time determine whether empirical evidence proves or doesn't prove something.
Speaker 5: They more easily fill gaps in science with supernatural forces,
Speaker 5: and they have trouble being critical of anything unless they've
Speaker 5: already gotten their talking points from their authorities. Regarding the
Speaker 5: highly compartmentalized minds, I mean, we all have some inconsistencies
Speaker 5: not thinking, but their minds as be like oil and water.
Speaker 5: One second they say in free speech, next they say
Speaker 5: in ban critical race theory. One moment they're talking about
Speaker 5: individual freedom, and next their basically throat in the boots
Speaker 5: of the state. They don't merge files in their brain
Speaker 5: to really see what fits. They sense to just pick
Speaker 5: up whatever their demogogues are saying. And if your mind
Speaker 5: is such a mess of contradiction, so you're going to
Speaker 5: end up a lot of double standards easily justify by
Speaker 5: whatever idea you hold it's most convenient in the moment.
Speaker 5: Principles are really irrelevant. Keep in mind the excuses they
Speaker 5: make for those in power and how hard they are
Speaker 5: in victims. Classic example is the difference between how they
Speaker 5: treat a prisoner who beats up another prisoner versus a
Speaker 5: police officer who beats up a prisoner. Low d was
Speaker 5: usually don't have such stark double standards when it comes
Speaker 5: to hypocrisy. I'm going to keep you using this example
Speaker 5: because you know it's still somewhat topical critical race theory.
Speaker 5: As much as authoritarians accuse the left of being anti
Speaker 5: free speech, politically correct types, rda WA is a far
Speaker 5: more likely to report a desire to censor ideas they
Speaker 5: don't like. This is also because they tend to lack
Speaker 5: basic self awareness. If presented with a list of things,
Speaker 5: right wing authoritarians are likely to do like be prejudiced, conformist,
Speaker 5: et cetera, and then ask how true it is of
Speaker 5: themselves compared to most other people. They really have no
Speaker 5: idea how different they actually are, and that's actually because
Speaker 5: of the bubble they tend to exist in us visus
Speaker 5: them is a very hard line in the sand for authoritarians.
Speaker 5: Humans as a whole do have a tendency sometimes to
Speaker 5: fall into tribal patterns of thinking, but authoritarians see the
Speaker 5: world far more sharply in terms of their in groups
Speaker 5: and our groups. And most we do tend to associate
Speaker 5: with people who agree with us in many issues. But
Speaker 5: authoritarians really do stick to their bubble of validation and
Speaker 5: ethnocentric reinforcement. That's why they don't realize how pressureous, or
Speaker 5: aggressive or submissive they are to compare to most people.
Speaker 5: By avoiding challenges to their beliefs and holding faster their authorities,
Speaker 5: they remain stuck in a secular logic of I'm right
Speaker 5: because the people I agree with say I'm right. Finally,
Speaker 5: in terms of dogmatism, higher ws holds to unchangeable, unjustified certainty,
Speaker 5: righteousness beyond a shadow of a doubt. They're more likely
Speaker 5: than most people to agree with statements like the things
Speaker 5: I believe in are so completely true, I could never
Speaker 5: doubt them, and there are no discoveries or facts that
Speaker 5: could possibly make me change my mind about the things
Speaker 5: that matter most in life. I am absolutely certain the
Speaker 5: ideas about the fundamental issues in life are correct. Meanwhile,
Speaker 5: they're more likely than most people to disagree with statements
Speaker 5: like it's best to be open to all possibilities and
Speaker 5: ready to re evaluate all your beliefs. And flexibility is
Speaker 5: a real virtue in thinking, since you may very well
Speaker 5: be wrong when you receive or absorb, rather than contemplate,
Speaker 5: your beliefs, you have no basis upon which sho determine
Speaker 5: whether or not they're true. So you avoid challenges by
Speaker 5: staying in the bubble as much as possible. When that
Speaker 5: can be avoided, threatton out whatever talking points you got
Speaker 5: from wherever, and if that dialogue tree fails, you can
Speaker 5: always fall back in your group's assurance that you are right.
Speaker 5: I could challenge your beliefs, or you could insist your
Speaker 5: right and retreat. What option do you think high it
Speaker 5: will be a sentage use Yeah, the double down exactly.
Speaker 5: Talkingtism is by far the best fall back defense, but
Speaker 5: it's also the most blatant, that giveaway that the person
Speaker 5: doesn't know why they believe what they believe. Alas hired
Speaker 5: w is only one side of the authoritarian coin, then
Speaker 5: nothing without their leaders. So next time we'll be talking
Speaker 5: about those leaders, those social dominators. Until then, all power
Speaker 5: to all the people. This, yes, welcome to it could
Speaker 5: happen here. I'm Andrew Sage of the YouTube channel Andrewism.
Speaker 5: Once again, I'm joined by.
Speaker 4: Jane and we go back in and I'm excited to
Speaker 4: learn more about authoritarian leaders this time right.
Speaker 5: Yes, last time we discussed the mind of the authoritarian
Speaker 5: follower thanks to the research of the late Bob Altemeier.
Speaker 5: You should definitely listen to the previous episode. But in summary,
Speaker 5: we looked at this concept of right wing authoritarianism, which
Speaker 5: refers to a personality type that features three primary traits
Speaker 5: or attitudes. First is a high degree of submission to
Speaker 5: authorities who are perceived to be established and legitimate in
Speaker 5: the societies in which one lives. The second is a
Speaker 5: general aggressiveness directed against various persons. It is perceived to
Speaker 5: be sanctioned by established authorities and the third is a
Speaker 5: high degree of adherence to the social conventions that are
Speaker 5: perceived to be endorsed by society and its established authorities.
Speaker 5: We also speculated the roots of authoritarian aggression and looked
Speaker 5: at the mind of the authoritarian follower, which demonstrates straits
Speaker 5: such as illogical thinking, highly compartmentalized minds, double standards, hypocrisy,
Speaker 5: and lack of self awareness, ethnic centrism, and dogmatism. Today,
Speaker 5: as promised, we're looking at the other side of the coin.
Speaker 5: We're looking at the leaders, but also what we can
Speaker 5: do to address both followers and leaders. So let's begin.
Speaker 5: In nineteen ninety four, social psychologists Fleescher Prattu and Jim
Speaker 5: Sedanias presented the social dominance orientation test as a measure
Speaker 5: of belief in social inequality. Social dominators agreed with statements
Speaker 5: like code, this country would be better off if we
Speaker 5: cared less about how equal all people are and code
Speaker 5: some people are just more worthy than others. While disagreeing
Speaker 5: with statements like code, if people were treated more equally,
Speaker 5: we would have fewer problems in this country. Fellow social
Speaker 5: psychologist Sam McFarland took their test and twenty one others,
Speaker 5: including the Art of Way scale to determine which would
Speaker 5: be the best predictor of prejudice. His research found that
Speaker 5: only two of those tests, the social dominant orientation and
Speaker 5: the Art of Way, could do the job well. But
Speaker 5: the thing is, though, while both tests were able to
Speaker 5: identify prejudiced people, they will identifying different types of prejudice
Speaker 5: people with very little overlap. Social dominators and high art
Speaker 5: double ways authoritarians of two flavors. They have some things
Speaker 5: in common though, besides prejudice. They tend to support the
Speaker 5: same political parties. They tend to have shared economic philosophies,
Speaker 5: usually conservative on both counts, but they also have some
Speaker 5: huge differences, starting with a desire for power also why
Speaker 5: I conducted two surveys with students that included the question
Speaker 5: how much power as in the ability to make adults
Speaker 5: do what you want? Do you want to have when
Speaker 5: you're forty years old? In this sense, automayer is using
Speaker 5: power in the sense of authority as I would define it.
