Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
Speaker 1: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 1: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 1: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 1: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 1: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's got to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 1: you can make your own decisions.
Speaker 2: Wonderful good podcast introduction Boys of West part of the podcast.
Speaker 2: Maybe that could be Harry Jo, Hi May, how are you?
Speaker 2: We're doing a podcast.
Speaker 3: I've been feed a The chess world has decided that
Speaker 3: my chess powers are too strong, and.
Speaker 2: I'm now being discriminated against. It's a good time, very excited.
Speaker 3: Yeah, having a great time with my biological advantage at chess.
Speaker 2: Yeah that's right. Well, you know you've got to reach
Speaker 2: those chess pieces somehow, and it's all to do with
Speaker 2: your hip angle.
Speaker 3: From transvestigators. My wrists are too powerful. This allows me
Speaker 3: to write down my moves faster than my opponent, thus
Speaker 3: giving me an advantage on the clock. I can also
Speaker 3: reach the clock faster. Incredible stuff happening in the world
Speaker 3: of chess, not.
Speaker 2: Just chess sadly, but the fact the Turfs have got
Speaker 2: their clause I guess, into many sports, which is what
Speaker 2: we are talking about today. Specifically, I thought we could
Speaker 2: talk about how the Turf's ruin cycling, because that is
Speaker 2: the thing they have been trying to do for some time.
Speaker 2: It's a thing I've written about before and hopefully a
Speaker 2: thing I will be able to write about again. And
Speaker 2: unless the cycling press just kind of gives itself over
Speaker 2: to the Turfs, which doesn't seem to have done, to
Speaker 2: be fair, generally generally dicycling press, I think it's fair
Speaker 2: to say it's lacked an intersexual analysis of anything. But
Speaker 2: they've been better on this than I had expected, especially
Speaker 2: the outlets which are not run by white sis head
Speaker 2: dudes in Boulder, which, to be fair, is a minority.
Speaker 2: Yeah strange, that odd? How odd? But yeah, shouting in
Speaker 2: particular to Outside for including a gear guide to the
Speaker 2: gear the cops used at the twenty sixteen RNC, which
Speaker 2: could perhaps be included as the most tone deaf article
Speaker 2: ever written. Yeah, yeah, incredibly, and then to leave it
Speaker 2: up in twenty twenty to not like cover your tracks.
Speaker 2: You know this is one of those.
Speaker 3: This is one of those, like when the workers take
Speaker 3: Boulder like no biker will go hungry moments.
Speaker 2: Ah yeah, Boulder, Colorado is a special place for bad things.
Speaker 2: I won't say bad things to happen because they had
Speaker 2: not a format shooting. But like social yeah, intersexual analysis
Speaker 2: has not made it to bolder savvy. Great, great shame.
Speaker 2: But we're not talking about bout it today. We're starting
Speaker 2: out with a little discussion of cyclo cross. So cycle across.
Speaker 2: Are you familiar with cycling across?
Speaker 4: Mire?
Speaker 5: No?
Speaker 2: Okay, So it's a fundamentally silly sport in which I've competed,
Speaker 2: of course. It's it's when competitors race skinny, tired drop
Speaker 2: bar bikes on off ro course. Yeah, I would please google,
Speaker 2: uh perhaps, Okay, I'm going to send you one one
Speaker 2: cyclo cross video. It is iconic for people who are
Speaker 2: who are at home. The videos called is joey. Okay,
Speaker 2: we can we can have mere reacting live.
Speaker 3: The first picture that I saw when when I googled
Speaker 3: this is two people not riding on their two people
Speaker 3: carrying their bikes.
Speaker 2: Yes, so this is a thing, right, you get really
Speaker 2: good at cyclic you train your entire life and then
Speaker 2: and then in psychelocross, there are parts where you have
Speaker 2: to get off. Unless you're very talented, you can't hop
Speaker 2: the barriers. I've tried that with mixed success. You can
Speaker 2: also you can ride the stairs, but you do have
Speaker 2: to be a bit of a boss. So there are
Speaker 2: barriers and challenges which you have to get off. It's
Speaker 2: called field riding in Dutch, which is about riding. Have
Speaker 2: you watched the video? Will include a link in the
Speaker 2: note to everyone else of it. Did you watch it
Speaker 2: with the sound on? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Okay, I'm trying to figure out how to describe this effectively.
Speaker 3: What has happened is this guy Okay, so these guy's
Speaker 3: like going at full speed and then while the bike
Speaker 3: is still moving, he's attempting to get off the bike
Speaker 3: before he gets to this barrier, and he like, he
Speaker 3: just goes. He does not get off in time. The
Speaker 3: bike's going too fast and he like she is she's
Speaker 3: like sprawling. But in mid arees he's flying off his
Speaker 3: bike over the sparricaane thing.
Speaker 2: It is incredible. Yeah. All the time people are shouting
Speaker 2: his name, And that's what you're supposed to do. You're
Speaker 2: supposed to dismount and just carry the speed you kind
Speaker 2: of you can either thwing your leg through or throwing
Speaker 2: your leg to the outside and then carry a speed
Speaker 2: and jump and then hop back on. It's a very
Speaker 2: strange sport, right, And a big part of cyclo cross
Speaker 2: is heckling. So the crowd will heckle you, right, they will.
Speaker 2: They'll do all kinds of things, like often the crowd.
Speaker 2: Hand ups are a big thing in cycle across. So,
Speaker 2: like I've been handed dollar bills beer. What is happening
Speaker 2: in the sport? Oh yeah, it's very funny. And the
Speaker 2: moment you're not competitive if you're just grabbing shit off
Speaker 2: the spectators. So like, like I remember racing in Las
Speaker 2: Vegas at night. There was a race in Las Vegas
Speaker 2: at night, and I ain't gonna win right like then,
Speaker 2: so I'm just grabbing dollar bills and shoving them down
Speaker 2: my like like.
Speaker 5: It's like.
Speaker 2: People will hand you like drinks. I've had beer hand ups,
Speaker 2: donut spake, and one notable occasion a cookie that was
Speaker 2: not just a normal cookie, which you should fucking disclose
Speaker 2: to someone before you get to Yeah, that was a
Speaker 2: bad day. I also had a pretty rough traumatic brain
Speaker 2: injury that day. Oh no, yeah, I'd already sustained the
Speaker 2: brain injury that hit the cookie. I thought my blood
Speaker 2: sugar was low, so I was like, yeah, I'm gonna
Speaker 2: got that cookie and it's going to be great. It
Speaker 2: was not. It wasn't the blood sugar. It was affected
Speaker 2: my cognition. So cyclograss is fun and silly, and heckling
Speaker 2: is part of it. But like heckling occurs within a
Speaker 2: certain certain bounds, right, Like you're not supposed to be mean,
Speaker 2: it's just supposed to be funny, Like everyone's supposed to laugh.
Speaker 2: So I think in twenty twenty one everyone was rather
Speaker 2: it's funny signed part of it too, right, But in
Speaker 2: twenty twenty one we saw some shit that was distinctly
Speaker 2: not funny when a group called Save Women's Sport posted
Speaker 2: up at the race and held what were, as you
Speaker 2: can probably guess by the name, transphobic science throughout the race.
Speaker 2: So a lot of people were upset by this, and
Speaker 2: by their own admission, nobody wanted them there. One woman
Speaker 2: told the protesters your ship feminism isn't welcome here, which
Speaker 2: I think would be a great T shirt. If she's listening,
Speaker 2: please will license your.
Speaker 5: T shirt.
Speaker 2: And they were pretty rarely rejected by most of the community,
Speaker 2: which is great, But the bigotry they bought really wasn't
Speaker 2: a surprise to anyone who'd been paying attention to online
Speaker 2: discourse for a while, especially with respect to cycling. The
Speaker 2: harassment of trans cyclists has been escalating for years. For
Speaker 2: at least five or six years now. The governing body
Speaker 2: USA Cycling has known about this and chosen to have done
Speaker 2: nothing to stop it. Right, So, this particular focus on
Speaker 2: cycling came about in twenty eighteen when anti transcadras began
Speaker 2: to focus on the sport because of the success of
Speaker 2: a woman named Veronica Ivy and that she wasn't called
Speaker 2: Veronica Ivy at the time, and she was using she
Speaker 2: had a different name then, but that's her name now,
Speaker 2: so I'm going to use that name out of respect
Speaker 2: for her choice for that to be her name. She
Speaker 2: she won a world championship in the women's thirty five
Speaker 2: to forty four spring category. Now, like, I have no
Speaker 2: disrespect at all for masters athletes.
Speaker 5: It's great.
Speaker 2: I'm glad people are out there exercising. This is not
Speaker 2: the same as an Olympic gold medal, right, Like the
Speaker 2: big I would I mean, people may disagree. The biggest
Speaker 2: determinant of your ability to win a master's track cycling
Speaker 2: gold medal is the amount of free time you have
Speaker 2: to exercise and the amount of money you have to
Speaker 2: buy fast gear and get to the event. Right, what
Speaker 2: is like the difference between masters is it's competitions for
Speaker 2: older people. So it's so in cycling you have juniors
Speaker 2: and there are various you know, obviously the eight year
Speaker 2: olds don't compete with eighteen year olds, but up to
Speaker 2: eighteen as juniors espoires is eighteen to twenty three. We
Speaker 2: use a French name because you know, you want to
Speaker 2: be call what is what's what? Jesus Christ? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: this French name under twenty three, right, you can call
Speaker 2: it if you want it to be an angler phile.
Speaker 2: And then from there you go into the elite competition.
Speaker 2: Elite competition is it's actually eighteen and like an eighteen
Speaker 2: year old could compete in an elite competition, so could
Speaker 2: a fifty year old, right, but it's the highest level
Speaker 2: of competition. And then you get protected age categories again
Speaker 2: once you get to thirty five, So so thirty five
Speaker 2: to forty four forty five to fifty four going ten
Speaker 2: year blocks, right, and that's for people who are only
Speaker 2: of that age. Now, it's the older you get, the
Speaker 2: less competitive it gets, just because more people will people
Speaker 2: will be racing, right, But thirty five plus masters sometimes
Speaker 2: they call it baby masters, is.
Speaker 6: Not.
Speaker 2: You don't have a significant decrease in your endurance performance
Speaker 2: at thirty five, So like some of these people are
Speaker 2: still very good, and that's why they call it baby masters,
Speaker 2: I guess. But like track cycling is not a big
Speaker 2: sport to begin with, right, that's going around in circles
Speaker 2: on an indoor velodrome. Masters track cycling, it's a smaller
Speaker 2: sport and the amount I know some excellent masters track
Speaker 2: cyclists who just don't care to go to worlds, right,
Speaker 2: they've been professional cyclists, are very high level amateur cyclists,
Speaker 2: and once you reach your mid forties, some people don't
Speaker 2: care to travel and spend that money and do that competition. Right.
Speaker 2: San Diego has a really great track scene. Some people
Speaker 2: who I know very well have recently won multiple world
Speaker 2: championships on the track. Like, we have a very thriving scene,
Speaker 2: but not all of those people even care to go
Speaker 2: to La to race worlds like let alone travel across
Speaker 2: the world. Right, So it doesn't necessarily truly mean the
Speaker 2: people who win Masters are the best athletes in the
Speaker 2: world for the age group, And certainly I wouldn't say.
Speaker 2: There are lots of things that make this competition unfair.
Speaker 2: One of them is how much track bikes cost, how
Speaker 2: much track time costs, and how much travel costs to
Speaker 2: get to the event. But of course it didn't matter
Speaker 2: to these people, right. What mattered is that a trans
Speaker 2: woman had won, and she became the center of the
Speaker 2: cultural war. And this was really, at least the first
Speaker 2: one that I was aware of, the sort of instance
Speaker 2: of someone a trans person winning a very a notable
Speaker 2: event in cycling. And maybe trans people have been competing
Speaker 2: in elite races in cycling for forty years, like Wally
Speaker 2: Cameron was the first trans woman to race in a
Speaker 2: World Cup, and Money's been racing for a while, and
Speaker 2: no one said shit, no one cared, right, But around
Speaker 2: twenty eighteen, the culture war around trans people was becoming heightened,
Speaker 2: and so people got mad about her wing the race.
Speaker 2: And since then there's been this steady increase in transphobic
Speaker 2: sentiment towards by crisis. It's really the sort of leading
Speaker 2: voice in this has been former probike grace at Inger Thompson.
Speaker 2: She's been joined by a few amateur women in various
Speaker 2: fields voicing their feelings about the participation of trans women.
Speaker 2: And Thompson has made a lot of statements, some of
Speaker 2: which you know, choose not to share with you. You
Speaker 2: can google them if you want, but most of them
Speaker 2: will be like she missgenderous people all the time, right,
Speaker 2: that that's what you can find her on Twitter, misgendering people.
Speaker 2: And I think that that is kind of the giveaway
Speaker 2: that this isn't necessarily about sport, right, And I think
Speaker 2: that it's really important that people, regardless of where you
Speaker 2: stand on sport, understand that this is a wedge, and
Speaker 2: it's a wedge that's designed to push trans people out
Speaker 2: and away from femininity in a way, from inclusion.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I think one of the reasons why it's important is
Speaker 3: it it's a way of focusing the discourse like on
Speaker 3: trans people, on like really really weird interpretations of physical characteristics. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and then this is something that you can use to
Speaker 3: sort of like, you know, this, this is the wedge
Speaker 3: that you can use to sort of like tear this
Speaker 3: sort of issue open. It's been really really effective at
Speaker 3: this and it's also been like you know, it's something
Speaker 3: that's sort of like vaguely plausible, plausibly deniable, and it
Speaker 3: also plays on a really kind of effective branding strategy
Speaker 3: that these people had, which is that like you know,
Speaker 3: if people remember what feminism was like in like the
Speaker 3: twenty tens, it was almost entirely about you know, not
Speaker 3: just in the twenty tens, like you even sort of
Speaker 3: previous to this, right, Like the notion that like women
Speaker 3: are weaker than men was something that was like like
Speaker 3: broadly considered to be sexist, Like that was not a
Speaker 3: feminist thing that was like like women are weaker than men.
Speaker 3: And then you know what you're getre You're getting into
Speaker 3: people complaining about like like trans women like being on
Speaker 3: Jeopardy or like this ship that's happening in Chester that
Speaker 3: we're going to talk about later. It's like, okay, like
Speaker 3: if you go back in time to before sort of
Speaker 3: trans arrangement syndrome set in, like and you told someone
Speaker 3: that in the future, this person is going to be
Speaker 3: arguing that like like like trans women have a biological
Speaker 3: advantage in jeopardy because men are smarter than women. They'd
Speaker 3: be like, what the fuck are you talking about, Like
Speaker 3: this person is like a neo Nazi.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's oh that women are only defined by their
Speaker 2: ability to bear children, right, and and then that is
Speaker 2: your sole characteristic and value as a woman, Like yeah, and.
Speaker 3: Like like this is and this is something that you know,
Speaker 3: if you go back to like Simon before God, I
Speaker 3: hate French. It's really a true it's a truly terrible language.
Speaker 2: That is the official stance of this podcast, Anti French action.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but like you know, I mean always has you know,
Speaker 2: like you actually read.
Speaker 3: The Second Sex and like in the Second Sex is
Speaker 3: talking about you know, we literally were like her famous
Speaker 3: line is like women like no one is born a woman,
Speaker 3: like women is made right because it's it's it's it's
Speaker 3: it's it's a social process, not a biological one. And
Speaker 3: then you know, and and but because there was like
Speaker 3: a kind of cultural victory for feminism where it suddenly
Speaker 3: became really really difficult to be a mainstream person and
Speaker 3: like call yourself, uh, like call yourself an anti feminist,
Speaker 3: like all of these people who believe all of the
Speaker 3: same ship that like Phylishchlaffley did like have to relabel
Speaker 3: themselves feminists, and you know, and sports is the sports
Speaker 3: the thing they picked to do that because sports is
Speaker 3: the like it's the area they can pick where they can,
Speaker 3: like with some plausible deniability, start doing all of this
Speaker 3: like oh, women are inherently weaker than men and have
Speaker 3: to be protected from men, like shit again.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and it's yes, it's very much like i'm
Speaker 2: recontstractive stuff that we would have seen it not feminist
Speaker 2: twenty years ago. Now sadly it's being advanced by people
Speaker 2: laying claimed to feminism. I guess. Yeah. So, in the
Speaker 2: most recent sight of Rouss Nationals, trans athlete Austin Killips
Speaker 2: finished third at the event, local John Brown gun Club
Speaker 2: members had attended to step in and protect trans athletes
Speaker 2: where the sports governing body wouldn't, And it was actually
Speaker 2: a really I mean, what you saw was a lot
Speaker 2: of discourse online about Austin quote unquote blocking and a
Speaker 2: SIS woman athlete, and then you saw like a lot
Speaker 2: of people sort of saying that and like SIS women
Speaker 2: had been I guess, like you know that Austin's inherent
Speaker 2: biological advantage. I'm using heavy scare quotes here had allowed
Speaker 2: her to come third. She got beaten by two sis girls, Right,
Speaker 2: this is always the thing like that.
Speaker 3: There was one of these in skateboarding, where like this
Speaker 3: turf skateboarder was like yelling about how she'd been beaten
Speaker 3: by a trans woman, and you look at the results.
Speaker 3: She lost to an eight year old.
Speaker 2: She was outplaced by an eight year old, Like, shut
Speaker 2: the fuck up. It's this bullshit like and a lot
Speaker 2: of the discourse about like Austin quote unquote blocking someone
Speaker 2: like I don't know, but to me, it very clearly
Speaker 2: seemed to come for people who hadn't watched many other
Speaker 2: bicycle competitions, right, like that's what we do. You push
Speaker 2: on each other, you lean on each other. Like if
Speaker 2: you didn't do that, people would fallo over a whole
Speaker 2: lot more. It's a race, you're trying to get to
Speaker 2: the finish line first. But she didn't do anything that
Speaker 2: anyone else wouldn't have done. And at the time Turfs
Speaker 2: kind of tried to make this a big deal but
Speaker 2: were unsuccessful. And it was not really until Austin won
Speaker 2: a race in New Mexico, a big race tour of
Speaker 2: the Healer that it became again, like like it wasn't
Speaker 2: twenty eighteen a very big deal? Right? So one of
Speaker 2: the key leaders, as I said, is Inga Thompson. Inga
Speaker 2: is a very accomplished cyclist. There's no doubt about that, right.
Speaker 2: She's a Bicycle Hall of Fame inductee, five time national champion,
Speaker 2: three time Olympic team member, a Tour de France firm,
Speaker 2: and a podium finisher, a three time silver medallist at
Speaker 2: the US World Championships. But I think she's arguably more
Speaker 2: famous now for her anti trans bigotry and she's a
Speaker 2: paid She tried to encourage cyclists to take a knee
Speaker 2: in protest at the UCI's transgender inclusion yeah, which like.
Speaker 3: Fox News finally finds something that they're for.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they've finally. She was actually removed from her role
Speaker 2: on the board of a France based American protein for
Speaker 2: her statements there. I thought that their statements kind of interesting.
Speaker 2: They said shared in the absence of politics, her knowledge
Speaker 2: and experience would benefit many in advanced cycling for everyone. However,
Speaker 2: she has decided to dedicate her time to excluding people
Speaker 2: that otherwise currently eligible to compete in UCI events. She
Speaker 2: is also tempted to use our team as a platform
Speaker 2: for political activity, which like is a very neutral stance,
Speaker 2: but it's also it's also like it's fine, right, like
Speaker 2: like our cycling team isn't here to hate trans people.
Speaker 2: If you're going to use it for hating trans people,
Speaker 2: please go somewhere else like it. It doesn't. You don't
Speaker 2: have to, like I do take a hugely radical stance
Speaker 2: to be like that this isn't a hate platform for
Speaker 2: hate speech, like like go away and uh that they
Speaker 2: added to be clear, Miss miss Thompson is entitled to
Speaker 2: her opinions an advocacy, but her methods and personal attacks
Speaker 2: are inconsistent with siniska's mission to advanced opportunities for women.
Speaker 2: These methods, well documented on Miss Thompson's social media presence,
Speaker 2: include dehumanization of transgender people, spreading misinformation, demagoguery, and personal
Speaker 2: attacks on anyone who opposes her views spellow alert that
Speaker 2: includes me. She doesn't like me it all, I don't
Speaker 2: don't be mean to trans people, uh don't missgender my friends.
Speaker 2: So I did think it was very funny that like
Speaker 2: this team isn't like the like I don't note like
Speaker 2: the woke team for woke people. They're just trying to
Speaker 2: get along with helping women's cycle and they can't do
Speaker 2: that if they're one of their board members. Is so
Speaker 2: consumed by hate that no one wants to have anything
Speaker 2: to do with it. So in the wake of this protest,
Speaker 2: the twenty twenty one Save Women's Sport protest Fliletted they're
Speaker 2: an official with USA Cycling, published an open letter calling
Speaker 2: for the resignation of the organization's CEO and the Safe
Speaker 2: Sport Coordinator, kelsy Erickson, who's responsible for preventing hate speech
Speaker 2: and bullying. They gather one hundred and five signatures from
Speaker 2: racists and other cyclists in support of their demands, and
Speaker 2: a day after they sent the letter to Martini announced
Speaker 2: he was stepping down. So he has a bit of
Speaker 2: a failure of just like there's a statement he made
Speaker 2: an interview where he said it would be different if
Speaker 2: our athletes were going to be affected. When he was
Speaker 2: talking about bands for trans athletes in interscholastic sports, he said,
Speaker 2: we don't believe they will be which like in technical
Speaker 2: and in technical sense because cyclists can bete for clubs,
Speaker 2: not schools. They might not have done. But if you
Speaker 2: think that a ban on trans kids playing at school
Speaker 2: isn't going to affect participation in trans athletes in all
Speaker 2: sports everywhere. You just either completely myopic or you're burying
Speaker 2: your bigotry. He claimed he was quoted out of context,
Speaker 2: but it was part of a pretty big block quote.
Speaker 2: I don't see how that can be taken out of context.
Speaker 2: They did say at that time that they're against any
Speaker 2: legislation limit trans inclusion. It's worth pointing out that cycling
Speaker 2: has a body as to all Olympic sports. It should
Speaker 2: prevent hate, beach, bigotry, and bullying, right, And that's called
Speaker 2: safe Sport set up in twenty seventeen, and that was
Speaker 2: following what happened at USA Gymnastics, right, which was widespread
Speaker 2: sexual abuse of athletes. People I'm sure will remember that
Speaker 2: Safe Sport, I feel fairly confident in saying has completely
Speaker 2: failed in preventing abuse, preventing harassment, preventing bullying. What it
Speaker 2: has done is is perhaps given a legal shield to
Speaker 2: governing bodies, so has prevented them getting sued. But it's
Speaker 2: done nothing to prevent this kind of bullying, which is
Speaker 2: why athletes and the community you've had to taken it
Speaker 2: upon themselves to do that, right, Like, if there's one
Speaker 2: thing you should expect a governing body to do, it's
Speaker 2: to make sure everyone feels safe at races. But people
Speaker 2: were legitimately worried about racing in areas where they knew
Speaker 2: there were a lot of not just turfs, but like
Speaker 2: groups like the prowd boys, right, who have kind of
Speaker 2: hung their hat on transphobia. I know people who didn't
Speaker 2: go to races in areas where they were worried about that.
Speaker 2: I know people who, like you know it, went out
Speaker 2: of went to an effort every day to drive a
Speaker 2: different way back to their hotel at races because they're
Speaker 2: worried about Like, people genuinely felt unsafe doing something that
Speaker 2: no one should feel unsafe doing, which is playing. So
Speaker 2: as I said, you know who won't make you feel unsafe?
Speaker 3: I I'm going to say the products and services, and
Speaker 3: then I'm gonna.
Speaker 2: They will wrap you up in a cocoon like blanket
Speaker 2: of gold and coins and meal kits. How can do
Speaker 2: you not feel so safe when you're surrounded by Reagan coins?
Speaker 2: No one fact checked.
Speaker 3: This is a fact check free zone.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The following and preceding thirty seconds
Speaker 2: have not been fact checked. All right, please enjoy these adverts,
Speaker 2: and we are back and we're still talking about turfs.
Speaker 2: So Saves Women's Sports, which is this organization that put
Speaker 2: on the protests, presents itself as an organic reaction to
Speaker 2: the participation of trans women, who it repeatedly misgenders in
Speaker 2: women's categories. It claimed that several races in the cycle
Speaker 2: across national championships privately did the organization to express concerns,
Speaker 2: but only one, Ev Edwards, competed under the SWS team banner.
Speaker 2: SWS at the time was not a nonprofit, so it
Speaker 2: was relatively hard to find out what exactly their financial
Speaker 2: ties to various other transphobic and right wing groups were.
Speaker 2: It's registered in Minnesota as a business, but it appears
Speaker 2: to be a sault. At the time, again, it was
Speaker 2: a sole prop run by someone called best Steltzer. The
Speaker 2: both Ev Edwards and SWS used the race to aggressively
Speaker 2: fundraise for their campaign. Steltzer, for instance, at the time,
Speaker 2: was making three hundred and eighty five bucks per month
Speaker 2: on Patreon by quote creating awareness of males Invading female Spaces.
Speaker 2: Page has been taken down since then. She turfed too
Speaker 2: close to the sun. She also received donations on her
Speaker 2: venmo page, which is very funny because I don't think
Speaker 2: she realized hervenmo page was public checked it out in
Speaker 2: the judgment. Yeah, that there is no there there was
Speaker 2: no distinction made between advocacy spending and personal spending on
Speaker 2: that account, I will say. And she was taking a
Speaker 2: donations and you know, making emoji purchases on her Venmo
Speaker 2: at the time. I think maybe since has made it private.
Speaker 3: But this is something that like if you ever want
Speaker 3: to just like I don't know, if someone just like
Speaker 3: appears in the news and they suck, like, go try
Speaker 3: to find them on venmo because people just don't realize
Speaker 3: that stuff. And oh yeah, you know, people like people
Speaker 3: recently caught like I think we talked about Clarence tom
Speaker 3: I think it was Clarence Thomas amazing paying his staffers
Speaker 3: on venmo. Like you can find a bunch of very
Speaker 3: funny stuff because people people are bad at doing crime.
Speaker 2: Now, Yeah, I cannot tell you how many people literally
Speaker 2: had things on their Venmo like travel to DC and
Speaker 2: like on January sixth, right like ven bowing each other
Speaker 2: for like revolution tacos after they'd evaded the capital smart
Speaker 2: stuff and no, no, please keep doing that if you're
Speaker 2: planning transphobia or coups. So much of this awareness that
Speaker 2: that save women's sports awareness. Like, I think if you're
Speaker 2: ever donating to someone who's promoting quote unquote awareness of anything,
Speaker 2: there should be a large red flag. It's an extremely
Speaker 2: nebulous concept that very ready does anything to help anyone.
Speaker 2: But much of this awareness seem to be tied to
Speaker 2: pre standard right wing anti trans talking points and not
Speaker 2: the many dozens, maybe hundreds of instances or transist women
Speaker 2: happily compete alongside each other, have a nice time, do exercise,
Speaker 2: go home, and don't engage in any bigotry. In the past,
Speaker 2: WUS has worked with far right organizations like the Heritage
Speaker 2: Foundation and the Family Research Council to prepare a guide
Speaker 2: to quote help parents understand the transgender issue. Again, if
Speaker 2: you're framing the existence of other people as an issue,
Speaker 2: you know that far from flaming it as a question,
Speaker 2: are you? Yeah? Like, I'm impressed the self awareness avoided
Speaker 2: the transgender question, but like, only by you know, using
Speaker 2: the thesaurus to reframe it as an issue. I guess
Speaker 2: the guide refers to the transgender trend quote unquote and
Speaker 2: repeatedly caused trans women men. They of course. Also you
Speaker 2: know Steltzer in particular, it appears anti abortion rallies, anti
Speaker 2: marriage equality rallies, things like that. Right, this is part
Speaker 2: of a wider space of painting bigotry. It's not just
Speaker 2: about support. Cyclists are taken it upon themselves to protect
Speaker 2: trans riders, so access of solidarity, of range for blocking
Speaker 2: SWS protesters and national Championships announces refusing to allegedly refusing
Speaker 2: to mention races on the team. That's pretty funny, Yeah,
Speaker 2: it is pretty funny. Also this Mney Cameron has this
Speaker 2: organization called Ride, which is let trans kids ride and
Speaker 2: money mate sees wristband which like a trans flag, the
Speaker 2: transpride flag, and like one of my friends won the
Speaker 2: biggest race in the US. It's cis guy with his
Speaker 2: Transpride ristband on, which is you know a little thing.
Speaker 2: But also like it's it's nice to see people show up,
Speaker 2: Like yeah, it's nice to see and like it's rare
Speaker 2: that you'll go to a race when people won't be
Speaker 2: you won't see a few people wearing that, like in
Speaker 2: pro men pro women, both like it's there are overwhelmingly
Speaker 2: people don't give a fuck. They're just happy if you're
Speaker 2: enjoying riding bikes. It's not like it's a big sport.
Speaker 9: You know.
Speaker 2: The real threat cycling is all of us getting killed
Speaker 2: by people in tesla's playing pong, Like it's not it's
Speaker 2: not trans women. But unfortunately the solidarity hasn't extended to
Speaker 2: the governing body. So two years after this initial protest, right,
Speaker 2: the UCI effectively banned all trans women from participating in
Speaker 2: elite level cycling. This happened just a few weeks before
Speaker 2: the World Championships. Like, I have friends who had to
Speaker 2: cancel their flights. Yeah, it was the most bungled, fucked
Speaker 2: up pseudoscience kind of half fast, Like it was just
Speaker 2: a mess. The whole thing was a fucking mess. They
Speaker 2: had an extraordinary meeting in August, just a few weeks
Speaker 2: before the World Championships, and like people previously had to
Speaker 2: have a submit blood numbers to show a testosterone level
Speaker 2: to compete, right, which is a thing lots of governing
Speaker 2: bodies have been doing for a while now. They had
Speaker 2: certified people, like weeks before this, they'd be like, yeah,
Speaker 2: you're good to go for another year and then psych no,
Speaker 2: you're not. You can't compete ever again. And like, this
Speaker 2: is people's jobs, right, this is their livelihood, it's how
Speaker 2: they pay rents. It's also like being an elite cyclist
Speaker 2: is hard. It is most of your life, right, Like
Speaker 2: you're you've got to sleep or you got to eat, right,
Speaker 2: You've got to train all the fucking time. You can't
Speaker 2: go out, you're going to be resting when you're not training.
Speaker 2: To take all that away from someone with a click
Speaker 2: of the fingers and bringing no consultation for them, it's
Speaker 2: incredibly cruel. And the I'll just read their statement because
Speaker 2: I think there's a couple of things in it we
Speaker 2: should pick apart. Obviously, you can't take Woying for it
Speaker 2: being inherently transphobic. From now on, female transgender athletes who
Speaker 2: have transitioned after quote male puberty will be prohibited from
Speaker 2: participating women's events on the UCI International Calendar in all
Speaker 2: categories in the various disciplines. Notably, they also said it's
Speaker 2: also impossible to rule out the possibility that biomechanical factors
Speaker 2: such as the shape and arrangement of the bones in
Speaker 2: their limbs may constitute a lasting advantage for female transgender athletes. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's yea, there's a lot going on there, right, Like
Speaker 2: they use female where where most people would use woman.
Speaker 2: The barrier they set is to rule out any possibility
Speaker 2: of an advantage, right, which is a very high barrier.
Speaker 2: That's like a kind of guilty, and to improve it
Speaker 2: innocent situation. Right, Like I'd also like the arrangement of
Speaker 2: the bones in my limbs changed significantly when I was
Speaker 2: racing bikes because I broke them all the fucking time. Like,
Speaker 2: such such a strange category to choose. Also, the requirement
Speaker 2: that you transition before puberty. That's not the same as
Speaker 2: taking puberty blockers, right, They're requiring that you're taking the
Speaker 2: hormones before puberty, like like eleven or twelve, yeah.
Speaker 3: Which which is just also now illegal in an enormous
Speaker 3: number of states, like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and even most from what I understand, most gender
Speaker 2: affirming care takes the approach of taking puberty blockers rather
Speaker 2: than yeah.
Speaker 3: Well this is this is sort of like, I mean,
Speaker 3: this is sort of the disaster that's been happening in
Speaker 3: the last like four or five years on this, which
Speaker 3: is that like like taking puberty blockers was the compromise position, yes,
Speaker 3: like that was the position that was taken because people
Speaker 3: thought it was too dangerous to like let kids do hot,
Speaker 3: which it's not like it's completely fine.
Speaker 2: In fact, it's actually like you.
Speaker 3: Know, you're you're going to go through puberty anyways, right,
Speaker 3: You're like like if if you are in a human body,
Speaker 3: you are doing uncontrolled puberty, and that is less safe
Speaker 3: than doing a controlled puberty, which is what you know,
Speaker 3: doing like doing it turgy when you're a child is yeah,
Speaker 3: but yeah, the young vice position was like, oh well
Speaker 3: we're not we're gonna do those will do puberty blockers,
Speaker 3: and then like everyone went insane about puberty blockers. And
Speaker 3: now like even the compromised position has been sort of
Speaker 3: like you know, I mean like when we're away that
Speaker 3: and it's like okay, like you know, but and then
Speaker 3: and then like and then you know, like now and
Speaker 3: then having done this right and it's like, oh well,
Speaker 3: now you can set up all of these rules that
Speaker 3: are like require you to have done a thing you've
Speaker 3: now made illegal. It's like this is great, yeah, exactly right.
