It Could Happen Here Weekly 149

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Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

Hello, and welcome through. You can happen here. It's James today and I'm joined by Luca and Sailor. They're both from Breadblock, which is a mutual aid group in San Diego. How are you doing today?

We're doing great, great.

How are you wonderful?

Yeah, I'm thriving. I've just received my seventy fifth COVID booster I think, I think so having a little miserable day, but that's okay, not going to get novel coronavirus, which is always nice. So can you guys start out by maybe explaining, well, what Breadblock does, how long it's done it, and why it does it.

Yeah, So we are a mutual a group. We mostly provide hot food. That's like the core of our services. We feed about one hundred people like like eighty to one hundred people depending on the day weekly in East Village in San Diego. We also provide clothing and harm reduction supplies and other things like tampons and plan b when we can get our hands on it, and we try to be we are there like at the same

Yeah, So this form of what we're doing with bread Block in a more organized way has We've only been doing it a few months. However, Initially we started doing it in twenty twenty one when I started getting into harm reduction stuff and I was working at a strange exchange and realized a lot of people would be asking for food and we weren't getting that out there, and

And started doing that.

There's just a lot of people down there on those nights, so.

It's time to happen at the same time that a harm reduction services happen the needle exchange, So it's at a time when a lot of people are down there and the amount of time are like collective doing this specific thing as exist is I believe since end of March early April is how long we've been like consistently providing services every week.

Yeah, that's great. That's a long time. So especially through like some it could be a difficult time. If you don't have a house in San Diego, it gets increasingly it gets very hot, and the streets themselves get hot, and that becomes dangerous for people.

Yeah, exactly.

So I want to start with like, at some point, right, say that you were doing a syringe exchange and you are like, these people need to be fed. They are hungry, and now we're here and you're feeding them every week, right, But you had to do a whole lot of things in between here and there. And like I know this because listeners email me all the time. So many people want to do that too, and it might not exist

Yeah, So I guess what came before that was we had already built relationships with each other around our leftist ideals and art and protesting and different stuff. So we already knew a lot of people who were who were interested in mutual aid and that capacity. Yeah, but I will say things like Instagram have helped just meet more people who are looking to get involved in mutual aid.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like Selah said, we had like had spent some time building community with each other and getting a core group of people that trust each other, that had gone to protests together, that were maybe in like affinity groups already with each other, and then there was just sort of like enough of us that were in community with each other at the time that when Sala was like the Encampment band is like really making things so much worse for people in communities and we really need to do something,

Yeah. Yeah, that's like I want to be opinion the camping band, because the Camping Band is making things worse for people who are already having a hard time just surviving here, and it fucking sucks, and it's tod glorious fault. You shouldn't vote.

Yep.

Let's talk about though, Like I want to get into nuts and bolts, right, feeding one hundred people, Right, you need a giant ass pan, you need loads of food, you need a place where you can cook. How did you identify all those things and how did you get to a place where you could regularly have those things?

So in twenty twenty one, when I had initially started this with kind of a different group of people, but there were definitely over us, we just did it and like used my mom's kitchen and bound some big pots and just made it happen. And I feel like, if you have the will to make it happen, you're going to figure it out. And you know, maybe in the beginning it was a lot more chaotic, which you know, we are anarchists, so we're okay with the chaos. But it just after doing it a week after week, it

Soup a lot.

Yeah.

Currently, our kitchen is like like, our cooking equipment includes two large pots and a rice cooker that someone recently donated to us. And then we needed a fridge, so we got a free fridge off offer up and cleaned it up and put some cool stickers on it and then plugged it into a garage. Currently, the kitchen that we use is like a couple of us just like live together, and so we use our kitchen and we have access to our garage and we just stored the

Oh fortunate or fortunate.

Yeah, And there's so much food waste that I feel like if we were to find the right people, we could be fully self supporting on just things that would be thrown away alone.

Yeah, definitely.

Yeah, we just have to meet the right people in order to do that. But we're getting there.

Yeah, And I do want to say the kitchen is a small slash regular sized kitchen, so you don't have to have some big, crazy warehouse type kitchen to.

Make this happen.

Yeah. And then you're feeding people right like you're doing it like in the afternoon and evening. Have you found there were things that you said you like soup? But I know, like we fed a lot of people at the border last winter, right, and we found out that certain things work, certain things didn't work, and we always tried to keep it vegan because of people's religious needs preferences. Right, Is there anything like that that you found the works or doesn't work.

We have done a lot of chili with our squad, and I know that Luca has done a lot of curry. So there are certain things and they can both be easily made vegan. Yeah, initially a lot of people when we would have vegan stuff would ask for me alternatives, to which I understand people, you know, they don't always have access to protein, so we tried out both options when we can nice.

Yeah, it varies what we have because our group kind of functions with for like autonomous squads, like well semi autonomous that take turns doing the distross so that you're only really responsible for it once a month, which helps reduce burnout.

Yeah, definitely, How does that work? Explain how you came up with that and how it's organized.

Yeah, so this was kind of like something we've been talking about for a while. Some of us are like more into the theory than others, but we're just kind of talking about, like, oh, well, like how do we

Yeah, for some people who show up like once every few months because they have other stuff going on, you know.

So it's very open and you.

Don't have to be in a squad and you could just to join whenever you have the time, with whoever's week it is. So it's pretty yeah, I would, but it does give a good sense of structure.

Yeah, that helps a lot. I remember one day last year, last winter, and I was out building shelters with an Uzbek guy and a few Kurdish guys and we built these shelters and we built three of them, And afterwards, I was sitting down with some of my friends who are also there as volunteers, and they're all anarchists too. We each asked each other what we did, and then one of them said, so what do we all learn? What did you learn when you did that today?

Right?

And I think that's a really valuable question that we should be asking ourselves in our organizing spaces. So like from your first distrow to now, I want to ask what did you learn?

I would say, We've really learned how to trust each other. We're working on, you know, how to get consensus models, how to split the labor between different people, how to work with different people, and also yeah, like I said in the beginning, how to really how to trust each other, which you know, we all want to see the revolution happen at some point, and so I feel like one of the most important and valuable things we can be doing is building relationships and communities with each other where

Yeah.

Yeah, And I think for me, like we've like tried to do stuff in the past like this, and I think the issue we've always run into was that, like sometimes there's like a tendency to want too much structure right away and be like, oh, if we don't have everything planned down, we don't know how everything's going to work, then we can't do it, and we need to figure everything out beforehand. And we learned a lot like doing it, and even like we didn't have everything figured out, like

Definitely, I think, yeah, we can overcomplicate it and like be too anxious. Talking of anxious, I am anxious. So we have yet to pivot to advertisements. So let's do that and then we'll come back and we're back. Okay. So you spoke about like a lot about the logistics of cooking, which is great, but I know from experience of feeding hungry people can be a challenge, right, And it's no one's fault, especially when people are hungry, like

Yeah.

Well, that also goes back to something more we've learned is we try to have enough people at the distro so we can have different people doing different things, and sometimes that means one person is just walking around talking to people, de escalating a situation if needs be.

And then we also figured out that at the end when we run out of food in order, but people who have.

Been waiting in line don't get mad, which is understandable. You know, they've been waiting in line and there's no more food than they're hungry. Yeah, of course, we try to have like different snacks and like muffins or crinola bards and water just to hand out at the end for those people who still need something. And so sometimes we have music and we all just try to bring a good energy and so far nothing that we haven't been able to handle happens.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

I know.

We found that music was really helpful when we were distributing food when really big groups at the border like play some music or have a friend who plays music, play some music, and then we'd always ask folks from the group who we were feeding to volunteer to help us in that it helped us so become language barriers and stuff.

That's happened a couple of times as well where people have just stepped up and wanted to help, which has been great.

Yeah, it's nice and it gives us all. Like part of what we're doing with Mutual Aid isn't just meeting material needs. It's also like the difference between solidarity and charity, right, Like we're there too because we care about you as people, not just as like hunger mouths that we can take off a spreadsheet and working together is an integral part of that and it's what distinguishes us from charity model.

And thankfully most of the time we have enough people if somebody needs to step aside and have a one on one conversation with somebody because that's what they need in that moment, and we can do that.

Yeah, having floaters is really important, Like we always have like two people at least two people serving food, and then we have like a snack table, water table usually, and then we have a section for harm reduction that usually gets served on like another table, and then we have like a section for clothes depending on what we have, and people sort of like go down the assembly line kind of like going down grabbing the different things, and we give people like plastic bags that we get from

And during that heat waves at one of the distros, I remember you ran across and thought somebody gatoring because they really were needed electrolytes. So we're lucky that we have enough people that we get to be able.

