Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
Speaker 1: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 1: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 1: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 1: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 1: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's gonna be nothing new here for you, but you
Speaker 1: can make your own decisions. God Area, Garrison takeover. I
Speaker 1: asked for some grunting that was like a word, Okay,
Speaker 1: what it was? I know lots of they could have
Speaker 1: been here, and openings have become bastards. Openings now just
Speaker 1: kind of opening. Robert doesn't have more than one type
Speaker 1: of opening. There's two. There's there's grunting and then yelling
Speaker 1: something weird that is that's basically the same learning how
Speaker 1: to do your job is cut shit. Also, to be honest,
Speaker 1: most of the time, doesn't know which podcast he's doing.
Speaker 1: Are all what is this are we doing? Is this
Speaker 1: the daily zeitgeist? Is this is Jack O'Brien, this is
Speaker 1: this is it could happen here. So we're talking today
Speaker 1: about the different things that are it um here being
Speaker 1: the States this time. UM, but we're talking about basically,
Speaker 1: over the course of the past few months, we have
Speaker 1: covered a few different topics on the show, UM, some
Speaker 1: of which have already kind of had some results of
Speaker 1: had updates to what we've already covered. So we're I'm
Speaker 1: gonna I'm gonna go through a list of like a
Speaker 1: three different things that we've covered and talk about kind
Speaker 1: of the updates in these stories. UM. You know, most
Speaker 1: of what we've covered around these topics have been like
Speaker 1: a mix of original reporting and interviews. So now there's
Speaker 1: been further further work down on this and this we're
Speaker 1: not kind of update people. If you know, they're not
Speaker 1: as termally online as us, maybe they have not heard
Speaker 1: that there's been changes to these stories. And I wanted
Speaker 1: to kind of put together a nice, little concise thing
Speaker 1: talking about updates to all the things we've covered. UM.
Speaker 1: So the first thing that we're gonna be talking a
Speaker 1: bit about is the cops City in Atlanta, and they
Speaker 1: defend the Atlanta Forest Coalision. So I think like a
Speaker 1: day after our episode dropped on that, UM, Atlanta City
Speaker 1: Council voted UH ten to four in favor of getting
Speaker 1: the militarized police training facility greenlit Um, nicknamed Cops City.
Speaker 1: There was seventeen hours of public testimony. We're seven seventy
Speaker 1: of the callers spilk out against the facility. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean that we had that happen in Portland. It doesn't. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it never matters. It doesn't matter what the vast majority,
Speaker 1: especially when there's especially when this money involved. Do not
Speaker 1: do not ever be deceived into thinking that you live
Speaker 1: in a democracy and that you actually want to matter.
Speaker 1: Is in any way, shape or form, this is just
Speaker 1: not This is empirically not true. Like like sixty percent
Speaker 1: of Texans periods support vaccine mandates in some instances, but
Speaker 1: the governor just made it illegal to do them. Ever. Um,
Speaker 1: Like it's it's it's that way across the board, across
Speaker 1: the nation. Um. People ask sometimes because like you know,
Speaker 1: when you get into anarchists discussions of politics, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of criticism of democracy. I don't I think democracy
Speaker 1: is a lovely idea. I would like to try it something.
Speaker 1: It would be nice to get it ago, it would
Speaker 1: be nice to experience. So Yeah, this city council voted
Speaker 1: to least the acres of city owned forest land to
Speaker 1: the Atlanta Police Foundation UM, at least eighty five acres
Speaker 1: of which is going to be slated to become the
Speaker 1: police training facility. UM. The facility is going to cost
Speaker 1: around ninety million dollars. Jesus Christ, I could train cops
Speaker 1: much cheaper than that, although training is the wrong word. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that is the wrong word for that. UM. So yeah, no,
Speaker 1: nine million dollars. It's gonna include. It's gonna include a
Speaker 1: state of the art explosive testing facility, firing ranges, emergency
Speaker 1: vehicle operations course, a classroom space UM, and an emergency
Speaker 1: and an emergency proper space. So we'll probably learn to read, right,
Speaker 1: I'm sure it's for teaching people to do bad things. UM.
Speaker 1: There's going to be an emergency helicopter pad and an
Speaker 1: entire like mock town. It is good that they have
Speaker 1: the emergency helicopter pad because cops shoot each other with
Speaker 1: live ammunition all the time, and that that does happen.
Speaker 1: It does happen a lot. So yeah. The main backup
Speaker 1: for this project UM is the Atlanta Police Foundation, which
Speaker 1: is a political advocacy group that you know, has a
Speaker 1: lot of funding from corporations and they try to you
Speaker 1: know sway the political power of the city into giving
Speaker 1: more power to the police. Um uh huh. So the
Speaker 1: interesting thing about this though, is like the vote was
Speaker 1: supposed to happen in AUGUSTUM, but it was rescheduled for
Speaker 1: early September after there was a lot of public backlash
Speaker 1: around this proposal. Um. Then the vote that was supposed
Speaker 1: to happen ont got pushed back the whole day because
Speaker 1: there was too many callers saying that they didn't want
Speaker 1: the facility. So the vote got pushed back a day
Speaker 1: in September, but it stays still voted for it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so thirty million dollars is going to be footed by
Speaker 1: taxpayers and the other sixty million is going to get
Speaker 1: paid for by the Police Foundation, which has a lot
Speaker 1: of different like corporate donors. So that's that's that's that's
Speaker 1: that um. And of course it's on you know, on
Speaker 1: this forest land, which is like some of the biggest
Speaker 1: forest land in any major American city. So you know,
Speaker 1: they're tearing down all this forest to build this concrete
Speaker 1: city to train cops in. We should also mentioned that
Speaker 1: at the end of her interview with some of the
Speaker 1: people resisting this, they basically said like, if the vote
Speaker 1: goes through, resists is going to continue, so we will continue.
Speaker 1: There's probably gonna be efforts to like actually try to
Speaker 1: physically prevent the construction of this. But the next thing
Speaker 1: we're gonna be talking about is stop line three um,
Speaker 1: which mean there was also you know, physical efforts to
Speaker 1: prevent that. But the type of efforts that people usually
Speaker 1: do in you know, modern green activism usually are a
Speaker 1: lot more performative or they're specifically to pressure to create
Speaker 1: means that will try to convince politicians to veto the process.
Speaker 1: So it's not you know, it's it's it's different from
Speaker 1: the nineties when it was easier to like actually physically
Speaker 1: stop the prevention of things. Now a lot of the
Speaker 1: people who you know are trying to do this, it
Speaker 1: is they're not convinced that, you know, doing a lock
Speaker 1: box is going to actually physically prevent it. What it's
Speaker 1: gonna do is create media coverage that truck that is
Speaker 1: going to hopefully convince politicians to be like, hey, maybe
Speaker 1: we shouldn't do this, and that's a hard bargain, right,
Speaker 1: That's not there's no saying that that's actually going to
Speaker 1: do the thing. You know, in the in the case
Speaker 1: of stop Line three that did not stop Line three. Um.
Speaker 1: There was a really good uh um critique of the
Speaker 1: stop Line three protests posted in It's Going Down by
Speaker 1: an indigenous anarchist who lives on that land who was
Speaker 1: like younger, um, and they're you know, watching all of
Speaker 1: these you know, older indigenous anarchists, you know, keep on
Speaker 1: getting arrested and brutalized. Like, but we're not actually doing
Speaker 1: anything in the methods that we're doing that the methods
Speaker 1: that we're trying to like, you know, gain public support,
Speaker 1: this isn't working in this specific context. Maybe we should
Speaker 1: reevaluate what we're actually doing. I know It's going down
Speaker 1: faced a bit of backlash for posting that critique, but
Speaker 1: I think that I think the critique is actually worth reading.
Speaker 1: Any any other thoughts on the Atlanta thing before we
Speaker 1: move on to the stop line three stuff, um, No,
Speaker 1: no other than to note that I think the best
Speaker 1: brisket I've ever had came from Atlanta. Okay, well, I'll
Speaker 1: probably I'll probably visiting Atlanta in the near future, maybe
Speaker 1: there with you, um, in which case I'll get some
Speaker 1: more motherfucking brisket. Yeah, it was actually the fun story.
Speaker 1: We were road tripping through town, me and in another
Speaker 1: friend in another car, and we were talking over radios
Speaker 1: and a trucker got on like the channel we were
Speaker 1: on because we were talking about where to get barbecue,
Speaker 1: and he told us where to go. Um, it was neat.
Speaker 1: It was like an actual nice like like moment of
Speaker 1: CB radio connection. Like this guy was just scanning the
Speaker 1: waves and found us and I was like, oh, I
Speaker 1: can tell you where to go anyway, continue Garrison. That
Speaker 1: was completely unrelated to stopping line three. So the next
Speaker 1: thing is earlier, I think in September, maybe August if
Speaker 1: it's been a while. H we we we posted two
Speaker 1: episodes about me visiting the top Plane three protests and
Speaker 1: the Earth First camp, and a lot of stuff has
Speaker 1: happened since then. Um, so you know, the main you
Speaker 1: know thing is that the pipe planet has been finished
Speaker 1: now um and is basically getting is ready to be operated,
Speaker 1: or it probably already has some operation. It's unclear how
Speaker 1: much is being used right now, but it is done construction.
Speaker 1: It doubles the capacity of the original pipeline. It's gonna
Speaker 1: be doing like a seven hundred and sixty thousand barrels
Speaker 1: of oil a day, so in the e carves outland
Speaker 1: through through wet lands where people grow wild rice and
Speaker 1: do hunting. Um So, overall the past few months police
Speaker 1: arrested over nine hundred people, and it's there's been a
Speaker 1: lot of like felony charges specifically for locking down, which
Speaker 1: is pretty new because they're using felony theft charges for
Speaker 1: people just locking down to equipment. Yeah, that is an
Speaker 1: unfortunate escalation. Yeah. Um So by the time we posted
Speaker 1: our top line three episodes, we kind of already figured
Speaker 1: this was going to be the result that That's kind
Speaker 1: of how he ended the episode saying there's been all
Speaker 1: this resistance, but probably it's going to get built, and
Speaker 1: you know, there's other things that we can learn from
Speaker 1: this movement going on into the future. Um But the
Speaker 1: new developments that have happened, um I. I did mention
Speaker 1: in the episodes how much Enbridge was directly paying cops.
Speaker 1: That was something we already knew that what was happening,
Speaker 1: But there was an article by The Guardian that really
Speaker 1: gave a lot of new information around how much police
Speaker 1: involvement there is with like with Enbridge, Like they are
Speaker 1: actually coordinating a lot. So overall, Uh, Enbridge has reimbursed
Speaker 1: US police almost two and a half million dollars for
Speaker 1: arresting and surveying protesters. UM, also paying for like food,
Speaker 1: lodging gas. It's like it's they're not not just not
Speaker 1: not just paying wages, they're paying like for extra stuff
Speaker 1: as well. So at least at least two and a
Speaker 1: half million dollars that's been paid from the Canadian oil
Speaker 1: company um, you know, including that includes officer officer training, UH,
Speaker 1: police patrol routes, surveillance, all this kind of stuff. UM.
Speaker 1: The one one interesting thing that was noted in the
Speaker 1: article is that the company at Enbridge meets daily with
Speaker 1: police officers to discuss intelligence gathering and patrols um. And
Speaker 1: when and when Enbridge wants protesters removed, it directly calls
Speaker 1: or sends letters to police, so they they actually like
Speaker 1: coordinate when to actually get police involved during protests, and
Speaker 1: they have at least daily information meetings. The one other
Speaker 1: interesting thing besides just directly paying them for food for
Speaker 1: you know, training, equipment and the coordination between end Bridge
Speaker 1: and people being on the ground, is um how much
Speaker 1: that the Enbridge paid for uh like proactive safety patrols
Speaker 1: and specific like specific officer surveillance following alleged activists like home,
Speaker 1: so they would like trail specific cars for a long
Speaker 1: time and try to like do like in person surveillance
Speaker 1: on specific people they thought were activists. And all of
Speaker 1: this time was paid for by end Bridge and was
Speaker 1: being coordinated with Bridge. So it's not just you know,
Speaker 1: paying for training, it's not just for paying for equipment.
Speaker 1: It's specific surveillance of certain people. And that is I
Speaker 1: don't know, that's something that we weren't We did not
Speaker 1: really know the depths of that for sure, but it's
Speaker 1: pretty it's pretty messed up. I know. We we suspected
Speaker 1: some of this coordination before, like when we talked about
Speaker 1: police showing up to the Stop Line three camp and
Speaker 1: blocking off access to the road. Um, this was at
Speaker 1: the same day that drilling under the river was just
Speaker 1: being finished, and we so we suspected like, yeah, there's
Speaker 1: like Embridges obviously talking with police to prevent people from
Speaker 1: leaving so that they can they can finish up this
Speaker 1: specific drilling project that was that was pretty obvious to
Speaker 1: us at the scene. Um, And now we have you know,
Speaker 1: extra confirmation that yeah, they do like meet daily to
Speaker 1: coordinate these types of things. Um, so it's good to
Speaker 1: have that extrame confirmation of the stuff we already like
Speaker 1: suspected and stuff we already kind of like put together
Speaker 1: through experience. But now we have like, you know, court
Speaker 1: documents and records showing the extent of the coordination. All right,
Speaker 1: well we'll talk about terrorism, but you know who else
Speaker 1: is a terrorist? Oh boy? The products and services that
Speaker 1: support this podcast are all right in a good way,
Speaker 1: you know, like um, you know, like uh like a
Speaker 1: kind of alright, well, it's it's complicated, all right, Do
Speaker 1: ads just run ads stuff? Oh so it will probably
Speaker 1: funnier if you bleep out the name of the terrorist organization.
Speaker 1: This is how we this is how we pick up
Speaker 1: from the ad brancast. You say that. So, um, Garrison,
Speaker 1: we got some some critiques that came in to the
Speaker 1: old news line, by which I mean people deemed me
Speaker 1: on redditch. Yeah. I never respond, Um, I almost never respond.
Speaker 1: It's nothing against people. I just don't like being communicated with. Um.
Speaker 1: But too many, too many people ask me to send
Speaker 1: messages to you and like, yeah, Garrison, you're not I'm
Speaker 1: not like, that's not what I'm ricks And welcome to
Speaker 1: the last three years of my life. Uh yeah, anyway, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, but that's funny, Sophie. Ah. Um. There were
Speaker 1: people who were like, hey, I don't know if you
Speaker 1: know this, but Earth First has a problematic history with
Speaker 1: like eco fascism and that sort of stuff. Just like
Speaker 1: that too. Yeah, and it's it's one of those things.
Speaker 1: They definitely are an organization that has said things in
Speaker 1: the past that I don't agree with. There's been specific
Speaker 1: people who do organizing with them that don't have great
Speaker 1: beliefs specifically around like you know, a lot of like
Speaker 1: in the old Green movements has been you know, a
Speaker 1: lot of like transphobia, some like racism. Um. It's it's
Speaker 1: not because they're the green movements. Like all left spaces
Speaker 1: deal with versions of variety stuff, you know, not like
Speaker 1: respecting like indigenous people. Um. You know that that's been
Speaker 1: that's been a thing. Um. But the specific term eco
Speaker 1: fascism I believe is incorrect um because they don't advocate
Speaker 1: for the genocide of a specific group um. And they
Speaker 1: don't have like far right populist policies. So like you
Speaker 1: can have bad opinions and bad ideas and you can
Speaker 1: actually be racist without actually being fascist, especially eco fascist. Um.
Speaker 1: So I feel like people throw that word around a
Speaker 1: lot and they don't actually know what it means. Um,
Speaker 1: But what were you specifically referring to, Robert Um. I'm
Speaker 1: trying to find the message here. But because I got
Speaker 1: a message saying that Earth First is bad because they're
Speaker 1: anti natalists, that means they're fascist, which isn't definitely got that,
Speaker 1: which isn't actually like I'm just going to disagree with
Speaker 1: that because I don't think anti natalism equits fascism, especially
Speaker 1: antien natalism. For like, antenatalism is basically saying, don't don't
Speaker 1: make people, maybe we should maybe we should stop having
Speaker 1: more kids right now because you have a lot of
Speaker 1: problems to deal with and maybe we shouldn't be having like,
Speaker 1: you know, three kids, which is it's not a take.
Speaker 1: I'm not an anti natalist. I don't actually disagree with
Speaker 1: that take though, but I think it's more in the
Speaker 1: line of, like, the most fundamental of all human desires
Speaker 1: for the majority of the population is to make more people,
Speaker 1: which is kind of why I like anti natalism, because
Speaker 1: it has that thing that's opposite to one of a
Speaker 1: lot of humans natural reaction and like, no one's forcing
Speaker 1: anti natalists, don't want to force you to be anti natalist.
Speaker 1: Bring up this as an idea, Yeah, and I think
Speaker 1: it's a valuable idea to discuss. And I don't think
Speaker 1: it's I don't think you're I don't think you're embracing
Speaker 1: like the massacre of human beings or Genesis. The way
Speaker 1: by saying like, I think it'd be best if we
Speaker 1: didn't make anymore not planning a arguable point. I'm not
Speaker 1: planning to have any kids because I don't see why it,
Speaker 1: especially when there's so many like children that can be adopted. Garrison,
Speaker 1: we talked about you having kids so we could experiment
Speaker 1: with making them blue. This is a separate conversation that
Speaker 1: we're not talking about involving. We are not talking about
Speaker 1: this on the plot. Will just include that tantalizing hint.
Speaker 1: I also just think in general, when we talk about
Speaker 1: a group that's had a long history and a specific
Speaker 1: thing they're doing in the present, yeah, this has happened
Speaker 1: in another situation, whe people like, well, you know they
Speaker 1: did this or some one of them said this. And
Speaker 1: there's a couple of things I feel about that. For
Speaker 1: one thing, it's it's like it's entirely possible that the
Speaker 1: people doing the thing in the present day have nothing
Speaker 1: to do with the people twenty years ago. Yeah, like
Speaker 1: most of the people out there First Gathering Gathering were
Speaker 1: like in their twenties and around my age, Like they
Speaker 1: weren't in the they weren't in Earth First Night, Like
Speaker 1: that's not like so I feel like silly about kind
Speaker 1: of making them be held accountable for something somebody else
Speaker 1: said under a similar banner decades ago. And on the podcast,
Speaker 1: I talked about how like people on the Earth First
Speaker 1: Earth First Gathering like talked about this stuff, like the
Speaker 1: people talked about Earth First like history and how they
Speaker 1: haven't handled some issues very well. There was a lot
Speaker 1: there was a massive effort for this gathering to like
Speaker 1: um to like uplift and make sure everyone focuses on
Speaker 1: indigenous voices, like they invited over multiple indigenous groups to
Speaker 1: give talks on green resistance and like land back like that.
Speaker 1: That was a big focus of like making sure that
Speaker 1: this actually is something that has hurt because people know,
Speaker 1: like this is, yeah, this is something important, this is
Speaker 1: something that actually should be done, and there are I
Speaker 1: think in general, and we talk about like holding organizations
Speaker 1: and individuals accountable for their past. Um, what matters is
Speaker 1: like a mix of what they did and what they're doing.
Speaker 1: So obviously, if Earth First had been saying twenty years ago,
Speaker 1: we need to wipe out all the Jews, I would
Speaker 1: be like, I wouldn't care what they were saying. Now,
Speaker 1: you know, it would be like, yeah, you can't really
Speaker 1: come back from that. If you want to do a
Speaker 1: completely different thing, it needs to be a new organization.
Speaker 1: But they weren't. And I'm not saying that where I'm
Speaker 1: just making an example, but like, as a rule, I
Speaker 1: think we should embrace the fact that organizations and people
Speaker 1: can change throughout time and be better than they were
Speaker 1: in the past, um and and learn from mistakes and flaws.
Speaker 1: And I feel pretty unwilling to condemn individuals or organizations
Speaker 1: for the mistakes of their past, although that is dependent
Speaker 1: upon the kind of mistake and the harm that it cost. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and like and how they address it in the futures,
Speaker 1: like a lot of these Yeah, because like it wasn't
Speaker 1: like the First as an overall organization of specific people
Speaker 1: they were affiliated with, like you know, specifically UM like
Speaker 1: UM Edward Abbey has said some not great things around
Speaker 1: different different different social issues, and his books were extremely
Speaker 1: influential on the beginning of green resistance. But that's something
Speaker 1: people talk about now, Like that's something that is like
Speaker 1: discussed and debated. Um and he was and he was
Speaker 1: like even in the eighties and nineties, he was like
Speaker 1: kicked out of Earth First gatherings for kind of being
Speaker 1: a loser, like for for having these bad views. Were like, yeah,
Speaker 1: we probably shouldn't have you here anymore. Leave go away.
Speaker 1: So like that was something that was even talked about
Speaker 1: back like back then as well. That is that isn't
Speaker 1: just a modern thing. Yeah, and I think in general,
Speaker 1: number there's a couple of things. Number One, whenever we
Speaker 1: talk about like an organization in a specific context they're
Speaker 1: doing this, that doesn't mean we're embracing everything they've done.
Speaker 1: And number two, whenever we talk about the history of
Speaker 1: of of of a movement or a group, I hope
Speaker 1: nobody ever takes that as like, here is the authoritative
Speaker 1: stance on the history of this thing. Like it's when
Speaker 1: we talked about the Black Panthers. There's a bunch of
Speaker 1: stuff we left out that's very important. Um My hope
Speaker 1: with those episodes, and I hope with anything we do
Speaker 1: is that it like inspires people to want to learn
Speaker 1: more and read more, and we're giving them a basis
Speaker 1: of understanding that they can use to expand their knowledge
Speaker 1: on an important topic. So please, we are we are.
Speaker 1: There's like one thing, uh collectively that that Garrison and
Speaker 1: I have any kind of expertise on, and uh, outside
Speaker 1: of that, you should not take anything we say as like,
Speaker 1: here's the comprehensive history of of this because it's I
Speaker 1: I understand one thing, and it's it's how the internet
Speaker 1: makes people shitty. Yeah, so yeah, um yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: that that was something that this whole It was something
Speaker 1: I thought about when writing these episodes is how much
Speaker 1: to include of this stuff? And I did not feel
Speaker 1: like it was super important to discuss this stuff because
Speaker 1: it wasn't relevant to the topic of stop lines. I
Speaker 1: think you didn't something relevant to the topic of like
Speaker 1: the current ongoing green resistance. If we want to do
Speaker 1: like a history of green activism, then yes, this is
Speaker 1: something that that would be that. Yeah, and I think
Speaker 1: like at some point we probably should do absolutely about
Speaker 1: just like mirror and like all of that ship. But
Speaker 1: like that there's a kind of stuff we want to
Speaker 1: talk about that we haven't yet because it's a daily
Speaker 1: show and my God, give us some fucking time. People
Speaker 1: speaking of Edward Abbey, you know what, huh sells quality
Speaker 1: monkey wrenches. Okay, alright, that's fine. The maybe one of
Speaker 1: our sponsors. It's I hope so as hardware. It's hardware.
Speaker 1: As hardware sponsoring us, they do sell. You can get
Speaker 1: some good monkey wrenches from Ace Hardware quality for fixing
Speaker 1: your faucet, for fixing your faucet. So go get wrench
Speaker 1: pilled and then listen to the rest of the show.
Speaker 1: Well we're back. We just had a good discussion about
Speaker 1: what we're gonna talk about, and we realized that it
Speaker 1: wasn't after the ad break, So here we are. Um.
Speaker 1: In in early September, we had an episodes about both
Speaker 1: California's climate and the ongoing recall election against Gavin Newsom.
Speaker 1: So a few days after our episodes dropped, the things
Speaker 1: like the day the day the second one dropped was
Speaker 1: was election day. Um we we we got the results
Speaker 1: in faster than what I was expecting. Um and Uh
Speaker 1: Newsome did handily beat uh Larry Elder with like yeah,
Speaker 1: so people people voted sixty one no and liket yes.
Speaker 1: Uh so he Knewsome did a decent job and pushing
Speaker 1: off elder Um. So this, this, this whole recall processed
Speaker 1: costed California taxpayers two hundred and seventy six million dollars.
Speaker 1: It's not like we needed the money for anything else. Garrison.
Speaker 1: Come on, Yeah, so you know a few takeaways. We're
Speaker 1: going to spend it on fighters literally anything else. Water
Speaker 1: giving California needs water and firefighters. Garrison coming giving houses
Speaker 1: to people who need houses. I don't know. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so takeaways from this, The recall process still should absolutely
Speaker 1: be invented. Yeah, it should require should require more than
Speaker 1: twelve signatures at the last voter turnout. Um. And the
Speaker 1: government should be requiring to get to if you're if
Speaker 1: you're gonna be elected in the government, you should be
Speaker 1: required to get a majority of votes. Um. Not not
Speaker 1: not just a plurality of a specific you know sect.
Speaker 1: So there's the whole we we we we talked about
Speaker 1: the specific reasons why it was bad in those episodes.
