Speaker 1: A zone media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 2: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 2: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 2: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 2: you can make your own decisions.
Speaker 3: Today, Shreen and I are talking to our friends at
Speaker 3: PK Gaza our Meednabdullah. You might remember them from an
Speaker 3: episode we did last October, and I've interviewed them before
Speaker 3: for Men's Health magazine in the UK. PK Gazer is
Speaker 3: a group that teaches parkour and free running to young
Speaker 3: people in the Gaza strip. They've been doing this for
Speaker 3: a long time and have some great videos you can
Speaker 3: find all over social media and YouTube. Both our D
Speaker 3: n Abdullah have the opportunity to leave Gaza. Our Ed
Speaker 3: now lives in Sweden. Abdullah lives in Italy. We spoke
Speaker 3: a couple of weeks ago, but very little has changed
Speaker 3: since then, and I just wanted to note that Abdalla's
Speaker 3: audio is a little bit rough, but we thought what
Speaker 3: he had to say was really important, so we hope
Speaker 3: that you'll take the time to listen to it.
Speaker 1: My name is Ahmed Matar. I am at twenty eight
Speaker 1: years old at the moment. I'm Palestinian from Gaza. Currently.
Speaker 1: I live in Sweden since eight years ago. And yeah,
Speaker 1: I live in Sweden. I worked with Parkour and I
Speaker 1: left from Parkour and that's what I do here. And
Speaker 1: the last summer was my first time visiting Gaza since
Speaker 1: eight years and yeah, but I'm back in Sweden. I
Speaker 1: was back in Sweden one month before the war started again.
Speaker 1: And yeah, a lot of a lot of things to say,
Speaker 1: a lot of things to express, and but yeah, that's me,
Speaker 1: Ahmed Matar, twenty years old from Gaza.
Speaker 4: I've a nice to meet you all. I'm a Puga
Speaker 4: stop and I'm twenty seven years old. I'm also Palestinian.
Speaker 4: I'm proud of that. I think the city originally and
Speaker 4: you live in Italy right now. For the most three years.
Speaker 5: We wanted to talk to them about how it feels
Speaker 5: to be outside of Gaza and wake up every day
Speaker 5: wondering if a bomb has killed your family or if
Speaker 5: your family is getting enough to eat?
Speaker 3: How have you been coping with, like dealing with It's
Speaker 3: bad enough for those of us who don't have family,
Speaker 3: watching the horrible things that happen every day, and like
Speaker 3: every morning you look on your phone and it's something worse.
Speaker 3: How has it been for you, guys? Just to give
Speaker 3: people an insight into how you're coping.
Speaker 1: From my side, I can say, yeah, life is a
Speaker 1: stop since the day that the war started. Six months
Speaker 1: since this war, and every day just watching the news.
Speaker 1: I go to work and then I come back while
Speaker 1: while I'm at war, I'm just watching the news. I'm
Speaker 1: lessening to the news, and that was my life since
Speaker 1: six months at the moment, and I don't feel to
Speaker 1: do anything else. I cannot feel like to train, and
Speaker 1: I cannot feel like to enjoy or to forget what's
Speaker 1: going on there because it's my family there, my friends,
Speaker 1: my people. If I feel like I want to forget
Speaker 1: about it, it feel like I'm I'm like betraying my people,
Speaker 1: my family. So I prefer to just watch the news,
Speaker 1: feel the same as them, and just do my best
Speaker 1: to help them with what I can. But it's actually
Speaker 1: like I just feel helpless at the moment that I
Speaker 1: cannot do anything to them in that situation like this,
Speaker 1: the moment.
Speaker 5: Oh Dulla said that when he chose to leave Gaza,
Speaker 5: it was one of the most difficult moments of his
Speaker 5: entire life. He knew that if he stayed, there wasn't
Speaker 5: much hope for his future, and he'd have to give
Speaker 5: up on so many of his dreams that would be
Speaker 5: achievable if he hadn't been born in an open air prison.
Speaker 5: Now that he's left, he can pursue his dreams in Italy,
Speaker 5: but he struggles to express how difficult he has been
Speaker 5: finding being so isolated and distant from his friends and family.
Speaker 4: I mean, one of the most important things in all
Speaker 4: life is it's not really the most important in his family
Speaker 4: since I really lived Italy. It was not really easy
Speaker 4: for me because he knew that I would be alone
Speaker 4: and I would be away from my family. But I
Speaker 4: took that decision because they knew that somehow I had to,
Speaker 4: let's say, somehow to sacrifice, and because you know, I
Speaker 4: was focusing somehow on my future, my goals, which was
Speaker 4: not really almost impossible. It's impossible to do it where
Speaker 4: I was, which is going to.
Speaker 6: See it was the hardest decision of made ever in
Speaker 6: my life, that even before anything really started, I'm going
Speaker 6: to explain how I feel since months back.
Speaker 4: I'm sure that everybody knows right now if he's going
Speaker 4: to put himself in my place, that he wouldn't have
Speaker 4: the right words to express his feelings. And I'm sure
Speaker 4: and I'm someone right now who doesn't really have the
Speaker 4: right words to suppress it them to tell you what
Speaker 4: I feel and how I feel, because it's it's not
Speaker 4: something that's easy for anyone to experience in his life.
Speaker 4: So that's how I feel.
Speaker 3: We wanted to ask him how they were able to
Speaker 3: keep in touch with their families. I remember I was
Speaker 3: talking to Upmed in October and like we were talking
Speaker 3: about how hard it was just to find out if
Speaker 3: your families were okay every day, right, like just to
Speaker 3: contact them and check is that still the case? Like
Speaker 3: how has it been just trying to contact your families
Speaker 3: over the last six months?
Speaker 1: It is actually still the same that they have to
Speaker 1: try calling and calling and calling the whole day until
Speaker 1: they catch up, like the connection is cut off or
Speaker 1: it's almost like impossible to get connected with them. So
Speaker 1: I have to try the whole day until like I
Speaker 1: get someone answering me because it's like I guess it's
Speaker 1: because it's a small place where they are, like in
Speaker 1: Rapa and there's more than one and a half million
Speaker 1: people and everyone is trying to call to Gaza and
Speaker 1: to check with everybody in there, so it's make it
Speaker 1: hard to get connected easily with them. So I try
Speaker 1: like every day. For sure, I in the end, it's
Speaker 1: better than before. At the moment when they were in Canyonits,
Speaker 1: it was like that I had to ask my friends
Speaker 1: who levey close to my area and then they tell
Speaker 1: me if my family are or not. And sometimes I
Speaker 1: I'm having no information about them for a whole week
Speaker 1: and just worry to if everything is okay with them.
Speaker 1: At the moment, I just wish for the best. That's
Speaker 1: what I am at home, wishing everything is okay with them,
Speaker 1: but without knowing if it's them or another family who
Speaker 1: got boned, because the TV is not showing a name
Speaker 1: or a family anymore, because it's you know, you're talking
Speaker 1: about more than thirty five thousand people getting killed, and
Speaker 1: to mention the names of every person getting killed, it's
Speaker 1: something impossible in the media. I guess I.
Speaker 4: Just want to mention, how does it feel for anyone
Speaker 4: who's really listening right now? How does it feel if
Speaker 4: you know that you know someone who's really the most
Speaker 4: important in your life, and you know the team in
Speaker 4: danger somehow, and you're trying to call one day to
Speaker 4: day through three days or even four weeks. Sometimes sometimes
Speaker 4: they even it happened two weeks and a few weeks,
Speaker 4: and you know that people they are dying every day,
Speaker 4: and it might be someone from your family that you know,
Speaker 4: like something you know happen and you cannot reach them
Speaker 4: because of the signal, because of the collection of good
Speaker 4: whatever it is, How would you feel A.
Speaker 3: Had said he hadn't actually seen his family for nearly
Speaker 3: a month because they hadn't had good enough signal for
Speaker 3: a call. Abdullah, on the other hand, hasn't even seen
Speaker 3: a picture of his family's its bombs begin to fall
Speaker 3: on the place where he grew up six months ago,
Speaker 3: like I have not.
Speaker 1: Seen my family like face to face on a camera
Speaker 1: or for more than three weeks at the moment the
Speaker 1: moment I saw them, And they have to go somewhere
Speaker 1: really high building too, so they can have internet. If
Speaker 1: they get this internet, and in the same time it's
Speaker 1: very dangerous for them to go on a high buildings.
Speaker 1: So yeah, you know, sometimes when my father sent me
Speaker 1: a picture of him on messenger more than a month ago,
Speaker 1: and then I was like just choked, how to see
Speaker 1: his white hair, like oh, gray hair everywhere, and he
Speaker 1: just changed in these six months totally, like I would
Speaker 1: not recognize the same person like he was before the war,
Speaker 1: because I was there seven months ago in Gaza and
Speaker 1: he was totally young, like you know, he's just fifty
Speaker 1: years but it's not that he had gray hair everywhere
Speaker 1: like how I saw in his picture. And then I
Speaker 1: see how suffering they are facing, how tough life they
Speaker 1: are having at the moment, just through his face, his yeah,
Speaker 1: his picture that he sent to me, which is really
Speaker 1: just for sure heir to see that, how how they
Speaker 1: are growing too fast because of this genocide we only come.
Speaker 4: I just want to add that I'm happy that you
Speaker 4: Ahmed to be the chance to to see your father.
Speaker 4: I still for the last six months I didn't see
Speaker 4: a picture or didn't want to pull my father.
Speaker 1: Just understand, I they really risk their life to go
Speaker 1: and talk to me. And then I always I also
Speaker 1: tell them to not do that. When I when I
Speaker 1: see them going to that building or where they go
Speaker 1: to get the internet, I was just telling them go home,
Speaker 1: be at a safer area. But still like they tell
Speaker 1: me there's no safe area. There is no safe area,
Speaker 1: and there is. It's the same anywhere, but then it's
Speaker 1: still like, yeah, it's a It gives more fear that
Speaker 1: when you are on a high building, any high building
Speaker 1: getting targeted in Gaza.
Speaker 5: I have been having an extremely hard time looking at
Speaker 5: what's happening through my phone, witnessing the suffering of people
Speaker 5: who might as well be my family. They all look
Speaker 5: and sound like my cousins, my aunts, my uncles, my parents,
Speaker 5: my siblings. I can't even imagine experiencing this if it
Speaker 5: was my actual family. I genuinely don't know how I
Speaker 5: could cope with not being able to reach them for months,
Speaker 5: or not even knowing if they're okay. I wanted to
Speaker 5: know if Ahmad Dinner Bellah have found ways to cope,
Speaker 5: or at least ways to get through each day. Do
Speaker 5: you guys have a community that you can reach out to.
Speaker 5: Do you guys talk to each other a lot? How
Speaker 5: How do you guys stay sane, like, how do you
Speaker 5: not lose your mind? Just as everyone else goes about
Speaker 5: their life.
Speaker 1: We talk to each other, mean abdollah, almost every day
Speaker 1: in the evening, we spend like more than four hours
Speaker 1: at least in a call. And besides that, yeah, while
Speaker 1: we are sitting calling each other, we are watching the news,
Speaker 1: and yeah, we have to be informed about everything is happening.
Speaker 1: That's how it make us feel better at least to
Speaker 1: know what's going on and to follow the news. Thing
Speaker 1: else can help it. I think I would not feel
Speaker 1: happy to go and enjoy while my family is not enjoying.
Speaker 1: And yeah, I don't feel good about it. It's not
Speaker 1: that I I should enjoy, it's I feel like I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna enjoy until my family is safe. Until my
Speaker 1: family is enjoying, and this is gonna take years, I guess.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 1: The aroma troma is that affected them from this genocide
Speaker 1: is gonna take a while to hear to recover. They
Speaker 1: will take long time to recover from this. And I
Speaker 1: don't know if I am affected by it or not.
Speaker 1: But you know, my life, as I told you, has
Speaker 1: been just watching news for six months and nothing else.
Speaker 1: I don't know how is that affecting me in the
Speaker 1: long run, like after the war ends. But for me,
Speaker 1: Parker has always been a way to to recover, and
Speaker 1: I'm sure Parker will help me later.
Speaker 4: I'm always trying to say to talk to myself because
Speaker 4: I guess it's really important. Everybody has to talk to himself,
Speaker 4: because it's the most important thing that Yeah, I'm your
Speaker 4: positive people's believe I'm not to lose your mind, tries
Speaker 4: just to be normal because of the end anyway, you
Speaker 4: don't have anything that you can do in your hand.
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 4: That you cannot change something like I already have fen
Speaker 4: of mind. I really told that I'm really proud of
Speaker 4: myself that at least I'm trying to stay normal. I'm
Speaker 4: trying to keep myself and act as a normal person.
Speaker 4: But the main question is I don't know will I
Speaker 4: would be able to. I'm afraid that once it's going
Speaker 4: to happen, that I'm going to lose everything and I'm
Speaker 4: going to destroy everything. And of course, you know, sometimes
Speaker 4: I'm trying to do out. I'm not trying to be alone,
Speaker 4: just trying to keep my mind and my life a
Speaker 4: little bit more busy as much seek.
Speaker 3: I've known Abdullah and I've made and several other members
Speaker 3: of PK Gaza since twenty twenty. I worked on a
Speaker 3: story about him in twenty twenty one, which was about
Speaker 3: the last time I could sell stories on gadz because
Speaker 3: for the most part, you only get to write about
Speaker 3: people in Gaza when they're dying. I asked them about
Speaker 3: the well being of some of the other members of
Speaker 3: the team.
Speaker 1: Side, Yeah, he's in our thoughts all the time and
Speaker 1: we will never forget. And for sure for Side was
Speaker 1: like the last person I saw in Gaza when I
Speaker 1: left Gaza, and.
Speaker 7: He was with me.
Speaker 1: Helping me with everything, like so I can live from
Speaker 1: Gaza to Egypt. So he was helping me with all
Speaker 1: the process I need in the crossing area because it's
Speaker 1: very busy and you need to know people in the
Speaker 1: crossing area so they can fix you and help you
Speaker 1: and carry my stuff with me. And I no say it.
Speaker 1: Since I was born, I can say Said's father and
Speaker 1: my father are very close friends. And since I grew up,
Speaker 1: like since I started to be aware on this life.
Speaker 1: I met Said and we were friends, neighbors. We were
Speaker 1: always playing together, and then we decided to go for
Speaker 1: a kung fu club and we started to train kung
Speaker 1: fu and martial arts together. And at the age of
Speaker 1: nine years me and Said also met Abdullah and met
Speaker 1: the other guys who does also martial arts, so we
Speaker 1: started to do martial arts together. And then we met
Speaker 1: a Barker guy Mohammed Jakhbir and Abdo lan Chassi, which
Speaker 1: made us turn into Barkour after and everything I was
Speaker 1: doing in like in my sports life and outside of
Speaker 1: my sports life, I was always meeting Side as a friend,
Speaker 1: as a brother and we were at each other's houses
Speaker 1: and eating together. And yeah, Side was really meaning a
Speaker 1: lot to me because I have always known him as
Speaker 1: the good guy who help everyone who need help.
Speaker 8: And the.
Speaker 1: Lately say it was like the manager of the Barker
Speaker 1: Academy that we created there and he was taking care
Speaker 1: and teaching kids for free and volunteering and putting from
Speaker 1: his time so more kids can go there and learn
Speaker 1: Barkour and my brother was one of them and he
Speaker 1: was helping him. And during this war, Side was the
Speaker 1: only one that informs me about my family in about
Speaker 1: how they are because he was the only one. He
Speaker 1: was connected to the internet at that time. So I
Speaker 1: was going through him about my family, and we were
Speaker 1: talking every day during.
Speaker 9: This war, and.
Speaker 1: Suddenly I just saw new it is about. That he
Speaker 1: got killed together with his brothers while trying to rescue
Speaker 1: some people from under the rabbit and then another rocket
Speaker 1: upon them and killed them all. I could not understand
Speaker 1: it and still cannot believe that Side is gone. It's
Speaker 1: something that I would not believe that they go to
Speaker 1: gas and say it is not there. I cannot imagine
Speaker 1: how it feels to his father, to his mother, and
Speaker 1: that they lost the three of their sons at once. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but.
Speaker 1: Side will always be in our memory, in our heart
Speaker 1: that we will never forget Palestinias.
Speaker 4: They are really different than anybody else. When the bonds
Speaker 4: really happening, everybody just trying to scale. Everybody's just trying
Speaker 4: to run away. What Side and his brothers did. They
Speaker 4: just went after that building was bombed. They just went
Speaker 4: to help others, to take others from Aldo Drepol, you know,
Speaker 4: to help them to see if they are injuries. If
Speaker 4: they are you know, they can't help others. And that
Speaker 4: was their fault that they were trying just to help
Speaker 4: others and then they could pomp three of them. That's
Speaker 4: that's what happened with them, and that's what most of
Speaker 4: the plastina durns. But they were really prayed, and yeah,
Speaker 4: it's it's it's such a ross that nobody can can imagine.
Speaker 3: It's hard enough for you a friend, so suddenly it's
Speaker 3: even harder when you have been able to see them
Speaker 3: for months and never got to say goodbye. We asked
Speaker 3: about the last time they spoke to their friend, and
Speaker 3: we asked him to share some of their memories of him.
Speaker 1: So he was aside, was telling me, listen to this sound,
Speaker 1: and then while listening, I was just hearing shooting. And
Speaker 1: then he was telling me, this is a quad Captor.
Speaker 1: The quad chapter is like a drone that is developed
Speaker 1: to shoot at the same time so it can film
Speaker 1: and see everything moving and shooting it at the same time,
Speaker 1: so it can kill people which is moving. And he
Speaker 1: tells me that everything is moving in this area, everything
Speaker 1: is moving around us, is getting shot. And he was
Speaker 1: at his home and together with his family, and I
Speaker 1: was telling him, just saying, leave the area. Go somewhere
Speaker 1: that is better, safer or something that you don't have
Speaker 1: to hear this sound. You maybe can get killed inside
Speaker 1: your home because you know this squad captures is a
Speaker 1: drone that can go inside windows, anything that it can
Speaker 1: go from the roof and enter your home. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: what he told me. What he told me was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: but if I live home, I will get killed. And
Speaker 1: if I if I leave another place, I will also
Speaker 1: get killed because it's not safe anywhere. It's the same.
Speaker 1: So if I die at our home or outside our home,
Speaker 1: it's the same. And in the end, I go to
Speaker 1: the heaven. It's directly it's better for me. And that's
Speaker 1: what he was saying, and that's what he received. He
Speaker 1: wanted the heaven, I guess. And but we we wanted
Speaker 1: him back in our life. We did not want him
Speaker 1: to go. But yeah, that's life. Take the good people
Speaker 1: for us always.
Speaker 3: That's the end of part one, but we'll be back tomorrow.
Speaker 3: It was the second part of our interview with Avemed
Speaker 3: and Abdullah Gaza Pakur.
Speaker 5: Since October seventh, Israel has killed tens of thousands of
Speaker 5: Palestinian civilians, many of them children. All over the world,
Speaker 5: people have taken to the streets to call for an
Speaker 5: end to the killing, to show solidarity with the people
Speaker 5: of Palestine amidst their genocide. This is an unprecedented act
Speaker 5: of solidarity, but it's also been a long time coming,
Speaker 5: and we wanted to know how it made Ahmed and
Speaker 5: Abdullah feel.
