It Could Happen Here Weekly 129

now lives in Sweden. Abdullah lives in Italy. We spoke a couple of weeks ago, but very little has changed since then, and I just wanted to note that Abdalla's audio is a little bit rough, but we thought what he had to say was really important, so we hope that you'll take the time to listen to it.

And yeah, a lot of a lot of things to say, a lot of things to express, and but yeah, that's me, Ahmed Matar, twenty years old from Gaza.

my people. If I feel like I want to forget about it, it feel like I'm I'm like betraying my people, my family. So I prefer to just watch the news, feel the same as them, and just do my best to help them with what I can. But it's actually like I just feel helpless at the moment that I cannot do anything to them in that situation like this, the moment.

not really almost impossible. It's impossible to do it where I was, which is going to.

it's almost like impossible to get connected with them. So I have to try the whole day until like I get someone answering me because it's like I guess it's because it's a small place where they are, like in Rapa and there's more than one and a half million people and everyone is trying to call to Gaza and to check with everybody in there, so it's make it hard to get connected easily with them. So I try like every day. For sure, I in the end, it's

better than before. At the moment when they were in Canyonits, it was like that I had to ask my friends who levey close to my area and then they tell me if my family are or not. And sometimes I I'm having no information about them for a whole week and just worry to if everything is okay with them.

At the moment, I just wish for the best. That's what I am at home, wishing everything is okay with them, but without knowing if it's them or another family who got boned, because the TV is not showing a name or a family anymore, because it's you know, you're talking about more than thirty five thousand people getting killed, and to mention the names of every person getting killed, it's something impossible in the media. I guess I.

day through three days or even four weeks. Sometimes sometimes they even it happened two weeks and a few weeks, and you know that people they are dying every day, and it might be someone from your family that you know, like something you know happen and you cannot reach them because of the signal, because of the collection of good whatever it is, How would you feel A.

So yeah, you know, sometimes when my father sent me a picture of him on messenger more than a month ago, and then I was like just choked, how to see his white hair, like oh, gray hair everywhere, and he just changed in these six months totally, like I would not recognize the same person like he was before the war, because I was there seven months ago in Gaza and he was totally young, like you know, he's just fifty years but it's not that he had gray hair everywhere

like how I saw in his picture. And then I see how suffering they are facing, how tough life they are having at the moment, just through his face, his yeah, his picture that he sent to me, which is really just for sure heir to see that, how how they are growing too fast because of this genocide we only come.

and there is. It's the same anywhere, but then it's still like, yeah, it's a It gives more fear that when you are on a high building, any high building getting targeted in Gaza.

or at least ways to get through each day. Do you guys have a community that you can reach out to. Do you guys talk to each other a lot? How How do you guys stay sane, like, how do you not lose your mind? Just as everyone else goes about their life.

And yeah, I don't feel good about it. It's not that I I should enjoy, it's I feel like I'm not gonna enjoy until my family is safe. Until my family is enjoying, and this is gonna take years, I guess.

I'm trying to do out. I'm not trying to be alone, just trying to keep my mind and my life a little bit more busy as much seek.

I met Said and we were friends, neighbors. We were always playing together, and then we decided to go for a kung fu club and we started to train kung fu and martial arts together. And at the age of nine years me and Said also met Abdullah and met the other guys who does also martial arts, so we

started to do martial arts together. And then we met a Barker guy Mohammed Jakhbir and Abdo lan Chassi, which made us turn into Barkour after and everything I was doing in like in my sports life and outside of my sports life, I was always meeting Side as a friend, as a brother and we were at each other's houses and eating together. And yeah, Side was really meaning a lot to me because I have always known him as the good guy who help everyone who need help.

was connected to the internet at that time. So I was going through him about my family, and we were talking every day during.

others and then they could pomp three of them. That's that's what happened with them, and that's what most of the plastina durns. But they were really prayed, and yeah, it's it's it's such a ross that nobody can can imagine.

is moving around us, is getting shot. And he was at his home and together with his family, and I was telling him, just saying, leave the area. Go somewhere that is better, safer or something that you don't have to hear this sound. You maybe can get killed inside your home because you know this squad captures is a drone that can go inside windows, anything that it can go from the roof and enter your home. Yeah, that's what he told me. What he told me was like, yeah,

but if I live home, I will get killed. And if I if I leave another place, I will also get killed because it's not safe anywhere. It's the same. So if I die at our home or outside our home, it's the same. And in the end, I go to the heaven. It's directly it's better for me. And that's what he was saying, and that's what he received. He wanted the heaven, I guess. And but we we wanted him back in our life. We did not want him to go. But yeah, that's life. Take the good people for us always.

this earth. And to see this support of the people, it's the most important for us to to live. It gives us a sense of freedom while we are not free yet, just make us give us hope that something will happen in the future. It's because it's a story of obbressed people who have been suffering, suffering for years, and I guess these people need attention, need the more effort of the so they can get their freedom as as they have when they have done about the black

lives matters. And it's also it should it should come from the people. That's how the world get affected. If the people go against their governments, against the the decisions of their leaders, that's what gonna change the public opinion, the leader's opinion.

come out of that. I want to ask, like, if people want to help and they have money, that tend to be the easiest way to make a difference, Right, But you've told me before, a lot of the angios, your parents, your families end up buying the food that gets donated, So is there an engio that's better? And then like what can people do to learn? I guess like to learn more. I mean either from you guys, or things or books or films that you think are good.

who are hungry are suffering. So yeah, for sure, like the food is not enough, and when someone wants to get this food, he have to or he or she they have to buy the food and it's more than tin times more expensive than what it was before, and sometimes it reaches even more and even the vegetables, it's

like higher than the price is here in Europe. Imagine like a country under a war, no work, no jobs, everything is stopped and the prices are going higher and higher because the stuff is very limited and the food is limited and everything is limited. So for sure, like people want to sell the stuff that they have so they can ear money so they can buy another stuff. And that's how the people are doing in Gaza. So if they get something maybe for free, which is very

rare that it happened because it's too many people. For example, my family are buying the food, and I know how it is for them that it is hard for them to get the stuff that they even need because all what they have is food that is backed in cans, beans mostly beans actually, and that's what they have everything. They tell me we have been eating beans or a lot of these and pasta and they buy this stuff.

It's not that it's for free sometimes every other month, every other two months to get a bag of flours so they can make bread.

we're sorry, we are out of cash, and that's what happens. Yeah, and I imagine like the same money going and coming back. So it's sometimes there is nothing in the banks, there is nothing in the offices that is exchanging and receiving

money from outside. Like Western Union is not working anymore, money Gram is not working, and now the people are using something like a crepit coin like USDT, and and you know, to send one hundred dollars for example, they take like more than fifteen percent of that, and then in the same time you also have to pay another ten percent or five percent for sending because the USDT is not equal with the USD because in the corrective coin it's more expensive, so you need to pay more

dollars to get USDT and then there they receive it as a dollar. So yeah, to support, I suggest if anyone wants to support or have the money that wants support a family or peopulling as the only thing is to actually contact the family that they want to support directly, because yeah, the all the support that goes through the organizations, the international organizations takes very long time and in the end it triches Gaza and the it's not enough for the people, and then the Bible have to buy it.

It's not that Ghaza for free.

going to take them a long time to heal. So I think I did not want to take a step a step like this, but I will ask in the end my people who follow me to if they want to support the people and if they want to support any member of my family to get out of Gaza, because I don't see it any better and I'm not

ready to lose any of my family. And yeah, I imagine, like I have a brother who's twelve years old at the moment, and I have a sister which turned sixteen, and another sister which has two kids, and one of them was born in the war, like four months old at the moment, And what about these kids, what will they do if they stay in Gaza. And you can apply that on the rest of Gaza people. Abdalla's family

and his brother's sons, his brother's kids. So yeah, that's the best is I don't know, but most many, many people want to really get out of there at the moment because they think about what happened to Gaza. It will take years, and it's my family's future, and they don't know for how long it will take to fix this future if they stay in Gaza and if they

still stay alive, because if they inter Gazza. At the moment, my family is in Rafa and close to the borders area with Egypt, and that's the only place where are most of the people at the moment. Like more than one and a half million are staying in a very small area and Israel inter Rafa. That will be just yeah, the huge is disaster that could ever happen on earth.

That imagine thirty six thousand people killed, and that's the one that is confirmed on the list that they found, but you know, thousands and thousands are like they cannot confirm, like they already unknown, they don't know who they are. And there's thousands under the rabble that they cannot get out and many missings, so it can be it could reach to one hundred thousand together with the injured people.