Speaker 1: Those are still those are still like, those are still valid,
Speaker 1: those are still relevant because there's still the same issues. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and none of the fact that this turned out well
Speaker 1: had anything to do with the Democratic Party who very
Speaker 1: nearly bungled it. And it and it doesn't it doesn't
Speaker 1: really impact. It doesn't impact you know, the Californias climate
Speaker 1: issues so much. And like just because new Sims in
Speaker 1: office doesn't mean they're going to get much better. You know,
Speaker 1: there's still things that he needs to be pushed on
Speaker 1: to to you know, make the climate a little bit
Speaker 1: more habitable. In the meantime, it it means that we
Speaker 1: will continue stumbling towards a cliff. Rather than speak so
Speaker 1: generally what voting for Democrats means, I will say, it's
Speaker 1: interesting to me that it doesn't seem like you can
Speaker 1: get the vote was rigged thing to work unless the
Speaker 1: election is like kind of this is the next thing
Speaker 1: I was going to talk about. Um, Yeah, because because
Speaker 1: like in the week before the election, the Fox News
Speaker 1: Republican Party and Larry Elder and even Trump, We're really
Speaker 1: starting to ramp up this idea that if Elder loses,
Speaker 1: that means the election was rigged. Uh. This was like
Speaker 1: they were really pushing this hard and you know, spreading
Speaker 1: like they were giving links to a website like before
Speaker 1: he lost even to be like, if you know, when
Speaker 1: I lose, use this website. I was like, okay, that's okay,
Speaker 1: that's weird. Um. But on the night of the election,
Speaker 1: Elders seems to kind of claim climb down from the
Speaker 1: inflammatory like rhetoric around the election. In his concession speech,
Speaker 1: he told supporters, let's be gracious and defeat um. So
Speaker 1: he once the actual results were in, he really climbed
Speaker 1: that down. So we can read into that. The other
Speaker 1: thing I want us to read into here is that
Speaker 1: could this could this rhetoric around if we lose, that
Speaker 1: means it was rigged? Could that disenfranchise Republican voters from
Speaker 1: even showing up if they believe that all elections will
Speaker 1: be stolen from them? Well that being that they'll be
Speaker 1: less Republican turn out if there's just if they think
Speaker 1: that it doesn't matter. So that's the other side of things,
Speaker 1: Like I'm not sure if if if the other side
Speaker 1: effects that this that this rhetoric could have. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: an interesting So during during the last election like national
Speaker 1: election cycle, there is one trement to use people who
Speaker 1: weren't voting in Florida, And I thought it was really
Speaker 1: interesting because there were there were several people they talked
Speaker 1: to who we're like, yeah, I don't vote because last
Speaker 1: time I voted was two thousands and they stole the election,
Speaker 1: which was literally which which yeah, and and you know
Speaker 1: i'd say that, yeah, Like I think it is slightly
Speaker 1: different when like two thousands, when actually like literally but
Speaker 1: there was there was the bricks like there there there
Speaker 1: Roger er Stone, Yeah, Roger Stone led a riot to
Speaker 1: stop like the votes from being counted, like whatever, weird Bush.
Speaker 1: I think people people got like like a bunch of
Speaker 1: people with like vaguely black names got like their names
Speaker 1: struck off the like the voting roles. Like there was
Speaker 1: a lot of yeah, but yeah, And I don't I
Speaker 1: don't know if it'll if it if the effect can
Speaker 1: work that strongly when it's like completely bullshit which was,
Speaker 1: I think it's yeah, interesting, I don't know. It's it's
Speaker 1: hard to say because it's it's it's unclear whether the
Speaker 1: voter turnout on the because like you know, there were
Speaker 1: times where they were pulling like fifty fifty between between
Speaker 1: between newsm an Elder, and it's unclear. I think definitely
Speaker 1: the big advertising push that corporate donors gave to Newsom
Speaker 1: in the month before the election did help get Democratic
Speaker 1: voter turnout, you know, like people voting for new getting
Speaker 1: people scared about the governor. That not was not ineffective,
Speaker 1: that that very much works. That did increase turn out there,
Speaker 1: But I don't know because like with the whole election
Speaker 1: being stolen rhetoric, that could both increase Republican voter turnout
Speaker 1: and there's also the side effect now where maybe it
Speaker 1: could decrease it because they're just disenfranchised about this concept.
Speaker 1: But this is kind of just speculation at this point.
Speaker 1: I don't have actual data backing up this claim right now.
Speaker 1: This is just something that I thought about while running
Speaker 1: this right up, I'm like, huh, I wonder if this
Speaker 1: could be a contributing factor in the future. People really
Speaker 1: I feel like they're always gonna lose. Maybe they just
Speaker 1: not not even are going to bother um. But it's
Speaker 1: hard to say. It's like, you know, the main reason
Speaker 1: why Elder lost wasn't due to newsome strength. That was
Speaker 1: because Elder is like, it's completely like he it was
Speaker 1: like it was the most yeah, like widely unqualified and
Speaker 1: like one of the more extreme candidates like running and yes,
Speaker 1: he did get a lot of support among Republicans, but
Speaker 1: among moderates and people you know, left of center in
Speaker 1: terms of like an American spectrum. Uh, they're like, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: this is gonna be a disaster if he gets elected.
Speaker 1: And that's the main reason why he didn't. Um, it's
Speaker 1: not due to Newsom being great. But I mean, Sophie
Speaker 1: did mention a few things that Newsom has done since then.
Speaker 1: Um so do do do do you want to say
Speaker 1: the specific details just so I don't have to look
Speaker 1: famously a big Newsome fans So yeah, not come on.
Speaker 1: Uh so not to give news some credit because this
Speaker 1: is like an obvious right thing to do situation. But um,
Speaker 1: at the beginning of October, the Senate Bill seven was
Speaker 1: signed into law. It was an unanimous vote and Newsom
Speaker 1: signed off on it to give back Bruce's speech, which
Speaker 1: was owned by a black family, Willa and Charles Bruce,
Speaker 1: back in their land was illegally taken away from them.
Speaker 1: It's a beach front plot in Manhattan Beach. And I
Speaker 1: signed into a lot of give it back. Uh that
Speaker 1: is I mean, yeah, yeah, more of that should be done.
Speaker 1: I mean that it is kind of the basis of like,
Speaker 1: you know, that is one side of land back, is
Speaker 1: just giving land back to people who used to have it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: of course this is this isn't tied to indigenous stuff.
Speaker 1: But you know, I've seen people make that same comparison
Speaker 1: for like, yeah, we should just be doing this more
Speaker 1: in general to a lot of people. Yeah. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: a I'm glad that that was done. It's also now
Speaker 1: illegal to remove a condom without consett in California, which
Speaker 1: is wait what Yeah, you're going to have to change
Speaker 1: a lot of things about how you have sex with Californians. Yeah,
Speaker 1: during intercourse, that's the it's the first state to do that,
Speaker 1: first of all. Huh. Yeah, and it's wild because under
Speaker 1: any reasonable definition, that's rape. Yeah yeah, it's just rap. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's absolutely rape. California also now requires menstral products in
Speaker 1: public schools, so that's a bare minimum. And that I
Speaker 1: didn't realize that it happened. Yea. And I want to
Speaker 1: be clear here, I'm not giving you some credit for this,
Speaker 1: but if he had lost the recall ellection, none of
Speaker 1: this would be happening. No, it's nice that he I'm
Speaker 1: sure some of this was him. Kind of providing a
Speaker 1: sop to the people who lined up to stop the recall,
Speaker 1: and those are good things that were done. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: I think I think that's sort of an important thing
Speaker 1: to understand about when politicians occasionally do good things. It's
Speaker 1: like they don't do good things because they want to
Speaker 1: do them. They they they do things that benefit from
Speaker 1: you because they're either in some ways scared of you,
Speaker 1: or it's because they need to buy they buy you off,
Speaker 1: and and that that is, you know, that is that
Speaker 1: is a legitimate way that good things happen. Like, I've
Speaker 1: got a couple other Uh, there's been a lot signed
Speaker 1: in recently, So I got a couple of other ones
Speaker 1: that I that I think are relevant to our show.
Speaker 1: California will not streamline extend assisted death law, So that's
Speaker 1: that's good. That reduces the time until terminal patients can
Speaker 1: choose to be given fatal drugs. So starting January one,
Speaker 1: the waiting period required time a patient makes separate oral
Speaker 1: request for medication would drop to forty down from the
Speaker 1: current minimum fifteen days. That is pretty rad Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: there's just there's there's a I mean, we'll see if
Speaker 1: it's it's hard a lot, there's a lot. It's it's hard,
Speaker 1: it's hard to be like worse than Larry Elder. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's this one definitely would not get get through for California.
Speaker 1: California Acts, a lot of strip badges from bad officers,
Speaker 1: like very vaguely written, is very vague. But yeah, well
Speaker 1: we'll see what happens to Like, No, none of the
Speaker 1: stuff would have happened under a larial thing. And I
Speaker 1: am surprised at like surprised that some of those things
Speaker 1: actually got through because I'm I'm surprised that democratic politicians
Speaker 1: would actually vote for those things we put office. That's
Speaker 1: why I was like basicallyasically like the condom thing. Yeah, yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: And I was not expecting that to go through some
Speaker 1: science legislation to extend to go cocktails. Wait, all right,
Speaker 1: that's sure, Okay, more where am I to cocktail heads? Sorry? Alright,
Speaker 1: So at least larryl there's not in office. There's still
Speaker 1: a lot of climate issues and maybe this rhetoric around
Speaker 1: stealing the elections not gonna work every single time they
Speaker 1: do it. Um, that's kind of the main that's the
Speaker 1: main things that I was going to talk about, and
Speaker 1: it is it is. I mean, one of the things
Speaker 1: that people are talking about in a lot of the
Speaker 1: spaces I generally agree with is like the foolishness of
Speaker 1: voting as harm reduction. And there's been a lot of
Speaker 1: if you want to believe that it isn't, there's been
Speaker 1: a lot of information coming up from the Biden in
Speaker 1: a the Ministry ation that will support that belief. Um.
Speaker 1: But what we're saying right now in California's group that
Speaker 1: can be like the these are not none of this
Speaker 1: is going to fundamentally change the major problems that are
Speaker 1: confronting us. But but a bunch of those things are
Speaker 1: going to, Like life's going to be easier for some
Speaker 1: little girls whose families don't have much money. You know,
Speaker 1: life got easier for that one family who got their
Speaker 1: land back. Um, you know, potentially it's going to be
Speaker 1: easier to get bad police officer or to get particularly
Speaker 1: bad police officers off the street. And that's not that's
Speaker 1: not nothing like when we say voting can be and
Speaker 1: I'm not saying that it usually is, but when we
Speaker 1: it can reduce harm, that's what it means. It means
Speaker 1: that like oh, some bad things that that would be
Speaker 1: worse are not as bad because of this, not that
Speaker 1: everything is better, A lot of stuff will be the
Speaker 1: same and is the same in California, like ecologically, nothing
Speaker 1: logically fundically fundamentally changed, but some ships a little easier
Speaker 1: for certain groups of people as some stuff and specific specifically,
Speaker 1: I think the getting getting more like contraceptive products and
Speaker 1: menstrual products inside public schools is one of the literally
Speaker 1: the best things we can do, like like for the
Speaker 1: whole country. It is like something that if that was
Speaker 1: required in every public school, that would make so many
Speaker 1: people's lives better a ridiculous degree significantly reduces harm in
Speaker 1: a specific way. And I think that just because like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's not going to stop us all from
Speaker 1: burning up, um, but that doesn't mean it's not worthwhile.
Speaker 1: So those those are the three stories that I wanted
Speaker 1: to give some updates for, um because I know, you know,
Speaker 1: there were changes happened, you know, very soon after posting
Speaker 1: those episodes. UM. I still think the California ones are
Speaker 1: worth listening to because they do lay out a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff around around California's climate, UM and the specific
Speaker 1: weird stuff that it has with its specific weird things
Speaker 1: that has with its election process. Um, I think the
Speaker 1: line three episodes are going to be pretty good to
Speaker 1: go back to as well. Um, and then uh, I
Speaker 1: at the the specific Cop City thing in Atlanta, that
Speaker 1: is the stuff that I am. It's gonna be the
Speaker 1: most like ongoing thing stills because that's going to be
Speaker 1: an ongoing project. So I'm sure we'll come back to
Speaker 1: the Cops City at different points throughout the next few months.
Speaker 1: So that that that that that's the updates. Um. Any
Speaker 1: any any closing notes from either Christopher, Robert or Sophie. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just just I do well excuse me, okay, sorright Sophie. Sorry,
Speaker 1: just I just just remind him we've said this earlier
Speaker 1: in the episode that like we're just giving you brief
Speaker 1: brief sniffets about this stuff. There's a lot there's a
Speaker 1: lot of really good articles online that go go deep
Speaker 1: into these things, and we'll post our sources on the website. Yep, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we we we we do. We do a good job
Speaker 1: I think most of the time. Yes, yes, but we
Speaker 1: were great. Yeah, we're we're the only heroes. That's fair
Speaker 1: to say, absolutely, But do you do not have a
Speaker 1: podcast be the only source of information absolutely lot of
Speaker 1: things like don't listen to if you think more of
Speaker 1: a of a left perspective, that is that that goes
Speaker 1: in some directions we don't. It's going down. Is a
Speaker 1: lovely place to check out Margaret Killjoy's um uh live
Speaker 1: Like the World Is Dying. St Andrew's YouTube channel. Um
Speaker 1: he does some some really incredible stuff. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: there's all sorts of good people out there. And then
Speaker 1: also like history books more than anything, like history books,
Speaker 1: history books for the thing that radicalized me. Yeah, if
Speaker 1: you want to read more about the new sub notable
Speaker 1: laws signed recently, the k c r A and Sacramento
Speaker 1: did A did a really good breakdown article. Oh sorry,
Speaker 1: so it it's okay. And and as a note, we
Speaker 1: will be doing more episodes like this over time, as
Speaker 1: like stories that we cover have additional things happen to them.
Speaker 1: This is like we don't want to just be like
Speaker 1: dropping a story and then ignore whatever happens next. Um.
Speaker 1: Sometimes that don't mean following up with people that we're
Speaker 1: talking to on the ground, but you know, we are
Speaker 1: trying to like keep you updated on the things that
Speaker 1: we think are important, you know, even when they end
Speaker 1: uh in a in a broadly positive sense or whatever.
Speaker 1: And uh, lastly, what was the name of that brisket
Speaker 1: place in Atlantic, because I'm sure people are gonna ask
Speaker 1: about it. Oh, I don't remember. It was some shitty
Speaker 1: little place in the middle of South Atlanta. Um and
Speaker 1: like a fucking strip mall that was really helpful. I
Speaker 1: don't remember. So if it was like eleven years ago,
Speaker 1: what do you I don't remember the best brisket you've
Speaker 1: ever had, and it was but the best. Like if
Speaker 1: you know anything about good barbecue, the best barbecue you
Speaker 1: ever have is either cooked by like your uncle or
Speaker 1: is cooked in some shitty little place with a diastern
Speaker 1: that wouldn't pass a code inspection. That is true that
Speaker 1: the more the more codes it violates, the better than bisket. Um. Anyway,
Speaker 1: if you see the chef actively ship on the grill,
Speaker 1: that means just going to be incredible. Jesus Christ, Twitter
Speaker 1: and Instagram, what happened here? Poticles out media? Subscribe to
Speaker 1: the feed and leave a five star review. That's it.
Speaker 1: Don't don't don't shoot on your brisket grill on everything?
Speaker 1: Alrighty Garrison, is that good? Is that the show? No?
Speaker 1: Just keep going? Though Okay, well it could happen. Here
Speaker 1: is the show that A tonal noise is my introduction
Speaker 1: this week because I'm a hack in a fraud. Who
Speaker 1: isn't a hack in a fraud? Is is our guest
Speaker 1: this week. St Andrew. St Andrew, you are a solar
Speaker 1: punk anarchist from Trinidad. Um. You have a YouTube channel,
Speaker 1: UM where you talk about solar punk. Um you talked
Speaker 1: about stuff like seed bombing. Yeah. I'm just very excited
Speaker 1: to have you on the show because I'm a big
Speaker 1: fan of YouTube channel. Thank you, glad to be here,
Speaker 1: big fan of your work as well, Andrew. I kind
Speaker 1: of wanted to start with why this Why solar punk
Speaker 1: is important? Because, um, I think it's easy for folks
Speaker 1: who just kind of skim it to see it. It's
Speaker 1: just like, oh, it's an aesthetic. It's maybe an art
Speaker 1: style or a fiction style. UM. Maybe something that's neat,
Speaker 1: but not something that has like a lot of inherent
Speaker 1: value to people trying to change the world. And obviously
Speaker 1: you disagree with that. I disagree with it to UM.
Speaker 1: A quote I keep coming back to again and again
Speaker 1: is one from Werner Herzog in the nineteen seventies and
Speaker 1: it was something along the lines of I think that
Speaker 1: without better myths, were destined to go the way of
Speaker 1: the dinosaurs. Um. Actually of I forget his name right now,
Speaker 1: But there's this excellent, excellent book called The Truth About Stories,
Speaker 1: and I think what it really emphasizes is throwing the
Speaker 1: book is the importance of stories, on how stories impact
Speaker 1: how we navigate the woot, which is why I sort
Speaker 1: of embraced the punk you know, as a story that
Speaker 1: we can work with green forward. Yeah, I think, Um,
Speaker 1: I think it's incredibly important to have better stories, better
Speaker 1: myths because for one thing, I think where the Left
Speaker 1: falls down a lot is not having is accurately diagnosing
Speaker 1: the problems without providing a better look at at the
Speaker 1: at the future, you know. Um. And when the problems
Speaker 1: are when the people who do kind of propose solutions,
Speaker 1: it's often um not in a way people can feel.
Speaker 1: One of the benefits that that that the right has,
Speaker 1: that fascism has, is that they they're very good at
Speaker 1: providing people with myths and providing people with kind of
Speaker 1: a fictional look at at their idealized world that draws
Speaker 1: people in. You know, you can laugh at the right
Speaker 1: you know, they have lot of people that work on
Speaker 1: like meta narratives and that's very, very core to their ideology. Um, So,
Speaker 1: I guess where I'd like to start with you, Andrew,
Speaker 1: because this is kind of the first time I think
Speaker 1: we've really talked about solar punk on on this show,
Speaker 1: even though from the beginning before any of these episodes dropped,
Speaker 1: this was always a central part of our discussion about
Speaker 1: what the show was was going to be. Um, would
Speaker 1: you kind of provide an introduction to to what solar
Speaker 1: punk is for our listeners? Sure? Sure, So I would
Speaker 1: say that solar punk is a vision of the future
Speaker 1: that places emphasis on the existing world and how we
Speaker 1: get to that future from where we are now. So
Speaker 1: it emphasizes the need for environmental sustainability, for self governance,
Speaker 1: and for a toronomy and social justice. It emphasizes the
Speaker 1: need for you know, human and ecocentric ends to really
Speaker 1: be in sync, and it aims to really heal the
Speaker 1: current rift between humanity and Nietzsche. It also recognizes, of course,
Speaker 1: that there isn't this binary between climate change happens and
Speaker 1: climate change doesn't happen. Rather, it understands that how we
Speaker 1: navigate it, we Uh, have a variety of consequences and
Speaker 1: some of the positive, some of the negative, but it's
Speaker 1: up to us to really shape that. Yeah, and it's UM.
Speaker 1: I want to drill into a couple of facets of that.
Speaker 1: But I want to quickly plug one of your YouTube
Speaker 1: videos for folks who kind of want a more involved
Speaker 1: um explanation and background. You have a video called what
Speaker 1: is solar Punk on your channel Saint Andrewism like Andrew
Speaker 1: I s m UM that I think is a fantastic
Speaker 1: introduction not just to like the aesthetics of solar punk,
Speaker 1: but some of the practical some of the practical kind
Speaker 1: of expressions of it. And and two of the ones
Speaker 1: you lists like examples of here's here's what this is
Speaker 1: is like actual practis you know, and not just an
Speaker 1: aesthetic is seed bombing um. And then you talk about
Speaker 1: this this very interesting kind of like terra Cotta air conditioning,
Speaker 1: which I think is I think it's neat because it's
Speaker 1: it's one of the problems that I think with kind
Speaker 1: of some versions of of of particularly kind of on
Speaker 1: the more liberal end of of of solar punk imagining
Speaker 1: is just sort of like ways of replacing um, ways
Speaker 1: of gaining the same kind of consumptive benefits that exist,
Speaker 1: I guess not even not even like greenwashing, right, greenwashing.
Speaker 1: Like here, let's get the same consumptive benefits we get scrapers, yes, skyscrapers,
Speaker 1: the same level of consumerism, same level of you know,
Speaker 1: destructive extractive practices. But we have some flowers and some trees.
Speaker 1: So yeah, and that's not enough. But at the same time,
Speaker 1: there are things that aren't. Like air conditioning is contributes
Speaker 1: massively to climate change. It's also not a luxury. Like
Speaker 1: if you live in a place where it's a hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty degrees a lot of the summer, that's not
Speaker 1: a luxury. Yeah, this is going from someone in a
Speaker 1: tropical country. Yeah, definitely a necessity. Yeah, So I wonder
Speaker 1: if you could talk about kind of those two, I mean,
Speaker 1: or if you have different ones you'd like to pick,
Speaker 1: but just kind of what you see is sort of
Speaker 1: the practice expressions of solar punk, sort of beyond the aesthetic,
Speaker 1: although we're going to drill into the aesthetics some too,
Speaker 1: because I also think that's important. Right, So, I think
Speaker 1: some of my favorite manifestations of the punk in a
Speaker 1: practical context, things like um, gorilla gardening. Grilla gardening is
Speaker 1: probably the biggest one because it's one that someone could
Speaker 1: literally pick up and do today or tomorrow, you know,
Speaker 1: as soon as they hear about it, doing about it.
Speaker 1: Just get some clay, get some seeds, you know, and
Speaker 1: put those things together. Then as you're walking home or
Speaker 1: walk into the store, just toss them wherever there some
Speaker 1: free dude. UM. So that's a fun one. There's also,
Speaker 1: of course things like little bit one involved, like community
Speaker 1: gardening and particularly forest gardening, because that will provide a
Speaker 1: level of food autonomy and agency for people who have
Speaker 1: been healing it for a long time from the process
Speaker 1: of food production. UM. They're also practices like compassing or
Speaker 1: corpach ng and it's like a way to produce lumber
Speaker 1: without chopping down a whole set of trees, so you
Speaker 1: are able to get the wood from the trees, but
Speaker 1: the tree remains alive. UM. There's also things like, of
Speaker 1: course solar powered technology, whether it be algae based UM
Speaker 1: windows that you know extract energy from the sun, or
Speaker 1: solar sales or solar ovens uh or like the terra
Speaker 1: cotta deconditioning, which, by the way, I learned recently contrary
Speaker 1: work in a human environment. Yeah, but yeah, there are
Speaker 1: a lot of difference opportunities there also there are things
Speaker 1: like you know, tool shares and make up spaces and
Speaker 1: seed libraries, all different ways to sort of bring it
Speaker 1: into fruition that is. Yeah, and I uh, I think
Speaker 1: a lot of that's really valuable. UM. I'm interested in
Speaker 1: in parts sort of your your attitude on UM what
Speaker 1: let me think about how to phrase this, UM, what
Speaker 1: do you think are kind of the things as we
Speaker 1: talk about sort of the things that can be at
Speaker 1: least potentially replaced UM with with less extract of less
Speaker 1: consumptive methods. Is sort of an example of solar punk
Speaker 1: practice is replacing those things. There's also things that we're
Speaker 1: not going to be able to have if we actually
Speaker 1: want to live in a more sustainable UM future that
Speaker 1: that doesn't contribute to some of the nightmares that we're
Speaker 1: all going to be increasingly facing. UM. You're you know,
Speaker 1: and again, I think it's it's telling that so much
Speaker 1: of kind of the future fantasies of that are written
Speaker 1: by people who come from you know, my part of
Speaker 1: the world. United States focus on like kind of post
Speaker 1: scarcity methods of of guaranteeing the continuation of consumption just
Speaker 1: through in some cases like fantastic methods um you know,
Speaker 1: magical three D printers and the like. Um, you come
Speaker 1: from a very different part of the world, very different perspective,
Speaker 1: what do you see as the things that like, we're
Speaker 1: going to have to give up? Coming from a country
Speaker 1: that is actually reliant on oil and natural gas production,
Speaker 1: we have to get rid of cause we definitely absolutely
Speaker 1: have to get rid of cause um free to ships
Speaker 1: as well, and really the whole way that you know,
Speaker 1: global supply chains are structured right now. Not to say
Speaker 1: that they won't be any sort of global um sharing
Speaker 1: of resources in the future, but the way that it's
Speaker 1: happening right now, it can't continue to go on. We
Speaker 1: can't continue to structure our cities and our lives around
Speaker 1: cause you know, and other methods of gas guzzlin transportation
Speaker 1: because we're literally going to run out. And we've known
Speaker 1: this for a long time, but it's nearing. The day
Speaker 1: is nearing, CLUSI and clusa, and yeah, we we have
Speaker 1: to find a way to do without it. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it's it's I think tell like, there's a couple of
Speaker 1: things that are important. One of them is you can't
Speaker 1: just say we have to stop global trade because in
Speaker 1: global travel, because the people have have sought and done
Speaker 1: that for as long as there have been people in
Speaker 1: one form or another. It's it's a fundamentally human thing.
