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Speaker 1: Hi, everyone, and welcome to it could happen here. It's
Speaker 1: a very special round table podcast today where we're going
Speaker 1: to discuss the United States ongoing campaign of bombing small
Speaker 1: boats in the Caribbean. I'm joined by Michael Palberg, an
Speaker 1: associate professor of political science at vir Junior Commonwealth University
Speaker 1: and a fellow at the Center for National Policy. Hi Michael,
Speaker 1: thanks for joining us.
Speaker 3: Hi, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: And Andrew is also here. Listeners of the show will
Speaker 1: be familiar with Andrew's work. He joins very often. In
Speaker 1: this instance, Andrew is talking as someone who is from
Speaker 1: Trinidad and Tobago, which of course is very much being
Speaker 1: impacted by this. Hey Andrew, Hey, what's going on much? Well,
Speaker 1: let's talk about what's going on, because something quite constantial
Speaker 1: is going on. What's going on is that the United
Speaker 1: States is carrying out a campaign of drone strikes against
Speaker 1: small vessels in the Caribbean. As far as we know,
Speaker 1: there have been seven strikes. At least thirty two people
Speaker 1: have been killed, two people have been detained and then repatriated,
Speaker 1: and a number of vessels have been struck. The US
Speaker 1: it's bringing its war on terrorism logic to the Western hemisphere.
Speaker 1: Rate it's claiming that it's fighting narco terrorism, and it's
Speaker 1: claiming that these boats are for the most part carrying
Speaker 1: Venezuelan nationals coming out of Venezuela. We've heard from Colombia
Speaker 1: that one Colombian national has been killed, the two people
Speaker 1: who are detained, and Ecuadorian and Colombian to Trinidadian or
Speaker 1: Trinidad and Tobago nationals have been killed as well. And
Speaker 1: this has sparked something of a and what it was
Speaker 1: a war of words, now it seems to be a
Speaker 1: war of more than that, like tariffs and sanctions. And
Speaker 1: if Columbia has withdrawn their diplomats from DC as of
Speaker 1: today or yesterday, so it sparks significant political turmoil in
Speaker 1: the Western hemisphere. I think we have a really good
Speaker 1: panel to talk about that. So to begin with, I
Speaker 1: guess we should start, Michael, Can you explain their accusation here?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 1: Is that these people are members of TRENDERRAA or potentially
Speaker 1: some other cartels that the Trump administration likes to talk about.
Speaker 1: We've talked about the prevalence of those groups, but can
Speaker 1: you explain very briefly what they are and I suppose
Speaker 1: the function that they have in Venezuela or what they're
Speaker 1: doing there versus what's been claimed that they're doing.
Speaker 4: So sure, I do research on organized crime in Latin
Speaker 4: America and ren de Aragua is a real organized criminal
Speaker 4: group in Venezuela and now all over Latin America. It
Speaker 4: is a street gang that started out as a prison gang.
Speaker 4: It does not primarily engage in international drug trafficking, moving
Speaker 4: large quantities of drugs across national borders or across oceans.
Speaker 4: It is primarily engaged in human trafficking.
Speaker 3: And extortion rackets.
Speaker 4: And it primarily follows the Venezuelan Niaskara people who have
Speaker 4: left Venezuela.
Speaker 3: And at this point it's an.
Speaker 4: Incredible twenty percent of the population over the last ten
Speaker 4: years of Maduro's presidency, so nearly eight million people wherever
Speaker 4: they go, and they take advantage of them, they extort
Speaker 4: them for money. They will also take money to move
Speaker 4: them across borders. But they're not a cartel in the
Speaker 4: way that we traditionally think about cartels like the Sinalo
Speaker 4: cartel or some of the Colombian cartels that that are
Speaker 4: engaged in international cocaine trafficking. And so it's highly unlikely
Speaker 4: that if the Drum administration is striking boats that they
Speaker 4: claim to be vessels transporting cocaine or Vensional, which is
Speaker 4: not made in Venezuela. It's primarily made in Mexico using
Speaker 4: precursor chemicals from China, and recently it's actually made the
Speaker 4: United States. Even that it's a tile synthetic drug, that's possible,
Speaker 4: and Venezuela, of course is not one of the countries
Speaker 4: where coca is grown and therefore cocaine comes from. If
Speaker 4: they are indeed striking drug boats, then they probably wouldn't
Speaker 4: be traded Atauga. And if they're striking boats with Brenda ar Aagua,
Speaker 4: they would be most likely striking migrant smuggling vessels, in
Speaker 4: which case the death count would likely be much higher.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so we should talk about the other Caribbean nations. Now,
Speaker 1: I guess I want to talk about trendent Tobago, but
Speaker 1: we should probably cover Columbia first, right, because we've seen
Speaker 1: significant pushback from Petro, President of Columbia, and then we've
Speaker 1: recently seen the President of the United States accused Petro,
Speaker 1: who is again President of Columbia, of being a drug
Speaker 1: trafficker himself, which is a fairy ludicrous claim on the
Speaker 1: face of it. But let's talk about Petro because he
Speaker 1: has some background in opposition to organize crime and drug smuggling. Actually, right,
Speaker 1: like he's been in this for a while. Can you
Speaker 1: explain a little bit of his career and then his
Speaker 1: recent stances.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So Petro is a mercurial figure in Columbia politics,
Speaker 4: has been for a long time. He is known for
Speaker 4: starting his career as a gorilla with a minor anti
Speaker 4: government guerrilla movement called the M nineteen Movement.
Speaker 3: Now, this is the.
Speaker 4: Movement which I don't know, maybe Western audiences are familiar
Speaker 4: with from the Netflix series Narcos, for having participated carried
Speaker 4: out the Palace of Justice siege at the Columbian Supreme Court,
Speaker 4: which was a major design during which the Clemian military
Speaker 4: went in guns blazing to rescue hostages of Supreme Court
Speaker 4: justices and other people just employed in the Palace of Justice,
Speaker 4: and most everyone died in a fire as a result.
Speaker 4: Petro was not involved in that operation as far as
Speaker 4: anyone knows. He was not involved in a violent comportations.
Speaker 4: And this organization, unlike the FARK and the LN never
Speaker 4: really got on the cocaine money train and therefore didn't
Speaker 4: last as long as those other organizations did. They did demobilize,
Speaker 4: they did turn to peaceful politics, and Petro began his
Speaker 4: political career at the local level Bogota and then eventually
Speaker 4: reached the presidency. So he is someone with a long
Speaker 4: political career and does have a constituency, does have a base,
Speaker 4: and he is the first truly left wing leader of Columbia,
Speaker 4: country that has been famously both ruled by the right
Speaker 4: and also very closely allied to the US. It's really
Speaker 4: the US's top out lie in Latin America, well in
Speaker 4: South America, at least specifically on security, given Plant Columbia
Speaker 4: and a long history of US giving as much as
Speaker 4: ten billion dollars over time to beef up Colombia's counterinsurgency
Speaker 4: and counter narcotics fights on our behalf.
Speaker 1: Yet too, he's a president of being a drug craft
Speaker 1: for is fairly ludicrous, like he's been, like even in
Speaker 1: his time as a senator, right, he was like I
Speaker 1: think he was sharing some like investigations or committees that
Speaker 1: looked to drug smuggling, if I remember correctly.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And so I would say Petro has been very
Speaker 4: critical of the War on Drugs approach generally, but he
Speaker 4: does still inherit this long standing deep relationship with the
Speaker 4: United States, and he's not exactly a full on peacenick
Speaker 4: when it comes to his own internal security. He did
Speaker 4: come it off as promising what he called total peace Possibal,
Speaker 4: a platform that was meant to put an end to
Speaker 4: all armed in certainties in the country by making a
Speaker 4: deal with the remaining combatant groups, namely the ELN, the
Speaker 4: dissident bar guerrillas, those who did not agree to the
Speaker 4: peace deal signed by Santos in twenty sixteen, and what's
Speaker 4: in different terms called the Klandel Gordfo or the AGC.
Speaker 4: The guy thamis self defense forces but one of the
Speaker 4: largest national narco paramilitary group that descends from the old
Speaker 4: AUC and he has failed in that and talks have
Speaker 4: broken off with those.
Speaker 3: Other armed groups.
Speaker 4: Colombia has gone back to war against them. The ELN
Speaker 4: has engaged in some pretty horrific violence, including a suicide
Speaker 4: car bombing the police barracks and the distant farc as
Speaker 4: well taking down a helicopter and a drone attack. So
Speaker 4: there has been a return to fairly high level, you know,
Speaker 4: armed insurgency in Colombia, even if it's nowhere near the
Speaker 4: level it was from the late nineties and early two thousands.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, And all of this is happening in the Caribbean,
Speaker 1: which is not a vast ocean, right, It's not a
Speaker 1: massive area of space. And as Andrew and I were
Speaker 1: talking about before we recorded, this has impacted other Caribbean nations,
Speaker 1: nations which are not the target of the Trump administration's
Speaker 1: aggression but nonetheless are being subjected to it. Do you
Speaker 1: want to talk, Andrew, Trinida and Tobago's in a particularly
Speaker 1: interesting the right word, It's not a great situation, right,
Speaker 1: because Trinidadian people are being killed at least two indeed,
Speaker 1: and the government is apparently completely unconcerned with this.
Speaker 6: Yes, I suppose I should provide some context. So there
Speaker 6: have been seven strikes to date and the fifth strike
Speaker 6: results in the deaths of two fishermen, the village of
Speaker 6: Las Cuevas in Trinantobago being claimed among the victims. The
Speaker 6: governments Transpigo has not made a statement about it, and
Speaker 6: the families have not really been contacted or providing any
Speaker 6: sort of support. Now, for those who are listening who
Speaker 6: may not know where Trinantopago is, it is an independent
Speaker 6: twin island republic in the Caribbean, and it's actually geographically
Speaker 6: an extension of South America. There's a gulf that separates it,
Speaker 6: but it's about eleven kilometers away from Venezuela itself. And
Speaker 6: our elections that took place this year led to the
Speaker 6: removal of the incumbent party and the return of the
Speaker 6: United National Congress, the political party led by Camera Posada Prossessor,
Speaker 6: claiming the government in a sweep landslide. Really, but despite
Speaker 6: that landslide, it wasn't really the result of popular support
Speaker 6: for the United National Congress. It was more so the
Speaker 6: lack of support for the previous party, the People's National Movement,
Speaker 6: which lost I believe two hundred thousand or so of
Speaker 6: their usual voters just didn't show up to vote for
Speaker 6: them this election, So the opposition party came into power
Speaker 6: when the opposition party wasn't the opposition. They in many
Speaker 6: ways appeared to just oppose for opposing's sake. They were
Speaker 6: in power previously from twenty ten to twenty fifteen, but
Speaker 6: they were voted out due to, among other things, corruption,
Speaker 6: and since then the party has further evolved into a
Speaker 6: sort of personality cult centered around came Pusser Prossessor, and
Speaker 6: her politics have also evolved in that time to align
Speaker 6: further and further toward the United States position. She's become
Speaker 6: something of a Trump Stan you know. She was kind
Speaker 6: of towing his line on a lot of issues. She
Speaker 6: supported Guido Juan Guido as the president of Venezuela and
Speaker 6: actually went so far while she was an opposition leader
Speaker 6: to call on the United States to sanction Trinantobago after
Speaker 6: the vice President of Venezuela had made a visit to
Speaker 6: the country to meet with the then Prime Minister Keith Rowley.
Speaker 6: So she has made her pro Washington stands clear for
Speaker 6: a very long time and as she's come into power,
Speaker 6: she has divoted our alignment with our regional bloc, the
Speaker 6: Caribbean Community cara COM and their call for the Caribbean
Speaker 6: to remain a zone of peace, and emphasized her continued
Speaker 6: endorsement for the US military's deployment outside of Venezuela's territorial waters,
Speaker 6: but still very much belligerent in her approach to this issue.
Speaker 6: You know, we have gone from a state that was
Speaker 6: respected as a non aligned entity that was able to
Speaker 6: approach various diplomatic partners from the US to China, to
Speaker 6: the eute in Yale to Venezuela as well, and we've
Speaker 6: gone from that sort of diplomatic approach to a very
Speaker 6: clear pro West stance that has really alienated US from
Speaker 6: the rest of the region and really placed US almost
Speaker 6: in the position of being a satellite state for US policy.
Speaker 6: You know, she's been inviting the US military if they
Speaker 6: want to base the operations Auto Turinad. She has opened
Speaker 6: our doors to that. She has called for the US
Speaker 6: to kill them all violently extraditionally, and stated that she
Speaker 6: is perfectly aligned with what the US is doing in
Speaker 6: the region, despite its flagrant violations of international law.
Speaker 1: Yeah, as you said earlier, right that them in this
Speaker 1: instance includes at least two of her own citizens.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 6: And I will say that this sort of Zone of
Speaker 6: East designation for the Caribbean, it is something that I
Speaker 6: would this is my personal opinion and consider more of
Speaker 6: a hopeful ideal rather than a reality. You know, the
Speaker 6: trafficking that takes place in the region does visit a
Speaker 6: lot of violence upon people. Is you know, by no
Speaker 6: means in reality a zone of peace. Even before the
Speaker 6: US's actions in the region. However, though we may not
Speaker 6: fit that postcard perfect perception of you know, tropical paradise,
Speaker 6: it is still necessary, I think for us to stand
Speaker 6: in solidarity as a region, to speak with one voice
Speaker 6: when it comes to these issues, especially as a continued
Speaker 6: existence depends on the observation of international law. The respect
Speaker 6: for the UN Charter as small islands or safety is
Speaker 6: really in numbers.
Speaker 7: And for the.
Speaker 6: Prime Minister to deviate from that solidarity in such a
Speaker 6: blatant way, it's really quite sad. But it shouldn't come
Speaker 6: as a surprise because there have been efforts by the
Speaker 6: US to divide Cara con in the past. During his
Speaker 6: first term, Trump had pulled some Cara Con countries into
Speaker 6: the LIMA Group, which was a US promoted coalition of
Speaker 6: right wing governments that was push in for regime change
Speaker 6: in Venezuela. And he's not doing the same thing with
Speaker 6: trying to get some Caracon governments to facilitate his actions
Speaker 6: towards Venezuela. They approached Grenada recently to try and get
Speaker 6: Grenada's assistance in basing a satellite there on the island.
Speaker 6: And it's really ironic that they would approach Grenada, which
Speaker 6: is also quite close to Venezuela, because Grenada is famously
Speaker 6: one of the countries that the United States invaded in
Speaker 6: October of nineteen eighty three.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think, I know. I say this a lot,
Speaker 1: but if you've listened to the song Washington Bullets by
Speaker 1: the Clash, and then you go to the border, you
Speaker 1: can kind of join up all the people from all
Speaker 1: the countries mentioned there and the outcome of US policy
Speaker 1: and what that does to migration over time. We should
Speaker 1: talk about the Venezuelan opposition. I guess, Michael, would you
Speaker 1: give I've done a pretty in depth discussion of Venezuela,
Speaker 1: a place where I have spent a decent amount of time,
Speaker 1: like I wanted to see that revolution myself when I
Speaker 1: was like nineteen and I was studying political science that
Speaker 1: I wanted to see what this like Pink Tide was about.
Speaker 1: And I have reported a lot on Venezuelan migrants people
Speaker 1: who are in new to the show. I guess the
Speaker 1: series I did from the Darien Gap would be where
Speaker 1: I would point you for my discussion of Venezuela and
Speaker 1: Venezuelan people. I still speak to people of Venezuela almost
Speaker 1: every day, but I think people could do myc with
Speaker 1: like a high level overview of the Venezuelan opposition. I
Speaker 1: guess we can talk about that about prize as well, which,
Speaker 1: despite what Donald Trump is saying, was not awarded to
Speaker 1: him this year.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So the big news is that Maria Quina Machado, who
Speaker 4: is the leader of the Venezuelan opposition as we as
Speaker 4: we know it today, was award of the Nobel Prize,
Speaker 4: which was a bit of a surprise and from a
Speaker 4: very US centric analysis. One idea that has been floated
Speaker 4: is that the Nobel Committee didn't want to award Trump
Speaker 4: the prize, but thought that maybe awarding it to an
Speaker 4: ally of Trump would we be away to modify Trump
Speaker 4: also possibly to encourage.
Speaker 3: Him to take a more peaceful approach at a.
Speaker 4: Time that the US is threatening armed intervention in some
Speaker 4: way in Venezuela, whether that is a counternarcotics operation or
Speaker 4: more likely a regime change operation of some kind, even
Speaker 4: though it's very unclear how they would get to regime
Speaker 4: change from blowing up boats, Wrea can blowing up people.
Speaker 1: Maybe we should pause and talk about regime change actually,
Speaker 1: because I like it's such a problematic idea. Right we
Speaker 1: have attempted regime changes. My career for the last several
Speaker 1: years has been reporting on the United States failed attempts
Speaker 1: to facilitate regime chams all over the world, right, Like,
Speaker 1: it's not something we're very good at. I don't think
Speaker 1: that the United States is going to invade maybe do
Speaker 1: you think differently? But I think we probably agree that
Speaker 1: the United States is unlikely to do like an Iraq
Speaker 1: style invasion of Venezuela. Can you explain the like why
Speaker 1: I suppose just just for people who you know, think
Speaker 1: that that's what's happening in the Caribbean at the moment
Speaker 1: with this concentration of forces.
Speaker 4: Well, it's undlikely to happen, because well, it's a very
Speaker 4: large country and it would take a lot more troops
Speaker 4: than what are currently deployed, which is approaching ten thousand now.
Speaker 4: But that's actually that includes all sorts of logistical support.
Speaker 4: The actual fighting force, the Marine Expeditionary Unit is actually
Speaker 4: a much smaller I've lived in Panama as a kid,
Speaker 4: and I was not old enough to be there for
Speaker 4: the invasion, but I lived there some years after that.
Speaker 4: That's probably the closest analog to this, at least the
Speaker 4: way that the Trump administration is promoting this, which is
Speaker 4: to say, a regime change operation that is disguised as
Speaker 4: a counter narcotics operation. Famously, nor Diega, it was not
Speaker 4: a war. It was an arrest of a foreign leader
Speaker 4: who was indeed involved in drug trafficking. And we knew
Speaker 4: that because he was literally a CIA asset whose drug
Speaker 4: trafficking was being protected as long as he was allied
Speaker 4: with the US against Cuban backed rebel groups in Central America.
Speaker 4: But at some point later he became too much of
Speaker 4: embarrassment for the US. Was genuinely a brutal guy. Pulled
Speaker 4: off the torture murder of Google Spot offortile, all sorts
Speaker 4: of nasty things. But the big difference is at that
Speaker 4: time and when I lived there, the US had multiple
Speaker 4: military basis in Panama. Panama was the headquarters of the
Speaker 4: US Southern Command, the Western Hemisphere, headquarters.
Speaker 3: Of the Pentagon.
Speaker 4: We had thirteen thousand troops already there ready to go.
Speaker 4: I think they doubled that for the invasion, which was
Speaker 4: officially termed Operation Just Cause, usually called Operation Blue Spoon.
Speaker 3: But they had to come with the sex of your day.
Speaker 4: And of course Panama is a tiny country and Venezuela
Speaker 4: is twenty times larger than Panama.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it's fuss, so it's very odd.
Speaker 4: It's obviously they have deployed many more troops and a
Speaker 4: much larger fleet than it's necessary for a counter narcotics operation. Incidentally,
Speaker 4: it's the US Coast Guard that carries out counter narcotics
Speaker 4: interdictions and does it very effectively, and incidentally does it
Speaker 4: with the cooperation of other countries which coordinate intelligence or
Speaker 4: just simply surveillance of suspicious ships or boats or planes
Speaker 4: and tip off the US Coast Guard. Even the Cuban
Speaker 4: government does that. In fact, it's the Coast Guard that
Speaker 4: is the US agency that has the best relationships with Cuba.
Speaker 4: It's oftentimes diplomacy kind of starts with the Coastguard's ties
Speaker 4: with Cuba. But anyway, that aside, it doesn't make sense
Speaker 4: from a counter narcotics standpoint, because look, if you actually
Speaker 4: wanted to break up a cartel, what do you do?
Speaker 4: I mean, if you are a prosecutor investigator, right, you
Speaker 4: capture the smugglers, you seize the cargo, the contraband, which
Speaker 4: is evidence. Then you try to flip them up for
Speaker 4: immunity for whoever your real targets are. Maybe your target
Speaker 4: is Maduro or someone else in the regime. But you
Speaker 4: can't do that when you kill everyone on the boat. Yeah, right,
Speaker 4: And I think the fact that in I think the
Speaker 4: latest boat strike, they didn't manage to kill everyone, and
Speaker 4: a couple of them got away, and then the US,
Speaker 4: rather than charge them with a crime, they just turned
Speaker 4: them back around. And you would think that if the
Speaker 4: US is so certain that the people on those boats
Speaker 4: are drug trafficking terrorists that they want to kill them,
Speaker 4: then you'd think they would have enough evidence to charge
Speaker 4: them to prosecute them of them. Apparently not. So this
Speaker 4: is all to say the idea that this is a
Speaker 4: counternarcocks operation doesn't hold up.
Speaker 3: Clearly.
Speaker 4: It is meant to be more of a regime change operation,
Speaker 4: but again I don't see how the one leads to
Speaker 4: the other. I believe that Trump thinks that if he
Speaker 4: just saber rattles a little bit and possibly tries some
Speaker 4: decapitation strikes the way that the US did on Soleimani
Speaker 4: and Iran, that's somehow the regime is going to collapse,
Speaker 4: and that does not make any sense. Maduro has surrounded
Speaker 4: himself with the security, a lot of it, including through
Speaker 4: Cuban advisors.
Speaker 8: He keeps his whereabouts very secret.
Speaker 4: Even if somehow they were to drone strike him, it's
Speaker 4: not as if the regime as a whole would all
Speaker 4: because it is an extremely militarized regime that is upheld
Speaker 4: by the armed forces who are not going to break
Speaker 4: with him. Because they have a hand in every lucrative
Speaker 4: business both legal and illegal, in Venezuela.
Speaker 3: They're not going to be.
Speaker 4: Paid off or not be swayed by a bounty that
Speaker 4: is currently what something like fifty million dollars. I mean,
Speaker 4: there are people around Madula that have made upwards of
Speaker 4: a billion dollars in oil rents. So it's not like
Speaker 4: you could pay off people to betray either.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's not. Nor is it like a cult
Speaker 1: of personality situation, like certainly not. Now, Java has had
Speaker 1: something of a sort of charismatic leadership role, but Madula
Speaker 1: is not that. So let's talk about the opposition in
Speaker 1: Venezuela in so much as like I guess if we
Speaker 1: go back to the election last year, right, that start
Speaker 1: with the election and explain to people what happened there
Speaker 1: and then the subsequent sort of avenues that are now
Speaker 1: open or the avenues of that opposition and is now exploring,
Speaker 1: if that's okay.
Speaker 4: But there was an election quote unquote that took place
Speaker 4: last year. It was broker largely by the US. The
Speaker 4: US under the my administration was pushing for some kind
Speaker 4: of negotiations between the opposition and Venezuelan government. They convinced
Speaker 4: enough people in the opposition to stand for elections under
Speaker 4: what was called the Barbados Agreement in twenty twenty three.
Speaker 4: And this was meant to be in exchange of partial
Speaker 4: lifting the sectoral sanctions that have been in place on
Speaker 4: Venezuela for a long time, in which the Trump administration.
Speaker 4: The first Trump administration really tightened in exchange for the
Speaker 4: Vodora government agreeing to stand for elections, and those elections
Speaker 4: happened last year. It was pretty clear from free electoral
Speaker 4: surveys and from exit polls and from the vote returns
Speaker 4: that were coming in at the time, that the opposite Cacada,
Speaker 4: was going to win by an enormous march, by a
Speaker 4: thirty five point margin. The candidate was officially in Mundo Gonzales,
Speaker 4: but he was candidates mostly because Murray Cornea and Matado,
Speaker 4: the now Nobel Prize laureate, was barred from running. So
Speaker 4: she for blessing to Gonzales to be basically her proxy,
Speaker 4: and people were more or less voting for both of them,
Speaker 4: so to speak. But both he and her are much
Speaker 4: more popular. Maduro, who by all accounts as an extremely
Speaker 4: unpopular leader, especially in contrast to as you said, Ugu Chavas, who,
Speaker 4: for all his faults, was a genuinely charismatic yeah leader,
Speaker 4: and you know, he did stand for elections and win them,
Speaker 4: you know, pretty convincingly.
Speaker 8: Incidentally, oil the.
Speaker 4: Price of oil was about one hundred dollars a barrel
Speaker 4: when he was president, and he was able to spend
Speaker 4: a lot on social programs, but that is sid Yeah,
Speaker 4: it helps. Madudo is pretty unpopular with this point. He
Speaker 4: is pretty widely seen as both a tyrant and also
Speaker 4: quite incompetent at managing basic state services. So he was
Speaker 4: going to lose unless he stole the what he did.
Speaker 4: The CNE the Vegetlain and Election Board announced that he
Speaker 4: had won with just fifty one percent of the vote,
Speaker 4: which is I have to say, I give him credit
Speaker 4: for being subtle. I expected them to announce that he
Speaker 4: won with like ninety nine percent of the vote.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and a sad margin.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, No one believed it, And I have to
Speaker 4: say one of my critiques of the bottom administration is
Speaker 4: that I think the whole thing was rather naive. I
Speaker 4: think they calculated that somehow Maduro would let himself be
Speaker 4: voted out of office. Maduro is we talked about under
Speaker 4: a bounty, has a bounty on his head. Many people
Speaker 4: in the US politics, of the US Republican in particular,
Speaker 4: have promised that they're going to send him to jail.
Speaker 4: So why would someone in that position, you know, give
Speaker 4: up power. I think, you know, he saw what happened
Speaker 4: to Kadafi and he's, you know, he doesn't want to
Speaker 4: be jailed or killed. And at the same time, the
Speaker 4: stick part of the Karen and Stick mechanism was that
Speaker 4: they would simply go back to the sanctions that existed before,
Speaker 4: which was called a snapback. And these those sanctions that
Speaker 4: the Venezuelan government has weathered for for many, many years,
Speaker 4: so it's not really that much of a disincentive. So anyway,
Speaker 4: everyone basically admits at this point that he stole the election,
Speaker 4: but what are you going to do about it? The opposition,
Speaker 4: for its part, has taken different approaches to how to
Speaker 4: confront him and is famously very divided. The Venezuelan opposition
Speaker 4: has never really been on the same page. They've never
Speaker 4: really had an uncontested leader. Bray CORNEYA Machado is about
Speaker 4: the closest they have had, but she herself really represents
Speaker 4: more one wing of the opposition, the more you might
Speaker 4: say hard line wing. For a long time, there was
Speaker 4: a hard line wing personify by Lopez, and there was
Speaker 4: a more I don't know if you call it a
Speaker 4: soft line or liberal or just more willing to talk
Speaker 4: to the regime wing led by Capriles.
Speaker 3: Who ran against Alto in the first election.
Speaker 4: And it's even within those factions there are there competing personality.
Speaker 4: It's a lot of it really is more personal and ideological.
Speaker 4: But Marie Corna Machado, she is on the right politically.
Speaker 4: She you know, styles herself after Margaret that she is also,
Speaker 4: I will give a credit for this, a very good organizer.
Speaker 4: She is famously kind of gone into communities that have
Speaker 4: historically voted with the Cha Vista left and convinced many
Speaker 4: people to leave that coalition. And also to have her credit,
Speaker 4: you know, I would say she is a very brave person.
Speaker 4: She has remained into the country at a time that
Speaker 4: many most opposition leaders, including Amerdo Gonzalez A, plied the country. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and she's been in hiding. She knows that the regime
Speaker 4: would arrest, if not kill her at its soonest opportunity.
Speaker 4: Yet she still shows up unannounced at at events, at
Speaker 4: rallies and makes speeches. So she has achieved this kind
Speaker 4: of mythic figure and this is something that obviously is
Speaker 4: only going to grow with the Nobel Prize. So then
Speaker 4: the question is what will this Nobel do. I think
Speaker 4: that one calculation is that it will simply keep her alive.
Speaker 4: You know, it'll be much harder for the material government
Speaker 4: to kill her if you know, if they would be
Speaker 4: killing an be laureate, So that may buy her a
Speaker 4: little bit more time.
Speaker 1: Try to best them on the first one to kill
Speaker 1: a novel laureate.
Speaker 4: I guess, right, right, yeah, But you know, will it
Speaker 4: bring peace? I'm not so sure, because Marik Gordon Machaalo
Speaker 4: has also been very closely allied and supportive of the
Speaker 4: Trump administration, and her side of the opposition has been
Speaker 4: encouraging the military strikes, backing sanctions, even though the sanctions
Speaker 4: both have done nothing to dislodge Maduro and also contribute
Speaker 4: to a great deal of suffering for the Venezuelan people.
Speaker 4: And I have to say, look, I'm not Venezuela. I
Speaker 4: have no right to give it the Venezuelan opposition advice.
Speaker 4: I would say that if they have tried multiple elections,
Speaker 4: you know, at least two of which have been stolen.
Speaker 4: If they have tried, you know, you might say more
Speaker 4: democratic means, and nothing has happened. I can understand why
Speaker 4: many people would think that a more radical approach is
Speaker 4: the only option left on the table. However, that approach
Speaker 4: hasn't done anything either, you know, sanctions have not to
Speaker 4: dislodge Maduro. Blowing up boats of possible drug traffickers, maybe
Speaker 4: just fishermen has not done anything.
Speaker 3: I think that nothing.
Speaker 4: Appears likely to lead to regime change. But I can
Speaker 4: understand the desperation of people living under what is broadly
Speaker 4: acknowledged to be an extremely repressive region.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and just the grinding poverty of everyday life in
Speaker 1: Venezuela is so like I've heard so many stories from
Speaker 1: so many people of such a difficult existence there. I
Speaker 1: can understand people's desperation, Andrew, you know, it's spoken about
Speaker 1: it like the Gulf between the government of Trinidad and
Speaker 1: Tobago and the people of Trinidad and Tobago right now,
Speaker 1: And obviously the same is true in Venezuela.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: It's not the opposition figures living in Spain who suffer
Speaker 1: when we have these sanctions, Right, it's not opposition can
Speaker 1: to get blown up when they go fishing. It's regular
Speaker 1: working class when it's way than people. Yeah, so do
Speaker 1: you want to talk about like, I'm not even sure
Speaker 1: what we can do by way of solidarity with these
Speaker 1: of these nations, But maybe you have some thoughts on that.
Speaker 6: I'm honestly at something of our loss myself, speaking from
Speaker 6: a small island, I think the US's superpower status is
Speaker 6: almost like into an eltriche horror. It feels like it's
Speaker 6: unfathomable how you could even go about approaching Other times,
Speaker 6: you don't try to remind myself that people have thought,
Speaker 6: and one you know, people have resisted, and one you know,
Speaker 6: currently there isn't that much going on.
Speaker 7: There are murmurs.
Speaker 6: They are momas of fair of disdain or disagreement, of distrust.
Speaker 6: In terms of grassroots effort, there's a lot still to
Speaker 6: be done.
Speaker 7: The leader of the move On for.
