It Could Happen Here Weekly 14

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 three Coup against Salat or Ende was a democratic socialist of a type that

has broadly ceased to exist today. A committed Marxist to believe that class of society could be created by means of electoral democracy, he embarked on a campaign drastically more radical than any modern social 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 unsanctioned 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 theorists Stanford Beer, who embarked on an operation called Project Cybersend 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. Bark's credentials, was fiercely critical of the bureaucratization of the U. S s R, and, in particular in the economic sphere, the way it's 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 participation 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 cordonas 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 cybermntics the question of how the system should be organized is that it ought to organize itself, in essence that Cyberson should be used to eliminate the bureaucracy in the state entirely

and allow workers to directly or nights production themselves. Now, Cyberson in theory is what the near a libals 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 a Vengi Motoro's put it, Pierre and Hyak knew each other, as Beer

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

in the entire economic bearment 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, Hyak 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 fun 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. Here's nineteen seventy two strike we've already discussed and he's 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. The reward for their services was capital turning around and

dutting them like a fish. In the eighties two fought a series of battles with his left flank. Disarming the mass workers assemblies that had formed in nineteen seventy two 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 Allen 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, which they were a fairly large number. Upon taking power, he carried out what would become the standard neoliberal 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 MAOS 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 nineteen seventy five came from demands from the I m F itself, who demanded terconian

measures to control inflation. Here, Pinochet was aided by the support 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 Friedman, 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. The 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 dele and 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 nineteen 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 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 outweighs that benefit because your vote only matters if it's 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 Modernization was an application of Virginia School doctrine to the entire Chilean state and as much as the society 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. Quote. 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 Vinea 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 uncontraded market forces to guide human interaction. 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 nineteen seventy eight and

that blessed with his approval. A dicatorship can restrict itself in A edicatorship 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 Yek's friends. She has wrote Rode Abount Pelion Again. The constitution was not only named after hys 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's 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 Guzman aggressively supported continuing the state of emergency, which legalized the use of whatever discretionary powers were deemed necessary to quial opposition. That Folks is a high achi in constitution used the state to murder any one once democracy or God to help them wants to control the production they're forced to

serve every day. Chile is near liberalisms voltron by binding the power of all four major schools of neoliberalism Chicago School and Monetary and Economic policy, Australian 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 slog that, on the one hand, is one of the most interesting explanations of what oiler rents are have ever encountered, but also features Corneal 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 statorship.

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

nineteen 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 Corp. The Auto Industry in Venezuela Corinial described it thus quote. The central goal was to have of the vehicle's value, including the drive train, produced locally.

By nineteen 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 Danda 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 Peano Shane notably leaves in the key sticking points in this joint and day impact venezuela attempts 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 sourced 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 by submitting designs that failed specs. The result was a kind of political war inside Venezuela and particularly inside the Venezuela and 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. The new international Economic Order never came. All the G seven had to do in order to stop it was stalled 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 G seventy seven was to pull the various factions in the seventy seven apart, in particular pulling the moderate governments away from the radical wing of 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 oil 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 roy 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 pecked to something called the lybor 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 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 were lifted nineteen sevent 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 control of the I m F fell to an arch neo liberal named Jacques

de la Rosier. I really don't know if that's how to pronounce his name, but he is evil. So neo liberals further took control of the World Bank in knee from the I m F and the World Bank, a sepsia of ne 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 to collectively negotiate debt relief. Sakara was promptly shot by a former ally who accused him of threatening Borkino 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 Knowledge Very Fund as their enforcer. The anthropologist David Graeber described the consequence of one such IMF hosterity 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 impost 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 thousand 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 bureaucratic institutions to act as dead enforcers and the the imposed neoliberal policies from above, without anything

