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the First Amendment. And the way that it has been reported, I think, or at least the way that it has been received, particularly by communities of people who do engage in a lot of First Amendment protected activity, has been with a certain amount of panic that the Supreme Court saying we're not going to hear this case, We're going to kick it back down to the Fifth Circuit. We're going to kick it back down to the district court.

Is you know, a harbinger of terrible things to come for the right to protest and for the kinds of liability that you might be exposed to if you are engaging in protest, And there is some truth to that. It is I would say often dangerous to engage in

acts of dissent. But I think that there's some real misapprehension of what's going on with this particular case, and so I thought it was worth having a conversation with you to try to clarify a little bit about what's going on here, what the risks are associated specifically with this case, and what the risks actually are on the ground with respect to protest, and also to talk to you about some of the resources that are available.

And then what kinds of resources there are? I guess the first thing I'm going to do is give you a very brief premer on the First Amendment. So the First Amendment guarantees, as I like to say, the very First Amendment guarantees our rights to speech and assembly. The government can place limits on the time, place, and manner of your protest, but the government is not authorized to

criminalize speech based on subject matter or viewpoint. And it can't impose what's called a prior restraint on speech, which can include making it so risky to speak that people engage in self censorship. But the First Amendment doesn't immunize you from prosecution or civil liability for otherwise unlawful conduct.

I see this is a very very similar case to the underlying case in this situation where Deray McKesson has been sued civilly, meaning he's being sued for money damages. He is not being criminally prosecuted. Right, That's an important distinction. So, you know what, let's back up a little bit.

lot of public statements. He made a lot of public statements on behalf of Black Lives Matter, which you know I'm going to get into is not a membership organization. But he made a bunch of statements as though he were the representative of a movement which he referred to as Black Lives Matter. He organized a lot of protests. I think at one point I have a memory that he ran for office, so he was a very visible

movement organizer, right. He organized a protest in I believe twenty seventeen in the wake of the police murder of Altms Sterling, at which a police officer was hit in the head with a hard object, a rock or a piece of concrete, and he was like, the police officer was injured.

rock at him. This theory requires a real failure to understand social movements and distributed networks because what it presumes, and I think we've talked about this before on this show, is the inability of the police and the courts to understand that not every social movement operates with a clear hierarchy like the police, right or the military. Because their social movement groups do imitate the military, they do imitate that hierarchy. They totally reproduce this sort of chain of

command theory. So if you look at the Klan, right, they are organized via they are incorporated, they have a membership, there is a clear hierarchy, who is in charge, who is giving orders, who is following orders?

I mean, it just is not. And that case was dismissed, you know, just entirely. And then the second case that was brought was this one where the guy who was hit in the head with a rock, and it's the same allegations, the same theory of liability, and everybody got dismissed out of that case. All of the defendants got

dismissed out of that case, except for Deray McKesson. And part of the reason that everyone else was dismissed out of that case, or that the suit was dismissed with respect to those named defendants, is that Black Lives Matter was an unincorporated association, and an unincorporated association can't be sued. So and this has been relevant in other cases. I'm not trying to give anyone legal advice, but I want

people to think about the fact. I think there's like a real impulse sometimes in social movement organizing that like we need to make everything a nonprofit.

a slap suit. It's a suit that endeavors to stifle speech that's in the public interest. When that suit first started, they tried to sue Earth First, but Earth first is not an entity. There's no one to serve. You know, there's nobody there. It's not you know, it's like antify. It'd be like trying to sue Batman fans.

And what's happening there is if someone says, okay, you've you know, you wrecked my car, or your dog bit me, or you punched me in the face and I lost a tooth, then you can be civilly sued by that person for money, damages, got it right to compensate you for the loss. So in this case, mister McKesson is being civilly sued, not arrested, not prosecuted, not subject like, there is no possability that if he loses this case, he'll go to jail.

all of these people can't be sued. But mister McKesson, we do think could be liable under a theory of negligence because he organized the protest and was present. This officer sues McKesson and a bunch of other people, and the office says that mister McKesson is liable because he organizes protests and should knew or should have known that

it could potentially turn violent. And so he says under Louisiana law, he can sue on a theory of negligence, which doesn't require any kind of intent or certain knowledge.

It's just being you know, negligent. Initially, the court, the federal district Court, dismisses those claims, all of them based on NAACPD Claiborne, which I talked about earlier, right, which says, if you're at a protest and one person gets violent, like the rest of the protest doesn't get does not lose its First Amendment protected character just because other people are violent. Then the cop appeals and the Fifth Circuit in part affirms their rulings about all of the other

people who were sued, but reinstates the negligence against mister McKesson. Right, he then it does it never, by the way, has proceeded to trial. This case is still in a very preliminary phase. Oh wow, it has been going on since twenty seventeen and it's been bouncing up and down the courts. But the question is can he even be sued under this theory? So we haven't gotten he hasn't been found guilty,

we haven't had a presentation of evidence. There's all kinds of stuff that has not yet happened in this case. The question is very, very narrow. It's can a person be sued under a theory of negligence when they organize a protest and somebody else at that protest causes some kind of harm?

One of the there was a three judge panel that ruled on this, so it was a two to one ruling. Two of the judges try to distinguish it from Claiborne. One of the judges Uh says, no, you know, Clayborn.

It's exactly the controlling You can only hold somebody liable for their own behavior, right, And one of the things he says is that if you make protest organizers liable for someone else's violent behavior, all accounter protester has to do is show up and start throwing rocks in order to order to get the whole protest too, you know,

to impute liability to the the organizerson who organized the protest. Yeah, and that goes both ways, right, So i've I am sort of surprised that they given that there are social movements that are probably more aligned with the values and beliefs of these federal judges in the Fifth Circuit. So the Fifth Circuit at this point says, no, go back to the district court and have the trial on the theory of negligence. Right, then, the Supreme Court decided a

case called Counterman be. Colorado. Counterman be. Colorado is not a First Amendment political speech case. It's a case about somebody making threats. But that case relies very heavily on Clayborne. So in that case, we have what's called a true threats analysis, and they're trying to determine whether a person who's making threats needs to actually know that the threats they're making are going to be perceived as real threats.

And what they decided was they do need to know to some degree that these statements could be taken as true threats. But they talk a lot. Kagan authored this opinion, and she talks a lot about how careful we have to be even with speech that is traditionally not protected like true threats, because it's very important not to chill

protected speech. And what she says is that the Court has always been really wary of chilling protected speech, and so sometimes it makes extra space for speech that isn't protected in order to make really sure it doesn't chill protected speech. Right, So she says, the court must consider the prospect of chilling non threatening expression given the ordinary

citizens predictable tendency to wide of the unlawful zone. The speaker's fear of mistaking whether a statement is a threat, his fear of the legal system getting that judgment wrong, his fear in any event of incurring legal costs, all those may lead him to swallow words that are in

fact not true threats. And so what they say is we need to make a standard that has enough what they say is breathing room to make sure that even if it means that some unprotected speech gets through, we have enough space for all of the protected speech to still exist and for nobody to feel uncertain about whether or not their.

intentionally to threaten someone. But if you're saying things that you even if you don't mean it to be a threat, if you could reasonably anticipate that it will be received as a threat, that's sufficient. Okay, okay, And then she says, this are incitement decisions, right, So, Supreme Court decisions regarding incitement to violence demand more. But the reason for that demand is not present here where we're talking about threats. When incitement is at issue, we have spoken in terms

of specific intent, presumably equivalent to purpose or knowledge. In doing so, we recognized that incitement to disorder is commonly a hair spread the way from political advocacy, and particularly from strong protests against the government and prevailing order. Such protests gave rise to all the cases in which the Court demanded a showing of intent, and the Court decided those cases against a resonant historical backdrop the Court's failure in an earlier era to protect mere advocacy of force

or law breaking from legal sanction. A strong intent requirement was and remains one way to guarantee history was not repeated. It was a way to ensure the efforts to prosecute incitement would not bleed over, either directly or through a chilling effect, to dissenting political speech at the First Amendment's core. Okay, so we have this case that's decided days after the Fifth Circuit makes its decision that directly speaks to this decision. Right,

it reaffirms Clayborne. It reaffirms that political speech is protected. It reaffirms that you cannot have a negligence standard. You have to have a standard. You can't just say, well, somebody knew or should have known that organizing a protest might lead to violence, and you say they have to be like, we're going to go out and we're going to do violence at this protest at this time. Right, they have to be actually advocating for violence in order to be held responsible for violence.

may deny what's called curcherai right hearing the case. The Court may deny sorcherai for many reasons, including that the law is not in need of further clarification.

And the statement makes even clearer that the First Amendment does not permit liability on the negligence theory advanced by the cop in this case. It doesn't say the cop in this case, so it makes very clear. You know, they have submitted mister mckesson's council has submitted this statement to the judge, and I think there is every possibility that this case is just going to die at this point.

You know, remember the District Court already dismissed it altogether at once, and it has only been carrying it forward because they were ordered to buy the Fifth Circuit.

with this. But I think if they did, and if mister McKesson was like a if they even allowed it to continue, it might just go right back up to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court might at that point hear it because they've already said, no, we expect you to follow the law that we just rearticulated in this other case. Right, But again, remember that we haven't had a trial yet. He hasn't been found guilty. He hasn't, right, Like, the question is can we even proceed in this case?

just one of many, right. And we've seen so many examples of this, and they are by no means new or novel, right, They're just trying out new legal theories, and this was one of them. And I don't think it's going to go anywhere, But I think we need to remember there's always sort of multiple fronts on which we're fighting this battle. Right. There's the legal front, right, and then there's the sort of on the ground law

enforcement front. One of the reasons that mister McKesson was targeted here is because he did make and this is not to say this is his fault, it absolutely is not. But one of the things that made him more susceptible to targeting is that he did make a ton of public statements and he was extremely visible in a way that aligned with the governments and the right wings understanding

of social structures. Right because if they understand that social movements are being directed from the top, which is not typically the case. But if that's if that's what it looks like to them, is a person that they can identify, who they can even a little bit make out, even the most tenuous case, is in charge, then you know that's the person they're going to go after.

You know, we're already very insulated from this kind of thing. Anyway, the dangers are what the dangers have always been, which are mass arrest because the police neither know nor care what the law is, and they don't care about Clayborn, and they don't care that the fact that you did not personally throw a rock doesn't constitute probable cause to

arrest you. Right, Like, I am always more concerned about things on the ground like mass arrests and police involved injuries than I am about frankly about even long term legal consequences because so often, and I guess I say this because I have the privilege of practicing in New York, where there is a very strong history of public protest and everyone sort of understands what that is and no

one feels all that threatened by it. Which doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of police involved injuries, and it doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of traumatic arrests, but it does mean that typically there are not devastating

legal consequences of that. Now, that's not the case in places like Georgia, right where they're doing their own sort of boundary testing down there to see what kinds of criminal liability and what kinds of theories of criminal law they can use to sort of bootstrap absolutely garden variety protest behavior into really serious felony charges. Right. So that's the kind of stuff that I would say, Yeah, we should be worried about it. It is dangerous to protest.

There's widespread surveillance, there's widespread public private collaboration, there's widespread agency cooperation. There's all kinds of non state actors, right, corporate actors, political actors, random sort of individuals and small groups that are doing are engaged in all kinds of surveillance.