Speaker 6: Social Justice, which is a small a progressive political party
Speaker 6: in Toronto, Bago, it's a guy named David Abdullah, and
Speaker 6: he has been part of this assembly of Caribbean people
Speaker 6: who have been signing and issuing a declaration reasserting our
Speaker 6: desire for peace, and that has been signed by various
Speaker 6: progressive organizations, social movements and figures across the Caribbean. And
Speaker 6: there was also an effort last week Thursday, that's October sixteenth,
Speaker 6: to organize a regionwide day of action in defense of
Speaker 6: the Caribbean, and so different actions were taking place all
Speaker 6: over in fifteen countries. We had press conferences, we had
Speaker 6: state months, and we had pickets at sit in US
Speaker 6: embassys and public demonstrations. It was kind of in the
Speaker 6: middle of the day on a Thursday, so there wasn't
Speaker 6: that big of its out from Baraiso when I had gone,
Speaker 6: but it shows that there is and from the at
Speaker 6: least anecdotal experience, there is a desire to keep the
Speaker 6: US out of the situation, you know, despite the issues
Speaker 6: of the Venezuelan government, despite the issues of our own governments.
Speaker 7: We don't want intervention, you know.
Speaker 6: And right now, all we can really levy is our voices,
Speaker 6: you know, our woods and all we can really do.
Speaker 6: I think, besides protest, what is going on is prepare
Speaker 6: for the worst, to ensure that we have you know,
Speaker 6: sit and support systems in place in case, you know,
Speaker 6: push comes to shove.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's pretty bleak, Michael. Do you have anything to
Speaker 1: add on how people can can be in solidarity with
Speaker 1: the people of Venezuela currently.
Speaker 4: Well, I've been calling for people broadly throughout the world
Speaker 4: to have solidarity more with people than with states, and
Speaker 4: certainly with veness world people as opposed to the Venezuelan state.
Speaker 4: I wrote something for the Center or International Policy about this,
Speaker 4: and listen, you know, it's not my place to police
Speaker 4: the left, so to speak. But you know, as someone
Speaker 4: speaking personally who comes from the labor movement, you know,
Speaker 4: comes from the Bernie Allied left, so to speak, you know,
Speaker 4: I do think it's been a little bit uncomfortable to
Speaker 4: observe how certain elements of the global left have have
Speaker 4: stood up for the Madu regime, or the very least
Speaker 4: been The criticism of it has been taboo. And I
Speaker 4: think a lot of that is a legacy of Tapas
Speaker 4: Chapas having this strong personal charisma, but also that he
Speaker 4: was willing to confront the United States the Bush administration
Speaker 4: at a time of the Iraq War, you know, especially
Speaker 4: low point in the US's global reputation. Also Venezuela's oil
Speaker 4: rants at the time, which we're financing a lot of
Speaker 4: not just social programs Venezuela, but a lot of financial
Speaker 4: largests to Allied states and movements around around the region.
Speaker 4: So a lot of left parties reflexively defended Maduro even
Speaker 4: as his repression and mismanagement just ramped up. I will
Speaker 4: say that's fading. You know, we were seeing this within
Speaker 4: Latin America. First of all, there's kind of a generational divide,
Speaker 4: and some of the older generational Latin American left, like
Speaker 4: Lula or like Petro, have not been overwhelmingly anti Maduru,
Speaker 4: but have expressed skepticism about the electoral results. But then
Speaker 4: there's a younger generation such as Borich and Chile, Chile
Speaker 4: and Idavolo and Guatemala who have been openly very critical
Speaker 4: about Duro and want to just not let him or
Speaker 4: his camp so to speak, define what it means to
Speaker 4: be on the left. And really the only countries that
Speaker 4: have unquestionably backed him at this point are Bolivia, Cuba,
Speaker 4: but also outside of the region, Russia, Iran, China. So
Speaker 4: I think that we should ask ourselves, like, who do
Speaker 4: we think is a more credible arbiter of progressive values?
Speaker 4: Is it Borich and Chile or is it Putin, you know,
Speaker 4: even not even the commonist part of Venezuela and no
Speaker 4: longer that's one of my favorite facts, as he has
Speaker 4: had their militants killed, you know, allegedly as well.
Speaker 8: So it's just it's not.
Speaker 4: Helpful to view the world for in this campus lens.
Speaker 4: You know, I think that if people, whether they identify
Speaker 4: as on the left or or whatever, want to show solidarity,
Speaker 4: I think it should be with the Venezuelan people, which means.
Speaker 8: Listening to voices within civil society.
Speaker 3: In Venezuela.
Speaker 4: There are a lot of NGOs, there are a lot
Speaker 4: of labor unions, there are a lot of human rights
Speaker 4: advocates that are not opposition parties, that are not running
Speaker 4: for office. They're not necessarily calling for regime change. Made
Speaker 4: them very critical of sanctions, but they have tried to
Speaker 4: push for better changes, you know, quality of life, you know,
Speaker 4: reforms that might lead to less repression, open up more
Speaker 4: space for civil society, and you know, those things are
Speaker 4: necessary when people are really living.
Speaker 3: Day by day, you know.
Speaker 4: And I think that if people on the left want
Speaker 4: to play the long game and understand care about the
Speaker 4: prospects of the future, they need to understand that the
Speaker 4: Maduers is the worst model for them to be associated with,
Speaker 4: you know. And this has already been taking place with campaigns,
Speaker 4: selectoral campaigns around Latin America where Cannon's on the right
Speaker 4: run against the boogeyman of you know, Chabbismo, of like
Speaker 4: of a Maduro model, and it makes sense. And if
Speaker 4: a lot of people on the left are very skeptical
Speaker 4: of Maria Croneamachado, like I have skeptism about some of
Speaker 4: for policy platforms of you know, privatization and and other
Speaker 4: neoliberal ideas, they also shouldn't be surprised if there's been
Speaker 4: a decade of people being told that this model of corruption, authoritarianism,
Speaker 4: state terror, criminal insecurity, that's what socialism is. Then people
Speaker 4: are gonna believe that, and then they're going to then
Speaker 4: their vote against whatever that is. And this model has
Speaker 4: provoked you know, the greatest refugee crisis, certainly in the region,
Speaker 4: eight million people.
Speaker 3: They're all carrying.
Speaker 4: With them stories about why they left right And so
Speaker 4: if there ever were to be democratic collections in Venezuela,
Speaker 4: it's pretty clear the country would turn to the right.
Speaker 3: And I don't think we should be surprised by that,
Speaker 3: you know.
Speaker 4: And I think we should also recognize that many of
Speaker 4: the things that Maludor embodies, these strong men politics, are
Speaker 4: things that are embodied by other strong men, not just
Speaker 4: on the left too.
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 4: I would just point out that least according to his son,
Speaker 4: Trump has privately expressed a lot of admiration for Madudo.
Speaker 4: I read John Bolton's book, and you know, the former
Speaker 4: National Security Visor. You know, maybe he has a lot
Speaker 4: of reasons to lie, but you know, he did say
Speaker 4: that Trump privately expressed a lot of admirasy for Maludor being,
Speaker 4: in his words, too smart and too tough to be overthrown.
Speaker 4: You know, was really happy to see him sprounded by
Speaker 4: what he called all these good looking generals. He disparage
Speaker 4: one Guido calling him the Beto Rourke of Venezuela means
Speaker 4: you know, so, I think that there is there's something
Speaker 4: he said about strong men recognizing strong men, and a
Speaker 4: lot of these authoritarian lesson are not limited to one
Speaker 4: side of the ideological spectrum.
Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely. I find that tendency on the American left
Speaker 1: or and that sort of Internet left to be massively frustrating.
Speaker 1: Like as someone who went there to see the revolution,
Speaker 1: who went there to understand it, and who spent masses
Speaker 1: of time with Venezuelan people in the Darien Gap at
Speaker 1: the border in Venezuela, I'm very fond of Venezuelan people,
Speaker 1: and I think, yeah, our sort of direity should be
Speaker 1: with them, not with some strong man's state. We saw
Speaker 1: this in Syria as well, right Like, it is heartbreaking,
Speaker 1: genuinely heartbreaking to explain to people how someone who identifies
Speaker 1: as a leftist is also denying that their children were
Speaker 1: gassed by chemical weapons in Syria. Right This campus graze tendency,
Speaker 1: and the American lefts specifically, is incredibly toxic, and anybody
Speaker 1: who seriously considers themselves to be a lest it's massively
Speaker 1: undermining any credibility they have when they associate themselves with
Speaker 1: regimes which willingly murder their own people. I would like
Speaker 1: to see people stop doing that. Perhaps both of you
Speaker 1: could finish up by suggesting US coverage of this has
Speaker 1: not been great, right like, it tends to focus on
Speaker 1: the United States very much, and of Venezuela kind of
Speaker 1: appears as a monolithic entity. Turning down Tobago rarely gets
Speaker 1: any coverage in the US media. I did see I
Speaker 1: think Reuter's or AP had done a piece about how
Speaker 1: fishermen were elected to go out. I would like to
Speaker 1: see more of that kind of reporting. Perhaps both of
Speaker 1: you could suggest a couple of sources where people could
Speaker 1: read about this.
Speaker 6: Sure, at least on my end, I suggest looking into
Speaker 6: all local news. Now, it's not the best source in
Speaker 6: terms of actual interrogation of the issues and the ways
Speaker 6: in which some of the narratives just kind of get
Speaker 6: repeated uncritically, but you do get at least the occasional interview,
Speaker 6: the occasional quote from a non ust Department source. I
Speaker 6: would also suggest on Instagram there are a couple of
Speaker 6: pages that bring a more radical progressive voice from the Caribbean.
Speaker 6: There's a page called Vintage Caribbean and there's another page
Speaker 6: called Trinbiago for Palestine, and both of those have been
Speaker 6: doing a lot of coverage on this particular incident lately,
Speaker 6: So you can look through those as well if you
Speaker 6: want to get us sort of a grassroots steak on
Speaker 6: the situation.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't really have any go to sources on this.
Speaker 8: I would say that it's enough of an interaction once
Speaker 8: and that all.
Speaker 3: The major news sources you're covering it.
Speaker 4: So you can read really any news source in Latin
Speaker 4: America if you speak Spanish Portuguese and see how that
Speaker 4: recording is different. Also, incidentally, by in Spain, you know
Speaker 4: quotes on the side.
Speaker 3: They do pretty good reporting. Yeah, they've been doing pretty.
Speaker 4: Good reporting and there's lots of blogs as well, and
Speaker 4: you know, newsletters check out. I will say, just made this.
Speaker 4: I'm biased because I focus a lot on crime. The
Speaker 4: site Insight Crime is pretty good in terms of looking
Speaker 4: into specific criminal groups, liked Aragua and calling question if
Speaker 4: you know, if this really is a you know, it's
Speaker 4: something that is controlled by the puppet master from you know, Flores,
Speaker 4: you know, Likeldor and some of these, some of these
Speaker 4: narratives that are justifying this.
Speaker 3: I'd also just as.
Speaker 4: A recommendation, I would say, you know, maybe it should
Speaker 4: be a little bit skeptical too about the timing and
Speaker 4: the purposes of these things. I did point out in
Speaker 4: a piece that I wrote for the Center for National Policy.
Speaker 4: Then the first boat strike happened on the same day
Speaker 4: that the House Judiciary Committee was releasing a redacted number
Speaker 4: of files related to the Jeffrey Epstein case. You know,
Speaker 4: and I think that there are many reasons why this
Speaker 4: administration would I would like to use this confrontation as
Speaker 4: a conmane distraction from from other things that they would
Speaker 4: rather not be talking about.
Speaker 1: Yeah, leak, I think it's probably a reasonable conclusion. Give
Speaker 1: them where we're at. Where can people find both of
Speaker 1: you on if they want to follow you online on
Speaker 1: social media or find more of your writing. We'll start
Speaker 1: with you, Andrew.
Speaker 6: Shure, Well, you can find me on my YouTube channel
Speaker 6: YouTube dot com, slash Andrew's own, or you could just
Speaker 6: call my website for all my other links, Andrew sage
Speaker 6: dot org.
Speaker 4: How about you, Michael, I do have a website. You
Speaker 4: can look up my name and that should come up.
Speaker 4: I haven't updated it recently, I probably should. I'm also
Speaker 4: on Twitter x blue Sky as my name m.
Speaker 3: P A A R L B B r G, so
Speaker 3: you can look me up there.
Speaker 1: Great, Thank you very much.
Speaker 7: With you.
Speaker 9: Welcome to it up here a podcast where you good
Speaker 9: and not everything that is called co op is good.
Speaker 10: Sometimes they're not actually really co ops.
Speaker 9: I am your host, Mia Long, and today we are
Speaker 9: joined by the people struggling under the tyrannical fist of
Speaker 9: a co op, a thing that shouldn't be possible and
Speaker 9: yet somehow.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Yeah, So we are talking today with Es and Finley,
Speaker 9: who are booksellers at the Seminary co Op in Chicago.
Speaker 9: And yeah, we are welcoming the union back to the show.
Speaker 9: And dear God, what a disaster.
Speaker 8: What a year it has been.
Speaker 11: Well, it's really great to be found. I wish we
Speaker 11: were back with slightly better news or yeah, since we
Speaker 11: were last here, certainly, Yeah, because when we last spoke,
Speaker 11: we had just sort of theatrically announced to our management
Speaker 11: that we were in an organized shop with the IWW
Speaker 11: and we were going to be bargaining with them for
Speaker 11: better wages and humane working conditions.
Speaker 12: For us all.
Speaker 11: And they were like, yeah, you're a union, we so
Speaker 11: recognize that, and then they have sat on their hands
Speaker 11: ever since.
Speaker 9: Yeah, so let's roll back all the way to the
Speaker 9: beginning and explain a little bit about what the Seminary
Speaker 9: co Op is for people who weren't here. How many
Speaker 9: years ago was that though?
Speaker 8: That must have been last year.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, it was a while ago.
Speaker 1: I don't know, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 11: So the Seminary co Op is a set of two
Speaker 11: bookstores in Hyde Park. The Seminary co Op Bookstore, which
Speaker 11: is a misnomer on two out of free counts, it's
Speaker 11: not a seminary anymore. It's not a co op anymore.
Speaker 11: It is still a bookstore, although it is a not
Speaker 11: for profit bookstore, which is a mysterious category of business,
Speaker 11: said that doesn't exist anywhere else, baffling.
Speaker 8: Yeah, briefly, just to enerject, I do think when I
Speaker 8: would announce events and sort of give this exact breakdown
Speaker 8: for audiences, like I said, not for profit bookstore whose
Speaker 8: mission is book selling, right, And when I was hired of,
Speaker 8: like about three months before we announced we were unionizing,
Speaker 8: the way it was put to me was other not
Speaker 8: for profit bookstores, they do a lot with like family literacy,
Speaker 8: or like specifically around women's issues. But that was just
Speaker 8: like an acknowledgement of the reality that bookstores don't make
Speaker 8: a whole lot of money, and what we are providing
Speaker 8: is a not for profit bookstore is just the browsing experience.
Speaker 8: We kept books on shelves for too long. It just
Speaker 8: it seemed like a like a really romantic idea of
Speaker 8: book selling that didn't have like a whole lot of
Speaker 8: legs underneath it, so to speak. Yeah, so it is nonsense,
Speaker 8: I would say, but that's me.
Speaker 9: It's just real library, Like we have this, it's called library,
Speaker 9: so they're.
Speaker 8: Really big book store. Just I don't know, it was vague, yeah.
Speaker 9: Baffling, baffling, yes, yeah, And then I guess. I guess
Speaker 9: the second part of it is like when they say
Speaker 9: it's a co op, what does that mean?
Speaker 11: It means truly and as conspeaks more that it was
Speaker 11: founded by Chicago Theological Seminary students and there was a
Speaker 11: reason for that.
Speaker 8: Yeah, like they did want to buy corsebooks at the
Speaker 8: at the prices that retailers got them wholesale, and so
Speaker 8: the thought was, I forget their names, but we have
Speaker 8: the pictures of them. It was like a Cavanaugh or something.
Speaker 8: But these two guys just you know, if you were
Speaker 8: a student at Chicago Theological Seminary, we're even like a
Speaker 8: student at one of the other divinity seminaries nearby. You
Speaker 8: just put an amount of money and you were part
Speaker 8: of like you got your course book cheaper, you know,
Speaker 8: and under like a specific manager who came like a
Speaker 8: couple decades after that, Like then it really became like
Speaker 8: this is the neighborhood bookstore. This is part of, like
Speaker 8: as say, like the intellectual sort of cultural life of
Speaker 8: the university. But yeah, at one point it was a
Speaker 8: cooperative because like you were a member and you got
Speaker 8: your course books cheaper because you you know, had a
Speaker 8: certain amount of shares in the books. But yeah, it
Speaker 8: was a think smarter, not harder kind of scheme.
Speaker 11: And then when they dissolved the like ownership shares and
Speaker 11: stopped being a co op. That was twenty nineteen when
Speaker 11: they organized as this not for profit. It's not a
Speaker 11: five oh one C three, they don't have nonprofit status.
Speaker 11: It's this slightly different thing. And so one of the
Speaker 11: one things that has happened in the past year is
Speaker 11: we had an interim director who got us like basically
Speaker 11: a nonprofit sponsor who lends its five oh one C
Speaker 11: three status to other organizations and allows you to take
Speaker 11: text deductible donations.
Speaker 1: But like, up to that.
Speaker 11: Point, we couldn't do that because we were not a
Speaker 11: legitimate nonprofit. We were this other thing.
Speaker 13: Yeah, so since twenty nineteen it's been that, and then
Speaker 13: since twenty twenty four, it's been that plus Chicago's standalone
Speaker 13: unionized bookstore.
Speaker 11: For now, we're hoping that others follow in la they will.
Speaker 9: Yes, I feel like it is not a great sign
Speaker 9: of your business being a well run when you are
Speaker 9: doing a thing that like rookie activist campaigns do, when
Speaker 9: they're like, oh shit, we got a bunch of buddy,
Speaker 9: we need to borrow someone else's five O one three status,
Speaker 9: Like yeah, great, great job management, like but incredible stuff.
Speaker 8: And like, for me, part of what's been so like
Speaker 8: just mind boggling is like the not for profit bookstore
Speaker 8: who's messed this. Book selling does sort of give this,
Speaker 8: you know, if we're like a five oh one C
Speaker 8: three who often does it they don't turn a profit
Speaker 8: or what they do they reinvest it back into the
Speaker 8: operations they're doing. But like part of and we can
Speaker 8: talk more about this as we get into like the bargaining,
Speaker 8: but like store financials have been so obscured, and I
Speaker 8: hate from like truly truly hate from linguistic standpoint, just
Speaker 8: sort of this subtle like, oh, we must not be
Speaker 8: doing well because to me that feels like the rhetoric
Speaker 8: that really justifies the pack that I'm paid sixteen ninety
Speaker 8: an hour and I have a Master's of Divinity from
Speaker 8: the Seminary of the Seminary co Op.
Speaker 9: Yeah, well, and it's and I think it's also worth
Speaker 9: noting that, like even from the perspective of capital, like
Speaker 9: all of the giant tech companies didn't make money for
Speaker 9: like decades and all those motherfuckers were walking off with
Speaker 9: like one hundred billion dollar payouts, you know, like they
Speaker 9: only ever started making money when they started like reeling
Speaker 9: in a bunch of government contracts for like web services
Speaker 9: and like defense contracts and shit. And it's like, I
Speaker 9: don't know, like this is this is I guess on topic,
Speaker 9: but it's just something that makes you really mad. Where
Speaker 9: people talk about like running the government like a business
Speaker 9: and then like you know, you get like the post
Speaker 9: office where it's like, oh, the post Office doesn't run
Speaker 9: a profit. It's like j you know, doesn't run a
Speaker 9: fucking profit. Uber literally has never brought a profit ever,
Speaker 9: not once, yes, no once, right, like no, like like
Speaker 9: I'm sorry, welcome, welcome to Welcome to fuck. Twenty twenty five.
Speaker 9: Capitalism like companies don't make profits. They either get contact
Speaker 9: from the government or their entire existence is either conting
Speaker 9: some venture capitalists dipshits out of all of their money,
Speaker 9: or it's like peer theel has decided that your like
Speaker 9: surveillance camera company is ideologically important to him taking over
Speaker 9: the world, so he's going to give you one billion
Speaker 9: dollars and it's like, oh, no, I'm sorry, Like our
Speaker 9: financials aren't good enough for you to pay you.
Speaker 10: It's like, motherfucker, Like have you seen the rest of capitalism?
Speaker 9: Like shit pay.
Speaker 8: Your workers, Like yeah, oh yeah, God damn well.
Speaker 11: We keep using that one meme over and over and
Speaker 11: then it is true, like we're trying to balance the budget.
Speaker 8: It's true.
Speaker 11: The candles drill, thank yeah, yeah, because our management is
Speaker 11: so infuriating. And they also in the year since we've
Speaker 11: been bargaining having an interim director and spent most of
Speaker 11: his tenure searching for an executive director to take over,
Speaker 11: that person is being paid one hundred and sixty thousand
Speaker 11: dollars a year to our knowledge, Jesus Christ.
Speaker 8: And that's the.
Speaker 11: Offer that we know of. We have yet to get
Speaker 11: his contract, even though we did make a formal information
Speaker 11: request for it.
Speaker 9: Yeah, which is fucked. And it's also like yeah, like
Speaker 9: every time these companies are like, oh, we don't have money,
Speaker 9: and it's like, okay, I can find like an unbelievable
Speaker 9: amount of money that you have given to someone to
Speaker 9: like to give a random, nonspecific example that has nothing
Speaker 9: to do with with with any company that is in
Speaker 9: any way related to this show.
Speaker 8: Live or Dead.
Speaker 9: By a board Ape Yacht Club NFT.
Speaker 8: Like this is like there's spent three hundred dollars on
Speaker 8: Google homes speakers for fifty seventh Street books and I'm like, wow,
Speaker 8: my having that three hundred dollars would change my life.
Speaker 8: But also like, you're paying that union busting lawyer thousands
Speaker 8: of dollars that you could be paid reverse. Yep, but
Speaker 8: that's that's capitalism.
Speaker 9: Yeah, they have enough money to make your lives miserable,
Speaker 9: but they apparently never have enough money to you know,
Speaker 9: like bake your lives not miserable, because they have to
Speaker 9: spend that money on making your lives miserable.
Speaker 11: Yeah, and it's so intentional because making us miserable means
Speaker 11: that they are wearing down the number of people that
Speaker 11: they have to deal with and making the people who
Speaker 11: are left so tired and so frustrated and so much
Speaker 11: less capable of fighting them.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and that feels like just you know, fens leaving.
Speaker 8: We've also had a number of folks like our bargaining
Speaker 8: unit that the last time y'all spoke last year was
Speaker 8: like twenty five people. Now we're down to eleven and
Speaker 8: it's there. They've refused to hire anybody time yeah, of course,
Speaker 8: but they've been giving seasonal workers sort of like extra hours,
Speaker 8: and that is someone's got to start counting they have,
Speaker 8: like unless they work for ninety days, they don't have to.
Speaker 8: And because they're seasonal, you know, YadA YadA, they don't
Speaker 8: really join our union as kind of what I understand
Speaker 8: why they are not considered eligible. But it's like, the
Speaker 8: booksellers are the heart of the store.
Speaker 11: The classification of signal workers and particularly of event runners,
Speaker 11: has been a point of contention throughout negotiations this whole time,
Speaker 11: because obviously, from our perspective, we want anyone who's working
Speaker 11: in the store in any capacity to be involved in
Speaker 11: the union. We want them to not have this random
Speaker 11: scab force that they can deploy at will. Yeah, And
Speaker 11: that has always been the point that gets revisited over
Speaker 11: and over again. Just when we think we've gotten them
Speaker 11: locked into being union members, they'll come back with their
Speaker 11: latest count and that's like, actually, I think because of X,
Speaker 11: Y and b Z that we just changed, they're no
Speaker 11: longer eligible to join your union. But they did just
Speaker 11: hire I think three people that they were training at
Speaker 11: fifty seventh Street last week. But they've made no formal
Speaker 11: announcement to anyone that these people have been hired. Yeah,
Speaker 11: I only know that they were like in the stores
Speaker 11: because one of them came to the co op by
Speaker 11: mistake instead of fifty seventh Street and was like, oh,
Speaker 11: I'm one of the hires. Oh, and so it's unclear
Speaker 11: if those are the seasonal workers or if those are
Speaker 11: new hires.
Speaker 8: Those are i'll say, the most recent member, like part time,
Speaker 8: full time member of our staff who's not me. None
Speaker 8: of us knew she was hired, and she just came
Speaker 8: up took a book right off my cart and I
Speaker 8: was like, bitch, what but she But those were events,
Speaker 8: those were the seasonal workers at the store. The other day,
Speaker 8: like I worked one of the Chicago Humanities events with them,
Speaker 8: and it is like, yeah, then they just changed the
Speaker 8: qualification of who can be in the union.
Speaker 11: Yeah, it's been very intentional, and it's been just like
Speaker 11: over and over they revisit and classified and less down.
Speaker 8: Yeah, we've done I think too. Since you last spoke,
Speaker 8: like a couple of work stoppages and then picketed outside
Speaker 8: of our store as well. But that I don't know
Speaker 8: in terms of like sort of regressive bargaining to attrition
Speaker 8: that we're seeing and that like they refuse to hire
Speaker 8: other people even though they're kind of shooting themselves in
Speaker 8: the foot. But just like our direct action has I
Speaker 8: think worked against what they're thinking, which is that we're
Speaker 8: tired and that we're not going to fight back and
Speaker 8: that we are overwhelmed and we don't know what we're doing.
Speaker 8: But there are a lot of folks who do have,
Speaker 8: you know, experience with these sort of direct actions, like
Speaker 8: a work stoppage, and I think it's why it's great
Speaker 8: that we're wildly's but also like I do kind of
Speaker 8: like on the work stoppage health flustered and not like upset,
Speaker 8: but just how flustered and yeah, just awkward management feels
Speaker 8: it's it's empowering for me. Yeah, but it's very much
Speaker 8: on purpose. Well, and I think that's one of these
Speaker 8: it's too just like a campaign. In the broad sense
Speaker 8: of continuing direct actions during negotiations is it is that
Speaker 8: chance to connect with your coworkers and re solidify that
Speaker 8: you're fighting for something intentional in the face of the
Speaker 8: fact that you will probably start being scheduled more sparsely,
Speaker 8: you will have fewer opportunities during the workday to talk
Speaker 8: to people and like that's just stuff that's going to
Speaker 8: happen while negotiations go on. But like making sure that
Speaker 8: you stay in touch with your union as best you
Speaker 8: can and like show up for all the direct things
Speaker 8: that you can helps you internally combat that, which is
Speaker 8: really helpful.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 9: And I mean, like you know, like I sound like
Speaker 9: we ran into organizing cues. We spent like I think
Speaker 9: it was two years bargaining for our contract, and they
Speaker 9: didn't have the capacity to literally force half the workforce
Speaker 9: to quit.
Speaker 8: But like, oh, don't worry.
Speaker 11: They don't have the capacity to lose this many people
Speaker 11: are falling seas and they are how few people they
Speaker 11: have Yep.
Speaker 9: This whole thing is it's just like a really really
Speaker 9: common managerial tactic, yeah, which is just like we're going
Speaker 9: to make everything unlivable and try to get as many
Speaker 9: people as we can to quit and then just make
Speaker 9: everyone else's lives a living hell, which is like this
Speaker 9: is I think I've said this before, but it's like
Speaker 9: the extent to which the strategy is just the deliberate
Speaker 9: infliction of terror.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 11: Well, and the strategy is just tank your business, which
Speaker 11: seems incredibly conintuitive from their perspective.
Speaker 8: And like there have been events for like it's been
Speaker 8: a book about like Karl Marx labor organizing, whether it's
Speaker 8: a history or like a like sociology book, and folks
Speaker 8: are like, I waited to buy this book here because
Speaker 8: it's the union bookstore, And like there is a way
Speaker 8: that us being a union bookstore could look given like
Speaker 8: that folks on our board are really progressive, people like
Speaker 8: Adam Gettichew, like State Senator Robert Peters, who's like running
Speaker 8: on a pretty pro labor background. Like us being unionized
Speaker 8: could be like we are already at tourist bookstore, like
Speaker 8: folks come from everywhere, or like this is such a
Speaker 8: famous bookstore. But like it does baffle me. It does
Speaker 8: make sense that it's a common tactic. But also there's
Speaker 8: so much that could work in their favor if they
Speaker 8: were not just like so committed to busting this union.
Speaker 9: We hold on sidebar Ale Gritch, she was my professor.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I talked to her today.
Speaker 12: Wait, she's just part of the management team.
Speaker 8: No no, no, there's okay, so this is part of
Speaker 8: it's just.
Speaker 9: Like a different thing. Okay, sorry, sorry, this is okay.
Speaker 8: No, no, no, this is This is where like us
Speaker 8: being a not for profit bookstore but not actually like
Speaker 8: having any legal standing as a not for profit gets
Speaker 8: a little confusing. And like Finn, you can probably speak
Speaker 8: more to how this has come up in the bargaining meeting.
Speaker 8: But when we I don't know if this was around
Speaker 8: before the cooperative was dissolved and shared are basically like
Speaker 8: worthless at that point. But there is a board of
Speaker 8: direct ors, one of whom like is very very famous
Speaker 8: and at least among the folks I know for effectively
Speaker 8: union investing employees at Experimental Station on sixty first in
Speaker 8: Blackstone when they try to unionize right. And also there
Speaker 8: are so many like Hyde Park progressives like RJP, like
Speaker 8: I Adam Getta, Chew eve Ewing as well, And these
Speaker 8: are people I really respect, but like because there's like
Speaker 8: this four cabinet, I think of folks who are have
Speaker 8: been in and out of bargaining meetings when we've had
Speaker 8: employees at other lead for unions who do have a
Speaker 8: connection to like for example, Robert Peters. It does very
Speaker 8: clear that like this governing board which does govern, they
Speaker 8: have terms, But we're also a retail outfit, you know,
Speaker 8: usually like a not for profit, the board of a
Speaker 8: not for profit would be helping with like an annual
Speaker 8: fundraising campaign. It's unclear entirely what the board does in
Speaker 8: a retail outfit other than, at least in my experience,
Speaker 8: like giving advice, writing emails to try to bust this union,
Speaker 8: you know, before we unionized, albeit I had a very
Speaker 8: short tenure before we had unionized. None of these people
Speaker 8: none of their names matter to me. But because like
Speaker 8: there's so much confusion about is management going to be
Speaker 8: representing folks in the bargaining meeting or is it going
Speaker 8: to be a board member representative. I've been just who
Speaker 8: is accountable to disclose what financial information and when or
Speaker 8: just any information and when? Like, yeah, Adam Adam Yettuchu
Speaker 8: is not one of our one of our bosses. But like,
Speaker 8: there is just a lot of confusion that I feel
Speaker 8: about what the board is responsible for in bargaining and
Speaker 8: with the manage and what management feels they're responsible for.
Speaker 8: And I can clear up a little bit of.
Speaker 11: That because what we were told when we first unionized
Speaker 11: and when the management team was kind of shifting and
Speaker 11: reorganizing itself around to the board, was the board is
Speaker 11: there primarily to advise and supervise and higher the executive
Speaker 11: director for the stores. And so there is a financial contribution,
Speaker 11: like they're all significant donors. That's part of the way
Speaker 11: that they secure their seats is making a large donation
Speaker 11: to the stores. But then, at least according to them,
Speaker 11: from that point forward, they have no managerial oversight over
Speaker 11: the operations of the store whatsoever. It is not their responsibility.
