It Could Happen Here Weekly 14

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get your podcast. Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compiletion episode. Every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's gonna be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to it could happen here a podcast about things falling apart, how they came

to be that way. I'm your host, Christopher Wong, and today we're doing part three of our series of Neoliberalism. We're gonna start today with one of the most famous episodes in history of neoliberalism, September eleventh coup against Salvator Allende was a democratic socialist of a type that has

broadly ceased to exist today. A committed Marxist to believe that a class of society could be created by means of electoral democracy, he embarked on a campaign drastically more radical than any modern socialist politician has done, more than dream of mass nationalizations, in an attempt to develop a technical system that would allow the government to democratically plan

as much of the economy as humanly possible. In part, his hand was forced by Chile's workers, who had embarked on their own unsancitioned campaign of takeovers of minds and factories, which I Andy disapproved of and now sought to bring

under the national planning scheme. To do this, he brought in British cybernetics theorist Stanford Beer, who embarked on an operation called Project Cybersen to collect and coordinate information between various factories and allow democratic planning at the ground level in a way that would allow stantaneous reaction to crises and immediate changes in production levels and conditions inside the

factories themselves to deal with them. All End for all of s Barker's credentials was fiercely critical of the bureaucratization of the U. S s R, and, in particular in the economic sphere, the way its planning systems were essentially unable to react to local changes quickly in a context where plans were only created every five years. Cybersen would solve these problems by workers participle patient at the factory level and constant updated data flows to the planning office.

As the project went on, Beer became progressively more radical. Strike by right wing truck workers backed by capitalists in the CIA in nineteen two threatened to grind the nation to a halt. In response, workers formed enormous coodonas industrialities or industrial belts to help self organized production and bypass the striking right wing workers in coordination with the Andia's

government and a new cybers in control room. They were able to outmaneuver the strike and maintain production and distribution and nearly full capacity by tracking where goods were going and where they needed to go along what roots. Beer rapidly became convinced that quote the basic answer of cybernetics. The question of how the system should be organized, is that it ought to organize itself, in essence, that cybersen should be used to eliminate the bureaucracy in the state

entirely and allow workers to directly organize production themselves. Now, Cybersen in theory is what the neillerbles claim, at least in public, to want, is an anti bureaucratic system that uses the centralized control over the means of production to combat totalitarianism and ensure that the state respects individual rights and liberties. In fact, as if Vengi Monuos put it,

Pierre and Hayek knew each other. As Beer noted in his diary, Hayek even complimented him on his vision for the cybernetic factory after Beer presented at a conference in the nineteen sixty in Illinois. So, naturally, when the system was actually implemented, at least in part Chile. The new liberal position was that every single person involved in the

entire economic exparment needed to be killed. Chile was put under economic blockade by the US and multinational corporations with full neilerable support, an ironic position given Milton Friedman, Hayek and Rope case pure and absolute opposition to economic blockades

of South Africa Rhodesia to its eternal shame. The a f L c i O's American Institute for Free Labor Development provided training and funds to the right wing unions that opposed the leftist government and others across Latin America. In Chile, working directly with the CIA, the a f L c i OS organizations to train the right wing truckers whose nineteen seventy two strike we've already discussed and whose nineteen seventy three strike would pave the way for

Pinochet's coup. In many cases, organized labor, especially in the US, but also in places like Italy, spent the seventies battling their own left flank in defensive capital. Their reward for their service as was capital turning around and dutting them like a fish in the eighties, Allen two fought a series of battles with this left flank, disarming the mass workers assemblies that had formed in nineteen seventy two and

could have saved him from the coup. The results was the Other nine eleven, on which day in nineteen seventy three, the military overthrew Allende and a coup, and Allende shot himself in the presidential palace. The man who would emerge on the top of the power struggle in the military at the end of the coup was one Augusto Pinochet. Now. Pinochet from the beginning had the support of Chile's own domestic neo liberals, of which they were a fairly large number.

Upon taking power, he carried out what would become the standard neo liberal program, returning nationalized industries to the capitalists, eliminating price controls, and increasing interest rates, But full scale

neoliberalism didn't come immediately. Inflation, which Pinochet had nominally in large part taken power to control, continued unabated, and in nineteen seventy four Milton Friedman arrived in Chile to argue for neoliberal shock therapy, but it wasn't until Pinochet's desperation from money drove him to the I m F that

he would fully embrace neoliberalism. Most of the world had refused to do business with new dictatorial regime, with the exception of the U S and oddly enough Mao's China, which poured money into the regime and Pinochet's personal pockets.

But that money was insufficient, and the I m F was the only remaining body who would actually lend money to Pinochet without any requirements on improving Chile's At this point of Bismo human rights record, much of the full neoliberal turn that hit Chile in ninety five came from demands from the I m F itself, who demanded Conian

measures to control inflay. Here, Pinochet was aided by the supporter of the neoliberals, whose legitimacy and academic standing allowed them to negotiate and secure favor from the I m F, which they had already begun to infiltrate. At this point, the infamous Chicago Boys, economist trains at the University of Chicago by Milton Freeman, were put in charge of the economy. University of Chicago trained economist Sergio di Castro, known as the Pinochet of the Economy was put in charge of

the Ministry of Economics. To Castro, privatized an enormous portion of the remaining profitable state industries, eliminated tariffs and implemented free trade policies, deregulated the finance sector, and eliminated any remaining price controls. Chicago Boys would go on to do things like privatizing the entire Chilean pension system with the exception of the military, which is a good education of any as to what the regime thought the actual effects

of privatization would be. In ninety eight, Pinochet declared something called the Seven Modernizations, with quote reforms in labor, education, health, regional decentralization, agriculture, and justice policy. The goal of these reforms was to introduce the market into literally every aspect of society. Now in episode one, I've very briefly mentioned the Virginia School as one of the major schools of deal liberalism. The Virginia School the people behind public choice theory.

Their thing is essentially taking the absolutely absurd set of beliefs Chicago School holds about people. Humans are all knowing, rational, calculating gods, optimizing their behavior to get the most of every single interaction to maximize the utility, and then applying it to political science and then literally every other field.

If you've ever heard someone say there's no rational reason to vote, because if you're a rational, self interested person, the cost of voting outwighs that benefit because your vote only matters if a deciding one. Therefore, it's against your interest to vote. That's the Virginia School and their public choice theory bullshit at work. Pinochet's Seven Modernizations was an application of Virginia School doctrine to the entire Chilean state and as much as the siety he is humanly possible,

with the goal of transforming it into a market. I'm going to read a section from the Road to Mount Pelion describing Virginia School titan James M. Buchanan's work. Quote Ineffectual consequences in the political market place were blamed solely on the fallacies of political decision making. We can summarize public choice as a theory of government failure end quote.

Buchanan delivered a highly abstract paper titled limited or Untitled Democracy to the Montpellion Society in Vina del Mar in Chile, which some constructed as a critique of the host country's mobilization for action history. Buchanan stated that if limited democracy was a polity predisposed to disable a political market that would otherwise promote the most efficient allocation of resources, the only meaningful task of the government would be to deprive

the polity of its ability to do so. Public choice theory thus sought to limit democracy and deep politicize the state in order to enable unconstrained market forces to guide human into action. Since the Pinochet regime was committed to using its governmental powers in precisely this manner, Buchanan's paper provided theoretical support for the regime, even if it did

not openly endorsed the authoritarian rule. Buchanan, of course, would spend a bunch of time doing lectures in Chile throughout Pinochet's icatorship, but he was not that regime's most vociferous

neoliberal supporter. That award goes to Frederick Hyak Chris Hiek when asked about Chile, which had been to ninety eight and that blessed with his approval, aedicatorship can restrict itself in a educatorship which deliberately is restricting itself can be more liberal in its politics than a democratic assembly, which has due limits. Chile's nineteen eighty constitution was drafted in part by one of Hiak's friends. He has wrote Road

Abount Pelion Again. The constitution was not only named after hias book The Constitution of Liberty, but also incorporated significant elements of hias thinking. Above all, the Constitution placed a strong emphasis on a neoliberal understanding of freedom. Guzman version of freedom is intrinsically connected to private property, free enterprise, and individual rights. Individual freedom, in his interpretation, can only

evolve in a radical market order. The Constitution was dedicated to guarantee such an order without constraining any economic activities. In order to protect free market conditions and individual freedoms against totalitarian attacks or democratic interventions, the Constitution stipulated a necessity of a strong central state authority to guarantee the established rule of law, and thus, above all else is

hampered in the application of discretionary government power. Exempted were measures to uphold the status quo, inasmuch as Goose Bond aggressively supported continuing the state of emergency, which legalized the use of whatever discretionary powers were deemed necessary. Quial opposition that Folks is a high achi in constitution used the state to murder any one wants democracy or God help them, wants to control the production their forced to serve every day.

Chile is near liberals voltron By combinding the power of all four major schools of neoliberalism Chicago School Monetary and Economic policy, Austrian School Constitutional order order, liberal reliance on the international bureaucracy and legal institutions like the I m F in order to promote a market economy, and Virginia School public choice theory running the state, you get a neoliberal,

right wing military dictatorship. Now most conventional accounts of neoliberalism will move from Chile to Reagan and Thatcher and next episode will cover the neoliberal kind of revolution in the angle sphere. But focusing on purely national events gives a skewed perception of how neoliberalism actually spreads, and in order

to correct that, we're going to look at Venezuela. I'm going to be drawing heavily here from the work of the legendary Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando core and Neil in his book The Magical State, which I highly recommend as one of the best things that are written about oil and

the Venezuelan state, so readers be warned. Chapter one is an absolute slow dog that, on the one hand, is one of the most interesting explanations of what oiler rents are have ever encountered, but also features coroneal inventing a new trielectic and then stubbornly refusing to explain what it is or literally anything about how it works. So read the Magical State skip chapter one now. The guiding principles of the new mass capitalists, democratic parties and posted katorship.

Venezuela since the nineties sixties had been developing sovereignty by economic independence. The keystone of this project was an attempt to use the power of the state in new oil rents to develop an automotive industry. The project has sort of stalled out from its origins in the sixties until the rise of the G seventy seven Opeque Alliance in

ninet nineteen seventy four that we discussed last episode. In nineteen seventy five, Venezuela's Assembly passed a law that granted the president's special powers to speed up the developments of the auto industry. Corn the auto industry in Venezuela. Corneal described it thus quote, The central goal was to have the vehicle value, including the drive train, produced locally. By

nineteen eighty five. Major components would be produced by enterprises having at least fifty one percent of their capital from local private sources. Existing foreign companies would have to become mixed or national firms in accord within day impact regulations if they wanted to benefit from the common market. Now,

this plan is what's called industrial import substitution. Developing countries would attempt to develop industries, in this case auto manufacturers inside of a country to produce cars for internal consumption

instead of importing them from other countries. The other key of this plan is the end Impact, an association of Bolivia, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru and Chile that was collaborating to develop a regional industrial economy, that we use local resources to build a local industrial economy producing industrial goods made entirely inside of the countries themselves from their resources. Now, Venezuela joins the pack in nineteen seventy three and Pinochet notably leaves in

ninety seven. The key sticking points in this joint and day impact Venezuela attempt to build an auto industry was that Venezuela needed technology held by multinational corporations in order

to actually produce the vehicles. Multinational car companies were willing to go ahead with the project to build cars in Venezuela in the short term because they were hurting from the oil shock and thus were willing to help national plans develop cars as long as they could use the parts to build their own cars with parts source from

around the world. And this is where the neoliberal defensive intellectual property rights becomes extremely important, because the companies who held the patents for the drive trains essentially had a technological strangleholder for car development. Now, Venezuela conducted an extensive bidding process for companies to make cars in Venezuela, but the car companies essentially sabotaged it by submitting designs that

failed specs. The result was a kind of political war inside Venezuela and particularly inside the Venezuelan ruling class, between national developments and international profits. The Venezuelan developmentalists needed a breakthrough. What they needed, in essence, was new international economic order and its corporate regulations. Debt relief and technology transfers. Without them, even a third World country like Venezuela, flush with oil

money was incapable of developing an industrial economy. But the new international economic order never came. All the G seven had to do in order to stop it was stall the G seventy seven out until commodity power faded. The G seventy seven had to fundamentally change the structure of the economy in order to allow them to industrialize before the sort of damocles hanging over all their heads the

mounting Third World debt fell and decapitated them. The G seven strategy to outlast the seventy seven was to pull the various factions in the seventy seven apart, in particular pulling the moderate governments away from the radical wing OPEC and the African Socialists. They attacked OPEC by using Saudi Arabia to undermine its unity, and attempted to peel the so called less developed countries away from their alliance with OPEC with a promise of aid to patch up the

damage dealt by increased prices. Neither worked incredibly well, but when combined with the US essentially shutting the U N down by refusing to let any business get done, refusing to vote for or even vetoing routine matters. The stalling worked, no new international economic order was forthcoming. Instead, the world would get neoliberalism. Neoliberalism arrived on the world stage in

the form of the Vulcar Shock. In nineteen seventy nine, Jimmy Carter appointed Paul Vulcar as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve for the broad mandate to do whatever he wanted to reduce inflation. Vulcar had become a disciple of monitorism, a Freedman Night Chicago School belief about the role of the money supply in the economy, considered to be absolutely crank even by modern neoliberals. His solution, which became known

as the Vulcar Shock, was to increase interest rate. This essentially blew a crater in the American economy and immediately sent it into recession. And we'll get to Vulcar at Reagan's efforts to destroy American labor in the next episode. But the damage to the Third World was even worse. G seventy seven, governments had for decades taking on adjustable rate loans pegged to something called the libor rate. When they took the loans out, interest rates were virtually negative,

but when the Vulgar shock hit, the skyrocketed. Now, as we talked about the last episode, a major part of the crisis of the seventies was enormous piles of oil money, mostly from the Gulf States, floating around that nobody could actually get returns on because of declining manufacturing profit rates. This money wound up flowing back into the American finance system. When capital controls are lifted nineteen seventy five, the banks

through the money at loans in the Third World. Now, some of that money had been put into industrial development that had yet to pay off. Some of the money had simply been put directly into dictator's bank accounts. But the bank's essentially didn't care if the loans they were making had little to no chance of being repaid without some kind of structure reformed. Because in envy, control of the I m F fell to an arch neo liberal

name Jacquis de la Rossier. I really don't know if that's how he pronounce his name, but he is evil. So neo liberals further took control of the World Bank in nine from the I M f and the World Bank. A secession of neo liberals enshrined the key principle of the new neoliberal order. Debtors must always pay back their debts. Creditors would no longer assume risk for their loans. Instead,

loans would be repaid at gunpoint. This was no mere rhetorical slogan, as the G seventy seven imploded as a political body under the weight of hundreds of billions of dollars of debt now with interest. Thomas Sankara, the socialist president of Burkina Fosso, attempted to rally its remains into collectively negotiate debt relief. Sakara was promptly shot by a former ally who accused him of threatening Burkina Fossil's relationship

with France. With all resistance slaughtered, entire nations were reduced to debt servicing machines, as tax dollars were directed from health, education, and social security programs into the coffers of international banks, which used the newly neo liberal controlled International Monetary Fund as their enforcer. The anthropologist David Graeber described the consequence of one such I m F austerity program in debt the first five thousand years quote. For almost two years

I had lived in the highlands of Madagascar. Shortly before I arrived, there had been an outbreak of malaria. It was a particularly virulent outbreak because malaria had been wiped out in Highlight Madagascar many years before, so that after a couple of generations, most people had lost their immunity.

The problem was it took money to maintain those mosquito radication programs, since there had to be periodic tests to make sure mosquitoes weren't starting to breed again, and spraying campaigns if it was discovered that they were not a lot of money. But owing to IMF and post austerity programs, the government had to cut the monitoring program. Ten thousand people died. I met young mothers grieving for lost children.

One might think it would be hard to make a case that the loss of ten thou human lives is really justified in order to ensure that City Bank wouldn't have to cut his losses on one irresponsible loan that

wasn't particularly important to its balance sheet anyways. Following the old old or liberal dream of a legal framework to ensure neoliberal market economies, the new generation of neoliberals used the I m F, World Bank and other bureacratic institutions to act as dead enforcers and the imposed neoliberal policies from above, without anything so petty as democracy interfering with it.

In fact, one of the first neo liberal structural adjustments, one of a bewildering new array of terms for I m F and force austerity programs, was implemented by the Jamaican socialist Michael Manly in nineteen seventy seven, which in a single year wiped out every gain in education in public health that Madly had spent his first term building up. Similar faith would befall health, education, and justice programs across the world. The death toll remains unknown. Venezuela would fall

victim to a similar fate. Without the new international Economic order, Venezuela's industrial policy imploded as post Volcra shock government debt skyrocketed in the nineteen eighties, the government began to impose ims structural adjustments. Carlos Andres Perez, the man who led the industrial push in the Nite and seven ins, was elected a second time in nineteen eighty nine, running a campaign that I've seen euphemistically described as quote against liberalization policy.

It was somewhat more extreme than that, featuring lines such as calling the I m F quote a bomb that only kills people. But Perez was negotiating with the I m F behind the scenes and imposed even harsher I m F Asteria measures upon winning the election, leading to a mass uprising in nineteen eighty nine that was suppressed in a bath of blood, with hundreds killed by the army.

But even more structural adjustments were imposed after Perez was deposed for corruption n implemented ironically by the founder of the Movement towards Socialism, Teodoro Petkof, the head of Venezuela's planning agency in nineteen ninety six. All of Venezuela's economic crisis from the nineteen eighties until now stem from the

failures of nineteen seventies industrialization. Without any kind of industrial economy, even the socialists that took power in the nine A national level were reduced to shuffling oil and surround and with the market economy still in place, the economy is

simply imploded again when the royal prices fell. This is how neoliberalism comes to most countries not as policies implemented by anything even remotely resembling the will of the people, but enforced by the international economic system itself and the bureaucrats the I m F, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. It is imposed by enormous states at gunpoints, constituted by the mass looting of the population in order

to pay corporate debt. Masters new liberals have effectively achieved their goal and transcendent democratic politics entirely from their purchase in the international bureaucracy. They can dictate policy to even hostile leaders. But tomorrow we'll see what happens when they

take power domestically. As we would conclude our Neoliberalism series with a man rotting in Hell with Paul Walker Ronald Reagan when P. T. Barnum's Great American Museum burned to the ground and eighteen six five what rose from its ashes would change the world. Welcome to Grim and Mild presents an ongoing journey into the strange, the unusual, and

the fascinating. For our inaugural season, we'll be giving you a backstage tour of the always complex and often misunderstood cultural artifact that is the American side show, So come along as we visit the shadowy corners of the stage and learn about the people who were at the center of it all in a place where spectacle was king. We will soon discover there's always more to the story than meets the eye. So step right up and get

in line. Listen to Grim and Mile Presents now on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more over at Grim and Mild dot com Slash Presents. I'm Jake Calbern, host of deep Cover. Our new season is about a lawyer who helped the mob run Chicago. We control the courts, We controlled absolutely everything. He brobed judges and even helped a hit man walk free, until one day when he started talking with the FBI

and promised that he could take the mob down. I've spent the past year trying to figure out why he flipped and what he was really after. From my perspective, Bob was too good to be true. There's got to be something wrong with this. I wouldn't trust that guy. He looks like a little scum, big liar, stool pidgeon. He looked like what he was or at I can say with all certainty. I think he's a hero because he didn't have to do what he did, and he did it anyway. The moment I put the wire around

the first time, my life was over. If it ever got out, they would kill me in a heartbeat. Listen to deep Cover on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Colleen with joined me the host of Eating Will Broke podcast. While I Eat a meal created by self made entrepreneurs, influencers and celebrities over a meal they once ate when they were broke. Today I have the lovely aj Crimson, the official Princess of compon, Asia Kidning and Assia. This is the professor.