so petty as democracy interfering with it. In fact, one of the first new 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 be fall 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 im st ctraal adjustments. Carlos Andres Perez, the man who led the industrial pushing in the nineteen seventies, 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 Nino, implemented ironically by the founder of the movement towards Socialism, Teodoro Petkoff, 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 socialist that took power in the national level were reduced to shuffling oil rents around, and with the market economy still in place, the economy is simply imploded again when wild 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, Yeah, 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. Well, Garrison, Hello, how you doing. I'm doing fine. We're gonna talk about something that is 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 fours is, 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 Neil Bulls to kind of kind of compromise. It has been worked out between labor and capital, particularly the US after sort of the open class warfare in the

directeen thirties. And you know, there's essentially there's 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 the is particularly after what we'd two 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 in time when you get the same bargain, and you know, they're in a lot of ways significantly

on militants, and this causes en normal sponsetermentional 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 tant 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 South I Rock war, and there's there's this whole

sort of thing. Then you know that 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 Carlson Tucker Carlos said, Glenn Greenwall trying to get people care about this thing that just nobody gives a single ship about. Yeah, you know, it was, it was, but the Ages 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 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 you want to do ne liberalism, if you want to destroy 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 in 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 a ropeky sort

of strategy for implenting the 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 American, and then also works off the sort of of off of the sort of mass Protestantism in the US, and this becomes a force study is responsible for like almost every bad thing that exists today in some form or another, a lot

of them. Yeah, I mean not not often, but you know,

I the 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 we talked about last episode, the Vulcar Shock, where Vulcar raises the interest rates 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 had 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, in 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 MOUs 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 smash 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 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, this 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 you get 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 basical basically 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 trust 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 by 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 and 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 everthing 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 the 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 the 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 Union Movement, right, which is a bunch of mostly black workers in Detroit, who are you know, there there

there there there 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 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, and bye bye bye. By the time you hit the eighties, especially in the US, the unions are just sort of a shell out their form ourselves, 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 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 with this, which is squeezing the unions 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 and it has you know, it's like, well, okay, so there's this alliance between middle management and the workers, and you know, it's 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 alliance between sort of middle managements and these unions and 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 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 there 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 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 percent of the company. And if you own fitment of the company, now you control, you have controlling interest. And so he goes in and she just he 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 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 that's these corporate scripts 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 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 the over 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 ghoul 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 Mitt 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 if 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, well, 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 contains, 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 from 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 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 an 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 doesn't adempological stuff. And the way they talk about the market, they literally talk about as if they're channeling it, right, like it's like something and they're like, these are yeah, these are these are that's what's one of the new gods of of our world? That yeah, that's I mean, that's that's not a uncommon term of

phrase to describe stuff like this. Yeah, and and what what what What I think is interesting 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 move

another firm. Right, So this makes sense side of the context of Wall Street, because these people like like these Wall Street firms they have they have like like thirty turned 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 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 if 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 and 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 got yeah, 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 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 crib. 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 at and movements 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 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 nink in eighties, is he starts doing basically all of the same stuff that that that

reagaan at thatacher doing. He starts, he starts implemented shock adoction, he starts privatization, he starts um like marketization, he starts cutting studying, cutting price controls, he starts, 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, these state own industries going under, getting privatized, um the

sort of like collective ownership structures imploding. And the product of this is that you know, melos Vic 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 they get said is just these this enormous way of privatizations, Uh, the worldfare state 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 professors 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 just 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 they're 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 Rothbar'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 whether 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, there's 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 is about

capitalism was absolutely true. Yeah, that's that seems to be roughly accurate. Yeah, 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 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 in ransoms. Not me, No I have, I have wrote for a website. He does not, like I cannot 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, Okay, 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 that this this brings me back to the single thing that I need everyone to understand about need liberalism, 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 in order for it to operate, it definitely extends drastically like the hands of the states 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 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 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 in comprehensible 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 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. You know, there's this this is just just this like process of abject humiliation that you have to go through 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 that 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 bureaucrat 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 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, and you know, and 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 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, but 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 neoliberal 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 nealiberal administration that they you know, they double it, right, it basically doubles again drained bedween 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 neil libils 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 drives politics in sort of in rural reasons in the US, which is that you have these places that used to sort of have industry is used to particularly like coal mining, things like that, and it gets replaced by prisons 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 will 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 conflu late about what neoliberalism is they can use it libertarianism 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 new 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 Pellion 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 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 moving to people, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Um, if you look at literally everything every neo liberal government has ever done,