And that's not a small number. And imagine if the enter to a place like Trafa, that will be just like double what have happened at least I hope that with not having but I see that Israelis are very decided that they want to do that even if no one would be able to stop them, they say, and they would do it even without the support of anyone, without the support of the USA or without and that shows how criminals they are. I can say that they

want just to slaughter all the people in Gaza. They don't care about civilian or not civilian.

IDF Terir own operators or US diplomats. To those people, their families are just numbers, but are made and Abdullah, their families are their whole world.

it is for Abdullah. How does he feel about the future of Gaza at the moment? How do you feel like for the next ten years watching your family? I cannot imagine. That's the thing. That's why it lead me to steps like that, because I always never wanted to My family are very you know, loving to the country

that they don't want to leave Gaza. My mother was like, no, we build home first, and I was telling trying to convince her by just explaining the situation and the next ten years from now, which is another disaster after the war, which is make her understand more of the effort so true to think about her children future and yeah, but in the same time, I understand the love for the country.

I always love Gaza and they even have Gaza and everything in my life, I have it in my name even like I always if I say my name, I say I'm Mather Gaza as as my name. You know, I don't say I'm a'm at mother in my social media even it says Mather Gaza since always not during the war, and it's because I'm proud to be from there because it's the place that taught me the strength. It gave me, the bower it gave me like it taught me a lot of values that I use in

my life at the moment. That made me patient, made me strong, and that's what is Gaza. It made me the person I am that I always hope and I always dream. I always have an x to dream because we always dream. As a bit of beeble from Gaza.

that is not a possibility for someone. He stressed the importance of posting on social media to continue spreading awareness and how the Palestinian struggle is a struggle that concerns all of humanity.

But in the same time, in the long run, it's not the the thing will that will make a change for my family's safety and future. And that's why I

don't know. I am stuck in between two things, like going to the place where I grow, where I learned all of these values to be strong, and but in the same time living life where everything is destroyed, where you don't have a future, or decide to be in a severe place where you may be fix the future, but away from your country, from your heart, because you know, for us, Gaza is our heart. We really love Gaza.

We care about everything in Gaza. But that's where I am stuck between safety and future and the heart Gaza, the place where we love.

about Palestine. That's the very least, very least you can do.

are women. And children and also prest Is el three and men teenagers.

and we have feelings. We we we have everything that any human thinking in this has and this world as same as everybody is really listening right now, when we are all equal, there's nobody is better than another one. At the end, we are all the same. So it's we are not numbers. Just I would I would like to everybody remember this. There's so many and so much really bigger stories behind every every want, everyone that will

really killed. Everyone has a family, and you have to think, what if there's just you know a person that he lost either one from his family. That's one story. The other person that he lost his kid, that's another story. The other person lost his mom, that's another story. The other persons his dad, that's another to the story. So everybody has his own story. That's why I'm just trying

to show that we are not just an numbers. There's so many other things that we haven't we would feel often so even though the people they are still alive, and they are alive, they are dead. They're not alive because literally they have nothing, even whether they lost someone from the family or whether they can die even from hunger. Thank you guys so much.

unions plunged towards the single digits. The unions that survived, battered and broken shells of the mighty behemists that shook the world for one hundred years, embraced so called business unionism, which set out not to conquer the world in the name of labor like its great predecessors, or even really to bargain for higher wages, but to make companies profitable

in order to keep their jobs. They took pay cuts and job losses without a fight, forcing their membership into line and effortlessly crushing the endless slates of reform caucuses that sought to put the fight back into the working class. Even the cutting edge of Marxist theory health the time

of unions was over. Workers were too anomized, too divided to fall or from the immediate processes of production, from the discipline of the factory, and from the massification of the city to assemble the working class in its old fighting form. There would be riots, to be sure, barricades, blockades, occupations, but not strikes. Whatever the working class did next, the age of the union was over. For much of the

twenty tens. That prediction was a smart bet. The bold proclamation of Wisconsin trade unionists that organized labor would turn back the tide of the Tea Party failed to ruin under the failure of their attempt to recall Wisconsin's hated union busting Governor Scott Walker. The Tea Party's march continued unimpeded, radicalizing even further in the wake of the twenty fourteen twenty fifteen uprisings in Ferguson and Baltimore to produce not

the victory of the working class but Donald Trump. Even success stories like the rejuvenation of the mighty Chicago Teachers Union AFT Local one by a bold reform caucus called the caucus of rank and file educators or corps who waged a pair of unexpectedly, wildly popular strikes, was tainted by the reality of limited wins and labor conditions in

Chicago schools that remained appalling. Even as the left returned in the wake of Occupy Ferguson and the election of Trump, union membership continued to plunge, and capitalists and Marxist alike continued to herald the union's demise. They were wrong. History, it seems, delights in irony. It was the dead enders, fighting hopeless battles and reform caucuses, losing union election after

union election. It was the wobblies fighting losing campaign after losing campaign, desperately trying to organize the unorganizable fast food and Rea tail workers. It was rank and file Marxist trade unionists waiting sixty long years, their comrades dead and gone, for somebody, anybody, to hear their plans for shutting down Capitol's logistics networks. It was labor notes, sixteen staffers compiling endless analyzes of labor struggles for a crowd that couldn't have filled a baseball stadium.

attempting to organize. Only the director intervention of the President to break a rail workers strike before it could start, and the last second portrayal of Teamster's leadership stopped twenty twenty three. This largest strike wave of the modern era, basking in his triumphs and conspiring to win more, was

Labor Notes. Labor Notes is a curious beast. It is simultaneously a journal that publishes news about labor struggles, a network that brings together a group of disparate rank and file union reform movements, largely but not exclusively from the US, maintaining a strong emphasis on solidarity and organizing with workers in Mexico, and a labor conference that runs every two years. It is a relic of another time, whose time, it seems,

has come again. Labor Notes was founded in nineteen seventy nine as a way to coordinate and expand the inter union connections formed to the United Mine Workers of America's nineteen seventy nine bituminous coal strike. It's one of the last direct connections to the era where labor was strong unwinningly task of keeping the flame of labor alive during the neoliberal downpour. Two weeks ago, they held their largest conference ever. Four five hundred people crammed into the Wyatt

Regency next to Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. At least a thousand people who tried to register were turned down. I personally watched interested workers turned away at the door because the venue's conference halls had already reached the mass capacity for fire safety. Labor we can safely say is back. It is returning to the South the great Rock unions

have shattered upon for one hundred years. It's moving in new directions towards service workers previously thought impossible to organize. Most of all, it's moving towards something we'd almost forgotten was possible. It's moving towards victory. The first thing you noticed about Labor Notes is it's staggered diversity, Young punks and battle jackets sat on benches next to old anti

war protesters from the sixties. Independent trade unionists and feminist activists in Mexico rubbed shoulders with battle hearted American union nurses. White middle aged longshore men and women plotted with young, queer Amazon warehouse workers to maximize the power of logistics strikes. You saw old industrial organizers from the sixties passing down lessons and tactics and stories of strikes that otherwise would

have vanished into the mists of history. Media workers fighting for their first contract, the lowliest rank and file workers chatting in breakout groups with union presidents. For all the talk I've done in this show about how many union organizers are trans, even I didn't expect to see this many trans people. It's a cross section of the American working class come to fight, and that, above all, is

what this Labor Notes conference was about fighting. The most direct conflict came on the first day of the conference, when Palestinian union activists called for a pro Palestine demonstration outside the hotel. The cops arrested three people in an attempt to clear the street. This, rather predictably was a terrible idea. Instead of backing down The crowd of several hundred union activists almost immediately surrounded the lone car and demanded they let their prisoner go. What happened next, to

use a technical term, fucking ripped. A bunch of kids had a rave to the changing police sirens. A fifty year old white duty from the electrical worker stood next to me. A Chinese transzoman from a podcast union, A bunch of longshore men, teamsters, staffers from unions. You wouldn't believe even if I told you Palestinian trade union activists, nurses, punks from independent unions. No one else in the crowd

could have named. An entire mass of unionists stood their ground and refused to let the cops take one of ours. A tradeswoman with drums marched around the police car and we're all saying which side are you on? After two hours, the police gave up to a crowd screaming Union power at the top of our lungs. It was an incredible display of solidarity that set the tone for the rest of the event. We were going to fight the bosses together and fuck them if they came for us. This

is not to say there weren't divisions. A group of protesters broke away from the cop car to demand that Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, the darling of the Chicago Teachers' Union, come tell the cops to let our people go. Now whether or not this would have worked is up to some debates. These cops were not Chicago police departments. They were the cops of Rosemont, which is technically a separate

entity from the city of Chicago. However, Labor notes staffers and securities tried to stop the protesters from reaching Brandon Johnson and ended up throwing punches at the protesters. As to quote one observer, union brother fought union brother. This fight reveals one of the important tensions in the movement.