We're here on Eating While Broke and today I'm gonna break down my meal that got me through a time when I was broken. Listen to Eating While Broke on the I Heart Radio app, on Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here a show about things falling apart and is for one final time this week about why and how things have fallen apart in this specific way. Um, I'm I'm I'm your host Christopher and Today with Me, I have Garrison, Garrison, HELLU,

how you doing. I'm doing fine. We're gonna talk about something that's not fine. It's not fine at all, is in fact extremely grim and bad, which is part four of our series of deal Liberalism, i e. All of the bad things happened at once, so in in in in all last episode we talked about how throughout throughout most of the Third World or you know what was at the time known as the Third World, new liberalism

is not really imposed by people voting for it. It's mostly imposed by either external forces via coup or by just the I m F going okay, just we're running the country now, um, but this this, yeah, we're we're gonna shift our focus a bit this episode with the people who were I don't know, unfortunate enough, misguided enough, decided that they hated each other enough to actually choose

neoliberalism for themselves. Now, one of the sort of stories we've been tracing here on sort of a very broad arc is the reaction by ne liberals to kind of kind of compromise it had been worked out between labor and capital, particularly the US after sort of the open class warfare in the reteen thirties, and you know, there's essentially this there's a kind of deal that's set up informally, which is so the we're working class will stop literally

constantly going on strike and showing up the strikes with like enormous numbers of guns and shooting at people, and they will you know, stop trying to overshow the government in exchange, the state gives you welfare programs, the state will give you a house. And this is this is particularly after what we're too the Americans say it just

you know, does this massive homeownersial campaign. And you know, if if you're if you're if you're you know, a union worker, particularly if you're a white man like this, this, you know, working working, working one of these union jobs will put you into the middle class. You can take vacations, you can have a house, um, you can get pensions. Your unions are legal now, which is the thing that like you know, hadn't happened before. And this is essentially

you know, this is essentially a kind of insurgency tool. Um. The goal of this is to stop people from you know, doing the kinds of revolts. So we're happening in at the dirties, but by the nineteen seventies, it's becoming very clear that this sort of the like can't it can't really be maintained because it's too expensive for sort of the capital states to maintain and trying to maintain both well.

And you know, the secondary thing here is is, you know, okay, so this deal specifically goes out to white men right now. Throughout the sixties and seventies, you get a bunch of other people who are not white men attempting to enter the workplace, attempting you get the same bargain, and you know, they're in a lot of ways significantly were militants. And this causes normal sponseimentional strife. You get you know, the US is murdering the black panthers. You get similar stuff

in the UK. And the neoliberals basically are the people who just fully called this to tants off and are you know, essentially going to return to full scale class war. And so now now we are, we are finally getting

to Reagan and Thatcher. And one day we will do a full episode about how Ronald Reagan, in a weird, shadowy cabal of Italian intelligence services, rigged the nineteen eighty election by planting fake stories about Jimmy Carter's brother and the press, which is if you hear the story, Garrison, No, but it sounds like regular media manipulation that happens all

the time. Now. Yeah, yeah, it's it's yeah, there, there's, there's, there's there's there's a whole three line there because you know a lot of those like same kind of intelligence tactics are gonna be used SOUTHI Iraq war, and there's there's this whole sort of thing. Then you know, there's also the specific Italian angle of uh yeah, the Italian States being run by this rogue Masonic lodge led by a fascist and it's it's a time this is all going on there. But that's you know, I'm just I'm

just thinking like Hunter Biden laptop and all of that. Yeah, yeah stuff. It's like, oh so that's just the same playbook. Yeah, it's it's the same thing, except like they were like actual intelligence people running it instead of just sort of like whatever Tucker carloson Tucker Carlos said in Glenn Greenwaal trying to get people like care about this thing that just nobody gives a single ship about. Yeah, you know, it was, it was, but the E's version of it

was significantly more effective. And you know, the product of this is that Reagan sort of Reagan finds like the secret sauce for right wing politics, which is kind of you know, in in in in some ways, and Nixon had been trying to develop it hadn't quite gotten right,

which is no, yeah, yeah, yeah. He he figures out that you know, if if you want to do nei liberalism, if you want to stroy the unions, you want to stroy the welfare state, the way you do it is basically a combination of racist tax and welfare recipients, and you mobilize new religious right. And this is extremely effective and it's but I think it's also interesting and worth noting that, you know, if if you got all the back to episode one, like this is this is rope

keys like white nationalism, like sure German white nationalism. Thing is this is explicitly what Ropeky sort of strategy for implenting new liberalism was. The problem is he was German and Catholic, which meant that like it could never work

in the US. But you know, you get Reagan, suddenly you get the American version of it, that is, you know, white but Erican and then also works off the sort of of off of the sort of mass Protestantism in the US, and this becomes a force that is responsible for like almost every bad thing that exists today in some form or another. Lot of them. Yeah, I mean not not often, but you know, I think thing things

go extremely badly. And so Reagan wins this election, and then almost exactly the same time, Margaret Thatcher wins the wins her election in in the UK, and that the combination of those two things, and also, as you talked about last episode, the Vulcar shock, where Vulcar raises the interest rates, just raised defendation become so Vulcar is installed weirdly not by Ronald Reagan but by Jimmy Carter, but is given this sort of mandate to just do whatever,

literally do whatever you have to to to get inflation under control. The thing that he decides to do is just literally nuke the entire world economy, you know when we talked about the effects of this hat on sort of the world in the last episode. But in the US this sets off a recession at last basically from like nineteen seventy nine to Night two at the height

of it. It's like it's I think we finally got more people unemployed during the pandemic, but I'm like sure that between World War Two and the pandemic, that was the single largest number of people who have been unemployed in the US, which just yeah, it was just apocle,

just apocle devastation. And you know, there's there's there's a whole thing here where the head of the a f l C. I OH is literally begging Vulcar like, please don't do this, like we can get inflation under control after, you know, after the economy recovers, and vocals just like no. The consequence of this is that you have you have an economy in which is no more number people unemployed, and the unions are weak, and both Reagan and Thatcher

sort of see this. Now the unions in the UK are in a snifful better position of the American unions. Reagan is able to sort of smashed the American unions

very quickly. There's there's the you know, the famous air traffic control strike where a bunch of American air traffic controllers go on strike technically illegally, and Reagan just has literally every single one of them fired and replaces them with just like like like people from flight school, like people who just just like ap literally anyone he can just like pull off the street who sort of kind of knows how to how to land an aircraft, like

they put on people from the military. It's it's just like this absolutely wild sort of feet of strike breaking. And then you know, and when when when that falls, and that that strike fails, you know, the air traffic controllers, well, okay, funnily so, the air traff controllers had actually backed Reagan.

They were like the only union that backed Reagan in the election, and they immediately just get you know, they get gutted for it, which, like I have mixed feelings about because like on the one hand, like, yeah, that's

that's that's what you get. But on the other hand, this is basically what the stories this dis is the consequences that this is basically what the stories like trade unions in the US because at this at this point, everyone realizes that the unions a week and they just start, you know, there's uet to the point where employers are deliberately provoking strikes so that they can just fire all

the unionized employees. And it's extremely effective. In in Britain, the fight is a lot more intense um in in in Ninity four, Thatcher cuts cold, like basically Thatchery wants to provoke a fight with with the coal unions, and so she basically wants to shut down a whole bunch of coal production and fire like twenty miners, and the miners go on strike, and they go on strike for over a year. But Thatcher had basically stockpiled enough cold

to stay off the worst effects of the strike. And then she makes these incredibly elaborate network of deals with like She's like this this whole scab driver like union, like basicallyically this whole network of scab drivers, like make sure you can move the coal around while the strike's going on. There there's all of this stuff, and you know, and and she eventually is able to crust the coal strike.

And this also just just completely annihilates, like the British trade union movement, I mean union participation, I think dreaming Thatcher's term alone falls and it's gotten way worse since then.

So so with with those two incidents, the air traffic control and the coal did did those just kind of make people be disillusioned or did that just like pave the way for similar tactics to be acceptable for every other union that tried to do the same thing both and then the ever thing was fear because you know, so with the air traffic controllers, right, the air traffic controllers are you know, these are the most highly skilled

like people people in there there. These are a bunch of people who are incredibly highly skilled, and they're in there, in there in a logistic industry, right, So you know, in theory, these are the people who have like the maximum amount of impact if they would go on strike.

And when Reagan shows that you can literally just fire twenty four thousand people of like the most highly skilled sort of workers in the in the US, you can fire them and just break the strike and nothing will happen, and you know, the result is total defeat and none

of these people ever work again. That basically spreads this massive wave of fear through the union movements because you know, if they can fire those guys, that can fire anyone, and then you know, the the employers should start doing it.

And the other thing that's been happening here is that for really since the end of the forties, the unions have kind of so we'll we'll talk about this more in in in an interview that's gonna come out probably next week about sort of the history American union movements, but American unions basically so American, like the union movement was built by radical organizers and in the forties and sort of moving on from there, all these people get

expelled from labor movement, and labor fights this basically incredibly intense battle against its own left flank, and you have you know, like, for example, in in there's this thing called the Dodge Revolutionary Movement, right, which is a bunch of mostly black workers in Detroit who are you know, they're they're they're they're forming unions, they're going on strike, but they're also fighting against the the u a W because the U a W is cooperating too closer but

the bosses etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And there's there's there's these you know, there's there's basically this battle between like not even just basically between the unions ranked and file and the radicals and the sort of business union management. And in fighting that battle, the unions had basically like massively

weakened themselves. And then you know, by by by by the time you hit the eighties, especially in the US, the unions are just sort of a shell out their former selves and and Reagan just sort of like smashes them aside. And Thatcher the British unions are much stronger, but you know, I mean that Thatcher is preparing to like like there she she has plans to, like the army is going to come in and suppress the strike. There's these and especially there's there's just, I mean just

an absolutely incredible amount of police violence. Um that's you know, I mean, this is this is something that had like happened before dream strikes, but the the the the level

of intensity of it is just like massively increased. And there's also another thing that's happening basically at the same time of this, which is squeezing the units from the other side, which is there's this I guess you could call it like an internal class war inside the ruling class between well specifically inside inside of the sort of corporate management between the sort of traditional like manager CEO class and the sort of like I guess you could

call them, I don't know, the sort of Wall Street finance bank types and so so yeah, so One of the other things that that happens at the end of you know, basically after the war is the sort of class compromise was talking about like this, this happens inside of the company too, and people start to see the corporation as like a social institution. It has you know, it's like, well, okay, so there's this alliance between middle

management and the workers. And I was like, okay, so we we both worked with each other, and you know, the compromises that you guys got to have unions, but the unions won't sort of disrupt production, will all work together and we'll just make like I don't know, we'll we'll make really really good ballpoint pens together. And so yeah, you have this lince between sort of middle managements and

and these unions. You know, and this this is embedded into the structure of the corporation because you know, you not you not only have the unions, but you have

corporations paying pensions. One of the things that that Reagan does is that Reagan starts, you know, Reagan does this massive series of financial deregulations, and the other part of this agreement basically had been that like the high level of finance class has sort of stayed out of the way of management, and so management kind of like you know, the the you get this like this independent sort of CEO class that that's that's a distinct thing that you

know that there people who come up through the company who managers and worked away at the top. And this is a distinct thing from sort of the finance people who are like they're not supposed to be allowed, like you know, the touch production. But in the nineteen eighties, the finance people start to look at this and go, wait, hold on, why are we not running things? And the finance people have because they have are two things on

their side. One they have a sort of neoliberal ideology, and the second thing they have is so Michael Milken he figures out how to do this thing called a leverage buyout option. It's it's it's a it's a kind

of complicated financial instrument. The short and simple explanation of what it is is he figures out a way too basically go into a bunch of debt, and he gets he gets people to givehim a bunch of money, like in the form of these bonds, and then he uses it just buy out entire companies he buys one of the company. And if you own fits of the company, now you control, you have controlling interest. And so he goes in and she just she just raises the stock

prices of all these companies. And now you know, but I mean, now he's gone into an enormous amount of debts right in order to buy, in order to buy this company, and so you know, in order to pay off that debt, he just starts strip money in the company. And so he starts, you know, anything that can be sold for money that he can put in his pocket

to pay off his debt starts getting sold. And you know, every anything the corporate that the company is doing, it doesn't immediately make money or doesn't immediately raise the stock price gets cut. And so you know, there there, there, there are. There are two major things that a company has that don't immediately make money and don't raise the stock price, and that is pensions and research and development.

And this this has you know, this, this this this this becomes known as the sort of this is the

hustle takeover waves. It gets rebranded as mergers and acquisitions in the nineties, but it's it's this huge sort of wave those these corporate scrips corporate America, and it turns the corporation from this kind of social body where it's like, well, everyone's cooperating and companies sort of have this responsibility to like provide for their workers and provide sort of for like the social good into literally the only like the single entire your purpose of any company is to raise

the stock price. And this yeah, this is really bad. Yeah, and and and you know, the part about it that's awful is that, you know, okay, so all all literally all a corporate rad has to do in order to buy out one of these companies is be able to is be able to offer a price for the stock that's higher from the stock price of the company now. And this means even so they're they're they're there's a

very famous series of battles they buy out. An enormous number of companies get bought out into strip minds like this, and you know, and everything and again these are these are very very profitable companies, right, These are companies with large research development budget. These are companies that are making enormous amounts of money, and they're just completely destroyed in order to sort of just like satiate these just like

absolute Google, corporate like vulture Rader people. This is you know, if you remember, might be too young for this, but Romney's campaign for so yeah. One of one of the reasons why Romney loses is that like he's one of these guys like he's he's like he's the big bang capital guy, and everyone's kind of looked at him and goes like, you're the reason we'd like guide to this

mess in the first place. But the problem, the problem is that these people who have enough money and they have enough power, they were able to do this and in order to stop them, so either there there there's

a massive there's a massive fight. A bunch of people try to take over good Year, who you know, they make the tires, they have the blimps, and Goodyear CEO is like fanatically opposed to all of this because you know, he's he's from the old ceo crop who's like, wow, okay, we're here to like make things instead of you know, increased stock prices. But the problem is the only way he can save off the raiders is by increasing a

stock price. And the only way to increase stock prices is by doing the things the corporate raiders already doing so he starts slashing ptations. He starts slashing with your development budgets. Yeah, and this and this, this sort of cycles because now you have you know, there's there, there's it's it's it's you're not only having pressure for you know,

like the government that's that's anti union. The corporations themselves are being forced to become more anti union because they're you know, they now have this pressure on them from the top down, from from these sort of these sort of finance schools, and the finance schools in a lot of ways just the perfect nilable subjects, right, because they

only see the world in money. They see everything as a market that they literally think that like they they are like these like shamans if if if there's a really good ethnography that I've plugged before on here called liquidated and an ethnography and void yet liquidated in Ethnography of Wall Street where an anthropologist goes onto Wall Street and works there for a while and then you cannot

a bunch of interviews, doesn't it does endthpological stuff. And the way they talk about the market, they they literally talk about as if they're channeling it, right, like it's like something and they're like, these are yea, these are these are that's that's one of the new gods of of our world. That yeah, that's I mean, that's that's

not an uncommon term of phrase to describe stuff like this. Yeah, and and what what what what I think is they just think about it though, is that you know that conception of the market of like every person is just like a peer like completely socially unbounds like thing of capital that you oh, well, okay, if you lose your job here, you can just moved to another firm, right, So this makes sense inside of the context of Wall Street because these people like like these Wall Street firms

they have they have like like thirty pc and turn over a year, and so all these people are constantly being fired and shuffle onto the next job, and fired and shuffle on to the next job. And so you know, they so they they do they do this very common sort of fallacy thing where they assume that because this is the way that it works for them, but this is the way it's gonna work for everyone else, And then they genuine and a lot of these people genuinely

believe this. They're like, well, Okay, So the things we're gonna with, things that we're about to do, like, you know, when we destroy these workers entire lives, when we be you know, when we close their factories, when we take their pensions, when we literally destroyed like every community and every like thing that's every just in your lives, they're like, oh, they'll just pick themselves up and go to another place and they'll be fine, because you know, if you're you're

you know, a Wall Street finance school, like, yeah, that's that's what happens when you get fired every three months. And so these people, these people basically take control of the entire corporate sector. They do. They do this very quickly by you know, they start this in the sort of early eighties. And uh, Milliken, the guy who comes up with the junk bonds leveraged buyout scheme, like he he goes to jail for I think securities fraud. They

get him for fraud. But it doesn't it a lot of those guys, yea, all of these people like again, all of these people are just doing crime. Like now, yeah, that's how finance standards, this is how this is how the Action Park guy got kicked out. You got kicked out doing in all the same stuff. And again I want to put this out, like the stuff they're doing is so illegal that like even the Reagan administration was like, no,

we have to prosecute you. Like it's like this is the this is the Ronald Reagan Justice Departments, and they're like it was it was so much grib Yeah, it's it's really bad. And and you know the result of this is just basically the total visceration of of the working class just like as a movement. And you know, all the left wing parties are sort of shaped by this, and you know, and you know, we we've been focusing on on the US and UH and the UK here,

but this is not the only place this happens. And you know, so one of the you know, like this, this happens, this, this also starts happening like in socialist states. Um and we talked about this in more detail in our interview with Arnessa Kusutra about Bosnia. But one of the big things that Miloshevik is doing in Yugoslavia and when when he takes power and he starts like actually being a real political force in think in eighties, is he starts doing basically all of the same stuff that

that that Reagan attacherent doing. He starts, he starts implemented shocked dooction, he starts privatization, he starts um like marketization, he starts cutting studying, cutting price controls, he starts sort of he starts doing I don't know if decollectivization is quite the right word, because Yugoslavia's economic system is complicated

and weirder than uh, the USSRS. But you know, he does this, and this is one of the things that starts Yugoslavia's death spiral, because you know, you have this enormous economic devastation from the increase in oil prices for the oil shock, and then that gets paired with, you know, the the economic devastation from everyone losing their benefits, people losing de pensions, the state own industries going under and

getting privatized, um the sort of like collective ownership structures, imploading. And the product of this is that, you know, Melosvik looks at this and it's like, Okay, how can I stay in power? And his answer is just genocide on that. It's just genocide on nationalism. And this sort of collapse or sort of state in social life is you know, and and the leaders at the top realizing that they can weaponize sort of nationalism is one of the things

at least directly to the Boston and genocide. Now towards the end of the eighties, the whole Soviet block starts coming apart. Um. Yeah, you know, the Berlin Wall falls and eventually, you know, the Soviet Union dissolves, and the people who are trying to end the Soviet Union, the things that they want basically are like freedom of speech, uh, the ability to like leave the country and basically like Scandinavian style social democracy. And it was like reasonable from

the Soviet Union. Yeah yeah, and you know, I mean these these people like you know, this is these you know, like they they they wanted to live in Scandinavia and instead they got, hey, welcome to the US. But like even worse. Yeah and so yeah yeah, yeah, it's it's really bad. And you know what what they get said is just these this normous wave of privatizations the worldfaret stage just vanishes, and you know this this causes basically

like total societal collapse. Um. Like one of my one of my professors, and this this happens basically across the whole Soviet block one of professions in college, and I think she was fumble gary. Um. She she told me about how dream the nineties like when she when she was growing up, like she and her family would just the only thing they had to eat was raw millet because there's no food. There's there's literally no food anywhere.

The entire economy is collapsed. Nobody has any money, and so you know, I was like, well, okay, everyone's eating raw grain because you know that that's what that's that's the only thing you can you can you have to survive. And you know, it's this it's it's literally so bad that in Russia it causes the single largest life expectancy drop in post World War Europe. It's like like it's the life expected to decrease is about like four years

because so many people die from this. Um you know, and on one of the one of the ways this happens is that there's so the way either they're going to deal with like the state owned industry thing is they they okay, And I've never been able to figure this figure out if it was like they they actually took Murray Rothbard's plan for this or if they just independently developed were a Rothbar's plan for for for dissolving state own the industries, which is give like everyone who

worked in it a share of the company. And so they do this right, and everyone has these shares, but these shares are just like paper, and you can't eat

this paper. So a bunch of sort of like organized crime guys and the people who have been you know, like like the sort of the people who've been richer or like had been sort of connected party people who were just like I'm just gonna cash out start, you know, just just going through cities and they're they'll, you know, they'll be like, okay, we'll give you a pair of gene, like we'll give you some food if you give us their share, and you know, everyone people just give up

their shares. And the result of this is that like just every industry at Russia immediately falls under the control

of just just like absolutely psychotic oligarchs. And you know, the the West definitely sharing this on that this this whole process is engineered by just a bunch of just like pure neoliberal ghoul like Harvards, like weird Harvard grads who gets sent into Russia and who are like, oh, we're gonna we're gonna run the Russian economy and we're gonna like fix everything, and they just just absolutely destroy it.