Speaker 1: But there are aspects of it, like you know, expecting
Speaker 1: that every kind of fruit and vegetable will be available
Speaker 1: year round, which is certainly thing that we in the
Speaker 1: United States expect. Um. That doesn't that that's not part
Speaker 1: of a realistic future. Um. And if it's part of
Speaker 1: the future, then it's only going to be part of
Speaker 1: the future for an ever shrinking chunk of of the country.
Speaker 1: And you can see that in sort of um or
Speaker 1: of the of the West, and you can see that
Speaker 1: in kind of um the like what we're dealing with
Speaker 1: right now with like the supply line shortages and failures,
Speaker 1: and like one of the I think the symbols of
Speaker 1: how far we have to go in my country is
Speaker 1: the degree to which people are freaking out by the
Speaker 1: fact that Christmas presents might be late. Um. Let alone
Speaker 1: being like, yeah, you might not be able to buy coffee,
Speaker 1: um um ever, or all the time you know, you
Speaker 1: might not be able to get tomatoes in December. Um,
Speaker 1: which UM, I think one benefits too for the gattening.
Speaker 1: And that's what's in my inset is as you learn
Speaker 1: to so you also learn to reap. Right. So a
Speaker 1: lot of people who get into grilla gardening also end
Speaker 1: up getting into foraging, and they are absent stuff you
Speaker 1: could download that allow you to, you know, learn how
Speaker 1: to identify plants in your area. And we surprise the
Speaker 1: number of plants in your area that are you know,
Speaker 1: useful for tease or for salads or for whatever purposes
Speaker 1: that can be used as replacements. I'm not sure if
Speaker 1: they could replace coffee, but they could be beneficial, um,
Speaker 1: in recognizing how we have to live with our local ecosystems. Basically, yeah,
Speaker 1: and a big you know, when you talk about living
Speaker 1: learning how to live with our ecosystem stuff like planting
Speaker 1: um forest gardens and the like or food forest I
Speaker 1: think is the term. UM. I think something that has
Speaker 1: to be discussed is the matter of indigenous sovereignty, especially
Speaker 1: when we're talking about you know, it's not just you know,
Speaker 1: North America, a lot of chunks of the globe indigenous
Speaker 1: people had spent you know, in some cases thousands of
Speaker 1: generations setting forests up in order to sustainably produce food. Um.
Speaker 1: And when when colonialism arrived, that was often just seen
Speaker 1: as like, oh, this is this is these are wild
Speaker 1: places for us to for us to extract or tear
Speaker 1: down and replace with monoc cultures, you know, single crops. Um.
Speaker 1: And so a big part of actually building back that capacity,
Speaker 1: the capacity of us to to survive off of the
Speaker 1: food that can sustainably grow where we live is is
Speaker 1: looking back to those indigenous methods and and also um,
Speaker 1: you know, giving back land in a lot of cases, um.
Speaker 1: And yeah, that's something you talk about in your videos
Speaker 1: that I think is really important to um to to
Speaker 1: to to explain to people. Yeah, I mean there's there
Speaker 1: really is no way to separate the violance and oppressive
Speaker 1: institution of clunealism with the equosido Nietzsche of modern states.
Speaker 1: You know, those two are deeply intertwined, deeply married together.
Speaker 1: And so you can't fight climate change without addressing the
Speaker 1: issue of severeignty of indigenous sergnity and land back. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's um, it's really interesting. I've been I've been up
Speaker 1: hunting on mountain Hood with a friend who is who
Speaker 1: went to school for like forestry management. And as we
Speaker 1: were driving way to drive through a chunk of the
Speaker 1: reservation in order to get to the BLM land where
Speaker 1: we're able to hunt, and he pointed it out, and
Speaker 1: once he did, it was immediately obvious just how different
Speaker 1: the land under indigenous control looked from the land, you know,
Speaker 1: just feed away that was being managed by the federal
Speaker 1: government in terms of like how much better the forest
Speaker 1: management was, how much how much smarter it was it
Speaker 1: was managed in order to reduce the chances of like
Speaker 1: a ladder fire that that actually kills you know, the
Speaker 1: trees and whatnot. There's this whole thing blowing up on
Speaker 1: Twitter right now where you've got a chunk of Marxists
Speaker 1: tour are trying to frame land back as uh, just
Speaker 1: like shifting ownership of resources, which I think is really
Speaker 1: missing the point. But I find interesting about Twitter is
Speaker 1: the exact same discourses are repeated over and over and
Speaker 1: over again. So I remember this exact conversation happening around
Speaker 1: this time last year, around April last year, um earlier
Speaker 1: this year as well. It's just the same discourses get
Speaker 1: recycled over and over again, and it's reach a point
Speaker 1: for me I realized that these people don't want to
Speaker 1: learn about land back or what it really means because
Speaker 1: they are invested in the structure as it exists and
Speaker 1: they don't want to have to interrogate that. So, Yeah,
Speaker 1: this will out to be an interesting thing of knowing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's UM, it's it's it's frustrating. UM. I guess
Speaker 1: that that acts as like a general uh description of
Speaker 1: Twitter discourse, but certainly does. Yeah. I think it's I
Speaker 1: think it's telling the degree to which people, even on
Speaker 1: the left treat it as a fantasy as opposed to
Speaker 1: dogged lye pragmatic um and and proven so like proven
Speaker 1: by like like you know, like you can read you
Speaker 1: in reports that will that will essentially say land back
Speaker 1: in the space of a five page you know, study
Speaker 1: on how indigenous land management functions a great deal better
Speaker 1: than UM than a lot of the stuff that's like
Speaker 1: centralized by the federal government, where we're like, our federal
Speaker 1: government is terrible at land management. UM, And it's part
Speaker 1: of the it's part of the problem. I think one
Speaker 1: of the things that that excites me about solar punk
Speaker 1: as anesthetic and idea is getting back to this relationship
Speaker 1: with the land as opposed to talking about just preserving
Speaker 1: it um as talking about managing it. Because because none
Speaker 1: of our none of the land that people live on
Speaker 1: is like wild in the sense that people mean it
Speaker 1: as it's been cultivated. And that's that's the thing, right.
Speaker 1: The whole philosophy of you know, um land preservation as
Speaker 1: was taken up by the US government with the whole
Speaker 1: um you know, you can stop forest fires kind of
Speaker 1: thing ended up leading to more forest fires downline, because
Speaker 1: they we have a rule in the ecosystem not just
Speaker 1: there to stand back from a far and to observe it.
Speaker 1: So we don't do our part to manage the underbrush
Speaker 1: and whatnots and clear to we and exercise you know,
Speaker 1: controlled fires, but we end up in the situation we're
Speaker 1: in today, you know, cultivation not just sterile preservation. Now.
Speaker 1: One of the things that you talk about well because
Speaker 1: because one of the more frustrating discourses this is not
Speaker 1: just a Twitter thing, this has been going on for years,
Speaker 1: is the discourse around GMO crops. And usually I would say,
Speaker 1: like the two most commonly heard sides are GMOs are
Speaker 1: bad because you know, monsanto cancer whatever, or GMOs are good.
Speaker 1: Um end end thought. Um. And the thing that you
Speaker 1: point out, which is I think the accurate take is GMOs.
Speaker 1: The preponderance of evidence says that, like, there's nothing inherently
Speaker 1: dangerous about genetically modified crops, but the way in which
Speaker 1: they're often used in order to create these massive mono
Speaker 1: cultures is really toxic. So there's a lot of promise
Speaker 1: um for GMOs in terms of keeping our our existence
Speaker 1: on this planet sustainable. But what's not sustainable is the
Speaker 1: kind of industrialized agriculture where you have ten thousand acres
Speaker 1: of one thing which just doesn't happen in nature exactly exactly.
Speaker 1: And if you look at how genetic modification and to
Speaker 1: please prior to you know, all advanced funds in genetic
Speaker 1: modification technology, um, I'm not so how many people are
Speaker 1: familiar with the dozens upon dozens, if not hundreds of
Speaker 1: varieties of just corn that were present in the Americas
Speaker 1: prior to colonization. A lot of those varieties were wiped
Speaker 1: out or was suppressed in fear of these mono cultures.
Speaker 1: But if we're able to culturally diversity of these crops
Speaker 1: and really bring some of them back through jestic modification,
Speaker 1: that would really help us with, you know, food resilience
Speaker 1: in a world with an increasingly unpredictable climate. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that. I mean, I think you said it perfectly.
Speaker 1: I want to move back to kind of what I
Speaker 1: introduced the episode with, which is talking about the value
Speaker 1: of of fiction and myth making in a in a
Speaker 1: very pragmatic sense. I guess I'll start by saying, I
Speaker 1: think one of the clearest signs of the danger that
Speaker 1: we're in and how toxic our society has gotten. Um
Speaker 1: And I am speaking from a primarily US centric standpoint here,
Speaker 1: but I don't think it's unique to the United States.
Speaker 1: Is the extent to which trust me um as as
Speaker 1: the saying is when the US sneeze, So anytime there's
Speaker 1: some phenomenon happening in the US, there are the coffee cuts.
Speaker 1: And I do think this is pretty global. I mean,
Speaker 1: you see it in like South Korean films and all over.
Speaker 1: What you're going to say, yeah, the obsession with apocalypse
Speaker 1: and when we when we go to the future, it's
Speaker 1: always a dystopia. Um. There's a degree to which we've
Speaker 1: almost forgotten how to imagine utopia, or even not just utopia,
Speaker 1: just a way of living that is an improvement in
Speaker 1: a lot of ways of future that's better. We've forgotten
Speaker 1: to do both utopian fiction and any just kind of
Speaker 1: like positive fiction in a lot of ways, because yeah,
Speaker 1: it's understandable because the world is kind of terrible right
Speaker 1: now in a lot of in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1: But there's also that's been utopie being fiction inside other
Speaker 1: terrible worlds as well. I think just the modern interconnected
Speaker 1: media sphere has really rewarded this type of like dystopian
Speaker 1: and collapse based apocalypse fiction. Yeah, and I'm sure that's
Speaker 1: that's worth interrogating. Why but it is a problem that
Speaker 1: needs to be solved. Yeah, and it is. And and
Speaker 1: you're I think it's important. It's not entirely based in
Speaker 1: how fucked up things are, because like when the first
Speaker 1: Star Trek came out, we were at like the height
Speaker 1: of the Cold War. Things were terrible. There was a
Speaker 1: lot of utopian fiction during World War Two. During World
Speaker 1: War two, UM, I will always be impressed by the
Speaker 1: fact that Gene Roddenberry saw it as incredibly important both
Speaker 1: to be like, Okay, well in the future, like in
Speaker 1: the middle of the civil rights movement, in the future,
Speaker 1: we will have overcome like racism, but not just that,
Speaker 1: but like I'm gonna I'm gonna stick a Russian on
Speaker 1: the bridge too, because nations are going to end as
Speaker 1: a concept and like this stuff won't matter, um, and
Speaker 1: that just that kind of utopian fiction, at least at
Speaker 1: this at the scale of popularity that you know, Star
Speaker 1: Trek wasn't its time just isn't present anymore. And I
Speaker 1: that's tremendously worrying to me. And I see a lot
Speaker 1: of hope in in Solar Punk for that, um. And
Speaker 1: I guess for starters, I'm interested in in your thoughts
Speaker 1: on this, and you're interested in Andrew, what you think
Speaker 1: is like the pragmatic value of of of positive a
Speaker 1: fiction that that that imagines a better world. Yes, so
Speaker 1: I've done probably I think I've done like two videos
Speaker 1: on Sola Punk soufar Um, two major videos on Sula Punk,
Speaker 1: as well as a smaller video two other smaller videos. Um.
Speaker 1: And what I've seen in the comments and in the
Speaker 1: general social media reaction again and again is sol the
Speaker 1: Punk saved my life. You know, Sola Punk has given
Speaker 1: me hoop. You know, I was slipping into the spare,
Speaker 1: but this video really give me a jump start to
Speaker 1: try something new and to start a fresh and to
Speaker 1: pursue action as opposed to justest lying down and taking
Speaker 1: whatever comes next, and that that is it for me.
Speaker 1: You know, I think the fact that sulapunk offers like
Speaker 1: an energizing vision. It's not just a vision, it's an
Speaker 1: energizing vision because in every step with the way, it
Speaker 1: shows what you can do. You know, when you show
Speaker 1: when you look at sula punk art or um, you
Speaker 1: look at the small but growing genre of sulapunk literary media,
Speaker 1: or you know, you look at but there's don't have
Speaker 1: many silopunk video games right now, but hopefully there will
Speaker 1: be in the future. When you look at the various
Speaker 1: forms of silopunk media that are coming out and people's
Speaker 1: responses to them, you see that it's not like as
Speaker 1: all mentioning like Star Trek, where it's all this far
Speaker 1: out technology that we can only aspire to for now.
Speaker 1: You know, sol the punk is something that you can
Speaker 1: literally put in your backyard or your balcony or your home,
Speaker 1: or your school or your community. You know, you could
Speaker 1: put these things in place like from now, you know,
Speaker 1: and you can incorporate it into your politics as you know,
Speaker 1: as they are, and they could also help to push
Speaker 1: your politics forward, you know, because through solar punk, we
Speaker 1: can open up discussions about Okay, so how do we
Speaker 1: ensure that people live comfortably within the parameters of you know,
Speaker 1: the Earth's carrying capacity? You know, you open up a
Speaker 1: discussions about indigenous sovereignty, you discussions about, um, the relationship
Speaker 1: between the google North and the global South, and responsibility
Speaker 1: with regard to our response to climate change. Well, you
Speaker 1: open up a lot of different discussions through the realm
Speaker 1: of sulla punk. It energizes people, as I said, and yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that is its progmatic purpose. It doesn't stand alone,
Speaker 1: of course, but it is a driving force. Yeah. Would
Speaker 1: you kind of give out a list of if people
Speaker 1: are you know, if this is someone's first introduction to
Speaker 1: the concept of solar punk, what is some reading you
Speaker 1: want to draw people towards. What are some fiction like
Speaker 1: I know you mentioned The Dispossessed by Laguin, right, um,
Speaker 1: which often gets cited. Um. Yeah, I'm interested in kind
Speaker 1: of other other recommendations you might have for our listeners.
Speaker 1: Are that right? So? Um, I'm still getting into the
Speaker 1: genre myself. So I don't have too many UM recommendations.
Speaker 1: There are some UM decent short story collections UM like
Speaker 1: sun Vaults by a couple of different authors. They as
Speaker 1: well so multi species Cities, so the punk urban futures UM.
Speaker 1: And the one I read most recently was Ecotopia, which
Speaker 1: is quite as much older than all the others. It's
Speaker 1: actually a book that was published in the UM and
Speaker 1: not all aspects of its politics things I agree with,
Speaker 1: but I think for a first UM it was one
Speaker 1: of the really the first of its kind in that
Speaker 1: sort of eco utopian genre that really laid out what
Speaker 1: the society would look like. UM. The book is structured
Speaker 1: in a series of novel entries and notebook reports by
Speaker 1: a journalist from the United States who has gone to
Speaker 1: this country called Ecotopia, which is sort of where the
Speaker 1: Pacific Northwest States are, and he's basically breaking down he's
Speaker 1: going to different parts of the country and breaking down
Speaker 1: how they have lived and how they have decided structure
Speaker 1: their lives. UM. And even though not every aspect of
Speaker 1: it is one that I would want to see implemented,
Speaker 1: I still think that it really sparks the imagination, really
Speaker 1: gets you thinking, well, maybe I wouldn't do it this week,
Speaker 1: but how else could this be done? And I think
Speaker 1: the capacity for sulpunk stories suggest generate that thought and
Speaker 1: generate one's imagination is very useful in a world where
Speaker 1: we don't really get to use our imagination as much,
Speaker 1: not really since childhood, you know. And um, yeah, I
Speaker 1: I think it's often understated the degree to which using
Speaker 1: your imagination is vitally necessary part of actual a radical politics. Um.
Speaker 1: And I think there's a lot of people who consider
Speaker 1: themselves radicals, you know, some of these some of these
Speaker 1: not to you know, slam every Marxist Leninist on the planet,
Speaker 1: but certainly some of the ones who were coming up
Speaker 1: with these bad faith criticisms of land back. It's like,
Speaker 1: you're not a radical, You're a conservative who wants to
Speaker 1: go back to a different kind of problematic thing. Um.
Speaker 1: It is more the fact that the Soviet Union poisoned
Speaker 1: like the largest body of water in Europe. You know,
Speaker 1: all the different things that the Soviet Union did that
Speaker 1: were horrible for the environment and extractive. And it's interesting that,
Speaker 1: you know, these people who call themselves radicals, but the
Speaker 1: very foost um encounter with a radical idea, their fuost
Speaker 1: instinct is to shut down. The whost instinct is to
Speaker 1: just pushed back against it, whereas not to my own
Speaker 1: corn or anything. But you know, when I see an
Speaker 1: idea that I haven't encountered before that may seem strange
Speaker 1: to me, that challenges my precontinutions, my first reaction is
Speaker 1: not to shout about how this goes against everything then
Speaker 1: and said, you know, my first reaction is to investigated
Speaker 1: and to open space for it in my mind, to really,
Speaker 1: you know, tune it around and imagine what it might
Speaker 1: look like and how it might fit with what I
Speaker 1: have learned about before. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, I mean I
Speaker 1: think that's that's that's great advice for radical politics. It's
Speaker 1: also just good life advice, Yeah, especially for engaging with
Speaker 1: ideas that you are less keen on at the moment
Speaker 1: or or or just unaware of. H I mean, my
Speaker 1: whole thing is if I have like a strong gut
Speaker 1: reaction to something, it might be because it may be
Speaker 1: hitting a pot of me that might be benefiting from
Speaker 1: that system, you know. I mean, I don't benefit from
Speaker 1: the system in a lot of respects, you know, as
Speaker 1: a black guy from the Caribbean, but as a man
Speaker 1: as in as a c SIS headman, you know, I
Speaker 1: do have privileges that I must be aware of, and
Speaker 1: I can't just like be so quick to shut down
Speaker 1: you know, something that might even a bit uncomfortable. You know, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's such a valuable thing to keep in mind,
Speaker 1: especially as a a more or less SIS white guy
Speaker 1: like a you know, a significant number of people listening
Speaker 1: are if you're uncomfortable by a new idea? Is it?
Speaker 1: Is it because the idea is bad? Or is because
Speaker 1: it strikes at an area in which you may not
Speaker 1: even have, like thought about being privileged, Like I'm I'm
Speaker 1: uncomfortable I have even though there's no I have no
Speaker 1: intellectual argument against it, with the idea of of INDI
Speaker 1: our use of cars as they exist, because I love
Speaker 1: I love to drive. But that's also heavily rooted in
Speaker 1: in in tremendous privilege on my behalf, um a culture,
Speaker 1: and so yeah, and um, you know, we we we
Speaker 1: we did talk about that a bit and the opening
Speaker 1: episodes of season two, the idea that like a more
Speaker 1: you know, when we we kind of had our little
Speaker 1: utopian ending, the idea that like, well, maybe you'd have
Speaker 1: a car that's communally owned and used for certain tasks.
Speaker 1: But you know, the idea of of of car culture
Speaker 1: as the center of a city is um is death.
Speaker 1: It's just death. When we talked about getting past cars,
Speaker 1: is not to say that like people will never use
Speaker 1: vehicles that move again, Like obviously we will. They're necessary
Speaker 1: for something and all going back to horse drawn buggies.
Speaker 1: I think one of the last things on like solar
Speaker 1: punk and kind of tying into the whole kind of
Speaker 1: nature of the shows, I really liked enter your point
Speaker 1: on like how solar punk is like an energizing force
Speaker 1: and I feel like we have very few of those
Speaker 1: on the left and especially on the anarchist left. Um,
Speaker 1: Like i've i've, i've, i've, I've had my decent stint
Speaker 1: of like anarcho nihilism. And the problem, like the problem
Speaker 1: with that is like it's very easy, Like anarcho nihilism
Speaker 1: is one of the easiest ideologies to grasp onto because
Speaker 1: it solidifies all of your bad feelings. Um. But it
Speaker 1: also it's most the people who I know who are
Speaker 1: like real into anarch nihilism, they're generally not very happy
Speaker 1: people because it's kind of it's kind of miserable all
Speaker 1: the time. Um, and sure they like scoff at like
Speaker 1: solar punk is like some like greenwashed yogurt commercial, like
Speaker 1: you know, like utopian thing, but also like it's actually
Speaker 1: lots of solar punk that we've talked about. It's like
Speaker 1: actually about doing specific things, Like it's actually like actually
Speaker 1: going to do something rather than just being an insurrecto
Speaker 1: kid um or just just you know, talking about nihilist
Speaker 1: znes and books on Twitter for all day. And I
Speaker 1: think one of one of your one of my favorite
Speaker 1: videos of yours is your video on the psychology of
Speaker 1: collapse UM, because I think that's one of my favorites
Speaker 1: as well. It's it's, it's, it's it's it's really just
Speaker 1: like a masterpiece. And how deep you get into every
Speaker 1: different type of collapse thinking. It's not just on the rights,
Speaker 1: not not not not on the left, it's not just
Speaker 1: whether you're you know more you know, anarchist, more authoritarian,
Speaker 1: it's like you get into every specific type of thinking
Speaker 1: that plays into this idea around collapse. And I think
Speaker 1: if I recommend everyone check out your channel, especially watching
Speaker 1: your solar punk videos, but specifically on the topic of
Speaker 1: collapse you know, part of our show we were trying
Speaker 1: to kind of be a little bit like anti collapse UM.
Speaker 1: And I think your your video really shows the depth
Speaker 1: of that topic, UM and how to approach this, because
Speaker 1: collapse is a feeling, like it's a feeling we all have,
Speaker 1: and it needs to be interrogated. And I think your
Speaker 1: video is just a magnificent job interrogating that feeling, right,
Speaker 1: thank you. I can't over emphasize how important that is,
Speaker 1: because I I one of the major failings. There were
Speaker 1: a number of victories for kind of anarchist thought, particularly
Speaker 1: within the United States during the the insurrection last year,
Speaker 1: one of its tremendous defeats is that it has become
Speaker 1: characterized in a huge number of people's eyes as breaking
Speaker 1: windows and and starting fires um. And yeah, that's a
Speaker 1: lot of that is because the media is trash, um,
Speaker 1: and it's trash it reporting on on all of this stuff.
Speaker 1: But some of it is because a lot of people
Speaker 1: have let that be their primary praxis UM. And that again,
Speaker 1: I don't care about people breaking windows, I don't care
Speaker 1: about people lighting dumpster fires. But if that's what you're
Speaker 1: presenting to the world as your practice, that doesn't appeal
Speaker 1: to people, and you have to um, because yeah, anarchism
Speaker 1: is not just destructive, it is also construct Yeah, the
Speaker 1: constructive part we need to be boosting more than And
Speaker 1: there were some, you know, from the context of Portland's,
Speaker 1: some really strong examples of that last year. The incredible
Speaker 1: amount of mutual aid that was was put together afraid
Speaker 1: of time. Yeah, during the fire relief was was incredible. UM.
Speaker 1: And the Red House, the the eviction defense occupation was
Speaker 1: a really good repost to you know, the disaster that
Speaker 1: was the Chaz in Seattle. That this was like, this
Speaker 1: was an area that was temporarily autonomous from the police,
Speaker 1: that did not collapse into violence, that succeeded in its goal,
Speaker 1: and that cleaned up after itself and presented an option
Speaker 1: for people like this is how it can look when
Speaker 1: we try to evict people. You know, this is what
Speaker 1: can happen. UM. So I think they're I don't want
Speaker 1: to like be too negative, but I think that a
Speaker 1: lot of folks because of for a variety of reasons,
Speaker 1: you know, the there's been so much focus on kind
Speaker 1: of the insurrection, not even that because I think that
Speaker 1: building can be insurrectionist. I think that can be can
Speaker 1: be profoundly insurrectionists. It's like, destruction has an immediate result
Speaker 1: of making you feel better, right, it has an immediate
Speaker 1: of endorphins and hormones. It makes you happy when you
Speaker 1: do it. It's it's it is, it is an exhilarating act,
Speaker 1: and you feel like you're accomplishing something. What's harder is
Speaker 1: to like have that same feeling by doing seed bombing, right,
Speaker 1: but by actually like improving your community slowly through these
Speaker 1: types of like so the park ideas, they don't have
Speaker 1: the same immediate emotional reactions. So a lot of people
Speaker 1: like when they you know, think about what insurrection is,
Speaker 1: they can a default to this destructive tendency, which destruction
Speaker 1: has its time and place. Um, but if that's your
Speaker 1: only practice, we're not gonna improve the world at all,
Speaker 1: Like right, that's that's not going to do anything helping
Speaker 1: through you know, giving out food, helping through giving out
Speaker 1: socks and clothes, helping through all of these solar punk ways.