it's exactly the opposite. It's they don't like that. Yeah, yeah, they hit it. And and and you know 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 decrease wages, blah blah blah blah. So 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 the new labels figured out

was that you know, these these these enormous market labor populations, the best way you can 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 has imposed money 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 neoliberals mind, right, the quintessential neoliberal 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 for the world and they're reaching themselves. And I think a lot of just think of it as like the quintessional 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 those guys look like. Yeah, I know, looking at the footage from the sixties and riot cops is like really depressed it because they're like, I could take these guys. 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 a that's like the arriety 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 on people, which is really bad. Yeah, I'm I'm looking at it, looking at it at the two thousand one riot cops, and yeah, they are not nearly

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

Now 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 neo 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, Like 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 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 neo liberalism, isn't it. Vicky usta Well talked about this on on

on the Occupy episode. It's it's the comps become more like become more like the army. The army becomes more like the cops. And you know, the result is this sort of pen out to con surveillance states, where like if you and seven people stand on a sidewalk, sixteen cops will show up. Yeah, they've they've really 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 pointed this out, which is that the problem with doing this is that, you know, Okay, so like the the the enormous 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 produced any goods um and not really much service either. No. And and this is you know this, this this is a problem, right because because neoliberalism is profit driven, and so you know, what 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 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. They're they're sometimes they're decent, you know. And one one of the story I want to end on is so there's you know, there 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 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 Appetistas 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 they, 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 started 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 this you know this, this this massive battle erupts um

it's just in the city and you know this is this is all the police attack it like three in the morning, right, but then they there's not enough of them, 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 just 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 it 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 very 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 median sative 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 aba hawkause it wasn't just people sort of like standing behind them, like like tens of thousands of people just joined the fight 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 the disaster it made it made even people the crowds were larger, and like, you know, one of the things that happens is, uh, the 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 a 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 are left wing tied, 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 big 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 to the ruling class will literally bathe the entire country in blood, like

they will destroy their own company. Is different. The way I mean this gets discussed and season will 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 oide 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. But you know, we 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 Mexican state. It's it's very very difficult to tell where the cartels 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 not 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 U a liberal. 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 they called them Thomas Anderson liberals. That that that that's 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 them, and thank thank thank thank you all for joining us. 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 and 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 who you are online so you can get get better advertisements. Yeah, follow us online, 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

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 chips in it's like you have a phone. It's hilarious. They tricked us into carry around speakers, cabras and gps is everywhere we go. It is really funny. It's amazing. All right, Well, bye funny Fye, 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. Um, 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, welcome the show. Thank you very much. It is my pleasure to be on it. It's great to meet you all in 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 filled with scripted shots 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 out 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 and 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, you know, 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 theirs 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. It didn't care if you

know that they weren't fully informed. If you know that they were barely informed. M hm, 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 gone the the kind of um, financialization of people's private data, 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 indifference. 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 lung 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 monopolist, 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 a 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 exhibited earlier in this episode, is this this tendency that I certainly see in myself and I see in other people to get kind of eaten 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 the 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 to 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 going to 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 start 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 an out your merger is legal, or you can roll the dice. But I tell you what, if you come up sneake, 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, and 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 tal going to have their in the Like um, yeah, well, and Peter Til of course loves 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 Biden has set so far is hiring Lena Khan and her colleagues cantor at

the d o 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 Facebook, they are well aware that like this might be a weight 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 in a minister aation here won't won't um put Marguerite 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 the worst privacy. So that's that's um, you know, it's a real home court advantage for Facebook. But it needs that other eight 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 jin Ping, for his own reasons, which are not my reasons and distinct from the Democrats and the Republicans reasons, is doing stuff to rein in big