Speaker 11: They don't make any decisions about the budget, they don't
Speaker 11: get involved, they don't want to be involved. And they
Speaker 11: were embarrassed by having this attitude when previous management went
Speaker 11: off the rails and nearly drove the store into the
Speaker 11: ground by buying stock on credit cards. What But then
Speaker 11: it's a cool thing that we do not have into
Speaker 11: But that's.
Speaker 8: This is bonkers.
Speaker 9: Yeah, oh yeah.
Speaker 11: That is to say that somehow that experience did not
Speaker 11: act as a wig up call for this board of directors,
Speaker 11: and they said, what we will do is hire the
Speaker 11: next way man we can find and take our hands
Speaker 11: back off the wheel.
Speaker 9: Jesus Christ, is this an institution that people like it
Speaker 9: would be helpful to put pressure on or.
Speaker 11: That's what it's hard to say, because there's this and
Speaker 11: I think I talked about it the last time we
Speaker 11: were on the podcast. But there's this responsibility carousel between
Speaker 11: management who in a bargaining session. Because the other thing
Speaker 11: is because we can't tell how involved the board is,
Speaker 11: because they tell us that they're not involved at all,
Speaker 11: and then they make decisions and we hear about the
Speaker 11: decisions that they're making. We have asked repeatedly that they
Speaker 11: be involved in bargaining and that they send someone to
Speaker 11: represent them, or they like participate and have an opinion
Speaker 11: on the way that the stores are run, and they
Speaker 11: have repeatedly refused those invitations, requests, demands, et cetera.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it seems.
Speaker 11: Their involvement has been to recommend that our management hire
Speaker 11: Jenny Goltz to be their lawyer, and that as about
Speaker 11: as much as they want to do she is christ like.
Speaker 8: Two things too. Then I think there was supposed to
Speaker 8: be a board member president at the next bargaining meeting,
Speaker 8: but because our meeting was contingent on having the full
Speaker 8: financial information that we requested literally a month ago, and
Speaker 8: when we requested that information the next day a board member,
Speaker 8: the president of the board said Okay, we'll get this
Speaker 8: to you. We got it. I think you might know
Speaker 8: more about the timing of this fit like at the
Speaker 8: last possible minute we.
Speaker 11: Got at the day before the meeting, oh god, yeah,
Speaker 11: and it was half of what we asked for. Yeah,
Speaker 11: and then we said this is not what we requested
Speaker 11: and we cannot meet because we said we couldn't meet
Speaker 11: without this full information. They were like, we're disappointed that
Speaker 11: you can't do that, and we were.
Speaker 14: Like, yeah, shocking, Yeah, we are back.
Speaker 9: Let's get more formally into like what the marketing process
Speaker 9: has looked like. It sounds like it's been extremely chaotic.
Speaker 9: They've been not turning over a information. It's deeply unclear
Speaker 9: who's making decisions which all seem and I can say,
Speaker 9: this is my professional opinion, not good a technical anout
Speaker 9: life assessment. Yeah, this is why they pay me the
Speaker 9: mediocre books.
Speaker 11: Well, I think you were just so well informed, yes.
Speaker 8: Journalistic insight.
Speaker 11: Yeah. So the way that we set it up on
Speaker 11: our end when we entered into negotiations was we had
Speaker 11: a core team of three people who were going to
Speaker 11: be our core bargaining unit who would attend every meeting,
Speaker 11: and then we had a small team of like three
Speaker 11: more people including myself that were like alternates in case
Speaker 11: something got scheduled on one day that one of the
Speaker 11: core team couldn't be there, and we made sure that
Speaker 11: we would always schedule one person who was not negotiating
Speaker 11: to be at the meeting and take notes, so that
Speaker 11: like none of the people who were negotiating, you had.
Speaker 8: To do that at the same time.
Speaker 11: And when we first started negotiating, the management team was
Speaker 11: sending Dan Meyer, the interim director, and name Kanno, who's
Speaker 11: our deputy director, who is basically the one person on
Speaker 11: the management team who is not she's not supposed to
Speaker 11: be a direct supervisor. She has not actually let go
Speaker 11: of the people that she was supervising, but she's like
Speaker 11: in that middle space between like supervising management and like
Speaker 11: director management. But she has since stepped down from negotiations
Speaker 11: because of the way that she's been involved in the
Speaker 11: rest of store operations. She was like, I can't come
Speaker 11: to the table anymore. And so the latest meeting that
Speaker 11: has been rescheduled is going to be with Kevin Bendle,
Speaker 11: who's the new executive director, and then one other name
Speaker 11: that I forget who is either a board members as thinks,
Speaker 11: or I'm not sure well, she would be, but.
Speaker 8: It is it is a board member, and I think
Speaker 8: it is Tira Goldstein. Is her name Tia Goldstein?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 11: Every so often in niotiating sessions, Dan or Nai would
Speaker 11: make some reference to like a financial decision that we
Speaker 11: were trying to bargain about being like not their choice
Speaker 11: and being something that would be up to the board,
Speaker 11: and we'd be like, so take it to the board,
Speaker 11: and then we'd be like, okay, and then we would
Speaker 11: never hear anything about it ever.
Speaker 9: Again, incredible, incredible work. Seems like a great tactic to
Speaker 9: never address anything you're supposed to be addressing.
Speaker 11: And so the way that we were negotiating, we were
Speaker 11: trying to come to terms on things that didn't affect
Speaker 11: the finances of the store first so that we could
Speaker 11: land some easy wins and like feel like we were
Speaker 11: making progress and then address the stuff that we expected
Speaker 11: to be thorny or later. But then what that ended
Speaker 11: up being as meetings went on and on was them
Speaker 11: asking us constantly like, but what is it that you
Speaker 11: guys really are like prioritizing, Like what is the thing
Speaker 11: that matters the most to you that like you have
Speaker 11: the least give on and We're like, it's wages. You know,
Speaker 11: it's wages. It's been wages this whole time. And they're like,
Speaker 11: but like, what if we were like asking you to
Speaker 11: give up all your benefits to get it's just.
Speaker 9: That you want.
Speaker 11: And we were like, Okay, that's not how negotiating works.
Speaker 11: And then, in an email that labeled it their best
Speaker 11: and final offer, which is language that they have yet
Speaker 11: to take back, they sent us a version of the
Speaker 11: contract bargaining agreement that we hey, let me just back
Speaker 11: up for a second. When we first started negotiating, they
Speaker 11: asked us to draft the entire first draft of the
Speaker 11: collective bargaining agreement ourselves, what which is incredible well standard,
Speaker 11: And we were like, that's fine because that gives us
Speaker 11: a leg up in terms of like studying the initial terms.
Speaker 11: I guess we'll do it, but like, yeah, incredibly nonstandards,
Speaker 11: super stupid, not a thing that we should have had
Speaker 11: to do.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I've never heard of that before.
Speaker 11: But so when we drafted it, we drafted a three
Speaker 11: year term collective bargaining agreement with a bunch of stuff
Speaker 11: about procedure and wages and benefits that we wanted done,
Speaker 11: and so zooming back forward to that best and final offer. Suddenly,
Speaker 11: the draft that they've sent us back of the collective
Speaker 11: bargaining moreement is a two year term, and up to
Speaker 11: this point, all of the offers that had gotten anything
Speaker 11: close to our ask on wages were in year three,
Speaker 11: and everything in year one and two was still like
Speaker 11: twenty five cents fifty cents increases. And so suddenly year three,
Speaker 11: which was always the only year that made any improvements
Speaker 11: for us, is gone, and you did not improve any
Speaker 11: other parts of the contract to make up for that
Speaker 11: unilateral decision.
Speaker 9: So that's just regressive bargaining.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it is.
Speaker 9: It is, which, by the way, okay, do you want
Speaker 9: to explain to our dear listeners what regressive bargaining is
Speaker 9: and why you're not allowed to do it.
Speaker 11: Yeah, regressive bargaining is is a dirty negotiation tactic where
Speaker 11: one side, without making any sort of give and take
Speaker 11: concessions like they should to balance a big move, just
Speaker 11: unilaterally decides to change a term, especially a large term
Speaker 11: like wages, contract term, et cetera. And so it is
Speaker 11: taking something that has been tentatively agreed upon and like
Speaker 11: in good faith taken as a part of the contract
Speaker 11: that will stand and acting it.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and you are not allowed to do this is
Speaker 9: this is under the under the terms under the terms
Speaker 9: of the National Labor Relations Act, which you know, who knows.
Speaker 9: But by the time this episode goes out, there is
Speaker 9: a small chance it won't exist anymore. A bunch of
Speaker 9: provisions of it are under attacked right now.
Speaker 11: But like that is like, we have a few unfair
Speaker 11: labor practices filed with the NLRB since the terms of
Speaker 11: Negotia have been in effect, and they are not, in
Speaker 11: fact progressive bargaining charges, but issues of status quo where
Speaker 11: they're trying to change the way that they do scheduling,
Speaker 11: change the way that they do like absence discipline, which
Speaker 11: are topics that are covered in bargaining and should only
Speaker 11: be changed in bargaining while bargaining is active, but they're
Speaker 11: trying to change them and then say that these have
Speaker 11: been the policies all along, and so.
Speaker 9: God literally gaslighting, yeah, like actual, actual, straight up. You
Speaker 9: could pick up the gap the psychologue the psychology textbook
Speaker 9: plight to it, like oh.
Speaker 11: Yeah, just pick up that whole lamp well, and we
Speaker 11: have their words in writing of every step of the
Speaker 11: way where you can see the language change and be like, no,
Speaker 11: you are the person who said before that it was
Speaker 11: this other thing that was you. Yeah, so we filed
Speaker 11: unfair labor practice about those things, and you can in
Speaker 11: fact not track them anymore because since the government shut down,
Speaker 11: you can find a little PDF that explains, yep, that
Speaker 11: all ulps are going to be pending indefinitely, and that
Speaker 11: is all you can find.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and it's also fun because Trump I legally fired
Speaker 9: one of the Democratic people on it, so I don't
Speaker 9: have a korum any on the board of the National RELATIONSIP. Boys,
Speaker 9: they don't have a korum anymore, which is a shit show.
Speaker 9: And snaking any NLRB like attempt to get anything done
Speaker 9: to the NLRB really annoying.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I think the direct action has been helpful where
Speaker 8: like just that reality where just they just it would
Speaker 8: drive me crazy. And it is it is gaslighting. This
Speaker 8: is traumatizing. If her boyfriend does it to you, it's
Speaker 8: a red flag. But when your boss does it to you,
Speaker 8: you know, it's like, yeah, the public's fine with it. Business, Yeah,
Speaker 8: it's a cost of business.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 8: It is just the continuous, non stop onslaught of regressive
Speaker 8: bargaining tactics that like from the minute we started, despite
Speaker 8: the fact that like I was sitting next to the
Speaker 8: director when we say reunionizing, it was like a split
Speaker 8: second before she said, yep, we recognize it. And so
Speaker 8: our direct action at the workstoppage. I remember our first workstop,
Speaker 8: if you sat for half an hour, management was very
Speaker 8: cool with that. The second time we did it, we
Speaker 8: did it for an hour. We should have done our
Speaker 8: homework better because we didn't know that you can't, like
Speaker 8: like leaf live it on store property because the US
Speaker 8: Chicago is our landlord and kind of like not store property.
Speaker 8: But I put on my clerical collar. I put on
Speaker 8: a T shirt that had like given to Caesar what
Speaker 8: is Caesar's and also like a little footnote about you know,
Speaker 8: run me my money. You know, there's a lot obvious
Speaker 8: instruction from Jesus out of Luke that's like pay the
Speaker 8: work or their wages. But I was wearing my clerical car.
Speaker 8: I set up the PA and I and I was loud.
Speaker 8: There was a Hyde Park Harold reporter who you know
Speaker 8: took my comment who I remember him walking over to
Speaker 8: Nien and I think asking her for her comment. I
Speaker 8: had a bluetooth speaker that was Dan's right playing never
Speaker 8: never fight a man with a perm by Idol and
Speaker 8: I will not forget. I will not forget. The way
Speaker 8: our the deputy director approached me, she was like, Okay,
Speaker 8: this is fine, this is all fine. I just want
Speaker 8: to let you know this is fine, but can you
Speaker 8: please turn the music off? And it took me about
Speaker 8: twenty minutes to just turn the buttons down slowly, But
Speaker 8: like that we were reprimanded.
Speaker 15: Yeah, we got a very very email the next day
Speaker 15: Elevet illustrating what the consequences would be if we tried
Speaker 15: to do a similar action again in that manner.
Speaker 8: And so we picketed outside their store. That was the
Speaker 8: next direct action that we did. But like I do
Speaker 8: think our most impactful direct actions have been the ones
Speaker 8: that have been noisy, that have been incredibly visible. When
Speaker 8: we picketed last it was on the first day of classes.
Speaker 8: We sell like a lot of core core course books
Speaker 8: for the college at the university, and so there were
Speaker 8: students like that. We we were like, hey, do you
Speaker 8: have the bookseller who sold you that book to have
Speaker 8: a living wage? And students like nineteen year old are
Speaker 8: so outraged by the end of money I make as
Speaker 8: a grown person.
Speaker 11: I heard so much eat the rich that day from sillennials.
Speaker 8: Hell yeah, hell yeah. But it's it is clear that
Speaker 8: when the public is made aware of what's happening at
Speaker 8: a store that a lot of people love just so much,
Speaker 8: like it is a part of the community, and I
Speaker 8: think so much a part of people's even like my
Speaker 8: own before I work there, our experience of being in
Speaker 8: this fight knit bizarre community, and folks are upset like
Speaker 8: they and I think rightfully so, and that's just I think,
Speaker 8: really the beauty of direct action is not just that
Speaker 8: it empowers u f but it really just like in
Speaker 8: a sort of spectacle way, says this is what this
Speaker 8: is what they're doing. You want a place that you
Speaker 8: love to run this way and to treat people like this.
Speaker 11: So and I think they're really effective for that reason,
Speaker 11: especially because people are really like on our side when
Speaker 11: they talk to us, but they're also really surprised because
Speaker 11: like part of the instant recognition thing, part of the
Speaker 11: being cool with us having union buttons on the register.
Speaker 11: Part of all of that is the fact that management
Speaker 11: is benefiting from the illusion that they're on good.
Speaker 1: Terms with us.
Speaker 11: And so like one of the reasons that we held
Speaker 11: that picket was to be like, hey, just because they
Speaker 11: are not stopping us does not mean they have done
Speaker 11: anything to improve the material conditions that we have been
Speaker 11: organizing around this whole time.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Well, and also to be incredibly clear about this, like
Speaker 9: it's so obvious it has to actually directly be stated,
Speaker 9: which is that all of the things they are doing
Speaker 9: our union busting tactics, because their strategy here is to
Speaker 9: do a recognition and then go for the second place
Speaker 9: where unions was commonly collapse, which is once you're recognized
Speaker 9: as as a bargaining the second place they fail is
Speaker 9: getting the first contract, and that that's what they're really
Speaker 9: obviously trying to do. And yeah, the fact that people
Speaker 9: don't understand that they're just running a thing that like
Speaker 9: I'm trying to think of how to even disc it
Speaker 9: was like like that bookstore was like like it was
Speaker 9: treated as like something that was as an institution that
Speaker 9: was like part of the university. That's like the way
Speaker 9: it was like treated culturally was this is like our thing,
Speaker 9: and these people are running it into the ground because
Speaker 9: they don't want to pay their workers like enough money.
Speaker 9: To survive. It's is just hideous.
Speaker 11: And that's really all it comes down too when you
Speaker 11: look at what the facts on the ground are is
Speaker 11: the decisions that they are making are directly tied to
Speaker 11: the fact that they feel like they have no money,
Speaker 11: which is directly to the fact that they are paying
Speaker 11: the executive director too much, which is directly died to
Speaker 11: the fact that they want to have an excuse to
Speaker 11: not pay us anything.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it's like, oh, wow, we don't have enough money
Speaker 9: because we're spending like one hundred and sixty thousand dollars
Speaker 9: on an executive director. Have you considered you can simply
Speaker 9: eliminate this entire expense by turning this into an actual
Speaker 9: co op. You could do it in like one day,
Speaker 9: and you suddenly would not have the administration expenses because
Speaker 9: those people wouldn't be there. You could do this yeah,
Speaker 9: really easily.
Speaker 11: Oh well, And as the like movement in and out
Speaker 11: of that position over the past year demonstrates, it has
Speaker 11: no effect on the operations of bookstore. The thing that
Speaker 11: has any effect on the operations of the bookstore is
Speaker 11: the fact that seven people have left, not been replaced,
Speaker 11: and all of their work has been redistributed across like
Speaker 11: increasingly siloed positions to the people who are left so
Speaker 11: that you have no help on your particular assigned task
Speaker 11: that is now yours and yours alone, and you just
Speaker 11: feel terrible in your little hole by yourself.
Speaker 9: Which there's is something like I know for a fact
Speaker 9: that like multiple people on that board know what a
Speaker 9: speed up is, Like, that's a speed up. I know
Speaker 9: for a fact that you know what this.
Speaker 11: Is, and most of them who know what it is
Speaker 11: have written against them.
Speaker 8: Yeah, just kind of like expanding a bit, like or
Speaker 8: the staff at the Museum of Science and Industry has
Speaker 8: also unionized, and they were outside of their store, you know,
Speaker 8: threatening to strike and so like I loved on the
Speaker 8: picket line, like I had a sign that said fire Jenny,
Speaker 8: and I went to explain to the Yeah, I want
Speaker 8: to explain to the UI employee who Jenny was. The
Speaker 8: UI employee who worked at the Graduate Students United at
Speaker 8: U Chicago, and she went, oh, I know who Jenny is,
Speaker 8: and that's I don't know. Just yeah, it's sick that
Speaker 8: like somebody can make their living making my life worse
Speaker 8: than a that's that's capitalism. And also be like I
Speaker 8: she has been involved that lawyer and like a number
Speaker 8: of like she busting you, trying to bust unions at
Speaker 8: U Chicago on successfully and also representing Northwestern in a
Speaker 8: case where one of their employees accused them of sexual
Speaker 8: harassment and discrimination. You know. So it's like you're you're
Speaker 8: really this this is this is the person that you're
Speaker 8: working with. This is the tool that you're using, you know,
Speaker 8: is it who you would rather pay? Yeah?
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah. And it's also it's like that that's the
Speaker 9: thing where this this whole metaphor of like the boss
Speaker 9: acting as an abusive partner is suddenly getting very literal
Speaker 9: in terms of who they're who are the people that
Speaker 9: they are employing do for their other ship, which is
Speaker 9: defending those people. Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's almost like
Speaker 9: there's a structural connection between management and patriarchy. Wow, who
Speaker 9: could possibly who could possibly have done this?
Speaker 11: Between systems of abuse?
Speaker 9: Yeah, Like who could possibly have written about this? Check's notes?
Speaker 10: Looks at the books that were written by the members
Speaker 10: of the board. Yeah, like, yeah, I'm so mad about this,
Speaker 10: Like we'll nicking after Empire is really good?
Speaker 8: It is? Yeah, And I like I don't know how
Speaker 8: much I can like hold those individual board members responsible,
Speaker 8: and it seems like so many of them are like
Speaker 8: just now finding out about it. Yeah, that's some abuse.
Speaker 8: One on one is to make sure that the person
Speaker 8: that you are exploiting, that you were, you know, taking
Speaker 8: advantage of that, they don't feel like they can say
Speaker 8: to people who could help them, this is what's happening
Speaker 8: to me, and that like the people who would be sympathetic,
Speaker 8: could you know, go and take the initiative to help folks.
Speaker 8: And ungrateful that we have a meeting with Robert Peters
Speaker 8: coming up soon. It was supposed to happen that has
Speaker 8: not yet, and I appreciate how dedicated he is and
Speaker 8: his staff is to making sure that our union sits
Speaker 8: down and talks with him.
Speaker 11: But it is also like there's a deep irony for
Speaker 11: him accepting an award from another union and rescheduling a
Speaker 11: meeting with.
Speaker 9: Ourskay do it?
Speaker 8: No, no, no, no, no, it's because we have Jacob, I
Speaker 8: always say it incorrectly asked me. Yeah, the BigInt. But
Speaker 8: that's also like part of the other great community support.
Speaker 8: Like I mentioned that UE employee, but you know, there
Speaker 8: are other union employees who just because they love the
Speaker 8: bookstore so much, will show up to every outreach event
Speaker 8: that we have. He was one of the first people
Speaker 8: to have a yard sign, and it's funny he was
Speaker 8: right now to this guy from my church who also
Speaker 8: has a been no sign, and that's why I found
Speaker 8: out they were neighbors. Yeah, it's really cute. But like,
Speaker 8: I'm proud that we're Wobbley's because there is a really
Speaker 8: long tradition of you know, being in Chicago, a lot
Speaker 8: of radical organizing that I think fits our spirit and
Speaker 8: also like the seminary co op spirit. It has been
Speaker 8: hard that we don't have a lot of resources towards bargaining,
Speaker 8: but like we're good at direct action and we also
Speaker 8: have I'll give it the ask Me Award. I'll give
Speaker 8: it a pass because Jacob's been so and other community
Speaker 8: members have been so helpful and just giving their time
Speaker 8: and their skills and their expertise.
Speaker 11: So yeah, yeah, the MSI Union, the grad Students' Union
Speaker 11: in particular, have been incredible allies to us and have
Speaker 11: been they were huge like presences on our picket because like,
Speaker 11: because we did an open store running picket, we had
Speaker 11: only about half of our actual union members available because
Speaker 11: everyone else had to be on desks in the stores
Speaker 11: keeping them running. And so the majority of the people
Speaker 11: who were like collecting signatures to get Jenny Goltz fired
Speaker 11: and otherwise improve our wardening conditions were people from other
Speaker 11: unions who were just out there being wonderful, awesome, solid
Speaker 11: argy with us.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 9: So my first picket line, I mean, I think it
Speaker 9: makes its last episode, but my first picket line ever
Speaker 9: was the grad student picket line in twenty nineteen. Those
Speaker 9: those the first time I was ever want a picket
Speaker 9: and it rocks. Yeah, and yeah, it makes it really
Speaker 9: happy to see that the whole base of sort of
Speaker 9: union organizing from that has like you know, it's it's
Speaker 9: this thing that like I remember when this was like
Speaker 9: you know, like I was there and like one of
Speaker 9: the big pushes everyone. They finally won, and it's like
Speaker 9: they're still around helping people because workers workers fucking fight
Speaker 9: together and.
Speaker 11: Well and then they'll always be like, hey, one thing
Speaker 11: that we know about Jenny GOLs is she likes to lose, and.
Speaker 8: We're like, thank thank you. Then it's not that she
Speaker 8: likes to use the quote, is she's very good at
Speaker 8: losing which that's true. Even better. Yeah, like what you
Speaker 8: were saying about GSU, I don't remember what I think,
Speaker 8: Like two thousand and eight. Two thousand and seven was
Speaker 8: like when they said we starting organizing for unionizing the
Speaker 8: graduate students. I had a roommate who was like a
Speaker 8: twelve year PhD student who was around when that shit started.
Speaker 8: You can just count hanging out with your wife in
Speaker 8: Australia as a field research, I guess.
Speaker 12: But.
Speaker 8: Well, she's just doing postdocs. You're just hanging out. But
Speaker 8: we had a baby yesterday anyway. Oh but yeah, like
Speaker 8: I was around he came back to finish his PhD
Speaker 8: like about the time, like when the contract was ratified,
Speaker 8: and I just with what is it, sixteen seventeen months
Speaker 8: of bargaining no contract in the name of my blessed
Speaker 8: Lord Jesus Christ. Like Jesus Christ. GSU has had, like
Speaker 8: has such a wealth of knowledge because they've been through
Speaker 8: just like heaps of bullshit and it's years.
Speaker 9: It's like, okay, I will like you the the fucking
Speaker 9: gs you think they had a whole thing when I
Speaker 9: was there, like in like twenty nineteen, the whole the
Speaker 9: whole thing was that and like Jenuay. This is like
Speaker 9: one of the most admirable things I've ever seen a
Speaker 9: union do, which was they refused to take their their
Speaker 9: case because the university was refusing to recognize them, and
Speaker 9: they they refused to take their case to the NLRB
Speaker 9: because they knew that if they did it, there was
Speaker 9: there was a pretty good chance that the old Trump
Speaker 9: n l RB was going to like bust every single
Speaker 9: graduate school union in the country. So instead of trying
Speaker 9: to win for themselves, they fucking didn't do it and
Speaker 9: just like fought on picket lines instead, and it fucking rocked.
Speaker 9: It was case like that they rock. They're they're great,
Speaker 9: Like yeah, yeah, shout out, shout outs shout out to GSU.
Speaker 8: Yeah, shout out to GSU.
Speaker 11: Well, And they are a great, great, great example to
Speaker 11: us all in terms of like how to persist on
Speaker 11: a fight through attrition, because one of the things that
Speaker 11: like you try so hard as a management team to
Speaker 11: do is just wait until ever and gets tired and leaves.
Speaker 11: And like it seems like Grand Students would be the
Speaker 11: perfect population just just wait out because they rotate out constantly.
Speaker 11: But like just the way that they have managed to
Speaker 11: maintain energy through generations and generations of organizers and get
Speaker 11: it over the line at long Lives is so encouraging.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there's the thing I remember from I think the
Speaker 5: last place I read into it was like one of
Speaker 5: Mike Duncan's things about the French Revolution.
Speaker 9: But like one of the things he talked about was
Speaker 9: like the ways in which part of what caused the
Speaker 9: French Revolution was that like they spent a whole bunch
Speaker 9: of time teaching all of these kids these like incredibly
Speaker 9: radical enlightenment ideas and then they were like, wait, we
Speaker 9: live in like the most absolute water key that has
Speaker 9: ever existed. What the fuck?
Speaker 11: I hate this?
Speaker 8: Yeah?
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, Like wait, hold on, And it's like there
Speaker 9: is obviously always sort of contradictions between like the number
Speaker 9: of people I have seen write books about labor resistance
Speaker 9: and then like go bust unions is pretty large. But
Speaker 9: there's a reason why everyone from like Pinochet through like
Speaker 9: the Trump administration, I mean back through like the original Nazis.
Speaker 9: It's like one of the first places and you know,
Speaker 9: I mean like the Greek riot plays had this thing
Speaker 9: where it was like the first place you go when
Speaker 9: there's discontent is like you must stop the workers from
Speaker 9: from allying with the students. You must do.
Speaker 3: This or you're fucked.
Speaker 11: Yeah, But the workers and the students love each other.
Speaker 11: They're all kissing. Yeah, And we're the.
Speaker 8: Same person sometimes, you know. Yeah, so often.
Speaker 9: Yep, yep, yep.
Speaker 8: All my comrades a kiss on the forehead, y ah.
Speaker 11: Yeah.
Speaker 9: And I think like that is I think like the
Speaker 9: filment of all of this is like the way that
Speaker 9: one campaign winning can transform the lives of everyone else
Speaker 9: around you is so astonishing. And I've seen it happen
Speaker 9: in so many places where like one shop wins and
Speaker 9: suddenly everyone else is like, it could be us, It
Speaker 9: could be us.
Speaker 8: Yes, it's possible. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 11: Well, and I think that we're trying to capitalize on
Speaker 11: that and trying to make sure that we can be
Speaker 11: the next person to like capitalize on GSU's win and
Speaker 11: help ms I do the same. But like, as much
Speaker 11: as we have really suffered from the at the table
Speaker 11: bargaining uhiating process and been really sort of beaten down
Speaker 11: in the past year on that battleground, I think we
Speaker 11: have learned so much about the allies that surround us
Speaker 11: and the people who like want to do more than
Speaker 11: just email our board members, and we're like, we don't
Speaker 11: know what else you can do because we don't know
Speaker 11: who makes these decisions for you to yell at. But
Speaker 11: we have so many people who have like signed up
Speaker 11: for an email list with us, so many people who
Speaker 11: are like ready to go as soon as we figure
Speaker 11: out what we need them to do.
Speaker 12: Yeah, and that's.
Speaker 11: Been really encouraging and bolstering, while management continues to like
Speaker 11: just not acknowledge us when they feel too cornered. Like
Speaker 11: they simply never spoke of the picket because it happened
Speaker 11: outside and so they couldn't be mad about it, so
Speaker 11: they didn't have to tell us all about it, but
Speaker 11: they also just didn't speak of it.
Speaker 8: Yeah, this is Chicago is a motherfucking union town, and
Speaker 8: that's what. Yeah, I'll admit I'm angry when I go
Speaker 8: into work. They don't care enough to get the mold
Speaker 8: and the dust remediated, you know, and the DUTs, and
Speaker 8: I can't really breathe when I go into work. And
Speaker 8: I also don't have health insurance right, oh my god, Well,
Speaker 8: I do have health insurance, but I have to pay
Speaker 8: for like, you know, I have to pay for my
Speaker 8: own premiums through a marketplace there. Yeah, and that's that's
Speaker 8: not really affordable. And like, as frustrated as I am
Speaker 8: like coming into work, it is it's the people you know,
Speaker 8: And I think that's for a lot of folks who
Speaker 8: have stayed at the bookstore. I don't know how much
Speaker 8: you relate to this then, like it has been like
Speaker 8: other booksellers, the folks that we've gotten to know through
Speaker 8: the community, who like who do make a difference at
Speaker 8: least for me and whether or not I stay. Oh, absolutely, yeah,
Speaker 8: this is a good fight.
Speaker 11: The union crew that we have is a incredibly worthwhile
Speaker 11: team to be on. It is a group of people
Speaker 11: that I feel very solid standing shoulder to shoulder with.
Speaker 11: I think that is, like, without question, one of the
Speaker 11: things that like keeps the stores a place that you
Speaker 11: can work, even if it's not a good.
Speaker 8: Place to work right now.
Speaker 11: Yeah, yeah, And honestly, I think that would have sustained
Speaker 11: me a lot longer if you were different, you know.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah for sure.
Speaker 10: Wait, okay, sorry, could ripole back to the part where
Speaker 10: you can't breathe because there's I feel like because there's
Speaker 10: bolds I feel like you just dropped that very quickly.
Speaker 9: It was like, oh, yeah, that's like a normal bar
Speaker 9: of the work.
Speaker 4: What the thought.
Speaker 11: Well, so for a very long time you've been allowed
Speaker 11: to request that you only work at the co op
Speaker 11: because there is a known mode problem at fifty seventh
Speaker 11: Street that they can't afford to or can't get the
Speaker 11: landlord to ameliorate. But there is also at least in
Speaker 11: our lung experience some sort of growth issue in the
Speaker 11: venting at the seminary.
Speaker 8: Come up, Yeah, it's it's very dusty at beast. And
Speaker 8: like I when I wear like like a kN ninety
Speaker 8: five for a little bit, like that helps a little.
Speaker 8: I take like five bena drill usually and then that
Speaker 8: je's that kind of that kind of helps. And that's
Speaker 8: more just I think, like I mean not more. That
Speaker 8: is in part like my own health. But if I
Speaker 8: had the resources too be able to take care of
Speaker 8: my health and get what I need, maybe I could
Speaker 8: withstand the mold and the dust and the ducks a
Speaker 8: little bit easier.
Speaker 9: But like that well, but also like like as an employer,
Speaker 9: it is your responsibility to not have your workplace poison
Speaker 9: your employees, Like I'm sorry, like that part yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 9: that also make them pay for the medical care to
Speaker 9: treat medical problems that they're having because you'd poison them
Speaker 9: with mold.