To do stuff like that when we need to, right, And I imagine that regularity is really important, Like people know that you will be there and that they can come and you will feed them. Like that builds trust, right Like, and everyone I think benefits from middle structure and being unhealthed. It could be really fucking hard to find structure.

Yes, exactly, And it's very hard to get like home cooked food.

Yeah, this is something I've encountered living in my cart, Like it's hard to get healthy food. The food you buy is shit. It's more expensive and it's less good for you. And like these things compound over time to have health and psychological consequences.

Yeah, everything we cook we eat as well.

And you know, if we're cooking or we're helping out with sister, of course it's.

Not the mutual and mutual aid, we can also eat it.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's definitely something else we learned at the border was that, like, especially if we're cooking something that's maybe not a cultural cuisine, because we're meeting people from all over the world a lot of times it's like like you were saying, chili and carriage. It's like hot wet food, right, like you know, the big semi liquid pan of chili or whatever that we would cook and spaghetti and like folks being like what's that, We're like, oh, do I'm going to eat some? Do you want some?

Yeah?

And like, I honestly had some of the happiest moments of last year. Just like I remember one day, I've been building yurts all day with that I was that guy and then we sat down and had our beans and just like talked about our lives and it was really sweet.

Yeah.

I think that that is a moment of solidarity that you don't get when you're you know, I've seen NGOs in the US military tossing MRIs or refugees, and I ain't the same thing.

Yeah.

Yeah, Now there shouldn't be like a line between like you and the people that you're providing mutual aid to. I mean, like it should you should never give someone food that you're not willing to eat yourself. And like if someone's hungry while we're cooking, like they can totally eat the food that we're making too. It's not like cordoned off. Yeah, like, of course, we like you know, we wear our ppe and we like you know, aren't

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Yeah, there's no separation you know, between us and them at the end of the day.

Yeah, I think that's super important. So I want to talk about the camping Maybe let's take another rab break. We'll talk about the camping ban when we come back.

We are back.

We are now discussing the topic which I love to talk about, which is evil things that Todd Gloria has done. And today it could be the whole podcast every day of the week for years. But we're going to talk about this camping ban. For folks who didn't listen to our camping ban episode, can you give me like a sixty second synopsis on the camping ban and then we can dive into what it's done.

Yeah.

So, basically, earlier this year, the Supreme Court overturned of basically an ordinance that you don't have the ability to cite or arrest somebody if there's not shelter available, but they overturn that so now they can. And Gavin Newsom issue the Sleeping Order that the agencies have to clear encampment and ordered that cities and counties do the same. So now there's fourteen plus the cities in California that do have a camping band in place. So that's criminalizing living outside.

The existence of unhouse people is now a crime. Yeah, so what have you seen post enforcement?

Yeah?

So I also like work in the field of harm reduction, So you know, I do this in my free time because I want to do it, but I also do it for work, which there's definitely sometimes I feel weird about, like working for an organization and wish that I didn't have to.

But it's just one of those things.

And I've seen it's really hard and really sad because when people are in encampment a lot of times they build a sort of community and family and they learn how to take care of each other, and constantly being split up is destroying.

These communities, and then they just have to.

Travel further and further away so that they're disconnected from not only their community, but also real versus that they do have. And so it's just really hard, and sometimes we lose connections with people.

We don't know where they went, you know, where they.

End up in jail or it's been really horrible, And we're just talking about how it just seems like people don't really care and it's crazy that this is happening in our communities and people.

Aren't talking about it and aren't outraged by it.

Yeah.

Yeah, these bands also have like a really nasty ripple effect because when these people got pushed out of San Diego, then they go to other cities that don't have an encampment band like Cheu La Vista National City and now Cheula Vista National City and other cities are advancing their own camping bands and citing an influx from San Diego. Right, So it's like creating this really awful, like just progressive expansion of these bands.

Yeah.

And one one more thing I'll add is that some people are like, oh, well, that's just going to you know, be good, because these people are going to get into shelters, find alternative ways of getting help. But that's not what's happening because we have not had any more shelters. It's really hard to get into a shelter actually, And you know, since musselm has been governor, we've had apparently so many billions of dollars twenty four billions spent tackling homelessness, and

Yeah, it's giving the appearance of doing something to make homeowners right, people who they think matter happy. It's really bleak. Yeah, let's discuss a little bit then, like this camping band, as you say, it's supposed people to other cities, Like what do you think it does to the unhoused community? Like you talked a little bit about breaking up encampments, Like where do people end up? Right when their campments get broken up in the community, and like where do

So you're right, some of them are ending up in river beds.

There's also like what they refer to as the Island kind of close to Old Town where a lot of people have been going. But you know, you have to get a rash to go there, and it's not easy to get there. They don't have a lot of resources there.

There's a lot of.

Crime that happens, and it's not the best scenario. And other than that, for making these safe sleeping sites which are not actually safe and they're kind of like concentration camps and they're from people I've talked to actually live in them. They're not good places to.

Be at, yeah at all.

And it's just kind of like pushing the problem out of you without actually doing anything or providing anything meaningful to people.

Yeah, which is the goal. I think it is to make property invisible.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And the other thing that happens is like I live in an area where there are a lot of encampments, and there probably would be permanent encampments if it weren't for the band, And personally I would prefer that, because like what happens is these people get like moved like there, their encamment will like crop up, It'll be there for like maybe a week, and then like it'll disappear, and like I'll wake up one morning and they're gone, and

Yeah, if ours stated goal is getting people off the streets, like chasing them around the streets, isn't doing that making it harder for people to find stability?

Yeah, And you know, I've talked to people also about the reason sometimes they don't like the term homeless is because they're like, yes, we may not have a house, but we make our homes, we make a community, we make a home, and losing that sense of security, any little bit of security they have constantly having to move, not ever feeling comfortable or safe.

You know, that's traumatizing, Taking a bad situation and making it worse, just what the state likes to do. I wonder like, before we finish up, a lot of people, like I said, want to start a mutual aid thing. Do you have any advice for them? Things that you would do if you were starting over, things that you feel like you did well. If you wanted to start bread bluck, now, how would you go about it?

Start a group chat, maybe make an Instagram where you can post about it and find people who are also in dressed than that.

Go to a local event? What else?

Luka having like a place where people can like congregate with each other, like having a regular like community event to meet people and get to know each other and

And like we did it with like literally.

Just like a couple of our members just like gave some money that we had and that we had, like you know, like we had like a couple hundred dollars that we got from people, and then that was enough to start and like you could literally start with like fifty bucks and figure it out.

Yeah, we did not come from a place.

Of any of us having a lot of money, so we've basically just had to figure it out.

And anybody can figure it out, you know.

I feel like our culture is so individualized, but we do have the capacity to come together and yeah, just take somebody being like all right, let's do this, and you'll you'll meet enough people who are also interested in that. Because people do want community at the end of the day, and people do want to help people.

Yeah. Is there anything else you guys want to mention before we go?

Yeah, The only last thing I wanted to mention is that we do have a lot of future goals of expanding and doing more street medicine as well.

And expanding to different areas. We're also having.

Mobile teams where we can go out and leave people who aren't in one location or who maybe have certain divisibilities and can't walk and get there. So we have a lot of ideas for that, and that just takes meeting more people who are into this and getting more funds and yeah.

Yeah, so hopefully that's something we can do.

And I just wanted to briefly mention one of our members did some really great research on the way the Hillcrest Business Association is using the Encampment band to further harm and using they're actually using like private security to push people out so people can enjoy their night life without having to deal with an objectionable minority that wants to live however it pleases for fuck's sake, the quote from mister Ben Nicholas of the Hillcrist Business Association, So

Yet, yeah, and on that topic, the way that people actually are a dressing it here is making it so much worse. Like San Diego has a hot team which is part of the police department.

It's called the Homeless Outreach Team.

And they're supposedly supposed to help get people into shelters and stuff like that. But anybody I've talked to who have tried to reach out for them and ask, you know, okay, if you're going to move me, like I need to.

Get into a shelter.

One of them who I was talking to about this was in the seventies and very medically vulnerable, and instead of helping them find somewhere to go, they just put his car which she was sleeping in because it was unregistered, and so they're not actually helping at all.

It's just a cop.

And that's why, you know, just us regular people have to do something because the state's not going to.