Should unions continue to back imperfect center left politicians in exchange for some political benefits, or should they take a hard line against politicians who betray their fundamental political principles. Brandon Johnson is a microcosm of the debate. On the one hand, he was elected with enormous resource expenditure from the Chicago Teachers' unions. On the other hand, he's been locking immigrants into berculosis ridden camps as the city lurches

from crisis to crisis. Even many of Chicago's other unionists were never happy with him in the first place, as he failed to use his previous position to come to the aid of striking nurses. When the two points of view collide, there's a fight. On a national level. The conflict is the question of Joe Biden in Palestine. At Labor Notes itself, there's strong support for Palestine. Palestinian solidarity. Panels were packed to the rafters with workers from every sector imaginable and activists from.

conference's closing address. There remains massive bastions of conservatism in the labor movements, who have actively fought against even statements on Palestine, much less concrete actions. Unions are still weak and the positions of activists within them are still tenuous. Even more favorable shops have yet to turn broader popular support among rank and file workers for Palestine into substantive strike actions, and it's deeply unclear to me if any

such action is possible at all. My pessimism on labour's willingness and ability to stop the genocide and Palestine, a pessimism reinforced by watching the rapid spread of student campus occupations while labor remains silent or perhaps more precisely dormant, is broadly intension with my optimism and effectively everything else that I saw there. There is incredible organizing going on

at labor notes. People are coordinating rank and file links between unions whose staffers and leaderships hate each other for grudges whose origins have passed into the mists of time. There was quite serious talk about plans to line up contracts to expire in twenty twenty eight to effectively create a miniature general strike, or perhaps more precisely, to create a version of what's called the Spring offensive in Japan.

Spring and offensive are the same word in Japanese, and so labor unions decided to have their contracts expire in the spring, thus maximizing the power of their strikes. This effort to have contracts aligned in twenty twenty eight is broadly speaking, a larger version of the Spring offensive. We

will cover this more in a later episode. For now, I think it's enough to say that discussions and organization were quite serious, and there was significant enthusiasm as well as discussions of the potential difficulties of getting people's contracts to actually align. People are organizing to bring their unions together on a sectoral base to share resources, coordinate, set standards for contracts, and generally help each other more effectively

oppose the bosses and unions that rule them all. Labor Notes has also from the beginning been an incubator for reform movements inside of unions, attempting to wrest control from corporate administrative caucuses. These reform movements almost always lose. The last fifty years is littered with defeats in union election after union election with sub ten percent turnout, and yet little by little these groups are starting to win. We heard from a number of smaller rank and file efforts

that had successfully taken control of their unions. The first major victory was a rank and file slate taking over the management of the notoriously corrupt and clickish Teamsters. Now I have my issues with the new Teamsters leadership too. There are something like two entire hours of this show dedicated to how angry rank and file Teamsters were over the fact that UPS workers didn't go on strike last year due to their leadership cutting a deal with management.

But on a broader level, the victory of the Teamsters reformed slates and the defeat of one of the oldest union I don't know if administrative caucus is really a that's a bit of a euphemism for the UPS sort of corrupt leadership dictatorship, but their victory on a broader

level was a sea change in American unionism. Their victory was followed by the victory of Seawan Fain in the UAW, a man who, as much as he angered members by endorsing Joe Biden, walked into Labor notes and gave a speech about the class war and the authoritarianism of corporate greed.

Certainly there was much to annoy trade activists concerned with Palestine, in the sense that his central metaphor labor was the arsenal of democracy was in bad taste as he described the unions that he leads as the successors of Liberator B fifty two bombers, which not, you know, not precisely the metaphor id shoes, as your own members are protesting

the bombs falling over Gaza. But on the other hand, if a giant speech about the class war and the need to organize across borders is now the conservative wing of progressive trade unionism, the future is bright. The kind of militant union actions we've seen over the past year have coalesced into a sort of strategy of fight as you build. It is based on a very basic strategy

that you would think unions would have already been doing. However, Comma, see everything I've ever said about administration, administrative caucuses, and business unionism and corporate unionism. The strategy is, if you win things for people, more of them will join unions. This strategy is already bearing fruit in Chattanooga and has

international implications as well. We heard from organizers that workers in Mexico and China were keenly watching the UAW strikes, and for good reason, these strikes are ultimately their fight too, and slowly but surely workers across the world are starting to realize it. The degree of internationalism at this Labrynes

was remarkable. I came into an early China panel fully expecting the same kinds of praise for the CCP that I've seen in other leftist events held in the city of Chicago, most recently the sort of fiasco China panel held at Socialism Conference that degraded into an argument about whether or not Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa socialist.

Here there was none of that. For sure, there were some slightly weird German maoist defending the Cultural Revolution, but on the other hand, there wasn't any defense of Chinese capitalism or their failed, bankrupt model of corporate unionism. On top of cross border organizing, sectorially, the conference has a

deep and ingrained pro immigrant position. Sean Fayn is probably the most high profile political figure I've seen actually discussing the horrific treatment of migrants at the border right now and taking time to remind everyone that immigrants are just workers trying to find a better life. This, however, makes his support for Joe Biden, the Butcher of Yakumba, even more questionable. Still, you can see the wheels of history turning.

You can see it there in the muffled buzz of conversations drifting through hallways, in the roar of the cheering crowd, in the bright laughs of co conspirators who moments before were strangers, and the drowsy chatter of abortion workers who let a transwoman sleep on their floor to hide from the police. In the chance of a hundred workers refusing to let the cops take one of their own. You can see the outline of the great Leviathan, the ruling

class thought buried stone dead in the nineteen eighties. You can see the working class waking from its day's slumber, shaking the sleep from its eyes and the dirt from its back. You can, for the first time in decades, hear the clatter and the roar as it tests its chains.

The great behemoth is beginning, just beginning, to assemble the iron will and terrible power necessary to turn its dreams into reality, to break its chains and shatter its cage, and reclaim the world it built with its blood and sweat and tears. That day is not today, it's not tomorrow, But for the first time in my life, it could be the day after that this has been it could happen here, Happy Mayda everyone.

back together. I'm writing this after flying back from Texas where my tad died, to Portland, waking up and basically immediately interviewing a group of testers in Arcada, California, at the cal Poly occupation in Humboldt, and then driving to Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, where there has also been a campus occupation, And both of these occupations have some stuff in common, and I wanted to talk about what was happening with both of them because I think

it's relevant, and obviously it's relevant to what is currently one of the larger stories going on in the country right now, which is that a series of occupations on campuses protesting the Israeli genocide and Gaza have spread to more than one hundred schools in the United States. You

will have heard of this now. We have covered some of this in recent episodes, particularly what was going on in Colombia at least at the initial stages of that, and today again I'm here to talk about two occupations. One of them is at cal Poly Humboldt in Arcada, California, and an other is at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon. As an out of side, I have lived in both of these cities, which is peculiar. It doesn't really mean anything, but I thought it was weird, and obviously I still

live in Portland. Protests started in Arcada first. On October twenty second, twenty twenty four, students on the cow Poly Humboldt also called CPH Campus occupied Seamen's Hall. These students were not members of any specific group, but we're all acting in solidarity with GAZA, and we're inspired at least partly by the solidarity encampment at Columbia University. It started with a small number of people, about forty five or so. These are a mix of students, some alumni, and a

few random Arcadens. Arcada is a pretty progressive town. You might call it Hippi. That's generally the reputation that it has. Campus police showed up. There was a series of negotiations, which here means they told everybody to leave, and at that point the police began escalating things. Because the Arcada Police Force is pretty small. Cops were called in from the surrounding area, quite a few of them. There were helicopters. It's much more of it to do than this fairly

sleepy community in the Redwoods is used to having. Community members started to show up as well because hey, something was happening. A ride up from Crime Thinks website describes what happened next quote, Police from every department in the county showed up, including a helicopter, canine units, and off duty police. Students responded by swarming them. The cops initial plan to carry out a mass arrest was thwarted by a series of clashes both inside and outside of the building.

The occupiers beat back police advances despite facing brutality unlike anything we have seen over the last decade of struggle in Humboldt County. Again, it's a pretty sleepy place. There were two arrests and a number of injuries. The arrests were apparently quite ugly, but police were unable to clear out the occupation. Barricades were thrown into place as the fighting continued off and on, until a crowd of people from the surrounding community, including other students and faculty, showed

up out side and effectively surrounded the police. After six hours, the police retreated, The university declared a lockdown, and the students were able to spend the next few days extending their defenses as well upsetting, as well as setting up infrastructure, including a kitchen. Early on the morning of the twenty ninth, a team from It Could Happen Here sat down with two of these students to discuss the occupation.