Speaker 10: Like what that's yeah, what Jesus Christ, it's so evil.
Speaker 11: Well, and we had a couple of pauses in our
Speaker 11: first draft of the Collective Bardnaining Agreement that included demands
Speaker 11: regarding mold remediation at fifty seventh Street, and I do
Speaker 11: believe th clauses have been struck in subsequent round.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I mean, I guess that's a thing that you
Speaker 9: could ask people to do, which is go ask people
Speaker 9: to complain about the fucking mold. Like it seems like
Speaker 9: a thing you could do.
Speaker 8: Yeah, that's another direct action. I also noticed, like people
Speaker 8: in the store, like they cough when they enter. Yeah,
Speaker 8: you know, and like, oh god, this is where the
Speaker 8: like the snake eats its own tail. The wheel turns
Speaker 8: inside the fucking wheel, right, because like maybe, like if
Speaker 8: I'm giving them good faith benefit of the doubt, management
Speaker 8: would have if they weren't overloaded with so many tasks
Speaker 8: that they have to take on, you know, sort of
Speaker 8: more supervisory management. If y'all didn't have to do all
Speaker 8: these tasks, maybe you would have time to If there
Speaker 8: are more people hired in the bargaining unit, perhaps you
Speaker 8: could yourself have more time to improve the conditions for
Speaker 8: the store, not just for your workers, but also for
Speaker 8: the people who enter the stores.
Speaker 12: But because people.
Speaker 8: Hire new workers until there's a contract, you are just
Speaker 8: so overworked and you can't and it's just like this
Speaker 8: this turns until the boss decides that it doesn't, and
Speaker 8: it's like this is their responsibility to to bargain in
Speaker 8: good faith and to treat their workers correctly, Like this
Speaker 8: is an active decision that they could make that they
Speaker 8: are not making.
Speaker 9: So yeah, I gotts say that that might be the
Speaker 9: single wildest thing I've ever heard, like an hour into
Speaker 9: an interview, is oh, yeah, they're poisoning.
Speaker 11: Guys in the mold, just the mold. It's just also
Speaker 11: just like prove that this is the craziest place to work,
Speaker 11: because like that doesn't even land on our radar anymore
Speaker 11: because we've been just like banging our head against walls
Speaker 11: for a year.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, I keep going back to
Speaker 9: the abusive relationship metaphor, but like that is one of
Speaker 9: the big things about the beusive relationships is that because
Speaker 9: of the information control and because of the way that
Speaker 9: your world gets condensed down into a really really tiny,
Speaker 9: narrow set of experiences where you're isolated and you're only
Speaker 9: interacting with like one person who was controlling everything about
Speaker 9: your life. It becomes really difficult to see things that
Speaker 9: are very, very obviously wrong the moment you step out
Speaker 9: of it. Yeah, and you know, I don't know. Maybe
Speaker 9: it turns out having absolutely hierarchical relationships of control is
Speaker 9: an extremely bad way to run literally anything, especially the
Speaker 9: thing that your livelihood depends on, that you do most
Speaker 9: of your time.
Speaker 11: Just to thought, wow, well, and it also just like
Speaker 11: means that you are too busy to actually interface in
Speaker 11: any meaningful way with your workers. Like, yeah, if I
Speaker 11: tell you that it took me two thirds of the
Speaker 11: day to schedule a fifteen minute conversation with any of
Speaker 11: four managers who were on site to quit, I would
Speaker 11: not be lying.
Speaker 9: Jesus Christ. They can't even take your resign, bitch.
Speaker 11: They at one point tried to reschedule that conversation which
Speaker 11: I was attempting to have on Friday to Monday, and
Speaker 11: I was like, I think you want.
Speaker 9: To know this. Yeah, it's like managers, you two are
Speaker 9: getting you too, are getting.
Speaker 10: Strewed over by by understaffing.
Speaker 8: Oh my god, I do think that's starting to take
Speaker 8: a toll to on management, which is a little encouraging.
Speaker 8: They're losing it. Yeah, they are not feeling well, and
Speaker 8: because like for me, I don't know, I'm not gonna
Speaker 8: trust a boss like I just stated, for three months
Speaker 8: in the nineteen ninety seven UAW strike like that's oh yeah,
Speaker 8: bosses are canceled. Yeah you know, I know how that ended.
Speaker 8: But I remember one of the supervisors who who we've
Speaker 8: had one point in her like her previous career had
Speaker 8: been on a picket line for a very long time,
Speaker 8: had been on strike, and she like immediately took one
Speaker 8: of our little sabocat reed pins put it on her backpack,
Speaker 8: and is otherwise like, as far as I can tell,
Speaker 8: generally supportive of the union, but also man lady, I
Speaker 8: wish she would make a stink mm hmm.
Speaker 11: Because here's the thing. I think she only talks to us.
Speaker 11: I feel like the other managers do not speak to her.
Speaker 11: I yeah, am I crazy.
Speaker 8: Yeah I could just talk about that for a very
Speaker 8: long time, and I don't think we have the time.
Speaker 9: So yeah, yeah, before we get into what can people
Speaker 9: do the help? Is there anything else that you want
Speaker 9: to make sure that you get to.
Speaker 11: I think the big thing that we should emphasize too
Speaker 11: is as much as we are complaining and frustrated about
Speaker 11: the process, we know that this is not impass and
Speaker 11: that we are so sure that like there is still
Speaker 11: negotiating to be done, there is still conversation to be had,
Speaker 11: and that like we have been emphasizing that at every
Speaker 11: opportunity to management as we have to. But like, just
Speaker 11: because we are tired and frustrated means nothing in terms
Speaker 11: of us giving up, because this is a fight that
Speaker 11: is going to continue.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, And like to that point, Finn, we're doing
Speaker 8: this because we love the stores. Like the stores were
Speaker 8: a really important place for me, just putting down roots
Speaker 8: in the neighborhood. And I think when you love something
Speaker 8: a lot, like you got to be brave enough to
Speaker 8: wrestle with it. And that our unionizing is the right thing.
Speaker 8: It is the thing that will like hopefully create an
Speaker 8: environment where the people who make that bookstore run, who
Speaker 8: sell the books. In the long run, it will make
Speaker 8: the institution healthier, do believe, and just that we've been
Speaker 8: talking about like this metaphor as the boss of like
Speaker 8: as an abusive partner. I think for so many folks
Speaker 8: when they are whether it's something like domestic violence, or
Speaker 8: it's in a union campaign, or you're speaking out against
Speaker 8: you know, your neighbors being abducted and shot and killed
Speaker 8: in the street, there is such an expectation that I
Speaker 8: have to sit by and be quiet while this happens.
Speaker 8: And part of that, I think, what does prevent and
Speaker 8: at least in my experience as someone who survived, you know,
Speaker 8: particular kinds of violence that Yeah, I wasn't sure I
Speaker 8: was doing the right thing, but us unionizing is absolutely
Speaker 8: the right thing. It is the right thing for the stores.
Speaker 8: It is the right thing for the community and for
Speaker 8: the workers. And I just as much as I'm frustrated,
Speaker 8: like I know myself and my fellow booksellers are doing
Speaker 8: this out of love, Like it is absolutely love for
Speaker 8: the stores in the community we serve.
Speaker 11: So yeah, we're never going to feel bad for continuing
Speaker 11: to fight for what is the right.
Speaker 8: Thing to do. Yeah, I'm too broke to feel bad.
Speaker 9: Yeah, don't be poisoned by bold. Every time you go
Speaker 9: to the bookstore, support the union.
Speaker 11: Yeah, wear your mask at seminary co op. Yeah, take
Speaker 11: a sab acap pin.
Speaker 8: Yeah. Ask to talk to a manager, make it a
Speaker 8: long talk.
Speaker 11: Yeah, honestly, see if you can get one on the floor,
Speaker 11: we'll help you.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 9: So how can people help support y'all? And do you
Speaker 9: have places where people can find more information about the
Speaker 9: campaign and follow updates?
Speaker 8: We have a change dot org petition that I think
Speaker 8: if you can link it somewhere in the description.
Speaker 9: Yep, yeah, we will link in the description.
Speaker 8: Yeah. So that that does ask folks to sign off
Speaker 8: and support the termination of Jenny Goltz, their union busting lawyer,
Speaker 8: as well as releasing like the full state of financial
Speaker 8: information too. So there's a change dot org petition. You
Speaker 8: can also follow us on Instagram at some booksellers union
Speaker 8: We've got the little icon with the sabocat sign up tian.
Speaker 8: There are also some action items on some of the posts,
Speaker 8: such as emailing the board and management about the release
Speaker 8: of financial information and also the termination of Jenny Golts's employment.
Speaker 8: You can also emailed those emails on that post about
Speaker 8: the mold too. If you want me to breathe at work.
Speaker 16: Yeah, I'm so glad about this.
Speaker 10: This is I am going to lead the description with
Speaker 10: they are poisoning you, because like, I'm so angry about this.
Speaker 8: Thank you, I'm too tired to be angry about it.
Speaker 11: I'm so glad at this woman the French perspective has
Speaker 11: remembered that the mold is totally bogus, because I had forgotten.
Speaker 8: It's crazy. Yeah, it's so bogus. It's also like it's
Speaker 8: in such plain sight, like if you're in fifty seven
Speaker 8: Street Books and you look to the right of the
Speaker 8: air conditioning unit and room one, you see that shit
Speaker 8: growing on the walls, and it's like, but I also
Speaker 8: feel like if I talked to management, which I tried
Speaker 8: about this, it just is a got a priority. My
Speaker 8: breathing not a priority. Yeah, it is wild. Thank you
Speaker 8: for reminding me.
Speaker 9: That someone one day, when you win, someone's going to
Speaker 9: write a paper by necropolitics in this or something like good.
Speaker 8: Lord, jeez, yeah some shit. Yeah, sign the petition, follow
Speaker 8: us on Instagram, help us make our.
Speaker 11: Ruckus and come talk to us and our managers at
Speaker 11: the bookstore because we love to talk to people while we.
Speaker 8: Saw them books. Yeah. Yeah, I'll take any good will
Speaker 8: we can get, so very much.
Speaker 9: So hell yeah, Well, thank you to both so much
Speaker 9: for coming on and just for doing this and I
Speaker 9: don't know, like a place that was really special to
Speaker 9: me when I was yeah, when I was there for
Speaker 9: a long time.
Speaker 8: Thanks for your help, Thank you for following up with us.
Speaker 11: Of course, it's really nice to have this platform every
Speaker 11: so often.
Speaker 8: Yeah for sure.
Speaker 9: Oh yeah, well, hopefully we'll have you back on when
Speaker 9: you fucking win.
Speaker 11: And yes, very round.
Speaker 8: I'm buying I'm personally buying the cool Zone media team
Speaker 8: around at Jimmy's. When we win our contract.
Speaker 11: I will come back to my park just for the celebration.
Speaker 8: Change everyone's oil while you're down to yeah, yeah, yeah, no,
Speaker 8: don't take that long.
Speaker 11: I won't be ready for a second.
Speaker 9: Yeah, this is, this has been. It could happen here,
Speaker 9: and you too can resist both your abuser and your boss,
Speaker 9: even when they're the same person, and.
Speaker 17: You should, ay man, get them and welcomed.
Speaker 7: It could happen here. I'm Andrew's age.
Speaker 6: I run andrewism over on YouTube, but I'm here on
Speaker 6: this podcast with the one and only.
Speaker 9: Mia Wong, who does this podcast most of the time.
Speaker 6: Exactly exactly, and I think you and I both have
Speaker 6: something in common, which is that we are people, and
Speaker 6: we are two people, but the world has a lot
Speaker 6: more than just two people. It's a really convoluted way
Speaker 6: of saying that. For this episode, we're going to be
Speaker 6: talking about population. You know, how many of people there are,
Speaker 6: and how many of them there will or will not
Speaker 6: be in the future, and all the different conversations that
Speaker 6: end up happening around.
Speaker 9: That, most of which suck. So it's a time truly.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 6: I mean, every single one of us humans is a
Speaker 6: product of billions of years of reproduction. But for most
Speaker 6: of that reproduction, population growth was pretty slow.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 7: The world's population is.
Speaker 6: Estimated at around five million in the eight thousand BC.
Speaker 6: So five million is like the population of New Zealand
Speaker 6: right now, or Costa Rica, or Ireland or Norway, but
Speaker 6: spread across the entire planet. Can you get so many
Speaker 6: people who are alive in the year one? See though,
Speaker 6: thirty million that's actually an underestimate. It's one hundred and
Speaker 6: eighty eight million, jeez, right, So that's between the current
Speaker 6: population of Bangladesh and the current population of Brazil, which
Speaker 6: are at one hundred and sixty nine million and two
Speaker 6: hundred and thirty million, respectively. But that's spread across the
Speaker 6: entire planet. So I mean imagine that, you know, a
Speaker 6: whole world of people so spread out. I mean they
Speaker 6: were concentrated into innarios, of course, but you had all
Speaker 6: this vast forest land and plains and entire content ccidents
Speaker 6: that barely had people compared to today. And the reason
Speaker 6: the population grew so slowly was really because, I mean,
Speaker 6: humans have always been doing the do you know, but
Speaker 6: death was kind of a very present phenomenon.
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 6: You had famines, you had plagues, you had the occasional war,
Speaker 6: and you especially had a lot of infant mortality. Yeah,
Speaker 6: and that's what really kept populations in check. You know,
Speaker 6: I remember hearing I don't even remember who it was,
Speaker 6: but this one person had like nineteen children and only
Speaker 6: eight of them survived to adulthood.
Speaker 9: Yeah, they honestly did pretty good, like by those metrics, Like, yeah,
Speaker 9: then infant mortality rate was unbelievably high.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, So families had a lot of children, but only
Speaker 6: a few of them made it to adulthood. Thanks to
Speaker 6: the industrializations, were able to change a bit. You know,
Speaker 6: we improved agriculture, we invented refrigeration, we got better fertilizer,
Speaker 6: and most importantly, we developed advancements in sanitisia. You know,
Speaker 6: doctors were actually washing their hands. You know, we developed vaccines,
Speaker 6: so children were dying of measles and mumps.
Speaker 7: Imagine that, good Lord.
Speaker 6: And we also had an overall improvement in medicine. You know,
Speaker 6: one of the greatest inventions of humanity, I think is
Speaker 6: the vaccine. And it's such a wonderful thing that there's
Speaker 6: not this massive movement of people who challenge it's very
Speaker 6: legitimacy in this day and age, and threaten all of
Speaker 6: our lives as a result.
Speaker 7: You know, imagine being in that world.
Speaker 9: God.
Speaker 6: So we eventually hit one billion in the year eighteen
Speaker 6: oh four, which is just below the current population of China,
Speaker 6: and things began to accelerate from there. We end up
Speaker 6: creating something called a Jacob of exponential population growth thanks
Speaker 6: to like I said, the decline in infant mortality and
Speaker 6: improvements and fertility and food production and the other billionaire
Speaker 6: milestone started rolling it. By eighteen oh four, Kiti had
Speaker 6: just gained its independence. Napoleon the First was crowned Emperor France,
Speaker 6: and Lewis and Clark had begun their expedition across America
Speaker 6: in nineteen twenty seven. As one hundred and twenty three
Speaker 6: years later, we hit two billion people. You know, by
Speaker 6: then we had Trotsky being expelled from the USSR, which
Speaker 6: had just been founded. We had Charles Linnenberg completing the
Speaker 6: first solo non stop flight across the Atlantic Ocean. And
Speaker 6: then also in nineteen twenty seven, we had the release
Speaker 6: of the first feature length film to feature synchronized sound
Speaker 6: for dialogue. Quite the time to be Alive. The fast
Speaker 6: forward to thirty three year later, nineteen sixty, and we
Speaker 6: hit three billion people. By then, Nigeria had just gained
Speaker 6: it independence. GfK was in the White House, ham the
Speaker 6: Chimpanzee went to space, and the FDA approved the first
Speaker 6: ever both control pill. But the birth control pill didn't
Speaker 6: really kick in in terms of, you know, hampering our
Speaker 6: growth for some time. By nineteen seventy four, fourteen years later,
Speaker 6: we hit four billion people. By then, Nixon had resigned
Speaker 6: to He had invaded Cyprus Portugal overthrow its dictatorship. The
Speaker 6: Godfather Part two came out, and Aber was still at
Speaker 6: the top of the charts. Nineteen eighty seven, thirteen years later,
Speaker 6: when we got five billion people. That's when we had
Speaker 6: most of the major colonies around the world gain the
Speaker 6: independence or having already had gained the independence. You know
Speaker 6: Thatcher was beginning her third term and The Simpsons first
Speaker 6: appayed on TV. Twelve years later in nineteen ninety nine,
Speaker 6: we had the Y two K panic, the Impeach Month,
Speaker 6: the SpongeBob premiere, the introduction of the euro, and six
Speaker 6: billion people made their debut on planets twenty eleven. Twelve
Speaker 6: years later we hit seven billion people, and that was
Speaker 6: in the midst of the Arab Spring, a tsunami hit
Speaker 6: in Japan, the Occupy movement, the premiere Game of Thrones,
Speaker 6: and really the beginning of smartphones and social media taken
Speaker 6: over the world. Finally, by twenty twenty two, which is
Speaker 6: eleven years after twenty eleven, we hit eight billion people.
Speaker 6: Amidst Russia invading in Ukraine, the growing popularity of TikTok,
Speaker 6: and Elon's purchase of Twitter. So from eighteen four to
Speaker 6: twenty twenty two we went from one billion people to
Speaker 6: eight billion people, and the un expected to grow by
Speaker 6: about one point nine billion between now and twenty one hundred,
Speaker 6: so we'll end up breaching from eight point two billion
Speaker 6: people to ten point two billion people, and population is
Speaker 6: projected to peak at ten point three billion in twenty
Speaker 6: eighty four and then decline to ten point two billion
Speaker 6: through the end of the century. So with this rapid
Speaker 6: population growth, there has been a lot of fayars surrounding overpopulation.
Speaker 6: Particularly in the late twentieth century and early two thousands,
Speaker 6: there was a lot of conversation around, you know, this
Speaker 6: population bomb, this worry that there were too many people. Now,
Speaker 6: at least early on in the population boom, I think
Speaker 6: it makes some sense to have concerns. You know, there
Speaker 6: had never been this many people on the eighth at
Speaker 6: any point in time prior. You know, if you're watching
Speaker 6: the numbers climb and climb and climb, you might have
Speaker 6: thought we were headed straight for a planet covered in
Speaker 6: cities and some kind of collapse. But even before we
Speaker 6: even hit a billion people. Yeah, idea of overpopulation being
Speaker 6: a significant problem wasn't new. In late seventeen hundreds, Thomas
Speaker 6: Mauthus argued that population would always outpace food supply, and
Speaker 6: his prediction was that there'd be tw many people, not
Speaker 6: enough resources, and a decline into famine, disease and mass death.
Speaker 7: Now he was.
Speaker 6: Obviously proven wrong, but in nineteenth century Britain, Marthus's ideas
Speaker 6: helped justify the harsh wealthare policies that that government ended
Speaker 6: up implementing, like the spread of workhouses around the country. Also,
Speaker 6: we speak about faminis if it's this natural phenomenon that
Speaker 6: can't be helped, that is just almost like a hurricane
Speaker 6: or a tornado. But famines are usually not actually the
Speaker 6: result of not having enough food.
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 6: Amartya Sen found that famines usually happened despite food surpluses.
Speaker 6: He was usually distribution and not scarcity, you know. A
Speaker 6: famous example being you know, during the Irish famine, Ireland
Speaker 6: was still exporting tons of food to feed its colonial overlord.
Speaker 6: So we fast forward to nineteen sixty eight and the
Speaker 6: biologist Paul Erlich publishes The Population Bomb. He describes visiting
Speaker 6: Delhi and feeling the crush of overpopulation, convinced that massterviation
Speaker 6: was imminent in the nineteen seventies. Now, I think that
Speaker 6: book that he published was one of the main influences
Speaker 6: in the widespread panic around overpopulation. You know, governments started
Speaker 6: to scramble about a lot of policies were born, likely
Speaker 6: from people reading that very book. You know, some of
Speaker 6: these policies were fairly benign. You know, you promote family planning,
Speaker 6: you improve access to contraceptives, you improve education for women especially,
Speaker 6: But other approaches were very harsh and brutal. You know,
Speaker 6: you had sterilization campaigns, forced sterilization campaigns taking place in
Speaker 6: India and Puerto Rico and in the United States. China's
Speaker 6: one child policy also gets a lot of attention, but
Speaker 6: it was only one example of a widespread brutality around
Speaker 6: the impositions placed on women, especially in that time, the
Speaker 6: fear of too many people and that anxiety leading to
Speaker 6: the control of women and their bodies. And it's a
Speaker 6: scary prospect, especially if you were a minority in this time,
Speaker 6: if you were a cultural, racial, or religious minority, Because
Speaker 6: it made very ordinary human activity, things like moving around,
Speaker 6: having children, just existing being it seemed like an existential
Speaker 6: threat to civilization, to humanity that needed to be dealt
Speaker 6: with by any means necessary. So they had some positive outcomes,
Speaker 6: of good positive outcomes of the overpopulation concerned. You know,
Speaker 6: you had pushes foreman's empowerment. You had the proposal of
Speaker 6: improved urbanization to reduce the sprawl of human activity. You
Speaker 6: also have people proposing things like extraterrestrial settlements, which you know,
Speaker 6: it's not really realistic as a solution for a multitude
Speaker 6: of valid reasons.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think it's really.
Speaker 6: Funny, you know, whenever other people push that sort of yeah,
Speaker 6: humans are destined for the stars kind of narrative. You know,
Speaker 6: it's a story, a really powerful story coming out of
Speaker 6: science fiction, and it's good that it has inspired people
Speaker 6: to learn more about space, and you know that their
Speaker 6: lives to the study of the stars and that kind
Speaker 6: of thing. But this idea that would to be shipping
Speaker 6: off like millions of people off planet to settle on
Speaker 6: other planets, I think is pretty safely in the realm
Speaker 6: of science fiction.
Speaker 9: Yeah, that's a full Like get back to me. In
Speaker 9: a thousand years, we could baby start talking about moving
Speaker 9: like thousands of people.
Speaker 6: Yeah, even thousands or hundreds of people. I mean, we
Speaker 6: don't have those those massive generationships. We can't even get
Speaker 6: those off the ground at this stage in our spacecraft.
Speaker 6: And we also have a lot of issues to resolve
Speaker 6: on Earth before we spread our problems across the galaxy
Speaker 6: as far as I'm concerned. But Beyond these solutions, the
Speaker 6: ideas and public discourses around population have also boothed a
Speaker 6: lot of conspiracy theories. You know, I'm sure you might
Speaker 6: have heard a few of them in your time.
Speaker 9: Oh boy, yep, this is one of the big Alex
Speaker 9: Jones things. For example, So he's convinced that there's like
Speaker 9: a giant plot by the globalists to kill off an
Speaker 9: enormous part of human population to stop over population or something.
Speaker 6: It's yeah, yeah, Honestly, any combination of conspiracies can be
Speaker 6: smushed together to fit that kind of narrative, and they
Speaker 6: can talk about all the vaccine sterilizing people, the chemtrails,
Speaker 6: the five Gita was, the Bill Gates, microchips, they are
Speaker 6: even the food supply, all these things allegedly being used
Speaker 6: to sterilize people. I'm not to say that there isn't
Speaker 6: validity to any claims of the things that we consume
Speaker 6: contributing to lower fertility. The fact that we clothe ourselves
Speaker 6: in like polyester. You know, we still have a full
Speaker 6: idea of the impact of microplastics on our bodies. You know,
Speaker 6: there's valid concerns about some of the consequences of the
Speaker 6: ultra processed foods that you know, fill out grocery shells.
Speaker 6: But that's just the sad thing about conspiracy theories. You know,
Speaker 6: they have some kleinos of truth mixed in to boster.
Speaker 6: They have validity, but then they mix it up with
Speaker 6: a bunch of garbage about you know that's a nonsense. Yeah,
Speaker 6: And then of course, I mean some of these consciracy
Speaker 6: theories are kind of benign.
Speaker 7: You know, like if you think it's.
Speaker 6: Five gitas, I guess you'd put a I don't know,
Speaker 6: a tinfoil hat on your junk.
Speaker 9: But I mean, to be fair, there was one of
Speaker 9: the five g guys who did like blow himself up
Speaker 9: at a giant car bomb.
Speaker 7: I did not hear about that a couple of years
Speaker 7: ago down.
Speaker 9: Oh yeah, luckily he only killed himself, but giant giant
Speaker 9: car bomb in the middle of I wanted to say
Speaker 9: Memphis or something down Yeah. But yeah, so like every
Speaker 9: once in a while he gets some real oh boys
Speaker 9: stuff from that.
Speaker 7: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 6: I mean, honestly, people could take even the simplest things
Speaker 6: and turn it into a threat to themselves and others
Speaker 6: if they're not in the right headspace. So they haven't
Speaker 6: been given the right sports sad rely and obviously like
Speaker 6: none of the conspiracies of A nine. I mean, if
Speaker 6: you have people rejecting vaccines, you know, it's almost like
Speaker 6: we're in the world that I alluded to earlier, you know,
Speaker 6: where we have our residence and measles.
Speaker 7: For example.
Speaker 9: Yeah, Jim O'Neil, who's the Deputy Secretary of Health and
Speaker 9: Human Services and the acting director for the CDC literally
Speaker 9: on Monday, called for splitting the MMR vaccine it's multiple vaccines, like,
Speaker 9: which is basically which is just straight up the Andrew
Speaker 9: Wakefield I think, like I've said this on seven podcasts
Speaker 9: on this show now, but this is literally just straight
Speaker 9: up the Andrew Wakefield anti vaccine thing from the original
Speaker 9: giant anti vaccine panic in the nineties.
Speaker 7: That was the autism seeing thing.
Speaker 9: Yeah yeah, like and this is this is this is
Speaker 9: the guy who's currently running the CDC. It's just being like, no, yeah,
Speaker 9: you should do this thing.
Speaker 7: That's yeah, yeah, you guys are cooked.
Speaker 9: Yeah again, this thing that was developed specifically so that
Speaker 9: Antie Wakefield could sell his own vaccine.
Speaker 7: Oh yeah, yeah. I mean that's that's the thing.
Speaker 6: If I was conspiracy brain, I would say that actually
Speaker 6: the popularization of vaccine conspiracies on social media sites contributes
Speaker 6: to exactly that kind of population control that those same
Speaker 6: conspiracy theorists famonga about. But that's if I was conspiracy brain,
Speaker 6: which I'm not.
Speaker 9: God, So someone someone believes that somewhere, absolutely, there is
Speaker 9: someone who's like, the anti vaxxers are a conspiracy to
Speaker 9: call them goal population or something like.
Speaker 6: No, because I mean, we have this very straightforwardly effective
Speaker 6: human invention and one of the best in the history
Speaker 6: of humankind. And you're telling me that a couple of
Speaker 6: people on Facebook and are responsible for the entire government
Speaker 6: rejecting the effectiveness of vaccines and you know, jeopardizing the
Speaker 6: healthy entire population.
Speaker 9: Come on, yeah, I mean, unfortunately, the true believers are
Speaker 9: in charge now.
Speaker 6: Indeed, indeed they are true believers, and of course people
Speaker 6: who stand to profit from the dip in the sales
Speaker 6: of paracetamol and whatever else. So they're those conspiracies about population.
Speaker 6: And then there's the typical far right Nazi conspiracies about
Speaker 6: great replacement, right, the idea that shataway elites orchestrating falling
Speaker 6: blue rates among white populations while encouraging immigration from the
Speaker 6: population boomen global seuth. I mean, of course, not all
Speaker 6: the global self is woomen population wise, a lot of
Speaker 6: please there's also experience in decline. It's a global problem.
Speaker 6: But we're going to get to that. Unconnected, of course,
Speaker 6: to those great replacement times. So you have the eco
Speaker 6: fash with their worries about the environmental impact of population,
Speaker 6: and their twisted belief that environmental collapse could be solved
Speaker 6: by reducing the number of people, which usually ends up
Speaker 6: target in marginalized groups, which is exactly the kind of
Speaker 6: thinking that inspired real violence, like with the Christian shooter
Speaker 6: in twenty nineteen. And of course the actual drivers of
Speaker 6: ecological collapse are not poor families in India or Africa
Speaker 6: having too many kids. It's the over consumption of the
Speaker 6: global norse. You know, if you actually wanted to reduce consumption,
Speaker 6: reduce the impact of population on the planet, are you
Speaker 6: going to start with fewer people? Are going to start
Speaker 6: with fewer billionaires flying private jets. You know, it's not
Speaker 6: about the number of people they head count, it's about
Speaker 6: their lifestyles and the systems that support what those lifestyles.
Speaker 6: You know, believing population is a very cheap, simplistic and
Speaker 6: cowardly get out of jail free code for the rich
Speaker 6: minority that drive this systemic crisis.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 9: The thing about this, obviously is that if you believe
Speaker 9: that you need to reduce the human population, that it's
Speaker 9: your obligation to go first.
Speaker 6: Yes, well, we are going to talk about those types
Speaker 6: of people in the next episode. But you know, speaking
Speaker 6: of the overpopulation, I think nowadays at least an opposite
Speaker 6: concern that is dominating the headlines. You know, in wealthier,
Speaker 6: more developed countries, fertility tends to be lower, and that's
Speaker 6: tied to things like back to education, more women working,
Speaker 6: urban living, greater choices, greater access to contraception, et cetera.
Speaker 6: But in less developed countries, fertility is usually higher because
Speaker 6: children are often seen as both help and hands and
Speaker 6: future caregivers, and education and access to both control are
Speaker 6: more limited. But the global fertility rate is now steadily
Speaker 6: dropping due to that increasing development, greater access to birth control,
Speaker 6: creater education of women's rights, And there's a fair nowadays
Speaker 6: where there won't be enough people to support the system
Speaker 6: as it has been built. Remember, capitalism is predicated on
Speaker 6: endless growth. When its population starts to decline, naturally, everything
Speaker 6: that is building towards in terms of the amount of consumers,
Speaker 6: the amount of infrastructure, the amount of workers. Those are
Speaker 6: not going to be there anymore, especially as more and
Speaker 6: more people end up dipping out of the workforce as
Speaker 6: they age. So in twenty three, the global average had
Speaker 6: dropped to just two point three children poor women, which
Speaker 6: is less than half of what it was sixty years ago.
Speaker 6: According to the United Nations, fertility will keep fallen throughout
Speaker 6: the century, and by the year twenty one hundred, the
Speaker 6: global average is expected to dip the low replacement level
Speaker 6: of two point one to about one point eight children
Speaker 6: poor woman. Now, some countries are already there. Japan sits
Speaker 6: at a one point two children poor woman, Italy, Spain,
Speaker 6: and much of Eastern Europe are well below one point five.
Speaker 6: South Korea is famously a demographic outlier at zero point
Speaker 6: seven children poor woman, which is the lowest facility rate
Speaker 6: in the world. And that means obviously that on average,
Speaker 6: Korean women are having less than one child each for
Speaker 6: very valid reasons, I might add, considering the economic and
Speaker 6: cultural conditions in that country. Now, I don't live in
Speaker 6: Eastern Europe or Southern Europe or East Asia, I live
Speaker 6: in the Caribbean.