And you know, the West has the thing they're they're you know, they're they're they're cheering on this whole process. They have this thing about how like everyone has to do belt tightening and it's you're gonna suffer for a

bit and it'll all be worth it. And meanwhile, Boris Jelson is just completely drunk off his asked like shelling the parliament with tanks, while like the U. S. Press is cheering, and you know there's the sort of like you know, the tragedy this is like it's not really like Russia got like more free, you know, like they still they still torture and disappeared anarchists and secret prisons

like you know they're there. They still just like randomly assassinate political dissidence with through increasingly bizarre like poison bullshit. Yeah they sure do. Yeah, but you know the big difference is that a bunch of Harvard grads made an indescribable amount of money. You now, no one has any pensions um and there's there's this is great, like this is a great Russian joke from this period that goes

he's talking about the communists. Everything they ever told us about communism was alive, but everything they ever told us about capitalism was absolutely true. Yeah, that's that seems to be roughly accurate. Yeah, it's it's basically true. And you know, and and the product is sort of neoliberalism coming to Russia is that by by by the end of the nineties, Russia is just literally controlled by the mob and these

sort of monsters oligarchs. And Putin's campaign is like I am better than the mob, and I will bring them. I will bring the mob and the oligarchs under control. And this is you know that, this is how Putin takes power because and he has failed to hold up to that probless to be fair, to be fair, the you are significantly less likely to just like randomly be kidnapped and ransoms. Not me. Oh I have I have wrote for a website. He does not like I could.

That's true, that's true. Yeah, if yeah, if you kiss off Putin, you might be held for ransom. But it's like, you know the number of random people who don't do anything political who are just like randomly held for ransom. Did kind of go down a bit, and like that's I mean, all right, all right, you gotta hand it to Putin, Okay, I give him. Yeah, well okay. The thing on hand to Putin is that he restored the state's monopoly on violence. Now that's not a good thing now,

but he did it. Yeah, he well he did it. And you know this, this was the basis of sort of because his power and political support was that and sort of nationalism. And this is like you know, and and there's always just the sort of liberal line on on on Putin. He's like, oh, he's an SKGB guy, and like oh, it's still communism again. And it's like no, like no, no, and and that this this brings me back to the single thing that I I need everyone to understand about, need to listen, which is that near

liberalism does not decrease the size of the state. Like there there were more there were more bureaucrats now in the Russian State than there were under the Soviet Union. No, And it definitely and in order for it to operate, it definitely extends drastically that like the hands of the state in terms of like like like military police, law enforcement,

like all those things. In order to keep this weird market driven thing alive, you need to have a lot of like enforcement on people who don't have but both both people who like actually make money and then but most of the people who don't make very much money. So it increases not only like the bureaucratic state, but also like the enforcement armor of the state. Yeah, and I think there's there's there's there's there's two interesting ways

this happens. One is that, well, okay, there's three ways happens. One is that anytime someone says they're gonna they're gonna do deregulation, like deregulation does not mean that they're going to decrease the number of regulations there are. What it means is that the regulations are bad for this company, and so they're they're going they're going to they're going to add more regulations in a way that is good

for this company. And the thing is that this actually this you know, this net increases the size of the state. Right there. They're not like they're not like they're not decreasing the number of laws or whatever. They're you know, they're they're they're they're they're writing like incredibly like absolutely incomprehensible banking legislation that like, let's banks charge like interest

rates that previously only organized crime could do. And then there's there's another aspect of this, which is that, you know, so the the welfare that remains right, you know, it becomes means tested, and you know that means that there's so you have the bureaucracy right that like gives you things, and then you have another bureaucracy on top of that that decides whether or not you should be allowed to do the thing it puts you know, there's this this

is just just this like process of abject humiliation that you have to go to to receive anything, yeah, from the state. And it's like and that sucks. And then because that is so awful, there's another layer of bureaucracy, which is like social workers and stuff, whose job it is, in large part, is to help you bypass the second layer of bureaucracy. So that creates another layer. Yeah, there's

there's there's there's so much. Yeah it is, and but but this is you know this, this this is one of the things in the liberals do, which is okay, so you know, you you have you have, you have your two doctrines. Right, you have the thing they actually believe, which is enormous, bureaucratic, military state, and then you have the thing they claim to believe, which is, oh, the state needs to be smaller, state needs to be decentralized,

the state shouldn't it you fear in the market. And so whenever, whenever, like the things that they do get too bad, they have this other thing that can turn to you to go, oh, yeah, the reason there's too much bureaucracy is because the state's getting involved too much. Elect us and we will get rid of the bureaucracy. And then you elect them and they make the state bigger,

and you know, you get this started perpetual cycle. I think the reason people get confused by this is that when when people when most people think of the state, right, they think of the state is something that provide services. You know that the quintessential thing of state does is build roads roads. Yeah, you know, you know when we can talk about how like the US building roads probably doomed the entire earth climate change. Oh yeah, no, like the way that we've done roads around cars and the

type of things we make roads. Yeah it's horrible, but yeah it's awful. Yeah, but but there there's there's there's another thing about roads which is interesting, which is that roads are you know, so the original reason why states built roads was they can move armies around and and this comes back to the core of what a state is. Right, there is nothing in the actual core definition of a state, which is basically it's a hierarch couple of localized monopoly

on violence. Right, there's nothing in that that has that like says at all the state has to do anything for you, right, like if if you know, if two guys with guns show up and sees a place, right, they can create a state. They don't have to give you anything. The state is the fundamental core of the state is just a bunch of armed people who can order people around and you know, people people sort of

can people sort of confuse the two. And the neoliberalisms entire thing is increasing the increasing the military, you know that the part of the state that takes things from you at gunpoint and decreasing the part of the states that like gives you things. And you know, one of one of the there's one of one of the other things that that happens in this period is that labor increasingly stops being about making or doing anything and just

becomes pure guard labor. So, you know, the the the last big neliberal project that doesn't really get talked about as a deliberal project ever, is that mass incarceration is a deliberal project. It started under under Nixon and under Carter. But you know, so when when Reagan takes office that the American prison population is about three thousand. When he leaves office, he has basically doubled it to uh six seven thousand. We have now more than doubled it again.

And you know it it basically it You know when whenever you get a large near liiberal administration that they you know, they double it, right, it basically doubles again dreamed between the Clinton administration, you know, it keeps accelerating and you know this is this is this is the other thing that that neoliberalism brings in, which is that okay, so near liberals and produces this enormous population of people who don't have any jobs, have no opportunities whatsoever, are

just screwed. So what do you do with them? And the answer is slavery and basically everywhere that you stay using neoliberalism, you see massive increases into prison population. Espect like the US is by far the worst example of this,

but this happens. You know that the seven is basically across the world and what what what you see is in place of you know, it's this is this one of the things that dries politics in sort of in real reasons in the US, which is that you have these places that used to sort of have industry is used, particularly like coal mining, things like that, and it gets replaced by prison because prisons, you know, having a prison in your sort of rural town is is the only

way to sort of ensure that you have a large economic base. And so you know, like local local city councils are you know, incredibly pro prison because it's like, oh, well the president would bring your jobs and you know this means that okay, so so so the people a lot of people who are prison guards are just you know, fascists. But there's also people who are prison guards who normally

would just be workers. Yeah no, absolutely, yeah, who have just been sort of but you know, there's nothing left right and they they're fighting, Uh Mike Davis talks about this, that they're fighting this just incredibly desperate, ferocious struggle to like stay in the places they love and stay with their families, and stay with their friends, stay with their communities. And the only way they can do this is, you know, by becoming part of this like just the neo liberal

health state. And you know, they don't like it either, but that's you know, that's what the liberalism is, right, is you no longer have a job. The only job available to you is picking up a gun and pointing it at someone who is exactly the same as you, except you know, they've been thrown into the slavery part of the system instead of the people holding the guns

at the slavery part of the system. And one of the things that that happens a lot of people just really conflate about what neoliberalism is is they can use it libertarianism, yes, and they're not the same thing. And and this, this is a condus is a very confusing problem because well, a, the term nea liberals don't get used in the US all that much. When people use it, they usually use it to mean something bad. And that's

just about it. Yeah, yeah, and and you know, and and also another part of the problem is that even if you go into like the Montpellion Society, right, which you know this is this is this is the arch de liberal institution, and it's just like basically like a think tank generator. There are there are libertarians in there.

There there are there are narco capitalists in the Montpellion Society, and the one Pillion Society is fighting this sort of constant internal battle between the people who actually believe the things that they say publicly, like you actually believe you should have a small state blah bla blah blah blah, and the people who understand that all the small states stuff is just like stuff you tell the masses in order to get them to like slash welfare things, while

you just hire more cops. And probably the single biggest distinction between the libertarians and and the New Liberals is about border control. Now, if if you listen to New Liberals on Twitter, or you listen to Neil or you listen to libertarians, right, capitalism is supposed to have open borders, is supposed to be free movement to people, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Um, if you look at literally everything every neo liberal government

has ever done, it's exactly the opposite. They don't like that. Yeah, yeah, they hit it. And and you know, the this whole thing about like oh you need workers to uh yeah, if if you, if you, if you let workers from other countries go into into the US, like oh they'll they'll they'll decreased wages, blah blah blah blah. So the the period in which the US like had strong unions and strong wages and stuff, with the period where there

was like basically no militarization on the Mexican border. I mean, there were some and you know there there's there's there's a build up sort of dream the Vietnam War and they're they're they're sort of been one back like around election revolution era. But you know it's it's nothing. It's literally nothing like it is today today. The US border

is this just absolute hellscape. Um. I mean just like there's there's there's this enormous perimeter of the U. S border where just the Constitution doesn't apply, where like the Bill of Rights just doesn't exist. If if if you're if you're if you're close enough to the border, it's

just it's all suspended. Uh, it's not entirely supended, but like basically the border patrol can just do whatever the funk they want to you, and you know, like this, this, this is this is how the border patrol was able to be deployed in Portland, right because Portland's technically on the border and the border patrol has increased power is there and the actual goal is so people people are always going to move right, And what with the New Labels figured out was that you know, these these these

enormous miket labor populations, the best way you could exploit them as if they're just absolutely terrorized by just this, you know, an incredible sort of ferociously hostile, murderous just border regime run by fascists. And it works, like they kill, they kill enormous numbers of people, They do horrible things, They put people with concentration camps, They sterilize people they like, they sexually assault children, they disappear people they like, still

people's babies. And this is you know, this is what neoliberalism is, right, This, this is what it actually is in practice. This is you know, like, this is the this is the this is the policy that is imposed

by they liberal states. And I think I want to end on that and I want to end on a note about what the quintessential sort of figure of neoliberalism is, because I think, you know, in the neil liberal's mind, right, the quintessential neo liberal figure is like the small entrepreneur who's like guy who's you know, turned their own creativity and like harnessed it into like the ability to create value, and you know, they're creating things in the world and

they're reaching themselves. And I think a lot of leftists think of it as like the quintessial the liberal is you know, a Chicago, Chicago School of Economics person. Yeah,

and I want to suggest that they quit. The single quintessential like neo liberal figure is a riot cop, and specifically specifically that the you know, if if you know, if every everyone by now knows what a riot cop looks like, right, I want everyone to go back and even even from from like two thousand one, look at what a riot police officer looks like in two thousand one versus what they look like now. And then go back to even like the nineteen sixties and look look

at look at what the those guys look like. Yeah, I know, looking at the footage from the sixties and riot cops is like really depressing because they're like, I could take these guys. Yeah, they're they're just wearing T shirts. They're just guys. It's it's way more of a fair fight. They have T shirts and sticks. We could have T shirts and sticks. That is that it's like the a riot of the sixties. It sounds like now they also in some cases will be much more willing just to

murder tons of people. Now there is that exception, but in like a big street brawl, it is it is generally a bit of a fair fight. I mean, I will say also sixties police love love dogs. They love like sicking dogs people, which is really bad. Yeah, I'm I'm looking at the looking at at the two thousand one riot cops, and yeah, they are not nearly as

robo copy. That's what they are now. Drin the Tin Chilean uprising in I was talking to someone in Chile and they were talking about how like they were describing it as like the cop we're just like like something had a change, beating Ninja turtles like it was like fighting the shredder. There's even even even the L. A. P. D. Riot cops for the nineteen two riots. They're also still just wearing like shirts like they just have they just have colored shirts and one stick. Yeah and now versus

now they're wearing there whatever dumb armor they have. Yeah. But you know, and this is this is you know and this this is this is if if you want to trace the path in near liberalism, it's this. It's a lot of the army surplus stuff that like the police have gotten a lot of. It's really scary. A lot of it also sucks, like a lot of those a t v S. Every like everyone who's ever had the drive them hates them. But you know, like like my my like absolutely tiny dinky town has a bear

cat and that shouldn't that shouldn't be. And I know where it is too, I know where the bear cat is. It's like, there shouldn't be a bear cat. My town is a tax cutout, like it's it's literally a tax carve out like that that's the reason, that's the really reason it exists. And it has a bear cat, And like, you know, this is this is sort of the this is the consequence of of of what neoliberalism, isn't it.

Vicky usta Well talked about this on on on the Occupy episode it's it's the cops become more like, become more like the army. The army becomes more like the cops. And you know, the the result is this sort of pent opticn surveillance states where like if you and seven

people stand on a sidewalk, sixteen cops will show up. Yeah, they've they've really uh excelled in making the capitalist realism Dumer philosophy be almost like the base philosophy for anyone who takes two seconds to think about the world that they live in. And you know, and this has been

really effective in a lot of ways. But you know, David Graeber point had pointed this out, which is that the problem with doing this is that, you know, okay, so like the the norm was some amount of guard labor, right, the enormous amount of sort of prison guards. Like that's all unproductive labor, right. You know, you you you make you make some of that money back off that the companies make some of the money back off the slave labor. Right. But like, but that in general there the guards aren't

adding anything. They're not they're not they're not producing any goods um and not really much service either. No, and and and this is you know this this this is a problem, right because because neoliberalism is profit driven, and so you know, what you have is is that the system has a choice between either it functioning or it making it appear as if it's the only system. And that's the thing is that it's it's it's kind of

profit driven. But honestly, the more that I the more that you've been talking like, no, it's just about eliminating any alternative. So it's not not even profit driven. It's that it's forcing itself to be the only acceptable option. Yeah, that's how it gets so much of its power. Yeah, but but you know, the the problem with this is that all of that sort of ideological coercion only last as long as the police can hold the streets, which is which is they're good at it there, They're sometimes

they're decent. You know. One of the story I want to end on is so there's you know, there has been in some with more varying degrees of success, there has actually been resistance in neoliberalism. And there are places where people have won the people. There are places where people have run the I m f out those people. There's places where people have you know, defeated coups where they've like you know, where they've where they've they've they've

successfully sort of taken over the state. There's places where you know, I mean there's there's there's places like you know, we're gonna talk about couple of things in Mexico, but yeah, I mean there's there's the Appetittas who have you know, are constantly besieged, but have carved out a territory in which they have you know, like totally defeated the Mexican

almost really defeated the Mexican state. And I think one of the sort of forgotten incidents in in the two thousands is this uprising in Wahaka where the yeah, yeah, there's a there's an enormous sort of a bunch of

teachers are going on strike. And you know, Wahawka's teaching unions are enormously powerful, incredibly radical, and so you know that they one of the things they do is that they go into the city and they have these like these giants start of protest tents that they showed up and they have these like giant camps and she just in six the police attack them, and so they start attacking and and the teachers fight back, and so you have there this you know this, this this massive battle

erupts um just in this city and you know this is this is all the police attack at like three in the morning, right, but they they there's not enough of in the clear teachers out and the teachers hold and they hold and they hold, and the city of Wahaka wakes up to this just enormous battle in the streets between a bunch of like teachers and the cops. And when Wahawka wakes up, they are just like what

the fuck is this? And you know, they joined the teachers and they go fight the cops and they they they're largely successful in like like they beat them, they drive, they drive the police from the city and you know, and and for for for for for several months, the city is basically under the control of these like direct democratic councils and like they're there are these there are these things they call the mega marshes, which just a million people will do a march to the streets and

the police there's the police just can't stop them because you know, there's a million people and yeah, that's that's the only way that I've seen that be successful, whether it be you know, just to sure sheer massive people driving cops out of a police station, or you know, an entire city rallying behind people like in in in Portland when the fence came, it's like you need to have like everybody to show up because they could fight

two hundred like twin canarchists. They're pretty easily you usually, um, but when you have like all of the moms and dads and regular people come up, that is much more of a complicated of fight on like on on their end, because yeah, we'll still have the teenage front liners throwing at the cops, but when you have like regular people behind them, that creates the whole media narrative to be

something totally different. And it got the feds to back down in Portland when Trump really wanted to not happen.

And I think also the thing, the thing that that was increding incredible hawky is it wasn't just people sort of like standing behind them, like maybe like tens of thousands of people just joined the fight in in in a way that you know it like if you know, if if there's like fifty thou people in a city throwing bricks at you like you you either have to start shooting into the crowd or try to hold them.

Can't you can't. And even when he start shooting into the crowd, Yeah, they tried it and it made it made even people the crowds were larger, and like, you know, one of the things that happens is that the revolutionaries try to like you know, they go to the radio station or like okay, well you broadcast this. The radio station says no, and so they start seizing radio stations

all over all over the city. Yeah, and they yeah, and then you know, and then they had they had these they had these like bonfire at the edge of the city where if one's at the meets and like they're there's they're they're sending their they're they're sending radio like messages like over the radio stations they've taken over from like barricade to barricade, and you know, eventually the police and like the like the Mexican Army shows up and at that point they're able to sort of retake

the city. And there's a couple of other things happening in Mexico at this point that are sort of this is giants sort of left wing tide, and the way that it gets stopped is that the Mexican army basically fully kicks off the drug war and they kill I mean, I've seen numbers up to like eight hundred thousand people in ten years. They just they basic they basically genocides

the indigenous population of of of Mexico. And you know, I think I think that's that's that's sort of a place to leave it because more hopeful note to end to the show on. Yeah, but I mean I think I think it is it is worth it is you know, it's it's it's it's worth thinking about. Is one. It is possible to beat the police too. The ruling class will literally bathe the entire country in blood, like they

will destroy their own country. Is different the way I mean this gets discussed and sell happen here, But like the way the American military works, I think it will

be less likely to do that. Yeah, well, I mean, and I want I want to put this o. Like so the thing that the army doesn't directly murder people what they do is but what they do is basically like they they set off a bunch of fighting between the cartels and then and the cartels fucking murder enormous members people you know it will happily murder each other. But yeah, yeah, well and also you know, I mean it's it's also this is this is you know, it's

the thing with the MYSIC and state. It's it's very, very difficult to tell where the Gartels stop and where the Mexican Army begins because a lot of them are the same thing. And like you know that there's yeah, that's hopeful. Note to end on and just but just to make the ending a bit better, I do want to say I'm no longer going to call anyone, uh neoliberal. I made this joke in the group chat yesterday and nobody responded to it, so it was set. So I'll

say it now. I'm only going to call them Thomas Anderson liberals. That that that that that's that is what I'm calling them now. Um, and I'll make everyone wait two seconds to understand what's going on and then sigh and then motion to get me out of the room. So thank you Chris for talking about the prom and thank thank thank thank you all for joining us. That this this has been NI could happen here. Um. You

can find us on Instagram and Twitter. If you so desire, if you want to get, if you want, if you want people to know that you follow us, create a whole network of surveillance based so everyone knows what you're watching and what you're listening to, to create a better picture for you are online so you can get better advertisements. Yeah, follow us online. Yeah, joined the Panopticon. Throw bricks at it. It is pretty funny how they tricked everyone into carrying

around gps is wherever they go. It's it's pretty funny. Yeah, it's it's amazing. It's like, oh, everyone, everyone, everyone in my town is like, oh, we can't get the vaccine. They have micro trips and it's like you have a phone. It's hilarious. They tricked us into carry around speakers, cameras and gps is everywhere we go. It is really funny.