But because their initial efforts to clear out the occupation failed, police have had to spend nearly a week watching and waiting as students dig in.

And I think we also, I think a big part of it is like logistically, we're in a small city and we don't really have the police force necessary, Yeah, which is why they've been trying to call you know, unfortunately, then trying to call officers from other places because especially like I feel like in the evenings especially, we have a lot of people both from the community and students on campus who have been occupying the quad. But what's so funny is that our main intention was not Like

the original intention was not to barricade that building. It was just going to be occupied, not arricaded. But because of police actions, I feel like we've actually stepped up more so. They kind of shot themselves on the foot with that one.

around the house and eventually the entire neighborhood. By the time the police realized what was going on, they had a nightmare on their hands, an occupation that would have been impossible to clear without significant violence. The end result of the situation was that the city government essentially negotiated an end to what was happening rather than just sending the police back into evict residence. There is much more

to the whole situation than that. This is something people still get angry about because the patriarch of the family at Red House was a weirdo sovereign citizen type. But the goal at the time was to stop evictions during the pandemic, and the tactics of the day worked. The cops backed off, the city came to the negotiating table. It was a successful action, whatever you think about the

individuals involved in it. After the call that Garrison Mia and myself had with those Humboldt students and we will hear more from them later, I got a message from a source that an occupation was also brewing on the Portland State University campus, or rather that it was going on, and folks were worried things were about to escalate. But don't you escalate until you've listened to these ads.

against maybe forty riot officers. The police pushed people out of the encampment. They went straight for the supply tent and took everything, loading medical equipment, food, etc. Into City of Portland trucks and hauling it away. It was a bad night for a lot of people. But what I gleaned from interviewing some of those folks was that they had learned one crucial lesson, which was that Portland police weren't willing to fuck with people or property that was

sitting on the PSU steps. This is probably a jurisdictional thing. School properties the responsibility of the PSU Campus Police PPB could police the park outside, but either couldn't or just didn't want to be arsd in dealing with the complications that might be caused by going into school property themselves.

So the school had to deal with the unenviable complication of the fact that these were their students protesting at a famously progressive school and having their cops cleared them out, especially if it caused violence or somebody got seriously hurt, would be a real pr headache. The administration at Humboldt University and famously progressive ARCATA ran into a similar problem.

In the days after the police backed away from their initial confrontation, students developed a list of demands by consensus. Here's one of our sources from the Humboldt occupation again and their description of the demands have been cut together from a longer interview. Some crosstalk has been edited out to make things flow a bit more clearly. Anyway, here's those demands.

of students who have been suspended. And it problem is to not suspend, resuspend, or expel any student protesters as a result of these accusations because they were claiming, you know, that we had committed property damage and trespassing and things like that, and that was a lot of the reasons that they gave for suspending us, Like in the email

we received about interim suspension. Two was divest We demand that the Kalipoly Humboldt Foundation commits to an audit and subsequent divestment from any funds related to Israel, Israeli products, or Israeli companies, and this includes those that own factories on stolen Palestinian land in Israel. There are four specific funds that at the minimum, we demand the divestment from within the next six months.

Qualcomm is an information technology company that does the majority of its technology development in Israel, so they have like factories there and that's kind of where they develop their smartphone chips and tracking intelligence, which is kind of like two of the main things that they work on and sell. And then Wells Fargo was part of a five hundred million dollar loan deal with multiple other lenders that support that was supporting Elbert Systems, which is an Israeli military

weapons manufacturer. So those are like two of the big ones just from the first fund that we had looked into. And our third demand was declare in solidarity with universities across the globe and for all Palestinian people, including their martyrs and refugees. We demand a ceasefire statement from KLi Pally Humble calling for an immediate and permanent Ceaspire in Palestine, and we encourage all other California State universities and universities

of California to do the same. As we were writing this, it was we found out that the faculty administration had released a Ceaspire statement, I believe, but the actual university like admin had it, like the whole university admin, but like the faculty had released a CESPIRE statement. Faculty specifically, I know there's there's definitely faculty that have There's some faculty who have been with us since day one, like

CA camping out with everyone since day one. And it's like a lot of the faculty, we like, we are totally comfortable putting our trust in like some of these faculty, Like if there was an emergency, like I would call them, you know, like if there was an emergency on campus where like I was about to be arrested, I'm like, yeah, I'm going to call up this professor. But they have been and they have been like trying to, you know,

update us with whatever they hear from Admin. But just in like the past few days, we've actually kind of discerned that upper admin has sort of cut off contact with lower admin and faculty. And this is something that we talked about with faculty members as well. Because of the significant faculty support that we've been receiving, Administration is literally just not telling faculty anything anymore.

included three demands. Number one, PSU should release a statement condemning the genocide of Palestinian people with weapons provided by the US. Number two, the university should end the sale of Israeli products on campus and any programs that would involve sending students, employees, or faculty to Israel. And number three, the board of trustees should terminate all relationships with Boeing

and other companies complicit in the ongoing genocide. Their list included Leopold, an Oregon based company who makes rifle scopes, but also companies like Intel and Hewlett Packard. Boeing was the company I heard reference most by protesters. The aerospace company, which is involved in the manufacture and design of just so many weapons, has a partnership with Portland State University.

Later on Friday, the same day that these lists of demands started coming together, the school president and cut announced a pause to the school's relationship with Boeing to address these protester demands.

that means. By late in the day Friday, media had started showing up in numbers to report on the occupation, which was still quite small, but bigger ones were happening all over the country, and if your local news you want to do anything you can to tie your area into whatever the big story is nationwide, so you know,

good excuse to show up. There was also some conflict between local student groups at this point and unaffiliated groups of activists, some of whom were also students, over whether or not to keep occupying over the weekend and keep attempting to you know, keep an occupation in place despite police crackdowns, or to save their strength for a new concerted push on Monday. At any rate, some people stayed and by seven pm that night Friday night, the Portland

Police Bureau showed back up in full riot gear. Park rangers told protesters to exit the park area, and a standoff ensued. While some protesters confronted police head on. A smaller group of activists used this as a distraction to move a number of tents onto the library steps, having noticed that PPB didn't seem to be willing to go directly onto campus property. Once this was done, the folks confronting the riot line gradually pulled back to the steps. The police seemed confused or at least.

of thing that a banner like. Basically, the fact that the banner touched trees in two different areas, or like touch two different trees meant that it would count it as a tent, and so they were allowed to take it down. It all sounded pretty silly to me, but students and others on campus property in the library were left to barricade the area around the library at will.

They started with pallets brought by an anonymous benefactor. Both sides of the staircases into the library were initially blocked. This only lasted until Saturday morning, when an cud president of the university since August of twenty twenty three, visited the encampment. Different protesters I have talked to related this event in different ways. Some described her visit as essentially chill. Others described Ann as quite angry and even threatening them.

schools that get this far. School faculty are often sympathetic to student actions, or at least to the students taking part in them, and supporting crackdowns is dicey for the administration at Humboldt State University. The administration attempted to de escalate and eventually euthanized the movement by trying to provide a safety valve, a way for students who'd had enough to leave, along with the suggestion but not the actual legally binding promise that they wouldn't be punished if they did.

And here's another clip from that interview. I understand that the school even set up basically a booth where you could come and officially like de register yourself from the protests in order to not get expelled or something like that. Is that a like I think you're It was unclear to me from what I read, like exactly how that system was supposed to function, but it seemed kind of shady, so they.

make signs to hang from the barricades. Donations began coming in on Saturday night and flooded in on Sunday, the point that by Monday protesters had stopped accepting donations of a lot of stuff like food and water, but also things like batteries and generators because they just didn't have room to take any more of them. During these weekend days and nights, those of the encampment discussed demands, their plans, and strategy for the future. One topic of discussion involved

the houseless. Would local houseless people be welcome inside the encampment and would they be welcomed to some of the donated resources. The ultimate decision, and I hear that this was not a particularly controversial one, was yes.

We actually had a few days encampment on campus for that too, I believe, and I feel like that never really got it got partially resolved, but Admin was like really fighting against all the possible options because there was like a couple of people arguing that, like we keep in mind, I don't even think these people were from campus, but apparently the two people like filed complaints about how the people living in their cars were like messy or something,

and so one of our requests was like, Okay, maybe like we could get a few more gumpsters or trash cans in the area where people are living. Yeah, And I'm just totally fought back against that, and so that was like what we're jokingly calling, like, oh, that was like strike one and then strike two. We were saying, is the faculty strike that happened earlier, I think this semester that was I think all over the state, But it really only lasted like one day, despite the momentum

for possibly lasting longer than that. And Admin wanted like sent out an email saying like if your faculty isn't holding classes, put their names here, geesh, and obviously all of us were like, what are you talking like you want us to like you're asking us to snitch on our like professors and faculty right now. So that's what we're joking, is like strike two because we're like, we're not doing that. And then this is what we're calling strike three. And I was like joking earlier wh to everyone,

I was like, strike three and we're out. Strike three and they're out, and everyone was like, yeah, I freaking hope.