Speaker 5: They recognized right above others in a social relationship to
Speaker 5: give commands, make decisions, and enforce obedience. So the scale
Speaker 5: went from zero meaning they don't care for it, to
Speaker 5: me and their goal is to have a great deal
Speaker 5: of authority. Social dominators consistently wanted to have much more
Speaker 5: power than most people did authority and followers did not. Now, obviously,
Speaker 5: people often want authority for different reasons, some more self
Speaker 5: righteous than others. But social dominators take thrill in authority
Speaker 5: in and of itself. Doesn't matter what the cause is,
Speaker 5: as long as they can control others in the process.
Speaker 5: There's another scale out to my users, the power Mad scale.
Speaker 5: On it, social dominators agree with statements like a mistake
Speaker 5: to interfere with the law of the jungle, some people
Speaker 5: were meant to dominate others, and do you enjoy taking
Speaker 5: charge of things and making people do things your way?
Speaker 5: They also disagree with statements like life is not governed
Speaker 5: by the survival of the fittest and we should let
Speaker 5: compassion and moral lawers be your guide. Social dominators are
Speaker 5: some of the highest scores on this scale, and high
Speaker 5: scorers tend to be intimidated, ruthless, and vengeful, with no
Speaker 5: care for nobility or charity. They despise empathy and have
Speaker 5: a dog eat dog mentality toward the world. They love
Speaker 5: the power to hurt in their drive to the top.
Speaker 5: High ruays just don't have that drive. And while authoritarian
Speaker 5: followers might highly value group cohesiveness and loyalty, social dominators
Speaker 5: don't because, like I keep saying, they're in it for themselves,
Speaker 5: for their power, and they will betray their own group
Speaker 5: if push comes to shove. Another area where social dominators
Speaker 5: and higher deg way is diverge is when it comes
Speaker 5: to religiousness. Authoritarian followers are usually religious fundamentalists, while dominators
Speaker 5: don't tend to be that involved. Some of them do
Speaker 5: go to church regularly, but that's for manipulative reasons because
Speaker 5: social dominators could lie. They lie a lot. All they
Speaker 5: have to do is pretend to be religious and say
Speaker 5: the right words, and boom they get through. The higher
Speaker 5: was reminds me of a certain politician.
Speaker 4: I'm just going to say this is put in the
Speaker 4: mind of like Donald Trump tay getting a massive crowd
Speaker 4: of people so he can walk to a church and
Speaker 4: then take photos outside and not go in.
Speaker 5: Yeah, good times. There's another scale we could take a
Speaker 5: look at, and that's the exploitative, manipulative, immoral dishonesty, or
Speaker 5: exploitative mad scale. Unlike higher w's social dominators, anonymous responses
Speaker 5: indicate that they agree with statements like there's really no
Speaker 5: such thing as right and wrong. It all boils down
Speaker 5: to what you can get away with, and there's a
Speaker 5: sucker bone every minute, and smart people don how to
Speaker 5: take advantage of them. Social dominators disagree with statements like
Speaker 5: it gains a person nothing if he uses deceit and
Speaker 5: treachery to get power and riches, and all in all,
Speaker 5: it's better to be humble and honest than important and dishonest.
Speaker 5: In essence, social dominators admit to strive and to manipulate,
Speaker 5: to be in dishonest, to be an immoral and treacherous.
Speaker 5: They see their followers as suckers, fools to be controlled.
Speaker 5: What else makes them different? Well, I could go back
Speaker 5: to the roots of hostility. Social dominators actually show greater
Speaker 5: prejudice against minorities and women than hired was do, but
Speaker 5: their followers are much more hostile towards LGBTQ people. Why Well,
Speaker 5: it ties back to the religiousness point and the hired
Speaker 5: wa respect for the law. Since attacks against minorities are
Speaker 5: less clearly supported by religious and civic authorities as they
Speaker 5: used to be. Authoritarian follower aggression towards these groups both
Speaker 5: overt or sneaky how to be curved a little bit. Meanwhile,
Speaker 5: social dominators are hostile because they already live in the
Speaker 5: apocalyptic jungle that hired WA is fair, and they are
Speaker 5: the epect predator. They don't score highly in the dangerous
Speaker 5: world scale because they're not scared. They're the ones ready
Speaker 5: to weaponize that fear. Dominance is their first priority for
Speaker 5: everyone they meet, they need a reason to not try
Speaker 5: to control them. They don't care too much about the
Speaker 5: law either. It's just about not getting caught. They're not
Speaker 5: as self righteous as higher w is because they're quite immoral,
Speaker 5: and higher ws aggress when they believe right and might
Speaker 5: on their side. Social dominators aggress because might makes right
Speaker 5: for them personally. Higher W is heat crimemount of fair
Speaker 5: and self righteousness in the name of authority. Social dominators
Speaker 5: hate crime ount or share desire to intimidate and control. Lastly,
Speaker 5: we need to look at the differences in their thought process.
Speaker 5: Social dominators, for the most part, don't have a web
Speaker 5: of contradictions, weak reason and skills, compartmentalized thinking, or gullibility
Speaker 5: that define higher w's mental life. They're not particularly dogmatic
Speaker 5: or zealous about any particular cause or creed. They just
Speaker 5: want authority. They say whatever they need to say to
Speaker 5: get ahead. Because they have no consistent values, they'll be
Speaker 5: hypocrites like hard wa Is, but they're probably aware of
Speaker 5: and find their own hypocrisy. For example, they're cool with wealth,
Speaker 5: inheritance and corruption. They're opposed to welfare. They're unconcerned with
Speaker 5: income inequality or photo disenfranchisement. They're apathetic to racial inequality
Speaker 5: and injustice. They believe that people should have to earn
Speaker 5: their place in society, and they don't care if most
Speaker 5: of them can't. They still talk about how the only
Speaker 5: way to have a level play and field is to
Speaker 5: get rid of things like affirmative action. And part of
Speaker 5: what defines social dominators is their utter disregard for equality.
Speaker 5: So we have to ask again what causes this? Why
Speaker 5: are they like this? And well, social scientists just are
Speaker 5: show Yet if we look at the life shape and
Speaker 5: experiences or social dominators, they would probably report the deceit
Speaker 5: and cheating were good tactics because it led to what
Speaker 5: they wanted. Taking advantage of suckers felt great. They enjoyed
Speaker 5: having power and having people afraid of them. Life boiled
Speaker 5: down to what you could get away with, and of
Speaker 5: course the experiences led them to believe that life is
Speaker 5: a jungle. Dominators were probably rewarded early in their lives
Speaker 5: when they cheated, took advantage of people, weaponized fear, overpowered others,
Speaker 5: or got away with something wrong. Whether or not their
Speaker 5: parents gave them that outlook on the world. Because of
Speaker 5: the psychological law of effect, they simply learn into the
Speaker 5: Being amoral, unsympathetic, and exploitative worked well for them. So
Speaker 5: what happens when higher was and social dominators worked together.
Speaker 5: In this field of research, the lethal union refers to
Speaker 5: the combination of happily subservient hired ws with social dominators
Speaker 5: who share their values in the drivers, eager to dominate
Speaker 5: and control, a death spiral union that develops all the
Speaker 5: time in the real world. As Altamaya aptly described, quote true,
Speaker 5: sufficiently skilled social dominators served by dedicated followers can make
Speaker 5: the trains run in time, but you have to worry
Speaker 5: about what the trains may be haulin' when dominators call
Speaker 5: the shots and the hirer was do the shooting end quote.