It's amazing, all right. Well, by Funny Fye. I'm Evrodsky, author of the New York Times bestseller fair Play and Find Your Unicorn Space, activists on the gender division of labor, attorney and family mediator. And I'm doctor as eating a rootcar, a Harvard physician and medical correspondent with an expertise and the science of stress, resilience, mental health, and burnout. We're so excited to share our podcast Time Out, a production

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for podcasts, but don't take our award for it. Find Against the Chronicles podcast and my Heart Radio app or wherever you get your podcast. Welcome to it could happen here. Um. The show that is normally introduced by me shouting a tonally, but today I did like a professional because today myself and my colleagues Garrison and Christopher are talking to someone. I'm very excited to chat with Mr Corey. Doctor. Oh Corey, Well the show. Thank you very much. It is my

pleasure to be on it. It's great to meet you all and to be talking to you today. Corey. You do a lot of writing about kind of technology and surveillance and cultural issues around those. You're also an author. You've written some great fiction. I think today will probably talk most around books like Attack Service and walk Away, but you've written a lot of wonderful stuff. Um, and you've also worked with the e f F for years and years. Um, so you you you're coming at what

I love about. I mean, we're gonna be talking today broadly about surveillance and kind of the future of of the Internet, will probably talk about some metaverse e stuff. What I love about the way in which you think and write about the future is that you're kind of coming about it from a number of angles, both as like a tech industry journalist, as a fiction writer imagining the future, and as somebody who's kind of weighted in

as an activist to this. And UM, I'm kind of wondering where do you see like the greatest potential for actual like change? Um? Is it? Is it in kind of is it in lobbying and engaging as an activist or is it in sort of imagining as a as a as a fiction writer? What might be? So I I see them as adjuncts uh, you know, diversity of tactics and all that stuff. Um. The thing is that tech policy arguments are often very abstract, uh, and they are only visceral for the people who would provide the

kind of political will to do something about them. Usually that that comes when it's too late, right, People people care about tech monopolies once the web is turned into five giant websites stilled with screenshots of text from the other four. But not when Yahoo is on a buying

spree of tech companies. And we're saying, oh, that's how tech companies grow, and all tech companies will grow in the future by buying all their nascent competitors and rolling them up into a big vertically integrated monopoly, which is kind of how we got Facebook and Google and the rest of it. And um, you need to be able to make policy arguments to policy people, but you also need to be able to put uh, some some sinew and muscle on the bone of that highly abstract kind

of argument. And and that's where fiction comes in. It's kind of a like a fly through of like an emotional architects rendering of what things might look like if we get it wrong or if we change it. It preserves the sense of possibility, you know. I think one of the great enemies of change is the inevitable is um of capitalist realism and the idea that there is no alternative. So if you can make people believe in an alternative, then they might work for one. And certainly

the opposite is true. If people don't believe there is any alternative possible, they won't work for one, why why would you? Uh? And so all of that together, I think is part of how you mobilize people to care about stuff. Yeah, I mean that makes that makes total sense, and it is. It's difficult, I think because I first came into technology as a journalist, and it's very difficult

to get people to care about stuff. And I think in particular privacy, which there was, it has been one of the most interesting cases of like the kind of thought leaders in in an industry freaking out over something and people not really having an issue with it because we kind of all agreed to hand over all of our data to a number of big side not all, but I don't know. I'm interested in your thoughts on that.

I understand the idea that like fiction is um is a much better way to try to get people to care about these things because it makes them feel as opposed to kind of reporting on I think people can get kind of lost in the weeds of acquisitions and like uh, pivots and you know, tech companies acquiring each other and whatnot. Well, look, I think that the part of the problem with privacy. The reason that we we're late to wake up and do something about it is

because it was obfuscated. You know, if you've ever seen the maps of like how an ad tech stock works, the flow diagrams. Uh. And there are some things that are complicated because um, there are some things that are hard to understand because they're complicated. And then there are some things that are made complicated so they will be hard to understand. And I think in the case of the surveillance industry, the latter is true. And it wasn't just that they were trying to play us for suckers.

They were also playing their customers for suckers. Right. One of the reasons that the ad tex st act is such a snarled hair ball is so that the people who buy ads and the publishers who run ads can't tell how badly they're being ripped off by their intermediaries. But this also has the side effect of making it very hard for us to know as the as the kind of inputs to that system, how our own dignity and private lives and safety and integrity are being put

to risk by these systems as well. Um, And you know, it may be that people if they had been well informed about what was going on, they might have been indifferent as well. But I think that when most people were very poorly informed, right when all there was was this kind of that privacy discourse was just like stuff as being your personal information is being siphoned up, but no kind of specifics on how that was being used and how that was being done and how it might

bring you to harm. Um, it's not clear that that you can say that that the reason they were indifferent is because they were fully informed and didn't care if you know that they weren't fully informed, if you know that they were barely informed. Mhm. I mean yeah, I

think you're absolutely right. Because when the Cambridge analytic Is scandal broke, which was I think one of the first times that there was a really huge international story that made it clear some of the consequences of all this, like it did provoke a lot of a lot of anger.

Um I I do you worry at all that, Like there's a degree to which because it because people got tricked or whatever you want to frame it, and it's glow the the kind of um financialization of people's private data, of people's like personal information, because that has gone so far, there's a risk that people are just kind of inured to it. Um. Yeah, well, well, I mean that kind of gets to my theory change here, which is that there is always going to be uh a point of

maximum and difference peak in difference. You know, Um, if you think about something like being a smoker, the likelihood that you care about cancer goes up the longer you smoke and the more health effects you feel. And certainly there will come a point in your life when you will only ever grow more worried about the effects of smoking on your life. But there's also a point of

no return. Right if the point at which you you're you're concern reaches the point where you're actually going to do something about smoking is the day you get diagnosed with stage four on cancer, then that, um, denialism can slide into nihilism. You can say, why bother, right, it's too late. It's like if if we spend years arguing about the crashing population of rhinos and then finally there's only one left, and you say you're right, there was

a problem. You might as well say, like, why don't we eat him and find out what he tastes like?

It's not like the rhinos are ever going to come back, right, And so for me, so much of the work is about shifting the point of peak indifference to the left of the point of no return on the timeline, so that people actually start to care earlier, because it's it's it's if you haven't a genuine problem, right, like the overcollection of our private data, the mishandling of it, the abuse of it, that genuine problem will eventually produce tangible

effects that are undeniable, right that the the our ability to ignore it just goes monotonically down. It's the thing about the climate emergency. You know, even if Shell had not our Exxon had not hidden the data had had on the role that it's products were playing in climate change in the seventies, it would have been hard to muster a sense of urgency in the seventies, right because the story is that in fifty years something bad's going

to happen. But here we are fifty years on, something bad is really happening, and a lot of people are caring about it. They still don't seem to care about it enough, or maybe they've slid into nihilism. There's certainly, I think on the part of the elites, a kind of nihilistic sense that maybe they can all retreat to like mountaintops and build fortresses and breathe their children by harrier jet you know, and and and you know that nihilism, I think is is what you get when the point

of no return has passed before peak denial. Uh and the privacy um catastrophe that is looming in our future that we haven't quite reached yet. I mean, we've just had the first kind of trickles of the dam breaking that's in our future. It hasn't been enough yet to shift people away from it. But but we might be getting there, right, We might We might eventually be able

to do something about it. And one of the things that will hasten that moment is UM restoring competition to those industries that one of the reasons that uh, the industry that spies on us is able to foster denial and indifference is because it is a monopolized industry. To companies control eighty percent of the ad market, Google and Facebook, and as as monopolists, they're able to extract huge monopoly rents. They're among the most profitable companies in the history of

the world. And some of those monopoly rents, rather than being returned to shareholders, can be mobilized to distort policy, to to make us think that there's nothing wrong with the way that they collect data and use it to forestall regulation, to pay Nick Clegg four million a year to go around Europe and the world and say, as the former Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, I'm here to tell you that Facebook is the friend of

the democratic regimes of the world. And and you know, if if the anti monopoly movement, which is a thing I've become very involved with, is able to go from strength to strength it's surging now, then one of the things that we might do is is destroy the ammunition that's being used by these large monopolistic firms to distort our policy and harm us in these ways with impunity.

And and then maybe we can actually take the the nascent and natural alarm that people do feel about the invasions of their privacy and and actually turn that into privacy policy that is meaningful in respect of these big

companies that actually reigns them in. Yeah, and I think I like that you frame it as a privacy catastrophe because I think I mean, what I just exhibit it earlier in this episode, is this this tendency that I certainly see in myself and I see in other people to get kind of beaten down by the continued um excesses of this industry and the continued kind of failure of anything to be done to curb it. And I

think you're right. It has to be viewed as um as a calamity and I and nothing I think makes that clearer than some of watching some of the stuff Facebook in particular has put out about their plans for the metaverse, and kind of thinking back from all of these sensors they want to store in your house, all of the ways in which they want to map everything

around you, um, they never you know. They they kind of advertise as like you'll be able to play basketball with somebody who's in a different state, But really what it is is you're giving Facebook access to every measurement of your body and you know, the pulse of the beat of your heart and all this this stuff that like, maybe we don't quite know what it would be useful for from financialization standpoint, but they it's unsettling to think

that they'll have to find a way because they'll have it. You know, I don't know, I don't know what is be done about that other than, as you say, kind of breaking up these monopolies. Well and and I mean breaking up is like one of the things we can do to monopolies. And and it takes a long time, you know, um A T and T. The first enforcement action against it happened sixty nine years before it was broken up in nineteen two. I don't think we can

wait that long. But there's a lot of intermediate steps, right Like we can force them to do interoperability, we can block them from from predatory acquisitions. We can force them to divest of companies and engage in structural separation.

We can do all kinds of things. It actually looks like the United Kingdom is going to stop them from buying Giffee, which might seem trivial after all, it's just like animated jifts, but um, what it actually is a surveillance beacons in every social media application, right because if you're hosting a Jeff from Giffee in your message to

someone else, Facebook has telemetry about that message. Um. And so the the the not the i c O. The competition, competition and Markets Authority in the UK was like, yeah, this is just gonna strengthen your market power. That's why you're buying this company. You have too much market power already. We're not gonna let you do it. Um. It was almost the case that the Fitbit merger was blocked Google's Fitbit merger. I think it's still not too late to

roll it back. And Lena Cohn, who's the new fire breathing dragon in charge of the FTC, who is an astonishing person who was a law student three years ago. Uh, she has said, oh, yeah, this this like one point three trillion dollars worth of mergers and acquisitions that you're doing right now to get in under the wire before we started enforcing. Guess what, We're gonna unwind those fucking

mergers if it looks like they were anti competitive. And not only are you going to lose all the money you spent on the M and A due diligence and the paperwork and the corporate stuff, but all that integration you're going to do between now and then, you're gonna have to de integrate those companies. When we tell you that you don't have uh, you don't have merger approval

and you're on notice. You can't come and complain later, right, Like you can either get in line and wait for us to tell you whether or not your merger is legal, or you can roll the dice. But I tell you what, if you come up sneak, guys, you are fucked. And that is amazing, right, that is a powerful change in American industrial policy that really makes a difference. Yeah, I mean that is a beautiful thing to think of being

in place and actually hitting as hard as it could. Obviously, the concern is that, like who will be you know, picking the head of the FTC in three years in change? And like how how how much influence is Peter Teal going to have their in the like um, yeah, well, and Peter til of course love's monopolies. He says, competition

is for losers. So you're right. I mean, obviously elections have consequences, but you know, one of the ways that you win elections is by making material differences in people's lives, and so you know, if people are policy, then uh. One of the most important policies by to set so far is hiring Lena Khan and her colleagues canter at the d R j and Tim Wu and the White House. Yeah,

I mean I would. I would love nothing more than to see particularly like Facebook reigned in at this point because I'm one of the casualties of the of the of the the ad market like crash of started in

like two sixteen seventeen. It feels like the odds of them being able to, like, I don't know, we we've got three years where we know, you know, theoretically these policies will be in place, and and I don't know, I'm hopeful, like when I when I because the Republicans are talking a lot about regulating social media too, about even breaking up these companies, but they often tend to be talking about it in a very different way and with a very different kind of end goal in mind.

Um And I guess you know, obviously they know that, right and Facebook they are well aware that like this might be a way out the clock situation for them,

and they have some arrows in that quiver. I mean that may be so, but also remember that Facebook's users are outside of the US, and that even a change administration here won't won't UM put Margueritte vest Dagger, who's the Competition Commissioner in the EU back in the bottle, and she's another fire breather, right, She's another amazing person. And so you know I wouldn't be too quick to

write that off. I mean Facebook needs its foreign markets. Yes, it's u S customers are worth more to anyone else because we have the most primitive privacy frameworks, so it can extract a lot more data for like we're the we're the richest people with a worse privacy. So that's that's UM. You know, it's a real home court advantage for Facebook, but it needs that other eighty percent of its users. It wouldn't be what it is without them,

and that makes it subject to their jurisdiction. And you know, one of the things about ad driven firms like Facebook, UM is that they really need sales offices in country. Uh so you know, even before we we had the proliferation national firewalls, which don't get me wrong, I don't

think it's a good thing. UM. These large global firms that operated UM sales offices in country, in every territory they worked in, were vulnerable to regulation because if you have staff in a country, then you have someone that can be arrested, right, and so it's not like they can just be like I don't know, like the Tour Project, which just you know, it has people um who who sit and hack on tour who are close to lawyers

who can defend people who sit on hack and on tour. Uh. You know, if the Tour Project had to have staff full time in Turkey and China and Russia and Syria in order to operate, it would be a very different project. But you know, Facebook and Twitter and Google, they all have staff in those countries and it makes them vulnerable

to regulation. And so, you know, China is really interesting because because m j and Ping, for his own reasons which are not my reasons and stink from the Democrats and the Republicans reasons, is doing stuff to rein in

big tech in China. And it's actually quite interesting because you know the argument that Nick Legg makes when he says why we shouldn't break up Facebook, as he says, uh, you know, China is coming for your UM, for your I P and for your industrial competitiveness with its big tech giants that it treats as national champions that projects soft power around the world. Meanwhile, China is like these

tech giants, we hate these tech giants. They present a countervailing force to the hedgemony of the the Communist Party and the and the executive branch that she should bring sets at the top of we're gonna neuter them, and we're gonna we're gonna disappear their founders, like Jack Mont to fucking Googlogs right Like, they're like, we don't want national champions because the nation that you know, we Bow and Ali Baba is the champion four is we Bow

and Ali Baba and ten Cent they're not. They're not champions for China by any stretch of the imagination. They don't give a shit about China. And so you know, they're all of these companies are going to face regulatory pressure, anti monopoly regulatory pressure all over the world, and you're you're so much more um optimistic. I guess about about the potential for that to bite than a lot of people I talked to, and I think more knowledgeable as well.

And I kind of wonder because there's this very strong, obviously influenced by decades of cyberpunk attitude that like, we're in this age of mega corporations whose power is you know, there's nothing that can stop Amazon from doing what Amazon wants to do. Right, Facebook is going to keep doing whatever they want to do forever. You you clearly don't believe that. And I you know you, you clearly know

your stuff. I'm wondering why you think that that image is still persist so persistent that like attitude in our heads, of these these these are kind of monolithic forces in our society that um just have to be endured. So I think it's a belief in the great forces of history, right, um, and the great man theory. You know that the the these um. Uh, you know that these rich people are driving history. Yeah, these these these powerful figures are driving history.

They're in charge there in the driver's seat. I mean, that's kind of what's behind Trump arrangement syndrome, right, the idea that Trump is uniquely powerful and talented demagogue as opposed to just like a demagogue shaped puzzle piece that fit in the demagogue shaped hold that was left by the collapse of credibility of capitalism. Uh. And you know, a man who is clearly too stupid to be a cause of anything and will only ever be the effect

of something. And uh, you know, the for me, the theory of of history and how it goes was really transformed by an exercise that my friend Ada Palmer does. So. Aida is a science fiction novelist. She's she's just published the fourth book of her Terra Ignota series, her debut series. It's an incredible series of books. But she's a real like kind of multi talented, multi threat. So she's a librettiston singer who has produced album length operas based on

the Norse mythos. She's also a tenured history of um a tenured professor of Renaissance history in Florence at the University of Chicago, where she studies heterodox information, pornography, homosexuality, witchcraft,

and so on. During the inquisitions and every year with her undergrads, she reenacts through a four week long live action role playing game, the Election of the Medici's Pope, and each of her students takes on the role of a cardinal from a great family and the in the actual election of the I forget what year was, uh, fourteen ninety or something, I forget, but they each take on this role and they have a character sheet and

has motivations like a dinner party, murder mystery. But for four weeks they make a alliances break, alliances stab each other in the back UH stage surprise reversals, And at the end of the four weeks there's a u faux Gothic cathedral on campus and they dress up in costume. Aida has a a Google alert for theater companies that are getting rid of their costumes, so she clothes them in the garb of the Medici's cardinals, and they gather and they go into a room, and then a puff

of smoke emerges, and you get the new Pope. And every year, four of the final candidates UH there are four final candidates rather and two of them are always the same, because the great forces of history bear down on that moment to say those people will absolutely be in the running for the for the papacy, and two of them have never once been the same, because human action still has space to alter the outcomes that are

prefigured by the great forces of history. And so for me, the idea of being an optimist or a pessimist has always felt very fatalistic. It's this either way, this idea that the great forces of history have determined the outcome and human action has no bearing on it. And I think that rather than optimism or pessimism, we can be hopeful,

And that's the word you use before. Hope is the idea not that you can see a path from here to the place you want to get to, but rather that you haven't run out of things that you can do to advance your your goal, right, Because if you can take a step to advance your goal, you can ascend the gradient towards the peak that you are trying to reach, then you will attain a new vantage point, and from that vantage point, you may have revealed to you courses of action that you didn't suspect before you

took that step. So, so long as the step is available, there's always another step lurking in the wings that you can't see from where you are. And the reason I'm hopeful about this is I can think of like fifty things that could improve the monopoly picture that we're living in now, and it's up from thirty things last year.

And so even though I don't know how we get from here to a better future, and even though I absolutely see the blockers you're talking about Trump landslide, uh losing Congress because they let Joe Mansion and Christmas Cinema Newter the build back better, Bill, Um, you know, all of those things that can happen. I have hope, you know, which is not the same as optimism or a belief that things will be great or even even like a sense a lack of a sense of foreboding. I have

that in spades. But I have hoped that when the next phase of the fight begins, that we will have many UM vulnerable spots we can strike at, and that we can capitalize on whichever victories we attain to find more vulnerabilities and move on. I think that's so important, and I think it goes in line with to bring up climate change again, the idea that like one of the most toxic things you can think are e climate

change is that they're nothing to do. We're already past every point of no return and there's no there's no positive action because it just leads you to doing the same thing as the people who deny it. UM. And it's Yeah, I think it's it's very important to UM recognized that like, not only are there things you can do, but when you do those things, you start taking those steps, other steps reveal themselves. Yeah, And you know what, if

you're feeling nihilistic about about climate. I'm nearly through Saul Griffith's book Electrify Uh. Saul's an old friend of mine. He's MacArthur Winner's electrical engineer, and he's just done the He's it's a popular engineering book. It's one of my favorite genres. They're like popular science books, except instead of telling you about how science works, they tell you about how engineering works. And he's basically like, here is why all the estimates of how much renewable as we need

are hugely overestimated. And it's basically that like keeping uh fossil fuel power online requires a lot of fossil fuel, right, something like of that estimate is just it's the energy that we need to make the energy, and it's not present in electrical models. Here's how we can manufacture it. Here's how we can distribute it. Here is basically how if we can figure out the financing, Americans can UH spend less money every year than they do now to get more stuff that they love every year. That we

can do this without hair shirts. It's a spectacular book. Um, And you know, I don't agree with everything Saul says every all the time, but he is very careful about his technical facts. There aren't technical errors in this. There might be assumptions that we disagree with, but as a technical matter, he's basically written a piece of design fiction in which, over the next fifteen years, using clever finance and and solid engineering, we really actually do avert the

climate emergency. And Yeah, as always, kind of the main barriers to doing the best version of the thing is the political realities on the ground. You know, you have to but I think that's the that's the value of at least trying to make it clear that there are options. I wanted to shift for a moment um. I was thinking recently about I think probably the earliest back book of yours that I've read, Pirate Cinema, which is heavily involved.