There's counter groups, right, we have like you mentioned before, the Proud Boy, we have all kinds of well, look, Canary Mission is a really good example, right, We have all kinds of actors, groups, individuals, corporations, government entities that have an interest in suppressing descent, and they engage in all kinds of conduct, you know, ranging from intense surveillance to doxing to you know, even more violent behavior, you know,

targeted harassment, not just by law enforcement, but by individuals, by neighbors, by media outlets. Right. And those are the kinds of things that make it dangerous to protest, I guess, But since when do we let that stop us?

can and very much will be used against you. Yeah, We're seeing a lot of employment and educational consequences right people are currently what's happening right now as we speak at Columbia University, people are losing their student housing, they're getting suspended from school, they're getting arrested, they're getting you know, these student disciplinary proceedings. There's all kinds of risks to being a public dissident. But the solution to that kind

of repression is not self censorship. It's courage.

to be brave. As we reach another election year, almost certainly like there will be protest, which, whatever happen, depends in the election, right, that will lead to people who are perhaps not so familiar with horizontal organizing, with like anti authoritarian or non authoritarian organizing, all these things, entering a protest movement, and people will inevitably have to learn like one way or the other, you know, like these basic things they can do to make it as safe

as possible to protest, and it would be great if they can learn them from a podcast, not from them or their friends getting hurt.

And you are probably better off knowing what that is before you do the thing than after you do that thing.

still help you to accomplish your political goals. And if you are going to go out and do something that you think is likely to involve a rest, I at least want you to know that it is likely to involve our resty exactly you know, and what your specific risks might be and to have somebody lined up to take care of you, to represent you if that becomes necessary.

And again, what I just referred to as the law of the land is not the same thing as law enforcement practice, right yeah.

We also have chapters all over the country and if you look in our referral directory you can find where those contacts for people all over the country. I think if you want a know your Rights training, you can reach out to the NALG and there are a lot of other a lot of other organizations that do know

your Rights trainings. I know in New York we have a really amazing organization called Cuney Clear, and I would highly recommend you follow them on Instagram because they often have a lot of resources they're posting Protect your People a digital toolkit for organizations and employers, and it was developed to combat anti LGBTQ plus harassment. But I think the principles remain the same no matter what it is that you're looking at. And I'll put the link to

that again. It's called Protect Your People and it's hosted by the Harvard Law LGBTQ Clinic. But I'll stick the link here in the chat for you, James, so that you can share it in the show notes.

is what happens when we get night recordings. But yeah, the thing, the thing we're putting together today is a union at a really interesting kind of very very interesting kind.

And since then they've expanded from you know, the tiny little location in California to seventy stores in the US and then over one hundred globally, including in China, Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and am I forgetting anywhere else.

coffee shops, the margins are terrible. Yeah, and really a as far as I can tell, the only value that Blue Bottle offers to Nesley is brand and like the ability to eventually grow to the point where at some point in the future they'll be able to make a little bit of money.

of tenuously connected to your labor. But on the other hand, like at the individual shop level, you're still dealing with all of the same sort of like you know, like hyper exploitation and trying to like ring every cent out of stuff.

like eighteen an hour. You know, we just got to pave up in April, so it's like I, you know, I do make more of the minimum wage. It's it can be a tough sell for people to be like, oh, but you know it's like marginally better, Like oh, I'm working at this like fancy coffee shop, don't they treat

us a little better? Like? But when you look at like also, the coffee industry has a hole on like on a global scale, incredibly exploitative industry that like we are both we play in too as people like in the US who make incredibly expensive specialty coffee, but also like as workers who are exploited ourselves.

of shops around here organized. There have been some incredibly like militant shops out here, like I think Gonza and I first got introduced to the Bluebettle campaign from the Star eight seven four picket line and they were out there for like two months, and I think that that, you know, those kinds of things have really influenced this campaign and really influenced our organizing as we go into this like really kind of corporate, bougie coffee shop that

is hard to hard to reconcile with, like, hey, I am also an exploited laborer. I you know, I am forced to make coffee all day for customers who are frankly quite rude and having to have those conversations with your coacs of like, hey, we deserve better. It might be marginally better than some other place, we still deserve better and we can fight for so much more. So I feel like I went on for a little bit there, but I hope that answered that.

And also people implicitly understand that the current model that the cafes operate on is kind of reckless, Like because we're owned basically as a venture capital scheme, this means that, you know, we're constantly trying to cut costs that shouldn't be cut. Like even today, Madeline and I ran out of decaf coffee beans because they hadn't placed in order for them.

in a rush. Like people would get really upset when you're confronted with like the oh wow, the money coming in and then the money.

slave labor to get chocolate or something. Right, But I don't know, there's this there's something really kind of just viscerally horrifying about like I've produced eight hundred dollars of coffee and they're paying me eighteen dollars. Yeah, so speaking of eight hundred dollars of coffee, this show.

can I pitch you guys on going independent? Like and at that time, I mean, I can't speak for the other folks, Like I did not know anything about independent unions. This campaign has also been an incredible like learning process

for me. And so you know, we talked about a little bit of like, hey, unions, everything that a union does, workers can do and really like trying to like instill this like we can do it ourselves because I think that like, for me, like the dream of independent unionism is like the having autonomy and control of our lives both in the workplace and in our unions at like as workers. And so you know this idea of like

oh yeah, this the the union just takes care of it. Oh, you pay dues and this stafford does all these things for you. But when you know, when we filed our petition, you know I filled that out, it's not that hard. You know, there are so many things where it's like oh, yeah, the union will take care of it, or oh this is what does pay for like, oh, we can have a lawyer look at it. At no part of this process was there really anything that workers could not have done.

Did we seek legal advice? Absolutely? Did we have people help us out who maybe knew more than I did. Yes, But that isn't to say that we were not learning the entire time. So to me, that's like the big ethos of independent unionism of like learning it, doing it, teaching others. I think it has been an incredible opportunity.

I think also like we really are committed to like rank and file democracy and so having workers have a say in all major decisions, especially like now that we have had our election, we're moving into bargaining hopefully soon, Like being able to have workers submit proposals, have workers look and do open bargaining, have them look at every at the contract at every step of the way, and

things like this, having people participate in their unions. I mean, I think that we are in a time of like the revitalization of the labor movement, and I don't want workers to get left behind in that. Like I think that we, you know, like we are the labor and so being able to control our unions and lead them in the ways that we want to as democratically as we can.

we were shopping around with business unions. Rocky and I had sat down with somebody from a fairly large one, and we're trying to ask all of these questions about, you know, would we be able to have rank and file control of our own campaign, would we be able to you know, legitimately examine unconventional tactics for launching or sustaining our campaign, you know, what is the actual process for requesting finances from the larger affiliate if we needed it,

And more or less, what we were told by this staffer was that none of this would be in the hands of rank and file, and it would either be determined by what this particular staffer thought was best or you know, they would have to get approval from you know, whoever was above them, which, despite the fact that this person was within the reform caucus of their union, did not strike them as being anti democratic at all.

begin with. In fact, in my own experience, the idea of affiliation has more or less come across as an implicit threat of how else are you going to take on Nesley without all of the money and resources that we have but won't let you use anyways.

acknowledge us. So at that point, across five of the six stores, we had a walk out on the eighth, and then that same day went downtown to file for an election with the NLRB, which despite the fact that we called them a week in advance to be like, is it okay if a lot of people show up kind of spontaneously to file for an election, And despite the fact that the person in the office said, yeah, it's fine as so long as like less than one hundred and you don't have like a sound stage or

anything you got to set up, and if you do get a permit. Once we walked up to the office, at least four DHS cop cars like a sump in front of us, and they would only let Rocky go into the office to file for our election while being escorted by a DHS agent the entire times.

like what the society you actually live in is. And I don't think there's like a more perfect demonstration of the National Labor Relations Boards sometimes will help you, but also also is very clearly a bureaucratic mechanism of a police state.

where there'll be a link to our GoFundMe. I'll also say that since we don't have staffers, our overhead is incredibly low and this will once again allows us to you know, actually do cool and fun things like we were able to pay everybody that did the walkout because we were able to raise enough money in the in between from April third to eighth, which was incredible.

have to worry about anything like that. We set union dues democratically and like and so it's just been like really helpful for when we were getting organized and everything. Just relaying that idea to coworkers, to family, friends and everyone just kind of like helps them be like, oh that makes sense.

is just you and all of your friends. And then on top of that, it also means that management hasn't known how to respond to us, because in the week leading up to our election, which we won thirty eight to four this past Friday, May third, Yeah, they put out like three or four different flyers, one talking about business unions that have signed management's rights clauses in the most fucking like I'm not owned.

So and also the way that they've been handing these flyers out, I don't know about like other cafes, but at mine specifically, it's been kind of awkward, like haha, cover my eyes, here's this flyer that I have to hand you kind of thing, and it's just like okay, yeah.

some extent. But because because of like the you know, the because because you can run like a staff union with like five people, right, this is this is a pretty good way for them to sort of like like you know, gain something that looks like political power, and like it's a way for them to bring other people who don't know what's going on into like the influencers of their organization, and they this can get really bad and really dangerous, at least the stuff you're talking about where, yeah,

they start trying to sabotage campaigns because they're not you know, like these groups aren't actually in this for you know, like they're not they're not in this for class struggles. But whatever they you know, will say about it, they're they're in this specifically to expand the influence of their own party. And you know, when you try to like actually do your own thing, this stuff happens.

protests all the time. So yeah, maybe maybe maybe that will help too, because I think a lot of it is people just you know, they're you run into like the World Workers Party, and like, you don't know that this party is a weird cult, right, They're just sort of talking about workers stuff. Yeah, so I think education will help with it too, but the bureaucratic maneuvering stuff is like the only thing they're good at because they're all these like weird micro party formations.

their really senior staffers unbelief to be transphobic, and you know, there's there's a whole thing there. But yeah, this is something that is not just a problem with independent unions and not just a problem with sort of like random locals. It can and does get into actual like national unions. On the other hand, one way to avoid this is to in fact organize your own union and don't let them be.

And that's happened to I mean, like this is this is a lot of how like these giant business unions became business unions, is they became basically these like lobbying firms on behalf of like whatever random like local democratic machine is running, Like this happens to Chicago, Like all the time you get these like just like the most important machine like candidates you've ever seen come out of the Democratic Party who are like guys who are like

so comically corrupt that like you know, you're They're like walking down the street and like like bundles of cash are falling out of the suitcases and they're getting endorsed by like the team stars, and it's like, well, you know.

like one hundred years now, right. They know how they operate, they know how their campaigns work, they know what levers

to push against them. On the other hand, they have not been fighting you specifically, random listener of this show, and you, specifically random listener of this show, and your coworkers can do things to surprise them and can do things in ways that they don't understand, and you know, you have we have a moment like right now, Like in like five years, they'll probably have worked out a

bunch of stuff about how to break independent unions. But right now, like literally right now, we have a we have a master strategic advantage because their playbook wasn't written to deal with people who are running these sort of like very low to the ground, very agile, very nimble, very sort of like you know, these spontaneous and creative campaigns, and you can use that to beat the crap out

of your boss and get more money from them. So this is the BA endorsement of doing doing fun things with unions.