They were extremely careful with what they said. A lot of it was just kind of repeating the list of agreed upon demands that the protesters had come up with. I did ask about a few other things. I wanted to know how protests in twenty twenty in protests on other campuses had impacted the tactics being seen here. The most common response I got to my questions where variations

of that's not something we'd like to talk about. But they did go into detail in a couple of things, and one of those was what it would take to

actually conclude this occupation. They noted that if representatives of the campus administration, including the president, were to come to them and make concrete steps to divest from Boeing and other military contractors that the school currently has a direct financial relationship with, that that could be the basis for moving forward in some way to start reducing the extent

of the encampment. Possibly, so that seemed to be kind of their line, if we actually see some real evidence that the school is divesting from these military investments that they have, will be willing to negotiate further. But what the school has done thus far, basically just announcing a pause and saying we'll meet about the Boeing thing later,

that's not enough. The liaisons I talked to also made it clear that they found the wide wave of campus actions around the country inspiring and that that had had an impact on how things were being carried out at PSU. I was pretty impressed by their message discipline to be honest. As a journalist, you want people to talk to you, but actions like this are dangerous, and cops aren't the

only danger. Anytime your movement gets pressed the attention that it acts will also attract grifters, particularly of the right wing variety, people who want to find someone they can catch saying something aggressive or dumb, or that just sounds bad out of context. You, as organizers and activists, want to keep attention on your goals and message and away

from that kind of bullshit. I should also note that there were some mentions of their desire that the campus essentially carry out an amnesty policy for people who had already been involved in the occupation, so that nobody would get kicked out of the school as a result of their participation in this movement. I've heard similar things from

the protesters and Humboldt. Yeah, it was an interesting conversation, and what's also interesting are these ads and we're back as my time at the protest on Monday, war On, Individuals from the occupation would occasionally march through the crowd and around the encampment, which grew at its height of the day to around five hundred or so people. In

the late afternoon. This was a mix of protesters, including people from a march that had formed elsewhere and ended up at PSU, and some bystanders, a lot of whom were students sitting nearby dorms. People who were members of the occupation would ask passers by and media not to film protesters and encourage folks to get involved and help with the occupation. Pamphlets on their goals were handed out, and pamphlets on radical political action were passed around. There

were also some people tabling for different causes. There was one group of people who were taking down folks information in order to support essentially a ballot measure that would increase the tax on corporations worth more than twenty five million dollars that were based in the city of Portland,

which sounded nice to me. And in addition to that, there were people who were working to organize a you know, one of those Sorry his very late, but essentially how people are a lot of people are attempting to get people to organize to like register is unaffiliated and the primaries, especially in order to like, you know, make a statement to the Biden administration about their support of Israel. There were folks who were trying to raise and get people

involved in that as well. So again, you know, it was like many protests of this size involved a lot of people. Sometimes in the past, especially in Portland, I have seen kind of more extreme and yeah, let's say extreme activists get angry at stuff like this, particularly when it's asking folks to like fill out or sign petitions. There's some concern obviously that like that could effectively docs people who are there. I've always found that concern a

little silly. I think people can be trusted to kind of measure their own threat matrix and decide am I going to be doing anything at this protest? That means I shouldn't, you know, put down on a piece of paper that I was around here that issue. I didn't notice at this Everyone seemed pretty copasetic, and as a general rule, it was quite peaceful. Folks seemed more or

less on the same page. The mostly masked protesters that I met were a pretty diverse lot, and this included a number of Muslim students, at least one of whom I watched prey before taking their place on the barricade. I also noticed numbers of students in his jobs watching from nearby windows, and eventually from the park out in

front of the occupation. From conversations I had on the ground, I became aware of the fact that several student organizations were hesitant to support, particularly the weekend occupations, as they had had concerns for the safety of their Palestinian members. One particularly salient fear was that fordn students who participated and were arrested might risk not just their academic status

but their ability to stay in country. And I know that a number of the protesters I met there who were particularly you know, white folks, felt like one reason they needed to participate was that they could participate without taking that kind of risk. On for the largest portion of the day Monday, I watched his activists reinforce the barricades on one side of the library, and the crowd

grew quite large in the park. Some signs I saw among the crowd and on the barricade included mass college protests are always on the right side of history, and fuck your homework. People are dying. There were speeches, but not much in the way of action until very late in the day, when all but maybe one hundred and fifty or so of the crowd had filtered away. My notes at the time say the big change happened at

around six fifty five pm. By this point in the early evening, I had seen very little of the police. Every now and then, a few PSU cruisers would come by circling the area, and small groups of four or five hecklers carrying makeshift fishing poles with donuts on them would run beside the squad cars, basically trying to like tempt the police officers to go grab the donuts. This seemed to demoralize the campus officers enough that they mostly

stayed away. I believe that at this point the city's plan and the administration's plan was to avoid doing anything fucked up and violent in front of such a large crowd, because that would be to risk restarting the whole twenty twenty Portland protest cycle.

The space that they had been allowed by the school to occupy in the sort of weird Dayton situation had been filled both with donations and just the number of people who were inside the occupation. There was no room to make it any bigger. So their next options were either number one, expand the occupation to the park and the Portland Police Bureau has the ability to legal ability

and obviously the gear to clear out the park. In addition, just from a tactical level, it's difficult to defend an encampment in that park the way that it's set up. You really don't have you know, you're kind of surrounded on all sides. The police can really mess with you. I've been gassed in that park a few times, I'm quite aware. The other option they had was take the entire library building and force a response from both PSU

and the city government. This would obviously give them warm room to maneuver, give them more room to take in more people, and it would force an escalation with the city government and with the school, which is you know, what they were looking for. Again, this is overall about particularly their school, not divesting from companies that they see is complicit in the genocide in Gaza, and about you know,

wanting to force a response from that's school's leadership. You know, There's a lot more to it than that, but that's what they were trying to do, and that's what they chose to do. A little before seven pm, someone on a bullhorn came out and began asking all of the people who were still there who was willing to engage in real militant action, and for those people to come help occupy the library. Those who were less willing to risk charges but still down for the cause should form

ranks out in front of the property. There were people with shields, etc. They looked like little bitty pealanxes.

But that's not what happened. For a few minutes, different organizers kind of put these groups of people together and drilled them, walk them through basic tactics, talked about what they should expect, and not long after this, two different PSU police cruisers began to coach from two different streets both of these different groups of people. These little platoons

split up and one would confront each vehicle. The officers were badly outnumbered in both cases, and they pulled back and essentially left the library without anyone really watching over it. The activists who were inside the library used this as an excuse to occupy the rest of the building. Once the police cruisers had been forced back, the protesters from these platoons started grabbing heavy objects that were just around them on the campus and dragging them back to fortify

the entrances and exits to the structure. Much of this took the form of black clad activists swarming onto a sports field behind the library and grabbing soccer goals, football training sleds, and other heavy pieces of equipment and using them to wall off exits and entrances to the ground floor of the building.

up the space for a proper occupation. I was told by at least one person that activists were purposely keeping the interior space accessible to those with wheelchairs, and there were a number of folks with wheelchairs who I saw outside at the occupation. I did not see any specific people inside. I left after nine pm, having been on the ground and wearing my armor for about eight hours

the day after landing back in Portland. That was all I had in me, but quite a few people were still present, both outside and inside the library when I left. Roughly an hour after I got home and started writing this episode at about eleven pm PST, a series of frantic late night phone calls resulted in the president of PSU, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, the Chief of Police for Portland and the City DA Mike Schmidt, holding an emergency press conference.