Speaker 2: You now have a rule that basically bans almost anyone
Speaker 2: from participation, like you have to begin transitioning at eleven.
Speaker 2: It's also very nebulous, like male puberty, Like like what
Speaker 2: does that mean? What what point are you to finding
Speaker 2: you have been through male puberty? Like are we going
Speaker 2: to aftereople to submit their fucking testosterone numbers from when
Speaker 2: they were eight? Like yeah, Like it's it's just a man,
Speaker 2: It's what it is, right, Like it it's a you
Speaker 2: can't ever transition satisfactorily enough.
Speaker 3: Yeah, or like, for example, I don't know, so like
Speaker 3: let's say you you you are on Like let's say
Speaker 3: you don't start hormones until you're like twenty four, but
Speaker 3: but you rearrange the bones in your body.
Speaker 2: It this allows you? Did you now have feminine bone arrangement?
Speaker 2: Does this now allows you to cycle gender affirming orthopedic surgery?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 2: And like and also this, And I want to get
Speaker 2: into this a little bit because it completely obfuscates or
Speaker 2: ignores I guess what we know to be true that
Speaker 2: there is not a binary puberty process, because there is not.
Speaker 2: Humans don't exist in a binary sex nor egisted binary genders. Right,
Speaker 2: So I think probably the best example of this would
Speaker 2: be Malie Jose Martinez Patigno. If people aren't familiar with her. Obviously,
Speaker 2: Google is right there for you. But she was dismissed
Speaker 2: from a Spanish Olympic team in nineteen eighty six for
Speaker 2: failing the gender test. She's publicly shamed for being like
Speaker 2: a secret male. She loses her fiancee, she loses her funding,
Speaker 2: she loses almost everything. She fought and won a successful
Speaker 2: court battle, illustrating the fallacy of this binary gender approach.
Speaker 2: But she's not a trans woman, to be clear. She's
Speaker 2: an intersexual woman who has androgen insensitivity syndrome. But she
Speaker 2: was able to They were using chromosome typing, right, Like
Speaker 2: you'll often this is a thing that you'll still see
Speaker 2: turf trotting out right, something that was outdated in nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty six, that like xx or x Y, that is
Speaker 2: that is not a binary that fits the entirety of
Speaker 2: the human species.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's like a lot of people for a lot
Speaker 3: of other different kinds.
Speaker 2: It's like it's again, like I get it, you didn't.
Speaker 2: You're not a biologist. That's fine, It's okay to shut
Speaker 2: the fuck up if you don't understand something.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but this this is one of those things that
Speaker 3: sucks because it's like like I wish these people had
Speaker 3: decided to like try to build airplanes based off of
Speaker 3: like pre Deutornian or something work, because it's like there's
Speaker 3: no consequence for them for not understanding biology. But it's
Speaker 3: like I don't know, like it like if if you,
Speaker 3: if you, if you're trying to argue that like general
Speaker 3: relativity doesn't exist, like you're you're like your satellite is
Speaker 3: gonna fall on you. But this, this is the one
Speaker 3: thing where you can just like you can say ship that.
Speaker 3: It's not even like like people people make the joke
Speaker 3: it's like high school biology. It's like it's not it's
Speaker 3: just like elementary school biology. And it's not right, like
Speaker 3: like YouTube biology, isn't it.
Speaker 2: That's what it is? Yeah, yeah, yes, exactly.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: But unfortunately the consequences of people who are not them, Yeah,
Speaker 2: and that's hugely unfortunate, right, Like even we see like
Speaker 2: Cassa Semnia when a cult case this month or last month,
Speaker 2: like allowing her to compete again, we found time and
Speaker 2: again that this notion of a binary sex is as
Speaker 2: nonsense to call as a motion of a binary gender.
Speaker 2: And yet we continue to try and force people into
Speaker 2: these different competitions. I just want to read a statement
Speaker 2: that Austin made and like, it's very hard not to
Speaker 2: see this as them, specifically seeing Austin winning a big
Speaker 2: stage race in New Mexico and going like, right, we
Speaker 2: can't fucking have that, Like as soon as trans women
Speaker 2: win stuff, right, It's fine if they come and then
Speaker 2: don't win, but as soon as they win stuff. And again,
Speaker 2: if she had this inherent, massive biological advantage, she would
Speaker 2: have won everything, which hasn't happened, she said. I'm devastated
Speaker 2: by the UCI decision to renege on the policy and
Speaker 2: framework it previously set out for inclusion. My journey in
Speaker 2: professional racing has allowed me to see the world, build
Speaker 2: lifelong friendships, and most importantly, if my absolutely or something
Speaker 2: I find deeply fulfilling, no one should be denied the
Speaker 2: opportunity to chase that same joy that I and others
Speaker 2: found through racing, which I think is great, and I
Speaker 2: think it's important to lift up her voice in this
Speaker 2: and other transathlete voices. In theory, there is what's called
Speaker 2: an open category, which is the men's category. The problem
Speaker 2: is that there are no open races, and that this category,
Speaker 2: like if you line up as a trans woman in
Speaker 2: the fucking open category. You're being very clearly othered, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: you're being like you're Some of them also will have
Speaker 2: women's licenses, like it's not clear what men's category they
Speaker 2: can race in. But more importantly, I think, as Chris
Speaker 2: Mosia pointed out, people will be familiar as Chris as
Speaker 2: the first trans athlete tend Olympic trials in the US.
Speaker 2: The open category contradicts both International Olympic committeeuidelines on fairness
Speaker 2: and inclusion and extensive research of states trans women do
Speaker 2: not have an inherent advantage in sport. Chris is a
Speaker 2: good follow on Twitter. It's to the Chris Mosia.
Speaker 8: But.
Speaker 2: It contradicts even like the IOC. Again, not like on
Speaker 2: the bastions of wokeness, people who sent the Olympics to
Speaker 2: the Nazis have a better policy than this. And yet
Speaker 2: cycling has chosen to go above and beyond, and in
Speaker 2: large part I can't not see that as because of
Speaker 2: the attention paid to this by people who do not
Speaker 2: give a fuck about cycling, because they've found a wedge,
Speaker 2: because our community has generally been inclusive. Like even after
Speaker 2: this at the World Championships, there were people with trans
Speaker 2: flags course, you know, like world championship or which trans
Speaker 2: women could not compete advocating for inclusion. Right, it was
Speaker 2: in Glasgow, and as a rule, the sport I think
Speaker 2: has been accepting Like I've never cycled, not known there
Speaker 2: being trans people in cycling, and I've cycled a lot,
Speaker 2: but this has allowed trans people to thrive. And when
Speaker 2: trans people started describing these fucking bigots to make this
Speaker 2: a wedge issue and that's why it's happening here. But
Speaker 2: it's also fucking happening in chess. So do you want
Speaker 2: to do you want to talk about chess?
Speaker 7: Man?
Speaker 2: This is this is insane, Okay.
Speaker 3: The weird part about the chess one is like I
Speaker 3: I don't know, I had. This is not something that
Speaker 3: anyone in chess was like talking about. Like chess has
Speaker 3: like a lot of incredibly weird and bizarre political stuff
Speaker 3: going on, but like they're I had, I don't know.
Speaker 3: Maybe I just missed it, or maybe it was just
Speaker 3: like a part of the chess discourse I wasn't following,
Speaker 3: But like I I don't know, really truly weirdly, just
Speaker 3: seemingly out of nowhere.
Speaker 2: I don't know what is going on with this seemingly out.
Speaker 3: Of nowhere fee Day, which is like the International Chess
Speaker 3: Federation released the statement, released this like policy that says
Speaker 3: that like it has a lot of weird stuff and
Speaker 3: effectively sets up fee Day as like what I can
Speaker 3: only describe as an gender council, where like, if you
Speaker 3: want to like change your gender, you have to like
Speaker 3: submit it to fe DA and then fee DA gets
Speaker 3: to decide what gender you are. So great, great things
Speaker 3: happening here. And then also for some reason, Okay, so
Speaker 3: chess has had this thing for a while where chess
Speaker 3: has like there are like women's sections for stuff, and
Speaker 3: there's a lot of some weird stuff going on here.
Speaker 3: So like there's the regular title like Grandmaster, there's also
Speaker 3: like a women's Grandmaster thing which has different qualification, is
Speaker 3: slightly different, and this was this was set up basically
Speaker 3: because like the guys who play chess are insane, Like
Speaker 3: I've talked about this some of the Bobby Fisher episodes right,
Speaker 3: like they're like most of the most famous chess players
Speaker 3: in history are like utterly deranged Neo Nazis or like
Speaker 3: like people who are even weirder than Neo Nazis, like
Speaker 3: like like unreconstructed like nineteen seventeen czarists like people like that,
Speaker 3: like just people with with like truly truly deeply weird
Speaker 3: political ideologies that are like unbelievably right wing, and you know,
Speaker 3: and like part of part of what like happens here
Speaker 3: is that like just chess in general is like unfathomably sexist,
Speaker 3: Like it's it's really really bad, and you know, like
Speaker 3: their solution to this effectively was like to create this
Speaker 3: like kind of parallel like women's infrastructure, which kind of
Speaker 3: works and kind of hasn't in a lot of ways.
Speaker 3: And you know, like part of what's going on is
Speaker 3: just like, okay, so a lot of girls, like young
Speaker 3: girls play chess, but there's this bottleneck that happens around
Speaker 3: when you're like thirteen or fourteen, while this is twelve
Speaker 3: to thirteen, So there's fourteen where like the number of
Speaker 3: girls playing chess just like collapses, right, And the reason
Speaker 3: that happens is because boys are fucking dog.
Speaker 2: Shit Like this is this.
Speaker 3: Is like literally what's happening, right, is like you have
Speaker 3: a bunch of sexist, like really sex as boys. And
Speaker 3: then the product of this is that because there's so
Speaker 3: many fewer like women who play chess and there are
Speaker 3: men you play chess, Like there's just like the example,
Speaker 3: like there's way less like women who are like really
Speaker 3: high rated chess players. And that's because there's just like
Speaker 3: like the barrier of institutional sexism to like become a
Speaker 3: woman who's really good at chess is so high. And
Speaker 3: then yeah, okay, so so this this is the sort
Speaker 3: of background, So like there are these separate like women's
Speaker 3: like tournaments and stuff like that, and so fee DA,
Speaker 3: which is the Chess Federation, released this thing where Okay,
Speaker 3: so they say a few things. One is that, okay,
Speaker 3: the the the big one is that if you like,
Speaker 3: if you are a trans woman, you cannot play in
Speaker 3: official feed day events or women until fee Day does something.
Speaker 3: And it's not entirely clear what that is.
Speaker 2: So is it like a testosterone level you have to submit?
Speaker 3: Wait, literally, I'm just gonna read this sentence because it's
Speaker 3: it's utterly unclear what is going on here. In the
Speaker 3: event that the gender was changed from male to female,
Speaker 3: the player has no right to participate in official fee
Speaker 3: day events or women until free Day's decision is made.
Speaker 3: Such decision should be based on further analysis and should
Speaker 3: and shall be taken by the fee Day Council at
Speaker 3: the earliest possible time, but no longer than within a
Speaker 3: two year period.
Speaker 2: So it's you can be out for two years. Well
Speaker 2: yeah wait wait why what the fuck? Like what what what? What?
Speaker 10: Like?
Speaker 3: What what are they possibly like analyzing here?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 2: Like I I is it?
Speaker 5: Is it?
Speaker 2: Like like what what? What? What?
Speaker 7: What it?
Speaker 3: What is supposed to be the thing that differentiates like
Speaker 3: the genders that like lets you that makes you not
Speaker 3: be able to compete in the women's category? Like is
Speaker 3: it like like is it like if you played you
Speaker 3: aggressively or some ship?
Speaker 2: Like what? What?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Well it's baffling. Yeah, that is a bizarre decision like
Speaker 2: and yeah, like you said, it's just completely It's not
Speaker 2: even that they're not it's not an Olympic sport, right,
Speaker 2: It's not like they have to conform to any IOC guidelines.
Speaker 3: It's yeah is the chess cartel right, like they can
Speaker 3: do whatever they want, you know, I mean, like I know,
Speaker 3: expecting FIDE to do stuff that isn't insane is like,
Speaker 3: look like this is the organization that after uh that,
Speaker 3: after Bobbie Fisher went on the radio in the Philippines
Speaker 3: and said that he hopes that the government like rounds
Speaker 3: up all Jewish people and kills them, like they let
Speaker 3: him back into feed A after that. So, like, you know,
Speaker 3: a great organization run by amazing people here. Yeah, but
Speaker 3: this is I don't know, it's it's incredibly deeply weird.
Speaker 3: Like the thing I keep thinking about is I don't know,
Speaker 3: this is kind of a weird, kind of silly story
Speaker 3: in some ways. But like so, like the first trans
Speaker 3: person that I was like aware of it was a
Speaker 3: trans StarCraft two player named Scarlett, and she's great, She's awesome,
Speaker 3: Scarlet rules she actually she she she's she's one of
Speaker 3: three non Korean players ever to win a tournament in Korea, which,
Speaker 3: like I I don't know how to express how difficult
Speaker 3: it is to win a StarCraft tournament Korea. Like it
Speaker 3: would be like if a football team from like Siberia
Speaker 3: showed up to the US was somehow allowed to play
Speaker 3: in the NFL and then like won the Super Bowl.
Speaker 3: Like that, That's about the level of difficulty it is
Speaker 3: to win a StarCraft tournament in Korea.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, Jamaica bove safe team moment.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, But like like yeah, so, like you know,
Speaker 3: it's it's one of those sort of like really wild things.
Speaker 3: But like one of the things I remember about that
Speaker 3: was like she was always, as best I could tell,
Speaker 3: like always allowed like StarCraft also had a women's division
Speaker 3: because you know, very very similar like probably even more
Speaker 3: intense sort of sexis going yeah, yeah, being pretty toxic
Speaker 3: you know, and like like yeah, like it was actually
Speaker 3: you know, over the arc of like the like the
Speaker 3: like over a decade she's been playing, like you know,
Speaker 3: like I've seen the scene get less transphobic. But like,
Speaker 3: as much as I could tell, there was never like
Speaker 3: a thing in the women's tournament. There always just like yeah, sure, hey,
Speaker 3: look a girl wants to play StarCraft like this rips
Speaker 3: and yeah yeah yeah, well more of us like yeah yeah,
Speaker 3: like you know, and she's also like and she's like
Speaker 3: again really really good at the game.
Speaker 2: But like you know, but like like this is the
Speaker 2: thing that like historically.
Speaker 3: Hasn't I don't know, like like Jenny Wiley like in
Speaker 3: in games like this that are like not well, okay,
Speaker 3: StarCraft is enormously more athletic than Chess, but like yeah,
Speaker 3: like you know, like this has been a thing where
Speaker 3: people Like there's if you're in one of these like
Speaker 3: incredibly sexist environments, there's like a real like really obvious
Speaker 3: like both trans women and since women like we're all
Speaker 3: in this together thing because you get to look at
Speaker 3: like the fucking ravening hordes of like absolutely deranged psychos
Speaker 3: in like the twitch chat and be like, oh god,
Speaker 3: they hate both of us. Yeah, yeah, which is also
Speaker 3: like I think the other thing about this is like
Speaker 3: it's unclear like who at feet day like decided this,
Speaker 3: Like this doc just like appeared, and so there's like
Speaker 3: a non zero chance this decision is being made by men,
Speaker 3: Like pretty high that this is just like a decision
Speaker 3: made by a bunch of men because fuck them, and
Speaker 3: they've just decided that, like you know, just like literally
Speaker 3: not giving a shit about women's jess for like the
Speaker 3: entirety of its existence. They've finally decided to do something,
Speaker 3: and they do something is make me not be able
Speaker 3: to play women's tournaments.
Speaker 2: Like right, yeah, you didn't take action when body Bobby
Speaker 2: Fisher went full Nazi, but you decided to.
Speaker 3: Yeah, It's like okay, this is great, great, great things
Speaker 3: are happening.
Speaker 2: I don't know, Yeah, talking of Nazis. There was a
Speaker 2: it was I think actually a a again a nonbine
Speaker 2: or like an intersex woman who competed for the Nazis
Speaker 2: in nineteen thirty six at the Olympics. Yeah, with I'm
Speaker 2: not entirely sure of her, like like external external sex presentation,
Speaker 2: I guess, but later definitely served as a man in
Speaker 2: the German Armed Forces. But that could have been a
Speaker 2: forced social transition. But yeah, there's a long history of
Speaker 2: us trying to work out gender ship through sport, and
Speaker 2: I guess I just want to finish by, like, if
Speaker 2: you don't give a shit about sport, you have to
Speaker 2: understand this is still important because like sport's always about
Speaker 2: like who's on our team and who's not right. That's
Speaker 2: why we didn't let black people play baseball in this
Speaker 2: fucking country. It's why they took like Olympic medals away
Speaker 2: from indigenous people for violating stupid amateurism rules because they
Speaker 2: were designed to only let people have a certain class pay.
Speaker 2: It's why Colin Kafmack doesn't have a job, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's why people didn't want to go to the Nazi
Speaker 2: Olympics and went to one in Barcelona, and it was bigger.
Speaker 2: Like sports not just about being the best to exercise,
Speaker 2: it's it's a social tool to include or exclude people.
Speaker 2: And if you care about including people, then I think
Speaker 2: you have to care about sport right now, because that
Speaker 2: is a wedge that transfers are using to exclude people.
Speaker 2: So yeah, that's that's what I have for you.
Speaker 4: I don't know.
Speaker 2: If you have money, you can give it to Molly
Speaker 2: Molly Cameron, you can. You can find her online. She
Speaker 2: will help more trans kids ride or yeah, yeah, go
Speaker 2: go ride a bike. It's fun.
Speaker 3: And uh, if, if, if, if, if you are one
Speaker 3: of the seven people in the world who still thinks
Speaker 3: that Colin Kaepernick doesn't have a job because he's not
Speaker 3: good enough of football, come find Come find me in
Speaker 3: the Bear's parking lot. I will force you to watch
Speaker 3: an entire season of the Chicago Bears, like, like, watch
Speaker 3: every quarterback we've ever fucking had in my lifetime, and
Speaker 3: then I will beat you. You will you will you
Speaker 3: will you will you you will be you will be
Speaker 3: in a catatonic state after that.
Speaker 2: I just found proven right. Money's website is ridegroup dot.
Speaker 2: People want to check that out? Oh oh yeah, find
Speaker 2: find Connin Kaepernick on the internet watch videos.
Speaker 3: Okay, that was that was That was slightly longer of
Speaker 3: an a total shriek. Now is it's back, And Robert
Speaker 3: has been coming after me for not doing a total
Speaker 3: shrieks to start the podcast enough so that that's how
Speaker 3: we're starting this episode. It could happen here the podcast
Speaker 3: where we taken into nowhere's victory lap because yeah, so
Speaker 3: if you've been following the discourse about inflation over the
Speaker 3: past about two two and a half years, and especially
Speaker 3: in the last like maybe year or so, so very
Speaker 3: interesting stuff has been happening, and the stuff that we've
Speaker 3: talked about on this show, and then also stuff that's
Speaker 3: been sort of moving around in the sort of broader
Speaker 3: discourse and has now reached like the IMF. And the
Speaker 3: thing that's been happening is that the theory of inflation
Speaker 3: that I've we've been pushing on this show, and that
Speaker 3: also very importantly I that has been being developed by
Speaker 3: Strange Matters has been like incredibly vindicated to the point
Speaker 3: of everyone else adopting it and then claiming that they
Speaker 3: invented it. So yeah, we're this is this is this
Speaker 3: is the this is the inflation Victory Lab episode and
Speaker 3: to talk about the fact that these two people and
Speaker 3: their colleagues were right about inflation and a bunch of
Speaker 3: other stuff too. Is John Michael Kolan and Steve Mann,
Speaker 3: who are both co editors of the magazine Strange Matters,
Speaker 3: And yeah, both.
Speaker 2: FIJU, welcome to the show.
Speaker 7: Thanks so much for having USA.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I'm excited about this because I've been wanting
Speaker 3: to do this episode for like ever since. So the
Speaker 3: the IMF tweeted out a graph that was arguing that like,
Speaker 3: I think it's like like fifty percent of inflation and
Speaker 3: the EU was based on corporate profits, which was like
Speaker 3: them basically, and this is this is them, and like
Speaker 3: all the mainstream economists are finally like having to admit
Speaker 3: that we were fucking right about inflation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I guess before we get into.
Speaker 3: What you two were arguing and what your colleagues are arguing,
Speaker 3: we should talk a bit about, like I guess who
Speaker 3: you two are, and also like talk about Strange Matters again,
Speaker 3: because I think it's been a bit since y'all have
Speaker 3: been on.
Speaker 7: Yeah. Absolutely, so Strange Matters is a this is our
Speaker 7: kind of boiler plate, a magazine of new and unconventional
Speaker 7: thinking in economics, politics, and culture. And we have a
Speaker 7: political bent, so we are broadly speaking all some flavor
Speaker 7: of libertarian. Socialist is kind of the umbrella term that
Speaker 7: we've used for ourselves, but that varies depending on the
Speaker 7: individual kind of members of the team. So we've got
Speaker 7: people who are anarchists, We've got people who are inspired
Speaker 7: by like democratic and federalism. We've got like people who
Speaker 7: don't like a lot of those labels but are really
Speaker 7: into like direct democracy stuff. But like you know, the
Speaker 7: the four of us basically converge on the direct democracy,
Speaker 7: you know, socialism is putting people in charge of the
Speaker 7: decisions that affect them kind of school of things. So
Speaker 7: in terms of our economics pages, however, we've for the
Speaker 7: last couple of years been really dedicated to publishing heterodox economists,
Speaker 7: economists who don't correspond to the usually quite right wing
Speaker 7: mainstream of the economics discipline, but challenging in fundamental ways.
Speaker 7: And there's a bunch of different schools of heterodox economics,
Speaker 7: like you know, everyone knows about like Marxists, but there's
Speaker 7: also post Kinesians and ecological economics and feminist economics, and
Speaker 7: a whole bunch of different schools. We've been dedicated to
Speaker 7: publishing people from all those different schools and trying to
Speaker 7: kind of get them to write in a style that's
Speaker 7: more accessible for ordinary people, so that some of those
Speaker 7: ideas actually start not just reaching the public, but actually
Speaker 7: reaching each other because they don't really talk to each
Speaker 7: other very much.
Speaker 3: This is this is one of this is one of
Speaker 3: the big problems is like, I mean, even just inside
Speaker 3: of Marxism, like if you get six Marxists same we
Speaker 3: all have nine different positions and they'll all be like
Speaker 3: ready to murder each other over it. And that's that's
Speaker 3: just the Marxists, and then you expand out to all
Speaker 3: the rest of the other heterodoxicontaoust people, and there's a
Speaker 3: lot of weird and sort of pointless rivalries going on
Speaker 3: that prevents people from like fusing really useful theories together.
Speaker 11: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Absolutely, Yeah.
Speaker 4: We tried to be a platform for diverging opinions to
Speaker 4: actually be put into dialogue with each other. And we've
Speaker 4: definitely I don't think there's been a single piece that
Speaker 4: all of us have been in lockstep agreement on theoretically,
Speaker 4: and I think that's a real strength. Actually, yeah, like
Speaker 4: there's there's quite a there's quite a few pieces that
Speaker 4: at least one of us is like, I still don't
Speaker 4: really know about this thesis, but I've been there have
Speaker 4: been times in which I've been down on a piece,
Speaker 4: but it does amazing, so let's go with it.
Speaker 7: And also, you know, part of the reasoning for that
Speaker 7: is not just to kind of like Lucy Goosey, let's
Speaker 7: all get along and sing around a camp, but it's
Speaker 7: actually a very principled thing because part of the story
Speaker 7: that we're telling with the magazine is how we have
Speaker 7: these enormous problems, you know, climate change, the whole crisis
Speaker 7: that the democracies have been going through since the two
Speaker 7: thousand and eight crisis, the whole and since like the
Speaker 7: rise of global fascism in the twenty tens, like the
Speaker 7: what are we going to do about like the Internet
Speaker 7: and its future? What are we going to do about
Speaker 7: these these horrible culture war type issues that like, you know,
Speaker 7: people talk about it as the culture of war, but
Speaker 7: actually it's these massive reconfigurations that we have to do
Speaker 7: of our consciousness in order to think about you know, gender,
Speaker 7: national identity, and ethnic identity and all these other things
Speaker 7: in different in new ways that are actually like freeing
Speaker 7: and emancipating and stuff like. Like all of these problems
Speaker 7: are vast and nobody actually knows what the answer is,
Speaker 7: and that includes leftists. Like there's a lot of these
Speaker 7: problems that are either like too technical or too complex
Speaker 7: for any one person to have the solution. So there
Speaker 7: needs to be a space where we kind of come
Speaker 7: together people who are kind of like of good faith
Speaker 7: and who like are trying to kind of do the
Speaker 7: whole democracy and egalitarianism thing, and we actually butt our
Speaker 7: heads together across lines of difference and are like, Okay,
Speaker 7: what are we going to do about this, and what
Speaker 7: are our different perspectives and what's the what's the common ground,
Speaker 7: and what are some little bits and pieces of things
Speaker 7: that people have figured out that we can kind of
Speaker 7: stitch together into something that will let us not just
Speaker 7: get steamrolled by the fascists. And that that's the kind
Speaker 7: of space that we're trying to be, and that's why
Speaker 7: we try to accommodate these different perspectives, even though we
Speaker 7: ourselves tend to come from rather strong perspectives both individually
Speaker 7: and as a group.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, and and I think we.
Speaker 3: Can like this inflation sort of argument that's been playing
Speaker 3: over the past few years, I think is a really
Speaker 3: like it's a really good indication of how well this
Speaker 3: stuff can work. If it's if it's like, you.
Speaker 9: Know, like.
Speaker 3: The fact that y'all have basically had the inflation theory
Speaker 3: that like a bunch of mainstream economists we're going to
Speaker 3: stumble over in the last like eight months, had effectively
Speaker 3: written we're discussing and we're writing it like two years ago.
Speaker 3: Is a is a sign that something is going right?
Speaker 7: Yeah, we feel really vindicated.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's been very, very very funny to watch.
Speaker 3: So I guess we should move into a bit about
Speaker 3: what this.
Speaker 2: Theory actually is.
Speaker 3: And the very very short version of it is that
Speaker 3: it's a supply chain theory of inflation. It's a theory
Speaker 3: of inflation that tracks, you know, tracks price increases based
Speaker 3: on like like price movement based on stuff happening like
Speaker 3: backwards in the supply chain. And yeah, that turns out
Speaker 3: to have been a really useful both predictive thing and
Speaker 3: explanatory thing once the inflation actually started.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I just.
Speaker 7: Really wanted to highlight that it's Steve who wrote the
Speaker 7: initial essay where we first put those pieces together. It's
Speaker 7: it's Steve's supply chain theory of inflation, foren' anybody else
Speaker 7: is So I definitely I defer to you in terms of,
Speaker 7: you know, laying the groundwork for it.
Speaker 4: Well. I wrote a piece called Notes toward e Theory Inflation,
Speaker 4: and it was kind of born partly out of frustration
Speaker 4: over the fuzzy language in which economists will try to
Speaker 4: speak about inflation. And when I was a grad student,
Speaker 4: I would like encounter it not just from any particular school,
Speaker 4: but from broadly speaking, most of the schools of economics.
Speaker 4: And like it's been prior to this inflationary episode and history,
Speaker 4: it's been almost forty years since we've experienced anything like this.
Speaker 4: And you know, in the in the last period of
Speaker 4: like runaway inflation in the eighties, people were having a
Speaker 4: similar reckoning, although they didn't quite coalesce around supply gene
Speaker 4: and cost puss related theories of inflation like they are
Speaker 4: at this time. But like the theory like in a nutshell,
Speaker 4: the supply chain theory of inflation is essentially saying that
Speaker 4: along there are groups of businesses called supply chains who
Speaker 4: buy inputs from each other in order to produce products
Speaker 4: and sell them to either the next person in the
Speaker 4: chain or to outside consumers that the end user and
Speaker 4: over time, given stressful enough biophysical conditions that they all
Speaker 4: find themselves in even if they don't want to raise prices.
Speaker 4: And broadly speaking, we know from empirical studies that most
Speaker 4: businesses most of the time are very biased towards not
Speaker 4: raising prices. If the situation gets dire enough and they've
Speaker 4: run they've exhausted all of their non price based mechanisms
Speaker 4: for dealing with bottlenecks what are called bottlenecks in the
Speaker 4: supply chain, Like they just don't have enough of the
Speaker 4: inputs that they need in or to sell enough stuff
Speaker 4: at assert at their normal price in order to make
Speaker 4: enough revenue to socially reproduce themselves and their supply chain.
Speaker 4: Eventually they will exhaust all options and there will be
Speaker 4: one person who's kind of like the progenitor price increaser.
Speaker 4: And because like every single and like, what is inflation, really,
Speaker 4: it's a general rise in prices. What are prices? Prices
Speaker 4: are things that people themselves inside of firms, it's their
Speaker 4: job to set and so any theory of inflation needs
Speaker 4: to start with a theory of price essentially. And like,
Speaker 4: so these managers whose job it is to set prices,
Speaker 4: when they change prices, why did they do it? Well,
Speaker 4: we have answers going back many decades, almost a century
Speaker 4: of the surveys of economists who have gone out and
Speaker 4: actually conducted surveys asking under what conditions would you raise prices?
Speaker 4: And at no time did anyone say, oh, I raise
Speaker 4: prices because I looked at monetary aggregates and I saw
Speaker 4: that there was too much money, so I raised prices
Speaker 4: that and so like that was kind of a starting
Speaker 4: point for me when I when I read those these
Speaker 4: surveys conducted by Gardner Means, who is an economists and
Speaker 4: doing this work in the twenties and thirties long. If
Speaker 4: I don't burrow, I got really excited because I'm like, oh,
Speaker 4: of course, well, of course it's inflation. There's so much
Speaker 4: mysticism about like piles of money building up, and then
Speaker 4: it's like demand pull and cost push, and like what
Speaker 4: does this all mean? Right? Well, at the bottom of it,
Speaker 4: it's what are pricing managers doing when they make that
Speaker 4: fateful decision to be the first guy to raise prices,
Speaker 4: because there is one. It has to start with someone,
Speaker 4: and it's usually, like I was saying, they've exhausted all
Speaker 4: of their other methods of dealing with this, such as
Speaker 4: rationing inputs or economizing like increasing their efficiency and their production,
Speaker 4: or diversifying their product lines and all this stuff in
Speaker 4: order to maintain customer goodwill throughout a period of biophysical
Speaker 4: stress to the supply chain. And they're just going to
Speaker 4: raise prices because they have to get a certain amount
Speaker 4: of revenue in order to make it as a business.
Speaker 4: So that's essentially what the supply chain theory is is
Speaker 4: that when that happens, it propagates along supply chains first
Speaker 4: and then because nowadays our economy is so extremely integrated,
Speaker 4: it's not just one supply line. It's an entire supply
Speaker 4: chain network nowadays, and it's global in scope, so even
Speaker 4: if it can't it's it's increasingly less constrained to just
Speaker 4: like one industry or even one country these days.
Speaker 7: That was a that was a beautiful explanation. That's that's
Speaker 7: probably the most concise that we've that we've accomplished yet
Speaker 7: at boiling it down. I'll just because this is the
Speaker 7: problem is that we could go on for like thirty
Speaker 7: minutes about this. Yeah, just this, I guess I have
Speaker 7: a couple of things to add that are just like
Speaker 7: digging out a couple of nuances that I think are
Speaker 7: important for listeners to understand. What Steve said about inflation
Speaker 7: being about a continuous general increase in prices is really
Speaker 7: really profound. I think the first person to articulate that
Speaker 7: I'm aware of was John K. Galbraith in an essay
Speaker 7: that he wrote about that, but in like the fifties.
Speaker 7: But like, that's honestly not the way that we usually
Speaker 7: think of it, right, Like, usually we think that inflation
Speaker 7: is when money, the value of money goes down value
Speaker 7: money buys you less than it usually does. And that
Speaker 7: is not just because that's how we experience it in
Speaker 7: our pocketbooks. Everything else is just scott more expensive. It
Speaker 7: also has to do with the kind of history of
Speaker 7: theories of inflation, because back in the day, the first
Speaker 7: and og theory of inflation, which people still some of
Speaker 7: them believe in, is the quantity theory of money, and
Speaker 7: it basically envisions like the entire economic universe as a
Speaker 7: bunch of like atomized individual agents. And by the way,
Speaker 7: there's no like distinction between companies and how households or
Speaker 7: anything like that here.
Speaker 2: Everyone's kind of like funny.
Speaker 7: It's just everyone's an individual agent. And there's a bunch
Speaker 7: of stuff that already exists out there in the economy.
Speaker 7: How it was produced, I mean, you deal with that
Speaker 7: in a production function. Other than that, like you don't
Speaker 7: talk about it. So there's a bunch of existing stuff
Speaker 7: out there in the economy and it's scarce, right, so
Speaker 7: like how is it going to be distributed? Well, we're
Speaker 7: trading the stuff that we have for the stuff that
Speaker 7: we need. And when things are more scarce, they're more valuable.
Speaker 7: When things are more abundant, they're less valuable. And when
Speaker 7: we want them more they're more valuable, we want them less,
Speaker 7: they're less valuable. So that's kind of like like the
Speaker 7: very basic universe that they're kind of like operating in.
Speaker 7: And money was just seen to be one one good
Speaker 7: being traded like any other. It just so happens to
Speaker 7: be the one that we trade in exchange for everything else.