Speaker 1: I walk in the straights here in Sweden and they
Speaker 1: see the people wearing the koffe Yah, the Palestinian Kofeya,
Speaker 1: and it's something that made me feel for sure happy
Speaker 1: and to see that the people start to be aware
Speaker 1: of what's going on in Palestine in us, start to
Speaker 1: understand that we have occupation, that we that finally you
Speaker 1: need to look in our cause and solve it. This
Speaker 1: is Ballistine, this is Palestinians that they need their freedom,
Speaker 1: they need to live as any other person or on
Speaker 1: this earth. And to see this support of the people,
Speaker 1: it's the most important for us to to live. It
Speaker 1: gives us a sense of freedom while we are not
Speaker 1: free yet, just make us give us hope that something
Speaker 1: will happen in the future. It's because it's a story
Speaker 1: of obbressed people who have been suffering, suffering for years,
Speaker 1: and I guess these people need attention, need the more
Speaker 1: effort of the so they can get their freedom as
Speaker 1: as they have when they have done about the black
Speaker 1: lives matters. And it's also it should it should come
Speaker 1: from the people. That's how the world get affected. If
Speaker 1: the people go against their governments, against the the decisions
Speaker 1: of their leaders, that's what gonna change the public opinion,
Speaker 1: the leader's opinion.
Speaker 3: Also, I wanted to ask about, like people want to
Speaker 3: help now more than I think they ever have in
Speaker 3: this country. People are aware, people who weren't aware before,
Speaker 3: People who couldn't have told you, like where like Palestine
Speaker 3: was in relation to the map, Maybe now want to help.
Speaker 10: And that's cool, that's great.
Speaker 3: Like I think obviously people have a lot of learning
Speaker 3: to do, because this isn't an issue that's been very
Speaker 3: well covered by the media in the US for decades. Right,
Speaker 3: the media in this country has also dedicated itself to
Speaker 3: dehumanizing Muslim people for a very long time, but extensively
Speaker 3: over the last twenty years. So, like two things that
Speaker 3: come out of that. I want to ask, like, if
Speaker 3: people want to help and they have money, that tend
Speaker 3: to be the easiest way to make a difference, Right,
Speaker 3: But you've told me before, a lot of the angios,
Speaker 3: your parents, your families end up buying the food that
Speaker 3: gets donated, So is there an engio that's better? And
Speaker 3: then like what can people do to learn? I guess
Speaker 3: like to learn more. I mean either from you guys,
Speaker 3: or things or books or films that you think are good.
Speaker 1: I mean the all the companies or the organizations that
Speaker 1: works in as are Yeah, for sure, they're trying their best.
Speaker 1: But yeah, as you have seen that most of the
Speaker 1: trucks are standing outside Rapa crossing and they are just
Speaker 1: allowing two hundred trucks a day for two million people
Speaker 1: who are hungry are suffering. So yeah, for sure, like
Speaker 1: the food is not enough, and when someone wants to
Speaker 1: get this food, he have to or he or she
Speaker 1: they have to buy the food and it's more than
Speaker 1: tin times more expensive than what it was before, and
Speaker 1: sometimes it reaches even more and even the vegetables, it's
Speaker 1: like higher than the price is here in Europe. Imagine
Speaker 1: like a country under a war, no work, no jobs,
Speaker 1: everything is stopped and the prices are going higher and
Speaker 1: higher because the stuff is very limited and the food
Speaker 1: is limited and everything is limited. So for sure, like
Speaker 1: people want to sell the stuff that they have so
Speaker 1: they can ear money so they can buy another stuff.
Speaker 1: And that's how the people are doing in Gaza. So
Speaker 1: if they get something maybe for free, which is very
Speaker 1: rare that it happened because it's too many people. For example,
Speaker 1: my family are buying the food, and I know how
Speaker 1: it is for them that it is hard for them
Speaker 1: to get the stuff that they even need because all
Speaker 1: what they have is food that is backed in cans,
Speaker 1: beans mostly beans actually, and that's what they have everything.
Speaker 1: They tell me we have been eating beans or a
Speaker 1: lot of these and pasta and they buy this stuff.
Speaker 1: It's not that it's for free sometimes every other month,
Speaker 1: every other two months to get a bag of flours
Speaker 1: so they can make bread.
Speaker 5: And it's not just food aid that can be hard
Speaker 5: to get your hands on in Gaza. Even sending money
Speaker 5: is difficult.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is starvation for the people. People are really
Speaker 1: like suffering from that and cannot imagine And how is
Speaker 1: my family living that situation, because I really find it
Speaker 1: hard these times they even send my family money because
Speaker 1: of how like most of the offices are closed that
Speaker 1: can that can receive money from outside Gaza. So it's
Speaker 1: most of the offices are very busy that they have
Speaker 1: to stand in a queue for more than ten hours
Speaker 1: five hours sometimes and in the end they tell them, oh,
Speaker 1: we're sorry, we are out of cash, and that's what happens. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I imagine like the same money going and coming back.
Speaker 1: So it's sometimes there is nothing in the banks, there
Speaker 1: is nothing in the offices that is exchanging and receiving
Speaker 1: money from outside. Like Western Union is not working anymore,
Speaker 1: money Gram is not working, and now the people are
Speaker 1: using something like a crepit coin like USDT, and and
Speaker 1: you know, to send one hundred dollars for example, they
Speaker 1: take like more than fifteen percent of that, and then
Speaker 1: in the same time you also have to pay another
Speaker 1: ten percent or five percent for sending because the USDT
Speaker 1: is not equal with the USD because in the corrective
Speaker 1: coin it's more expensive, so you need to pay more
Speaker 1: dollars to get USDT and then there they receive it
Speaker 1: as a dollar. So yeah, to support, I suggest if
Speaker 1: anyone wants to support or have the money that wants
Speaker 1: support a family or peopulling as the only thing is
Speaker 1: to actually contact the family that they want to support directly,
Speaker 1: because yeah, the all the support that goes through the organizations,
Speaker 1: the international organizations takes very long time and in the
Speaker 1: end it triches Gaza and the it's not enough for
Speaker 1: the people, and then the Bible have to buy it.
Speaker 1: It's not that Ghaza for free.
Speaker 5: Although millions of people are trapped in Gaza right now,
Speaker 5: we also know that some Gazans have been able to leave.
Speaker 5: We've seen fundraisers pop up for people trying to get
Speaker 5: themselves or their families out of Gaza. We asked Ahmed
Speaker 5: and Andola if they had an idea how much it
Speaker 5: would cost to leave Gaza right now.
Speaker 1: But then imagine Egyptians government are charging five thousand dollars
Speaker 1: for each truck entering Gaza, and they're charging every person
Speaker 1: five thousand dollars to leave from Gaza. So it's something
Speaker 1: else to help with. If you want to help someone
Speaker 1: to live from Gaza, is also help our families or
Speaker 1: something like that.
Speaker 4: I can say.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm trying to get my family out of
Speaker 1: there because I don't see any better future in Gaza
Speaker 1: at the moment. Imagine like this, what happened to Gaza
Speaker 1: will need at least more than ten years to recover.
Speaker 1: All the schools are destroyed, all the houses, our home
Speaker 1: is bombed, you know, to rebuild a home, it's not
Speaker 1: just about rebuilding a home.
Speaker 3: Even if the bombing stopped today, the crisis woulden't. Almost
Speaker 3: all of Gaza's infrastructure, it's hospitals, universities, schools, and streets
Speaker 3: has been destroyed. There's nothing left in Gaza. There's nowhere
Speaker 3: to go if you're sick. There's nowhere to buy food
Speaker 3: or clothes for your children. There's no where to buy
Speaker 3: the materials to fix your bombed house. Given all of this,
Speaker 3: it's hard to see a future for people there, which
Speaker 3: isn't very difficult. So we asked Abdollah, not made about rebuilding.
Speaker 1: You need to rebuild everything. You know, where will the
Speaker 1: water go, Where will the water come from? The electricity?
Speaker 1: Everything is bombed. You know, you need to build a
Speaker 1: whole new city, which will take at least at least
Speaker 1: at least at least ten years. It's much much more.
Speaker 1: And the affection of it on the Bible themselves also,
Speaker 1: what they have suffered, what they have, you know, it's
Speaker 1: going to take them a long time to heal. So
Speaker 1: I think I did not want to take a step
Speaker 1: a step like this, but I will ask in the
Speaker 1: end my people who follow me to if they want
Speaker 1: to support the people and if they want to support
Speaker 1: any member of my family to get out of Gaza,
Speaker 1: because I don't see it any better and I'm not
Speaker 1: ready to lose any of my family. And yeah, I imagine,
Speaker 1: like I have a brother who's twelve years old at
Speaker 1: the moment, and I have a sister which turned sixteen,
Speaker 1: and another sister which has two kids, and one of
Speaker 1: them was born in the war, like four months old
Speaker 1: at the moment, And what about these kids, what will
Speaker 1: they do if they stay in Gaza. And you can
Speaker 1: apply that on the rest of Gaza people. Abdalla's family
Speaker 1: and his brother's sons, his brother's kids. So yeah, that's
Speaker 1: the best is I don't know, but most many, many
Speaker 1: people want to really get out of there at the
Speaker 1: moment because they think about what happened to Gaza. It
Speaker 1: will take years, and it's my family's future, and they
Speaker 1: don't know for how long it will take to fix
Speaker 1: this future if they stay in Gaza and if they
Speaker 1: still stay alive, because if they inter Gazza. At the moment,
Speaker 1: my family is in Rafa and close to the borders
Speaker 1: area with Egypt, and that's the only place where are
Speaker 1: most of the people at the moment. Like more than
Speaker 1: one and a half million are staying in a very
Speaker 1: small area and Israel inter Rafa. That will be just yeah,
Speaker 1: the huge is disaster that could ever happen on earth.
Speaker 1: That imagine thirty six thousand people killed, and that's the
Speaker 1: one that is confirmed on the list that they found,
Speaker 1: but you know, thousands and thousands are like they cannot confirm,
Speaker 1: like they already unknown, they don't know who they are.
Speaker 1: And there's thousands under the rabble that they cannot get
Speaker 1: out and many missings, so it can be it could
Speaker 1: reach to one hundred thousand together with the injured people.
Speaker 1: And that's not a small number. And imagine if the
Speaker 1: enter to a place like Trafa, that will be just
Speaker 1: like double what have happened at least I hope that
Speaker 1: with not having but I see that Israelis are very
Speaker 1: decided that they want to do that even if no
Speaker 1: one would be able to stop them, they say, and
Speaker 1: they would do it even without the support of anyone,
Speaker 1: without the support of the USA or without and that
Speaker 1: shows how criminals they are. I can say that they
Speaker 1: want just to slaughter all the people in Gaza. They
Speaker 1: don't care about civilian or not civilian.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I.
Speaker 1: Want to do my best to help my family, and
Speaker 1: they see.
Speaker 8: I have to.
Speaker 1: To take them to a several place and I don't
Speaker 1: know if it's possible of this day in Gaza.
Speaker 3: Like anyone else, Armed and Abdullah want their families to
Speaker 3: be safe. But because they were born in Palestine, they
Speaker 3: don't have the privilege of not having to constantly worry
Speaker 3: about their families safety. They also don't get to be
Speaker 3: the ones making choices to impact their safety. Instead, these
Speaker 3: choices are made by other people. Those people don't know
Speaker 3: are mad n Abdullah or their families. They might be
Speaker 3: IDF Terir own operators or US diplomats. To those people,
Speaker 3: their families are just numbers, but are made and Abdullah,
Speaker 3: their families are their whole world.
Speaker 1: How it works to get people out of Gaza is
Speaker 1: like you have to send someone in Egypt to pay
Speaker 1: for the government in Egypt. So they put their names
Speaker 1: in the last of Rapha borders so they can travel.
Speaker 1: That's how it works. So and they charge every person
Speaker 1: at least five thousand. You pay more than you are
Speaker 1: able to leave earlier. If you don't pay, or you
Speaker 1: pay five thousand, you stay and wait in the queue.
Speaker 1: If you don't pay you die in Gaza. Yeah, you're
Speaker 1: worth nothing. That's how it is. I don't know how
Speaker 1: it is for Abdullah. How does he feel about the
Speaker 1: future of Gaza at the moment? How do you feel
Speaker 1: like for the next ten years watching your family? I
Speaker 1: cannot imagine. That's the thing. That's why it lead me
Speaker 1: to steps like that, because I always never wanted to
Speaker 1: My family are very you know, loving to the country
Speaker 1: that they don't want to leave Gaza. My mother was like, no,
Speaker 1: we build home first, and I was telling trying to
Speaker 1: convince her by just explaining the situation and the next
Speaker 1: ten years from now, which is another disaster after the war,
Speaker 1: which is make her understand more of the effort so
Speaker 1: true to think about her children future and yeah, but
Speaker 1: in the same time, I understand the love for the country.
Speaker 1: I always love Gaza and they even have Gaza and
Speaker 1: everything in my life, I have it in my name
Speaker 1: even like I always if I say my name, I
Speaker 1: say I'm Mather Gaza as as my name. You know,
Speaker 1: I don't say I'm a'm at mother in my social
Speaker 1: media even it says Mather Gaza since always not during
Speaker 1: the war, and it's because I'm proud to be from
Speaker 1: there because it's the place that taught me the strength.
Speaker 1: It gave me, the bower it gave me like it
Speaker 1: taught me a lot of values that I use in
Speaker 1: my life at the moment. That made me patient, made
Speaker 1: me strong, and that's what is Gaza. It made me
Speaker 1: the person I am that I always hope and I
Speaker 1: always dream. I always have an x to dream because
Speaker 1: we always dream. As a bit of beeble from Gaza.
Speaker 5: Al Billa told us that his family is similar to Ahmed's,
Speaker 5: not wanting to leave Gaza because of their love of
Speaker 5: the land. Their priorities are to help their families. He
Speaker 5: said that when people ask him how can I help,
Speaker 5: his view is that everyone has their own way of supporting.
Speaker 5: It does not necessarily have to mean financial help if
Speaker 5: that is not a possibility for someone. He stressed the
Speaker 5: importance of posting on social media to continue spreading awareness
Speaker 5: and how the Palestinian struggle is a struggle that concerns
Speaker 5: all of humanity.
Speaker 1: You know, the beginning I was, I was thinking like
Speaker 1: I want to go to Gas directly after this or
Speaker 1: during the war. But the wars I see it, the
Speaker 1: harder it make it like that even if I go,
Speaker 1: what will it help with my family? Like home is destroyed.
Speaker 1: Everything is destroyed, not just our home, our whole area,
Speaker 1: like our neighbors, everything or our hood is destroyed, which
Speaker 1: is as we said, would take long time to fix.
Speaker 1: So going to Gas, yeah, for sure it can help.
Speaker 1: But in the same time, in the long run, it's
Speaker 1: not the the thing will that will make a change
Speaker 1: for my family's safety and future. And that's why I
Speaker 1: don't know. I am stuck in between two things, like
Speaker 1: going to the place where I grow, where I learned
Speaker 1: all of these values to be strong, and but in
Speaker 1: the same time living life where everything is destroyed, where
Speaker 1: you don't have a future, or decide to be in
Speaker 1: a severe place where you may be fix the future,
Speaker 1: but away from your country, from your heart, because you know,
Speaker 1: for us, Gaza is our heart. We really love Gaza.
Speaker 1: We care about everything in Gaza. But that's where I
Speaker 1: am stuck between safety and future and the heart Gaza,
Speaker 1: the place where we love.
Speaker 5: We really appreciate you, both of you guys, sharing your
Speaker 5: your feelings and your stories. And I think I'll make
Speaker 5: a great point about how even if you can't support financially,
Speaker 5: there's a huge benefit of continuing to share posts about
Speaker 5: Palestine and continue to talk about it and not letting
Speaker 5: life just go as usual and making people remember what's
Speaker 5: happening and not letting them forget. So I think that's
Speaker 5: the part you remember for all the listeners, just if
Speaker 5: you're able, Like, the least we can do is talk
Speaker 5: about Palestine. That's the very least, very least you can do.
Speaker 4: Thank you.
Speaker 1: It was a bleacher, a blisure to talk to you
Speaker 1: and share the story with you, for sure, and to
Speaker 1: tell you the situation of every person who's living outside Gaza,
Speaker 1: away from their families. That's I guess, not just me,
Speaker 1: not just up the lights, every Palestinian from Gaza who's
Speaker 1: living away from their family.
Speaker 4: They are really.
Speaker 1: Suffering, I can say, because we are not living normal
Speaker 1: since this unicide started in Gaza, and we hope it
Speaker 1: will end soon so we can see our families. And yeah,
Speaker 1: stop the killing of this people from this children, because
Speaker 1: it has been a war, a genocide on the children,
Speaker 1: women innocent. More than fifteen thousand children have been killed
Speaker 1: and much more disappearing. And yeah women and so it's
Speaker 1: more than seventy percent of the people who being killed
Speaker 1: are women. And children and also prest Is el three
Speaker 1: and men teenagers.
Speaker 3: Guys, Where can people if they want to follow along,
Speaker 3: like to hear more from you guys, just to see
Speaker 3: your stories? Where can they find you a on social
Speaker 3: media online?
Speaker 1: You can find me on my Instagram at Arghaza or.
Speaker 4: THEO this week that's my accounting Instagram. Ahmad was saying,
Speaker 4: I mean we really appreciate everything and we are I
Speaker 4: mean we are here because also what we want as
Speaker 4: much as people to know about it and just to
Speaker 4: think and to know that in urgasman super expinions, they
Speaker 4: are not really numbers. They are people. There are people
Speaker 4: that everybody has really hot and it's beating all the time,
Speaker 4: and we have feelings. We we we have everything that
Speaker 4: any human thinking in this has and this world as
Speaker 4: same as everybody is really listening right now, when we
Speaker 4: are all equal, there's nobody is better than another one.
Speaker 4: At the end, we are all the same. So it's
Speaker 4: we are not numbers. Just I would I would like
Speaker 4: to everybody remember this. There's so many and so much
Speaker 4: really bigger stories behind every every want, everyone that will
Speaker 4: really killed. Everyone has a family, and you have to think,
Speaker 4: what if there's just you know a person that he
Speaker 4: lost either one from his family. That's one story. The
Speaker 4: other person that he lost his kid, that's another story.
Speaker 4: The other person lost his mom, that's another story. The
Speaker 4: other persons his dad, that's another to the story. So
Speaker 4: everybody has his own story. That's why I'm just trying
Speaker 4: to show that we are not just an numbers. There's
Speaker 4: so many other things that we haven't we would feel
Speaker 4: often so even though the people they are still alive,
Speaker 4: and they are alive, they are dead. They're not alive
Speaker 4: because literally they have nothing, even whether they lost someone
Speaker 4: from the family or whether they can die even from hunger.
Speaker 4: Thank you guys so much.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you man, Thank you boy.
Speaker 11: We really appreciate it.
Speaker 4: Thank you.
Speaker 3: Hey everyone, it's me Games. I hope you found those enlightening.