Speaker 7: I live in Trinan, Tobago.
Speaker 6: But speaking anecdotally at least, which obviously is not representative
Speaker 6: of the full picture, I can count, maybe had one hand,
Speaker 6: the number of people I know my age who think
Speaker 6: that they'll be able to bring children into the world,
Speaker 6: whether they want.
Speaker 7: To or not.
Speaker 6: You know, very few people I know actually want children,
Speaker 6: or if they do want children, they don't think they'll
Speaker 6: be able to afford to have children. But maybe that's
Speaker 6: a selfishness. What do you think.
Speaker 9: I mean, I don't know, like I am not interacting
Speaker 9: with a representative example of the population. But no, yeah,
Speaker 9: I mean it's a lot of people who are like no,
Speaker 9: and it's too expensive. It sucks, I don't want to
Speaker 9: deal with this. But again, like, not not a representative
Speaker 9: sample here.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean you could just look at
Speaker 6: the economy. Things have been getting wood for my entire life.
Speaker 6: You know, there hasn't been any point in my life
Speaker 6: where anyone in my generation could look around honestly and say, yeah,
Speaker 6: you know, this is we be cooking. You know, it's
Speaker 6: time to double double it. You know, let's have a child.
Speaker 6: You know, the housing situation has gotten worse. The cost
Speaker 6: of living and as a whole has gotten worse, child
Speaker 6: care costs have gotten worse. And of course, outside of
Speaker 6: that economic stuff, there's also cultural attitude shifts and people
Speaker 6: realizing I don't need to have a child to be fulfilled,
Speaker 6: to find meaning. You know, people are able to pursue
Speaker 6: higher education, and also they're more educated about the process
Speaker 6: of child bearing in general, including the very valid medical
Speaker 6: concerns surrounding that whole process. I mean, if I were
Speaker 6: a woman, I would not want to have a child.
Speaker 6: You know, the consequences on their bodies, on their minds,
Speaker 6: and their health, the risks to their very life are
Speaker 6: not something that can be swept aside as it was previously.
Speaker 6: People are aware of it now, people are talking about
Speaker 6: it now, and they are empowered to make decisions that
Speaker 6: be right for them. You know, a lot of people
Speaker 6: are also very much focused on their careers, either by
Speaker 6: choice or because they don't have any other choice but
Speaker 6: to focus on putting food on the table. You know,
Speaker 6: people are also getting married later and as a whole,
Speaker 6: we have shifted to what a more individual society. So
Speaker 6: you know, in the past you did have the extended families,
Speaker 6: the closet communities that made raising children a bit more manageable.
Speaker 6: But today it's a bit rarer to find, and you
Speaker 6: send to see a lot more nuclear families or even
Speaker 6: just individuals going at it a loonan you know, less
Speaker 6: support and more isolation, and so it makes it very difficult.
Speaker 6: And then there's the existential angst of it all. You know,
Speaker 6: I can't forget the fact that there are multiple wars
Speaker 6: waging around the world. You know, there's a lot of
Speaker 6: political instability in much of the world, and of course
Speaker 6: the biggest issue of all climate change, which makes it honestly,
Speaker 6: it makes it feel it responsible to even think about
Speaker 6: bringing a child into this mess. So a declining fertility,
Speaker 6: a decline in population, it has the government's panicing. You know,
Speaker 6: China went from having decades of a one child policy
Speaker 6: to now desperately trying to encourage people to have more babies.
Speaker 6: They're offering cash bonuses and housing books and extended parent
Speaker 6: to leave. But it's not really working. You know, as
Speaker 6: populations are aging, there's a lot more elderly people to
Speaker 6: care for and fewer workinish people to support them. So
Speaker 6: that is you know, a recipe for pension crises and
Speaker 6: labor shortages and spiral and healthcare costs. So some governments
Speaker 6: are even trying to raise the retirement age, which, as
Speaker 6: France and their protests have shown, is not going to
Speaker 6: go over well with much of the population. Nobody wants
Speaker 6: to work extra five years and extra ten years more
Speaker 6: when they've already put so much of their lives to
Speaker 6: these dead end pointless and you know, mentally and physically
Speaker 6: dreaming tasks that really just line the pockets of their bosses.
Speaker 9: It is worth pointing out the last year there was
Speaker 9: a pretty massive raise in the retirement age people in China.
Speaker 9: That's being phased in a way where're going to take
Speaker 9: over the course of fifteen years. It goes up gradually
Speaker 9: to sort of like spread out the anger over it.
Speaker 9: But yeah, it is worth noting that China's is like
Speaker 9: significantly increased or is going to significantly increase over the
Speaker 9: course of the next fifteen years.
Speaker 7: M Yeah.
Speaker 6: And then on the other side of things, there is
Speaker 6: in the retirement age now, but the young people who
Speaker 6: are working today are more than likely not going to
Speaker 6: get any kind of pension.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I've rather the world of my sixty don't look
Speaker 6: like the world of my twenties, that would be my preference.
Speaker 6: So I would rather that we've reached a point as
Speaker 6: a society where pensions are not the necessary band aid
Speaker 6: that they are right now. But until then, you know,
Speaker 6: there's quite the powder keg.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 6: We also have in Eastern Europe, you know, you have
Speaker 6: countries rolling out pro natalist policies that tie financial support
Speaker 6: directly to family size. I'm going to get a bit
Speaker 6: more into pronatalists in the next episode. But there's also
Speaker 6: the darker side of that pronatalist push in terms of
Speaker 6: the policies meant to reverse the population decline. Some governments,
Speaker 6: instead of making life better for potential appearance, are criminalizing
Speaker 6: They're turning to anti choice policies. They are strict in abortion,
Speaker 6: and they're limited reproductive rights. They're demonizing child free lifestyles.
Speaker 6: Russia actually recently criminalized what they called child the free propaganda,
Speaker 6: you know. And then this is also part of a
Speaker 6: broader conversation about population where they have the immigration concerns
Speaker 6: as a political flashpoint because a lot of wealthy countries,
Speaker 6: because of their population decline, are starting to rely more
Speaker 6: on immigrants to keep their economies going. But as a
Speaker 6: flip side that tends to fuel backlash from the farhad
Speaker 6: groups who are able to frame it as a threat
Speaker 6: to national identity, and because the system of the states
Speaker 6: and capitalism is not interested in actually taking care of people,
Speaker 6: those immigrants become a very useful scapegoat.
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 6: Obviously, I'm in support of people moving and living wherever
Speaker 6: they want to move and live as they please. I
Speaker 6: don't believe in borders, especially as the climate consequences are
Speaker 6: hitting those of us in the global South boost. But
Speaker 6: I also I'm not a fan of the way that
Speaker 6: some progressives end up talking about immigration, where they act
Speaker 6: as if, you know, the global sealth is like a
Speaker 6: population bank that wealthy countries could tap into and you know,
Speaker 6: pull population from, regardless of the consequences on the home
Speaker 6: countries of these people. You know, it's like, let immigrants come,
Speaker 6: and I'm all for that, But then it's also like,
Speaker 6: your your government is destabilizing their governments, your your system,
Speaker 6: your economic system, and the global economic systems beaking life
Speaker 6: in those countries unlivable. And I think the priority also
Speaker 6: needs to be on dealing with that issue and not
Speaker 6: just shrugging and saying, well, you know, not. At least
Speaker 6: immigrants are able to help our economy stay aflut even
Speaker 6: as their countries languish and suffer. So to kind of
Speaker 6: wrap things up, where does this all leave us? You know,
Speaker 6: for centuries we feared having two many people, and now
Speaker 6: we're signed to fair having too few people, and both
Speaker 6: anxieties are shaping policy, feel and racy theories and sparkan
Speaker 6: culture wars. And whether the future holds overcrowded cities or
Speaker 6: ghost towns really depends on the direction of politics, economy, culture,
Speaker 6: and urban designs.
Speaker 7: Teak.
Speaker 6: On the next episode, I'm going to be talking about
Speaker 6: the ideas around the population, the pro natalists and the
Speaker 6: anti natalists. But until then, I've been Andrew Sage here
Speaker 6: with Mia Wong on it could Happen Here.
Speaker 9: This.
Speaker 12: Trigger Trader, I heard ah, Hello, Welcome to It could
Speaker 12: Happen Here? The Spooky Special. I'm your host, Garrison Davis.
Speaker 12: Once again, there has been far too many important world
Speaker 12: events taking precedents that we here at the show are
Speaker 12: unable to provide listeners with an entire spooky week's worth
Speaker 12: of themed episodes. But I know how important Halloween is
Speaker 12: for many millennials, so I've taken it upon myself to
Speaker 12: produce two spooky episodes to book and the Holiday, this
Speaker 12: episode that you're listening to right now, as well as
Speaker 12: another that will release Monday morning or Sunday night. As
Speaker 12: the world is becoming an increasingly spooky, scary place, I
Speaker 12: needed to up the ante to exceed the weird and
Speaker 12: eerie fright that comes from living in America and the
Speaker 12: world in general in twenty twenty five. So last week
Speaker 12: I traveled from New York to Brussels, briefly caught up
Speaker 12: with my close personal friend and colleague Hinton, and then
Speaker 12: took the train to Germany. Very scary indeed, once in Germany,
Speaker 12: I was confronted with seemingly occult words and symbols. People
Speaker 12: spoke in odd incantations. I came across a map that
Speaker 12: appeared via my black scrying mirror the iPhone, which, upon deciphering,
Speaker 12: led me to an old power plant warehouse in East Berlin.
Speaker 12: I entered this dark, looming building and inside the air
Speaker 12: was thick with smoke and incense. Figures dressed in all
Speaker 12: black emerged from the fog, Witches, wizards and magicians. I
Speaker 12: followed them into a candlelit room. Where hooded occultists conducted
Speaker 12: a ritual welcoming us to the twenty twenty five A
Speaker 12: Culture Conference. A Culture is a by yearly conference that's
Speaker 12: once every two years, focusing on the intersection of occultism
Speaker 12: and culture, pop or otherwise. This is arguably the most
Speaker 12: prestigious occultism conference in the world. I have been wanting
Speaker 12: to attend four years, and I was finally able to
Speaker 12: go this go round on the condition that I make
Speaker 12: four podcast episodes. The two that I'm releasing this week
Speaker 12: and next will cover some of the core magical and
Speaker 12: topical currents throughout the conference, mostly via a panel discussion
Speaker 12: between myself and three other attendees, and then before Christmas,
Speaker 12: I'll have two fully scripted episodes interrogating these concepts further
Speaker 12: and discussing the use of occult practice in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 12: So to start, let's meet our panelists. I should introduce
Speaker 12: my magical travel team for this conference. Let's start with Delta,
Speaker 12: a Belgian magician and artist which I recruited to join
Speaker 12: me in this wacky adventure. Delta Sahi, Hello, what do
Speaker 12: you do, Delta? What's your magical specialty? I suppose well,
Speaker 12: it's kind of into the microphone. It's kind of a
Speaker 12: mix of things where.
Speaker 18: Part of it is.
Speaker 12: Just into the microphone. I'm sorry, how you can you
Speaker 12: can you can get you can get prety close to.
Speaker 19: It, Okay. It's a kind of a mix of things
Speaker 19: really between conventional chaos magic and more theoretical like weird
Speaker 19: theory stuff like Mark Fisher and the CCRU adjacent things.
Speaker 12: We talk a lot about Mark Fisher, some landstuff, metafiction theory, fiction, hyperstition,
Speaker 12: Delta myself talk about magic through the Internet quite a
Speaker 12: bit and how it combines with cultural theory, which is
Speaker 12: relevant to this conference. Let's move over to my left.
Speaker 18: I've been recruited along on this magical journey. I'm Ryan.
Speaker 18: I practiced the Vasriana, a Greco Egyptian magical practice, and
Speaker 18: also am involved in a Haitian voodoo house. Prior to that,
Speaker 18: I was also an academic for a good period of
Speaker 18: time where I studied Renaissance rhetoric and political theory, philosophy,
Speaker 18: and economics. So my contributions are going to be wide
Speaker 18: and varied.
Speaker 12: We've been making a lot of Hegel jokes this weekend,
Speaker 12: so many Hegel jokes our last crew member, which people
Speaker 12: may have heard before on various shows him.
Speaker 20: My name is Elaine, and I make art and research
Speaker 20: a lot of Renaissance script mark magic, and most of
Speaker 20: the things I do are a lot of idiosyncratic practices
Speaker 20: and based on various folk magic and chaos magic and
Speaker 20: Balkan folk magic.
Speaker 12: Before we continue the conversation between myself and my three guests,
Speaker 12: let's start by discussing the word a culture, the namesake
Speaker 12: of the conference. Obviously, this is a combination of the
Speaker 12: word ac cult and culture, and it describes how the
Speaker 12: two influence and possibly undermine one another. To read a
Speaker 12: quote from the person who originated the term, quote, a
Speaker 12: culture is a word that was inevitable during the hyperactive
Speaker 12: phase of the Temple of Psychic Youth in the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 12: We were casting around for an all embracing term to
Speaker 12: describe an approach to combining a unique, demystified spiritual philosophy
Speaker 12: with a fervent insistence that all life and art are indivisible.
Speaker 12: At any given moment, our sensory environment is whispering to us,
Speaker 12: telling us hidden stories, revealing subliminal connections. This concealed dialogue
Speaker 12: between every level of popular cultural forms and magical conclusions
Speaker 12: is what we named a culture unquote. That is from
Speaker 12: genesis b Puurage a musician, magician, artist, a cult leader,
Speaker 12: and hashtag slightly problematic queer icon. In the seventies, they
Speaker 12: started the band Throbbing Gristle, pioneered industrial music, and later
Speaker 12: started the Chaos magic organization, the Temple of Psychic Youth
Speaker 12: and its associated band Psychic TV. Though a culture did
Speaker 12: not just describe this sort of personal spiritual movement, it
Speaker 12: carried a strong offensive element targeted against society and perceived
Speaker 12: systems of control. Through their many projects, including Throbbing Gristle
Speaker 12: Psychic TV in the Temple of Psychic Youth, Purage utilized
Speaker 12: art and magical practice to conduct a quote unquote war
Speaker 12: on culture. Similar to another figure that will soon get
Speaker 12: to william S. Burrows, a culture describes a process of
Speaker 12: cultural osmosis. The occult bleeds into and morph's culture, affecting
Speaker 12: everything from pop culture to politics and philosophy. But as
Speaker 12: a part of this osmosis, the occult becomes increasingly commodified, knowable, safe, territory, marketable.
Speaker 12: The hidden occult loses its very essence of being hidden
Speaker 12: despite its use as a tool of attack against mainstream culture.
Speaker 12: Like most countercultural forms, the occult has been largely recuperated.
Speaker 12: Even creative works which our genuine explorations into the occult
Speaker 12: fall into this recuperation herodigm. They get turned into products
Speaker 12: consumed by mostly secular audience, like the works of Dueling Wizards,
Speaker 12: Allen Moore and Grant Morrison. Now some occultists rejoice, knowing
Speaker 12: that this wide exposure will influence more people to become
Speaker 12: interested in or adopt occult practices of their own, while
Speaker 12: others bemoan this dilution and commodification of what to them
Speaker 12: is an important spiritual practice. As the modern occult revival,
Speaker 12: along with a heavy helping hand of scientific advancement, de
Speaker 12: territorialized Christian hegemonic religion. Now the occult itself has been
Speaker 12: re territorialized, which is not to say that the occult
Speaker 12: is no longer a field of play, which is what
Speaker 12: this conference attempts to assert. Let's go back to the panel.
Speaker 18: In terms of the conference itself, as we'll get into later,
Speaker 18: the term a culture very specifically seems to be focused
Speaker 18: on the study of the interrelation of magical practice and
Speaker 18: the material aspects of occult culture and its influence and
Speaker 18: appropriation by wider society. So in terms of political projects
Speaker 18: or social projects, you can probably relate this. I think
Speaker 18: that it would be fair to say that it's something
Speaker 18: like culture jamming if we're looking for some familiar concepts
Speaker 18: for people to map onto. That is to say, a
Speaker 18: focus of way from simply solitary practice in the ways
Speaker 18: in which occult elements influence broader aspects of our society
Speaker 18: or are appropriated, whether that's through consumerist forces or through
Speaker 18: various artistic practices, or even the production of for example,
Speaker 18: film television movies. So I think that's a fair assessment
Speaker 18: of the impacts of a culture.
Speaker 12: And relevant to our discussion later. It's influenced in the
Speaker 12: tech sector and the emergence of AI, which the current
Speaker 12: manifestation of has some heavily occult origins regarding around a
Speaker 12: whole bunch of people in the nineties who were writing
Speaker 12: about AI as this as this occult project, and that
Speaker 12: influenced many a AI engineer and coder who are now
Speaker 12: building this stuff and it's becoming an ever present part
Speaker 12: of our lives, and the occultists now are trying to
Speaker 12: incorporate it into their own practice, which we will discuss
Speaker 12: in a sect. Any other notes on a culture as
Speaker 12: a concept or what this conference is doing with the concept.
Speaker 20: I think a culture is a concept is something that's
Speaker 20: basically been around as long as there's been magical practices,
Speaker 20: just looking at so much of things, like you know,
Speaker 20: the concept of the British Empire being invented by John
Speaker 20: d because of conversations he was having with angels. So
Speaker 20: I think that naming it and calling it something is
Speaker 20: also very much felt like an attempt to sort of
Speaker 20: regain control over the ways that magical practice and greater
Speaker 20: society seem to influence each other, as opposed to a
Speaker 20: more unintentional way that they have been going back and
Speaker 20: forth for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
Speaker 18: There may also be one other aspect that's important for
Speaker 18: our American audience is given that we're recording this in Deutschland,
Speaker 18: this conference varies significantly from other American equivalent, or something
Speaker 18: that might be an American equivalent formerly Pantheaicon in and
Speaker 18: around San Francisco and San Jose specifically, or Paganicon in
Speaker 18: the Twin Cities, which specifically has much more of a
Speaker 18: new age neopagan reconstructionist, and so most academic discussion is
Speaker 18: viewed with some suspicion. And I'm hesitant to say that
Speaker 18: there's an anti intellectual trend because I don't necessarily think
Speaker 18: that's true. However, there is a resistance to the kind
Speaker 18: of academic styling that we saw very prevalent at this
Speaker 18: conference to talk about the occult more generally as an
Speaker 18: area of study in addition to just idiosyncratic practice or
Speaker 18: part of a larger social neopagan movement, which is again
Speaker 18: very much the focus of most US based conferences.
Speaker 12: As an editorial note, when we're talking about magic, to clarify,
Speaker 12: we're not talking about stage magicians. We're referring to magic
Speaker 12: with a K. That is, rituals and practices based on
Speaker 12: occult knowledge. It seeks to cause change in accordance with will,
Speaker 12: whether that's changed within yourself or in our consensus reality.
Speaker 12: Occult magical practice can also serve as a form of spirituality, mysticism,
Speaker 12: an alternative religious practice or an alternative to religion, with
Speaker 12: its beliefs in practice largely influenced by historical esoteric orders,
Speaker 12: mystery traditions, paganism, witchcraft, herbalism, astrology, hermantic philosophy, and alchemy,
Speaker 12: and all these things are influences. I'm not saying that
Speaker 12: the actual historic manifestations of these things are the same
Speaker 12: as the modern occult practices that are influenced by these things,
Speaker 12: because often these can be wildly varying, especially when you
Speaker 12: talk about things like witchcraft and alchemy, which have been
Speaker 12: misinterpreted or reconstructed into completely new forms than what the
Speaker 12: historical manifestation of them actually contained. But a lot of
Speaker 12: modern day ocultism has manifested as an individually mediated spirituality
Speaker 12: containing some of the group ritual or ritual aspects of
Speaker 12: something like Catholicism, but with the individuality of Protestantism. Many
Speaker 12: conferences have an opening ceremony, and as I previously mentioned,
Speaker 12: a culture had an opening ritual. This accomplishes a very
Speaker 12: similar goal to any opening ceremony, to get attendees in
Speaker 12: a certain headspace, prepare them for the rest of the conference,
Speaker 12: and set a certain mood in which the rest of
Speaker 12: the events will kind of follow suit. The a culture
Speaker 12: opening ritual called upon the attendee's demiurgic capacity. How they
Speaker 12: are part of creating the reality of what this conference
Speaker 12: is and how it will continue for the next few days.
Speaker 12: Back to the panel. The framing of the ritual was
Speaker 12: a blindfolded woman holding the scales of balance, and each
Speaker 12: person put a intention for the week, or for the conference,
Speaker 12: or for themselves into a stone, which was handed out
Speaker 12: to each person who entered the ritual, and at certain
Speaker 12: point these stones were placed on to the scales of
Speaker 12: balance to create an equilibrium between the two sides of
Speaker 12: the scale, along with the you know, chanting, meditation, and
Speaker 12: a lot of incense.
Speaker 18: A significant deal of incense given that we were in
Speaker 18: a former German forge warehouse. The you know, billowing smoke
Speaker 18: that existed throughout the conference, from fires to incense to
Speaker 18: various other inflammatory items was rather impressive. But in terms
Speaker 18: of actual ritual design, it met several elements that I
Speaker 18: found to be rather impressive. One, it was encompassing of
Speaker 18: all of those elements that we would later expect to
Speaker 18: see in the actual body of the conference itself. In
Speaker 18: terms of like the artistic performances, the musical you know,
Speaker 18: metal golf music that was played, but also a very
Speaker 18: practical and open approach to ritual. It was highly inclusive.
Speaker 18: Everyone who was there participated. It did an exceptional job
Speaker 18: I felt of actually bringing setting intention and adding to
Speaker 18: I don't know, at risk of sounding to new age
Speaker 18: the vibrations that we all felt as we engaged and
Speaker 18: were present. The theatrical quality, I have to say, was
Speaker 18: also very much.
Speaker 19: Dark and spooky.
Speaker 18: Dark and spooky, but something to be admired.
Speaker 2: They did a very good.
Speaker 12: Job, definitely one of the more high effort rituals of
Speaker 12: the weekend in terms of the performative aspect, with there
Speaker 12: being little less than a dozen hooded cloaked figures stationed
Speaker 12: at different points, either holding specific positions in a meditative
Speaker 12: state for probably over half an hour, standing still in
Speaker 12: a decision that would become uncomfortable, and swinging, swinging incense,
Speaker 12: or holding torches or lights. Setting intention specifically is usually
Speaker 12: you talk to these people. The first step of any
Speaker 12: kind of magical working is setting your intention for what
Speaker 12: the work is supposed to do or accomplish in you
Speaker 12: or out into the world. Mirroring the opening ritual, Culture
Speaker 12: twenty twenty five little booklet has a few paragraphs on
Speaker 12: the concept for this conference, talking about the cosmic craftsman
Speaker 12: as the demiir to shapes matter and spirit alike who
Speaker 12: embodies creation and transformation, revealing both the light and the hidden,
Speaker 12: the shadowed face of the divine, as well as having
Speaker 12: cosmic balance and balancing destruction with creation and order and
Speaker 12: chaos and the hidden and the scene. The last paragraph
Speaker 12: in which I will read I think relates specifically to
Speaker 12: this show and the cultural political aspects quote. In the
Speaker 12: age of relentless acceleration, the craftsman becomes a figure of resistance.
Speaker 12: His patience and ritual discipline reclaims sacred time, restoring a
Speaker 12: them beyond the acceleration of modern life. A Culture twenty
Speaker 12: twenty five invites us to dwell in this threshold where creation, intuition,
Speaker 12: and the hidden divine converge, and with that we converge
Speaker 12: on an outbreak. Welcome back to the it could happen here,
Speaker 12: Spooky Special On the A Culture Conference. The figure name
Speaker 12: dropped the most throughout this conference might surprise some people,
Speaker 12: because I'm assuming most do not consider him to be
Speaker 12: an occultist or really a serious occult figure. The most
Speaker 12: discussed individual, at least in my experience of the conference,
Speaker 12: was not Alistair Crowley, John d someone like Lena Blovotsky,
Speaker 12: but in fact william S Burrows. And now we'll return
Speaker 12: to the panel to discuss the Burrosian current. Let's talk
Speaker 12: about what I would argue was the strongest current throughout
Speaker 12: this conference, what I'm gonna call the Burrosian current, relating
Speaker 12: to writer, beat poet, and mystic and occultists in his
Speaker 12: own right, William S Burrows and the magical technology that
Speaker 12: he either invented or popularized in the second half of
Speaker 12: the twentieth century and played a significant role in influencing
Speaker 12: successor movements such as chaos magic and even the work
Speaker 12: of the CCRU and Land and Fisher. The very first
Speaker 12: talk that we attended was specifically on Burroughs, and Burrows
Speaker 12: ghost haunted the remainder of the conference thereafter and introduced
Speaker 12: a few of the key tensions throughout the rest of
Speaker 12: the conference which we will discuss as specifically technology in AI.
Speaker 18: So our first talk by castro Opstrop, who I believe
Speaker 18: was Swedish, one of those.
Speaker 19: He was working at the University of Copenhagen.
Speaker 18: The University of Copenhagen certainly Scandinavian of some flavor of variety,
Speaker 18: focused on William S Burrows and Brian Geyson, I think
Speaker 18: that it's important, and I appreciated this claim on the
Speaker 18: outset that they argued that both Geyson and Burroughs are
Speaker 18: actually closer to the late Surrealists rather than to the
Speaker 18: beat poets generation which we typically associate them with, which,
Speaker 18: interestingly enough, I made both of these figures far more
Speaker 18: compelling to me my understanding of them. I mean, despite
Speaker 18: my familiarity with the cut up method, and you know,
Speaker 18: several of the things that Burrows had written, I always
Speaker 18: considered them far more beat and therefore less less of
Speaker 18: interest to me specifically. But this proximity to the Surrealists,
Speaker 18: especially the late latter Surrealists, I found particularly compelled, and
Speaker 18: I think that brings us to the real focus of
Speaker 18: this talk was Burrows's cut up method and another book
Speaker 18: that he published on the Third Mind, which gave way
Speaker 18: to the latter discussions on artificial intelligence and large language models.
Speaker 12: So Burrows definitely popularized the cut up method, which Geyson originated,
Speaker 12: but Burroughs changed its different forms of manifestations to various
Speaker 12: mediums of art like the tape recorder and his own
Speaker 12: writings and just words and language. And I guess the
Speaker 12: reason why I think talking about this current is important
Speaker 12: to start. Is also revolves around this idea of magic
Speaker 12: as this form of like resistance or this like a
Speaker 12: culture jamming practice, which Burrows framed his own work in
Speaker 12: his like a you know, work that could we could
Speaker 12: just describe as like esoteric or inspired byesoterism or achieving
Speaker 12: esotericals is specifically for this cultural infusion to to disrupt
Speaker 12: mainstream culture in some capacity, to go against the one
Speaker 12: God universe, sometimes in an anarchic way, sometimes in a
Speaker 12: libertarian way. There's a mix of a mix of like
Speaker 12: motivations that play here, same thing with like Robert Anton Wilson,
Speaker 12: which I'm sure you've heard Robert Evans talk about before.
Speaker 12: These were contemporaries. These guys were friends and operating under
Speaker 12: like similar goals of disrupting culture through these techniques which
Speaker 12: they thought literally like disrupted the linear flow of culture
Speaker 12: or the mechanisms of control such as like language and
Speaker 12: linear time, which later gets developed on by Land and Fissure.
Speaker 20: Yeah, I think looking at some of my notes, some
Speaker 20: of the things that stuck out to me, especially in
Speaker 20: view of the fact that the other classes going on
Speaker 20: at the time began with Alistair Crowley, but we're diving
Speaker 20: into a lot of more classical and historical magical traditions.
Speaker 20: Was that language can shape reality, which is something that
Speaker 20: would also be held by a lot of the classical
Speaker 20: magical ideas that sound and image have a cult power,
Speaker 20: which is very true in a lot of magical traditions
Speaker 20: dating back to the Pickatrix and more ancient texts, and
Speaker 20: that tech available at the time can be a magical instrument,
Speaker 20: which the tech available currently and for William Burrows is
Speaker 20: very different than classical tech, but is something that has
Speaker 20: been done for a very long time as well. What
Speaker 20: really changes is stepping out of the idea of a
Speaker 20: linear representation of it and into something that could be edited,
Speaker 20: cut and reprogrammed, specifically using technology that allowed that as
Speaker 20: opposed to something that you're trying to control solely through
Speaker 20: say more spiritual magical acts. It's something that you can
Speaker 20: do with a tape recording.
Speaker 12: And this is like you know, based on forms like
Speaker 12: social engineering and the manipulation of the reproduction of reality,
Speaker 12: which Burrows believes language plays a key role in, even
Speaker 12: though I might disagree with him in a few ways
Speaker 12: on like the nature of like a language as a
Speaker 12: as a human concept versus this like alien concept which
Speaker 12: it's like infected to human delta. You should explain what
Speaker 12: the cut up method is.
Speaker 19: Yes, well, the name itself kind of is self explanatory,
Speaker 19: but the idea of being essentially too thick any form
Speaker 19: of texts or writing, cut up the words or pieces
Speaker 19: of sentences, jumble them up in a hat or a
Speaker 19: bucket or whatever, and then kind of like play a
Speaker 19: jigsaw puzzle with language, reshifting sentences into new ideas and
Speaker 19: new forms of poetry, especially which I'm just looking at
Speaker 19: my own cut ups right in front of me.
Speaker 12: To force like randomized combinations of the word that you
Speaker 12: would not choose to combine on your own volition, and
Speaker 12: seeing why that sort of thought that generates what're kind
Speaker 12: of meaning can be constructed through that combination exactly.
Speaker 20: We're on some of the first cut ups done with
Speaker 20: books and just making holes, cutting out words and seeing
Speaker 20: the other words that would appear underneath, and if new
Speaker 20: meaning would arise through the surprise combinations.
Speaker 12: Words from like the future or the past presenting themselves
Speaker 12: into a current present within the book.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 19: I think one of the Boroughs quotes is when you
Speaker 19: cut into the present, the future leaks out, which.
Speaker 18: Is related to the concept of time sorcery that was
Speaker 18: talked about towards the end of that discussion. I think
Speaker 18: another element to the cut up method that's important, especially
Speaker 18: as it was framed in this a culture context, is
Speaker 18: as the we quoted from the or as I wrote
Speaker 18: this quote down from the actual lecture itself. Reality is
Speaker 18: made of words, images, and vibrations, and sounds and images
Speaker 18: have occult power, and therefore these sounds and images and
Speaker 18: words can be marshaled or used, edited, cut through, rearranged
Speaker 18: for the purposes of reprogramming. It's fascinating because I think
Speaker 18: that this really is something that carries through to the
Speaker 18: whole conference, and not just the Burrow's method, but what
Speaker 18: this Burrow's method or the Barosian current of the conference.
Speaker 18: It seems that there was a problematic I mean, we
Speaker 18: started basically with Dari Da, and we ended with Dari Da.
Speaker 18: We with discussions of like critiques of the master narrative
Speaker 18: that we get from you know, Deluze and Leotard and
Speaker 18: Baudriard and these people. But the goal of this cut
Speaker 18: up method was to rewrite the master narrative. So again
Speaker 18: back to that concept of culture jamming. As Ger said,
Speaker 18: this concept of the one God universe, this cut up
Speaker 18: method is meant to interrupt the linearity of words of language,
Speaker 18: that is a process of control. So I issue with
Speaker 18: this concept of language as a virus because that implies
Speaker 18: that it's a foreign body, and I mean it's true
Speaker 18: post structuralists. I guess that I am there is no
Speaker 18: outside to language, and I think that that's actually something
Speaker 18: that shines through in this third mind concept.