Speaker 7: So rather than doing barter like like of everything, you know,
Speaker 7: many chickens for this amount of haircut, you know, like instead,
Speaker 7: it's like, you know, we choose one thing to be
Speaker 7: exchangeable for everything else, but it still has a value,
Speaker 7: which is basically determined, according to this theory, by how
Speaker 7: much of it there is. So if you increase the
Speaker 7: money supply, money gets less valuable, which is why you know,
Speaker 7: everything becomes more expensive, prices go up. Whereas if the
Speaker 7: money supply shrinks, you know, then the value of money
Speaker 7: is higher relative to the goods that it buys, so
Speaker 7: therefore prices will go down. This was the theory that
Speaker 7: was developed in like the sixteen and seventeen hundreds to
Speaker 7: try to explain a massive global inflation that happened then
Speaker 7: in the so called price revolution of the seventeenth century.
Speaker 7: And frankly everyone by the twentieth century knows that there's
Speaker 7: huge issues with this, so they start trying to evolve
Speaker 7: away from it, away from the quantity theory of money,
Speaker 7: because it has no real empure goal basis. I mean,
Speaker 7: some people tried to kind of like, you know, juke
Speaker 7: the stats to make it look like there was but like, really,
Speaker 7: our best estimates of the money supply have no real
Speaker 7: good correspondence to prices in the economy. It's not it
Speaker 7: doesn't really work that way.
Speaker 3: So yeah, this is this is the sort of modern
Speaker 3: version of this is called monetarism, which is like that's real. Yeah,
Speaker 3: And this is like, this is maybe the only thing
Speaker 3: I have ever seen even like most neoclassical economists drop
Speaker 3: because it's empirically wrong, like it's stunning, Like you do
Speaker 3: you know how wrong something has to be for neo
Speaker 3: classical economists to go, wait, hold on, maybe this isn't right,
Speaker 3: Like it's it's incredible.
Speaker 7: But the problem is that they retreated into theories that
Speaker 7: are not necessarily right either. Yeah, perhaps perhaps groping their
Speaker 7: way clumsily towards the truth, but not really that right.
Speaker 7: So this is this is where all that pull and
Speaker 7: push stuff comes in, and it's it's it's a little
Speaker 7: too technical to get into. Steve Essay has like the
Speaker 7: full version of it, but basically they started evolving away
Speaker 7: from a theory where the absolute amount of money in
Speaker 7: the economy is what matters most, and towards theories where,
Speaker 7: for example, it's the amount of money relative to the
Speaker 7: goods that can be bought by it. So if you
Speaker 7: have a bunch of people spending money to buy stuff,
Speaker 7: but there's not enough stuff to meet that demand, then
Speaker 7: that will basically mean that there's like scarcity and shortages
Speaker 7: and things like that, and that will cost prices to
Speaker 7: go up. Although why they do, like the underlying microeconomics
Speaker 7: of why prices go up when they're shortages and stuff,
Speaker 7: this theory doesn't really address because it's a macro theory
Speaker 7: and it'll kind of like fall back on supply and
Speaker 7: demand stuff or various kind of weird hydraulic metaphors about
Speaker 7: like well, god, yeah, yeah, you know, it's really like like,
Speaker 7: you know, different people will have different versions of this
Speaker 7: that have totally different explanations of why it's happening, but
Speaker 7: they'll generally say, if you look at the economy as
Speaker 7: a whole, if the stuff that's being made is less
Speaker 7: than the orders being put in for it, then that
Speaker 7: costs inflation because you're just not producing enough stuff. And
Speaker 7: they call that demand pull because the poll of basically
Speaker 7: it's like demand pulling, you know, for stuff that isn't
Speaker 7: being produced, so it's like okay, well that that causes
Speaker 7: price rises. There was a parallel development where they're trying
Speaker 7: to get away from the QTM another way, where some
Speaker 7: people were like, well, what's the most important single cost
Speaker 7: for businesses across the economy And they say labor obviously, right,
Speaker 7: like everyone needs to pay somebody to do wages to
Speaker 7: keep the business going. So they just said, okay, well,
Speaker 7: if the cost of labor goes up across the economy,
Speaker 7: then that will cause prices to go up. So that's
Speaker 7: called cost push, which now theoretically this could be true
Speaker 7: of any cost. And this is kind of like where
Speaker 7: you know Steve's theory comes in is because it actually
Speaker 7: like starts talking realistically about what the cost of businesses are.
Speaker 7: But originally this was again a macro theory, so they
Speaker 7: picked the one cost that's common to all the things
Speaker 7: in the economy and they said that basically, inflation is
Speaker 7: the cost of workers agitating for higher pages, which leads
Speaker 7: wages to go up, which causes cost push inflation. The
Speaker 7: cost go up, so that pushes puts pressure down the
Speaker 7: supply chain because it's a it's a cost for everybody
Speaker 7: downstream of it, so then it causes it to the
Speaker 7: prices to go up. Now, the problem with these theories
Speaker 7: is that like they're very like rigid. It's like it
Speaker 7: has one cause and it's also like, you know, and
Speaker 7: it's this one thing and it has to operate across
Speaker 7: the entire economy, right, But that's not actually how our
Speaker 7: economy is put together. Because our economy is not this
Speaker 7: general equilibrium produced by the trading of individual agents who
Speaker 7: are buying cheap and selling deer to each other. That
Speaker 7: whole universe doesn't really exist. The universe that we actually
Speaker 7: live in is one where businesses are not isolated. They're interdependent.
Speaker 7: Right Like the the you know, the people who collect sands,
Speaker 7: you know, from the earth and other minerals, feed into
Speaker 7: the factories that turn it into glass, which feeds into
Speaker 7: the construction industry that puts those glass well actually, no,
Speaker 7: sorry I missed a step there. You know, it feeds
Speaker 7: into the factories that turn that glass into windows, which
Speaker 7: then feeds into the construction industry, which puts them into
Speaker 7: buildings that then feeds into like real estate conglomerates that
Speaker 7: rent it, which then feeds into businesses and households that
Speaker 7: live there. Right Like, that's the entire supply chain, and
Speaker 7: all those businesses depend upon each other because they're each
Speaker 7: other's customers. So how much glass do they make in
Speaker 7: the in the glass factory. It depends on how much
Speaker 7: how many windows the window factories that are all their
Speaker 7: customers order. That's what determines how much they're going to make.
Speaker 7: You know, this whole picture of the world as supply
Speaker 7: chains is common sense to anybody who actually like works
Speaker 7: a job, especially if they're like in a management position
Speaker 7: where they have to maybe be dealing with some of
Speaker 7: the supplier relations stuff or customer relations stuff. Economists just
Speaker 7: don't talk about it. It's not really in their models
Speaker 7: because their models are developed from the ground up from
Speaker 7: this kind of like everybody's just trading as individuals perspective.
Speaker 7: And that's a great deal of the reason why Steve's
Speaker 7: theory is so powerful. Now, a lot of this supply
Speaker 7: chain picture that I'm painting, besides coming from the real world,
Speaker 7: it also came from a particular heterodox economist that I
Speaker 7: wrote a very long profile of, called Frederick S. Lee.
Speaker 3: Before we get into Lee, we unfortunately do need to
Speaker 3: take an ad break because capitalism. But do you know
Speaker 3: what Frederick Lee would have hated? And it's this ad
Speaker 3: break we're about to do right now, all right, and
Speaker 3: we're back to talk about Frederick Lee, who was very
Speaker 3: cool and I'm very excited about Yeah.
Speaker 7: Well, unfortunately started a little wait, we're not going to
Speaker 7: talk a ton about him. The only really important thing
Speaker 7: so he was. He was a great guy. He was
Speaker 7: an anarcho syndicalist. He was a lifelong member of the IWW.
Speaker 7: He actually helped recover Joe Hill's ashes from the federal
Speaker 7: government and properly bury them. That's not in Part one
Speaker 7: of my profile, which is published. It's in part two,
Speaker 7: which is coming up. But in addition to that, he
Speaker 7: was also a great economic theorist, and part of what
Speaker 7: he did is that he put together the bits and
Speaker 7: pieces of this alternative picture of the economy, where, for example,
Speaker 7: prices are not this thing that allocates resources automatically through
Speaker 7: supply and demand, and their price changes are telling us
Speaker 7: what to how much to produce and how much to consume,
Speaker 7: which is the kind of like mainstream neoclassical picture. But
Speaker 7: rather prices are a markup that businesses like set themselves.
Speaker 7: They're not receiving it from the market. They set a
Speaker 7: price markup over their total costs of production in order
Speaker 7: to get the money that they need to keep the
Speaker 7: lights on and stay in business. This all sounds very trivial,
Speaker 7: I know, but believe it or not, in economics, this
Speaker 7: is like a revolutionary idea. So well then it's like, okay, well,
Speaker 7: if that's the way that an individual company is, how
Speaker 7: are the companies linked together? He basically comes to he
Speaker 7: doesn't call it this, but to a supply chain view
Speaker 7: of the economy, especially in his last textbook, which tries
Speaker 7: to create a model of the economy as a whole,
Speaker 7: and he says that the entire economy is basically just
Speaker 7: a circuit of supply chains. It's all the businesses sort
Speaker 7: of linked up together, forming a closed circuit that loops
Speaker 7: back on itself. And that is the economy that we
Speaker 7: use to produce the goods and services that just keep
Speaker 7: society going day to day, week to week, year to year.
Speaker 7: So he Lee basically had all of that and that
Speaker 7: was the main ingredient that we used. But it was
Speaker 7: Steve who then took that framework and used it to
Speaker 7: create a new theory of inflation, because if you have
Speaker 7: a world of the supply chains, then it becomes very
Speaker 7: obvious that if prices are going to rise all across
Speaker 7: the economy, it's going to be because people's cost go
Speaker 7: up so then the question becomes why how do people's
Speaker 7: costs go up? And the answer is almost always what
Speaker 7: Steve called his progenitor price increase. This this first guy
Speaker 7: who chooses to raise his prices if and only if
Speaker 7: that person is even only if that person is in
Speaker 7: the uh you know, in a position in the supply chamber,
Speaker 7: a bunch of people are downstream of them. And that
Speaker 7: tends to happen when, for example, an input that goes
Speaker 7: into the entire economy, like energy, suddenly goes up in
Speaker 7: price or becomes scarce, or it happens when a natural
Speaker 7: disaster causes disruptions in a couple of businesses that everybody
Speaker 7: else depends upon, or when there's an adverse shift in
Speaker 7: the balance of payments, you know, the the Let's say
Speaker 7: that the peso you know starts becoming you know, versus
Speaker 7: the dollar. You know, the dollar becomes much more expensive,
Speaker 7: So imports become much more expensive. So any business that
Speaker 7: depends upon imports, you know, will suddenly will suddenly have
Speaker 7: their costs go up. These are the kinds of events
Speaker 7: that are like an external shock that leads to a
Speaker 7: rise in prices, and key nodes in the supply chain
Speaker 7: that because so many people are connected to them as customers,
Speaker 7: their costs become more expensive, and that's these costs increase
Speaker 7: travel across particular supply chain. So you have to actually
Speaker 7: know how all the businesses are linked together so that
Speaker 7: you can identify what the origin of the stress was
Speaker 7: and see which particular supply chain is traveling down. It's
Speaker 7: not this like this thing that has to do with
Speaker 7: a single factor across the whole economy or this or
Speaker 7: much less the amount of money that's being printed. The
Speaker 7: amount of money is almost like irrelevant in this situation basically.
Speaker 7: I mean, it maybe has relevance inasmuch as, like you know,
Speaker 7: if people have the amount of money in their pockets
Speaker 7: that they have, usually they might start purchasing more things
Speaker 7: than can be produced at this moment. But that's usually
Speaker 7: like like usually it balances out normal situations. The only
Speaker 7: reason why that would be true is because there was
Speaker 7: some kind of disruption upstream, so that what's normally produced
Speaker 7: isn't being produced, And so you always have to look
Speaker 7: at the particular supply chains and the kinds of stress
Speaker 7: that they might have. Did I did I communicate that roughly?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Yeah, that was a fantastic summary. I have like a
Speaker 4: few small notes just to add to it in the
Speaker 4: in the sort of survey of existing theories of inflation
Speaker 4: that I did in the paper of the JMC, like
Speaker 4: very ably summaries for us, like specifically for the cost
Speaker 4: push guys. They I think they have a tendency to
Speaker 4: focus on like macrodynamic forces at work in the lens
Speaker 4: of cost push, like partly because it is like it
Speaker 4: really it relies on high profile fights between labor unions
Speaker 4: and companies that the audience already kind of understands, and
Speaker 4: it makes a lot of sense that you would go
Speaker 4: to union fights in particular since they're like one of
Speaker 4: the big items that they typically fight over is cost
Speaker 4: of living adjustments built into their wage increases. And so
Speaker 4: that's like an obvious like, Okay, if there is ever
Speaker 4: a time in which macrodemic forces would convene in to
Speaker 4: specifically to raise inflation, it would probably be fought over
Speaker 4: like the cola adjustments, cost living adjustments, and like the
Speaker 4: that leaves so much of the story untold. Focusing on
Speaker 4: cola adjustments in these union fights leaves so much of
Speaker 4: the story untold because it's it's putting like, what's really
Speaker 4: this incredibly interdependent, micro based phenomenon onto the backs of
Speaker 4: like one union against one company fighting over one contract,
Speaker 4: and the way they make it work in like a
Speaker 4: lot a lot of the modern interpretations of cost push
Speaker 4: in this macrodynamic sense, the way they square, the way
Speaker 4: they square how it gets from that fight to become
Speaker 4: a generalized inflationary episode, which is what people want to
Speaker 4: know about, Like they don't want to know about one well,
Speaker 4: they want to know about politically about a union fight,
Speaker 4: but in terms of the economics, they want to know
Speaker 4: about the inflationary episode. The way they square that is
Speaker 4: that there's typically like in what they call an information
Speaker 4: diffusional component to this, it's where and that's a fancy
Speaker 4: way of saying people learn about the outcome of the
Speaker 4: fight and then replicate.
Speaker 7: It monkey see monkey doo.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So one union fight or one or one company
Speaker 4: backclash against a union fight, word gets out, it spreads,
Speaker 4: and it's all over the place. And that's really like
Speaker 4: when you look at the economic history of the data
Speaker 4: of inflationary episodes, although there are union fights going on,
Speaker 4: inflation is not springing up specifically from those fights in
Speaker 4: the way that they're describing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I mean, one of the things you can
Speaker 3: tell this is obviously wrong is that they're just they're like,
Speaker 3: at no point in the US's history has there ever
Speaker 3: been enough percentage of the US population who are in
Speaker 3: unions for this to mix, this to actually work, Like,
Speaker 3: at no point even if you were to be really
Speaker 3: generous to them and only look at union density and
Speaker 3: like steel production union density and stuff that are like
Speaker 3: like an important part to the supply chain, Like, it's
Speaker 3: just not enough people, Like it can't it literally cannot
Speaker 3: be true that it is purely like a union cost
Speaker 3: testment thing because they're just not enough people.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So in these models, one of the important tasks
Speaker 4: that they've given themselves is to estimate the coefficient of
Speaker 4: information diffusional content from these union fights and like, so
Speaker 4: they will try to estimate that coefficient and thereby out
Speaker 4: build a model that outputs what price increase we can
Speaker 4: expect from like labor militancy if you're on the right wing,
Speaker 4: or company price gouging if you're on the left.
Speaker 7: Between Yeah, and this is this is really just like
Speaker 7: a perfect example. I think that Steve could have possibly
Speaker 7: put it better of the way that certain things that
Speaker 7: sound super sophisticated and intelligent, because you know, you can
Speaker 7: have like, you know, rather rather pink economists using this framework, right,
Speaker 7: like you know, social democratic ones, you know. But the
Speaker 7: thing is that, like it sounds really fancy to be
Speaker 7: talking about like the district what was it, the informational
Speaker 7: informational communication coefficient or whatever like that sounds that sounds
Speaker 7: incredibly sophisticated, right, but like, actually what it is is
Speaker 7: that it's this kind of like Nutsoe story about how
Speaker 7: the reason why price rises happen across the economy is
Speaker 7: because people are picking union fights when like empirically and
Speaker 7: labor economists often do this, like you know, the ones
Speaker 7: who work for unions and stuff. It's like it is
Speaker 7: almost always the case that wages lagh cost of living,
Speaker 7: you know, like significantly, so cost of living goes up,
Speaker 7: and that that's why people at some point, usually years later,
Speaker 7: will try to, if they're organized, agitate for for for
Speaker 7: higher wages to catch up with costs of living. So
Speaker 7: like the causality of it of cost push, you know,
Speaker 7: probably is not labor action. Like that's a sort of
Speaker 7: macro brain superstition. But funnily enough, this is kind of
Speaker 7: like like the devil is in the details. Because cost
Speaker 7: push as a general framework ought to probably be the
Speaker 7: basis for any reasonable theory of inflation, because the idea
Speaker 7: that it's costs going up, that then whatever prices now
Speaker 7: stream of those costs also go up, that is probably true.
Speaker 7: It's just that you have to look at particular supply
Speaker 7: chains and their costs and not just like their labor costs,
Speaker 7: but all the costs that they have and what cost
Speaker 7: in particular went up that affects those particular supply chains.
Speaker 7: Like that's but that's a different story, and it's a
Speaker 7: story that looks more like Steve's and also a story
Speaker 7: that looks more like what's been going on in the
Speaker 7: world since twenty two.
Speaker 4: Yeah, some of the critics when my paper and subsequent
Speaker 4: papers that we're we're on the same vein as this
Speaker 4: came out, is saying that we're just conflate, Like how
Speaker 4: are you guys really different than the cost push guys
Speaker 4: that you're critiquing for part of your paper, And it's
Speaker 4: really comes down to this kind of macro brain mecrodynamic
Speaker 4: interpretation based on just wages or just like one union
Speaker 4: fight and then some like people see it and just
Speaker 4: copy it or something, and it's just a least so
Speaker 4: much of a story, I'm told, Yeah.
Speaker 3: I mean, like I think, I think this is like
Speaker 3: the strength of looking at it through a supplush and
Speaker 3: it's like you can have it, you know, it has
Speaker 3: the what like for what for a normal person is
Speaker 3: a really simple idea, but for an economist is like
Speaker 3: unbelievably galaxy brain absolutely impossible to comprehend idea that something
Speaker 3: can have multiple causes at the same time and those
Speaker 3: multiple like you can't literally just reduce an entire like
Speaker 3: thing that's happening to exactly one driver, which you know,
Speaker 3: you would think would be a pretty like not that
Speaker 3: controversial thing. But then economists can't tell the difference between
Speaker 3: a theory in which you can have multiple different things
Speaker 3: that are working on a supply chain and a theory
Speaker 3: where you can have like a thing.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah exactly.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So like in in the COVID inflation that was that
Speaker 4: transpired just after the first of these pieces of ours
Speaker 4: came out, like it wasn't into full swing anyway in
Speaker 4: terms of in terms of being like a national phenomenon
Speaker 4: until just after like there, yes, there there there's a
Speaker 4: beginning of the labor militancy upsurge happily, but does like
Speaker 4: some people tried to light like the the people who
Speaker 4: were predicting no inflation, but then we started to see
Speaker 4: a little bit of it, started to attribute it to
Speaker 4: this like macrodynamic cost push story eventually of like well,
Speaker 4: either like but you can you can tell that they
Speaker 4: are kind of hedging because there will be there's like
Speaker 4: a bifurcation of interpretations of it, like one is the
Speaker 4: like it really is, just you can tell it's not
Speaker 4: that strong of a theory because there are two like
Speaker 4: diametrically opposed interpretations saying that like, oh, you'res this corporate
Speaker 4: price gouging or it's workers uh causing inflation themselves, which
Speaker 4: like if like James was saying, there's a lag typically
Speaker 4: associated that workers are just trying to catch up with
Speaker 4: the prices that were being raised by firms in order
Speaker 4: to keep up with inflation they generate.
Speaker 7: Yeah, if actually, if we could talk more, I was
Speaker 7: I was hoping that I could actually get into the
Speaker 7: COVID inflation and it's caused us a little bit. If
Speaker 7: that's okay with books, because not only because it's important
Speaker 7: in itself, but because I think this was actually one
Speaker 7: of our first successes as a magazine. So we launched
Speaker 7: as a magazine in April I think it was of
Speaker 7: twenty twenty two, but we've been working on the magazine
Speaker 7: from like twenty twenty on, so like there was twenty two,
Speaker 7: it was March of twenty twenty two. The that's right,
Speaker 7: but we'd been working on the magazine all through like
Speaker 7: twenty twenty and twenty twenty one and twenty And the
Speaker 7: thing is that Steve's Peace was kind of like taking shape,
Speaker 7: and you know, we as editors but then also as
Speaker 7: people who are like helping with the research and talking
Speaker 7: things out internally and talking with other people outside the collective,
Speaker 7: we're all kind of like sort of imbibing it and
Speaker 7: thinking about it. When COVID hit right and one of
Speaker 7: the things that was rather magical, And there is written
Speaker 7: evidence of this, funnily enough, not as an article because
Speaker 7: the magazine didn't exist yet, but as a Twitter thread
Speaker 7: that I made actually on March third of twenty twenty one.
Speaker 7: And the reason I'm being so specific about dates is
Speaker 7: because of what happened where we and I was just
Speaker 7: summarizing basically conversations that we had been having inside the
Speaker 7: magazine internally. You know, that was when some of the
Speaker 7: news stories were starting to come out about shortages that
Speaker 7: were being caused by COVID. So most famously the chips
Speaker 7: shortage were semiconductors, which take like a year to make,
Speaker 7: like from the moment that the order is put in
Speaker 7: to the moment when the thing is actually shipped, it's
Speaker 7: like a year. And if that process is disrupted, you
Speaker 7: have to start from the beginning. So the shutdowns in
Speaker 7: China shut down semiconductor production, and actually I say China,
Speaker 7: but it was really China and Taiwan because both of
Speaker 7: those places have major chips companies, and that basically screwed
Speaker 7: up ships production for like as long as the shutdown happened,
Speaker 7: and then after that at a lag of like a
Speaker 7: year at least, and then that in turn caused a
Speaker 7: bunch of other shortages. The fact that we were all
Speaker 7: inside meant that like there was a huge problem in food,
Speaker 7: both in agriculture itself and in food processing factories, you know,
Speaker 7: where the raw products that we take out of the
Speaker 7: earth are turned into the packaged you know, bits and
Speaker 7: bobs that you know, go to restaurants or to you know,
Speaker 7: food product factories and things like that, Like you couldn't
Speaker 7: get people to work there, or if they did, you know,
Speaker 7: and you tried to like pay them measure or whatever,
Speaker 7: they would get sick so they would stop production. So
Speaker 7: there was a labor shortage in agriculture as well. Then
Speaker 7: there was a container shortage right in in shipping, where
Speaker 7: we weren't producing enough containers to actually ship stuff around
Speaker 7: the world. And if you can't do that, well, everything
Speaker 7: is made. Everything that somebody needs to make something is
Speaker 7: often now made in another kind of or at least
Speaker 7: another part of a country, you know, that's connected by trucks.
Speaker 7: So if there's no containers, how do you get stuff
Speaker 7: from one place to the other? And the answers that
Speaker 7: you don't So they were just piling up like mountains
Speaker 7: in the in the docks of various countries, including here
Speaker 7: on the West Coast and the East coast. So all
Speaker 7: of these shortages caused by the pandemic. Basically we're hitting
Speaker 7: key sectors of the economy, right that everybody depends upon.
Speaker 7: So transportation, everybody needs it, you know, semiconductors, a whole
Speaker 7: bunch of manufacturing needs it. So that's that's why cars
Speaker 7: suddenly got super expensive, is because the chips in the
Speaker 7: machines that make the cars got more expensive and scarce,
Speaker 7: and not just expensive, it's scarce, like you just couldn't
Speaker 7: get them. And then food everybody depends on, and you know,
Speaker 7: like everybody buys groceries. Restaurants need it, so restaurant prices
Speaker 7: went up. So you can see how specific sectors having
Speaker 7: these problems traveled down specific supply chains to produce the
Speaker 7: cost increases that we all start and seeing. But here's
Speaker 7: the thing. All that stuff was happening from twenty twenty on.
Speaker 7: I did this thread on March third of twenty twenty one.
Speaker 7: But the thing is that at that point there was
Speaker 7: not yet inflation. We predicted that there was going to
Speaker 7: be inflation, and there was a lot of people, like
Speaker 7: including left wingers, including heterodox economists, who got really angry
Speaker 7: about this because for them, inflation fear mongering. You know,
Speaker 7: this was in the context of the government printing out
Speaker 7: all the stimmy checks, right, so inflation fear mongering for
Speaker 7: them is kind of like something that a right winger
Speaker 7: would do, you know, by saying the government's printing too
Speaker 7: much money, so there's going to be inflation, you know,
Speaker 7: quantity theory of money stuff, Milton Friedman stuff, the stuff
Speaker 7: that they had experienced in the turn to neoliberalism from
Speaker 7: the seventies to the eighties. Right. I understand that fear.
Speaker 7: But the thing is, this wasn't fear mongering. These shortages
Speaker 7: for very clear reasons that were clear if you had
Speaker 7: the supply chain theory of inflation framework, which unfortunately we
Speaker 7: did because we hadn't published it yet. Like you know,
Speaker 7: it was very clear that these shortages were going to
Speaker 7: cause cost increases in very well linked together, you know,
Speaker 7: nodes within supply chains that we're going to travel down
Speaker 7: those supply chains and basically be economy wide. So I
Speaker 7: said so because I had a hunch that it was
Speaker 7: going to be true, and that it would be a
Speaker 7: big deal if it was true, for you know, validating
Speaker 7: these discussions that we were having internally. So I said,
Speaker 7: some predictions. One, there's going to be inflation in the
Speaker 7: next year or two, potentially lots. Two it will be
Speaker 7: caused by cost increases due to the chips shortage and
Speaker 7: COVID induced bottlenecks, and agriculture and manufacturing. Three, they'll try
Speaker 7: to blame the stimmy checks and attempt to implement austerity. Now,
Speaker 7: at the time of that first tweet, inflation was at
Speaker 7: two point six percent, which is like within normal bounds,
Speaker 7: although slightly higher than have been before. By the end
Speaker 7: of that year, even actually, I think just a few
Speaker 7: months later, it was at four point seven percent, and
Speaker 7: in twenty twenty two it would peak at eight point
Speaker 7: seventy three percent, which was like the most inflation that
Speaker 7: we've seen since the Crisis of the seventies fifty years ago. Like,
Speaker 7: so we you know, the first success that we had
Speaker 7: as the magazine, before we even came out as a magazine,
Speaker 7: is that we successfully predicted the biggest inflationary crisis since
Speaker 7: the Crisis of the seventies, and not only predicted it,
Speaker 7: but predicted its specific causes. Because as the thread kind
Speaker 7: of was continually updated over over the course of that
Speaker 7: next year, like you know, people started looking digging in
Speaker 7: and actually, like a lot of journalism was uncovering that
Speaker 7: precisely those bottlenecks were leading to cost increases, you know,
Speaker 7: the and there were other ones that were kind of
Speaker 7: added to it. So when the Ukraine War started in
Speaker 7: twenty twenty two. That increased global inflation because Ukraine is
Speaker 7: the world's single biggest and by a lot, supplier of wheat,
Speaker 7: which is a key staple in diets across the planet.
Speaker 7: So the shortages that were created by the Ukraine War,
Speaker 7: by Russia's blockades and also just by bombing and you know,
Speaker 7: the war disrupting the labor market over there and all
Speaker 7: these other kinds of things that meant that there was
Speaker 7: less wheat being exported, which created bottlenecks in those supply chains,
Speaker 7: which led to the global increase in the price of wheat,
Speaker 7: which led to the global increase anything that uses wheat, bread,
Speaker 7: you know, and other food products. So beer, actually, well
Speaker 7: does I'm not wrong about that?
Speaker 9: Right?
Speaker 7: Beer uses wheat? I should actually know that, Yeah, I
Speaker 7: think I think so. I had to do a double
Speaker 7: take there. So anyway, the point is that this was
Speaker 7: like a really big deal because like there were a
Speaker 7: lot of people, including like in the Biden administration, who
Speaker 7: were denying that inflation was happening even as it was happening.
Speaker 7: And eventually the kind of shifted to a story where
Speaker 7: it was like, well, it'll be transitional because only demand
Speaker 7: pull inflation is real, right, this is clearly a cost
Speaker 7: push thing created by these shortages. But like demand pull is,
Speaker 7: the real form of inflation is when there's like too
Speaker 7: much money in people's pockets. And that's not what's happening clearly,
Speaker 7: so we'll be fine. You just have to wait, right,
Speaker 7: which is not Actually the attitude that you have to take.
Speaker 7: Inflation is inflation and like you know, the the if
Speaker 7: the causes or these disruptions and supply chains. You actually,
Speaker 7: i mean, this is like the really edgy take. You
Speaker 7: actually have to spend more money in order to unplug
Speaker 7: these bottlenecks. You know, It's far from inflation being a
Speaker 7: product of there being too much money in the economy.
Speaker 7: You might actually need to do government spending too, for example,
Speaker 7: hire people you know, and and take extra steps for
Speaker 7: precaution for their safety to unplug bottlenecks created by labor shortages.
Speaker 7: Or you might have to like you know, rapidly invest
Speaker 7: you know, on a large scale, almost as if you're
Speaker 7: in a war are in order to create a new
Speaker 7: industry to like, you know, to to replace something like
Speaker 7: containers that that that you would normally import, you know,
Speaker 7: or something like that so like like these are these
Speaker 7: are the kinds of actions that a more muscular approach
Speaker 7: to the inflation would have would have been. But instead
Speaker 7: they basically just waited for the supply chains to fix themselves,
Speaker 7: even when multinational corporations and their boards of directors were
Speaker 7: begging the government to actually intervene more. Uh, which is
Speaker 7: insane with economic planning. You know, you would never expect
Speaker 7: to hear something like that, but it was in the
Speaker 7: things like the pages of the Financial.
Speaker 3: Times, speaking of the Financial Times, we do we do
Speaker 3: need to take another ad break unfortunately. Yeah, do you
Speaker 3: know what the Financial Times will not be doing buying
Speaker 3: ads on this show hasn't happened yet. Could happen, would
Speaker 3: be very funny, but it has not happened yet. All right,
Speaker 3: we're we are now back from ads. Yeah, I endeavored
Speaker 3: to have better ad pivots, but you know, you get
Speaker 3: what you get.
Speaker 4: Speaking of like what they could have done differently, like
Speaker 4: they there's a whole World War two playbook essentially that
Speaker 4: they just didn't chose, they're ignorant of or chose to
Speaker 4: ignore of, like a system of price controls, rationing and
Speaker 4: rapid redeployment of resources, to unstuck the bottlenecks along and
Speaker 4: across supply chains on the domestic side to support the warfront.
Speaker 4: There's no war going on for us directly right now,
Speaker 4: but it could it could have easily been replicated.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that's something I think is really interesting because eventually,
Speaker 3: like as the inflationary crisis sort of went on, like
Speaker 3: you did see a little bit of people trying stuff
Speaker 3: like this, like you saw Germany, if I remembering by
Speaker 3: Germany did these price controls on uh on, like natural
Speaker 3: gas prices and stuff. But that that that gets into
Speaker 3: another interesting thing is which is that So Yeah, I
Speaker 3: think we should get into a bit of this sort.
Speaker 1: Of like.
Speaker 2: The I don't know how you describe it, the.
Speaker 3: Mainstream adoption of like a version of y'all's theory that
Speaker 3: eventually started happening, that eventually started to push like some
Speaker 3: of this stuff, which, yeah, I guess we should introduce
Speaker 3: another person who I don't know the relationship between exactly
Speaker 3: what of your stuff she read is sort of unclear.
Speaker 3: But one of the things that happens in this sort
Speaker 3: of period is this this German economist named Isabella Weber
Speaker 3: who wrote a like fine like mostly reasonable book about
Speaker 3: like the economists behind the like the reform period in
Speaker 3: the eighties and China like started pushing well, actually, this
Speaker 3: is the thing where I'm sort of unclear at the timeline.
Speaker 3: I started pushing the greedflation thing, although she had a
Speaker 3: different name for it. Yeah, I wasn't really talking about
Speaker 3: that sort of whole thing, because that was really interesting,
Speaker 3: sort of like turn in the whole inflationary discourse inflation.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think the prior so like prior to Waber's
Speaker 4: peace coming out in the earliest phases of COVID in
Speaker 4: twenty twenty and twenty twenty one, before there was any inflation,
Speaker 4: there was a group of left wing like a fairly
Speaker 4: large swath of like left wing academics, progressives and liberals,
Speaker 4: and also Biden, the Biden administration itself, saying that inflation
Speaker 4: would be transitory and that we should it will if anything,
Speaker 4: it would be moderates, but would come right back down
Speaker 4: because like, supply chings are so much more nimble now
Speaker 4: than they were in like the seventies and eighties, and
Speaker 4: like liquidity sources are so much more plentiful, they have
Speaker 4: so many Like I'm probably giving them too much credit. Actually,
Speaker 4: I think they literally just were like.
Speaker 7: Yeah, there was no because that I remember, like that would.
Speaker 4: Be basically have it because actually I'm filling the in
Speaker 4: the blanks for them as I go. I think they
Speaker 4: were just saying it's going to be transitory because it
Speaker 4: hasn't happened. Yeah, and like when it obviously in late
Speaker 4: twenty twenty two to to through the middle of twenty
Speaker 4: twenty three, when there's obvious evidence that that wasn't the case,
Speaker 4: then they like really didn't, like they went like hard
Speaker 4: to starboard and said, like, Okay, the inflation that we see,
Speaker 4: it's because of corporate greed and it just reduces to
Speaker 4: that now. Yeah, and so it's like a purely opportunistic
Speaker 4: thing between of like the largest corporations. And then you know,
Speaker 4: maybe later people saw that and did monkey see monkey do,
Speaker 4: but it's it's because of.