tech in China. And it's a actually quite interesting because you know the argument that Nick Klegg 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 hedgeminy 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 Montt 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, regular tory 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 a uniquely powerful and talented demagogue as opposed to just like a demagogue shaped puzzle piece that fit in the demagogue shaped hole 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,

that 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 in an incredible series of books. But she's a real like kind of multi talented, multi threat. So she's a librettist and singer who's pretty 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 fifteen, 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 alliances, break alliances, stab each other in the back uh stage surprise reversals, and at the end of the 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're 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 there's 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 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 renewables we need are hugely overestimated, and it's basically that like keeping uh fossil fuel power online requires a lot of fossil fuel, right, so 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 what 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 crack 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 out 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 Groster 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 perse 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 per stream rate 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 felony, 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 vp ends in it. And so you know that this um endgame of the copyright wars is I think

a lot more dystopian than uh 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 Deer were a smaller, weaker firm, it would be less able to resist both the claims of its work force 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 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. 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 people who make tractors. Sure, but you know if you grew up watching professional wrestling and now you're a ghas 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 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 raspberry 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 Years Optical, and lens Crafters and Specsavers 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 he full fine 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 in 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 D printing presents for that. We have an organization in Portland that does kind of three D printing glasses frame since 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 brewed 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 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 potent chell 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 to 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 UM three D printing was that the patents have been concentrated into the hands of two arch 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 leave 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 out of 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

on 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 summer 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, right, not maliciously,

just through incompetence. Um. And so you know, the 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 geofense warrants, which again, if you're like sitting there going oh, geofense 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 um kickstarted the audiobook 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 surveillance that was done on the pipeline protests, and a lot of it was provocateurs and undercovers who were just terrible at 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's like you, 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 no but here stories yeah here, it was

not that we did just didn't see that incredible efficacy. Yeah, And I do think that 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. It 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 keep my 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 my pleasure. You know what, I think it's time to do a podcast. All right, I did it, Sophie.

This 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

a 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 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 getting 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 at 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 Republicans. Yeah, So using that very specifically turn of phrase is definitely uh notable. And then another pole from arlier in the year 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 maybe 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 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 GOSAR, from elected Republican leaders, from governors, from state level elected officials, um. 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 other thing that's interesting about that, which is I think it was one of those are these our sps arguing that it was like, well, the Pentagon's not particularly civil like, well, the Pentagon doesn't want civil war, They're

not gonna step into it. But but I think it is also important to note that, like, like if you remember what happened last summer, there's a lot of FEDS who are just like, you know, like when like yeah, so so you know, the the army kind of doesn't want Trump to like send the army against protesters. But like you know, like bor Tak for example, like was just like absolutely hyped up to just like absolutely just go disappear a bunch of peopowl 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 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 there 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? So? Yeah, like there is there is a lot of backing um, at least performatively among certain types of like 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 seems to be like like like Bobart and that, and those types aren't. 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 nbcp's actually puts out, it's it's all of this kind of like divisive um and and more violent of rhetoric and behavior

displayed by and towards some of our like 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 versus just like increasingly increasingly normalizing extreme violence against uh you know, quote unquote

fellow countrymen. I think is is ah, yeah, like that there's we are going to be more likely to be just moving in that direction slowly, and at the point when there is 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 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 whatever. 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 think 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 I see that as very concerning and as kind of prelude to the sort of armed mobilizations that you would see 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 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 impunity, UM. And I think the feeling of being matched uh 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, so that the years a letter this kind of like a roughly ten year period in Italy of I don't know, mass terrorismating 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 haus And there's a litt also,

there's there's a bunch of intelligence and she's involved. There's a lot of foreign kind of false false bombings, like hundred hundreds of people are being killed in bombings, and I think there 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 agency 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 suicide bombings, the left doesn't kidnap people like like the modern American

left doesn't do that, and that a big part of what was happening from the years of lad was that, you know, sometimes the left was doing this. A lot of times it was the state pretending to be the

left carrying out 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 durban 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 imprison 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 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 gun fights between left

and right in American towns. The products and services 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? Any? 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 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 two 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 is the thing is that, like, I don't think this guy, Brian Michael Dickens 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 war old works, and I like, people spend

their time. No, people aren't doing bowling leagues, but yeah, woman, young men are spending and and you know, middle edgement 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