Yeah, yeah, I think that's a great thing. That's the fucking doc about the Hill Grest Business Association for people who aren'tailiar with San Diego. San Diego is like LGBTQA. A neighborhood is called Hillcrest. One in three of our trandth youth are run housed and like, I guess they don't matter to the Hill Grest Business Association. Not surprising, but just fucked up. Where can people if they want to support you, they want to follow you, if they

Yeah, they can find us on Instagram. Our Instagram is bread Block Underscore Distro. If you want to provide like direct funds, bread Underscore Block is our Venmo.

Lots with the feed not o k b l oc Oh.

Yeah, yeah, b l oc like block.

We are.

Yeah, And I also wanted to mention a couple of comrades of ours are facing houselessness themselves, and there's a mutual aid post on our Instagram and you can also find them at ruster dot music that's our U s T e R Music or their venmo is also in a post on our page. They could really use some help because they are really big individuals who like show up all the time and help us cook and our a big part of our group, and you know also could use some mutual.

Aid, yeah, people to help them. Thank you so much for your time, guys. Thank you for doing all that important work and thank you for sharing it with us. If people have questions, they can reach out to you, right, yes.

Yes, of course, thank you so much for having them.

Yeah, thank you so much. It's much appreciated.

Welcome to katap and here I'm Andrew Siege, a FUTUREE channel Andrewism.

I'm joined by Garrison Davis.

Hello there, once again, hello, and today I regret to inform you that you must come to Brazil.

I've heard mixed things about about Brazil currently, but I'm not I'm not I'm not against the idea. I have considered it before.

Yes, well we're not going to the Brazil of present times will actually be time traveling, continuing the somewhat informal series I've been doing on Latin American anarchism. We'll be dipping our tours into the sand and the sea, the farmlands and jungles, the mountains and deserts, the cities and villages that make up the land, and crowned of the potential liberty of the people forcil, particularly the struggles for anarchism that they would have had in the late nineteenth

Many such cases, many such cases.

But despite all these efforts, the cracks were starting to show. In eighteen ninety two, seven families packed up and return to Italy. By the end of the year, the colonu's population had dwindled just twenty people. Oh dang, yeah, it's a very very rapid decline.

Yeah.

The sustainability of these types of projects is always like the big thing, and especially when it comes to like food and farming like that is unfortunately the joke whenever people talk about these sorts of projects. Now all of these artists and craftsmens don't want to spend out time toiling away in the fields.

Yeah. Yeah, it's a challenge that the persisted today.

So far, it seems like there's like a decent mix of like labor organizing, like social organizing, like with like newspapers, like theaters, plays like that kind of like more like cultural engagement stuff with like unions and this little like anarchist society that they try. They've kind of like like sped run through a whole bunch of like I don't want to say like social anarchism, because that is a

They would end up engaging in a lot more heavy like you're talking about, like direct engagement with the state.

Yeah.

I think in this early period, when they were still building up and spread in the wood, it was sort of a honeymoon period for the movement in a sense.

I mean that would like make sense as it's like within like a bigger city.

Yes, yes, And Garibaldi has a rather interesting history that I'm only recently learning about. And I didn't even know he went all the way to like South America and Sclevantin and stuff. But like I learned very recently that he had married, I believe, an indigenous or a Mestizo woman while he was in South America and they had like this very romantic, dramatic life together, leading battlefield side by side all that stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, So I'm not surprised that the Italian anarchists were perhaps inspired by Garibaldi, even if he himself was not an anarchist. Sure so, anyway, by eighteen ninety three new settlers had arrived, thankfully, and the colony was trying to manufacture shoes and wine barrels so they could make some sort of an income. They eventually grew to sixty four residents, and they established two wells and a new access road. But even with those new developments, the colony

Rose out of that also many such cases.

Many such cases. By the end of eighteen ninety three, it was abundantly clear that the colony couldn't survive. Labor was in high demand the nearby cities, and despite efforts to attract new settlers through socialist propaganda in Europe. The colony just couldn't maintain its population, and eighteen ninety four Celia Colony officially came to an end. They have in

I'll try to find a dub somewhere maybe yeah.

And its Olian Portuguese. But anyway, so, the experiment had held on for four dramatic years define pressure from the newly established Brazilian Republican government, heavy taxes and even military inclusions. Eventually material conditions disease and until the conflicts brought it Tourne and how we're entering into the twentieth century. Nineteen oh three saw the founding of the first fourmal structure,

But this is such an interesting moment in like international anarchism that at least right now, just like we have like the Internet, but that sucks, like this style of like actual like like international like anarchism. It's just something that is I've I've never really been able to like experience before.

But Garrison, you forgets in something we have discourse.

Oh I'm sure they also had discourse, but they got to go to London to do their discourse, which sounds which sounds much better than doing it from my toilet on Twitter dot com. Sorry xx dot com, My apologies not that that's.

True, though, I would much rather the discords take place in puson over you know, the discord suvas and the Switzer and Breddit threads.

I mean, like especially in that like international aspect, Like there's there's certainly like like anarchist gatherings and like conferences and convergences, you know, within within countries.

I've been to many in the United States.

But yeah, this this sort of like like having anarchists in Brazil go to London to talk with anarchists from everywhere else in the world, like compare their experiences and compare notes. Yeah, then talk about like what their actual like political goals are. It's something that I think is just stalling, doesn't really exist anymore.

And that's really a vital component for international solidarity because that's kind of solidarity, that kind of portunity is very difficult to find just through virtual interaction. There's something meaningful and shake and a Pusson's hand and embrace in them and laugh at and crying together in Pusson sharing a meal, I think really makes a difference.

I mean, yeah, especially when you have like the spread of anarchism is built on that internationalism, Like you have anarchists from Portugal and Italy and Spain.

The immigrant influence exactly is very very profound.

Yeah.

But although there was the outbreak of war one closer to whom the anarchists were still involving themselves in that sort of regional discourse. I may have been flying to London, but they managed to meet with delegates from Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay at the International Peace Conference and the South American Anarchist Congress in October nineteen fifteen, all in an aim to foster both regional and international anarchist cooperation as

I was also wondering, like, where are the people like deported to?

Like it sounded like they've been in Brazil for quite a while when you were like mentioning there was all those all those other people who were deported out of the country, Like where where did they go?

Yeah, there was a story I was reading about that I didn't maintaince in my notes. Some only half remember in it, but one of my sources would have had it of the names I listed at the beginning, but they were spoken about how there were these I believe Portuguese people in Brazil, as in Portuguese from Portugal who have been there and there and working there and whatever for years and years and years, and because they hadn't naturalized, they were like subject to like these heavy attacks. And

Between that and like sending thousands of people to a penal colony with hundreds dying, like this is a massive wave of repression they're dealing with in like the early twenties.

Here indeed, indeed, and unfortunately, their supposed allies weren't exactly a help. In nineteen twenty seven, the anarchists Antonio Dominquez and Damiao the Silver who murdered by the communists, who also wounded another ten members of the printers union and attacked and stole the assets of the footwear workers Union, so that further weakened the anarchist struggle when they were already dealing with that government repression. And in a sense,

That's pretty fucked up, I would assume. Also just very damaging to the entire labor movement in the country, A very intense series of restrictions.

Yes, as a very immigrant empowered labor movement. Yeah, yeah, that was definitely targeted. Definitely definitely targeted. Obviously, like the class consciousness of the immigrant workers was such a threat that they had to root them all from any position of influence within the sanctioned unions. Salgado and the Interioralists, of course, welcomed these degrees and work with the police to capture in the ten workers. The communeists also apparently

So they just started like kidnapping people and doing like basically state sanctioned terrorism exactly.

Another integralist, Gustavo Barosso, used his walking stick to break the arm of an anti fascist sixteen year old worker named neer Colejo as she was making a speech against fascism.

Time is a flat circle.

Indeed it is instead of sticks this time they're using cars. But it's the same same principle and sticks. Oh yeah, people are still collecting sticks.

I have been hit by many a stick from a fascist at a street demo, but especially as the data hture.

Hmm, down. So with all this violence the deal with in this time the anarchist presses had to hounked down and prepare to face further attacks. In nineteen thirty three, the Libertarian Anti Fascist Committee sounded alarm on the dire threat of integralism as what anarchist press wrote, like fascism, integralism means to enslave and fetter the people that has now defend our liberty like men. Let's we be forced

There's a few interesting things in this moment here, particularly like how the like initial struggle against fascism once again kind of laid at the feet of anarchists and communists had like a degree of hesitancy to like to like jump in fully and then also, like I find it interesting the way that these like this era of fascists in Brazil particularly, we're targeting unions, but as almost as a way just to target like immigrants, Like it was like the easiest way for them to actually just do

Yeah, anti immigrant violence is almost always anti worker violence as well.