Speaker 7: Them, And to be fair, like the tricky thing here
Speaker 7: is that, like so I'll preface this by saying that, like,
Speaker 7: you know, and I think this is true Steve too,
Speaker 7: Like I really respect us of Bella Vapor's work when
Speaker 7: it's good, you know, and which is often you know,
Speaker 7: Like I think that that she's a very solid headerdox
Speaker 7: economist who has some really important refutations of mainstream ideas,
Speaker 7: and as an example of the good stuff. For example,
Speaker 7: she actually uh one of her one of the underrated
Speaker 7: aspects of a paper that kind of pushes what is
Speaker 7: popularly known as the greenflation thing. The better part of
Speaker 7: that paper is that it actually creates a map of
Speaker 7: the current to today's supply chains in the US, like
Speaker 7: you know, and and identifies the keynodes you know. And
Speaker 7: she's a method called input output input output tables, which
Speaker 7: Steve and I have written about and we're gonna write
Speaker 7: about it more on the magazine. This is like the
Speaker 7: main tool that you can use to do real economic planning.
Speaker 3: JMC has been setting the input output tables for like
Speaker 3: seven years now.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I just scream about it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I should make it clear. It's like the iotable
Speaker 4: stuff is amazing, and I think I think people just
Speaker 4: latched onto kind of really not like hardly the most
Speaker 4: important part of your piece.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and that that, by the way, I mean, I
Speaker 7: don't know if she read Steve's Peace or not, but
Speaker 7: it is a huge vindication of Steve's piece, which came
Speaker 7: out like a year and a half before you know
Speaker 7: because because it's basically mapping the supply chains that Steve
Speaker 7: talks about using io tables and saying, Okay, these are
Speaker 7: the nodes. If prices go up here, everything downstream of
Speaker 7: them will go up, and those the and and that
Speaker 7: basically hits most sectors of the economy, like and knowing
Speaker 7: what those nodes are is like super important because then
Speaker 7: you can figure out how to protect them, you know,
Speaker 7: like that's that's actually like one of the key things
Speaker 7: that you know, one wishes that that that that governments
Speaker 7: were doing, it would be one of the few useful
Speaker 7: things that they could do in a situation like this, right,
Speaker 7: But unfortunately there's another aspect of her work which is
Speaker 7: more and this also comes from heterodox theory, but it's
Speaker 7: just not good theory in my opinion. And it's this
Speaker 7: whole deal with like, okay, inflation, with prices going up.
Speaker 7: So why are the prices going up? Well, a lot
Speaker 7: of them are going up because corporate management sees that
Speaker 7: everybody's talking about inflation. Now, maybe their costs. They're not
Speaker 7: in one of these sectors where upstream their suppliers are
Speaker 7: raising prices. They're actually getting the same prices for their
Speaker 7: ingredients as always. But because everybody's talking about inflation, they're
Speaker 7: expecting prices to go up, right, so why not just
Speaker 7: raise prices, you know, like like the and so like.
Speaker 7: That basically ended up that basically ended up being a
Speaker 7: theory of like, well, a lot of the price rises
Speaker 7: that going up is because of corporate greed, and corporations
Speaker 7: are always greedy. But a situation where people are talking
Speaker 7: about inflation means that they can that they can basically
Speaker 7: do a price get away with a price rise that
Speaker 7: they wouldn't be able to get away with normally. Now,
Speaker 7: there might be situations like this. I'm not even denying
Speaker 7: that that's the case. Like there are clearly, you know,
Speaker 7: based on a couple of journalistic exposees some companies whose
Speaker 7: costs have not really gone up, but they're raising the
Speaker 7: prices opportunistically so that they can do higher payoffs for
Speaker 7: the shareholders and upper management. However, as a primary explanation
Speaker 7: for why the inflation happened, as an argument for the
Speaker 7: main cause of the inflation, and therefore for what the
Speaker 7: main solution should be, which is slapping on price controls
Speaker 7: and saying no, you can't do this, I don't think
Speaker 7: that that's tenable because there are clearly biophysical stressors in
Speaker 7: at least the places that are experiencing them, that are
Speaker 7: traveling down supply where if you slap price controls down,
Speaker 7: that's not going to get you more chips that at
Speaker 7: least not by itself, and in itself, price control should
Speaker 7: be part of the picture, but that's not, especially in
Speaker 7: situations where there is corporate greed sort of driven price rises.
Speaker 7: But that's just not an explanation for everything. And some
Speaker 7: of Weber's followers, not not necessarily her, but some of
Speaker 7: the people who are like promoting this perspective are doing
Speaker 7: so again partly in order to avoid conversation, in my opinion,
Speaker 7: about these kinds of biophysical bottlenecks and how they might
Speaker 7: be they might be undone, and it's and it's a
Speaker 7: huge issue. One thing to kind of like conclude is
Speaker 7: that like in you know, this, this whole thing that
Speaker 7: we've been saying about the supply chain as disruptions to
Speaker 7: the supply chain as the cause of a progenitor and
Speaker 7: price increased by people in the affected sectors, which in turn,
Speaker 7: through their connections to a bunch of customers, leads to
Speaker 7: price rises across at least second of the economy. That
Speaker 7: whole story allowed us to kind of see all this.
Speaker 7: A lot of the inflation that's happened in the world
Speaker 7: since twenty twenty, we saw it coming, and we saw
Speaker 7: specific causes coming. And now no less a capitalist institution
Speaker 7: than the imf right has kind of been forced reluctantly,
Speaker 7: I would say, in some ways to admit that, as
Speaker 7: Christine Legard said recently, you know, energy played a significant role,
Speaker 7: then food kicked in, and energy is now fading. You know.
Speaker 7: Now they still want to make it about wages, right,
Speaker 7: I mean, that's the thing that ends up happening in
Speaker 7: a crisis like this, is that they do want to
Speaker 7: blame wage increases. But it is quite clear that even
Speaker 7: the authorities have needed to kind of admit that these specific,
Speaker 7: measurable biophysical crises have been the source, the main source
Speaker 7: of the inflation. And then a great deal of the
Speaker 7: of the battle has been over who's going to kind
Speaker 7: of like who who's going to have to narrow their
Speaker 7: ambitions for their goals as a result of it, capital
Speaker 7: or labor. And this is where I think VAPOR is
Speaker 7: on firmer ground, not as an explanation for the inflation.
Speaker 7: But afterwards, and then after inflation is already kicked in,
Speaker 7: who ends up having to quote unquote foot the bill,
Speaker 7: right is there's now like less money coming in in
Speaker 7: these companies. So do you give it to workers so
Speaker 7: that they can, you know, since their money buys them less,
Speaker 7: you know, compared to rising costs of living, you give
Speaker 7: them a little bit more so that they can like
Speaker 7: kind of like balance it out. Or do you give
Speaker 7: it to management? You know, Now, obviously if it's management
Speaker 7: making the decision about what to do with the company surplus,
Speaker 7: because we live in a capitalist economy, that's a dictatorship
Speaker 7: with the big owners, guess what they're gonna say, you know,
Speaker 7: and now and now you have a therefore a class struggle,
Speaker 7: the distributional conflict that some of the kind of traditional
Speaker 7: cost push theories always talk about between capital and labor
Speaker 7: over what to do with these rising markups in firms. Now,
Speaker 7: they would say that's why the inflation happened. I think
Speaker 7: I would say, and I think Steve would be in
Speaker 7: agreement with this, that it's what happens after inflation, an
Speaker 7: inflationary crisis kicks in, and then there's a battle between
Speaker 7: capital and labor over who gets screwed as a result.
Speaker 7: I think that that's kind of the way that we
Speaker 7: should think about a lot of the labor struggles that
Speaker 7: have taken place since COVID.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I also like to add that there's kind of
Speaker 4: like a distinction that needs to be drawn between companies,
Speaker 4: typically small and medium sized ones within who exist within
Speaker 4: larger supply chains, who are sort of like doing what
Speaker 4: they must, versus large corporations, often multinational who there's documented
Speaker 4: evidence that yes, there's some opportunistic price price increases that
Speaker 4: they are administering at the same time. So there's a mixture,
Speaker 4: i would say, bias towards the former group, those who
Speaker 4: have to do what they have to do in order
Speaker 4: to socially provision themselves. But there's a mixture of them,
Speaker 4: And so you have to look at like that, who
Speaker 4: are the price leaders and are they opportunistically raising prices
Speaker 4: and are people copying that? Yes? Sometimes, but as far
Speaker 4: as like the progenitor price increase that we keep talking about,
Speaker 4: you know, in our pieces like that, very often like
Speaker 4: and this is born out in the surveys, like when
Speaker 4: they're asked like for their reasoning as to why they
Speaker 4: raise prices. It was typically like for the for reasons
Speaker 4: like that are quote unquote socially acceptable at least to say,
Speaker 4: And for the most part, they were just defending their margins,
Speaker 4: like they they were at risk of going under right, Yeah,
Speaker 4: and so you have to you have to weigh there's
Speaker 4: a dynamic, there's an interplay between those that group and
Speaker 4: then the opportunistic group, and so it really doesn't like
Speaker 4: reduce neatly into the greed inflation sort of like vestardization
Speaker 4: of vapors. Otherwise, really excellent piece that goes through some
Speaker 4: like interesting and out but analysis.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and I think that like this is a really
Speaker 7: important thing for listeners because I think a lot of
Speaker 7: left wing listeners they if they ask what's inflation and
Speaker 7: a left wing economist tells them because of corporate greed,
Speaker 7: they'll be like yeah, but and and and they might
Speaker 7: listen to us and be like, well, it looks like
Speaker 7: it sounds like you're defending corporations, And I would argue, no,
Speaker 7: we're not. We're trying to understand the actual causes for things,
Speaker 7: and we think that actually help you because, for example,
Speaker 7: if a company, let's say that you're in a company
Speaker 7: that is part of this wave of unionizations where you know,
Speaker 7: let's say you're a Starbucks worker and people want to
Speaker 7: start up a Starbucks union. Maybe one of the ways
Speaker 7: that management is trying to kind of like screw over
Speaker 7: your union is to tell people who are on the fence, well, like,
Speaker 7: the reason why there's so much inflation is because of
Speaker 7: these unions, like we we have to all stick together,
Speaker 7: and you know, the company's got your best interests at heart,
Speaker 7: so you like, don't join this union that's going to
Speaker 7: be pushing for for wages that are ultimately just going
Speaker 7: to get eaten up by inflation. Like like, let let
Speaker 7: let management figure out what'll what's best, because otherwise you'll
Speaker 7: just end up screwing up the whole economy. And which
Speaker 7: is not unheard of. You know, it might be something
Speaker 7: they'll fall back on the negotiations and their anti union
Speaker 7: propaganda if you know that the actual cause of the
Speaker 7: inflation has to do with disrupted supply chains and that
Speaker 7: really the question is who's going to be screwed over
Speaker 7: and who's not. Within the company, you can go back
Speaker 7: and say, hey, wages are always chasing. Cost of living increases,
Speaker 7: the cost of living increases happened before the big unionization
Speaker 7: wave kicked off, and we can tell that it's specific
Speaker 7: causes in logistics, and its specific causes in chips, and
Speaker 7: specific causes in agriculture that are causing the price of this,
Speaker 7: that and the other thing. You can even map out
Speaker 7: your company's supply chain and maybe point out certain cost
Speaker 7: increases that caused it, and you can say, okay, so
Speaker 7: we're going to have to raise our prices. But where's
Speaker 7: that money going to go? Not all of us should
Speaker 7: go to management. Some of this should go to us.
Speaker 7: So this is what a materialist understanding of how the
Speaker 7: actual causes of the thing worked out can help you
Speaker 7: in organizing your workplace and in pushing back against the
Speaker 7: kinds of things that your boss might try to tell you.
Speaker 7: So that's what I would say to somebody who's like, oh, well,
Speaker 7: you're just defending corporations. No, I'm absolutely not. But I
Speaker 7: don't think that we can actually have power, we can
Speaker 7: actually kind of like take direct actions that really matter
Speaker 7: because they're actually going to make life better for us
Speaker 7: and our friends and our loved ones. Like, I don't
Speaker 7: think that we can actually do that unless we understand
Speaker 7: how the world works, and sometimes the world works in
Speaker 7: a way that doesn't necessarily look like we would most
Speaker 7: expect it to or most wish it to. But nevertheless,
Speaker 7: you have to kind of see how it works so
Speaker 7: that you can then figure out what's the best intervention
Speaker 7: that I can make into it, given where I'm at,
Speaker 7: the institutions that I work through, the coalitions that I
Speaker 7: can put together, and that kind of thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think this is this is a kind
Speaker 3: of like left field, like take on this too, but
Speaker 3: like there are lots of sort of you know, if
Speaker 3: you go through like an economic price history or like
Speaker 3: an economic history of like the socialist period in China, right,
Speaker 3: like you will find them having to deal with like
Speaker 3: basically exactly the same ship where they have these like
Speaker 3: massive inflationary spikes that have to do with like basically
Speaker 3: these I mean for them, it was less supply chain
Speaker 3: bottle like supply chain breakdowns is like you know, they'd
Speaker 3: get the supply chain bottle now because they just didn't
Speaker 3: have way through them, and like people fucking that up,
Speaker 3: Like there was a like there is a decent argument
Speaker 3: that like that's part of what caused the Great Leap
Speaker 3: Forward was people not fucking understanding that, like not quite
Speaker 3: understanding how to deal with their supply chain stuff and
Speaker 3: seeing this kind of like inflation like issue kicking in
Speaker 3: and being like fuck it were to do something that's
Speaker 3: completely nuts, and you know, that went like about as
Speaker 3: badly as like any attempt anyone has ever tried to do,
Speaker 3: like to fix any problem has ever gone. And the
Speaker 3: larger the number of people who actually understand how this
Speaker 3: stuff works, even in sort of like you know, even
Speaker 3: even on a kind of like not enormously grandeur level,
Speaker 3: the more likely you are to have someone who's in
Speaker 3: and it has the ability to make a decision where
Speaker 3: this stuff matters and you know it and like yeah,
Speaker 3: you could be like, oh well, like the odds that
Speaker 3: we're ever gonna be in a place for this matters
Speaker 3: is like direct, you're gonna be the one making the
Speaker 3: decisons pretty low.
Speaker 2: But like, you know, it's not zero.
Speaker 3: It's happened to people before, and them not knowing about
Speaker 3: it was like a really apocable disaster, and we can
Speaker 3: you know, avoid doing stuff like that by having a
Speaker 3: better understanding of like how our supply chains function and
Speaker 3: what effect that has on sort of economic distribution and
Speaker 3: stuff like that. So yeah, that's that's one of my
Speaker 3: two pitches, And my other pitch on this is, I
Speaker 3: I don't know how. It's hard to actually gauge the
Speaker 3: influence of discourse on policy makers, especially when they're as
Speaker 3: opaque as like the chairman of the Federal Reserve, but
Speaker 3: it is worth noting that we didn't get a like
Speaker 3: Vulgar style fifteen percent like interest rate increase, And I
Speaker 3: think there's a non zero argument the fact that there
Speaker 3: were other alternative explanations to inflation like around and that
Speaker 3: enough people were pushing them, like is a reason why
Speaker 3: we didn't get one of these, like a Vulcar style thing,
Speaker 3: which would have pushed employment to like unemployment to like
Speaker 3: twenty five percent, destroy the entire global economy. And that,
Speaker 3: you know, like we could count that as a fucking
Speaker 3: w because as as bad as things are right now,
Speaker 3: like the world, the world where Jerome Powell pulls the
Speaker 3: trigger and hits the like hey, I'm now a monitorist,
Speaker 3: like I'm gonna I'm gonna decrease the money supply button
Speaker 3: and Jack's the interest wrapped like a dew percent, Like
Speaker 3: that world is so much worse than this one. It
Speaker 3: is it is difficult to imagine.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think we dodged a bullet of like twelve
Speaker 4: percent federal funds rate this time. Yeah, we've surpassed Monashers
Speaker 4: and to an extent anyway, there's they're still doing some
Speaker 4: quantitative tightening. Yeah, they but uh, I don't know, at
Speaker 4: least as like a mortgage industry professional. I'm kind of
Speaker 4: hoping he keeps it under six for the federal funds, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we'll see what happens there.
Speaker 3: But it hasn't been We haven't gotten the apocalyptic reaction
Speaker 3: that we very very easily could have, like to the
Speaker 3: extent that, like, I'm pretty sure if this, if this
Speaker 3: had happened under Obama, we'd be in like a recession
Speaker 3: that would have made two thousand and eight look like
Speaker 3: a joke right now.
Speaker 2: So yeah, okay, I.
Speaker 7: I think that there's a lot more to discuss about
Speaker 7: it because and it seems like we're gonna probably have
Speaker 7: a part two to this at some point. Yeah, So
Speaker 7: we can probably get into it there because we have
Speaker 7: actually an essay that we published about interest rates which
Speaker 7: hadn't even bigger influence than this, Yeah, than these early
Speaker 7: essays that we're talking about. But but you know, like
Speaker 7: at the end of the day, I think that what's important,
Speaker 7: what's most important about what we've discussed, is this for me,
Speaker 7: like having this model which we developed, you know obviously,
Speaker 7: like steve've developed it out of as an expansion of
Speaker 7: the logic of Fred Lee's work. And fred Lee was
Speaker 7: not actually particularly original. He just synthesized a whole bunch
Speaker 7: of stuff that existed previously, like these pricing studies by
Speaker 7: Gardner Means in the thirties and pricing studies over the
Speaker 7: next hundred years from all sorts of different people, you know,
Speaker 7: into his post Kanteene price theory and stuff like that,
Speaker 7: the cost plus markup stuff. But like like having a
Speaker 7: theory that's developed by looking at the world and building
Speaker 7: your abstractions up out of things that you can see,
Speaker 7: particularly in a field like economics that's so complex that
Speaker 7: you have to kind of start with like observable relations
Speaker 7: between actual institutions that exist in the world that empowered us,
Speaker 7: you know, that allowed us who really were just like
Speaker 7: four weirdos started a magazine right like four anarchistish weirdos, But.
Speaker 12: That allowed us to see earlier than like most people,
Speaker 12: including a lot of like credential professionals, what was going
Speaker 12: to happen in the future, at least the near future,
Speaker 12: like you know, the next like like like two to
Speaker 12: five years from that vantage point, which was like twenty
Speaker 12: twenty one. That is really incredible, And I'm not saying
Speaker 12: that to brag, like, although it is certainly something that
Speaker 12: I that I take a sick pleasure in. It's also
Speaker 12: informative because think about all the things about which we
Speaker 12: don't have that concrete material picture. The question of how
Speaker 12: we're going to get fossil fuels out of agricultural production
Speaker 12: without causing famines, right, the question of what do you
Speaker 12: do now that we have the Internet, Like how do
Speaker 12: you govern that?
Speaker 7: Because it's clearly not working under these giant vertically integrated
Speaker 7: media Oligo believes with the platforms, but it's also not
Speaker 7: going to work if we put it under the government,
Speaker 7: So what the hell do we do about it? You know?
Speaker 7: It's it's like there's all these key questions that we
Speaker 7: just don't have have even like working models like of
Speaker 7: like what the world is even like right now, much
Speaker 7: less like you know, what could plausibly be done with it?
Speaker 7: Right to make it a better place. And obviously, like
Speaker 7: you know, some of this sounds like stuff that the
Speaker 7: government should do, but a lot of this is actually
Speaker 7: stuff that social movements need. If you think the rent
Speaker 7: is too damn high in your city, and you organize
Speaker 7: a tenancy union that has real political muscle and you
Speaker 7: actually like have the ability to do stoppages or other
Speaker 7: actions that can really like bully the local city government. Okay,
Speaker 7: but what do you ask for, what do you demand
Speaker 7: or what do you try to put into place yourself
Speaker 7: using your own money? Like, what do you do if
Speaker 7: the rent is too damn high? How do you get
Speaker 7: it lower? And it's like, oh, well, there shouldn't be rent,
Speaker 7: we should abolish it, Okay, how do you do that?
Speaker 7: You know, you need models of the world, and that's
Speaker 7: what we've been trying to kind of build in the
Speaker 7: magazine more than anything else, especially in our ECON coverage.
Speaker 7: So there's a lot more that happened after this. We'll
Speaker 7: probably have a part two, but I just to wrap
Speaker 7: up the story up to then. So we did launch
Speaker 7: the magazine, we did put out Steve's essay, but then
Speaker 7: a really remarkable thing happened, which is that we started getting,
Speaker 7: like all magazines do, people who came in into the
Speaker 7: slush pile who were inspired by Steve's work, and we're like,
Speaker 7: this makes the most sense of anything that I've heard,
Speaker 7: and I want to build on it too. So we
Speaker 7: started publishing other essays that we're kind of building on
Speaker 7: the research program that Steve kind of got us started on.
Speaker 7: And although our sort of influence was difficult to calculate
Speaker 7: in terms of, like, you know, how much we influenced
Speaker 7: the discussion, you know, in these early stages before the
Speaker 7: magazine was even up and running. Afterwards, after we kind
Speaker 7: of publish the people that I'm talking about, some of
Speaker 7: those pieces have actually definitely influenced the conversation in really
Speaker 7: exciting ways, and I think that we can talk about
Speaker 7: some of that next time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so that will be at some point in the future.
Speaker 3: I don't all I'm going up put down a definitive
Speaker 3: date when it happens, because I don't know the world
Speaker 3: is chaos and this. Yeah, but however, Comma, this story
Speaker 3: will continue in part two dot dot dot dot dot Yeah,
Speaker 3: So Steve Jamc, thank you both so much for joining me.
Speaker 3: And yeah, do you have where where can people go
Speaker 3: to find the magazine and you two if they want
Speaker 3: to find you.
Speaker 4: Oh, you can go to Strangemagers dot coop. That's our
Speaker 4: main website. If you want to subscribe, we have digital
Speaker 4: subscriptions starting at five dollars and Prince monthly is seven
Speaker 4: ninety nine. There are also annual subscriptions too.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and please do consider subscribing or donating. You can
Speaker 7: actually donate any amount of money to us. We're not
Speaker 7: a nonprofit, so it's not tax deductible, but it would
Speaker 7: be a really helpful donation because any dollar that we
Speaker 7: get that doesn't go to our capitalist overlords, you know,
Speaker 7: for the services that we have to use to keep
Speaker 7: the magazine going, all of that goes right now to
Speaker 7: our writers. And we try to pay writers above market
Speaker 7: rate for magazines of our size, and you know, to
Speaker 7: do that is very difficult, you know, we need we
Speaker 7: need to So if you want to support worker controlled
Speaker 7: media production that's financially independent. We don't have any big foundations,
Speaker 7: you know, like telling us what to write or things
Speaker 7: like that. It's all like basically small donations and subscriptions,
Speaker 7: like you know, if you want to keep that kind
Speaker 7: of media alive and keep this kind of economic analysis
Speaker 7: alive along with our cultural philosophy, philosophical, historical, anthropological, literary stuff.
Speaker 7: Then then please consider it because we could really use
Speaker 7: the support.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so go do that. Yeah, and go read some
Speaker 3: of the some of the work that you all have
Speaker 3: done on inflation, because it's really good. And yeah, this
Speaker 3: is prediculate apple.
Speaker 7: Here.
Speaker 3: You can find us in the usual places. And yes,
Speaker 3: go go, go into the world and cause mischief.
Speaker 8: This summer has been a critical junction in the fight
Speaker 8: against Copp City, the Atlanta Police Foundation's massive proposed training
Speaker 8: facility Indicab County, which is slated to begin construction later
Speaker 8: this very month. The last week of action in March
Speaker 8: of twenty twenty three drew in over a thousand people
Speaker 8: against Copp City and saw hundreds of force defenders attack
Speaker 8: in mass the construction equipment and police infrastructure stored on
Speaker 8: the site in a pretty successful action. The police repression
Speaker 8: came down hard, but the militancy of the force defenders
Speaker 8: left a pretty impressionable mark. Later that month, to Cab
Speaker 8: County closed and barricaded in Trenchment Creek Park citing public
Speaker 8: safety concerns, and allegedly found booby traps police did an
Speaker 8: exhaustive sweep of the forest and established a relatively firm
Speaker 8: control of the territory. After a year and a half
Speaker 8: of there being a nearly continuous presence in the Mulani
Speaker 8: by forest defenders, now the police began a forest occupation
Speaker 8: of their own. During the month that followed, the Atlanta
Speaker 8: Police Foundation, or the APF, rushed to clear cut around
Speaker 8: ninety acres of the Mulani Forest, seemingly in a ploy
Speaker 8: to show investors and the city that they are committed
Speaker 8: to the project and to crush the spirits of those
Speaker 8: who spent years opposing the facility and defending the forest.
Speaker 8: People then set their sights on the Atlanta's City Council,
Speaker 8: who in early June was to vote on whether or
Speaker 8: not to provide taxpayer funding for the APF's project. Over
Speaker 8: twenty three hours of public comment across multiple days, almost
Speaker 8: universally against copp City, culminated at the June fifth City
Speaker 8: Council meeting, which lasted into the early hours of the
Speaker 8: next morning. Despite the record breaking turnout opposing the facility,
Speaker 8: in the early morning of Tuesday, June sixth, the Atlanta
Speaker 8: City Council voted eleven to four in favor of the
Speaker 8: sixty seven million dollar funding package to build cop City.
Speaker 8: The next day, a group of community organizers announced a
Speaker 8: referendum campaign to collect tens of thousands of petition signatures
Speaker 8: from Atlanta voters to put the cop City land lease
Speaker 8: on the upcoming ballot. City council approving public funds for
Speaker 8: cop City was certainly disappointing, but not quite unexpected, because
Speaker 8: another Week of action to stop cop City was already
Speaker 8: planned for later that same month. This is it could
Speaker 8: happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. In this three part series,
Speaker 8: I'll be talking about what's been happening in Atlanta this
Speaker 8: summer to stop cop City. If you want to hear
Speaker 8: more about the background of this movement. In the month
Speaker 8: of May, we put out a five part series on
Speaker 8: the Week of Action from that spring, along with the
Speaker 8: few other previous Defend the Forest and Stop Cup City
Speaker 8: mini series published over the course of the last year
Speaker 8: and a half. With much of the forest already destroyed
Speaker 8: and no easy access to Entrenchment Creek Park, this Week
Speaker 8: of Action in June was set to be very unlike
Speaker 8: any that had come before. The kickoff rally was to
Speaker 8: begin on Saturday, June twenty fourth, at Brownwood Park in
Speaker 8: East Atlanta. I made my way there and met up
Speaker 8: with Matt from the Atlantic Community Press Collective. My first
Speaker 8: feeling walking in is like it felt very society of
Speaker 8: the spectacle in terms of like the ratio of cameras
Speaker 8: to participants was the most extreme that I've really ever
Speaker 8: ever seen for like, you know, a week of action,
Speaker 8: like there was there was an outside of like a
Speaker 8: press conference, yeah, and like it felt like there was
Speaker 8: so many just cameras looming around, and it's like there's
Speaker 8: so many people trying to make a similar from the
Speaker 8: movements to sell back to other people at this point
Speaker 8: in time, and like there's just a very like that's
Speaker 8: just a very large, pervasive feeling, and that combined with
Speaker 8: the more kind of the more liberalization of certain of
Speaker 8: certain aspects, again compared to the last week of Action,
Speaker 8: which felt there was a strong militant continuent.
Speaker 5: And like the liberal continued was still there.
Speaker 11: If you build it, we will burn it.
Speaker 8: And that's not the vibe here. That's not the vibe here.
Speaker 8: There's definitely a big separation in terms of what types
Speaker 8: of people are at what side of the park.
Speaker 11: Right now.
Speaker 8: There's a more like more like forested section of the
Speaker 8: park with a creek on the south side, which is
Speaker 8: where people are setting up. Some camping sites have of
Speaker 8: a kitchen that's where the well content is. And then
Speaker 8: there's the other side of the park that has like
Speaker 8: the rec center and the playground, which seems more like
Speaker 8: family friendly stuff.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there are kids there, there's the popcorn setup.
Speaker 8: It's more like house so there is a bouncy house,
Speaker 8: which is great return.
Speaker 11: They couldn't, they couldn't keep this moving down. I won't.
Speaker 8: I won't rest until destroyed until the contrastory Everybounty Castle
Speaker 8: in Atlanta, till every bouncy castle is deflated.
Speaker 5: That is, that is the new movement's so good.
Speaker 8: In contrast to the last kickoff rally at Gresham Park,
Speaker 8: which felt very unified, this time there was a noticeable
Speaker 8: separation in terms of what types of people are on
Speaker 8: the two sides of the park. People wearing camouflage and
Speaker 8: masks were more situated on the south side of the
Speaker 8: park where tents were being set up, versus people by
Speaker 8: the playground who were going around with the referendum sign
Speaker 8: up sheet and where all the food was being handed out.
Speaker 5: It's so separated the game, the two groups.
Speaker 8: Cannot cannot, cannot counsel each other, and even like people
Speaker 8: like turnout seemed to be a bit lower than some
Speaker 8: people expected, and it was definitely much lower compared to
Speaker 8: the previous few weeks of action, and overall the rally
Speaker 8: was very muted and lacked a sense of energy or focus,
Speaker 8: Like the rallies start at eleven, which kind of kind
Speaker 8: of like nothing happened, like it just it felt very directionless,
Speaker 8: felt like people did not quite know why they were
Speaker 8: there at this point in.
Speaker 5: Times, almost Nune before anyone really spoke on the bullhorn,
Speaker 5: and the music didn't start until noon and then what
Speaker 5: was it like a half hour ago, so like twelve
Speaker 5: thirty probably when when the first like speaker said anything
Speaker 5: from the Faith Coalition, I don't know.
Speaker 8: So far, the rally kind of feels like a microcosmum
Speaker 8: of the entire movement at this point, just not quite
Speaker 8: sure where to direct the energy to.
Speaker 11: There's a feeling that like people should do something, but
Speaker 11: they don't quite know how to.
Speaker 8: They haven't decided how that should be directed yet, and
Speaker 8: so like there's some people showing up, but it's just
Speaker 8: like it feels kind of stagnant and like there's this
Speaker 8: there's this need to evolve right now.
Speaker 3: And I don't know.
Speaker 8: I think maybe people got burnt out from this council
Speaker 8: things that there's a lot of energy being pumped into that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and then I guess some people that.
Speaker 8: Was like three weeks of pushing energy and that and
Speaker 8: that was only like two weeks ago, like that that's
Speaker 8: still very recently. Three weeks now, it still feels it
Speaker 8: still feels very raw. Walking down the pathway on the
Speaker 8: south side of Brownwood you can see people setting up tents,
Speaker 8: carrying camping supplies and.
Speaker 3: Big jugs of water.
Speaker 8: Other people were assembling a makeshift kitchen in the tree line,
Speaker 8: and all of that was physically reminiscent of the last
Speaker 8: week of action. But being four miles away from the
Speaker 8: forest at Brownwood Park instead of the wallani impacted the
Speaker 8: feeling on the ground. We're both we're so far away
Speaker 8: from the forest. But if there's like that separation of space,
Speaker 8: like it feels so distant.
Speaker 5: And distant, even more than than Gresham Park, even with
Speaker 5: the Gresham Like if this were happening in Gresham Park,
Speaker 5: I think that might even be a different feeling, yeah,
Speaker 5: because at least you're attached to your Luilani.
Speaker 8: There was more determination on like the south side of
Speaker 8: of the park and you could feel like the people
Speaker 8: want at least people want to do something physically, and
Speaker 8: they were. But it's even still unclear how it's going
Speaker 8: to get directed towards, like like what is this doing.
Speaker 11: To stop prop city right now? Like that is that's
Speaker 11: the big thing.
Speaker 8: Is like people are trying to figure that out and
Speaker 8: there's people here, but like what are what are people
Speaker 8: actually going to be doing?
Speaker 5: Like I that's that's the question that is You're going
Speaker 5: to be un answered at least today.
Speaker 8: I would say the last week of action in March
Speaker 8: was very important in terms of setting the stage for
Speaker 8: what the next few months would look like. The direct
Speaker 8: action that happened on Sunday during the music festival was
Speaker 8: very important and successful, but also carried large ramifications for
Speaker 8: how the rest of the movement would be shaped in
Speaker 8: terms of the police repression and increase police presence in
Speaker 8: the forest. The weeks of action definitely have this ability
Speaker 8: to affect how the movement as a whole evolves in
Speaker 8: the subsequent months. On Saturday, there were worries that if
Speaker 8: things were simply going to continue to be like this
Speaker 8: kickoff rally, that wouldn't be a positive direction and would
Speaker 8: be a bad sign. It's just so I mean, it's
Speaker 8: hard not to convey this to the to the last
Speaker 8: Week of Action kickoff rally at Gresham, which just felt
Speaker 8: so different like that, there was like almost ten times
Speaker 8: as many people. There was like a feeling of like motion.
Speaker 8: There was a feeling of like we can, we have
Speaker 8: we have to go do a thing, and we're gonna
Speaker 8: do it no matter what, Like we don't know it's
Speaker 8: gonna be on the other side of the tunnel, but
Speaker 8: we're going there to do it anyway.
Speaker 5: We're gonna find it out together.
Speaker 11: And there was that was a lot of determination, and
Speaker 11: then there was a lot.