I also want to make it clear upfront that this is not an ad. Some of the equipment I tested was provided for free as review units, some of it was purchased with my own money, and some with company money. I'll try to make it pretty clear at each point, but I promise it doesn't matter ari my opinions on any specific product. No one paid us in any way for their inclusion in this episode. Anyway, back to my stupid waterbed. The first thing to know about waterbeds is

that they are surprisingly cheap. They cost about as much as an equivalent sized mattress. Knew, so not cheap, but the one I bought costs the same as any delivery mattress sold for, and cheaper than some of them. The reason that most people can't afford a waterbed isn't the actual cost of the bed itself. It's that landlords are terrified of the things, and so you can't get one

if you don't own your own home. In case you're curious, my desire to own a waterbed is entirely the result of the fact that, as a small child, my aunt and uncle fell upon hard times and had to live with us for a while. Then for another while they lived elsewhere, but their stuff stayed with us. That stuff included a waterbed, and for a few glorious months it was my waterbed. I have craved the insane high of

waterbed ownership ever since. For three perfect years. Then I slept in wavy comfort until about two days before I wrote this episode. My bed sprang a pinhole leak. I don't know how you might guess a cat, but the actual bladder that contains the water is inside and underneath a very thick, padded frame that cat claws can't really puncture. I should also note that the bladder sits inside a vinyl sort of soft cage, so that when it sprang a leak, it got some of my sheets wet, but

it did not cause damage to my home anyway. Because waterbeds are the kind of product that only an insane manchild would dare to own, fixing a hole in one is not the same as performing maintenance on your regular mattress, because the kinds of beds that reasonable people own don't spring leaks. To patch the leak, then I had to purchase a patch kit. But you can't apply a patch kit to what is effectively a soft bladder filled with

roughly a metric ton of water. I did do the bare minimum of research here, and king sized waterbeds weigh around two thousand pounds. Now that's not all water weight, but it is basically all water weight. I bring this up because I'm proud of myself for guessing right. So to apply the patch we had to first drain the bed, which necessitated attaching a hose to one of the spigots

through which we had originally filled the bed. Because of the layout of my home and the ground outside of the window where we intended to pour the water, we couldn't get the hosts started without assistance, the kind of assistance that you would say, need to suck gasoline free if a stranger's truck were you hard up for fuel money. Thankfully, my roommate had a wet back which we were able to hook up to the hose, but how to power

the wetback well. We could have run an extra long extension cord, but mine were all in use for various insane projects around the farm, and instead I opted to wheel out the solar generator that I had filled with the beneficence of the Sun God Raw just a couple of days earlier. The generator was one of two similar products I tested for this episode, a Jackery SG two thousand plus, which had been sent to me by the

good people at Jackery in previous weeks. I'd tested it by powering my deep freeze and a refer refrigerator, and in case you're wondering with the panels outside in the sun. I got a little over a day before things ran dry on my refrigerator. If I'd had the panels in a better position, I could have had longer and the deep freeze it would have been able to power essentially indefinitely,

because deep freezes are actually insanely efficient machines. I also used it to run a heat gun for my friend's art project, which is about as intense a test of output as you can run a battery through short of powering your home, and it handles that. In terms of specs, this battery is part of a more modular system that you could wire in to power your home or off grid setup. You can actually attach this to your breaker.

It has a maximum output of six thousand watts in parallel connection and one twenty to two forty expandable voltage. For a rough idea of what that means, it can power most household electronics and even power tools for a while. You'd get about one and a half hours of running a home as unit, and more like two two and a half. You know, with a portable unit or a window unit, you could charge this thing too full in

two hours with good sunlight. If you had six two hundred watt panels attached in perfect sunlight, which is another three thousand or so dollars in panels. But that's not an insignificant thing to be able to do, mind you, that would mean just running your ac most of the day and nothing else. Neither of these are cheap products. In Jackery's case, the battery itself runs about two thousand dollars. I understand that's out of reach, perhaps wildly so for

a lot of people. We will be talking about cheaper options at the end, but it is an unavoidable fact that unless you are a skilled electrician and scavenger, setting up substantial solar systems costs money period. Jackery actually represents one of the more affordable options for a plug and play home backup system that is also portable, i e. Can be taken camping or hauled away with your shit

during an evacuation. I should note that you can connect the Jackery SG two thousand plus directly to your breaker, and also connect the battery to other similar Jackery battery generators to g additional capacity and output from it. I tested another solar gener radar system for this episode, the Geniverse Home Power O two, which was provided to me by Genniverse. Both the Genniverse and Jackery systems are similar enough that they can use each other's solar panels and

operate in basically the same manner. Jackery's product is cheaper. Other reviews I've read suggests the Geniverse system might be more robust, lasting longer over time. It is certainly heavier and thus has a higher capacity around twenty four hundred watt hours as opposed to a little over two thousand for the Jackery system. Both of these can be the basis of an off grid or full backup power system for your home, and we'll be talking about home off

grid power in future episodes. I want to make clear upfront that what I'm advising you on today is the quality and utility of different solar generator battery products for emergency power. So let's talk about what emergency means. The primary emergency you might encounter that a battery solar setup would help with is a power outage at your home. In that case, you have a couple of immediate and

real life needs. I will list these from most basic and easy cheapest to fill to most expensive and difficult to meet. Number one would be to keep your devices and stuff like flashlights that are chargeable topped off so you can keep in contact with your community and stay aware of breaking news on whatever emergency you happen to be in. Being able to entertain yourself with books and movies does, in my view, count as one purpose for

these systems and an emergency, because morale ain't nothing. Number two is being able to run emergency cooling devices, starting with fans and terminating and stuff like window AC units or even portable camping AC units. Number three is being able to keep a fridge going so your food doesn't spoil.

If you're prepping for disaster, you should have storable food, anything from freeze dried stuff to beans and rits, etc. But losing all of your shit in an outage is expensive and annoying, and it's nice to be able to avoid. The Most achievable of these systems for a person of normal income is number one, and if you have disposable income at all, you can afford some sort of emergency solars set up to keep your phone or laptop and rechargeable lights going. There are a wide variety of battery

packs that have solar panels built into them. I have tried a lot of these over the years, and I have never once been happy with the quality, either of their ability to charge in the sun or to last over time. The system that I currently take with me on trips is made by a company called Goal zero, who produce a variety of solar battery and charger products.

I purchase for myself a Nomad thirteen solar panels set, which folds into something that approximates the size of a trapper keeper set you had as a kid in school. I've had this for years. I take it with me on every flight as my carry on. I have it and two batteries, which are different incarnations of Goal Zero's Schirpa one hundred on me wherever I go. The Sriper one hundred has a little three prong outlet you can charge basically any laptop on it. You could even do

like emergency power for a computer. I think with it this and one battery would allow me to keep my phone going for emergency purposes indefinitely. Two batteries and shars, I'm able to travel with roughly three or four working days of power for my laptop and phone wherever I go, and that's without me actually trying to recharge them using the panels. You can find various years of this battery model on Amazon or at other retailers, from two hundred

dollars on up. The latest model retails for three hundred dollars off Goal Zero's website. These batteries are TSA approved, as are the panels. I have never had an issue flying with them. Obviously in different countries, your experience may vary, but I've taken these things to most parts of the world,

and again I haven't had an issue. They have varying sizes, but the Nomad one hundred, which is one hundred watt hours, runs about three hundred bucks, So you're looking at five or six hundred dollars for this traveling setup, which is also great to keep in your home and just have less a bit. You know, if you find used versions on eBay or wherever, which is often possible, that's not

an insignificant cost. But if you're building an emergency kit over time, most people are capable of bearing that cost again over time. You could just start with the battery, which is the most initially useful part of the kit, and then you could get a panel set six months or whatever.

As we deal with more climate change, more natural disasters, all of these things are going to become inevitably more common. These are also all averages of huge numbers of people in huge areas of terrain. I will guess that the percentage of people listening to this who have as adults lost power for a day or more at a time

is very close to one hundred percent. Now, given the averages, you might consider just perching battery power units without sol panels, because in most instances, what you're trying to do is ensure that if your phone is dead and there's a bad storm and you know you run out of power by the time you get home, a two or three hour outage doesn't leave you unable to contact your people

or emergency services. I have a fuckload of different portable batteries because I try to keep enough on my work bag wherever I go to function in my job for most of a week without power when I go on trips. This kind of preparation has stood me in good stead in places like Syria, Iraq and the desperate wilds of Seattle that one time. But if you're not going to such terrifying hellscapes, you can probably get a suitable battery

that's reasonably tough for under one hundred dollars. And we will continue talking about batteries and talking about you know, next kind of home solutions and eventually cheap solutions. But you know what's not cheap is the products and services that support this podcast. Affordable but not cheap. Anyway, here's

these ads. We're back and we're talking thinking about portable batteries, right And my only note here is that if you're buying portable batteries, you know, stuff not necessarily to run on solar, just to have some extra juice with you wherever you'd go to keep it home in an emergency.

These fluctuate wildly in quality, and when it comes to disaster kit to something that you need to work in an emergency, it can be worth going with a brand that is a known quantity with a long record and a lot of testing done on their products, rather than whatever the Amazon algorithm spits out when you Google battery.

The advantage of a small portable folding setup like the one I have from Goal zero is that you can take it with you and have it on demand if shit happens when you're traveling, or if you have to evacuate and it's idiot proof right. A good option if you just want something in your home to keep your devices topped off, is what I'd call a large small

battery generator. These are a couple of steps below products like the Jaggery two thousand to the Geniverse that I tried, but above the handheld little batteries that many of you have already. The two examples of this product category that I have and have tested are the Yeti four hundred from Goal zero and the anchor a n Ker Solix

Solix C eight hundred. The Yeti four hundred is the product I purchased with my own money and It's what I've taken with me for years into the mountains when I go shooting or hunting, usually with a set of folding panels. This ensures that if my car dies and I've been dumb enough to let my jumper box that I keep with me die, I have a backup that I can use to charge my jumper box. I also have a convenient way to top off my phone or my E reader or my sat phone, both for normal

use and in an emergency. It handles extreme cold and extreme heat well, and that's not always something you can take for granted with batteries. Again, kind of top of the list is that I am an idiot. I don't know much about electricity, and these products are pretty idiot proof. When it comes to my YETI four hundred or the C eight hundred from Anchor, I keep them both plugged into the wall at all times that I can grab

either for an emergency. Now, the Solix C eight hundred that I have was sent to me as a review by Solix, and by necessity, I have not been able to subject it to the years of rigorous real life testing that my Goal zero YETI four hundred has endured.

I will note that it is well reviewed, and from the exploration I have done on it, which does not include years of testing but does include a decent amount of reading and some testing, I think it's better constructed and more conveniently laid out in the goal zero, and it also gets you about twice the storage nearly eight hundred watt hours as opposed to a bit over four hundred. Both products cost the same price around six hundred dollars,

although older generations are often available cheaper online. New and used. Either is enough to keep a family of Force phones charged for a two or three day outage without severe rationing. You can get a lot more obviously on the anchor, and you might not want to have someone like gaming on an alien ware laptop or whatever with either, but you can charge your laptops and the like off of them. If you want to watch a movie at the end of the night, you're all huddled together there in the dark.