Yeah, no, no, in the States at least right now, we're just like seeing another kind of uptick in like anti immigrant rhetoric and violence, and yeah, a lot of it is tied to like labor, like how immigrants are are taking jobs away from the lower classes, that sort of thing.

Huh. As always you remember that, you know it could happen here, and it's important to be constantly aware and on God against even the ghost, the shadow of fascism creeping up in your communities. It's easy to be treated by the media or by others as just oh, you're making a big deal about it, over exaggerates in the threat. But know, these things sinuwable very quickly. They need to be nipped in the bud. And it's largely thanks to anti fascists on the front lines that the situation is

No, I mean this is something like you see a lot especially after or during like a movement that's faced incredible repression. Is that kind of it goes back to kind of its earlier forms, at least in terms of like like the like the social aspects. In some ways, it feels like it's kind of regressing back to kind of where it like started back in the last episode with some of those like same like you know, like

Yeah, it's really quite necessary. Unfortunately, in nineteen sixty nine, the headquarters of Sepchu was raided by Air Force agents. The invasion resulted in the arrass and prospers of eighteen members, including the anarchist Adiel Perez, who endured a month of imprisonment and torture. So between nineteen seventy two nineteen seventy seven anarchists were forced into even greater degrees of secrecy,

You know, some have considered me a pro homosexual, Okay, but but no mean this is a continued It is interesting to see this like starting with student movements and then getting back into kind of labor over time after they like rebuild their movement through students and then continuing to like adopt more and more like modern social views and like cultural engagement. Have an image here of one of their newspapers that has what looks like two men

Incredible, must have been very scandalous at the time.

Yeah.

Where the nineteen nineties, as Brazil transitioned to the New Republic and embraced new liberalism, anarchists became key players in shaping a wave of social movements. They actively helped to create and integrate into these movements, advocating their principles and strategies. One prominent example was Brazil's involvement in the global anti globalization movement, inspired by protests like the Seattle Wto demonstrations

Similar to what they were doing ninety years ago. We've also seen a resurgence of anarchist anti fascism in Brazil. Indeed, around the same time we kind of saw this rise in the United States as well as in Europe with the emergence of these like right wing populist politicians between like Trump and Bolsonario, you've been seeing more of like the black block style anarchism in Brazil, which often kind of in this era went hand in hand with like anti fascist action in organizing.

Indeed, so that's been the story, very summarized account like I would recommend that you check out. Of course, the scholarship of the folks I mentioned the beginning, the resources all across the Internet, particularly the Anarchists Library discussing Brazilian anarchism. This has been it can happen here. I've been Andrew Siege. You can find me on YouTube dot com, stash Andrewism feature dot com stas Saint Drew. I've been here with Gare and that's a piece.

Welcome back to It could Happen Here, a podcast in which every week I sit down with my friends Mia and Garrison and I walk them through a little backyard chemistry project. Now today we are building a common commonly used explosive no paters called oh What's that?

Cason.

That is, we cannot give those instructions on air.

Oh oh oh, well, what about what about for our DX like hexogen safe? We can make hexogen right?

I think you need a special H tech stamp or permit to teach that.

Sorry, what if we talk about how to make it in roadblocks?

Oh?

Yeah, no, that's fine. They haven't. They haven't cracked roadblocks yet. They correct minecraft.

That's good, that's good. The FEDS don't know about that one.

Okay, they don't know about that one yet.

Well, in that case, I'm going to read these this ingredient list for pet in that I found in a torrent of Taylor Swift songs. So this is I'm certain the best information available right now. Anyway, we're talking this week about explosives. We're talking particularly about the fact that Israel just carry out an attack against Tesblah, a militant organization in Lebanon, using pet in, which is one of the two ingredients in Semtex. It is commonly used as

Which is generally like hexygen.

You know, you mix the two together with like plastic agents and you get like that's where you get the traditional plastic explosives. And it's come out recently that the Masad managed to sneak some of this stuff, well sneak's not even really the right word, but they managed to impregnate a batch of pagers and radios with pet in. Now, this was a pretty big story last week. I think a lot of people are focusing kind of on the

So that's what we're going to be talking about today.

Do you think like the the either like hijacking or infiltration of the supply chain is as replicable for yes, a non state agency.

Yes, that is the thing that is scariest about this attack to me, and that is going to be kind of the meat of what talking about. We should probably start by this sort of laying out the scale the attack.

I mean, I also have one main question. What's a pager?

So Garrison, once upon a time, Uh huh, we kind of had the ability to broadcast signals over large areas, but it was a real pain in the ass to like do that with a phone call or anything but a couple of words at a time. Oh so like a text message, like a text message, except for you can't really respond to it. Oh okay, but it looked pretty cool to clip on your belt in the late nineties, if you were like one of the doctors on the set of Er.

Did you ever watch Er Garrison?

Were you too young for that? That's the George Clooney show, right.

Cluone tang, But yes, he looked great in it. Yeah, So that's that's where pagers came from. Was the television show Er, written by Michael Crichton, which means pagers are related to dinosaurs.

And yeah, so.

Israel managed to get We'll talk a little bit later about how, but they managed to get explosives in an unknown number, but certainly hundreds of these walkie talkies, particularly in the batteries. By the end of the first day of attacks, round a dozen people were dead and twenty seven hundred had been wounded.

Many people.

Seriously, there's like horrible videos of folks going flying off of bicycles and the like when this stuff detonates, Like it takes very little petn to create a pretty significant explosion, and we're looking at about like zero point one point one grams I think of explosive agent actually in each walkie talkie, which was enough to kill in May May shitload of people. Some of these folks were members of Hesbelah. I think HESBLA has confirmed that eight of their fighters

And it's just also obvious that this was Israel who else, Like who else would do this?

Now, one of the reasons I'm getting into this is that there were a lot like the first kind of concern that people had when this attack was carried out is like, oh shit, was this some sort of a hack? Did Israel exploit some sort of a glitch in how these products batteries worked and basically like hack them to cause a runaway thermal escalation within the battery that led to it detonating.

Is all of our electronics just one hack away from turning from being turned into a bob No?

And I understand why people focused on that aspect of it, but it led to I think some articles that are this is going to be one of those we always we try to I hope we usually managed to be the like calm voices in the room, but this is one of those cases where really people need to be less calm. And I do want to highlight an article that I think went in the wrong direction on that front. It's a CNN business piece called we still don't know

Experts who spoke.

To CNN set Justin Kappos, a cybersecurity professor at NYU, said that it's possible to cause damage to a variety of batteries, most commonly lithium batteries, but he said it seems like the devices were intentionally designed to explode when triggered, not a pager that everyone else in the world is using. If you're a normal person with a lithium ion battery, I would not be over concerned about this CAPO set and I think that that is an error, and we're going to get into as to why. But let's talk

Right.

And it's the kind of thing where it's not just any idiot could do it, but any reason intelligent person with the degree of like experience and engineering can do it.

Right.

Andrew is obviously a very smart guy with a lot of capabilities that you know, a layperson might not have. But basically any kind of competent engineer could figure this out pretty much. And you're talking again, a few thousand dollars to get potentially, you know, hundreds or even more of these made. Now, the other side of the attack here is that the Israelis created a bunch of shell companies.

Right.

There is a way to scan for it, but it takes like a half hour per package, and it's the kind of thing where even if you're taking this stuff apart, unless you have someone who is like doing chemical tests on what's in there, anyone who's even someone who is moderately trained, is not going to be able to recognize a battery that's had some pet and put into it

Why were hesblow using pages in the first place?

Oh, yeah, I can talk about that.

Couldn't they afford it an iPhone? Great question or something? Well, I think we'll let mea talk about that a second. But gar I will say an initial response to that. You know how like all of the activists in the United States after twenty twenty especially are saying like, hey, your phone isn't safe, don't use your phone, you know for any kind of like actions.

The state can listen in on that.

Yeah, yeah, Well Hesbela has been paranoid about that for a long time, and the Masade actually has spent a lot of effort spreading rumors within Hesblah about how capable Israel's smartphone exploits are like how strong their ability to like listen and on conversations, and that played a significant role in changing like policy from the top and hes a lot to like we are going to use the lowest tech communications solutions possible, and we're going to talk some more about that.

You know, it's not low tech.

These products and services that support this very podcast.

That's right, high tech and absolutely no explosives in them, probably but really there would be no way to tell if there were.

And we're back Mia, you wanted to talk.

Yeah.