Speaker 8: Of like there was like a pointed nes like they
Speaker 8: knew where they were going, and this does not It
Speaker 8: lacks that pointedness. It feels like people aren't quite sure
Speaker 8: why they're here or what to do at this point
Speaker 8: in time. And if the movement wants to be able
Speaker 8: to continue in its goals, it has to find some
Speaker 8: way to evolve in the next two months, as construction
Speaker 8: is gonna about and.
Speaker 11: I guess this was weak, kind.
Speaker 5: Of wild the bell weather either well, either a bell
Speaker 5: weather or a learning experience. Yeah, it might not be
Speaker 5: any sort of death now, but it will have to
Speaker 5: be a learning experience probably. Yeah.
Speaker 8: That's that's kind of most of most of my thoughts
Speaker 8: so far based on walking through both places.
Speaker 11: There's just not much else talkulaks and how much is happening?
Speaker 7: Like it?
Speaker 8: Soon enough, however, other things did start happening thanks to
Speaker 8: the Atlanta Police Department, but throughout that afternoon things remained
Speaker 8: mostly low key, and as the day went on, the
Speaker 8: gathering at Brownwood Park turned into a community barbecue and
Speaker 8: people started to get a much more clear idea of
Speaker 8: what the expectations for that day were. As people settled
Speaker 8: into the park, there seemed to be any big anticipation
Speaker 8: for what everyone was going to be doing that first day.
Speaker 8: There wasn't supposed to be a vigil for Tortighita in
Speaker 8: the park that evening, which was in terrupted by Atlanta
Speaker 8: Police officers who swept through the park issuing a quote
Speaker 8: unquote friendly reminder that the park closed at eleven pm.
Speaker 8: All right, it's around eight thirty, about forty police officers
Speaker 8: just walked through Brownwood Park telling people that are gathered
Speaker 8: here that the park closes at eleven and everyone's basically
Speaker 8: anticipating that police are going to try to sweep the
Speaker 8: entirety of the park, including the sections where people are
Speaker 8: trying to camp out. Around eleven PM, the cops were
Speaker 8: walking south through the park as the crowd was walking
Speaker 8: and chanting along the way as well. Cops left under
Speaker 8: the heels of like maybe seventy five to two hundred
Speaker 8: people who were chanting along the south side of Brownwood.
Speaker 8: They've been staging around Brownwood Park and Portland Avenue for
Speaker 8: the past hour or so. They had like twenty thirty cars,
Speaker 8: it's around forty fifty officers. People decided they did not
Speaker 8: wish to stand their ground and fight off a possible
Speaker 8: police raid at Brownwood Park, so they spent the next
Speaker 8: few hours packing up all the supplies and equipment that
Speaker 8: they just spent all day setting up, and then evacuated
Speaker 8: from the area. Okay, it is eleven ten PM. It
Speaker 8: seems like the cops essentially just did what I'm referring
Speaker 8: to as advanced bluffing. So they walk through it on
Speaker 8: eight thirty warning people hey, park closes at eleven, which
Speaker 8: very much, very much indicating that, hey, we're.
Speaker 11: Going to sweep through and fuck with your shit if
Speaker 11: you're still here.
Speaker 8: So the next few hours people spent time you know,
Speaker 8: packing up, breaking down the tents, of leaving, heading to
Speaker 8: other locations. And then at eleven, we kind of just
Speaker 8: expected police to do a standard sweep through, you know,
Speaker 8: destroy anything they find. If they find people, tell them
Speaker 8: to leave or else get arrested. Standard stuff. At this point,
Speaker 8: there's about seven or eight police cruisers staged around the
Speaker 8: south side of the park, but they're not actually sweeping
Speaker 8: through because it's pretty clear that there's like no one
Speaker 8: actually in the park at this point. It's just very
Speaker 8: clearly like empty and quiet, So I don't even I
Speaker 8: don't even think cops are going to sweep through. It's
Speaker 8: it's been already like ten to fifteen minutes, so we
Speaker 8: expected them to kind of sweep on the hour, but
Speaker 8: they just like don't need to because it's very clear
Speaker 8: that no one's in the park, so they just kind
Speaker 8: of like successfully bluffed themselves into getting everyone to leave.
Speaker 8: I mean, if there were people still here in visible capacity,
Speaker 8: I'm sure police would sweep through, but there's really there's
Speaker 8: no one visible in the park from many of like
Speaker 8: the perimeters around, so they're not even gonna bother sweeping through.
Speaker 8: But yeah, it looks like this is the end of
Speaker 8: Brownwood Day one and the very kind of low key
Speaker 8: kickoff rally. Still, the week definitely is lacking a sense
Speaker 8: of direction. There's been a cab swat doing perimeter sweeps
Speaker 8: around the Wailani Forest and the round Grressian Park where
Speaker 8: there's some future events planned. We will see how that
Speaker 8: plays out in these next few days. It certainly seems
Speaker 8: like police wanted to make some show of force early
Speaker 8: on in the week to stifle the week of action.
Speaker 8: The threat of array the very first tonight was indeed
Speaker 8: disruptive to the logistics for the week, but ultimately peopeople
Speaker 8: were able to band together to keep each other safe
Speaker 8: and cared for. During this current general sense of directionlessness,
Speaker 8: there were a lot of questions on how the movement
Speaker 8: will change during this turning point. With little in the
Speaker 8: way of obvious answers or new paths of resistance, The
Speaker 8: following Sunday and Monday of the week continued to be
Speaker 8: mostly low key. People used those days to facilitate workshops
Speaker 8: and discussions to work through the shift the movement was
Speaker 8: going through. At the end of the week, I sat
Speaker 8: down with Matt in East Atlanta Village to talk about
Speaker 8: the week as a whole and compare notes. Here's a
Speaker 8: bit of our conversation talking about the discussions that started
Speaker 8: happening during those first few days. This was a week
Speaker 8: of discussions, like it was, it really was. There was
Speaker 8: a lot of meetings, There was a lot of discussions happening,
Speaker 8: people figuring out what do we do, Like if we
Speaker 8: actually want to stop cop City and it's going to
Speaker 8: get built in these next few months, like now.
Speaker 11: Is the time to figure out what the fuck to
Speaker 11: do next.
Speaker 8: So people have been having those discussions this week, and
Speaker 8: if anything, the Week of Action has been useful in
Speaker 8: this in this sense that it's brought a lot of
Speaker 8: people together so they can have these generative conversations. And
Speaker 8: there was a lot more conversations during this week than
Speaker 8: last week. There was one on like what the state
Speaker 8: of the movement is now, especially with the referendum taking
Speaker 8: up more visibility, how are like radical is going to
Speaker 8: navigate this space and this movement with a lot of
Speaker 8: things in flux, and I think that that was definitely
Speaker 8: my first read. Even even on the Cookoff rally, I
Speaker 8: felt like there's a lot of people like not sure
Speaker 8: what to do, as very directionless. People were asking a
Speaker 8: lot of questions, and more questions were being asked all
Speaker 8: throughout the week. There's a lot of discussions, a lot
Speaker 8: of meetings about like what do we do now, Like
Speaker 8: if construction is going to start in the next two months,
Speaker 8: like what is this movement going to do? Like that
Speaker 8: people can chant if you build it, we will burn it.
Speaker 8: But chanting it and doing it two different things. And
Speaker 8: the movement is it's going to go through a period
Speaker 8: of evolution and then in these next few months, and
Speaker 8: with all of those questions being asked, I feel like
Speaker 8: the answer to those questions is going to be the
Speaker 8: actions people do take in these next few months. In
Speaker 8: the aftermath of the clear cutting, it felt like in
Speaker 8: some ways that the window of possibility for this movement
Speaker 8: was closing as options seemed to be getting smaller. More
Speaker 8: people started pursuing the referendum as a potential means of
Speaker 8: stopping Copcity, but those in the more militant anarchist wing
Speaker 8: of the movement were left questioning, after two years of
Speaker 8: employing a diversity of tactics largely led by direct action,
Speaker 8: if it's the right and move to switch to an
Speaker 8: electoral strategy now when the situation is approaching its most
Speaker 8: dire but since it is happening whether they like it
Speaker 8: or not, anarchists were wondering, what can people do so
Speaker 8: that the referendum doesn't completely dominate the narrative of the
Speaker 8: movement or disincentivize other evolutions of the struggle. Now, obviously,
Speaker 8: a group of people pursuing a referendum does not prohibit
Speaker 8: other people from engaging in direct action, but there still
Speaker 8: were worries that the referendum could become a sort of
Speaker 8: release mechanism for the move both in terms of new
Speaker 8: people's involvement being pushed toward this more liberalized electoral strategy
Speaker 8: instead of radical action, or if the petition or even
Speaker 8: potential ballot vote fails, then that being used as an
Speaker 8: indicator that most people in the city actually do want copcity.
Speaker 8: But through all this, what anarchists can do, and what
Speaker 8: they typically do, is to encourage radical autonomy and self determination,
Speaker 8: regardless of electoral strategies or outcomes, whether or not a
Speaker 8: petition gets sixty some thousand signatures does not affect a
Speaker 8: burning construction vehicle. Just as these sort of discussions were happening.
Speaker 8: It's kind of fitting that on Monday, June twenty sixth,
Speaker 8: we saw the first communication in months claiming responsibility for
Speaker 8: equipment sabotage. After the last week of Action in March
Speaker 8: and subsequent police raids on the forest, increased security, the
Speaker 8: rapid clear cutting and big push for city council public
Speaker 8: comment followed by the start of the referendum. Throughout that
Speaker 8: series of events, there really hadn't been much in the
Speaker 8: way of nocturnal direct action sabotage happening in Atlanta or
Speaker 8: across the country. In solidarity once a core component of
Speaker 8: this movement was seriously lacking in the months leading up
Speaker 8: to this summer, and then suddenly, after the June Week
Speaker 8: of Action's mostly uneventful start, a post went up on
Speaker 8: the sketchu web site scene stott no blogs dot org
Speaker 8: claiming that a group of anonymous individuals snuck into a
Speaker 8: subcontractor's machine storage lot and poured hydrochloric acid into the
Speaker 8: oil tanks of three vehicles. The target was Brent Scarborough, company,
Speaker 8: a Georgia based subcontractor who was hired to clear cut
Speaker 8: the Wallani forest and was currently engaged in mass land
Speaker 8: grading on the site. I drove by the site on
Speaker 8: Monday and I saw like over twenty machines like actively
Speaker 8: working on the land.
Speaker 5: Very avatar was.
Speaker 8: Yes, y or Fer and Gully the superior film, but no,
Speaker 8: like it's like the site's being very actively worked on.
Speaker 8: Like I've never seen that many machines doing active work,
Speaker 8: like all moving at the same time. Early Monday morning,
Speaker 8: the Stop Cop City referendum put out a strong statement
Speaker 8: of solidarity with quote all tactics on the road to
Speaker 8: collective liberation unquote and openly rejected the state's framing of
Speaker 8: quote unquote violent and nonviolent resistance. To briefly quote a
Speaker 8: few of the last sentences of the statement, quote, the
Speaker 8: cop City vote referendum campaign is grounded in the values
Speaker 8: of abolitionist organizing and racial and environmental justice. We also
Speaker 8: recognize our chosen tactic is a single intervention in a
Speaker 8: wide rainbow of fighting state repression. We seek to use
Speaker 8: the Cop City referendum to leverage local power, educate and
Speaker 8: activate our communities, and build networks that can strengthen our
Speaker 8: city and future mobilizations. The referendum is one piece of
Speaker 8: a vibrant, into multifaceted movement, one that defies respectable categorization
Speaker 8: as well as its state violence and repression. The Cop
Speaker 8: City Vote Referendum Coalition stands in solidarity and full support
Speaker 8: of the Stop Cop City Week of Action, the larger
Speaker 8: movement and abolitionist organizers and activists across this city.
Speaker 5: Unintentionally, these two things coincided. There was the release of
Speaker 5: the scenes like the first sabotage in months, and then
Speaker 5: the referendum released that same day, the solidarity statement for
Speaker 5: all Yes actions taken to stock Coop City. No, just
Speaker 5: think that needs the statement itself needs to be highlighted,
Speaker 5: and yeah, I think it seems like they're going to
Speaker 5: stick to that.
Speaker 8: The solidarity statement was widely applauded and seen as a
Speaker 8: good sign regarding the referendum's place in the larger fight
Speaker 8: against Cop City and how it was not intending to
Speaker 8: take space away from other aspects of the movement. Tuesday morning,
Speaker 8: there was a small protest outside the Cab County Commissioner's
Speaker 8: Building to call for the reopening of entrenchment Creek Park.
Speaker 8: The park was a common gathering spot for the movement
Speaker 8: at where many people camped during previous weeks of action.
Speaker 8: An executive order from DECAB CEO Michael Thurmond closed the
Speaker 8: park late last March as the police geared up to
Speaker 8: fortify Bolauni and speed run all of the tree felling.
Speaker 5: So I sat in the Board of Commissioners meeting and
Speaker 5: it's different than a city council meeting, where like anybody
Speaker 5: who signs up to do public comment can do public comment.
Speaker 5: They only a lot thirty minutes of public comment, so
Speaker 5: about that amounts to ten speakers, and I think about
Speaker 5: six of them were actually there for, you know, to
Speaker 5: talk about opening the park. And then the rally, I
Speaker 5: think it was something like thirty thirty people. It was
Speaker 5: a student organized rally, and they did a couple speakers
Speaker 5: and then that was that was it. Not much from
Speaker 5: the cab, Like the cab only came out to make
Speaker 5: sure that they were blocking a pathway okay, And it
Speaker 5: was kind of hands off. I did get a parking ticket,
Speaker 5: that was my fault, you did. Yeah, I let my
Speaker 5: parking expire for twelve minutes. A legalist mascot at the ACPC. Wow.
Speaker 5: Uh and yeah, the minute I do something illegal, I
Speaker 5: get a traving ticket.
Speaker 8: Previously in June that a CAB CEO proposed a one
Speaker 8: point eight million dollar construction plan necessary to reopen the park,
Speaker 8: but no clear date on when that would happen. One
Speaker 8: County commissioner has been trying to fast track reopening the park,
Speaker 8: but their resolution has repeatedly been deferred by the county Board.
Speaker 8: The soonest it will be reconsidered is October tenth. Meanwhile,
Speaker 8: the park will remain indefinitely closed. Throughout the first few
Speaker 8: days of the Week of action, there was something kind
Speaker 8: of looming over everyone's heads. There was a march planned
Speaker 8: from Gresham Park towards Bolani that was to take place
Speaker 8: on the evening of Wednesday, June twenty eighth. The police
Speaker 8: response to this action was prime to be the most
Speaker 8: intense out of the week. The path to Entrenchment Creek
Speaker 8: Park is a pretty closed in bike path with a
Speaker 8: tunnel going under an overpass where police have been staging
Speaker 8: to prevent people from entering the forest.
Speaker 6: No.
Speaker 8: I definitely felt like on Monday and Tuesday everyone was
Speaker 8: everyone was still like thinking about what would happen on Wednesday,
Speaker 8: what would happen on the march from Gresham Park.
Speaker 11: That was that was the big unknown, That was the
Speaker 11: big danger.
Speaker 5: Like very palpable. Yeah, concern about how that was going
Speaker 5: to play out. Yeah, that probably, I mean all the
Speaker 5: way back to Saturday. That was probably like playing through
Speaker 5: people's minds and causing some of that like uncertainty.
Speaker 8: Police were setting up perimeters around the forest in an
Speaker 8: increased capacity than the usual detail. Pretty early on in
Speaker 8: the day, there was a Dacab County SWAT mobile command
Speaker 8: center posted up in a school parking lot next to
Speaker 8: the tunnel and bike path leading from Gresham to Wolani.
Speaker 8: Kind of as expected, this entire section of South Atlanta
Speaker 8: was crawling with police before people even gathered at Gresham Park.
Speaker 8: The day began with an unfortunately rocky start and the
Speaker 8: first arrest of the week outside Cadence Bank in Midtown.
Speaker 8: The protest was calling on the bank to cancel their
Speaker 8: twenty million dollar construction loan given to the Atlanta Police Foundation.
Speaker 5: So there was this action at Cadence Bank that they
Speaker 5: specifically didn't want media and so none of us were there. Yeah,
Speaker 5: and that was early in the morning. I don't I
Speaker 5: think We found out about it after renoon or something,
Speaker 5: so after I woke up. Yeah, I think it was
Speaker 5: like they said, thirty people, kind of like we saw
Speaker 5: the other day Friday, Yeah, on Friday. But as they
Speaker 5: were walking away, somebody gets well multiple they try to
Speaker 5: arrest multiple p.
Speaker 11: Please start chasing people.
Speaker 8: Someone gets grabbed and arrested, another person gets detained and
Speaker 8: then let go.
Speaker 11: Seemed like a pretty chaotic scene.
Speaker 8: That's not a great way to start off the day
Speaker 8: where you have your most stressful action plan for later.
Speaker 8: You wake up, you get chased by cops, and you're
Speaker 8: expecting to go do a march in a few hours. Yeah,
Speaker 8: in the most heavily police area of Atlanta right now.
Speaker 8: The march was to take place on the same bike
Speaker 8: path from Gresham Park to Intrenchment Creek Park that people
Speaker 8: took during the kickoff rally at the last week of Action,
Speaker 8: but much has changed on the ground since then. As
Speaker 8: people started to gather at Gresham Park on Wednesday evening,
Speaker 8: the numbers were quite small. As I progressed, around one
Speaker 8: hundred and fifty people eventually amassed, but it was still
Speaker 8: a small fraction of the number of people at the
Speaker 8: previous Gresham Park March and with a much greater police presence.
Speaker 8: The exact plan for the night was heavily dependent on
Speaker 8: a lot of factors that it was impossible to explicitly
Speaker 8: know beforehand, like how many people would show up and
Speaker 8: what they would feel comfortable doing based on the police response.
Speaker 11: Right, this is.
Speaker 8: Wednesday, June twenty eighth. Me and Matt from the Community
Speaker 8: Press Collective are gathered at Gresham Park. Overhead you can
Speaker 8: hear the Dacab helicopter circle at favorite sound, our favorite sound. Yes,
Speaker 8: there's about I don't know, maybe seventy five or more,
Speaker 8: close to one hundred, close to one hundred people gathered
Speaker 8: here in Gresham Park and people have plans to march
Speaker 8: towards Wolani or at least to the tunnel. And then
Speaker 8: what happens after that's kind of a big mystery. Definitely
Speaker 8: very different than the last time we were gathered in
Speaker 8: Gresham Park with a crowd of people.
Speaker 5: We're missing the music, we're missing the duwali like paint clouds,
Speaker 5: we're missing the kids. We're missing maybe the vibes just
Speaker 5: in general.
Speaker 8: Another eight hundred people or so, but I mean people
Speaker 8: are setting out science and some banners. Police have a
Speaker 8: decent presence around the around like the tunnel, or like
Speaker 8: the overpass over the tunnel, and around Wilani.
Speaker 5: Right now, all around the Wi Lanni triangle there's there
Speaker 5: APD and the cab County police just hanging out more
Speaker 5: than usual. And at the fire station there was more
Speaker 5: cops than I've seen since March fifth, since the last
Speaker 5: week of action.
Speaker 8: Yeah, earlier this morning I saw a d KEB County
Speaker 8: swat nobile command unit at the school next to the
Speaker 8: tunnel overpass, but I do not know where that is now.
Speaker 8: It was It was not parked there last time we
Speaker 8: drove by about half an hour ago. So yeah, just
Speaker 8: that is. That is the update as of as of
Speaker 8: six thirty. So I'm guessing this crowd will start moving
Speaker 8: the next thirty minutes to forty minutes.
Speaker 5: Probably have hour. Yeah all right.
Speaker 8: Right, as the crowd was about to set off, someone
Speaker 8: made an announcement that due to small numbers and large
Speaker 8: police presence, there was to be a change of plans.
Speaker 8: Instead of going all the way to Entrenchment Creek Park
Speaker 8: or even the tunnel, they were going to march one
Speaker 8: third of the way and stop on the bike path.
Speaker 8: All right, it's around seven to twenty pm, About one
Speaker 8: hundred and fifty people are leaving Gresham Park and they
Speaker 8: announce they're going to be going to hold a small
Speaker 8: vigil near one of one of the felled trees on
Speaker 8: the bike path. For a little while, the march was
Speaker 8: getting along fine, there was music and chanting, when suddenly
Speaker 8: police made an early appearance. Okay, so it's what seven
Speaker 8: seven fifty seven forty one on Wednesday, June twenty eighth.
Speaker 8: We are walking on the bike path and staged.
Speaker 5: Twenty five minutes into the walk and here we come
Speaker 5: on our first police presence of the day along our path.
Speaker 5: So too, thinking to Cab County. Yeah, two Decab County
Speaker 5: SuDS part side by side along the path, but they
Speaker 5: are not out of their vehicles.
Speaker 8: No oh, I think the crowd spears order.
Speaker 11: They might try to give you a sporsal order because
Speaker 11: there's too many people.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 8: I didn't think they would try to fuck with it
Speaker 8: this soon. I thought they would wait to the tunnel.
Speaker 8: A small number of police were posted up right before
Speaker 8: the first bridge on the bike path, roughly about halfway
Speaker 8: to the tunnel. If they wanted to the crowd could
Speaker 8: have marched past the police as they were not blocking
Speaker 8: the path. The two cop cars couldn't even follow behind
Speaker 8: because there was big metal bulgards preventing vehicles from going
Speaker 8: on the Wooden bridge. But the visible police caused the
Speaker 8: group to pause.
Speaker 5: There was that one speech that we need to touch
Speaker 5: on from that night, and that was the speaker said,
Speaker 5: in order to win, we have to let go of
Speaker 5: the idea of losing while looking good. Yeah, And that
Speaker 5: I think is going to inform whatever the direct action
Speaker 5: side of things are for the next this next phase
Speaker 5: of the movement.
Speaker 8: While paused in front of the police cruisers, the crowd
Speaker 8: deliberated on what they wanted to do and what they
Speaker 8: thought they could accomplish. After a few minutes of discussion,
Speaker 8: they decided that they were not prepared to unnecessarily sacrifice themselves.
Speaker 8: One of the people from the crowd spoke briefly not
Speaker 8: only on this decision, but also how it fits into
Speaker 8: the difficult situation the movement has found itself in. Right now,
Speaker 8: I'm going to quote a little bit from this impromptu
Speaker 8: speech quote. We shouldn't come away from this feeling demoralized.
Speaker 8: We should feel clarity because we believe we set out
Speaker 8: to participate in a movement to obstruct the construction of
Speaker 8: a police militarization site, but that is not being allowed
Speaker 8: to happen. The people we're fighting against believe we are
Speaker 8: a domestic insurgency. They are treating us like an insurgency.
Speaker 8: The state is using militaristic language like denying anarchists operating space.
Speaker 8: And so we're going to great lengths to be safe,
Speaker 8: to play it safe, and to go slow, and to
Speaker 8: proceed rationally and defend one another. But we're coming under
Speaker 8: constant attack everything we do. We're under attack unquote. Just
Speaker 8: earlier that morning, people were attacked by the state and
Speaker 8: arrested as they stood on the sidewalk outside of a bank.
Speaker 8: Those who work to bail activists out of jail are attacked.
Speaker 8: People doing on the ground jail support are physically attacked
Speaker 8: and face police intimidation.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 8: We don't want to be engaged in a failing struggle.
Speaker 8: Our enemy is treating us like terrorists. That's what they're
Speaker 8: calling us, and that's what they believe we are. It's
Speaker 8: not just a rhetorical trick. That's how they're treating the movement.
Speaker 8: And so we have to figure out how we're gonna win,
Speaker 8: because we intend to win, but you can't just only
Speaker 8: defend yourself. The safest thing for us to do is
Speaker 8: to never go to a protest about this movement. Again,
Speaker 8: if our top priority is safety, everyone who's not currently
Speaker 8: facing charges should move away, should not go to events
Speaker 8: or actions. But if we have a higher priority than
Speaker 8: safety alone, we're gonna have to figure out what we're
Speaker 8: going to do to achieve that, which is going to
Speaker 8: require going on the offense when we're able and how
Speaker 8: we're able. This movement has been very creative, and we're
Speaker 8: going to have to continue to be more and more creative,
Speaker 8: and we're going to have to continue to deploy all
Speaker 8: available means in order to have this kind of offensive, victorious,
Speaker 8: and strong movement that we all deserve when we fight,
Speaker 8: when we attack the enemy, when we have our offensive actions,
Speaker 8: we have to follow through with them. We have to
Speaker 8: go all the way with them. We have to be
Speaker 8: willing to believe in ourselves to believe that we can win.
Speaker 8: And so I believe that we are going to win
Speaker 8: this movement, and I think you guys believe that we're
Speaker 8: going to win this movement. But that's going to require
Speaker 8: us to abandon the idea of looking good while losing.
Speaker 8: We can't look good losing. So are we going to
Speaker 8: look good losing or are we going to win?
Speaker 2: Unquote?
Speaker 11: All right, it is eight o'clock.
Speaker 8: The crowd sat in the middle of the trail behind
Speaker 8: the first bridge, where two decap County vehicles are parked.
Speaker 8: They deliberated for a little bit, and then a few
Speaker 8: people spoke, and now the crowd has turned around at
Speaker 8: a marching back to Greshiam Park, marching back.
Speaker 5: No arrests. We do have two helicopters now hanging out
Speaker 5: over us. That's my favorite thing.
Speaker 6: In the world.
Speaker 8: And a lot of other decav on the ground and
Speaker 8: other parts of the bike path in the trails.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they would have walked directly into what looked like
Speaker 5: a full swat team above the bridge. So they made
Speaker 5: the right choice, is what it seems like to me.
Speaker 8: Yeah, And they talked about their intentionality of the decision,
Speaker 8: and it's how it's important to not just keep losing
Speaker 8: while trying to look cool and throw yourself out a
Speaker 8: line of police.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and that hopefully, I mean, what does that look
Speaker 5: like in practice? I guess we'll see you over the
Speaker 5: next few months.
Speaker 8: Three days, three days to two months, Yeah.
Speaker 5: Three days, It several months. But it does sound like
Speaker 5: there's some attempt now at directionality. That wasn't I wasn't
Speaker 5: sing yeah until.
Speaker 8: This is the exact same March people tried to do
Speaker 8: back in March, and they did it, and they're trying
Speaker 8: to do it here again in June.
Speaker 11: And it doesn't work.
Speaker 5: It didn't.
Speaker 11: It doesn't work the first time.
Speaker 5: It doesn't work.
Speaker 11: It worked the first time, it does mean the second time.
Speaker 11: So now it's time to change something.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 8: On the walk back to Gresham Park, we got clear
Speaker 8: photos of the amount of riot police waiting for us
Speaker 8: at the tunnel, and it was a great many.
Speaker 11: Oh yeah, there is a lot.
Speaker 5: That's a lot of a lot of a lot of riot.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 11: And that was when of the vans posted above the tunnel.
Speaker 5: Yeah. So that trailer, Yeah, that's what they bring all
Speaker 5: their riots shields in.
Speaker 7: OK.
Speaker 11: Yeah, that that would have sucked.
Speaker 5: That would not have been fun.
Speaker 11: No, that would have gone very poorly.
Speaker 5: Would have been tear gas though, and I do miss
Speaker 5: being tear gas.
Speaker 11: I can like spray with pepper spray.
Speaker 5: If you want. It's not the same as tears I guess.
Speaker 11: Pretty right now if you want.
Speaker 8: Matt ultimately declined to be pepper sprayed. Tortia Guita's mother,
Speaker 8: Belquise Tearran, came to Gresham Park to also join the march.
Speaker 5: So what we had was one hundred and fifty people
Speaker 5: in Belquist turn and I think that that, yeah, plays
Speaker 5: a role in how this goes on.
Speaker 11: No having belle Keise.
Speaker 8: Very like visibly present, like walking up to everybody there
Speaker 8: and greeting them. Just having her presence there affects what
Speaker 8: people want to do, and it reminds you of what's
Speaker 8: actually like the actual stakes at hand, so you're caring
Speaker 8: for everyone around you in a much more like conscious capacity.
Speaker 8: Belcise spoke, a few other people spoke, and then they
Speaker 8: turned around and headed back to Gresham and that was
Speaker 8: the decision that was.
Speaker 11: Made, and no one was hurt, no one was arrested.
Speaker 8: People got back to Gresham Park, some people had ice cream.
Speaker 5: Two people in particular had ice cream, and they were
Speaker 5: very happy about it. It definitely wasn't maybe it was us.
Speaker 11: Other people also had ice cream.
Speaker 5: Other people did have ice cream. I don't think they
Speaker 5: were quite as excited.
Speaker 8: Throughout the week, you could tell that people were really
Speaker 8: wanting to be back in the forest and Willani People's Park.
Speaker 8: People made do gathering at Brownwood Park, but it wasn't
Speaker 8: the same. There was an undeniable distance between where people
Speaker 8: were gathered this week of action and the sight of
Speaker 8: all the previous battles in the Wilani. The fact that
Speaker 8: so much of the forest had already been destroyed loomed
Speaker 8: heavily over the week, and that's something that people are
Speaker 8: still processing and are still comprehending. Another big aspect of
Speaker 8: the week, like this is this is the first week
Speaker 8: of action where people haven't gone in the gone in
Speaker 8: the Wilani, Like.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there's no action, which feels weird, well, we should
Speaker 5: say in the triangle because you know, but like the site.
Speaker 8: Like this is the first time that people haven't been
Speaker 8: like in the forest, and that's a new thing to navigate,
Speaker 8: that a new feeling to navigate, Like there's there's a
Speaker 8: different there's a different.
Speaker 5: Sense multiple chances.
Speaker 8: There's multiple chance being like not one lead, don't cut
Speaker 8: down the trees and like the trees are gone, like
Speaker 8: it's the site's been cleared, and I think people are
Speaker 8: still catching up to that and like relight, Like it's
Speaker 8: still something that people are processing and they're gonna have
Speaker 8: to process that if they want to like continue, like
Speaker 8: they have to like look at the situation being like
Speaker 8: this is we have to accept what has happened. Then
Speaker 8: we can choose what's to do, because you can't.
Speaker 5: Act as can't deny what the reality is.
Speaker 8: No, and you can't act as if the trees are
Speaker 8: still there, because that's going to change the type of
Speaker 8: the types of like actions you do, Like.
Speaker 11: You can't tree set in the trees.
Speaker 8: It's it's changing the actual actions people are going to
Speaker 8: take to try to stop copsitting. Yeah, I think the
Speaker 8: Wednesday action almost needed to happen. So many people still
Speaker 8: dream about what if we could reoccupy Wallawi. People are
Speaker 8: still caught in that headspace because they got so used
Speaker 8: to that over the course of almost two years. So
Speaker 8: it never there was going to be an attempt where
Speaker 8: a few hundred people try to re enter Wilani People's Park.
Speaker 8: They're almost needed to be an attempt just to see
Speaker 8: what would happen. And we saw what would happen, and
Speaker 8: now people can use that action as reference when making
Speaker 8: future plans and decisions about actions, because you can point
Speaker 8: back to this and demonstrate what the police response will
Speaker 8: be when people march to Wolani. Massive amounts of SWAT
Speaker 8: riot police waiting for you, SWAT mobile command centers, heavily
Speaker 8: armed police estanged on roads, overpasses, entrances, and all around
Speaker 8: the forest specifically waiting for people to try to cross
Speaker 8: over or through the tunnel. So now people know what
Speaker 8: will happen if they try and do the same thing again.
Speaker 8: In some ways, it kind of needed to not just
Speaker 8: be theoretical speculation, but actually happen so that people can
Speaker 8: now truly allow themselves to evolve, so that you don't
Speaker 8: have this question in the back of your head, because
Speaker 8: now that question has been answered, you would be throwing
Speaker 8: yourself at a wall of swat and riot gear. And
Speaker 8: now everyone can let themselves evolve and start figuring out
Speaker 8: what new things can be fostered and imagined. We'll hear
Speaker 8: more about those evolutions and conclude my coverage of the
Speaker 8: week of action.
Speaker 11: In the next episode.
Speaker 8: See you on the other side, Welcome back to it
Speaker 8: could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. This is part two
Speaker 8: of my mini series about what's been happening this summer
Speaker 8: in Atlanta to stop cop City. Last episode, we left
Speaker 8: off with the attempted march from Gresham Park to Entrenchman
Speaker 8: Creek Park, which some might say was a disappointment, but
Speaker 8: it also gave everyone more clarity about the current state
Speaker 8: of these types of direct action marches in Atlanta and
Speaker 8: the necessity for evolution. The main event on Thursday, June
Speaker 8: twenty ninth was a protest outside the Home Depot in
Speaker 8: the upscale retail district off of Ponce de Leon Avenue.
Speaker 8: Home Depot is one of the Atlanta Police Foundation's financial backers.
Speaker 5: There had been a rumor that Home Depot was was
Speaker 5: gonna be close earlier in the day. I got there
Speaker 5: four thirty. It wasn't closed, so I didn't see any signage.
Speaker 5: So I went and parked my car and came back
Speaker 5: and like, I think I got there for fifty and
Speaker 5: people were starting to line up along the road, like, uh,
Speaker 5: there's a Starbucks. And they were lining up along Ponce
Speaker 5: next to the Starbucks, and you know, I'm I'm talking
Speaker 5: to them watching this. They're chanting, they're they're pulling out banners,
Speaker 5: and we get a call that they are arresting Lorraine Fontana. So,
Speaker 5: Lorraine Fontana is a seventy six year old activist in Atlanta,
Speaker 5: and she's great like she she pops up everywhere. She's
Speaker 5: beloved by everyone. And so we get this call that
Speaker 5: Lorraine Fontana is being arrested, and uh, I bolts as
Speaker 5: far as my little legs will take me in. Then
Speaker 5: I have to stop and catch my breath, like right
Speaker 5: before I get there. But Lorraine and one other person
Speaker 5: were arrested in the parking lot right outside the home depot.