Local KTU reporter tan vy Varma summarized the conference message this way on Twitter.

many of this is going to shake out. As I type this, the occupation at Humboldt is under heavy attack and it sounds like it's going to be quite ugly. Hey everyone, so you know, again this is a little messy because I wrote this late last night. I woke up in the morning to listen to the edit of it and some things that happened in the early hours

of Tuesday morning. About twenty five people were arrested after more than a hundred riot officers arrived at the cow Poly Humboldt campus and cracked down on the Gaza protest occupation. Riot police arrived around two thirty am. Legal observers say, no injuries. It's kind of really unclear to me how bad it was what actually happened, but you know, quite a few people have been arrested, and at this point it looks like they're being charged with some pretty narly

crimes conspiracy, I think, assault on a police officer. So this is one of those things that's going to be an ongoing story. The university accused the occupiers of doing more than a million dollars worth of damage to university property. I'll actually just read a quote here from an MSN article. Those arrested faced a range of different charges depending on individual circumstances, including unlawful assembly, vandalism, conspiracy, assault of police officers,

and others. In addition, students could face discipline for conduct violations, while any university employees arrested could face disciplinary action. That's them quoting a university news release. So that's kind of

where we are with cal Poly Humboldt. I wanted to note that the folks that we talk to, who I hope are doing well, had requested that we send people to donate to a bail fund, if at all poss If you want to find that and support the Humboldt protesters, you can go to rally dot org slash arc Bailfund. That's rally dot org slash AARC bail fund, so that would help out with those folks who currently need it. There has also been a request to call the university

and request the release of Humboldt protesters for Palestine. The CPH University police phone number is seven oh seven eight two six five five five five. There is a suggested script which I'm going to read here. Hi, my name is blank, and I demand the immediate release of the arrested Humboldt student and faculty protesters for Palestine. They should not be charged, let alone rated an attack for being

on the right side of history. They include, but are not only, Fern McBride, Olivia Fox, Jared Cruz, Ruhala Agacella, Lana Word, Alison Merten, Isaiah Morales, and Adelmi Ruiz. So that's where things are with Humboldt University, I thought are with the people who are arrested, the people who were forced out of the occupation. As of the recording and airing of this episode, the occupation at the PSU library is still in progress, and what will happen there is

less clear. Throughout today Tuesday, the police and city government have made some pretty aggressive statements about clearing out the occupation. About criminal behavior there being unacceptable about their suspicion that there's been significant damage done to university property. For their part, protesters have promised that they will not damage any books. You know, We're going to see what's going to actually happen.

What is clear to me at this point is that in the last day or so, the situation has gone from managed something where the police were every now and then clearing out tents and it was relatively under control, to something so out of control that it necessitated a

late night press conference by the whole city government. So we will see where everything canludes with the PSU occupation, if the police come in and carry out a raid as was done an Humboldt, or if the university administration is willing to actually come to the table and make some of these solid steps towards divesting the university from companies like Boeing, which is what the protesters are demanding.

All really unclear, but yeah, we will continue to cover this and you all continue to you know, be angry about bad things, and yeah, I don't know, I'm still very tired. Good luck to everybody who is out there in the streets. Robert Evans here and I wanted to give an update on Wednesday night. I'm I'm recording this around four forty pm on Wednesday, But a day after I recorded the original ending to this, some more stuff has happened. The occupation has continued. You know, on Monday night,

only a small number of people stayed behind. I think there may be something like a dozen I was told who actually slept in the library that night. There was kind of an anticipation that the cops could come at any minute. The next day, word spread about the occupation and there were a lot more people in the library on Tuesday night, and as a result, it seems as if plans that had initially been down for the police

to rate on Tuesday night were canceled. The Government of Portland published an article today and I'm going to quote from it here. The Portland Police Bureau places an emphasis on de escalation and time is a key de escalation tactic that we use whenever possible. That has not been my experience with them. If police action can be delayed to a time when conditions are safer, we will do so. An example of this occurred Tuesday evening. A plan was

in place to resolve the library incident. However, conditions changed and the incident commander made the decision to delay for the well being of all concerned. My guess is that the conditions that changed largely were how many people were on the ground, as well as the fact that they didn't feel comfortable with their understanding of how much access students had gotten. You know, they didn't have a full

operational plan involved. The police publication notes that there was a rumor circulated that the planned operation was scheduled due to a decision made by the DA's office. This is because the current District Attorney, Mike Schmidt, is considered a progressive. He made a decision not to prosecute all of the acts that he could have prosecuted in twenty twenty and has been kind of consistently attacked by the police and by conservatives in the city for this decision ever since.

Schmidt did prosecute quite a few people in twenty twenty and beyond, and from the beginning of all of this said that his office will prosecute students and anyone else involved with the occupation. I think this is just election you're messaging by the police going after Schmidt because they want more of a hardliner in In either case, nothing was done Tuesday. The occupation continued to spread on Tuesday night.

Students had a movie night. On Wednesday night. As I basically, as I record this, there's a barbecue and a lot of this is occurring kind of outside of the library and like the law and area around it, the idea basically being to keep numbers up in and around the library occupation to make it more politically costly and just harder for the police to actually force everyone out. While all this has been going on, faculty and student organizers

have been meeting with the president of the university. Students refused initially to come to a negotiating table unless the demand their demands for full amnesty were guaranteed for students and non students who were taking part in the occupation. This is something When I talked to folks on Monday night, the focus was on There was some talk of amnesty, but a lot of the primary thing I was told about was that the school needed to divest from Boeing

and other arms manufacturers. The demand for amnesty has grown as the occupation has become more of a real thing, which it had started to be by the end of my time there. On Monday, there was some initial talk from the university president that she was willing to not press charges. If you know, the students who were involved agreed not to violate the student Code of Conduct for the rest of their time at the university and basically

handed all of their names over to the university. That was not an agreement that wound up coming through, very similar to what we saw at Humboldt. Right where you've got this the school being like, well, we'll offer some sort of amnesty, even though we can't really promise full amnesty because the DA can choose to prosecute people still, but if you sign your name up on this list that you were here in committing crimes, we'll kind of try to do something that did not wind up de

escalating the situation. And as I record this, the library at PSU is still occupied by students. We'll see how all of this goes. You know, I've heard a number of things from inside the occupation. It's kind of one of those things where the full details of what's happening will shake out. It's been, as these things always are a little bit messy. The first night I was there and up through you know, a sizable chunk of Tuesday.

You can find articles from media who showed up saying that protesters let them in and then at some point the people at the gates so to speak, changed and a number of press got in and took some pictures of the occupation. You can find those online. There's a lot of local reporters koyn and whatnot who have published

different things about the occupation. It's been interesting to see like the reactions of different reporters because they change based on like the kind the reporter who's there, and kind of I think, how personable they are with people and the folks that they wind up meeting. So you'll you'll find some local reporters being like everyone was really nice, and some local reporters being.

involved twenty twenty stuff. Are really open minded, you know, despite kind of political disagreements that may exist between people, there's this understanding that like folks are a lot less ossified and their beliefs about what constitutes valid action and what constitutes, you know, how people should proceed with things like generally, that has been impressed upon me by some of the older activists is that these younger student organizers

seem much more open minded and optimistic about accomplishing things and trying new things. And this is definitely a different kind of occupation Portland has seen. I noticed some of

that on the first night earlier in their courting. I made that comment about how I noticed that people were out kind of taking petitions and whatnot for different bills, taking advantage of the fact that there was a crowd who had gathered for the protest, and that in the past I had seen folks like that have issue with members of the crowd, and I didn't really notice that

this time. And I guess maybe that comes down to some of what some of these older activists have told me, which is that a lot of the student organizers here are kind.

And there's a very good chance that Portland will have joined that parade of ugly videos by the time this comes up. But as I record this, there's a barbecue going on, and I hope that will be the case tomorrow as well.

a bit of a lighter note. Last week I did an episode on a new movie titled The People's Joker, an unauthorized Batman parody through the lens of a surprisingly genuine queer coming of age story by transgender filmmaker Vera Drew. If you want to hear me geek out about that movie in gay Batman Stuff, you can listen to that

episode from last week. But this episode is going to delve more into the diy nature of this movie, some behind the scenes and how you go from an idea to a piece of wacky queer art playing in a movie theater or a TV show on your local cable access TV station. So I talked to two trans women who are currently making independent queer media, mentioned Vera Drew as well as Ella Yeerman, host of the late night comedy show Late Stage Live, transgender and a comedian, the

two most persecuted classes. So I've been keeping up with Ella's indie transgender gen Z comedy project since it first got announced earlier this year. I have kind of a love hate relationship with the late night comedy news format, and I myself have thrown around the idea of playing with that format. So when I first heard about Ella's new show, Late Stage Live, my first thought was damn it, That's such a good title for a show, and now

I can't use it. Just this immense sense of jealousy washed over me, and I've had to watch everything she's put out since then.

a live studio audience. And the vaguest pitch I give to people who have no idea what the show is is that it's what if The Daily Show was hosted by a transgender woman. And we draw a lot of comparisons to the Daily Show by virtue of sort of similar formats, But myself and my writers are really interested in sort of, for lack of a better term, queering the late night format and sort of exploring what late night can do for a younger, more radical political audience.