The only thing I want to mention about that is so there's been a lot of focus in terms of the page you use on like on Hesbela trying to build this communications grid that's like more difficult to like do to compromise, Yeah, yeah, we well to compromise from like digitally right. But the other thing that's kind of going on here that I think is getting a lot less attention is that Lebanon's economy has been an absolute

The terminal like heart attack moment was that barge exploding, but it had not been doing it had been on the road down.

I mean there were there were, I mean there were

Yeah, and again it's this kind of perfect storm of like paranoia and economics sort of factors colliding here. But the sort of gist of it is Israel definitely wanted to push has a lot to adopting, Like they clearly had an understanding of what they could do and wanted deliberately to kind of push for this because it's a lot easier to get some a manufactured explosive and it would have been a lot harder to do this with like iPhones, right, Not that Israel hasn't done this with

Yeah, I mean that was one of the first things that we talked about once news of this drop is like beyond the actual like physical injuries and death caused by this attack, this is like primarily an infrastructure attack. In this case completely destroys like the communications infrastructure of HESBLA.

Well, it's very worrying. And one of the things that I keep thinking about is the degree to which the way Amazon has restructured the economy, and particularly the way that like digital commerce works, has created an opportunity for a malicious actor to carry out an attack like this with excellent security. Because you don't even have to be

It's like terrorism in the era of the gig economy. Yeah, And that was one of the reasons I like to Fincher's recent movie The Killer, Yeah, just in terms of how much of the gig economy was like worked into these traditional industries, whether that be like terrorism, because hitmen aren't really real.

But certainly terrorism is.

And I think there's a lot of ways that these things can be applied in this kind of bizarre uber Amazon world that we've created where the economy is just so fractured in all these little ways.

There's also I think the sort of production angle to which is that because the way that manufacturing is happening has become so decentralized and because it's become based on these it's kind of less so now. But a lot of like Chinese manufacturing had worked like this, where you'd get these sort of like smaller pop up things, and each of these sort of like fairly small like production facilities is like shipping stuff to like a larger one

Yeah, there's no quality control, there's no intense vetting. It's all extremely accessible. It's very easy to infiltrate this process.

Yeah, here's another line from that Andro Huang article on Bunny at Bunny's Studios, be you in an Ie Studios, which is his blog. You don't even have to go so far as offering anyone a bribe or being a state level agency to get tampered batteries into a supply chain. Anyone can buy a bunch of items from Amazon, swap out the batteries, restore the packaging and seals, and return the goods to the warehouse. And yes, there is already a whole industry devoted to copying packaging and security seals

Yeah, and the other worrying part about that too is that you know, okay, so getting the explosives to work is kind of difficult, right, Like bomb making is not easy, but.

You have to have a degree of competence.

Yes, but the actual cost fifteen thousand dollars like that, that's not even like you're looking at like a millionaire, Like that's just something your local dentist can afford to pull off.

You could carry out an attack like this in terms of cash expenditure for the cost of like a reasonably nice car, which is not prohibitive to a large scale international terrorist organization.

Or even just like a rich guy. Yeah, not even that rich guy can pull this off, yep, Which is.

I guess the kind of the main inhibiting factor is we still don't quite know how Israel got these two detonates, yes, whether that is some sort of hack that overheated the battery, whether it was like a message that was sent out that like triggered something.

Within the device.

It seems to have been a message that mede the explosive detonates, because they did send a message immediately before, so it seems to have been tied to some extent with a message. Andrew Hwang kind of looked into and came to the conclusion that you could very well do a thermal runaway to set this off, but obviously the messade doesn't have any trouble getting a hold of military detonators. Wang also walked through how you could build a circuit

This is going to be the one that gets all arrested. Yeah, and we're back.

Here's a quote from Andrew on how these might have been detonated. Detonating the pet in is a bit more tricky. Without a detonator, PETN may conflagrate burn fast instead of detonating and creating the much more damaging shockwave. However, the Wikipedia page notes that an electric spark with an energy in the range of ten to sixty millidules is sufficient

Of the battery. And basically that's where you put it. Oops. Oops, and again I did talk to.

Someone with expertise and explosives who said that they thought it was likelier that there was a conventional detonator, not because it would have been impossible to do with a thermal runway or the way that Andrew's set up, but because this is the masade, they have access to detonators, and a detonator guarantees that you get the proper kind of explosion. But again, even if you're using kind of the less Gucci method here, that would be available to

This is so terroristic nature and like if any other group did this, like it has blood. Yeah, if homocitis attack.

Oh my god, we would be we would be bombing them right now. Yeah.

If some like just random like accelerationist network somehow pulled this off, like ye, we would be pully or hair out.

We would we would like go to war over something like this.

And the fact that it's like it's this type of attack is only okay when this one military does it is just I don't.

Know what to do aniven, They've endangered.

There, they have endangered everyone, right, Like, like every single person listening to this is less safe because it is reel carried out this attack.

What is airport screening going to look like if this keeps happening?

Importantly?

Am I going to be able to take all of my batteries on the planes that I could play video games on a fourteen hour flight?

Garrison? You know, Yeah, the plugs in the seats don't always work well.

I mean, and even like what if you're able to do this to like the electronics of like the pilot jeez, and then you just you just like take out an entire airpa.

Yeah.

It's like it's such a fucked up Pandora's box that it feels like there's gonna be no real consequences for which is just kind of yeah, things have been this past year, I guess.

Yeah.

And the other the other issue with it is that like the only way to fix this would be an actual like you would you would have to change how our supply chains work, and it's like, well, no one's gonna do that.

No one.

There is no number of people that you like, maybe if they literally killed the president of the United States, maybe you could get enough political capital together to try to do something about it.

But like, there's no way, no, and there's there's no way, and like the way the state will respond to this is by making air travel vastly worse. Right, Yeah, it's

What many reasons?

What of many reasons, the dead kids being another.

Yeah, I do want to conclude I've quoted a lot from Andrew Huang's wonderful article turning everyday gadgets into bombs is a bad idea, But I want to quote from his conclusion here. Not all things that could exist should exist, and some ideas are better left unimplemented. Technology alone has no ethics. The difference between a patch and an exploit

Yeah, yeah, I think I think so Jesus Christ just as enacting terrorism through like the gig economy ecosystem. Yeah, and oh boy, what a fun time we've we've built for ourselves.

What a great fresh hell for us all.

Yeah, very excited first to have our first drop shipping terrorist attack.

It's going to be great. It's going to be it's gonna be great.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Anyway, folks, maybe drive next trip you got to take, probably should note before we come out here. The obvious question, and there's not a long answer to this for obvious reasons, is like, well, couldn't nonstate actor get their hands on PETN or RDX, you know these kind of explosive compounds that you can make into plastic explosives. And the short answer is yes, any moderately competent chemist with the right ingredients could make this stuff and they're not super hard

You need a chemist, an engineer, and someone who knows how to set up businesses. And between the three years them they are going to have enough money to this, which is yeah, not great, Yeah.

Not great. Anyway, everybody, have a good night, enjoy your explain flight.

Hello, and welcome back to it could happen here in your daily dose of the horrors that are in fact already happening all around us. I'm your occasional host, Molly Conger, and I am delighted to be joined today by the critically acclaimed author of Culture Warlords, journalist researcher, sword enthusiast, Sandwich expert, and my friend Talia Lavin. Hello.

Yeah, I once introduced myself at an event as a Sandwich historian, which I think was the pinnacle of my public speaking career.

But this is the second Pinnacle. Hey, Molly, what's up.

Thank you so much for coming on today to talk with me about your new book, Wild Faith, is coming out in just a few weeks October fifteenth.

Right, yeah, Wild Faith, How the Christian Right is taking over America. Not the terrible b movie entitled Wild Faith.

Yeah, the SEO is scrambled on that one. But the book, however, is very good. I mean, first of all, I just want to say, like, so, I've been reading the Gally copy that you sent me, which I honestly made me feel very fancy. I've never received a Galli copy of a book that's not out yet before, so I felt, you know, kind of a kind of a broadcasting professional with my special book.

It's an exclusive club. You're one of like five people thus read it. Oh my god, that that's very exclusive. Yeah, well it's about to become a lot less exclusive, So feel special while.

You can, right.

But I realized when I was reading it, you know, I have my little sticky tabs because I'm reading a lot more books lately. Regrettably, not not not big time book guy he's reading. I read a lot of court documents, but I'm reading a lot of books right now. For research for my show, and it's like my little sticky tabs, And as I'm reading it, I realize I'm not marking passages that I think would be useful for us to

Ah, sorry for punching you, no, but I mean, I mean with the way the power of your words, because like a lot of what I'm reading sucks.