Speaker 13: It's a store called.
Speaker 14: Me called four Prays here, and they did not want
Speaker 14: anybody protests in the store. When they start reading out
Speaker 14: the layer, I asked them to boy handed and said
Speaker 14: the practices at that time. I'll also usually the look
Speaker 14: from a trust past warning telling them their how people
Speaker 14: cannot want their faces or inside the store.
Speaker 8: After protesters left the store, they stood by a corner
Speaker 8: in the parking lot to holding signs, where they were
Speaker 8: then approached by APD officers who then arrested two people
Speaker 8: without warning.
Speaker 5: It does kind of just show APD like basically doing
Speaker 5: exactly what they would with anyone, except in this case
Speaker 5: it's the seventy six year old woman who's like five
Speaker 5: or four eleven or something like that.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, no, I mean it was a lot of
Speaker 8: people were like surprised that this happened, Like how could.
Speaker 5: The police do this?
Speaker 8: I think others were like not as surprised, be like, no,
Speaker 8: it's the APD. They like it was a good demonstration
Speaker 8: for people being like showing that they do not care.
Speaker 11: They don't really care if you're a.
Speaker 8: Seventy seven year old woman or if you're a nineteen
Speaker 8: year old eco terrorist, they're gonna treat you roughly the same.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 8: After Lorraine's arrest, more and more people began showing up
Speaker 8: across the street from home Depot calling for their divestment
Speaker 8: from the Atlanta Police Foundation.
Speaker 5: It got up to like thirty maybe forty people mostly
Speaker 5: just like chanting on the sidewalks sidewalk, but then they
Speaker 5: started to like walk back and forth when the crosswalk
Speaker 5: was like there, yeah, and they were pushing the limit,
Speaker 5: like seeing what they could get. But there was also
Speaker 5: my favorite part was the APD officer who was sitting
Speaker 5: in his I'm sorry. My favorite part was, fuck, I
Speaker 5: gotta do this about breaking down in the middle.
Speaker 11: I did hear a little bit about this, all right?
Speaker 5: Take three, Take three? Uh, there was the APD officer
Speaker 5: that was sitting in his Ford Explorer on Ponts and
Speaker 5: at one point he calls out on his you know,
Speaker 5: loud speaker, I'm not an idiot. I swear I'm not
Speaker 5: an idiot. While he's backing up on Ponts with his
Speaker 5: lights on, just like what are you doing?
Speaker 11: People are asking a lot of questions.
Speaker 2: They are already answered, I'm on an idiots shirt.
Speaker 5: Oh it was great. So I caught like the briefest
Speaker 5: snippet of that audio, thankfully. That's funny.
Speaker 8: On Thursday night, after the Home Depot rally, there was
Speaker 8: a jail vigil around ten pm for Lorraine at the
Speaker 8: Rice Street Fulton County Jail.
Speaker 5: So there are two jails. There's Adventas City Detention Center
Speaker 5: and then there's Fulton County Jail, which we just Rice
Speaker 5: Street because it's off off Rice Street. Okay, so when
Speaker 5: you get charged with criminal trespassed, it's like a misdemeanor charge,
Speaker 5: and typically you would go to Atlantic City Detention Center,
Speaker 5: which still a jail is still terrible, but relatively like better. Okay,
Speaker 5: Fulton County Jail is you know atrocious it is, you
Speaker 5: know Leshawan Thompson. Of course that the guy who was
Speaker 5: eaten alive in his in his cell by bugs because
Speaker 5: of neglect. That is Rice Street Jail. That's the Fulton
Speaker 5: County Jail. That's the Fulton County Jail. So we get
Speaker 5: worried that Lorraine is at Fulton County Jail and not ACDC,
Speaker 5: which is pretty striking. So everybody goes down to do
Speaker 5: a jail vigil and noise demo for context.
Speaker 8: Last September, Lashawan Thompson, a thirty five year old man,
Speaker 8: was found dead after spending three months in an infested
Speaker 8: Fulton County Jail psychiatric cell. His body was covered in
Speaker 8: a thousand bug bites and were found in his mouth, ears, nose,
Speaker 8: and all across his body. Such inhumane incidents are not
Speaker 8: in irregularity in Fulton County Jail. Just earlier this month,
Speaker 8: a thirty five year old named Christopher Smith died in
Speaker 8: Fulton County Jail. He had been held in custody since
Speaker 8: October sixth, twenty nineteen, without bond on several unspecified felony
Speaker 8: and misdemeanor charges. According to the County Sheriff's Office, last month,
Speaker 8: a nineteen year old girl died in Fulton County custody
Speaker 8: after being arrested on a minor misdemeanor charge. This past
Speaker 8: year alone, six people have died in the Fulton County
Speaker 8: jail system. People in Atlanta have been doing jail vigils
Speaker 8: and noise demos for years and it's never really been
Speaker 8: a problem. Cops might tell people to move off to
Speaker 8: the side if the crowd gets to a certain size,
Speaker 8: but they have typically gone on without issue. But this
Speaker 8: time Fulton County deputies came out and declared that people
Speaker 8: are not allowed to protest outside the jail and ordered
Speaker 8: everyone to completely leave the parking and go all the
Speaker 8: way to the other side of this big hill off
Speaker 8: of Rice Street to jail property in order to continue protesting,
Speaker 8: which no one was really keen on doing, so this
Speaker 8: kind of game of chicken began.
Speaker 5: They eventually they pull on a bunch more sheriff's deputies
Speaker 5: and threatened arrest. So people start making their way up
Speaker 5: the hill linking arms, and they get to the top
Speaker 5: of the hill and they're met with another group of
Speaker 5: protesters who had tried to come down, but they were
Speaker 5: stopped by police at the top of the hill. So
Speaker 5: now the crowd size like essentially doubled. Yeah, and the
Speaker 5: energy just goes through the roof. You know, both sides
Speaker 5: are just going back and forth. This This deputy is
Speaker 5: like completely overmatched, doesn't really They didn't seem like Fulton
Speaker 5: County had a plan. You know, usually APD or the
Speaker 5: cat they have some sort of protest planned. Fulton was
Speaker 5: flying by the seat of their pants. And so all
Speaker 5: of our cars were down at the bottom with the hill.
Speaker 5: They were back in the Rice Street parking lot. And
Speaker 5: this this becomes like an issue because some of the
Speaker 5: protesters cars are there, all of the media cars are there,
Speaker 5: like down at the bottom of this hill, and they're
Speaker 5: not letting anyone go down there. And this woman shows
Speaker 5: up to like put I think money on her son's
Speaker 5: commissary car and they don't let her. Now she's like
Speaker 5: they're just shutting down jail rage aloud, Yeah exactly. So
Speaker 5: they finally first they're like we're gonna let you go
Speaker 5: down one by one, and everyone's like hell no, like
Speaker 5: we are not trusting you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, sure, sure, sure, buddy, let's go.
Speaker 8: Let's isolate, isolated move through this police fortress in an isolated.
Speaker 5: Uh So then they're like, okay, you can go as
Speaker 5: a group. Yeah, okay, as long as you have your
Speaker 5: vehicles down there, you can go as a group. So
Speaker 5: they slowly start to make their way down.
Speaker 10: They do not see in the next five minutes we
Speaker 10: want to.
Speaker 5: Start up to do They get all the way to
Speaker 5: the bottom hill. They're in the parking lot and just
Speaker 5: like on the edge of where the cars are, and
Speaker 5: they kind of stop moving and the Shaff's deputy is like, yeah,
Speaker 5: I gotta keep moving, and so they start moving again
Speaker 5: and then stop again, and then the shriffs deputy says,
Speaker 5: all right, get them, and so then the deputy start
Speaker 5: moving in to make a rest and quickly, you know this,
Speaker 5: this march kind of becomes this backward moving thing. Yeah
Speaker 5: I can't see that. I'm moving my hands to Showcarrison,
Speaker 5: but it becomes this backward moving thing up up the hill.
Speaker 5: That's the bottom line.
Speaker 2: You in the street and we will be taking in fush,
Speaker 2: Get out the street, Get.
Speaker 9: Out the street.
Speaker 8: The crowd was able to leave before anyone was detained,
Speaker 8: but it was a quite tense situation. The sort of
Speaker 8: dynamic we saw at the jail vigil and home Depot
Speaker 8: protest led directly into the next event on Friday morning,
Speaker 8: a previously announced second pro test outside of Cadence Bank
Speaker 8: in Midtown calling on Cadence Bank to cancel the Atlanta
Speaker 8: Police Foundation's twenty million dollar construction loan. All right, people
Speaker 8: had a protest on Friday morning at Cadence Bank in
Speaker 8: Midtown Atlanta.
Speaker 11: There's maybe like.
Speaker 8: Around a dozen people here, uh, canting outside of the building.
Speaker 8: Also about a dozen APD officers walking walking down from
Speaker 8: up the street, preparing to meet the crowd. They're moving
Speaker 8: in closer that they're walking in again. People still, I
Speaker 8: don't think anyone's even touched touched the class door. Most
Speaker 8: of the people are just standing here on the sidewalk.
Speaker 5: You know that game you play with your cats where
Speaker 5: they come at you, but they stop when you're watching them. Yeah,
Speaker 5: that's the game we're playing.
Speaker 11: Yeah, yeah, yea yeah yeah, we turn away. The cops advanced.
Speaker 8: We like this is also like half of like the
Speaker 8: lo Ney tunes gags is they're doing a Michelin frog
Speaker 8: all right, and they're they're now on the King's Bank property.
Speaker 8: They're starting to advance. Police were yelling at people that
Speaker 8: they couldn't touch any of the steps leading up to
Speaker 8: the bank entrance, and that you weren't allowed to lean
Speaker 8: against any hand rails because the metal poll was bank property.
Speaker 8: So once again we got this little game of back
Speaker 8: and forth, except one side has guns and the power
Speaker 8: to arrest you.
Speaker 15: Propera this coup said in the crowds trying to incite
Speaker 15: a riot.
Speaker 5: It feels very much like what you saw I guess
Speaker 5: in Portland. Obviously I wasn't there. There's an object that
Speaker 5: becomes this sacred goal.
Speaker 11: And then you're you're battling over the thing because the
Speaker 11: thing is now been.
Speaker 5: Given something like me actual physical like presence, and that
Speaker 5: is the thing that you are now fighting for.
Speaker 16: It.
Speaker 2: It becomes a symbolic in front of a building.
Speaker 5: It don't matter, but the police gave it significent.
Speaker 8: Because the police turn it into this like symbolic thing,
Speaker 8: it now means more than it just just being stepped.
Speaker 5: So there was this camera guy who like kept kind
Speaker 5: of stepping up and like pushing the envelope.
Speaker 8: And eventually more activists put one foot on the steps,
Speaker 8: being like okay, if you're gonna come after us for
Speaker 8: putting a foot on the bank steps, fine, come at us,
Speaker 8: like call call the bluff.
Speaker 11: Yeah.
Speaker 8: So there was like people yelling at the CoP's face
Speaker 8: for like forty five minutes, maybe maybe longer.
Speaker 11: Time always stretches during these sorts of things.
Speaker 5: It's hard to it's hard to keep it.
Speaker 8: It's hard to keep a sense of like temporal stability,
Speaker 8: even just during during weeks of action in general, it's
Speaker 8: always hard to keep a sense of temporal stability. That's
Speaker 8: the sense of time warps around. Days blend into each other.
Speaker 8: A day feels like a week, a week feels like
Speaker 8: a day. It's it's very it gets very fuzzy, it gets.
Speaker 5: Incredibly trippy, and you're like yeah, and the exhaustion right,
Speaker 5: like just no, there's a lot of things.
Speaker 11: That feed into it.
Speaker 8: Despite about a dozen people putting their foot on the
Speaker 8: sacred steps, the police did not decide to arrest anyone
Speaker 8: at this protest, and after about an hour of disruption,
Speaker 8: the crowd departed. The week of action ended much like
Speaker 8: the last one, with the final rally being the youth
Speaker 8: march back at Brownwood Park. Lorraine just got out on
Speaker 8: bail and spoke about the jail conditions to the crowd
Speaker 8: of one hundred or so people gathered in the park
Speaker 8: on the morning of July first.
Speaker 17: And I don't want people to forget that our movement
Speaker 17: is connected with lots of other stone, one of which
Speaker 17: is prison abolition.
Speaker 7: Yeah, the idea that are.
Speaker 17: So quote criminal justice system is such that people get
Speaker 17: just shoved behind bars. We don't want to see them.
Speaker 18: We don't care what happens to them.
Speaker 2: And even if they're not.
Speaker 17: Hadn't gone to trial yet, and they're in a jail
Speaker 17: awaiting hearing or awaiting a trial, they're treated like.
Speaker 7: They're already on the people with at they're a criminal. See,
Speaker 7: we don't have to care as much about them.
Speaker 8: They're kind of the other the bad people in Lorraine
Speaker 8: said that she was in a crowded holding cell with
Speaker 8: twenty two other women and just a few metal benches,
Speaker 8: nothing else. This is where nearly two dozen people had
Speaker 8: to sleep, had to eat, use the bathroom, all in
Speaker 8: one place for days on end. Women were trying to
Speaker 8: sit or sleep on either of the hard benches or
Speaker 8: the floor. Some were attempting to use menstrul pads in
Speaker 8: place of a mattress. If they were lucky enough to
Speaker 8: be asleep, they were woken up at two am for
Speaker 8: breakfast and then again at four am for head counting.
Speaker 17: They were so full they didn't have room for the
Speaker 17: people that were arrested, so they were in this holding sale.
Speaker 11: Some of them been there three days.
Speaker 17: It was eighteen feet by six feet across. The last
Speaker 17: six feet were behind a divider.
Speaker 9: The had of toylets toys, so with.
Speaker 17: Even less room, the prison system is every day doing
Speaker 17: these kind of being union treatments to people that get
Speaker 17: arrested or not yet guilty of anything.
Speaker 8: Student organizers and parents also briefly spoke on why people
Speaker 8: are fighting against copp City.
Speaker 2: I don't want to live in a city.
Speaker 16: I don't want to live in a country in a
Speaker 16: world that prioritizes the protection of private property through murder
Speaker 16: and state violence over the fundamental building blocks of life. Okay,
Speaker 16: I think we need to be focusing on giving people
Speaker 16: places to live, giving people food to eat, water to drink,
Speaker 16: not on giving the police playgrounds where they can blow.
Speaker 2: Up bombs and shoot their guns.
Speaker 16: And that's why all of us together here need to
Speaker 16: come together, be as one here in beautiful community, with children,
Speaker 16: with elders, everything in between, doing this amazing community.
Speaker 5: Beldor I love being out here with y'all.
Speaker 2: It's so much fun to just like be working the
Speaker 2: popcorn machines and all that.
Speaker 16: And that's why we're all here together, because we know
Speaker 16: that community is the key for us to stop cop city.
Speaker 2: Stop cop city.
Speaker 18: And so as we fight to stop cop City, we
Speaker 18: are fighting for investment in the things that make families
Speaker 18: thrive in this city.
Speaker 7: We tell them's right, chickens.
Speaker 18: We tell the little police foundations, and we demand that
Speaker 18: money be reinvested.
Speaker 2: And they're housing for the people, shall care for.
Speaker 18: The people, education for the people, health care for the people.
Speaker 18: But those are the things that make our communities truly safe.
Speaker 18: And if they won't give it to us, we're gonna
Speaker 18: build those networks of care in our communities ourselves. That
Speaker 18: is what makes days like today so beautiful, the fact.
Speaker 2: That the people have the capacity to feel and feed
Speaker 2: the people.
Speaker 18: The people have the capacity to make sure that people say,
Speaker 18: hy drating, people have the capacity to give each other
Speaker 18: medical care. And as we build out those networks of care,
Speaker 18: we make the government irrelevance.
Speaker 2: You kind of tellup for the new all day long.
Speaker 18: But if we continue to build people's power, well they
Speaker 18: have to say don't even matter, So are you ready
Speaker 18: to build.
Speaker 7: That kind of world?
Speaker 8: As people got ready to depart, the energy was noticeably
Speaker 8: higher than most other events that week. All right, it
Speaker 8: is Saturday morning on July first. This is the last
Speaker 8: day of the sixth week of action of the Youth Rally.
Speaker 8: Just left Brownwood Park and is now marching through East
Speaker 8: Atlanta Village. Shortly before the Youth Rally, news started to
Speaker 8: circulate that early early that morning, just after midnight, several
Speaker 8: Atlanta police motorcycles and cop cars suffered mysterious damages, which
Speaker 8: possibly could have contributed to the more bolsterous energy among
Speaker 8: some of the radical attendees. People are driving by and
Speaker 8: honking in support. As about seventy five people, maybe one
Speaker 8: hundred are marked as about seventy five or one hundred
Speaker 8: people are marching next to Metropolitan Avenue.
Speaker 5: Take a fire truck would pull their air horn.
Speaker 2: The fire trucks were kind of busy last night.
Speaker 19: Actually, I'm not sure the fire trucks were busy doing
Speaker 19: what There's well, it seems like a lot of police
Speaker 19: motorcycles were found to be set on fire at the
Speaker 19: sight of the old Police Trading Academy.
Speaker 5: Sounded like some police suck cruisers were wrecked somewhere else
Speaker 5: in the city too.
Speaker 11: On Memorial Drive Southeast, it sounded like three cop cars
Speaker 11: were also smashed up.
Speaker 5: Is you think there's something going around?
Speaker 2: Is it contagious?
Speaker 11: So, Yeah, the fire crews were a little bit busy
Speaker 11: last night.
Speaker 5: Spontaneous vehicle vandalism.
Speaker 8: Yeah, that's certainly one way to end this week of action.
Speaker 8: This definitely feels like the most positive part of the
Speaker 8: Week of action so far. Yeah, people have been marching
Speaker 8: for about twenty minutes now. The march is now turned
Speaker 8: down Glenwood and is heading back towards Brownwood Park. No
Speaker 8: police presence at all so far. There was just complete
Speaker 8: I've not seen a single cop car in this in
Speaker 8: this section of town. There's also three less cop cars
Speaker 8: in Atlanta than there usually is, so that that might
Speaker 8: have something to do with it.
Speaker 5: It was from this zone too, that the second one
Speaker 5: where the cop cars are it was like a mile
Speaker 5: and a half away. Yeah, it's very very close, but yeah,
Speaker 5: very different than what we saw on last Saturday. Yes,
Speaker 5: where I like, even on my way in, I saw
Speaker 5: apd here every you know, twenty feet Yeah, and do
Speaker 5: not see a single no, a beauty vehicle is notable.
Speaker 8: The youth rally that closed the last week of action
Speaker 8: in March kind of felt like the end of an era.
Speaker 8: This one on July first felt very different, much more
Speaker 8: like a beginning of a new era. After a very
Speaker 8: scattered week, the movement finally started to feel like it
Speaker 8: had multiple directions to grow. This week definitely started on
Speaker 8: I would say, a muted note, and it's ended with
Speaker 8: a bit more directionality for the future and a bit
Speaker 8: more positivity.
Speaker 4: I think.
Speaker 8: I think people were able to think of ways that
Speaker 8: the movement can evolve and grow from here and recognize
Speaker 8: the necessity for that and now change and yet recognized
Speaker 8: the necessity for change, and people are ready to continue
Speaker 8: and evolve as the situation on the ground is also changing.
Speaker 5: And I mean adaptability was a part of the movement
Speaker 5: from the get go. Yes, just I think we got
Speaker 5: the movement got very tied to certain modes of operation
Speaker 5: that are not available anymore.
Speaker 7: Yep.
Speaker 8: You know, for the past like a few months, people
Speaker 8: have been it felt like people have been playing on
Speaker 8: the police's like board like they've been they've been following
Speaker 8: that and both both of the action last night and
Speaker 8: the sort of talks that are happening throughout the city.
Speaker 11: I think that is probably going to change.
Speaker 5: All right.
Speaker 8: We are about a block away from Brownwood Park on
Speaker 8: Portland Avenue and Gresham Avenue.
Speaker 5: Where there is pizza and water waiting.
Speaker 8: That is, that is I'm excited for water. I don't
Speaker 8: think I can have hot pizza right now. I think
Speaker 8: I would just faint. But cold water is certainly, certainly enticeing.
Speaker 8: Certain Yeah, and there's music back here in Brownwood. Tables
Speaker 8: set up giving out literature, giving out food, water, lots
Speaker 8: of bubbles. Earlier, earlier, at the earlier, at the rally
Speaker 8: before the march, there was a water balloon fight which
Speaker 8: was very interest.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I left it. I don't know why you've stayed around.
Speaker 2: The water moved.
Speaker 5: I took my laptop and left.
Speaker 11: There was there was there was a few very close
Speaker 11: moments there.
Speaker 2: But yeah, no, there's food.
Speaker 8: There's lots of signs, banners, what a lot of Little
Speaker 8: Caesar's pizza. There was much more energy here compared to
Speaker 8: the kickoff rally, which happened in the very same park
Speaker 8: exactly a week beforehand, which felt sort of reversed from
Speaker 8: the previous week of action this past March, which is
Speaker 8: interesting because like last week of action, you know, the
Speaker 8: kickoff rally was like the biggest thing, was the biggest
Speaker 8: energy point, and the youth rally was kind of the
Speaker 8: more like muted clothes And this has kind of been inversed.
Speaker 5: Which honestly for when you're looking at like what has
Speaker 5: happened over the last few months, maybe reading leading beating
Speaker 5: out with a high note is yeah, is the idea.
Speaker 8: I like, we're also ending with the bouncy castle, which
Speaker 8: is very very important.
Speaker 5: Yeah, for the full flip, we have to end with
Speaker 5: the bouncy castle.
Speaker 8: Yes, We've although we should move the bouncy castle to
Speaker 8: eight to ninety Memorial Drive south east.
Speaker 2: Oh my god. Stop.
Speaker 8: After the youth rally, Matt and I got some coffee
Speaker 8: in East Atlanta Village and talked about the broad strokes
Speaker 8: of the week and the general state of the movement.
Speaker 8: But like I said, I think this week started with
Speaker 8: a lot of questions being had, and it's ended with
Speaker 8: some of those questions being being answered and people figuring
Speaker 8: out that to answer some of some of those other questions,
Speaker 8: the answer will will will take the form of actions
Speaker 8: that happened in these next few months, and I feel
Speaker 8: like there's it's it's it's ended with a bit more
Speaker 8: directionality than what it began, which is interesting for a
Speaker 8: week of action. Yeah, it was needed, though it was
Speaker 8: absolutely needed. Like at like the first rally just felt
Speaker 8: so weird that for the first kickoff rally that the
Speaker 8: first day, that the first few days felt just very
Speaker 8: very like very scattered. It was unclear how what was
Speaker 8: happening was related to stop in Cop City. And in
Speaker 8: some ways, this week of Action feels like the reverse
Speaker 8: of the last week of Action, where like the last
Speaker 8: week of Action, it started with a point of directionality,
Speaker 8: like we are going to retake Kolani and they did.
Speaker 11: And then they're like, we are.
Speaker 8: Going to do an action to physically stop the construction
Speaker 8: of Cop City, and they did, Like they was doing
Speaker 8: all these things. And I think that week ended with
Speaker 8: more questions and what it started with because the police
Speaker 8: did the rate of the forest, there was a lot
Speaker 8: of there was more uncertainty by the end of the
Speaker 8: week because there was so much over policing.
Speaker 5: There was a lot of changes throughout throughout that week.
Speaker 8: And I think this week started in like an inverse
Speaker 8: is people started this week with a directionless of sense,
Speaker 8: and they had a lot of questions going into this week,
Speaker 8: and I feel like some people have started to kind
Speaker 8: of figure out how the movement will evolve.
Speaker 11: In these next few months, and it feels like people
Speaker 11: have a.
Speaker 8: Better idea of where, of like how they're going to
Speaker 8: move forward in these next three months six months, and
Speaker 8: like the month and a half when construction is slated
Speaker 8: to begin in August.
Speaker 5: Wait to begin. And you know, this referendum is looking
Speaker 5: like it's doing pretty well, so hopefully that that does delay.
Speaker 5: But yeah, of course we also ended with bouncy castle.
Speaker 5: We can't do it so acknowledging the importance of bouncy
Speaker 5: castles to this movement, or at least to Garrison, and
Speaker 5: I yes.
Speaker 8: I think the other thing that makes it interesting in
Speaker 8: terms of this week being an inverse of the last
Speaker 8: week is that, you know, on the last week, day two,
Speaker 8: there was this very fiery action with vehicles being smashed.
Speaker 8: And then on the second to last day, which is
Speaker 8: like late last night, either like late Friday night or
Speaker 8: early Saturday morning, at like one am, two am, there
Speaker 8: was three Atlanta police cars smashed by Reynoldstown.
Speaker 4: I believe.
Speaker 5: Yeah, just right, like a mile and a half away
Speaker 5: from from Brownwood Park, yep.
Speaker 8: And close to the airport at the old Police Trade Academy,
Speaker 8: there was a it looks like a good fleet of
Speaker 8: Atlanta police motorcycles.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's where the motorcycle Like, that's where the motors
Speaker 5: the quarters.
Speaker 8: Ye is one outside and those motorcycles are going to
Speaker 8: be no longer functioning. Yes, they are all charged to
Speaker 8: a crisp with like incendiary devices found there.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 8: One of the most noticeable differences about this week of
Speaker 8: action compared to the previous one was the turnout out
Speaker 8: of state support did not show up in similar numbers
Speaker 8: as to the last week of action in March. There's
Speaker 8: a lot of potential reasons for this. This week may
Speaker 8: have simply happened too soon, It coincided with other events
Speaker 8: across the country. Its messaging may not have reflected an
Speaker 8: adequate level of planning. There was probably some demoralization from
Speaker 8: the ninety acres of trees cut down and with Entrenchment
Speaker 8: Creek Park closed and under police occupation. Launching options in
Speaker 8: Atlanta was more of a mystery for those coming from
Speaker 8: outside the city. More time away from the death of
Speaker 8: Tortigita is probably also a factor. People in Atlanta may
Speaker 8: have to reconcile that the movement may not have as
Speaker 8: much widespread national support and all the ground numbers as
Speaker 8: it did last March.
Speaker 5: This is the smallest week of action we've had in
Speaker 5: over a year in recent memory.
Speaker 11: This is the smallest one I've reported on.
Speaker 5: Right, Yeah, you know, I think it might have even
Speaker 5: been comparable to the first week of Action, like it
Speaker 5: was around there, but it also felt more local.
Speaker 11: It did feel way more local.
Speaker 5: Once you go from like something so big as the
Speaker 5: last week of action to something more constrained, that is
Speaker 5: that sets a like a vibe shift that I think
Speaker 5: you've got to kind of come to terms with. And
Speaker 5: it's one of those moments where you're like, Okay, we
Speaker 5: are in a different paradigm.
Speaker 8: Yeah, fewer numbers is not necessarily a bad thing. A
Speaker 8: group of five to ten people can sometimes be much
Speaker 8: more effective at doing certain things than a crowd of
Speaker 8: two hundred or even a thousand. You just have to
Speaker 8: specifically prepare for the numbers that you know that you'll
Speaker 8: have for such a long time. I felt like this
Speaker 8: was this movement was extremely effective in delay and construction
Speaker 8: like that was like extremely effective. Deadline year and a half,
Speaker 8: deadlines kept getting pushed back every single thing. Like the
Speaker 8: occupation was very good at doing what it attempted to do,
Speaker 8: and at a certain point that became no longer viable
Speaker 8: and things are now changing gears. Yeah, and you have
Speaker 8: to allow yourself that evolution, Like it has to the
Speaker 8: same way people started occupying the forest in October after
Speaker 8: the city council stuff in September twenty twenty one.
Speaker 11: Like as the things changed, you have to change your
Speaker 11: tactics with it.
Speaker 5: And as I mean, as revolutionary strategy goes, that's just
Speaker 5: that should be a baseline, yea. And adapting to what
Speaker 5: the situation is and not what the situation what you
Speaker 5: want it to be.
Speaker 8: Yeah, And I think more people are talking about that
Speaker 8: this week and realizing that, like maybe even another week
Speaker 8: of Action does not make sense for this new paradigm
Speaker 8: that we're existing in Atlanta. I've talked about the possibility
Speaker 8: of changing the week of Action structure before in previous episodes,
Speaker 8: and I really only brought that up because that's what
Speaker 8: people were conveying to me at the time. And this
Speaker 8: has continued to be a topic of debate both during
Speaker 8: and since June, what do you.
Speaker 5: Do with the Week of Action format? And I know
Speaker 5: that we kind of talked about this during the last
Speaker 5: YEP recap episode where you brought up that that might
Speaker 5: have been the last Week of Action, but it wasn't.
Speaker 8: It wasn't because as I was making as episodes this
Speaker 8: Week of Action what was announced, I've heard more people
Speaker 8: say that they don't think the Week of Action format
Speaker 8: is applicable.
Speaker 11: Aim.
Speaker 8: I've heard more people say that than I did last week.
Speaker 8: What if Atlanta has kind of outgrown this format? This
Speaker 8: format's proved to be very useful in these past few years.
Speaker 8: It's been very positive parts, it's been very negative parts.
Speaker 8: And what if there's time for what if it's time
Speaker 8: for something like completely new, something that the police don't.
Speaker 5: Know how to respond to, because something that matches the
Speaker 5: new paradigm.
Speaker 8: Yeah, because that's That's the other thing is like people
Speaker 8: have been doing this for like two years now, Like
Speaker 8: not only have people gotten used to a pattern, but
Speaker 8: like police have gotten used to a pattern. Like police
Speaker 8: have gotten very good at repressing the Week of Action
Speaker 8: like they have they have had two years to practice,
Speaker 8: they have they know how to do this now? So
Speaker 8: why why keep playing on their battlefield? Like why why
Speaker 8: keep doing what APD.
Speaker 5: Is expecting you to do.
Speaker 8: That's part of what's you know, interesting about this resurgence
Speaker 8: of these nocturnal hit and run sabotages that are unannounced.
Speaker 8: That we saw the ones earlier in this week with
Speaker 8: the with the Brent scarboroughs machines, when we saw the
Speaker 8: APD vehicles get hit last night, So perhaps there there
Speaker 8: will be more of that. Perhaps they'll be just new
Speaker 8: things that we can't even predict, like there's so many
Speaker 8: other avenues that things could that things could go. Even
Speaker 8: during the use March, Matt and I were wondering if
Speaker 8: this new spike in sabotage actions would break the spell
Speaker 8: and we'd see a return this type of action happening
Speaker 8: more frequently.
Speaker 19: You know.
Speaker 5: It's the sort of direct action that has really been
Speaker 5: missing over the last several months.
Speaker 11: Yeah, and no, we've been talking about a lot this
Speaker 11: past week.
Speaker 8: We're talking about how there's been a lack of these
Speaker 8: sorts of like nocturnal hit and run direct actions, and
Speaker 8: late last night it seems like there was a resurgence.
Speaker 5: So we'll see how that continues, you know, after the
Speaker 5: Week of Action, if it continues or if it was
Speaker 5: a Week of Action inspired element. But I have a
Speaker 5: feeling we'll see some of those continue to crop up.
Speaker 11: Absolutely and this did indeed turn out to be the case.
Speaker 11: All right.
Speaker 8: I will do my best to go over a short
Speaker 8: list of the claimed attacks against contractors building cop City
Speaker 8: and corporations that fund the Atlanta Police Foundation from after
Speaker 8: this week of action. On a July first, over half
Speaker 8: a dozen Bank of America buildings in the Bay Area
Speaker 8: were vandalized and a dozen or so ATMs were smashed.
Speaker 8: In late June to early July, a group of friends
Speaker 8: visited the home of copp City architect Anthony Kenny in Norcross, Georgia,
Speaker 8: while another group paid a visit to ambush Basil Walla,
Speaker 8: a member of the boarder trustees for the Atlanta Police Foundation.
Speaker 8: People painted messages around their homes and tires were slashed.
Speaker 8: On the night of July second, Keith Johnson, the Eastern
Speaker 8: regional president for Brassfield and Gory, the contracting firm who
Speaker 8: broadly oversaw the destruction of the forest and who has
Speaker 8: decided to physically build cop City, also received a mysterious visit.
Speaker 8: Late in the night, an unknown number of people evaded
Speaker 8: security guards and spread blood red paint around his pool
Speaker 8: and left a message reading cop City will never be built.
Speaker 8: Drop the contract and you can't hide. According to an
Speaker 8: online communicate, rotten fish and dirty motor oil were left
Speaker 8: hidden somewhere on the property. Part of the communicat addressed
Speaker 8: to Keith reads, quote, we know things haven't been feeling
Speaker 8: great in the office. You're losing money. Subcontractors are upset.
Speaker 8: There are fractures everywhere in the cop City project, and
Speaker 8: all of that weight and procarity is on your fragile shoulders.
Speaker 8: Each time you think of us or see the reminders
Speaker 8: we left you, remember this is your own doing. You
Speaker 8: can make all of this stop by dropping the Copcity
Speaker 8: contract unquote. On July fourth, in lieu of fireworks, people
Speaker 8: claimed to have set two Brent Scarborough machines on fire
Speaker 8: in broad daylight due to the lack of security during daytime.
Speaker 8: Scarborough is the subcontractor who physically leveled the ninety sum
Speaker 8: acres of forest in the Wallani The same day, in Michigan,
Speaker 8: Chase Bank ATMs were sabotaged with glue and the bank
Speaker 8: was vandalized with messages of resistance. Chase Bank's head of
Speaker 8: Regional Investment Banking serves on the board of the Atlanta
Speaker 8: Police found and on July eighth, a Bank of America
Speaker 8: in Berkeley was vandalized with stopcop city slogans and three
Speaker 8: ATMs were smashed. During the start of this little wave
Speaker 8: of actions, the Mayor's office and APD were none too happy,
Speaker 8: so on July fifth, Mayor Andre Dickens and Atlanta Police
Speaker 8: Chief Darren Shecherbaum put on a press conference with the ATS,
Speaker 8: Georgia Bureau of Investigation and FBI to discuss the recent
Speaker 8: surge of direct actions.
Speaker 10: Our public safety facilities and property were the target of
Speaker 10: an extremely violent and dangerous attack on Saturday, July first,
Speaker 10: and there were several other destructive acts of extreme vandalism
Speaker 10: on public and private property property that occurred that we
Speaker 10: have reason to believe are related to the construction of
Speaker 10: the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center in Decab County. The
Speaker 10: current Atlanta Police Training Center at W one eighty south
Speaker 10: Side Industrial Parkway was set ablaze in the early morning
Speaker 10: hours of Saturday, July first. The targeted attack utilized extremely
Speaker 10: dangerous homemade incendiary devices to set a fire to the
Speaker 10: building and completely destroyed eight police motorcycle motorcycles. As shocking
Speaker 10: as this is, this was not an isolated incident of violence.
Speaker 10: This group actually took credit for these incidents and they
Speaker 10: stated it as I quote, we are vengeful wing nuts
Speaker 10: with nothing left to lose.
Speaker 20: Prior to that, about one hour prior to the event
Speaker 20: that one of the South Side industrial we had another
Speaker 20: precinct that was targeted in the city. This is our
Speaker 20: Path Force precinct Memorial Drive and the eight hundred block
Speaker 20: of Memorial. These officers control the belt line which many
Speaker 20: of you all visit frequently. At that location, we had
Speaker 20: multiple windows broken on police vehicles. We believe the intent
Speaker 20: was to set those vehicles on fires. Well, there's a
Speaker 20: burgraff and fire off of the red fuse on the
Speaker 20: ground that has been used by this group in the
Speaker 20: past to set police vehicles on fire that was dropped
Speaker 20: when a citizen observed the criminal actions progress and actually
Speaker 20: interrupted the crimes that were occurring there. So we believe
Speaker 20: that the fire attack that was planned on Memorial Drive
Speaker 20: was thwarted by an observant citizen. A short time later,
Speaker 20: about an hour, we had the fire at our facility
Speaker 20: on South Side Industrial. Our training center has housed there
Speaker 20: most recently, and then our special operations precinct is there.
Speaker 20: The intent was for all forty to be destroyed, and
Speaker 20: had all those forty vehicles caught on fire, that police
Speaker 20: facility would have been gravely damaged, if not destroyed in
Speaker 20: the fire. And we are thankful for a police officer
Speaker 20: that saw this unfolding and likely interrupted that plan for
Speaker 20: being able.
Speaker 7: To play out in its fullness.
Speaker 20: There's an indication that this was likely committed by the
Speaker 20: exact same individuals.
Speaker 2: We will let and see where the fact takets.
Speaker 8: According to Chief Sheerbaum and Mayor Dickens, the actions against
Speaker 8: Atlanta Police on July first, over the course of just
Speaker 8: a few hours, equalled over three hundred thousand dollars in Damages's.
Speaker 20: Way around thirty five thousand. And they want you outfit
Speaker 20: us a little bit more. So do that times eight?
Speaker 20: That's going to put you in the ballpark.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and that's not even including the rest of the
Speaker 10: smoke and damage and other things and the broken windows
Speaker 10: on the police car, etc.
Speaker 20: So the group that struck this weekend is a dedicated
Speaker 20: group of professional anarchists, and I know that may seem
Speaker 20: a contradiction in terms. So this is a group of
Speaker 20: individuals that don't pray, play by any rules, and we'll
Speaker 20: go to any links they need to to carry out
Speaker 20: and this is their words. We will wage a campaign
Speaker 20: of violence and destruction, and so what we saw this
Speaker 20: weekend was part of that campaign.
Speaker 8: It's always funny when police make anarchists sound very cool
Speaker 8: and scary. But Chief Shecherbam also pretty clearly explained the
Speaker 8: reasoned methodology behind the pressure campaigns targeting contractors and APF
Speaker 8: financial sponsors.
Speaker 20: We know from the postings of this group their intent
Speaker 20: to stop the Public Safety Training Center has left the
Speaker 20: democratic process of the city Council and is now moving
Speaker 20: to intimidate and force out contractors that are committed to
Speaker 20: building the public Safety Training Center. This weekend, during the
Speaker 20: week of action, three different locations private residences were targeted.
Speaker 20: Tires were flattened on a contractors home, a home of
Speaker 20: an executive for Brassalgory was significantly vanalyzed in another jurisdiction,
Speaker 20: and then we had another location where graffiti was used
Speaker 20: to intimidate. And then yesterday morning, slightly after seven o'clock
Speaker 20: in the morning. A location at four eighteen McDonough Boulevard
Speaker 20: belonging into Brent Scarborough's company, which is a key provider
Speaker 20: of work and this training centers was also targeted and
Speaker 20: attacked and equipment was set on fire at that location.
Speaker 20: These acts are of a small, determined group. These are
Speaker 20: small individuals from across the country that are using violence
Speaker 20: and fear and intimidation to stop a public safety training center.
Speaker 20: And this group cannot hide behind the dark of night
Speaker 20: or the home address and feel that they are not
Speaker 20: going to be held accountable. I have standing at this
Speaker 20: podium with me today representings from the Federal Bureau of Investigation,
Speaker 20: the ATF, and we are also partner with the Georgia
Speaker 20: Bureau of Investigation. These agencies are working together to determine
Speaker 20: where federal laws violated this weekend and ensure that the
Speaker 20: full expertise of American law enforcement is present right here
Speaker 20: in Atlanta to stop this group, stop this group across
Speaker 20: the region, stop their ability to impact the public safety
Speaker 20: network of Atlanta, and hold them accountable.
Speaker 8: Despite continued threats from law enforcement, the only arrests that
Speaker 8: have happened so far in relation to this movement are
Speaker 8: from daytime protests, forest raids, and bail fund organizers. We've
Speaker 8: yet to see anyone arrested in Atlanta for doing like
Speaker 8: a specific one of these nocturnal night sabotage actions that
Speaker 8: has not happened. Yeah, I mean, the scariest indictments everyone's
Speaker 8: expecting are going to come in these next few years,
Speaker 8: after you give the FBI two three, four years to investigate,
Speaker 8: after you interview more people who've been arrested, see if
Speaker 8: anyone stitches, see if anyone turns state's witness. But so far,
Speaker 8: it's been safer to do nocturnal sabotage actions than it
Speaker 8: has been to attend a public protest. And that is
Speaker 8: an interesting paradigm as well, is that no one's actually
Speaker 8: got arrested for lighting like cop cars and fire in
Speaker 8: the middle of the night. No one's been arrested for
Speaker 8: sabotaging equipment in the middle of the night. All of
Speaker 8: the arrests that are you know, are being tied to
Speaker 8: like violent crime, are from like daytime protests, which is
Speaker 8: an interesting factor about this movement. Direct action in the
Speaker 8: most surveiled city in America can be tricky and even
Speaker 8: just managing cell phones and Internet search data is a
Speaker 8: huge factor, but as much real security there is out
Speaker 8: in the world, the amount of security theater is arguably
Speaker 8: a stronger aspect in getting people to not go out
Speaker 8: and do direct action. The implicit threat of the opticon
Speaker 8: is often enough to stifle people's potential action, but these
Speaker 8: things are beatable. Guides for how to do it exist
Speaker 8: either at your local anarchist book fair or online as
Speaker 8: long as the computer is running tour browser and a
Speaker 8: reputable VPN.
Speaker 11: The Internet.
Speaker 8: The internet's a fun place. That's there is a lot
Speaker 8: of no blogs and sites and the zines that tell
Speaker 8: you how to do that. I don't know, I mean
Speaker 8: they people always make mistakes, people get caught, sometimes make mistakes.
Speaker 5: It's risky, and there are cameras everywhere in the city.
Speaker 5: You have to Yeah, some of them, don't worry. But
Speaker 5: it's like, do you really want to play Russian Roulette?
Speaker 8: No, That's a part of that's a part of when
Speaker 8: people like plan these nocturnal actions is like just because
Speaker 8: it's nighttime doesn't mean you're not sick getting watched or
Speaker 8: you're not Like it's there's a lot of things that
Speaker 8: go into that. There's a lot of ways to get
Speaker 8: got whether you're like buying supplies and you keep a
Speaker 8: receipt and people please find a receipt, They track back,
Speaker 8: they find security acount of you'll be purchasing things and
Speaker 8: then they're like, oh, this bottle is bought at this
Speaker 8: place because you have this receipt in your house and
Speaker 8: blah blah, bah blah blah. Like there's there's lots of
Speaker 8: ways that that stuff happens. So like I'm not going
Speaker 8: to give a guide on how to do it right now,
Speaker 8: but like this anarchists have been.
Speaker 11: Doing this for a long time.
Speaker 8: After you do that crime, you've never done that crime,
Speaker 8: Like it's it's not something that you do as a person,
Speaker 8: Like you cease to become a person, you become like.
Speaker 5: You are that action. It issued the action, and then
Speaker 5: and then you never talked about it ever again it's
Speaker 5: gone or else you end up going to prison yep,
Speaker 5: and risking like not just your safety, the safety everyone's
Speaker 5: safety just by remembering that you did it.
Speaker 8: No, you know, like these become standards and anarchist communities,
Speaker 8: like you never brag about something, you never allude to anything,
Speaker 8: like it's it's it's not it's it's not a game,
Speaker 8: like you're it's not a game, you're it is your
Speaker 8: your life and other people's lives on the line. When
Speaker 8: when when you're doing stuff like this and it's yeah,
Speaker 8: you never do it to like be cool. You never
Speaker 8: do it to brag about it like that. That's just
Speaker 8: not how this works, which is why there's like kind
Speaker 8: of a much more like kind of insular culture around
Speaker 8: some anarchists, especially anarchists to identify as like illegalists or
Speaker 8: like the types of like like green nihilists or green anarchists.
Speaker 8: That kind of pioneered the militancy of this movement, both
Speaker 8: slightly even slightly before the first city council vote and
Speaker 8: then definitely after the first city council vote where we
Speaker 8: saw a massive explosion no pun intended in the number
Speaker 8: of type of sabotages happening in the Wlani Forest. Yeah,
Speaker 8: which I think that drew a lot of anarchists do
Speaker 8: come to Atlanta because it was like, oh, they're doing a.
Speaker 5: Thing that's been the thing since the end of the
Speaker 5: Green Scare.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 8: No, this is like the thing that I believe in
Speaker 8: that this is like this is my politics. Now there's
Speaker 8: a spot where I can do my politics and still
Speaker 8: no one's been caught for that. And I think that
Speaker 8: that was a big part of why Atlanta got so
Speaker 8: big last year, is that people have the ability to
Speaker 8: like live free in the forest and then do crazy
Speaker 8: shit at night. Like you can you live in this
Speaker 8: like autonomous zone during the day, you're able, whether you're
Speaker 8: you have housing instability, whether you just want like an
Speaker 8: escape from like horrible police state living like where in whatever,
Speaker 8: wherever the city you're in, you can go live in
Speaker 8: the Wilane Forest. You can live in a tent, you
Speaker 8: can have friends, you can defend this force during the day,
Speaker 8: and then you can do crazy, crazy shit at night.
Speaker 8: And that drew a lot of people to Atlanta, and
Speaker 8: now with the forest not being there, that that also
Speaker 8: changes that that changes the type of people who are
Speaker 8: come who are who want to come to the city
Speaker 8: because that that was a big draw for people and
Speaker 8: now that that's no longer an option, you can't really
Speaker 8: sleep in the Wilani Forest as easily anymore. Yeah, that
Speaker 8: changes the types of people who want to come to
Speaker 8: Atlanta and who are gonna like do crazy shit because
Speaker 8: that's just how and further own safety they're not here.
Speaker 11: Yeah, No, absolutely.
Speaker 8: As the referendum is hoping to stop cop City by
Speaker 8: having Atlantas voute on whether to cancel the land lease.
Speaker 8: Others in the Diverse movement have continued their efforts to
Speaker 8: pressure contractors and funders to drop out of the cop
Speaker 8: City project. This tactic has already demonstrated its ability to succeed,
Speaker 8: with Reeve's Young Construction dropping out of the project in
Speaker 8: April of twenty twenty two, and some material suppliers have
Speaker 8: since cut ties with cop City. This is something that
Speaker 8: APD Chief Darren Sheerbaum certainly seems worried about.
Speaker 20: This effort of fear was not going to succeed, and
Speaker 20: the coalition of law enforcement from the GBI to the FBI,
Speaker 20: to the ATF, Atlanta Police Department, and a slew of
Speaker 20: regional agencies is going to stop that campaign so it
Speaker 20: doesn't happen and individuals.
Speaker 2: Do not leave the project.
Speaker 8: On July second, protesters in Minnesota visited the homes of
Speaker 8: Atlas Technical Consultants employees during daylight. People marched around the
Speaker 8: neighborhoods with instruments and banners, knocked on doors, talked with neighbors,
Speaker 8: and lets a letter of demands to drop the contract
Speaker 8: and cut ties with the Atlanta Police Foundation. The project
Speaker 8: manager for Atlas Technical Consultants engaged with protesters in the
Speaker 8: street and told them that Atlas had indeed already dropped
Speaker 8: out of the project due to mounting pressure.
Speaker 13: Then we want Atlas is no longer involved.
Speaker 5: Why did they decide to get out of it?
Speaker 7: We stopped doing that.
Speaker 21: Why because you guys are fucking nightmares and you broke
Speaker 21: all our fucking windows. So I don't care what you
Speaker 21: want to say to my house and knock on my
Speaker 21: door and do this ship. My company is not involved
Speaker 21: in this, So get the fuck away from me, Okay.
Speaker 13: I'm glad.
Speaker 8: Get A few days later, Atlas and Long Engineering released
Speaker 8: an official statement saying that they would no longer be
Speaker 8: working on the cop City project. Anarchists and those on
Speaker 8: the left in general seem to have a hard time
Speaker 8: calling wins, but I'm not sure if it gets any
Speaker 8: more definitive than that audio clip in showing that this
Speaker 8: type of direct action can absolutely work in getting businesses
Speaker 8: to leave the project. In the next episode, we'll talk
Speaker 8: more about the referendum, the city's attempts to divide the
Speaker 8: movement and the growing pr battle over the fate of
Speaker 8: Cop City. See you on the other side, Welcome back
Speaker 8: to it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis, and this
Speaker 8: is the last episode in my trilogy covering what's been
Speaker 8: happening this summer in Atlanta to stop Cop City. Last
Speaker 8: episode we covered the end of the Week of Action,
Speaker 8: the resurgence of nighttime sabotage, and at Las long Engineering
Speaker 8: dropping out of the Cop City project. A relatively new,
Speaker 8: big aspect of the movement that I've really only mentioned
Speaker 8: peripherally is the Cop City vote referendum. The goal of
Speaker 8: the referendum is to let the people of Atlanta vote
Speaker 8: on whether to repeal an ordinance authorizing the land lease
Speaker 8: of three hundred and eighty one acres of forest into
Speaker 8: Cab County that was given to the Atlanta Police Foundation
Speaker 8: in twenty twenty one to use the land for the
Speaker 8: construction of Cop City. In order to get the referendum
Speaker 8: on an upcoming ballot, the petition had to gather sixty
Speaker 8: thousand signatures in sixty days. Every signature must be from
Speaker 8: an Atlanta resident who was registered to vote in twenty
Speaker 8: twenty one, and initially those who gathered signatures had to
Speaker 8: also be Atlanta residents. Sixty thousand signatures in sixty days
Speaker 8: was a lofty goal, but volunteers around the city were
Speaker 8: being increasingly mobilized during and after the week of action.
Speaker 8: For the first few weeks of the referendum, the city
Speaker 8: stayed mostly quiet, but then on the July fifth APD
Speaker 8: press conference, Mayor Andre Dickens addressed the referendum.
Speaker 9: Man, are some of these protesters and posts of the
Speaker 9: training center have bigger collecting signatures in the hope of
Speaker 9: having a referendum putting the November boundary. What's your reaction
Speaker 9: to that?
Speaker 7: What's your comment on that?
Speaker 9: Will you allow them to do what they're doing right
Speaker 9: now and constantly have the referendum?
Speaker 10: Absolutely, the referendum process is one that's legally documented. It's
Speaker 10: in the city code, and anybody can attempt to get
Speaker 10: the petition going and get the necessary signatures. We asked
Speaker 10: that they do so with honesty and truth, collect the
Speaker 10: signatures from real people, with sharing the truth about what
Speaker 10: they are looking to do. And so I don't personally
Speaker 10: believe they're going to be successful. I believe that based
Speaker 10: on what we know about the citizens of Atlanta. They
Speaker 10: are a supportive of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center.
Speaker 10: We know that this is going to be unsuccessful if
Speaker 10: it's done honestly, and so we're making sure that we
Speaker 10: continue to monitor the process.
Speaker 8: This statement by the Democrat mayor of Atlanta, I don't
Speaker 8: think has been highlighted enough. The mayor is trying to
Speaker 8: frame a successful referendum as a fraudulent one. Dickens is
Speaker 8: priming propaganda channels and testing the waters for blatant election
Speaker 8: fraud style messaging in the future by very clearly insinuating
Speaker 8: that if you win this, that means you're cheating.
Speaker 5: The referendum kept popping up like throughout the Week of
Speaker 5: Action without it was ling up space.
Speaker 2: It was never it was never, never the focus.
Speaker 11: It was always just like on the sideline.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but it was everywhere, Like every I think every
Speaker 5: event the referendum was in some way, shape or form.
Speaker 5: You know, they're like the Home Depot rally and people
Speaker 5: walking by they were talking about the referendum and talking
Speaker 5: about the Week of Action collecting signatures.
Speaker 8: It did not feel like it was taking space away
Speaker 8: from any of the other aspects of the movement. I'm
Speaker 8: trying to I think some people were definitely worried about that,
Speaker 8: Like people worried that the referendum might act as like
Speaker 8: a release sylve for both the movement and like the
Speaker 8: people who are like out of the movement and still
Speaker 8: like looking at cop City being like, how can you
Speaker 8: get involved.
Speaker 11: In this thing?
Speaker 8: And you see this like very like above for electoral
Speaker 8: strategy of planning stuff like what if people's efforts just
Speaker 8: get funneled into that and they missed that on the
Speaker 8: other much more expansive aspects.
Speaker 11: Of the movement.
Speaker 8: One of the few more referendum focused events during the
Speaker 8: Week of Action was a community town hall discussion put
Speaker 8: on by the Hip Hop Caucus at the Gathering Spot
Speaker 8: on the evening of Friday, June thirtieth. Before the panel discussion,
Speaker 8: myself and Matt from the Atlantic Community Press Collective talked
Speaker 8: with two members of the Hip Hop Caucus about the
Speaker 8: event and their hopes for the referendum. This is Brandy Williams,
Speaker 8: an organizer with the Hip Hop Caucus.
Speaker 22: So the Hip Hop Coccus is a national nonpart is
Speaker 22: a nonprofit organization that uses hip hop culture to connect
Speaker 22: people to the civic and political process and essentially we
Speaker 22: do that in four areas. We do that with I
Speaker 22: think one hundred percent climbate and environmental justice work. We
Speaker 22: were founded as a voting and democracy organization out of
Speaker 22: the Voter Die movement, so we still do that work
Speaker 22: under our respect My Vote platform. We also have our
Speaker 22: Good Trouble civil and human rights work. It's our multi
Speaker 22: isssue platform and we look at it as the justice
Speaker 22: department for hip hop, so we do it. We work
Speaker 22: on everything from police reform to education and healthcare, and
Speaker 22: then our Justice Paid in Full, which is our economic
Speaker 22: justice platform, So how do we achieve economic justice. We
Speaker 22: actually started our activation like on the groundwork in LA
Speaker 22: last week during bet weekend, so we did a similar
Speaker 22: event in LA. We're doing this one here and we're
Speaker 22: planning to be here in Atlanta and through the referendum
Speaker 22: and through the election.
Speaker 8: We also talked with Theondajaha Lone Wolf and Atlanta resident
Speaker 8: and national community organizer. Recently she had been working de
Speaker 8: spread awareness across the country about what's been going on
Speaker 8: in Atlanta.
Speaker 13: Myself, hip Hop Quark is movement for Black Lives until Freedom,
Speaker 13: community movement builders. We all came up with this idea
Speaker 13: to to create this photo shoot campaign similar to voter
Speaker 13: Die or in anything, you know, with these where you
Speaker 13: have a nice shirt or a sticker and you're taking
Speaker 13: and just being there in solidarity. So we s did
Speaker 13: it during La BT Awards weekend last weekend. We had
Speaker 13: a nice turnout of folks that came. I was in
Speaker 13: LA for the Hollywood Climate Summit. I spoke on the
Speaker 13: panel with Jane Fonda, so there was a lot of
Speaker 13: people from Hollywood that came and said, oh my god,
Speaker 13: that's what's happening in in Georgia. We have to be
Speaker 13: if we cannot sign for on the referendum, but we
Speaker 13: w we stand with you all because what we are
Speaker 13: also educating people at is that if Cop City is built,
Speaker 13: they already having contracts with police nationally to come here.
Speaker 13: This would be the largest farm police training facility in
Speaker 13: the United States. I went to Universal Studios, Hollywood, Universal Studios.
Speaker 13: Roller Coaster's huge, just nice. It's four hundred acres. That's
Speaker 13: fifty acres less will be Cop City then, you know,
Speaker 13: and I'm like, that's an amusement park of nothing but real,
Speaker 13: real gunfire, real bombs, real real everything. It's not gonna
Speaker 13: be fake. It's not amusement park in that way, but
Speaker 13: this is their call of duty.
Speaker 5: In real life, and it's in the middle of a
Speaker 5: residential neighborhood.
Speaker 13: They're not here to protect and serve. They're here to
Speaker 13: shoot to kill. And so police from all across this
Speaker 13: nation will be coming here to Georgia for this militarized
Speaker 13: police training and that's a problem for me. And the
Speaker 13: turnout in California showed that that's a problem for them too.
Speaker 13: So we had a lot of people that came for that,
Speaker 13: and today we're doing the same thing and we're having
Speaker 13: a community town hall discussion because I think there's a
Speaker 13: lot of people that don't understand why is cop city
Speaker 13: because the mayor. I want to meet the mayor's publicists
Speaker 13: because the way that this whole thing has been spinned
Speaker 13: on his side that no, it would be great for
Speaker 13: the EMT and the firefighters, and and they're pushing EMT
Speaker 13: firefighters more than the police part, but the police part
Speaker 13: is a huge part. I think these type of conversations
Speaker 13: need to be talked about, and so that's what this
Speaker 13: community town hall is all about as well. For those
Speaker 13: that are kind of wavering neutral, maybe don't know, maybe
Speaker 13: they know it a lot, you know, because the number
Speaker 13: one thing that we've been seeing, like I was on
Speaker 13: V one oh three yesterday on the radio station, and
Speaker 13: I also have been doing a couple of other media
Speaker 13: and call ins, and a lot of people don't understand,
Speaker 13: like they a lot of people don't understand, like why
Speaker 13: is this a bad thing? You know, you can move
Speaker 13: it somewhere else, they say. But even if it's moved
Speaker 13: somewhere else, I'm still gonna fight against cop city, you know,
Speaker 13: just because I have this hits home for me too.
Speaker 13: Many of my friends and family have been murdered by
Speaker 13: the hands of radical power hungry, gun happy, trigger happy
Speaker 13: police officers. And I feel that there is and then
Speaker 13: also another thing too, there is answers, you know, in
Speaker 13: regards to we don't need more police, we need resources.
Speaker 13: They shut down our hospital, they shut down the shelters.
Speaker 13: It's not like they don't know, right, Like we tell them,
Speaker 13: we need more jobs, not just any job, good quality jobs.
Speaker 13: We need pristine health care, not just affordable healthcare. And
Speaker 13: then most importantly, it just are unsheltered friends to see
Speaker 13: that they put bulldozers. They this administration, this city continues
Speaker 13: to ignore, ignore, the people. We have the hugest, the
Speaker 13: biggest wealth gap in the nation. They and they call
Speaker 13: it Wakanda, the blackest city. But if this is how
Speaker 13: you treat us, our people, our people need resources. That's
Speaker 13: where this sixty seven million dollars should be going. It
Speaker 13: should not be going towards a more police. We don't
Speaker 13: need more police because when you go to Cobb County,
Speaker 13: when you go over to Alpharetta, they don't have a
Speaker 13: lot of police. They don't have a lot of Why
Speaker 13: would they mean a lot of police because they already
Speaker 13: got the resources.
Speaker 8: On top of the community town hall discussion, there were
Speaker 8: a few other things to do at the event that
Speaker 8: Euanajaha talked about.
Speaker 13: Stop cop City photo campaign, So everyone you come and
Speaker 13: take your photo and just showing that you stand in solidarity,
Speaker 13: and then most importantly is to get some signatures as.
Speaker 8: Well throughout the referendum process. It's been interesting how many people,
Speaker 8: even in Atlanta are just now learning about cop City.
Speaker 5: When did you first hear about cop City?
Speaker 22: Honestly earlier this year, And and like a lot of
Speaker 22: the people that I am talking to now, I was
Speaker 22: also kind of confused about the issue. I wasn't really
Speaker 22: sure why you know, they were so opposed until I
Speaker 22: started learning a little more about what actually was going
Speaker 22: to happen at this training facility. So, the idea of
Speaker 22: building a mini city with the helicopter landing pad with
Speaker 22: a shooting range or a firing range military grade in
Speaker 22: a community. So this is not on the outskirts. This
Speaker 22: is in a community and in a community of color,
Speaker 22: and you're bringing police from around the country in to
Speaker 22: learn military tactics, tactics that we use in foreign countries
Speaker 22: to protect citizens. We should not be thinking about our citizens,
Speaker 22: our residents as people who need to be protect did
Speaker 22: from them sales, if I'm making sense, you know what
Speaker 22: I mean.
Speaker 5: So it's sort of like enemy combatants in your own
Speaker 5: and you're.
Speaker 22: All backyard, but you're training them up in a black community.
Speaker 22: So I can only imagine that some of that many
Speaker 22: cities going to spill over into the communities. Then you're
Speaker 22: bringing police officers from around the country here, so they're
Speaker 22: taking that back.
Speaker 8: The specific community where the Atlanta Police Foundation is trying
Speaker 8: to build cop City has already been traumatized by the
Speaker 8: violence of the state.
Speaker 2: For hundreds of years.
Speaker 10: Now.
Speaker 8: This whole area was violently stolen from Muskogee Creek. Then
Speaker 8: it became a slave plantation, and then part of it
Speaker 8: was sold to the city of Atlanta, and then it
Speaker 8: became a prison farm. Since then, the land has been
Speaker 8: home to two landfills and three detention facilities. This is
Speaker 8: the history of just this neighborhood for the last few
Speaker 8: hundred years. Now the car sort of violence inflicted on
Speaker 8: this land is attempting to be exported as police the
Speaker 8: Beast will soon come from around the country and even
Speaker 8: the world to train at copp City.
Speaker 22: No one wants it in their community, but you're going
Speaker 22: to continue to burden this particular community with the same
Speaker 22: thing over and over and over again. The people of
Speaker 22: that community for generations have experienced all kinds of harm
Speaker 22: at the hands of the people that they supposedly are
Speaker 22: electing to represent and protect them from these types of things,
Speaker 22: and they're actually the ones doing it to them. You
Speaker 22: were elected by people to represent them, and they've told
Speaker 22: you for two years, we don't want this, and you
Speaker 22: are ignoring their voice.
Speaker 8: On the day of the Hip Hopcoccus panel and their
Speaker 8: quality alert was issued due to incoming smoke from wildfires
Speaker 8: up north in Atlanta. The AQI reached one hundred and
Speaker 8: fifty the ocean.
Speaker 13: These fish, these birds, they're screaming at us right now.
Speaker 13: What we are doing to Mother Earth right now is
Speaker 13: we are from cutting down the trees, fossil fuels, everything,
Speaker 13: this is, this is, and especially this being the lungs
Speaker 13: of Atlanta today, I'm wearing my mask because on my
Speaker 13: weather advisory it said it said the air quality is
Speaker 13: not good today for sensitive people. And that is just
Speaker 13: with the trees, and they keep on cutting down these trees.
Speaker 13: I moved here because of the trees. I'm from Arizona,
Speaker 13: so I needed trees. That was nothing but desert. But
Speaker 13: I moved here because of these trees, because I love
Speaker 13: the life force that trees give us. Even when we
Speaker 13: see a tree, the earth is talking back to us, saying,
Speaker 13: stop doing what you're doing. The dolphins, the orcas, the wells,
Speaker 13: they're all migrant. They're like, you're the ocean is hot
Speaker 13: right now, so they are they're yelling at us. And
Speaker 13: when not listening. And as a native in my native way,
Speaker 13: our elders, our chiefs have said that we plan for
Speaker 13: seven generations from now. I am a mother of two
Speaker 13: sons and what this administration is doing and what these
Speaker 13: corporations are doing. They're not looking at seven generations from now.
Speaker 13: They're not looking at how this is going to affect
Speaker 13: us on the long run. And I love the fact
Speaker 13: of everyone that is standing firm and saying stop cop
Speaker 13: City because we see the vision. We know what this
Speaker 13: Uchi Marka, this mother Earth is going to look like
Speaker 13: seven generations from now. And we're fighting to our death
Speaker 13: because of the fact that we want to make sure
Speaker 13: that our children's children's children's children could still live here
Speaker 13: and be in a peaceful, safe place and environment to live.
Speaker 8: Since being elected as the Progressive candidate in twenty twenty one,
Speaker 8: there's been an ever growing animosity towards Mayor Dickens from
Speaker 8: all of his unfulfilled promises. When talking with Nashaha, she
Speaker 8: expressed that she felt disappointed that herself and this big
Speaker 8: block of people helped Andre get elected and now Mayor
Speaker 8: Dickens is fully committed to the cop City project and
Speaker 8: is even having conversations with other black leaders in the
Speaker 8: city to bring them on board and prevent them from
Speaker 8: opposing Cop City.
Speaker 13: The mayor is in his position because of the blood,
Speaker 13: sweat and tears and arrest and beat ups that we
Speaker 13: got during freedom summer twenty twenty. He used the social
Speaker 13: justice the civil rights organizations and activists and voices to
Speaker 13: get him in the position that he used them and say,
Speaker 13: y'all help me. I'm going to be there for you all,
Speaker 13: And it's all a slap in the face. So I
Speaker 13: don't like hypocrisy. And I see hypocrites all throughout this
Speaker 13: and on this administration side, from the governor all the
Speaker 13: way down, even when we try to help our unsheltered friends.
Speaker 13: In December, when it was so cold out here, I
Speaker 13: went on social media. I raised five thousand dollars in
Speaker 13: two hours. I went and went, Me and my friends
Speaker 13: went and got them all tents, tents, sleeping bags, everything.
Speaker 13: The mayor called my comrade. Mayor Andre called my comrade
Speaker 13: and was all like, why are you saying that they
Speaker 13: don't have no heating stations? And I set up a
Speaker 13: heating station. Not everyone wants to go there, because so
Speaker 13: is there. Where is your mental health services? Where's the
Speaker 13: transitioning team that you should have on the ground to
Speaker 13: help transition them. Don't just open up a temporary heating shelter.
Speaker 13: Where's the transition team to go and talk to the
Speaker 13: people of saying, hey, let me walk you in to
Speaker 13: go get heated. There was none of that. You're just
Speaker 13: expecting people to just go in there or they knew.
Speaker 7: Where it was at.
Speaker 13: So we went to the cab. We went to the
Speaker 13: cab and we also went down to Atlanta. We gave
Speaker 13: them tents. The police went down there. The Atlanta PD
Speaker 13: went down there and put holes all in their tents.
Speaker 13: They slight, They used a knife and put and slice
Speaker 13: their tents open so it wouldn't they couldn't even stay
Speaker 13: in it. Yes, yes, while it was still below freezing.
Speaker 13: This is all under the administration of Mayor Andre. So no,
Speaker 13: we can't trust We can't trust them.
Speaker 5: Do you feel betrayed by Andre? Yes?
Speaker 13: Because I voted for him. I voted for him. I
Speaker 13: voted for him because I think I voted for him
Speaker 13: like every other person voted for vote for someone. Is
Speaker 13: that their charismatic They talk an amazing game, and on
Speaker 13: top of it, my friends that were close with him
Speaker 13: vote for him. My friends in the movement after this,
Speaker 13: people that I look up to from as mentorship, they said, man, Andre,
Speaker 13: he's gonna he's gonna have fund a lot of the
Speaker 13: things that we're doing.
Speaker 8: Leonaja Haw spoke about how many Dickens works to build
Speaker 8: mutually beneficial relationships between the city and non governmental quote
Speaker 8: unquote progressive organizations. So while some NGOs have received money
Speaker 8: from the city, now many of these big quote unquote
Speaker 8: civil rights orgs are scared of jeopardizing potential funding and
Speaker 8: are now currently refusing to speak out against cop City.
Speaker 13: Yeah. When I talked so, the same people that have
Speaker 13: spoken to Andre are the same people. I'm like, why
Speaker 13: don't you involved, you know, and they're just like, I
Speaker 13: think it's going to be built, and at least I'm
Speaker 13: at the table. A lot of them think that way.
Speaker 13: They was like, I was there at the beginning fighting,
Speaker 13: I had to sit down with the mayor. I believe
Speaker 13: this is going to be built. So since this is
Speaker 13: going to be built, let me figure out at least
Speaker 13: I'm at the table in the community and there's community engagement.
Speaker 13: At least there's some type of ridging happening. That's their angle.
Speaker 13: Anyone that said Black Lives Matter was on the front
Speaker 13: line with us in twenty twenty, that that was horrified
Speaker 13: by the videos that they saw this we are at
Speaker 13: prime time. This is the epicenter of police terrorism being built.
Speaker 13: This is it, this is this is it.
Speaker 2: This is not each individual.
Speaker 13: We're trying to prevent more families, because if they build this,
Speaker 13: it's gonna be a lot more families that's gonna be
Speaker 13: crying and saying, they killed my baby. So we're out
Speaker 13: the epicenter of a cop city and you are silent.
Speaker 13: You're silent, But you was there for these families. You
Speaker 13: was there posting black lives matter. You was there saying
Speaker 13: stop police terrorism. But they're building a they're building a
Speaker 13: terrorist headquarters, and you don't have nothing to say. You're
Speaker 13: a hypocrite. You're a hypocrite, period, point blank.
Speaker 8: Brandy also talked about the hypocrisy of pushing forward cop
Speaker 8: city after the George Floyd uprising in twenty twenty.
Speaker 22: You know, three years ago, just in May, all these
Speaker 22: companies were sending out these emails saying that black lives matter.
Speaker 22: After George Floyd. They were pouring money into the community
Speaker 22: to show their support for black lives. But some of
Speaker 22: those same communities Home Depot, Coca Cola, Delta Airlines, waffle House.
Speaker 22: You guys, are I'm sure sent those emails out, and
Speaker 22: now you're putting money into something that does not respect
Speaker 22: black lives. So I think there's just this huge contradiction
Speaker 22: in who these companies say they are how they're showing up.
Speaker 8: Part of the growing propaganda battle over cop City is
Speaker 8: an attempt to frame this state of the arched militarized
Speaker 8: police training facility as a quote unquote public safety training center,
Speaker 8: embodying the call for police reform that liberals protested for
Speaker 8: in twenty twenty. Not only does this erase the abolitionist
Speaker 8: core of the twenty twenty uprising, but it also obfuscates
Speaker 8: the fact that cop City is indeed a direct response
Speaker 8: to twenty twenty, not in terms of police reform, but
Speaker 8: in the aftermath of the neoliberal police state being under
Speaker 8: genuine threat. Corporate America and police have made this pact
Speaker 8: to maintain each other's legitimacy, as one cannot survive without
Speaker 8: the other. Cop City is to ensure that what happened
Speaker 8: in twenty twenty will never happen again. After the clear
Speaker 8: cutting of around eighty acres in the Wallani Forest, there's
Speaker 8: been more of a focus on the stop Coop City
Speaker 8: wing of the movement than defend the forest. Sure, there
Speaker 8: are still three hundred acres to defend and eighty acres
Speaker 8: to restore, but as construction is getting more imminent, the
Speaker 8: specific cop city focus has taken center stage in messaging.
Speaker 22: When it was initially talked about, it was all about
Speaker 22: the environment. They're tearing down the forest and as marginalized
Speaker 22: poor people. If I am hearing that, I'm not seeing
Speaker 22: it as important. I'm trying to figure ou how much
Speaker 22: pay my rent, how muchy my kids, how I'm i
Speaker 22: pay my bills, how I'm getting to and from work,
Speaker 22: and so those things I think made it difficult to
Speaker 22: break into the households of people who really need to
Speaker 22: be paying attention. And I would dare to say even
Speaker 22: the people in the community. I watched some of the
Speaker 22: testimony from the city council meeting several weeks ago.
Speaker 7: In the.
Speaker 22: State representative that spoke first talked about how the church
Speaker 22: right next door to the facility didn't even know what
Speaker 22: was happening next door to them. So for the City
Speaker 22: of Atlanta to say, oh, we've done outreach people in
Speaker 22: the community, No, that's not true, right. But part of
Speaker 22: that is the way that the narrative has started, and
Speaker 22: I think they were like, Okay, that ain't got nothing
Speaker 22: to do with me. And then also the fact that
Speaker 22: the faces that they saw on t it was they're
Speaker 22: thinking this is a white lead, white organization, white problem.
Speaker 22: It's not our problem. So they haven't engaged. So I
Speaker 22: think those are all things that we have to consider
Speaker 22: that and let people know this is a diverse problem.
Speaker 22: It impacts everybody. It's going to impact people of color
Speaker 22: and poor and marginalized communities more than anybody else, just
Speaker 22: because of the nature of how policing is done in
Speaker 22: America and so and the and the problems that we
Speaker 22: still have with that. So our program is from Red
Speaker 22: Dogs to cop City, the Dirty South history of over
Speaker 22: policing Atlanta. So helping them understand how this is just
Speaker 22: a new iteration of what's been happening. So the Red
Speaker 22: Dog Unit was at some call it a gang within
Speaker 22: Atlanta PD for many years. It was disbanded in twenty eleven,
Speaker 22: but they were terrorizing low poor communities of color, and
Speaker 22: so cop City in the way that they're thinking about
Speaker 22: training these officers would be just a new iteration of that.
Speaker 22: So helping them understand that just because we have come
Speaker 22: far with the civil rights, with our civil rights, and
Speaker 22: I'm not even talking specifically about the sixties movement, but
Speaker 22: civil rights for people of color, women, LGBTQI plus communities.
Speaker 22: Just because we've come far doesn't mean it can't go back.
Speaker 8: Atlanta's Red Dogs inspired the Scorpion Unit in Memphis that
Speaker 8: killed Tyree Nichols this past January, and the current iteration
Speaker 8: of the Red Dogs in Atlanta is the Apex Unit,
Speaker 8: who have been very active in suppressing stop Cop City protests.
Speaker 8: I'm going to play three brief clips from the panel discussion.
Speaker 8: The first is from Mariah Parker, a local activist and
Speaker 8: former Georgia County commissioner.
Speaker 7: This is a war on the uprise in twenty twenty.
Speaker 5: Okay, this is.
Speaker 7: Of the law of suprise in North America.
Speaker 6: The Atlanta Police Foundation, who is the main driver and
Speaker 6: living funder and actually the.
Speaker 7: Owner of prop City. I keep forgetting the fact that
Speaker 7: this is not actually going to go busy.
Speaker 6: The old Police Foundation trying to reassert their control over
Speaker 6: black communities at a time when people are starting to
Speaker 6: understand that communities are made safe for by afordable housing
Speaker 6: and healthcare and childcare and education, and where They're supremacy
Speaker 6: in the public safety apparatus has been challenged, their dominance
Speaker 6: has been challenged, and so in response to that uprising,
Speaker 6: they seized hold of the narrative that more police training,
Speaker 6: more diversity in our officers would be the magic key
Speaker 6: to heal all the wounds in our communities and to
Speaker 6: actually deliver.
Speaker 7: A style of policing that serves some people.
Speaker 6: And so with that they were able to make arguments
Speaker 6: that cop city would be the answer to right.
Speaker 7: Allegedly rising crime rates.
Speaker 6: He always divides, et cetera, et cetera, when at the
Speaker 6: end of the day, they it's like it's a form
Speaker 6: of counter insurgency. The people rose up, and so this
Speaker 6: is the police rising up in response to reassert their dominance.
Speaker 8: Next is kJ Henson, an Atlanta local and organizer with
Speaker 8: Black Men Build and Blackmail Initiative Georgia.
Speaker 7: Where's clear that the police are not our protectors.
Speaker 5: Right, we.
Speaker 7: Suffered at the hands of the system on a daily basis.
Speaker 10: Right, the system was built upon our backs literally.
Speaker 23: So we see that we've been discarded, we've been abused
Speaker 23: by the system.
Speaker 7: And that's the point. It's not that we're disengaged because
Speaker 7: we don't care. We're disengaged because we do care. Right,
Speaker 7: every election cycle, it's black voters to the rescue. We're
Speaker 7: the folks that are most.
Speaker 23: Impacted by the decisions of the same elected officials that
Speaker 23: beg us to put them in position.
Speaker 7: We suffer because these people come to us and beg
Speaker 7: for votes, for canvassers, for money, and they turn around
Speaker 7: and they sell us out the first chance they need.
Speaker 2: So we're disengaged of a.
Speaker 8: Matter of.
Speaker 7: I can't get what I need from these people that
Speaker 7: say that they're for me. Right, the very means of
Speaker 7: the people are at risk.
Speaker 23: Cop city threatenings are very right to protest.
Speaker 7: Right, cop city threatens the.
Speaker 23: Right for us to stand in the street and use
Speaker 23: our voice as a means of building collective power as a.
Speaker 7: Viata cool for making societal change.
Speaker 2: You become a domestic terrorist, you get.
Speaker 7: Jailed without bail, without bond, you won't have a court date.
Speaker 7: I've been there myself, not for proestic terrorism.
Speaker 11: But just beco recording.
Speaker 23: So we're seeing the rise of fascism in a very
Speaker 23: real way.
Speaker 7: Like in the realistic ways.
Speaker 23: Comp City, like you said, is ground and zero for
Speaker 23: what would become a very popular trend, not just in
Speaker 23: America but across the world right.
Speaker 2: So it's on us to make sure that we do
Speaker 2: everything that's in our.
Speaker 7: Power to make sure that this day is stopped. Cop
Speaker 7: City is.
Speaker 23: Giving police the training and the ability to have urban
Speaker 23: warfare and suppression tactics at their will to.
Speaker 7: Be used against the people. Urban warfare and suppression not
Speaker 7: like thinking, not unlike what we.
Speaker 23: See in other countries, in other cities with organized resistance.
Speaker 8: Every Lastly, we have Reverend Keana Jones, member of the
Speaker 8: Faith Coalition Do Stop Cop City, whom we've heard from
Speaker 8: on this show before.
Speaker 7: I want every Black Atlanta to think about what you
Speaker 7: don't have.
Speaker 24: If you don't have affordable housing, it's because they putting
Speaker 24: the money.
Speaker 7: In the cop CI.
Speaker 6: If you can't pay your life bill, it's because that
Speaker 6: assistance got given back to the federal government, but they
Speaker 6: paying for cop C.
Speaker 25: If there are no policing alternatives and no urgent initiatives
Speaker 25: getting your communities, if they've given the money to cop sick,
Speaker 25: If you fell into that pop hoole on Posilion, it's
Speaker 25: because they give it the money to top C. If
Speaker 25: you can't walk out of your door and breath clean
Speaker 25: airs because they rather get it to top C.
Speaker 7: So Andre Diickins does not care about black people. I'm
Speaker 7: gonna do a Kanye West right now, but.
Speaker 24: I'm saying, I'm Murray Gigons don't care about black people.
Speaker 25: And Andre Nickens ain't no different than nobody else and
Speaker 25: some of those other so people out there who have.
Speaker 6: Those soul called names ain't doing nothing but black people.
Speaker 6: So once the game, what is Andre Diga is doing
Speaker 6: for you?
Speaker 24: If he is willing to say police and make sure
Speaker 24: that they got slot takes to roll around they walking
Speaker 24: around the ars in your neighborhood, your children walking out
Speaker 24: the house to hearing good shots constantly, What the Andre
Speaker 24: giggets care about you?
Speaker 7: Does his children hear that?
Speaker 13: Okay?
Speaker 10: God?
Speaker 8: It is important to mention the venue that that this
Speaker 8: was that this panel took place in, because this is
Speaker 8: like a very much like a it feels it feels
Speaker 8: like a black excellent type of like space, like that
Speaker 8: is the space.
Speaker 9: That it is.
Speaker 11: It's it is, it is a private club. It holds
Speaker 11: like an amount.
Speaker 5: Of like respect there cultural significance.
Speaker 8: And on this panel at at the gathering spot, the
Speaker 8: panelists were we're talking about how why Why is the
Speaker 8: mayor who meant many these people helped get elected because
Speaker 8: he had promises about, you know, helping out the community,
Speaker 8: giving millions of dollars to affordable housing. Why is he
Speaker 8: using now like sixty seventy million dollars that could go
Speaker 8: to affordable housing, that could go towards supporting black people
Speaker 8: in Atlanta. This is funneling all of that money into
Speaker 8: the police and into not even like the police department,
Speaker 8: a private police foundation, like funding the APFS.
Speaker 11: Project, not a city project.
Speaker 8: I think it was Keana who said that Andre Dickens
Speaker 8: does not care about black people. Yeah, and having that
Speaker 8: be said at the gathering spot, I think actually is
Speaker 8: very important and is worth worth talking about. As the
Speaker 8: referendum was progressing and people from across all sides of
Speaker 8: the movement, we're working in conjunction to spread awareness of
Speaker 8: Copcity and engage in action, the mayor was making attempts
Speaker 8: to divide the movement.
Speaker 10: Criminals are hiding in the middle of peaceful protests and
Speaker 10: sometimes they are doing their own separate acts of violence.
Speaker 10: Some of them are career arsonists and vandals from across
Speaker 10: the nation. Local activists have been alerted to this numerous times.
Speaker 10: These are the actions of blatantly outrageous, dangerous, and violent criminals.
Speaker 10: How are arsonists, vandals, violent actors able to be alongside
Speaker 10: peaceful protesters. You have individuals that will burn up construction equipment,
Speaker 10: light a fire to police vehicles, and then have a
Speaker 10: bouncy house party the next day with peaceful protesters at
Speaker 10: a park. So they will go to a park by day,
Speaker 10: and then by night they're burning up police equipment or
Speaker 10: setting fires or trying to destroy construction equipment. So these
Speaker 10: individuals are trying to use the guys of peaceful protests
Speaker 10: that maybe some local Atlantans may actually be engaged in
Speaker 10: desired conversation about their views on public safety. But these
Speaker 10: individuals have different views than those folks. These individuals are anarchists.
Speaker 10: They want to destroy. So these individuals are alongside these arsonists,
Speaker 10: these criminals are alongside peaceful protesters, and sometimes the peaceful
Speaker 10: protesters are aware of it, and sometimes they are not.
Speaker 10: We have made it clear to local activists that we
Speaker 10: know and individuals that tend to be peaceful, We're letting
Speaker 10: them know that we are aware that there are individuals
Speaker 10: that are in our city that have committed crimes across
Speaker 10: the nation, and that they are on your social media
Speaker 10: or in your network saying they're coming to your event
Speaker 10: to do the same.
Speaker 8: Mayor Dickens went further and essentially threatened that if you
Speaker 8: are a so called activist and you don't snitch, then
Speaker 8: the APD will treat you the same as a violent criminal.
Speaker 10: So when we give you that heads up as a
Speaker 10: local organizer, you should take that heads up and also
Speaker 10: see something, say something as we're asking any other the
Speaker 10: citizen to do. When peaceful protesters, when organizers are not
Speaker 10: utilizing their best judgment, then bad things can happen with
Speaker 10: them being alongside them, and it makes it real tough
Speaker 10: for APD to know who was the one with the
Speaker 10: dirty hands, so to speak. And so that's what the
Speaker 10: message that we want to get out to the public
Speaker 10: is that these individuals mean harm and you don't want
Speaker 10: to be around them or associated with them. When you are,
Speaker 10: it makes it difficult to tell who's who.
Speaker 8: The city wants the various wings of the fight to
Speaker 8: stop cop City to turn on each other, to resent
Speaker 8: each other, to so distrust and undermine any collective power.
Speaker 8: That's why the referendum's statement of solidarity explicitly rejecting respectability
Speaker 8: politics and the framing of violent and nonviolent resistance was
Speaker 8: so important, and online communicate claiming responsibility for torching police
Speaker 8: motorcycles on the last day of the Week of action
Speaker 8: addressed this dynamic quote. We took action after non combative
Speaker 8: demonstrations at Cadence Bank and Home Depot. The police attacked
Speaker 8: those demonstrations with no cause, as they do wherever and
Speaker 8: however the movement gathers. There can be no separation of
Speaker 8: time and space for tactics when police have turned society
Speaker 8: into a war zone. Despite this, we dispersed our activity
Speaker 8: as much as possible across their area of control. We
Speaker 8: encourage those who are pursuing a strategy of referendum to
Speaker 8: continue supporting all methods to stop cop City. If you
Speaker 8: defy the state's unilateral authority in any way, you will
Speaker 8: be seen as a valid target. As demonstrated throughout the
Speaker 8: history of this movement, including during this last Week of action,
Speaker 8: police will treat you like a violent criminal, whether you're
Speaker 8: holding a sign in a parking lot, bailing activists out
Speaker 8: of jail, or smashing a cop car. Only a group
Speaker 8: of activists in unincorporated Decab County, near the potential site
Speaker 8: of cop City, filed a lawsuit against the City of
Speaker 8: Atlanta and the State of Georgia, claiming the requirement that
Speaker 8: signature gatherers must themselves be Atlanta residents violated their First
Speaker 8: Amendment right to free speech and petition the government. Due
Speaker 8: to the potential constitutional violation, the lawsuit also requested the
Speaker 8: court reset the sixty day clock for gathering signatures while
Speaker 8: still counting the signatures that were already gathered.
Speaker 11: In mid July, the.
Speaker 8: City of Atlanta filed a reply in federal court arguing
Speaker 8: that the cop City referendum was wholly invalid since it
Speaker 8: seeks to revoke a land lease that has already been signed.
Speaker 8: The filing reads, in part, quote, repeal of a year's
Speaker 8: old ordinance cannot retroactively revoke authorization to do something that
Speaker 8: has already been done. But if the referendum could claim
Speaker 8: to result in a revocation or cancelation of the lease,
Speaker 8: they would still be invalid because it would amount to
Speaker 8: an impermissible impairment of that contract unquote. The city also
Speaker 8: argued that if the court does deem the Atlanta residency
Speaker 8: requirement for gathering signatures unconstitutional, then the entire referendum should
Speaker 8: be deemed unlawful. A rebuttal by the plaintiffs said that
Speaker 8: the city did not provide factual or legal evidence for
Speaker 8: its claims and misread the cited precedence. According to the plaintiffs,
Speaker 8: the land lease contract is ongoing, not an irreversible quote
Speaker 8: unquote one time event, and since the city authorized and
Speaker 8: issued the petition form, they skipped their chance to argue
Speaker 8: that the referendum is somehow invalid by already approving the
Speaker 8: language of the petition and letting the referendum process begin.
Speaker 8: Near the end of July, US District Court Judge Mark
Speaker 8: Cohen ruled in favor of the cop city referendum, allowing
Speaker 8: non Atlanta residents to collect signature and reset the sixty
Speaker 8: day clock to collect the roughly sixty thousand signatures needed
Speaker 8: to put the land lease on the ballot. In his ruling,
Speaker 8: Judge Mark Cohen said, quote requiring signature gatherers to be
Speaker 8: residents of the city imposes a severe burden on core
Speaker 8: political speech and does little to protect the city's interest
Speaker 8: in self governance unquote. Mary hooks. The tactical lead of
Speaker 8: the referendum coalition reacted to the ruling, saying quote, we
Speaker 8: are thrilled by Judge Cohen's ruling and the expansion of
Speaker 8: democracy to include our cab neighbors and level the playing
Speaker 8: field for our coalition unquote. The city quickly filed for
Speaker 8: an appeal, which was subsequently denied on August fourteenth, with
Speaker 8: the judge stating quote, the city's real concern may be
Speaker 8: that now that non residents have the ability to gather
Speaker 8: signatures on the petition for the entire time that they
Speaker 8: would have been permitted to do so had their initial
Speaker 8: request been granted, there is an increased possibility that a
Speaker 8: sufficient number of valid signatures could be obtained. As liberals
Speaker 8: cheered on the Fulton County District Attorney in Atlanta for
Speaker 8: indicting Trump and co conspirators for election tampering under rico charges,
Speaker 8: the same exact sort of charges that this office has
Speaker 8: used against young black rappers and have been wielded against
Speaker 8: the Stop Cop City movement, the City of Atlanta's own
Speaker 8: election interference by repressing the referendum has been largely ignored.
Speaker 8: Fulton County Court set Trump's bond for two hundred thousand
Speaker 8: dollars for attempting to overthrow a federal election. The same
Speaker 8: court set bond at three hundred and fifty five thousand
Speaker 8: dollars each for multiple protesters arrested for being merely present
Speaker 8: at a protest. After Georgia State Patrol killed force defender
Speaker 8: Torteguita in January of this year, during all of the
Speaker 8: glowing press for District Attorney Fanny Willis and the City
Speaker 8: of Atlanta, it was revealed that on August eleventh, the
Speaker 8: Atlanta Police Department killed a sixty two year old, unarmed
Speaker 8: black man named Johnny Holman while responding to a minor
Speaker 8: traffic accident. Both Holman and the unnamed second driver called
Speaker 8: nine one one after the accident. Holman told nine one
Speaker 8: one operators, quote, somebody ran into my truck unquote. After
Speaker 8: waiting for over an hour for police to arrive, twenty
Speaker 8: three year old officer Kiaran Kimbro responded to the scene.
Speaker 8: Kimbro joined APD in March of twenty twenty one and
Speaker 8: currently has an open complaint for quote sexual misconduct non
Speaker 8: criminal unquote. Johnny Holman, who served as a deacon in
Speaker 8: his church, called his kids to listen to how the
Speaker 8: officer was escalating the situation, and then an unknown witness
Speaker 8: helped this APD officer wrestle sixty two year old Johnny
Speaker 8: Holman to the ground and put him in handcuffs as
Speaker 8: the officer used his taser. To quote the Atlantic Community
Speaker 8: Press Collective quote, the children listen for seventeen minutes as
Speaker 8: they drove to the scene of the accident, hearing their
Speaker 8: father call for help after officer kimbro tased him. When
Speaker 8: they arrived on scene, they found officers giving chest compressions
Speaker 8: to their father.
Speaker 3: Unquote.
Speaker 8: Johnny Holman was then pronounced dead at Grady Hospital. A
Speaker 8: week after APD killed Holman, Another person incarcerated at Fulton
Speaker 8: County Jail died while being held on five thousand dollars
Speaker 8: bond after being denied seing the trebond for shoplifting less
Speaker 8: than five hundred dollars of goods. The City of Atlanta's
Speaker 8: own alleged voter suppression has continued. Initially, the cop city
Speaker 8: vote referendum hoped to not have to use the extra
Speaker 8: day is granted by the judge and submit the collected
Speaker 8: signatures on August twenty first, with the intention of getting
Speaker 8: them verified in time. To put the cop city vote
Speaker 8: on the upcoming November ballot come Monday, August twenty first,
Speaker 8: the referendum of put out statement that, despite collecting over
Speaker 8: one hundred thousand signatures, that they are delaying submitting the
Speaker 8: petition due to concerns that the city was going to
Speaker 8: employ voter suppression tactics during the validation process. The statement reads,
Speaker 8: in part quote, In recent days, we began to hear
Speaker 8: from reporters and sources inside city Hall that the City
Speaker 8: of Atlanta is planning to argue for a higher than
Speaker 8: previously reported legal minimum signature count for ballot access. More
Speaker 8: concerning were reports that they also planned to utilize signature
Speaker 8: match in their verification process, an archaic and widely abandoned
Speaker 8: tool of voter suppression that has been widely condemned across
Speaker 8: the political spectrum, including by the Republican controlled Georgia State legislature.
Speaker 8: Signature matching is a subjective form of a vote validation,
Speaker 8: which uses election workers to visually match signatures on a
Speaker 8: ballot or in this case of petition, to a previous
Speaker 8: signature on their driver's license or voter registration card. Hours
Speaker 8: after the referendum's statement, the city of Atlanta officially announced
Speaker 8: their intention to use his signature matching for the cop
Speaker 8: city vote referendum. Back in twenty eighteen, a federal judge
Speaker 8: in Georgia ruled that signature matching did not serve any
Speaker 8: legitimate interest and disenfranchised black and brown voters disproportionately. For years,
Speaker 8: the ACLU has advocated against and won multiple court cases
Speaker 8: against discriminatory signature matching processes. Fair Fight Action, a Georgia
Speaker 8: based voting rights organization founded by Stacy Abrams, responded to
Speaker 8: the news Atlanta would be using signature matching with a
Speaker 8: statement saying, quote, signature matching is a tool of voter
Speaker 8: suppression that litigated extensively in Georgia and removed from the
Speaker 8: mail in ballot process because of its harm to voters
Speaker 8: resulting in mass disenfranchisement. Using the discredited process of signature
Speaker 8: matching is unacceptable and risks unfairly rejecting thousands of valid petitions.
Speaker 8: Signature of verification is notoriously subjective, disproportionately impacts voters of color,
Speaker 8: and as biased against disabled and elderly voters. There is
Speaker 8: extensive precedent in Georgia showing the harms of this process,
Speaker 8: it must be relegated to the past. Fair Fight calls
Speaker 8: on the City of Atlanta to rescind their intent to
Speaker 8: use this process and to enact steps that fairly evaluate
Speaker 8: these petitions unquote. Facing the City of Atlanta's quote open
Speaker 8: and ongoing hostility to the cop city vote referendum, the
Speaker 8: coalition has decided to use the time extension granted by
Speaker 8: federal Judge Mark Cohen to continue collecting signatures to quote
Speaker 8: leave no doubt as to the will of Atlantic voters unquote.
Speaker 8: They now plan to submit petition signatures on September twenty third.
Speaker 8: The City Council will then have fifty days to validate
Speaker 8: the signatures, which means that, if successful, and assuming the
Speaker 8: city doesn't further interf the referendum would get put on
Speaker 8: the ballot during the March primary election in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 8: The vote being pushed into March adds a few complications.
Speaker 8: Turnout may skew more Republican as it's unlikely there will
Speaker 8: be a Democratic presidential primary, and the vote being seven
Speaker 8: months away disrupts the momentum that the campaign has been
Speaker 8: gaining over the past couple of months. People who sign
Speaker 8: the petition back in June would have to wait almost
Speaker 8: a whole year to vote on the ballot. The few
Speaker 8: extra months does give more time to educate the public
Speaker 8: about Cop City during a lead up to the election,
Speaker 8: but that goes both ways, which means that after two
Speaker 8: years of this movement mostly taking form as a ground
Speaker 8: war over territory, now for the time being, much of
Speaker 8: the fight to stop Cop City will change into a
Speaker 8: pr war in the public sphere. This shift from a
Speaker 8: physical offense to a metaphysical offense was something that I
Speaker 8: already felt coming back during the Week of action in
Speaker 8: terms of like cameras and spectacle the other The big
Speaker 8: feeling I had on the Saturday kickoff rally was like
Speaker 8: this just feels like society of the spectacle, Like.
Speaker 5: There's such a performance.
Speaker 8: It was very performative, but it was like almost like
Speaker 8: with all of the cameras looking at everything all the time,
Speaker 8: it was like are people trying to make a proximily
Speaker 8: of this movement for the cameras? Like is that has
Speaker 8: become almost more important?
Speaker 5: Or like it felt that way.
Speaker 8: This is a conversation that people have, like is it
Speaker 8: worth creating moments where we expect the police to lash
Speaker 8: out violently, Like, is that effective as a propaganda tactic?
Speaker 5: Yeah, and that if comes with losing while looking good,
Speaker 5: it does.
Speaker 8: Yeah, that is like, that is losing while looking good.
Speaker 8: But also I don't think that's nearly as effective as
Speaker 8: people think it is. I think after twenty twenty, I
Speaker 8: think people are kind of desensitized to a lot of
Speaker 8: police violence at protests. The visual the visuals of police
Speaker 8: hurting protesters, I don't think is nearly as impactful as
Speaker 8: it was even three years ago. So I think people
Speaker 8: are also realizing that and realizing that, hey, the sacrifice
Speaker 8: inherent in setting up actions where you know that you're
Speaker 8: probably going to get fucked up by police, that's not
Speaker 8: worth it. That one, it treats people as like tools.
Speaker 8: It treats people as disposable, which is, you know, that's
Speaker 8: not great if you want to build a long lasting movement,
Speaker 8: And that's not even very effective. As the public relations
Speaker 8: battle over the fate of cop City intensifies in the
Speaker 8: lead up to the vote, with the City of Atlanta
Speaker 8: undoubtedly ready to run a full election propaganda campaign, strategies
Speaker 8: of resistance cannot overlook the physical construction of the facility.
Speaker 8: Pre construction has been active and ongoing for a few
Speaker 8: months now, mostly in the form of tree clearing and
Speaker 8: land grading. Just a few days ago, the Atlanta Police
Speaker 8: Foundation updated their construction timeline, saying that they had just
Speaker 8: began installing a stone base for the main roadway, that
Speaker 8: irrigation and site lighting is now underway, and full lawn
Speaker 8: construction is set to quote begin in the next week
Speaker 8: or so. Unquote That now may be out of date,
Speaker 8: but based on the progress being made on the site,
Speaker 8: it's clear that construction is now imminent, and with the
Speaker 8: threat of the referendum, the APF will try to get
Speaker 8: as much built as quickly as possible to help with
Speaker 8: the pro cop city side of election messaging. One of
Speaker 8: the original goals of the referendum was to try to
Speaker 8: place an injunction on further construction until the ballot vote,
Speaker 8: but it's unknown if or when that would happen. In
Speaker 8: the meantime, activists may take a queue from Earth First
Speaker 8: and instead of trying to occupy the site, instead they
Speaker 8: might find creative ways to make the construction site hard
Speaker 8: to work on with the increased element of spectacle, placing
Speaker 8: a lot of extra eyes on pre announced public demonstrations,
Speaker 8: more secretive actions may start becoming more common. There's other
Speaker 8: actions that can happen more covertly, like if you're doing
Speaker 8: sabotage where you don't need to invite a camera crew
Speaker 8: to film.
Speaker 5: You do crimes. Why is move Why is?
Speaker 8: But no, it's also like as a rule, like why
Speaker 8: That's the other thing is like so many of these
Speaker 8: events during during these weeks of action are pre planned.
Speaker 8: That not only gives media heads up on like we're
Speaker 8: gonna film this, and this is also gonna that's gonna
Speaker 8: change the actions that happened while this is happening because
Speaker 8: everyone knows they're being launched, it also gives police heads.
Speaker 7: Up to.
Speaker 5: Shut down the paths your intrudgment career.
Speaker 8: So that I think that comes with the Week of
Speaker 8: Action format because if people coming in from out of town,
Speaker 8: they don't know where to go, if they're not already
Speaker 8: tied in with the movement, they don't know what what
Speaker 8: what exactly to do. So that's that's another thing that
Speaker 8: thinks could change during future actions that may not be.
Speaker 11: Part of the Week of Action is more covert.
Speaker 8: Let's pre planned, pre announced actions that are maybe a
Speaker 8: little bit more mischievous. In their recent statement on voter suppression,
Speaker 8: the referendum also announced, quote the coalition will consider using
Speaker 8: upcoming opportunities for non violent direct actions to direct the
Speaker 8: people's frustration with the city council's obstruction of the democratic
Speaker 8: process unquote. Camal Franklin of Community Movement Builders added quote,
Speaker 8: if the city needs to see a demonstration of the
Speaker 8: people's commitment to the issue, we're happy to provide one.
Speaker 2: Unquote.
Speaker 8: Police intentionally denying anarchists operating space by occupying the Wolani
Speaker 8: themselves may shift the more liberal side of the movement
Speaker 8: to now focus on rallies and events around the construction site,
Speaker 8: which could also inadvertently draw eyeballs away and open up
Speaker 8: other territory across the city that might be more vulnerable
Speaker 8: to attack by small groups to quote the direct action
Speaker 8: communicate claiming respont onsibility for torching the police motorcade on
Speaker 8: July first. Quote, while signatures are collected, the police are
Speaker 8: still killing. We cannot wait. If the referendum fails, actions
Speaker 8: like ours and Boulder will be the only means available unquote.
Speaker 8: With construction imminent, subcontractor tensions increasing and the City of
Speaker 8: Atlanta gambling with voter suppression. Right now, the movement really
Speaker 8: cannot afford to alienate the green anarchists that pioneered the
Speaker 8: early legitimacy of this movement with bold direct action. The
Speaker 8: Atlanta Police Foundation is trying to snatch a victory from
Speaker 8: the jaws of defeat. What happens in the next few
Speaker 8: months may push Atlanta to a dangerous tipping point. No
Speaker 8: matter the endpoint of this particular struggle, victory or defeat
Speaker 8: cannot be imagined as the end. The fight against Coppcity
Speaker 8: is one large battle in an ongoing war, a war
Speaker 8: of police militarization, racism, environmental justice, and against the incestuous
Speaker 8: neoliberal police state in its leviathan like formation. Based on
Speaker 8: what happens here in Atlanta, similar police project proposals will
Speaker 8: be recalibrated. As the South goes, so goes the nation.
Speaker 8: Capitalist realism posits that history is over, that it's a
Speaker 8: literal thing of the past, But it turns out you're
Speaker 8: living through it right now, so what will you do
Speaker 8: to create it? You can read more about the fights
Speaker 8: to stop Coopcity at Atlpresscollective dot com and donate to
Speaker 8: the Atlanta Solidarity Fund at atlsolidarity dot org.
Speaker 11: See you on the other side.
Speaker 1: Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 1: from now until the heat death of the universe. It
Speaker 1: Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 1: coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
Speaker 1: find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at
Speaker 1: coolzonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.