Speaker 12: As two people work together on something, there's a composite
Speaker 12: mind that like emerges and affects the work is the
Speaker 12: concept there.
Speaker 18: So when two people collaborate, a third mind or intelligence
Speaker 18: communicates with you through the revelation of the new that
Speaker 18: was already present. And I think that that's really important
Speaker 18: to point out because it's not as though there's this
Speaker 18: outside thing. The implication is from this method is that
Speaker 18: the new reveals itself through this process that's already present
Speaker 18: in language. Because this is a question that I had
Speaker 18: throughout is that if language is this foreign entity that
Speaker 18: dominates us through control, and the method itself is language,
Speaker 18: then how are we not just re I mean, I
Speaker 18: guess it's a kind of inoculation. If we have a
Speaker 18: you know, a theory of language that is based in
Speaker 18: you know, what what do we call this? What is
Speaker 18: it that we all just got during COVID kevin fever? No, no,
Speaker 18: the things that we inject into our body that created
Speaker 18: the indo vaccines? There we go, that's the ticket inoculations.
Speaker 12: Not all, not all of us got vaccines.
Speaker 2: Okay, care.
Speaker 18: You heard it here first vaccine did not know where
Speaker 18: was it going with this? Okay?
Speaker 12: Speaking of methods of speaking of methods of control.
Speaker 8: I mean a lot of it.
Speaker 18: The new just came out there. Wait just one moment, Sorry, Elane.
Speaker 18: I likened this to this process of dialectics. But that's
Speaker 18: because I couldn't shut up about Hagel the entire time
Speaker 18: we were there, because I don't think enough occultists are
Speaker 18: talking about Hegel. Why is no one talking about Hegel?
Speaker 18: Everyone should be talking about Hegel.
Speaker 12: I mean, as fun as it is to think about this,
Speaker 12: like third mind as like an egg grigor figure, which
Speaker 12: we've we've mentioned before, is like it's like a group
Speaker 12: thought form, like a being or a force that is
Speaker 12: generated through through multiple people believing in it. You make
Speaker 12: up an imaginary friend in a way, that's what of
Speaker 12: a severtre, but true in a grigoras as a is yeah,
Speaker 12: of a form of thought that they gained its own,
Speaker 12: like an autonomy and becomes kind of, you know, like
Speaker 12: a like a little tiny.
Speaker 18: God, I guess.
Speaker 12: Or they also combined the third mind idea to like
Speaker 12: network consciousness. The one last thing I will say on
Speaker 12: this before we get to like the AI aspect, I guess.
Speaker 12: On this culture jamming nonlinearity is the concept of the
Speaker 12: circuit jump, which was playing back words from from politicians
Speaker 12: in different contexts as a sort of like a Uno
Speaker 12: reverso psychic attack, which I don't know if that actually
Speaker 12: works considering the current's political situation, but this is certainly
Speaker 12: a tactic to which I have employed many such cases,
Speaker 12: and we see a lot of people attempt attempt to
Speaker 12: do this, and I think there are certain figures who
Speaker 12: have their own very strong magical force field protecting them,
Speaker 12: which has been pretty evident through the past ten years,
Speaker 12: including the President of the United States. But as a
Speaker 12: as a circuit jump is playing something from the wrong
Speaker 12: the wrong time in a different context as a as
Speaker 12: a form of attack. The most famous conversion of this,
Speaker 12: which isn't necessarily for political ends, so this was for
Speaker 12: personal ends. It's the Burroughs cafe incident, which I've been
Speaker 12: a fan of for years, in which he was slighted
Speaker 12: by a cafe so then he started recording.
Speaker 20: All that happened was they changed their menu and he
Speaker 20: couldn't order the one food that he ordered every day.
Speaker 12: There's been some menus that have changed that I would
Speaker 12: consider us using this tactic where he recorded sounds from
Speaker 12: from outside of like people talking or arguing, or walking
Speaker 12: by or plates dropping, and then played them back outside
Speaker 12: of the cafe for a series of months until the
Speaker 12: cafe closed. And this is like the funniest, the funniest
Speaker 12: form of this sort of magical obsession, because this really
Speaker 12: is just a crazy guy playing loud sounds in front
Speaker 12: of a cafe until they close. I mean it worked,
Speaker 12: of yeah, playing back sounds of you know, arguing, fighting,
Speaker 12: plates is smashing, which would probably create a negative aura
Speaker 12: around around this building. But that is that is the
Speaker 12: most most funny of Burrows the circu jump moment. Although
Speaker 12: I mean burrows life is full of these humorous and
Speaker 12: sometimes worrying anecdotes.
Speaker 20: There's one other thing that stuck out to me. Given
Speaker 20: what a lot of the other talks in that space
Speaker 20: ended up dealing with, along with AI and stuff, was
Speaker 20: really the speaker talking a lot about the fact that
Speaker 20: for Burros and Geyson, the reproduction of reality is how
Speaker 20: control occurs. And so the goal was to manipulate the
Speaker 20: reproduction of reality, because if you can manipulate the reproduction
Speaker 20: of reality, you are also manipulating reality itself, which I
Speaker 20: don't think anyone went into nearly as much, but is
Speaker 20: something that we're seeing with say even the Republican Party
Speaker 20: releasing deep fake videos of Democratic politicians.
Speaker 12: Yeah, and this is something our materialist friend does talk about,
Speaker 12: is how there's a quote from some neo cons about
Speaker 12: how like Democrats just have to kind of like you know,
Speaker 12: react to reality versus the Republicans who generate it, and
Speaker 12: they like decide what reality is. And you can see
Speaker 12: this with all of the sort of moral panics which
Speaker 12: have spread across the United States and around the world
Speaker 12: the past few years, whether that's gender ideology, with it's immigration,
Speaker 12: whether that's this non existent crime wave, or it is
Speaker 12: a genuine like creation of reality. And then this this
Speaker 12: this goes into you know, the Burrows ideas later get
Speaker 12: developed by a group of academics and occultists that formed
Speaker 12: the c c r U. This included say Plant nick Land,
Speaker 12: who then turned to the dark side, and uh the
Speaker 12: since past Mark Fisher, who put a name to some
Speaker 12: of this sort of phenomenon called the hyperstition, which is
Speaker 12: Robert has talked about before in the show. But it
Speaker 12: is it is a self fulfilling prophecy. It is a
Speaker 12: fiction that becomes true through the creation of the fiction
Speaker 12: and the dissemination of this fiction. And this is part
Speaker 12: of how reality can get formed, is through these falsehoods
Speaker 12: that that through through repetition and dissemination, become self manifest.
Speaker 19: The thing about that, though, is that the high perstitional
Speaker 19: model itself requires to the acceptance of the idea that
Speaker 19: everything is a fiction.
Speaker 12: Yes, like well yeah, I mean a lot of those
Speaker 12: things go through a process like this, yes, yes, yes,
Speaker 12: but doing doing such a thing like intentionally and like offensively, right,
Speaker 12: which is which is the idea that we're discussing here
Speaker 12: in like a political context. Is this this this offensive
Speaker 12: reality formation where you literally decide what is real and
Speaker 12: like what isn't. And you know, if you have hundreds
Speaker 12: of millions dollars in like a news company at your disposal,
Speaker 12: this can become easier.
Speaker 20: Are you saying that media companies are currently cutting up
Speaker 20: reality to shape it in the image of the people
Speaker 20: who fund them.
Speaker 12: Yeah, yeah, I mean they are. They are much. It's
Speaker 12: it's funny because like occultists, I think, are the people
Speaker 12: who are often.
Speaker 20: The clips are you going to use from the conference?
Speaker 12: And I will later in my written work, But I
Speaker 12: think on that note, I think occultists are a class
Speaker 12: of people who are maybe the worst at doing magic,
Speaker 12: because the people that are really good at this sort
Speaker 12: of thing are perhaps way better at the occult element
Speaker 12: of hiding their their you know, awareness of what they
Speaker 12: are doing, because they at a lot of them know
Speaker 12: what they're doing. That you just actually keep it a
Speaker 12: more cultic, whereas the magicians will not shut the fuck
Speaker 12: up because there's always a there's always a new book
Speaker 12: to sell.
Speaker 18: That was an excellent segue to an ad break, Laye.
Speaker 18: Thank you for that, and now a word from our
Speaker 18: sponsors on this note, though, Gary, I agree with you
Speaker 18: completely As a former academic and just a healthy level
Speaker 18: of skepticism going into any magical conference. I sat down,
Speaker 18: I listened and I've been to enough conferences listening to
Speaker 18: magicians attempt to map on rather poorly magic onto a
Speaker 18: cultural figure, and I think Burrows is really unique here.
Speaker 18: But my academic pretense was to sit here and to
Speaker 18: listen and think about, you know, language as a pharmicon,
Speaker 18: think about darry Da Delouze, Baudrard Leotard when they're discussing
Speaker 18: the master narrative or rewriting the master narrative. But what's
Speaker 18: unique about Burrows and why I gave up that you know,
Speaker 18: academic mapping of philosophy and asking myself, why are we
Speaker 18: having this conversation. We could just go read these texts
Speaker 18: they talk about similar things. But the point is is
Speaker 18: that those texts talk about similar things. And what's unique
Speaker 18: about Burrows is that he's actually doing the doer. He's
Speaker 18: a doer. This is fundamentally the difference between the vida
Speaker 18: activa and the vita contempt the taiva. Like I'm thinking
Speaker 18: in terms of philosophers. And it took me half of
Speaker 18: this talk to be like, no, he's actually doing shit.
Speaker 18: As soon as we get out to like, you know,
Speaker 18: him actually standing out in front of the cafe and
Speaker 18: doing this. He's not just developing a method, but by
Speaker 18: virtue of the fact that he's inviting other artists, like
Speaker 18: the slides upon slides that we saw of him, you know,
Speaker 18: working with new machines that he was creating and trying
Speaker 18: these things. He was actively involved in this practice, which
Speaker 18: again makes them far more magical than most occultists. Don't
Speaker 18: come for me absolutely.
Speaker 12: AI specifically be discussing debates and uses of generative AI
Speaker 12: in this conference because the last A Culture conference was
Speaker 12: in twenty twenty three, as these large language models and
Speaker 12: image generation platforms were just just starting to gain popularity
Speaker 12: and now they have a stranglehold over at the stock
Speaker 12: market and many people's imagination. The first, I guess real
Speaker 12: debate around AI happened as the three of you stayed
Speaker 12: to listen to a panel after Willie Mesburrough's panel, as
Speaker 12: well as a Austin OsmAnd Spare panel, a proto cast
Speaker 12: magician from the twentieth century. It was a contemporary of
Speaker 12: Alistair Crowley. I left to go listen to a mathematical
Speaker 12: thelemic ontology talk, which was probably less interesting than the panel.
Speaker 12: Hear you guys talk about the debates around AI and
Speaker 12: how they emerged in this panel, and then also juxtasing
Speaker 12: that to the different forms of like AI in discussions
Speaker 12: or an AI that dominated a large part of the
Speaker 12: rest of the conference.
Speaker 20: Well, actually AI came up because the initial discussion question
Speaker 20: for the panel was what does it mean to talk
Speaker 20: about art as magic in the digital era? So everyone
Speaker 20: was very specifically being asked to discuss the differences between
Speaker 20: the creation process is magic when you can use AI,
Speaker 20: when you can use large language models to just generate things,
Speaker 20: and if the generative method using AI was at all
Speaker 20: related to say, the cut up method or other things.
Speaker 20: So that was the initial conversation that began that whole panel.
Speaker 18: Well, and that was certainly a topic that was begged
Speaker 18: by the other two talks that we didn't really discuss.
Speaker 18: The Austin Osman spare was about automatic drawing. So this
Speaker 18: conception and of you know, this drawing that is coming
Speaker 18: from the outside, coming from the subconscious, coming from within,
Speaker 18: with all within one line. But more than that, it
Speaker 18: was a very traditional kind of European nineteen seventies lecture.
Speaker 18: You know, you had a lovely Italian man who stood
Speaker 18: in the front that was ready to smoke a cigarette
Speaker 18: while trying to get through, you know, a very well formulated,
Speaker 18: well argued essay, while a series of images presented to
Speaker 18: us behind him that covered an overview of artists that
Speaker 18: are doing very similar things. He argued, exists in a
Speaker 18: similar kind of vein and the occurrences of not just
Speaker 18: magical tropes, but cultural influences that happen independently, so artists
Speaker 18: all over the world. The third talk by I believe
Speaker 18: Kate Lady, Yeah, the ritual transformation and hybridity in Leonora
Speaker 18: Carrington's Judith, which was a stage production which happened in
Speaker 18: Mexico City, I believe so he had a few pictures
Speaker 18: of this, but Leonora Carrington's art very specifically has to
Speaker 18: do with this like hybrid of like animals and mythical
Speaker 18: figures and creatures, and the stage production was incredibly intense.
Speaker 18: I really appreciated this talk a lot. But then focus
Speaker 18: on talking about you know, generative artificial intelligence and these
Speaker 18: large language models and the role of art or what
Speaker 18: it means to do art in this era was related
Speaker 18: to this idea of the third mind, of automatic drawing,
Speaker 18: of this concept of hybridity, of this like transformative or
Speaker 18: this discovering of the new through a synthetic putting together
Speaker 18: of different elements or images, words, sounds, costumery, these kinds
Speaker 18: of things, so that it was a natural question to lead,
Speaker 18: but the audience members took it in a very strange
Speaker 18: direction that I would like you all to talk about.
Speaker 20: I mean, the initial question was really that people started
Speaker 20: asking after the panel was proposed, was so, what did
Speaker 20: the panelists think about ai art? Do the panelists think
Speaker 20: aiart is magic? Do the panelists think that ai art
Speaker 20: is channeling? Do the panelists think that, you know, putting
Speaker 20: a prompt and a language model is the same as
Speaker 20: doing some sort of trans state automatic writing. There was
Speaker 20: a lot of variations on functionally that all of the
Speaker 20: panelist's reaction was no, it's not, and a lot of
Speaker 20: them did not immediately really want to even dive into
Speaker 20: that topic. And we're very annoyed at the question.
Speaker 18: That's actually not true because I got triggered almost immediately
Speaker 18: because it was our first speaker that responded not to
Speaker 18: that first question, but to the second question. And the
Speaker 18: second question had to do with the role of technology
Speaker 18: and whether we see that there's a possibility for these tools,
Speaker 18: you know, as a technology, a techne in magical practice,
Speaker 18: and our first speaker's reaction was to sit back and
Speaker 18: give us a tentative yes to the tech, to the
Speaker 18: tech that's core to AI.
Speaker 20: They were like, their initial rerection was still also no.
Speaker 18: But yes they they indeed got there, but it was
Speaker 18: unclear at first, and I was a little raw about it,
Speaker 18: given that seemed completely contrary to the talk that you
Speaker 18: know that he had mentioned before. There was a question
Speaker 18: about NFTs. Do you remember this question?
Speaker 20: Oh, I tried to put it immediately out of my head.
Speaker 1: Yes, that was the fact.
Speaker 20: That it started with, like, well, NFTs failed because people
Speaker 20: like weren't ready to embrace the blockchain as a generative
Speaker 20: idea for making art, as opposed to the fact that
Speaker 20: why would I own an NFT if I can screenshot
Speaker 20: the picture?
Speaker 18: Yeah, Well, it was this idea that like NFTs themselves,
Speaker 18: were part of this breaking up of the control process,
Speaker 18: the linearity of money and financial systems, that somehow it
Speaker 18: was related to the cut up method. It was one
Speaker 18: of those questions that was a narrative before it finally
Speaker 18: got to your question that really just invited the readers
Speaker 18: to respond. There were others that talked about this too,
Speaker 18: and related their own personal experience to the generative AI
Speaker 18: process that you know, they approach AI not with the
Speaker 18: expectation that will provide sense, but it'll almost have this
Speaker 18: oracular or again this they related it to the third mind,
Speaker 18: this idea that again you and the AI come together
Speaker 18: and somehow reveal the new which I at this point
Speaker 18: was absolutely seething.
Speaker 11: Yeah.
Speaker 20: I think the closest actually that we had to some
Speaker 20: really like someone even trying to approach it was asking about,
Speaker 20: if you're making this art, if you're generating these new things,
Speaker 20: does it matter that corporations are controlling the algorithm by
Speaker 20: which you're doing so, which started to touch on some
Speaker 20: of the problems, but still was definitely relying on the
Speaker 20: base assumption that using a large language model to produce
Speaker 20: stories or art, that you're interacting with something else that's
Speaker 20: actually capable of creating at all.
Speaker 18: And to her credit, my girl Kate Lady, who was
Speaker 18: talking about Leonora Carrington, the one that seemed to be
Speaker 18: kind of tangentially separate from the other two but the
Speaker 18: hybridity really made it was the one that just gave
Speaker 18: us a great straight Marxist answer of like, no, this
Speaker 18: is bullshit. Let's actually look at the material implications as
Speaker 18: to where this is coming from and the environmental costs
Speaker 18: of running these programs of server farms, the destruction of
Speaker 18: space of you know, liveable areas throughout the United States.
Speaker 18: That these are questions that we need to ask and
Speaker 18: are not separate from these questions of magic. So I
Speaker 18: really shout out to her. I appreciated that response because
Speaker 18: it was instant, and it was it was heated.
Speaker 19: It is also, like I mean, from my perspective, it's
Speaker 19: also a labory she write, because these large language models
Speaker 19: and generative AI just scrape like so much data that
Speaker 19: that's like writing from real artists and created by real.
Speaker 18: Like painters and whatever.
Speaker 19: And it is the appropriation of human labor to shit
Speaker 19: out some advertising. Essentially, that is like my main well,
Speaker 19: aside from all the ecological and the political issues with it,
Speaker 19: it's like very much that labor angle to it that
Speaker 19: frustrates me.
Speaker 18: Well, in the context of the talk, it's really important
Speaker 18: to then ground And this is the comment that that
Speaker 18: I made that the panel broadly seemed to agree with,
Speaker 18: although I didn't really leave them much opportunity to disagree
Speaker 18: with me. I mean, you're right, Thank you.
Speaker 8: Go on.
Speaker 18: So this Burrow's concept of the third mind, this book
Speaker 18: that he wrote, right, when two minds collaborate, a third
Speaker 18: mind or intelligence communicates with you, again, not about creating
Speaker 18: the new, but about revealing itself in what was already present.
Speaker 12: Yes, but the idea is that you have to have two.
Speaker 18: Minds in order to get this dialectical third mind that
Speaker 18: was inherent in the conditions, the situation, the language of
Speaker 18: the two. When one interacts with any form of large
Speaker 18: language model or chat GBT, I in my mind and
Speaker 18: with what I carry sit in front of a computer
Speaker 18: and type my input. That's one mind. Can you tell
Speaker 18: me where the second is?
Speaker 20: Because even if you're cutting up a book, there's a
Speaker 20: mind in the book. There's a story, there's an actual
Speaker 20: thing there, there's a thing that you are interacting with
Speaker 20: that were thoughts that were produced by someone that you
Speaker 20: are cutting up. You are not just scraping the toilet
Speaker 20: bowl of humans production.
Speaker 18: But even if we're going to be generous and say
Speaker 18: that these large language models are the ones that are
Speaker 18: doing the cut up process and you are secondary or
Speaker 18: tertiary or even further down the line to it, I
Speaker 18: mean it doesn't involve a human intelligence at that point.
Speaker 18: So just in terms of the you know, the Barosian current,
Speaker 18: it's just not a third mind. It's the material conditions
Speaker 18: are such that it is not and cannot be a
Speaker 18: third mind.
Speaker 12: Where I would like to take this discussion is actually
Speaker 12: the very next talk that I attended as part of
Speaker 12: a three talk series called the Politics of Taro, and
Speaker 12: the specific one that I think continued on this line
Speaker 12: of thought and even stuff like automatic writing was from
Speaker 12: Icon to Index by Thomas Leak, the Generative Logic of Taro,
Speaker 12: in which he discussed I will have to check his
Speaker 12: name later, but discussed an author in the eighty who
Speaker 12: was trying to use Taro as a way to remove
Speaker 12: the human element of writing, try to create an automatic
Speaker 12: story using the tarot archetypes assembled in a randomized shuffling
Speaker 12: to generate a story based on the linkages between each
Speaker 12: of the cards and remove his own agency and directing
Speaker 12: where the story goes except for trying to bridge each
Speaker 12: card one to another. And the presenter was was discussing
Speaker 12: if this bears any similarity to like generative text models.
Speaker 12: The presenter said no. Presenter said, no, this actually is
Speaker 12: not like llms, which purely operate on a people pleasing
Speaker 12: probabilistic capacity to follow one word after another in accordance
Speaker 12: with whatever the prompt of the person who's operating the
Speaker 12: AI wants it to generate. Though the presenter stated that
Speaker 12: this author who was using Tarot probably would have loved
Speaker 12: using an LLM to try to pomplish this goal of
Speaker 12: his trying to access kind of like a form of
Speaker 12: automatic writing similar to Mike austn Osman's Bear, but without
Speaker 12: human input. The shuffling of the cards and forcing the
Speaker 12: human brain to make connections between these archetypes still contains
Speaker 12: a creative human process based on randomness in the shuffling
Speaker 12: of the deck versus the people pleasing probabilistic generative text
Speaker 12: that lms produce. This concludes the first episode of My
Speaker 12: Culture twenty twenty five coverage. In part to releasing Sunday Night.
Speaker 12: The panel will discuss digital technomancy, traditional magical practice, and
Speaker 12: why people are doing occult practice in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 12: See You on the Other Side.
Speaker 2: No, Yep, yep, it's it could happen here.
Speaker 12: Electile Disorder Executive Disorder, which is our weekly newscast which
Speaker 12: we've been doing all year, so we should we should
Speaker 12: know what it's called by now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's why I'm so good at doing it naming it.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 12: This show covers what's happening in the White House, the
Speaker 12: crumbling world, and what it means for you and me
Speaker 12: and everyone else. I'm Garrison Davis. This episode, I'm joined
Speaker 12: by Robert Evans, James Stout, and Maya Wong, and we
Speaker 12: are covering the week of October twenty second to October thirtieth.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 9: So I think we should start off the bat by
Speaker 9: but the same thing we started off last week with,
Speaker 9: which is that as you're the Halloween. Yeah, well that
Speaker 9: so on the upside, Halloween woo spooky. On the downside,
Speaker 9: like forty million people lose, lose, there's no benefits the
Speaker 9: next day on Saturday.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but what's spookier than that. Look, one thing you
Speaker 2: can't say about the government is that they're not failing
Speaker 2: to celebrate the holiday.
Speaker 1: I am scared of the consequences.
Speaker 12: Yeah, stock up on the trigger, treater candy. I guess,
Speaker 12: steal as much candy as you can.
Speaker 2: You're going to need it to stay alive.
Speaker 1: See a group of children you run past him.
Speaker 2: Tick them. Oh they're kids. They can't stop you.
Speaker 1: Ye, hold it above your head. They can't reach it.
Speaker 12: No, it is. It is extremely grim, and there seems
Speaker 12: to be no indication from the Republicans of the Trump
Speaker 12: administration that they are going to work with the Democrats
Speaker 12: to resolve this without sacrificing healthcare for millions of Americans.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So, Gavin Newsom, a friend of the show, has
Speaker 1: deployed the California National Guard to assist food banks in
Speaker 1: the state.
Speaker 9: Oh my god.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Like, Look, the thing is, when you participate in
Speaker 1: the largest crackdown and protected First Amendments speech in recent history,
Speaker 1: you don't get to show up and hand out snacks
Speaker 1: and feel good. And many food banks, including some in
Speaker 1: the Bay Area, have refused the help of National Guard members,
Speaker 1: right because they have this very obvious concern that some
Speaker 1: people might be reluctant to go to places where the
Speaker 1: soldiers who are standing right next to all the different
Speaker 1: immigration agents in la are now working. And so this
Speaker 1: will have the opposite of a positive effect in those instances, right,
Speaker 1: people who are afraid to go to food banks and
Speaker 1: going to remain hungry. The consequences of this will be negative.
Speaker 1: The issue I don't think is a lack of person power.
Speaker 1: The issue is a lack of funding. The state has
Speaker 1: mobilized eighty million dollars in funds, but millions of Californians
Speaker 1: will be going hungry. And because of the failure of
Speaker 1: state authorities to stop federal authorities deploying the National Guard
Speaker 1: to LA and to other areas where immigration enforcement was happening,
Speaker 1: this stunt that Newsmen is going for could have very
Speaker 1: negative consequences for for food banks and for Californians who
Speaker 1: are hungry. Something sick and cool you can do if
Speaker 1: you have the means and the time is to pick
Speaker 1: up food from food banks for people who need it.
Speaker 1: A lot of people might be concerned.
Speaker 12: One of the biggest problems is how much food banks
Speaker 12: get food also through these programs, yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean support. Yeah, food banks themselves are
Speaker 1: going to be struggling right now. So like I actually
Speaker 1: I did a thread on lib on blue sky. Where
Speaker 1: were you going to say? Lived Twitter and then corrected
Speaker 1: to blue Sky. I was going to say lib Sky. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I fact checked myself. It's blue wave Sky.
Speaker 2: There you go.
Speaker 12: You cannot get that past me. I could pick up
Speaker 12: on what you were doing.
Speaker 1: I garitone Davis like a viper struck. Yeah, at the
Speaker 1: core of my thought process. Yeah, So if you're on
Speaker 1: if you're on Skeeter, then you can you can find
Speaker 1: the threader made I link in the show notes with
Speaker 1: food banks that are looking for donations, and you can
Speaker 1: also had to find a food bank in your area
Speaker 1: if you're interested in that. But yet, this is a
Speaker 1: serious problem. The should be the biggest news story. I'm
Speaker 1: thinking particularly of those folks in Alaska right who found
Speaker 1: themselves as climate refugees due to this storm right which
Speaker 1: flooded their villages, and now not only facing the loss
Speaker 1: of their villages and their homes, but also all their
Speaker 1: cased food. These are people who often would have hunted
Speaker 1: or fished or relied on storing food for the winter,
Speaker 1: and now finding themselves unable to access federal benefits.
Speaker 2: Doing the thing that like. There's a representative. Clay Higgins
Speaker 2: of Louisiana made a tweet today blaming Snap recipients for
Speaker 2: not stockpiling a month's worth of food.
Speaker 1: Does he understand how this works?
Speaker 2: He said, Try to get your head wrapped around how
Speaker 2: many pantries you can stock with forty two hundred dollars,
Speaker 2: which is what people get on average per year. If
Speaker 2: he says, with Snap benefits in properly shopped groceries, any
Speaker 2: American who's been receiving forty two hundred dollars per year
Speaker 2: of free grocer reason does not have at least one
Speaker 2: month of grocery stock should never again receive Snap because wow,
Speaker 2: stop smoking crack.
Speaker 12: That's inhumane.
Speaker 2: Dealing with the shit that they talk about is almost
Speaker 2: pointless because they're all liars. But like, as like what
Speaker 2: you said, Like people are on Snap for a wide
Speaker 2: variety of reasons. They're largely employed. They're just not getting
Speaker 2: enough money to actually like survive and feed their family.
Speaker 2: And like the forty two hundred dollars a year for
Speaker 2: a family is not in fact enough to stockpile a
Speaker 2: huge quantity of food.
Speaker 1: No, it's not like it's remarkable how totach the people
Speaker 1: who make our laws off from Yeah, the working class experience.
Speaker 9: There is no way that guy knows how much of
Speaker 9: banana costs, No way, zero, Well.
Speaker 2: He has no idea. That man isn't shopped for himself
Speaker 2: in fucking twenty years.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that guy does not know how much it
Speaker 1: cost to buy mac and cheese for your kids.
Speaker 2: And obviously you know we hear we talk about storing food,
Speaker 2: about canning your own food, and there are things you
Speaker 2: can do even on a budget when you don't have
Speaker 2: much money to build a stockpile. And that's why I
Speaker 2: encourage people to pay attention to things like prices at
Speaker 2: the grocery store when things are a lot cheaper because
Speaker 2: they're in season, and learn how to do things like
Speaker 2: pressure can right and pickle different foods you want it,
Speaker 2: because there are ways that you can. And this is why, right,
Speaker 2: it's not because you should be doing that irresponsible, it's
Speaker 2: because we even when it comes to the social safety net,
Speaker 2: you know that we have what little of one that
Speaker 2: we have. You can't rely on it because at any
Speaker 2: given point it could become a fucking fucking football for
Speaker 2: Democrats and Republicans to fight over and go away. Right, Like,
Speaker 2: none of this stuff is reliable, which is why people
Speaker 2: ought to, if it's at all possible, be doing stuff
Speaker 2: like that, right, not because they should have to do that,
Speaker 2: but because you cannot rely on the government.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: And I don't say that as like a critique of
Speaker 2: people or to like shit on people. It's just like
Speaker 2: it's a it's a fact. It's the fact that people
Speaker 2: need to increasingly accept because this is not going to
Speaker 2: be getting better in the long run. Yeah, let's talk
Speaker 2: about Graham Platner.
Speaker 1: All right, Oh god, I do so to touch politicians.
Speaker 2: A couple of weeks ago, James brought up Graham Plattner,
Speaker 2: who is running for Congress in Maine, and some ads
Speaker 2: that he had put out which were really and I
Speaker 2: still think are really good ads, good ads in terms
Speaker 2: of they were effective objectively. He raised a lot of money.
Speaker 2: He was leading in the polls prior to us. We'll
Speaker 2: talk about a bunch of scandals coming out. He's no
Speaker 2: longer leading, but he was doing very well for a while.
Speaker 2: So his campaign, the strategy that he was following, which
Speaker 2: was largely a mix of talking about and really pushing
Speaker 2: investments in social programs and particularly healthcare, and attacking the
Speaker 2: billionaire class in very stark terms. Talked about they need
Speaker 2: to effectively get rid of that as a group of people,
Speaker 2: like tax them out of existence. That's a popular you know,
Speaker 2: and a good thing to campaign on. And the success
Speaker 2: that he had early on is evidence that there's a
Speaker 2: lot of legs to talking about that kind of stuff,
Speaker 2: and the way that he didn't he talked about in
Speaker 2: a very combative way. Right, this guy was a former marine. Yeah,
Speaker 2: some sort of fisherman. I think whatever kind of he's
Speaker 2: like fish. I think it's an oyster farmer or some
Speaker 2: shit whatever. They have a the nonsense State, Sorry Maynites.
Speaker 1: They called maniacs. Technically I think they're called maners. That
Speaker 1: copy right Garrison.
Speaker 2: So he was coming across as a very like blue
Speaker 2: collar guy, right, like a very and kind of crude,
Speaker 2: but crewed in a like I'm a straight talker sort
Speaker 2: of guy. And that worked. That that was a good campaign,
Speaker 2: and we highlighted that because I think it struck you know,
Speaker 2: James is the one who brought it to our attention,
Speaker 2: but I think it struck all of us as, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: this is a guy who was kind of doing talking
Speaker 2: to voters in a way that we wish more Democrats
Speaker 2: were right. And then in the last couple of weeks,
Speaker 2: oh god, so many scamps come out about this guy.
Speaker 2: The most well known of them as that for the
Speaker 2: last twenty years of his life he has had a
Speaker 2: totin cough tattooed over his pectoral that is the Death's Head. Now,
Speaker 2: it dates back before the Nazis. It was a niche.