Speaker 1: These are things that actually like are going to improve
Speaker 1: things on a tangible level, and they and they're gonna
Speaker 1: make more people be like, oh hey, what what are
Speaker 1: these anarchists doing? That's actually interesting versus Oh, what are
Speaker 1: these anarchists are doing? This is stupid? Ignore everything they say. Yeah,
Speaker 1: people have to remember as well that, Um, you know,
Speaker 1: there's seeds a sort of funk in Kirp Hootkins writ
Speaker 1: things you know, from the conquest of bread to mutual aid,
Speaker 1: and those are sort of things that should be just
Speaker 1: as emphasized as the destructive, exhilerating aspects of anarchism. Yeah.
Speaker 1: There's a line in a Frank Turner song, a couple
Speaker 1: of lines actually in a song called nineteen thirty three
Speaker 1: that I go back to a lot, But one of
Speaker 1: them is you can't fix the world of all you
Speaker 1: have is a hammer. And that's I guess what I
Speaker 1: see is like the primary practical benefit of solar punk,
Speaker 1: just as an aesthetic as a piece of fiction, is
Speaker 1: getting people to expand their toolbox. Yeah, get yourself a trowel,
Speaker 1: you know, some some screwdrivas, you know. Yeah, keep the hammer,
Speaker 1: you need that sometimes too, But what's grab some other tools?
Speaker 1: Expand the toolbox thing isn't really great metaphor type of thing. Yeah, yeah, Um,
Speaker 1: I think that's most of what we're going to get
Speaker 1: into today. Um, there's a couple of pieces of things
Speaker 1: I would want to read. One of them Isn't. This
Speaker 1: isn't directly I think it predates the solar punk, but
Speaker 1: it it I think feeds into some of what I
Speaker 1: think it emotionally feeds into a lot of we're talking
Speaker 1: about here. It's an essay from David Graber called The
Speaker 1: Shock of Victory UM, which I think is really useful
Speaker 1: to me. Yeah. Um, And I would also recommend um.
Speaker 1: Corey doctor O's new fiction novel walk Away Um, which
Speaker 1: I think is a really wonderful piece, was a wonderful,
Speaker 1: wonderful book. I should have included my recommendations. It was
Speaker 1: really great. Yeah. I read it recently and it made
Speaker 1: me Um. It made me feel the way like as
Speaker 1: a fiction writer that a good piece of fiction should,
Speaker 1: which is like I felt bad, Uh, felt bad about
Speaker 1: some of the things that I had written. Because there's
Speaker 1: there's there's such there's so much more courage because I
Speaker 1: wrote a piece of fiction that has some solar punk elements,
Speaker 1: has some quasi utopian elements in the dystopia, but I
Speaker 1: didn't have the courage to kind of go as far
Speaker 1: as as Corey did and to imagine a kind of
Speaker 1: passivism that he he has the courage to kind of
Speaker 1: put into the into the hands of his his protagonists.
Speaker 1: Like I, I I really respect that about the book.
Speaker 1: I mean, the book goes in something very interesting eye
Speaker 1: directions as well, but it's it's got some great ship um.
Speaker 1: And I always enjoy Corey's Corey's leve of burning man
Speaker 1: um of what it could be as kind of what
Speaker 1: the what what some of it's turned into. But yeah, um, Andrew,
Speaker 1: is there anything else you wanted to get into before
Speaker 1: we we close this out? I just want to remind
Speaker 1: people to check on your friends. M you know, um,
Speaker 1: we're all going through various stages of collapse. As I
Speaker 1: outlined in my video. You know, we shift between them
Speaker 1: from time to time, so try not to go through
Speaker 1: it alone. You know, there's no there's no eye in
Speaker 1: Sula Punk. Yeah yeah, um check out st Andrew on
Speaker 1: YouTube at st andrews Um. Um, Andrew, is there any
Speaker 1: anything else you wanted to kind of plug from your
Speaker 1: own your own personal work. Yeah? So, um, other than
Speaker 1: the you know, the Sula Punk videos and the collapse videos,
Speaker 1: I want to remind sorry, rather I want to shout
Speaker 1: out my video on black anarchism. I think that is
Speaker 1: a pretty essential look into, uh the history of black
Speaker 1: anarchism in the United States and in the world. I
Speaker 1: also want to recommend um my video on the psychology
Speaker 1: the authoritarianism. I know a lot of people have family
Speaker 1: members who are conservative or on the right, it will
Speaker 1: may be leaning fascist, and I think that can be
Speaker 1: helpful for you know, helping them to or rather helping
Speaker 1: you to understand where they mindset sade m hm. And also,
Speaker 1: you know, check out my video on puma let sing.
Speaker 1: I think that was a pretty fun one as well.
Speaker 1: It breaks down a lot of it break breaks down
Speaker 1: how you can go about implementing food forests or puma
Speaker 1: culture gardens wherever you find yourself. Awesome, Um, thank you
Speaker 1: very much for being on the show. Andrew, thank you
Speaker 1: all for listening. We'll be back tomorrow or if this
Speaker 1: comes out Friday, we'll be back, you know, another day.
Speaker 1: We'll be back at some point. You know, you know
Speaker 1: how this works. You understand podcasts ahcast. All right, Chris,
Speaker 1: you go, so welcome, Welcome to it could happen here
Speaker 1: a podcast that I think for the first time is
Speaker 1: just me and Robert. This is this is the very
Speaker 1: first time that this is happening. You're you're all here
Speaker 1: at a moment of legendary significance and historic importance. So
Speaker 1: try to try to face it with the requisite all
Speaker 1: that's all I ask, yes, And another thing that, man,
Speaker 1: this is a terrible transition. Something else we're facing with
Speaker 1: requisite awe is weird shortages of goods and price increases.
Speaker 1: M So it's fucking rad. I was just at the
Speaker 1: Asian market today, um, and they did not have the
Speaker 1: snack chips that I most prefer now officially a calamity. Um,
Speaker 1: we've entered crisis of historic proportion. Yeah, I think I
Speaker 1: don't think we're going to live through this one. Nope,
Speaker 1: we're doing We can't look at that without the action
Speaker 1: snack chips Like it's the ones that are like they're
Speaker 1: like pieces of seaweed, but that have been tempered, fried
Speaker 1: and temper a batter's completely out tragic, absolutely tragifying. I
Speaker 1: think there's a couple of things. I mean, you've got
Speaker 1: a script, so I'll probably just let you do that
Speaker 1: in the not too distant future. But one of the
Speaker 1: things that's frustrating to me, although maybe it shouldn't be,
Speaker 1: because I'm probably partly responsible for this, is that this
Speaker 1: is being um this is often kind of being talked
Speaker 1: about with by people online, is like, oh, it's a
Speaker 1: sign that like society is crumbling. And what they mean
Speaker 1: by that is that like, oh, well, we just don't
Speaker 1: have stuff, like we're we're not able to like keep
Speaker 1: up with with demand and like the ability to produce
Speaker 1: these things is crumbling. And it's actually much more complex
Speaker 1: than that and a lot less rooted in a lack
Speaker 1: of specific resources and more decisions made under capitalism about
Speaker 1: how the supply chain would work. And it's I don't know,
Speaker 1: I think it's important because it is you can say
Speaker 1: it still is like a situation where this is an
Speaker 1: example of the system falling apart. But it's not falling
Speaker 1: apart because we don't have the paper to make toilet
Speaker 1: paper with. It's falling apart because decisions were made in
Speaker 1: order to increase the stock prices of companies by reducing
Speaker 1: the amount of products that they kept on hand. And
Speaker 1: that's led to an incredibly fragile system that that did
Speaker 1: nothing well but maximize profits. And I think, well, okay,
Speaker 1: I think there's there's there's a couple of things with
Speaker 1: that that we should talk about. Yeah, because there's a
Speaker 1: lot of different explanations they're floating around for why is happening,
Speaker 1: and I think some of them are good, but I
Speaker 1: think a lot of them are missing part of the story.
Speaker 1: And I think it's important because Okay, so, like like
Speaker 1: my grandma like called me yesterday, like like called our
Speaker 1: family to like talk about the supply chain problem because
Speaker 1: someone had like she'd been like fed a conspiracy theory
Speaker 1: that like the shortages were because American dock workers like
Speaker 1: didn't want to open containers from China. Uh yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like yeah, like I mean this is not that's not right,
Speaker 1: But it's not like if that had happened, it would
Speaker 1: be like, well, okay, that does scan like yeah, and
Speaker 1: I think yeah, and like I think this is this
Speaker 1: is a moment where yeah, you know, okay, think think
Speaker 1: things are not working how they're supposed to you. And
Speaker 1: there's a lot of sort of competing stories about it,
Speaker 1: one which because on which are bad. And I think
Speaker 1: most of the conventional accounts and whereber it was talking
Speaker 1: about this, uh you know, even the really good ones,
Speaker 1: they start with sort of the eighties Wall Street takeover
Speaker 1: of corporate America and the transformation of sort of all
Speaker 1: corporate management into an attempt to like raise short term
Speaker 1: stock prices. And you know, part of this is lead
Speaker 1: in production and this is true, and this is sort
Speaker 1: of true, but dismisses about half of the story. And
Speaker 1: and the part of the story that it misses that's
Speaker 1: really important, I think is the sort of it's it's
Speaker 1: the broader like frame in which all of this is
Speaker 1: happening in is essentially the worry of how the working
Speaker 1: class essentially loses the class war in the six season seventies.
Speaker 1: And weirdly, it's also a story about the Cose boomerang.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, Dan Long, throw in, throw in, the music
Speaker 1: clip that we've all decided is going to be the
Speaker 1: one we put in whenever someone talks about food. Cose boomerang,
Speaker 1: which is probably just going to be another time machine noise.
Speaker 1: So real quick, the Cose credit to Cody. Um, Okay,
Speaker 1: continue brief refresher on what that is. So basically the
Speaker 1: free cost boomerang is that Okay, if if you if
Speaker 1: if if a government does something like repressive like technology,
Speaker 1: repressive technique or passive technology like in a colony, like
Speaker 1: in a war somewhere. Eventually it will come back and
Speaker 1: be used against like the citizens of that country. And yeah,
Speaker 1: a great example would be fingerprinting was invented for the
Speaker 1: British like policing um insurgents in Malaysia, and is now
Speaker 1: has them back to every you know, colonizing nation now
Speaker 1: uses finger printing, which is also deeply flawed as a technology.
Speaker 1: But anyway, yeah, yeah, and you know, and I think
Speaker 1: most people tend to think about this is our armored
Speaker 1: personnel carriers. But we will eventually get to this. The
Speaker 1: boomerang technology here is actually shipping containers hell yeah, which
Speaker 1: have done like irreparable damage to the mankind. Alright, alright,
Speaker 1: I'm ready for this. I don't know much about this.
Speaker 1: Hit me, all right, I bear with you with this
Speaker 1: because we're we're we're we're gonna talk about two threads.
Speaker 1: They're going to seem like they have nothing to do
Speaker 1: with supply chains, and then they're all going to tie together.
Speaker 1: It turns out is literally all supply chains. So in
Speaker 1: the cities and seventies you have, you know, in very
Speaker 1: very broad general strokes, you have two kinds of class war.
Speaker 1: The first kind is what I'm sort of very broadly
Speaker 1: calling the war and the factories and this is this
Speaker 1: is an enormous series that sort of strikes outright uprising
Speaker 1: a stretched from sort of Detroit to tur into Tokyo.
Speaker 1: And you know, the most famous of these is the
Speaker 1: student sort of worker uprising in May sixty eight in
Speaker 1: France and they you know, they're they're they're close enough
Speaker 1: taking the country that like French President Charles de Gaul
Speaker 1: like flees in a helicopter to in secret, and like
Speaker 1: flees to Germany in secret, and you know, and that
Speaker 1: that that that's like a big event, but it's sort
Speaker 1: of it sort of fades. What doesn't fade is May
Speaker 1: sixty eight in Italy. And you know that it doesn't
Speaker 1: fade there because Italy, Italy has been in the middle
Speaker 1: of a strike wave since two sixty four. It's the
Speaker 1: whole sixties that basically just strik waves there and you know,
Speaker 1: they have their own sixty and unlike in France where
Speaker 1: peters out, in Italy you get the just incredibly named hot,
Speaker 1: hot autumn of sixty nine, which is my bet was
Speaker 1: a hot autumn. Yeah, it's it's great. And so basically
Speaker 1: what happens is you get hundreds of thousands of workers
Speaker 1: go on strike, they start seizing control their factories. Um,
Speaker 1: and most of most of this is playing out in
Speaker 1: in the Fiat factories. Yeah, it's a giant car factories
Speaker 1: in Italy's industrial triangle, and you know, I mean they're
Speaker 1: there for like, they're there for a long time. They're
Speaker 1: into like seventy and eventually they lose. But you know,
Speaker 1: Italy is just sort of rocked by conflict and sort
Speaker 1: of class war stuff, and all of this reculminates in
Speaker 1: yet another enormous uprising in en seventies seven, this one
Speaker 1: driven like in large part by people who were basically
Speaker 1: just like, funk this, I'm not working in the factory anymore.
Speaker 1: It's awful, which which I think is something that like,
Speaker 1: you know, if if you're looking at the modern political landscape,
Speaker 1: you have a bunch of people who are going like,
Speaker 1: funk this, I'm not going to go like die in
Speaker 1: these factories anymore. And those people all have in a
Speaker 1: lot of cases, safer employing situations than many people today. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like it's starting to get worse than which is why
Speaker 1: people are are frustrated but likes yeah, yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: and and this this it's sort of interesting because there
Speaker 1: there's a kind of like Vicky Uster while I've had
Speaker 1: on here. It calls it, it calls it like the
Speaker 1: Monkeys Paul thing, where it's like people in the seventies
Speaker 1: and Italy wanted like autonomy and like freedom from work,
Speaker 1: and so what what capitalism gave them was like, oh,
Speaker 1: we'll give you autonomy. We'll just make you all contract workers.
Speaker 1: And now like, yeah, you don't you don't have to
Speaker 1: like wake up every morning and like go to a
Speaker 1: job in the factory and leave it five or whatever.
Speaker 1: But now you just you know, you're you're a contract worker,
Speaker 1: so you just have no stability whatsoever, and that that's
Speaker 1: your autonomy. But you know this, this is this is
Speaker 1: really bad for the Italian ruling class. Like they almost
Speaker 1: lose control of Italy three times in ten years, and
Speaker 1: after not seventy seven, they're just like fuck this and they,
Speaker 1: I mean, they started to start doing mass arrest they
Speaker 1: imprison like tens of thousands of people, a torture a
Speaker 1: bunch of people, and you know, but it becomes clear
Speaker 1: that like pure repression is like not going to be
Speaker 1: enough to like just destroy the section of the working
Speaker 1: class movements that you know, God help you thinks that
Speaker 1: you should like run production for themselves, and so they
Speaker 1: start looking elsewhere for answers. And the place they find
Speaker 1: these answers, weirdly enough, is in the second set of
Speaker 1: wars that are going on in this period, which are
Speaker 1: the sort of national liberation wars. And you know, these
Speaker 1: are the national liberation wars. Are these these are full scale,
Speaker 1: like these aren't sort of class warm metaphors. These are
Speaker 1: you know, this is this is giddy be Saw, this
Speaker 1: is Algeria. And you know, importantly, for for our purposes,
Speaker 1: the US fights two of them, which is Korean Vietnam.
Speaker 1: Now Korean Vietnam are strategically really bad places for the
Speaker 1: US to fight wars, like they're on the other side
Speaker 1: of the world, which you know, it makes it more
Speaker 1: difficult to do war crimes because you know, if you're
Speaker 1: fire bombing of village, right, you have to be able
Speaker 1: to move fire bombs, jet fighters and like oil and
Speaker 1: rations to the other side of the world. And this
Speaker 1: is hard about a lot easier when they can commit
Speaker 1: war crimes. And like, I don't know, duloof, yeah, yeah, well,
Speaker 1: like even even like you know, you got to commit
Speaker 1: a war crime in Mexico. It's like, okay, you just
Speaker 1: sign a bunch of people over the border. It would
Speaker 1: be so easy to commit war crimes in Mexico. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and really really up our war crime quoti. Well,
Speaker 1: I would say, we do do a lot of war
Speaker 1: crimes in Mexico. It's just that like they're done based
Speaker 1: on by proxies. That's true. But I mean we've killed like,
Speaker 1: we've killed like a million people there in the last
Speaker 1: like twenty years. And the war on drugs. But yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, so the US, you know, the U s okay,
Speaker 1: So it has this logistics problem, and logistics problem is
Speaker 1: that it can't do war crimes enough, and so it
Speaker 1: comes up with a couple of solutions to them. One
Speaker 1: of them is essentially they rebuild the whole Japanese economy
Speaker 1: in order to just use Japan's industrial base to fight
Speaker 1: the war in Korea. And then after the war in Korea,
Speaker 1: and they rebuild the South Korean economy in order to
Speaker 1: you know, fight the war in Vietnam. And this works,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't solve the problem that you know, okay,
Speaker 1: even even even if you're you know, you're you have
Speaker 1: of an industrial based in Japan, right, you still need
Speaker 1: to be able to efficiently move things by sea to Korea,
Speaker 1: and you know, you still need to still supplies you
Speaker 1: need to move from the US, And so the solution
Speaker 1: for this is containery shipping and continerary shipping. This is
Speaker 1: the pivot point upon which the entire history of the
Speaker 1: twentieth century and everything that's happening in the twenty one
Speaker 1: century hinges on like this, this is the pivot And
Speaker 1: you know, like I'm not even this isn't even really
Speaker 1: an exaggeration, because it turns out that like the ability
Speaker 1: to have uniform boxes that you can stack on top
Speaker 1: of each other like legos and put on a ship
Speaker 1: is like like it's like comparable to the nuclear bomb
Speaker 1: in terms of how important it is, which is really
Speaker 1: really used to the only way to get things from
Speaker 1: A to B was a big wooden ship filled with
Speaker 1: dubloons like pilet bags and stuff. Yeah, yeah, I know,
Speaker 1: how did we, like global commerce work before shipping containers?
Speaker 1: What did we what did we literally like you just
Speaker 1: like sometimes sometimes you would just like physically people would
Speaker 1: just pick up the items and put them on the ship,
Speaker 1: or they would like sometimes they put them in boxes
Speaker 1: or like you would like strap them to like the
Speaker 1: top of the ship. And so with the trains a
Speaker 1: lot they would just like strap like machinery like onto
Speaker 1: a train car. And this was like not, this is
Speaker 1: like really inefficient. It's really so yeah, and so the
Speaker 1: US in order to like do war crimes in Korea,
Speaker 1: and then you know, it's just like, oh, hey, what
Speaker 1: if we just make metal boxes and then they get
Speaker 1: they progressively get better and better at it because you know,
Speaker 1: they have to go do more war crimes in in Vietnam.
Speaker 1: And but by the time you're getting to the end, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, look lots of war crimes that do you need?
Speaker 1: You need good logistics networks to do all of these
Speaker 1: war crimes. I mean, it makes sense that that's where
Speaker 1: we got shipping containers, but I didn't realize. I had
Speaker 1: just assumed it would have come out of the shipping
Speaker 1: industry as opposed to like we got to get more
Speaker 1: missiles over to these places. Yeah, well, this is the
Speaker 1: interesting thing. We'll get to this in a bit. But basically,
Speaker 1: like a lot of the logistics revolution stuff either comes
Speaker 1: out of the military or is developed by X fascists
Speaker 1: and and and a lot of the reason for this
Speaker 1: is Okay, I mean this is you know, this is
Speaker 1: the seventies. They're still are in d happening like this
Speaker 1: still actual research and developments, but the military is doing
Speaker 1: just an enormous amount of the research development for all
Speaker 1: of global capitalism. And you know, and and and the
Speaker 1: other thing, Yes, what's happening here? And you know this
Speaker 1: this is the sort of boomerang thing is that you know,
Speaker 1: so the container are shipping logistics, stuff that had been
Speaker 1: used to just like obliterate the global South suddenly starts
Speaker 1: spreading into capital like you know, just into like broader
Speaker 1: shipping because people look at this and they're like, oh,
Speaker 1: this is efficient. And then the contracting companies the US
Speaker 1: is using. This turns into the solution to both sort
Speaker 1: of the war and the factories are talking about in
Speaker 1: in in Europe and the US and in Japan itself,
Speaker 1: and then also to the solution of the national liberation
Speaker 1: movements and sort of like communism in East Asia because
Speaker 1: you know, okay, so you have this question, right, the US,
Speaker 1: like we kind of fight to a draw in Korea,
Speaker 1: like we kill a norm's number of people, but the
Speaker 1: North Korea. Yeah, and like yeah, but we don't really win, right,
Speaker 1: like we we we can't actually defeat the Chinese army
Speaker 1: or yeah, and and you know, and we lose Vietnam,
Speaker 1: and so the question is, okay, so like how how
Speaker 1: are we going to stop communism? And the answer, it
Speaker 1: turns out, is to just integrate integrate the communist countries
Speaker 1: into the capitalist supply chain. And I mean there's a
Speaker 1: lot of examples of this, like market Thatcher, for example,
Speaker 1: is like very good buddies with Nikolai chessqu Ah. That's nice.
Speaker 1: It's they could be friends despite their the fact that
Speaker 1: they well I guess they weren't really that different as people, No,
Speaker 1: not really, Like basically the difference is that ky lost
Speaker 1: and thus got like murdered on state television on a
Speaker 1: state funeral treatment. That's my official stance. They should have
Speaker 1: for stuff we will talk about in a bit. But yes,
Speaker 1: but you know, the archetypal example of this is actually China.
Speaker 1: And you know, there's a lot of various sort of
Speaker 1: skilled diplomatic work by Kissinger and also the US like
Speaker 1: throughout the seventies, just like they're just like sending entire
Speaker 1: factories to China like like the like they'll they'll they'll
Speaker 1: take an entire factory, break it down, put it in
Speaker 1: boxes and then just like ship at the China great
Speaker 1: at the time, and yes, so yeah they're they're they're
Speaker 1: just like sending to knowlogy of China. And the end
Speaker 1: result of this is that you know, China goes from
Speaker 1: like fighting American troops with like like doing bannit charges
Speaker 1: like through the yeah yeah against the Yeah. I was
Speaker 1: just like yeah to to you know, being an American
Speaker 1: ally and like invading Vietnam as a way to like
Speaker 1: stick it to the Soviets basically, and so you know,
Speaker 1: so the uses sensely just integrates China to the global
Speaker 1: supply chain, and they eventually do the same thing to Vietnam,
Speaker 1: which again is another country that they couldn't defeat militarily.
Speaker 1: But what they you know what they actually beat them
Speaker 1: with it's a shipping container. And before the shipping container,
Speaker 1: this would have been impossible, right, like basically it was
Speaker 1: too inefficient and too expensive, like the cost of shipping
Speaker 1: was too high to have all of this production. You know,
Speaker 1: like some half your parts made in China, some of
Speaker 1: them made India's on them made in like Japan's one
Speaker 1: of the maid in Korean and then shipped them all
Speaker 1: around the world, which is how the modern system works.
Speaker 1: But with with container I shipping, suddenly shipping is really
Speaker 1: cheap and it becomes much cheaper to pay shipping costs
Speaker 1: it is to pay labor costs. And this is the
Speaker 1: solution to to the sort of war and the factories.
Speaker 1: You know, if if workers start making too much noise
Speaker 1: about pay or like again a god forbids start talking
Speaker 1: about like taking control of factories and running the democratically
Speaker 1: like some kind of anarchist monsters, corporation can just move
Speaker 1: the factories overseas, and this becomes an incredibly effective way
Speaker 1: to just destroy the labor movement because anytime, you know,
Speaker 1: organized labor starts making demands, you can be like, well, okay, sorry,
Speaker 1: we're just gonna pack up and we're gonna you know,
Speaker 1: we're gonna go to China, We're gonna go to somewhere else.
Speaker 1: And this coincides with, you know, the thing, the thing
Speaker 1: that gets talked about a lot in the conventional accounts,
Speaker 1: which is the Wall Street sort of corporate takeover. Well,
Speaker 1: the Wall Street takeover of corporate America, which is something
Speaker 1: I think that sounds really weird to us now, But
Speaker 1: you know, the whole the whole story here is really
Speaker 1: interesting and extremely long, and if if you want to
Speaker 1: like have a very detailed accounts of how this all
Speaker 1: played out, the book Liquidated by Karen Hoe is just incredible,
Speaker 1: like ethnography and history of Wall Street. She like she's
Speaker 1: a Karen has an athropologist, and she like went and
Speaker 1: worked on Wall Street and like did ethnography there for
Speaker 1: a bit and it's very interesting stuff, but it's kind
Speaker 1: of outside of our scope. So the very very very
Speaker 1: short version is that the Wall Street bankers basically figure
Speaker 1: out a way to just like buy out corporations to
Speaker 1: raise a bunch of money and just entirely buy out corporations.