The Daily Show was like a really big radicalizing force I think for a certain generation people really John Stewart took that show and turned it into a really powerful tool for getting people engaged and aware of things that they might not have otherwise been aware of. But the culture has really shifted in terms of politics, in terms of media consumption since John started the Daily Show in

the nineties. We have shows like Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, we have shows like My Coworkers and Bosses at Some More News and when we have like all of the alternative media sphere, ranging from like Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones to the Young Turks to everybody and their mom on YouTube.

they check at least once a week. TikTok reigns supreme for information dissemination. Over one third of adults under the age of thirty regularly scroll the app for news, often treating it like a search engine, with the rest of the youths and young adults going to YouTube as well as other social media apps to fill in the information gaps, as well as podcasts such as this.

media consumption. We're seeing a lot of that with the Palatine stuff right now. People don't have to rely on the New York Times, people don't have to rely on these big media insitutions with their obvious biases to get information. But it also sort of engenders this I think, this very specific attitude towards intellectually.

dig into data, and then what putting that into a late night format means. We have a live audience, which a lot of stuff on YouTube doesn't have, and we have a lot of the trappings of like og late night. We have like sketches, and we have correspondence, and we have a theme song, and a lot of that has sort of gone away as we've moved more into like

a YouTube media sphere. So it's been exciting to both bring that back for like esthetic and nostalgia's sake, and then also to sort of see what and I think the show's in early stages, so I am excited to keep playing with this but finding out like what exactly the package does for the content. We talk a lot about like form follows function and vice versa. But I think there's like intentionality behind presenting it as a late night show. It's not just like for aesthetic value.

of Todd Phillips's Joker movie. Phillips had been in the news cycle complaining that quote unquote woke culture was making it too hard to make comedy, which is interesting coming from a guy who's continually made some of the most successful comedies in the past twenty years. But I digress. Here's Vera Drew talking about how The People's Joker ballooned from an ironic re edit of the in Cell Joker movie into a whole new piece of queer cinema.

woosh noises and slips and slide whistles. But as I was working on it and kind of just making this like big piece of like bound footage video art, like a narrative kind of just like fell into play and it kind of just came in an instant and I was just like, oh, Okay, I think I actually want to make like a coming of age film, but I want to make like a parody of The Joker, like in that process and kind of just like tell like a really earnest and super personal autobiographical story about my

life and growing up in the Midwest and coming out as trans and comedy and you know, my relationship with my mom and toxic relationship I was in and stuff, but kind of process and mythologize all of that through Batman characters. So that's kind of the origin of the movie.

weirdly fascinated by late night TV. My parents never watched the news, but they watched late night. They got their news from Stephen Colbert. They got their news from, at least at a certain point, Jimmy Fallon, although that fell off quite quickly. But I've just always been incredibly fascinated by the whole late night format as a cultural source

for news. At a certain point, around twenty seventeen, YouTube started pushing late night clips into everyone's feeds, and everyone just got so inundated with this style of political comedy.

partying info Wars, which is almost an unparitable thing. So like the like the right wing media ecosystem has shifted so far that that you can't really get a Colbert Report now, it just doesn't work. But yeah, like there's so many people who get their information directly from that. And I think a lot about like the creator responsibility, like which is a word that gets start or a

lot around in social media spaces. But it's interesting to think that Colbert now and Stuart and even like Seth Meyers have this responsibility as like informants to their audience, in some sorts of the sole source of news for those people. When we were writing our misinformation piece, we did talk about how in twenty fifteen, there was a poll that came out that said that like the majority of liberals, like the highest percentage of rules got their

news from The Daily Show with John Stewart. And I think a lot about the excuse John used to give to conservatives at the time who would criticize him for not doing his due diligence on any given subject. He would often say, well, we're a comedy show. The show that comes on after us is puppets making prank phone calls. And he would sort of like deflect that responsibility by saying,

I'm an entertainer first. And I think that one of the big things that has changed in the last twenty years or however long, is that the line between enter retainer and journalist has totally blurred. With like the rise of like video essays on YouTube, and just like again like the democratization of information and content creation, everyone is sort of an entertainer. Everyone is sort of a journalist.

There is like a responsibility that comes with having a platform, and so obviously, like our show, takes a great deal of care to make sure that the information we're presenting is it's accurate and correct, and that the analysis we're doing is as empathetic and thoughtful as we can.

its own thing. I've always been interested to see what a late night show with my politics would look like, and I think to some degree, you can look at John Stewart in the two thousands, and I've been watching Stuart's new stuff on The Daily Show every Monday, mostly just to see how he's going to handle this landscape,

which is very different from one he left in twenty fifteen. Nowadays, I think you can look to John Oliver as being probably slightly more radical, but even still there's a decent gap. Certainly some YouTube shows try to fill in that gap, but I've really enjoyed watching the Late Stage team apply classic late night stylings to a more radical queer form of politics, including like Ella mentioned correspondence segments as well as actual reporting. Late Stage Live did a recent piece

on the effects of Libs of TikTok. It was a really good look at something that I oddly hadn't seen anyone else really interrogate before, actually looking at the people that Libs of TikTok has targeted and how that has literally affected their lives.

want to keep exploring. One of my favorite parts of the Daily Show is the more serious, like field pieces they end up doing that obviously also have comedic games applied to them, but also are like real journalism that maybe mainstream news institutions don't cover, and that's really exciting and obviously coming from like a specifically queer perspective. There's not a ton of specifically queer news. There's a few magazines, but there's nothing huge.

in being tamed for a sis straight audience. The end result is one holy reflective of the community that has fostered the arts creation. To extrapolate on this, let's return to my interview with Vera Drew. I know, for for a while you were getting people to send in to like send in stuff to get put in the film.

There was kind of it was like a very collaborative start to this project, and I am I am interested in that aspect of like how this is like both like a collage multimedia piece, but also it's not like the work of like one singular artist. It's like a very like queer community made thing. And it definitely feels that way, especially with all of like all like the sets, all of like the art. It's so many different styles

mashed together. Into like this beautiful mosaic, and I'm interested in like your decision to have it be that collaborative thing and how that kind of came together.

cash in. But you know, the movie started as this like video remix thing, and then I think as we were writing the script and it became more narrative driven. It was just like we were always writing this script that was very impossible to film, uh you know, just a very like there's Batmobile and like yeah, you know, fuck are you gonna do that? But we weren't really

thinking about that as much. We were just like, let's just write this movie, and let's just write it as like a comic book movie, like let's have the tropes of a comic book movie and a queer coming of age film and and just fully execute those and you know, I think the idea of it becoming sort of this mixed media piece was was very gradual. I think like it was one of the many things about this This movie was made very intuitively, like I never had a budget. Really,

I never make a movie like this again. It was it was very like kind of figuring it out as you go in a lot of ways, especially just on the like business side of things.

space of what is this really? But just so many artists came forward, and most of them artists who had never worked on film or TV before. So it was a lot of just like fine, artists and painters and illustrators and visual artists, and then like a lot of people too, just that I had seen for years on trans Twitter or like like featured in like very like

fringe like zines and shit like that. So it's just like, holy shit, like we could really make this movie that looks like nothing you've ever seen before, and we can do it too in a way that like we're creating original art. You know, like all the art in it is original. I mean like we recreate a lot of sets and stuff from famous comic book movies, but like it was painstakingly created and every character had its own

character design, you know, original character design. Like we couldn't just take mister mixuplick and put them in the movie, Like we had to go, okay, like how can we clear mister mix OLEPLI, Like, Okay, We'll make a mix mixy and they'll be like a weird like floating like Hanna barbera cartoon type. It's kind of more hr puff and stuff. Was the vibe we went for there, very sit in Marty Kroft.

wanted a very queer focused show. I wanted an in person writer's room ultimately or like a local writer's room, because everyone else at some more News is LA based as far as I'm aware, and I'm the only East Coaster out here, and I just wanted the whole bunch of things that Somewere News wasn't doing. So I was like, Okay, I guess I have to do that myself because there's no one else doing it that will hire me. But I'm grateful that I had my experience with some More

News and continue to have my experience with them. Because I structure our writer's room very similarly to them, and I took a lot of inspiration from their early stages in terms of like the creative side of things, and then in terms of like finding people and making it happen. Something I've learned my whole life as a creative is that you just sort of have to fucking do it. I've been like self producing work.

again the next year. It got better after that, and then after I graduated college, I started doing stand up again. I just stand up a little bit pre transition and it was terrible, and so I stopped to become a girl and I started doing stand up again, and I realized there wasn't a ton of spaces in the stand up scene for trans people, and I said.