Speaker 3: I know they're difficult to listen to, but I think
Speaker 3: they're important as well. I just wanted to update the
Speaker 3: end of the episode to let you know that Ahmed
Speaker 3: has made a fundraising page. He's raising funds for his
Speaker 3: family who are still trapped in Gaza. If you'd like
Speaker 3: to donate to that, we will include the link in
Speaker 3: the show notes. But I'm also going to read it
Speaker 3: here just so you can remember it you're driving or
Speaker 3: what have you.
Speaker 5: Hey, everybody, the URL has been updated. Actually it is
Speaker 5: now go fund me, g o f und dot m E,
Speaker 5: go fund me, dot me forward slash F six B
Speaker 5: one F seven b E. So go to that go
Speaker 5: fund me and please donate what you can. It will
Speaker 5: also be in the description of this episode.
Speaker 10: Thanks welcome a special May Day episode of vicd Appen Here.
Speaker 10: I'm your host, Mia Wong. It wasn't too long ago
Speaker 10: that unions were finished. The percentage of American workers in
Speaker 10: unions plunged towards the single digits. The unions that survived,
Speaker 10: battered and broken shells of the mighty behemists that shook
Speaker 10: the world for one hundred years, embraced so called business unionism,
Speaker 10: which set out not to conquer the world in the
Speaker 10: name of labor like its great predecessors, or even really
Speaker 10: to bargain for higher wages, but to make companies profitable
Speaker 10: in order to keep their jobs. They took pay cuts
Speaker 10: and job losses without a fight, forcing their membership into
Speaker 10: line and effortlessly crushing the endless slates of reform caucuses
Speaker 10: that sought to put the fight back into the working class.
Speaker 10: Even the cutting edge of Marxist theory health the time
Speaker 10: of unions was over. Workers were too anomized, too divided
Speaker 10: to fall or from the immediate processes of production, from
Speaker 10: the discipline of the factory, and from the massification of
Speaker 10: the city to assemble the working class in its old
Speaker 10: fighting form. There would be riots, to be sure, barricades, blockades, occupations,
Speaker 10: but not strikes. Whatever the working class did next, the
Speaker 10: age of the union was over. For much of the
Speaker 10: twenty tens. That prediction was a smart bet. The bold
Speaker 10: proclamation of Wisconsin trade unionists that organized labor would turn
Speaker 10: back the tide of the Tea Party failed to ruin
Speaker 10: under the failure of their attempt to recall Wisconsin's hated
Speaker 10: union busting Governor Scott Walker. The Tea Party's march continued unimpeded,
Speaker 10: radicalizing even further in the wake of the twenty fourteen
Speaker 10: twenty fifteen uprisings in Ferguson and Baltimore to produce not
Speaker 10: the victory of the working class but Donald Trump. Even
Speaker 10: success stories like the rejuvenation of the mighty Chicago Teachers
Speaker 10: Union AFT Local one by a bold reform caucus called
Speaker 10: the caucus of rank and file educators or corps who
Speaker 10: waged a pair of unexpectedly, wildly popular strikes, was tainted
Speaker 10: by the reality of limited wins and labor conditions in
Speaker 10: Chicago schools that remained appalling. Even as the left returned
Speaker 10: in the wake of Occupy Ferguson and the election of Trump,
Speaker 10: union membership continued to plunge, and capitalists and Marxist alike
Speaker 10: continued to herald the union's demise. They were wrong. History,
Speaker 10: it seems, delights in irony. It was the dead enders,
Speaker 10: fighting hopeless battles and reform caucuses, losing union election after
Speaker 10: union election. It was the wobblies fighting losing campaign after
Speaker 10: losing campaign, desperately trying to organize the unorganizable fast food
Speaker 10: and Rea tail workers. It was rank and file Marxist
Speaker 10: trade unionists waiting sixty long years, their comrades dead and gone,
Speaker 10: for somebody, anybody, to hear their plans for shutting down
Speaker 10: Capitol's logistics networks. It was labor notes, sixteen staffers compiling
Speaker 10: endless analyzes of labor struggles for a crowd that couldn't
Speaker 10: have filled a baseball stadium.
Speaker 4: Who was right?
Speaker 10: Unions are back, while still small compared to the height
Speaker 10: of union power in the nineteen fifties, twenty twenty three
Speaker 10: saw a wave of massively popular strikes waged by unions
Speaker 10: from the massive behemoths like the UAW in the Writers
Speaker 10: Guild to tiny independent coffee unions whose members Larger existing
Speaker 10: unions are rather spin on than spend a single cent
Speaker 10: attempting to organize. Only the director intervention of the President
Speaker 10: to break a rail workers strike before it could start,
Speaker 10: and the last second portrayal of Teamster's leadership stopped twenty
Speaker 10: twenty three. This largest strike wave of the modern era,
Speaker 10: basking in his triumphs and conspiring to win more, was
Speaker 10: Labor Notes. Labor Notes is a curious beast. It is
Speaker 10: simultaneously a journal that publishes news about labor struggles, a
Speaker 10: network that brings together a group of disparate rank and
Speaker 10: file union reform movements, largely but not exclusively from the US,
Speaker 10: maintaining a strong emphasis on solidarity and organizing with workers
Speaker 10: in Mexico, and a labor conference that runs every two years.
Speaker 10: It is a relic of another time, whose time, it seems,
Speaker 10: has come again. Labor Notes was founded in nineteen seventy
Speaker 10: nine as a way to coordinate and expand the inter
Speaker 10: union connections formed to the United Mine Workers of America's
Speaker 10: nineteen seventy nine bituminous coal strike. It's one of the
Speaker 10: last direct connections to the era where labor was strong
Speaker 10: unwinningly task of keeping the flame of labor alive during
Speaker 10: the neoliberal downpour. Two weeks ago, they held their largest
Speaker 10: conference ever. Four five hundred people crammed into the Wyatt
Speaker 10: Regency next to Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. At least a
Speaker 10: thousand people who tried to register were turned down. I
Speaker 10: personally watched interested workers turned away at the door because
Speaker 10: the venue's conference halls had already reached the mass capacity
Speaker 10: for fire safety. Labor we can safely say is back.
Speaker 10: It is returning to the South the great Rock unions
Speaker 10: have shattered upon for one hundred years. It's moving in
Speaker 10: new directions towards service workers previously thought impossible to organize.
Speaker 10: Most of all, it's moving towards something we'd almost forgotten
Speaker 10: was possible. It's moving towards victory. The first thing you
Speaker 10: noticed about Labor Notes is it's staggered diversity, Young punks
Speaker 10: and battle jackets sat on benches next to old anti
Speaker 10: war protesters from the sixties. Independent trade unionists and feminist
Speaker 10: activists in Mexico rubbed shoulders with battle hearted American union nurses.
Speaker 10: White middle aged longshore men and women plotted with young,
Speaker 10: queer Amazon warehouse workers to maximize the power of logistics strikes.
Speaker 10: You saw old industrial organizers from the sixties passing down
Speaker 10: lessons and tactics and stories of strikes that otherwise would
Speaker 10: have vanished into the mists of history. Media workers fighting
Speaker 10: for their first contract, the lowliest rank and file workers
Speaker 10: chatting in breakout groups with union presidents. For all the
Speaker 10: talk I've done in this show about how many union
Speaker 10: organizers are trans, even I didn't expect to see this
Speaker 10: many trans people. It's a cross section of the American
Speaker 10: working class come to fight, and that, above all, is
Speaker 10: what this Labor Notes conference was about fighting. The most
Speaker 10: direct conflict came on the first day of the conference,
Speaker 10: when Palestinian union activists called for a pro Palestine demonstration
Speaker 10: outside the hotel. The cops arrested three people in an
Speaker 10: attempt to clear the street. This, rather predictably was a
Speaker 10: terrible idea. Instead of backing down The crowd of several
Speaker 10: hundred union activists almost immediately surrounded the lone car and
Speaker 10: demanded they let their prisoner go. What happened next, to
Speaker 10: use a technical term, fucking ripped. A bunch of kids
Speaker 10: had a rave to the changing police sirens. A fifty
Speaker 10: year old white duty from the electrical worker stood next
Speaker 10: to me. A Chinese transzoman from a podcast union, A
Speaker 10: bunch of longshore men, teamsters, staffers from unions. You wouldn't
Speaker 10: believe even if I told you Palestinian trade union activists, nurses,
Speaker 10: punks from independent unions. No one else in the crowd
Speaker 10: could have named. An entire mass of unionists stood their
Speaker 10: ground and refused to let the cops take one of ours.
Speaker 10: A tradeswoman with drums marched around the police car and
Speaker 10: we're all saying which side are you on? After two hours,
Speaker 10: the police gave up to a crowd screaming Union power
Speaker 10: at the top of our lungs. It was an incredible
Speaker 10: display of solidarity that set the tone for the rest
Speaker 10: of the event. We were going to fight the bosses
Speaker 10: together and fuck them if they came for us. This
Speaker 10: is not to say there weren't divisions. A group of
Speaker 10: protesters broke away from the cop car to demand that
Speaker 10: Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, the darling of the Chicago Teachers' Union,
Speaker 10: come tell the cops to let our people go. Now
Speaker 10: whether or not this would have worked is up to
Speaker 10: some debates. These cops were not Chicago police departments. They
Speaker 10: were the cops of Rosemont, which is technically a separate
Speaker 10: entity from the city of Chicago. However, Labor notes staffers
Speaker 10: and securities tried to stop the protesters from reaching Brandon
Speaker 10: Johnson and ended up throwing punches at the protesters. As
Speaker 10: to quote one observer, union brother fought union brother. This
Speaker 10: fight reveals one of the important tensions in the movement.
Speaker 10: Should unions continue to back imperfect center left politicians in
Speaker 10: exchange for some political benefits, or should they take a
Speaker 10: hard line against politicians who betray their fundamental political principles.
Speaker 10: Brandon Johnson is a microcosm of the debate. On the
Speaker 10: one hand, he was elected with enormous resource expenditure from
Speaker 10: the Chicago Teachers' unions. On the other hand, he's been
Speaker 10: locking immigrants into berculosis ridden camps as the city lurches
Speaker 10: from crisis to crisis. Even many of Chicago's other unionists
Speaker 10: were never happy with him in the first place, as
Speaker 10: he failed to use his previous position to come to
Speaker 10: the aid of striking nurses. When the two points of
Speaker 10: view collide, there's a fight. On a national level. The
Speaker 10: conflict is the question of Joe Biden in Palestine. At
Speaker 10: Labor Notes itself, there's strong support for Palestine. Palestinian solidarity.
Speaker 10: Panels were packed to the rafters with workers from every
Speaker 10: sector imaginable and activists from.
Speaker 11: Across the world.
Speaker 10: I saw UAW workers deeply unhappy with their union leadership's
Speaker 10: decision to endorse Biden, a decision made by maybe five
Speaker 10: members of an executive committee, with how a vote from
Speaker 10: the union therein lies the issue. As much as Labor
Speaker 10: Notes represents the bleeding edge of the labor movements. UAW
Speaker 10: president Sean Fein, fresh off the uaw's astounding seventy three
Speaker 10: percent victory at a Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga, gave the
Speaker 10: conference's closing address. There remains massive bastions of conservatism in
Speaker 10: the labor movements, who have actively fought against even statements
Speaker 10: on Palestine, much less concrete actions. Unions are still weak
Speaker 10: and the positions of activists within them are still tenuous.
Speaker 10: Even more favorable shops have yet to turn broader popular
Speaker 10: support among rank and file workers for Palestine into substantive
Speaker 10: strike actions, and it's deeply unclear to me if any
Speaker 10: such action is possible at all. My pessimism on labour's
Speaker 10: willingness and ability to stop the genocide and Palestine, a
Speaker 10: pessimism reinforced by watching the rapid spread of student campus
Speaker 10: occupations while labor remains silent or perhaps more precisely dormant,
Speaker 10: is broadly intension with my optimism and effectively everything else
Speaker 10: that I saw there. There is incredible organizing going on
Speaker 10: at labor notes. People are coordinating rank and file links
Speaker 10: between unions whose staffers and leaderships hate each other for
Speaker 10: grudges whose origins have passed into the mists of time.
Speaker 10: There was quite serious talk about plans to line up
Speaker 10: contracts to expire in twenty twenty eight to effectively create
Speaker 10: a miniature general strike, or perhaps more precisely, to create
Speaker 10: a version of what's called the Spring offensive in Japan.
Speaker 10: Spring and offensive are the same word in Japanese, and
Speaker 10: so labor unions decided to have their contracts expire in
Speaker 10: the spring, thus maximizing the power of their strikes. This
Speaker 10: effort to have contracts aligned in twenty twenty eight is
Speaker 10: broadly speaking, a larger version of the Spring offensive. We
Speaker 10: will cover this more in a later episode. For now,
Speaker 10: I think it's enough to say that discussions and organization
Speaker 10: were quite serious, and there was significant enthusiasm as well
Speaker 10: as discussions of the potential difficulties of getting people's contracts
Speaker 10: to actually align. People are organizing to bring their unions
Speaker 10: together on a sectoral base to share resources, coordinate, set
Speaker 10: standards for contracts, and generally help each other more effectively
Speaker 10: oppose the bosses and unions that rule them all. Labor
Speaker 10: Notes has also from the beginning been an incubator for
Speaker 10: reform movements inside of unions, attempting to wrest control from
Speaker 10: corporate administrative caucuses. These reform movements almost always lose. The
Speaker 10: last fifty years is littered with defeats in union election
Speaker 10: after union election with sub ten percent turnout, and yet
Speaker 10: little by little these groups are starting to win. We
Speaker 10: heard from a number of smaller rank and file efforts
Speaker 10: that had successfully taken control of their unions. The first
Speaker 10: major victory was a rank and file slate taking over
Speaker 10: the management of the notoriously corrupt and clickish Teamsters. Now
Speaker 10: I have my issues with the new Teamsters leadership too.
Speaker 10: There are something like two entire hours of this show
Speaker 10: dedicated to how angry rank and file Teamsters were over
Speaker 10: the fact that UPS workers didn't go on strike last
Speaker 10: year due to their leadership cutting a deal with management.
Speaker 10: But on a broader level, the victory of the Teamsters
Speaker 10: reformed slates and the defeat of one of the oldest
Speaker 10: union I don't know if administrative caucus is really a
Speaker 10: that's a bit of a euphemism for the UPS sort
Speaker 10: of corrupt leadership dictatorship, but their victory on a broader
Speaker 10: level was a sea change in American unionism. Their victory
Speaker 10: was followed by the victory of Seawan Fain in the UAW,
Speaker 10: a man who, as much as he angered members by
Speaker 10: endorsing Joe Biden, walked into Labor notes and gave a
Speaker 10: speech about the class war and the authoritarianism of corporate greed.
Speaker 10: Certainly there was much to annoy trade activists concerned with Palestine,
Speaker 10: in the sense that his central metaphor labor was the
Speaker 10: arsenal of democracy was in bad taste as he described
Speaker 10: the unions that he leads as the successors of Liberator
Speaker 10: B fifty two bombers, which not, you know, not precisely
Speaker 10: the metaphor id shoes, as your own members are protesting
Speaker 10: the bombs falling over Gaza. But on the other hand,
Speaker 10: if a giant speech about the class war and the
Speaker 10: need to organize across borders is now the conservative wing
Speaker 10: of progressive trade unionism, the future is bright. The kind
Speaker 10: of militant union actions we've seen over the past year
Speaker 10: have coalesced into a sort of strategy of fight as
Speaker 10: you build. It is based on a very basic strategy
Speaker 10: that you would think unions would have already been doing. However, Comma,
Speaker 10: see everything I've ever said about administration, administrative caucuses, and
Speaker 10: business unionism and corporate unionism. The strategy is, if you
Speaker 10: win things for people, more of them will join unions.
Speaker 10: This strategy is already bearing fruit in Chattanooga and has
Speaker 10: international implications as well. We heard from organizers that workers
Speaker 10: in Mexico and China were keenly watching the UAW strikes,
Speaker 10: and for good reason, these strikes are ultimately their fight too,
Speaker 10: and slowly but surely workers across the world are starting
Speaker 10: to realize it. The degree of internationalism at this Labrynes
Speaker 10: was remarkable. I came into an early China panel fully
Speaker 10: expecting the same kinds of praise for the CCP that
Speaker 10: I've seen in other leftist events held in the city
Speaker 10: of Chicago, most recently the sort of fiasco China panel
Speaker 10: held at Socialism Conference that degraded into an argument about
Speaker 10: whether or not Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa socialist.
Speaker 10: Here there was none of that. For sure, there were
Speaker 10: some slightly weird German maoist defending the Cultural Revolution, but
Speaker 10: on the other hand, there wasn't any defense of Chinese
Speaker 10: capitalism or their failed, bankrupt model of corporate unionism. On
Speaker 10: top of cross border organizing, sectorially, the conference has a
Speaker 10: deep and ingrained pro immigrant position. Sean Fayn is probably
Speaker 10: the most high profile political figure I've seen actually discussing
Speaker 10: the horrific treatment of migrants at the border right now
Speaker 10: and taking time to remind everyone that immigrants are just
Speaker 10: workers trying to find a better life. This, however, makes
Speaker 10: his support for Joe Biden, the Butcher of Yakumba, even
Speaker 10: more questionable. Still, you can see the wheels of history turning.
Speaker 10: You can see it there in the muffled buzz of
Speaker 10: conversations drifting through hallways, in the roar of the cheering crowd,
Speaker 10: in the bright laughs of co conspirators who moments before
Speaker 10: were strangers, and the drowsy chatter of abortion workers who
Speaker 10: let a transwoman sleep on their floor to hide from
Speaker 10: the police. In the chance of a hundred workers refusing
Speaker 10: to let the cops take one of their own. You
Speaker 10: can see the outline of the great Leviathan, the ruling
Speaker 10: class thought buried stone dead in the nineteen eighties. You
Speaker 10: can see the working class waking from its day's slumber,
Speaker 10: shaking the sleep from its eyes and the dirt from
Speaker 10: its back. You can, for the first time in decades,
Speaker 10: hear the clatter and the roar as it tests its chains.
Speaker 10: The great behemoth is beginning, just beginning, to assemble the
Speaker 10: iron will and terrible power necessary to turn its dreams
Speaker 10: into reality, to break its chains and shatter its cage,
Speaker 10: and reclaim the world it built with its blood and
Speaker 10: sweat and tears. That day is not today, it's not tomorrow,
Speaker 10: But for the first time in my life, it could
Speaker 10: be the day after that this has been it could
Speaker 10: happen here, Happy Mayda everyone.
Speaker 2: Hey everyone, Robert Evans here and it could happen here.
Speaker 2: A podcast about things falling apart and sometimes putting them
Speaker 2: back together. I'm writing this after flying back from Texas
Speaker 2: where my tad died, to Portland, waking up and basically
Speaker 2: immediately interviewing a group of testers in Arcada, California, at
Speaker 2: the cal Poly occupation in Humboldt, and then driving to
Speaker 2: Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, where there has also
Speaker 2: been a campus occupation, And both of these occupations have
Speaker 2: some stuff in common, and I wanted to talk about
Speaker 2: what was happening with both of them because I think
Speaker 2: it's relevant, and obviously it's relevant to what is currently
Speaker 2: one of the larger stories going on in the country
Speaker 2: right now, which is that a series of occupations on
Speaker 2: campuses protesting the Israeli genocide and Gaza have spread to
Speaker 2: more than one hundred schools in the United States. You
Speaker 2: will have heard of this now. We have covered some
Speaker 2: of this in recent episodes, particularly what was going on
Speaker 2: in Colombia at least at the initial stages of that,
Speaker 2: and today again I'm here to talk about two occupations.