Speaker 1: And then once they have the corporation, right, what what
Speaker 1: what what the you know? This is corporate rating, So
Speaker 1: they're they're they they loot all the assets, they sell
Speaker 1: it off, and they try to sell off their stock
Speaker 1: at a higher price. The parcels of this is sort
Speaker 1: of complicated, but the net result of this is that
Speaker 1: Wall Street completely takes over the corporate world in the
Speaker 1: way they hadn't before. Like the wall streets. The wall
Speaker 1: street like finance people are now, you know, they're there
Speaker 1: are the people making off the decisions, and you know,
Speaker 1: and and they're their only goal is to raise the
Speaker 1: stock price, like that's that's the only thing they care about.
Speaker 1: That they don't they don't even care about making money,
Speaker 1: right if if you lose money and your stock price
Speaker 1: still rises, like you don't care. And those guys start
Speaker 1: looking at a lot of the things that had existed
Speaker 1: in corporations before that, things like pensions, uh, particularly things
Speaker 1: like research and development. They look at it and go, Okay,
Speaker 1: why are we spending money on R and D? Like
Speaker 1: this this doesn't this doesn't raise our stock price, This
Speaker 1: doesn't have any immediate shorter and value. So they cut it, right,
Speaker 1: They start cutting pensions, They start just destroying the unions,
Speaker 1: and you know, and and because because this is happening
Speaker 1: at the same time as corporations really like get the
Speaker 1: ability to outsource for the first time, you know, they
Speaker 1: lean into it and they start essentially, we're just just
Speaker 1: slashing the amount of people who work for the company,
Speaker 1: right and so you know, and so and instead of
Speaker 1: having direct employees, they start working with contractors and they
Speaker 1: start moving to the contractors overseas, and you know, and
Speaker 1: and this is this is where we get to sort
Speaker 1: of this whole outsourcing wave because you know, something I
Speaker 1: don't think I talked about enough withoutsourcing is why actually
Speaker 1: are the labor costs lower in the countries that these
Speaker 1: people are are moving their factories to h And part
Speaker 1: of it is, you know, people talk about development like
Speaker 1: they're moving to undeveloped countries, and you know, part of
Speaker 1: part of part of development is just you know, how
Speaker 1: much technological capacity their manufacturing system has, right, and that
Speaker 1: you know. But but the other part of it is
Speaker 1: that if you move your production to say Columbia, right
Speaker 1: or like you know, you're investing in sort of like
Speaker 1: cocoa bean farming in Columbia and people try to do
Speaker 1: you need organizing, you can hire des squads to murder them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and yeah, yeah, it's like you can basically just sort
Speaker 1: of like you can you can outsource the violence and
Speaker 1: you can you can you know, the corporate term for
Speaker 1: it is reducing labor costs, but really what you're doing
Speaker 1: is just like murdering people with death squads and terrorizing them,
Speaker 1: and you know that that does lower labor costs, right,
Speaker 1: But you know, and I think there's there's another example
Speaker 1: of this, Like this is a lot of what like
Speaker 1: the killing at Tienamen was really about. It was you know,
Speaker 1: not so much in Tianna Square itself. I've talked about
Speaker 1: this elsewere but like the workers that they kill outside
Speaker 1: of the square, like a lot of the reason they're
Speaker 1: doing very little about Tinaman Square other than like protesters
Speaker 1: China government bad. The guy stands up the tank and
Speaker 1: then yeah, yeah, yeah, I've talked about this elsewhere. More
Speaker 1: like the very short version is, so there's a bunch
Speaker 1: of students in the square, right, and the students in
Speaker 1: the square itself like basically they kind of went democracy
Speaker 1: and mostly they want like market reforms to go faster.
Speaker 1: But then outside of the square, you know, bijings like
Speaker 1: whole working class shows up and there's these enormous demonstrations.
Speaker 1: They basically start like like barricading like blocks and blocks
Speaker 1: and blocks, and like this radius outside of the street.
Speaker 1: You get this sort of like mini commune thing ing,
Speaker 1: and those guys are like you know, like they're they're
Speaker 1: they're advocating for democracy and the factory like they're you know,
Speaker 1: they're they're talking about things like like they're they're like that,
Speaker 1: you know, they they they they they have their like
Speaker 1: marks out and they're talking about how like they're they're
Speaker 1: they're calculating their rate of surplus value that's being extracted
Speaker 1: from them by the capitalists. And those are the people,
Speaker 1: like almost everyone who dies at Chana man Is is
Speaker 1: from those guys. Like those are the people that they
Speaker 1: just get massacred. And you know, and and the reason
Speaker 1: that happens is that the CCP is looking at this
Speaker 1: and it's like, okay, this, this is this is like
Speaker 1: this this is sort of this is the return of
Speaker 1: organized labor, and we need to destroy it before it
Speaker 1: like gets anywhere. And so they do, and organized labor
Speaker 1: and China just implode. I mean it was already pretty
Speaker 1: weak because you have a lot of stake cantual unions,
Speaker 1: but I mean now it's just nothing. And you know,
Speaker 1: and and and there, I mean there there have been
Speaker 1: attempts to labor organizing and China sort of recently and
Speaker 1: like yeah, the to be just rest everyone, right, and
Speaker 1: so you know this, this this is how this is,
Speaker 1: this is the price of cheap labor. Right, It's just
Speaker 1: incredible state repression. But this is also you know, and
Speaker 1: this is this is a sort of like macro scale
Speaker 1: thing of why the supply chains suck because everyone talks
Speaker 1: about like the efficiency of the supply chaine, but the
Speaker 1: supply chains aren't efficient. They make no sense, right if
Speaker 1: if if if what you're trying to do is move
Speaker 1: something quickly from points A to point B. They make
Speaker 1: no sense because you know, these supply chain are spread
Speaker 1: all over the world, like in individual parts are being
Speaker 1: made in six countries, right you have like people will
Speaker 1: like for tax dodge purposes, like they'll have one part
Speaker 1: of a component's built in one country, and then they'll
Speaker 1: move it from another country to have another part of it,
Speaker 1: and then they'll ship all of it to Mexico and
Speaker 1: they'll ship it across the border and they'll have the
Speaker 1: whole thing be assembled in the USC they can say
Speaker 1: it was made in the US. Like there's all of
Speaker 1: these things that are just just nonsense right there. They're
Speaker 1: not They're not efficient at all. It's it's completely ridiculous.
Speaker 1: It's it's this just you know, it's just completely absurd
Speaker 1: web And and the reason why it is designed like
Speaker 1: this is as as a giant sort of kind of
Speaker 1: unsurgency thing. Like the reason the reason supply chains are
Speaker 1: are just bad is because there, you know, they they
Speaker 1: they're not designed to move things. That they're designed as
Speaker 1: an instrument to just like solve the problem of of
Speaker 1: of of class power right there there there. They're designed
Speaker 1: destroy unions. Are designed to make sure that nobody ever
Speaker 1: sort of like gets any ideas about widges, to make
Speaker 1: sure nobody gets an ideas about like taking anything. And
Speaker 1: so you know, but this this, this can work for
Speaker 1: a while. The problem is again, like they're not efficient.
Speaker 1: It's it's just it just it is not efficient to
Speaker 1: like move have everything made in like six countries and
Speaker 1: then you have to send them somewhere else. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: so you know, it's efficient in the sense that it
Speaker 1: efficiently maximizes the value of stock prices for like stock
Speaker 1: by bags and stuff. And generally what is meant by
Speaker 1: like efficiency in that sense is like what makes the
Speaker 1: seventy people who actually own this company the most money.
Speaker 1: That's the efficient thing. But it's horribly inefficient in every
Speaker 1: practical sense of the work. And and and that this
Speaker 1: is kind of an interesting change because I mean, you
Speaker 1: know this this isn't to say that like the supply
Speaker 1: chains that worked before this were like better, because they
Speaker 1: also sucked in a lot of their own ways. But
Speaker 1: all of the like efficiency stuff that we're about to
Speaker 1: talk about just just in time production, etcetera, etcetera, Like
Speaker 1: you know what isn't produced just in time? Sorry, but
Speaker 1: it isn't add right time. Yeah, they're they're they're they're
Speaker 1: not produced just in time anymore because the supply chains
Speaker 1: falling apart. That's that's what that is. Our promise about
Speaker 1: our sponsors is that, uh, they're they're not at all
Speaker 1: in time. Who knows when they'll get your products to you.
Speaker 1: There's no way to tell. It's impossible to know. We're back, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're back to talk about how, you know, having having
Speaker 1: developed an entire network of extremely inefficient supply chains that
Speaker 1: just absolutely suck and don't make any sense. Uh, people
Speaker 1: tried to make them efficient. And this this is where
Speaker 1: we go back to Japan, because Japan, you know, I
Speaker 1: guess this is this is this is the other Forks boomerang,
Speaker 1: which is that you know, okay, so we we we
Speaker 1: industrialized Japan in order to like fighter colonial wars, right,
Speaker 1: But then you know, this turns into this huge like
Speaker 1: Pikachu face moment when Japan suddenly starts like industrializing more
Speaker 1: efficiently than the US does. It's very funny. And then
Speaker 1: and writes a bunch of books that are the premise
Speaker 1: of all of them, is Japan scary? Yeah, it's very funny. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, like this is interesting. Is this is an
Speaker 1: interesting thing here, which is that like all of the
Speaker 1: panic around China, there was exactly the same panic like
Speaker 1: around Japan in the in like the seventies, and it's
Speaker 1: exactly same, like right down to like a bunch of
Speaker 1: socialists going like, hey, look this this is a model
Speaker 1: for anti capitalism. Like people people said that about the
Speaker 1: Japanese model, and it's like it's it's all, it's all
Speaker 1: the same thing. It's just it's just happening again. But
Speaker 1: you know what what what type what what Japan did,
Speaker 1: and specifically, what Toyota does is create this thing called
Speaker 1: the Toyota production system, which eventually becomes known as justin
Speaker 1: time production. And this if you've read anything about sort
Speaker 1: of the modern supply chain problems, you've almost certainly heard
Speaker 1: of just in time production or or lean production, and
Speaker 1: just in time and lean production are technically difference, but
Speaker 1: the differences don't matter for us. So yeah, and and
Speaker 1: this this stuff is derived from what Toyota was sort
Speaker 1: of doing in the post war era. And basically the
Speaker 1: goal of it is, you're you're never supposed to have
Speaker 1: any inventory that's just sitting there, so that the whole
Speaker 1: distant supposed to be constantly the whole system is supposed
Speaker 1: to be constantly in motion. So you have parts come in,
Speaker 1: they get put into their immediately get put into the
Speaker 1: production line, and the finished products immediately shipped out to
Speaker 1: the stores. And you know, the theory is that the
Speaker 1: stores are only going to carry exactly enough product to
Speaker 1: meet demands. And it's supposed to be quote unquote flexible,
Speaker 1: which means that it can react to shifts in consumer
Speaker 1: taste and demand by like increasing or decreasing production, and
Speaker 1: it can't do this. This is what we've been seeing
Speaker 1: for the entirety of COVID, which is that you know
Speaker 1: that this is this is why every time there's a
Speaker 1: run of toilet paper, everyone runs out of toilet paper,
Speaker 1: because it turns out that these systems can't even a
Speaker 1: ten percent increase just completely obliterates this entire system and
Speaker 1: it just collapses and can't produce enough toilet paper. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and again just because it's expensive to store things. It's pricey.
Speaker 1: This is a big part of like why actually the
Speaker 1: John Deer strike, which has the potential to disrupt the
Speaker 1: status quote movement more than any strike in recent history,
Speaker 1: um is so potent because John Deer tractors are kind
Speaker 1: of a necessary part of the agriculture industry, not just
Speaker 1: their ability to sell new tractors, but their ability to
Speaker 1: repair the extant tractors. Like if harvest season comes around
Speaker 1: owned and there's not spare parts to repair tractors that break,
Speaker 1: like food doesn't get harvested, it's a significant issue John Deere.
Speaker 1: We'll talk more about this in another date. But like,
Speaker 1: not only did the most that they could do to
Speaker 1: squeeze their employees to suck out pensions, to cut you know,
Speaker 1: expenditures on wages, but they they set up their factories
Speaker 1: in such a way that there was no extra space,
Speaker 1: so they could not scale up any of these factories
Speaker 1: to increase demand when they needed to. So that now
Speaker 1: that John Deere is going on strike, if they lose
Speaker 1: a month of productivity, they can't ever catch up. It's
Speaker 1: impossible because they can't actually expand the productive capacity of
Speaker 1: their factories. And because the strike is hitting, they didn't
Speaker 1: have any extra spare parts lying around, So if ship
Speaker 1: gets broken, they can't manufacture the parts necessary to keep
Speaker 1: tractors functioning in a lot of American farms because they
Speaker 1: didn't store anything, because that was not the most efficient
Speaker 1: thing for the economic bottom line of the CEO who
Speaker 1: gets a hundred and sixty million dollars a year. And anyway,
Speaker 1: this is this is the funny part about this whole thing,
Speaker 1: which is that you know, okay, so this whole supply
Speaker 1: chain system was based around just like destroying destroying the
Speaker 1: organized working class, right, But it's like they were so
Speaker 1: successful at it that they've like turned around and fucked
Speaker 1: themselves with it because like you know this this is
Speaker 1: this is the thing about about the John Deer strike. Right.
Speaker 1: It used to be you know, back back back if
Speaker 1: you look at like like how how the unions were
Speaker 1: broken in the eighties, or like if you look at
Speaker 1: like the giant like auto strikes you'd have in the seventies, right,
Speaker 1: and companies still do this to this day, but like
Speaker 1: there worst at it. The thing they would do is
Speaker 1: so okay. So you you you know, if you're a company,
Speaker 1: you know roughly when a strike is gonna happen, right,
Speaker 1: And the reason you know when a strike is gonna
Speaker 1: happen is because in the US, like the way labor
Speaker 1: law works is that like you can you can basically
Speaker 1: only strike like when a contract is up. I mean,
Speaker 1: you can do wildcats, but it's illegal. But you know, okay,
Speaker 1: so they knew that the audio unions, for example, we're
Speaker 1: about to go we're going to go on strike when
Speaker 1: when the contract like what was coming up, and you know,
Speaker 1: they'd have spies, and you can get a sense of like,
Speaker 1: you know, okay, so are are how likely are they
Speaker 1: to do this strike? And you know so so that
Speaker 1: that that lets you do things like build up an
Speaker 1: enormous sort of inventorio spare parts. It lets you build
Speaker 1: up an inventory of supplies, and it lets you build
Speaker 1: up you know it basically it lets you build up
Speaker 1: the capacity you need to outlast a strike. But the
Speaker 1: problem with just in times, they can't do that anymore
Speaker 1: because yeah, they they've they've you know, they've they've completely
Speaker 1: fucked themselves by by then the John deer situation because
Speaker 1: they hadn't strike. The workers hadn't had gone on strike
Speaker 1: since eighties six. They've been putting funds into their strike
Speaker 1: survival fund for years, but the company had nothing like
Speaker 1: has Um. It's rather and this is you know, this,
Speaker 1: this is the other part of of of why everything
Speaker 1: like good that's happening right now is happening is that
Speaker 1: they they they you know, they everything has circled back
Speaker 1: around and suddenly all of these companies are you know,
Speaker 1: we are incredibly vulnerable to strikes again because yeah, as
Speaker 1: you're talking about the just in time production thing, it
Speaker 1: only works if if everything actually comes in on time,
Speaker 1: all right, Like if if if any if any individual
Speaker 1: part is late, the whole system starts to fall apart.
Speaker 1: And then and then you can't repair it. And you know,
Speaker 1: and there's there's a lot of ways that that this
Speaker 1: this this can be very bad. Um. You know, we've
Speaker 1: talked about the john do you We talked about the
Speaker 1: labor stuff. The other big thing that's happening is COVID,
Speaker 1: which has happened and continues to happen and has killed
Speaker 1: off just enormous parts of the working class. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's like four million dead worldwide or something. And again
Speaker 1: that that's also probably an undercount because that's just direct.
Speaker 1: Guess that's not like, yeah, it's probably like twice that
Speaker 1: it's I mean, we're looking at a minimum of seven
Speaker 1: in the US. And again that's probably a million undercounted
Speaker 1: at least. Yeah, it's it's a horror show, right, And
Speaker 1: and the people they killed with that, you know, like
Speaker 1: especially in the initial phases, like it was just it
Speaker 1: was just they took a chain chainsaw to the working class.
Speaker 1: And those are a bunch of people who you know
Speaker 1: that they're they're not replaceable, they're they're very highly skilled
Speaker 1: and they do a bunch of jobs that absolutely suck.
Speaker 1: And now you know, and one of one of the
Speaker 1: places that this this has caused a bunch of problems
Speaker 1: is in the ports, because ever, the other thing that
Speaker 1: this entire supply gamb relies on is being able to
Speaker 1: very quickly and cheaply moved parts from you know, China
Speaker 1: to the US, from China to Mexico from like Bangladesh too,
Speaker 1: like symbolia, you have, you have, you have you have
Speaker 1: to be able to continuously like keep moving stuff around
Speaker 1: in in Yeah, you have to continuously keep moving ships around,
Speaker 1: and you also have to be able to load noneload them.
Speaker 1: And we you know, we we we saw like there
Speaker 1: there was the that when that ship got stuck in
Speaker 1: the Suez, there is that whole yeah that you know
Speaker 1: that that that was sex We're when people couldn't get
Speaker 1: sex asses because the world's supply of sex asses for
Speaker 1: months was on that one ship. Um, it was a
Speaker 1: real crisis for the sex ass community. Those are plastic
Speaker 1: assis that you have sex with if you're curious. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's the world appears as an immense collection of commodities,
Speaker 1: some of which are sex asses. Yeah, most of which,
Speaker 1: in terms of the ones that matter, are sex asses. Yes,
Speaker 1: sex ass industrial complex is really the lynchpin of global capital.
Speaker 1: But please continue. Yeah, well you know, but the sex
Speaker 1: assi indictial complex falls apart, and you know, and it's
Speaker 1: not just the ship being stuck in the Sis like
Speaker 1: made everything way worse, right, But it was very funny, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was. It was extutally funny, but it was extremely funny.
Speaker 1: The part the thing is like not very funny is
Speaker 1: that like, Okay, so in order to getting this to
Speaker 1: work right, you have to have a bunch of longshoremen.
Speaker 1: You have to unload all of the ship mhm. And
Speaker 1: you know, one of one of the problems with that
Speaker 1: is that is happening in the sort of global supply
Speaker 1: chain right now, is that the ships can't be unloaded
Speaker 1: fast enough. And part of this is like this job sucks,
Speaker 1: and people just a lot of people don't want to
Speaker 1: do it, and a lot of people died and in
Speaker 1: the and it's causing this huge problem, and and there's
Speaker 1: and then there's there's another you know, if you want
Speaker 1: to take like the macrospective about this, it's that this
Speaker 1: whole system is relying on logistics workers and so it
Speaker 1: also needs you know, you need truck drivers. And we're
Speaker 1: coming back and you know in the US, is that
Speaker 1: there's yeah, you know, there's there's a sort of a
Speaker 1: truck drivers now because again their job sucks and they've
Speaker 1: been like just absolutely screwing these people over for decades
Speaker 1: and decades and decades now and turn into the subcontractors
Speaker 1: just not paying them, and you know, and and this
Speaker 1: and when you know, when the when the ports shut down,
Speaker 1: like not even shut up, like when when the ports
Speaker 1: are behind unloading stuff and when the trucks like that
Speaker 1: are supposed to be moving this stuff, they aren't off
Speaker 1: of them, and like the cost of that increases, it
Speaker 1: throws off the whole system. And that's that's another big
Speaker 1: part of like why this whole thing is is sort
Speaker 1: of imploding. And and it's interesting because I remember this.
Speaker 1: There was like a decade where like every other article
Speaker 1: we'll be talking about how they were going to like
Speaker 1: automate like truck driving. It was like, the truck drivers
Speaker 1: are all going to go out of business because they're
Speaker 1: going to automated. It just never happened at all. And
Speaker 1: say the same thing with with their you know, there's
Speaker 1: I mean there's been some port automization, but like not
Speaker 1: on the scale that you know, actually does anything. And
Speaker 1: part of the reason for that is, you know, I
Speaker 1: was talking about people not investing in research developments. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so the biggest people who aren't doing that are the
Speaker 1: shipping companies. And that's a good time because the shipping
Speaker 1: cup basically like container shipping, has been taken over by
Speaker 1: was essentially just like a monopoly of two companies. And
Speaker 1: those two companies make just an indescribable amount of money.
Speaker 1: They have like a thousand percent profits and they just
Speaker 1: pay it all out as dividends. And so they're not
Speaker 1: they're not investing in any port infrastructure, they're not investing automation.
Speaker 1: They're just pocketing the money. And that means that, you know,
Speaker 1: we have all that and they're they're spending in in
Speaker 1: the case of John Deere, which I keep going back to,
Speaker 1: a bunch of money lobbying to make it illegal for
Speaker 1: farmers to repair uh their tractors. Yeah, yeah, they're there.
Speaker 1: You know, they they figured they figured out that like
Speaker 1: the the easiest way to make money is just get
Speaker 1: the state to shake people down for you. It's like
Speaker 1: fun like investing in in making anything that we have better.
Speaker 1: Let's just you know, like let's just turn the state
Speaker 1: into a det collector. And and it's interesting because so
Speaker 1: this this is the part of of the supply chain
Speaker 1: crisis that like Biden has been focusing on. But Biden's plan,
Speaker 1: Biden's plans great. Biden's plan is literally make the longshoremen
Speaker 1: work harder. So his plan is here, we go, there,
Speaker 1: we go, there, we building back better. Baby. Yeah, we're
Speaker 1: gonna we're gonna make We're gonna keep the ports open
Speaker 1: twenty four hours a day. Seven days a week and
Speaker 1: like make people work weekends now, and then he also
Speaker 1: got FedEx Walmart and ups to do twenty four hour
Speaker 1: or seven day a week shipping. So yeah, the solution
Speaker 1: is literally just like feed more workers into a grinder
Speaker 1: and make them work longer, which is which is great
Speaker 1: and and you know will not in any way backfire. No,
Speaker 1: it's fine. I don't even think we should be talking
Speaker 1: about it. No, it's great, it's gonna it's it's yeah,
Speaker 1: it's you know, but I get like this is the thing,
Speaker 1: Like this won't work, and it can't and the reason
Speaker 1: it won't work is that, like part of the reason
Speaker 1: there's a shortage is that you know, it's it's not
Speaker 1: it's not just about the like the fact that people
Speaker 1: aren't paying enough. It's about the fact that these jobs
Speaker 1: are just awful. Like you have people, you have people
Speaker 1: working like twelve hours shifts that start at like six
Speaker 1: am and then they have to wake another twelve hour
Speaker 1: shift in hours later, and that these people have them
Speaker 1: can do this over and over and over again and
Speaker 1: it's well, and they don't like the way that these
Speaker 1: shifts are usually put on them is that like you'll
Speaker 1: find out when you come in that instead of working
Speaker 1: six am to four pm or whatever, they're actually gonna
Speaker 1: need you to stay until eight and then they're gonna
Speaker 1: need you to come in. By the way, you're gonna
Speaker 1: need to come in like two hours early tomorrow. So
Speaker 1: you're realized that like in between your two shifts, you
Speaker 1: have a total of eight hours to get home and sleep.