It's just right Like I spent all day yesterday reading like twenty five year old Issues of Resistance, which was the quarterly magazine for a white power music label. So this, I mean it's a real departure, so you know, really just reveling in the richness of the pros and the fact that it, you know, didn't want to kill me.

Yeah.

No, I also have experienced, you know, Nazi research fatigue, and also just like the sort of lentless grimness of flowing through these like fundamentally hostile texts and also like academic texts, which are difficult in their own way. I try to write accessively or just like excitingly. I find that a lot of especially nonfiction sort of journalism me. Books tend to be a little dry, and I'm like,

You know, it's just you have such a way with words.

I mean, you know this.

You're a professional writer. I don't want to embarrass you on the show.

So I feel like I'm twirling my hair, like, yes, but I do write for a living.

If you'll indulge me, if it's legal, if the publisher will allow this. I just want to read this passage from the introduction that I think is a good jumping off point, and it was one of the first things I marked because I was just like, oh, hell yeah, we're getting into this. There's there's good words in here, okay. The Christian Right is a force in American politics and has been for decades, half a century to be precise,

Yeah, it's like cast of characters, the worst people ever, but like, let's write about it in an exciting way.

I think that one of the themes of the book.

Is really how these extra legal extremist movements like the anti abortion terror movement, and the legal framework of a

Yeah. One of the notes that I wrote down in that vein while I was reading was that, you know, the Christian Right drives its power across a spectrum, right from the clinic bomber to the senator. But it's not you know, you might say it's two sides of the same coin, but to me, it looks like this isn't too different spheres of power to sort of separate but coexisting or comorbid ideologies. They're just different numbers on the same dial. Right, it's turning up and turning down.

Yeah, it's like the hand that lights the torch and the hand that puts it to the you know, pyre. They perform different functions, but they have really the same goals. And if like me, you view stripping half the populace of its bodily autonomy, imposing a theocracy, hounding queer people out of public life, slash into death as fundamentally violent goals, yeah, I don't think there's like a respectable iteration necessarily, there's just cosplaying respectability and right.

You can say it with a tie on on the Senate floor, but it's it's the same message.

Yeah, and I think so much of our mediaaratus and governmental apparatus is really sort of views like again, this like form and function, right, Like if you are if you say something politely, it doesn't really matter what you're saying, Like if you say something with a suit on in the register of like, you know, in a calm sort of Mike Penci and Rush Limbaugh and decaf as.

He called himself.

Boy, she says, did he say that, Yeah, that's what he called himself when he read it, did a like evangelical radio show.

Yeah.

No, no matter what you say, as long as you are like white and you say it politely, like this is fundamentally sort of fine. And then if you look at it from you know, a step or two back, and you're like, no, actually, no matter how politely say it, this is like a violent, deeply unpopular theocratic agenda that like fundamentally is incompatible with multiracial democracy. I also think and running into this like well meaning liberals being like,

We're making laws for Jesus, and.

We have covenant marriages and we want you to too.

Yeah, like we're gonna outlaw divorce because of God, and like, you know, women dying of sepsis in hospital parking lots is what Jesus wants and like, and I experienced this, I think you probably have to when you like report on you know, zealots and extremists, and people inevitably wind up like measuring other people's weep by their own bushel. In other words, they're like, they can't really believe this stuff, and it's like, no, they really do. They can't really

That's just synergy maybe Yeah.

And also fundamentally, this is a world premise done grievance, where it's this idea that like the world has got one O, We're on you. And so in a sense, grift is just like, well, you know, the world's corrupt and I'm fighting a righteous cause, So what does it matter the ethics that I sort of skip on along the way.

I mean, once you've amped the stakes up to you're fighting the literal devil and everyone who's getting in my way is animated by actual demons from Hell. I mean, the steaks couldn't be higher. So you do what you have to do exactly, and it's this theory of power. And so then people sort of.

Standing outside of that paradigm who are not keyed into this idea of like we're in an ethical spiritual battle, like and we must create like a Kingdom of Christ on Earth in America to win again devil, and then people outside being like, you're hypocrites, and it's like it's not a valid criticism to them because they're like, first of all, you're not like a Christian if you're a liberal, but also like you're not on our level, like we're fighting Lucifer and you're probably.

A stand like on his team if you oppose us.

So you know, a multitude of apparent hypocrisies can be excused by the idea that like this is a holy war, and in war, there's like all kinds of amart behavior that's OK, but doing holy war crimes, Yeah, exactly. I mean this is why, for example, you see a lot of like prominent female figures from Philish slaughleet, you know, in the seventies and eighties to like the tradwives now, and it's like, how does this fit in with your overall sort of idea that women should be chaste and

But yeah, I mean filish Filish made a living professionally saying that women shouldn't make a living professionally, but that contradiction doesn't matter.

Yeah, I mean I think I call them valkyries for feminine submission in the book. Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, like if you believe that this is your your calling, your mission, you know, your mission field in the service of the Lord to undo the demonic sort of influence of feminism, Like of course you're going to speak.

You've been moved by God to do so. Yeah.

And of course, like female leaders with the evangelical community, like sort of minority Republicans can be like knocked off their pedestal quicker and easier, but like they still can come out and exist and testify and schlafly throughout her very long prolific and lucrative career, you know, was like, I'm a housewife with six kids, and that was her.

You don't really care I.

Wanted to talk about that. So I'm not sure how sort of common knowledge this is, but the Protestant Christian community in the United States did not care about abortion until the seventies. It was not an issue in their communities. They were generally pro abortion. They were you know, the Baptists were in favor of Rob Wade.

Yeah, the fucking Southern Baptist Convention came out in like seventy four. I think it was and was like, yeah, we approved Rob Wade.

So it's not like, you know, opposition to abortion is baked into Christianity. It is baked into the American Evangelical Christianity of post nineteen seventy five or so because of this sort of conscious cynical political decision, And that I think is so interesting because you know, you get into this conversation of well, what are their deeply held beliefs and do they really believe it and does that matter?

Yeah, I mean, first of all, I would say, like people can still like this is like several generations later of like constant barrages of extremely violent propaganda against abortion.

Right, so the belief is sincere today, but you could look at it where it was born. Yeah exactly, it should have been aborted, right, Yeah, no, it definitely should not have been carried to term. But like it's it's crazy. And in addition, Tomi's book Randall Bahmer does some really good coverage of this.

So the sort of general arc is like three sort of nineteen seventy you had this like generally conservative population of Southern Baptists who were like on board with McCarthyism, hated the godless reds, but kind of viewed politics as like worldly and not really their sphere, and we're not

Black students or minority students.

And that is what woke the sleeping dragon of the Christian right really like, you know, get your filthy government hands off our tax exemptions. Like they just went, you know, nuts, they were really mobilized. You know, like these are the people who are like growing tomatoes at Ruby Bridges, Like, you know, they're really politically motivated for the first time

And then by the sort of mids seventies to eighties.

You had these like savvy or political operators coming out and saying, hey, guys, segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. Is Like it's great that it really fired y'all up, but it has sort of a limited appeal.

And they shot George Wallace. It's over.

Yeah, Like there's gonna be a ceiling on that, And a lot of people think you suck. So why don't you get it on the ground on this new civil rights struggle abortion where you can fight for the unborn who conveniently will never disagree with you.

Right, their voices don't have to be centered here. We can speak for them.

I mean, they're the most convenient political constituency in history.

Right, because they're so innocent and you can't milkshake duck a fetus. He's not even here.

Yeah, he can't talk, but he's not gonna say shit. So I mean that's like the very capsule history. And then of course it becomes this idea of like the moral majority and where the guardians of America's soul and we're gonna get really weird about sex.

Also, it's just.

Like if you strip it all the way down to the studs, like the core of this is women are bleeding to death in hospital parking lots because Jerry Folwell didn't want to pay his taxes or stop being racist.

Yeah, I mean that's not fair.

No, people sometimes like are a little skeptical when I'm like, all of the hatreds are interconnected. But then you look at like concrete historical examples of like this world historical wave of misogyny. I mean, it's not that this population wasn't like weird about sex or weird about women.

Like to start with. I mean, maybe they would have gotten here a different way, but that's how we got here.

Yeah, we got here by just like no, we will pay taxes on our segregation academies. Bob Jones University's interracial dating ban is perfectly great, and we're gonna mobilize about it. And so what you have then now is just like fifty years of political lock step because and you see this.

In like other religious communities.

I mean, like, I know, like it's sort of notorious how much corruption slides by in New York because like the Considic communities vote as a block, Like it is very useful to have a congregation that all votes the same way. It's politically useful.