Speaker 2: One of them is at cal Poly Humboldt in Arcada, California,
Speaker 2: and an other is at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon.
Speaker 2: As an out of side, I have lived in both
Speaker 2: of these cities, which is peculiar. It doesn't really mean anything,
Speaker 2: but I thought it was weird, and obviously I still
Speaker 2: live in Portland. Protests started in Arcada first. On October
Speaker 2: twenty second, twenty twenty four, students on the cow Poly
Speaker 2: Humboldt also called CPH Campus occupied Seamen's Hall. These students
Speaker 2: were not members of any specific group, but we're all
Speaker 2: acting in solidarity with GAZA, and we're inspired at least
Speaker 2: partly by the solidarity encampment at Columbia University. It started
Speaker 2: with a small number of people, about forty five or so.
Speaker 2: These are a mix of students, some alumni, and a
Speaker 2: few random Arcadens. Arcada is a pretty progressive town. You
Speaker 2: might call it Hippi. That's generally the reputation that it has.
Speaker 2: Campus police showed up. There was a series of negotiations,
Speaker 2: which here means they told everybody to leave, and at
Speaker 2: that point the police began escalating things. Because the Arcada
Speaker 2: Police Force is pretty small. Cops were called in from
Speaker 2: the surrounding area, quite a few of them. There were helicopters.
Speaker 2: It's much more of it to do than this fairly
Speaker 2: sleepy community in the Redwoods is used to having. Community
Speaker 2: members started to show up as well because hey, something
Speaker 2: was happening. A ride up from Crime Thinks website describes
Speaker 2: what happened next quote, Police from every department in the
Speaker 2: county showed up, including a helicopter, canine units, and off
Speaker 2: duty police. Students responded by swarming them. The cops initial
Speaker 2: plan to carry out a mass arrest was thwarted by
Speaker 2: a series of clashes both inside and outside of the building.
Speaker 2: The occupiers beat back police advances despite facing brutality unlike
Speaker 2: anything we have seen over the last decade of struggle
Speaker 2: in Humboldt County. Again, it's a pretty sleepy place. There
Speaker 2: were two arrests and a number of injuries. The arrests
Speaker 2: were apparently quite ugly, but police were unable to clear
Speaker 2: out the occupation. Barricades were thrown into place as the
Speaker 2: fighting continued off and on, until a crowd of people
Speaker 2: from the surrounding community, including other students and faculty, showed
Speaker 2: up out side and effectively surrounded the police. After six hours,
Speaker 2: the police retreated, The university declared a lockdown, and the
Speaker 2: students were able to spend the next few days extending
Speaker 2: their defenses as well upsetting, as well as setting up infrastructure,
Speaker 2: including a kitchen. Early on the morning of the twenty ninth,
Speaker 2: a team from It Could Happen Here sat down with
Speaker 2: two of these students to discuss the occupation.
Speaker 12: I go by Stinger online and I have been part
Speaker 12: of the occupation since I think the morning of day two.
Speaker 12: I think it's been night after the pops tried to
Speaker 12: enter the barricaded building and got pushed back. I think
Speaker 12: I've been here since the morning after that.
Speaker 11: Yeah, Blue, And what's been your history with this?
Speaker 13: I came here on Tuesday morning. I just attended a
Speaker 13: meeting with everyone, and I've just been here how at
Speaker 13: the MAC, mainly because I feel like that's where I'm
Speaker 13: the most useful.
Speaker 11: What's the MAC?
Speaker 13: The MAC is the Mutual Aid Kitchen. God, we've been
Speaker 13: handing out food and I've just been helping prepare food
Speaker 13: for people and trying to let other people involved do
Speaker 13: more things because I know I'm the most useful in
Speaker 13: the mac personally rather than being anywhere else doing anything else.
Speaker 2: By the time we talked to them, the rumor mill
Speaker 2: widely expected the police to carry out a major attempt
Speaker 2: to clear the occupation that night. As I write this
Speaker 2: ten thirteen pm PST on the twenty ninth of April,
Speaker 2: local police have just given Siemens Hall a dispersal order.
Speaker 2: So we'll see how that goes. Hey, everyone, Robert here,
Speaker 2: we saw how it goes. Police cracked down, arrested a
Speaker 2: bunch of people and ended the occupation. We will talk
Speaker 2: more about that a little at the end of the episode.
Speaker 2: But because their initial efforts to clear out the occupation failed,
Speaker 2: police have had to spend nearly a week watching and
Speaker 2: waiting as students dig in.
Speaker 12: Yeah, police have not tried to like actively push us
Speaker 12: out like we've seen on other campuses, where like they've
Speaker 12: totally like raided and like worn down tents and everything.
Speaker 12: And I think we also, I think a big part
Speaker 12: of it is like logistically, we're in a small city
Speaker 12: and we don't really have the police force necessary, Yeah,
Speaker 12: which is why they've been trying to call you know, unfortunately,
Speaker 12: then trying to call officers from other places because especially
Speaker 12: like I feel like in the evenings especially, we have
Speaker 12: a lot of people both from the community and students
Speaker 12: on campus who have been occupying the quad. But what's
Speaker 12: so funny is that our main intention was not Like
Speaker 12: the original intention was not to barricade that building. It
Speaker 12: was just going to be occupied, not arricaded. But because
Speaker 12: of police actions, I feel like we've actually stepped up
Speaker 12: more so. They kind of shot themselves on the foot
Speaker 12: with that one.
Speaker 2: This is a pattern we've seen a few times in
Speaker 2: recent years. In late twenty twenty, Garrison and I reported
Speaker 2: from an eviction defense at the famous Red House in Portland.
Speaker 2: The basic idea is that local protesters were trying to
Speaker 2: stop police from serving an eviction during the pandemic. There
Speaker 2: was a clash outside the house and some arrests, but
Speaker 2: police pulled back when protesters were still on the ground
Speaker 2: and in numbers. Said protesters began to fortify the area
Speaker 2: around the house and eventually the entire neighborhood. By the
Speaker 2: time the police realized what was going on, they had
Speaker 2: a nightmare on their hands, an occupation that would have
Speaker 2: been impossible to clear without significant violence. The end result
Speaker 2: of the situation was that the city government essentially negotiated
Speaker 2: an end to what was happening rather than just sending
Speaker 2: the police back into evict residence. There is much more
Speaker 2: to the whole situation than that. This is something people
Speaker 2: still get angry about because the patriarch of the family
Speaker 2: at Red House was a weirdo sovereign citizen type. But
Speaker 2: the goal at the time was to stop evictions during
Speaker 2: the pandemic, and the tactics of the day worked. The
Speaker 2: cops backed off, the city came to the negotiating table.
Speaker 2: It was a successful action, whatever you think about the
Speaker 2: individuals involved in it. After the call that Garrison Mia
Speaker 2: and myself had with those Humboldt students and we will
Speaker 2: hear more from them later, I got a message from
Speaker 2: a source that an occupation was also brewing on the
Speaker 2: Portland State University campus, or rather that it was going on,
Speaker 2: and folks were worried things were about to escalate. But
Speaker 2: don't you escalate until you've listened to these ads.
Speaker 11: Anyway, here they are, We're back.
Speaker 2: Actions at Portland State University started on Thursday, the twenty fifth,
Speaker 2: and it was initially pretty simple. One tent and one
Speaker 2: banner strung between trees in front of the Branford Price
Speaker 2: Miller Library steps. Social media did its thing. Once this
Speaker 2: first tent was up, and the encampment slowly grew to
Speaker 2: maybe half a dozen tents by midnight. At around one
Speaker 2: twenty am, the police swept the encampment. Only a few
Speaker 2: people were awake and less than twenty people were present
Speaker 2: against maybe forty riot officers. The police pushed people out
Speaker 2: of the encampment. They went straight for the supply tent
Speaker 2: and took everything, loading medical equipment, food, etc. Into City
Speaker 2: of Portland trucks and hauling it away. It was a
Speaker 2: bad night for a lot of people. But what I
Speaker 2: gleaned from interviewing some of those folks was that they
Speaker 2: had learned one crucial lesson, which was that Portland police
Speaker 2: weren't willing to fuck with people or property that was
Speaker 2: sitting on the PSU steps. This is probably a jurisdictional thing.
Speaker 2: School properties the responsibility of the PSU Campus Police PPB
Speaker 2: could police the park outside, but either couldn't or just
Speaker 2: didn't want to be arsd in dealing with the complications
Speaker 2: that might be caused by going into school property themselves.
Speaker 2: So the school had to deal with the unenviable complication
Speaker 2: of the fact that these were their students protesting at
Speaker 2: a famously progressive school and having their cops cleared them out,
Speaker 2: especially if it caused violence or somebody got seriously hurt,
Speaker 2: would be a real pr headache. The administration at Humboldt
Speaker 2: University and famously progressive ARCATA ran into a similar problem.
Speaker 2: In the days after the police backed away from their
Speaker 2: initial confrontation, students developed a list of demands by consensus.
Speaker 2: Here's one of our sources from the Humboldt occupation again
Speaker 2: and their description of the demands have been cut together
Speaker 2: from a longer interview. Some crosstalk has been edited out
Speaker 2: to make things flow a bit more clearly. Anyway, here's
Speaker 2: those demands.
Speaker 12: Okay, So students, with the mediation of faculty, have reached
Speaker 12: out to administration in hopes of re engaging negotiations. So
Speaker 12: we would like administration to agree to the following through demands.
Speaker 12: One de escalated. We demand the immediate removal of police
Speaker 12: from university campus. We also demand the immediate re enrollment
Speaker 12: of students who have been suspended. And it problem is
Speaker 12: to not suspend, resuspend, or expel any student protesters as
Speaker 12: a result of these accusations because they were claiming, you know,
Speaker 12: that we had committed property damage and trespassing and things
Speaker 12: like that, and that was a lot of the reasons
Speaker 12: that they gave for suspending us, Like in the email
Speaker 12: we received about interim suspension. Two was divest We demand
Speaker 12: that the Kalipoly Humboldt Foundation commits to an audit and
Speaker 12: subsequent divestment from any funds related to Israel, Israeli products,
Speaker 12: or Israeli companies, and this includes those that own factories
Speaker 12: on stolen Palestinian land in Israel. There are four specific
Speaker 12: funds that at the minimum, we demand the divestment from
Speaker 12: within the next six months.
Speaker 7: These were til c X, DFSTX, fe up X, and DOODFX.
Speaker 12: And we did research into these holdings that these funds
Speaker 12: have and how the companies that they may have holdings
Speaker 12: in are connected to Israel. So for example, ti LCx,
Speaker 12: their top three holdings are in Qualcomm, Wells Fargo, and Chubb.
Speaker 12: Qualcomm is an information technology company that does the majority
Speaker 12: of its technology development in Israel, so they have like
Speaker 12: factories there and that's kind of where they develop their
Speaker 12: smartphone chips and tracking intelligence, which is kind of like
Speaker 12: two of the main things that they work on and sell.
Speaker 12: And then Wells Fargo was part of a five hundred
Speaker 12: million dollar loan deal with multiple other lenders that support
Speaker 12: that was supporting Elbert Systems, which is an Israeli military
Speaker 12: weapons manufacturer. So those are like two of the big
Speaker 12: ones just from the first fund that we had looked into.
Speaker 12: And our third demand was declare in solidarity with universities
Speaker 12: across the globe and for all Palestinian people, including their
Speaker 12: martyrs and refugees. We demand a ceasefire statement from KLi
Speaker 12: Pally Humble calling for an immediate and permanent Ceaspire in Palestine,
Speaker 12: and we encourage all other California State universities and universities
Speaker 12: of California to do the same. As we were writing this,
Speaker 12: it was we found out that the faculty administration had
Speaker 12: released a Ceaspire statement, I believe, but the actual university
Speaker 12: like admin had it, like the whole university admin, but
Speaker 12: like the faculty had released a CESPIRE statement. Faculty specifically,
Speaker 12: I know there's there's definitely faculty that have There's some
Speaker 12: faculty who have been with us since day one, like
Speaker 12: CA camping out with everyone since day one. And it's
Speaker 12: like a lot of the faculty, we like, we are
Speaker 12: totally comfortable putting our trust in like some of these faculty,
Speaker 12: Like if there was an emergency, like I would call them,
Speaker 12: you know, like if there was an emergency on campus
Speaker 12: where like I was about to be arrested, I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 12: I'm going to call up this professor. But they have
Speaker 12: been and they have been like trying to, you know,
Speaker 12: update us with whatever they hear from Admin. But just
Speaker 12: in like the past few days, we've actually kind of
Speaker 12: discerned that upper admin has sort of cut off contact
Speaker 12: with lower admin and faculty. And this is something that
Speaker 12: we talked about with faculty members as well. Because of
Speaker 12: the significant faculty support that we've been receiving, Administration is
Speaker 12: literally just not telling faculty anything anymore.
Speaker 10: Yeah, it really seems like it's turned into just this
Speaker 10: pure conflict between everyone who is part of the process
Speaker 10: of an education fighting against the admin who are not
Speaker 10: part of that process, who are trying to stop everyone
Speaker 10: with cops.
Speaker 2: Back in Portland, that first failed encampment brought more people
Speaker 2: out the next day, Friday, the twenty sixth, and by noon,
Speaker 2: more tents than a few banners had been set up,
Speaker 2: student organizations had put together lists of demands. Now these
Speaker 2: demands have varied and have been edited a few times
Speaker 2: after long democratic consensus sessions by people present. The list
Speaker 2: I was presented with when I showed up on Monday
Speaker 2: included three demands. Number one, PSU should release a statement
Speaker 2: condemning the genocide of Palestinian people with weapons provided by
Speaker 2: the US. Number two, the university should end the sale
Speaker 2: of Israeli products on campus and any programs that would
Speaker 2: involve sending students, employees, or faculty to Israel. And number three,
Speaker 2: the board of trustees should terminate all relationships with Boeing
Speaker 2: and other companies complicit in the ongoing genocide. Their list
Speaker 2: included Leopold, an Oregon based company who makes rifle scopes,
Speaker 2: but also companies like Intel and Hewlett Packard. Boeing was
Speaker 2: the company I heard reference most by protesters. The aerospace company,
Speaker 2: which is involved in the manufacture and design of just
Speaker 2: so many weapons, has a partnership with Portland State University.
Speaker 2: Later on Friday, the same day that these lists of
Speaker 2: demands started coming together, the school president and cut announced
Speaker 2: a pause to the school's relationship with Boeing to address
Speaker 2: these protester demands.
Speaker 11: Precisely.
Speaker 2: What pausing this relationship means is unclear, and a lot
Speaker 2: of the people I talked to felt like it essentially
Speaker 2: meant nothing but cut wrote quote. PSU will host a
Speaker 2: forum at which these concerns can be carefully framed and debated.
Speaker 2: We will organize a two hour moderated debate in May
Speaker 2: to include faculty and student voices, so you know whatever
Speaker 2: that means. By late in the day Friday, media had
Speaker 2: started showing up in numbers to report on the occupation,
Speaker 2: which was still quite small, but bigger ones were happening
Speaker 2: all over the country, and if your local news you
Speaker 2: want to do anything you can to tie your area
Speaker 2: into whatever the big story is nationwide, so you know,
Speaker 2: good excuse to show up. There was also some conflict
Speaker 2: between local student groups at this point and unaffiliated groups
Speaker 2: of activists, some of whom were also students, over whether
Speaker 2: or not to keep occupying over the weekend and keep
Speaker 2: attempting to you know, keep an occupation in place despite
Speaker 2: police crackdowns, or to save their strength for a new
Speaker 2: concerted push on Monday. At any rate, some people stayed
Speaker 2: and by seven pm that night Friday night, the Portland
Speaker 2: Police Bureau showed back up in full riot gear. Park
Speaker 2: rangers told protesters to exit the park area, and a
Speaker 2: standoff ensued. While some protesters confronted police head on. A
Speaker 2: smaller group of activists used this as a distraction to
Speaker 2: move a number of tents onto the library steps, having
Speaker 2: noticed that PPB didn't seem to be willing to go
Speaker 2: directly onto campus property. Once this was done, the folks
Speaker 2: confronting the riot line gradually pulled back to the steps.
Speaker 2: The police seemed confused or at least.
Speaker 11: Put out by this.
Speaker 2: They left for a while, then returned briefly to cut
Speaker 2: down the banners hung on the trees. I was told
Speaker 2: a number of people mentioned this kind of laughingly when
Speaker 2: I was around that the way in which the police
Speaker 2: justified this was that a recent anti camping public camping
Speaker 2: measure meant to target the homeless specified that the kind
Speaker 2: of thing that a banner like. Basically, the fact that
Speaker 2: the banner touched trees in two different areas, or like
Speaker 2: touch two different trees meant that it would count it
Speaker 2: as a tent, and so they were allowed to take
Speaker 2: it down. It all sounded pretty silly to me, but
Speaker 2: students and others on campus property in the library were
Speaker 2: left to barricade the area around the library at will.
Speaker 2: They started with pallets brought by an anonymous benefactor. Both
Speaker 2: sides of the staircases into the library were initially blocked.
Speaker 2: This only lasted until Saturday morning, when an cud president
Speaker 2: of the university since August of twenty twenty three, visited
Speaker 2: the encampment. Different protesters I have talked to related this
Speaker 2: event in different ways. Some described her visit as essentially chill.
Speaker 2: Others described Ann as quite angry and even threatening them.
Speaker 11: I was not there.
Speaker 2: The end result was an agreement, though, if protesters allowed
Speaker 2: students to continue to have access to the doorway into
Speaker 2: the library so students could still use the library, PSU
Speaker 2: wouldn't send in their cops or call in the city
Speaker 2: cops to clear out the occupation. After what one source
Speaker 2: described as much heated discussion, protesters agreed to this arrangement. Now,
Speaker 2: variations of stuff like this are common in occupations at
Speaker 2: schools that get this far. School faculty are often sympathetic
Speaker 2: to student actions, or at least to the students taking
Speaker 2: part in them, and supporting crackdowns is dicey for the
Speaker 2: administration at Humboldt State University. The administration attempted to de
Speaker 2: escalate and eventually euthanized the movement by trying to provide
Speaker 2: a safety valve, a way for students who'd had enough
Speaker 2: to leave, along with the suggestion but not the actual
Speaker 2: legally binding promise that they wouldn't be punished if they did.
Speaker 2: And here's another clip from that interview. I understand that
Speaker 2: the school even set up basically a booth where you
Speaker 2: could come and officially like de register yourself from the
Speaker 2: protests in order to not get expelled or something like that.
Speaker 2: Is that a like I think you're It was unclear
Speaker 2: to me from what I read, like exactly how that
Speaker 2: system was supposed to function, but it seemed kind of shady,
Speaker 2: so they.