Speaker 1: And if you say no, uh uh, well, the idea
Speaker 1: is that if you say no, like you won't have
Speaker 1: the job. It's required. Now. The reality is that most
Speaker 1: of these companies are also pretty desperate to have these workers,
Speaker 1: and a lot of these manufacturing and packing firms, it
Speaker 1: takes time to train people up and then they quit
Speaker 1: a couple of weeks in because the work is miserable
Speaker 1: and the schedule is fucking miserable. Um, and it's yeah,
Speaker 1: it's all, it's it's it's it's simultaneously like deeply inhuman,
Speaker 1: but also is leading to a situation. There's a reason
Speaker 1: why there's so many strikes on right now is that
Speaker 1: there is opportunity because in sort of the chasing of
Speaker 1: short term profits, a lot of these fucking oligarchs have
Speaker 1: exposed themselves in a in a pretty vulnerable position. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think you know this this is coming back
Speaker 1: to a sort of the other way that when when
Speaker 1: there was a crisis in in the senties, the other
Speaker 1: way they saw this was just authoritarianism, right it was
Speaker 1: you know, is this is the pinos a solution, right like, oh,
Speaker 1: like workers are using control comprom minds, Okay, we'll just
Speaker 1: shoot them, right and yeah and yeah, and this is
Speaker 1: you know, they're they're they're finally running into a point
Speaker 1: where you know, this is this is the solution they've
Speaker 1: been trying to do now with with with this crisis,
Speaker 1: is you know, the the they're relying on the fact
Speaker 1: that just the workplace is just indescribably authoritarian. I mean
Speaker 1: it's it's like it's it's it's a dictatorship on a
Speaker 1: scale that is like like even to like the most
Speaker 1: despotic absolute monarch is just like unimaginable. Like your boss
Speaker 1: gets to control like when you ship, like they get
Speaker 1: a control, when you eat, they get a control exactly
Speaker 1: what you're doing, like at all times, they get control
Speaker 1: when you do it, they get a control like when
Speaker 1: the next time you're going to do it is they
Speaker 1: don't even have to tell you when it's going to
Speaker 1: be untel like you show up and you know, for
Speaker 1: the this is this is this has been the gamble
Speaker 1: for for you know, capitalism, the entire existence, which is
Speaker 1: that like you just have to take this and eat
Speaker 1: ship or they get to take away your ability to eat,
Speaker 1: get medical care and have a place to leave to live.
Speaker 1: But that's not true anymore. Like you can just say no,
Speaker 1: you can tell them to funk off. You can, you
Speaker 1: know you can, you can, you can organize a union.
Speaker 1: You can just fucking just leave your job, like just
Speaker 1: leave it, fucking walk out. And this is why we focus.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is number one why within the context
Speaker 1: of unions, strike funds are so important, but also why
Speaker 1: mutual aid is so important. Is it? It? It potentially
Speaker 1: when organized well enough provides people with the option to like, well,
Speaker 1: how are you going to feed yourself? Well, there's people
Speaker 1: in my community who want to make sure that I'm
Speaker 1: fed because they believe in what I'm striking for. Um,
Speaker 1: that's the promise of all of that. That's the practical
Speaker 1: behind the kind of high minded you know, anarchists of
Speaker 1: just you know whatever. Theorizing is the ability that like, well,
Speaker 1: this actually is a weapon too. Yeah, and I think
Speaker 1: you know what else is a weapon? Chris are product.
Speaker 1: I hope we're not being sponsored some I hope we are. Chris. Look,
Speaker 1: I've I've said before for weapons. I'll read any ad
Speaker 1: for a weapons manufacturer as long as they send me
Speaker 1: some weapons. So come on, guys, get on it. You
Speaker 1: could uh, you could be you could be in the
Speaker 1: middle of this conversation. Raypheon, you know, send me a
Speaker 1: couple of missile guidance chips Lockheed Martin. You know you
Speaker 1: want to give me an F thirty five, we'll we'll
Speaker 1: plug you. You know. That's what's that's that's the deal.
Speaker 1: That's how it works. Baby. All right, we're back. Hopefully
Speaker 1: hopefully you have now heard the advertisement for knife missile
Speaker 1: to knife missile harder now with like five knives, a
Speaker 1: thing that I and not making up. It actually exists. Yeah,
Speaker 1: people keep being surprised that the R nine X is
Speaker 1: a real thing. But there's another one. There's there's there's
Speaker 1: one with more knives. They put more knives. We do
Speaker 1: you You're not gonna look again, you can't. It's like
Speaker 1: with Apple products, right, planned obsolescence is a critical you
Speaker 1: have to You can't just rest on your laurels. You're
Speaker 1: gonna run out of money. So you've gotta make another
Speaker 1: knife missile with a couple of more knives. Yeah, just
Speaker 1: keep keep adding knives. Nothing can ever go wrong. Do
Speaker 1: not ask any questions about why you're developing knife missiles.
Speaker 1: Send me one and like a drone or three. I
Speaker 1: swear to God, I'll use it for legal purposes. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: I guess the last thing that I that's that's really
Speaker 1: interesting about this moment that doesn't usually happen is that
Speaker 1: you know, okay, so if you, if you, if you,
Speaker 1: if you, you read your very basic marks, right. One
Speaker 1: of the things Marks talks about is that there's this
Speaker 1: thing called the Reserve Army of Labor, which is it's
Speaker 1: just like, you know, there's a bunch of people who
Speaker 1: are just always unemployed and they get along by doing
Speaker 1: sort of like odd jobs, like you know, like my, my,
Speaker 1: My quintessential person for this is like if you ever
Speaker 1: go on a subway, there's you know, it's it's the
Speaker 1: guy selling candy bars in the subway. Yeah, right, it's
Speaker 1: people who quasi legal you know, sometimes they just kind
Speaker 1: of like doing whatever. You know, we call them. In
Speaker 1: the West Coast, you have a lot of those, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: people who tream marijuana for a couple of months and
Speaker 1: then just kind of like crashing you know, camp sites
Speaker 1: the rest of the year or whatever. Like, yeah, there's
Speaker 1: a bunch of those folks, for sure. Yeah. And you know,
Speaker 1: and like the the the number of these people who
Speaker 1: have been just like kicked out of like the formal
Speaker 1: labor system has been increasing for a long time. But
Speaker 1: what's interesting about this moment is that you know, every
Speaker 1: every strike you see has a second strike behind it,
Speaker 1: and that strike is the informal general strike, which is
Speaker 1: just again people just quitting their jobs and leaving. And
Speaker 1: you have this weird moment where where normally the sort
Speaker 1: of reserve army of labor is this thing that like
Speaker 1: capitalism can always sort of rely on as a way
Speaker 1: to sort of solve its problems because it's like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: all right, if if you're not gonna do this job,
Speaker 1: we can bring another person. But you know this, this
Speaker 1: is a weird moment where like the reserve army of
Speaker 1: labor is like fighting on our side. M h. And
Speaker 1: the fact that all of these people are just like
Speaker 1: you know, they're seeing the just incredible authoritarianism of these workplaces.
Speaker 1: That's just horrific abuse. The fact that you know they're
Speaker 1: they're being in a lot of cases just asked to
Speaker 1: show up and die and they're saying no is a
Speaker 1: really sort of is a really incredibly powerful thing. And
Speaker 1: when when when you add that to the fact that
Speaker 1: you know, all these companies have completely screwed themselves with
Speaker 1: how they designed the supply chains or it's it's all,
Speaker 1: it's all come back around and suddenly all all the
Speaker 1: supply chain stuff that they carefully laid out over decades
Speaker 1: and decades decades is way to like break the union
Speaker 1: movement and make sure nobody ever asked more wages. You know,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's it's it's been revealed to be incredibly
Speaker 1: fragile and you know, week to our attack, and that
Speaker 1: leads us, I think, to this other tension in Biden's
Speaker 1: plan to sort of like revive the economy, which is
Speaker 1: that so the US technically speaking has this like very
Speaker 1: large central planning capability, but it only has it to
Speaker 1: like build weapons. So you know, like the army has
Speaker 1: this incredible ability like that there there's a lot of
Speaker 1: bullets you know it, despite the huge stress on the
Speaker 1: bullets supply chain, it really has scaled. You know, the
Speaker 1: prices have increased, but we're we're still still still getting bullets.
Speaker 1: America is great at making bullets. Yeah, it's less great
Speaker 1: at keeping tractors working, but be a problem. Yeah, then
Speaker 1: you're like even if you remember at the beginning of
Speaker 1: the pandemic, it was like the US just couldn't produce masks,
Speaker 1: like we said, we we never we never like did
Speaker 1: that right, like that, like the government never at any
Speaker 1: point was like We're just gonna make mass given the people.
Speaker 1: They just never did it. And so you know, our
Speaker 1: mass supplies. All those suppli chains suck. And the only
Speaker 1: way that like the States can intervene and get the
Speaker 1: supply chains to work is by doing one of two things.
Speaker 1: It's by either doing a thing Biden was doing, which
Speaker 1: is just go to a bunch of companies and tell
Speaker 1: them to make all of their workers work harder, which
Speaker 1: is the thing that like, you know, totally won't backfire
Speaker 1: or explode in his face. And then the second thing
Speaker 1: is for Biden basically to like do all this saber
Speaker 1: rattling about how we have to have like medical supply
Speaker 1: chains in the US because national defense or something. And
Speaker 1: that's the second thing he's trying to do. But you
Speaker 1: know that just that just makes the problem worse, right
Speaker 1: because once you once you lose the ability to outsource, you,
Speaker 1: you lose the hammer even beating the unions with And
Speaker 1: so you know, all all of the sort of all
Speaker 1: of the tendencies that are you know, making things like
Speaker 1: bad and scary right now are also weirdly making this.
Speaker 1: You know, the fact that prices are rising, right, the
Speaker 1: fact that there's all these shortages. It's it's it's making
Speaker 1: this like the best moment two you know, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's it's making this the best moment that and that
Speaker 1: anyone's had in ages to actually try to make something better. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and and the important thing is we're starting to
Speaker 1: see it happen. And yeah, and we're we're we're we're
Speaker 1: gonna talk more about sch October and sort of the
Speaker 1: strike wave in the coming you know, weeks and months.
Speaker 1: But yeah, we're gonna we're gonna be hitting this pretty hard,
Speaker 1: even just next week. Um, we have a lot of
Speaker 1: stuff in the pipeline. Kind of wish we've gotten to
Speaker 1: it earlier. But there's a lot of stuff to talk
Speaker 1: about in the world happening that that's within our milieu.
Speaker 1: It turns out when you're when you're specific focus is
Speaker 1: things falling up a uh, you're always behind uncovering all
Speaker 1: the things that are on the mark. But I think
Speaker 1: it is a good time to to to drive this
Speaker 1: to a close, to drag this episode out behind the
Speaker 1: farm the barn, and and and shoot it and bury
Speaker 1: it in a shallow grave and and break its bones
Speaker 1: with the hammers that the police can't identify it. Chris, Um,
Speaker 1: thank you for putting this together. I got anything anything
Speaker 1: else to say? Uh, quit your job, you or you
Speaker 1: and or unionize your workplace and or take it over
Speaker 1: and run it yourselves, because Lord knows the people who
Speaker 1: are telling you what to do, just literally do not
Speaker 1: care if you die. Yeah, And I mean with with that, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: I was just gonna uh, I don't know what I
Speaker 1: was gonna do, Chris, I don't know what I was
Speaker 1: gonna do. Do do Go go do something. You know
Speaker 1: you're you're listening to things, Go do something. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: and yeah, and if you want to live and to
Speaker 1: us do more things. We are allegedly allegedly we we
Speaker 1: we are at cool Zone media on on the Twitter
Speaker 1: and and the you can't prove that in court, it's true.
Speaker 1: Good luck, good luck to them and trying to prove
Speaker 1: that we did this. Yeah, that's right, motherfucker's all right.
Speaker 1: Uh uh excellent, Chris, that's good. That's good. That's the
Speaker 1: kind of a tonal grunting that people have come to
Speaker 1: express respect from the introductions of my podcast. I was
Speaker 1: hoping it wouldn't be that, but then it was so
Speaker 1: bad that it was great thrill. That's our brand. Now
Speaker 1: it can't be anything else. We've we've established it. Look,
Speaker 1: no body else is doing that. The Cometown guys, I
Speaker 1: assume aren't a totally grunting to start their podcast. I
Speaker 1: don't know, actually, but I assume not. I guess this
Speaker 1: is just how we start It could happen here is
Speaker 1: a podcast. You don't sound like you believe it enthusiastically,
Speaker 1: Chris with feeling. This is a podcasting happening here. That yeah, excellent,
Speaker 1: that's how we do it. Okay, what are we talking
Speaker 1: about today? Well, one of the things that is happening here,
Speaker 1: as we have discussed briefly in previous episodes is a
Speaker 1: bunch of strikes, And with us today to talk about
Speaker 1: one of these stripes, specifically the Collogue strike is Mel Buwer,
Speaker 1: an independent researcher, educator, and freelance journalists based in Omaha, Nebraska,
Speaker 1: where this particular strike is taking place, who has done
Speaker 1: done a lot of journalism previously on the local Protestant
Speaker 1: Uprising Street and is also researching writing a book on
Speaker 1: alternative media. Hi, Hello, we'll welcome to the show. Than strikes,
Speaker 1: strikes apparently is what's up? It is? It is Strictober.
Speaker 1: We're doing strikes, strike wave baby. Ye. So this this
Speaker 1: specific strike, Um, why don't can you can you walk
Speaker 1: us through a bit about how we got to the
Speaker 1: point where this Kellogg factory is on strike? Um? Well,
Speaker 1: first off, it's four plants. It's all for American Kellogg
Speaker 1: cereal plants have gone on strike. Um. The workers and
Speaker 1: these plants are represented by the bakery, confectionery tobacco workers
Speaker 1: in grain Miller's International Union. I do love that bakeries
Speaker 1: and tobacco workers are in the same union. Yeah that's
Speaker 1: rat yeah yeah. So um, their contract was up for
Speaker 1: renegotiation in actually UM and UM due to a series
Speaker 1: of weird things happening, they pushed the negotiations to UM.
Speaker 1: They renegotiate their contract every five years UM and at
Speaker 1: stake this year, UM was a sort of pushing back
Speaker 1: against a recently introduced to tier employment system that they
Speaker 1: company sort of strong armed the union into, which essentially
Speaker 1: is not it's not a good deal for anyone UM.
Speaker 1: In they pushed in this sort of two tier system
Speaker 1: where one tier is a lower transitional tier and one
Speaker 1: tier is a legacy or full time employee tier. UM.
Speaker 1: And what it is is that you know, it amounts
Speaker 1: to a difference of twelve bucks an hour and less benefits. UM. Yes, yes, UM.
Speaker 1: Dan Osborne recently did an interview with Ax Salvarez at
Speaker 1: Working People podcast and he really kind of talked about
Speaker 1: exactly what was going on there UM. And you know,
Speaker 1: there's four people who work in four plants. There's about
Speaker 1: four employees at the Omaha plant, which has been around
Speaker 1: for decades and UM. Essentially what this tier system does
Speaker 1: is it's capped at their union workforce. And the whole
Speaker 1: idea is as these full time employees retire or quit,
Speaker 1: then these transitional employees will sort of be funneled into
Speaker 1: the full time tier. Right over the last five years,
Speaker 1: that hasn't really happened really at all. Um. It was
Speaker 1: a bad deal from the start according to many of
Speaker 1: the workers who sort of felt like they, you know,
Speaker 1: they were backed into a wall because Kellogg's was threatening
Speaker 1: to close the Memphis plant if they didn't ratify this
Speaker 1: negotiated contract. So rather than experience, you know, five hundred
Speaker 1: layoffs in Memphis, they just agreed to it. So they
Speaker 1: you going to the negotiating table in that they were
Speaker 1: going to try and sort of walk that back because
Speaker 1: these workers all work in the same plant, same days
Speaker 1: for a second third shift. Transitional workers are working side
Speaker 1: by side with these full time employees, working the same hours,
Speaker 1: which can amount to seven days a week twelve the
Speaker 1: sixteen hours a day on mandatory over time, and they
Speaker 1: are making twelve dollars an hour less and they are
Speaker 1: not getting the benefits that these full time employees are getting.
Speaker 1: So really, these full time employees are kind of going
Speaker 1: to bat for the transitional employees. UM, Kelloggs wants to
Speaker 1: remove the cap which the union negotiated, which is attent
Speaker 1: of their workforce. They want to to do that, do
Speaker 1: away with that so that they can continue hiring more
Speaker 1: transitional workers, and they want to funk with the insurance benefits. So, uh,
Speaker 1: the union tried to negotiate this. I think according to
Speaker 1: the local union president, Kellogg's negotiators were at the negotiating
Speaker 1: table for ten hours and they negotiated eight hours a day,
Speaker 1: five days a week for two weeks. Ten hours there
Speaker 1: at the table. So they weren't interested in negotiating a contract.
Speaker 1: They had laid out their their terms and they essentially
Speaker 1: told the union to go kick rocks. And so the
Speaker 1: union said, you know, we have we have until October
Speaker 1: five and then our contract is up, and if we
Speaker 1: haven't ratified a new contract, then we're going out on strike.
Speaker 1: And that's ultimately what happened. So they've been on strike
Speaker 1: for this will be their fourteenth day today. I think
Speaker 1: the fight against the two tier system, I think is
Speaker 1: an interesting part of this because that's been a huge
Speaker 1: part of a lot of the different strikes you've been
Speaker 1: seeing since the John Deer strikes, is part of the
Speaker 1: Kaiser strikes. And Yeah, I'm wondering what you think specifically
Speaker 1: about the fact that this is like this is the
Speaker 1: moment that people have decided to like push back against
Speaker 1: against two or even three tier systems they were introduced
Speaker 1: in the last really like ten or fifteen years. For
Speaker 1: the most part, well, I think it's just, you know,
Speaker 1: it's a divide and conquer strategy for Kellogg's or for
Speaker 1: these other companies. And ultimately, what it looks like is
Speaker 1: it uh destabilizes well established unions, especially at Kellogg's. UM
Speaker 1: and UM, it pits workers against each other, you know, UM,
Speaker 1: particularly at Kellogg's. If they're able to remove this cap
Speaker 1: on this tier system, UM, what they're essentially doing is
Speaker 1: they're creating a more precarious workplace for these workers. UM.
Speaker 1: The turnover rate and the lower tier at the Omaha
Speaker 1: plant is right around UM. And you know, prior to
Speaker 1: you didn't really see a whole lot of people leaving
Speaker 1: the Kellogg's plant. You know, these were These are workers
Speaker 1: who are spending their entire careers at this plant. Their
Speaker 1: parents work, their their grandparents work there. You know. UM,
Speaker 1: they because they're all getting paid around the same amount
Speaker 1: of money, there isn't this tension on the line, so
Speaker 1: they're they're working with each other, they're helping each other,
Speaker 1: right UM. And with this tier system, what they're doing
Speaker 1: is they're throwing these newer workers into uh pretty uh
Speaker 1: insane factory conditions, UM and making it really difficult for
Speaker 1: them to uh I feel like they have any reason
Speaker 1: to stay there. Right. A lot of these people will,
Speaker 1: you know put in. Some of these workers were transitional
Speaker 1: workers who weren't officially hired by the company. You know,
Speaker 1: there aren't full time employees. They aren't receiving benefits like
Speaker 1: the full time employees are for five years. They work
Speaker 1: this every day, seven days a week, three months on end. Right. Uh.
Speaker 1: They have this really you know punitive attendance based points
Speaker 1: system that discourages you calling in sick. There's injuries that
Speaker 1: happened in the factory all the time. You know. I
Speaker 1: went out to the line and wrote a piece for
Speaker 1: the Real News about this, and pretty much every person
Speaker 1: I talked to showed me scars from accidents that happened,
Speaker 1: injuries in the plant. UM. The union president himself got
Speaker 1: his hand stuck in a m like a mill and
Speaker 1: broke all the fingers in his hand. He had to
Speaker 1: have ten surgeries on his hand, you know. UM, there
Speaker 1: was an accident at the plant two or three weeks
Speaker 1: ago wherein a transitional employee got both arms stuck in
Speaker 1: a conveyor belt. You know. Um, the thing is is
Speaker 1: these folks super proud of the work that they do,
Speaker 1: like absolutely take this work extremely seriously. You know, they're
Speaker 1: not even asking for changes to their overtime. They are
Speaker 1: not asking for you know, anything that you know, from
Speaker 1: me on the outside, i'd be fighting for more humane
Speaker 1: working conditions. But to them, you know, it's it's not
Speaker 1: like it's a point of pride, but they feld that
Speaker 1: they have put blood, sweat, tears, uh, you know, fractured relationships,
Speaker 1: time that they could be spending with their children into
Speaker 1: this factory and Kelloggs is essentially fucking them over. Yea.
Speaker 1: You know, they see, as we have sacrificed for this
Speaker 1: company for years and years and years, um, and we
Speaker 1: are asking for equal pay for all and for everyone
Speaker 1: to have the same health care so that we can
Speaker 1: do this job, you know, and Kelloggs is saying no, absolutely.
Speaker 1: You know. I think the union president said that some
Speaker 1: of the negotiators called those demands outlandish during negotiations, which
Speaker 1: I think is just incredible, you know, just corporate greed. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think the other part of the story is that,
Speaker 1: like I mean, it's kind of a weird consequence of it,
Speaker 1: but like one of the things, one of those consequences
Speaker 1: is sort of like rising like staple commodity price, staple
Speaker 1: grain prices and stuff, is that Kelloggs like they're doing
Speaker 1: They have like record they have record off its right
Speaker 1: now and they're still just doing this ship because yeah,
Speaker 1: they made record profits during the pandemic. They gave their
Speaker 1: CEO pretty huffy raise bonus. Um, there was a stock
Speaker 1: buy back program that helped happened among the c suite
Speaker 1: folks last year. They made a lot of money, a
Speaker 1: lot of money. And UM, you know, these workers worked
Speaker 1: every day through the pandemic, UM continually understaffed, you know, UM,
Speaker 1: doing their best because again, they they take this job
Speaker 1: very seriously and they are proud that they are feeding
Speaker 1: the American people, you know, UM, and they are proud
Speaker 1: to work at Kellogg's. And uh, they feel that this
Speaker 1: contract is just shit, it's just ship. And you know
Speaker 1: the only sensible thing to do is to to walk
Speaker 1: out on strike because you know, they've been backed into
Speaker 1: a corner and negotiations have stagnated completely, you know, UM,
Speaker 1: and Um, they don't want to They don't want to
Speaker 1: back down from this, you know. Um, they and I agree.
Speaker 1: I feel what they're what they're asking for is fair.
Speaker 1: It's very fair. I mean, I think it's I think
Speaker 1: asking for a lot more would be fair, but not
Speaker 1: my place to be doing. One of the things that
Speaker 1: strikes me about this you talk about this tier system
Speaker 1: that Kellogg's introduced, which I can't help but think of
Speaker 1: what happened at John Deere where they I think in
Speaker 1: nineties six cut pensions by two thirds and then like
Speaker 1: last year eliminated them entirely. And this kind of bid
Speaker 1: to pitt chunks of the workforced against each other. Um,
Speaker 1: where you have like you know, different groups making different
Speaker 1: amounts and sort of like, I don't know, it seems
Speaker 1: kind of like the strategy that you see in the
Speaker 1: broader economy, like written within within the space of a company,
Speaker 1: where you've got like some people who are getting pretty
Speaker 1: well taken care of in their jobs and other newer
Speaker 1: people who are who are getting more screwed over in
Speaker 1: kind of this this attempt to create division within the
Speaker 1: workforce so that this this kind of organizing doesn't happen.
Speaker 1: M M. I would agree. And you also have to think,
Speaker 1: you know, if they are able to remove this cap
Speaker 1: on the transitional tier, but that means that this is
Speaker 1: they'll be able to instead of say, say a full
Speaker 1: time employee retires, they leave that space empty, but they
Speaker 1: still need an extra space, an extra person, right, so
Speaker 1: they can just hire a transitional worker instead of funneling
Speaker 1: one of those transitional workers into that full time space. Ah,
Speaker 1: what ends up happening is suddenly you have instead of
Speaker 1: sevent full time to transitional, the it starts tipping, right,
Speaker 1: it becomes a more precarious workforce. Then say, for example,
Speaker 1: to do that in the next five years. You know,
Speaker 1: now they have seventy percent of these transitional workers who
Speaker 1: don't think the union is offering anything for them. They
Speaker 1: can essentially just offer a better deal to these transitional
Speaker 1: workers and kick the union out of the company at
Speaker 1: some point. You know. Um, and these folks on the
Speaker 1: line understand that and know that that's kind of Kellogg's plan, right,
Speaker 1: they know that the Kelloggs, what Kelloggs is trying to
Speaker 1: do is essentially destabilize the power of the union inside
Speaker 1: the plants. And everyone on the line that I've spoken
Speaker 1: with know exactly what's happening, you know, and these full
Speaker 1: time employees are out there every day making sure that
Speaker 1: their transitional and you know, colleagues know that that's why
Speaker 1: they're out there because they want to not allow this
Speaker 1: to be something that divides their workforce. It remains to
Speaker 1: be seen what's going to happen, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: They've brought in scabs to get the plant up and
Speaker 1: running again, and most recently, uh, yesterday this morning. Yesterday,
Speaker 1: the Building and Construction Trades Council union and met with
Speaker 1: the union president in Omaha because they have about a
Speaker 1: hundred third party iron workers, carpenters, electricians, and skilled trades
Speaker 1: people that are union trades people that have contracts at Kellogg's,
Speaker 1: and they came to what Dan Osborne, the union president,
Speaker 1: decided called was a tough decision that those union workers
Speaker 1: are going to cross the picket line to honor those contracts.