That's not going to be something you have to stress out about too much. Again, theoncre solex is going toe you a lot more juice to play around with, but either should be enough for an average outage if you just keep them plugged in. You can also use them to power a fan during the day. They will not run small AC units. These are worth considering as an

intermediate option for the more casual prepper. What you're looking for here is not a full off grid replacement, but something that can provide you with options from more than just basic gadget power. With these big, small batteries, you can run a fan or fans, maybe not long enough for comfort, but in bursts throughout the day to get you through the hottest part of the day during a blackout, during what we call a wet bulb event. This would be the life saving health emergency that a basic solar

setup would be most useful in saving you from. For context in case people aren't up to date, a wet bulb event is a weather situation in which the temperature reaches a critical level above eighty eight degrees fahrenheit and does not drop below that point for an extended period of time. If people lack access to effective cooling during

heating events like this, they will die. We saw one of these hit a couple of years ago where I live in Portland, Oregon, which has been long famed for its mild temperatures and thus most homes lack central air. During a three day heat wave, temperatures rose to record highs and did not drop low enough at night to allow people any recovery time. More than one hundred of

them died. This kind of thing is possible anywhere. If you have central air standard where you live, the grid can always go down, as we've seen happen in Texas over and over again. For someone with money, your best bet might be pairing a portable air conditioner like the Idea Duo, which ranges from five hundred to six hundred dollars on Amazon, with something like the Jackery SG two thousand plus, which with panels and a good sunlight, would allow you to run it during the day at least

in a single room. As an aside, this is actually a case in which someone with a window unit is at more of an advantage than someone with central air.

You can connect your jaggery directly to the breaker, but without expansion batteries, it's not going to run a whole home long, so you'd want to unplug everything and turn off the lights, running your AC in short bursts, and maintaining discipline with your doors at windows, ideally putting up foil or at least cardboard over the windows to maximize efficiency.

If you're just being able to run a fan because you've got a smaller unit, you're probably looking at something like, you know, getting towels and rags wet, putting them over people's chests and faces, and kind of getting directly under the fan for the periods of time that you can afford to run it. Again, we are not talking about the most ideal comfort situations here, we are talking survival.

The limitations I found for are generally twofold. One is that even with good sunlight, folding panels like the ones Jackerie and Jennifer ship me don't always hit their advertised wattage. This is because you've got to deal with a lot of other factors, the movement of the sun throughout the day, where shadows fall in your home or property, your access to the roof, how clean the panels are, and under normal use conditions, it is surprisingly easy to get stuff

on them. On a sunny spring day in Oregon, I found my two hundred wat Jackery panels tended to get one hundred and twenty two one hundred and fifty watts during the most optimal parts of the day. I was able to plug the Jackery panels into the Geniverse generator and vice versa, and I found that Jackerre's panels generally performed ten to fifteen percent better during real life conditions. I looked it up and on paper, the Genniverse has a solar cell efficiency or EFF rating of about twenty

three point four percent. Jackery beats them by one percent with an EFF rating of twenty four point three. That is not enough of a difference to matter too much, although I should know that what I saw in real life use was a notable difference. You may experience something different with these panels, with any panels that you get. I can't claim to have tested anything but the ones

that they shipped me. The Jackery Explorer two hundred plus is capable of taking fourteen hundred botts of input max, which would be seven sets of panels, although from what the manual says, it can take up to six solar Saga eighty panels to their two hundred wade panels under

normal conditions. You can expand all this with added Explorer two thousands running in tandem and up to twelve solar Saga eighties on a single generator but doing that requires some wonky shit with cables, and at that point we're talking about a system beyond what most people are likely to want or need. When it comes to durability, I suspect that both the Jackerie and Genniverse are probably close and functioning. Online reviews give both systems good user reliability ratings.

In real world conditions, I had the opportunity to do something that you never want to do in real life with the device you've paid for, which was work one of these systems to death. It shows the Genniverse and the torture test I used basically involved keeping it outside, charging and providing power at a fairly low trickle for twelve days of intermittent rain and wind in the Pacific

Northwest late winter. We got about two inches of rain during this time, and that was enough to eventually kill the generator, but it took close to two weeks of downright irresponsible treatment. We are talking the kind of neglect you would not subject a product like this too without no other option. In subsequent tests with the Jaggery, I've been able to keep it operating outdoors in bad weather without damage through taking minimal measures to shield the generator.

The least I did was stick a plastic home depot crate lid above it, literally at it down on top of the unit to stop water from just hitting the ports on the sides and back directly. The most elaborate protective set up outdoors was a simple tarp cover and making sure it was elevated a bit above the ground.

When it comes to which of these systems would be best for you, the primary difference between the Giniverse and the Jackery is that the Ginniverse is higher capacity twenty four hundred nineteen watt hours as opposed to a little over twenty forty two for the Jackery. This means that without input, you can run a normal fridge off the Giniverse for about six hours, and goodsn you can recharge it fully in eight hours with two Geniverse solar powered

two panels. The Jackery system will recharge in a similar timeframe under optimal conditions and give you a bit less usable power. It has the benefit of being almost twenty pounds lighter and significantly friendlier in design. For reasons that elude explanation, the Giniverse lacks a telescoping handle or wheels to help you maneuver it. Into or out of position.

This sucks because it's heavy, and if it's not wired into your breaker and you're using this for an emergency, you might need to move it around so that you can have the panels in different positions to take advantage of the sun. This also makes the geniverse less useful than the Jaggery in normal daily life tasks. I started this episode with a rather ridiculous story about my waterbed, but I've actually found quite a few tasks at which having a weeelable battery capable of this kind of output

is handy. Basically, any power tool that you are likely to own will run off of either of these systems, but only the Jaggery is friendly enough to want to move around outdoors to take advantage of this fact. And this kind of gets us to the crux of a question some of you have been asking this whole episode, how practical are any of these solutions. My answer is complicated,

but I think fair. If you can't or aren't going to expend the energy to become competent with solar power to the extent that someone living off grid would generally want to be, these are exceptional solutions so long as you can afford them. In both cases, you're looking at around three thousand dollars for a setup that could power anything in your home and would handle all necessary tasks for law longer than the length of an average blackout.

The Jackerree and Geniverse systems are also future capable. You can expand both with added batteries over time and add in more panel capacity up to a point that makes them quite attractive if you can afford them. My personal recommendation would be for the Jackery over the Geniverse for most people for a couple of reasons. Please note that I received review units from both companies and money from neither, so I have no vested interest in picking one over

the other. One reason that I chose the Jackery Explorer two thousand is that it is a bit cheaper nineteen hundred for the base system and four hundred and seventy nine for each set of two hundred watt folding panels. Compare that to the Geniverse Home Power two Pro, which starts at two two hundred and ninety nine dollars and thirty four hundred dollars for the generator with two two

hundred watt panels. The Jackery is also meaningfully easier to use in recreational situations, so it is a system that the average person will get more use out of. You can take it camping easily, you can use it for overlanding, and you can have it ready for another emergency. I will note that if you have a system like this, you will surprise yourself with how often it comes in a handy for simple tasks. What I like about both

systems is again their future compatible. You can start with the base system and then add a couple of panels, and as you save more money, you can add an additional battery packs and panels to give you both more capacity and more input, with the goal of eventually storing a day or a couple of days of power and being able to run your home minimally during extended emergencies.

The shortcoming that you'll find with either system is that if you have a normal home, it will cost as much as a nice used car to have a setup that could run your house for extended periods of time, let alone indefinitely. A typical home AC unit can burn something like fourteen thousand kilowat hours per day, and that's just half of what an average home draws heating amounts

to a comparable draw. So while these systems can be expanded significantly with additional batteries, if you're dealing with an outage that extends past several days, you will encounter severe limitations. This brings me to the most impressive but least accessible piece of gear that I test for these episodes, The Anchor Solick's F thirty eight hundred portable power station. This holds about three eight hundred and forty watt hours of

electricity and can output six thousand watts if necessary. You can charge your electric car or run a welding rig off of this thing. It can be expanded with additional battery storage, and if you had thirty or forty grand to spend, you could wire this thing up to power

your house for close to a week without sunlight. The F thirty eight hundred itself costs four thousand dollars, and you can run two of them in tandem with twelve battery packs each to power your home for about two weeks for just the cost of at this point a rather nice car that is wildly out of reach for most people, But if you can afford it, the Anchor is a really cool system. There's been a tremendous amount of thought put into everything, from how the device is

constructed and laid out to how you carry it. I particularly appreciate the fact that you can wheel it like a big suitcase or lay it on its side, where it has additional pop out handles to enable you to carry it in multiple different ways. All of Anchor's products feel premium, and the metal handles that I said pop out are like metal. They're very solid. Everything has a clean interface and what I would describe as an exceedingly

livable industrial design. If you happen to be one of the people who can consider putting down four thousand dollars for an emergency battery, the Solix F thirty eight hundred will see you through ninety nine percent of the power loss situations you are likely to encounter, and require minimal

knowledge to set up and get working. It is easy to attach to your home breaker, and Anchor's instructions for doing so are simple to follow for folks who can afford the cost then, and that cost is not inconsiderable. It is a great mix of might save your life and will definitely come in handy. I should also note that the Jaggery system has a better pedigree than the

Geniverse system in the industry, probably similar to Anchor. They've got a long track record and are well regarded not as inexpensive solution, but as a reliable one with a good warranty and a lot of history to back them up. All of these systems are, in my experience, reliable and easy to use. All of them are and I have to hit on this a few times because it matters expensive.

That presents a problem if you're someone who sees the value and these is potential emergency devices, but will realistically never be able to throw down three thousand dollars for them. It would be irresponsible of me to give you some specific technical advice because I lack that knowledge. But I have some experience here, and we're going to get to that after this next set of adds. We're back and we're talking about what you can do at least a

little bit of what you can do. Again the furthest thing in the world from an expert here, but I wanted to at least provide some starting points from folks who are never going to be able to afford these more formal, easier to use idiot proof kind of situations, because while I'm not an expert on this, I have lived off grit a bit, and I have known people who have done so in a wide variety of weird situations.

At one point, my partner operated a solar powered shack that they lived out of, with batteries so comparatively primitive that she had to regularly refill them with water. That kind of maintenance is going to be second nature to people who know they're shit with solar, and those people have a lot more options than the laymen. Probably the most impressive in cash neutral setup I saw was in

a place called East Jesus in far southern California. This was a totally off grid power setup that kept around twelve to eighteen people alive year round and often intense temperatures, powering AC units and trailers and RVs, fridges, fans, lights, The entertainment equipment they used the wakes Now. Their setup

was all scavenged or bought cheap in auction. The batteries they used, which took up an entire shipping container sized space, were purchased cheap from a telecom company in the area, which retired its deep cycle batteries once they hit eighty percent of their original functioning capacity or something like that.

Panels were likewise scavenged or bought cheap and used. Since they had a lot of space but little money, Wiring a shitload of panels a varying efficiency together was a solution that they could afford, both in terms of the money that it cost and in terms of the space that was required. Most people lack the technical knowledg to

set something like this up. I sure do, and even more of them lack the space, but it is an example of the sort of solutions that people with little to no cash can cook up if they're clever and knowledgeable about the fundamental technology. It would be extremely irresponsible if I did not add here that solar setups are the sort of thing where it behooves you to be

exceedingly fucking careful. The chief benefit of the system's goal zero anchor, Jenniverse and Jackery make is that they are all as close to idiot proof as they can be. Part of the cost comes from the fact that they use expensive but extremely stable lithium iron phosphate batteries. These have long life spans. Jackery rates theirs at ten years and a cycle life of up to two thousand cycles.