Speaker 14: Wanted us to So they set up a table by
Speaker 14: one of the exits, and they wanted us to like
Speaker 14: give them like our information, and they were like, if
Speaker 14: you do this, you won't get immediately arrested. But keep
Speaker 14: in mind they said not immediately arrested, And they even
Speaker 14: clarified like in their alert about they were like, by
Speaker 14: the way, this doesn't protect you from any future consequences.
Speaker 12: So it was like, why would we do that? Then?
Speaker 12: What is that a doing for any of us?
Speaker 10: I don't think a single person took that opportunity back
Speaker 10: in Portland.
Speaker 2: After the detunt with the school administration, things continued awkwardly
Speaker 2: but smoothly.
Speaker 11: For the next day or so.
Speaker 2: Protesters continued to fortify the library defenses while students entered
Speaker 2: and exited and used it at will, although the school
Speaker 2: did shut it down early on Monday. In the meantime,
Speaker 2: protesters used the small space available to them to set
Speaker 2: up minimal infrastructure as an humble, small kitchen tent was
Speaker 2: put up, along with a larger medical tent, a designated
Speaker 2: smoking area tent, and an art station for people to
Speaker 2: make signs to hang from the barricades. Donations began coming
Speaker 2: in on Saturday night and flooded in on Sunday, the
Speaker 2: point that by Monday protesters had stopped accepting donations of
Speaker 2: a lot of stuff like food and water, but also
Speaker 2: things like batteries and generators because they just didn't have
Speaker 2: room to take any more of them. During these weekend
Speaker 2: days and nights, those of the encampment discussed demands, their plans,
Speaker 2: and strategy for the future. One topic of discussion involved
Speaker 2: the houseless. Would local houseless people be welcome inside the
Speaker 2: encampment and would they be welcomed to some of the
Speaker 2: donated resources. The ultimate decision, and I hear that this
Speaker 2: was not a particularly controversial one, was yes.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 2: I should also note here that the Humboldt students we
Speaker 2: talked with claimed that their school's treatment of houseless residents earlier,
Speaker 2: like a couple of years ago, was one of the
Speaker 2: inciting incidents of this occupation. Obviously, the genocide in Gaza
Speaker 2: was the spark and purpose for why the occupation at
Speaker 2: Humboldt happened and why this occupation at PSU happened. But
Speaker 2: nothing happens in a vacuum. And I wanted to include
Speaker 2: this bit from the interview because I think it's interesting.
Speaker 12: We're joking about this is life the third strike for
Speaker 12: administration because in twenty twenty two, the La Times released
Speaker 12: an article about how administration was kicking homeless students off
Speaker 12: campus for living in their vehicles. Jesus and I believe
Speaker 12: our university, out of all the cal States, has the
Speaker 12: highest rate of homeless students. Yeah, and so this kind
Speaker 12: of this outrage a lot of people, including people on campus.
Speaker 12: We actually had a few days encampment on campus for
Speaker 12: that too, I believe, and I feel like that never
Speaker 12: really got it got partially resolved, but Admin was like
Speaker 12: really fighting against all the possible options because there was
Speaker 12: like a couple of people arguing that, like we keep
Speaker 12: in mind, I don't even think these people were from campus,
Speaker 12: but apparently the two people like filed complaints about how
Speaker 12: the people living in their cars were like messy or something,
Speaker 12: and so one of our requests was like, Okay, maybe
Speaker 12: like we could get a few more gumpsters or trash
Speaker 12: cans in the area where people are living. Yeah, And
Speaker 12: I'm just totally fought back against that, and so that
Speaker 12: was like what we're jokingly calling, like, oh, that was
Speaker 12: like strike one and then strike two. We were saying,
Speaker 12: is the faculty strike that happened earlier, I think this
Speaker 12: semester that was I think all over the state, But
Speaker 12: it really only lasted like one day, despite the momentum
Speaker 12: for possibly lasting longer than that. And Admin wanted like
Speaker 12: sent out an email saying like if your faculty isn't
Speaker 12: holding classes, put their names here, geesh, and obviously all
Speaker 12: of us were like, what are you talking like you
Speaker 12: want us to like you're asking us to snitch on
Speaker 12: our like professors and faculty right now. So that's what
Speaker 12: we're joking, is like strike two because we're like, we're
Speaker 12: not doing that. And then this is what we're calling
Speaker 12: strike three. And I was like joking earlier wh to everyone,
Speaker 12: I was like, strike three and we're out. Strike three
Speaker 12: and they're out, and everyone was like, yeah, I freaking hope.
Speaker 2: So can't be. Occupations like this are always complex things,
Speaker 2: not just in the different motivating factors that come together
Speaker 2: to make situations like this possible, but in the ways
Speaker 2: in which extant student groups and organizations that arise spontaneously
Speaker 2: due to the pressures of the moment, interface and interact.
Speaker 2: When I arrived at the encampment at about one PM,
Speaker 2: I was introduced to several media liaisons for the occupation.
Speaker 2: They were extremely careful with what they said. A lot
Speaker 2: of it was just kind of repeating the list of
Speaker 2: agreed upon demands that the protesters had come up with.
Speaker 2: I did ask about a few other things. I wanted
Speaker 2: to know how protests in twenty twenty in protests on
Speaker 2: other campuses had impacted the tactics being seen here. The
Speaker 2: most common response I got to my questions where variations
Speaker 2: of that's not something we'd like to talk about. But
Speaker 2: they did go into detail in a couple of things,
Speaker 2: and one of those was what it would take to
Speaker 2: actually conclude this occupation. They noted that if representatives of
Speaker 2: the campus administration, including the president, were to come to
Speaker 2: them and make concrete steps to divest from Boeing and
Speaker 2: other military contractors that the school currently has a direct
Speaker 2: financial relationship with, that that could be the basis for
Speaker 2: moving forward in some way to start reducing the extent
Speaker 2: of the encampment. Possibly, so that seemed to be kind
Speaker 2: of their line, if we actually see some real evidence
Speaker 2: that the school is divesting from these military investments that
Speaker 2: they have, will be willing to negotiate further. But what
Speaker 2: the school has done thus far, basically just announcing a
Speaker 2: pause and saying we'll meet about the Boeing thing later,
Speaker 2: that's not enough. The liaisons I talked to also made
Speaker 2: it clear that they found the wide wave of campus
Speaker 2: actions around the country inspiring and that that had had
Speaker 2: an impact on how things were being carried out at PSU.
Speaker 2: I was pretty impressed by their message discipline to be honest.
Speaker 2: As a journalist, you want people to talk to you,
Speaker 2: but actions like this are dangerous, and cops aren't the
Speaker 2: only danger. Anytime your movement gets pressed the attention that
Speaker 2: it acts will also attract grifters, particularly of the right
Speaker 2: wing variety, people who want to find someone they can
Speaker 2: catch saying something aggressive or dumb, or that just sounds
Speaker 2: bad out of context. You, as organizers and activists, want
Speaker 2: to keep attention on your goals and message and away
Speaker 2: from that kind of bullshit. I should also note that
Speaker 2: there were some mentions of their desire that the campus
Speaker 2: essentially carry out an amnesty policy for people who had
Speaker 2: already been involved in the occupation, so that nobody would
Speaker 2: get kicked out of the school as a result of
Speaker 2: their participation in this movement. I've heard similar things from
Speaker 2: the protesters and Humboldt. Yeah, it was an interesting conversation,
Speaker 2: and what's also interesting are these ads and we're back
Speaker 2: as my time at the protest on Monday, war On,
Speaker 2: Individuals from the occupation would occasionally march through the crowd
Speaker 2: and around the encampment, which grew at its height of
Speaker 2: the day to around five hundred or so people. In
Speaker 2: the late afternoon. This was a mix of protesters, including
Speaker 2: people from a march that had formed elsewhere and ended
Speaker 2: up at PSU, and some bystanders, a lot of whom
Speaker 2: were students sitting nearby dorms. People who were members of
Speaker 2: the occupation would ask passers by and media not to
Speaker 2: film protesters and encourage folks to get involved and help
Speaker 2: with the occupation. Pamphlets on their goals were handed out,
Speaker 2: and pamphlets on radical political action were passed around. There
Speaker 2: were also some people tabling for different causes. There was
Speaker 2: one group of people who were taking down folks information
Speaker 2: in order to support essentially a ballot measure that would
Speaker 2: increase the tax on corporations worth more than twenty five
Speaker 2: million dollars that were based in the city of Portland,
Speaker 2: which sounded nice to me. And in addition to that,
Speaker 2: there were people who were working to organize a you know,
Speaker 2: one of those Sorry his very late, but essentially how
Speaker 2: people are a lot of people are attempting to get
Speaker 2: people to organize to like register is unaffiliated and the primaries,
Speaker 2: especially in order to like, you know, make a statement
Speaker 2: to the Biden administration about their support of Israel. There
Speaker 2: were folks who were trying to raise and get people
Speaker 2: involved in that as well. So again, you know, it
Speaker 2: was like many protests of this size involved a lot
Speaker 2: of people. Sometimes in the past, especially in Portland, I
Speaker 2: have seen kind of more extreme and yeah, let's say
Speaker 2: extreme activists get angry at stuff like this, particularly when
Speaker 2: it's asking folks to like fill out or sign petitions.
Speaker 2: There's some concern obviously that like that could effectively docs
Speaker 2: people who are there. I've always found that concern a
Speaker 2: little silly. I think people can be trusted to kind
Speaker 2: of measure their own threat matrix and decide am I
Speaker 2: going to be doing anything at this protest? That means
Speaker 2: I shouldn't, you know, put down on a piece of
Speaker 2: paper that I was around here that issue. I didn't
Speaker 2: notice at this Everyone seemed pretty copasetic, and as a
Speaker 2: general rule, it was quite peaceful. Folks seemed more or
Speaker 2: less on the same page. The mostly masked protesters that
Speaker 2: I met were a pretty diverse lot, and this included
Speaker 2: a number of Muslim students, at least one of whom
Speaker 2: I watched prey before taking their place on the barricade.
Speaker 2: I also noticed numbers of students in his jobs watching
Speaker 2: from nearby windows, and eventually from the park out in
Speaker 2: front of the occupation. From conversations I had on the ground,
Speaker 2: I became aware of the fact that several student organizations
Speaker 2: were hesitant to support, particularly the weekend occupations, as they
Speaker 2: had had concerns for the safety of their Palestinian members.
Speaker 2: One particularly salient fear was that fordn students who participated
Speaker 2: and were arrested might risk not just their academic status
Speaker 2: but their ability to stay in country. And I know
Speaker 2: that a number of the protesters I met there who
Speaker 2: were particularly you know, white folks, felt like one reason
Speaker 2: they needed to participate was that they could participate without
Speaker 2: taking that kind of risk. On for the largest portion
Speaker 2: of the day Monday, I watched his activists reinforce the
Speaker 2: barricades on one side of the library, and the crowd
Speaker 2: grew quite large in the park. Some signs I saw
Speaker 2: among the crowd and on the barricade included mass college
Speaker 2: protests are always on the right side of history, and
Speaker 2: fuck your homework. People are dying. There were speeches, but
Speaker 2: not much in the way of action until very late
Speaker 2: in the day, when all but maybe one hundred and
Speaker 2: fifty or so of the crowd had filtered away. My
Speaker 2: notes at the time say the big change happened at
Speaker 2: around six fifty five pm. By this point in the
Speaker 2: early evening, I had seen very little of the police.
Speaker 2: Every now and then, a few PSU cruisers would come
Speaker 2: by circling the area, and small groups of four or
Speaker 2: five hecklers carrying makeshift fishing poles with donuts on them
Speaker 2: would run beside the squad cars, basically trying to like
Speaker 2: tempt the police officers to go grab the donuts. This
Speaker 2: seemed to demoralize the campus officers enough that they mostly
Speaker 2: stayed away. I believe that at this point the city's
Speaker 2: plan and the administration's plan was to avoid doing anything
Speaker 2: fucked up and violent in front of such a large crowd,
Speaker 2: because that would be to risk restarting the whole twenty
Speaker 2: twenty Portland protest cycle.
Speaker 11: Again. Remember, it's not just as simple as can we
Speaker 11: crush this protest?
Speaker 2: But if we go kick all these people out now
Speaker 2: and a bunch of them get seen in broad daylight
Speaker 2: getting beaten and gassed, does that mean we have to
Speaker 2: deal with thousands of people in the street tomorrow. Honestly,
Speaker 2: staying away was the smart play on behalf of the police,
Speaker 2: and as a result of them making the smart play,
Speaker 2: protesters in the encampment were themselves confronted with a choice.
Speaker 2: The space that they had been allowed by the school
Speaker 2: to occupy in the sort of weird Dayton situation had
Speaker 2: been filled both with donations and just the number of
Speaker 2: people who were inside the occupation. There was no room
Speaker 2: to make it any bigger. So their next options were
Speaker 2: either number one, expand the occupation to the park and
Speaker 2: the Portland Police Bureau has the ability to legal ability
Speaker 2: and obviously the gear to clear out the park. In addition,
Speaker 2: just from a tactical level, it's difficult to defend an
Speaker 2: encampment in that park the way that it's set up.
Speaker 2: You really don't have you know, you're kind of surrounded
Speaker 2: on all sides. The police can really mess with you.
Speaker 2: I've been gassed in that park a few times, I'm
Speaker 2: quite aware. The other option they had was take the
Speaker 2: entire library building and force a response from both PSU
Speaker 2: and the city government. This would obviously give them warm
Speaker 2: room to maneuver, give them more room to take in
Speaker 2: more people, and it would force an escalation with the
Speaker 2: city government and with the school, which is you know,
Speaker 2: what they were looking for. Again, this is overall about
Speaker 2: particularly their school, not divesting from companies that they see
Speaker 2: is complicit in the genocide in Gaza, and about you know,
Speaker 2: wanting to force a response from that's school's leadership. You know,
Speaker 2: There's a lot more to it than that, but that's
Speaker 2: what they were trying to do, and that's what they
Speaker 2: chose to do. A little before seven pm, someone on
Speaker 2: a bullhorn came out and began asking all of the
Speaker 2: people who were still there who was willing to engage
Speaker 2: in real militant action, and for those people to come
Speaker 2: help occupy the library. Those who were less willing to
Speaker 2: risk charges but still down for the cause should form
Speaker 2: ranks out in front of the property. There were people
Speaker 2: with shields, etc. They looked like little bitty pealanxes.
Speaker 12: You know.
Speaker 2: People had a mix of umbrellas and shields and you know,
Speaker 2: usually two lines thick or so of people linking arms.
Speaker 2: And I thought at first they were just kind of
Speaker 2: getting ready for the police to come in to sort
Speaker 2: of resist the charge if they occupied more of the library,
Speaker 2: But that's not what happened. For a few minutes, different
Speaker 2: organizers kind of put these groups of people together and
Speaker 2: drilled them, walk them through basic tactics, talked about what
Speaker 2: they should expect, and not long after this, two different
Speaker 2: PSU police cruisers began to coach from two different streets
Speaker 2: both of these different groups of people. These little platoons
Speaker 2: split up and one would confront each vehicle. The officers
Speaker 2: were badly outnumbered in both cases, and they pulled back
Speaker 2: and essentially left the library without anyone really watching over it.
Speaker 2: The activists who were inside the library used this as
Speaker 2: an excuse to occupy the rest of the building. Once
Speaker 2: the police cruisers had been forced back, the protesters from
Speaker 2: these platoons started grabbing heavy objects that were just around
Speaker 2: them on the campus and dragging them back to fortify
Speaker 2: the entrances and exits to the structure. Much of this
Speaker 2: took the form of black clad activists swarming onto a
Speaker 2: sports field behind the library and grabbing soccer goals, football
Speaker 2: training sleds, and other heavy pieces of equipment and using
Speaker 2: them to wall off exits and entrances to the ground
Speaker 2: floor of the building.
Speaker 11: I watched one group.
Speaker 2: Of protesters cut through locks to liberate a pair of dumpsters,
Speaker 2: which quickly found their way into the barricades in the
Speaker 2: front of the structure. I did not into the library,
Speaker 2: fairly certain that would been illegal, but I did see
Speaker 2: numerous people running around on floors above ground level setting
Speaker 2: up the space for a proper occupation. I was told
Speaker 2: by at least one person that activists were purposely keeping
Speaker 2: the interior space accessible to those with wheelchairs, and there
Speaker 2: were a number of folks with wheelchairs who I saw
Speaker 2: outside at the occupation. I did not see any specific
Speaker 2: people inside. I left after nine pm, having been on
Speaker 2: the ground and wearing my armor for about eight hours
Speaker 2: the day after landing back in Portland. That was all
Speaker 2: I had in me, but quite a few people were
Speaker 2: still present, both outside and inside the library when I left.
Speaker 2: Roughly an hour after I got home and started writing
Speaker 2: this episode at about eleven pm PST, a series of
Speaker 2: frantic late night phone calls resulted in the president of PSU,
Speaker 2: Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, the Chief of Police for Portland
Speaker 2: and the City DA Mike Schmidt, holding an emergency press conference.
Speaker 2: Local KTU reporter tan vy Varma summarized the conference message
Speaker 2: this way on Twitter.
Speaker 4: Quote.
Speaker 2: PSU president said, the protesters damage property and I've broken
Speaker 2: into the library. She says she cannot entertain property damage
Speaker 2: or breaking an entering. She asked them to choose to
Speaker 2: engage civilly. She says they'll be asking PPB to remove
Speaker 2: the trespassers from the library. PPB Police chief says he'd
Speaker 2: like to resolve this with no force or arrests. He
Speaker 2: has asked those who are breaking the law in the
Speaker 2: protest to stop. It's unclear to me at present how
Speaker 2: many of this is going to shake out. As I
Speaker 2: type this, the occupation at Humboldt is under heavy attack
Speaker 2: and it sounds like it's going to be quite ugly.
Speaker 2: Hey everyone, so you know, again this is a little
Speaker 2: messy because I wrote this late last night. I woke
Speaker 2: up in the morning to listen to the edit of
Speaker 2: it and some things that happened in the early hours
Speaker 2: of Tuesday morning. About twenty five people were arrested after
Speaker 2: more than a hundred riot officers arrived at the cow
Speaker 2: Poly Humboldt campus and cracked down on the Gaza protest occupation.
Speaker 2: Riot police arrived around two thirty am. Legal observers say,
Speaker 2: no injuries. It's kind of really unclear to me how
Speaker 2: bad it was what actually happened, but you know, quite
Speaker 2: a few people have been arrested, and at this point
Speaker 2: it looks like they're being charged with some pretty narly
Speaker 2: crimes conspiracy, I think, assault on a police officer. So
Speaker 2: this is one of those things that's going to be
Speaker 2: an ongoing story. The university accused the occupiers of doing
Speaker 2: more than a million dollars worth of damage to university property.
Speaker 2: I'll actually just read a quote here from an MSN article.
Speaker 2: Those arrested faced a range of different charges depending on
Speaker 2: individual circumstances, including unlawful assembly, vandalism, conspiracy, assault of police officers,
Speaker 2: and others. In addition, students could face discipline for conduct violations,
Speaker 2: while any university employees arrested could face disciplinary action. That's
Speaker 2: them quoting a university news release. So that's kind of
Speaker 2: where we are with cal Poly Humboldt. I wanted to
Speaker 2: note that the folks that we talk to, who I
Speaker 2: hope are doing well, had requested that we send people
Speaker 2: to donate to a bail fund, if at all poss
Speaker 2: If you want to find that and support the Humboldt protesters,
Speaker 2: you can go to rally dot org slash arc Bailfund.