Speaker 2: I don't know if this was the very first use
Speaker 2: of it, but the very first prominent use of it
Speaker 2: in military history was as the insignia for a unit
Speaker 2: called the Death'shead Hussars, which was an elite German cavalry unit.
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm sure I think they did still exist
Speaker 2: in World War One, but they were that was well
Speaker 2: past their prime. And it was then adopted by the SS,
Speaker 2: and it was worn by a number by a lot
Speaker 2: of guys in the SS, but it was specifically the
Speaker 2: insignia of a unit called the totenkof SS, which existed
Speaker 2: to guard concentration camps and death camps. So having one tattooed.
Speaker 1: On you bad, Yeah, not cool.
Speaker 2: Platner has said, basically, it was a dumb tattoo I
Speaker 2: got when I was young and just joining the Marine Corps,
Speaker 2: and I didn't know what it meant. And I am
Speaker 2: willing to believe that like a nineteen year old who
Speaker 2: joins the Marines would make a bad tattoo decision, because
Speaker 2: I have a lot of friends that were in the
Speaker 2: Marines and they all have bad tattoos, right, none of
Speaker 2: them have Death's heads.
Speaker 12: So you got it well in like Croatia drunk.
Speaker 2: Yeah right, and he was, he was hammered.
Speaker 12: And yeah, the probability of walking into a tattoo shop
Speaker 12: in Croatia and coming out with a Nazi tattoo is
Speaker 12: extremely high.
Speaker 2: Sure, Yeah, it's not low.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, they're on the flash seat for Friday the thirteenth.
Speaker 1: They probably are.
Speaker 2: If it had just come out that he'd had this
Speaker 2: for some period of time, being like, yeah, I got
Speaker 2: like I was hammered in Croatia and I got a
Speaker 2: fucked up tattoo and realized it and got it covered.
Speaker 2: I had it been like not a story, right, like
Speaker 2: man gets bad tattoos, dumb kid. But number one, he
Speaker 2: kept it until he got it covered in like the
Speaker 2: last week or so.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let me tell you that was a real piece
Speaker 1: of odd that he covered.
Speaker 2: It with, which is a wild choice to just keep
Speaker 2: it for that long. But also he and I had
Speaker 2: no idea until it like came out as a story
Speaker 2: because I forget what outlet, but some news outlet found
Speaker 2: out that he had it and was going to publish it,
Speaker 2: and I.
Speaker 1: Think his team told Pod Save America when he went
Speaker 1: on the PUD Save America pod.
Speaker 12: Yeah, yeah, but he had heard that there was opposition research.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, because he had sent out to like another
Speaker 9: thing that he went on, like a picture of him
Speaker 9: with his shirt off, and they were like, wait, what, Like.
Speaker 1: There were a few of them floating around.
Speaker 8: Huh.
Speaker 1: If you've lived that kind of life, there's going to
Speaker 1: be pitches of you with the shirt off, you know,
Speaker 1: like the refusing to acknowledge.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I knew earlier in my life that it was
Speaker 2: a death's head and like there's reports from people who
Speaker 2: knew him that he called it a tote gough and
Speaker 2: joked about it.
Speaker 1: I didn't know that. I'll be clear.
Speaker 2: I don't actually think that Graham is a secret Nazi
Speaker 2: sleeper agent. I really don't. I think he's a guy
Speaker 2: with really questionable judgment, which is where he's and you know,
Speaker 2: to be very critical of his campaign. And yeah, I
Speaker 2: take a lot of issue with how he's responded to
Speaker 2: this because rather than again just kind of doing a
Speaker 2: MEA POPA, he's gone on the this is my enemies
Speaker 2: in the Democratic Party trying to silence me thing and
Speaker 2: a very weird coalition has propped up kind of around him,
Speaker 2: trying to argue that this is a circular firing squad
Speaker 2: kind of deal. Like there was a Jacobin article being
Speaker 2: like it's fucked up that people are going after Graham
Speaker 2: and the pod Save guys are defending him, like it
Speaker 2: is a weird coalition that's circling around this fella.
Speaker 12: What do you think that Joe Rogan of the Left meant?
Speaker 12: Vibes essays.
Speaker 1: We wanted a guy who took loads of steroids and
Speaker 1: didn't have problematic opinions.
Speaker 2: I'm never gonna say this in any other instance about
Speaker 2: Joe Rogan, but he wouldn't have gotten that tattoo because
Speaker 2: he knows what a death said.
Speaker 12: I don't know if he knew in like two thousand
Speaker 12: and seven or what. I think there's a very strong
Speaker 12: innate world where two thousand and seven, Joe Rogan is
Speaker 12: traveling at accidentally gets a god tattoo.
Speaker 2: It's not impossible. You're right, You're right. I guess I'm
Speaker 2: just assuming he's watched enough World War two documentaries to know.
Speaker 12: Yeah, but watching those while like smoking weeds, so he
Speaker 12: doesn't remember anything.
Speaker 2: That's fair. These are fair points. You're making Garrison. So
Speaker 2: a couple of surprising things about this, and this is
Speaker 2: not the only scandal that's kind of come out about
Speaker 2: him recently, but at number one, it did not immediately
Speaker 2: take a strong hit to his polling. This seems to
Speaker 2: be primarily just because a lot of voters aren't aware
Speaker 2: of it. Because in poles where they at where they
Speaker 2: informed people that he had a Nazi tattoo, his support
Speaker 2: drops dramatically by like thirty points. That said, he was
Speaker 2: leading until like two or three days ago, I think
Speaker 2: was the most recent poll that came out that had
Speaker 2: a main governor, Janet Mills, in the lead above him.
Speaker 2: We're not talking about the main race. This is we're
Speaker 2: still in the primary, right, so he's challenging Janet Mills
Speaker 2: for the primary.
Speaker 1: Sure.
Speaker 2: And yeah, at present, according to so called strategies who
Speaker 2: did a pole very recently and it's the most recent poll,
Speaker 2: Mills has forty one percent from likely voters and Platner
Speaker 2: has thirty six percent, although about a fifth of respondence
Speaker 2: are undecided. And yeah, this is a pretty dramatic upset
Speaker 2: because prior to the whole Nazi tattoo news coming out,
Speaker 2: Platner was leading Mills by about thirty four points. So
Speaker 2: this has gone from Platner looked to have it in
Speaker 2: the bag to it's pretty close. Mills is ahead, not
Speaker 2: by a lead that's so commanding that it's a definite thing.
Speaker 2: You know, a standard polling error could have them basically
Speaker 2: be neck and neck, and we all should know at
Speaker 2: this point how frequently that kind of stuff happens.
Speaker 1: Yeah, polling never wrong.
Speaker 2: But yeah, so I don't know. It's one of those.
Speaker 2: Somebody got angry at us on the subreddit, being like,
Speaker 2: I can't believe they're hiding that like this has happened,
Speaker 2: you know, with this guy that they endorsed like we
Speaker 2: did Endor seven Uber two like this, this shit was breaking.
Speaker 2: When we were recording the ed last week. We made
Speaker 2: like a reference about it, but not much had come out,
Speaker 2: and there certainly hadn't been time for us to really
Speaker 2: look into what was going on here. And it's not
Speaker 2: this is a main Senate primary, and this is not
Speaker 2: like the very top of our list of crucial things
Speaker 2: to hit the second it happens. We can wait on
Speaker 2: something like this to see how stuff's shaking out.
Speaker 3: A little bit.
Speaker 2: No one's voting yet, so It's not like we're influencing
Speaker 2: the election by not coming out or whatever.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like we only get to coup so much. We
Speaker 1: have one hour of like News round up show a week,
Speaker 1: and the Blue Sky Twitter drama about Grand Plannery is
Speaker 1: not as important as the fact that millions of people
Speaker 1: are losing their food this week.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: One thing that is interesting, and I do think this
Speaker 2: is an important race just because of kind of what
Speaker 2: it says about what sort of strategies are working now
Speaker 2: and igniting the base, and what kind of stuff does
Speaker 2: matter in terms of scandals. I think there are some
Speaker 2: things that are really relevant here. One thing that is
Speaker 2: interesting to me is that, according to a poll, very
Speaker 2: recent poll the article came in October twenty sixth, twenty
Speaker 2: twenty five, majority of young Democrats still back Graham Platner
Speaker 2: even after the whole tattoo thing. And this is really
Speaker 2: interesting to me because the data shows that in general,
Speaker 2: among likely voters, his potential support plummets when people are
Speaker 2: made aware that he had the tattoo. But young Democrats
Speaker 2: are by far the group most likely to have become
Speaker 2: aware of it as soon as the story broke, because
Speaker 2: young people are much more online than older people, and
Speaker 2: among young people he's still well ahead, which I really
Speaker 2: just do think speaks more than anything to the strength
Speaker 2: of the rhetoric he has been using. The platform that
Speaker 2: he came out the gate with. It's and the rhetoric right,
Speaker 2: his combative rhetoric is really attractive to young voters, especially.
Speaker 1: Explain your generation to us Garrison, why you like this.
Speaker 12: I mean, there's a lot of stuff that the Zoron
Speaker 12: campaign kind of like ignited around.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're right, exactly absolute rhetoric.
Speaker 12: And then you know, Sanders and AOC had their anti
Speaker 12: oligarchy tour, which I mean, we don't need to like
Speaker 12: debate like the use of like that term. But no,
Speaker 12: there isn't a huge frustration at the geriatric Democratic Party,
Speaker 12: and this sort of populist rhetoric is very popular among
Speaker 12: young people as it as it has been since the
Speaker 12: Sanders campaign in twenty sixteen. This isn't like new a
Speaker 12: revolutionary information. The fact that this guy has gotten to
Speaker 12: this point has gotten either past scandals or it's navigating
Speaker 12: through it. Despite his like you know, very questionable background
Speaker 12: and military and uh military private contracting, his like misogynistic
Speaker 12: Reddit posts which were unearthed as as like an attack
Speaker 12: against him, which I think he actually handled that scandal
Speaker 12: fairly well, using it as a parallel to chart his
Speaker 12: own political journey. So yeah, I can understand why a
Speaker 12: whole bunch of young people who are reading about this
Speaker 12: aren't gonna actually care at all about any of these
Speaker 12: stories and still vote for him because of what he's saying.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I want to be clear, I didn't bring
Speaker 2: this up because it's bad even that, like young people
Speaker 2: are still supporting him. I think this is something that people,
Speaker 2: especially in the Democratic Party, who care about winning, And
Speaker 2: I think it's people on the left who are trying
Speaker 2: to look at what can we do to get more
Speaker 2: progressive and combative candidates who are going to do something
Speaker 2: both about the right and about the billionaire class. What
Speaker 2: can we do to actually like win. You should be
Speaker 2: paying attention to this because this this rhetoric works.
Speaker 12: Yeah, and because surely there's one other guy who can
Speaker 12: say these things enough. You can find one person who
Speaker 12: could use rhetoric, is good on camera and has not
Speaker 12: had a totalent CoV tattooed on their chest for almost
Speaker 12: twenty years.
Speaker 9: Yeah. And also the most wild part about this, I
Speaker 9: don't even think is that it's that this guy was
Speaker 9: in Blackwater, like so Eid's constell Us, but he calls
Speaker 9: it Blackwater.
Speaker 1: He was, yeah, that's the other scandals. Please, let's let's yeah.
Speaker 9: He deployed to Afghanistan for Blackwater in twenty eight their
Speaker 9: first shrug administration. No one at any point in this
Speaker 9: process went, hold on, wait, this guy went to fight
Speaker 9: in Afghanistan, like in twenty eighteen.
Speaker 16: Like, yeah, they prosecuted the guys from Nisar Square, Yeah,
Speaker 16: from the Sour Square massacre. Yeah, after the square, Like
Speaker 16: those people got prosecuted four years before that.
Speaker 9: And he joined Blackwater in twenty eighteen.
Speaker 2: And to be clear, because this is something James brought
Speaker 2: up when we talked about this in our chat previously,
Speaker 2: he didn't technically join Blackwater because Blackwater has changed its
Speaker 2: name and I think merged for a couple of countries.
Speaker 2: It was a culprit.
Speaker 1: But to be fair to me, yeah, he got all
Speaker 1: that Blackwater. He said, I worked for Blackwater. There's a
Speaker 1: way in which like, I'm okay with people fucking up
Speaker 1: if they acknowledge they funked up, right, Like, I'm okay
Speaker 1: with him saying I did this and it was wrong,
Speaker 1: So I left and I regret doing it.
Speaker 12: I mean that that is what he's saying, though it
Speaker 12: was specifically after this deployment. Yes, this is where he
Speaker 12: says that like this marked his like political coticalization or
Speaker 12: like yeah, during the path of like how he viewed
Speaker 12: his life in politics specifically was negative experiences during this deployment.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And I guess that is something I have
Speaker 2: really complicated opinions on because I'm I'm not and I
Speaker 2: really have a lot of issues with folks on the
Speaker 2: left who are like anyone who was ever in the
Speaker 2: military is forever and deeply like I think that's yeah, deeply,
Speaker 2: deeply unseerious and incredibly counterproductive. And I don't I think that,
Speaker 2: like it's good that someone can do something as fucked
Speaker 2: up as joined Blackwater and realize that they did a
Speaker 2: harleble thing and change. Maybe doing it in twenty eighteen
Speaker 2: is too recently for me to want him in Congress
Speaker 2: as a progressive.
Speaker 8: I don't know.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it was like that was it was like a
Speaker 9: decade after like he was one of the so he
Speaker 9: wasn't one of the like the torture guards. But no, no,
Speaker 9: like when he was a marine. He guard, He was
Speaker 9: like one of the guys he was like assigned to
Speaker 9: guard Aubu Grab. Yeah, I think, yeah, the torture scandal.
Speaker 9: But it's it's like it took you, it took you
Speaker 9: like a decade after that. Yeah, is that maybe the
Speaker 9: thing I'm doing is bad? Like I just I just
Speaker 9: oh god.
Speaker 2: Well yeah, And that's that's kind of like the because
Speaker 2: I don't, you know, I don't think having been stationed
Speaker 2: to guard a place where horrible thing like war crimes
Speaker 2: were committed necessarily damns you forever, because like you don't
Speaker 2: choose where you're stationed. A guard who knows when he
Speaker 2: became aware what was going on in the place he
Speaker 2: was guarding, But at some point he did and that
Speaker 2: wasn't like the moment where he was like, ah fuck,
Speaker 2: you know. And I again, I have a lot of
Speaker 2: friend I have friends who were with the very first
Speaker 2: infantry unit into Iraq, one of whom, as they were invading,
Speaker 2: was like, you know this is criminal, guys, right, you
Speaker 2: know we're breaking you know this is fucked up. You
Speaker 2: know this this war's bullshit. Pat Tillman was saying that, right,
Speaker 2: like Derd.
Speaker 9: The invasions, this guy ship out in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's like it took him.
Speaker 9: I would it took him, manutes, it took him reasonably
Speaker 9: long time. And also when you read his interviews about it,
Speaker 9: he's like, I did it because it was.
Speaker 2: Fun, which is just like, that's that's honest.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it's honest. It makes me insane.
Speaker 2: Look, I mean, that's that's why people join the Marines,
Speaker 2: is they like money and or they're adrenaline jokies.
Speaker 1: Right, I'd rather he was honest about that shit. Actually,
Speaker 1: like I I am. It is just like distressing.
Speaker 2: I actually like that. And again I do kind of
Speaker 2: like because there's not a there's not a perfect answer
Speaker 2: as to like, well, when should you have had a
Speaker 2: change of heart about something like this before you can
Speaker 2: like be trusted as a political leader on the left.
Speaker 2: And I actually don't really know. I think I would
Speaker 2: be inclined to be like give him the benefit of
Speaker 2: the doubt on that stuff more if it weren't for
Speaker 2: the not.
Speaker 9: Yeah, play shift out with plug eighteen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all those things together are kind of sketchy.
Speaker 9: Maybe do a couple of tours as a dog catcher first.
Speaker 2: Like, you know, I'm seeing a lot of because there's
Speaker 2: a whole lot of like, well, no one else who
Speaker 2: has a chance of winning in Maine is supporting the
Speaker 2: progressive policies he is. You know, you can't have it
Speaker 2: all be perfect or whatever he's you know, we should
Speaker 2: at least hope that he gets in and he does
Speaker 2: the things he's saying. And I guess, like, if he
Speaker 2: does get elected, and it's not the most likely thing
Speaker 2: right now, but it's certainly not impossible, I guess I
Speaker 2: hope he does the good stuff he says that he's done.
Speaker 2: I just have a lot less faith in that, given
Speaker 2: both what's coming and his reaction to it.
Speaker 1: Right, it's his reaction to it. It was really disqualifying, right, like, right,
Speaker 1: there's a world I guess I didn't know that he
Speaker 1: told people it was a total golf that's pretty fucking incriminating.
Speaker 12: But yeah, there's reports from people who have said that
Speaker 12: it's it's unclear.
Speaker 1: Okay, there's reports, got it.
Speaker 2: We don't know objectively, but people have talked to the
Speaker 2: press who knew him and said that he described it
Speaker 2: as a total cough to them several years ago.
Speaker 1: Okay, Yeah, if his response had been like, oh fuck,
Speaker 1: I didn't know let me get that covered up immediately.
Speaker 1: That's his response was so bad. To defend it and
Speaker 1: to be like there's a conspiracy against it. Really bad.
Speaker 1: It's that failure. And it also just shows like a
Speaker 1: lack of judgment and lack of ability to like be
Speaker 1: critical of his own actions, which is worrying.
Speaker 2: It shows the kind of Trumpian fancifulness that really worries me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, demnic Augay kind of thing.
Speaker 12: A lot of populists are like this, like this is
Speaker 12: this is a part of populist Yes, yes, I don't
Speaker 12: think you can fully decouple.
Speaker 2: That's probably true, Garrison. Yeah, that's probably true, But I
Speaker 2: I don't know. I'm not gonna tell you how to vote.
Speaker 2: I've made a habit of never telling people how to vote.
Speaker 2: So if you're in Maine, enjoy your mc lobster and
Speaker 2: do whatever your heart tells you. It's the right thing
Speaker 2: to do, my friend. But also, please don't eat a
Speaker 2: mc lobster there. It's clearly poisoned, you know. Avoid avoid
Speaker 2: a mc lobster's at all costs.
Speaker 1: Yeah, buy an oyster ins to it.
Speaker 12: The strongest endorsement Robert Ethans can make, is it not
Speaker 12: by a MC lobster.
Speaker 2: Avoid a MC lobster at all costs.
Speaker 1: If you're on the West coast, avoid shellfish, and in
Speaker 1: some months it will costs because you can get paralytic
Speaker 1: shellfish poisoning.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I mean some people, that's just basically getting
Speaker 2: free muscle relaxers.
Speaker 12: James's let's do it ad break for muscle at excerpts. Okay,
Speaker 12: all right, we are back. Can I do my Halloween
Speaker 12: ice Nazi? Sure Bevino segment? Is that how you say
Speaker 12: his name? Bavino?
Speaker 3: Greg?
Speaker 1: Yeah, Greg Green?
Speaker 12: It looks like a Bavino to me. So we're gonna
Speaker 12: talk about him playing dress up and how border patrol
Speaker 12: disrupted a Halloween parade. So last weekend, while conducting an
Speaker 12: immigration enforcement range, border patrol disrupted the root of a
Speaker 12: children's Halloween parade in Old Irving Park in Chicago, using
Speaker 12: tear gas and arresting several people, including two US citizens.
Speaker 12: A crowd gathered around after a border patrol arrested a
Speaker 12: thirty five year old construction worker who has lived in
Speaker 12: Chicago since he was four years old. Jesus neighborhood residents
Speaker 12: said that federal agents then deployed tear gas without warning
Speaker 12: that following Tuesday, the ARC attacked of Operation Midway Blitz.
Speaker 12: Greg Bavino appeared in a federal corps a part of
Speaker 12: a lawsuit alleging excessive force and violations of a tro
Speaker 12: restricting the use of tear gas and crowd control munitions.
Speaker 12: Bavino seems to be flagrantly violating this tro as he
Speaker 12: was photographed personally throwing a tear guest canister into a
Speaker 12: crowd in October twenty second during a raid on a
Speaker 12: laundromat and home depot. The DHS says that protesters were
Speaker 12: throwing rocks and Border Patrol issued warnings, though this account
Speaker 12: is contradicted by video of the incident. US District Judge
Speaker 12: Sarah Ellis told the Border Patrol chief quote, kids dressed
Speaker 12: in Halloween costumes walking to a parade do not pose
Speaker 12: an immediate threat to the safety of law enforcement officers.
Speaker 12: They just don't, and you can't use riot control weapons
Speaker 12: against them. Unquote. This tro requires that crowd control munitions
Speaker 12: may only be used as someone pose as an immediate
Speaker 12: threat to law enforcement agents instructed to give two verbal
Speaker 12: warnings before tear gas pepper spray can be deployed, and
Speaker 12: to wear body cams, badges, or visible ideas. This order
Speaker 12: was issued on October ninth to get an idea of how
Speaker 12: closely this is being followed. Lavino himself still is not
Speaker 12: where a body cam and told Judge ellis quote, I
Speaker 12: have not received a body worn camera nor the training unquote.
Speaker 11: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Body of Troll agents have generally, just to give some
Speaker 1: context here, not worn body worn cameras for a number
Speaker 1: of reasons. Firstly, they just don't want to. Secondly, no
Speaker 1: one's making them. Thirdly, they believe that it is possible
Speaker 1: for people to detect the bluetooth signal that the camera
Speaker 1: gives out and thus find them. This is something that
Speaker 1: is theoretically possible as best my research can tell. You
Speaker 1: can make your own judgment as to which those factors
Speaker 1: is weighing most heavily on their choice not to wear them,
Speaker 1: but that they have never been required as a group
Speaker 1: to wear body worn cameras all the time.
Speaker 12: Now this judge is trying to force them to. They're
Speaker 12: just refusing to follow the order. Even despite Bavino saying
Speaker 12: that ninety nine percent of agents have these cameras, which
Speaker 12: is bizarrely specific claim.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like, is he the one percent?
Speaker 9: Like, I guess it's like he's just so obviously lying.
Speaker 9: It's just oh god.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's just it's lying. We I think we
Speaker 1: that should be enough to say. Yeah, I don't know
Speaker 1: if I said they never wear them. To be clear,
Speaker 1: they have gone forward and back on wearing them. But
Speaker 1: it was earlier this year that the specific security risk.
Speaker 12: They have access to the cameras. Yes, yes, they're just
Speaker 12: refusing to follow this order.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 12: The same complaint that alleged that Vino threw a canister
Speaker 12: with their justification into this crowd also details an incident
Speaker 12: from the next day, October twenty third, where agents without
Speaker 12: wearing identification as required by the order, shot a protester
Speaker 12: in the neck with pepperball from five feet away, and
Speaker 12: while driving away, pointed a pepper ball gun and I'm
Speaker 12: gonna read from the complaint quote and then a real
Speaker 12: gun at declarant Chris Gentry, a combat veteran who was
Speaker 12: lawfully standing on the side of the road voicing his
Speaker 12: opposition as agents were driving by in their vehicles. The
Speaker 12: agent who pointed the real gun at mister Gentry's face said,
Speaker 12: quote bang bang, you're dead liberal unquote great, cool, anyway,
Speaker 12: plaintifs have requested bodycam footage of this incident, which has
Speaker 12: yet to be provided.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and I think it's worth noting that, I mean,
Speaker 9: they do this every single time there is any kind
Speaker 9: of protest, they do stuff like this. They've been pointing
Speaker 9: guns at people the entire time they've been here.
Speaker 12: They've been putting a lot of guns the past few months,
Speaker 12: as we have reported.
Speaker 1: Yes they have.
Speaker 12: Yeah, they they kill people, two people.
Speaker 1: They've shot more than two people. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 12: Saying something like this is insane.
Speaker 1: Yeah no. Yeah, it shows obviously like a complete lack
Speaker 1: of concern for accountabit right now, like like absolutely no
Speaker 1: thought that you could be held accountable for this.
Speaker 2: Yeah no, And it also shows a desire to kill liberally, yes, yeah,
Speaker 2: which liberals need to be aware of.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I mean yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: You can't let this organization continue to exist, nor can
Speaker 2: you let the people doing this stay free. If you
Speaker 2: ever take power again, there has to be accountability, and
Speaker 2: there has to be an end to their ability, to
Speaker 2: the ability of any law enforcement agency to exist knowing
Speaker 2: that they are unaccountable and cannot be punished for the
Speaker 2: violence that they do to civilians.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess I'll take this point to mention that
Speaker 1: we've covered CBP and DHS's previous shootings in previous years
Speaker 1: and the internal review process they have for those, which
Speaker 1: has led to a lack of accountability even when compared
Speaker 1: to other law enforcement officers.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 12: During this hearing this last Tuesday, the judge declined to
Speaker 12: alter the tier row to ban the use of tear
Speaker 12: gas completely, saying that she believes Baveno quote understands where
Speaker 12: I'm coming from. End quote. I don't know that we're
Speaker 12: gonna see a whole lot of tear gas being deployed
Speaker 12: over the next week. Unquote cool, great, amazing stuff, jumping
Speaker 12: out an our traditionary.
Speaker 1: Greg's picking up on the vibe. So we should be
Speaker 1: fine now.
Speaker 12: Yeah, this Buffdo guy seems incredibly trustworthy. Though Judge Ellis
Speaker 12: did instruct Blevino to meet with her every weekday evening
Speaker 12: throughout Operation Midway Blitz till the next hearing in November
Speaker 12: to provide instant briefings on use of force, though just
Speaker 12: one day later, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals blocked
Speaker 12: Judge Ellis's order requiring these daily reports. In some other
Speaker 12: Bovino mows Earlier this week, news broke that top ICE
Speaker 12: field office chief are set to be reassigned and replaced
Speaker 12: by senior Border Patrol and CBP officials with the goal
Speaker 12: of netting more arrests to boost deportation numbers.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So the role of Border Patrol Germany is into
Speaker 1: patrol the physical border and to do enforcement in that
Speaker 1: one hundred mile border zone. Right. Their role of ICE,
Speaker 1: the majority of ICE agents are not the people that
Speaker 1: you see out there, yea, jumping out of cars and
Speaker 1: doing these these smashing grabs. Right. The majority of ICE
Speaker 1: agents people who will work in the office, who will
Speaker 1: check in with migrants through their intensive supervision program, which
Speaker 1: is one of their quote unquote alternatives to detention. Right.
Speaker 1: Both of these agencies, you know, are relatively aligned with
Speaker 1: what I'll call like Donald Trump's agenda. But Border patrol
Speaker 1: particularly has made a name for itself, like Bevino himself
Speaker 1: and other Border Patrol chiefs were there was a time
Speaker 1: and it looked like they were going to force Veino
Speaker 1: to retire, and that time was twenty twenty three read
Speaker 1: briefing against it by an administration, Right, Brevino has been
Speaker 1: kind of particularly emblematic of this new border patrol approach,
Speaker 1: and it is particularly BP that has been aligned just
Speaker 1: with with a lot of things that you know, they had,
Speaker 1: they had issues getting people vaccinated, right like with this
Speaker 1: whole kind of political social media that is representative of
Speaker 1: the modern right we see with isoations. Like some of
Speaker 1: these people, I'm not going to say they joined like
Speaker 1: looking to help, you know, maybe like make the word
Speaker 1: actually a happy place, but like they they are reasonable
Speaker 1: civil servants, right Like, Like I've talked to plenty of
Speaker 1: migrants who have gone to there and you and you'll
Speaker 1: hear from some of them in a scripted series next month,
Speaker 1: gone to their ice check into been like, that was fine,
Speaker 1: that person was professional, that they seemed genuinely concerned for
Speaker 1: things I'm facing, and you know I was not unduly harassed,
Speaker 1: made to feel uncomfortable, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 12: Now the border patrol agents are like particularly brutal.
Speaker 1: I have not heard that's same. That was a reasonable
Speaker 1: professional about border patrol agents from migrants. Yeah, border patrol
Speaker 1: also has a pretty high churn, right as you know,
Speaker 1: so that they have a lot of people who have
Speaker 1: joined since let's say the first Trump admin.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that may kind of change things because those
Speaker 2: people are joining specifically because they want to fuck with migrants.
Speaker 2: And while that's always been a thing for Border Patrol,
Speaker 2: a lot of people join the Border Patrol because it's
Speaker 2: the easiest way to become technically a federal agent. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and it can be a path to becoming a better
Speaker 2: kind of federal agent.
Speaker 1: Sure, you can be.
Speaker 2: A career thing, which is why part of why there's
Speaker 2: so much ch part of why.
Speaker 1: BP just to like characterize some of the issues the
Speaker 1: organization has had, right has consistently offered waivers the academic
Speaker 1: qualifications other agencies would not offer waivers for they have
Speaker 1: a problem, a serious problem with sexual assault, not just
Speaker 1: of migrants, but of women in the Border Patrol. They
Speaker 1: call the women in the Border Patrol the fierce five
Speaker 1: percent because this is an agency that has not succeeded
Speaker 1: in getting more than five percent of his agents to
Speaker 1: be women. Like it is an agency that has I
Speaker 1: guess for one of a better term radicalized, even even
Speaker 1: you know within DHS agencies.
Speaker 12: Yeah, I mean all of the most brutal incidents have
Speaker 12: used forced in like Portland in twenty twenty that came
Speaker 12: from FEDS was Border Patrol.
Speaker 1: That was Bortech, Yeah, boord Tech. Yeah. I would encourage people,
Speaker 1: if they want to get a sense of how Border
Speaker 1: Patrol sees itself, to go to the social media page
Speaker 1: that Baveno curates and has created for a while to look.
Speaker 1: And again he was my understanding, like hemmed up for
Speaker 1: his social media posts in the Biden administration. He's obviously
Speaker 1: not being restrained in that way. Now, go and look
Speaker 1: at I think it's called Border Patrol Special Operations Command
Speaker 1: or DHS Special Operations Command, which includes Bortach. Go and
Speaker 1: look at their pages. Right, Like these guys they see
Speaker 1: themselves in the realm of like a military branch or
Speaker 1: a paramilitary police.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And and that is what they are doing in Chicago.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 12: NBC is reporting that the White House has approved three
Speaker 12: assignment of at least a dozen directors of ice Field offices,
Speaker 12: with sources telling Fox News that the cities will include
Speaker 12: Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, Philadelphia, El Paso, San Diego, Seattle, Portland,
Speaker 12: and New Orleans. This is almost half of the ice
Speaker 12: Field offices in the country. This turnover is being orchestrated
Speaker 12: by DHS Secretary Christine Nome and DHS senior advisor Corey Lewandowski,
Speaker 12: with some of the replacements being hand picked by Bevino.
Speaker 12: This is like Bevino began to shape ICE how he
Speaker 12: sees fit using his border patrol like background, and these
Speaker 12: changes are reportedly motivated on differing views on tactics across
Speaker 12: agency leadership with the ICE strategy like the Tom Holman
Speaker 12: strategy of focusing on targeted removal of known criminals or
Speaker 12: immigrants with pre existing deputation orders versus the border patrol
Speaker 12: of doing these large sweeps and roundups around places like
Speaker 12: hom deepos, laundromats, restaurants, neighborhoods, urban centers.