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 lessing he talks about this, oh, is the thing that formed the commons or national identity was

shared universal Military service. And it's like, okay, the 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 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 basic,

it's basically made it make America great again. But sort of like, yeah, that this type of rhetoric is actually very similar to like the return return to tradition stuff, being like the solution to our extremism that need to be going to church church again, being a 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 America grade again, returned 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, so that I mean, but like, yeah, citizen militias 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 have 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 Jenkins 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've 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 are 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 is 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, yeah, yeah, we were really

civil war. Yeah yeah, yeah, that's that's there was fighting between two halfs of the country that it was a proxy for two others several other kind of ye 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. Like I mean, in in any civil war, like there's a lot of other countries that get involved. In the US Civil War, there was

a significant amount of that sort of thing. 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 i optic 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 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 cities 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 skirmiches 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 really 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 much resources and the fact that rural areas are isolated in a different way and lack of separate resources. That is not something that makes a civil war less likely. That just makes it more complicated and makes it 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 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 and I think it's important thing to say, 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 a 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 are like kind of terrorism people, right, and the

kind of terrorism kind of resurgence people. It's weird because they used to understand it, like you know, like a lot of like you know, because like in in you know, in the twentieth century and even sort of early century, like the the sort of the sort of standard like grilla 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 ural 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 there the three thousand's where like you know, what what what, Yeah, you have kind of an urban reyal divide with they have allies in the cities, but the sort of you know, like the you have a bunch of rural indigenous groups that literally just you know, they blockade every road in

the country and then start off the cities out right. I mean, this is this is this is this is just a thing that happened in like five six 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 jud's and gave them guns and sent them in with the army. Um. And I was like, yeah, I could absolutely see ship could that happen? Yeah, Like if there was some sort of uprising in a in a liberal city. There's 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 found 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 hedge

fund shirt. I don't 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 the hedge fund guy because this is when something with this much money he is talking about this one just for fun, right, he's doing this just for ships for 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 Rage Dahlio is a hedge fund manager and he is So he runs Bridge Bridgewater Associates one allegedly the

world's largest hedge fund firm. Yeah, and it depends how you to find anything, but yeah, alleged it's a very large fund. And this guy, this guy is weird by like venture capital standards. So the Bridge Waters whole thing is that everyone in the company is constantly surveiled at all times, and anyone else in the company could look

at when anyone else is doing. It's supposed to be like it's like total transparency, and 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 world's funds. It's great, it's we it's it's amazing and good we give these 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, I 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 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 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 big elections, that can 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 going to solve the close election problem. That doesn't even if you do it, that won't be a solution. You know, I will say, like, yeah,

credit where minor credit is due. Raydalio is in fact right that the difference between two thousands, which is when the last time someone actually literally stolen election happened where yeah, but Bush Bush openly reads the election. It's incredibly obvious, like there there's like six ways he does this. Everyone

knows what'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 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 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 that 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 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 Rogers 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 Daio

thinks is going to like get everybody on board. So maybe maybe, uh 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 the Supreme Court. It beats it beats every other quote solution these articles. I mean Odin Kirk brought Twitter together that one week. Maybe yeah, yeah, you know with with

the practice to your court. If you just picked twelve random people off the street, and we're like, 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 term yes of of almost I forget exactly. But it's when a government is not composed of elected leaders, composed of a random selected a random selection of people, and they made decisions and then their 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 of Brooking Institution, on the Civil War, and then uh, Brian went no, not not Brian, yes of Brian Michael jenkins Um, senior advisor to the President of rand Brime I j 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, yeah, or in terms of the in terms of the hedge fun 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 of 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 resource into something more manageable for them. And because they don't have a good grasp, especially the Brian Michaeljakins guy has and 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? Man, he just did plan them on. He would absolutely Brian Michael Jakins would get PanAm on so fucking quick. The panamanias 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 Jenkins is seventy nine years old, so oh it won't it wouldn't be hard. I just that that that's like a ten minute job. I'm just I'm just thinking like Brian Michael Jenkins, he's a quote unquote an American expert on terrorism and transportation security with four neckends 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 why 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. That's why I 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, 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's it has been a hot minute and definitely decrease in bowling leagues. It keeps happening in the UK. Yeah, I love was meaning specifically in in America and well, 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