Speaker 2: That's rally dot org slash AARC bail fund, so that
Speaker 2: would help out with those folks who currently need it.
Speaker 2: There has also been a request to call the university
Speaker 2: and request the release of Humboldt protesters for Palestine. The
Speaker 2: CPH University police phone number is seven oh seven eight
Speaker 2: two six five five five five. There is a suggested
Speaker 2: script which I'm going to read here. Hi, my name
Speaker 2: is blank, and I demand the immediate release of the
Speaker 2: arrested Humboldt student and faculty protesters for Palestine. They should
Speaker 2: not be charged, let alone rated an attack for being
Speaker 2: on the right side of history. They include, but are
Speaker 2: not only, Fern McBride, Olivia Fox, Jared Cruz, Ruhala Agacella,
Speaker 2: Lana Word, Alison Merten, Isaiah Morales, and Adelmi Ruiz. So
Speaker 2: that's where things are with Humboldt University, I thought are
Speaker 2: with the people who are arrested, the people who were
Speaker 2: forced out of the occupation. As of the recording and
Speaker 2: airing of this episode, the occupation at the PSU library
Speaker 2: is still in progress, and what will happen there is
Speaker 2: less clear. Throughout today Tuesday, the police and city government
Speaker 2: have made some pretty aggressive statements about clearing out the occupation.
Speaker 2: About criminal behavior there being unacceptable about their suspicion that
Speaker 2: there's been significant damage done to university property. For their part,
Speaker 2: protesters have promised that they will not damage any books.
Speaker 2: You know, We're going to see what's going to actually happen.
Speaker 2: What is clear to me at this point is that
Speaker 2: in the last day or so, the situation has gone
Speaker 2: from managed something where the police were every now and
Speaker 2: then clearing out tents and it was relatively under control,
Speaker 2: to something so out of control that it necessitated a
Speaker 2: late night press conference by the whole city government. So
Speaker 2: we will see where everything canludes with the PSU occupation,
Speaker 2: if the police come in and carry out a raid
Speaker 2: as was done an Humboldt, or if the university administration
Speaker 2: is willing to actually come to the table and make
Speaker 2: some of these solid steps towards divesting the university from
Speaker 2: companies like Boeing, which is what the protesters are demanding.
Speaker 2: All really unclear, but yeah, we will continue to cover
Speaker 2: this and you all continue to you know, be angry
Speaker 2: about bad things, and yeah, I don't know, I'm still
Speaker 2: very tired. Good luck to everybody who is out there
Speaker 2: in the streets. Robert Evans here and I wanted to
Speaker 2: give an update on Wednesday night. I'm I'm recording this
Speaker 2: around four forty pm on Wednesday, But a day after
Speaker 2: I recorded the original ending to this, some more stuff
Speaker 2: has happened. The occupation has continued. You know, on Monday night,
Speaker 2: only a small number of people stayed behind. I think
Speaker 2: there may be something like a dozen I was told
Speaker 2: who actually slept in the library that night. There was
Speaker 2: kind of an anticipation that the cops could come at
Speaker 2: any minute. The next day, word spread about the occupation
Speaker 2: and there were a lot more people in the library
Speaker 2: on Tuesday night, and as a result, it seems as
Speaker 2: if plans that had initially been down for the police
Speaker 2: to rate on Tuesday night were canceled. The Government of
Speaker 2: Portland published an article today and I'm going to quote
Speaker 2: from it here. The Portland Police Bureau places an emphasis
Speaker 2: on de escalation and time is a key de escalation
Speaker 2: tactic that we use whenever possible. That has not been
Speaker 2: my experience with them. If police action can be delayed
Speaker 2: to a time when conditions are safer, we will do so.
Speaker 2: An example of this occurred Tuesday evening. A plan was
Speaker 2: in place to resolve the library incident. However, conditions changed
Speaker 2: and the incident commander made the decision to delay for
Speaker 2: the well being of all concerned. My guess is that
Speaker 2: the conditions that changed largely were how many people were
Speaker 2: on the ground, as well as the fact that they
Speaker 2: didn't feel comfortable with their understanding of how much access
Speaker 2: students had gotten. You know, they didn't have a full
Speaker 2: operational plan involved. The police publication notes that there was
Speaker 2: a rumor circulated that the planned operation was scheduled due
Speaker 2: to a decision made by the DA's office. This is
Speaker 2: because the current District Attorney, Mike Schmidt, is considered a progressive.
Speaker 2: He made a decision not to prosecute all of the
Speaker 2: acts that he could have prosecuted in twenty twenty and
Speaker 2: has been kind of consistently attacked by the police and
Speaker 2: by conservatives in the city for this decision ever since.
Speaker 2: Schmidt did prosecute quite a few people in twenty twenty
Speaker 2: and beyond, and from the beginning of all of this
Speaker 2: said that his office will prosecute students and anyone else
Speaker 2: involved with the occupation. I think this is just election
Speaker 2: you're messaging by the police going after Schmidt because they
Speaker 2: want more of a hardliner in In either case, nothing
Speaker 2: was done Tuesday. The occupation continued to spread on Tuesday night.
Speaker 2: Students had a movie night. On Wednesday night. As I basically,
Speaker 2: as I record this, there's a barbecue and a lot
Speaker 2: of this is occurring kind of outside of the library
Speaker 2: and like the law and area around it, the idea
Speaker 2: basically being to keep numbers up in and around the
Speaker 2: library occupation to make it more politically costly and just
Speaker 2: harder for the police to actually force everyone out. While
Speaker 2: all this has been going on, faculty and student organizers
Speaker 2: have been meeting with the president of the university. Students
Speaker 2: refused initially to come to a negotiating table unless the
Speaker 2: demand their demands for full amnesty were guaranteed for students
Speaker 2: and non students who were taking part in the occupation.
Speaker 2: This is something When I talked to folks on Monday night,
Speaker 2: the focus was on There was some talk of amnesty,
Speaker 2: but a lot of the primary thing I was told
Speaker 2: about was that the school needed to divest from Boeing
Speaker 2: and other arms manufacturers. The demand for amnesty has grown
Speaker 2: as the occupation has become more of a real thing,
Speaker 2: which it had started to be by the end of
Speaker 2: my time there. On Monday, there was some initial talk
Speaker 2: from the university president that she was willing to not
Speaker 2: press charges. If you know, the students who were involved
Speaker 2: agreed not to violate the student Code of Conduct for
Speaker 2: the rest of their time at the university and basically
Speaker 2: handed all of their names over to the university. That
Speaker 2: was not an agreement that wound up coming through, very
Speaker 2: similar to what we saw at Humboldt. Right where you've
Speaker 2: got this the school being like, well, we'll offer some
Speaker 2: sort of amnesty, even though we can't really promise full
Speaker 2: amnesty because the DA can choose to prosecute people still,
Speaker 2: but if you sign your name up on this list
Speaker 2: that you were here in committing crimes, we'll kind of
Speaker 2: try to do something that did not wind up de
Speaker 2: escalating the situation. And as I record this, the library
Speaker 2: at PSU is still occupied by students. We'll see how
Speaker 2: all of this goes. You know, I've heard a number
Speaker 2: of things from inside the occupation. It's kind of one
Speaker 2: of those things where the full details of what's happening
Speaker 2: will shake out. It's been, as these things always are
Speaker 2: a little bit messy. The first night I was there
Speaker 2: and up through you know, a sizable chunk of Tuesday.
Speaker 2: You can find articles from media who showed up saying
Speaker 2: that protesters let them in and then at some point
Speaker 2: the people at the gates so to speak, changed and
Speaker 2: a number of press got in and took some pictures
Speaker 2: of the occupation. You can find those online. There's a
Speaker 2: lot of local reporters koyn and whatnot who have published
Speaker 2: different things about the occupation. It's been interesting to see
Speaker 2: like the reactions of different reporters because they change based
Speaker 2: on like the kind the reporter who's there, and kind
Speaker 2: of I think, how personable they are with people and
Speaker 2: the folks that they wind up meeting. So you'll you'll
Speaker 2: find some local reporters being like everyone was really nice,
Speaker 2: and some local reporters being.
Speaker 11: Like everybody was really mean.
Speaker 2: They wouldn't let me in, And it's you know, these
Speaker 2: are not uncommon things to encounter when you're seeing press
Speaker 2: interact with a protest like this. One of the things
Speaker 2: I do find interesting that has been emphasized to me
Speaker 2: by some of the older protesters who have been taking
Speaker 2: part in aspects of this occupation, is that the student
Speaker 2: protesters who are organizing and leading this, who are of
Speaker 2: course younger and we're too young to have generally been
Speaker 2: involved twenty twenty stuff. Are really open minded, you know,
Speaker 2: despite kind of political disagreements that may exist between people,
Speaker 2: there's this understanding that like folks are a lot less
Speaker 2: ossified and their beliefs about what constitutes valid action and
Speaker 2: what constitutes, you know, how people should proceed with things
Speaker 2: like generally, that has been impressed upon me by some
Speaker 2: of the older activists is that these younger student organizers
Speaker 2: seem much more open minded and optimistic about accomplishing things
Speaker 2: and trying new things. And this is definitely a different
Speaker 2: kind of occupation Portland has seen. I noticed some of
Speaker 2: that on the first night earlier in their courting. I
Speaker 2: made that comment about how I noticed that people were
Speaker 2: out kind of taking petitions and whatnot for different bills,
Speaker 2: taking advantage of the fact that there was a crowd
Speaker 2: who had gathered for the protest, and that in the
Speaker 2: past I had seen folks like that have issue with
Speaker 2: members of the crowd, and I didn't really notice that
Speaker 2: this time. And I guess maybe that comes down to
Speaker 2: some of what some of these older activists have told me,
Speaker 2: which is that a lot of the student organizers here
Speaker 2: are kind.
Speaker 11: Of less set in some of their ways.
Speaker 12: You know.
Speaker 2: We we'll see as this all continues to develop. There's
Speaker 2: a very good chance that by the time you hear
Speaker 2: this episode by Thursday morning, the police will have raided.
Speaker 2: That's definitely been happening all around the country. You know,
Speaker 2: as we have researched and recorded these episodes, there have
Speaker 2: been police crackdowns at Columbia University, at UC San Diego,
Speaker 2: at UCLA. We've seen, you know, a lot of pretty
Speaker 2: hideous things on the news in regards to these student occupations.
Speaker 2: And there's a very good chance that Portland will have
Speaker 2: joined that parade of ugly videos by the time this
Speaker 2: comes up. But as I record this, there's a barbecue
Speaker 2: going on, and I hope that will be the case
Speaker 2: tomorrow as well.
Speaker 15: Bye, this is it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis,
Speaker 15: And once again, it does continue to be happening here
Speaker 15: as a massive wave of police repression is levied against
Speaker 15: students protesting the ongoing Palestinian genocide. Since it's been so
Speaker 15: busy and hectic, I thought to end this week on
Speaker 15: a bit of a lighter note. Last week I did
Speaker 15: an episode on a new movie titled The People's Joker,
Speaker 15: an unauthorized Batman parody through the lens of a surprisingly
Speaker 15: genuine queer coming of age story by transgender filmmaker Vera Drew.
Speaker 15: If you want to hear me geek out about that
Speaker 15: movie in gay Batman Stuff, you can listen to that
Speaker 15: episode from last week. But this episode is going to
Speaker 15: delve more into the diy nature of this movie, some
Speaker 15: behind the scenes and how you go from an idea
Speaker 15: to a piece of wacky queer art playing in a
Speaker 15: movie theater or a TV show on your local cable
Speaker 15: access TV station. So I talked to two trans women
Speaker 15: who are currently making independent queer media, mentioned Vera Drew
Speaker 15: as well as Ella Yeerman, host of the late night
Speaker 15: comedy show Late Stage Live, transgender and a comedian, the
Speaker 15: two most persecuted classes. So I've been keeping up with
Speaker 15: Ella's indie transgender gen Z comedy project since it first
Speaker 15: got announced earlier this year. I have kind of a
Speaker 15: love hate relationship with the late night comedy news format,
Speaker 15: and I myself have thrown around the idea of playing
Speaker 15: with that format. So when I first heard about Ella's
Speaker 15: new show, Late Stage Live, my first thought was damn it,
Speaker 15: That's such a good title for a show, and now
Speaker 15: I can't use it. Just this immense sense of jealousy
Speaker 15: washed over me, and I've had to watch everything she's
Speaker 15: put out since then.
Speaker 12: Hi.
Speaker 8: I'm Ella Yeerman. My pronouns are she Her. I am
Speaker 8: a comedian, journalist, writer living in Brooklyn. I host Late
Speaker 8: Stage Live, which is a queer gen Z public access
Speaker 8: night show on Brooklyn Public Access and YouTube. And I
Speaker 8: also host T for T Comedy, which is Brooklyn's premiere
Speaker 8: all trans stand up comedy show. We film in a
Speaker 8: Brooklyn Public Access studio called brick Bric in front of
Speaker 8: a live studio audience. And the vaguest pitch I give
Speaker 8: to people who have no idea what the show is
Speaker 8: is that it's what if The Daily Show was hosted
Speaker 8: by a transgender woman. And we draw a lot of
Speaker 8: comparisons to the Daily Show by virtue of sort of
Speaker 8: similar formats, But myself and my writers are really interested
Speaker 8: in sort of, for lack of a better term, queering
Speaker 8: the late night format and sort of exploring what late
Speaker 8: night can do for a younger, more radical political audience.
Speaker 8: The Daily Show was like a really big radicalizing force
Speaker 8: I think for a certain generation people really John Stewart
Speaker 8: took that show and turned it into a really powerful
Speaker 8: tool for getting people engaged and aware of things that
Speaker 8: they might not have otherwise been aware of. But the
Speaker 8: culture has really shifted in terms of politics, in terms
Speaker 8: of media consumption since John started the Daily Show in
Speaker 8: the nineties. We have shows like Last Week Tonight with
Speaker 8: John Oliver, we have shows like My Coworkers and Bosses
Speaker 8: at Some More News and when we have like all
Speaker 8: of the alternative media sphere, ranging from like Tucker Carlson
Speaker 8: and Alex Jones to the Young Turks to everybody and
Speaker 8: their mom on YouTube.
Speaker 15: Now, kids these days don't really watch the news. I
Speaker 15: don't know anyone my age who's tuning into MSNBC. A
Speaker 15: twenty twenty two statistica survey of gen Z reported sixty
Speaker 15: percent of respondents never go to local or national papers
Speaker 15: for news, and only a respect of five percent checked
Speaker 15: their local or national papers for news daily, weekly, or
Speaker 15: once a month. But fifty percent of gen Z check
Speaker 15: social media daily for news, with seventy five percent reporting
Speaker 15: they check at least once a week. TikTok reigns supreme
Speaker 15: for information dissemination. Over one third of adults under the
Speaker 15: age of thirty regularly scroll the app for news, often
Speaker 15: treating it like a search engine, with the rest of
Speaker 15: the youths and young adults going to YouTube as well
Speaker 15: as other social media apps to fill in the information gaps,
Speaker 15: as well as podcasts such as this.
Speaker 16: My writers and I especially read Pope.
Speaker 8: My head writer and I talk a lot about just
Speaker 8: like where our generation is getting its information from and
Speaker 8: where it's consuming media, and how ideas and political ideas
Speaker 8: are being disseminated, especially in the age of short form
Speaker 8: content with TikTok and the democratization of information. We did
Speaker 8: a whole episode about sort of misinformation and the democratization
Speaker 8: of information a few months ago, where there's like, obviously
Speaker 8: all of these benefits to the lack of centralization of
Speaker 8: media consumption. We're seeing a lot of that with the
Speaker 8: Palatine stuff right now. People don't have to rely on
Speaker 8: the New York Times, people don't have to rely on
Speaker 8: these big media insitutions with their obvious biases to get information.
Speaker 8: But it also sort of engenders this I think, this
Speaker 8: very specific attitude towards intellectually.
Speaker 16: Engaging with information.
Speaker 8: The platforms and the systems that we use really encourage
Speaker 8: very quick opinions and fast reactions and picking up your
Speaker 8: phone and talking immediately about something as quickly as possible,
Speaker 8: hot take political environments, and we were really interested in
Speaker 8: looking at a format that has historically been more about
Speaker 8: a team of people with multiple perspectives coming together to
Speaker 8: create one piece of analysis and taking longer to look
Speaker 8: at those pieces of analysis and being able to really
Speaker 8: dig into data, and then what putting that into a
Speaker 8: late night format means. We have a live audience, which
Speaker 8: a lot of stuff on YouTube doesn't have, and we
Speaker 8: have a lot of the trappings of like og late night.
Speaker 8: We have like sketches, and we have correspondence, and we
Speaker 8: have a theme song, and a lot of that has
Speaker 8: sort of gone away as we've moved more into like
Speaker 8: a YouTube media sphere. So it's been exciting to both
Speaker 8: bring that back for like esthetic and nostalgia's sake, and
Speaker 8: then also to sort of see what and I think
Speaker 8: the show's in early stages, so I am excited to
Speaker 8: keep playing with this but finding out like what exactly
Speaker 8: the package does for the content. We talk a lot
Speaker 8: about like form follows function and vice versa. But I
Speaker 8: think there's like intentionality behind presenting it as a late
Speaker 8: night show. It's not just like for aesthetic value.
Speaker 15: Speaking of late night televised comedy, The People's Joker follows
Speaker 15: an aspiring comedian who goes by Joker the Harlequin as
Speaker 15: she attempts to host a Lauren Michael's TV show, legally
Speaker 15: distinct from snl Oh, and on her way, she transits
Speaker 15: her gender and fights Batman. The project started a few
Speaker 15: years ago because a friend of filmmaker Vera Drew jokingly
Speaker 15: commissioned her for twelve dollars to make a re edit
Speaker 15: of Todd Phillips's Joker movie. Phillips had been in the
Speaker 15: news cycle complaining that quote unquote woke culture was making
Speaker 15: it too hard to make comedy, which is interesting coming
Speaker 15: from a guy who's continually made some of the most
Speaker 15: successful comedies in the past twenty years. But I digress.
Speaker 15: Here's Vera Drew talking about how The People's Joker ballooned
Speaker 15: from an ironic re edit of the in Cell Joker
Speaker 15: movie into a whole new piece of queer cinema.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I started doing it like in earnest I started
Speaker 9: like actually re editing the movie, and I had worked
Speaker 9: at Absolutely Productions for years as an editor and had
Speaker 9: kind of come up as an alternative comedy editor, so
Speaker 9: you know, at that point it was probably just going
Speaker 9: to be like a lot of art sound effects and
Speaker 9: woosh noises and slips and slide whistles. But as I
Speaker 9: was working on it and kind of just making this
Speaker 9: like big piece of like bound footage video art, like
Speaker 9: a narrative kind of just like fell into play and
Speaker 9: it kind of just came in an instant and I
Speaker 9: was just like, oh, Okay, I think I actually want
Speaker 9: to make like a coming of age film, but I
Speaker 9: want to make like a parody of The Joker, like
Speaker 9: in that process and kind of just like tell like
Speaker 9: a really earnest and super personal autobiographical story about my
Speaker 9: life and growing up in the Midwest and coming out
Speaker 9: as trans and comedy and you know, my relationship with
Speaker 9: my mom and toxic relationship I was in and stuff,
Speaker 9: but kind of process and mythologize all of that through
Speaker 9: Batman characters. So that's kind of the origin of the movie.