I reached out to my headwriter, Read Pope last April after seeing a similarly live show by my friend Kay Loggins called Knight Live that she does every so often, and I helped her with the production day on that and it was a thirteen hour production day, and I just remember having so much fun realizing that you could find people in the artistic community like enough, people who were willing to do it.

growth in terms of production team at first. And that just comes from like working within your own community and like finding an artistic community. I don't think I could be doing this two years ago, Like I'm really grateful for having hosted a stand up show for many years first to integrate myself into that community and knowing a lot of like hardworking, multifaceted artists.

we'll make it look like a like a Doom like N sixty four video game or something, and the batmobile too.

So it's just kind of like figure like breaking up everybody's role into these individual pieces and like kind of going by like both physical locations, like reserving one artist for each physical location that we'd see pop up and things, you know, like Paul McBride did all of the Joker apartment shots and we recreated Woking Phoenix's Joker apartment, but you know, change the color and the wallpaper and blah

blah blah. And Paul again like another person who just like Paul just makes three D models just to like relax, I guess, like he just makes these beautiful interiors. And it was like, okay, cool, we'll make like a beautiful, like hyper realistic interior. I never really forced my aesthetic on anybody. I really just allowed people to just kind of like lean into their aesthetic and just do what they wanted and kind of like just run wild and be like okay, so you make low polyart, like we'll

do just do that in this case. And our amusement park set was made by this artist at GRAT and he just makes beautiful DMT like psychedelic imagery. So it was like we got this you know, hyper crazy, like weird perspective amusement park from him, and we turned that into a three D model, you know, rather than going like how are we going to make this work? You know, like this is a this is a flat painting, you know, like it's a location we keep seeing in the movie,

like how are we going to make it work? But it was just like just kind of saying yes and to everything and really allowing everybody to just play to their best strengths. And I knew that, like my voice and my vision were always going to be there, like my face was going to be on screen for most of the movie, and like it's my story, Like I was never really worried about losing myself or disappearing in the art at all, and instinctually I just kind of

knew it would make the movie feel very clear. And that's really just what it was.

line in the way like all filmmakers have to. You know, you just stick to a color scheme, you stick to a very certain type of pacing, and you know, and musically too, like I think we really like were able to like bridge a lot of the things together just by like having constant music playing. And you know, I think I was really influenced by Natural Born Killers and Pink Floyd's of the Wall and also Headwig in The

Angry Inch. I think we're like kind of the Big Three, and also returned to Oz those are the Big four, and just to round it out to five, then Batman Forever of course. But I think like a movie's never

really been made. I think plenty of movies are made like this all the time, like where these like little communities of people get together, but like this was like an intercontinental kind of community project, and it was beautiful, Like I'm so glad we did it, and it was it was an opportunity to really hopefully, like get a lot of artists visibility in spaces that they normally wouldn't be visible, and an opportunity too to like work with a lot of really talented people and allow them and

make them feel valued.

of never really was. It was always like ours. It was always mine and my friends and you know, all the people that worked on it with me. And I think that is just really cool, and thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk about it, because I think it's one of the things that kind of gets lost about this project a lot, just because of how personal is and because of like our legal stuff. But like I would have never been able to make this. If it wasn't for the team, we will return to, it

could happen here. After these messages we now return to. It could happen here.

and our entire crew and writing stuff is volunteer. Right now, We're making a little bit of money on Patreon, but certainly not enough to pay the twenty plus person team that ends up working with us every month, although that is the goal down the line. But yeah, people are willing to do a cool thing and volunteer their time. Artists want to be making stuff, and so it's just

about doing it and then just doing it again. When I first started hosting my stay up show, we did it the first time, and I spent months like thinking about it, and after the first month, I was like, oh my god, that was so hard. How am I going to find enough transcomics to you at a second time? How am I going to have the energy to do

a second time? And my boyfriend at the time said, if you want it to be a monthly show, you just have to do it every month for a while, even if it sucks, and then eventually it will suck less.

this show. I work a forty hour food service day job that I came directly from to do this interview. Everyone else on my show is either working full time on top of the show, or unemployed and slowly losing money at various stages. People would like to fire queer people. So every few weeks someone comes into a writer's meeting is like, guys, I lost my job.

but like, you don't have to wait for that. You can just make the work you're doing. And I've had conversations with my writers where they've all been like, this has been a really cool opportunity because at the very least I've sort of found out if I would actually want to write on a late night show. We talk about that as a coveted job, but maybe I don't want to do that. It's a very different skill than stand up and that's been a fun learning curve as

well as hiring a bunch of stand ups. To write long form political analysis, you sort of have to herd cats to some degree.

very personal story. Right before the movie was set to premiere at tiff the Toronto International Film Festival back in twenty twenty two, Warner Brothers sent a vaguely worded but threatening letter which resulted in the People's Joker of being pulled from the festival save for one late night screening. Yet throughout the legal chaos, Vera Drew remained to steadfast to ensure the movie would be released the right way

on the big screen where it belongs. This film has had like a I guess, a troubled history, some some might say, and how are you able to like stick with this project after encountering like hurdles and problems, like because like a certain point, it's like, is this like a some cost fallacy or something like how did you decide to like actually stick with this and like really fight for this as a as a piece of like expressive art.

at least U Joker and Batman will be in public domain in ten or fifteen years. So like that was like an idea. I guess that was floated to me a few times. Bro, It's just like I don't I didn't want to wait that long, and I had just I really put all I had into this movie, you know, like I cashed in every favor I had ever accumulated in Hollywood financially, Like I took out a huge loan to finish it, and it was just this big, deeply personal thing that I had made that originally really was

just for me and my friends. Like it was just kind of a thing that I had just made. You know, maybe I would have shown it to like my Patreon or something, but like after a certain point, like it, you know, once we had that like premiere, it was just like like I can't just post this to YouTube. I can't like just dump it somewhere or like shelve it all my agents and stuff. I have way too many agents now, and they all were like telling me to that basically, like it's it's it's okay that it's

not coming out. We can basically just use this to get the next project going. But I mean I quickly realized in that process, like this movie is like a fucking like you don't show this movie to a studio executive and then they immediately are like, yeah, let's let's hire this person. They just want to like have lunch with this crazy bitch who made the Joker movie, you know.

Like so it was like it just quickly became clear like where like kind of just the people around me who had the best interest of the movie at heart, and also like just what felt bad and what felt right and what felt right. Really was like taking the movie out just to festivals and kind of doing like a secret screening tour, which is what we did, and that was really exciting and kind of like a jokerfied

way of sort of getting this movie out there. And that was really just on an emotional and like personal level,

really what carried me through. I was lucky enough to be in attendance at one of the secret festival screenings a few years back, and I was delighted to hear that nearly two years after it initially premiered at Tiff The People's Joker was able to secure a distribution partner to put the movie in theaters nationwide, So once again I was fortunate enough to rewatch a piece of queer Batman art that otherwise would have never been made under Warner Brothers Thumb, and I think this is also the

case with Late Stage Live and many of these new independent queer projects. They most likely would not be produced by one of the massive media conglomerates that controls almost everything. You see.

growth opportunities. But Brick the Public Access network is their whole thing is free speech, and so part of working with them is their commitment to free speech and radical programming.

retain full ownership of our stuff. And so the way it is in this zany Internet landscape is that YouTube is the pls to get eyes on a project. Like if I thought that public access TV was going to be the place to to like blow up, I maybe would be like focusing much harder on promoting that end of distribution. But I think for what we're making and what we're doing, YouTube and the Internet is like how

to build an audience. But it's it's it does lend it like an interesting credibility to be on public access and esthetically we really like leaning into sort of like the nineties public access vibes. Part of that is the equipment we're using. Our cameras are not the most modern, so you get a slightly grainy vibe.

I just couldn't. I didn't have the bandwidth. And I want to make films, I don't want to distribute them at this point, like maybe someday, but like right now, I just like want to tell as many stories as I can I had a lot of support around me, and there was just so much enthusiasm from you know, people like you who saw it at festivals last year, who like were basically like holy shit, and just all

the kind of responses we're seeing now to it. Like it was, I got little like micronoses of that last year, which literally was I mean, I it's probably fucking tacky to say, but it was just the darkest year of my life. I was really just an anxious mess the

entire time. But I really did make this movie to like not only understand myself and sort of mythologize my life and my friends' lives and stuff like that, but like I made it to like get better, Like I made it to kind of heal not only my relationship with like my gender, but my family and my art

and like how I want to make stuff. And I think, what's really beautiful what happened in that like dark period and up up until now and even right now, this movie does really require me to take care of myself emotionally and mentally in ways that are what I've always needed. So it's it's been it's been a cool kind of just like really expensive therapy. Ultimately, even though a lot of it's been really grueling.

scenes content on Patreon at Latestage Live. Solidarity to everyone out there this week, see you on the other side.