Speaker 5: While most social dominators get fairly low scores on RA
Speaker 5: tests and vice versa, a, very very small percentage of
Speaker 5: people in ultimiya samples scored highly on both r A
Speaker 5: and social dominance tests. These other double highs. If prejudice
Speaker 5: was as sports in the Olympics, hird WA's we get bronze,
Speaker 5: social dominators we get silver, and double Highs would definitely
Speaker 5: get gold. Now you might be wondering how do they
Speaker 5: manage to score so highly on both tests? Social dominators
Speaker 5: and highways have so many differences. How can there would
Speaker 5: be a submissive dominator? So there are a couple of
Speaker 5: reasons why want to be dictator with score highly on
Speaker 5: both tests. One is because some WA scale statements are
Speaker 5: open to interpretation. Take the statement code our country desperately
Speaker 5: needs a mighty leader who will do what has to
Speaker 5: be done to destroy the radical new ways and sinfulness
Speaker 5: that are ruining us, and code follow ull be like
Speaker 5: yes please, and a dominator will be like here I
Speaker 5: am behold, I'm your leader. Double Highs still score highly
Speaker 5: on all the power scales, like other social dominators and
Speaker 5: unlike other higher ways. Secondly, double Highs are the religious
Speaker 5: among the social dominators, so they respond to this religious
Speaker 5: items on the r WA scale that other social dominators don't,
Speaker 5: thereby significantly raising their art wa IS score. I don't
Speaker 5: think I need to go into too much detail. I
Speaker 5: feel like I should be absolutely clear. The double highs suck.
Speaker 5: Whatever the su they probably are on the wrong side
Speaker 5: of it, the worst of the worst, prejudiced, power hungry, exploitaive, mad,
Speaker 5: religiously fundamentalist, dogmatic, dangerous, worldest a noxious stew of the
Speaker 5: worst of all social dominators and hired was. Regular social
Speaker 5: dominators might end up in charge of pts, howays, workplaces,
Speaker 5: local governments, and other personal kingdoms. Not all of them
Speaker 5: succeed in life due to the animosity they create, the
Speaker 5: obstacles they might face, or their lack of intelligence, attractiveness,
Speaker 5: or network to gain the kind of power they want.
Speaker 5: And some of them might even get caught in their
Speaker 5: lives and i legalities and don't have the capital to
Speaker 5: get out of it. They see double highs, they tend
Speaker 5: to have a head start will Regular social dominators have
Speaker 5: to fake their religiousness to get the support of hired was.
Speaker 5: Double highs can more easily get started in their own churches,
Speaker 5: already part of the in group, sharing their prejudices, economic philosophies,
Speaker 5: and political leanents, even if they are faking it a
Speaker 5: little bit. A double high already knows all the code words,
Speaker 5: dog whistles and Bible verses. They need to get ahead
Speaker 5: if they know what stands they should hold about evolution,
Speaker 5: the role of women, abortion, school prayers, censorship, law and order,
Speaker 5: et cetera, et cetera. Double highs run the show you dig?
Speaker 9: Yeah for sure?
Speaker 5: So now what? Knowing that social dominators do whatever they
Speaker 5: can to hold on to power, and higher W is
Speaker 5: extremely resistant to change, how do we deal with a
Speaker 5: situation where social change requires dealing with these people? I mean,
Speaker 5: they can't debate them. Even if you were to intellectually
Speaker 5: wrestle with a double high leader and utterly destroy them
Speaker 5: with facts and logic, their higher W audience is not
Speaker 5: likely to change their minds. Trying to change highly dogmatic,
Speaker 5: evidence immune ethnocentric people is an exercise in frustration and futility.
Speaker 5: It's also hard to fight the share fair mongerant power
Speaker 5: of the likes of Fox News and Facebook to combat
Speaker 5: the class and religious roots of ethnocentrism and to reduce
Speaker 5: the self righteousness of their followers. It's even harder to
Speaker 5: convince them that they are being systematically misinformed and played
Speaker 5: for fools by their leaders. Even if they listen to
Speaker 5: these episodes or watched my videos or read ultimized books,
Speaker 5: they would either get defensive or honestly, because a lot
Speaker 5: of them aren't self aware, assume that this is about
Speaker 5: someone else finding a way to compartmentalize, misinterpret, rationalize, and
Speaker 5: dogmatically deny anything I've said so far. So what to do? First,
Speaker 5: and foremost, representation matters. It's important to hire see more
Speaker 5: of the breath and diversity of human existence and experience.
Speaker 5: The reality is skewed. The visibility and representation of people
Speaker 5: from other backgrounds, not just in media, but also in
Speaker 5: their personal lives is very important. One thing studies have
Speaker 5: shown is that higher w's who know a Cay person
Speaker 5: are far less likely to be homophobic than their fellow
Speaker 5: higher ws. And the best exposures different types of people
Speaker 5: is through access to higher education, or more broadly, just
Speaker 5: any space with diversity. College may not necessarily turn them
Speaker 5: into commit to revolutionaries, contrary to popular belief, but the
Speaker 5: environment of higher education has a tremendously beneficial impact on
Speaker 5: higher ws. Four years of undergrad experience can knock their
Speaker 5: scores down by fifteen to twenty percent. Academic spaces need
Speaker 5: to be alive, vibrant, and most of all accessible, and
Speaker 5: we need people in academic and non academic spaces to
Speaker 5: embrace the power of influence. I don't mean this in
Speaker 5: a give them an authority and to follow kind of way.
Speaker 5: I'm not talking about becoming a club president or ordering
Speaker 5: people around. I'm not thinking about hierarchical leadership, but rather
Speaker 5: the natural influence of individuals who model exemplary behavior and
Speaker 5: provide an example for others to look to, people who
Speaker 5: freely lend their talents and knowledge and mentorship to others.
Speaker 5: In a conformity experiment, in however, in the late nineteen forties,
Speaker 5: real subjects were surrounded by actors who deliberately gave obviously
Speaker 5: wrong answers to questions. Usually, the subjects went along with
Speaker 5: the wrong majority at least some of the time. But
Speaker 5: if in another condition of the experiment, one other person
Speaker 5: gave the right answer, real subjects were much more likely
Speaker 5: to do the right thing, even though it meant joining
Speaker 5: a distinct minority rather than the majority. So I'm saying
Speaker 5: that as the people who hold radical beliefs, it's important
Speaker 5: to stand up. You know, you don't have to form
Speaker 5: majority to have an effect. Two or three people speaking
Speaker 5: out can sometimes change the decisions of entire school boards,
Speaker 5: church boards, or other institutions. Obviously, reform is not going
Speaker 5: to be enough, but we do need to present some
Speaker 5: opposition on that front and that sphere. You know, lack
Speaker 5: of opposition teaches dominators to keep dominating, and it only
Speaker 5: takes one person to start the opposition. The domino effects
Speaker 5: that could potentially influence even higher wis because at the
Speaker 5: end of the day, it's clear that they want to
Speaker 5: be quote unquote normal in their bubbles and their echo chambers.
Speaker 5: They don't really realize how extreme. They are. Then, to
Speaker 5: be exposed to the perspectives and experiences of people outside
Speaker 5: their tight circles, Mutual aid and other organized efforts can
Speaker 5: show them the humanity of other people finding common ground
Speaker 5: in common course. But ultimately, in my view, the best
Speaker 5: long term solutions require youth liberation and prefiguration. We need
Speaker 5: use liberation both at home and at school and everywhere else.