I mean, what other populations can you get together once a week as a captive audience and speak to with authority if you can mobilize those people. And that's what Jerry Folwell saw, right, is like this is a great way to get a lot of people to vote the way I want them to vote.

Yeah, And you know, the church has always been like a really prominent institution in American civil society, especially as the rest of sort of civil society has fallen away and degraded. Like churches are some of the only social outlets that Americans have. And what's interesting when you talk to evangelicals and next evangelicals is just like being a Republican is like part of their religious identity in a

I mean, that's how the demons give in.

Yeah, yeah, demoncrats, I mean, and like, yeah, it's stupid. But it's also like half of the people saying demoncrats like literally mean democrats are aligned with Lucifer.

And I think that's a point that I don't want to get lost on the listener.

This.

You know, this idea that people literally have demons in them, that demons are active in the world, that demons are motivating the actions of their enemies is real for them. And I'm not saying that to be derisive or you know, it's real. It's real. It is an animating factor for a lot of these people. And that's hard to wrap your mind around.

I mean, I.

Struggle with the idea that that is real for them. But like that's how you get things like satanic panic, and we see echoes of satanic panic in this idea of you know, groomers in kids' schools, they really have this fundamental, like foundational belief in this, you know, whether or not they're calling it demons, that the existence of some sort of ontological evil that is coming for their children.

Yeah, I mean, it's really hard to get people to step outside their own worldviews, and in both directions, right, Like I don't believe that demons are you know, abroad in the world and motivating like every element of political action to someone who.

I'm starting to see them some places, but generally.

To someone who does, my viewpoint is incomprehensible and vice versa. So I think part of I mean not that I'm like one of those people that's like polarization is the big problem, like you know, as opposed to anything with like concrete policy, like you know where it's like the big problem is we all don't like each other enough.

Congratulations, private, and you're.

Probably in the side of the devil, so good job. I mean, I don't know, like a lot of Americans believe in angels and demons and that's fine, but it's like when starts impinging on the political sphere in a very serious way, It's like, how far would you go if you believed your opponent was under the thrall of like Satan?

You would go pretty damn far's.

I mean that's why you know clinic bombings were and I guess are on the rise again, right, like these arsins of clinics. It's not like other kinds of crime in my mind, right, it's not a crime of passion

Yeah, I mean there's your dual element to that. I mean, first of all, absolutely, yes, Like I've read some anti abortion terror manuals speaking of extremely unpleasant research, and it's just really like these people are murderers. It's mass murderers, Like you're like killing Hitler, right.

And wouldn't you wouldn't you kill baby Hitler?

Exactly?

Poltical about baby Hitler in like a countrywide scale. And when specific abortion doctors have been mentioned in right wing media, those guys end up dead and that's not a coincidence. So there's there's that element of it, which is the majority of it.

It's huge.

But there's also this idea of demonic geography, where like demons can possess sort of places like abortion clinics or institutions like Planned parenthood or even the Democratic Party, which you know, I read a lot of demonology books, like Taxonomies of Demons. Pigs in the Parlor was this really big hit in like the seventies, and it's been like reissued and reissued and millions of copies, and it's just like, on one level, it's really compelling because it's like, are

You'll try anything, and this guy's going to do it for free.

I watch so many videos of deliverance ministers doing their thing, and it's like crazy. It's like people you know, are just like sitting there and they're like people praying over them and screaming in their face, like and they wind up vomiting and crying and it's all very like intense. And you know, if you think about it from a placebo effect perspective. For like one second, you're like, obviously this person would feel a weightlifted from them. They've had

Getting weirder every day.

Yeah.

JD Vance, I hate women exist to reproduce, breathe you filthy sow. But like, even beyond the adult Catholic convert style weirdness, like right wing Catholics are an integral part of the Christian right, like Amy Cony Barrett, you know, antonin Scalia, that kind of thing. That's another bunch of millions. So this reactionary force has like numerically significant constituency. On the other hand, it definitely punches way above its weight in terms of right.

They have an outsized influence of both you know, on the legislative floor and when it comes to you know who's racking up the most.

Yeah, and also even like the culture wars right, like the sort of loudest culture warriors tend to at least come from like a background of I'm speaking for God or Christ is King or whatever it is, Like how many times have you and I encountered that an extremist contacts But also like the sort of more mainstream me, What the fuck the mainstream is? I don't know, it's full of piss, But like the more mainstream me, like Christian grifter, right, they come from this this I'm speaking

Right, religious freedom to do what I mean, it's like states rights, states rights to do what right?

Yeah, Like you answer the question, yeah, it's it's religious freedom to have segregated schools, is the answer.

To that, And you still see echoes of that with either still religious schools that can't accept federal grant money because they don't let students be gay, right, Like it's not racial segregation anymore, but they are refusing to admit gay students and that is a violation of federal civil rights law.

Yeah, but that's where I mean, that's where that stillgan started. And then it's blossomed to include basically like a gay person came into my shop.

Except they didn't, right, I know, there's no standing, right, Like that whole case was built a lie.

Whatever.

That's yeah, but it's like and the standing in the Supreme Court is so ridiculous. This, I mean, in many ways, this Supreme Court is the culmination and embodiment and apotheosis of like Christian right theocracy because you have these like absolutely bat shit religious zealots. I mean, Amy Cony Barrett is like from a cult, and in this unaccountable body, they're passing unpopular theocratic principles that the majority of the

Just like so little, like these little like little fingernails. Yeah, and it doesn't look like a tiny baby doll. That's just very small. Yeah, exactly, it's not like a mini baby like it like tides of gore. It's like literally like a tiny cluster of cells. So the anti abortion propaganda, like you are not immune to propaganda. It has like wormed its way into the popular consciousness just by virtue of its ubiquity and constant repetition being the key to

Yeah, Like sex for your sins a mortal sin and sex should be punished, and.

I they must be doing it wrong.

Like, I'm like, why do you want sex to have consequences and be punished? The like intensity of the misogyny around purity culture is so intense.

I wanted to ask you, you know, about the experience of writing the book, right, So you know, your first book, Culture Warlords, was traumatizing for you to craft, right, because you had to spend so much time in these digital spaces in some in some cases physical spaces with you know, neo Nazis, four Chan guys, you know, aspiring terrorists, and so that's traumatic to experience, you know. But largely that experience was alone, like at your computer screen, sort of

And like what was that?

How?

I mean, how did you to do that? I don't even know how it'd begin to do that with care.

I mean, I think my goal going in is like I'm not going to betray you, Like that was my guiding ethos of just like I view like your trust in me as a sacred thing, not like sacred in any formal religious sense, but just like you know, I view your trust in me as something that I hold very dearly. It's very important. I'm going to treat your pain with as much gentleness and respect as I can.

I mean, it was tough.

I definitely took more time. Like I wrote Culture Warlords in nine months, so I was like totally immersed constantly. It just like didn't come up for ayer, yeah at all. And this one I was like, I need a little more time, guys, Like I wrote it over you know,

And sort of bringing it to an outside audience too. I think a lot of expangelicals their audience is largely their fellow expangelicals exactly.

And I'm someone who, like I grew up as a Jew, and I'm like, yeah, this sucked. This terrible.

I'm like appalled reading like to Train Up a Child by the Pearls or or The Strong Willed Child by jam Stobson which, like, to be clear, the strong willed child is a bad thing. It's a bad thing to have a child with us.

You have to beat it out of them. Sure, literally, And I ran into this in the wild recently. I don't know if you have come across this guy online. Do you know the nineties movie The Little Rascals?

Oh my god, alf from The Little Rascals turns out to.

Be all Falfa. The guy who played Alfalfa's name is Bug Hall. He like, really like I don't got into a sort of main character situation over some posts about how he beats his infants. He beats infants because that's I guess, a good way to raise a baby.

Yeah.

Also I think he's homeless.

No, he's a surf. Oh he's a voluntary serfdom arrangement.

Oh my god.

Okay, well he sounds like a big rat school. Yeah, he's continued that trajectory of rascaldom. But don't be your kids. I mean, I will also say the reason why this book focuses so much on child abuse, which, like I encountered some some haters and losers and doubters along the way who were like, why are you focused so much on child abuse, and I was like, there are a lot of different theories about like how authoritarianism develops, but one of the big ones is focusing on the pedagogy.

In authoritarian societies.

The societies that become authoritarian, you know, evolve from democracy to authoritarianism, and beating the shit out of people from when they're in infancy and particularly when they display disobedience or ask why, or you know, just deviate from expectations.

It's a great way to make an obedient brown shirt.