Speaker 1: So Bavino like has been on this for a minute,
Speaker 1: right like, and I'm now realizing we need to cover
Speaker 1: his his career in more depth. But like I've seen this,
Speaker 1: Oh where did Bevino come from? Stuff? In twenty ten,
Speaker 1: when he was out of at the Blithe Border Patrol
Speaker 1: station I believe Blyza, California. For those not familiar, Bavino
Speaker 1: was part of a raid on bus and train stations
Speaker 1: in Las Vegas, right like, these these broader kind of
Speaker 1: dragnets have been something that he seems to have been
Speaker 1: a characteristic of his career, right, so that would make
Speaker 1: sense for him to be the guy advocating for this now.
Speaker 12: The official statement made by DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin
Speaker 12: at this point says, quote, while we have no personnel
Speaker 12: changes to announce at this time, the Romme administration remains
Speaker 12: laser focused on delivering results and removing violent criminal legal
Speaker 12: aliens from this country. And she followed up this statement
Speaker 12: with a tweet naming a whole bitch of people involved
Speaker 12: in all of these news stories, including Bavino and like,
Speaker 12: praising them for their patriotism. Let's take a look at
Speaker 12: two pictures of Boveto here for his courtroom attire. Who
Speaker 12: wants to describe what Bavito is wearing here?
Speaker 1: It looks like a statue of Stalin.
Speaker 2: He looks like a guy in the SS is dressing
Speaker 2: as a guy in the SS for Halloween.
Speaker 12: I don't think it's very Stalin. I think it's very German.
Speaker 9: N Actually, that.
Speaker 2: Is an ssque looking coat. I'm sorry, it's intense.
Speaker 12: He has the little is little stars on his collar
Speaker 12: and yeah, this this like boxy wool trench coat. It's
Speaker 12: very with the like shaved sides of his head. It's
Speaker 12: very clear what he is trying to evoke. This is
Speaker 12: a little bit koy, but like come on, come on, dude,
Speaker 12: and to follow this up, like DHS is really is
Speaker 12: really pushing Bavino now is like the face of this,
Speaker 12: this mass deportation push and they're making fucking like fash
Speaker 12: wave pype fash wave hype edit reels.
Speaker 1: Of show it. God it's mass.
Speaker 12: And I will I'll play the whole thing, but really
Speaker 12: it's the first two seconds that demonstrate what's what's going
Speaker 12: on here.
Speaker 1: This will be linked in the notes. I didn't realize
Speaker 1: it was Hampster Dance Coldplay on the soundtrack, Like I
Speaker 1: I had never listened to that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a choice.
Speaker 12: We're not gonna play much of that audio, garretson, We're
Speaker 12: gonna play we are not playing thirty seconds of copyrighted audio,
Speaker 12: but just the first literally the first two seconds of
Speaker 12: him doing what is very clearly a se kyle and
Speaker 12: then transferring it into like military hand signals, but like
Speaker 12: come on, dude, and then throughout throughout this the rest
Speaker 12: of the little fash wave edit, it's like pictures of
Speaker 12: him and his like uh, you know, tactical gear, and
Speaker 12: then pictures of him in what you I would describe
Speaker 12: as an SS inspired military dress uniform with the little
Speaker 12: you know, the stars, the trench code. It's like very
Speaker 12: clear what he's doing. The DHS Twitter account has been
Speaker 12: doing these little cute Nazi posts for a long time.
Speaker 12: Now they know what they're doing. It's yeah, but specifically
Speaker 12: this now being like the the new kind of face
Speaker 12: of this of this whole operation, both by playing a
Speaker 12: hand in restructuring the leadership of ICE and deploying to
Speaker 12: the forefront of paces like Chicago as he leads and
Speaker 12: orchestrates the mass deportation operation like Operation Midway Blitz like
Speaker 12: blitz really do blitz yest interesting, interesting, unfucking believable that
Speaker 12: the fact that this guy was not canned by any
Speaker 12: previous Democrat administration, like like about like abolishing ICE is
Speaker 12: is obviously like not enough here, because as we're talking
Speaker 12: about the way that like border patrols actually been the
Speaker 12: ones leading the most brutal of these raids, I think
Speaker 12: like there is a specific focus on like ICE because
Speaker 12: that's like a safer target. I get like it feels
Speaker 12: like because people know what you're talking about.
Speaker 2: All of DHS, we need to get rid of.
Speaker 9: Yeah, the fact that this guy wasn't fired is going
Speaker 9: to be looked back upon in the same way that
Speaker 9: like Allende promoting Pinochet is looked back on.
Speaker 1: Just yeah, yeah, it's.
Speaker 2: It's yeah, what how else do you describe it?
Speaker 9: Yeah, Like, if there was going to be a free country,
Speaker 9: all of this shit, all of the DHS agencies, all
Speaker 9: of this needs to cease to exist as a minimum,
Speaker 9: and these people need to be like haled in front
Speaker 9: of a neurobird tribunal, and that's that's the minimum viable.
Speaker 9: There might be a democracy after that.
Speaker 2: We need so many Neurembergs.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And like it's not but I don't want
Speaker 1: to burn a bloat about this. It's not hard to
Speaker 1: have seen this coming. We have talked about this four years, right, Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: this began in the nineteen nineties with Operation Gatekeeper, Operation
Speaker 1: Hold the Line. We've documented this extensively. We've documented the
Speaker 1: fact that under the Biden administration there was virtually no oversight,
Speaker 1: right that they were able to detain people outdoors without food, water,
Speaker 1: or shelter and deny that those people were detained. This
Speaker 1: is all stuff that we've covered. If it wasn't in
Speaker 1: your news diet, then you should question the news sources
Speaker 1: that you were using. But like, it was very easy
Speaker 1: to see this coming, and as Mia said, very little
Speaker 1: was done to prevent it during the last four years yep.
Speaker 2: And somewhat more amusing news during the ongoing trial over
Speaker 2: the different federal agents deployed to Portland and the necessity
Speaker 2: of that federal deployment and potentially the mobilization of National
Speaker 2: Guard troops in Oregon being sent to Portland, which is
Speaker 2: still being fought over in the courts. Portland police were
Speaker 2: brought up on the stand and testified that during one
Speaker 2: night out at Ice, federal officers gassed Portland police and
Speaker 2: fired pepper balls at one officer. And when Portland Police
Speaker 2: confronted federal not ice, sorry but these are these are
Speaker 2: federal FPS agents outside of the ICE building.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And when Portland Police confronted the FPS agents afterwards, they
Speaker 2: responded help or get out of the way.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 2: And this is simply there's no actually, there's no there's
Speaker 2: no rules of engagement, right, rules of engagement for you know,
Speaker 2: soldiers in the like are supposed to be stuff like
Speaker 2: you don't fire until a certain standard of danger exists. Right,
Speaker 2: you don't. There are rules at which point you are
Speaker 2: allowed to engage with which kinds of weapons, right your
Speaker 2: r Oh, we may say one thing about using a
Speaker 2: night stick or and it will say something else about
Speaker 2: using dear gas or whatever. There's no actual ro for
Speaker 2: these guys. They're allowed to just kind of fire whenever
Speaker 2: they want, and they're not well trained. They're not very
Speaker 2: good at what they do. Most of them have not
Speaker 2: actually had the kind of draining I've been supposed to
Speaker 2: have with these weapons systems they're using, and they're just
Speaker 2: kind of firing willy and illy, which is why they've
Speaker 2: been heading cops repeatedly.
Speaker 1: Most FS agents are contractors. They're not full time law
Speaker 1: enforcement officers.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: Talking of things that it would have been easy to
Speaker 1: see coming, I want to talk about ICE's facial recognition app.
Speaker 1: So I've seen a piece of four four media. Four
Speaker 1: and four media is the most annoying outlet to read
Speaker 1: pieces in because they will send you seventeen emails a day.
Speaker 1: Four A form media suggests that ICE is claiming a
Speaker 1: facial recognition match in its app mobile Fortify is a
Speaker 1: definitive determination of somebody's status. They're quoting here the ranking
Speaker 1: member of the House Home Land Security Committee, Benny G. Thompson,
Speaker 1: as saying, quote mobile Fortify is a dangerous tool in
Speaker 1: the hands of ICE, and it puts American citizens a
Speaker 1: risk of detention and even deportation. He also said that
Speaker 1: quote ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric
Speaker 1: match by mobile fortifier is a definitive determination of a
Speaker 1: person's status, and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence
Speaker 1: of American citizenship, including a birth certificate, if the app
Speaker 1: says the person is an alien. ICE using a mobile
Speaker 1: biometrics app in this way, in ways its developers at
Speaker 1: CBP never intended or tested, is a frightening, repugnant, and
Speaker 1: unconstitutional attack on Americans rights and freedoms. Thompson is misguided
Speaker 1: if he thinks that like this is new, it is new,
Speaker 1: and that's that its impacted US citizens. Yes, this article,
Speaker 1: for reasons I cannot explain, does not mention CBP one right,
Speaker 1: and as is often the case some immigration reporting that
Speaker 1: we see now, it's completely lacking in context. The context
Speaker 1: here is at CBP one is an app developed in
Speaker 1: the first Trump administration. It's often referred to as a
Speaker 1: Biden app because the definitive political question of our time
Speaker 1: is who was present in twenty twenty.
Speaker 12: There's just no way to know.
Speaker 2: It's impossible to say you can't do data on anything
Speaker 2: happening that far back.
Speaker 1: Unfortunately, I have a new one which is more recent,
Speaker 1: which we're going to talk about next.
Speaker 12: Groc This is real.
Speaker 1: But CBP one was effectively determinative for migrants, right. We've
Speaker 1: covered this in great detail here. There were some public
Speaker 1: records about CBP one that I've looked at extensively. There's
Speaker 1: sort of too long didn't read. Version is app did
Speaker 1: not work well on Android phones, especially previous generation Android phones,
Speaker 1: which are very common among people coming from the Global South.
Speaker 1: The facial liveness scan. So what the facial liveness scan
Speaker 1: does is that let's say Robert is coming to the US, right,
Speaker 1: they wanted to check that the phone is being held
Speaker 1: by Robert, that it's not been held someone's not holding
Speaker 1: up a photograph of Robert in front of the camera, right,
Speaker 1: So you sort of move it around. Then it determines
Speaker 1: that it's a real three D face, not a photograph.
Speaker 1: It really struggled with black faces. I've seen this firsthand.
Speaker 2: I've all this stuff does that's the same thing with
Speaker 2: like how there have been like motion activated fossets and
Speaker 2: stuff that wouldn't recognize dark scale.
Speaker 1: It's a data set that they put in right to
Speaker 1: my understand Yeah, the results of those scans were determinative
Speaker 1: for migrants, right. It could determine their ability to make
Speaker 1: an asylum appointment and therefore to enter the US and
Speaker 1: make a claim for asylum. This caused people to remain
Speaker 1: in various very dangerous situations. It has probably led to
Speaker 1: people dying. It's another example of why we have to
Speaker 1: pay attention to the border if you want to know
Speaker 1: what's coming down the pipe domestically, and talking of shit
Speaker 1: that is coming down the pipe from the border domestically.
Speaker 1: I want to talk about public lands again because Utah
Speaker 1: Senator Mike Lee is back on his bullshit. This time
Speaker 1: he has another bill. People will remember that Mike Lee
Speaker 1: tried to insert in the budget reconciliation bill a massive
Speaker 1: sell off of public lands, right. And what Lee does
Speaker 1: is he uses whatever terminology he thinks will make people
Speaker 1: support this crusade he has against land zone by the
Speaker 1: public for if we want to access In the last time,
Speaker 1: he tried to wrap it up a language about affordable housing.
Speaker 1: If you read the bill, you would have seen that
Speaker 1: there wasn't going to result in any affordable housing. This time,
Speaker 1: he's wrapping it up in the language of border security.
Speaker 1: And this is where I'm where We're going to return
Speaker 1: to the defining political question of our time. Who is President?
Speaker 1: Because Lee, who introduced the bell in October of twenty
Speaker 1: twenty five, said, and I quote, Biden's open border chaos
Speaker 1: is destroying American's crown jewels. Families who want to enjoy
Speaker 1: a safe hike or camp out are instead finding trash piles,
Speaker 1: burned landscapes, and trails closed because rangers are stuck clearing
Speaker 1: up the fallout cartails are exploding their disorder, using these
Speaker 1: lands as cover for their operation. This bill GIFs land
Speaker 1: managers and border agents the tools to restore order and
Speaker 1: protect these places for the people they were meant to serve.
Speaker 1: Diligent observers will notice that Biden is no longer the
Speaker 1: president of the United States, and further diligent observers will
Speaker 1: notice that many people currently working for the federal government
Speaker 1: on public lands are being laid off or furloughed due
Speaker 1: to the government shutdown. What Lee's bill would do is
Speaker 1: allow dhs to identify illegal roads in public land areas
Speaker 1: and then to upgrade them to navigable roads. This is
Speaker 1: important because the nineteen sixty four Wilderness Act doesn't allow
Speaker 1: motorized access to wilderness areas, and what Lee is proposing
Speaker 1: is that they would identify these illegal roads within one
Speaker 1: hundred mile zone. But he is proposing a blanket change
Speaker 1: to the nineteen sixty four Wilderness Act to allow the
Speaker 1: construction of roads, which would completely change the nature of
Speaker 1: wilderness in the United States. And sometimes a sliperslow argument
Speaker 1: can also be a fallacy, but in this case, building
Speaker 1: roads into the wilderness will permanently change the nature of
Speaker 1: their wilderness and will lead to other losses of protection
Speaker 1: on public land. Lee makes the argument that it's important
Speaker 1: for search and rescue and for border access. There is
Speaker 1: already mechanized access for search and rescue. They give search
Speaker 1: and rescue helicopters, for instance, can access wilderness areas that
Speaker 1: they have agreements in place with land management agencies which
Speaker 1: allow them to do this already when there is a
Speaker 1: risk to human life. The bill also talks about removing
Speaker 1: invasive species and reducing fire risk by removing fire fuels
Speaker 1: down by the border. Again, I'm guessing what this would
Speaker 1: do would be This would I mean if you fire
Speaker 1: fuels like look at the souther border near where I live, right,
Speaker 1: like think of the California sage brush chaparral. Like, clearing
Speaker 1: fire fuels there would completely change that landscape forever. It
Speaker 1: would remove much of the value that this wilderness has
Speaker 1: not as untouched. Right, people have lived in this area
Speaker 1: for tenths of thousands of years, and that they have
Speaker 1: touched that nature, and they have lived alongside it and
Speaker 1: worked with it. But it is an area that is
Speaker 1: significantly less damaged than most of the United States.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: The bill would also inventory fires and damage to wilderness
Speaker 1: caused by migrants. I guess this is just an attempt
Speaker 1: to say another bad thing about migrants. It also prohibits
Speaker 1: any housing of migrants on federal lands unless it is
Speaker 1: in a prison. It's Lee taking this border hawk stuff
Speaker 1: and trapping it onto this crusade that he has been
Speaker 1: on for a long time to deprive people in the
Speaker 1: United States and people visiting the United States have access
Speaker 1: to their public lands and eventually to sell those lands
Speaker 1: off to the highest bidder. He introduced it on October second.
Speaker 1: It's in the committee stage right now. This probably is
Speaker 1: one of the things that folks could call a representative
Speaker 1: about and suggest it's a very bad idea. Talking to
Speaker 1: bad ideas. My daughter has announced the formation of an
Speaker 1: international brigade to defend his incredibly corrupt regime in Venezuela.
Speaker 1: I say this is someone who has been to Venezuela
Speaker 1: and written a PhD about the Spanish Civil War. This
Speaker 1: is a very bad idea. Don't do this.
Speaker 17: This is.
Speaker 1: Maduro does not need your help. Fuck that guy talking
Speaker 1: of things that don't need your help. Here are some adverts.
Speaker 12: I can't believe you're throwing the People's Republic of Venezuela
Speaker 12: under the bus like that, as there facing down war
Speaker 12: with the United States of America.
Speaker 1: Right now, standing in the breach against imperialism. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: read a lot about it.
Speaker 12: What happened? Does hashtag solidarity? Jane?
Speaker 1: I'm sorry. I read about it on the Gray Zone
Speaker 1: and I'm changing my opinions, having spent more time than
Speaker 1: I'm sure half the staff the Gray Zone in Venezuela.
Speaker 9: Speaking of Spooky, the ship Trump's getting is part of
Speaker 9: terraff negotiations who.
Speaker 21: Jazz, jazz rock, jazz rock, jazz bo.
Speaker 9: All right, So, as we talked about last week, Trump
Speaker 9: has been in East Asia to do a bunch of
Speaker 9: meetings for conversations already happening. And this is where terrificagotiations
Speaker 9: have been being handled. This has been being held in
Speaker 9: South Korea. South Korean President Lee JM Young presented Trump
Speaker 9: with South Korea's highest honor and also gave him a
Speaker 9: giant golden crown. Have you all seen the giant golden crowd?
Speaker 12: It's that easy, folks. All you gotta do, it's all
Speaker 12: you gotta do is just these little stupid things, and
Speaker 12: then he loves.
Speaker 9: You, giant gilded crowd.
Speaker 1: I haven't seen the crown. I'm gonna look at the crown.
Speaker 9: Look up the crowd. I am beseeching you all yet.
Speaker 9: I however, big you think this crown is? It is
Speaker 9: way larger than that it is.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, yeah, no, it's Jesus wow.
Speaker 9: It's like the size of all fire hydran. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe they directly they directly took the one that
Speaker 1: they took from Prince Andrew for being a nonse and
Speaker 1: melted it down.
Speaker 9: It's really something now, now, Lee J. Meung is a
Speaker 9: name you might recognize because he's the guy who was
Speaker 9: famous for that video of climbing over the fence to
Speaker 9: stop the coup last year. And one year later he
Speaker 9: is giving Trump what I think might be the largest
Speaker 9: crown I have ever seen. Now, this crown is being
Speaker 9: described as quote a gilded replica. So I don't know
Speaker 9: how much of this is actually gold. I suspect it's
Speaker 9: gold paint or whatever. I don't know. I do not
Speaker 9: have confirmation on it. But you know, great great things
Speaker 9: happening in sort of like a revolutionary anti coup movement
Speaker 9: which has giving Trump the giant golden crown. Yeah, and
Speaker 9: apparently and they got like a kind of favorable, sort
Speaker 9: of okay ish kind of trade dealt out of out
Speaker 9: of giving the President of the United States giant golden crown. So,
Speaker 9: in terms of tariff news, while in China, Trump had
Speaker 9: his long awaited beating Lustijian Ping, they struck a deal.
Speaker 9: Trump decreased the quote unquote fence andyl tariffs to ten percent,
Speaker 9: which leaves the teriff right for all Chinese goods at
Speaker 9: forty seven percent, down from its previous fifty seven percent.
Speaker 9: China has a reed to not do Rare Earth's mineral
Speaker 9: restrictions that we talked about last week, and has also
Speaker 9: pledged by US soybeans. Again, it's deeply unclear how much
Speaker 9: of this is actually going to happen. I think my
Speaker 9: guess is that they probably won't do the harshest of
Speaker 9: the mineral restrictions, but I will believe the soybean purchases
Speaker 9: when I see it, and I haven't seen it yet.
Speaker 9: There's also been some interesting US out of the Senate
Speaker 9: where there's been a couple of symbolic votes against some
Speaker 9: sets of tariffs. The Senate voted fifty to forty six
Speaker 9: to end the state of emergency that supposedly allows Trump
Speaker 9: to do the Canada tariffs, and also voted to block
Speaker 9: tariffs against Brazil. The four people who voted against both
Speaker 9: of these, who voted with the Democrats are Mitch McConnell,
Speaker 9: Rand Paul, Susan Collins, and Lisa Morowski. Which it kind
Speaker 9: of makes sense because Collins and Morowski are supposed to
Speaker 9: lead the two moderates. Rand Paul is like just hates tariffs. Yeah,
Speaker 9: he's a free trade hardliner who whenever I talk about this,
Speaker 9: I will say he has had as much as all
Speaker 9: of this is his fault, he has had one great light, ever,
Speaker 9: which is I have a trade deficit with my grocery store.
Speaker 9: Actually really good.
Speaker 12: Is he like an Austrian like economists, like libertarian type,
Speaker 12: Like I know he's like a libertarian guy. I'm just
Speaker 12: trying to figure out what specific flavor.
Speaker 9: He's like an he's like one of the Austrian like
Speaker 9: gold standards, but also like those people are still free
Speaker 9: trade people, like really hardline.
Speaker 12: Last time I heard Charlie Kirk talk in person, he
Speaker 12: was debating like five Austrian economists the most annoying people mean.
Speaker 2: To Like, honestly, I wouldn't wish that on anyone. That
Speaker 2: sounds like that sounds like why would you agree to
Speaker 2: do that, especially if you're already rich. I don't understand that.
Speaker 2: I don't understand it.
Speaker 9: Now, Okay, it's just also word doating though that despite
Speaker 9: these votes, none of this is going to take effect
Speaker 9: because the House right now effectively does not exist as.
Speaker 2: A legislative body.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it doesn't exist in general because they keep not
Speaker 9: calling sessions because every time they try to call a session,
Speaker 9: the Democrats in the one political theater thing that like
Speaker 9: is kind of a good idea, but they're so bad
Speaker 9: at it. They keep being like, you have to release
Speaker 9: the Epstein files, and the Republicans keep being like, no,
Speaker 9: so we kind of don't have a House of Representatives.
Speaker 2: I keep thinking about that one scene from Mars Attacks
Speaker 2: with the presidents, like, you've still got two out of
Speaker 2: three branches a government, and that ain't bad.
Speaker 12: Yeah, we basically have one branch of government.
Speaker 9: We have one branch of Yeah, we have one branch
Speaker 9: of governments, and like.
Speaker 2: But that doesn't work as a Mars Attacks Joe.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 9: But and also it's worth noting the House voted to
Speaker 9: not allow any tariff legislation until March twenty twenty six,
Speaker 9: a thing that it could apparently do. It is totally normal.
Speaker 1: Sure, Oh well, yeah, you.
Speaker 9: Know so, and speak of things are totally normal. We're
Speaker 9: gonna close this with Trump getting mad at Canada because
Speaker 9: we saw an ad they were running, Oh my god,
Speaker 9: yeah series that God it was.
Speaker 12: It was.
Speaker 9: It was a bunch of clips of Ronald Reagan being like,
Speaker 9: tariff's bad because Reagan Reagan's domestic protectionism took the form
Speaker 9: of currency devaluations and not tariffs, et cetera. Et cetera.
Speaker 9: But like, yeah, so and and and Trump saw this,
Speaker 9: lost his mind, said that it was Ai. There's a
Speaker 9: whole saga here about him claiming that it was like
Speaker 9: also unauthorized usage of footage, which is a fiasco. And
Speaker 9: then also all of the terror negotiations that have been
Speaker 9: happening to the US and Canada have been called off
Speaker 9: and he just put another ten percent terriff on them
Speaker 9: because he was mad about it. Goje, which yeah, totally,
Speaker 9: you know, I I totally absolutely a thing that like
Speaker 9: an elected head of government does and not a a
Speaker 9: guy who just received it a massive golden crown. Ah garousaid,
Speaker 9: that's not a blue Jay's hat, but.
Speaker 12: You know this is a blue Jay's hat. Mia, How
Speaker 12: fucking dare you try to? Uh, she'splain my own, my
Speaker 12: own country, myself.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's Toronto's team.
Speaker 1: Garrison's wearing a hat for those who are not working
Speaker 1: for coolers own media.
Speaker 12: It's the Toronto Blue Jays. Oh my god, yeah yeah yeah,
Speaker 12: in Toronto blue.
Speaker 2: It was the Toronto Blue Jays.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but there's not.
Speaker 3: A J on it.
Speaker 12: Why well no, it just has the map, but.
Speaker 1: It's only three points. It's not a not a traditional
Speaker 1: maple leaf.
Speaker 12: James, are you gonna Are you gonna she explain my
Speaker 12: own country.
Speaker 1: To me, Garrison when it comes to birds and leaves,
Speaker 1: I am.
Speaker 9: Going to Canada explain to you it rocks. Yeah, but
Speaker 9: that's fun. That's just how tariff policy is set. Now,
Speaker 9: is you pissed off the king and he decided to
Speaker 9: put a teriff?
Speaker 8: This is.
Speaker 9: I don't know, I don't really know how to do
Speaker 9: analysis of the fact that we just have a child
Speaker 9: king setting tariff policy. It's it's great.
Speaker 12: Look quick, fact, Jack, do you read can you read this?
Speaker 11: Oh?
Speaker 8: Wow?
Speaker 9: It does say Blue Jays.
Speaker 12: Read this genuine m LB merchandise. Okay, wow wow wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah. They one would ever put that in fake MLB merchandise, Yeah,
Speaker 2: wouldn't be allowed.
Speaker 1: I've never seen any genuine MLB merchandise in markets in
Speaker 1: a Rocks for example.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Hey, I'm the owner of a proud Fixing Gan
Speaker 2: shirt that I bought at a market in there.
Speaker 12: All right, all right, all right, everybody, Okay. I think
Speaker 12: it's politically important for the Blue Jays to win the
Speaker 12: World Series and contribute to the American Century of humiliation.
Speaker 2: I still have my my Tumberland boots that I bought
Speaker 2: in Syria.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I have a five dot one dot one jacket.
Speaker 2: Oh and I've got it. I got a greater Adotus
Speaker 2: track suit when I was in Istanbul.
Speaker 12: Do you want to do this fallection right now?
Speaker 1: And yeah, let's do it now. Let's talk about talking
Speaker 1: of things which are not as they seem. California Attorney General,
Speaker 1: look at that Charason. That is why they pay me
Speaker 1: the medium bugs. California Attorney General Rob Bonter is warning.
Speaker 2: Such a fake guess name.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, sorry, Garrison is wearing that hat for those
Speaker 1: not watching this podcast. On top of the head in
Speaker 1: the fashion of affairs, California Attorney General Rob Bonte is
Speaker 1: wannering about election interference by the federal government. The federal
Speaker 1: government has sent monitors to California to a number of
Speaker 1: different counties in California in order to monitor the elections
Speaker 1: that are happening here on the fourth of November. To
Speaker 1: be clear, federal monitoring is not uncommon. The Biden administration
Speaker 1: did it in more than eighty places in twenty twenty four,
Speaker 1: for example. But BoNT seems convinced this monitoring is going
Speaker 1: to lead to election denial. Elector interference. Here's Gavin Newsom
Speaker 1: talking on X about this.
Speaker 22: So today the trop administration announced they're sending election monitors
Speaker 22: to five specific counties here in the state of California.
Speaker 22: They have no business doing that, they have no basis
Speaker 22: to do that. In fact, we have a state wide
Speaker 22: election for a statewide constitution. This is about voter intimidation.
Speaker 22: This is about voter suppression, period, full stop. And it's
Speaker 22: a pattern, isn't it. It's consistent with what they've done
Speaker 22: with the federalization of the National Guard and the intimidation
Speaker 22: of the chill that that's created. They'll do that right
Speaker 22: around election day as well. Same thing with ice and
Speaker 22: Border Patrol.
Speaker 7: Mass men watch that space showing up.
Speaker 22: In and around polling booths and voting places. But this
Speaker 22: is a bridge too far, and I hope people understand
Speaker 22: it's a bridge that they're trying to build a scaffolding
Speaker 22: for all across this country and next Novembers election. They
Speaker 22: do not believe in fair and free elections. Our republic,
Speaker 22: our democracy is on the line. We all need to
Speaker 22: wake up.
Speaker 1: I met Monkencerne with the stuff around that. I think
Speaker 1: he's probably right that we will see like more federal
Speaker 1: agents around polling places in election time. What California was
Speaker 1: doing in response is assigning monitors to monitor the federal monitors,
Speaker 1: which will be interesting and it seems unusual, right for
Speaker 1: the federal monitors be monitoring. Think that one of the
Speaker 1: things that's on the ballot this year is Prop fifty right,
Speaker 1: which would redistrict California. It's jerry mandering, so jerry mandering proposition.
Speaker 2: To it's revenge gerrymandering character Jerry The bill is specifically
Speaker 2: we not we're going to do this, but we're going
Speaker 2: to do this if the there's redistricting in Texas.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's yes, it's an attempt to rectify the
Speaker 1: very obvious gary mandering Texas.
Speaker 2: It's kind of mad. Mutually asserted destruction is applied to
Speaker 2: Jerry Man.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah. Neither of these things are great. That's
Speaker 1: here we are. I think that's what I had on
Speaker 1: this Actually cool.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 1: I think that's that's U E eisode. That's where we're at,
Speaker 1: all right, everybody.
Speaker 12: Well, until breaking autism news, God Texas is suing Thailand
Speaker 12: and all specifically a pharmacytic company Johnston Johnson for marketing
Speaker 12: tile and all the pregnant women and failing to disclose.
Speaker 12: But a turny general can Paxton calls quote a significantly
Speaker 12: increased risk of autism and other disorders unquote.
Speaker 1: They don't market it to pregnant women. Like Geremany.
Speaker 2: It says like if I'm not mistaken, it says on
Speaker 2: the bottles, don't take if your nurse you're pregnant.
Speaker 1: We covered this in a previous episode. But like Germany,
Speaker 1: drugs are not very few drugs are marketed to pregnant people, right,
Speaker 1: be the women or otherwise.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, the only thing you're supposed to take is a
Speaker 2: pregnant woman is cocaine, and you got to make sure
Speaker 2: it's pure.
Speaker 9: Non Binary people thought you can take anything.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, you're If you're not pregnant, it's
Speaker 2: okay to do whatever.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you are pregnant, not a woman, it's okay,
Speaker 1: go right.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah yeah sure, yes, wait, no, I don't think
Speaker 2: that that's how it works.
Speaker 9: Transmasting double yeah yeah, yeah, true.
Speaker 2: I think if you have a fetus gest dating in you,
Speaker 2: you're only supposed to do cocaine.
Speaker 12: Definitely the least autistic for people, non binary people. Yeah,
Speaker 12: definitely definitely. They can just take whatever or do or
Speaker 12: do take whatever.
Speaker 1: Yeah, too many drugs like like they'll they'll say that
Speaker 1: you should consult with it with your doctor.
Speaker 12: Consulted doctor.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and none of them are risk free. But it's
Speaker 1: it's it's a cost benefit analysis, right.
Speaker 12: We covered this the autism and Thailand all like correlation
Speaker 12: versus causation based on that one Sweeter s this is.
Speaker 12: I'm interested to see how Johnston and Johnson argues this
Speaker 12: in court and if that will have effects across you know,
Speaker 12: the rest of the Trump of administration's anti Thailand all push.
Speaker 12: If they're able to successfully defend their product against Ken
Speaker 12: Paxton so critical support sant Thailand. All, I guess.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the resistance, Big pharma Jesus.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if people listen to more and that we can
Speaker 1: get back and find out previous episode.
Speaker 2: All right, everybody, until next time, try not to be
Speaker 2: on a fishing boat anywhere south of the US southern border.
Speaker 2: It's not safe right now.
Speaker 12: Good luck trick or treating. Happy Halloween.
Speaker 2: Yeah, good love trick or treating. It's not safe right now.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, don't be trick or treating in a boat.
Speaker 12: This year we've reported the news that sucks.
Speaker 21: Yeah, we reported the news.
Speaker 12: Hey.
Speaker 2: We'll be back Monday, with more episodes every week from
Speaker 2: now until the heat death of the universe.
Speaker 23: It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
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Speaker 23: in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.