Speaker 5: As long as we continue to reinforce the notion that
Speaker 5: children need to blindly submit to authorities, as long as
Speaker 5: we refuse to grant them humanity and autonomy. We will
Speaker 5: continue to be without humanity and autonomy. We will continue
Speaker 5: to have adult generation after generation who do not know
Speaker 5: how to resist authority. We must prefigure those relationships in
Speaker 5: our personal lives and our social spaces, or we must
Speaker 5: prefigure our liberation. It's not enough to just campaign against
Speaker 5: social dominators. We have to dismantle the systems that allow
Speaker 5: them to dominate in the first place. The only way
Speaker 5: to keep social dominators from season power is to prefigure
Speaker 5: a system where no one person can so easily coerce
Speaker 5: and dominate. To quote Barb Waltimaya one last time, we
Speaker 5: cannot secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our
Speaker 5: posterity if we sit with our oars out of the water.
Speaker 5: If we drift mind leslie, circumstances can sweep us a disaster.
Speaker 5: Our societies presently produce millions of highly authoritarian personalities, as
Speaker 5: a matter of course, enough to stage the Nuremberg rallies
Speaker 5: over and over and over again. Turn in a blind
Speaker 5: eye to this put someday point guns at all of
Speaker 5: our heads, and the fingers on the triggers will belong
Speaker 5: to right wing authoritarians. We ignore this at our peril.
Speaker 5: Social dominators want you complacent, apathetic, hopeless and out of
Speaker 5: the way. They want to control everything and everybody, and
Speaker 5: they have their loyal followers ready to mobilize. They are
Speaker 5: not the majority, but they're determined to win. Do not
Speaker 5: let them. If you know what's happening, if you spot
Speaker 5: these signs in your own spaces, it's your responsibility to
Speaker 5: do something about it, to organize, to educate. Because one
Speaker 5: person could accomplish so much, and two people could accomplish
Speaker 5: so much more. Good luck, all power to all the
Speaker 5: people because it could happen here. Can follow me on
Speaker 5: puture dot com. Stas Saint Drew. This has been Andre
Speaker 5: sage Araism. It could happen here. All La Jazz.
Speaker 1: Peace, welcome back to it could happen here. A podcast
Speaker 1: about it happening here. And you know, when we talk
Speaker 1: about like collapse, things falling apart, there's very few case
Speaker 1: studies that are more important for folks to be aware
Speaker 1: of than what has happened and is continuing to happen
Speaker 1: in Northeast Syria, in a region of the world known
Speaker 1: as Rojava, or the Autonomous Regions of Northeastyria and I'm
Speaker 1: here with James Stout. He and I have both reported
Speaker 1: from the ro Javon Project, and we are talking again
Speaker 1: with Arthur and Debbie Bookchin about what's going on there now,
Speaker 1: kind of as as the struggle continues, so to speak.
Speaker 4: That's right, and thank you very much for joining us,
Speaker 4: Arthurine Debbie, and you're both here in your capacity as
Speaker 4: representatives of the Emergency Committee for Rajava.
Speaker 13: Right, that's right, and thanks for having us.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks for coming back.
Speaker 4: So I think perhaps we should begin by explaining what
Speaker 4: ECI is and does. I've been very fortunate to be
Speaker 4: asked to speak at one of your meetings, so I'm familiar,
Speaker 4: but I think maybe some of our listeners wouldn't be.
Speaker 4: So could you begin with explaining what it is what
Speaker 4: it does?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 14: Absolutely, So, the Emergency Committee for Is it's kind of
Speaker 14: the only standing US based organization focused.
Speaker 6: On solidarity with the Rojeva revolution.
Speaker 14: And what we do is we try to build a
Speaker 14: grassroots solidarity movement with the revolution in North East Syria,
Speaker 14: with the Kurtis Freedom movement more broadly, and we do
Speaker 14: that in a few different ways. One is like just
Speaker 14: trying to inform the public. Right, So, kind of public education.
Speaker 14: Another is advocacy trying to sort of put pressure on
Speaker 14: the United States government to stop arming people who are
Speaker 14: trying to kill everybody in Rogeva and to support the
Speaker 14: people instead. But another thing that we do is try
Speaker 14: to build kind of movement to movement relationships, now, like
Speaker 14: finding social movements in the United States that we think
Speaker 14: share a lot of affinity with movement over there, try
Speaker 14: to put them in touch and try to kind of
Speaker 14: facilitate dialogue.
Speaker 1: Yeah. No, I mean, I think it's important to kind
Speaker 1: of start, as we often do, with the attempt to
Speaker 1: get the US government to stop arming folks killing the
Speaker 1: people there, which in this case refers specifically to the
Speaker 1: Turkish military. I mean, we're all kind of dealing with
Speaker 1: in a separate part of the world, how difficult it
Speaker 1: is to stop the United States government from army people.
Speaker 6: Do that, right.
Speaker 13: Yeah, it's a great point, Robert. You know, I think
Speaker 13: sometimes it's hard for people to even comprehend just the
Speaker 13: massive flow of weapons from the United States to Turkey.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean, over the years, it's.
Speaker 13: Been it's just I think in the last fifteen years alone,
Speaker 13: the US has sold Turkey something like four billion dollars
Speaker 13: worth of Patriot missiles alone, you know, and then billions
Speaker 13: or at least millions, and you know, helicopters, the Cobra
Speaker 13: attack helicopters. There is just a huge flow of arms
Speaker 13: from the United States to Turkey, and as Arthur said,
Speaker 13: you know, one of the things that we really do
Speaker 13: try and do at ECR is to get people not
Speaker 13: only aware but also into doing some advocacy on that.
Speaker 13: And one of the things that we're also trying to
Speaker 13: prevent right now is the sale of any more F
Speaker 13: sixteens to Turkey, which, as I'm sure your listeners know,
Speaker 13: are used in the bombing of people in Rojeva and
Speaker 13: also in Turkey and in northern Iraq. So that's a
Speaker 13: very critical issue in fact.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And it's a critical issue in part because
Speaker 1: like what we're seeing is I would describe it as
Speaker 1: a pretty concentrated attempt to destroy civil society in Rojeva, right,
Speaker 1: Like you're not just through the use of air strikes,
Speaker 1: through things like blocking off access to water, but the
Speaker 1: F sixteens that Turkey purchases from the United States and
Speaker 1: the continuing armaments to keep those things flying and firing
Speaker 1: missiles are a huge part of how they're able to
Speaker 1: continue degrading the capacity of the self administration to maintain
Speaker 1: civil society exactly.
Speaker 13: I mean, there is really an aim They're aimed to
Speaker 13: completely destabilize the society, to shake confidence in the autonomous administration,
Speaker 13: to break morale, to engage in psychological terror, and frankly,
Speaker 13: you know, also to do physical harm. As I'm sure
Speaker 13: you know and your listeners know, they Turkey very effectively
Speaker 13: uses drones and other methods to take out leadership, particularly
Speaker 13: female leadership, women who are leaders of the movement. And
Speaker 13: you know, there's not a day that goes by really
Speaker 13: that doesn't include strikes from Turkey into Rojeva.
Speaker 5: I mean, I'm just thinking.
Speaker 13: You know, the Membij Military Council just has reported in
Speaker 13: the last couple of days that the State of Turkey
Speaker 13: has shelled various villages and Membies.
Speaker 5: You know that.
Speaker 13: Kurdish neighborhoods in Aleppo are really subjected to continuous embargoes
Speaker 13: by the Damascus government, but also you know, Turkey intercedes
Speaker 13: to prevent supplies from getting to these places. So it's
Speaker 13: really I think there's something like more than two hundred
Speaker 13: bombings by Turkey in Iraqi Kurdistan even since just the
Speaker 13: beginning of the year, so it's really ongoing assault.
Speaker 14: No, absolutely, I think you know, for people who are
Speaker 14: less familiar with it, it's easy to kind of get
Speaker 14: bogged down in the weeds because all the details they
Speaker 14: change every day. But I think the bronze strokes are
Speaker 14: pretty clear and haven't changed for a long time.
Speaker 6: I mean, Turkey sees.
Speaker 14: This revolution rightly so as a threat to its own power,
Speaker 14: to its own ideology. You know, the idea that local
Speaker 14: communities would govern themselves pluralistically through autonomy is a direct.
Speaker 6: Threat to the idea of the Turkish state, which is
Speaker 6: basically a.
Speaker 14: Fascist nation state, and they kind of have a twofold strategy.
Speaker 14: I think you could see it this way, right, So,
Speaker 14: like for those who don't know, Turkey has already invade
Speaker 14: in Northeastiria multiple times. It's invaded Aufrin in twenty eighteen,
Speaker 14: se Dekanye ta Labiat in twenty nineteen, and it occupies
Speaker 14: that territory still to this day. But when it's been
Speaker 14: unable to seize more territory directly, it kind of has
Speaker 14: this twofold strategy where the other side of the coin
Speaker 14: is to just do everything possible to make life unlivable, right,
Speaker 14: So that's where the assassinations come in.
Speaker 6: That's where the sort of.
Speaker 14: Information warfare, blocking of water, sort of economic embargo. The
Speaker 14: basic idea is just to spread fear, to spread uncertainty
Speaker 14: into every sphere of life, and, like you said, Robert,
Speaker 14: to basically attack civil society itself.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I wonder if you could explain. I think our
Speaker 4: listeners are maybe familiar with the campaign again and civil
Speaker 4: society and civilian targets that we saw, like in October
Speaker 4: November of last year, that I saw some of while
Speaker 4: I was there. But Turkey's recently launched like a spring offensive, right,
Speaker 4: which doesn't isn't exclusively unlimited to bombing, but also it
Speaker 4: contains like I guess, combined arms, you know, infantry bombing.
Speaker 4: Can you explain what's happening there and what the sort
Speaker 4: of I think the plan you've sort of very well
Speaker 4: summed up already, right, which is to make life unlivable
Speaker 4: for the Kurdish freedom movement. But can you explain what's
Speaker 4: been happening in the last few weeks for people who
Speaker 4: haven't caught up.
Speaker 14: So for one, for people to understand the connection in
Speaker 14: the first place. Right, it's important to understand that, really, wow,
Speaker 14: there are distinct organizations which are autonomous and are place
Speaker 14: based within the Kurdish movement. Right, there's their own parties
Speaker 14: and self defense forces in Syria and in Iraq and
Speaker 14: other parts of Kurdistan. It's important to see it also
Speaker 14: as kind of one big Kurtish freedom movement in another
Speaker 14: sense and an important sense, because Turkey sees it in
Speaker 14: that light. So for the same reasons, the Turkey wants
Speaker 14: to crush the revolution in Northeastyria, the Turkey wants to
Speaker 14: crush the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers Party, right, and the
Speaker 14: gorillas of the PKK are based in northern Iraq, and
Speaker 14: time and time again they've tried to sort of dislodge
Speaker 14: the gorilla forces from the mountains, but it's pretty hard
Speaker 14: to do. You know, this is NATO's second largest military
Speaker 14: and they still after decades, have not been able to
Speaker 14: crush this insurgency.
Speaker 6: And so what we're seeing.
Speaker 14: In recent weeks is not necessarily so novel. I mean,
Speaker 14: you can again you can get into the weeds about
Speaker 14: the region of Metina and a particular road that they're
Speaker 14: trying to seize for logistics on their way to the
Speaker 14: Mountain of Ghara. But the truth is they're trying to
Speaker 14: crush the movement where it is and they're seizing an opportunity.
Speaker 14: There's often like a weather wind for the fighting in
Speaker 14: the mountains as well, and so when the snow starts
Speaker 14: to melt in the spring, you start to see an
Speaker 14: escalation of the fighting in the mountains, which often winds
Speaker 14: down in the fall. Again, but it's yet to be seen.
Speaker 6: Now this is going to go.
Speaker 14: I mean, y'all have I don't have to tell you
Speaker 14: right like you've done some recent episodes on technological developments
Speaker 14: with the movement, and Turkey's been having a really hard
Speaker 14: time making gains on the ground.
Speaker 13: And also I mean, as I think, as Megan Bodette
Speaker 13: noted on this podcast recently, you know, the Turkish leader
Speaker 13: Erdowan tends to take out any insult he feels he suffered,
Speaker 13: and particularly elections setbacks has happened in the local elections
Speaker 13: at the end of March on the Kurdish regions everywhere
Speaker 13: in Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and so we're seeing also crackdowns
Speaker 13: has happened also for quite some time. But on journalists
Speaker 13: again sort of cranking up again. It's funny that on
Speaker 13: World Press Day, which was May third, Kurdish journalist was arrested,
Speaker 13: you know, strip search, a woman thrown in jail, and
Speaker 13: this is you know, another sort of wave of politicians
Speaker 13: being arrested. Just again on Monday, I think thirteen politicians
Speaker 13: were sentenced to six years plus in jail, in prison.
Speaker 13: So this sort of policy that seems to show itself
Speaker 13: every time Airdawan feels a bit threatened is one that
Speaker 13: we're seeing right now, in part I think as a
Speaker 13: result of those election defeats that his party suffered.
Speaker 14: Yeah, absolutely, and sinister as it is. Whenever they lose
Speaker 14: in the mountains, they often hit harder in Northeastyria and
Speaker 14: vice versa. So it's all just a big kind of
Speaker 14: ugly game that they're playing.
Speaker 1: Well, I want to get to some more here, but
Speaker 1: first we've got to take a quick break. We're going
Speaker 1: to throw to some ads and then we'll come back
Speaker 1: and continue this discussion. All right, we're back, and I'm
Speaker 1: trying to get a sense of how the situation is
Speaker 1: on the ground right now despite the or considering the
Speaker 1: challenges of the attacks on infrastructure, that have continued to
Speaker 1: go on, like what are we looking at from a
Speaker 1: daily life point of view in places like Comichelo.
Speaker 13: Well, you know, one of the things that I think
Speaker 13: is important to emphasize is just how strong a lot
Speaker 13: of the civil structures really are even in the face
Speaker 13: of these attacks by Turkey. And I'm sure Arthur will
Speaker 13: have something to say about that, and also about maybe
Speaker 13: some of the sort of the military side of this.
Speaker 13: But you know, the extraordinary thing about Rojeva is just
Speaker 13: how deeply engaged they are on the civil level. In
Speaker 13: our group at the Emergency Committee for Rojeva, we're in
Speaker 13: contact with a lot of people in civil society and
Speaker 13: it's I'm always amazed at how many sort of requests
Speaker 13: we get for, you know, exchanges of information and scholars
Speaker 13: and they're building the university there to do more and
Speaker 13: more technical things, you know, whether computers or agricultural sciences
Speaker 13: or you know, just a vast variety of graduate program
Speaker 13: they want to do right now in social ecology that
Speaker 13: I've been working with them on. And so so, even
Speaker 13: though there's this effort by Turkey to kind of terrorize
Speaker 13: the civilian population, and I'm sure you know, people can
Speaker 13: imagine what it must feel like to have drones flying
Speaker 13: constantly overhead and wondering if you get into a car
Speaker 13: whether it might you might you know, be the subject
Speaker 13: of a drone attack. Nonetheless, there is still this extraordinary
Speaker 13: sort of hopefulness and also energy towards building the society.