I think I'm gonna you know, if you're one of the folks like me who was on the Internet back when you know, file sharing sites, when that was a huge topic of discussion, when the r i A Was going after people, when like copyright was kind of a a much more prevalent part of kind of the online discourse. Um, it deals a lot in that and these kind of I think there's elements of it that kind of prefigured what Disney has done buying up every imaginable fictional property

in the world. And that's kind of the the elements of dystopia that book deals with is is, you know, the attempts of these this, these giant multinational entertainment corporations to shut down the free tape trading of ideas, remixing

and all that stuff. And then kind of thinking about the difference between the focus of that and the focus of books like Attack Surface, where you're really delving more into, you know, I the fictional versions of real life companies like Tiger Swan that do it, uh the surveillance on protesters and all around the world, and that are kind of using tactics that were pioneered by other contractors and

like Iraq and Afghanistan years earlier. I guess kind of the things that I find interesting about that as as I can remember, when I was first on the Internet, the big social kind of crusades online with the people that that I paid attention to at least, was all around copyright. It was about not just you know, the attempts to stop people from remixing and sharing copyrighted work, but about um attempts to like buy up copyrights and like into these these ever kind of larger uh agglomerations,

and and that's kind of hit. It seems to have hit like a terminal point with the you know, movies like Ready Player one and kind of a lot of the stuff we're seeing in Marble where everything is showing up everywhere Space Jam two. UM. I guess the part of it that feels less dystopian the days attempts to crack down on file sharing, which I don't think went

kind of in the worst case scenario. I'm interested actually in your thoughts on that, um, because I can remember, you know, when the r I A would be threatening people with years in jail and whatnot over sharing stuff on kaza we seem to be I don't know. Is it just that it gets less like I'm interested in your in your thoughts on that. Is it just that it's less publicized when they cracked down on people, or has kind of the nature of their response to that

really changed. Well. I think that what's happened with the kind of steady state of the copyright wars has been the introduction of um brittleness and fragility into our speech platforms like Twitter, UH and and Facebook and YouTube, where it's very easy to get material removed by by making copyright claims UM. And you know, we see that with the sleazier side of the reputation management industry, where they

use bogus copyright claims to take down criticisms. You know, there was a group of leftists who are really celebrating the idea that if you if Nazis were marching in your town, you could stop them from uploading their videos by playing copyrighted music in the background. And I was like, you have no idea, what a terrible fucking idea that is. And you know, within a couple of years, cops and

Beverly Hills were doing it. Whenever people tried to film the police there, they would just turn on some Taylor Swift to try and stop uploading UM. You know, the thing about the copyright wars is that the real action

turned out to be in UM wage theft through monopolization. So, you know, the neutering and destruction of label independent music distribution platforms like Khazah or grow Ster or Napster, and the Supreme Court decision, the Groster decision that supported that meant that the only UM way that you could launch a service like that was in cooperation with the big labels,

and the you know, most successful one is Spotify. Spotify is actually partially owned by the labels, and the labels use that ownership stake to negotiate a kind of formalized wage theft where they allowed for a lower purse stream rate because when they get royalties for a stream, part of that money goes to their musicians, and that meant that the firm Spotify retain more profits which it returned to it in the form of higher dividends, and dividends

go just straight to their shareholders. They don't that there's no claim that musicians can make on this. And because they set the benchmark rate, it meant that everyone, irrespective of whether you were assigned to one of the big three labels, ended up getting the same perse stream eight as as Universal's artists. So they were able to structure

the whole market. In the meantime, in the industrial side, UH copyright laws, notably Section twelve of one of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which is a law past that makes it a felony to remove DRM to bypass a technical protection measure UM that has become the go to system for blocking repair interoperability UH and to prevent third parties from um UH from from creating services or add ons that accomplish positive ends like improved accessibility, improved security,

um AD blocking and privacy and so on. They just say, well, you know, we we put a one molecule thick layer of DRM around say YouTube, and when you make a YouTube downloader for archival purposes or whatever, UM, you you just create a um A UH, you bypass our technical protection measure. And so you're committing a elmy and you can go to prison for five years and and pay a five dollar fine. And so you have this like relentless monotonic expansion of DRM into like automotive tractors. Medtronic

uses it to block people from fixing ventilators. UM. So you know, this, this UM assault on the ability to reconfigure a technology that is ever more prevalent in our lives and that increasingly holds our lives in its in its hands right its choices determine whether we live or die, has been really consequential. And I know, we don't really think of it as a copyright problem. We think of it as right to repair. We think of a security auditing our accessibility. But the rule that is being used

to block into operability is a copyright law. It's what printer companies used to stop you from buying third party inc um. It's what Apple uses to stop you from installing a third party app store. And you know the absence of a third party app store is why when Apple removed all the working VPNs in China, Chinese users couldn't just switch to another app store that had working VPNs in it. And so you know that this um endgame of the copyright wars is I think a lot

more dystopian than merely suing college kids. Uh, it's it's actually really screwed us in ways that are that are hard to fathom. Yeah, it's a fascinating example of kind of dystopic creep because, at least kind of from my

more more ignorant position. When I was nineteen, I was like worried that all of these these people remixing music and movies that I liked, like we're going to get cracked down on or have their stuff pulled um, and the the kind of thing that I didn't I don't think a lot of people saw coming until it hit.

I certainly didn't was what you were just talking about the fact that kind of the logic of how these these entertainment companies were looking at like an album or you know, a movie, and and cutting up pieces of that they've they've applied to like a tractor, you know, and now you can't like repair your John Deer or

modify your John Deer so it works better. And then you know, you get situations like we just kind of averted with the John Deere strike, where there was a very real possibility that we wouldn't be able to get a large chunk of a harvest because there wouldn't be parts and you can't put your own in. And that's to think that that the thought process that led us there started with like trying to protect Metallica. In some ways,

it's kind of funny. And this is why the anti monopoly critique is great because it shows you that there's cause for solidarity between John Deere tractor owners and John Deere tractor UH makers the workers who work there, because the same force that has allowed John Deere to cram down its workforce for forty years is the is the force that allows it to um UH take away the agency and economic liberties of farmers who own John Deer tractors, and it's it's the it's the political power that comes

with monopoly. And so you know, if John Deere were a smaller, weaker firm, it would be less able to resist both the claims of its workforce and the claims of its um uh customers. Mhm yeah, I mean that makes that makes sense, And it is like I like that idea of of because it's not just kind of solidarity between John Deere purchasers UM and and the people who work in the factories. It's also there's kind of solidarity between a wide like anyone concerned with UM copyright.

It's a much broader base of solidarity than just people who are worried about you know, what's happening uh to fiction or like what Disney is doing to like copyrights around Mickey Mouse or whatever. Like it's it. You can you can draw in concerns UM from right to repair to a bunch of other things, which potentially means there's there's a greater body of people available for action if you can make them see kind of UM converging interests there, which is I think is an interesting idea. Well, I

think you're getting something really important. And this is um This comes from James Boyle, who's a copyright scholar at Duke University and was really involved and found in creative commons and in those early copyright fights. And and Jamie makes an analogy to the coining of the term ecology. And he says that before the term ecology came along, you know, someone us cared about owls and someone us cared about the ozone layer. But it wasn't really clear

that we were on the same side. You know, it's not clear if you're Martian looking through a telescope, you might be hard pressed to explain why. You know, the destiny of charismatic charismatic nocturnal birds and the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere were the same issue. Right in the term ecology. Let all these people who cared about different things find a single point to rally around. It

turned a thousand issues into one movement. And I think that in the in the course of resisting corporate power, which is to say, resisting monopoly, we have the potential to weld together people from very diverse fields. You know, farmers and and people who make tractors. Sure, but you know, if you grew up watching professional wrestling and now you're aghast that the wrestlers that you loved are begging on

go fund me for pennies to die with dignity. You know, once someone explains to the reason that that's happening is that thirty wrestling leagues became one wrestling league that was able to practice worker's classification, turn those performers into contractors, take away their health insurance, and leave them to die.

Then suddenly you're on the same side of the people who were worried about big tech and big tractor, and the people are worried about the fact that there's only one manufacturer of cheerleading uniform uniforms, and two manufacturers of athletic shoes, and two manufacturers of spirits, and two manufacturers of beer, one manufacturer of eyewear that also owns all

the eye wear stores and the eyewear ensure. You know that Duff Beer thing from the early Simpsons, where there's like Duff Beer, Rispberry thing, Dulci Gabana, Oliver, People's Boushan, Loam Versaci. Every eyewear brand you've ever heard of is one company coach all of them and They also own Sunglass Hut and uh Target Optical and Sears Optical and lens Crafters and spec Savers and every other eyewear story

you've ever heard of. And they bought all the labs that make the lenses, so more than half the lenses in the world come from them. A division called and they bought imed, which is the company that bought all the insurance companies that ensure I Wear, and so they're also the company that's ensuring your glasses, your your eyes one company, and I Wear costs a thousand percent more

than it did a decade ago. They stole our fucking eyes, right, So people who care about that have common cause with people who care about wrestlers and people who care about beer and big tech and the fact that there's four shipping companies and they have no competitive pressure and so they just keep building bigger ships that gets stuck in the fucking Suez canal Right, we're all on the same side. Yeah,

And I I like the idea that I like. I like hoping that that kind of inherent solidarity, if you can point it out to people, is potentially an antidote to or at least a partial antidote to the level of the layer of politicization that's fallen down over everything, um, that stops people from actually considering matters but instead considering like I don't know, is this owning the libs right?

Like if you if they if if you can get them to see that, like, yeah, their favorite wrestler is like dying because he couldn't afford insulin, and that that that's tied to the issue of like the reason his dad can't get tractor parts this year or whatever, um, And that that's tied to other issues that are maybe championed by people he would reflexively dismiss. But like, yeah,

I I I find that really inspiring. It's still a significant there's a significant challenge for people who are trying to make those connections, for folks who are who are trying to like inform them of that state. I mean, yeah, that's true. And you know, like Steve Bannon will tell you that the reason to do cultural world culture culture war bullshit is because politics are down downstream from culture,

and there's probably an element of truth to that. But I also think the reason that people find culture war bullshits so attractive is because they got nothing else. Yeah, I think we we talked about that a lot within

the context of conservative for politics. I grew up very conservative, and I do remember how the tenor of things I was hearing through the bush ears changed from advocation of policies to just all culture war all the time, all all striking the dims all the time, and it was the kind of um it and that's not the only place that's happen. You see it on the left to absolutely like it's it's endemic. Now it's it's a poison

and kind of the discourse. But I think that there's a lot that needs to be I think there's a lot to be discovered still for like how to break people out of that. I'm kind of bullish when we talk about these issues like you were bringing up with sort of the monopolization of these industries you wouldn't expect to be monopolized. I'm hopeful about the future that stuff

like three deep printing presents for that. We have an organization in Portland that does kind of three D printing glasses, frames and stuff and is helping people with that sort of stuff. And I'm in conversations with like the four Thieves,

Vinegar collective. I think it's called. UM. Yeah, some of the folks doing like trying to do working on pharmaceutical hacking making at the moment like lower cost uh kind of home scratch brood versions of like different aids medications, and the Holy Grail is doing that with um insulin effectively.

UM And I think it is. And I do think one of the things that's exciting about that is because the way in which the way in which collaboration on three D printing works, in the way in which actually spreading,

like the ability to do stuff works. I think it's synergizes nicely with the ability of people to kind of reach other folks through writing or other forms of content, because they can both spread through the same You can have a video or a story, and you can have like kind of embedded guides on how to do that. UM I I I don't know that I've I've runned into a lot of your writings on kind of the potential of three D printing in this space, But I'm interested,

like to what do you do. Are you looking at that as kind of an area of hope or do you see that still is kind of too two niche and labor focus to really actually take off in the way that it would need to to crack some of these nuts. This is where I do my my woody Allen, you know nothing of my work stick because I had

this novel Maker Makers in two thousand and eight. It's it's why uh Bree Pettis went out and founded Maker Bought uh and it's you know, credited with like kickstarting the homebrew three D printed revolution blah blah blah blah blah and um and it was a very bullish novel about three D printing. I um, you know, the reality hasn't lived up to the hype yet. It may just be that we're in the long trough of despair, as

the Gardner hype cycle model has it. Uh. But you know, I think the problem with three D printing was that the patents had been concentrated into the hands of two large firms that had bought all their competitors, including Maker Bought and UM. When those patents finally expired. The big one was the laser centering of of powder patent expired.

There just wasn't a big bang. And I think it's because the supply chain for it still had a lot of proprietary elements and so producing the powder and producing the components that allowed for that powder printing remained a very high bar, and so we just didn't see the kind of new industry emerged that we would have hoped for. And you know, it's like seven years since those patents expired. Five years since those patent expired. Now we're seeing a

few more of those powder printers. You get a lot more like UVY cured epoxy printers because those came off patent earlier and they have a less complicated supply chain. Um. But still, I mean mostly when we talked about printers, we're talking about filament, and just filaments just not a great technology. It's been pushed in ways that you wouldn't even believe, and people have figured out how to do

absolutely incredible things with it. But it's not it's not something that you would make aerospace components for, you know, it's it's it's something that you make, um novelty dungeons and dragons dice, which is an important industry to disrupt. Don't get me wrong, but I'm with you, with you. I can remember paying thirty bucks for a set of dice as a kid and thinking somebody's gotta fix this scam. I can put you something for Christmas, Robert, Thank you Garrison.

And you know now I I own a I bought a comic con a couple of years ago. I bought a tiny little D twenty made out of meteoric or I have a sky metal D twenty. Oh now that's yeah, that's that's classy. Um. I'm curious. We've got a little bit of time left, and I wanted to ask in

your your novel Attack Surface. I know it was released right October if I'm not mistaken, um, And obviously a lot of that deals with again these kind of like corporations that have been contractors for the D O D doing like fucked up surveillance shit in Iraq and Afghanistan, bringing that technology to crack down on like US uh, sort of dissident left wing political movements. It comes out the year that we have a nationwide kind of uprising.

Um that a lot of fucked up surveillance ship that had been kind of demoed state side around it like Standing Rock and whatnot, gets gets really put into its own How much of that was written before ship went down? And I and I'm assuming like I don't know exactly how your process works, but I'm wondering, like I assume you started the project before everything went the way it did last summer. How much did kind of what happened last summer affect the way you imagined that technology in

those tactics functioning in that book. Yeah, the the timeline goes the other direction. I wrote that book before the are uprising, um long, long, long long before that, and I wrote it about things like, um, the surveillance technology we saw in Belarus and chev and also at Occupy and Standing Rock and at other Black Lives Matter demonstrations

and uprisings in Americans. Yeah, and if you you know, also the monotonic expansion of surveillance leagues right where you know, first we learned about MC catchers, and then we learned about dirt boxes, which are MC catchers on airplanes, and you know, like we just all of that stuff leaked like crazy because you know, these surveillance giants are are not good at what they do, right, which isn't a

reason we should be hopeful. A company that's bad at what it does is in some ways even worse because one of the ways that they're incompetence expresses itself is that they often gather a bunch of data on innocent people and then leak it. Yeah, right, not deliciously, just through incompetence. Um. And so you know, the this expansion of surveillance has like been on my mind for a long time, and I've been writing about it, well at least since Little Brother, Right, So two thousand and six,

I wrote that novel, and I've had my finger in that. Yeah. So I've had my finger in that for all that time, and and working with the f F it's impossible to miss. Sure. Was there a degree to which, um, I don't know, I guess we're you surprised by anything that happened last time? Or did it just kind of comprehensively feel like these are everything slotting into place that I knew was heading

in this direction? Because yeah, I mean you're right, I did like there was like everything was kind of presaged um years before. I'm yeah, I I'm wondering if if there was anything that kind of surprised you, um, or was it was it all just sort of what you've been braced for. Yeah, I don't feel like there were any kind of surveillance surprises. I mean the reverse the use of reverse warrants. I think we all kind of assumed was going on. There had been hints of it

in Google's warrant canarias beforehand. But you know, those defense warrants, which again, if you're like sitting there going oh gofense, warrants are awesome because they're catching the one six rioters, Like, dude, you are going to be so disappointed, Holy sh it, that's not where they're going to keep using this. Yeah. Um, So, you know, learning more about those reverse warrants I think

was was interesting. Um, but I don't feel like, I don't well, off the top of my head, I can't say that there was any new technical stuff that emerged. You know. I I am kickstarted the audio book for Attack Surface. Uh, and I offered as like the top tier you could commission short stories in the Little Brother universe, and there were three of those and I just finished the first of them, and it's about um future pipeline

protests and uh. You know, I spent a lot of time in my research looking at the survey that was done on the pipeline protests, and a lot of it was provocateurs and undercovers who were just terrible at their jobs, right, like the intercepts, long publication of of uh, you know, long documents about how those operators worked. They just like showed up in military haircuts and combat boots. And then we're like, hey, I'm from Portland and I'm here because

we're gonna funk up some bad guys. Let's go do it. Let's go do violence and save Indian country. And like everyone was like you and like does anyone want to buy drugs? And and the actual protesters were like, you're a provocateur, like go away, you know, like they could tell. I mean, I guess you know, there are a lot more effective in the UK in infiltrating the climate movement.

You know, they impregnated several protesters, so you know, and had long term relationships with them and raised kids with them. So there is that. But here stories yeah, here, it was not that we didn't just didn't see that incredible efficacy. Yeah,

and I do think it. That's I think kind of the message I took out of it because I I was I started reporting on like dirt boxes back during Standing Rock, just having them like it explained to me by people who were on the ground when I showed up that like, yeah, there's this your like phones don't work the same out here, and like we're trying to figure out what's going on, but like everything is is and it's not just that we're out in the sticks

or anything. And I think the only surprise, the big surprise for me last year was how I think how little the technology accomplished for them and how much it just it just wound up back down to violence. Was like that was kind of the for all of the toys they had. The toys that actually made the most difference was gassing and beating people and violence and like old fashioned informants that was that was the stuff, and just having a dude there. Yeah, they were really relied on.

And the fact that you that that you, Corey, weren't super surprised, But anything last year I think kind of just more shows kind of the strength of your work in terms of how you're very good at seeing the trends that are already happening but taking them to their next logical place. Um and it's a really great way to kind of get a sense of what is something, what what will something maybe look like in the next decade or so, because it's it's all based on already

existing stuff, just in different kind of original ways. So that's why I think it's it's so useful to look at your books as as an activist, specifically around like surveillance and stuff, because it's it's just really it's it's really good for kind of keeping keeping an eye on, keeping your head, yeah, and and keeping an eye on what's keeping an eye on you, um and all that

kind of stuff. This was a really lovely conversation. Was a lovely last thing to do in my home office in because I leave tomorrow and won't be back until the next year, and then I'm actually gonna be offline for a month after a joint replacement. So it was it was really lovely to meet you all on to chat with you. Thanks so much for chatting with us today, Glory,

what's up? Guys? Have a shop Aloud and I am Troy Millions and we are the host of the Earnier Leisure podcast where we break down business models and examine the latest trends and finance. We hold court and have exclusive interviews with some of the biggest names of business, sport and entertainment, from DJ Khaled to Mark Cuban, Rick Ross, and Shaquille O'Neil. I mean our alumnilists expansive. Listen to as our guests reveal their business models, hardships and triumphs

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is it could happen here a podcast that's begun. We talk about how things are falling apart, and occasionally, when we're feeling good, how to maybe how to maybe put them back together a little bit. But today we're more talking about the growing consensus that things in the US culture wars are heating up to an unacceptable level and and maybe people are going to start doing some non culture type wars here in the near future, like civil

type war here in the near future. Those of you who know me, which why would you be listening to this podcast if you if you don't know, like the earlier seasons of this exact show, uh know that I talk a lot about the potential of a mass civil conflict in the United States. I've been kind of trying to warn about it for a while, and today we're gonna do an episode about some of the more mainstream sources that have started to kind of accept this as

a possibility, um and get concerned about it. Garrison, You've presented us with three articles, one from NBC News, one from The Independent, and one from the Brookings Institute, all kind of fiddling around this idea that certain unnamed journalists have spent years discussing. So, yeah, we're gonna we're gonna get into it. Garrison. Yeah, So it is that the past the past few months, we have well I've I've been watching to see how how this idea has been

slowly kind of eating in popularity. Of course, there was like a spike in this around like January six, but then stuff kind of settled down, and now we're kind of seeing it come back up against we had these these three pieces, all published within like a month of each other, um all kind of on this topic, and specifically, like the pieces themselves are definitely going coming out this

from a more like liberal perspective. But the thing that made them interesting is that they did have a decent number of like of of polls and uh and and surveys in them based on like what who who what types of people think are like are thinking about this and think it's more more of a possibility. One survey published on November one, they've said eighteen percent of Americans believe that quote unquote patriots might have to resort to

violence to quote save the country. Um so. And then that included a thirty percent of Republicans um so, but eighteen percent of all of of of of Americans in general of republic and so using that very specifically turn of phrase is definitely uh notable. And then another pole from are there in the Air found that forty six percent of people thought the country was somewhat or very

likely to have another type of civil war. And that's the plurality of the people pulled in that because only like said unlikely, So the majority of people are not the majority of people pulled, but like the most common leaned on, yes, it is, I think we're going to

have us a war, yeah, which is not great. The one that uh NBC published included in their article had but like thirty three percent of people saying no, it's it's probably not gonna happen, kind of on the maybe and and and and forty seven leaning on yeah this, maybe, this is, this is probably gonna happen at some point soon. YEP.