Speaker 1: So Kelloggs is forcing the unions in the city in
Speaker 1: like into a bind really because they're they're you know,
Speaker 1: uh going to lose their own contracts at Kellogg's. So
Speaker 1: that's kind of been like the most recent development here
Speaker 1: is that rather than just temps coming in. We have
Speaker 1: now skilled union trades people from various Omaha unions who
Speaker 1: are also crossing the picket line two honor their contracts
Speaker 1: at Kellogg's, you know, um, past these striking workers. So
Speaker 1: it's a bit of a mess a little bit, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's so much going on right now. I'm kind of
Speaker 1: wondering what you think are the because we've got a
Speaker 1: number of strikes kind of all coming to ahead at
Speaker 1: the same time, I'm wondering, specifically from the Kellogg strike,
Speaker 1: what do you think are kind of the lessons that
Speaker 1: should be taken from what's happened so far for the
Speaker 1: broader labor movement. UM. I think the biggest thing that's
Speaker 1: kind of impacted me as I've gone to the line. UM,
Speaker 1: I've stood on the picket line, I've covered these you know,
Speaker 1: this strike, I've talked to people, UM, is that when
Speaker 1: these types of actions happen, they really only can be
Speaker 1: sustained because the community comes together to support them. You know. UM,
Speaker 1: these strike funds that are going around and folks showing
Speaker 1: up to stand on the picket line who are not
Speaker 1: part of the union are really sort of become you know,
Speaker 1: they are helping support these workers who can only hold
Speaker 1: out so long with finite resources. Right. So the big
Speaker 1: thing to me is that past these news cycles of
Speaker 1: excitement of strike Ober of you know, these people just
Speaker 1: walked out today, well they may be you know, they
Speaker 1: may be on the line for months and months on end,
Speaker 1: and the news cycle is going to move on, and
Speaker 1: these communities are still going to have to try and
Speaker 1: and and back up these labor actions, right Um. You
Speaker 1: really can't have true you know, you can't have a
Speaker 1: labor movement without you know, support, right um. And that's
Speaker 1: kind of been the biggest thing that has impacted me particularly.
Speaker 1: You know this Almaha used to be a really formidable union,
Speaker 1: tim you know, back in the eighties, it was really
Speaker 1: really something to see that the business unions in in
Speaker 1: the various locals here really had some of these union
Speaker 1: leaders had more political power than the mayor, right um.
Speaker 1: And that has gone downhill over the last forty years.
Speaker 1: And it's really cool to see, ah, the level of
Speaker 1: solidarity that's happening amongst the community, you know, um, in
Speaker 1: the ways in which people are kind of coming out
Speaker 1: to talk to and and be a part of this
Speaker 1: strike and to remind these Kellogg's workers that they're not
Speaker 1: operating in a bubble, you know, and that the rest
Speaker 1: of the community really hopes that the strike will end
Speaker 1: quickly and peacefully and with a really good resolution for
Speaker 1: these workers. You know. Whatever thing I wanted to ask
Speaker 1: about in in terms of sort of this this kind
Speaker 1: of research in to the union movements, and in in
Speaker 1: in terms of sort of communities support is the level
Speaker 1: of violence that there's been against like against the strikes.
Speaker 1: I've seen a lot of like stuff about people canna
Speaker 1: hit by buses and like, and I don't I don't
Speaker 1: know if I think I think I'm getting my strikes.
Speaker 1: I don't don't know if they've they have been direct
Speaker 1: car attacks on this specific picket line. But that's when
Speaker 1: I think that it's been happening a lot and a
Speaker 1: couple of documented cases. Yeah, yeah, and yeah, I was
Speaker 1: wondering what you think about that, and like what actually
Speaker 1: can be done about the fact that, like, you know that,
Speaker 1: you know, like this just the fact that we're just
Speaker 1: seeing auto attacks on picket lines regularly, Now, I mean,
Speaker 1: is it that's you know, it's a it's a shitty development.
Speaker 1: You know. Um, I was out on the picket line
Speaker 1: last Thursday, and um, they were attempting to bring in
Speaker 1: buses at shift change past the the picketers who walk slowly.
Speaker 1: You know, they don't want to stop in front of
Speaker 1: the bus. It's illegal to stop and and you know
Speaker 1: make it, you know, so that they can't pass through
Speaker 1: the gates, but they slow them down for a little bit.
Speaker 1: And um, one gentleman was trying, you know, was standing
Speaker 1: there and this bus just bumped right into them. You know,
Speaker 1: there's videos that have been shared through local news of
Speaker 1: buses knocking down workers as they're trying to cross the
Speaker 1: picket line. UM. And I you know there are also
Speaker 1: personal vehicles that go through and it could be the
Speaker 1: private security that's been hired, it could be managers. UM.
Speaker 1: But you know they're running through these lines really quickly, dangerously.
Speaker 1: It's unfortunate, and you know, I don't have an answer
Speaker 1: for what the best UH solution for that is. You know,
Speaker 1: but vehicle tax have become sort of more uh, I
Speaker 1: don't want to say commonplace, but you see them happening
Speaker 1: a lot both at protests last year, and you know,
Speaker 1: I think Warrior met Cole had some bosses running through
Speaker 1: the lines and being reckless with their vehicles. You know. Um,
Speaker 1: the problem is is on the on the back end,
Speaker 1: and the police don't step in when they see these instances,
Speaker 1: you know. Um. And in fact, last Thursday, when we
Speaker 1: had a hundred plus motorcyclists from various mc s show
Speaker 1: up to support the strike, Um, the police were the
Speaker 1: ones who protected the scabs and made sure that they
Speaker 1: made it through the picket line. So you know, UM,
Speaker 1: the answer to that not sure, you know, yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean that's a time honored police tradition. Yeah, they historically
Speaker 1: don't don't exist to protect laborers, with the notable exception
Speaker 1: of of the sheriff and what was it, Mattawan and
Speaker 1: uh during the um the coal miner strike in West Virginia.
Speaker 1: M Well yeah they shot him so well yeah, but
Speaker 1: it shot some people first, yeah, Um, sid Hatfield that
Speaker 1: was the name. Yeah, I don't know. Um, I've gotten
Speaker 1: to know some of these folks the line of the
Speaker 1: last two weeks, and they're just fantastic human beings, you know. Um,
Speaker 1: they are accommodating and hard working, and they come from
Speaker 1: all age brackets and they bring their families out and
Speaker 1: you know they're getting they're getting a raw deal from
Speaker 1: Kellogg's and UM, so far, the community support has been
Speaker 1: overwhelmingly positive. Um, there hasn't really been like at the
Speaker 1: John Deer strike. They're not getting eggs thrown out them,
Speaker 1: you know. Um, they get a lot more honking and
Speaker 1: messages of support than they do people driving by to
Speaker 1: yell at them for uh, you know, being a strike.
Speaker 1: So that's been nice to see, you know. UM. And
Speaker 1: actually this weekend on Saturday, UM, there's gonna be a
Speaker 1: like cool vintage car show cruise around Kellogg's event that
Speaker 1: they've got planned the fire departments bringing rigs and um,
Speaker 1: teamsters fire department is yeah, and the Teamsters are bringing cars,
Speaker 1: and that there's a bunch of vintage car clubs that
Speaker 1: are going to be coming out. So you know, those
Speaker 1: types of things have like really kind of like fired
Speaker 1: up these people to keep them out on the line
Speaker 1: as long as they need to be, you know, so
Speaker 1: communities there for him. One of the things I'm continuing
Speaker 1: to wonder about is what it takes to close the
Speaker 1: gap between understanding that you and your colleagues are getting
Speaker 1: screwed over by this system and understanding that you and
Speaker 1: all of the other people striking at the same time,
Speaker 1: and perhaps even a bunch of people not striking are
Speaker 1: all kind of fighting the same fight. And then maybe
Speaker 1: there's grander things to achieve than the negotiation of a
Speaker 1: single contract, because that seems like the big leap that
Speaker 1: is going to be the real struggle to clear. Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: you know. Um. I will say that some of the
Speaker 1: workers are fully aware that this is not just about
Speaker 1: a single contract negotiation and is actually, you know, more
Speaker 1: about struggles of the working class against corporate greed and
Speaker 1: the ways in which the working class gets their asses
Speaker 1: handed to them all the time, um um. And they
Speaker 1: know that they know that at some point, perhaps at
Speaker 1: some point in the future, someone else is going to
Speaker 1: look at their example and be inspired by it. Right. Um.
Speaker 1: As far as like maybe I don't know, ideologically speaking
Speaker 1: or politically speaking, for these folks, it's uh doesn't fit
Speaker 1: into any sort of ideology leftist or conservative or whatever.
Speaker 1: Everyone's got their own personal politics. But they don't really
Speaker 1: talk about it on the line. What they talk about
Speaker 1: is working class versus ruling class. Um that you know,
Speaker 1: that's their sense. It's corporate greed, it's um asshole. CEO
Speaker 1: is making eleven point six million dollars a year while
Speaker 1: they're struggling to pay their own bills, you know, UM,
Speaker 1: and and you know that conversation is more common than UM.
Speaker 1: Trying to fit this into a larger political movement or
Speaker 1: revolutionary movement, if that makes sense, you know yeah, um,
Speaker 1: But I would say that the vast majority of the workers,
Speaker 1: regardless of their own personal politics, have a very clear
Speaker 1: sense of where they sit in terms of class consciousness
Speaker 1: and understand that this is one of one of the
Speaker 1: most effective tactics to try and force the hand of
Speaker 1: these assholes, you know, UM is to withhold work and
Speaker 1: withhold their labor. So well, this has been great. I
Speaker 1: mean that's everything I had to ask Chris anything else
Speaker 1: that I have? So there is there a call to
Speaker 1: action we could have for our listeners or pages people
Speaker 1: should be following strike fund Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a
Speaker 1: go fund me and there's a PayPal set up for
Speaker 1: the Omaha strikers. I believe the b C t g
Speaker 1: M International page has like a page of each of
Speaker 1: the strike funds for each of the four plants. So
Speaker 1: that might be something that you might want to share
Speaker 1: with your listeners. I can send you an email with
Speaker 1: that um, because it's probably going to be easier to do. Um.
Speaker 1: But yeah, as far as I know, bct GM isn't
Speaker 1: called for an official boycott of Kellogg's products. However, they
Speaker 1: wouldn't be mad if you just didn't buy any right now.
Speaker 1: There was some talk last week that some of the
Speaker 1: picketers might you know, be flying outside of grocery stores
Speaker 1: to try and educate the community on what's going on
Speaker 1: with this strike. But beyond that, they also are concerned
Speaker 1: about the quality of the food being produced by scabs,
Speaker 1: So it probably would be healthy for you to not
Speaker 1: by the food, you know, because I think it wasn't
Speaker 1: what two thousand eighteen during the works a lockout in Memphis,
Speaker 1: the same company that they brought in then that they're
Speaker 1: bringing in now, uh piste in the cereal on the line,
Speaker 1: and it didn't release video of that for two years
Speaker 1: after the incident, so it ended up in someone's um,
Speaker 1: you know, gross yikes, yikes, Yeah, I guess, but yeah,
Speaker 1: that's pretty fun right. Um. So yeah, you know, uh,
Speaker 1: support your local strike fund and if you are in
Speaker 1: a city where Kellogg's plant is striking, I'm sure those
Speaker 1: workers would love love to to hear from you fill
Speaker 1: your support. So where and where can our listeners follow you?
Speaker 1: I am on Twitter primarily at cold Brood Tool. I
Speaker 1: don't know why I picked that name, but I like it. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I got it. I haven't changed that handle since I
Speaker 1: got into Twitter, so um. But yeah, that's usually where
Speaker 1: I'm at. Otherwise, you know, I teach locally and had
Speaker 1: to have a podcast that I'm developing and do a
Speaker 1: bunch of different projects. So Twitter is the best way
Speaker 1: to get a hold of me if you have questions. Awesome,
Speaker 1: all right, thanks for having me on folks, Thanks to us,
Speaker 1: Thanks for thanks for joining us. I'll be back at
Speaker 1: the picket line, you know, talking to these folks, and
Speaker 1: I'm going to do my best to keep this ship
Speaker 1: in the new cycles so that they aren't forgotten. So awesome.
Speaker 1: We've got a link to the strike Fund and some
Speaker 1: other ways to help me in the description. So yeah,
Speaker 1: this has been it could Happen Here pod. Follow us
Speaker 1: on Twitter, Instagram at Happened Here pod, and at cools
Speaker 1: on media for all the rest of our shows. Hey, everybody,
Speaker 1: Robert Evans here your favorite podcast. Are also legally the
Speaker 1: only podcaster that that people are allowed to enjoy on
Speaker 1: the internet here to introduce a really exciting episode of
Speaker 1: it could happen here. So for the last bit of time,
Speaker 1: I've been in and out of touch with a number
Speaker 1: of members of the Puget Sound John Brown Club. They
Speaker 1: have provided armed self defense groups for a couple of
Speaker 1: different protests in the Washington area over the last year
Speaker 1: and change, UM, and we wanted to sit down and
Speaker 1: talk to them about the ideas behind community self defense,
Speaker 1: how to do it responsibly, how to do it irresponsibly.
Speaker 1: We also had some discussions with them about the disasters
Speaker 1: that happened at the Chop Slash Chaz last year. They
Speaker 1: were not involved with that as an organization UM, but
Speaker 1: they have some insights on the matter. UM. That's going
Speaker 1: to be coming at you in a separate episode or
Speaker 1: maybe even a couple of episodes in the near future.
Speaker 1: Today we're just kind of talking about the concepts of
Speaker 1: armed community self defense. You know, what's responsible, what's irresponsible,
Speaker 1: how people should think about it. I think you'll enjoy
Speaker 1: the conversation here. It is a decent chunk of the
Speaker 1: folks listening, especially the Portlanders, will have experience with UH
Speaker 1: and that that Garrison and I have certainly had experienced
Speaker 1: with it is people at protests declaring themselves security, sometimes
Speaker 1: even wearing shirts that say security and uh, picking up
Speaker 1: a variety of what fense, often paintball guns and mace,
Speaker 1: and using them, often irresponsibly on other protesters, on on bystanders,
Speaker 1: in the name of of of keeping things safe. And UM,
Speaker 1: I think we're pretty clear, and I think most reasonable
Speaker 1: people can see that that's not community self defense. But
Speaker 1: often those people certainly claim that what they're doing is
Speaker 1: community self defense. UM. And I'm specifically wanting to start
Speaker 1: by getting a kind of a range of definitions from folks,
Speaker 1: as you are, all people who have engaged in community
Speaker 1: self defense, UM, and particularly armed community self defense. What
Speaker 1: do you see as the actual role of community self
Speaker 1: defense and and how should it look as opposed to,
Speaker 1: you know, a guy with a paintball gun yelling at
Speaker 1: kids for tagging a window. Ray you wanna you want
Speaker 1: to kick us off with an answer there, I do.
Speaker 1: Community defense should be part of the a broad health
Speaker 1: and safety infrastructure set up for or a protest movement
Speaker 1: or a community. Being deliberately vague here, but specifically, armed
Speaker 1: community defense deals with mitigating lethal and egregious harm to
Speaker 1: members of a community. The goal is forced and foremost prevention,
Speaker 1: mitigation and control of those threats. In my mind, ideally
Speaker 1: community defense would involve no one doing anything, carrying around
Speaker 1: a bunch of really heavy ship and nothing happening, but
Speaker 1: deterring those from harming others. In the absolute worst case,
Speaker 1: it means you have to actually do something that can
Speaker 1: get messy pretty quickly. I want to circle back to
Speaker 1: a couple of things. Actually, I do have one one
Speaker 1: quick follow up question for you before we move on
Speaker 1: to the next people. Ray. When you say like carrying
Speaker 1: heavy things and whatnot, I'm wondering, what do you think
Speaker 1: I'm interested in you and I'll probably ask other people
Speaker 1: to follow up when it when it comes to carrying
Speaker 1: and bringing a firearm to either a protest situation some
Speaker 1: other community self defense situation. What it is going through
Speaker 1: your head when you do determine what to bring, Because
Speaker 1: I've seen people carry a variety of different guns from
Speaker 1: like shotguns and in one case is of mos and
Speaker 1: negot to a r S or handguns. Um, what do
Speaker 1: you think is kind of the the logic train I
Speaker 1: guess that you would take, Like, what is the appropriate
Speaker 1: tool to bring like in this situation, So that depends
Speaker 1: entirely on what the anticipated threat is and how one
Speaker 1: plans to mitigate the anticipated threat. There's no correct answer
Speaker 1: for that. Sometimes the answer to mitigate lethal or regious
Speaker 1: bodily harm is not a firearm at all. Indeed, firearms
Speaker 1: are applicable in an extraordinarily narrow range of scenarios, but
Speaker 1: those range of scenarios are catastrophic and need extreme measures
Speaker 1: to be mitigated. So it depends on what if you
Speaker 1: are considering bringing firem what is the firearm good at
Speaker 1: And then you get into the minutia of what firearm
Speaker 1: is good for what thing, which depends on your legal
Speaker 1: context and particular threat. But I think one has to
Speaker 1: start with the question is is the thing I'm bringing
Speaker 1: able to mitigate the type of harm I might see
Speaker 1: happen to my community? And to get a little bit
Speaker 1: less vague, there are people who think that bringing a
Speaker 1: shotgun is a good way to stop a car speeding
Speaker 1: into a crowd, when it clearly isn't right. So one
Speaker 1: has to make sure that the tool, whatever they have
Speaker 1: is you is appropriate for the task at hand and
Speaker 1: the threat you anticipate. That was great. Thank you, Ray,
Speaker 1: Um Katie you want to you want to give us
Speaker 1: your answer next. I agree with everything that Race said,
Speaker 1: and the only addition that I'd make is that, UM,
Speaker 1: it's specifically in our in our cases generally doesn't mean
Speaker 1: standing between protesters and police, but more guiding protesters, you know,
Speaker 1: our activists or participants away from potential situations of harm.
Speaker 1: It's like, we can't stand in front of police and
Speaker 1: stop cops from doing their job. Like that just gets
Speaker 1: you arrested and uh or worse or worse, and that's
Speaker 1: not what we're here for. So yeah, that's all I
Speaker 1: wanted to could you, because I have chatted with a
Speaker 1: couple of your number about this, about um kind of
Speaker 1: the role that that an armed contingent at a protest
Speaker 1: can play in kind of allowing an avenue of retreat,
Speaker 1: you know, especially during confrontations with non state actors. UM,
Speaker 1: I'm interested in kind of what you um, you know,
Speaker 1: you're not You're not to kind of as you did,
Speaker 1: kind of kind of clarify this conception. You don't see
Speaker 1: your role as standing in front of the protesters between
Speaker 1: them and the cops and like presenting a threat to
Speaker 1: the cops. What is the utility and kind of an
Speaker 1: active protest situation that you've seen of of of what
Speaker 1: y'all do. So that's a good question. And um, if
Speaker 1: we're doing our job well, then most people think we
Speaker 1: don't do anything at all. Um. A lot of what
Speaker 1: we do is we're watching external potential threats to my
Speaker 1: try to come in. The most common factor these days
Speaker 1: is a car um but generally we're looking for folks
Speaker 1: that might cause trouble and finding ensuring that we're not
Speaker 1: putting ourselves in a position where we're gonna get cornered
Speaker 1: or trapped and and really you know, just trying to
Speaker 1: help facilitate and work with the facilitators and organizers to
Speaker 1: keep things, you know, progressing in a safe way. So
Speaker 1: as far as what we're protecting against threat wise, that
Speaker 1: that ranges from everything from like angry people who are
Speaker 1: just angry and trying to go home and getting blocked
Speaker 1: by a protest too, people who are who are actively
Speaker 1: looking to do harm to a movement that happens to
Speaker 1: be involved in the protests, or you know, maybe it's
Speaker 1: something as as as specific as a person who's looking
Speaker 1: to specifically do harm to uh, organizers. So most of
Speaker 1: the time it's we're focused outward and and just making
Speaker 1: sure that our exits are are covered and that we
Speaker 1: have way to get people away from potential bad situations. Um,
Speaker 1: that was great, Thank you, Katie Shannon you want to
Speaker 1: give your answer, No, absolutely, thanks. I would add there's
Speaker 1: a really critical element to community defense that begins and
Speaker 1: ends with the word community. Obviously, there's a big difference
Speaker 1: between proclaiming yourself security and showing up someplace and being
Speaker 1: there as an intentional community support where the community plays
Speaker 1: a role in you being there and also has some
Speaker 1: influence on that question of what are you carrying and
Speaker 1: what is the response. I think it's just really important
Speaker 1: that you keep the community aspect at the forefront, and
Speaker 1: that's a huge part of our collective work is making
Speaker 1: sure that when we're providing community defense, we're aligning ourselves
Speaker 1: with the desires of the community group that has asked
Speaker 1: us to be there, also filtering it through our judgment
Speaker 1: as to what's safe and appropriate under the circumstances, using
Speaker 1: some of those filters that Ray mentioned when they were
Speaker 1: answering and UM, what do you see as like like
Speaker 1: this is something that that I kind of gets to
Speaker 1: both what what is an issue with me? And kind
Speaker 1: of the folks who declare themselves a security, which is
Speaker 1: that they're often kind of separating themselves from the rest
Speaker 1: of the movement, specifically in a cop like way to
Speaker 1: say like, well, it's my job to keep you saving,
Speaker 1: even though that means or it's my job to keep
Speaker 1: things order leaven if that means attacking some other people
Speaker 1: at this protest. One of the things that Scott Crowe
Speaker 1: in is uh in Setting Sights, which is a really
Speaker 1: good book on community self defense, does is set out that, um,
Speaker 1: a key aspect of community self defense, as you said,
Speaker 1: is that you're like a member of the community. And
Speaker 1: I think, I guess the question I have is because
Speaker 1: guns are what they are and have the kind of
Speaker 1: cultural weight that they have, it's you people are always
Speaker 1: people who accept being armed as an aspect of their
Speaker 1: personality are always going to be kind of fighting having
Speaker 1: that dominate their personality. And it wouldn't. It's clearly something
Speaker 1: that a lot of people have an issue with. The
Speaker 1: thing that is important is to be a member of
Speaker 1: the community who happens to be armed, as opposed to
Speaker 1: an armed activist whose whose role is being armed right,
Speaker 1: Like I I mean, do you agree with what I'm
Speaker 1: saying or kind of like I'm wondering how you think
Speaker 1: about it, because this is something that I'm kind of
Speaker 1: going around in my head about as well, because it's
Speaker 1: it's it's clearly where a lot of the problems happen,
Speaker 1: right that the gun becomes central to the identity of
Speaker 1: the people who bring it, which is something that happens
Speaker 1: to the cops. Yes, and also the mentality of separating
Speaker 1: yourself from the community and not being part of the
Speaker 1: purpose of being there. And so I'll defer to my
Speaker 1: my comrades here to go a little bit further with it,
Speaker 1: but I would just say that there's a significant difference
Speaker 1: between armed community defense and having an intentional presence of
Speaker 1: armed community defense at an event or protest and being
Speaker 1: a person who shows up with a gun. Those are
Speaker 1: two really different things, and so I think that's the
Speaker 1: that's one of the benefits of being part of an
Speaker 1: organization that does this collectively, with accountability, with training, with
Speaker 1: a known role in the community, so that there is
Speaker 1: um consistency among what we do and why we do it,
Speaker 1: and history of folks understanding that if we're present somewhere,
Speaker 1: it's because we've been asked to be there, and that
Speaker 1: what we're doing there is aligned with and approved of
Speaker 1: by the people who are organizing the event. And then
Speaker 1: I'll let somebody else who's more eloquent than I am
Speaker 1: uh answered that further if they feel like they can. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think NOVA is up now. If you wanted to
Speaker 1: give your answer and kind of also comment on what
Speaker 1: we've been chatting about, what Channon and I were just
Speaker 1: chatting about, Nova, Hi, thank you so much. UM. I
Speaker 1: would say that folks like Ray and Katie and of
Speaker 1: course Shannon really put it very sustinctly, very well together
Speaker 1: and answered a lot of the things that I was
Speaker 1: gonna already provided things that I was going to add
Speaker 1: to it. But um, the specifically the part about the
Speaker 1: gun becoming the driving factor in somebody's presence at the protest,
Speaker 1: or the gun being a part of the personality of
Speaker 1: somebody who's going to appoint themselves as a guardian towards
Speaker 1: a bunch of people, I would I would say that
Speaker 1: with any responsible community community defense role within a protest context,
Speaker 1: that the act of being a body in between a
Speaker 1: threat and your community has to come first, and that
Speaker 1: the that the firearm has to be secondary. Um. Uh,
Speaker 1: there there was an incident on the night of protest
Speaker 1: where uh many of us were at risk of being
Speaker 1: harmed by a vehicle attack, and uh, in retrospect, a
Speaker 1: firearm would not have mitigated that threat terribly well, but
Speaker 1: the idea of being in between a threat such as
Speaker 1: that and somebody else who is possibly more vulnerable than
Speaker 1: you are bore a lot more of a significance on that.