Speaker 4: I guess.
Speaker 9: I had also kind of been kicking around an idea
Speaker 9: for like a body horror, like a trans Body horror
Speaker 9: movie before that that was basically like about a drag
Speaker 9: queen who was physically addicted to irony and like couldn't
Speaker 9: like survive without it. But it was also like destroying
Speaker 9: her from the inside out, and the two ideas kind
Speaker 9: of like merged together into this sort of I guess,
Speaker 9: like ver Drew, I watched a lot of Batman growing up,
Speaker 9: but from a weirdly young age, I was also always
Speaker 9: weirdly fascinated by late night TV. My parents never watched
Speaker 9: the news, but they watched late night. They got their
Speaker 9: news from Stephen Colbert. They got their news from, at
Speaker 9: least at a certain point, Jimmy Fallon, although that fell
Speaker 9: off quite quickly. But I've just always been incredibly fascinated
Speaker 9: by the whole late night format as a cultural source
Speaker 9: for news. At a certain point, around twenty seventeen, YouTube
Speaker 9: started pushing late night clips into everyone's feeds, and everyone
Speaker 9: just got so inundated with this style of political comedy.
Speaker 16: I also grew up on The Daily Show and Colbert.
Speaker 8: My parents are both journalists, so I probably am a
Speaker 8: little biased towards being someone who did read the paper
Speaker 8: growing up, who did like watch CNN growing up, but
Speaker 8: I recognized there's this huge chunk of America who gets
Speaker 8: their news from yeah, Colbert's monologue, from Letterman's monologue, from
Speaker 8: the Colbert Report, which is such a crazy.
Speaker 10: Very very scary.
Speaker 15: I had so many like conservative family members who did
Speaker 15: not realize the Colbert Rapport was satire, took it as
Speaker 15: a legitimate news source.
Speaker 8: Well, I mean when Trevor Noah took over The Daily Show,
Speaker 8: they tried to do like their version of the Colbert
Speaker 8: Report with Jordan Klepper's The Opposition, And I think there
Speaker 8: are a number of reasons that didn't work out, but
Speaker 8: one of them being that the like the Colbert Rapport
Speaker 8: was partying the other Fox News guy. Yeah, I was
Speaker 8: parting that whole realm of people, and the Opposition was
Speaker 8: partying info Wars, which is almost an unparitable thing. So
Speaker 8: like the like the right wing media ecosystem has shifted
Speaker 8: so far that that you can't really get a Colbert
Speaker 8: Report now, it just doesn't work. But yeah, like there's
Speaker 8: so many people who get their information directly from that.
Speaker 8: And I think a lot about like the creator responsibility,
Speaker 8: like which is a word that gets start or a
Speaker 8: lot around in social media spaces. But it's interesting to
Speaker 8: think that Colbert now and Stuart and even like Seth
Speaker 8: Meyers have this responsibility as like informants to their audience,
Speaker 8: in some sorts of the sole source of news for
Speaker 8: those people. When we were writing our misinformation piece, we
Speaker 8: did talk about how in twenty fifteen, there was a
Speaker 8: poll that came out that said that like the majority
Speaker 8: of liberals, like the highest percentage of rules got their
Speaker 8: news from The Daily Show with John Stewart. And I
Speaker 8: think a lot about the excuse John used to give
Speaker 8: to conservatives at the time who would criticize him for
Speaker 8: not doing his due diligence on any given subject. He
Speaker 8: would often say, well, we're a comedy show. The show
Speaker 8: that comes on after us is puppets making prank phone calls.
Speaker 8: And he would sort of like deflect that responsibility by saying,
Speaker 8: I'm an entertainer first. And I think that one of
Speaker 8: the big things that has changed in the last twenty
Speaker 8: years or however long, is that the line between enter
Speaker 8: retainer and journalist has totally blurred. With like the rise
Speaker 8: of like video essays on YouTube, and just like again
Speaker 8: like the democratization of information and content creation, everyone is
Speaker 8: sort of an entertainer. Everyone is sort of a journalist.
Speaker 8: There is like a responsibility that comes with having a platform,
Speaker 8: and so obviously, like our show, takes a great deal
Speaker 8: of care to make sure that the information we're presenting
Speaker 8: is it's accurate and correct, and that the analysis we're
Speaker 8: doing is as empathetic and thoughtful as we can.
Speaker 15: I do think there is real value in going after
Speaker 15: late night as a specific culturally impactful mode that isn't
Speaker 15: just comedy, isn'to just to the news, and in its
Speaker 15: quest to be a little bit of both, it becomes
Speaker 15: its own thing. I've always been interested to see what
Speaker 15: a late night show with my politics would look like,
Speaker 15: and I think to some degree, you can look at
Speaker 15: John Stewart in the two thousands, and I've been watching
Speaker 15: Stuart's new stuff on The Daily Show every Monday, mostly
Speaker 15: just to see how he's going to handle this landscape,
Speaker 15: which is very different from one he left in twenty fifteen. Nowadays,
Speaker 15: I think you can look to John Oliver as being
Speaker 15: probably slightly more radical, but even still there's a decent gap.
Speaker 15: Certainly some YouTube shows try to fill in that gap,
Speaker 15: but I've really enjoyed watching the Late Stage team apply
Speaker 15: classic late night stylings to a more radical queer form
Speaker 15: of politics, including like Ella mentioned correspondence segments as well
Speaker 15: as actual reporting. Late Stage Live did a recent piece
Speaker 15: on the effects of Libs of TikTok. It was a
Speaker 15: really good look at something that I oddly hadn't seen
Speaker 15: anyone else really interrogate before, actually looking at the people
Speaker 15: that Libs of TikTok has targeted and how that has
Speaker 15: literally affected their lives.
Speaker 8: Obviously, we are still like growing and trying new things.
Speaker 8: I was really proud of the Libs of TikTok piece.
Speaker 8: It was the first time we'd done like firsthand reporting
Speaker 8: on the show, and it's stuff like the thing I
Speaker 8: want to keep exploring. One of my favorite parts of
Speaker 8: the Daily Show is the more serious, like field pieces
Speaker 8: they end up doing that obviously also have comedic games
Speaker 8: applied to them, but also are like real journalism that
Speaker 8: maybe mainstream news institutions don't cover, and that's really exciting
Speaker 8: and obviously coming from like a specifically queer perspective. There's
Speaker 8: not a ton of specifically queer news. There's a few magazines,
Speaker 8: but there's nothing huge.
Speaker 15: It could happen here will return after these messages we
Speaker 15: now returned to it could happen here. Something I noticed
Speaker 15: about both Late Stage Lives and The People's Joker is
Speaker 15: that they're not just made by queer people, but the
Speaker 15: work itself feels queer. I think part of the reason
Speaker 15: why is that both carry this spirit of patchwork and collaboration,
Speaker 15: proudly featuring a sense of punkish outside noess that's uninterested
Speaker 15: in being tamed for a sis straight audience. The end
Speaker 15: result is one holy reflective of the community that has
Speaker 15: fostered the arts creation. To extrapolate on this, let's return
Speaker 15: to my interview with Vera Drew. I know, for for
Speaker 15: a while you were getting people to send in to
Speaker 15: like send in stuff to get put in the film.
Speaker 15: There was kind of it was like a very collaborative
Speaker 15: start to this project, and I am I am interested
Speaker 15: in that aspect of like how this is like both
Speaker 15: like a collage multimedia piece, but also it's not like
Speaker 15: the work of like one singular artist. It's like a
Speaker 15: very like queer community made thing. And it definitely feels
Speaker 15: that way, especially with all of like all like the sets,
Speaker 15: all of like the art. It's so many different styles
Speaker 15: mashed together. Into like this beautiful mosaic, and I'm interested
Speaker 15: in like your decision to have it be that collaborative
Speaker 15: thing and how that kind of came together.
Speaker 9: Thank you for asking, because yeah, I don't I don't
Speaker 9: really get to talk about that that much. And it's
Speaker 9: it's definitely like a part of this that really, I
Speaker 9: think is why the movie just feels inherently queer. You know,
Speaker 9: we had just this incredible team of people working on
Speaker 9: it because you know, like I said, like I did
Speaker 9: cash in like every favor I had, you know, to
Speaker 9: cash in. But you know, the movie started as this
Speaker 9: like video remix thing, and then I think as we
Speaker 9: were writing the script and it became more narrative driven.
Speaker 9: It was just like we were always writing this script
Speaker 9: that was very impossible to film, uh you know, just
Speaker 9: a very like there's Batmobile and like yeah, you know,
Speaker 9: fuck are you gonna do that? But we weren't really
Speaker 9: thinking about that as much. We were just like, let's
Speaker 9: just write this movie, and let's just write it as
Speaker 9: like a comic book movie, like let's have the tropes
Speaker 9: of a comic book movie and a queer coming of
Speaker 9: age film and and just fully execute those and you know,
Speaker 9: I think the idea of it becoming sort of this
Speaker 9: mixed media piece was was very gradual. I think like
Speaker 9: it was one of the many things about this This
Speaker 9: movie was made very intuitively, like I never had a budget. Really,
Speaker 9: I never make a movie like this again. It was
Speaker 9: it was very like kind of figuring it out as
Speaker 9: you go in a lot of ways, especially just on
Speaker 9: the like business side of things.
Speaker 15: Yeah, it has that kind of Inland Empire uncanniness a
Speaker 15: little bit totally.
Speaker 9: There's definitely that. It's definitely I'm working backwards this. This
Speaker 9: is my Inland Empire, and you know, like twenty years
Speaker 9: I'll have my eraser Head finally. Yes, yes, But it
Speaker 9: really just kind of followed that like sort of intuitive path,
Speaker 9: and I kind of announced what I was doing and
Speaker 9: I said, you know, my friend and I are making
Speaker 9: this Queer Joker parody, and anybody who wants to help us, like,
Speaker 9: you know, right here, and I kind of at that
Speaker 9: point it still was in this kind of like loose
Speaker 9: space of what is this really? But just so many
Speaker 9: artists came forward, and most of them artists who had
Speaker 9: never worked on film or TV before. So it was
Speaker 9: a lot of just like fine, artists and painters and
Speaker 9: illustrators and visual artists, and then like a lot of
Speaker 9: people too, just that I had seen for years on
Speaker 9: trans Twitter or like like featured in like very like
Speaker 9: fringe like zines and shit like that. So it's just like,
Speaker 9: holy shit, like we could really make this movie that
Speaker 9: looks like nothing you've ever seen before, and we can
Speaker 9: do it too in a way that like we're creating
Speaker 9: original art. You know, like all the art in it
Speaker 9: is original. I mean like we recreate a lot of
Speaker 9: sets and stuff from famous comic book movies, but like
Speaker 9: it was painstakingly created and every character had its own
Speaker 9: character design, you know, original character design. Like we couldn't
Speaker 9: just take mister mixuplick and put them in the movie,
Speaker 9: Like we had to go, okay, like how can we
Speaker 9: clear mister mix OLEPLI, Like, Okay, We'll make a mix
Speaker 9: mixy and they'll be like a weird like floating like
Speaker 9: Hanna barbera cartoon type. It's kind of more hr puff
Speaker 9: and stuff. Was the vibe we went for there, very
Speaker 9: sit in Marty Kroft.
Speaker 15: Even with a community of queer artists, how does one
Speaker 15: go from the idea stage of say, hey, let's make
Speaker 15: a more queer and radically oriented late night comedy show
Speaker 15: to having it actually be filmed and then broadcast. So
Speaker 15: I asked Ella what allowed her to get this project
Speaker 15: off the ground and what her process was like going
Speaker 15: from an idea to something that's now on air.
Speaker 8: So, like I said, I've been writing for some More
Speaker 8: News for three years and I love that job and
Speaker 8: I love my coworkers there, but they are doing one thing,
Speaker 8: and I, over the last year or so sort of
Speaker 8: started to realize that I also wanted to be doing
Speaker 8: this other thing. I wanted the live studio audience. I
Speaker 8: wanted a very queer focused show. I wanted an in
Speaker 8: person writer's room ultimately or like a local writer's room,
Speaker 8: because everyone else at some more News is LA based
Speaker 8: as far as I'm aware, and I'm the only East
Speaker 8: Coaster out here, and I just wanted the whole bunch
Speaker 8: of things that Somewere News wasn't doing. So I was like, Okay,
Speaker 8: I guess I have to do that myself because there's
Speaker 8: no one else doing it that will hire me. But
Speaker 8: I'm grateful that I had my experience with some More
Speaker 8: News and continue to have my experience with them. Because
Speaker 8: I structure our writer's room very similarly to them, and
Speaker 8: I took a lot of inspiration from their early stages
Speaker 8: in terms of like the creative side of things, and
Speaker 8: then in terms of like finding people and making it happen.
Speaker 8: Something I've learned my whole life as a creative is
Speaker 8: that you just sort of have to fucking do it.
Speaker 8: I've been like self producing work.
Speaker 16: Since I was eighteen. When I was eighteen, my community.
Speaker 8: Theater in my hometown had a big all hands meeting
Speaker 8: where they were like, Hey, we're out of money.
Speaker 7: What do we do?
Speaker 8: And I said, you should do a Shakespeare play because
Speaker 8: you don't have to pay for the royalties for that.
Speaker 8: And they were like, well, we don't have anyone who
Speaker 8: wants to direct a Shakespeare play. And I said, okay,
Speaker 8: then I'll do it. And they were like, okay, then
Speaker 8: you do it. And I sort of had to just
Speaker 8: do it. And I did it and it was messy
Speaker 8: and pretty amateurish, and then I did it again the
Speaker 8: next year, and I got better, and I did it
Speaker 8: again the next year. It got better after that, and
Speaker 8: then after I graduated college, I started doing stand up again.
Speaker 8: I just stand up a little bit pre transition and
Speaker 8: it was terrible, and so I stopped to become a
Speaker 8: girl and I started doing stand up again, and I
Speaker 8: realized there wasn't a ton of spaces in the stand
Speaker 8: up scene for trans people, and I said.
Speaker 10: Okay, so let's host a trans show.
Speaker 8: And I found a bar and I got in touch
Speaker 8: with the bar, and then I just started dming comics
Speaker 8: and I said, hey, I don't really know any of
Speaker 8: you because I'm not really integrated into this comedy scene,
Speaker 8: but please, and the show solely grew and I started
Speaker 8: to meet more people, and then by the time I
Speaker 8: had the idea to do late stage, I had been
Speaker 8: doing my show for about a year and a half
Speaker 8: and I was pretty integrated into the comedy scene, so
Speaker 8: I was never worried about finding writers in terms of quantity.
Speaker 8: I reached out to my headwriter, Read Pope last April
Speaker 8: after seeing a similarly live show by my friend Kay
Speaker 8: Loggins called Knight Live that she does every so often,
Speaker 8: and I helped her with the production day on that
Speaker 8: and it was a thirteen hour production day, and I
Speaker 8: just remember having so much fun realizing that you could
Speaker 8: find people in the artistic community like enough, people who
Speaker 8: were willing to do it.
Speaker 12: So Yeah.
Speaker 8: I reached out to Read in April and I said, hey,
Speaker 8: I have this idea, and they said, cool, here's a
Speaker 8: list of people I think would be fun to work with.
Speaker 8: And we reached out to a small handful of writers
Speaker 8: and some of them got back to us and some
Speaker 8: of them didn't, and we slowly found our team of
Speaker 8: people who were able to commit to at first monthly
Speaker 8: and now weekly writers meeting.
Speaker 15: After the writing team was assembled, they still needed to
Speaker 15: find a place to record the show. The director and
Speaker 15: executive producer Octavia helped find the public access station in
Speaker 15: Brooklyn that Late Stage now shoots at, which is open
Speaker 15: to the public.
Speaker 8: Do you have to take a five week course there
Speaker 8: where you get certified in all of the equipment and
Speaker 8: then you just get to sort of reserve their space
Speaker 8: and do whatever.
Speaker 16: You want there.
Speaker 8: And over the course of those five weeks, Read, Octavia
Speaker 8: and I would take this like bi weekly class and
Speaker 8: afterwards we've got and get food and we would just
Speaker 8: talk about what the show needed and where it was.
Speaker 8: Every time a roll popped up in discussion that we
Speaker 8: didn't have yet, Octavia or Read or I would say, oh,
Speaker 8: I know someone and we'd pick up the phone and
Speaker 8: call them immediately. And so it was a very organic
Speaker 8: growth in terms of production team at first. And that
Speaker 8: just comes from like working within your own community and
Speaker 8: like finding an artistic community. I don't think I could
Speaker 8: be doing this two years ago, Like I'm really grateful
Speaker 8: for having hosted a stand up show for many years
Speaker 8: first to integrate myself into that community and knowing a
Speaker 8: lot of like hardworking, multifaceted artists.
Speaker 15: Once again, the ability to make friends, both in your
Speaker 15: local community and even online remains one of the best
Speaker 15: ways to get shit done. The collaborative multi media collage
Speaker 15: aspect not only impuse a project with a sense of
Speaker 15: DIY queerness, it also makes tackling a project as gargantuan
Speaker 15: as The People's Joker a bit more feasible.
Speaker 9: We'd have these like artists with like you know, like
Speaker 9: Maddy Forrest makes beautiful puppets and just beautiful art, so
Speaker 9: it's like, okay, like obviously we're an ad Maddie asked
Speaker 9: Maddie to make the mixele Plick puppet, and like it'll
Speaker 9: be like a Sid Mardi Kroft puppet, and like one
Speaker 9: of the other artists that came through was Salem Hughes,
Speaker 9: who makes these like three D like low poly three
Speaker 9: D models, and at that point it was like, okay, well,
Speaker 9: that obviously has to be like our bat cave, like
Speaker 9: we'll make it look like a like a Doom like
Speaker 9: N sixty four video game or something, and the batmobile too.
Speaker 9: So it's just kind of like figure like breaking up
Speaker 9: everybody's role into these individual pieces and like kind of
Speaker 9: going by like both physical locations, like reserving one artist
Speaker 9: for each physical location that we'd see pop up and things,
Speaker 9: you know, like Paul McBride did all of the Joker
Speaker 9: apartment shots and we recreated Woking Phoenix's Joker apartment, but
Speaker 9: you know, change the color and the wallpaper and blah
Speaker 9: blah blah. And Paul again like another person who just
Speaker 9: like Paul just makes three D models just to like relax,
Speaker 9: I guess, like he just makes these beautiful interiors. And
Speaker 9: it was like, okay, cool, we'll make like a beautiful,
Speaker 9: like hyper realistic interior. I never really forced my aesthetic
Speaker 9: on anybody. I really just allowed people to just kind
Speaker 9: of like lean into their aesthetic and just do what
Speaker 9: they wanted and kind of like just run wild and
Speaker 9: be like okay, so you make low polyart, like we'll
Speaker 9: do just do that in this case. And our amusement
Speaker 9: park set was made by this artist at GRAT and
Speaker 9: he just makes beautiful DMT like psychedelic imagery. So it
Speaker 9: was like we got this you know, hyper crazy, like
Speaker 9: weird perspective amusement park from him, and we turned that
Speaker 9: into a three D model, you know, rather than going
Speaker 9: like how are we going to make this work? You know,
Speaker 9: like this is a this is a flat painting, you know,
Speaker 9: like it's a location we keep seeing in the movie,
Speaker 9: like how are we going to make it work? But
Speaker 9: it was just like just kind of saying yes and
Speaker 9: to everything and really allowing everybody to just play to
Speaker 9: their best strengths. And I knew that, like my voice
Speaker 9: and my vision were always going to be there, like
Speaker 9: my face was going to be on screen for most
Speaker 9: of the movie, and like it's my story, Like I
Speaker 9: was never really worried about losing myself or disappearing in
Speaker 9: the art at all, and instinctually I just kind of
Speaker 9: knew it would make the movie feel very clear. And
Speaker 9: that's really just what it was.