They have a good standby time too. Jackery rates theirs at up to fifty percent charge after two years in storage. A lot of the cheaper or scavenged options you find are lithium polymer batteries. These are rather infamous for igniting and burning down people's homes. There are solutions you can find online and if you're interested in cheaper homebrew solar setups out there, one place I'd suggest starting is diyssolarforum dot com. The people there will have suggestions for minimizing risk.

Since LiPo is one of the most dangerous battery chemistry types out there. Some people build what are called battery bunkers. One a form I've seen this tape is basically a cube of bricks around and below the batteries with a ceramic flat sheet above them. Some people will suggest lacing sandbags above the bunkers that if the battery goes into a thermal runway, it will melt the sandbag and pour

sand into the battery to stop the fire. Again, I am not giving advice here, just providing you with an example of the kinds of concerns that you do have to think about. When considering building setups like this for your own, it is unfortunate. The most financially accessible way to do this is by taking the research into your own hands and relying on the experience of hobbyists and lifestyle explorers who have been there before. But disasters aren't fair,

and neither is life. Another exploratory option I'd suggest is googling questions like how to run small room ac off solar or how to run twelve volt fridge indefinitely I'm a solar, and then add Reddit as a search term. You'll find threads of people in off grids, solar or overlanding subreddits who have explored these problems for themselves and their journeys can at least act as a basis for your own. I'd like to thank at the end of this the reps at Jacker, each universe and anchor who

sent products for me to review. It was incredibly nice of them all, and from an esthetic point of view, they all make great gear that is a genuine pleasure to use. Goll Zero didn't send me anything, but I've paid for their stuff for years and I've never had anything fail in the field, so I figure I owe them a shout out here.

Last month, students at American universities began protesting their university's ties to Israel and weapons manufacturers, calling for divestment, as well as urging their institutions to join in calls for ceasefire. After a militarized police raid at the Humboldt protest utilizing a prison swat team, police departments around the country began

cracking down more harshly on the protest encampments. The day after the Humboldt one, NYPD raided Columbia University and fired a gun inside Hamilton Hall while trying to use their handgun as a flashlight. The Portland Police Bureau quickly followed suit and cracked down at the encampment at Portland State University and have since barricaded that library. As of time of recording, around twenty five hundred arrests have taken place

at college protests all around the country. Police have displayed incredible violence, sending people to the hospital with broken ankles and concussions. In many cities, there's been heavy use of pepper spray, pepperballs as well as tasers. The protests have also faced violence from a mix of far right agitators, zionist counter protesters, and racist frats that have targeted the

protest encampments with physical violence, especially at UCLA. We here at it could happen here are lucky enough to have correspondence kind of based all around the country. So I'm joined today by Mia Wong, James Stout, and Molly Konger to discuss our experiences as people who have been present at some of these encampments all across the country. I'm going to start by talking about Emory University here in Atlanta, Georgia.

This is a weird one and I think I'll actually go into more depth in a future episode, but this episode's going to kind of focus on discussions and we're going to kind of compare our experiences. So oddly enough, I think Emory was the first one to actually face significant police repression. Tents went up on the Emory Quad on April fifteenth, and that morning there was a heavy

police response from EMORYPD, APD and Georgia State Patrol. They fired tasers, there was rubber bullets, pepper balls, and over two dozen arrests. Students and others began to rally later that afternoon to retake the quad. A few hundred people did so, and a small occupation began inside the Kendler School of Theology building. M REYPD was pinned up against this building. GSP arrived as reinforcements, and people started to flee, as you know, you see GSP kind of form this area.

But people were able to calm some of those other students down and regroup and actually hold that position for a little while longer police began attacking students, a small clash began, there was pepper balls. People continued to kind of hold that ground in front of the building. There

was students also inside. As people try to you know, render aid to those who have been pepper baled, and while maintaining this position in front of the building, more and more police arrived like a ridiculous number, and the crowd eventually starts to slowly disperse as police just flood campus. Police from all around the greater Atlanta area just flood this very small section of Decatur, which is a small suburb to the northeast of Atlanta or to the east of Atlanta.

then reiterate to justify the massive crackdown at Columbia. So the next day we had five hundred people march around campus and then this little kind of committee of Emory faculty and staff called the Every Open Expression Committee began to negotiate with the protest and they quote unquote allowed the protest to march around campus, and this small subset of the group began to occupy the Coxhaull Food Court

and police. Plice were ordered to stay out of sight this whole day and a few of the days after unless the Open Expression Committee specifically called them in. And what was able to happen is that this Open Expression Committee was able to wield the threat of police as a deterrent from people taking kind of more militant action or to actually set up things that would hold down an encampment, like if tenths were set up, this would result in this Open Expression Committee to call in the police.

So this was a very successfully wielded threat. So as the night goes on, the Open Spression Committee does threaten to call police on the Cox Food Hall protest, which scares a whole bunch of these you know, young teens early twenties out of the building. A smaller group of around one hundred people remain on the quad till midnight,

police arrive and then everyone disperses. The next day kind of follows a similar pattern open expression and some student organizers over the course of the next few days actually start directing police to detain and criminally trespass people wearing cafeas on suspicion of them having been engaged in like doing graffiti, and really it just allows police to target specific people that the Open Expression Committee kind of just don't want on campus based on either how they dress,

how they're kind of walking, acting, behaving, that sort of thing. And this pattern followed basically up until the present. People would try to take buildings do smaller protests. Police would either be called or there would be threats that they would be called. It would kind of calm the crowd down, everyone would disperse. If ten's got set up, that was seen as like a major sign of escalation, which would

result in police being called. And it's kind of the small back and forth, and eventually this just kind of led to the situation Emory slowly dissolving, slowly fizzling out as the people who were wanting to do stuff kind of got pushed more to the side, got pushed out, more and more people became began getting criminally trespassed, and the group of students at Emory just did not want to risk a further engagement with police after the first day,

and that's kind of led to things slowly slowly dissolving, And that's basically with the situation currently. Things of the kind of tapered off. School's ending. I'm sure this will be a similar, similar thing across the country as the school season is ending and these protest encampments will so we also just dissolve away as police repression continues. Let's see who should we move on to the next little report? James James stout from you. You went to U see San Diego.

So what they did was they posted that they were going to have a big rally on Friday, and that, as it turned out, was like a fake out, and they actually started their encampment on Wednesday, So they distracted admin with that Instagram post, which is pretty clever, pretty funny, And they began this encampment on Wednesday on Library Walk, which is kind of right in the middle of UCSD. If people have seen, you know, people would be familiar with the UCSD guys Le Library from the film Attack

of the Killer Tomatoes, which it played important role in. Yeah, I can see the look of recognition on my colleagues faces. But yeah, that's the only thing that's ever cool that's

happened at UCSD. So they set up this encampment. It wasn't huge, but it was certainly a serious presence, right, and they didn't barricade it or sort of make it make a defensible That was a conscious choice, right, And they did set up a security system whereby they had student security people controlling who entered and I guess left the encampment if you really wanted to, you get the cops got in, right, Like it was a wist high vinyl offence. But in theory, these people were controlling who

went in and who went out. Some times these people were asking people to sign up on a sheet. I think I hope they stopped doing that because obviously that you're sort of helping the cops make their prosecution case. There. Over the next five days, the encampment was extremely peaceful. Right There was a focus among this group on not giving any provocation to police or to addmin to any

reason to evict them. So they had some lectures, some speeches, they had some live music, they did some dancing, all stuff that's in no way provocation or violent. On the fifth of May, a large counter protest was organized. Most it bought kind of like get off my Law and boomer types, but then also like some right wing streamers Oreo Express or I guess the surviving half of Oreo Express, Josh Fulfer, was there. I think the guy who was first responded to media, Jsuay or Joe Felix, was also there.

These are right wing streamers that, sadly, like, if you live where I live, you have to be familiar with where they do a lot of border harassment to They were obviously trying to film and identify students, so I guess this was on the evening of the fifth That evening, the Chancellor Costler sent around an email basically saying that what the students were doing was prohibited, that the tents were not included in freedom of speech, and asking them

to disband peacefully. The next morning, at about five or six in their morning, literally hundreds of cops from several agencies. Right the UCPD does not have the footprint that we saw. There was California Highway Patrol, San Diego Sheriff's Department, and UCPD all in full right gear lined up opposite the encampment. They say that they asked students to leave and that those who didn't were arrested. And when they're arrested, obviously like violence was used by the police, as always is,

the encampment was destroyed. Everything that was there was tossed into a dumpster. Some stuff was then recovered. I guess there's now a lost and found people to recover their things like laptops, right, like expensive personal items that were swept up. At that point, people were arrested and then detained in the Price Center at UCSD. The Price Center, if you've not been on campus, is like a large shopping mall that also has some lecture facilities. But it's

where the Panda expresses on campus. It's not trapped in with the Panda Express, which is a dangerous situation. Yeah yeah, and the Panda Express is not operational sadly more it's a shame, but it's where they have those their dining horn. It's like a center of corporate operations on campus. It's a very bleak place. So they're trapped in the Price Center.

The students around campus, those who are not in the encampment then rallied to protect these students and tried to block the police from loading them on buses and then block the buses from leaving. And that's when we saw the Sheriff's department using massive amounts of violence. Right, our Sheriff's department still carry just like big wooden sticks. They're not like the black night sticks, you know, with like the right angled grip. It's just a giant it's just

a big wooden baton. Yeah, it's the esthetic of our Sheriff's Department's right gear is consciously or unconsciously something that I associate with the civil rights tear and the repression of the civil rights movement. Perhaps that's a choice. I don't know, but that was when the Sheriff's department started to become violent. That's when they brutalized and arrested both generalists and students. In total, sixty five people are arrested protests and moved down to the two jails. We have

different facility. There's a men's journal at women's jail, and they tend to they tend to incarcerate trans people with the gender they're assigned at birth. I've heard about lots of things that happened in those jails that were pretty bad, but I haven't been able to confirm them enough that I think I'd be comfortable airing them. So people are released, lots of them charged with several misdemeanors, trespassing, encroachment, being

at the scene of a riot, resisting arrests, things like that. Right, two members of faculty were also arrested. Forty people were students, and at the last time I checked, they hadn't confirmed the status of the other twenty ish people. So that happened on the sixth yesterday, which was of course the eighth. There was a big march about a thousand students. It looked like kind of both calling for the UC to divest and calling for the UC to drop charges and

drop academic sanctions. So right now, all the people who are arrested are facing interim suspension, they're facing a viction from their student housing, which San Diego, if we've spoken about brazilion times, has an incredibly expensive housing market and it's almost impossible to access to affordable housing here. And in some cases, you know, they're facing serious academic sanctions.