Speaker 13: And for example, one of the things that they recently did,
Speaker 13: and it took a long time, but they rewrote their
Speaker 13: Social Contract, which is what we would think of as
Speaker 13: a constitution, to empower women even more, you know, to
Speaker 13: empower various ethnic minorities more, and to make it a
Speaker 13: document that is truly inclusive in terms of how it
Speaker 13: was written and how it will be implemented, and so
Speaker 13: on the ground, I think, even though they are suffering
Speaker 13: in a lot of ways, and they are because you know,
Speaker 13: Rojaeve is also a region that is subject to terrible
Speaker 13: environmental dislocations because of global warming, there's still a huge
Speaker 13: sort of excitement I think about about the fact that
Speaker 13: they are self governing and the fact that they are
Speaker 13: empowering women, and those kinds of activities, especially on the
Speaker 13: part of the women's movement. Congress star just continue to
Speaker 13: go on. You know, they've built an alternative justice system.
Speaker 13: They are increasingly turning their sort of economy as much
Speaker 13: as is feasible, and it's a slow process, but into
Speaker 13: a more of a cooperative economy. So all of those
Speaker 13: things are very much underway there. And education is a
Speaker 13: huge part of that.
Speaker 6: No, I mean, that's that's also true, It really is.
Speaker 14: But just to speak to kind of the other side
Speaker 14: of that, you know, Robert s sort of what is
Speaker 14: life like, say.
Speaker 6: In a place like Commushula right now?
Speaker 14: You know, I think in some ways it's a lot
Speaker 14: like it was when I was in a place called Zirgon,
Speaker 14: which is another frontline city where at the same time
Speaker 14: Debbie's describing life goes on, people trying to build up
Speaker 14: civil society, They're trying to organize the communes and the cooperatives.
Speaker 14: At the same time, there's a tremendous fear and uncertainty,
Speaker 14: fear in an immediate sense around these drone strikes. I mean,
Speaker 14: you guys have been there too, right, Like I've been
Speaker 14: home I think eleven months now, and I still every
Speaker 14: time I hear a small airplane, my body just even
Speaker 14: if my brain knows that it's just a plane, like
Speaker 14: my body's convinced it's a Turkish drone. And imagine, you know,
Speaker 14: you live your whole life in a place like that,
Speaker 14: or you've spent the last ten years, So a lot
Speaker 14: of people are living in this constant state of fear
Speaker 14: and uncertainty. Even on a practical level. You know, say
Speaker 14: you're a farmer and you're going to plant your seats
Speaker 14: this year, do you know that you're even going to
Speaker 14: have your land in a month or six months? You know,
Speaker 14: people are taking Turkey's threat of an Invasionviously, it hasn't
Speaker 14: happened again since twenty nineteen, but I can tell you
Speaker 14: I talked to people there almost every day, and they're
Speaker 14: taking it extremely seriously. So there's kind of this idea
Speaker 14: of impending invasion sort of hangs like a cloud over
Speaker 14: daily life in so many ways. And on top of
Speaker 14: all of that, of course, since I left Northeast Siria,
Speaker 14: there was this major wave of attacks against civilian infrastructure
Speaker 14: right around the time you were there last, James, you know,
Speaker 14: and you can probably speak to it more, but I
Speaker 14: mean we're talking about power stations and oil wells, and
Speaker 14: hospitals and schools and food storage facilities, So they're still.
Speaker 6: Really reeling from these infrastructure attacks.
Speaker 13: Cutting off electricity to a million people at a time
Speaker 13: and water supplies.
Speaker 1: Which is about a third of the population of the region.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean, you know, war crimes. There's another word
Speaker 6: for it, that's what they're called.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a very jarring experience, at least in my
Speaker 4: time there, which is briefer than then the amount of
Speaker 4: time both of you have spent there to like go
Speaker 4: out in the daytime and talk to people and see
Speaker 4: this incredible optimism for like, we are building a different world,
Speaker 4: and like it's there and you can see it, and
Speaker 4: we're moving towards it. It's not like, you know, we're
Speaker 4: building a different world when we have encampments on campus too,
Speaker 4: but this is a tangible societal product.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, and that it speaks to That's why the attacks
Speaker 1: Turkey is carrying out take the form they're taking, right,
Speaker 1: because the priority, the primary strength of the self administration
Speaker 1: is not in its arms. It's in its ability to
Speaker 1: provide a functional civil society that people are motivated to
Speaker 1: take part in, which is why their primary weapon is
Speaker 1: to try to destroy the ability of people to live.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and that's exact what it feels.
Speaker 4: Like like you know, my experience with a brief. You know,
Speaker 4: we lost electricity every night. People are not willing or
Speaker 4: people are less willing to go out and drive long
Speaker 4: distances after dark. There is very clearly damage to the infrastructure.
Speaker 4: You know, I was in a couple of different places.
Speaker 4: One of them was having issues getting getting water pumped.
Speaker 4: There are massive funerals right for people who have been killed.
Speaker 4: And you get to see this what is like it's
Speaker 4: a beautiful spectacle in a sense, but also like, you know,
Speaker 4: you can't spend a week in Roger were a Nazi,
Speaker 4: a little baby say goodbye to their dad, or just
Speaker 4: a dead baby, and that's that's terrible, you know.
Speaker 5: And like the one.
Speaker 4: Thing that I noticed, which I think people might not
Speaker 4: have picked up on just sort of consuming media, the
Speaker 4: presence of people hope about martyrs as they call them,
Speaker 4: right Shahad. It's so it's everywhere. From the first place
Speaker 4: I stepped foot across the river, you know, there were
Speaker 4: these portraits, these yellow and green portraits on aroundabout since
Speaker 4: cities and people's homes. Like the scale of the sacrifice
Speaker 4: both to build this project and to defeat isis I
Speaker 4: think is very hot. I mean the United States has
Speaker 4: been all for most of our lives, but it hasn't
Speaker 4: nowhere near the same impact on our daily lives it
Speaker 4: has had there.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's so true.
Speaker 13: There's not a family really in Rogeval. When you spend
Speaker 13: some time there and you meet with different people, there's
Speaker 13: not a single family that hasn't lost somebody. I mean,
Speaker 13: it's thirteen thousand people in the fight against ISIS alone
Speaker 13: and now, and not to mention, for example, the two
Speaker 13: hundred thousand people who were displaced when Turkey is you know,
Speaker 13: jihadi malicious invaded Aphrine, the westernmost region. So it's it's
Speaker 13: absolutely effective bree day life.
Speaker 4: Yeah, every time I spend a lot of time volunteering
Speaker 4: at the border, as people listening know, and every time
Speaker 4: we meet Kurdish people, often you know they're they're from
Speaker 4: like northern Kurdistan, which is in Turkey under in control
Speaker 4: of the Turkish state. I guess even like the volunteers
Speaker 4: who are not super briefed out shaba, who are just
Speaker 4: people who want to help. Like everyone knows what it
Speaker 4: means when people when you talk to people and they
Speaker 4: have the little green picture or the little little yellow
Speaker 4: picture on them, Yeah, which is it's a profound part
Speaker 4: of the lived experience of being part of the Kurdish
Speaker 4: freedom movement or just existing as a Kurdish person in
Speaker 4: that area. And that's it's it's really hard to grasp
Speaker 4: the scale of that.