Speaker 1: So the firearm being there to respond to a threat
Speaker 1: and perhaps mitigate an active, ongoing, deadly threat to your
Speaker 1: community is one thing, But I think the imary thing
Speaker 1: is going to be just putting yourself in harm's way
Speaker 1: so that you can spare that responsibility from somebody possibly
Speaker 1: more vulnerable than you. If that makes sense, that should
Speaker 1: be the primary responsibility. And um, how do you avoid
Speaker 1: letting that turn people doing that into feeling like a
Speaker 1: separate and even elevated chunk of the community, Because that again,
Speaker 1: that's what happens with police. You know, this idea that
Speaker 1: it starts as like, well, we're here to serve and
Speaker 1: protect um, and that that through a variety of toxic
Speaker 1: alchemies turns into this idea of the thin blue line.
Speaker 1: What is the way you push back on that? How
Speaker 1: do you actually stop it from going from I'm someone
Speaker 1: who is accepting personal responsibility for the well being of
Speaker 1: the people around me um and putting my body in
Speaker 1: between them on harm's way if necessary, uh, to I
Speaker 1: it's my job to protect people, to it's my job
Speaker 1: to you know, from turning that into kind of this
Speaker 1: idea of I think stewardship in some ways that like
Speaker 1: some people in law enforcement have where like you're there,
Speaker 1: they they get to tell you what to do because
Speaker 1: that's their responsibility to keep you safe. Like, how do
Speaker 1: you how do you stop that attitude from evolving? Because
Speaker 1: I've seen it happen to people fairly quickly when they
Speaker 1: put themselves in some of these situations sometimes and it's
Speaker 1: certainly not like most people, but it is. It doesn't
Speaker 1: take a long time for somebody to like especially if
Speaker 1: they're vulnerable, to get in that position. So how do you,
Speaker 1: especially if you're approaching it from an organizational standpoint, right,
Speaker 1: you're an organization made up of people who come to
Speaker 1: do this, how do you fight back against that? Like?
Speaker 1: What is the active kind of counter programming, if you will,
Speaker 1: I'd see I don't have an easy answer for that question,
Speaker 1: to be completely honest with you, but I say that
Speaker 1: the closest thing uh to an answer to that would
Speaker 1: be that and almost you know, monastic devotion to the
Speaker 1: task that was acts asked of you by the group
Speaker 1: that asked you there. Um. So if somebody asked us
Speaker 1: to be a part of a march and to simply
Speaker 1: look outward for external threats and to be willing to
Speaker 1: respond to those threats that need be again putting our
Speaker 1: bodies in harm's way, but also be willing to respond
Speaker 1: to lethal force and kind should the worst case scenario arise. Um,
Speaker 1: I'd say that the ultimate accountability rest with the people
Speaker 1: who asked you to be there. Uh. And there's no
Speaker 1: easy answer as to what that mechanism of accountability looks like.
Speaker 1: But you know, in several layers, that would start with
Speaker 1: your teammates, the people who are part of your organization
Speaker 1: that asked you to be that is asked to be there.
Speaker 1: So other members of of j B g C are
Speaker 1: you know, definitely going to try and keep each other accountable.
Speaker 1: But it's also the larger the the the the the
Speaker 1: larger contingent of the action that you're a part of. Uh,
Speaker 1: to be ultimately willing to back down from whatever you're
Speaker 1: doing if a concern is voiced by that community. And
Speaker 1: I wish I had a better way to word that, uh,
Speaker 1: But just the the the the constant vigilance within oneself
Speaker 1: against overstepping the boundaries that were clearly set by people
Speaker 1: who invited you into a space. UM. That's really the
Speaker 1: best answer I can get for that at the moment
Speaker 1: without further percolating. Well, I mean, yeah, for for one thing,
Speaker 1: I think this is the reason we're having this conversation,
Speaker 1: and I'm getting ahead of us a little, is because
Speaker 1: this is still very much a developing thing on the
Speaker 1: left and and I don't think anybody has all the
Speaker 1: answers on how to do it well, although I think
Speaker 1: an increasing number of folks except the necessity. UM. So
Speaker 1: I think that's part of the reason for the conversation,
Speaker 1: is this like continuing exploration of how to actually do
Speaker 1: this responsibly. UM. But I do think you hit on
Speaker 1: something important there when you talked about the that you're
Speaker 1: there at the invitation of a community, as opposed to
Speaker 1: you are there too to police or to maintain order.
Speaker 1: Like the idea of approaching it as if you were
Speaker 1: to guest strikes me as a really good idea, UM,
Speaker 1: in order to keep yourself on a certain behavioral um standpoint,
Speaker 1: like I'm I'm I'm here at the request of this
Speaker 1: community as their guest, as opposed to I am here
Speaker 1: to protect this community. You know, absolutely, that's a that's
Speaker 1: a That's a perfect way to summarize what I was
Speaker 1: trying to go for with that one. I think that
Speaker 1: the ultimately to be averse to being put in a
Speaker 1: position of power or authority is the best way to
Speaker 1: check against that um and to simply be a servant
Speaker 1: to the community that is again inviting you into that
Speaker 1: space and putting yourself in a m servile is not
Speaker 1: the right word. I'm looking for a different word for that,
Speaker 1: but a a position of service, a true position like
Speaker 1: like yes, what what what community defense should be is
Speaker 1: ultimately a service and a burden rather than a reward
Speaker 1: of responsibility and power over your fellow community members. Okay, yeah, great,
Speaker 1: I think next was Ray again, Um, you had something
Speaker 1: to say there. Yeah, I'll finish that thought in my
Speaker 1: notes under the section of what happens when things go right.
Speaker 1: I think one thing that can go right is normalizing
Speaker 1: that firearms are just a thing that can be around
Speaker 1: and they don't have to be your entire ass personality,
Speaker 1: nor do they have to be a differentiating factor. Indeed,
Speaker 1: I think one of the successes there are not many,
Speaker 1: but of community defense in the Chop was normalizing the
Speaker 1: idea that people can have firearms and they're not an
Speaker 1: inherent threat. UM. Thinking of people who are armed often
Speaker 1: and we're pointed out routinely, and it was like, Nah,
Speaker 1: he's still he's He's a cool dude, you know, just
Speaker 1: a guy, just like the things like, you know, do
Speaker 1: you really think the black guy is going to shoot
Speaker 1: up the top? I don't know that. He's totally fine.
Speaker 1: I know him. His jokes are great. Um a goat
Speaker 1: an overhearing of these kind of conversations, it helps, you know,
Speaker 1: firearms become like part of the tapestry of life, not
Speaker 1: this differentiating factor, not a beauty item, not something of
Speaker 1: rape your personality around. It's just like they're there and
Speaker 1: that they can be good, bad, right, wrong, or different.
Speaker 1: And I think that normalizing effect is one of the
Speaker 1: successes community can have and I'm happy to talk about
Speaker 1: other things the community defense can normalize, but I wanted
Speaker 1: to emphasize the you just have a firearm. You're not
Speaker 1: talking about it, you're not touching it, you're not thinking
Speaker 1: about it. You know, people have that. It's just around
Speaker 1: And it became pretty chill, and there was kind of
Speaker 1: the Chop specifically, there's an area where firearms just kind
Speaker 1: of were around and nothing happened really and that was
Speaker 1: kind of wonderful in my mind. So, um, from my
Speaker 1: experience with with the club, Uh, it's basically the even
Speaker 1: though we are the John Brown Gun Club, the guns
Speaker 1: are like the last thing that we even consider. Like
Speaker 1: it would technically if we were to actually rename the club,
Speaker 1: it would be the John Brown de Escalation Club. Um,
Speaker 1: we would like most of the time any um, any
Speaker 1: anything that's gone on. Even when I did visit the
Speaker 1: Chop and there were some weird stuff going on, like
Speaker 1: Brother Matthew being Brother Matthew, people were um using their
Speaker 1: skills to um to to d escalate situation, to calm
Speaker 1: the calm out, calm down individuals to make sure that
Speaker 1: that whatever hostility they have would be abated through just
Speaker 1: verbal verbal communications talked about that in a little more detail,
Speaker 1: because I don't know who. I mean, I was at
Speaker 1: the Chazz briefly, but I don't know who brother Matthew was,
Speaker 1: or like what incident you're talking about. Something is a
Speaker 1: guy who shows up up here all around the Seattle area.
Speaker 1: And also I think he's even shut up in Portland
Speaker 1: as well. Um got preacher guy, gets in everybody's faces,
Speaker 1: usually not liked by everybody, super afraid of snakes, thanks Jerry. Um.
Speaker 1: But yeah, he like like he's he's a person who
Speaker 1: drives off a confrontation and uses the Bible as as
Speaker 1: his mode of of operation. But um, I remember distinctly
Speaker 1: at at the chop Um he was getting it, getting
Speaker 1: into it with people. But everybody who was around tried
Speaker 1: to talk him down. They tried to chill make him
Speaker 1: chill out, even though he was continually screaming for attention
Speaker 1: and just being weird. But um, but in the end,
Speaker 1: um like that's just like that happens more often with
Speaker 1: protests situations or marked situations or direct action situations where
Speaker 1: we're asked to be a part of it by the organizers.
Speaker 1: And and as um Ray had mentioned, and Nova had
Speaker 1: mentioned um. We like we're asked to be there and
Speaker 1: we're not just asked and then we suddenly show up,
Speaker 1: Like we get involved with the people who are organizing
Speaker 1: any of the partners that they that they that they
Speaker 1: get that they bring into it. We try to learn
Speaker 1: as much about what's going on with them, who are
Speaker 1: the threats, where, where the event is, how the event
Speaker 1: is um going to be thought of. We ask a
Speaker 1: lot of questions about it, Like we plan and plan
Speaker 1: and plan and plan to make sure that everything is
Speaker 1: super safe or as safe as possible based on all
Speaker 1: known variables and uh, and then the stuff that's unknown,
Speaker 1: we do our best to mitigate that somehow. Yes we
Speaker 1: are armed, but that's like the last thing that we
Speaker 1: ever even think of, and that's even in our planning,
Speaker 1: Like we say flat out de escalate first. Um. If
Speaker 1: things start to ratch it up, respond in kind. So
Speaker 1: like if someone you know, like tries to like I
Speaker 1: don't know, like starts to fist fight, We're not going
Speaker 1: to pull out a gun on someone who wants to
Speaker 1: box somebody on the street. We're going to do our
Speaker 1: best to stop so uh, stop them through other means,
Speaker 1: like whether if it's just to block a punch or whatever.
Speaker 1: But the first things and foremost is d escal Asian calm,
Speaker 1: calm that person down and tell them to go away
Speaker 1: or just to chill out or whatever the whatever is necessary.
Speaker 1: I mean de escalation. All of the best community self
Speaker 1: defense that I've personally watched has been de escalation. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, they're They're not the only situations I've seen.
Speaker 1: I've seen force used a couple of times in situations
Speaker 1: that were necessary, but by far, de escalation is the
Speaker 1: thing I've seen, um actually protect people in dicey situations
Speaker 1: the most. Um, And generally that's that's going to be
Speaker 1: the case. Yeah. I know for myself, like my attitude
Speaker 1: is we all go home. Everybody who shows up there
Speaker 1: goes home, not to the hospital, not to jail, or
Speaker 1: not to the morgue. We all go home. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think that's definitely seems like the best way to look
Speaker 1: at it. So into the specific question of how not
Speaker 1: to become a cop in this position and on the gun,
Speaker 1: the only way I've been able to do anything in
Speaker 1: that regard has been to not have that be my
Speaker 1: primary thing that I fulfilled. I'm part of a community
Speaker 1: and I'm a mechanical person this community. I try to
Speaker 1: have my mission be not that other skill set or
Speaker 1: that other access to being of an aid to a community,
Speaker 1: be my actual purpose in the community, if that makes
Speaker 1: any sense. M Yeah, that makes complete sense. Um and Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think is the healthiest way to to deal with it.
Speaker 1: So something I've been wondering about as so I'm like
Speaker 1: nott armed at all. So I guess I'm on like
Speaker 1: the other the other side of defense, of the sort
Speaker 1: of community self defense. I think that people show up
Speaker 1: to protests, um. And So something I was wondering about
Speaker 1: is is the relationship between this stuff and you know,
Speaker 1: between the sort of hot mentality development and the difficulty
Speaker 1: of sort of integrating to the community, of having organizations
Speaker 1: that are basically independent security groups and not for example,
Speaker 1: like taking like I don't know, take like an historical example,
Speaker 1: like there was a thing in China you'd see a
Speaker 1: lot in like the nine hundreds where you know, you'd
Speaker 1: have armed pickets, right, and so you you you have
Speaker 1: an armed force there, but the armed force is like
Speaker 1: you know, this is this is like a branch of
Speaker 1: the union, right, and that's that's how they sort of
Speaker 1: like like that that was the sort of solution to
Speaker 1: how do you stop cops syndrome is that you know
Speaker 1: they're they're they're basically like a part of another community organization.
Speaker 1: And so I'm I'm curious what you all think about
Speaker 1: what the sort of I guess that the strengths and
Speaker 1: weaknesses of being an independent or having having sort of
Speaker 1: independent security organizations versus having I guess, subsections of other
Speaker 1: organizations that are armed. Yeah, I feel like I can
Speaker 1: offer a unique perspective here as someone who's been privy
Speaker 1: to multiple angles of this, including separate organizations, ones integrated
Speaker 1: with others, and ones that are sort of just parts
Speaker 1: of the community. I don't think there's any like inherent
Speaker 1: sort of best answer here. I do think being part
Speaker 1: of a separate organization makes it harder to be in
Speaker 1: the community versus of the community, meaning you came from
Speaker 1: the community and now you're sort of kind of separate
Speaker 1: but not really UM like JB in particular has a
Speaker 1: perpetual problem with people saying, oh, you know, John Brown
Speaker 1: will do X. And this is something that has been
Speaker 1: discussed and often this is to people's immense fire. I
Speaker 1: don't want to speak for everyone here, but it does
Speaker 1: seem to be that, so seldom does one wish to
Speaker 1: be said, oh, hello, It's kind of like saying, oh,
Speaker 1: the Union will solve this, and it's like, turns out
Speaker 1: you're the Union buddy, um right, and never referred to
Speaker 1: be union in the first person. So I do think
Speaker 1: being embedded into other groups or being sort of this
Speaker 1: loose diffuse group can make it easier to be part
Speaker 1: of the community because of the structural forces that make that, um,
Speaker 1: it is easier to get there. A separate organization can
Speaker 1: help focus and codify certain procedures training, you know, make
Speaker 1: sure that people have some sort of unified goals and values,
Speaker 1: at the expense of making it a bit harder to
Speaker 1: integrate into one's community. I think given the era we're in,
Speaker 1: I'm not surprised we see many many approaches to community
Speaker 1: defense with varying effectiveness at different times, including JBS perspective. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and um, I guess I'm interested as we are as
Speaker 1: we move on here, and like, one of the one
Speaker 1: of the questions I see is how do you the
Speaker 1: difficulty and kind of you don't want to have a
Speaker 1: situation where there's absolutely no where the community self defense
Speaker 1: contention is anyone who shows up with a gun, because
Speaker 1: then anyone can show up with a gun, and you
Speaker 1: as someone else who's showing up with a weapin or
Speaker 1: potentially like if that person uh makes a bad decision,
Speaker 1: that's going to I mean as it as it has
Speaker 1: in the past, that has significant repercussions on everybody else.
Speaker 1: And I that is one of the thorny or points
Speaker 1: because I I do one of the things I see
Speaker 1: is valuable. Someone mentioned earlier, like the nice thing about
Speaker 1: it just in not being firearms being normalized, not as
Speaker 1: a like gun culture thing, but as this is just
Speaker 1: a thing that is present in the community. And I
Speaker 1: saw that a lot in Rojaba, right that everybody was armed,
Speaker 1: or at least the significant chunk of the populace had
Speaker 1: access to arms, but nobody was showing off with them.
Speaker 1: They were not like anybody's like like piece of identity.
Speaker 1: They were just one of the tools like a like
Speaker 1: a like a spade or a shovel that we're present
Speaker 1: in the community. Um okay, I think I've skipped over
Speaker 1: a couple of people. I wanted to give Thud a
Speaker 1: chance to talk. That's actually very much short of in
Speaker 1: line with But the point I was going to make,
Speaker 1: which is, for me, a huge part of community defense
Speaker 1: is making sure that the aspect that is defending the
Speaker 1: community is not alienated from the community because it isn't
Speaker 1: concentrated in just a few people. Because I think one
Speaker 1: of the other things that we emphasize the lots with
Speaker 1: outside of direct protest actions is you try to teach
Speaker 1: people how to safely operate firearms, but also to give
Speaker 1: firearms the respect that they deserve. That farms are not
Speaker 1: there so that you are badass. Firearms are not there
Speaker 1: because you know you're going to get into a gunfight.
Speaker 1: And it's well, the first rule, I mean, one of
Speaker 1: the one of the things that we stress sort of
Speaker 1: beyond the basic four rules of gun safety is the
Speaker 1: first rule of gunpipe is don't get into a gunpipe.
Speaker 1: That it's you know, you want to exhaust every possible
Speaker 1: option that you have. And when the community at large
Speaker 1: is engaged, and like Pray was saying that, it sort
Speaker 1: of it becomes normalized that oh, we're not relying on
Speaker 1: these several people to keep us safe, but that in fact,
Speaker 1: as an entire collective, we're keeping a safe and that
Speaker 1: gives recognition the fact that some people it's not it's
Speaker 1: not the right choice for them to carry again for
Speaker 1: one reason or another. And the at the same time,
Speaker 1: the power that is present in that particular tool is
Speaker 1: dispersed to the point where it doesn't you know, you
Speaker 1: don't have people getting self aggrandizing thoughts because of the
Speaker 1: fact that they're possessing firearps. And I think that's something
Speaker 1: that we, you know, work really hard to instill end
Speaker 1: evil in a variety of context, and I think is
Speaker 1: really critical to this question. So the question trying to summarize, UM,
Speaker 1: what the question was earlier, What the strengths or weaknesses
Speaker 1: of having an organized armed response are UM. One of
Speaker 1: the things that that I wanted to bring up is
Speaker 1: the historical context of armed response, specifically community armed response
Speaker 1: in Seattle. UM. I did some digging and found in
Speaker 1: a book called History of Seattle from the Earliest Settlement
Speaker 1: to the Present Time, Volume two, which I started pouring
Speaker 1: through and found that there was in eighteen seventy four
Speaker 1: there was a group called the Seattle Amateur Rifle Association
Speaker 1: which least land for a range on current present day
Speaker 1: Capitol Hill, UM, like right where the train station is.
Speaker 1: If you're familiar with the yet so like right where
Speaker 1: protests always happened these days. Later on, there's record record
Speaker 1: in eight seventy seven of the Seattle Rifle Team organizing
Speaker 1: and shooting contests. And then later on in eight six,
Speaker 1: which is a number that probably rings the bell, the
Speaker 1: Chinese Riots, as they called them at the time, happened,
Speaker 1: which was sort of the start of the labor movement,
Speaker 1: where everyone decided that Chinese immigrants were the cause of
Speaker 1: all of our woes, that the low wages being paid
Speaker 1: to Chinese immigrants were because of Chinese immigrants and not racism.
Speaker 1: So they decided to run every person who looked Chinese
Speaker 1: out of town. Literally. They referred to this as the
Speaker 1: Tacoma method, and that's what they did in Takemma exactly.
Speaker 1: It started there and there was a February seventh of
Speaker 1: eight six, this massive, angry racist mob tried to push
Speaker 1: all of the Chinese folks out of Seattle or anyone
Speaker 1: they thought might look like Chinese is and they tried
Speaker 1: to push them onto a steamboat, but there weren't there
Speaker 1: wasn't enough room for them all there. Um cops got involved.
Speaker 1: A bunch of other stuff happened they decided no, give
Speaker 1: them time in court. But in the process of making
Speaker 1: this decision, you know, the racist got a mob together
Speaker 1: and we're basically just going to try and put a
Speaker 1: stop to this before the legal proceedings could to go forward.
Speaker 1: So they reached out to local allies and arms. They
Speaker 1: had the Home Guards, which I'm not exactly sure exactly
Speaker 1: what the Home Guards were, but I assume there's something
Speaker 1: related to National Guard later on, or maybe just an
Speaker 1: extension of military, but the Home Guards and the Seattle
Speaker 1: Rifles as well as the University Cadets, which I'm assuming
Speaker 1: are of course soldiers in training, and pulled them all
Speaker 1: out and made a community self defense group out of them.
Speaker 1: They put a rifle line and held the mob back
Speaker 1: and enabled those folks to get you know, safely, to
Speaker 1: have their day in court, um, and then to protect
Speaker 1: them for a while afterward. They actually organized a sort
Speaker 1: of a watch because they didn't have enough police to
Speaker 1: to manage the mob. They use folks from the Seattle
Speaker 1: Rifles and these other groups to uh to sort of
Speaker 1: bolster the police forces and keep peace in the town.
Speaker 1: So the sort of thing that we do is a
Speaker 1: longstanding historical presence but I think there's a lot of
Speaker 1: things you can look at the history of and sort
Speaker 1: of take lessons from so um as as very mentioned,
Speaker 1: a unified response is of course a huge benefit of
Speaker 1: having a huge strength of having an organized armed group. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it's it's literally if someone reaches out and says
Speaker 1: we need help, help is available. Um. But there are
Speaker 1: a lot of weaknesses. Businesses and clubs can be held
Speaker 1: liable legally, and this is an endemic problem within gun
Speaker 1: law as it stands. The laws are written such that
Speaker 1: they effectively there that it comes down to situational context
Speaker 1: to determine how a gun law should be enforced. And
Speaker 1: the law will never be on the side of a
Speaker 1: group trying to abolish parts of the law. So you
Speaker 1: have to be very careful about how you how especially
Speaker 1: an organized or formally organized armed group has to be
Speaker 1: very cheerful about how they put their their worked in
Speaker 1: play with that in mind. Yeah, that was great. I
Speaker 1: was unaware, actually I was aware of the of the riots.
Speaker 1: I was unaware of that part of the history, which
Speaker 1: is fascinating, UM and I think very important. Yeah, Ray,
Speaker 1: did you want to explain the threat onion? Yeah, the
Speaker 1: integrated threat onion. So this is kind of a a
Speaker 1: well known meme in certain circles slash at tool thing,
Speaker 1: and it's designed to help you understand how to like
Speaker 1: mitigate threat and sorry, integrated survivability onion mitigate threats. Right.
Speaker 1: So the teel deer is, you know, do you want
Speaker 1: to try to preserve life by having body armor and
Speaker 1: hoping a bullet hits you in the body armor or
Speaker 1: do you want to preserve life by I don't know,
Speaker 1: not showing the funk up to something where you might
Speaker 1: get shot. And the idea is it's it's a meme
Speaker 1: because so often, you know, people are like, oh, they
Speaker 1: want to get in there and get and get engaged
Speaker 1: with conflict and be the hero. And the answer is,
Speaker 1: you know, you could just like not go there, right,
Speaker 1: and it would probably be a lot easier to do that.
Speaker 1: But there's some real weight to the survivability onion, which
Speaker 1: is like, there are many many ways to mitigate threats
Speaker 1: to yourself in your community, and very often the most
Speaker 1: boring and mundane answer is probably the one that's going
Speaker 1: to actually result in the biggest impact, and the heroic
Speaker 1: answer is probably the absolute worst answer, and only what
Speaker 1: you rely on if everything I'll has gone to hell.
Speaker 1: So that's someone I think it was thund spoken to
Speaker 1: alluded to the threat onion and ways to mitigate harm
Speaker 1: to oneself in one's community, and I had to repeat
Speaker 1: it because it's this this meme that's been coming up forever. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it is like the basic idea of the threat
Speaker 1: onion is that you have like this again you you
Speaker 1: think of it in layers. That's why they call it
Speaker 1: an onion. Um of like things that protect you, and
Speaker 1: the things that provide the most protection are stuff like
Speaker 1: not being seen or present when somebody wants to harm you, um,
Speaker 1: not or being behind cover when somebody wants to harm you.
Speaker 1: And the thing that offers the least protection is having
Speaker 1: body armor. You know. It's this the idea that like, um,
Speaker 1: the things that people buy and and focus on because
Speaker 1: they look cool, UM are all things that offer less
Speaker 1: protection than situational awareness and good judgment. UM is kind
Speaker 1: of the actual like lesson I think to take out
Speaker 1: of the threat onion. That to be my opinion on
Speaker 1: the matter. This has been it could happen here. That's
Speaker 1: all for this week. Find us at Happen Here pod
Speaker 1: on Instagram. And Twitter, and find the rest of our
Speaker 1: shows at cool zone Media in the same places. Hey,
Speaker 1: We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from
Speaker 1: now until the heat death of the Universe. It Could
Speaker 1: Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For
Speaker 1: more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Speaker 1: zone media dot com, or check us out on the
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
Speaker 1: to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here,
Speaker 1: updated monthly at cool zone media dot com slash sources.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.