I mean a lot of a lot a lot of what these articles are talking about is just like kind of the increased increased threats against like elected officials and then increased almost like militancy or performative militancy of elected officials types of like like you know, like a performatively bringing your gun into Congress and that type of thing.

And it lays out like a list of a list of like of of of threats or stuff enacted against governors, congressmen, all that kind of stuff in in the past, in the past, like a year year mainly. Yeah. One of the things I really disagree about the Brookings because Brookings is the one who kind of is analyzing that made that big poll and talking about it, has a list of reasons why we might have a civil war and

a list of reasons why it's unlikely. And one of the reasons why it's unlikely is quote most of the organizations talking about civil war or private not public entities, um. And note that when Southern States seceded in eighteen sixty, they had police forces, military organizations, and state sponsored militias.

The rights of that now, Yeah, Like there's a ton of signal posting from guys like Jim Jordan's uh Hawthorne um, Gates Bobert um, a ton of signal posting of Gostre from elected Republican leaders, from governors, from state level elected officials, and like regular street cops. Yeah, and like regular street cops that are like civil war adjacent, um, if not directly advocating for internet scene violence. So I think that that I don't think Brookings, I don't think they're analysis

is spot on with this. And I think there's just one of every thing that's interesting about that, which is I think it was one of those are these our sles arguing that it was like, well, the Pentagon's not particularly civil Like, well, the Pentagon doesn't want a civil war,

They're not gonna step into it. But but I think it is also important to note that, like, like if remember what happened last summer, there's a lot of FEDS who are just like you know, like when like yeah, so's you know, the army kind of doesn't want Trump to like send the army against protesters, but like you know, like Bortach for example, like was just like absolutely hyped up to just like absolutely just go disappear a bunch

of people, and they were very excited about that part. Yeah, Yeah, they love they love this stuff, and it's like, yeah, the notion that it's less likely because it doesn't have like formal police backing is really silly because if you spend any time monitoring these type of militia groups, you know that a good portion of them are also members of some type of law enforcement or have like family

connections to member. There have been a bunch of cases of weapons being stolen stolen from forts UM, particularly in like the West Coast right now, Like, yeah, there's a ton of connections to the and a ton of like members in common. It's like at the Capital riot that were like thirty something active duty police officers involved. UM. To say that there's not direct connections with law enforcement

is nonsense. And it's true that, like our military leadership remains pretty much a political and very like committed to being a political in the sense that like in the within the like US partisan context, right, Like they don't come in to prop up the Democrats of the Republicans, and I don't think that's immediately likely. But police forces in the United States are extremely politicized and have more than enough power to carry out a counterinsurgency campaign nationwide.

And as long as the US military didn't step in, and why would they, Like the cops are willing and able to do the civil warring for the government. Why do you think they have all those tanks? You know? So yeah, like there is there is a lot of backing um, at least performatively among certain types of writing politicians and of course police. But I think a lot of what the politicians are trying to do is more like encourage regular folks or people in like civilian militias

to just start doing violence against other elected leaders. That it seems to be like like like Bobart and that, and those types aren't they They're not like telling police to go do this. They're speaking to like regular people um.

And I think one one one decent point the actually the nbc PS actually puts out it says, all of this kind of like divisive um and and more violent rhetoric and behavior displayed by and towards some of our elected officials does not necessarily mean another like civil war in terms of like a military conduct contest between states. Um. It just does not mean that it's inevitable or even

probable or even like probable. A more likely scenario is a turbulent era of civil disturbances, armed confrontations, standoffs, threats,

assassination attempts, and other acts of political violence. In other words, one that's a lot like the last two years of American history, which I feel like, yeah, in terms of in terms of the likelihood of there being like a more formally declared kind of conflict versus just first just like increasingly increasingly normalizing extreme violence against uh you know,

quote unquote fellow countrymen. I think is is a yeah, like there's we are going to be more likely to be just moving in that direction slowly, and at the point when there's like frequent enough exchange of the fire, that's when we say, yeah, we're basically in a civil war. We're just not calling it that, um, which is you know, that's the points that you Robert, you have made a

lot in the in the past. Yeah, I mean, and there's I I'm I think a lot of this is just a failure of kind of imagination and ability to accept from a group like Brookings, who I know has paid some attention to the Syrian Civil War, that like civil conflicts in the United States or in the in the twenty one century often don't like there's no clear regional split. Like you look at a lot of what was happening in Syria. You had cities divided up by

neighborhoods between like who who was in charge? Um, you know that that's very much what we see here. And you do see like clear regional split between urban and rural divides. And it's not like they say, within specific states, but like I would say, it's very specific and limited states that don't have huge urban rural divides. Um, Like that's that is the norm everywhere in this country that I've been. Maybe it's different in fucking Vermont or New Hampshire,

but I don't trust those places. Um. Yeah, and I guess I think they're overly optimistic based on kind of a fundamental misunderstanding of how these sorts of conflicts occur. Um that said, I don't know, like it's it's one of those things. I think the number one the number one thing you should be looking at in terms of whether or not a civil war is likely is the number of people who respond in polls with things like, yes, I think we need to use violence to restore the

nation or what ever. Um That it's not just enough, like I I it's not just enough to think that a civil war is likely, because a lot of that's just based on people who don't want one, but are paying attention to the same media as everybody else and are watching the same stuff we're watching, and they're like, well, this seems sketchy. I think that the main indicator is the number of people who respond, yeah, I think it would be awesome to use violence as a like in

order to make America more like what I wanted to be. Um. And again, that doesn't mean we'll we'll creep over the point. There's a number of interesting things that have happened. UM on kind of the we're headed towards the civil war side. The number one thing that I've seen recently is the use of paramilitary organizations UM to kind of choke uh,

local civil institutions, um, like school boards. I see that as very concerning and as kind of prelude to the sort of armed mobilizations that you would see a unlocalized areas in any kind of civil conflict. It's it's the

precursors to death squads. So that's the that's the thing that I see on the ground that worries me most, um in terms of the thing that I'm I'm less certain about honestly, Like one of the things they note in here in the Brookings article that like the sheer number of guns in the United States is a reason why we might have a civil war, and I agree with that entirely. When you have four million weapons in private hands, it increases the odds that they'll be used

in some sort of scale. Um. We've also seen historic numbers of non white people of of of like folks who are from marginalized communities, UM, not just buying up weapons that unprecedented rates, but organizing with them. And I'm not really sure how to think of that. There's certainly a way it could certainly be a very negative development, but it could also be. I think a big part of what I've seen from the right lately is the sense of impede unity. UM. And I think the feeling

of being matched in arms is an end to impunity potentially. UM. Then the big question is like, well what about the police, and like, well if the police side with the riot against you know, there's there's still a number of questions there and we don't have any clean answers. But um, I don't know that. I I think that on the whole I'm more worried than I was two years ago

when I wrote it could happen here. Um. But it's not clean, and I think in some to some extent, I'm I'm a little more worried about something like the years of lead in Italy than I am about Syria

right now, if that makes sense. I will say one thing about the years of lead, which because a lot of people talk about the years of less that the years a letter, this kind of like a roughly ten year period in Italy of I don't know, mass herostic escalating political violence with effigant body counts in a way that stood out from the years around it. Yeah, and I mean you know, the years of Lead has and the use at Also there's there's a bunch of intelligence

agents involved. There's a lot of four kind false flag false flag bombings, like hundred hundreds of people are being killed in bombings. And I think there's one absolutely crucial difference between now in the years of let. I mean, well, okay, so partially it's that unlike Italy, we don't have seventeen thousand intelligence agenci is operating in the US and like

trying to kidnap and kill the foreign prime minister. But the the other thing that's very important is that unlike unlike the Italian left, and you know, really unlike the whole global left of the seventies and eighties, there is

no American like left wing like left wing. I guess you could call like there's there's no left wing terrorist tradition, right like the like the left doesn't do suside bombings, The left doesn't kidnap people like like the modern American leftis doesn't do that, And that a big part of of what was happening in the years of Lead was that,

you know, sometimes the left was doing this. A lot of times it was the state pretending to be the left carrying up bombings, and that isn't really something that is happening right now because there's just like the like, the the left is not in a place where everyone is going, we need to do armed urban guerrilla movements and yeah. So and then that that makes it harder to sort of pin things like pin actual urban guerrilla movement stuff on the left because there's just none of that.

But I don't think and I agree years of Left is kind of like a broad Strokes comparison, because what I see is more likely is what we're what we're already witnessing on the ground with these right wing militant groups increases, and they moved to the point of kidnapping and executing and potentially in concert with law enforcement, like doing stuff like in states that have issued harsh laws, you know, banning certain books you have in a town,

local law enforcement and militias like go after and grab individual leftists and either kill or im a is in them, and conflicts over that, and you have the left increasingly organized an arm um as a defense against that, and then a number of armed conflicts you know, as a result of that, which maybe then proceed to bombings and stuff that that's terrorism or proceed to just more kind of skirmishes that the FEDS have a minimal response to,

and local or state law enforcement kind of tacitly allows. Um like that. That's that's kind of obviously that's not a direct comparison to what happened in Italy, but of course we're a different country. But that's kind of that's kind of the the kind of brush fire conflict I could see cropping up in the very near future in this country. You know what else will start a series of armed gunfights between left and right in American towns. The products and services they they're they're working on it

every day. The products and services that support this podcast urged violence on the streets of the United States. That's behind the bastards. Guarantee, Sophie, we're not doing behind the bastards? What what show are we? Who are we? Anyway? Here's ads? All right? Oh my gosh, uh we're back. Yeah, what a great ad. I really nailed that transition. Um, just

absolutely so. The next thing that I want to talk about, UM, something that I think has some some backing behind it, and something that I think is kind of more silly, is that one of one of the reasons that this uh NBC piece by what's his name, uh, Brian Brian Michael Jenkins is uh. He says. One of one of the reasons that we're kind of getting more okay with, you know, uh, killing or hurting our neighbors essentially is um quote, Americans do fewer things together. Church attendance is declining.

Membership and civic organizations and lodges have been decreasing for decades. PTA membership has dropped by nearly half from what it was in nineteen sixties, Bowling leagues have almost disappeared, and a shared national experience of military service disintegrated with the abolition of conscription in nineteen seventy three. Meanwhile, self proclaimed citizen militia's driven mainly by far right conspiracy theories, have surged since to US and eight, especially in the past

five years. So he is wrong, but he's yes, militias have leagues, militias have risen. But is that due to bowling leagues. Yeah, I don't think it's due to a drop in bowling leagues. I think it's due to the fact that all these guys are terminally online now and

we're watching Fox news for twenty years before that. That that is the thing is that like, I don't think this guy, Brian Michael Chickens understands how the Internet intersects with extremism because he's he's doing this from a very like like he's he's acting like we're still in the seventies and he like like that's not how the world works,

and how like people spend their time. No, people aren't doing bowling leagues, but yeah, whoman young men are spending and and you know middle aged men are spending time online, whether that be discord in a terrorist group chat, or that be a Facebook group that's for a militia, and that's where that socialization is happening. And because the Internet rewards extremism and the hottest take, it's moving in that direction even with people who would ordinarily just have historically

the past joined bowling leagues. I guess, but it very it's it's correlation doesn't equal causation. Ship it's wow, less people are in bowling leagues and going to church and militias have grown wildly, wildly, Um, this one must cause the other. And it's like, well, no, they're both both of those things may have some causes in common. There may be similar factors that are driving both of those things, but they are not caused like that, they don't necessary

one doesn't necessarily cause the other. UM. And if you like, again, the smart person version of this would be to say, hey, people are doing less things together out in the world. People are reporting because you can find statistic backup for this. People seem to be lonelier than ever. UM. People are more depressed than ever. Suicide rates have risen, and while

this is happening, militias and extremist groups have grown. Perhaps there's something about these organizations UM that makes them particularly attractive when folks are vulnerable due to these things, and like, let's look at you know, the failure of our political system to confront these issues further feeds into the desire amongst some chunk of the populace for some sort of

nihilistic cleansing violence. And again, pieces of all the pieces of this article could be could be reassembled into something with um some insight, but I I don't think Brian Michael Jenkins has much. I think it's also an interesting thing to note here about because so the last thing he talks about this oh is the thing that formed the common sort of national identity was shared universal military service.

And it's like, okay, the reason shared universal military service went away was that everyone kept murdering literally just blowing their officers up in Vietnam like that. And you know, if if you want to talk about I think like incredibly high levels of political polarization and like mass violence between Americans, I mean, the army basically fighting a civil war against itself in Vietnam is you know, in an

enormously important part of this. And then simultaneously the sort of right wing vets returning home and you know, going Louis Beam and stuff like that that you know, he's relying on this kind of mythos of this. So there was a time when you know, it's it's it's basically made it make America great again. But sort of like, yeah,

that's that's a liberal. This this type of rhetoric is actually very similar to like the return return to tradition stuff, being like the solution to our extremism need to be going to church church again, being part of civil organizations,

joining bowling leagues, and conscript conscripted military service. That's like that is that that is just the same that that is very similar to like the make American grade again, return to tradition sect because those are those are also their goals, except that they're just willing to use violence to achieve those goals, whereas this guy just wants people

to start doing that again. I guess, um, I don't know. Yeah, Like in terms of like military service not leading to extremism, I mean, like Oklahoma City bombing, I don't, I don't, I don't really there is other stuff going on there, But like in terms of terms of that being like an example, it is, it is very silly because a lot of a lot of a lot of the guys even inside you know, are are current like three per centers and stuff. A lot of them have former military service.

That I mean. But like, yeah, citizen Militia's in terms of gaining popularity, but specifically due to um kind of overall distrust of the federal government and the type of socialization that being online too much results in, has yes, grown grown grown the militia movement a lot um and and I just don't see how Bowling is going to solve that issue in terms of in terms of how do we mean to trust the federal government solve that issue, Garrison.

But but you've never watched The Big Lebowski, so you wouldn't you wouldn't understand. I've not watched The Big Lebowski, So I'm kind of I'm kind of I'm kind of done with the kind of done with the NBC piece there. I know there was there was something Brian Michael Jenkins.

The other thing on on the Brookings thing that I have a decent issue with is that they're one of the reasons they give for and and this is actually something that Brian Michael Junkins also brings up with the NBC piece, is that one of the reasons why they believe the civil war is not as inevitable is because there is no clear regional split like a North South divide, and they, for some reason think this means that there

is less likely to be civil conflict. Um. They they recognized there is an urban rule divide in most states, but because there is no large, kind of obvious North South divide, they think this is going to make a civil war less likely. Well, the map would really be a pain in the ass, so it probably won't happen, right, Like, That's that's the thing they're thinking, is like, oh, if I was gonna if I have to map this out,

it's gonna be too complicated. When I read that, I had flashbacks to my first trip to a war zone in Ukraine, where we were like taking Google Maps up to a certain point and then we had to use like hand drawn notes because he was like, well the different like the different chunks of this air next like twenty acres that are owned by the separatists as opposed to the government, or like, you can't use Google it'll send you into enemy territories because it's not a clean

break because you had literally suburbs of cities fighting each other and you still do. Yeah, this is a this is you know, I think personally, this this this is a sort of peak American brain thing because you know, there's there's been like five ever civil wars that are broken like this, and the problem is that there's American civil war and then we also fought in both Vietnam and North Korea, but like, well, yeah, yeah, but we

just really civil war. Yeah yeah, yeah, that's that's there was fighting between two halves of the country that it

was a proxy for two others. Several other kind of yeah, and that's yeah, and that's and that's the thing that like, it's the combination of the American Civil War was very unique civil war and then the other major things that we think of as like quote unquote civil wars were you know, we're basically cold war stuff, and I mean, you know, like that, there there are a couple other like yeah, I mean there have been other examples of like secessionist stuff like that, as like I mean, in

in in any civil there's a lot of other countries that get involved. In the US Civil War, there was a significant amount of that sort of and even even even even in the US Civil War, like there are just like towns in the middle of like Confederate Territory they're like, no, funk this, we're not going over. But everyone but people have this just like incredibly myopic view

of what a civil war is. And it's like every other civil war that's been fought in the last like fifty years has been just seven thousand factions like neighborhood fighting each other. I don't know, it's just incredibly frustrating to watch these people not understand this. It's very America brained and it's very sad because I'm going to read a quote that's gonna make us want to purge our ears.

There are urban rule differences within specific states, with progressives dominating the city as while conservatives reside in rural communities, but that is a far different geographic divide than when one region could wage war on another. The lack of a distinctive or uniform geographic division limits the ability to confront other areas organized supply chains and mobilize the population.

There can be local skirmaches between different forces, but not a situation where one state or region attacks another, which

is complete nonsense. And that's not how like it's like they don't understand that guerrilla fighting exists, and they don't understand how the whole, the whole, the whole part about organizing supply chains and mobilized population like that is just another way to fight a war is by exploiting that specific thing like the fact that cities are so isolated um and lack and and and lack of home wage resources, and the fact that rural areas are isolated in a

different way and lack separate resources. That is not something that makes a civil war less likely. That just makes it more complicated and makes it more fighting over Amazon fulfillment centers and the like. Yeah, like it's it's the it is it is ridiculous, um saying that, Yeah, saying that the uh that that it's it's far different from a geographic divide that one reacher could wage one another.

Is like that. No that you're you're just saying something that is just completely wrong and like you have not studied any type of like urban conflict whatsoever. Yeah, And I think there's important thing in here, which is that regions mostly it's not that region's wage warning. Yeah, it's not people don't do the fighting. Yeah, Like regions aren't

the things that are fighting. It's the people in areas and people can move around and people can block off access to areas, and like it's it's this, it's a weird it's a it's super weird way to think about things. And it's the fact that if if this is something that like the Brooking Institution, um is, if this is what they think on this topic, that's pretty sad indicator for what a lot of people how they how like a lot of mainstream levels are going to view the

possibility of any type of civil conflict. And I don't know, maybe they feel very secure in their cities um, which which is a weird thing. I've I've not felt that in years. Yeah. And I think the other thing that's very weird about this is that because so a lot of people writing about this are x are um like kind are like kind of terrorism people, right, and the

kind of terrorism kind of insurgence people. It's weird because they used to understand this, like, you know, like a lot of like you know, because like in in you know, in in the twentieth century and in even sort of the early century, like the the sort of the sort of standard like grilling insurgency doctrine was you know, it's some some some some variation on the like maoists fish in the sea, like surround the cities where we're like real areas, etcetera, etcet etcetera, and like and you you

even see versions of this, you know, in things that are quite civil wars but are kind of like what happened like the water and gas wars and Oblivi and the the two thousands were like you know what, what what? Yeah, you have kind of an urban real divide without they have allies in the cities, but the sort of you know, like that the you have a bunch of rural indigenous groups that literally just you know, they blockade every road in the country and then start of the cities out right.