Yeah, exactly, Like this is a recipe for future authoritarians, like the people I spoke to who had sort of broken away largely from this culture. But many of the sort of most obedient soldiers in the Army's Army of God like are that way. Because again, I can't overemphasize how much these parenting manuals, which spanned from like nineteen seventy to twenty fifteen, these texts, you know, the dates

I mean, you're doing fascism in the home, right.

So the the author, like Alice Miller, the author of the book For Your Own Good, lays out a pretty she was also a Holocaust survivor. She lays out a pretty strong case for like, you know, early twentieth century Germany having this poisonous pedagogy that also involved beating the shit out of your kids until I was illegal to love your children. Yeah, to obey you, and how basically

Western democracies in that regard. And like on a national level.

We're the only country in the world that hasn't ratified the UN Conventions on the Rights of a Child, which include like having a name and like not being beaten and not being thrown in to like juvi solitary.

Oh well, that's why America can't touch that. We need to incarcerate the children.

Yeah, the children yearn for the cells.

But it's also just like a lot of it actually was like worries that like evangelicals like would sort of object to the the interference in there.

It's an infringement on their religious freedom to be this shit out of babies.

Yeah, and their parental rights, which is another buzzword of this, this movement.

Pnal rights is a red flag for me.

Oh yeah, no, I hear parental rights, and I think you want to beat the shit out of your kids.

You don't want your children to learn science.

Yeah, you out of homeschool and under educate your kids or miseducate you want to cause a measles outbreak exactly. But that's like for us, because we're weirdos. We're like obsessively clued into this stuff. If you're not, Like parental rights is like religious freedom is like it sounds good. Yeah, it's an effective marketing slogan, but like what it means is like we're going to show up at the school board and yell about how I mean.

And Trump is like bought.

Into this obviously because he knows where his bread is buttered. He has savvy Like he's like, you guys do the policy, but like his current parental rights based his biggest like policy that he's advocating is like denying federal funding to any school with any vaccine a mandate, which is basically just like make measles great again, like bring back diphtheria.

Yeah, the dark place that we're going as a coffin.

Yeah yeah yeah.

But even should he lose, which you know, hope, there's still twenty two states where abortion is outlawed or severely restricted, and these places are becoming care deserts. Like medical residents. My extremely sexy partner is a medical residence, so I know more about the state of medicine than I otherwise would. But like residents don't want to do their residencies in states with abortion restrictions.

They're like, right, given a choice, gynecological providers just are practicing there anymore. Like even if you know, even though your primary focus is not abortions, or even if your primary focus is not you know, pregnancy care, they just don't want they just don't want to work there.

Well, it's also first of all that, but second of all, it's like, if you're in the er, you're going to experience pregnancy loss because it happens in one in five pregnancy.

Right, so they're choosing to work in states where they're not going to go to jail for doing medicine.

Yeah, like they don't want to incur the moral injury of not being able to apply the standard of care to patients in extremely common situations such as incomplete miscarriage and you know, pregnancy loss, whether you know self induced or just like miscarriage is super common and nobody talks about it.

It's more common than we an Ectopic pregnancy is so much more common than people realize. Like there are so many things that your body can do to betray you that you need a doctors help with just ordinary pregnancy. And then after the baby is born, then your lustrous hair all falls out.

Yeah, like ordinary pregnancy is so fraught with like weird body horror. Like but anyway, that's besides the point.

Whatever.

The point is someone presents with abdominal pain in the er and it turns out to be an ectopic pregnancy, and like you can't do standard of care like dilation and cure tash procedures without checking with the hospital lawyer. Like that is a really bad position for a care

Like the life of the mother, How dead does she have to be? First?

Yeah, she has to be almost dead, right, and then sometimes she winds up dying because almost dead is tough to judge, Like, it just winds up this grotesque sort of farce of medicine. And they're you directly, like, residents don't want to train, doctors don't want to practice in these places.

And so you know, right, so this ends up killing more people than just the ones hemorrhaging in the parking lot. There are people who have completely unrelated problems who are now unable to access unrelated kinds of care because the doctors just aren't there.

Yeah, Or people who have ordinary wanted pregnancies who can't access neonatal care, who have to drive hours and hours and hours to like get checkups. Like you know, I mean, human reproduction is like a pretty major part of like life, and a lot of people are doing it. Yeah, Like it's sort of how you know, it's just people do it all the time and not being able to access medical care around like the entire spectrum of like reproduction

Without a lawyer in the room. Yeah, exactly, I.

Mean, and then there are doctors who are bigots and doctors who are happily on board with abortion bands, But like, do you want that to be the.

Only doctor in your county? I don't think so, you know.

It's just it's a really grim situation. And I just like, I'm such an absolutist about bodily autonomy. It's like, if you don't own your body, you are not a full citizen, period, end of story. Like if a major organ in your body is treated as a controlled substance, like, you are not a full and equal citizen with rights, which I would like to be.

I aspire to it. Yeah, so I want to ask you one more question about your book, and I will let you go. I told you that I wouldn't keep you very long, and I lied.

But it's like, it's just because I like talking to you. So it's I think I've done the majority of the topics.

You can't.

You can't be like, oh, it's about your book, which you should buy listeners, preorder it now wherever you buy a books. And if you like the dulcet tones of my voice, which are I shouldn't have you to narrate in my audience books, you brush that passage.

I'm a professional talker now, yeah, yeah.

Well I narrated the audio book and then was like, why did I write such complicated sentences?

Afterwards?

So now that I read my own writing like on a regular basis out loud, which is new for me, right, So you know, I have my podcast and I'm writing my little scripts and then then I'm reading into a little microphone. Now that I struggle with that. I noticed while I was reading your book that oh, I wouldn't be able to read this out loud. Where would I breathe? I know it was because I write like that too, and it's something I'm like really grappling with right now.

She's like call me ten clubs. I'm like, oh fuck, this sentence is this paragraph. This sentence is a paragraph.

Stop it like I really really lost, really lost momentum that one.

Yeah, I know, but like I managed to get through it. And if you if you enjoy the dulcae sounds of my voice, you can hear it for like, I don't know, eight hours or whatever. I assume you're being like, listen to my voice.

But you know, invite me into your mind.

Yeah.

But I do think it's nice as an author to read your audiobook because I can like get mad and like, you know, emphasize stuff that I think is important. And also I'm a theater kid, like, like, I don't have many opportunities to perform, and it is a performance and it's it's fun.

But yeah, and that comes out at the same time as the physical book.

Yes, it comes out audio ebook, physical book with a cool snake on it.

Oh yeah, Oh, I guess this is an audio medium. The listener can't see that I'm showing the cool cover.

Yeah, it's got a cool snake, a red and black snake on the cover. I've named him Rocco that he has a cross for a tongue. If you're looking for a book to give to the metal head.

In your life.

Oh yeah, it's pretty metal.

Heads, atheists, degenerates. Everyone is gonna love this book.

It's perfect for everyone.

And if you're light on cash flow, want it for supporting India authors is ask your library to stock it or your local bookstore because library orders are really important and you can just like put in a request in your library system and that is super helpful.

Hell yeah, everybody go to your library's website right now and request that they purchase a copy of Wild Faith by Talia Lavin. Yeah, tallywhere else can people find you online?

So I have a newsletter. It's on button down.

I left some stack because they were like, we're never going to censor Nazis, but we will sensor porn. And I was like, I don't like your priorities, so I left for button down. So it's buttondown dot com. Slash the Sword in the Sandwich or if you just google, the Sword in the Sandwich comes up. Most Tuesdays I write about like the horrific state of politics, et cetera, And then Fridays I write an essay about a different

The sandwich content alone is worth the price of admission. You need to find out about these sandwiches.

I mean it just and I get really deep into like the history and the provenance and like like ah, the shifting of people's led to this sandwich. But so I get really deep into it. And then you can also find me on Blue Sky, where I most of the time now because Twitter is just like robots and Nazis and Nazi robots, where I'm at swords Jew. I'm still on vishy Twitter as Moby Dick Energy. And you know, if you want to say hi or invite me to speak at your synagogue or bookstore, I'm at tellyol Even

Yeah, if it's like a cool church, Yeah, you show up and they pass you a snake.

Yeah, exactly. Oh god, I didn't tune up speaking at times for this book.

Well, Tally, thank you so much for coming on today again. The book is Wild Faith by Talia Lavin, and you can pre order it now wherever books are sold, and you should request it from your library.

Yeah, well, stand Civic services, and I'm a huge fan of public libraries and also of Molly Coungar.

So thanks for having me on and take care.

Bye bye.

Hey.

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