probably Coles on media. If we Go Missing it was great Dalo. If We Go Missing it was Ray Daldio. But could ye everybody welcome to 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 in these sorts of hearings, and so we did not expect

the decision on that day. UM. But sure enough, the judge felt h strongly enough about this case and sure enough about her decision that she did roll from the bench and rolled 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 four Service just drops this Shenanigan entirely,

which hopefully they will do, but we'll see. Yeah, so they they blocked, they blocked the posts far logging and the the the basically started start starting to clear cut these areas without without actual like public and put 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, well what was what was the uh? 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 weeks ago. It was just demonstrate how many people love this place and how the Forest 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 without 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're 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, were absolutely overjoyed. Um. The news spread, you know, like wildfire, excuse the pun it how to do it? Um, and just you know, all this the 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 I was like 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 truth 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, when 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 before 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 like 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 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 agrees with us. 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, hard, 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 fullial 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, 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 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 UM came out from the timber industry, an 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 slu this logging propaganda, saying well, actually, our forests aren't worth anything standing after they've been burned, and they're contributing to the climate crisis, and they're destructive, you know, and 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 are using too 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 British 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 um 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? What was it?

What was a few of the actual things that they were that they were trying to do that eventually like came to light mm hmm. 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 fires, 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 sideboards, 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 were they were 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. 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 couldn't have predicted, Judge Akinstone 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 was going to happen here us silly little beasts.

But she did talk to them, 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 too.

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, it's not accurate.

In the judge agrees. Yeah, 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 lawsuits 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 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 all towns and be like, hey, we can promise you economic growth if you can like assist in this you know, extract of process, and they'll be able to convince them with you know, misleading statistics 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 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 environmentalists 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 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 pull 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 black 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 making 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 Oregonians, 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's 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. This

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 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 going to 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 up?

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's 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 as 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, presuming 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 being 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 by the general role like no more terraforming,

you'll just leave it. Let's just let's just leave us, let's leave us for a bit just as but for real though, whoever wrote that comment, I mean, that is a timber industry talking point that 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 you. And it's that they totally don't because it does not look at a 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 deforestation. They're replacing an old forest with something that's not a 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 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. They argue that the deer and the butterflies love the clear cuts, and so

just call that out as bullshit. Next time you'll 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 wanted 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 someone 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 were really there was there was this firefighter 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 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 about 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. 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 Santa Inspires and the Archie Creek fires and probably more. And so yeah, how about the

power line companies get their ships 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 think, 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, then 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 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 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 did. It's COP

twenty six. But in terms of like, in terms of like 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 towns, similar to you know, logging towns. How how does 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 logging. 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 unefit local communities

or you know, 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 economically 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, while streets caring for our four us

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 line 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 spline stuff. But like how they do. It's like the day of the direct action to block off 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 this this is like this is like one of Lex Luthor's

favorite things to do. Hell like like go into this like small town. Who's gonna start like this evil you know, evil like uh like lab At and he'll like fund like this small town event thing and like I've like 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 out like free drinks and like oh no, like this is yeah, Like you're 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 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 cold 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 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 wraps it up for us today. I just what one thing I want to mention is like,

what what is going to happen going forward? Now? After this, after this legal victory, what's kind of just just just just just just 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 it is going to be an effort made on behalf of lawyers UM to try and get the Force service to just stop, to just drop this to Nanigan UM and walk away UM while they're you know where they're at. 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 four Service knows now that they can't just get get away with stuff like this. People are watching, UM, 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 happened. Thank you. Thanks. In any of these 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. Yeah. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the Universe. It Could

Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at cool zone Media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.