Speaker 6: No, it's so true.
Speaker 14: I mean, it just makes me think that it's kind
Speaker 14: of related to this larger sort of spirit of sacrifice
Speaker 14: that's part of what the movement calls, like a revolutionary personality.
Speaker 14: You know, in a lot of ways, the families of
Speaker 14: you know what they call them martyrs, they also see
Speaker 14: it as their sacrifice, it's their contribution to the movement.
Speaker 14: And it's it's easy for I think Westerners to kind of,
Speaker 14: I don't know, dismiss it or get really uncomfortable with it.
Speaker 14: We're not familiar with that on a cultural level as much.
Speaker 14: But I think it's it's a mistake to see it
Speaker 14: that way. I think there's something incredibly profound about it
Speaker 14: that has to do with the way that people really
Speaker 14: identify their whole lives, the meaning of their lives with
Speaker 14: the revolution, with the movement, that that is what that
Speaker 14: is the purpose of their lives, that's the purpose of
Speaker 14: the life of their families and come what may. That's
Speaker 14: something that you know, movements here can't really relate to
Speaker 14: in the same way.
Speaker 1: Yet, I think, yeah, and I kind of want to
Speaker 1: talk a little bit more about that. We're gonna We're
Speaker 1: going to throw one last time to adds and then
Speaker 1: we'll come back and kind of flesh out this discussion,
Speaker 1: and we're back talking about like what it means to
Speaker 1: be part of a revolution as opposed to someone who
Speaker 1: has revolutionary sympathies, which it's easy to be and we
Speaker 1: have a lot of those in the United States. I'm
Speaker 1: going to guess most of the people listening to this
Speaker 1: show have at least some of those, right, whether or
Speaker 1: not you think there's any realistic chance of seeing that
Speaker 1: during your own life, it's a very different thing from
Speaker 1: being from living it, which people do. You know, about
Speaker 1: three million of them in Rosheva every day, And the
Speaker 1: sacrifice is a part of it. The kind of continual
Speaker 1: conflict is another part of it. Because you know, it's
Speaker 1: worth emphasizing we're about a decade into the project right now.
Speaker 1: Right if we consider that being from you know, the
Speaker 1: start of the self administration in varying fashion, and that's
Speaker 1: that's not like it's not a perfectly even process, right,
Speaker 1: because it occurred as part of this series of broader conflicts.
Speaker 1: But what you've seen is both the retreat of the
Speaker 1: government that had formerly controlled the area. You've seen a
Speaker 1: successful war prosecuted against isis you've seen when you could
Speaker 1: look at as one conflict or kind of a series
Speaker 1: of conflicts with both these Turkish backed militias and the
Speaker 1: Turkish military itself, and then this also this continuing conflict
Speaker 1: both with the environment, you know, just because that that
Speaker 1: is really that's a force at work here the Cold War,
Speaker 1: that kind of that's not even really a perfect way
Speaker 1: of describing the situation with the the Asad regime and
Speaker 1: with you know, their their backers in their Russian government,
Speaker 1: but it's a it's a complex, interwoven series of conflict.
Speaker 1: But kind of the result is just a life of
Speaker 1: conflict for the people who are are part of this
Speaker 1: revolution as sort of a just a fact of daily life.
Speaker 1: And I think that is really hard to grasp.
Speaker 6: I think that's true, and I think there's.
Speaker 14: Part of it, like you say, that has to do
Speaker 14: with the sort of objective situation where the conditions of
Speaker 14: people are living in this perpetual conflict that you're talking about,
Speaker 14: and at the same time, I think there's also an
Speaker 14: aspect that's more like, I don't know, like subjective, you
Speaker 14: could call it. It has to do with the kind
Speaker 14: of movement that they've really actively been building for themselves,
Speaker 14: and the kind of spirit that their movement has taken
Speaker 14: on that they've cultivated themselves, sort of painstaking me for years.
Speaker 14: I mean, I think one of the things that I know,
Speaker 14: Debbie and I really want to get to in our
Speaker 14: conversations with the speaking tour that we're working on which
Speaker 14: is coming up later later this month on the West Coast,
Speaker 14: is we really, well, we want people to be.
Speaker 6: Inspired by this revolution.
Speaker 14: We really don't want people to just see it as
Speaker 14: this very like other thing on the other side of
Speaker 14: the world. You know, even those who are really supportive,
Speaker 14: especially us, you know anarchistory, say, fellow travelers, we have
Speaker 14: a tendency to kind of maybe oversimplify or romanticize what's
Speaker 14: happening over there and think, oh, well, you know, if
Speaker 14: the state could just collapse here, I'm sure everybody would
Speaker 14: just sort of like melt into an anarchist utopia of statelessness,
Speaker 14: and that would be a mistake too. I think the
Speaker 14: truth is that what Rojava shows you is a real
Speaker 14: revolution is incredibly messy, and they only were able to
Speaker 14: kind of face the threats and the opportunities that crisis
Speaker 14: brought to them in Syria because of the kind of
Speaker 14: movement they had built for themselves, and they had these
Speaker 14: practical tools to kind of help local communities govern themselves
Speaker 14: in that sort of chaos in the power vacuum that arose.
Speaker 14: And you know, in a moment like this the world over,
Speaker 14: especially here in the United States, you know, we're the
Speaker 14: cris that we're facing, the crisis that we're looking down
Speaker 14: the barrel of I think there's been no more kind
Speaker 14: of relevant or urgent time to think about how those
Speaker 14: lessons actually could apply here and what it means for us.
Speaker 14: What kind of movement do we need to build to
Speaker 14: be ready for that moment.
Speaker 13: Yeah, you know, I really agree, And Robert, I'm glad
Speaker 13: you mentioned, you know, the fact that the revolution is
Speaker 13: over ten years old, because I think, you know, And
Speaker 13: to follow up sort of just on what Arthur was
Speaker 13: saying that sort of sometimes the crises that we face
Speaker 13: environmentally logical, global warming, and not to mention democracy itself,
Speaker 13: you know, can seem almost paralyzing, or that we're constantly
Speaker 13: in a state of reaction. But one of the things
Speaker 13: that the revolution in Roseeve teaches us is that, first
Speaker 13: of all, that moments of crisis can also be moments
Speaker 13: of great transformation, but really only if we're prepared for them.
Speaker 13: And that's why, you know, whenever I talk about the
Speaker 13: Roji of a project, I feel it's important to remind
Speaker 13: people that it didn't just spring miraculously out of nowhere
Speaker 13: in the moment of the Syrian Civil War. The folks
Speaker 13: on the ground there had really been preparing for years,
Speaker 13: I mean decades, even for the opportunity that opened up
Speaker 13: for them during the Syrian Civil War. And in various ways,
Speaker 13: of course, they were educating themselves on radical history and
Speaker 13: particular understanding, you know, the failures of classical Marxism, Leninism,
Speaker 13: you know, which had been embraced previously by the PKK,
Speaker 13: and putting also into practice clandestinely the kinds of grassroots
Speaker 13: democratic social structures that we see operating on the ground
Speaker 13: there today. So I think that that's one of the
Speaker 13: lessons that we hear in the US can absorb that
Speaker 13: you know that we need to be able to exploit
Speaker 13: the crisis of legitimacy that's growing here today, thinking about
Speaker 13: what kind of alternatives we want to build and showing
Speaker 13: people that those alternatives exist, you know these Yeah, that,
Speaker 13: and you know that's includes engaging in a kind of
Speaker 13: prefigurative politics that really focuses on things like dual power,
Speaker 13: you know, cooperative economic project but also local assembly, democratic politics.