I mean, this is this, this is this is just a thing that happened in It's just like yeah, that is like, yeah, that is that. That is going to happen sooner than later, whether that be caused by accident, by some type of climate natural disaster, or on purpose by a militia like that. It's just a matter of

time until we have to deal with this massive problem. Yeah. Um. And it's like I've been reading recently about um Uruguay and what happened with them, and like the seventies when their dictatorship took over and they had a left wing group that was like very much engaged in kind of a lot of acts of poetic terrorism, like you know, robbing banks to steal paperwork that they would then hand over to like somebody to reveal malfeasance within a company,

or like stealing trucks of food going to like some big wealthy Christmas party and redistributing it in poor neighborhoods. Pretty rad stuff, and one of the ways in which the new incoming dictatorial regime cracked down to them as they deputized like ten thousand chuds and gave them guns and sent them in with the army. Um. And I

was like, yeah, I could absolutely see could that happen? Yeah, Like if there was some sort of uprising in a in a liberal city, there's rual areas around them filled with chuds there, and there is precedent, There is precedent for police doing that. Um, they have done it within your r I shot garrison like on small scales. So I think we'll have one more break and come back and talk about a talk about a hedge fund. Oh funk I love hedge funds. Let me get Let me

get my hedge funds. Shared out the shirt that I wear when talking about hedge funds. All right, I have my hedge fund shirt on UM. As you can all see, it's a picture of Ringo star filating himself. I don't know why that's my head fun shirt. I don't know either, but I love the beach Boys. Um. Anyway, so thank you perfect nailed it. Uh. We should we talk about

this hedge fund guy? Yes, I do want to talk with this hedge fund guy, because this is when something with this much money is talking about this one just for fun, right, he's doing this just for ship funds. Yeah, he's doing it for ships and giggles. And he wrote a book kind of on this topic and he proposed one one solution. He came up with one thing that will prevent us from entering a civil war. Um, which

shows how smart these hedge fund people are. Um. But first, uh, I Chris would love to I would love for you to explain who who this? Who this dude is? Okay, So Rae Dao is a hedge fund manager and he is so he runs Bridge Bridge Water Social allegedly the world's largest hedge fund firm. Yeah, and it depends how you de find everything. But yeah, it's a very large fund. And this guy, this guy is weird by like venture

capital standards. So the Bridgewaters whole thing is that everyone in the company is constantly surveiled at all times, and anyone else when the company could look at when anyone else is doing. It's supposed to be like it was like total transparency, and what what it actually means again, is it like you can you can look at like fucking what any of your colleagues, like also working at this place, is doing just sucking at their day job. You can see all their records, you can see everything

they're looking at. And the other thing that he's known for is that he doesn't trust anyone else to like run the hedge fund after he retires. Your dies, So he's trying to build like like a cybernetic version of his brain to keep running the hedge funds. The like other hedge fund weirdos think this guy is fucking wild. And yeah, he's he's a time and he runs one of the worlds or just has funds. It's great, it's we it's it's amazing and good we give there's people

this much money to control. So I will say, when it comes to his actual analysis of like whether or not it's likely, I don't particularly disagree with anything. Yes, it's it's broadly reasonable. Yeah, his looking Yeah for what, he's just doing this because because he thinks it's fun. He has enough money he's gonna survive whatever. Um. But yeah, he's also I mean, part of why this is fairly credible is he's I mean, if you're if you're good at this, it means that you have one actual talent,

which is is judging risk. Um, and I think he's probably pretty good at judging risk. Yeah. So he he he said that he believes there's like a high likely could that a civil war or something resembling it will break out within the decade. Um is the number he gives. He's the number he gives and then he, um, yeah, wait, let's see. Yeah he said there's also he have a quality says it's a we're we're in a we're in

a high risk position right now. Um. And yeah. He talks about the different kind of reasons why he believes so in this book, most of which are like pretty reasonable, um in terms of like uh, in terms of like looking at a population and how much how like you know, the various like polarization between politics and culture and all

this kind of stuff. Um. But the solution that he gives to this is that, um, we should make a formal judgment for quote unquote close elections and have the losers respect the outcomes, and then once that happens, the order is going to be like restored and respected, and then we will avert a civil war. So he he thinks that a civil will will probably be like enacted by some type of election dispute, which that is actually very reasonable in terms of what happened in our last election.

If there's like a big if there's a big election dispute, that could absolutely spark some type of conflict. But the idea that we can avert a civil war by just having an organization to judge close elections is like, but that's not gonna solve, Like, that's not gonna if you do that, that's not gonna solve the close election problem. That doesn't even if you do it, that won't be a solution, you know, And I I will say, like, yeah, lexcuse some saying credit credit where minor credit is due.

Radalio is in fact right that the difference between two thousands, which is when the last time someone actually literally stole an election happened, where yeah, but Bush Bush openly rigs the election. It's incredibly obvious, like there's like six ways he does this. Everyone knows it's happening. And the reaction is everyone just kind of shrugs because they're like, oh, this dream courts legitimate compared to both, which yeah, that that's you know, that's that's that's there there's been an

actual break there. It's just that I don't know, Maybe I think it's it's almost just like a lip brained thing where it's like you think that if if you have an institution that sets down rules this, this will make everything okay because everyone will obey it. And that's just not where we are anymore. Yeah, I mean, there

was just a poll that came out recently. It should like Americans trust in the military has fallen to its lowest level ever registered, and like that was kind of the one thing left that most people felt positively about. Not to say that that's even a good thing, but just like the there is such a complete fucking lack of faith in institutions across the spectrum in the United States.

But it's like, how unless you're hiring I don't know, um fucking no. I would say Tom Hanks, but Tom Hanks has even gotten politicized even because believes in viruses. So yeah, there's no one they could pick to get do this job that people would feel good about if they Yeah, I mean, I'm sure if they brought Mr Rodgers back from the dead, half the country would call him a cuck. So I don't I don't know what what, I don't know who Dahio thinks is going to like

get everybody on board. So maybe maybe maybe um Danny DeVito, Danny DeVito might be able to do it. Well. I think if if we put all of our hope in Danny DeVito, that is a better solution than what any of these articles and the court. It beats it beats every other quote solution the articles posited. I mean Odin Kirk brought Twitter together that one week. Maybe, yeah, you know, with with this practice in court, if you just picked twelve random people off the street and we're like you,

that's that's the thing. It's like, I am, I am all for It's the term isn't the term isn't a democracy. Um, it's it's I forget the other yes of of almost I forget exactly, but it's it's when a government is not composed of elected leaders, composed of a random selected a random selection of people, and the decisions and then the decisions over then we then we get a new selection. I'm all for that model of government over almost any other.

It sounds way better than what we have. Yeah. Yeah, So that that is, that is the three pieces I want to talk about the independent piece on the Hedge Fund, Brooking Institution on the Civil War. And then uh, Brian wentno, not not Brian, yes, um Brian Michael Jenkins Um, senior advisor to the president of RAND Who who who wrote who? Who wrote the thing for NBC. So yeah, that is just the terms of in terms of you know, people in institutions talking about the topic more generally and sometimes

decent ways, oftentimes not decent ways. That is, that is the stuff from like the just the past between the past week two months of people with big salaries talking about the Civil War yea, or in terms of the in terms of the Hedge Fund guy, not a salary, just billions of dollars, Yeah, just billions of dollars and thinking it's neat. Um. I don't know. You know, every time one these comes out, I get tagged by a bunch of people, um saying like, Robbert is the thing

you were talking about? Other people are talking about it, and um, I don't know, I don't like that this is the thing other people are talking about that I've been talking about as opposed to mass Zeppelin, transit or something more fun. Yeah, these people could dedicate the resources into something more manageable for them, and because they don't have a good grasp, especially that Brian Michael guys has

no grasp on how extremism works. Um, and it would be better if they dedicate the resources to something else. But this is the world we live in. It would be better if perhaps Brian Michael Jenkins dedicated his his efforts and his platform at NBC to looking into Mr Dario and whatever the funk he's been up to. Um, that might that might do more. Very man, he just get plan them on. He would absolutely Brian Michael Jenkins

would get PanAm on so fucking quick. Al Right, Well, the hannimnious motherfucker in journalism just just like not even not even downtime before that car gets bombed as he's talking on air. The Okay, Brian Michael Jakins is seventy nine years old, so it won't it wouldn't be hard. H I just that that that's like a ten minute job. I'm just I'm just thinking like Brian Michael Jakins, he's a quote unquote an American expert on terrorism and transportation

security with four neckets of analysis. This is why he doesn't understand modern extremism. It's because yeah, he's still thinking in the seventies mode. That's sure. I'm sure of his thoughts on terrorism are just him rehashing opinions about like Hezbollah in the eighties. Yeah, all of all of his stuff is superdated. So that's that's why I said that previously, is that he still views terrorism as like as it was in the seventies. And yeah, this is this is why.

Um So that's great, guy, that's that's him. Um, anyway, that wraps up our show. Um, yeah, watch out for the one. The one Brian Michael Jenkins prediction I do think will happen is that there's a decent chance we might be back in an assassination territory, because it is, but it has been a long time since that has happened. It's it has been a hot minute and definitely leagues when it keeps happening in the UK. Yeah, I was meaning specifically in in in America and yeah, that's what

I'm saying. We're we're not that far away from them in terms of like things happening, so that I'm kind of surprised it hasn't had. I think it's probably just because maybe American legislators are all much more concerned about assassination because guns, so people like our elected leaders take more precautions than British ones. Did. I don't know. Maybe I don't know either. Well, speaking of assassinations, you can follow us on Twitter and Instagram. That happened here particles

on media. If we go missing it was great. If we go think it was Radaldio co Hi. Everybody, This is Roxanne Gay, host of The Roxanne Gay Agenda, The Bad Rominast podcast of Your Dreams. Now, what is the Roxanne Gay Agenda, you might ask. It's a podcast where I'm going to speak my mind about what's on my mind, and that could be anything. Every week I will be in conversation with an interesting person who has something to say. We're going to talk about feminism, race, writing in books,

and art, food, pop culture, and yes, politics. I started show with a recommendation. Really, I'm just going to share with you a movie or a book, or maybe some music or a comedy set, something that I really want you to be aware of and maybe engage with as well. Listen to the Luminary original podcast The Roxanne Gay Agenda, The Bad Cominist podcast of your dream every Tuesday on the I Heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you

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there is something else you could do. If you've got something to say, you could, I don't know, start up podcast with Spreaker from my heart and unleash your creative freedom and spend all day researching and talking about stuff you love and maybe even earn enough money to one day tell your irritating boss as you quit and walk off into the sunset. Hey I'm no settler, I'm an explorer. Spreaker dot com. That's spr e a k E R. Hustle on over Today, Welcome to it could happen here

talk podcast YEP. I could say it a podcast. That's what we're doing, and it's about it's about how things are kind of kind of kind of falling apart sometimes, or at least it feels like it, and I don't know, maybe we can do some things to help make it better, like what happened recently in terms of forests. So, hey, a good news episode. Whoa rare rare rare episode drop

for us? Uh, we got some good news. So I'm gonna be talking with Sam, who was on a previous episode discussing a forest defense, about an update on on all of the things that we were talking about a few weeks ago. Um. So yeah, I think we can. We can pretty much get into it, and then then we'll talk about some other stuff around kind of forests in general. So Hello, Sam, Thank thank you for joining me again to talk about trees, one of one of

our favorite topics. Hello, my pleasure always. So I think it was like a day or two after we dropped the episode or something, or I think I think it was. Actually it was maybe maybe even like right like right before, Um, we got some extra extra news about all about the post about the postfire logging um near the bright Bush Watershed. Um, yeah, what happened there? Yeah, yeah, it was pretty wild. Actually

it was really serendipitous timing too. Um. We as I think we mentioned in the last podcast, we were awaiting the first hearing for the court case essentially, you know, we believed that the plan to log in that area for myriad reasons was not only unethical but also illegal. Um. And so it was going to court and we were awaiting a hearing that happened on December three, Friday, And typically the judge does not rule from the bench and these sorts of hearings, and so we did not expect

the decision on that day. UM. But sure enough the judge felt uh strongly enough about this case and sure enough about her decision that she did rule from the bench and ruled in our favor. And so yeah, victories. UM. Now we have um a preliminary injunction in place, meaning that no logging can happen there um at least until this uh timber sale has its real day in court, or until the Fourth Service just drops this shenanigan entirely,

which hopefully they will do, but we'll see. Yeah. So they they blocked, they blocked the posts part logging and the the the basically started start starting to clear cut these areas without without actual like public and putting, without actually going through the process as flawed as the process. Maybe they were just skipping it entirely so that that was that was that was blocked by this, by by this legal case. Um, what was I guess Yeah, what what was what was the h what? What was what?

What was the reaction like in in in the room and in the various signal chats when this happened. Yeah, in the ether spheres, Um, the reaction was super awesome. I mean, so many people love this place and that was kind of the whole point of what we were trying to do when we did the direct action out there a number of years ago. It was just demonstrate how many people love this place and how the four Service wasn't going to get away with what they're planning

to do. UM because people, as we promised, would be back if they tried to log it and move forward with that logging, which, as you pointed out, and as we said last time, was super sketchy, not only because it was a terrible plan that they were planning to do UM in this beloved for us, but also because it was behind locked gates that in the public wasn't allowed into and so UM it was just this you know, travesty that was about to happen. And when we found out, um,

and when we heard the judges incredibly strong ruling. Um. We you know, we're absolutely overjoyed. Um. The news spread, you know, like wildfire, excuse the pun it do it um, and just you know, all the signal threads were popping. People were putting it on Twitter. People were reposting the sexy photos of the blockade with the giant slash pile and the fire truck and the band on top of

the fire truck. And I just wish that we all could have hung out again and had another dance party because it was the best that doesn't incredibly incredibly rad um was was like your this is this is this is something I don't I don't don't actually know, but it was like the documentation that was taking place by by going to these places and showing hey, this is where they're cutting. Was that brought up in the court case in terms of like, hey, this is we actually

went and saw what's actually happening. So it was was that type of evidence used and did it, in your mind, like um um uh kind of be a small part of like the result of the ruling. Yeah, it definitely was. And that is such an important point and I really hope that everyone who's listening can just like put that in their minds for later. How important it is for people to be UM field surveying or sometimes we call it ground true thing UM these places and actually collecting

documentation photographic evidence. UM. A lot of folks do kind of like what we call community surveying and collect um some site specific UM kind of like uh, community science sort of stuff. But all of that was used in court and it was super awesome. UM. I actually was one of the standing declarence, so I got to submit a lot of evidence from my many years of traveling that place. UM, and that all of that was referenced

in court. So so so important. UM. Even you know, when the forest services essentially trying to kick everyone out and keep everyone out of these places, it's really important to go um and see them. Anyways. Obviously, you know, everyone needs to consider how they do that and their own security and safety UM, and it's becoming difficult UM, but certainly putting eyes on threatened places is one of

the best tools we have to save them. Yeah. I just think that's really important to really focus on that as like a thing, because like, yeah, stuff that people did actually had an impact on this not happening right now. UM. And yeah, but by going out there and documenting and then talking about it, um, it has like an actual like causal relation, which is very hard to It's it's it's hard to get direct causal stuff to happen in like the general umbrella of activism. Um. And it's I

think it's it's just really exciting that that that this happened. Yeah, that's so true. It does feel in the general umbrellaive activism really hard to point to things that we do that are actually making an effect, and this is totally one of them. I mean, wh and uh if and when this case does have its day in court, um, you know, outside of the preliminary injunction itself. UM, I am sure that so much of that evidence from all the folks who've been traveling there, um and documenting it

will be used. We documented, you know, so many green living trees and places the Four Service that were dead. Um, you know, so many like unused roads in places the Forest Service said they needed to log alongside these roads because they're so trafficed and they're posing a safety hazard. And so it's basically like, you know, the best way to expose their gas lighting and lies is to just

go document what's there. Yeah, because a big part of their ability to do this is utilizing deception in terms of like and and and utilizing like non information, Like they're just not talking about the stuff that's actually happening, or they're doing like white lies to make it sound better.

So they're just they're they're lying about the type of like um uh, the type of sales that they're doing with these with these treets, and how they're classifying the trees that they're logging to like get it past all of the loopholes. But they're not actually like that, that's not actually reality. They're just changing the terms to make it fit what they want. So like as as soon as you start looking into this stuff, it gets all it gets very sketchy because it is they're just lying

about a lot of this stuff. Like if you're like listening and be like, oh, you know, be these people just love trees, Like yes, we do love trees, but like the actual thing that's going on is like they're lying about the types of damage that's being done. They're lying about what areas this is happening in all to just rack up more timber sales like that that that

is that that that is what's actually happening. Um. And that's so so important to say, like loudly and clearly, because the Forest Service and other management agencies are experts in making the public feel dumb and wrong and misinformed. And right now, even we sound a little wing nutty being like yeah, you know, but like let us be clear, a federal judge agree with us, Yeah, yeah, you know, like we're not the ones who are wrong here, and

I think you're totally right. You know, they're using a mixture of blatant lies, um, but also euphemisms like we no one's they don't they don't use the word clear cut anymore. They're using all of these euphemisms, you know, regeneration, harvest, I ship you not a lot of and a lot of this stuff that they're deciding to do is like not open to the public. You need to do like fully requests to to to actually learn what they're doing, because they don't talk about it like that. It is all.

It is all extremely sketchy and yeah, like the fact that like a federal a federal judge agreed with like green activists is not a sentence you here often so like it's like yeah, like this is actually a thing, and it's it's important to remember, like you are not immune to propaganda, like all a lot of this stuff is uh is has people who want a lot of money are vested in making people believe things about about

about like force management, all this kind of stuff. Um. Yeah, I know it may it may sound crazy when we're talking about you know, the secret illuminati of the Force Service. But like, no, like it acts like it's it is a it is a governmental organization. All governmental organizations are kind of sketchy, especially when their sole purpose is to one of their purposes is to make money or assistant like sales of something like yeah, it's it's gonna have

some sketchy stuff. Um. Absolutely, and also you know in the realm of just like the propaganda machine. Um we you know. Just the other day, UM, a hilarious response piece came out from the timber industry and organization called Federal Forest Resource Coalition, which is just a coalition of loggers. UM put out this hilarious little mini video responding directly to the line that we've been using in forest events, which is worth more standing. Our forests are worth more standing.

And they put out a hilarious response that is essentially you know, pushing this timber sale, this logging propaganda, saying well, actually, our forests aren't worth anything standing after they've been burned, and their contry a beating to the climate crisis, and they're destructive and you know in all these things, and so totally, I mean, even people who see it with their eyes can be convinced by these voices that they're wrong because they're so good, so good at making us

feel just like we're the wrong ones, but we're not. We got this, yeah, in terms of like this the secretive kind of decision making and stuff behind the scenes, in terms of like the types of like terms they're using to to you know, do like restoration, thinning, um and all this stuff around around trying to like basically just just take as many trees from the Bright britsh

Watershed as they can. And the judge said that she was quote disappointed in the agency, uh for for all of their silly behind the scenes trench coat meat in the dark alley way to pass off information type of thing, um, which is yeah, like so what what what is what is some of the other kind of stuff that the four Service and the related organizations were trying to we're trying to hide like what like what what what? What? What?

What was the stuff that like came out um via this legal process that was like yeah, what was it was the what's a few of the actual things that they were that they were trying to do that eventually like came to light. M h. The major thing is that they were trying to get away with changing the logging contracts without doing any additional environmental analysis or public

engagement process. And so there were before there were there was a plan to do what they what we had fought them so hard to get them to agree to do, which was not log a bunch of these this older stands protect tree. They had a diameter limit on trees

that they were going to log. So we basically like slapped their hands off of all of these trees and finally were like, okay, we won't sue you if you move forward with the plan as stated, and it had very strong side bore words and you know, even local folks were like, okay, go do this. And then the fires came through and so what they were trying to do was just change the plans. They turned it all

into clear cuts in the forest. That we slapped their hands off of and they were trying to argue that they didn't need to do any an additional analysis and they didn't need to engage the public, and even in court, you know, that's what they were arguing. Um they are they're doing some stupid magic math and you know, somersaults, um to try and explain how they had already done an analysis that accounted somehow for the fires that no

one could have ever predicted before. A yeah. So the judge was like just you know, she was just roundly like, y'all couldn't have predicted. I like to give her, you know, Southern accident, y'all, I couldn't have predicted, Judge Akins still the South. No, Uh, you couldn't have predicted. Uh, you know that the fires were going to burn through and so there's no way you could have done analysis for fire that you didn't know what's going to happen. Here

used silly little beasts. But she did talk to them, um, you know, as if they were just naughty little children, which I loved to hear. You know, the disappointed in the Forest Service was a major move. And I think the other one that came up is just you know, the Forest Service was arguing that they needed quote need to do this logging um, for restoration, for economic recovery, um, and to prevent future wildfires from severely burning in the area.