It could affect the rest of their academic careers, student workers who are arrested or also now not being allowed to work on campus. So one hundred and eighty three faculty signed the letter asking the university to not do that. That came out last night, and that's kind of where we're at in terms of what's happened to these people. I think it's probably worth noting that the U see

Riverside settled, right that they negotiated a settlement. That's in so Riverside is north and slightly east of here, east of Los Angeles County. You see Riverside is. I don't know in terms of student numbers how big it is, but they settled I think on the Wednesday, so it'd be mad Mayda. The Friday, May the third, I was at the UCSD and meant that day and I heard

them announce it. They were overside settlement. I'm just going to say it didn't achieve some of the more radical goals of the student organizing movement, not to be divestment, to be an academic boycott. They did get the university to publish its investments which are linked to Israel at least, which is a step. I guess. They got a task force. The university is going to be very willing to grant you task forces and panels and things which can turn

your radical aims into a bureaucratic mess. Right, And they got the university to look into removing Sabra Hummas from its men use as well. Get get Yeah.

cops come to get you. And I understand, but this is a sort of visa concessions or university is going to give you. Right, you might get a snack task force, and you might get they're already publicly available investments listed in one place on their website at UCSD. The administration

claims that the students were unwilling to negotiate. I wasn't able to ascertain if what system they had, right, Like I was trying to ask if they had delegates or representatives, who are going to do those being different things, right, who are going to negotiate? I was enabled to get a clear answer, and that they did very clearly publish their demands right, And the university doesn't seem to have proceeded to any of them. So that more or less is where we're at in San Diego. They're are ongoing

panels and press conferences. I'm going to attend one, so it's going to be one by faculty tomorrow on the ninth, the faculty have also been organizing right in a group called Faculty for Justice in Palestine, and they've been organizing. I think it was very impressive that they like accepted student leadership and didn't try and like, you know, come in and take a vanguard roll or tell everybody what to do. But but there mostly to facilitate the student

protest and protect it. So they're having a press conference tomorrow, so things that's definitely ongoing here. But that's kind of where we're at as of today, which is the ninth of me.

they're all kind of late comers. On April twenty fifth, Northwestern one starts and it's a really chill occupation for the most part. So there's like a police raid on night one, but then the kids just come back and put all the tents up again. And then after that, like the Evanston police department is a joke, right, Like they're not I mean, they've probably done terrible things, but

like they're not. They're not like the police departments in the rest of the city, who are like the guys you teach the CIA how to torture people, right, Yeah, and so yeah, I wanted to talk a bit about kind of the vibes of it because it was it's a very like early occupation kind of vibe, right. It's I mean, like I walk in, there's it's a bunch of kids like sitting on tents doing homework. People are sleeping, There's like people are like eating meals.

This one like I walked in there and there is a woman on the stage in the encampment while I say stage, and there's a woman using their sound equipment, which made you quieter.

and powerful. I mean, like, you know, I was walking through the tamp and I was I was like, you know, there are kids like reading on the on the lawn and I'm like I'm like pointing out like, oh hey, this is that's the copy of The Wretched of the Earth that I have from college. Like you know, it's all stuff like that. It was all very chill. It like rained on us. So we spend much time like

waterproofing tents. I think the interesting things about this is that there's a there's a really kind of wild mix

of people there. It's it's this, it's this thing you only really get in social movements that are like going somewhere where, you know, I mean I was running into people from groups like old school, like like I ran to zone from students for a democratic society, Like I didn't even know that groups still existed, like I thought I thought went down well, so there there was a second round of them in the two thousands, so I

thought they died after that, but apparently not. You know, so you have these mix of people from like groups that everyone thought was dead, right, Like, you know, there's a lot of sort of very experienced, like student organizers. There's also a lot of grad students, which is a dynamic. I don't think it's talked about very much because it's it's not just like eighteen year olds. There are a lot of people in these camps who have been doing

this for a very long time. And you know, so you have those people, but you also have people who just I mean, like I talked to people who this was literally their first protest, right, It's like the first thing that evertility they'd ever come out to, And you know, there was this very kind of there's this very sort

of camarader ReVibe. What there wasn't was a functional democracy, and that's that's a very Dusty everything about this encampment that was very different than the Chicago one, which I'll be getting to in a second. It's like they there was this sort of there was this group that was negotiating with the administration, and no one could really tell what they were doing. Like every once in a while a representative would come back from them and you'd hear something.

But in the meantime, everyone is sort of running around based on rumors, trying to figure out what these people are negotiating. And it turns out what they're negotiating is an end to the protests, and basically the students like, okay, so there's a complicated set of demands. What actually happens is that all of the entire occupation is taken down. After a week, it's completely gone. Now there's nothing there. What they get from it was the university is re

establishing an advisory committee on investment responsibilities. They got like question this Northwest supposed to answer questions about holding some stakeholders which may be disclosure, may not be. And they got some stuff that like is real from for like visiting like Palestinian faculty. But basically they didn't get any of the goals of the encampment, right, there's no investments.

There's you know, a committee that can make recommendations about the investment, and we'll see if that even happens, because that's supposed to be spun out back in the fall. So, you know, they take down the encampment, they get nothing, they get no leverage, and nothing is you know, and all of the sort of student negotiators, and these negotiators tend they you know, Okay, so there are also like

political splits in the camp. Right, It's kind of hard to get a sense of them just from looking at it, but you know, if you talk to enough people, you can sort of get the sense of like what the splits are, right, and Northwestern was sort of split between like the sort of liberal nego student negotiators who are from a lot of like some of the sort of more liberal student organizations, and the people who want to like you know, they're sort of like Baxibleist radicals and

the maximust radicals get out maduvry because there's just not enough of them, and so they take the encampment down. And the people who were doing the negotiations had this whole line by we're building power, this is just the beginning, and there's nothing. There's been nothing else. They're screwed. They lost everything. Their negotiating power is gone.

They're a suburb. The University of Chicago, on the other hand, is smack dab in the middle of the south side of Chicago. There's the University bubble, and then around the university this is like the heart, like the heart of black Chicago, right, very very different vibe. The other thing that's important about this is so the University of Chicago occupation starts in the context of the massive raids in Columbia, the raid and Humboldt, and very importantly the raids in UCLA, and.

And so University of Chicago camp when I get there, is right in the middle of transforming from a kind of like Northwestern style everyone's getting along like singing Kumbaya camp to like an actual fighting camp. Because I get there and like that day I get there at like nine, right three hours from when I get there, they were scheduled to be a giant rally of like right wing frats that is going to go come and attack the encampment. So the vibe is extremely different. It is a fighting camp.

Everyone is preparing to, like, you know, fight for their lives. Everyone knows what happens at UCLA, and also everyone knows

what happened at Northwestern, and people are fucking pissed. People are like, I mean unbelievably angry that then you know, then their view is the Northwestern camp sold everyone out, sure, and so you know, I mean, and the other thing about Chicago that was different from Northwestern is that U Chicago had has functional general assemblies, So there are like functional democratic meetings where everyone in the camp goes, Okay, we're going to like figure out what we're going to do.

And these meetings are people are not happy with, you know, like they're not happy with what happened at the Northwestern. They're also like really pissed off at the third occupation, which was well, I mean, I guess I think that Paul happened in the middle of there. But the third occupation was the occupation at the School of the Art Institute. The School of the Art Institute is literally right in the heart of downtown Chicago. Like it is across like

it is like across the street from Ballennium Park. It is like across the street from like the Art Institute of Chicago. It is in like the corporate center of Chicago. Sure, so they they they do. They do an occupation right and inside of like like I think I think they got seven hours in before SWAT teams showed up. They rerest sixty of people. It is a brutal raid.

And so they like it's very clear orders are coming down from above that this encampment can't be allowed to stay, and so they get the ship beaten out of them. And this is important for a few reasons. One it kind of like it kind of heightens the fear of

police deppression. But the thing that it does that's important is that this goes fucking this like completely backfires on Brandon Johnson and you know, so that's sort of the mayor of the political administration, because this is you know, it turns out people are very very angry that a bunch of swat teams just beat up a bunch of art students with metal bars, right, And the consequence of this is that Brandon Johnson like refuses to or at least openly what he's saying is that he won't use

the Chicago Police Department at at at on the University Chicago campus. University of Chicago has its own police force that's about one hundred and fifty officers. It's sort of vaunted as like the largest police force in like the largest pri one of the largest private police forces in the world. You know, they also shot a fucking kit while I was at school there, so you know, I

have a like depatriot of them. But what kind of ends up happening is so there's there's that big the day I'm there, there's this big like confentration between protesters and kind of protesters, and you know, the kids form a.

But something that's very interesting about both of these encampments, and this has been true of both of the encampments that I've I've seen, is is who is like the racial and gender composition of who's there, Because these are you know, and you could see this like when you're when when the counter protesters are facing off against the protesters, is the counter protesters they're like exclusively white, like most of them are white frat ros, white CIS dudes usually yeah, yeah.

And then in the camps it is basically like it is like non it's non white people of all genders and like non sistued people of all races. Yeah, very very very very prominently. And this this is something that I think is a sign of how the sort of like American political alignment has changed and the kind of kinds of political alliances that are kind of so normal

now that we don't even really think about them. But if you step back for a second and look at what's actually happening, this is this is the this is the actual political composition of these protests. It's queer people and non white people and obviously like people like me who are both. And I think that's an important thing because you know, it's it's a dynamic of these camps. It doesn't get talked about, it en off, but is the core thing that's happening like politically.

their stuff down, they put up some tents. The police chief of the university Police Force, Timothy Longo, showed up immediately and said, no tense tends to the red line. Take the tents down. So that first night they took the tents down, and so for three nights they slept outside unsheltered because it was clear from the university that the tents are going to be the problem. That's the only issue that we have is the tents. You can be here, you just can't put up the tents, and

you can't use amplified sound. You can't be too noisy. The place where they'd set up was this patch of grass. That's so if you're familiar with the University of Virginia, there's the lawn. It's called the lawn. It's not the only grass, but it's just the special grass. It's the grass between the lawn rooms and the rotunda. It's like

a long narrow They weren't on the lawn. I think that would have been a much bigger problem for the university, just because of the optics of it, and because students live in the lawn rooms, so they were actually on the other side of the rotunda, in this shady, grassy area between the rotunda and the chapel, so within kind of spitting distance of that statue of Thomas Jefferson that the Nazis famously surrounded in twenty seventeen, so that that same sort of area of the university. So for three

nights they were out there unsheltered. It was pretty quiet. It was, you know, a few dozen students. Most of the time classes had just ended, so they were preparing for finals, they were writing papers. I think some afternoons they had tas come out and help people with their with their papers, help them study.

violent or embattled environment. There were babies there and they held the vigil and after the vigil they had Shabbot dinner. But as the sun was going down, it was starting to rain, so they put up a pop up tent to cover the Shabbat dinner, you know, the food that had been set out. And it was at that point that they began setting up the camping tents. And you know, they've been told all along by the police chief, you can't put tens up. You can't put tens up. It's

against the rules. That's that's when we're going to have to intervene if you put the tense up. But every UVA school policy is available on the school's website. They have a policy database where you can, you know, search by keyword. You can, you know, you can see every official school policy. And the official school policy is that tens are allowed. It's on the website. You can have a tent. And so now this, you know, the university is saying that this discrepancy as well. You know that

actually isn't a policy. It was a sort it's guidance on the policy. But it is in the policy database on the policy website where they keep the policies and it says guideline on it, and a guideline it's a synonym for a policy. So they are there. I think the lesson to take away here, you know, I'm not going to Monday morning quarterback the student organizers. I was not privy to internal discussions. I don't think that's my role. I think the takeaway here though, is that they're always

going to move the posts. The only protest the administration will ever approve of is one that happened at least thirty years ago. Right, you have to be decades removed from progress to see it as positive. They never like progress while it's happening. They never like protest while it is happening. There's nothing you can do that will be allowed. Right, Because the entire time of those first three days, when the police were keeping their distance, they were always there.

There was always this sort of like needling back and forth while you know, can you just can you adjust this, can you change this kind of behavior, like you know you're not breaking the rules yet, but just you know, we're watching, be careful, this constant needling. And so in the end on the fourth when the Virginia State Police showed up, you know, up until that point, the idea was, well, the provocation was the tense. The problem was the tents.