Speaker 13: So that's one of the things that I'm also really
Speaker 13: excited about talking about talking about as Arthur and I
Speaker 13: make our way from Seattle down to San Francisco and
Speaker 13: Oakland during the course of these six presentations and chats
Speaker 13: and talks and discussions that we're really excited about having
Speaker 13: beginning next weekend.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah. Let's let's let's provide people with a
Speaker 1: little bit of information on how, you know, they might
Speaker 1: be able to attend and take part in that. So
Speaker 1: what should folks look up and look into if they
Speaker 1: if they're interested in where are you guys going to be?
Speaker 14: Absolutely? Yeah, thanks. I think the best thing people can
Speaker 14: do is go to defend dot org. That's the website
Speaker 14: for the Emergency Committee for Roje our group. But right
Speaker 14: there the front page. You're going to see a poster
Speaker 14: for our tour that you can click on. It'll take
Speaker 14: you to links for all the different stops that we're
Speaker 14: going to do. We're going to be making our way
Speaker 14: all the way from Bellingham, Washington, which is up near
Speaker 14: the border of Canada, down to the Bay Area, and
Speaker 14: you know, we really wish we.
Speaker 6: Could make more cities.
Speaker 14: There are a couple events that are our comrades and
Speaker 14: colleagues are organizing on the East Coast around the same timeframe,
Speaker 14: so be sure to look up the calendar on our website.
Speaker 6: But people can go to defend dot org to hear more.
Speaker 14: But the basic idea, like Debbie said, is we want
Speaker 14: to talk to people not only about what's going on
Speaker 14: in Rogievo, why we think it matters how they can
Speaker 14: stand in solidarity, but we want to talk about what
Speaker 14: we're going to do in our own communities to take
Speaker 14: those lessons and to apply them to our own context.
Speaker 6: We want to help connect.
Speaker 14: People who are doing you know, real community organizing in
Speaker 14: local movements and to try to kind of inspire and
Speaker 14: strengthen what's already going on, rather than just to see
Speaker 14: this as being strictly about Rocheva, because I mean, y'all
Speaker 14: probably were told the same thing. When when you're over
Speaker 14: there and you ask people what can we do to support,
Speaker 14: one of the things they'll tell you is you've got
Speaker 14: to organize the revolution at home. And that's on us,
Speaker 14: you know, it's a it's a it's easier said than done, right,
Speaker 14: And we're not saying we have all the answers, But
Speaker 14: what we do want to do is to invite local
Speaker 14: grassroots activists especially to come join the discussion and let's
Speaker 14: talk together about what it would mean to apply these
Speaker 14: basic principles, not to copy and payte then, but to
Speaker 14: apply these basic principles and lessons, principles of direct democracy,
Speaker 14: local autonomy, you know, cooperation, feminism. We haven't even talked
Speaker 14: about how central you know, gender liberation.
Speaker 6: Is to the Kurdish freedom movement. How do we apply
Speaker 6: these things in our own communities.
Speaker 12: Yeah.
Speaker 13: And one of the things, by the way, if people
Speaker 13: are interested in getting some more detail and a real
Speaker 13: inside look at what is going on in Rojaeven detail
Speaker 13: is that Arthur has two pieces in the magazine Strange Matters,
Speaker 13: which is also online, which are just terrific and they're
Speaker 13: part of a series that he's going to be doing
Speaker 13: i think monthly over the over the next few months,
Speaker 13: and so that's some great background as well.
Speaker 9: Aw shucks, Yeah, it's fantastic, Stev.
Speaker 6: Yeah, woe, thank you.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Check that out obviously, folks if you're if you haven't,
Speaker 1: We've also got a podcast series, The Women's War, that
Speaker 1: covers the earlier history of the Rajavian Revolution up to
Speaker 1: about twenty nineteen, late twenty nineteen, which will cover quite
Speaker 1: a bit of the impact that kind of this sort
Speaker 1: of feminist lens has had on what's happening over there
Speaker 1: and how it's actually persisted, you know, under the conditions
Speaker 1: that are really kind of almost impossibly challenging when you
Speaker 1: look at what these people are up against, which is
Speaker 1: part of again, I guess ultimately why, as we've repeatedly
Speaker 1: come back to, I think this is so important for
Speaker 1: people in the West to study as things get worse
Speaker 1: for a lot of folks here and as we attempt
Speaker 1: to arrest and take charge of the situation in our
Speaker 1: own lives. You know, we have all these questions about
Speaker 1: how do we stop our government from arming not just Turkey,
Speaker 1: but all of these regimes around the world that are
Speaker 1: doing such terrible things.
Speaker 5: How do we stop?
Speaker 1: How do we arrest you know, these problems that are
Speaker 1: continuing to affect you know, really ultimately, billions of people
Speaker 1: around the world's taking charge of our own lives, and
Speaker 1: the same way that these people have. It's kind of
Speaker 1: making that slogan of the Rejaban revolution, you know, resistance
Speaker 1: is life. Actually embracing that in a way that matters,
Speaker 1: and when you focus on sort of the challenges to
Speaker 1: like the sheer amount of work that has to be
Speaker 1: done here, the very primitive state of any kind of
Speaker 1: meaningful resistance, the relatively primitive state of organizing on the left,
Speaker 1: compared to, for example, the organizing that the right does
Speaker 1: in tandem with paramilitaries in the state. It can seem
Speaker 1: like an impossible challenge. But ten years on, the people
Speaker 1: in northeast Syria are still are still fighting, you know,
Speaker 1: and I think you have to. I think paying attention
Speaker 1: to that makes it clear that it is actually possible
Speaker 1: to win.
Speaker 6: So true.
Speaker 1: Well, I guess that's kind of it for us today.
Speaker 1: Is there anything else we want to plug? I just
Speaker 1: wanted to go out on a better note.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm writing a piece for Kurdish Peace Institute. I'm
Speaker 4: manifesting this on the podcast, so I've actually write it
Speaker 4: about Mian Mah Kurdistan solidarity, which I think is cool.
Speaker 1: So like great topic.
Speaker 4: Yes, yeah, I don't think we have a lot of time,
Speaker 4: but I think that one thing that I've learned from
Speaker 4: the friends in Roche is that, like, even when you
Speaker 4: are going through difficulties, you can still stand in solidarity
Speaker 4: with other people. And God knows we're all going through
Speaker 4: difficulties in economic and political and state violence terms in
Speaker 4: this country, and I think that like one thing I
Speaker 4: really took from that was that it's never too hard
Speaker 4: for you to be in solidarity. And I hope that
Speaker 4: folks who are in this country will appreciate that and
Speaker 4: be in solidarity with people in Roche as well.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, well, Wie Arthur, thank you both so much for
Speaker 1: being here with us, and thank you for continuing to
Speaker 1: do the work that you do to keep this topic
Speaker 1: alive in people's hearts and minds.
Speaker 6: Thank you all so much.
Speaker 1: Yeah, always happy.
Speaker 6: Yeah, keep up the great work yourselves.
Speaker 1: All right, everybody, that's the episode. We will be back
Speaker 1: tomorrow unless this comes out on a Friday, in which
Speaker 1: case we might not be back tomorrow, but we'll be back,
Speaker 1: you know, Monday. You understand how this works at this point, right?
Speaker 12: It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
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Speaker 12: You can find sources for It could Happen here, updated
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Speaker 1: Hey, We'll be back Monday, with more episodes every week
Speaker 1: from now until the heat death of the Universe.