All of that to BS. Like. One thing that the judge said that was super strong, UM was that she sees and obviously on paraphrasing here, um, but she she sees that the community loves this place. It's obvious that this is like a beloved place, and she, you know,

essentially understands that the forest is worth more standing. She said that she wanted she thinks that the forest needs an opportunity to recover from the fires, and so basically just called the BS on the Forest Service for their hilarious, you know, justifications for logging. All the we're gonna save the forest by logging. It is just not it's not right,

not accurate, and the judge agrees. Yeah. I mean, I'm very very excited about about this ruling and what it means for the future and at least at least at least postponing this until um if if if the if if the lawsuit is going going to go through or if or if they're just going to drop this, which they also very well, maybe they might decide to focus on another part that is that they just don't tell anybody about and start doing it there and then you know,

we'll we'll start we'll start this again. But for this particular area, UM, that is that is very exciting, and yeah, it is. It is rare for a federal judge to agree with people on this topic. UM. And now I want want to talk about a few other kind of stuff around like forests, um and how and how these kind of types of things work. I I didn't get an interesting comment which I totally agree with in terms

of like how propaganda works in this department, um. And how like how like logging towns operate, or how like towns became logging towns. How like they're basically able to convince local populations that logging is is like good because like yeah, like they're they're gonna they're gonna move into this town, they're gonna restore the town because they're gonna

bring in new money through like a logging industry. UM. And yeah, this is a very like, very like a typical move, whether it be for like you know, coal mining, whether it be for pipelines, in terms of like big companies going into small towns to be like, hey, we can promise you economic growth if you can like assist in this you know, extractive process, and they'll be able to convince them with you know, misleading statistics on and

you know all that kind of stuff. In terms of logging industry is getting getting really good at radicalizing rule populations to have them believe that it's one not it's it's not like economically destructive to take down trees. They might even say it's like good, um and all all that kind of stuff has have Has there been like any outreach in terms of kind of addressing addressing people in small towns who like maybe used to like you know, rely on unlogging or something and how does how does

that works? I know, like they'll be like, oh, but you people come from the city and now you're coming out here into like the woods where I live, and I think it's good that they're chopping down these trees. Right. There's there's there's there's like that kind of that that kind of disconnection because again, no one, no one's immune to propaganda. You can you just you just just have

to find the specific one. Um. See I'm just curious about, like in terms of in terms of like forest defense, how often this comes up and how and how you kind of yeah, I don't know what's what steps to make to to be like to tell people, hey, maybe you're believe these things because timber industries told you them, Like how how? How how do you start that conversation with people? Yeah, this is like actually the heart of the forest defense work ahead, what you're talking about right now,

the heart of our work ahead, um. And I would also say, you know, there's a there's certainly, um, a dichotomy that the media especially likes to present between the rural logging communities and you know, Portland or city based in batimentalists and the hippie environmentalists to come in and yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, And everyone's familiar with that, and there's of course some truth um to that, but I want to say, like super clearly, there are so

many rural folks who do not support the logging industry, and so that's like a false dichotomy that gets presented to us right off the bat, and a lot of those you know, for in the in um the work that I've been doing on forest forest defense, Essentially, we're always connecting with folks on the ground in literally the backyards of these logging proposals, and many of them are

super uninterested in having their backyards clear cut. And so we you know, the we we pushed directly against that mythology that you know, it's just environmentalists coming in from Portland, because we work directly with people, including for Brighton Bush, but with every single thing that we work on directly with people who are literally on the front lines of that logging. That said, there is absolutely um a huge pole um. You know, Oregon specifically as you know, famous

for logging. Like we talked about last time, there's a logger on top of the capitol. UM. You know, are the mayor of Portland's logging money It's in Oregon's Oregonians blood. Yeah, and for rural Oregonians, UM, there are economic realities where in some cases some counties benefit from um logging in their total from the logging industry, their school you know,

schools are tied to logging money. UM. And there's you know, in a lot of ways a narrative that is not really accurate anymore, but has like an element of nostalgia to it. Like you know, logging towns and um this old story about how things used to work with small, small family logging. That's not how it is anymore. But that narrative that like nostalgic narrative, carries on into a

lot of communities. And so what the way that I like to cut through that um for people is by makeing it really clear that there's a difference between small you know, family loggers of lore um and and you know of you know, people's what people are attached to and the kinds of what we're seeing today is we're looking at Wall Street logging. We're looking at Wall Street invested UM invested, huge you know, corporate industries who owned who can who still own like you know, huge percentages

of our drinking water sheds, of our um communities. Some some of the communities on the coast are owned primarily by private industrial Wall Street funded UM logging corporations. And that's you know, those aren't mom and pop. They're not living in the community. They're living often not even on the Pacific Northwest. These are rich ass assholes who are destroying our bioregion. And you know, I think that making it clear that those aren't those folks are not like us.

You know, those are not like rural Aragonians, your those are not your friends. Those are not you know, your pals or your neighbors. And just cutting through that narrative that like, oh, you know logging communities, Um, you know loggers are your friendly neighbor. Actually, no, loggers are Wall Street, Um, you know, investment corporations, rich money people who are doing this destruction. And just kind of like breaking that I guess, like that um, that attachment that people have to this idea,

that's just not a reality anymore. The reality is that people who are for logging in rural communities are they have a lot more common with those of us who are fighting logging than the actual people doing the logging, if that makes sense. Like there's a lack of understanding

of what the logging industry actually is. It's like back to that nostalgia, Like people who are against logging in rural communities, um, you know often genuinely do not realize that this is Wall Street and like who's doing this logging. They're still thinking it's their you know, neighbor or their

friend and it's you know, these stories. But you know the reality is that you know, this is corporate timber owners who are maximizing their financial gain by buying out small landowners all over the place, um ensuring that they aren't taxed by lobbying heavily in the government, so they don't you know, have any sort of taxation that then

goes back to benefit our communities. Don't even get me started about how many taxes the timber industry skips out on that could actually benefit our communities and our schools and our libraries and our fire departments but aren't. UM.

And then they're adopting exploitative labor practices. Basically, you know, the contracted workers who are in the logging industry right now, who are doing the logging and hauling UM and reforestation so called reforestation planting of mono crop plantations, they are experiencing flat wages and declining work quality conditions um. Meanwhile, while the corporate timber forms are expanding their profits um and you know, getting more wealthy investors. So that is

the reality of the timber industry. These are not you know, your friendly neighborhood loggers anymore. So. A few other points I wanted to bring up, kind of on force itself someone someone said something about how we talked about like old growth, and and I guess they think that we said that all forests in this area is old growth, and that's not something we actually said. Old growth is a specific term that means a specific thing. And yeah, regardless of it being old growth or not, they still

shouldn't be cut down. I don't know, So I'm not sure why this point was really raised, because we didn't I did. I don't think we did, uh say that every that every tree there is is old growth. Um. A lot of them were planted in the past few hundred years, UM, But that that doesn't mean like they're like much less important. It's like, just because they're not old growth doesn't mean we shouldn't be preserving this particular watershed in this particular environment and not be clear cutting

all of it. Yeah, old growth is like like the term old growth is just like become fetishized to me, and this like this thing that you know. This also, let's be clear, that's not an agreement on what old growth actually means across the board, even between agencies, Like there's an arbitrary date cut off that the federal government uses to define old growth. UM. But obviously if you walk into a forest stand, this a healthy you know, a healthy old growth stand is complex in terms of

age diversity. There's going to be old growth individual trees,

there's going to be a lot of younger trees. Is gonna be horizontal and vertical diversification, Like old growth is complicated, it's messy, But the whole point is like you're right, Like it doesn't actually matter if it's like quote in the CAD, the small narrow category of what the Forest Service would define as old growth, if it's a forest that's been around for you know, a hundred years or even you know, I would argue, if it's a forest that's over like seventy or eighty years old, what are

we doing cutting that down? Especially now you know that's storing so much carbon safely in the ground. And also by that age, it's had the opportunity, you know, to to become more diverse than these like monocrop plantations that we're seeing younger forests. So I would argue any forest that's not a monocrop plantation, a young monocrop plantation should

absolutely not be clear cut. It's just an inappropriate activity to do in native forest and speaking of a clear cut, there was another Another comment was about how clear cutting can sometimes be good because it creates new environments for other animals and living things to exist in. And I

find this to be a really weird comment to make. Um, I don't, I don't quite understand this, this kind of idea, because yes, of course, if you cut down a forest, you are creating a new environment, but that's not where that environment should be, nor is it where it is. It's like if you if you erect a whole bunch of concrete skyscrapers where a force used to be. Yeah, you're also making a new environment. But I would say we probably shouldn't do that, though I don't. That's not

that's not a good thing. The same thing with like the people obsessed with like putting solar panels in the desert, Like the desert is an actual environment, like it has There is reasons for why deserts need to exist and that have this whole like a whole like a whole whole environment and a whole um I forget the word, but like and it has an entire system of living things that exist there that should Um, we we don't need to terraform everything. I don't think that's like, I

don't we shouldn't. I think preserving the environment in general, preserving the environments that are existing and who are creating like ecosystems, is a good thing. I think generally, the less terraforming probably probably the better, at least right now, when we're dealing with a massive like looming climate crisis that's caused by us terraforming the earth. Um, maybe we should not do that as much. Yeah, we could call a bout a general role like no more terraforming, You'll

just leave it. Let's just let's just leave let's leave us for a bit. We just addressed the other things. But for real, though, whoever wrote that comment, I mean, that is a timber industry talking point that at the time it's literally, that is literally and whether they meant it or not, you know, this is how the timber industry gets us. They're real good at this. This is there, you know, nice sounding talking points that we rebut all the time, um, you know, not just in media but

also in court. Um. And the talking point is clear cuts mimic natural disasters like severe fires by replacing it. And it's part totally don't clear cut, go look at a fire. It's a completely different experience than I could go down that rabbit hole all day on fire ecology another time maybe, but suffice it's to say, you know, what they're arguing is that they're creating young forest or quote early several habitat by clear cutting an old forest.

But what they're actually doing is DeForest station. They're replacing an old forest with something that's not forest, A young mono crop plantation is a crop. It is not a forest, and so they are deforesting, and um, it is ecosystem. It is ecoside, and um, yeah it is. It is egoside.

And I think, yeah, the insistence that like it's it's good because it will allow some species to exist in this new environment, like, yeah, but there's other environments where they can't exist, and we don't we don't need to be destroying the ones that are already kind of important and doing good stuff to make room for other ones that aren't already there. And they argue that the deer and the butterflies love the clear cuts, and so just call that out as bullshit next time you'all hear that.

It's you know, spread the word that is some timber industry bs. They're tricksy, but don't let them get you. And the last thing I want to mention is why blocking off access to these areas is bad. Um, because I got someone someone said something like, um, you know, because fires are human caused, closing off public lands is it can be good because then fires wone gets hurt in those areas, And this really just misunderstands why fires

get started. And also it's just a bad thing to do anyway, because like fire if you look at like the map of where wildfires start, um, almost all of them are on the path of highways. UM. Specifically in

California that when when the fires are really there. There was a firefighter who who who made a great video about like why the fire line was all next to the highway and there was like conspiracy theories of like including the Antifa's driving down highways and setting the forest on fire, which was which was an actual popular talking point because we live in the hell world. Um. But like you know, he's explained like the reason why, like they are like human caused, but they're not, like a

lot of them aren't intentionally caused. It's because that's where power lines run. And this is where a lot of sparks can ignite stuff on the edges of of of highways that will then take out a part of the forest. Now, every once in a while there's a gender reveal party that goes horribly wrong and does and and does ignite it. That is true, and I think the solution to that is not closing down the forest. It's not having gender

reveal parties that we stopped selling uh on Amazon. I'm all thor Tanna right as an idea, But how about let's stop selling blue and pink Tanna right packets to people who don't know how to use explosives genuinely don't know, because yeah, like they're not they're not actually using Tanna right for what it's meant for, and they're not using it to do like like training. Um, they're using it to say that they're having a baby. And this has

caused a lot of wildfire death. So how how about we just stopped selling uh the gender reveal party bombs. I think that'd be a better solution than closing down massive swaths of public land. And how about our power line companies get their ship together and stop Yeah, do actually have a plan for planned power shut offs. And actually, you know, we know now actually Pacific Corps is in

court right now because they started the Santiam fires. Their power lines started the stand Inspires and the Archie Creek fires and probably more. And so yeah, how about the

powerline companies get their ship together. But I feel like the other huge thing here is that, you know, the suggestion that we should close off these forests to the public to me is just like more uh you know, it's you know, blatantly it's racist, um, and it's you know, I think it's wrong because these lands, these belong to indigenous people. We should be giving these lands back to

indigenous people. And you know, when we're talking about like rural communities too in adjust transition, like rural community members should actually have more say in what happens in their backyard. Forests should be able to be more engaged, um in you know, the forests that literally provide them with their drinking water, um, and you know all of the things that they need, um to survive. So we should not be you know, locking off these lands and keeping humans out.

Humans have a place in these lands. I've always had a place in a role in these lands, and um, if we take leadership from the right folks, and we could totally live in a much more reasonable way than the gender revealed party path. Yeah, and like I don't know if you know this, but like being in the forest is great. It's like it is great to be

surrounded by giant trees. It makes you feel awesome. The last thing I want to talk about is um you mentioned before, like getting people who live in these rural areas who used to rely on logging, getting them are involved and doing a just transition, because this is a topic that comes out that comes up on climate change like everywhere in terms of like you know, like countries that are still developing not being able to have access to the same amount of fossil fuels that countries like

the States you know had when they when when they were developing, and like how is that fair? Right? This is this is like this is a very common thing of in terms of countries that are better off. UM need will you know have kind of kind of like a duty to assist assist countries that are trying to develop and trying to get better standards of living. Um, because we profited off the fossil fuels and now they won't have the same opportunity if we're trying to you know,

get to a carbon neutral world. Um So, in terms of like a just just transition, this is something like you know, a COP twenty six. There was supposed to be funding for adaptation efforts in in the developing countries. Now that failed because of course it's COP twenty six.

But in terms of like, in terms of like this this idea of a just transition, how do you see this like locally in the rural environment within the States and for for like these types of areas, because like, yeah, because it's similar to like coal mining, the town's similar to you know, logging towns. How how does how how do you see this working? Yeah? This is something I

think about so much. Um And we actually put out a platform called a Green New Deal for our Forests in the Pacific Northwest that talks like all about what a just transition could look like for communities. But I mean, this is a dream and I think it's like a really inspiring, uh inspiring path forward because what it means is that you know, we're not saying to end logging and we're not saying that rural communities basically need to

like stop existing and getting funding from lodge. And what we're saying is that rural community members, what we that nostalgic dream that are that people are playing to, we actually want to have something in that regard. We would like people to you know, engage with and interact with their local forests. Now that shouldn't look like clear cutting them, because um, that's irresponsible and that doesn't benefit local communities

or you know, of the benefit of future. But that could look like restoring these young mono crop plantations into complex, healthy forests. It could be looked like bringing fire back onto the landscape with prescribed fire and cultural burning, taking lessons from indigenous folks who are doing network UM. It could look like education and recreation and so many things of like you know, hands on engagement with backyard forests

that surround us UM. And you know that that could look like basically firing the freddies and uh taking this land and giving it to local communities with UM you know, the with with conservation goals, but also goals to economic support by all of those ways you know, jobs but

also jobs and recreation UM economically support local communities. So basically giving the land back to the local communities who rely on them and giving them power and control um to care for them in ways that makes sense because right now wall streets caring for our forests, and really

it should be us. And I think one other thing on this topic, for like how how well propagando works when I was um at the stop plane three purchase camps last summer in terms of like how do corporations get towns to start supporting these ideas and how do they like foster this hatred of environmentalism um, despite you know, these areas often being the worst impact one of the worst impacted ones by these like effort efforts. Right uh, you know, you're they're chopping down forests near where this

town is. Pipeline is going next to the town. If it leaks, it's going to cause all this problem to like their water splant and stuff. But like how they do. It's like the day of the direct action to block the pipeline, Enbridge was sponsoring like a town fair in like the little downtown area, and it's like this super surreal moment of being like, oh, this is like I've read this happened in like comics before, like and this this is like this is like one of Lex Luthor's

favorite things to do. Like hell, like go into this like small town. Who's gonna start like this evil you know evil like a like lab at and he'll like fund like this small town event thing and like I've seen this before in so many superhero comics. Like I've seen this trope and that I'm just like living it.

You're just like watching it happen. You're like driving past the town to go block up pipeline and then you see like Enbridge with like a little stage and like a little like fair and like everyone in the towns like dancing and they're giving up like free drinks and like oh no, like this is yeah, like you're like living the things like you know, a lot of it.

It's about like this idea of like rein like reinvigorating like like you know like the the like the spirit of the town and injecting injecting new life into it.

So like you know, this this is like a new one for like they're they're putting a pipeline down, but like you know, it's the same thing for like you know old like old coal towns, old logging towns, and these corporations will come in you know, make the town more active again, start putting on events, make it feel like more of a place, and then that that gets

so the company gets associated with positive changes. Right, so then people who live in the towns like, oh yeah, and we're just doing all these good things for my town. That must mean they actually, you know, are gonna care about us here and then help and help us out. Meanwhile, these people from all around the country are driving through and trying to block the pipeline and the police are

driving everywhere. Now it's all this chaos, right, these stupid environmentalists, they don't understand how this is gonna you know, it's it's we're creating so many jobs here, which actually didn't. Enbridge outsourced most of the jobs out of state, but they lied about the type of job creation. You know,

all all all all this type of stuff. And this is a very very common thing totally, and like timber unity is like delivering would to people when the when when the snow storm happened and everyone was cold and didn't have power and they were you know, going door

to door with mutual aid support. Um. But that is why you know, a remember how everyone should remember how how tricks e and how dishonest these folks are, but also be why um, those of us who want to see a different way need to be doing mutual aid too, Like we actually need to be out there in our communities and making friends and building trust and not just showing up to function up when it's time to function up.

And I think that kind of like circles back to the point we talked about earlier, which is like building relationships with people on the front lines. Um. Looks like so much more than just like the defense of a bad thing in their backyards. It looks like, you know, mutual aid because the industry is doing it, um, and they're they're good at it, and we need to be better. Um. I think that wrops up for us today. What one thing I want, like, what what is going to happen

going forward now after this, after this legal victory. What's kind of just to just just just just as so people know, like what is like the next steps that are going to be taken on the legal process that will kind of determine what what happens um with like you know, direct actions and going to see the forest in like in the future. Yeah, Um, well, basically we're waiting um for a date for this court case. UM. And so that will hopefully be scheduled if it if

it ends up having to go through, which it might not. UM. Obviously there's going to be an effort made on behalf of lawyers UM to try and get the Forest Service to just stop, to just drop this shenanigan UM and walk away UM while they're you know where they're at, UM, because we we do think we have a really strong case UM that will win in court if it goes to court. So that's kind of like the legal avenue UM. Same story as what I said with the last time

we talked. You know, if if logging is going to move forward in that area, whether that be because UM it happens in the future or because somehow this legal case is lost, direct action will happen. People will be out there in the way of logging. There's no way people are going to let that go down in the Brighton Bush community. UM. So right now we're kind of

in a waiting game. We're watching and waiting UM. But you know, I hope the Forest Service knows now that they can't just get get away with stuff like this. People are watching. People are going to file public records request. We're documenting this and um, hopefully you know, we won't be seeing more of this, but because we live in the real world, the real sad world, we will be seeing more of this, and so, um, you know, we'll be out there again when the next forest is on

the chopping block, which is probably going to be you know, today, tomorrow. Yeah, it's kind of always the thing. Um. Well, thank thank you so much for coming on to talk about this and the uh rare rare good news episode of Hey, something good happening. Thank you. In any other sources people can kind of follow along on the fight that the people can find online. Yeah, make sure to follow Cascadia Forest Offenders and Portland Rising tide Um, who will be

definitely tracking and posting. You can also follow Cascadia Wildlands, who um was the lead nonprofit on the lawsuit and they've been posting about it too. Great. All right, thanks everybody for listening. Uh go see a tree, Touch Tree. Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen.

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