The police had to become because of the tents. You know that the policy on the school's website changed Saturday morning, like we have the you know, the cash on the website. You can see when the PDF was altered.

in the area and they're known to law enforcement. And I'll be honest with you, I did not see these individuals. But at the same time, who care who? It's public property, right, this is a public university. You know, this outside agitator narrative. You know, we had to beat and Pepper's bray these

students because of these mysterious men. But at the same time, you know, the entire time that the students were in the encampment, they had faculty liaisons from Faculty for Justice in Palestine, and the faculty liaison were not you know, negotiating, because students were clear that there was no negotiation, right that, you know, they're not negotiating on their demands, but that all communication between admin and the police into the encampment

came through these faculty liaisons and they were in constant open communication. And the faculty liaisms are saying, well, if there was someone dangerous here, if the police had identified like a you know, an actual danger in this space, they never communicated that to us, right that before this raid happened, no one ever said to the faculty liaison, someone here is dangerous, there's a known criminal here, there's you know, this is why this has to That was

never communicated. So I'm not sure these you know, four mysterious individuals exist.

had been babies there the day before. It was very calm, and so I thought, well, I'll wash their wet blankets and socks and bring them back and then we can, you know, they can regroup and move forward. And while I was in home washing wet socks, I heard that the raid was starting. And again so you know, because it had been raining, and it was a pretty small protest to begin with, people are doing their finals. There were maybe a few dozen people there, like a few

dozen at most. But once the riot cops showed up, people start pouring out of the libraries. Hundreds and hundreds of students come to see what all the noise is about, right, they come to see what the disturbance is about. The university used the emergency alert system that texts students. It sends texts and emails for emergencies, you know, things like

a fire or a tornado or a mass shooting. Right that a lot of these students have recent memory of a very serious shooting here that they got these texts for. These texts are for real emergencies, but they use the emergency alert system to tell students to avoid the area.

So of course they poured into the area to see what was happening, and so they set up a perimeter around the camp so the people inside could not get out and the people who came to see what was happening could not get in, and a lie on riot cops marched into the camp and just bludgeoned and pepper sprayed at like point blank range. Pepper sprang them directly

into their mouth, nose, and eyes. I think one student was wearing goggles and they removed her goggles so they could spray her directly in the eyes while she was already prone on the ground. One woman was having a seizure, but they didn't stop arresting her to let her seize in peace, and they were just sort of dragging her limp body away. It was very nasty and once they made their leave twenty six arrests, they turned on the crowd that had gathered to watch, and they started pushing

this massive crowd of students out into the street. They didn't close the street, like there was a dean on scene who was watching this happen and sort of making frantic phone calls to try and close the street that the students were being pushed into because it was an open street with traffic. And then the frat boys showed up, right, so, you know, the students are coming out to see. Some of them are joining the protests, some of them are just curious, and all of a sudden, now there's an

entire hillside covered in frat boys. Some of them have Israeli flags, some of them have American flags. And there were times as that, you know, the police were you know, I'm very short, I'm about five feet tall, so there were times as the police were pushing towards us. I can't actually see that because the person in front of me is taller than me, and I would know the police were starting to advance again because the frat boys would cheer. They would start cheering, and you know, at

one point, I'm standing next to this older professor. You know, I don'tant to call anybody elderly, right, but this was this sort of a grandmotherly professor who had been Pepper sprayed and was, you know, shouldered or shoulder with students, And she looked over at those frat boys and she said, I don't know how we're supposed to teach them.

is UVA. UVA is Charlottesville. It is the largest employer in the region. It is sort of the you know, the iconic focal point of the region. It's a public school. People attend sporting events there, They attend concerts that like our largest local concert venue as a UVA property. You know, I did attend UBA, and I sometimes speak at classes at UBA, so like I have some sort of tangential affiliation with the university, but I don't have to justify

my presence there, right. I mean, that's like saying you can't protest Elbit or Boeing unless you purchase bomb systems or work.

was no really attempt to put barricades up. And you have like, you know, pretty pretty big barricades in Portland of course, and then like Humboldt being really the one that was like no, like you could like hold down a space for like a while if you have like lots of barricades. We see that, we see that in LA and I know the difference between the bear kids going up and the barricades not and how that that does kind of slow. That's just slow a police story.

That just slow some police response. And I think one of the one of the one of the dynamics we have there is like at least her a emory, right, we had the first day people faced you know, a pretty sizable amount of plice violence. You know, there was like twenty twenty eight arrests. A lot of people were assaulted by police. And for many people, this this was

their first protest. A lot of these people were too young to participate in twenty twenty, which is kind of you know, odd looking back on it, but yeah, a lot of these people were quite young, and this is their first experience of like police brutality in person.

first protest experiences. And she said, when the cop approached her with something in his hand, she didn't know what it was, and she couldn't understand what he was doing or what he wanted from her. And it wasn't until he raised the object above his head that she had this realization that he can hit me. Yeah, only can he hit me, but he is going to hit me. That like, to have that realization in real time that you are not safe in your body, that the state

will carry out violence against you. To not have known that before and to find it out as it is happening, I think is truly horrifying.

of use threat of police. It's a very effective to turn to be like, hey, if you keep things kind of chill, no tense, nothing crazy.

more militanty. I don't know their exact affiliation at the university. I don't care, but so some more some more like militant, need more anarchistic people. Because it's Atlanta, we're like kind of like like shaming some of the students for not like doing more stuff. Like they got on the microphone and were like shaving them be like hey, this this isn't a protest, You're just you're just hanging out, and like, I I get it, but also like what is that

going to accomplish? I think I think shaming people for being scared of police is not effective. You need to you need to help them to feel empowered, and that that's a very different thing to navigate.

success as you know, these are young people. They are learning to organize together, they're learning to create that space together, they are coming together to talk about this issue, and I think that can be success. I don't think you have to bleed to have succeeded.

term trauma and possibly long term trauma. But like you have a much more accurate view of how the world works now, especially for a lot of these like Ivy League kids who've never never thought of police as a threat before. Police is always like a helper, right, A lot of these are like you know, good kids exactly, Yeah, and and and learning that like there doesn't need to be provocation to entice a police response. That is, that is not a that's not a real dynamic.

up as a little kid. Like there was the like the anti sweatshow movement, which morphed into the G eight movement, which morphed into like xapeties to Solidarity, which morphed into the Free Palestine movement and moving against the British National Party, and we got to like step up until we were fighting Nazis, right because folks, young people who are protesting now who didn't participate in twenty twenty didn't get like

this was just like a baptism of fire. Like the people in twenty twenty got to go out in twenty sixteen for Donald Trump, bright in twenty seventeen and wear the little pink hats and walk around in the pink hats, you know, and they got introduced to the cops and the fact that they are just going to fuck you

up because they want too slowly. But these people didn't And I don't think we should blame them for being like none of us are, to be clear, but like, folks, I've seen it too much on the internet, like don't do that shit, like teach people to be stronger than the state. Don't shame them for not already being there.

couldn't do it. Like, they hurt a lot of people, right, like two hundred people I think went to the hospital or at least treated by medics after it. Right, they hurt a lot of people. It was really scary, but they couldn't break they couldn't break the barricades. And that happened at Chicago too. It was like they couldn't like in the Chicago like those those like they're they're on. But at nine o'clock in the morning on the day

of that encampment, there were no fucking barricades. It was just a bunch of tents at a lawn, right, and in like three hours they set up a thing that you know, still I mean they weren't still weren't really barricades, but like you got to watch these kids, and you know, the people who were there, like you know, like realize that a group of them can stand and fight and

hold these people. And they and they did it. They fucking stood there, they stood their ground, they held them, they fought, and at the end of the day, the fucking trapros ran away and it wasn't really intel. And then this is I think it's been a really interesting element of this is that like these these per military groups have been just staggeringly unable to actually like beat a bunch of protesters like in you know, in in the sort of military sense of like who holds the

field at the end of the fight. They can't do it, and only the cops have been able to.

you can't you can't use the same tactics. And being forced to defend yourself like had this real sort of like impact on people, and like I don't know, it's like like I gotta see people just like understanding what you can do with the physical mass of a group of people, and I don't know it was it was like it was it was a really emotional experience for like a lot of the people there, and it was really cool.

ball in various ways. I think the thing that we can completely criticize and point you as a as a as a massive failure is everyone who has not been participating, how they have been viewing what's going on, And this is this is this will be the last thing I talk about, especially even even it's on like the media side and in this general discussion, like there's been such a such a singular focus on the campus encampment like itself, instead of like why the protests are happening in the

first place, what's going on in Gaza just instead just focusing on like, yeah, the actual the actual thing on campus, but but but not caring about why these protests are even happening, wilfully ignoring why it's happening, framing all literally all of the campus protests as inherently anti semitic, as if that is the main driver, and ignoring ignoring the many instances for people who have expressed anti Semitic things have been being like removed and pushed out of campus,

which has happened in many places. But it's it's just it's just so lazy to totally like reject the reasoning for why these protests are happening, the framing of trespassing as a form of violence, call calling these encampments violent as if as if being on campus is violent, and meanwhile never once mentioning the actual violence on display, which is almost solely at the hands of police and these

other far right groups. Friend of the Pod Cody Johnston had a had a very very good tweet quote, these people who I despise and never agree with, should protest the way I prefer unquote.

that bombing children is bad and wanted to stop. We had a world war about this, like genocides are bad. So this will be a topic we continue to cover on the show over the course. At summer, we'll have I'm planning a deep dive about what happened at Emory. Margaret has an upcoming episode about how people who were engaged in the campus protests can stay involved over the summer, and of course we will continue to talk about what's

been happening in Gaza. Thanks for listening, solid Air. To everyone who's out.

and reflect upon a very somber and important holiday. It is May fifteenth as we are recording this today, and today is actually recognized the world over as Knackba Day, a day to remember the first Knakba, the founding of the state of Israel and the force displacement of the Palestinian people. And this year, as a new Nakba continues, as the genocide is being committed against the Palestinian people, it's more important than ever to remember that these atrocities

did not start last year. But that isn't the memorial day I invited you here to talk about. Here in the United States, the holiday officially on the books today is not Knackba Day. It is National Peace Officers Memorial Day. In nineteen sixty two, President Kennedy signed a proclamation establishing May fifteenth as National Peace Officers Memorial Day and the week it falls within as National Police Week. It's an entire week to honor commemorate the brave boys in blue

who've lost their lives in the line of duty. And I can't think of a better way to spend this afternoon with both of you than to talk about how this holiday is celebrated and to share some of these incredible stories of courage and sacrifice. So one of the most frequently cited sources during Police Week and year round when you're talking about the mortality rate of police officers

is a website called the Officer Down Memorial Page. Highly encourage you to visit it, make an account browse the pages. The website is run by a nonprofit organization by the same name and has had tax exempt status since two thousand.

According to their IRS Form nine nineties, the tax form that tax exempt nonprofits have to file annually, they're pulling in around seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, a third of which goes directly toward executive compensation and why why shouldn't someone make a quarter of a million dollars annually to do such important work? Public records show the website's founder, Chris Cosgriff, is a police officer himself

in Fairfax County, Virginia. Available salary data from twenty eighteen shows him making a policeman salary of about sixty nine thousand dollars. According to his LinkedIn page, Cosgriff still works for the Fairfax County Police Department as a recruiting supervisor

the officer down memorial page. Tax documents show he paid himself a paltry twenty four thousand, five hundred dollars in twenty twenty three as the executive director of the nonprofit, though they list key employee compensation at an expense of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars that year, with no indication of who is being paid that remaining two hundred and twenty five thousand dollars or what that person's position is.

When the organization received a thirty thousand dollars PPP loan in twenty twenty, they indicated on their loan documents that there were five employees at the organization. I'm not an accountant, so I won't hazard any kind of guesses here, but I am having trouble making sense of that twenty twenty four nine ninety, which lists five company officers by name and only cosgriff is drawing a salary, he paid himself

fifty thousand dollars that year. So that same document from twenty twenty shows that the organization and had expenses of two hundred thousand dollars for compensation of officers, but it doesn't say where that remaining one hundred and fifty thousand dollars went.

as America. That's not real, it's not We didn't actually really have what is considered modern policing back then, so they're really kind of stretching definitions, are.

Assaulted or LEOCA Report. The data used by the FBI is collected as part of the uniform Crime Reporting System, and if you take just a minute to look at the Officer down Memorial Page's annual data, the reason for this mismatch is immediately clear. They're padding their numbers by including deaths by natural causes on duty, deaths due to accidents or incidents unrelated to the officer's duties, and they're including law enforcement adjacent personnel that the FBI does not

consider to be law enforcement deaths in their reporting. The FBI's LEOCA report has really clear criteria for inclusion. To be considered a law enforcement line of duty death, the deceased must have been a duly sworn law enforcement officer acting in their official capacity at the time of their death. So they have to be a real cop, somebody who can carries a badge and a gun and has full

arrest powers. And the FBI specifically excludes death by natural causes like heart attacks or COVID deesths that occurred on duty, but quote attributed to their own personal situation, such as domestic violence, neighbor conflict, et cetera, which like that they have to list that by name. If you died doing a domestic violence in uniform, that doesn't count. How often is that happening?

focus on somewhat different aspects of these important topics. Therefore, care should be taken not to compare LEOCA data to data provided by other entities, such as the Officer Down Memorial page. So they're specifically saying, we know these numbers don't match. We know these numbers don't match because a few years ago we gave them a few hundred thousand dollars in grant money to make numbers that are fake.

statistical anomalies. In their twenty twenty, twenty twenty one, and twenty two data, they include officers who died of natural causes years after sustaining minor on the job injuries, which, you know, if you're involved in a civil lawsuit after the death of a loved one, you could maybe argue that this was sort of a you know, a downhill

kind of thing. If you're trying geting a settlement from the state, maybe you could say that, you know, the injury sustained contributed to the death, but that's you can't tell me that slipping in the parking lot and then dying six years later is an experience unique to the

dangers of law enforcement. A district attorney who flipped his car after hitting a log that fell off a truck on the highway on a Friday night is not a law enforcement line of duty death because that not only was that not a cop it was a single car accident. And when DeSoto County Search and Rescue Director Deputy William Nichols went on a beach vacation and took his family into the ocean despite red flag riptide hazard condition warnings. He lost his life trying to rescue his son. And

that's very sad. But drowning on vacation is not a line of duty death. When Indiana Department of Natural Resources Sergeant Ed Bollman and his friend drowned in the middle of a frozen lake while ice fishing, that wasn't a line of duty death. It's just a sad accident while dudes were hanging out.

the data on ODMP. It's very user friendly. It shows you a little picture and a bio of each officer. It's very easy to use. You can search by year, agency, cause of death, state, or an officer's name. It's not a wall of small text with little data tables and links to ZIP files of more data tables. The FBI's report is ugly and it's uncompelling, and it's sort of

overwhelming to navigate. If that's not something you are interested in doing, so don't want to be too hard on the twenty two year old news anchor scrambling to put something on the screen at six o'clock. The officer down the more page makes it a matter of a few easy clicks for your local news anchor to find a handful of local interest stories to run on May fifteenth.

But the people who run the website know exactly what they're doing, and it's an intentional ideological project to perpetuate the myth of the courageous, noble policeman doing America's most dangerous and thankless job, a job that is uniquely and outlandishly perilous, standing apart from any other profession, and that that's not true. That's not true. And for this I take you to another government agency's annual reports, the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

the average desk job. But while it is more dangerous than being a receptionist, policing doesn't even crack the top ten for most dangerous professions. Loggers are seven times more likely to die on the job. Roofers are more than four times more likely than a cop to die due to a workplace incident. Being a fisherman is more than three and a half times more dangerous than being a cop. General construction work is more than three times more dangerous

than police work. Delivery drivers are more than twice as likely to die at work than a cop. It is more dangerous to be a day laborer on a farm picking fruit, or to drive a garbage truck. Being a cop has a similar level of risk of death by workplace incident as being a groundskeeper, So it is about as safe as being the guy that cuts the grass at the park.

So I am I will say, I am fairly confident. I cannot say this is nasty effect. I am fairly confident that farming is actually significantly more dangerous than the real labor statistics says, so like it is so much more dangerous you like pick your food that it is to be a cop.

allowed to do that. So for each of these vignettes, I pulled original contemporaneous local reporting on the incidents, and in some cases actual court records, so you can't get me. In twenty ten, Saint Joseph, Missouri police officer Dan Dacry was participating in a training exercise. During a break, he and another officer put down the training weapons they've been using, which were loaded with something called simmunition, So simulated ammunition.

It's not real bullets, it's a plastic, non lethal object that goes.

a dog, so they holstered their duty weapons. Upon returning after their break, drinks in hand, officer to Cry asked his colleague, officer Jason Strong, to shoot him with a simmunition round because he wanted to know what it would feel like.

Officer Decrai's family received a settlement of three hundred and seventy six thousand dollars from the City of Saint Joseph. Again, settlement money does not come from police departments. It comes from the municipality. It comes from just the taxpayers. It does not affect the police's budget to do this.

in the Ohio River. Polling, Who's thirty two at the time, had previously been employed as a police officer with the Gallipolis Police Department and at a different time as a sheriff's deputy with the Galia County Sheriff's Office, So by thirty two he's been both a police officer and a sheriff's deputy, but he is neither of those things anymore. In two thousand and seven, he was working as a

parole officer. In the reporting from the time, it's not actually clear why he was present, but he was nearby when a police officer stopped a pedestrian on the sidewalk and frisked him because he suspected this man may have just come out of the house where he believed drug deals were being conducted, so he's doing a stop and frisk on a guy mined in his business. The man was not charged with a drug offense when this was

all over, so I guess they didn't find drugs. But during the encounter, the man bolted, and Polling, who again had a cop just a guy who's nearby, chased after him. The man jumped into the Ohio River, and Polling jumped in after him. The suspect, Joseph Harris, made it quickly to a small island in the middle of the river, but polling immediately after hitting the water, sank and disappeared.

expensive mishaps. This is just policing. But when I started looking for primary sources about this incident, actually just kept getting weirder. And now I'm kind of down a new rabbit hole of got some requests out for more documents. I'm gonna figure this out. Something happened here. But before I tell you about Officer Henry Macalene and Junior, we'll

take another quick ad break, all right. I hope he used that ad break time not only to think about products and services, but to reflect on the sacrifice of the parole officer who drowned in the Ohio River. On August twenty first, two thousand, Miami Dade Police officers Henry Macalene and Junior and his partner Ittala Elias responded to a request from a home alarm company to check out what turned out to be a false alarm at a

residential home in southwest Miami. Arriving on the scene, they found no sign of a break in, nothing unusual, and no one answered the front door. Normally a cop would probably just leave. They don't really like working. They don't really like doing their jobs. It's hard and it's boring, and they have candy Crush to play Molly.

and began beating the dogs. Really just doing their job in their own backyard.

They were like, he just grabs the dog's face. Oh yeah, where It's like there's just something like on a fundamental level, like we co evolved with this animal, and like if you like cannot do the basic this is a dog and your response is like I'm gonna grab his face, or your response is I Am going to beat this dog up with a baton, like you have somehow fundamentally failed at like the process of being human.

the dogs as he is beating them. Wow. Now, we talked before about some problems with aiming, right, cops don't have great marksmanship. When you're talking about a complicated physical situation, right, they're sort of entangled. The dogs are small, the man is big. She shot him in the dick, so he's beating these dogs. She shoots him in the groin. It doesn't say what happened to the dogs, but it doesn't indicate she fired her service weapon multiple times, so maybe

she just shot him and then put it up. He was airlifted to the hospital to undergo emergency groin surgery, and he did survive. Oh mackalleenen continued to serve with the Miami Dade Police Department for another sixteen years, and he was still with the department when he passed away in twenty sixteen at the age of sixty six. His own obituary does not list a cause of death, only that his wife was at his bedside for thirty six

days before he passed. The first mention of macleen in's passing being a line of duty death is in a National Police Week local news piece the following year, which lists his cause of death as accidental gunfire. A year later, in twenty eighteen, a Police Week story indicates that he was quote killed by gunfire on the date that he died in twenty sixteen, it's not until years later that you start to see claims that his cause of death was due to complications from the sixteen year old wound.

So it's not clear where that claim even originated. But he did die sixteen years after being shot, and during those intervening sixteen years, he was well enough to continue to serve on the force.

the wreckyard and hit his head. A shocking number of accidents at the shooting range or during training exitizes.

But he got scared and drew his real gun and really shot and really killed the director of the Mississippi Gaming Commission. Almost every cop death was completely preventable. They're careless and they're reckless, and they're doing shit they should not be doing. They're counting normal wear and tear, like knee injuries and heart attacks as though these are noble

deaths of martyrs. And it's all part of this ideological project of myth making around American policing, right, because you have to believe that this is a uniquely dangerous and frightening job only the bravest boys can do. Because they're under so much risk, they have to react the way that they do. They have to react with extreme violence.

They have to shoot first and ask questions later because their job is just so dangerous, Right, And I think it's interesting as we drive to a clothes to draw a comparison here, right, because they react with great violence against us because of their fear of imaginary violence that

they might face. So the FBI prepares this meticulous report every year with rigorous and mandatory data collection processes, so we have a comprehensive set of data about not just every cop who dies, but every cop who is assaulted on the job. The LEOCA report includes on the job assaults and injuries, so we have a very clear idea of how much violence and how many accidents cops are exposed to, mostly in the form of single car accidents.

information together on their own. The Washington Post has a very thorough police shooting database, and nonprofit websites like Mapping Police Violence do their best to document each case, but even they admit they aren't capturing every fatal encounter with police. So while the FBI reports literally just a few dozen officers a year fall into the feloniously killed category in

the Leoga report, so not the our accident one. So there's a few dozen actual killings of officers a year, we can only hope to know the names of the average of over twelve hundred people who are killed each year by a cop, and that does kind of send

a message about whose lives matter. So as you celebrate National Police Week this week, I guess you'll be hearing this on Friday if you listen to it the day it comes out, just take a moment to remember our brave boys like Lonnie Burton, who tripped on a curb outside of the Wayland Baptist University police station and later died of complications, or brave officers like Trooper Jack Holland who died because he was allergic to yellowjackets, or officers

like Deputy Sheriff Joseph Baka, who was trying to tackle a suspect to the ground and fell into a bee's nest. It turns out he was allergic to bees.