Speaker 13: Like.
Speaker 9: It was really just this big kind of DIY community
Speaker 9: art project, and it was a big task for me
Speaker 9: to kind of like find the unified aesthetic. But thankfully,
Speaker 9: you know, like I've done VFX, I had a lot
Speaker 9: of other VFX artists helping me work on the film,
Speaker 9: and we were able to kind of find a through
Speaker 9: line in the way like all filmmakers have to. You know,
Speaker 9: you just stick to a color scheme, you stick to
Speaker 9: a very certain type of pacing, and you know, and
Speaker 9: musically too, like I think we really like were able
Speaker 9: to like bridge a lot of the things together just
Speaker 9: by like having constant music playing. And you know, I
Speaker 9: think I was really influenced by Natural Born Killers and
Speaker 9: Pink Floyd's of the Wall and also Headwig in The
Speaker 9: Angry Inch. I think we're like kind of the Big Three,
Speaker 9: and also returned to Oz those are the Big four,
Speaker 9: and just to round it out to five, then Batman
Speaker 9: Forever of course. But I think like a movie's never
Speaker 9: really been made. I think plenty of movies are made
Speaker 9: like this all the time, like where these like little
Speaker 9: communities of people get together, but like this was like
Speaker 9: an intercontinental kind of community project, and it was beautiful,
Speaker 9: Like I'm so glad we did it, and it was
Speaker 9: it was an opportunity to really hopefully, like get a
Speaker 9: lot of artists visibility in spaces that they normally wouldn't
Speaker 9: be visible, and an opportunity too to like work with
Speaker 9: a lot of really talented people and allow them and
Speaker 9: make them feel valued.
Speaker 12: You know.
Speaker 9: I just worked on so many things where it's like
Speaker 9: you get art back from somebody and then you're like,
Speaker 9: we got to send this back or you're fired or
Speaker 9: you know whatever, and this is like I never wanted
Speaker 9: to be that. It was very much like this is
Speaker 9: kind of all of our movie in a way. And
Speaker 9: now that the movie's out there too, I really think
Speaker 9: of it. It's like it's just it's got its own life,
Speaker 9: Like it's kind of no longer mine, and it kind
Speaker 9: of never really was. It was always like ours. It
Speaker 9: was always mine and my friends and you know, all
Speaker 9: the people that worked on it with me. And I
Speaker 9: think that is just really cool, and thanks for giving
Speaker 9: me the opportunity to talk about it, because I think
Speaker 9: it's one of the things that kind of gets lost
Speaker 9: about this project a lot, just because of how personal
Speaker 9: is and because of like our legal stuff. But like
Speaker 9: I would have never been able to make this. If
Speaker 9: it wasn't for the team, we will return to, it
Speaker 9: could happen here. After these messages we now return to.
Speaker 9: It could happen here.
Speaker 15: What I find most inspiring about projects like The People's
Speaker 15: Joker and some of the other indie no budget transfilms
Speaker 15: by filmmakers like Alice Mayo, Mackay and Mia Moore, as
Speaker 15: well as projects like Late Stage Live, is that they
Speaker 15: demonstrate that we don't need to rely on big studios
Speaker 15: or big production companies to green light things in order
Speaker 15: to make our own stuff.
Speaker 10: You can just make it.
Speaker 15: Which is not to say that it's easy, but the
Speaker 15: biggest drive to getting something done is literally just getting
Speaker 15: it done.
Speaker 10: Is just doing it.
Speaker 15: And if people see you doing a cool thing, oddly enough,
Speaker 15: some of them will want to help you, which is
Speaker 15: kind of a bizarre, but it does end up being true.
Speaker 8: The core thing I've learned about producing work over the
Speaker 8: last many years is people are willing to do stuff
Speaker 8: if you do it first. If you prove to them
Speaker 8: that you're committed to something and have a cool idea,
Speaker 8: people will jump on board. Yeah, And I think that's
Speaker 8: been proven by how excited our audience has been for
Speaker 8: the show. How willing people have been to jump on,
Speaker 8: and our entire crew and writing stuff is volunteer. Right now,
Speaker 8: We're making a little bit of money on Patreon, but
Speaker 8: certainly not enough to pay the twenty plus person team
Speaker 8: that ends up working with us every month, although that
Speaker 8: is the goal down the line. But yeah, people are
Speaker 8: willing to do a cool thing and volunteer their time.
Speaker 8: Artists want to be making stuff, and so it's just
Speaker 8: about doing it and then just doing it again. When
Speaker 8: I first started hosting my stay up show, we did
Speaker 8: it the first time, and I spent months like thinking
Speaker 8: about it, and after the first month, I was like,
Speaker 8: oh my god, that was so hard. How am I
Speaker 8: going to find enough transcomics to you at a second time?
Speaker 8: How am I going to have the energy to do
Speaker 8: a second time? And my boyfriend at the time said,
Speaker 8: if you want it to be a monthly show, you
Speaker 8: just have to do it every month for a while,
Speaker 8: even if it sucks, and then eventually it will suck less.
Speaker 16: And he's right. He's still right, and I'm still doing
Speaker 16: that show two years later.
Speaker 8: And we did late stage the first time, and it
Speaker 8: was several months push to get the first script out
Speaker 8: and we got the first episode out and we were like,
Speaker 8: oh my god, Okay, let's do this again in one month,
Speaker 8: can we do it? And we did it a second
Speaker 8: time and it was also fun and good, and then
Speaker 8: you just like figure out how to make it easier
Speaker 8: each time. And I will not deny that it is
Speaker 8: hard work. We are all slowly killing ourselves to make
Speaker 8: this show. I work a forty hour food service day
Speaker 8: job that I came directly from to do this interview.
Speaker 8: Everyone else on my show is either working full time
Speaker 8: on top of the show, or unemployed and slowly losing
Speaker 8: money at various stages. People would like to fire queer people.
Speaker 8: So every few weeks someone comes into a writer's meeting
Speaker 8: is like, guys, I lost my job.
Speaker 9: Haha.
Speaker 8: So I will not deny that it's hard, and I
Speaker 8: don't want to. I don't ever want someone to think
Speaker 8: of me saying just do it. Is like it's easy
Speaker 8: because it's a lot of work, and all of my
Speaker 8: team is like incredibly talented and has years of experience
Speaker 8: doing things. Everyone in the comedy scene in Brooklyn talks
Speaker 8: about like wanting to get staffed on a late night show,
Speaker 8: which is awesome, And I would love to get staffed
Speaker 8: on a late age like that's the coveted job at
Speaker 8: the end of the line for the stand up community,
Speaker 8: but like, you don't have to wait for that. You
Speaker 8: can just make the work you're doing. And I've had
Speaker 8: conversations with my writers where they've all been like, this
Speaker 8: has been a really cool opportunity because at the very
Speaker 8: least I've sort of found out if I would actually
Speaker 8: want to write on a late night show. We talk
Speaker 8: about that as a coveted job, but maybe I don't
Speaker 8: want to do that. It's a very different skill than
Speaker 8: stand up and that's been a fun learning curve as
Speaker 8: well as hiring a bunch of stand ups. To write
Speaker 8: long form political analysis, you sort of have to herd
Speaker 8: cats to some degree.
Speaker 15: Even with a supportive community, the work can be really grueling,
Speaker 15: and the road from a finished movie to being on
Speaker 15: the big screen can be a monumental challenge. The People's
Speaker 15: is slightly unique in this way because of its peculiar
Speaker 15: copyright status of being a fair use superhero parody using
Speaker 15: some of our culture's most recognizable iconography to tell a
Speaker 15: very personal story. Right before the movie was set to
Speaker 15: premiere at tiff the Toronto International Film Festival back in
Speaker 15: twenty twenty two, Warner Brothers sent a vaguely worded but
Speaker 15: threatening letter which resulted in the People's Joker of being
Speaker 15: pulled from the festival save for one late night screening.
Speaker 15: Yet throughout the legal chaos, Vera Drew remained to steadfast
Speaker 15: to ensure the movie would be released the right way
Speaker 15: on the big screen where it belongs. This film has
Speaker 15: had like a I guess, a troubled history, some some
Speaker 15: might say, and how are you able to like stick
Speaker 15: with this project after encountering like hurdles and problems, like
Speaker 15: because like a certain point, it's like, is this like
Speaker 15: a some cost fallacy or something like how did you
Speaker 15: decide to like actually stick with this and like really
Speaker 15: fight for this as a as a piece of like
Speaker 15: expressive art.
Speaker 9: Gosh, you know, I mean I think I feel like
Speaker 9: I just didn't have like a choice, really, like I
Speaker 9: think with the movie done and with how well just
Speaker 9: our first screening at TIFF went like it was just
Speaker 9: like I was kind of at a point where I
Speaker 9: could shelve it, like cause that was really the other option,
Speaker 9: you know, put it just away for a few years
Speaker 9: and come back and maybe like you know, when public
Speaker 9: domain is a little bit more, you know, it falls
Speaker 9: under public domain because it will and like I mean,
Speaker 9: at least U Joker and Batman will be in public
Speaker 9: domain in ten or fifteen years. So like that was
Speaker 9: like an idea. I guess that was floated to me
Speaker 9: a few times. Bro, It's just like I don't I
Speaker 9: didn't want to wait that long, and I had just
Speaker 9: I really put all I had into this movie, you know,
Speaker 9: like I cashed in every favor I had ever accumulated
Speaker 9: in Hollywood financially, Like I took out a huge loan
Speaker 9: to finish it, and it was just this big, deeply
Speaker 9: personal thing that I had made that originally really was
Speaker 9: just for me and my friends. Like it was just
Speaker 9: kind of a thing that I had just made. You know,
Speaker 9: maybe I would have shown it to like my Patreon
Speaker 9: or something, but like after a certain point, like it,
Speaker 9: you know, once we had that like premiere, it was
Speaker 9: just like like I can't just post this to YouTube.
Speaker 9: I can't like just dump it somewhere or like shelve
Speaker 9: it all my agents and stuff. I have way too
Speaker 9: many agents now, and they all were like telling me
Speaker 9: to that basically, like it's it's it's okay that it's
Speaker 9: not coming out. We can basically just use this to
Speaker 9: get the next project going. But I mean I quickly
Speaker 9: realized in that process, like this movie is like a
Speaker 9: fucking like you don't show this movie to a studio
Speaker 9: executive and then they immediately are like, yeah, let's let's
Speaker 9: hire this person. They just want to like have lunch
Speaker 9: with this crazy bitch who made the Joker movie, you know.
Speaker 9: Like so it was like it just quickly became clear
Speaker 9: like where like kind of just the people around me
Speaker 9: who had the best interest of the movie at heart,
Speaker 9: and also like just what felt bad and what felt
Speaker 9: right and what felt right. Really was like taking the
Speaker 9: movie out just to festivals and kind of doing like
Speaker 9: a secret screening tour, which is what we did, and
Speaker 9: that was really exciting and kind of like a jokerfied
Speaker 9: way of sort of getting this movie out there. And
Speaker 9: that was really just on an emotional and like personal level,
Speaker 9: really what carried me through. I was lucky enough to
Speaker 9: be in attendance at one of the secret festival screenings
Speaker 9: a few years back, and I was delighted to hear
Speaker 9: that nearly two years after it initially premiered at Tiff
Speaker 9: The People's Joker was able to secure a distribution partner
Speaker 9: to put the movie in theaters nationwide, So once again
Speaker 9: I was fortunate enough to rewatch a piece of queer
Speaker 9: Batman art that otherwise would have never been made under
Speaker 9: Warner Brothers Thumb, and I think this is also the
Speaker 9: case with Late Stage Live and many of these new
Speaker 9: independent queer projects. They most likely would not be produced
Speaker 9: by one of the massive media conglomerates that controls almost everything.
Speaker 9: You see.
Speaker 15: The small, independent nature of these productions actually gives them
Speaker 15: an opportunity to be much more queer and politically radical
Speaker 15: than what would be allowed under Disney, Universal, Sony, Paramount,
Speaker 15: Warner Media Incorporated.
Speaker 8: We're like obviously far more radical politically than any other
Speaker 8: late night show on the air right now. And it's
Speaker 8: something we've been thinking about as we attempt to scale
Speaker 8: and try to find people who are going to fund us,
Speaker 8: is that there are certainly people who could give us
Speaker 8: a lot of money who would also then really want
Speaker 8: to like limit the kind of speech we can make
Speaker 8: and the kind of opinions we can have. And so
Speaker 8: there's obviously a balance as we look for funding and
Speaker 8: growth opportunities. But Brick the Public Access network is their
Speaker 8: whole thing is free speech, and so part of working
Speaker 8: with them is their commitment to free speech and radical programming.
Speaker 15: I'm really interested in the choice to have it also
Speaker 15: be on cable access. I find that to be oddly
Speaker 15: compelling in an interesting way, and I wonder, like, what
Speaker 15: led you to that decision.
Speaker 8: So part of that is like rules and regulations at
Speaker 8: Brick the studio. So you take one hundred dollars five
Speaker 8: week class with them to learn how to use their stuff,
Speaker 8: and they offer a lot of other classes too. You
Speaker 8: can take a podcasting class to use their podcasting studio,
Speaker 8: or a field class to be able to rent out
Speaker 8: equipment and go do stuff in the field. A lot
Speaker 8: of people make documentaries with their equipment. It's a very
Speaker 8: cool team. If you're in Brooklyn, you should go work
Speaker 8: with Brick.
Speaker 16: They're awesome.
Speaker 8: But on one of the contingencies of working in their
Speaker 8: space is that when you film something with them, you
Speaker 8: do eventually owe them a product that they air on
Speaker 8: their network, and that for us is the show. We're
Speaker 8: not doing a ton of other stuff right now, although
Speaker 8: you know, with infinite money and time, we would love
Speaker 8: to be doing many other things, but Brick is awesome
Speaker 8: and really values like free speech and creator freedom, and
Speaker 8: so even though we owe them a product, we get
Speaker 8: retain full ownership of our stuff. And so the way
Speaker 8: it is in this zany Internet landscape is that YouTube
Speaker 8: is the pls to get eyes on a project. Like
Speaker 8: if I thought that public access TV was going to
Speaker 8: be the place to to like blow up, I maybe
Speaker 8: would be like focusing much harder on promoting that end
Speaker 8: of distribution. But I think for what we're making and
Speaker 8: what we're doing, YouTube and the Internet is like how
Speaker 8: to build an audience. But it's it's it does lend
Speaker 8: it like an interesting credibility to be on public access
Speaker 8: and esthetically we really like leaning into sort of like
Speaker 8: the nineties public access vibes. Part of that is the
Speaker 8: equipment we're using. Our cameras are not the most modern,
Speaker 8: so you get a slightly grainy vibe.
Speaker 4: You get.
Speaker 8: The backdrop is like string and papers frum together. We're
Speaker 8: filming in four to three, which is a really strong decision. Well,
Speaker 8: actually we film in sixty nine, we expert in four
Speaker 8: three whatever, but it gives us a very distinct visual look.
Speaker 15: I think next episode we'll talk more about how so
Speaker 15: much queer video art feels like it's forced to be
Speaker 15: on YouTube and attempts to break out of that bubble.
Speaker 15: When The People's Joker was stuck in legal limbo, there
Speaker 15: was a lot of pressure just to put the film
Speaker 15: up online for free, and as much as Patients is painful,
Speaker 15: resisting that urge and waiting for the right distribution partner
Speaker 15: to come along really paid off in the long run.
Speaker 9: I was just surrounded by other filmmakers in the genre community,
Speaker 9: and you know who would see the movie at this
Speaker 9: festival and be like, you need to just wait, Like
Speaker 9: the person who's going to help you is gonna come.
Speaker 9: And if that doesn't happen, like you can self distribute,
Speaker 9: which I did not want to do. Like at a
Speaker 9: certain point it was just like I had spent so
Speaker 9: much money finishing it. I just I would have ruined
Speaker 9: my life. I think if I self distributed it, like
Speaker 9: I just couldn't. I didn't have the bandwidth. And I
Speaker 9: want to make films, I don't want to distribute them
Speaker 9: at this point, like maybe someday, but like right now,
Speaker 9: I just like want to tell as many stories as
Speaker 9: I can I had a lot of support around me,
Speaker 9: and there was just so much enthusiasm from you know,
Speaker 9: people like you who saw it at festivals last year,
Speaker 9: who like were basically like holy shit, and just all
Speaker 9: the kind of responses we're seeing now to it. Like
Speaker 9: it was, I got little like micronoses of that last year,
Speaker 9: which literally was I mean, I it's probably fucking tacky
Speaker 9: to say, but it was just the darkest year of
Speaker 9: my life. I was really just an anxious mess the
Speaker 9: entire time. But I really did make this movie to
Speaker 9: like not only understand myself and sort of mythologize my
Speaker 9: life and my friends' lives and stuff like that, but
Speaker 9: like I made it to like get better, Like I
Speaker 9: made it to kind of heal not only my relationship
Speaker 9: with like my gender, but my family and my art
Speaker 9: and like how I want to make stuff. And I think,
Speaker 9: what's really beautiful what happened in that like dark period
Speaker 9: and up up until now and even right now, this
Speaker 9: movie does really require me to take care of myself
Speaker 9: emotionally and mentally in ways that are what I've always needed.
Speaker 9: So it's it's been it's been a cool kind of
Speaker 9: just like really expensive therapy. Ultimately, even though a lot
Speaker 9: of it's been really grueling.
Speaker 15: That does it for this week at It Could Happen Here.
Speaker 15: In the next episode after the weekend, I'll conclude my
Speaker 15: conversation with Vera Drew and Ella Yerman talking about the
Speaker 15: pitfalls of representation, moving beyond the YouTube bubble, and the
Speaker 15: future of queer filmmaking. You can go to the Peoplesjoker
Speaker 15: dot com for information on tickets and showtimes, and you
Speaker 15: can find Late Stage Live by that name on all platforms,
Speaker 15: and to support the show, you can get behind the
Speaker 15: scenes content on Patreon at Latestage Live. Solidarity to everyone
Speaker 15: out there this week, see you on the other side.
Speaker 2: Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 2: from now until the heat death of the Universe.
Speaker 10: It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 5: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 5: coolzonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 5: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
Speaker 5: find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at
Speaker 5: coolzonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening,