It Could Happen Here Weekly 15

about what you can do about it. And today we're doing We're we're going we're we're going completely full into it what you can do about an episode and specifically we're gonna be talking about unions, union organizing, the basics of what they are and also some of the history of it and to to talk with us about this. I I have brought. I have brought my good friend John Horonomus, who is a nurse steward with National Nurses United in Chicago. Hi, John, how are you? How are

you doing? I'm doing good. Yeah. Esterday was my first full day back at work after being out on light duty from having COVID UH for this last year. And so I got home yesterday and was pretty tired because I haven't walked that much in a day. It's fine, but I mean it was a good day. I got lots of lugs from my coworkers. I didn't I didn't forget anyone's name, which I was terrified of, um, and

didn't funk anything up. Um. And then when I got when I got home, I hopped on after I got my kids from school, I hopped on a union organizing call with twenty nurses from a hospital in the South. We're very excited about so um I was. It was. It was a big day that that rules. Oh yeah, yeah,

I guess it's awesome. Do a do a very very brief long COVID check in because this is everything that I think people are talking about that is also like a huge labor issue, which is that yeah, like long COVID fucking sucks and like I know, like I know, like like like one of my cousins had it, and you know, they they've been in bad shape for a long time, like they still can't taste properly and like they I think you got from from what I remember, like pretty bad like in terms of yeah, sorry, if

you don't have you don't want to, but oh I don't care. I mean I think people should like know that this is still going on, Like the pandemic is still happening. Um, people are still getting sick and some are still dying, which really sucks, and the long COVID

thing is real. Um they I didn't get sick in the sense of showing up having to be in like a hospital or I see you or anything like that mine, but I got sick, and um, the recovery, like the the year or the month or so after I got sick was when things actually got bad because something happened with my um my nerves and my neuro I had a neuromuscular variant of like the long COVID symptoms, and that led me to having all its kinds of issues

with basically just being exhausted from basic things. Anything more than just getting up and walking around. I would have to like lay in bed afterwards. And it would add multiple episodes of the past year where I would cross some invisible line in terms of like endurance and then be stuck in bed for a week. And so it's been a long thing. But I've been slowly getting better, and people who fall into that neuromuscular thing do slowly

get better. I think that's the upshot people with heart problems, those tend to be permanent and aren't getting better, which sucks. Um, But yeah, I mean it's just like I think that a lot of people. It's a very weird, surreal thing to watch what is effectively like a like a a global public health catastrophe get politicized the way it has and treated the way it has been by everybody involved.

So um, anyway, I just I'm doing better with that, and it's shaped me over the last year, and it's shaped union organizing, and um, I'm glad that I would say this to people who are thinking about unions. I'm glad that I had the union kind of backing me up, um, even when I had to pull them a little bit in the direct the right direction. Uh. It's much better to have that kind of collective power behind you when

you're dealing with those kind of problems. So that's actually a good way into looking at just sort of in general what a union is, because I think there's there's there's two things here. There is what a union is legally and what a union actually is in terms of just the people in it and the sort of power

behind it. And so I was wondering if you could, well one, I mean, is on an incredibly basic level, explain what a union is like legally, like what is legally defined as doing, because I feel like that's also something that is not as well understood as it should be. Yeah, for sure. So in the United States, there's a series of laws that kind of regulates, UM, you know, the kind of collective UM bargaining UM and collective organization of

workers at work UM. An important thing to understand is that, UM, those laws are mostly designed to constrain workers power to affect their their you know, working conditions UM. And so when you look at what a union legally is UM, unions are for the most part, UM, they're legal organizations that kind of like operate on a dues basis. So if you're in a union, you're paying dues out of

your paycheck. UM. If you work at a unionized workplace, those dudes will get subtracted out regardless of your membership or activity within the union. UM. One thing that people don't understand is that you can if you don't want your dues to go to anything besides supporting organizing your particular workplace. You can request, unions are legally required to

offer you that as an option. UM. And then those dudes get taken out of your paycheck and they get used to do things like rent a union hall um, pay staffers to help you with your organizing. UM. They get taken to do lobbying, various types of political activity. And so for a lot of people, unions will feel like a professional association that lobbies on their break behalf rather than a collective expression of the will of workers in a particular workplace. But UM, or it'll feel like

patronage machine for you know, Democratic party, that sort of stuff. UM. But that being said, UM, unions all have by laws, they all have mechanisms by which there you know, theoretically democratically accountable to the membership UM. And there are oftentimes UM campaigns by workers to change how unions operate and UM.

And then also you know, when you're setting up a union, if you're in a new if you're in a place that doesn't have a union and you're looking to get a union because you're fed up with not having any kind of power over your workplace, or you feel like people are getting discriminity against or bullied, UM, you feel like you haven't gotten a raise, um, those sorts of things.

You can pick the union that you decide if you want to get up a collective bargaining agreement, which is a legal contract kind of like dictating how your workplace operates in a uniform way. You can pick the union that you want to organize with, and their unions that are better to organize with, that are more democratic and more collectively accountable. There are unions that are more organized or more focused on actually building the union power and

organizing new workplaces. And then there are unions that are kind of like there, you know, and I'm gonna say that kind of blur. In the US, there's like a blurry line between rank and file unions and business unions because even rank and file unions are kind of constrained by the same pressures that business unions operate under. And

I'll explain the difference. I'll sell any difference in a second, but I just want to say that, like when you're when you're getting a new union, it's really important for you to critically look at what you're options are and you're set and who you're organizing with, because unions have different cultures and different amounts of UM, different kinds of politics, and you should be aware of that before you and your coworkers decide to commit to working with one union

while you're getting an or a union organized. UM. And then I can explain that next part if you want me to. All right, so yeah, so, And you know, if you get deep into union history and deep into organizing and figuring out like what unions are and what they do and how they've worked kind of in the past,

you'll find that there's different types of unions. So American unions started as like kind of like craft guilds, where basically you would have a factory that might have like twenty different unions of each individual group of people UM in each individual skill set would be underneath the union, and it was used as a way to kind of control UM who was able to do the work and who was getting hired in to do the work. And a lot of times that would end up in the

United States UM being segregated UM. And there would be these called union scamming where you would go in and do work against people who are striking because your union was fine, and you were cool with your boss and these other people, whatever their problem is, You're just going to keep doing the boss will offer you more money and you'll do the work right. So and a lot of that has kind of carried into we called trade unions in the US a specific, and trade unionism is

particularly um prominent in uh in construction. So you'll have carpenters, and you'll have you know, mason's and you'll have you know, pipe fitters and iron workers, all these different guys and they all kind of come together and work as a crew for like a construction company, and oftentimes their union operates more like a contractor than like a collective like uh, expression of the power of those workers. So um, then there are more there are unions that are would be

considered like industrial unions, so industrial unions. Industrial unionism was invented by a union a hundred years ago called the Industrial Workers of the World, and they were like, what if we got took all of the workers in an industry and got them into one big union, right, and then what if all those workers in those different industries were talking to each other and building their their power And the goal would be that you would become so

powerful that you could basically take over industries as workers and run them on a democratic basis, so that you wouldn't have you kind of liquidate capital. And I want, I want to say that this briefly also like yeah,

so the bosses did not like this. I mean the MW, Like the MW was so feared that like, like there's something the Everett massacre where it's like it got to a point in the early nighteen hundreds where just a group of IWW people showing up to a place was enough to get like the the the the entire like the entire city police force and like rounding up literally every right winger they could do and deputizing them and then just opening fire like into the crowd because like

the IWW had showed up on a boat like this was these people were tired, Like people were terrified of them. And I think that the other thing I think was really interesting about the early ww's history is that is the so you know, part of the response to them is like they are just massive, and this is what the first red Scare was. Basically it was an anti IWW thing. And also you know, they shot people, they

arrested people. They like they deported people. And but they also you know a lot of the things that I think we we have this tenants you look at as like a socialist reform where for example, like putting workers on corporate boards, right, or like like in internal democratic self management, but that's like, you know, that's still still sort of boss controlled, right, It's like, wow, Okay, you have like a council of people who can make recommendations

or like even even down to you know, we're going to have our own internal like corporate unions like set up by the company, but you know that the corporate union gives you a workers council and the council can sort of control production. But you know, it's it's still

it's still run by the bosses. Like all of these things were stuff that like the Rockefellers set up or like even even the early neer levels would set the stuffup because they were they were so scared of people, like they were so scared of people just taking over stuff democratically, just running it just literally through the union that they were like we will we will literally give you democracy in the workplace. We will give you like we will give you like workers on corporate boards literally

just so long as you don't like take everything over. Yeah, I think that it's it's hard for people to imagine how intense like the struggle for getting any kind of rights in the workplace have been in the United States in particular. I think a lot of people think that, you know, uh, maybe not so much anymore. But when I was younger, you know, twenty years ago, people would

be like, oh, you know, we're in America. We've got you know, like we've got all these things, like we've got, you know, an eight hour work day, and we've got like a weekend and all like. And the thing is is that literally people were murdered to win those things, right, like, if you like. The reason why we have an eight hour work day is because there was in Chicago a famous uh, a famous strike that um ended up with

a massacre of um. It was like a police riot, and then they rounded up a bunch of union organizers, socialists and anarchists who were like involved in the labor movement at that time, and then the state of Illinois hung them. Um and so the wife of one of them, of one of those people who was murdered at the Haymarket or they called him the Haymarket murders. H Albert

Parsons was one of them. Her or his wife, Lucy Parsons, who was I had a very veritable kind of like not quite sure what her background was, but we do know that she was probably a former slave. Uh. Albert Parsons was a former Confederate. They got married in the South, became Southern Republicans trying to like participate in radical reconstruction, and then they basically had to flee because they were

um with their lives to the north. And uh. But after that whole trial and all that shook out, Lucy Parsons became a labor agitator across the United States fighting for the eight hour day. And and they memorialized the Haymarket Martyrs. And something that I think some of your listeners will know about. Maybe they won't, but you know, made a made a lot of people is like, oh,

that's Russian or some foreign sort of thing. Now, that is an American labor tradition that started here, and it was because of a specific like the the labor movement in the movement for the eight hour day in the United States. So um, and that's kind of like once you go from the IWW and industrial unions as an idea, it got crushed in the twenties because it was so terrifying.

There's a really good, uh, a really good essay on all that called the stop Watch and the Wooden Shoe by a guy named Mike Davis, who kind of explains how it is that IWW as the first union too not only um try and build workers organization, but to challenge workplace organization and to make those push back on how production was happening and fight something called this speed up where I think a lot of people who have worked have experienced this time where a boss will come

in and say we're going to do things differently, and they'll either get rid of a worker and put all the extra work onto people who remain, or they'll change things so you're doing more with the same amount of time. Um, they got you know, they provoked a backlash. Um. There were like spectacular like general strikes, the first general strike

in America in Seattle. There were i w W members who are key members of the Seattle Labor Council, which took craft unions and got their radicals together and coordinated a general strike which is where there's a lot of tweets about general strikes. But general strikes require a lot of organization and coordination. We can talk about that later if we want to, but key thing is the i w W was always pushing for the organization necessary to

pull off a general strike, and they did it. And so amongst those different things and their mine wars in Colorado mine wars and Virginia West Virginia UM, they were the first union that was explicitly anti racist. UM. They they weren't perfect, but they were, but they organized multi racial unions in UM, Philadelphia, the Docks, and various other places. They were one of the few unions that really took the first steps into organizing in the South in the way that UM A lot of unions have kind of

failed too since. And because they were so effective and so frightening, they got crushed. I mean. Also, what every thing I want I want to say about them is that, like, like the WW fought in the Mexican Revolution, because you know a lot of the WW members in California particular were like a lot of a lot of indigenous people,

a lot of sort of voted Mexican immigrants. So yeah, they these huge ties and like they like they I think, I think to this day this is still true outside of Puerto Rico, Like they are the only leftist movement that has ever like taking control of an American city, like they they took to Lexico and Mexicality and like a bunch of the sort of the border area. Yeah.

That that's that, that's you know, part of why it just escalates to everyone starts shooting them because well and and they were truly an international union because they were they focused on like longshoremen and organizing and docks that sort of thing. There were members of the i w W organizing basically everywhere in the world, and they were considered part of like what was like a global movement.

You call them syndicalists, which is kind of like a an Italian term or French term um, which is this the you know, like like the Latin version of the Union of Syndicate uh and um. There were similar unions across the world up through the early twentieth century until right about the time when the Russians, the Russian Revolution happened,

and then there were subsequent crackdowns. And because these people, who I mean, the IWW was a mix of native native born Americans and immigrants, and they were painted as this foreign sort of force. They were un American. That was like the whole nexus of un Americanism as like an idea, and the US state was able to mobilize after World War One to really put that down and so so there's a lot of history there in that. But the idea of the industrial union didn't go away, right.

The union, the IWW was effectively dismembered and scattered. But a lot of people who had experience as IWW members who had been in those strikes, UM didn't like just disappear. They didn't all get deported or sent away. UM. A lot of them kind of tuck their heads down and went back to work, you know. And in the ninet thirties we saw the rise of another industrial the next step towards industrial unionism. So it's called the c i O, which is the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Now there were

multiple at that point. There was the Communist Party USA, the Socialist Party of America, and UM, former members of the IWW and various like anarchists who were participants in kind of the organization of the c i O. And the thing about c i O was was that when they came together, UM, it was in the Great Depression had really kind of kicked off, and they were able to organize like really explosively across all these new industries.

So they like the U a W. United Auto Workers was like part of the c i O. And they would they pioneered forms of strikes called sit down strike,

which was basically a factory seizure. All the workers would just say we're not going to walk out, We're going to lock ourselves in and we're going to sit down and it's our factory now, and now you're going to have to negotiate with And it became this thing where it was like millions of people were like the I w W at any one time was like hundreds of thousands of people, and the c i O became a thing where it was millions of people and UM and at least at the beginning when they had there, when

they had we're at the peak of their like power and militancy. UM, they were able to mobilize workers to take over factories, take over factories from some of the most powerful corporations on the earth on Earth. And you know, at the same time um. While they were doing this, the police and UH company UM company security and vigilantes which had never gone away from like the IW, we're

doing the same sorts of things. So they would regularly beat strikers, would regularly there would be you know, regular labor massacres, um disappearances of various um of labor organizers or labor leaders or even just random workers that they thought were like, oh, you're a unionist, um, you know, get in the back of this uh, get in the

back of this truck. And then they were never seen again. Um. And then laws started to be enacted, I believe out of fear that if this, if this movement didn't get somehow put under brought in under control, that there would be a revolution. And so uh so that's when we started to see the enactment of laws like the National Labor Relations Act, which made having a union like that was the first time when being any union was considered

legal at the federal level. And that uh the FDR the New Deal Democrats basically attempted to broker something called labor peace where they would say, we're no longer going to mobilize the state against workers in the way that we have previously. Now local police would still side with bosses that sort of thing. But uh, and those sorts of massacres and that sort of stuff didn't really go

away until like the forties. Um. But um, that was the beginning of because what you do see is unions get channeled into Once you have like a million people in the union, you have just enormous amounts of resources, all these dues coming in. You have the beginning of

the labor bureaucracy. Whereas before it would be you know, there would be hired you know, paid labor organizers, but they were always shifting around, and they were they were brought up as communists or socialists, and they had ideological commitments to building the power of the union and the power of workers that you know, if you are just a you know, and someone with some ambition and decided you want to become like anyone at this point you know,

who wants to become a paid union staffer. If you're like you know, if you care to and a lot of people, Um, then being a union staffer was a different thing than is now. It was. I think I'm trying to remember the name of the president. I think

it's John Lewis. John Lewis, who was a Republican back in the day, said, you know, I think famously said at one point it's like, if you want to build a union, or if you want to build a house, you call a carpenter, if you want to build a union, you call communists, and so uh and so they would literally would go to like the the you know, the

Communist Party and say we need organizers. And the Communist Party did a lot of work to training people to be organizers, and they were militant, they were ready to throw down because to them, they were looking at this as part of a you know, class struggle against you know, bosses and you know, a way of overthrown capital. Um. That kind of went through until World War two. And uh.

When World War two hit, that's when the Soviet Union, which in many ways controlled what was happening with communists with CPUs A, basically said we need a labor piece because we need to support the war effort. And so that's when union started signing contracts with no strike clauses, and they started um agreeing that they would no longer strike um and and they started agreeing to things like

speed ups. There used to be a time when uh, these mass industrial unions, the stewards would walk around with a whistle on their neck. They have a whistle on a lanyard and any time that workers decided that this is like an example of how powerful these unions were.

Not just like as like an organization, but every day at your workplace, if you thought that something was not right, or you were not being treated fairly, or somehow the contract was in breach, you would go to your steward and your steward would pull out this whistle and would blow the whistle. It's called a whistle stop strike and everyone would set down their tools until management would come out and they would either agree to pay more or

stop what was happening and fix it. And so um, there was a time when strikes would be you would have intermittent work stoppages. So you wouldn't go out like indefinitely. You would go out on strike for like three months. Though that happened. You wouldn't just and it wouldn't just be your factory. It would be hey, we're getting on the phone and we're calling our friends down the street at the next at your supplier. It's called a secondary strike.

So if you're working at like a steel mill, and your steel mills dependent on coke from the next factory over. You're calling up your friends in the same union down the way, say stop sending coke, stop sending materials. Where these things to us, we're on strike. You as you

all set your tools down, you go on strike. And it would and these strikes would like massively expand so you would see things instead of seeing you know, we just went through Striketober, right, yeah, and we just and so we saw like what we call a strike wave. But in and in some ways it was a strike wave.

But I think that we still don't I think it's so far away from living memory of what a real strike wave is, where people would go on strike in one factory and then the next factory, in the next factory, the next very it literally would be a wave of people um going on strike. And this was all the result of all the organization that people had, in the militant attitude that people had about like how they were

going to be treated at work. It's worth mentioning that one of the so the National Labor Relations Act, which is past nineteenturty five, which is like that you know, this is the beginning labor piece, Like you know, it's okay, we'll give you the right re union, but you cannot do secondary strikes like that, Like this is this is explicitly banned in this if I'm remembering this right, is that there's a specific thing that says you can't do

secondary strikes anymore. And you know, and this was this was you know, the basis of this piece was that like yeah, as you sort of said before, it was like, well, okay, so the state will put their guns down, but the

workers also essentially have to put their guns down. And yeah, and this this starts this whole process of you know, on once once you lose like that kind of consciousness and once you lose the practical experience of doing this stuff, it kind of it fades and and over time, you know, yeah, the atrophies and and the unions get weaker and weaker because you know, like with without like you know what, once you once you've set aside, right and you've decided

that you're gonna essentially you know, okay, we're gonna we're gonna follow the laws, we're gonna sit down, we're gonna do this, We're gonna like negotiate in good faith, we're going to have all of this sort of um, you know, we're we're gonna go through the National LA Relations Board. It's like, well, at that point, people like people, people's willingness to pick the weapons back up that they put

down just sort of continues to diminish. Well, I think what happens is I mean, And so there was like a ten year period. So first there was like the first five you know, five ten years of c I oh was when we see like this really like intense militancy within these unions. And halfway through like you know, the passage of that first long in the nineteen thirties, UM,

that's when we started to see the erosion. And we constantly see I think I think that people don't understand is that our bosses are always trying to assert their control over work. And we'll see that like UM bosses will do all kinds of contortions as long as they get to stay in charge and that they're unquestioned. And I don't think we understand quite how long the long game is for UM, for management, for our bosses, and

for capital. And so you know, it starts with the National Labor Relations Act and then it goes through uh, um, it goes through World War Two. In the World War Two, that's when the c i O goes from you know, you know, millions of people to like tens of millions, and it becomes like a thing where like that's when you know, like Americans are in a union, right, um, because I mean to the extent that that to the extent that um, there were those compromises happened. It didn't

just compromise. It wasn't just like a failure of like, oh, like we're just going to start capitulating. It's like there were interests inside the union. They're looking at like, well, this is a lot of resources and power that we have now. But wait until like it's you know of

America paying union dudes. And there were people inside the Democratic Party who were willing to trade um, that labor piece for that you would start to see, you know, that's when politicians would show up to UM two union hall to talk and try and get you know, and that's when you know, the Democratic Party, it would be it wouldn't be unusual to hear a Democratic politician, UM say things about like labor that you would like that

no politician would say today. And now that doesn't mean that they were like on the side of the workers, but you know, you would have literally, um, President Eisenhower telling the president of U. S. Steel to get fucked over like a general, like you're you're trying to shut down like you know, this is like the the steel industry is a lifeblood of backbone of the American economy. Um, you know, and you're trying to shut this down, trying to kill the golden goose, like get back to work,

let the pay these people what they're asking. Um. But you know, so you would see the people who kind of floated to the top of those uh unions trading their trading away their workers power and their workers well

being for more and more month. First off, the would be more money, so you would you like, they would start getting raises that were really substantial, and it would boost up a union steel worker or a union auto worker into what we consider like the comfortable middle class where people could like buy a like a fishing cabin or something up on a lake, send their kids to college, all these sorts of things that were just kind of like unobtainable sorts of things. If you were the same

in the same industry twenty years earlier. Yeah, and um, and that felt like wins, you know, two people. And also in the nineteen forties, after World War Two, they passed the Taff Hartley Act, which basically meant that they forced unions. Well they did, okay, they wrote into law that it was illegal to be a communist or an anarchist in uh in a union. And so they're literally still unions that still have language in their in their membership parts or they're like I declare, I'm I've never

been a member of the Communist Party. I'm not an you know, an anarchist. Uh. I mean like I have friends who have pulled that out. Now it doesn't have any effect now, but that was they basically took all the people, you know, the people that uh that were you know, the people that you would have called to build the union twenty years later or before, we're getting thrown out of unions. And that didn't happen in every like. There were attempts to do that in all kinds of countries.

They tried to do it in the UK, and the unions in the UK told basically told the government to go fund themselves, and they you know, it's like but because the leadership of the of the c I O industrial unions began to see themselves more in alignment with are ruling class and are you know, like the Democratic Party, they decided that they were big enough that they didn't

have to have militants involved anymore. And that's when you know, uh, people were literally would get fired out of did either either militants and staff would get fired or uh, they would get fired out of factories if you're like a ranking file worker. So um, and that's when we begin to see the rise of what we call business unionism. And that's where we would have union bureaucrats would and um would you know, would basically start making concessionary contracts.

And this started you know back in you know, a lot of people are like, oh, you know, back in the fifties, unions are really powerful and they were powerful to get you know, like raises, but those raises came at the expense of control over the work process, came at the expense of the speed up um and as unions like because the rank and file workers, like you're saying, you know, ranking file workers, and they see their things there these tools getting put down and they were more

reluctant to pick them up first off, is because of the amount of money that they're getting paid. And but they pushed back, they were like this is I mean, like, there's a really great book called The Next Shift UM by Gabriel win At. It's all about the shift from steel, the steel industry as like the center of the U. S economy to healthcare UM, and how unions basically started to erode away there like throw it, like hand over

their power in exchange for money. And then when they were told like there was UM and attempts to get socialized medicine and the under the Truman administration, and when they were basically uh, they they hit a speed bump in there and it got shot down. They decided that instead of trying to win those uh those broad social reforms for everybody, they're like, well, we can use our our power to strike to get basically construct a private

welfare date for our workers. And so that's when you begin to see UM things like uh, the they call them like the gold plated insurance plans for certain types of unionized workers, and those would kind of UM and those are kind of used as like a private welfare state for all those workers. And it was built with the assumption you're gonna have low cost workers basically doing all this care work UM, and oftentimes it would be

women of color and UM. And through that you start to see this real sharp client from the sixties in

like UH in union UM, militancy UM. And that's when factory, when capital starts moving factories out of city centers where it's very easy to organize a factory when everyone lives within walking distance the factory, and when they're done with their shift at the factory, they're all at the bar outside the outside the factory gates, and you can just like if you want to have a union meeting, if you want organized even a wildcat strike, all you have to do is show up at the right bar and

that's where everyone is after they're done with their shift. UM. They started moving and dispersing the industrial capacity of the United of you know, the the US urban core out into suburbs. So that's now where you'll drive through rural Indiana and you'll pass like five factories and they're surrounded by nothing but corn fields. It's because it's a lot harder to organize auto workers when they all live thirty minute drive from each other, and none of them hang

out at the same bar anymore. Uh, And then you start to see UM and all through that time, the commitments to anti racism are eroded. So you'll see UM jobs get start to get segregated out inside it's like steel mills and things like that. But then, you know, is also the rise of rank and file movements to

push back. So UM, all the while we're talking about this, there's always workers who remember what these things were like and why, and the power that they used to have, and they would do the best that they could get organized and so UM. There's a really good UM documentary you can find a YouTube called Finally Got the News. It's about the Dodge Revolutionary Union movement in Detroit, which was a rank and file reform movement organized by UM

by black auto workers. They got like a fair amount of support from white auto workers because they're basically there's you know, interviews with U a W bureaucrats and they're just like, you know, we're getting people these raises. Why are they upset that they're like getting named in the factory right, or why are they getting upset that you know, you know, black workers are constantly getting put into the shittiest jobs or the first to get laid off, that

sort of thing. And that's a it's a really I suggest anyone has time. And that came out of like the I think that was immediately after the was getting organized after the assassination Martin Luther King and all the riots that were happening in the h in the sixties had like that late sixties period. Um, in the seventies, there was a teamster, the teamster rank and file rebellion. My grandpa was a teamster trucker. My grandma was a teamster.

She was like a punch card operator. But yeah, sorry, yeah, yeah, no, I mean like teams, these unions got so big and they have that's how you end up with like there's U a W teaching assistance now, right, Um, Like how do you end up with these huge like uh unions? And during teams are rebellion And my grandpa would tell these stories like we're going on there would be a wildcat strike and they call it out over the CB radios.

And the way they would enforce the picket line wasn't just like oh, we're gonna like standing in the road or something. They would hang coke bottles full of rocks over the overpasses, just high enough up to like that cars wo pass underneath them, but if you hit one and you're in a truck, it's funk up your day. Um. And that was like a really um like a really kind of like powerful pushback by rank and file workers against what they saw was the erosion of their power.

Because I think that I think there's this sometimes amongst people who consider themselves to be left or whatever, there's like this kind of doom and gloom like, oh, it's only like we're only losing, right. But and there's been a lot of as the seventies happened, and capital is kind of reconfiguring itself in the middle of all the

economic upheaval inflation. Um, Basically, they got to the point where we can't maintain labor peace and maintain profits, right, so they could maintain labor piece and have something more like a socialist system, or they can maintain control over the work process and just do everything in their power to destroy the power of workers. And they decide to do that. Um. So I think we were coming out of this kind of era where you know, if you

were in a union and working at a factory. Um, there was a real threat that they're like, well, we're just gonna shut this factory down, and you know, naft to get signed. Well, first it was the pet Go strike with Reagan. Reagan gets elected and air air traffic controllers decided they're going to go on strike and um, and they and Reagan decided he was going to break it, and they brought in they basically there was this bigg recession.

It was like this huge mess where people were really desperate for work and um, you know, they said, we're going to hire anyone to be an air traffic controller and we're gonna break the strike. And that was the first real the first like that the beginning of the end of that final, like that big moment era of

industry real unionism in the United States. And we went from a place where you know, U a W had millions, the United Auto Workers had millions and millions of workers and if you drove a car or a truck in his main America is made by union worker, to this point where now the AW is around fifty people. I was shocked when I heard that, literally like two weeks ago. Um, you know, we just have the big U, a W

strike at John Deer, UM. And there's been and you know, all through this while this is going on, UM, there's various union corruption scandals. And that's again the cause of like when you kick out all the people who have an ideological commitment to improving the lives of working people and building the power of working people out of this organization that's only existence is to like build the power of working people. UM, then you then you end up

with people who are basically criminals. Like you end up

like there would be Uh. I think Reagan scat like Ronald Reagan and was h was a union member, but he was like the union member for like a corrupt like there was like there was like a battle between like the c I O controlled union in like Hollywood and like the corrupt like moss mobbed up union and the mobbed up union, like that was the side if I'm that that was a side that Raagant picked and uh and yeah, so it's like you could kind of and there was a lot of like media where they

would be like you know, the Waterfront in various like movies and things talking about union corruption. And I think the union corruption is real and it's a it's when it happens, it's a huge problem. It shouldn't like it's in other countries like in like in Germany, if they found out like a union union official like misappropriated like two thousand euros, it would be a nationwide scandal like UM. Also in uh In like European countries, you pay union

dues on a voluntary basis. Right in the US legally, since we're a close shop system, like once you're at a union UH union workplace, your dues get taken, whether you know whether you're happy with the union or not. Now there are people will say that's really important because unions need every penny they can to fight where they have.

But when unions have to fight for membership and make sure that their membership knows that they're getting like what they're paying for, you get a little bit more responsiveness. So I think that's another thing that especially people are thinking about unions and thinking about joining a union are

creating getting any of the workplace. Just understand what a union is and how they work and where your money is going to, and that if you're unhappy with that, the best thing to do is to get involved with your union to try and like get connected with your coworkers who have similar complaints and change the union. Because there's a saying it's like any union is better than

no union. That's not always true, but it generally is there there there's like a very small chance that like you're like living in nineteen nine China and like your union is like is controlled by like a commodation of the K and T and like literally the Chinese heroine trade.

But you know that that like, yeah, that like doesn't there there there are things where you'll have like there, my dad worked at a factory and there was it was a teamster organized factory, and like some of the stewards for bullies and literally like there were some people who were dealing drugs out of it, and they gave the the workers like try to bring in another union, and the and the management decided to offer to also try and desertify decertify the union at the same time,

and the workers voted to desert. And the thing is is that now that factory shut down and gone um and I guess like the thing is is that you have to It's far better for workers to assert their rights within their union where they have some modicum of democratic control over what's going on than it is to just throw up your hands and like there's and do nothing. Because if you do nothing, the boss is always doing something. Yeah, Like that's the thing is, like management is always organizing.

They're always coming up with ways to like to undermine the control of workers at work, to pick people against each other. Um, we can get into it later, but like, uh, they want, they'll use racism and those sorts of things to dole out favors or curry favoritism and like you know,

pit people against each other. So I think that it's important to just say that, like the union is going to be your only effective way to push back, well, the union or collective action, because I guess I also want to say that there are times when organizing union isn't the best solution to solving your problem at work. Ultimately, this is all about how do you solve problems at work? Right?

And they're sometimes when you can do collective action that is protected as you know as labor organizing, but it's not done within a union. And so and because America is a really best of place and you have right to work states and places where like being in a

union is like literally illegal. Um sometimes putting the time, you're like you can't get into a union, and therefore you have to come up with other solutions, or sometimes because of the nature of a workplace, like getting a union is like it's very hard or like basically impossible. That doesn't mean that you can't organize, And I think

that that's the thing that everyone needs to understand. I think there's a lot of like boosterism of unions amongst younger workers because people just don't understand how they work or they haven't experienced in themselves. And I think that the main thing is is that you've got to be very careful with your time and understanding. Like building a union can take like ten years from the beginning of we're upset to now we have a collective bargaining agreement,

or now we have a collective bargaining agreement. It could be another five or ten years before you actually get to the point where you're organized enough to go on strike. And people oftentimes think that that's like they look back at the history of things and they're like, oh, it's so easy. But back then people were taking all they mean, they it took them years to build the the US labor movement into what it was at its peak. It took decades, right, and I think that we are kind

of used to this instant gratification kind of stuff. We have to understand it. It's like, if you're going to be in a workplace where you're there for enough time to build the trust and relationships and understanding of how the work workplace works and keep your job and be someone that people don't look at, is like a shirk or whatever. Not that I don't think that people should you know, people should work as hard as they can

and not any more harder than that. But whatever. Um. But I think that you know, I'm anti work, but you know that's the whole other thing. Unions are the best way to limit the amount of work that you have to do. Um, if you're gonna if you're going to uh, you know, work as a wage labor um. But I'll just say that, it's like I think that

people don't that. It's difficult sometimes to understand how much work goes into getting to the point of getting a union, but it's always worth putting the time in to get there. And you may not win the first try, but if you are if if the conditions are right and things like, you know, we make our history, but not in conditions of our choosing. Sometimes things don't work out, but not doing it is I think, a it's detrimental to you

and your co workers. And even times like I've talked with people who have been involved in campaigns where they got fired but then all of a sudden conditions approved afterwards, and they look at that as like, oh, ship, we didn't get our union, but everyone got raises and they change some things at work, and that's actually a victory.

So you know, I think that I think of each other as like collective building collective power, and the amount of time it takes to do that is daunting, but I think it's the sort of thing that we need to do if we're serious about changing how we can actually like how our lives work and how much power we have outside of work, because unions are also places where we do things that affect outside of our work

as well. Um, George flayd uprising. You know, uh in Minneapolis there were nurses union nurses who walked out the door um to support uh, you know, people who were uh basically having an insurrection against like you know, police violence. In in Minneapolis when the when COVID pandemic hit off, year of everything going off, nurses nurses were going out and confronting UH. Union nurses were going out and confronting

anti mass protesters. Like I was literally getting screamed at by like some Looney Tunes doctor holding a banner that said nurses are dying. Go home with like twenty other union nurses And we were the only people out there who are like together, who are you know, immediately impacted by this stuff and UM, And I think it made a difference, Like I think it's important, and so I

think that UM some idea called social unionism. So if you get to the point where building a union and you're making progress, and you get to that point where you have a union, always be advocating for to the extent that you can that your union is engaged in the kind of UM, like connecting with your community around your workplace, figuring out the things that are impacting people's lives outside of unions. Because I think that's another thing

that UM. For a long time, unions just ignored or let atrophy because they didn't think it was their problem anymore. Was you know, mutual aid helped build the labor movement.

You know, workers would get would literally like in West Virginia and matuan Uh they had uh company police throwing people out of their apartments who are on strike, and the there were you know, all of a sudden, two thousand of your fellow workers showing up and throwing the police out of town and putting people's uh, you know,

belonging to in their house or you know. And I believe we're getting back to that point where you know, teachers went on striking West Virginia and the union and the teachers did everything they could to support their students while they were out, because like, I think there's this idea that a lot of union workers at this point are you know, everyone is like, you know, the American workforce is so desperate and so and they've just been pushed around so much that you know, there was this

idea for a time like in Wisconsin, what was or what was the Scott Walker consint Uprising just eleven, wasn't it? I think it was like right around occupy It wasn't around there, And like there was this idea that's like, oh you're a nurse, Oh you're a teacher, Like you should just be happy that your job has some kind of meaning to it, right, And it was a lot of like weird discourse around in the media of about like how dare these people? I think that they deserve anything?

And the thing is is that how can you, like, as a nurse, how can I take care of my patients safely when I'm constantly having, um like, more and more work put on me, right, and that that immediately affects the people that I'm taken care of. So that when when we went on strike in twenty nineteen, it was around our safe staffing. UM and if I've seen management make decisions about staffing that kill people, and I've seen management make decisions that lead to my coworkers getting injured.

Um I management made decisions that led to me getting COVID and messed me up for a year. And so when people in these kind of care worker roles, which I think has become a more prominent part of the U. S economy as people are getting older and they need more like care work, home care workers, nursing home workers, hospital workers. UM. Parents don't can't rely on family the way they used to to help take care kids. School has become like this really important, like uh institution for

you know, working class survival. Um that you can't do those jobs as a worker if you don't have the resources. So like our our children were at the Chicago public schools and there that you know, the Chicago Teachers Union, which was taken over by the rank and file UM, I think in two thousand five or six by you know, a group of black women led by Karen Lewis. They set up a group called like a rank and file caucus called the Caucus of Rank and File Educators or

Radical Educators. Cores might be messing up, but it's called CORE. They went out on strike in and and as a you know, as just this was before my kids were old not to be in those schools. I was out there still taking them coffee donuts, right because I knew

that they're in there. Because things stuck. By the time my kids were old enough in nineteen for it to be a big thing, and the teachers when I'm striking in Chicago, it had gotten so it's so bad that Chicago teachers like Chicago Public schools have the the lowest number of staff two students of any school system in Illinois. It's not even like half right and um. And it's funny because the state had been constantly trying to erode

the power of the union. They're making Chicago teachers like pay their for their own retirement basically in a way that no other like workers have to. Um. They were making it so that Chicago teachers could only go on strike over of the teachers voted to go on strike. UM so when so what that does is there's kind of like a a little bit of a flip where oh, we have to make of you know, people agree to go on strike. Well, let's organize so much that we get people to agree to go on strike, and then

how powerful is our strikes? Our strikes is going to be. We're literally like one of the things I do as a steward is I connect with all the different unions and at the University Chicago where I work, through a labor council, we were going, as you know, university workers to all the picket lines of the public schools around our neighborhood and we're bringing out coffee, bringing out donuts, talking to people. Hey, I'm a nurse. We were on strike like six or like two or three months ago.

What do you all need connecting with people. And then and then like at one point when the teachers were like, we're not getting what we want and this is LORI lightfoot is trash there, uh, we helped organized this mass march where multiple marches of teachers and school workers and we're all out in the streets dodging cop cars until

we have this big convergence. And it was really beautiful, Like we had like multiple people with like multiple banners and different columns, each one saying we will win, going through the streets of our neighborhood UM and like messing up like the commercial traffic area in uh in our

very bougie neighborhood. UM. But that was happening all over the city and it's just like when you see that happen, it's because we're literally in the support of the community for those strikes was so overwhelming because people knew that. It's like these people, aren't it. I mean, like, first off, it's a hard job. There's no reason why anyone doing that job shouldn't have like a materially comfortable life. That's how stressful it is and how much work they do.

And I really like, I really need to emphasize this enough people. There's this whole thing is like, oh, teachers don't work over the summer, like, oh, but no, like their job sucks. They have to they have to deal with these kids all day. And the other thing is like, you know, the part of it that you don't see is they have to do all the lesson plans. They have to great all the stuff, have to do all this stuff like after the school day end, they have

to do all the suff honestibly, all the time. This job is awful. It is extremely hard, and like they don't. Yeah,

the conditions are extremely bad. I'll never forget when I'll never forget when I ran into my seventh grade science teacher on the summer she was waiting tables at a local restaurant, you know, I mean, And so I think that there's this assumption that like that, especially care workers get some sort of you can't you know, you can't cash in fulfillment right or prestige or whatever that doesn't pay the rent, that doesn't put you know, groceries on your table um that sort of thing. And so you know,

I think we're beginning to see this thing resurgence. And it started with teachers and I know, for and teachers and nurses have been out fighting like hell for the past like five years, and it's beginning to kind of like spark other kinds of organizing outside of outside of the care work areas, and a lot of this stuff was It's funny how it was kind of like predicted

by occupy and like revolt of the carrying classes. Someone who wrote a really cool book that just came out, David Graeber, who was talking about, like, why is it that we're seeing all these people who are out in the streets like during occupy, who are like social workers and nurses and teachers and all this stuff there There's something going on here, and I think that so you'll see places where organizing conditions are easier because the pressure

on especially care workers right now is immense in a

way that it isn't as immense other places. But look at for those like when you're thinking about unions and whether to do build a union at your workplace or do some sort of collective organizing your workplace, do you have the dynamics where you guys are can the boss shut down your, uh, your your workplace and move it like ten miles without completely destroying their like their business right, And so you know, we've seen strikes happen in grocery stores,

um and uh Massachusetts there was a really like uh pretty well publicized grocery worker strike and apparently there was like internal documents got released to like shareholders about how that was like one of the most like it was like for a month in the winter or three weeks, and they said they lost like of customers refused across the picket line. I mean, and I think we're thinking it's like getting to the point where you can go

on strike. It's a lot, it's a process, and it takes a lot of work, and I think that people underestimate what that looks like. Hence we see hashtag general strike things all the time. Um. But like when you get there, I think that we're at a point now where people have a lot more sympathy for workers, and workers have become more visible in the way that they

weren't before. Like the essential workers over the past year and a half have been the only workers that sometimes people will see, right, So you'll see things also like you have you know, Amazonians United, which is a union that's organizing, but they're trying to organize something called a solidarity union. So they're not, you know, at least the ones here in Chicago, and I think some of them in New York. And this may be changing. Things are

always shifting around. But for a long for a while, through like the pandemic, they were organizing on a like in contrast to the best sumer uh Amazon campaign. Sorry, there was a a business union tried to organize a union in Alabama, Investment Alabama at an Amazon warehouse, and there was a lot of like media attention to that. Democratic politicians, we're paying attention to it, you know, Joe Biden said, I support the right of workers to choose

to have the choice. Stabby union some really milk toast bullshit and a lot of celebrities showing up. And what wasn't happening was you weren't seeing a lot of evidence that the workers themselves were very excited about the union. And it turned out that that campaign failed. Um, whereas workers at Amazonian's united up here, like in Chicago, and granted it's a very different organizing environment in Illinois than it is in Alabama. UM, they haven't been focusing on

getting contract. They've been focusing on getting work changes like They're like, we want to have water, like we need water breaks, and so they would they have these stand up meetings at the beginning of every shift, and they had coordinated where you have you know, thirty of your co workers all say we're not starting until we get water. And then management panics because they're not used to that kind of demand. They're used to We're going to have

a campaign. Then we can you know, mess with votes and that sort of thing and make people afraid. Collective action overcomes fear, right, So when you have collective action, even through a regular like a more regular conventional union campaign,

those collective actions are what needs to successful unions. So like, um, so, you know, they'd say, we aren't starting the shift until we get water, and then all of a sudden a manager disappears and then comes back with palates full of water, right, and all of a sudden, people are like, I'm gonna have the drink water before I start, like all together, and then they go off and do their thing, and it's like, you know, things like that build the power of the union to the point where they shut down

that warehouse. But then Amazonian United popped up in the three new warehouses that they step in Chicago. So it's like when you build that kind of collective power and people feel like this is how you get things, then it's hard to repress. Right. It's one thing we're like, we lost an election, why did we even bother? It's another thing where like no, we wont like all this, like this, that, and the other thing like we got you know, like our regular schedules fixed. We got like

water on our shifts. We got this. You know, that's what gets people into the mindset that they can change things. And I think this is the thing that a lot of people don't get. It's it's like, the difficult part isn't getting people to agree that things are fucked up at your workplace. Most people understand that things are sucked up in their workplace. Difficult part isn't saying that, like, well,

this is a solution, right. The difficult part is getting people to understand that collective action is the only way to solve the problems, right even within unionized workplaces. Getting your coworkers to understand that if we don't do this as a collective, we will fail. And so like when there was a like the first successful private hospital union drive North Carolina popped off early. UM. Throughout that campaign, they were constantly like demonstrations of collective power. We're gonna

do a vigil. How many people are gonna show up to the visual We're gonna all walk around stickers saying like safe staffing saves lives or like you know, um, patients over profits. That sort of stuff and building that kind of collective power together is what gets you. UM, It's what gets you a successful Like that's what builds a union. Fundamentally, union is UM. There's the legal thing and then there's the real thing, and the real thing is only as powerful as people are willing to fight

for and build that kind of collective power together. When nurses were on straight and I talked a lot about nurses because I know a lot about nurses, but like you know, or like you know in um in Iowa, when the John Deere strike happened, people were out on the picket lines and people were ready to get hit by cars to like stop scabs from coming like crossing the picket line. And if you're not willing to do

that kind of stuff. And I'm not saying that you need to put your body on the line for things, but you do need to be willing to draw outside the lines. Right, there's the law and then there's what you can get people to do. And you will be surprised when people start moving. They move fast and they get really riled up, like this, funk, this, this is

what we're gonna do. And sometimes unions try and like bottle that energy up um or you know, if you're in a good union, you use that energy to fix things. So I think that's kind of where land on all this stuff. It's like be aware of like the pitfalls of what organizing at work means. Everyone has a right to organize at work everywhere in this country. If you get fired for like for organizing, you can fight that

that sort of thing. Yeah, it's federally protected, like it's this is this is a federal government thing, like you know, this is this is this is what we got in exchange for everything else is like like this is you know, like this this is what we got in exchange of putting our guns down. Is that Like yeah, the the the actual Feds will be like, no, you can't do this. Yeah, I mean and sometimes that doesn't sound like fold consolation

and it doesn't always work. But and I guess this is the other thing is there are people who are like, this is how we're gonna, you know, we're gonna when socialism is everyone's in the union. And I guess, like my take on it is is this is how we build all the networks and get the skills and all the necessary things to be prepared to do bigger stuff

down the road. So when we when workers are talking to each other across like you know, at when Chicago, when Chicago teachers went on strike, they didn't just go

on strike as the teachers. They also talked to the They lined up their strike to go out as the same as education like the school workers who are in s C I you and they went out at the same time, um, in order to incre improve the power of the strike, because the more workers who are out, less able the bosses are to like like to undermine the boss either with people scabbing on each other or whatever.

And I think it's just like and like that's the point of our labor council is like when like the grad workers at Universe Chicago go on strike, we got teachers out or we got well, there were teachers from CTU out on those picket lines. There were nurses and anew on those picket lines, and we were doing everything we could to communicate to each other because like in my work, it doesn't matter that I'm a nurse and you're a secretary. We have the same boss. We have

the same problems a lot of the times. And so I think people people want to do the thing, which is to all have the glorious general strike that like overthrows capitalism or whatever or fixes all the problems that your work. But you know, starting everyone forgets all the

necessary intermediate steps to get to that point. And sometimes it means just get the union in the door in the first place, because like at a campaign I was a part of here in Chicago where my University Chicago bought a non union hospital that was out in the community. Just getting in there, they were able to expose like basically an entire hospital wide scheme of like racial racist

like practices around raises and compensation. And that is like that first step and then fixing that right, because you don't want to have like white worse nurses making more than black nurses and black percent more than like did immigrant nurses like Filipino or like Mexican nurses, get everyone on the same page so that you're fighting together instead of fighting each other. And you know, those are those

first steps that you take. And then and then you start reaching out to people on other other workplaces or other work areas and build that kind of militancy across

unions so that you can support each other. So maybe a secondary strike is illegal right now, but that doesn't mean that you don't have, you know, teamsters who won't cross the picket line, right you know, how do you go out and make it or you can build that solidarity so that like in Buffalo and the UM the c w A nurses went on strike and they want

pretty impressive things around staffing ratios. They literally had other unions going out and picketing board members of their hospitals businesses and like getting really really like aggressive with that

sort of stuff. So I think that I think that people need to just big takeaway is is the biggest barrier to any of this stuff, is just getting people to believe that collective action is possible and they can get you wins, and then making sure that you take your time and be patient and understand that there's going to be losses. But in the grand scheme of things.

Don't don't don't mistake what looks like a setback when it's actually a victory for like a victory like for a real like a defeat, and um, and talk with people like that's what they hate that, Like, bosses hate it when we're talking with each other and talk to people you're not comfortable with. That's the That's the other thing is that people are very nervous to talk to

people like. It's always funny when you run into people who are ra ra like unions, ra ra like socialism, YadA YadA YadA, and they don't talk to their co workers, right, and your co workers are the people you're gonna be around for maybe some years, and that's where you spend a huge chunk of your time. And like, but you don't know what's going on, they're like, oh, they're all hostile. They don't want to know anything, they don't want to

do anything. Funny thing is is that oftentimes the most people who seem very skeptical and anti union can be flipped and sometimes those people become the best, like the most dedicated people to the union. It also means that you're going to talk to people you disagree with. Like, there was a Trump dude who was on like the argating committee for the like our last strike. He fucking

loved that thing. He was like, we're going on strike, but you know, it's also a union full of black women, and he shut the funk up when you know it wasn't like, you know, being racist and ship, but you

know you're gonna be with those people. And part of the thing is is that it's about how we're all moving together rather than making sure everyone is on the same page for every single thing, because the biggest thing is the collective action and building that collective power, and hopefully the collective power is hopefully the collective power outweighs. It's if you stand firm on principles like anti racism and fighting against discrimination and misogyny that sort of thing,

it actually builds the power of the union. I think that's the other thing is that people are like, oh, I don't you know, like, you know, working class people

are all racist or reactionary or whatever. So I'm going to do that and that's how I'm gonna get that's my inn And it's like, I think there are a lot of people who like they really don't like, you know, they don't like being around loud, racist assholes or people who you know, say slurs, like especially if it's like, I mean, you can make the arguments like this is that's their way of dividing us. Our goal is to be together. And historically speaking, the one thing that's done

the most too fight working class racism is union organizing. Yeah. So, And I think also, like you know, in terms of like building something that's actually you know, durable and powerful on top of sort of just the division. I mean, you know, even when it becomes stuff like transphobia. Right, it's like, you know, if if you can convince people to fight like first like fight for the person next to them, right, you know, I mean this is this is the thing that people like said a lot during

the Dreean the Burning campaign. But it was like, you know, if people like, yeah, like, if you can get someone to uh fight like fight for the person next to you in a concrete way in the workplace, in a way that's actually real for something that doesn't directly aff them, you think, you know a A it is just like the the amount of power that you've built there is incredible. And then be also Okay, I forgot where I was going with that, Daniel, please cut that. Hold on, hold on,

I can kind of build off. Let me just say this, My personal experience is that queer women run the labor movement and that like and that if you think that people who have been bullied from the day they like stepped into like a into a kindergarten aren't going to be the people who are most equipped to fight bullshit, bullying from a boss or injustice or bullshit you're fucking like, like, just get the funk out because you haven't been in

a union and you don't know what you know. I mean, you like the like people, unions are at their best when they incorporate, you know, all, like when they are fighting for everybody, because what a boss can get away with with the weakest person, that's what they'll do to all of us if they get the chance. And so I think that there's this idea that's like, oh, we're going to set we're not going to we're going to

ignore this or that sort of thing. It's like, you know, that's when people like, you know, people will turn away from unions as they feel like they're not being listened to or taken seriously, and you don't know what people's like identities are just because you see how they look. And so I think that it's real important for us to understand that if we're going to fight these fights, we need to do so with the understanding that it's everybody, and that the working class is a giant, multi racial

conglomeration of every identity in this country. Um, and that the more marginal your identity is, the more useful having a union is to like solving your problems. Like I said, like racist racist compensation practices, there was no way that was going to get fixed, Like it wasn't even uncovered. People didn't understand that it was happening until like the union got in. Doesn't mean there are other ways of fixing, but it's one of the one of the most powerful

ways to fix things. I think that people just like don't understand because they don't have experience. Because they don't have an experience, they end up with they end up with misconceptions about what they're going to get into, and then they get disappointed. And I think the reality, I mean, I think that the reality is not as bad as sometimes it seems. But also you gotta go into all this ship with open eyes. And I think that there's and that's the other thing one of the fun things.

Maybe this will make it into the podcast. I don't know, but um, one of the fun things is always like hanging out with like if you like every workplace has like its lefties just about, and like hanging out with the lefties who just can't get their brains wrapped around the ship that you need to have a union. I think that there's like this idea that's like, oh, I'm

gonna talk to my friend. They're like they're like they say they're a communists, so that the and then that all those people do not always but they're they're sitting there. It's like talking a bunch of ship about like the union. They're a bunch of sellouts is or that, and it's like literally it's the only thing you're gonna do to get your like to fix the problem. And you're just like, we're just trying to get this problem fixed. Can we just set aside what you think needs to happen like

that you guys talked about it. You're like Spartacus League meeting or whatever, like, oh, this isn't a real strike, Like we're not going out until like for like you know, three months. And it's like, you know, it's like the sort of thing where um sometimes or oftentimes, and I think it's because a lot of people kind of pick up their politics almost like an aesthetic as opposed to like a thing that like is about like fixing the

problems in their lives. And sometimes even I'm like, you know, like this is the problem that I face is like like shit is real like for a lot of people, and you can sit there and talk about this or that, and like you're you know, you think that things. You know, you've got this perfect ideal vision of what things should be, and then you've got this kind of imperfect thing in front of you that is even though it's imperfect, it's

basically what you've got. And so it's like you've got to kind of you've got to work with what you have and fix it up and make it the best that you think it can be. UM, but also understand, because it's an organization full of people, that it's not

going to be perfect every time. And yeah, maybe your union is going to do some liberal ship, you know, and you're gonna and that's going to annoy you, but you know, like, um, those people are still going to show up on the picket line if you're like, if you're organized and you're good and like, you know, that's it's not the end of the world that your union

isn't perfect. Um, but you've got to do everything you can to do your best to make it better because if you don't, then then liberals will do whatever they're gonna do, or conservatives will do whatever they're gonna do, and then they will like furtter away this thing. Like

you can destroy a union if you aren't engaged. Like a union can be destroyed by people who think that you know, they're just like I just want to get my rays and like go home them and like, you know, if people's can main concern is like their healthcare or like you know, that hour of prep time before they start their shift or whatever should you know, start their school day or whatever. Um, you know, a union can like dissolve out from underneath you and people are like,

why is no one showing up to this thing? It's because you didn't talk to people and find out what it is. I think that's the other thing. It's like listen, like there's this idea that you're gonna get up and give a big speech and get everyone really excited about your about like being in a union. But the main thing is listening to people and listening to people who are critics. You know, your coworkers who have complaints aren't

like people that you should ignore. Those are people who need to listen to because those are people who they've got I mean, everyone's got legitimate problems with how you know, work is happening. And like just because someone's like, you know, union is like, you know, trash, Like then find out why they think it's trash and then try and be like I want to try and fix out what can we do to fix it together? That sort of thing.

I remember when when I was working, So I worked at like maintenance and a county facility for a while, and you know, so I was like a like I was like I was like a summer higher basically, and so we we weren't in the union, but like everyone we were working for was in the union, and they all like, you know, these are old ex construction worker

guys and you know, like they're in the union. But like I remember that we show these conversations that were like okay, so we have a union meeting this week, just like do you want to be the person who tries to talk about raising wages? And it was like everyone was just like no, and you know, people you know, like these guys are like very right wing and they were just sort of like piste off all the time.

But it was interesting because the thing they were piste off all the time about was that, like, you know, their union didn't do anything like the union like they they're they they're like they they were. They were basically constantly annoyed that like the union didn't like the the the union wasn't fighting for pay raises us and wasn't sort of fighting And I think that was, you know, an example of how this stuff sort of just fails if if people aren't like if people don't feel like

they can actually do something like itself. I mean, and they call it service unionism. There's this idea that like um or like like that a business union's job is to kind of serve you and you kind of like they do all the work. Like one of the complaints that some people who are not big fans of our union our hospital is that like, oh well, other other

unions have lawyers negotiate the contract for you. And when we negotiate, we have a room full of nurses who are doing the who are doing the negotiations, and the goal is to have it be as transparent as possible, and like the idea that you're going to hand over negotiations to a lawyer and somehow get a better deal than than a room full of of the actual workers. And it's funny because we have our bargaining team and then like will periodically do something called open bargaining because

it's the thing that bosses hate. It's like they want to make a deal like with a door shut right, um, But there's no reason why a union has to do that. Like,

you can invite whoever you want to your bargaining. You can invite community members to your bargaining if you feel like you're man it could because management behind closed doors will say all kinds of things, and you know, they'll they'll trash talk everyone involved and they'll you know, and they will make absurd demands about you know, it's like, oh, you're all gonna take a pay cut, you know, on this contract, that sort of thing, and they hate it.

They absolutely hate it when like workers actually show up to these things, and so, um, I think that understanding that, like, I think there's this idea that like some people are big on like we have to be kind of like secretive to like get the best deal, and like we shouldn't be like we shouldn't be transparent with everyone about what's going on because that's how like because then they'll

figure out some way to counter us. But in my experience, my understanding is that the more transparent your union is, the more involved people get, and the more able people are, the more willing people are to put their time and

energy into it. Because that's what comes down to is like people out to like everyone's working and busy and their life life is hard and sucks, and so like do you have time to dedicate to show up to like talk to like if you why would you go to a union meeting if when you raise the concern like we want higher wages, and like the union like staffer doesn't care if you get higher wages because they're like while we're getting our union dudes, and like what

what then do we care? Right, that's like a huge problem. And the part of the thing is that those problems don't get solved if they if they exist, because they that definitely exists. And and a lot of unions, more unions, and uh than not if the workers don't get organized together.

Like right, we just saw a an election within the Teamsters International where uh the halfa uh Jimmy Haffa Jr. One of the half a kids was like president of the union and was this like not doing a great job and um, and like there was a rank and file like push to get that guy uh unelected, you know, and put it replaced with a rank and file worker who wants to put actual time and resources into organizing.

You know. Like there's nothing sadder than a than like watching a union campaign failed because the union clearly is phoning it in, Like that's happened. I've seen it happen, not inside my union, but in other unions. And uh and I mean like at my workplace, there's several unions and I've seen I've seen a failed campaign and it's like obvious, like there's uh, you know, I'm not I don't co sign everything that someone like Jaye mccavalary. I think that's a share McCay clary has to say. She wrote,

like no shortcuts. Um, I don't sign off and everything she has to say, but she has some really insightful things. It's like if you're not organizing to win, like you'll fail, and like you have to take this so seriously. And that's where like I'll say that, like, if you've got a choice between I'm going to put time into a political political campaign versus a union campaign, You're going to

get way more bang for your buck. You're gonna get so much more experience, You're gonna get like a durable organization that's going to be around for years if you

put that time into a union campaign. Because like, imagine winning an election right, um, except the politician you're running against is the incumbent and they can um basically drag every one of their constituents into like a meeting and tell them how awful you are all the time and lie and say whatever they want, and then they can, you know, do all kinds of tricks to like basically

dismantle your campaign. So I guess like the thing that I would say is that like if you if you do it the right way and you actually win one of those campaigns, you're going to come out way ahead and sort of understanding like you have to talk to people. You have to be super organized. You have to know what people's issues are in their different targeting units. UM. You have to find people like part of like it's

successful campaigns. I've been part of literally going on a search to go find like the people that need to be like signing cards and stuff. And you just have to be a very good listener, ready to talk and listen and hear what people have to say, um, and then turn that um information into knowledge and knowledge and power um and UM. I think that if you pull it off, you have done something substantially harder than say, like winning a school board election or something like that.

I mean, it's it's it really is. It's like taking like those kind of skills that you would use to like win some sort of small municipal election, and it's like exponentially more hard because the rules are just so tilted against you winning. So if you are serious about it, if you're serious about changing the world, if you can't like someone, uh yeah, I think Murray Buckschen once said, if you can't run for dog catcher, you probably shouldn't

be talking about revolution, you know. But I think that probably more you know, more appropriate to be like if you can't win a union election, you probably shouldn't be talking about revolution because even if you want to do all the things, you need to have the ability, the skills, the ability I mediate conflict, getting everyone on board to do the collective action that like you would need to do to successfully kind of like carry out. Like you know,

it's one thing to have the the grand insurrection. It's the other thing to carry it forward and keep carrying it to the point where you're over the line you've completely changed the world, right, So and I think that and so I just think that like UM and I think that's similar things go with, like you know, tenant organizing, community organizing. There's various types of organizing that use those

similar skills that you get in like a union campaign. UM. And it's just a very different type of UM politics and organization and skills that you would get from you know, showing up for your local justice down and you know, like knocking on the doors of strangers you'll never you may never speak to you again. You know, when you're talking with your coworkers, those are your coworkers. They are going to be there until you're you know, you retire

or you're fired. Or you quit. So anyway, that's I guess that's another good takeaway I think from all this. So one thing I wanted to make sure to get to is, so I think there's a lot of people who are listening to this who working non union workplaces and want to try to start this, and I wanted to know what would be your recommendations for them. You know, how, how how do you start this process? What does this look like? In what kinds of conversations should you be

having with your coworkers? Yeah, for sure. So, um, I think one of the first things that I think a lot of people, a lot of people don't understand is that there's an amount of risk and stuff too organizing and that you're like, first off, like you should be chill and like not like running around telling everyone you want a union, because that's a great way to lose

your job. Um. I think the thing is is that you build relationships and find out what's happening, like just like you know, take from your experience and figure out what's like in uh, like, man, it really sucks, like I got like I got screwed over on my vacation requests or like I you know, man, our raises were really shitty this year, and I heard like, you know, boss talking about like how much like like they've made

so much money that sort of thing. Um, So I think that it comes down to you have to be it's kind of like a combination of like like an investigative reporter and like someone who is just really good at like talking to people and just kind of like understanding what's making them tick and understanding also that maybe you're not the person who's going to get everyone on board, but that finding other people who every like I think the big thing is like who's like the most respected

person on like in your work area that sort of thing, who like they know that the unit, or they know the work area, they've been there the longest, they have like the most experience. People look up to them. There are the people who train other people that sort of thing. Those are the people who everyone looks to when it

comes down to these sorts of things. And you know, just you don't have to be friends with everybody, but like doing it's I think it's really good to just like two be open to you listening to everybody that you work with and finding out what it is that's

really going on. Yes, I've noticed like in a lot of places that I've worked, like the bosses often don't really know what's going on either, like they and I think that that that's something they can give you if you understand how the process works and who's doing what and what people like need, that gives you like a big advantage over the bosses who just have no idea

what's going on. Which I think, yeah, I think it's very it's very normal for bosses to really not know what's happening, and there's always someone who does like figuring out the people who really know how things work are like those are like the those are the people who, um, you want to be talking with and figuring out like where they kind of stand on things, and um, you know, I think like the first step is like just having good relationships and people trusting you and you know, you know,

if you know, Like, I don't think everyone needs to be a superstar workers sort of thing to be a good union organizer. But like they always say, it's like people who have the most problems oftentimes are people that aren't don't make great organizers because people don't see them as people to follow. But um, um, but I think that it's important to just like talk with your to like just figure out what's going on first. That's your first step. Figure out what's going on? What are the

things I mean? And you can come around together in you know, and like and how do you get people outside of the workplace? So you talk like how do you, like do you have like a group chat or signal chat or like a What's app chat or Facebook group?

And where do you just like start kind of like and you know, be very care be careful about who's involved and just kind of like low key, just like start talking with folks and identifying to people who who are outside of your work area, who know people Like sometimes it's you know, you'll talk to people and they're like, I don't want to talk about a union, but you can be like, do you know anyone who cares? Who who has said anything about unions before? And so talking

to people to find out who they know. Like these are all this kind of like crucial first steps to like organizing. And I think the thing is is that, like there have been times where you'll have a non union workplace where if the people in a particular area of of like a of like a hospital or like a workplace wherever we'll do some collective thing that gets

some sort of results. So I think it's always like it's like, let's get people to sign off on a petition about like you know, like if of your coworkers are unhappy with like races or something like that. Like the more people that are involved in those first steps, the more likely it is that it won't result in

retaliation and like you'll end up getting some sort of victory. Um. So I guess like the thing that I would say is just like be be ready for like people to look at greet you a skepticism because like it's it's hard, it's a hard thing to do, and um, always just be finding out what is bothering people and then look at little things that you can do to kind of like flex power, like to like collectively flex your power.

And um, it can be as small as like everyone bringing up the same issue at like a work meeting, right, Like if you and it could be like, hey, let's talk about this at this work meeting. This is and if we all say something together like we're going to

be fine. Right. Um, So, like starting with those first steps, I think it is the first like thing Like the first thing is know what's going on, build relationships, be a trustworthy person, Like you can't be like the unit gossip or the the work a gossip that like knows that's in everyone's business or stirring up stuff and be

successful at this UM. But if you are, you know, if you're someone that people like trust or look to or you know, like a person that people are like they help solve our problems, those are the people who I mean, you're going to be well set to begin to kind of take the steps on that and then you know, as you kind of build those kind of

like build that organization step by step. No, no union UM is going to invest the time in a union campaign if it's just you and like to other people like you need like you need to get a room. They're always say like, well, if you get a room full of people together, I'm willing to talk to them.

And that's kind of the thing. And you know, Zoom and stuff has actually made that a little bit easier UM, which in some ways can be a weakness because you end up with like it's a lot less commitment to show up to a Zoom meeting that it is to UM to show up at like a bar or a place to work UM or a church or wherever it's like a good like like neutral, safe place and people feel like they can be honest with each other about

what's going on. UM. But at the same time, just like being the more the the more people you get on board with the thing, the more likely that it will succeed. You'll attract support from like an actual union that m is able to help you if you decide that that's how you want to do it, or if that makes sense in a legal context. And so I just like always like start small, figure out the small things, be willing to do like collective action to get little

small victories. And that's a great way to get started, I think, and then like really do like sleuthing and research,

like figure out how things actually work. UM. That's like you know, that was a problem with the best Market campaign down in uh down in Alabama with those Amazon workers is they didn't know how many people worked at that facility, and then all of a sudden, they're like, oh, yeah, we're going to include like an extra thousand people on this vote, you know, like six weeks out, and you know, like I don't want to I don't want to take

a dump on the people who did that. But like, if you don't know that there's like another thousand people or you don't have like everyone on board, you're not going to succeed. So no, everything you can as you're going in and do everything you can to find out things or make buddies with the friends buddies of the people who are gonna you know, know these things and you know, and then support each other, like it means

showing up and like someone. Sometimes what we do during these campaigns is someone will will have the contact for someone who's interested, and then your job is to go and find that person where they work and talk with them and then talk with them while they talk with their coworkers, or back up them while they're talking to the co workers, because they trust their their co workers,

trust their coworker. You know, you're a random stranger, you know, And then like don't be afraid to say, I don't know, but I will find out. Right, there's like this there's this pressure I think to like have all the answers to like whatever people's questions are. And I think that it's like, um, I think that it's like I think that it's important to be honest when you don't understand, but then do the work of figuring out the answers

for people. Um, and I think people respect that. And you know a lot of people who are vocally against these sorts of things up front, it's because they don't know.

And if you you know, you're like, no, we've got a right to do this, or like, you know, the the you know, a management will say things like managion will say things like oh you will, um, you know, the union will get in between our relationship with you know, with you and us, right, And the point is is that like, well, the union is us where the cod where the people doing it, like everyone running. You can't run a union if you don't have a bunch of

people involved from the workplace. And it's like and making sure that people who are um, those people who end up being kind of like spokespersons for everyone else, are people that folks trust and they have like a good like grasp of what everyone wants and yeah, so yeah, and then like you know, don't get bogged down in the legal ship. Like you know, collective action really is like your most powerful tool, um, all the other kind of like the grievances and that's some stuff. It's important

and you can't let it go. But it's also like it's designed to kind of grind people down. So um, you know, the more collective action you take, like, the more likely it is that you're going to be successful

and keep people engaged and excited. Yeah, going back to what you were saying earlier, this might mind up being last episode depending on where this breaks down time wise, But yeah, I think it's also it's just this is going to take time and a lot of work, and I think it's it's it's important age to understand going in that this is a long and difficult process. It's not gonna happen overnight and be that it's a lot of work, Like you have to there's there's a lot

of things that you have to do. There's a lot of sort of logistics, there's a lot of talking, there's a lot of like negotiating, there's a lot of sort of I mean just just even I don't know, before anything gets off the ground, you have to spend enormous amounts of time and effort doing stuff. And that's that's

that's like it's just the reality of it. So yeah, there's there's no there's there's no there's there's there's there's no magic bullet, like there's no sort of yeah, there's there's no just like one thing you can do that like magically makes a U need appear. It's a bunch of people coming together and like fighting for it for a long time. Yeah, I think that that's like the main thing is like you're it's it's a cliche, that's

like it's a marathon not as prints. Um. Sometimes I hate when people say that ship, but it's true, like you you really do have like, um, you're in it for the long haul, and a lot of times it's like your people are ready to do these things when they're like this is like I don't want you know, it's one thing to pop up in a place and be there for like you know, six months, be like I need a we need a union, right, No one

you know that works at that place, trust you. They don't know who you are, Like they're not going to follow you to do anything or you know, or take you you know, follow your lead. Um, it's the people who are like I'm gonna be here, this is my this is where I want to be, and you know, this is a I want to be here for the next two years and think of it as like a long term investment in the quality of your life and the quality of life at your workplace, because to win,

you have to be sticking around, you know. And I think that's where it gets tough with people who are in like precarious types of employment or different types of and that's you have to start looking at alternate ways to organize because maybe you're a precarious worker who does maybe you drive, like for a rideshare service, or maybe you like do delivery or like you know, um for

an app or whatever, you delivered for an app. And I think the thing is is like that sort of thing because of how and you know, these aren't like new forms of work. This is actually really old forms of work that are just like been like rebranded by tech bros who have decided like they're like they're like they're great geniuses like rebranding the kind of like precarious work that was really like prominent like throughout the nineteenth century.

And it's like, so then what do you do is you come up with ways to organize people regardless of like oh, like I'm you know, I work for this, like I work for Lift or I work for Uber, and it kind of switches back and forth. Like the thing is, it's like that's when you start talking with you know, rideshare drivers across different like apps or whatever, and then you come up with a way to work

collectively um to to change sorts of things. And sometimes that's it's gonna be it's gonna be tough, you know, And that's when I kind of look at those that sort of thing is like this is where it's a learning experience and maybe I don't get everything I want, but you know, it's really important. I mean, it's like building these networks that people who care about like what they're working conditions are like, and you can pull things

off maybe unexpectedly that you didn't expect. We're going to be like the thing, you know, like you may start with something that looks like a union drive and then you end up with something that looks like very different. It could you know, could go in all sorts of

different directions. So um you know there and look outside of the US, you know their countries where like in UM I think that there have been some pretty successful delivery app or going to organizing in London UM and you know, I think that to a certain extent, like formal extent, US unions have not been very successful in organizing those workers because it doesn't it's hard to do from the extant business union model, and so it's like it's one of those things where you know it used

to be you know, they would have like you know, the fight would be instead of trying to get like workers are like a contract at a particular like work site, you'd set up a hiring hall, like the i w W would set up hiring halls UM and like you know, for lumberjacks and that sort of thing, and those workers are always precarious, right, but they would go trying set up so that like people would only take jobs out of the hiring hall, and that's how they would control

their like their work. And I think that more unions needed. And part of this is like if there's any union people out there who are in staff and that sort of thing, is like there needs to be a serious examination of how we do unions in this country. And I think a lot of people inside unions understand that, but no one has quite done it yet in a way that's effective and I think that we really do need to kind of re evaluate that sort of stuff.

So just you know, as someone who's going into like a new sort of organizing campaign, just understand that like getting the union contract isn't necessarily the end gold end goal is to try and get your boss to do things differently so that you're not like miserable at work. And that might look like a contract, or it might look like you know, a a one day like uh, you know, app strike or something like that. You know, you'll you'll figure you've got to figure out how it's

going to work. Like with you know, in healthcare, you know, there's this idea that like, you know, there's the gold standard of the strike where you strike until we win and we're out for like you know, like two or three months. Well, the problem is that there's an industry of scab nurses and health care workers where at any point they can bring in people to replace enough of

you that a hospital can maintain operations. And unless you're super organized like they were up in um Buffalo, uh with c W A like, and have a big network of people and you're ready to go to like you know,

like picket board members houses and that sort of stuff. Um, those long term strikes can end and defeat where you end up with you know, you're all replaced with scabs, and and it sucks and it's happened, and then you gotta I guess you gotta learn from it, you know, like we've there was a famous strike in Minnesota with healthcare workers and they went out and they were out for months and months, and there are people on you know, going to the super kitchen to feed their kids and stuff,

and they lost right. And so my union tends to do one day strikes, but instead of just being at one hospital, we organized multiple hospitals across the country so that it soaks up all the like the scat drives up right, scabs, and it really like that. I think ideas like intermittent strikes we're actually a really powerful tool. Back when you know, back when it was the c I oh, and it was like we're going to just stop working until you fix this problem. Um, And that's

why they made them illegal. And it takes a lot of work to pull them off. But if you can't pull them off, that could be an effective way. And if you're not in a union, maybe getting people down for a one day like work stoppage at your work or even you know, maybe it's like we're not starting our shift, right. I've been in the room. I've been in the room where it's like, no, we're not going out to take that assignment until like we get our

staff situation set up like fixed. And you know, sometimes it's just those collective actions are you know, it's not the end, Like there's no end. I'll be all one size fits all solution. Just be ready to kind of like explore what it means, get all the resources you can. There's groups like there's still like the Industrial Workers of the World, which has really good organizing trainings OT one on one one of too. I'll pitch that as a member of as a also a dual carding member of

the i w w UM. But there's also Labor notes UM and other groups like Essential Workers Organizing Committee that's sort of things that like give you good like rundowns on how to do the organizing work. So just be careful, always be careful, to be aware that people are afraid. Bosses use fear um to scare you guys, to scare everybody, and like the the more people on board with a

thing the less fear. Like it's amazing when you're running up into a strike and you're really firing on all cylinders and like everyone in your like work areas like we're getting together to take a picture, like getting ready to go on strike, and it's like literally, i mean when we went on strike, when our hospital went on strike, it was the first time where like there was like nurses on one places, the first time when all of us were in one place ever. And it's this massive,

like coming together thing experience. It's and it's really hard to describe when you when because you know, we're always griping at each other about this or that thing's like, but when you're actually all out there together at the same time, when you pull it off, it's really amazing. Um. It's hard, it's it's hard to describe, um. But when you do it, it's like it's like the purest drug.

And so I've I've heard some people who are union skeptical be like, well, you just experienced like the good ship, and like what about all the defeats, Like, well, get the little hits, get the little hits here and there, and get yourself to the point where you can do the big thing. You know, you're the whole thing is like getting people to do the thing is like the is it's like the perennial uh you know, curse of

the left, can you do it? Or curse of you know, like the organizer activists or you know, whatever you wanna call it. You know, it's just but you know, if you don't do anything, nothing happens. You can all sit and complain and nothing changes. So you know, the only way to changes things just take those complaints and turn them into collective action. Yeah, I think I think that's that's that That that that that's that's a pretty good positive note to end on. Just go do thing. Go

do the thing now. Stop tweet stop tweeting, stop tweeting about it, Go do the thing. Um yeah, I think that's I Like, I guess one last thing because I talked about social media and talk you know, I talked smack. I like, I've been off Twitter for some months now,

is it really cleared my brain? But you know, um, being on finding the social media space where your your coworkers are at is really important and that might mean setting up like a discord or you know, what's app or a Facebook group you can set up secret Facebook groups that no one can see, and yeah, like you like, Facebook will periodically shut them down. But like our hospital has like a like a Facebook group with like two thousand nurses and we and that's where we really amped up.

And it was a way for us to be talking with each other and talk each other through, um, the stress of setting up you know, this thing. And then also like you know, people workers can't organize like like people will do organizing even if like they don't have

like that full support. So like some coworkers that coworkers, but members of my union went on strike at Coke County this year, and the whole thing was organized practically without like staff, right because the staff were barred from being in meetings, like in person meetings because of COVID and they couldn't go into the hospital because of COVID. So people were very pissed about how things have been going and they were talking to each other and we

organized that strike. They organized that strike on their own practically, Um, you know, it lined up. They were off there. You know, they didn't have that no strike clause like operating at the time, and um, and they pulled off like a pretty like a significant victory UM from there one day strike and it really um really you know, like got them some big wins. But and they didn't they didn't need the union to do it for them. You know, the union was kind of like a facilitation tool rather

than like the thing that got it done. I think that's the other thing is that there are people who think that like it's all dependent on like having like this hero staffer sort of thing situation, and at the end of the day, like if it's not the workers doing it themselves, nothing's going to happen. Yeah, yeah, right, the power. The power is with the working class itself, and if the working class doesn't use it, nothing will ever happen. Yeah, but if it does use it, I

will trail off here. It sounds good. So, John, is is there any place that you want people to find things that you do? Like? Yea, I used to be on Twitter. Um periodically will show up on uh varn vlog, which is uh see Derek Varnes vlog on YouTube. Um there's I recommend people UH listen to. There's a group of podcasts called the Emancipatient Network. I really like their stuff, specially UM. There's a what's it called General Intellect Unit,

which talks about like cybernetics and the left. UM. They have a lot of particularly cool stuff that's just come out recently about UM, about strategy that I think is really important for everyone to understand. UM. I was a founding member of the UH Libertarian Socialist Caucus at d s A. But I'm no longer in d s A. There's a but that group is still kind of kicking around. We're coming up with new things. Uh. Then then I guess, like, um, the University of Chicago Labor Council is a group that

I spend a lot of time with. And there's also a tennency unit at Highe Park with Loan, which is a tenant union that you helped set up. And to hell. Yeah, so you know, um, go out there and you know, don't don't listen to me or don't try and find follow me. Go like you go figure it out and you're our neighborhood and ye, and set up a mill, set up a million different you know, like labor councils and worker committees and tenant unions that yeah, like build

build power. That's why I think I sometimes we are afraid of the term power. I think that power is that it's best when it's everybody. And so I guess I might say it's like, go out there and build community and worker power and um, don't be afraid because fear is the one thing that they've got to wave over our heads. And sometimes you just got to take that jump and do the thing. And uh and that's how we're hopefully going to win one day save the world.

And you can do this just like all of these things, everything we've been talking about for the past like two hours, these were all just done by ordinary people. Like there's just there's there's it's all. It's all done by random people. And you know that random person can be you. You just have to go and do go to the thing. Yeah. So yeah, this that this has been it could happen here. You can find us on Twitter at Happened Here pod and also on Instagram there and uh yeah there's other

cool zone stuff. Oh I guess yeah, well there's there's there's a new show called Mega Corp. That that we have that's about how corporations are bad, and the first seasons about Amazon. It's out now. Okay, he just doesn't have a Twitter, but Yeah, it's it's called Mega Corp. And you can find it wherever fine podcasts are distributed. Yes, okay, bye,

m welcome everybody too. It could happen here. Um podcast about I don't know, how things are kind of kind of kind of crumbling and how we can maybe put it, put stuff, put stuff back together. And today I am excited to talk with a senior let's see what is what is what? What is the actual? What's actual term? I saw it A senior programs strategist at Wikimedia, Alex Stinson. Hello, greetings, Hi,

it's so good to be here. I'm very excited about our talk today because I mean, this should this should surprise nobody that I used to I used to be a Wikipedia editor back in the day. Not not shocking at all, if if if you know me. Um, but yeah, we're gonna be talking about what kind of Wikipedia just itself, and then also climate misinformation and disinformation and how we can maybe create a better understanding of climate change in its effects across kind of the world and how digital

information works. Those are all kind of topics we talk about often enough, but never within the actual context of like Wikipedia as an entity. Um, so I guess let's let's just start there with with Wikipedia. And like for those who don't, maybe maybe people like use website, but they're not quite sure what it is. Like how how do you actually describe what Wikipedia is? Because it is

like an interesting kind of amorphous entity. It's so many things. Um, I think most people are used to thinking about Wikipedia is like the fact checking device. Like I have a bar argument with my friends and I pull out my phone and yeah, yeah website at me. Right, Um, it's a lot of things. It's three language Wikipedia's. Actually it's not just one. Each of these communities has its own editorial community. Um. At last I checked, it's like sixty

million articles across the languages. It's it's really it's a lot of different content. Um. And a topic can be on each of those Wikipedia's right. Um. And this is important as we start talking about disinformation. Is like each Wikipedia because it's edited by people in that language, and it's written by that language community. Um. You know each article is different and have different perspectives. Um. Two d

eighty thousand volunteers editing every month. Uh so this is a lot of people, right, But the bulk of that's happening on English, Wikipedia, and some of the larger languages that are spoken across multiple cultural context And then there's also a lot of other content sitting behind Wikipedia. So

there's a media repository, um. And there's a we called Wikimedia Commons, and there's a database called wiki Data, which kind of powers those little knowledge graphs on the right side of Google and a whole bunch of other parts of the Internet. Wiki data shows up in Amazon, Alexa and all kinds of other places, right and and so it's it's we're not just like one website. It's many websites, lots of knowledge, lots of platforms, lots of context. Um.

And we'll come back to that the more as we talked. Yeah, what really interesting part of it is like I don't know my my personal kind of social leanings. I generally kind of like things that are more decentralized in general. Um. Other other hosts in the podcast are generally kind of

on like the progressive left libertarian spectrum. Um. And one thing I do really appreciate about Wikipedia is is it's more like it's It's not I I don't think it's like open source, but it's the way it has decentralized editing and all that kind of stuff. It's just a really interesting model of of like what if a lot more stuff worked this way? And I'm not sure like how how much like a decentralization focus is there, like consciously at people at the foundation and people who try

to like actually like run it behind the scenes and stuff. Yeah. So Wikipedia grows out of the like open source movement and the kind of early days of the Internet. Right, this idea that like knowledge wants to be free, technology wants to be free, software wants to be free. Um, let's let's use the legal infrastructure to like create freedom, right uh in that sense. And then there's also the free as in like anyone can edit, and then the free to like do whatever you want out there in

the world. Um. There there's people are like free as in beer and free as in speech, right uh, and those things are those things are also there's they're always intention uh and they're kind of working. And as you can imagine, especially when you get outside of kind of multicultural Internet spaces like English Wikipedia, um, it can get challenging. Like if you're in Croatia and everyone is speaking Croatian, there's a very small bubble in which to create that

Wikipedia right, um. And so it's interesting in that sense. Um. I think there's also another part of Wikipedia that a lot of people don't see, which is the movement behind it. So there's the editorial communities. People show up and make edits. Um. But because there's this ideology that you're talking about, this like decentralized, like we need to share knowledge or culture or language on the Internet, there's also a whole social

movement sitting behind the scenes. Uh. And there there's a podcast recently dot com The Wikipedia Story that kind of captured that the essence of that, um. And it's it's a lot of people like myself, So I started editing in high school. Yeah, yeah, one of those like, oh I know how to click the edit button and I figure out how to use the Internet and that kind

of thing. But there's a lot of people that like the intuitiveness of clicking and edit button on a piece of open source software to create content is just not It's not clear, right, And so you have to organize and invite people in. And so we have a whole

movement that does that too. That there's about a hundred organizations around the world that we organize events, work with libraries and museums and educational institutions, and so there's always this um kind of interesting dynamic where our values, which is this like open software platform stuff has also lived in our practice, in our outreach, like creating change through society by sharing knowledge and education. Um. And so I think, yeah,

it's it's it's an interesting it's an interesting dynamic. Yeah. I think that does create a really oftentimes beautiful reflection. It could it can have some dark sides different once in a while, but it is it is really nice to have like kind of the ideology driving it being reflected in the actions of operating it and spreading it

and that kind of thing. Um. So this is something we kind of briefly touched on already, but I think I'd like to move on to kind of why, like how climate change in broader like social issues are covered on Wikipedia, because you already mentioned like it's kind because there's not a Wikipedia, there's many based on different languages in places. It feels like to me, whenever social issues kind of get covered on Wikipedia, it's going to be in some part like a local reflection of whatever is

in that area. You know, if if there's like a white liberal writing articles in New York, it's gonna be different than someone you know, halfway across the world writing them in you know, a much smaller country, let's say, like Belarus, who's under like what I would call a dictatorship. Um so that's gonna change kind of the nature of what people are making because of that kind of divide.

So how how does that kind of crop up and is there any like solutions to that or because because the because of the decentralized thing, it's like, how much can we like impose like who like I'm I'm, I'm I'm not in Belarus? How much can I impose what I want their Wikipedia to look like? Yeah, there's kind of two or three dynamics you're you're touching on here.

The first is because there's kind of an intention bias, Like something comes up in the news, and our Wikipedia community, like people are within minutes of breaking news stories are usually like editing the page, working to improve it. Right. Um So if things show up in the you know, European American press, it's very likely, especially something like English Wikipedia will pick up on it and immediately cover it.

And because there are multiple perspectives in those press usually um, kind of the ideological uh kind of multi sided nice like works itself out because there's a lot of eyes and a lot of people who know how to edit there, right, um on in a kind of cultural linguistic geographic context where there's like one set of stories and there's not

a lot of diversity. Um uh, this this happens. And and I'm going to refer to the creation Wikipedia because we we actually had an external researcher look at Croatian Wikipedia because part of it has been kind of caught by by folks with kind of very ideological leanings in a way that's excluding others. And this is not good, right. It creates a very one sided information environment and it really reflects um, kind of the news dynamic going on there.

So when like breaking news happens, or when a topic like a social issue or not neces like climate change is not a social issue, right, this is a global like life threatening issue. Um. When when something becomes politicized, it's very easy for especially in smaller language wikipedias, for few people to kind of swing the whole perspective on that. Um. So, yeah, there's this breaking news issue and this is where are

kind of organized communities are really important. So the example we when I point out of this working well UM is in medicine. So are our medical community during the all the outbreaks a few years back, UM in West Africa, we're able to organize both on English and then languages that were accessible for local communities, high quality coverage of the medical content because it's like has impact on people's lives,

and so they recruited translators. They thought about, like what's a simple way to communicate the story UM in that context, and like what do the workers, the or the advocates or whoever on the ground who's working with that crisis, what knowledge do they need? Right? UM? And you see like other open technology movements do stuff like this, like humanitarian Open Streetmap has a similar kind of way of organizing.

They're like, hey, there's a crisis happening, UM, let's pull people together from different parts of the world who have the right knowledge or skills and like address the knowledge gap. UM, so so you can solve it. It's just it's complicated. UM. And you know, we've been trying to address as a

movement what we call the gender gap. So there's both less women editors as women's content on many of the wikis, and like, it's taken years, and it's very hard to organize, and even when there's investment in it, um, it's it's challenging to make substantial progress because there might be contextual issues around it too. And so you can't just like drop in on a Central Asian language with a like Western perspective and expect to like change the culture of

the wiki overnight. You have to engage with it consistently and be persistent and work on it over and over and over again. We are going to take a short break to hear a message from our lovely lovely advertisers unless it's exomobile again, but we will be back shortly, Okay,

and we're back. Um. One one thing that we cover decently part of my job and and and Robert Evans job is disinformation and misinformation and how that type of stuff spreads online, um, particularly you usually kind of linked to like political extremism um or conspiracy theories or you know,

in that general kind of bubble um. And so, what what type of kind of climate misinformation has really been festering on various you know wikipedias across the world really because like we were just were talking about like these topics and how and how and like why it happens, but like what are the main types of misinformation or disinformation that is much more like prevalent. Yeah. Um, so the first is just kind of neglect of uh, content

that's happening across the various things related to climate. Um. But we've identified on English Wikipedia over three thousand, seven hundred articles that are directly related to climate change. Uh. We don't have a very big editorial community in English on that topic. That's like interesting fluent in the science

and fluent and the other stuff. And then you go out to the other languages and like some of the languages have like three thousand of them, some of them have like two hundred, right, um, And so there is both um and some of that content was like translated several years ago, right or five or ten years ago, and yeah, you know, and like the climate rhetoric has really changed it and like numbers and statistics all that stuff gets updated every year, and it's yeah, that is

there is there's there's a lot to cap with and like reading the IPCC report or looking at any of the consensus science, there's like a lot of change that you have to be influent in, like science communication, you have to understand like where to look for the information. Um.

And it's interesting. My partner is a Spanish language speaker and she was in a kind of workshop for journalists in Argentina for climate communication, and the work shop is like, oh, you should cite the Guardian, right, so even as to

to kind of understand this climate stuff. So a lot of these local language contexts, there aren't even good sources, and the sources they do have are often citing like the dominant narrative that's going on and like the anglophone news cycle, right, because there's not a lot of climate communication going on, and so there's just a lot of complexity involved in updating that much content all the time. Um. And so the bulk of the stuff that kind of

creeps in is like this neglect, right. It's like some dominant idea in the narrative just hasn't been updated and like we need someone to update it. Um. And that's like an organizing problem, right, that's uh, like we need more people who are science literate, who speak the local language, who understand how to edit Wikipedia. Um. And that's trainable,

like we can do that. Yeah. The reason that matters, the neglect matters is it stops people from making decisions about climate change because they don't have like an accurate sense of what we need to do, right, which is cut the false fuels, increase increased resilience, do adaptation like actual political change, right. Um. And so so that that's just it's a problem. Um. The other stuff is a

bit more it's a little bit more complicated. Um. One of the things that happens is that, as you know, there's quite a manipulation of narrative that has happened around climate change. There's this really great podcast by Amy Westervelt about how the fossil fuel industry like got its message into schools in the last three years in the US, and like that narrative is just so prevalent. And so one of the things about wikipedias that we try to

do a balance of positions. If there are reputable sources kind of describing or analyzing a topic, and this is back to your polarization question too. If they're reputable sources describing on topic, we try to give them equal weight and balance across the article. The problem with climate is that some of the narratives that look like reputable sources are just pumped out of fossil fuel industry funded sink tanks, right,

and these things are not truthful narratives, right. Um. And so the BBC ran an article, uh two weeks ago on kind of climate denial and some of these smaller languages, a smaller language Wikipedias, and what they found was a lot of these narratives being given equal weight with the

climate science. Um. And I took a look our community after that BBC article came out, started looking across all the language Wikipedia articles about just the main climate change page, and they found thirty one Wikipedia's that had some of that like equal weight of bad climate science. Interesting, yeah, um. And you know the BBC article only found like five or ten, right, We found another lot a lot more

yeah yeah yeah. And so it's it's like a it's a really like these narratives just seep in and you know, again, I'm gonna go back to the Croatian example, like if your media environment has been locked down by a certain political rhetoric, too, those narratives might have traveled from like the Anglo sphere into these other spaces and then gotten stuck, right, and it's just like keeps getting recycled and so that

causes delay. UM. And I was listening to your podcasts recently about soft climate denial, Like this is what's happening in other language environments, right, is people are rehearsing this misinformation. It's seems like a valid position because it's been rehearsed so many times by by folks. Some people who are championing that position are like doing so unknowingly, and then the process, we're kind of disconnecting it entirely from the source of the information, and that is just it's it's

really bad. One interesting thing that I thought of when you were bringing up like sourcing, how sourcing itself coming an issue in like in the States. There's kind of like a joke that like wicked like when people use just Wikipedia as like as a source to be like they just they just link the article. But like that is the default for so many people when they begin begin a research project is like, Okay, what's the what's the what is what does Wikipedia have on it? What's

the sources Wikipedia uses? Um and kind of branch off from there. It's a very common thing. So I'm not sure what like how different Internet culture will be different in in other countries. But if they do not, if they if they don't have like the bas sourcing necessary to create like a decent home page article, than just sourcing from Wikipedia in the first place becomes so much harder.

Um because you like you were saying, like just use the Guardian is is like one of the things, like that's not horrible advice, But if it's only just from one thing, then that that's going to change the entire nature of like coverage and information on specific topics. Yeah. Yeah, I've had just be really interesting kind of thing that I never thought of before is how different countries wikipedias or like language with Wikipedia's will have will have like

different sources. So then getting information from from the page it's just going to be so different. And like yeah, like like the whole, like the whole like teared of

sourcing is just completely changed. Yeah. And and I think, like you know, in medicine and most medical practitioners expect most of the medical literature to be in a handful of languages like English and Chinese and that kind of stuff, right, and like part of your professional work and part of like saving people's lives is being able to use those sources.

And so if a medical Wikipedia article has a translation from like an English article into another language, and you're distributing that to medical practitioners and they find the citation and it's in English and they can go follow the source, like that's not such a big deal. But with in a topic like climate UM, where the vast majority of the people that have to make decisions on this information

do not have access to other languages. Maybe their access to English is through like machine translation, Google or something like that. Like having not having sources in your local language UM, or just having the sources that were translated from an English Wikipedia article, which happens a lot on these smaller language wikipedias, is kind of like not helpful

for climate decision making UM. And this is where it's UM and it's easy for example, and a lot of these like Eastern European languages or Central Asian UH languages for like a politically spun news site opinion about something to kind of creep in at the same level of of kind of UH validity as as another as scientific research as the the you know, consensus understanding of the climate prices. So how how might I know we talked about like like trainings for like journalists and people to

start editing Wikipedia's in their language. But like, how how do we kind of improve climate communication overall with open access to information and you know, creating more linguistic um diversity and stuff. Yeah, well, I think there's like a couple opportunities um in this, and then I there's some other misinformation I also want to talk about too, UM. But I think that this, the sourcing one, is a particularly challenging one. UM. We need like more basic science

based climate communication and more languages. And I'm not saying like just the the like more languages, like the big un languages are the ones that are kind of colonial across cultural languages like Spanish or French or Arabic or you know, all these languages that have been used across cultures. We also need it in local languages, um. And we needed to be evidence based and we needed to be

an audience based. Right, So if if someone is like searching online in Swahili about how like drought is happening in Kenya right or Tanzania or or the you know there's suddenly flooding or like I need to deal with X, Y and Z adaptation to the climate crisis, UM, which is by the way, what all of the global South is doing right now, right, Like, the global South is having to adapt to this crisis that polluting countries has have made, and we're not at actually giving them the

resources to the to the problem that we've cost you. Well, it's not even like giving the research. We're not even like the people who are like, we want to adapt our society. We're not resourcing the folks on the ground who have the agency, who have the understanding, who know how to do the research in the context, who know

how to do the communication in the context. Right, We're not even like bolstering their their request for help, right, Like the the the UN Climate Conference kind of failed on this adaptation funding, right, And uh, this is you know, this is where like a platform like Wikipedia and like kind of approaching this from a knowledge activist perspective where you're like, there are people who need this knowledge to address like understand what's happening around them so they can

make decisions. That doesn't like you know, yeah, we need those kinds of information. We need open source knowledge, not

just Wikipedia but one of the platforms UM. And and you know the you all do open source investigation, and you're used to like open source software communities, and I listen a couple of your podcasts and you're kind of constantly speaking back to those open communities that that come out of like anglophone software spaces, UM, and like we need to acknowledge that, Like we we figured out how to acknowledge, but we haven't given all those tools. We

haven't transferred the knowledge on how to do it. We haven't adapted those tools to other parts of the world and other languages. UM. And so just like starting to look for these other communities, asking for the people, like who's ready to organize, like giving them money to go do it? Right? These things are like really practical, UM, And I think we're we're not We're not often not

listening or we're not looking for that solution. And reinder like most of the people having to adapt UM are in the global South and speak other languages, Like we need to be there in that language if we want the climate crisis so like resolve itself without you know, destroying people's lives. Yeah, absolutely, UM. Yeah, That's that's the thing we try to bring up, is that the people is going to be initially worse affected are the people who are already kind of not in the greatest situation

in the first place. That's like, how how like how like the areas that are gonna that are gonna experience the most flooding, the most extreme weather events, all this kind of stuff. It's it's it's not it's not starting with something like New York City. It's starting with areas that are already dealing with a lot of like local issues and now this is just something else on top. And yeah, fixing all of that is uh, I mean,

fixing all of it's impossible. We can we can only take like small adaptive steps to like mitigate some of the worst as X And yeah, I mean that that's that's stuff that comes up a bunch. But you mentioned you wanted to at least briefly mentioned, um, some other forms of disinformation. Yeah, so we we've also witnessed a couple of times, um where something will hit like breaking news or become a political position in a context, and then like we will see bad actors show up on

Wikipedia and try to manipulate it. Um. I have two examples of those. The first is about a year year ago, Uh, we found a group of accounts editing about some of the inter Amazonian highways that the Bolsonaro presidency is building through through the Amazon UM where they were trying to remove the environmental and indigenous people's UH impact assessments from the Wikipedia articles UH and so like basic human rights stuff, basic you know, healthy environment things that the government is

like expected to follow through on. We're being like manipulated out of the articles for a more like pro economic growth narrative UM and so you know, it's we can't like the shift towards this like very extreme right like economic growth only version of reality UM does play out on the wiki. Now, we we were lucky that this was fairly trans like fairly easy to see once we found it, but we had to coordinate across UM, English,

Spanish and Portuguese to like address the problem. So so we need like multi lingual communities who are kind of coordinating and talking to each other to address that. UM. The other thing we've seen is like, so did you I don't know how well you follow the climate movement? UM, but did you see when Disha Rabb got arrested and India? By chance? I don't think so. So she she's a youth climate activist that was part of Friday's for Future India, which is like a group kind of sister group of

the group that formed in Europe around Greta Twinberg. Right um and uh she uh um. Her Gmail account got attached to a Google doc. Uh just seen active on a Google doc that was about sharing social media about the India the farmers protests in India, which have been like a real political sticking point issue. And I had written so I'm both a volunteer and a professional who

organizes the community. And in my volunteer time, I had written the biography Adisha Rabbi like months before the Indian government kind of identified her with this social media tool kit. And um when she got arrested for something that's like just basic social organizing tactic social media, umu, the kind of Hindu nationalist social media environment like zoomed in on her Wikipedia article and on all these other social media presences she had, and they tried to silence it. Um

be like okay, we need to leave this article. And uh Fortunately, like a group of us were watching the page and we caught it and we're able to stop that. But there's kind of the the the kind of flash mob situation that happens a lot now in social media, where it's that is, this thing has been polarized, now we need to go attack it. Um. And so you can imagine like English Wikipedia has a healthy immune system

for this kind of stuff. It like sees it, but it has enough, it has enough people that it can do that. Yeah. Yeah, but you can imagine on a smaller wiki that the narrative could shift and stay permanently shifted quite quickly. Yeah, um if that happened. And so that that's another concern. Right, So there's like the subtle like a few accounts just like quietly removing things, and then like the act of political um kind of intervention

that happens. And in terms of like disinformation, do you see the Wikipedia as being kind of susceptible to like intentional disinformation campaigns of people slowly kind of editing the ideology of of articles to to push kind of some agenda. What whether that be like individually and like like you know, more of like a crowd operation um or even like

run by like people with political power, um. Like do do you how much of a risk do you see that with this kind of open source idea is that's of of like intentional slow dissemination of disinformation on like important articles and stuff. Well, so I think I might reframe your question a little bit like, uh, all open source kind of knowledge spaces are susceptible to that, right. Um. The question is to like what degree and how harmful

is it going to be? Right? Um, like is it is it like very open to this and will it cause a lot of problems? Um, the bigger language wikipedias have healthy immune systems, but we we have a combination of kind of bots that are like AI generated that flag bag edits, and then we have a lot of

community patrolling happening. And even in some of the smaller communities that have like medium sized editor communities, like Swedish Wikipedia, it doesn't take a lot for that local language community to patrol the pages and like be like oh okay, um, these changes are kind of weird. I can roll it back, Um, like this doesn't seem like it fits our culture of Wikipedia. The problem is when a language Wikipedia has very few

editors and they're not active all the time. Um, And and so this is where we need kind of more eyes on the content, right because it's it's very easy for like a really small language community to kind of have a little bit of content but never see it maintained.

Um And and this is where the like where where our communities are forming around these languages, like a lot of the West African languages for example, that our communities are are kind of organizing in we we like invest in those communities existing and like figuring out the governance and training people how to edit and getting access to

the kind of technical skills to do this. Um. And you know, we have kind of systems that we're hoping over the next few years invest in that resilience, right, like building a code of conduct making it easier for communities to see this kind of stuff. But it is three languages, right, um yeah, And it is a volunteer built system, and you do need a healthy editatorial community

in order to keep a wiki from like drifting too much. UM. So a good example of listening to get a reference creation because it's the one we've done research on, Like it was possible for a few people to push people who are more in consensus with the global position on various topics out of the wiki. Um. And that's just like we we have to find a balance between like

local language. Uh and this is my personal opinion, right, we need to find a balance between kind of local language sovereignty on this stuff and also not like radicalizing its topical environment. And we and we see this particularly on impactful topics, right, like ones that directly affect like politics or in the kids climate crisis, like people's livelihoods and ability to function in society, right. Um And we just like we need to be cautious about that. But

but you know, Wikipedia is a common resource. Uh. And I think this is really important. Like the way Wikipedia works is you know, the Wikimmunitia Foundation provides the servers, We fund our communities, we support them, we help them work through governance issues. But like the we need editorial communities to maintain it. That's what those two thousand people are doing as volunteers as they're building an editorial practice that makes the content work. Um. And and we we

need that um. And so we need you know, like minded communities like the people for your podcasts who are like, oh, we need the Internet to be reliable and have accurate information a lot to show up um. Because if we don't do that, it's it's really like it's the common resource we we we have a decent international listening MACE

as well. UM, and I'm thinking like, what would would you like recommend people you know in different countries or even people inside inside kind of like, uh, you know the States, America, Canada, the UK who are like multi langual, would you at least encourage them to browse other language wikipedias and maybe start making edits when they see this type of misinformation popping up. Yeah, so I to kind of perspectives on this one. Um, look for a local

organized community. So we we have what's called Wikimedia Affiliates. These are fifty organizations around the world. They regularly run events, especially now that we're leaving COVID, increasingly more in person events. They trained folks like look for them in your context and if you need help finding, you know, find me on Twitter and I can connect you with those communities. Um.

And the other part is small edits. So I think a lot of people look at Wikipedia and they think about like a traditional publishing platform, right like, oh, you know I have to write the whole whole article. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I have to be a master. And and the secret sauce to all of this is most people start with one citation, one comma, one type of fix, and they do a handful of those a month, and then they

keep coming back. And as you do those small edits, you start reading the content more carefully and fixing the things you can fix. And so I recommend going in to like add one citation. Like if you go and add one citation today, that like makes life better, or you fix the communication on the sentence. UM. The other part of it is, you know, I said, there's these organized groups, uh for the climate in particular, I run this campaign called Wiki for Human Rights, which is focused

on UM. We with it's a theme that we kind of identified with you and human rights on the right to a healthy environment, which is this new human right that has been acknowledged by the Human Rights Council. And we're we're organizing kind of writing contests and editor the fons and kind of train names for communities to go and look for the human dimension of the climate crisis.

So I think when we think about climate communication, a lot of people are like science right there, like, oh, this is you know about how weather systems work and how the atmosphere it forms, and the kind of stuff

and the content that's more impactful. Is this like human inflected stuff like how does the climate crisis in fact you as an individual and agriculture in the cities you live in, and the clothing you buy in the manufactured goods in mine around the corner that's producing water pollution that's gonna harm your children for the next thirty years, right, um, and and that is the kind of stuff that we're

encouraging communities to pay attention to. Is it is more the like justice and human rights oriented perspective on these topics? And your cat is very cute. Every once in a while they love to love to take the camera. Um and so yeah. So, so if you follow me on Twitter, I will I can hook you up with that campaign as well. Yeah. Yeah. Where where can people find you online and to learn more information about, you know, the

various kind of topics we've discussed today. So, um, search if you're interested in climate change stuff on Wikipedia English. Wikipedia has a wonderful wiki project climate change that has a little tab at the So if you search wiki project climate change on Google and you find there's a tab at the top that says get started with easy edits and that kind of can get you oriented to like, where can you affect English Wikipedia on this? And you know, once you find a gap on English, it's easy to

find it on other languages. UM. For the kind of learning about Wiki free human rights, you can search for that um and or follow me on Twitter. UM s A D A D S sad ads on Twitter. Um. Uh. We also have a group called Wikimedians for Sustainable Development who's kind of communicating on Twitter, which is the group

that's really focused on sustainability topics more generally. UM. And you know, the other way to look is find something you've been reading about about the climate crisis or sustainability issues in the news. Look it up on Wikipedia. See if it's missing. UM. If it's not, click that edit button at a sence. Right. UM. The good example of this, I learned about a park and uh the center of Nairobi that's being protested by environmental activists because some of

the big trees were being cut down a Huru park. Right. Uh. This came by on my Twitter handle, Like I'm not connected to this at the moment, right, UM, But because I had news sources, I had three or four news sources, I could say really simply in two thousand one the park came under scrutiny for renovation that included removing old trees. That's a climate action, right uh. And I think you know, I am constantly overwhelmed by the climate crisis, as as

a lot of people. Yeah yeah, And and like just being able to tell that little story, like hey, um, the decisions people are making are not productive here, right Um. Just just gathering that story is important. And what's important is Wikipedia plays institutional memory on this, right. I feel like you know, a lot of a lot of activists work is very temporal. It's very like in that moment, right um. And if it doesn't get documented on Wikipedia, the local news sources are gonna get lost in the

wind of time. Um. And so I think you know, if you to do your little activist motion, like a sentence describing what happened in a moment where resistance was happening, is like a huge step forward, right um, because it connects the environmental crisis, climate crisis, human rights issues too, like daily lives. Like people look up this park probably on Google because they want to go there, right or they read about it because people are like when was

it created? What was that protest that happened? There the other day. And if those sourcesn't there, um, then it doesn't really exist in their minds. Yeah, it doesn't exist in their minds. And I think that's like one of the big issues with climate crisis, and you know, amplified even worse in other languages, right, is that people aren't making that connection. They aren't seeing it around them, and they're not you know, kind of connecting action to how

we address it. That. Uh, that is a really good that's a really good point. And yeah, I mean I will encourage everybody to to start making small leddits. That's what's what I did for a long time before I moved into like open source um journalism and reporting. It's a great way to get started, and it's a great way to get just start start disseminating small bits of information because the only thing that we can really do

is people is small steps. We can have like an adaptive goal in mind, but you need to take small steps to get there. And that is a really great way to start influencing the way people think about climate and our situation. Um. Yeah, And and I think too, you know, your your podcast kind of appeals to folks who are interested in like finding the truth and reality, right, and that that's that's like that that investigation is what

a Wikipedia article is. It is like one ten hundred editors out there in the world trying to go like, what the heck is this topic about? Right? How do I compile my notes? Uh in a way that helps other people? And I think in the face of the climate crisis, Dr Ianna Johnson says, like, find the thing you're good at, find the thing you're passionate about, and find the thing that like or that that makes you feel good and you're you're just rewarding, And find the

thing that actually like helps affect the climate crisis. Right, And a small idn'ta on Wikipedia meets your kind of knowledge needs. It's very satisfying because people will read it and it is incriminal change in the right direction, right, people will make decisions on it. Uh. Yeah, I mean, and I guess uh, I think that I think that probably closes this up today and let's see anything else to add. Um, I guess one more plug for your Twitter so we can get get more eyeballs on you.

Um and the work that you're doing. Yeah, um so at S A D A D S. It's my long term handle on the internet and you you can find me Oliver Plate uh and I tweet about Wikipedia on the climate crisis. Will and we'll we'll link the Wikipedia wiki project climate change page in the description for people to find. Thank you so much for taking time to talk to us all about these topics. I'm really really great, uh, really grateful to have this type of knowledge readily accessible

to more people. Also, you know, in the spirit of Wikipedia. Thanks so thank you so much. Um. You can follow us by subscribing to the feed and on Twitter, Instagram at Happened Here pod and cool Zone Media. See you on the other side, everybody. It's could happen Here? That's the podcast that this is. It's about things crumbling and uh, how to maybe uncrumble some of the things that are crumbling.

And today when we think about the crumbles, when you start thinking about the hell world that that we're all increasingly inhappening, the scar y ship that is getting scarier day by day. Number one on a lot of people's list is going to be the cops um real cause of anxiety for a significant chunk of people listening to this podcast right now, including its hosts, Um Alexander you

and I have chatted before on the air. Our guest today Alexander Williams, Um, you were a police officer in the past and you are not currently and you want to chat about Um the topic kind of the way you pitched it to us is there's a lot of aspects of police training that are very similar to what colts do to indoctrinate people, and you kind of wanted to speak on that. Yeah, there's a lot of there's a lot of cross sections. Um, so, yeah, I used

to be a cop. I was in law enforcement for just shot at fifteen years until I woke up and got out luckily, and uh, all the stuff that's been going on over the last couple of years, and the craziness and really ingesting a lot of stuff around, you know, cults, and I started going down that the little checklist that you go down of like are you in a high control group? And man, they all just look just deinged in my head every single time of like, oh, this

is exactly what it was like being a cop. Oh, this is exactly what it was like being a cop. And I'm curious, kind of before we get more into it, do you want to walk us through a little bit more kind of what was your process of UM, I know, de radicalization isn't exactly the right term, but I think you know what I'm getting. It's it's in the it's in the it's in the neighborhood shore. Yeah. Mine. So I was raising a cop family. My dad was a copy,

went the whole nine yards, retirement, the whole thing. And when I got into it, just shy of twenty two years old, which that's young to be making these kinds of choices looking back on it. Um. We had talked on the last podcast of your season one, UM about when my brother got arrested and got beat by my own team, my my own crew, and the jail that I worked with, which is the jails is where I primarily spent most of my time. And I think that that was, uh, item number one kind of on my shelf,

like people call it. That's that's that's a big one to right on the shelf. Um. And during my training, I've always been an obstinate little bastard and I've always had that kind of like authority defiance. And in training they say start telling you really early, like hey, you know what you know where your family we understand you, We're going to get you. And then like the language even then kind of flared red flags wrong for me.

And whenever a group of people says we're your family, and so right, like that's what you like, we're your family and you can talk to us anytime. Fine, we're your family and I got your back. Fine, we're your family, and that's why you need to do this. Things have got to ride. It's it's it usually is where your family comma now? Yeah? Yeah? And yes. So that that was like literally day one, it was where your family now, where you're you know, they use all that language, the

familiar language, where your brothers, your sisters. Yeah. And the one that kicked for me and my brain was they said, within a year, you're not gonna have any friends that aren't cops, Like all of your civilian friends are going to be gone because they're not gonna understand you and they're not going to be able to be around you and handle you. So within a year, you know, we're

going to be everything you've got. And for me, that was like that was a line in the sand, and like part of my brain was screaming like nope, never letting that happen. I will not let my uh myself

not have any non cop friends. Yeah, that's probably good because that's I mean, you have like when it it gets to it's the same thing that happens to anybody, right, like some people got like last year in Portland and Activist Brain where there was this all the people were spending time with other people were out protesting, and so we have this really intense bond and we also are kind of separated, increasingly separated from the people around us

because we just can't communicate with anybody else. And that kind of going on for years and years, because this is your career for twenty something years, and it's like, yeah, that would you'd be, you'd be after a couple of years of that you were inhabiting a different planet. They really are. And it's the how you said that, like, you know, this is usually twenty to thirty years, you know, because you want to get that sweet retirement at the end after you've abused your mind and your body for

three decades um. It was keyed off something that you and Garrison talked about in a previous episode of The Hiring Practices where the Washington Stay guys and they were they got busted because the therapist was showing tons of bias. And that brought up for me the hiring process because those psyche exams are the only time as a cop did you get a psych exam? That's the only time you ever talked to a therapist mandatorially. Yeah that's not great. Yeah,

it's a really bad move. And there's a joke in cop culture of like, well, yeah, you gotta pass it before you get hired, because after you get hired, you're never going to pass that test. Mm hmm, because you know, being a cop is is micro dosing PTSD and your system the entire time. See, I guess one thing I'm wondering because you you were in it for fifteen years, so that's that's not an insignificant span of time. Has

it gotten to be more that way? Because I knew about fifteen something years ago when I was like eighteen nineteen, just like I lived in the shitty little apartment complex, and like the dude who live below above me, and then like the dude who lived two doors down, we're both Dallas cops um, and I don't know, like I you know, I was not particularly political at that point,

but I didn't. They didn't seem to have trouble relating, like they would hang out and ship after work, like just like not like like we would be like barbecuing outside and they would drop by and stuff, and it was never I never got the sense that they were living in a separate planet. But this is like fifteen years ago, and I'm wondering what to what extent do you think this is kind of increased in recent memory, Like this the kind of you don't really socialize with

people outside of the family, so to speak. It is kind of like that. So, yeah, a lot of the language you're using is perfect because so what you're describing and what I remember from being a kid in the eighties and the nineties and stuff was um community policing.

Like it's it's a literal style of policing, going back to more of like the professional police style before it went military, and in areas where people actively live in their community and engage with their community, there's a striking difference in the level of police violence that happens. But nowadays, uh, it's not the same thing because a lot of especially in bigger metropolitan areas, you're a cop there, you can't

afford to live there. You're you're definitely not getting paid enough to live most of the time in the cities that you're supposed to be, you know, a part of. And it's gotten to the point where they actually teach this like method up methodically in academies. They'll be like, hey, if you want to be a cop in a big town, you need to start shopping around in the smaller cities around it to find a place to live, maybe like

an hour away. Um. And then they also pitch it as a safety thing because it's all about, you know, the cheology Grossman, we're all under attack, so they'll teach people, you know what, it's it's safest to not live in the town where you're a cop now. So it's become intentional, and it's one of those things where because I don't want to breeze past this is not the episode world talk about community policing. There's very good criticisms of community policing,

and there's a lot of things that doesn't solve. But I think it's yeah, yeah, absolutely, we're not trying to say like the solution is just to get cops, you know, to be members of their communities. But it it is worse when they're driving in from an hour out of town and see it as like I'm occupying almost this area like it does. Yeah, that language fits perfectly, especially with Grossman and all that. Yes, and we've got a two partner on David Grossman or Behind the Bastards if

you want to check it out. But he's kind of the one of the big, one of the big individuals, who's who's done the most to like really push UM. I don't even like it's usually framed as militarized thinking, but I don't know a lot of soldiers who have been who were trained to think that way about ship. Like most of the people I know who we're getting shot at every day for years overseas, we're not thinking the way Grossman does. No, that's probably because he never

actually wouldn't did anything. I think maybe we should probably Alexander, have you go start going through this um, this document you put together, kind of walking through UM and I wonder if you might start when you kind of started thinking about police training and the mindset inculcated inside police departments from like a cultic perspective, When did that really start to come together for you? Uh? It probably really started to come together. Um uh when actually when I

got involved, I used to be an instructor. When I got you know, behind that part of the curtain, and I got involved in those things. Um and I started going to teaching, and I started teaching other departments that would come to us, and it was it was a joke in my head at first, was like, oh, we all speak the same language. And then that got my brain rolling on linguistics and how linguistics work and how that you know, the words we use change how we

perceive reality. And then I clicked and I was like, oh, we're like a We're a subculture. We're we're like no matter where you go in the country, we are a little subculture. We are a little group. And uh, that's what started to kind of push me towards like it's like being in a cult because you know, you girl up around Central California and there's a lot of really religious people and you start seeing the intersectionality of it

really fast. Yeah, and that's interesting because we've talked a few times on various shows I've done about how any good subculture, any really good party, has elements of like a cult. Right, there's there's little bits of that. There's bits of that in friendship and whatnot. Yeah, yeah, it's just a thing like cults are taking advantage, like pulling a bunch of things that people do together in order to manipulate human beings. Um, I'm wondering kind of where

where you think? Where are some of the areas you think it kind of crosses the line with police from like this is you know a degree of like I'm sure firefighters have a degree of this. You know, Um, these are people that like I hang around with all the time and we wipe up in some intense situations together.

That causes there are culti aspects that's always going to cause. Um, I'm wondering, kind of where where are the first areas you started to realize this this is crossing that line of Probably the first area is in how much the department, like and this was universal and lots of departments that I had contact with, is how much the department owns you? And I mean like they use that language. They they'll tell you like we own you like anything you do

in your personal life. Your first thought needs to be how does this affect my department and my my sheriff, my chief, my whatever, Like every single thing you do is supposed to be potentially pr for the department. So they tell you flat out, in the forefront of your mind every waking moment, your own duty. You're you're, you're here, you're you, we own you. Um. And that that was the first one that was just like, oh man, Like, no, I punch out at the end of my shift and

I go home. This isn't like, this isn't this is a job. It's not supposed to be a life. It's it's then that that was the first one that started going it. Um. Probably the second one that I really noticed was that you can tell anyone's a because they'll tell you within about five seconds of meeting them. But

they're common. If you're at a bar, you're at a party, or at whatever, they'll be like, hi, my, my, mine's Alexander work for the search part Like it's it's gonna come out of their mouth in two seconds, because it is. It's their identity, it's their entire sense of self. Yeah, I wonder because one of the things we've seen in the last couple of years in particular, is aspects of that bleed out, like the thin blue line flags and stuff, and some of that's some of that's just you know, signpost.

Some of that's just I know, people who were in uh, certain jobs where they transported things that were sketchy and had those flags. Is like, well maybe the cop won't search mer, you know, but like there and there's elements that they're just you know, I don't want the cops to stop me from you know, fucking with these people or whatever. But I think there's also elements of that.

Um And I think probably television is to blame for aspects of this, but of kind of that sheep dog culture as as as grossman calls that are starting to bleed over into chunks of the civilian world. UM. And I guess I'm wondering kind of like, yeah, what that looks like as a as someone unlike the the deep inside of that as a police officer, Like what is it? I'm wondering, like to what extent where you kind of conscious of that aspect of society like filling out around you.

Like some of these like the cult of the of the heroic police officer kind of spreading to be um something new, which which it really started doing from like two thousand and eighteen up to the present moment is when a lot of that shift seems to have happened based on kind of what I've saw. You No, that timeline fits perfectly because I remember when I first got hired, the thin blue line. It existed. It was a thing, but it was just it was just a matte black

with a blue line and that was it. Uh. And you didn't really even in cop culture, like I didn't grow up seeing that thing in the eighties and the nineties, not much, not at all. And then when I was in the department in the in the in the two thousand's, you kind of saw it every now and again, someone might have a pelpin like in the department, but out in public, nobody had that stuff. No nobody, nobody had

any of that rocking stuff. And it didn't It never really bothered me until it showed up on an American flag and then that was that was a big red flag of like, oh this m this is bad. I was like, this is this is nationalism, guys, this isn't good. And like my whole crew look to me and go what's nationalism? And I'm just like, fuck, is there this like sense that people are totying or is it this sense that like this is kind of the silent majority that backs us in doing whatever hard work we need

to do. I think it started out as tody, it really did, and it's but it's now shifted into um this whole like, you know, you get those guys that are like, oh, if I see a cop getting in a fight, I'm gonna get out of my car and I'm gonna jump in there and I'm gonna back them up because they're like they're playing top. They really want that authority or that whatever, but for whatever reason they

don't go do it. M Yeah, but this has been a way of like kind of they get to see themselves as being like a posse kind of a thing, like I'm in the I'm in the club. I'm not in the club, but like they're my buddies and is there I don't know, does that make being in the club cooler? The fact that there's these kind of posse's forming around it, these people kind of work worshiping the culture associated with it. I mean, there probably is now, but honestly, when I was in there freaked me the

hell out. It really really creeped me out. I didn't like it at all. Yeah. I mean, you have to think about if you're if you're a reasonable person, how weird it would be to see your job turned into a cult like Garrison, you know that feeling, or you're you're going to learn when we when we make the cult. Yeah, okay, so I wanted to. I guess let's let's let's get back to this kind of list you put together, because you were sort of going through different hallmarks of what

makes something a cult. One of them is the group displays and excessively zealous and unquestioning commitment to its eater and whether he is alive or dead, regards his belief system, ideology, in practices as the truth as law. Um. And I'll remind you we were not talking about my podcast. We're talking about cults here. Uh that's right. Um, Yes, stay quiet, Garrison. They're just smiling, silently staring at us through zoom. I see you. Okay, And you've written under this the law

is the higher power. They grant control of their actions. Blind faith in the system frees them from having to consider their role in the system. It's my job to arrest in charge high let the court figure out the rest it sounds a lot like kill them all let and let God sort him out. In this case, the criminal justice system is a direct replacement for God. I think, I think this is this is a really good point.

This is even this is the thing even when I was like a dumb kid and thought cops were fine, This was the one thing that even like just even still freaked me out about cops because every once in a while you would see a video of like the cot was randomly like a saulting somebody, and then other cops nearby just mindlessly join in, and I'm like, whoa, that's so such a weird kind of group dynamic of they see someone doing something and they just don't question

it at all and immediately back it up, no matter what actually was happening. Because like I always tried to think things through more like logically, and that type of like mindlessness really freaked me out, and I think was maybe one of the first things that was like huh, maybe it was. It was one of the first cracks and like maybe cops actually aren't good. Um. I think, yeah, I think this is a really great point in terms of how this ties into like, yeah, it's my job

to it's my job to arrest and charge. I don't sort out what happens afterwards, so it doesn't actually matter. Like it's like I'm not I'm not actually hurting these people because if if they did something wrong, it's gonna get figured out in the court system. I'm just doing

this like preliminary task. It's it plays into a whole bunch of like weird psychological things that make you feel better about horrible actions you're doing because you have so much backing that's gonna make sure what you do actually isn't bad. Yeah, this is like this, you know, this arrest, which may be physical and ugly even if they're innocent later. It's just part of what you have to do to get to the point where you determine whether or not

they're innocence. So I'm not doing anything bad. Yeah, yeah, And actually, Garrison, I it's it's what you said. It's perfect because in the bottom of the thing where I was just spewing notes to myself, I literally put down here it's not a job to them, it's a central component of their sense of self. This is why they will do terrible things to validate their perceived reality and

how these things. Yeah, they it's you might say, like imagine how like think about how hard it is to get people to admit they're wrong about a political belief on Twitter, especially when their name is attached to their account. Now imagine you have like imagine that's the thing being argued, is like the central thing around which you organize your life. And also you get to shoot people who make you angry. Oh yeah, it's it's a rough situ. It should to

be it. It is, it is. It's crazy. And the part that I wrote of it's my job to arrest and charge high, I think that's that's a part of the mentality of it is like, yeah, I don't want to say it's like a game, but it almost is like a game. It's almost like they're trying to get points, like score high and talk to me about talk to me about when you say a rest and charge high kind of what is that? What does that sort of look like on the ground before we get into kind

of why people do that. So, when when you're using your your powers of arrest, you're you're you're supposed to adhere to a penal code. But there is code and I'm only speaking to California, because that's where I got my trainer. Um, they don't expect cops to remember every single element of every single PC code because that's ridiculous.

No one's going to be able to do that. Um. So there's there's wiggle room, there's play where I know you did this thing, and I know it's what they call a wobbler, Like I can go felony and go misdemeanor. They'll teach you in the academy. They're like, if it's a wabbler, always charge felony every single time, even if you don't think it's gonna work. Charge it felony, take it to the d A and let the d A c if they can make it stick. And if they don't, whatever,

who cares. That's not part of our job anymore. And yeah, and that's one of those things where a lot of people I've had friends who got charged with felonies that got dropped. But like, you're still living under your You essentially have to live as like the diet version of a felon while that's hanging over your head um, which is not fun. No, And it's a big part of the whole criminal justice. I'm sure you guys are aware

that d a's love to crack deals. They love to make their big may general backroom deals, and facilitating that is cops charging high. You're here in the room, you're facing felony charges, and the d A is gonna be like, oh, man, I can knock that down to him his demeanor. But that's because he knows he doesn't have a case. But he didn't get that opportunity without a cop charging the

higher charge. Now you know who isn't going to charge high because their prices are incredibly low, very reasonable, very fair. The products and services that support our podcast. Uh, we're back. So the next thing you've got on here is kind of talking about cult characteristics. Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished. And you've written academies are commonly paramilitary.

They're working to break down and build up cadets. As discussed last season on my show, the FDO program is where fresh cadets meet salty veterans in the cycle of abuse starts. The paramilitary environment is usually casual and unnoticeable until somebody questions orders or tradition. Questioning order gets the that's an order threat. While questioning tradition and suggesting improvements gets that's how it's always been done. There is no

forum for change your progress. Some places have these forums, but they're just for public relations. And this is the thing that I think people who are trying to engage with from a perspective of like reform or whatever, trying to change law enforcement, as a lot of people were last year, where things get jammed up a lot is the there's this attitude among civilians, so to speak, among most of us that like, well, anything the government does should be subject to like what we should watch out.

We should look at it, we should see if it works. If it doesn't work, we should change it to make it work better. And that's how kind of everything should work. And that's what you're getting it here. Is interesting because it's the reticence to actual change among police as legendary. But I don't think there's a lot of discussion if the psychology behind it. Yeah, I mean it's that it goes back to that whole will do anything to reinforce

our perception of reality thing. Um, like I said earlier, grew up in a cop family and it's specifically in the department that I worked at so you know, we were called like blue bloods or legacy kids, And no matter what was going on, like anything that you questioned, it was always, well, that's always it's that's the way it's always been done. That's the way it's always been done. And I grew to hate that answer, like with a passion, in my personal life everywhere. I refused to give that

as an answer. When I became a sergeant, eventually, um, and yeah, they'll do anything. I mean they will, they will bend laws, they'll break laws because who's gonna charge them. Yeah, because it's what they've always done always. My department famously had um our union got all of our union news embezzled by people in our brass and they got caught dead to rights. But that case never went anywhere. Nobody

would touch it with a ten foot poll. Uh. And even if you go and google it and you try to look at archives from the local newspaper, it's gone. It never happened. And Yeah, that's interesting to me because that's like cops getting screwed over by cops. Why how is that? How is that? How was it? Like? What what what is the impulse to defend the hat Well, because so there's a division in in cop culture of

like like ranks and a cult. Once you get to what they called brass your your lieutenant, captain or higher, they don't look at us the same way they don't look at the grunts, the line workers, the guys doing the twelve hour shifts were all that family talk goes out the window and it's like, well, we're mom and dad now, and they change their role in that world, and again to maintain that power and authority, they'll do whatever they have to do. Yeah, that's um. I mean.

It also kind of feeds into this this idea that like there used to be less restrictions. There used to be like we used to really be able to like do this and do that, Like we like a lot of violence get justified that way. But it also it provides an opportunity I think for like police who are trying to engage with reformers to do some sneaky ship because often this like community policing is referred to like yeah, we need to go back to the old methods of policing.

It's like, well, but there were probed do you remember the fire houses being used to black people during the Civil rights movement, Like there were issues back before we got militarized. It's and I mean, and that was the stuff they were doing outside. Um, the jail I worked in. Because you bring up fire hoses, this is where I'm going. Um, they we had big cotton fire hoses up on the floors in this jail and there was actually built out

of old parts of the Texas prison. And you know, everyone talks about the good old days when we could really do stuff. And the story that always went around was that when the inmates were getting rowdy, they would just walk down the tier with the hose and just name them. And then Jesus Christ put it back because again, who who's gonna who's gonna tell on me? Who's gonna believe these guys? Yeah, and that was back in like seventies era. You know, that's the that's the big fish

story that guys used to always tell. But I'm like, I have no reason to not believe that story. It sounds very I mean worre stuff happens in prisons today. Yeah, yeah, I'm not surprised. All right, moving on down your list, This one's really interesting to me and I'm I'm curious from some detail on this, because this is not something

I ever really thought about. Um. Mind altering practices such as meditation, chanting, speaking in tongues, denunciation sessions, or debilitating work routines are used in excess and served to suppress doubts about the group and its leaders. And you've written cop talk briefings, evails are always negative, and the work

routine is abusive. It is paired with hyper vigilance. Um. I'm I'm extremely interested in that and kind of like how it how it sounds like the kind of language that you're talking about people using among each other when they're doing this, So I you know almost, I mean, I'm not even almost in kind of a PTSD response. I've blocked out like a lot of my memories from

those years, Like I'll talk to that make sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll talk to X cops and they're like, hey, remember blah blah blah, and I'm like no, Um, So cop talk is mostly slang. It's like it's the ten code stuff. Um. But it gets stuck in your head and you start and it's it's one of those things where they talk about how you're not gonna have friends outside of work

because you're gonna start talking in this language. You will say, you know, what's your twenty You know, I'm code for if you see someone who's acting a certain way, like out of the ordinary, maybe a mentally ill person, you'll say like, oh, that's a jay cat. Like you'll use this jailhouse slang, and it just it permeates your brain. And like we said before, your words manipulate how you for see reality and you just start seeing everything that way. Um.

The big one is the hyper vigilance cycle. Is the is the abusive part. That's that's the part that really got me thinking of cults of how they'll you know, deny your food, sleep, make you work crazy hours and do all these things. Um. And that's that's that's the one that really keep the whole calb aspect for me was the hyper vigilance cycle. The studies that have gone into it. UM. I learned about it from a book this little guy right here. It's called Emotional Survival for

Law Enforcement. It's by Kevin M. Gil Martin, PhD. He's an X cop who kind of PhD in neuroscience and studies studied cops brains and got to see how they function. And he's the one that kind of coined this whole hyper vigilance cycle of you're always edging at this parasympathetic fight flight or freeze response time when you're on duty. Yeah, it just stays up there the entire time. I'm sure soldiers about the same thing, funk. I'm sure you had the same thing, Robert when you were doing your war

journalism stuff, man, or fuck just being in Portland last year. Yeah. Yeah, it keeps you at that edge, that cresting peak, and then you crash and you get back up and boom, you peek up again and then you crash, And it's

almost like a drug. Your brain becomes addicted to that peeked out feeling that you get from the hyper vigilance because you do here a little better, you see a little brother better, your brains moving a little faster because there's that high the amount of adrenaline just constantly dripping into your system, and then you crash. And when you crash is when you're not at work, So you start associating not being at work with feeling bad and being

at work feels good. Yeah, I mean, the same thing happened. I'm sure Garrison, it happened like during the riots where you would feel shitty when you weren't out there. Um, yes, some days I would go out, not even to just to cover it, just to kind of just stand there like a block away because there was nothing else to do. Like it was, there's like I could sit at home and rest, but I'll just be watching whatever is happening,

not doing anything else. You just it it feels it would feel more relaxing just to stand on a street corner and watch people throws stuff over events, because that that that's just that's more relaxing than laying down. It was like it's that a very a very weird disassociate of like feeling that. Yeah, Like my my brain is it's accustomed to this environy it now, so this is

the environment I'm gonna be in. Right, And look how fast your brain got into that groove now, you know, imagine doing it for thirty years, yeah, instead of like six months or even though it's it's it's started only after like two months, right, and or even even in some cases like a month. Yeah, it sets in fast. Yeah. Um, all right, so I wanted to get into the kind of the next thing here. Um, the leadership dictates sometimes in great detail how members should think, act and feel.

E g. Members must get permission to date, change jobs, are married or Leaders prescribe what to wear, where to live, whether to have children, how to discipline children, and so forth. Um, very classic cult ship, right, like the nut really of what I had. We had all all that stuff when I was a kid. Yeah, I would guess that, like the time, if you ask someone for a quick definition of a cult, this is what they're gonna say something or there. This this is the kind of ship they're

going to highlight. Um. And I'm interes did in Yeah, just talk because you already chatted a bit about about this.

Just the fact that, like the way in which police policy works kind of restructures how you function off duty, which I think is something that people everyone understands elements of it, right, Like if you're a fucking dishwasher for a living, you will wash dishes differently forever, right Like if you if you bag your like bagsh it at a grocery store, like that's something that you'll always kind of know how to do. Like these bits and pieces of this, but it's not quite the same as what

you're talking about. And I want to get kind of into why. Yeah, it's kind of like when you're when you're as an adult, you do something that you're like, oh, I used to do that at my first job and I was like fifteen, But yeah, it does stick with you the muscle. The muscle memory sticks in those narrow pathways that your brain gets carved unless you get the right kinds of mushrooms to fix that. So and then you just throw ship in the bad suck it. Yeah,

smooth out those curves. Um. But yeah, the leadership he does dictate. I mean some of them are some of them you can foy and some of the republic you can. You can pull up policies and procedures, standard operating procedures, and you can look at like there's a ton of policies that literally dictate what you are and are not allowed to do in your personal life. Things you're allowed to post on social media, places, you're allowed to go

in uniform. And it all just starts like tinking away at your armor of that that sense of identity, that sense of self, and that's how the job becomes your identity. Again. It permeates every corner of your life if you let it. Um, if you don't have, like the I don't know the mental strength to kind of resist that. It washes over your real fast. Because while that's all going on, especially as a young cop, you feel great. You're you're special. Now,

you're you're in this, You're in the magic club. You you have the the symbol on your chest and the gun on your hip, and it's really easy to let that slip and just become everything about you. Um yeah, remember permissions like so, permission to date and things like that might sound a little weird, but there are times where like, my wife and I don't dress like the

typical conservative Central Valley person. Uh, and at out of work functions I would get I would get comments from people being like, hey, maybe, yeah, your your wife has a lot of really colorful hair, like maybe she should tone that down Jesus for again. That was another one where I'm like, what, No, that's my wife. She can do whatever she damn well wants. Yeah, I mean that's that's that's the kind of talking that should get somebody

slapped upside the head. Yeah yeah. Um. The uh. The next thing you have here is the group is elitist, claiming a special exalted status for itself, it's leader and it's members. The leader is And I'm interested in kind of because you you have you have elements of this right um with it, like the sheep dog thing. We're kind of like the cop is the center of the cult for people who are not cop coults. I don't know, like does this exist, Like I don't see like cult,

a cult leader sort of within this this thing. I think it's it's almost more nebulous than that, where this idea of the agent of the law is kind of the center of the cult that the people who are agents of the law buy into as well as folks outside of it. You know, I don't know. This is probably deserve any I mean, I'm interested in your thoughts on this. This probably deserves significantly more analysis than we're going to give it today. But I think it's a

fascinating thing to think about. Right. It's kind of like how I when I put earlier that the criminal justice system is the direct substitute for God. It is God, the law is God. I mean, how many times have you gotten into a debate with someone where they'll be like, well, it's ethically fine because it's legal, and you're like, well, No, legality does not equal you know, ethical or moral and there. But there's these people in America who are just like, no,

if it's legal, it's legal, that means it's okay. Yeah. And the elitism, Yeah, it's obvious. I mean if you've met it's kind of a religious belief though that like, yeah, it's illegal, so it's bad. She there were a criminal, so they deserved X. Like making a making a homebrewed cleric that believed in the law for D and D was pretty easy, uh, to be like, yeah, this is a church, this is a religion. Um, yeah it is.

It is the sheep dog 'm on on sheep and the you know, it's us against the wolves and blah blah blah. And then we have a guy's name in here that I won't say for anonymity. But we had we had a Braska a lieutenant that would give us these prepared speeches whenever he thought someone's morale was getting low, where he would talk about how and he was wrong that the word sheriff comes from uh like Sanskrit or Arabic sharif, which is not true. It comes from shire Reeve.

It's old English, just squished because English is a hideous l which Um, but he had to. I mean, I can't count how many times he told me that exact same speech to my face, over and over again, as if it was the first time I was hearing the story. And it's to me that was another thing to click where I'm like, God, it's like talking, It's like a

call and response when you're in church. Sometimes. Yeah, any time you confront a religious person, they just to have that that that that dogmatic skeew that regurgitates and just like, well, here's my opinion that I was told by someone who told me. Okay, So Alexander, UM, we've got more to say. You've got a lot more that you've written here. Um, we're gonna we've gone kind of a little over the time we had here. So I want to have you

back on tomorrow for part two of this. Before we roll out, do you have anything you'd like to plug? Maybe the Washington State Patrol? No, Um, No, I don't really have anything to plug. I'm I'm never say die where all the easier threes because I'm that elder nerd from the ninety Yeah, and uh saw hackers in the theater. I it's claimed to fame on Twitter if you want to come see me. How are your hips doing? I talk about that. It's okay, Garrison's never seen Wayne's World.

Oh I know that's true. That's true. Too young. I tried to show Wayne's World to my brother, who's still like five years older than Garrison, and did not take. Didn't take. It's it's a it's a time thing. My oldest is about four years younger than Garrison, and they've seen Wayne's World. I'm just wow. Okay, uh oh where it's us? The podcast that we are. It could happen here behind the podcast bad stuff. It could happen here, it is, it could happen here. Okay. Well, Part two

of Why Police Are Occult? Thanks Garrison, Thanks for doing the job that is one of our jobs, certainly, but apparently not mine. Alexander Williams back again, Um, Alexander? How are you? How are you feeling good? Is your life in a radically different place now than it was when we ended part one? Oh? Yeah? Like no, Well that's for the best, because anything that would change in about the thirty seconds between these episodes probably would not have

been a positive change. You're letting the magic out. People are gonna know. Yeah, they should know already. Uh So the next thing you've got here in terms of cult characteristics that you saw inside the police is the group has a polarized us versus them mentality, which may cause conflict with the wider society. Um yeah, And I think this is the one that like, yeah, we've all we all kind of saw that one. Actually, are you sure about that one? I'm not convinced. Yeah, it was a

Eureka moment, right Yeah. Um, I do think it's probably worth a little bit of exploration about like what it means emotionally to be told like I want to defund or even abolish the police as a police officer, Like that's that's a um yeah. Yeah. I remember the first time that I heard that, the concept of it when I was a cop. I think I was about five years away from getting out, um, and it blew my mind.

It was it was like I'm like, you don't know, we don't have enough funding, Like how how in the world? But we can't do our job because you know, in our in my head, we're we're the thing holding society up. If we're not here, everything falls apart and crumbles. Um. So the idea of being told like we need to defund the police. For cops, it's it's an attack on

your values and your role in the world. It's also attack on like your personal life because because your life is police as well, right, and and and it's and it's like you're you've you've been talking a lot about how the job becomes such a central part of your identity that it's not even just attacking like your paycheck, but it's attacking like your essence now as a person.

It is it's like if you've ever had a debate with with an extremely like evangelical religious person, it's the same as trying to tell a cop like, hey, you don't actually hold society up. You're not exactly as important as you think you are. Um And like I said, like, we don't get we don't get paid very much. Health insurance usually isn't that good um our our unions that we toad as being the best, we're usually pretty corrupt um.

And they don't really go to bat for us and get us the good health insurance and get us the good pay. They get us just enough. And so when a cop here's like, hey, we defund the police, it's like from our perspective, we think what we're hearing is we don't appreciate you. We already think you get paid too much. We we think of it less about like the structure of law enforcement, and we think it personally

of like, oh, you don't think my kids should have dinner? Yeah, and that's uh, I mean, yeah, of course that has like of course it ends the way that we saw it in you know, or at least it continues the way we saw it and continue last year, right, And and it's I think it could help like people like us are on one side of the line and you know, the other people are on the other side of the line still, and I think it could help people on our side of the of the of the barricades to

understand just how willing these guys are to do things and things that they wouldn't normally do, things that you would never consider doing on your own, but for the job and as an order, they'll do it because again, it's part of their identity, and it's it's there. You know, you're attacking me, You're also attacking my family, You're you're it goes back to that grossman thing of being told a lot of Um, no matter what you do, you go home tonight. So no matter what I do on

my shift, I go home tonight. It's better to be judged by twelve and carried by six. Yeah that one. Yeah, Like I'm thinking of like the police of the riot line, and yeah, you can see them being like middle aged conservative dudes, like look at all these like fucking like gay queer teenagers throwing suffet me. Right, it's like the specific thing you're like, oh you you like I'm getting attacked by like the lowest of the low society. I'm being attacked by like did like degenerates and like this

weird kind of scum. I'm actually what society should be. The people that are fighting against me are like this weird anti so sual thing, right, That's that's how it is from their perspective. Um, when almost an actuality. I've been I've been slowly kind of appropriating that type of language for when I see a cop do something horrible, I'm like, wow, look at that, like anti social, violent freak. Because you can look at that language because it flips

the way we usually view like aesthetics. When you know, because like when you see someone do something horribly horribly violent, but they addressed in a uniform. It is it has the appearance of being proper, but like, no, that actually still is anti social and extremely violent. So I think I've been playing around with like flip flipping that language, but you can definitely see it on the cops faces when a whole bunch of like young queer as fun

people are throwing water bottles at them. Oh yeah, you can't. And and the thing that to the thing to remember about most cops is they're there. Their ego is paper thin, their skin. They cannot take a joke, they cannot take an insult. The the number of cops that I would see, and I would argue that I saw some of the worst worst behavior than on the streets, because because inside the jail you're you know, you're in your own little world.

You're inside these walls. The public can't see you unless you're on camera and prebody cameras, you know where all the cameras are. And I the the amount of guys that like an inmate would call them like the f slur or any other slur, and the cop would just snap, we just lose their mind. And me and another couple other guys being the only kind of cops that would get in the guy's way and be like no. And it was never we couldn't say no, that's wrong, don't

do that. It was always no, it's not worth it, or no, you're gonna get in trouble, or no, you know if you do that, he wins man, because if we said don't do that, it's wrong, we may have we may have stopped that bad thing from happening, but we have now marked ourselves as being, you know, potential apostates against the close. Um. So yeah, that's yeah, calling them names works. Six and stones do breaktops bones, Like,

oh boy, it does work. Like in terms of if if the goal is make them extremely angry, yes, it doesn't work. It's yeah. Obviously the next one you've got is the leader. The leader is not accountable to any authorities, um, which the police regulate and investigate themselves. That's one of the most basic ones. But it does it kind of, It does lead to this, like it is interesting to think about the way the Church of Scientology handles uh misbehavior from its agents and the way that like a

police department does. Because there's not a ton of daylight betwixt the two, there's not listening to you the l Ron episodes. Anyone who hasn't listened to them, go back and listen to them. They're fantastic. One of my favorites. Um yeah, listening to that. And the way that they're a little internalized security system was structured was very, very analog to exactly what happens in law enforcement when they're sowing so policing themselves b s because god they don't.

They'll do every little thing to manipulate the situation to have the cop come out on top and not be in trouble because who's gonna all them responsible? That my own guy at my own department's interviewing me. We've known each other since you were kids, or I've known his dad, or his dad's known me, or or he's you know, related or whatever. It never works when the you know, the watchmen are watching themselves. It doesn't work. I don't

know how. We don't, well I do, you know how, But I really wish there was if we do have to still have law enforcement, civilian oversight with actual power, actual authority to do. Yeah, that's that's the thing is that everywhere and a lot of the times that's been try to put into legislator. It doesn't. It's always like neutered, It's always like and I'm like, I've I've seen version of it pop up in Portland and it just never

does anything. Yeah, And that's I mean, obviously the whole the question of is to what extent can increasing civilian oversight UH solve problems? To what extent is it like

papering over them? Those are all things worth discussing. UM. I think I want to kind of keep us focused on the mindset that that inflcates, because that that's the thing that I don't think people get in part because like most people who are part of these abolitionous movements, most people who are are on the sides that we are on this um either probably don't know a police officer very well apart and certainly almost most of them

have not been police officers. And I'm kind of wondering, what are you actually scared of doing as a police officer, Like what what what are you actually scared of in terms of like the blowback, the fault, Like, what what is it you actually get worried about if it's not pissing off everyone else in the city who wasn't a cop,

you know. So Yeah, what it comes down to is, uh, you know that the the church of law, the Church of criminal justice, and what they're scared of is so if I get a dirty cop who's not blatantly doing something bad, like he just he hit a guy too hard or something, it's something that hasn't hit the news yet. Um, but I have to morally, like ethically, on paper, I'm required to have an I A division investigate these people.

The reason that in my head when I was there and being interviewed for these things, it's because you have to hold up the infallibility of the law. It doesn't matter what really happened. All that matters is what's in black and white on paper in our files. If we ever get audited by a federal body and we can say, look, a bad thing happened, Yes we investigated it, here's what

Here were the results. And it's all about holding up the infallibility of the law, because if it really gets out and cops really get in trouble for stuff like some of the stuff that's been happening where cops are actually being convicted finally for doing terrible things, it erodes the blind faith that the masses have in law enforcement.

Because I've heard people here in Utah, which is a very conservative place, look at some of those shootings that have happened where the cops have actually been found guilty and they've actually been like, oh wow, like I never once thought a cop would do this, And it doesn't sound like much, but in their head, that's that's a

seed that's setting in their consciousness. And that's that's the whole point of the blue wall of silence and keeping everything in the house is if everybody realizes that we're just a little weird man behind a curtain, you know, the Wizard of Oz doesn't work anymore. We have to maintain this false image that we are infallible and we know we know exactly what we're doing, and we are taking care of you. You have to believe that. So they'll do anything to maintain the lie. Wow. Yeah that

makes sense. It's bleak, but it makes sense. Yeah, it felt bleeping in there. This ties into kind of the the role of like lying right and and and the kind of the cult thing you're tying this into is that like colts will often talk about how the things the cult is doing are so important that you can do terrible things to achieve them. Right. You see this in the Church of Scientology and their dirty tricks programs.

Sent and On had its its version of this. Um and you you've written here we are taught to lie to get what we need. It's only true if it's on tape or written down. As long as it looks good, it is good. Um and I uh, I mean it. It made me think, among other things, of a guy I used to know who became a local prosecutor. Um and eventually quick it because he kept being assured by police officers that like something that they had put in like the charging document was true, and then being unable

to prove it in court. Um and it it pissed him off after a period of time. Um And I'm interested, like in the I'm sure like obviously some fraction of people doing it are just like just literally don't give a ship. But how does someone who actually does have a moral compass and believe in the law. How does

someone who really believes justify lying to screw somebody over. Um. So as the guy who was there, who had morals, which is why I'm not there anymore, I couldn't all right, And I actually got in trouble on a couple of instances of everybody was going one way on a story and I was going in the opposite direction, and without using blatant terms, they use all the like the little you know, legal legal fuckory terms to not say what they're trying to say, but implying and getting it across

to you of like you need to get on the same page, you need to tow the line, you need to you need to get in here. And I could never do it. I just I don't know, it's just my moral fiber won't let me do that kind of thing. Um. I once was told by a lieutenant that I had my moral fiber was too high, Like he literally told me, because you can't expect everyone else to live up to your moral standards. And I'm like, dude, we're we're supposed to be like a little bit above the typical moral standard.

We're supposed to be the example of how you know, our civilians, our citizens are supposed to act. But it wasn't the truth. Yeah, I mean, my first I think kind of radicalizing thing very early on was just like the fake drug scandal in Dallas, was realizing that like on a significant scale. Uh, local police had been planting ship on people in order to charge them. People have

gone to prison, which happens other places too. But like, yeah, um, and I'm the bulk of the work making something like that happen, isn't the people who are planting the fake drugs? The people who realize that the department will look bad if it gets out and then dedicate themselves to stopping it from getting out even beyond because you have you know, X number of people are willing to plant plant fake drugs on a guy, but a much larger number of people are willing to try to cover that up. So

it's not a problem. That's That's the thing I really appreciate about, Alex. You're framing of this in terms of like their main or not one of the main motivations is not, you know, actually doing the job itself. It's about it's about making sure that their reality and by extension, what they want everyone else as a reality to be, to stay the same. Like they all of the effort into whether that be lying for supposedly in their view,

like moral reasons and all, that's kind of work. It's it's it's it's to maintain the specific version of reality. It's not it's not actually for like like it's it's it's not for like actually promoting what is like the law and the books by any means. It's it's it's it's the it's the thing like in hot fuzz, it's for the greater good. That's that's what that is. That is what they're trying to That's what they're trying to do.

So even if they like, as long as their reality is maintained, then you know, we have some semblance of like order in the world, whether that be you know, this nostalgic, semi like proto militaristic nationalist version of order. But that's that's that's the thing that wants to be maintained. So every every task, everything that they're doing isn't just a simple task. It's all in the overall effort of maintaining this like this perception um and and that's a

a much more I think interesting way to think about police. Yeah, it really is. Uh, these guys in like in pill talk, these guys would take the blue pill and a heartbeat and then they don't rest Morpheus for trying to deal drugs. Like that's how dedicated. These guys are too staying inside this version of their reality. Now, um, I kind of let's move on next to um, the next kind of cult aspect, the leadership induces feelings of shame and or

guilt in order to influence and control members. And you're talking you've litten down here, toxic masculinity and the warrior mindset. Yeah. Um, do you have any kind of like case examples of how that that actually looks of like kind of using shame or guilt to people who aren't kind of in the this quote quote unquote warrior mindset. H Yeah, I mean it happened a lot. Um, there was a lot of Monday night quarterbacking that would happen, especially with the

advent of like cameras and things becoming more popular. Uh I love my body camera. That was my little best friend. But we would go you know, you go back and you'd watch videos of incidents and things, and if somebody wasn't like engaging fast enough, they would get real did hard like haze and you know, made fun of and

mocked it. And when you were in this, you know, we're a family mindset, and you're you know, we're we got each other's backs and we only understand each other, and then all of a sudden, you're on the outside because you dared to have even a remotely moderate to liberal position on anything, or you didn't jump in on the you know, the the ass beating on something to

fast enough, they turn on you fast. Like. The only thing I could compare it to is like you know every eighties and like nineties military movie or or you know nerds movie where people just haze the ship out of each other, and it's that that dude brow everyone's got a our wire sun tattoo on their bicep, just rampant everywhere. I mean, it permeated the whole place. That drove me that that was one of the things that really drove me next, because I've never been that kind

of guy. I've always been a a more of a

a de escalation person and a book reader. And then I think it helps explain a lot why you see some of these videos where it's just like why did they go to zero to ten from zero to tend so fast with well, because somebody's gonna make fun of them and call them names if they don't go hard enough, fast enough on somebody when they do certain things like and yeah, the zero to a hundred thing also ties into that whole, that whole hyper vigilance thing that always

being um a compressed spring, and then it ties back into that warrior mindset of like they tell you flat out like if anyone ever attacks you, they're trying to kill you. It's it's there's there's no offens or, but you need to act like they're trying to kill you, because it goes back to the whole I'm going home

at the end of the shift kind of thing. And once once that's ingrained itself into like your muscle memory, and that becomes the reflex, that becomes the thought that passes in front of your mind when a critical incident happens, then that's how you're gonna act, and you're gonna do and you're gonna go from zero to a hundred because you're going to assume that any little furtive movement movement, which god, there's that language furtive movement UM, any little

movement that someone makes, like that's that's a green light. That's an excuse that I can end whatever interaction I'm having with this person with violence because they flinched enough where I think, Okay, I got this, Yeah, Jesus. Now one of the next ones you have here is talking about recruitment, which obviously COLT STU, but also like it's

a job and jobs do this constantly recruiting. I'm kind of wondering because you've you've listed here things like Explorer programs, which are like r OTC or the Boy Scouts kind of these different one of which Kyle Rittenhouse did like ways in which kind of people get onboarded. I'm wondering sort of what how you see how you see police recruitment as kind of different in a fundamentally cult your way. Then you know, every job has to bring in new people, right, like, yeah,

it's it's it didn't used to be this way. But I think in the in the two thousands, especially when numbers staffing numbers really started to drop because it's I don't know if they've just realized it isn't worth it or they found somewhere better to get paid. But employment's gone down for law enforcement, and so recruitment goes up in response. But now they have a more active role in most places where it's almost on part of the military. They'll go to job fairs they go to high school

career days. Um, they didn't used to do that stuff. And when they do, they'll they'll find someone to like pull stuff out of the pulp cultures thatitgeist what we know? What cool? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, what can we what can we cash in on to try and draw these kids in, because just like the military, cops are looking to pull in disenfranchised kids who probably aren't going to go to college, don't think it's an option. And here's this job. All

you need is a high school diploma. Here's the health insurance. Here's the retirement package, which is trash. But you're seventeen. You don't know that, you don't know how to read all this, but it looks real. Goal Yeah yeah, um yeah, they explore stuff. I mean you're familiar with that. So but yeah, they get little kids to go out and you know, the little baby cops and it's I mean, it's it's one of those things like some of this is so much deeper than even the the individual departments

or any choice made by the police. Because like, as a kid, some of the first toys I had were cop toys, right, like everything every boy, I think, like, yes, some of the first what you're gonna get badge a gun, you're gonna play detective. You're gonna be watching cops shows, You're gonna be watching movies where cops are the And that's I mean that that's a bigger subject than today. But like, yeah, no, that is like what the one of the most prevalent forms of media that's instilled in

young uh boys, I guess yeah. You know what else is instilled in young boys the love of capitalism and products and specifically products and services. Find a child and whisper the names of our sponsor into their ears, preferably a child that's yours. Hopefully know any child, any child throw something so there, parents look away and then leaned down and whisper better. You only counts if you get caught.

We're back, um. And your next point was the group is preoccupied with making money, which is a huge thing for cults. Um, not all of them. There are some, like you know, there there are some cults that were shall we say pure um, but they're nearly We're like hey man Manson, just it was all about the music and the Heaven's Gate was a pure cult. Yeah, yeah, Heaven's Gate. It certainly wasn't just the money for Heaven's But yes, cops. Cops have civil acids forfeiture, which they

just took a hundred thousand dollars from someone in Dallas. Yeah, and the person did not get charged with anything, um, which is usually the case. Yeah. But but I mean yeah, like you have written here that like the main the main ways just increasing their budget as much as possible, which you have. Most police departments right now have the biggest budget they've ever had. UM. Specifically in like main cities we have, they're they're the most funded department, um

in in for the whole city. There's there's this there's this great gag in the opening episode of a show called Ugly Americans that's about trying to rere financialize the city's budget. And they have like like a social spending and cop budget and they take like all of social spending and move it over and leave this one tiny sliver and they're like, oh there, that's better. That will solve all the problems. Um. It's it is a better sketch than what I explaining it just like this sounds

not funny, but the sketch is actually pretty good. But yes, and and it is and it is relatively accurate in terms of just moving all the funding from social programs over into law enforcement. Yeah. So there's uh there, you know, there's everyone gets their financing different ways. There's county, there's stayed, there's their city. But a common thing that would happen was the uh law enforcement agencies would try to take anything that they could under the umbrella of law enforcement.

So if it was like, hey, we want to have more, you know, security equipment at the high school, and then the cops will be like, no, no no, no, no, no, give us that money. We'll give you another another officer on campus. Or they want to hire something for the part, you know, and we want to install lights the city park to increase security. No no no, no, no, no, no no, you just give us that money. We'll make sure our guys patrol it more. Mm hmm. So they actively try

to just like coach money from everybody else. Yeah, I mean, and you you can see this in a lot of towns where like the number one use of public funds is the police. I mean, it's it's all over the country at this point. Um, yeah, that makes sense. Uh. So members are expected to devote inordinate amounts of time to the group and group related activities. Um, yeah, because you have written here four years with no days off, but scored a satisfactor told to put in more time

outside of work. Yeah. So, like I said, our emails were always sounds so much like MLM shit it is. It is they they every time you're going for an evail, they negg you, like no matter what are Our scoring system was one to ten. Um, nobody ever got higher than a six. Maybe I think I saw like one

or two sevens in my entire time there. And when I became a supervisor, I asked the brass I'm like, hey, I want to give this guy this this upper grade of like an eight or nine, and he told me flat, because no, we don't do that, Like, no one's allowed to get higher than a seven. And if you want a seven, you're gonna have to like write a novel about how great this person is to get them this rating. Um, it was just yeah, it was. It was consistently just

pinning you down. The four years no dated off. So yeah, I did h four years straight without calling in sick once, like I took vacations. But um, when I went in from my email and he slides me a thing that says. It says attendance satisfactory. And I was like, what are you talking about? I was like, I haven't taken a day a sick day in four years. You know, I have three kids. How do you think I managed that?

Like I've sacrificed to be here that much. And his response was well like, yeah, but I never see you at barbecues, I never see you at the union meetings. I never see you at the fundraisers for the sheriff's reelection, even though it's blatantly against policy and illegal to do. And I told him that in his response was, what are you gonna do? Tell on me? Are you're gonna tell Jesus? Yeah? That makes sense? Yeah, yeah, I mean who are you going to tell that? Who are to? Yeah?

And it is it's also just like this. It isolates you from other people. It stops you from knowing folks that aren't cops. And it's yeah, it's a lot like what your up line is gonna tell you if you're selling mary kay that that that that ties into the that ties into the next point. Members are encouraged to or required to live and or socialize only with other group of members um and you say this is like

part of the hyper vigilance isolate isolation cycle. But I also see this in terms of like something I uh get into for fun, is I join like a wife of cops um Facebook groups just because it's fast just to have all of just to have all of these like cops spouses in a Facebook group, and it's super Yeah, Like it's it's a really interesting like culture of like

just associating with other people on the job. You know, there's like cop barbecues like you mentioned and all this kind of stuff where it's like we're the only ones that can understand you. So we're gonna build like this like you know, force field around all of us and we can be together as a family and keep out everyone else because we're the ones that really know what's up. Um. Yeah, it seems uh, I mean for some people who are really into it, I guess that is you know, that's

how humans socialize in some ways. So like, you know, for people who think being cops are good and quote unquote enjoy it, I'm sure they have a decent time hanging out with their cop buddies, right, Um, And I'm sure the cops spouse facebook groups I'm sure they have a good time laughing about whatever viral video there is of someone using too much force, you know who, who

knows what? Like how how they actually think about those types of very isolated environments, because you know, it's it's about fend find you know, it's it's almost like it's it's extending out into like fandom rules where you're associating with other people the same way fandoms work, which is very just very similar to to how cults work. Um so, yeah, yeah, it's an armed, militant fandom. And your last point here, the most loyal members, the true believers, feel there can

be no life outside the context of the group. They believe there is no other way to be, and often fear reprisals to themselves or others if they leave or even consider leaving the group. Yeah, so I put in the note of just self expantiory. But yeah, it's me

quit was weird. I knew I needed to do it, but I I had a massive existential crisis of identity and of of logistical things, but a lot of it was it was tied to my identity, and it was it was letting go of something that was like a core pillar of my personality and it really freaked me out. And I think that if I was more inside the group, and I was more like one of the guys, a golden boy or something like, I probably would have never left.

If I was, if I was getting that constant reinforcement of the good boy feelings, I don't think I would have quit. Um. But after I did quit, that actually kicked off a cascade of people around my same age and within my same seniority level in looking at their job and looking at what it was doing to them psychologically and physically and with their families, and thinking to themselves, I can and leave that. That is how cult, How

that is how leaving cults work. Yeah. Yeah. And so once I left, a bunch of other guys were like, oh, I don't have to do this until I'm fifty five. I can I can go start another career somewhere else. I can go start another retirement plan at a different place. And I just it felt great to see other people tear away and do that. But at the same time, I know for some of that it hurt mhm really bad to leave that behind. Because once you're once you

are out, UM, you are kind of out. Even if you leave amicably like hey, I just want to go do something else with my life, you're no longer in those people's minds anymore because you're not part of the team, you're not in the club, you're not in the family anymore. You're that guy that used to be here. And I guess kind of at the conclusion of this and this is you know, when you when the question is like, how do you de radicalize get people out of colts?

How do you like, no one has good answer to that, So I don't think we should expect you to suddenly have like here's how to here's how to convince everybody to stop doing this, because we can't do that for fucking Q and on, like de radicalization of the people who say they're involved in it are fucking drifting, like it's it's it's a big mess of a of a fucking field in the first place. But I am wondering, do you have some insights into like, yeah, how then

do we de radicalize these people? Uh? Like I don't think there is Like I don't think there is a cookie cutter answer for like pulling people out. Um, you know, we can't bag them in a white vand and take

them to a hotel. Uh. The only thing I can think of that would actually change the culture is a huge shift in our national culture around like mental health and toxic masculinity and you know, wrapping your identity into into your job because it's not just cops that do this' it's it's it's it's like that is that is America now?

Is that is like hustle culture and that is what the idea of a career is my name and I am a blank Like that career career comes from the word that means like careening, Like you are going full force into this thing that is that is what you are doing now. That is your existence, is your career. You're going at it um that is that is what this whole country is built on. Uh. So getting out of that for a lot of people, for just regular jobs,

it's difficult. Now adding on the idea that you are the thing that holds society together, that is that that has a whole other level of complexity, like psychologically for the person inside it um. Because I'm sure like telemarketers, if you can get really into it and make money, sure that can be a career. But you know, you're not holding society together and like that's not that's not that's not a delusion that you have and nobody outside shares has There's there's no there, there is there's no

thin telemarketing line of supporting you. So it is it is different for like police specifically, even more so than like firefighters or like E. M. T. S. UM. This particular fandom that's developed around police and and and like the the incredible self importance that they is that is cultivated um to. Yeah, like the idea of I'm doing this to maintain reality is like a very like big thing to tell yourself and get getting out of that

seems uh challenging. Yeah, it really is. It's like it's almost it's almost worse than most like churches in a sense because in this version it's so it's so materialized. It's it's it is, Yeah, it's it's it's right in front of you. I can reach out and touch it

because I'm part of society. But if I'm not here and we're not here, you know, anarchy the bad guy that the way people think the word means, you know, everything's gonna catch fire, and the only reason people are good to each other is because the law makes them be that way and all that kind of toxic bs.

So the only thing I can think of to be like to help de radicalize people is it's almost like treating someone in your family that listens to too much Q and on is to you know, if you know a cop or you have a friend that used to be a cop, and he ever like reaches out to you, maybe with like kid gloves, kind of be like, hey, how you doing just small things because that could maybe lead to him putting them putting something on their shelf.

Just like when people get out of religions and things, they'll often reach out to people and be like, hey, this is such a fucking it kind of means something if he's going outside of the group. And so yeah, maybe recognize that, like you have an opportunity. Yeah, if if a cop reaches out to you, it's just like someone in a religious institution. They're reaching out to you because they feel safe talking to you because you're not going to turn them in your It's not gonna have

any uh immediate impact on their life right now. Yeah that makes sense. Um, All right, well, Alexander, anything else you wanted to get into I mean I could talk about this kind of stuff for days and days and hours and hours, the whole hyper vigilance cycle, and like I said, I've read a bunch of books on it. I really tried to get training on just the hyper

vigilance cycle. Like well, if you ask most cops about hyper vigilance, they would just look at you and be like, I don't even know what that means what you're talking about, which is why I used to I used to give this book, the Emotional Survival Bout for law enforcement. I would I gave it to new hires, and some of those new hires didn't come back, and I'm fine with that.

Yeah that's good. Yeah. Some of them looked at it and we're like, no, I'm not signing up for this because you you really don't know what you're signing up for the real stuff that you're signing up for until you're in it. Yeah. Yeah, I mean also like a cult um Yeah yeah, well all right, uh, Alexander, thank you so much for coming on and for sharing this with us. I think it's a useful look behind the curtain um that that folks need um and this has been it could happen here you can find Garrison on

the internet. Go go, go track down Garrison's fake Facebook account. You know what goes do that you can't? You can? I I have, I have made up possible specifically for this reason, a cop wife group with Harrison joined me and Vanessa so we could discuss our husband's careers. Hey, for all you know, you may cause the de radicalization of the cop Yeah. That, or Garrison just gets really weirdly into role playing as the wife of like a career episode is over. We are done. This is I

am pulling the plug. Harrison starts the episode. I don't trust Robbert to me, you want me to start, I don't trust Robbert. Today. It's time, Garrison, it's time for you to learn. Wow, my advice is a tonal shrieking. I am not doing that. Everyone's gonna be like, oh, Garrison's just copying Robert's tone and cadence. You mean you mean they're making sounds with my mouth. Yeah, that's that's how that's how, that's how communication works. Start the episode

with that and trigger everybody like me. You use a microphone, it's very real. Yeah, you Steve, we're a recording. Let's let's do this Hey, time for stories we love We love stories here Attika Happen here pod the podcast about how things are kind of falling apart and too maybe some ways to put them back together. Um, I'm Garrison. I'm starting this episode today. I'm not sure why hungover Robert is real hungry because I didn't trust Robert to do his job today. But I trust you, Garrison. You

didn't really not trust me to do my job. I know that's that's fun. Um. We also we also have Christopher here, hey, and and we have uh writer Rebecca Campbell. Hello, hey, and uh, what why don't you briefly explain who who you are and what what's what's going on today? Okay, while I'm a Canadian writer and sometimes I'm a teacher, but mostly I just write really sad stories about climate

change and coasts and aies and near future stuff like that. Um. This story I'm reading is called thank You from Your Patients. It came out and reckoning for I guess last year. And uh, it's based on my partner's time when he was working in a call center and the kind of nightmares stories that I heard from them every time he came home from work. But It's also about me being on the other side of the country from the part of the world that I love the most, which is

the Pacific Northwest. Um. And you know, watching Fukushima a few years ago, and watching wildfires a few weeks ago, and um, being separated from the things that are important to you, um as they're all falling apart. Well, I'm just excited that this podcast is now two fifths Canadian, So that's that's the main thing I'm excited about. Uh no, oh my god, I just Tim Horton's cup just appeared next to me. It's terrible donut I have. I do have a Tim Hortons kept in my kitchen. Um do. Anyway,

let's uh, let's let's let's start at this. Start this, uh, start this reading. Let's eat this popsicle stand as they say a thing, Let's continue, Let's let's eat this. Okay, thank you for your patients. I'm lucky because they replaced a bunch of chairs last month and I got a new one. A good chair is important when you spend ten hours a day in a cubicle talking to strangers

about their problems. I've been here three years and worked on most of Western Morgan's Services, which means I can, with no thought, help Grandma set up her WiFi, or troubleshoot banking software, or set up your cell phone plan, or help you with some app designed to find your soulmate that nevertheless fills you with hopelessness. I can't help you with the hopelessness. It's nonstandard. But I'm Western Morgan's floater, and Jordi or Kirsty just dropped me where the calls

are heavy or turnover as high. On Twitter, I can answer questions within five seconds of some asshole in Toronto saying what the fuck my TV doesn't see the house network, and I respond, I'm sorry to hear that Toronto asshole. Let's see if I can help. I'm impossible to rile because I've heard everything, every possible stupid question, every strange request regarding lapsed policies and mispayments, every paranoid rand, every sort of impotent rage. The management is shitty and the

customers are irritable. But there's beauty and problem solving. The really bad stuff started at the end of last month, when I had to do on one on one majority team lead for the floor. I've been fielding a bunch of questions regarding a recent patch that had broken everything. I had this rhythm, hitting my thirty second age t and typing without thinking, Mark here, how can I help you? But one on one is mandated interruptions. So I listened

to Geordy brainstorm about improving morale. They stopped having barbecues because it was too expensive, even when the burgers were sawdust and soy. Also, no one wanted to be outside because Detroit was still burning, and the PPM up to something like Beijing. Listen to this Western Morrigan idol. Jordi told me we judge three of the top right calls, and we have a thing, and someone walks away with a Timmy's gift card like fifty bucks. Jordy said that

like it was a good thing. What about a key fob? I asked, we can't get out with what without one? After hours? But only management could hold or the winner gets to wear Jane's or keep their phone for a shift. That didn't rate an answer. The most frustrating thing about Western Morrigan is that team leads have to hold your phone like you're an untrusted teenager who's been grounded. I feel like I'm lost in a cave or a space station. When I do a lot of overtime, I arrived when

it's dark, and I leave when it's dark. And while sometimes I go around the corner for coffee or McNuggets, it always feels like I'm just visiting the world. I don't know what's happened, if a government's fall on or if an ice shelf has collapsed, if Detroit is burning again, or maybe California or the Great Lakes are dying at a slightly faster rate than they were before I left for work, never knowing what's going on outside. I sit in my good chair and say that sounds frustrating to everyone,

no matter who's talking or what they want. Let me see if I understand your problem, you could judge, Jordy, Stead said, still talking about Morrel. You're impartial. You hate everyone. I don't hate everyone, Geordy, I said, reflexively, though, to be fair, I hate a lot of people here. After my mandated fifteen minutes with Jority, I saw that Misty had a problem with my documentation, which has been rough since they changed policy on me. She's in the Philippines,

where most of the real work happens. Upper management is all in India. They only have us because they need Canadian accents on the phones and they get tax breaks bringing jobs to one of the more desolate parts of the country down when from Detroit Rampant West Nile and ninety percent of the province's heavy metals processed at the plant out by the ball. Seventy percent of the baby's born here or girls. Something to do with residual b P. A misty is on the other side of the Pacific

in Lagazpi. But you think she was right here considering how aggressively she organizes us. Your ship at filling out forms mark the right up is going to kill your rank. We're stack ranked. Every shift it gets you points you can redeem. You can redeem, which honestly is worth it for the grocery store gift cards. Just tell me what I did wrong. Lagazpi, we were in the middle of

a rough month. The flu hit everywhere at once, and no one could afford to lose the work, So we had a bunch of people come in sick coughs and juicy sneezes all over the floor, and half the time you got on the elevator and everyone was gray faced and weaving. I came in over the weekend to cover mobile because they lost half their staff, so i'd been on for eight days by Monday, when Jordy was manic trying to call people in so he wouldn't have to

go on the phones. He always says when we're smoking outside, and he's pointedly not looking at the place where the jam building used to be. It's not the extra fifty cents and hour. It's the fact I don't have to deal with people. He hated taking calls. He offered me overtime, so I started coming in at six and leaving at ten,

and I didn't even notice the weekend. I do remember going home those nights and thinking how hollow my room felt with my roommates playing Call of Duty in the living room, and how my body seemed to vibrate caffeine maybe your pseudophedan. I heard phantom time warnings and chimes, and when I closed my eyes I could see the screen and call after call flooding the queue. By Saturday, Western Morgan was a haunted house, but I still wasn't sick. That sounds frustrating. Let me see if I can help.

I was dealing with this woman on Vancouver Islands who couldn't generate invoices. We've been at it for two hours and I could feel her getting upset when I told her to wipe the whole system and start again. I could help her with that, but she was like, no, we'll lose two weeks of work. There's nothing I can say to that, so we keep troubleshooting, even though it's pointless. Okay, I said it. You can go back to your root invoice and try. Oh, she said what, And that was it.

I didn't hear anything but the line itself, which just went dead, that kind of absence you get when someone hangs up on you. Are you there, ma'am? I called back, but I got a reorder tone, not voice mail or an old fashioned busy signal, but the one that means the whole system is busier, blocked or down. I dropped out of the queue then, which you're not supposed to do, obviously, and went looking for Jordy, who was chatting with Kirsty

about Western Morgan idol. I asked if they knew anything, but of course they didn't, And when I asked if I could at least grab my phone to see what was happening. Kirsty did a kind of elementary school teacher sigh documentation for three eight zero your overdue mark call you dropped. I saw that explanation happening across the board. Looks like the problems at their end. I didn't find

out until Moe came back from Break Street. Wet in the way you are if you run out into that rain blowing in from Detroit because you don't want it to touch your skin, saying earthquake on the West coast? You know anyone out there? I thought about the woman trying to get the invoice together for a tiny order of sea salts from some equally tiny place on Vancouver Island. Her business so miniscule it's still fit into our cheapest subscription.

In my unsubmitted documentation for Misty, I had written that her voice sounded like a hopeful but slightly overwhelmed great aunt trying to make the remote control work. No one, how bad like nine point six, the worst since forever, like for hundreds of years, Jesus, I said, Jesus, Jesus,

I've had similar moments on calls when they're shooting. Happened in Montreal, not view Ma real, but the one where the kids ran downtown from McGill and the photographer caught the girl as the bullet tour at her right kneecap. I was on the line with this dick wad and a coworking place on Maisonneuve, who was talking, who was asking to talk to my supervisor. Then midwhile and he stopped talking like he suddenly didn't care about my attitude. I could hear his phone pinging, sir, are you there?

Can you hear that it's happening on the street. I can see a faint popping voice raised and doors slammed. Then he cut the call. I kept in the queue, helped someone update. I did a subscription renewal. The next person, though, needed a backup and that took forever. So we chatted about hockey until she said, did you hear about Montreal? No, ma'am, I said, thinking about the sound I maybe heard before his phone cut. Firecrackers, backfires. Some guy shot up the

whole downtown. I think it was terrorists, who knows FLQ or Muslims, maybe Red Power fifty dead, but it was going up every single time ever fresh the page. She kept going on like this while we did a backup, and then I made sure everything worked. And it had been like three hours at that point, and I kept thinking of the guy and his silence and what was going on in the streets while we talked about his log in and how unprofessional I was. I don't have

any friends in Montreal. I there wants to drink when I was eighteen. But that's it. I just had that guy and the thump of footsteps fleeing the coworking space. When I took my break, the rain was falling again, the faintly gray kind that runs down the sidewalks and the gutters, and when it builds up enough you can see it's a little milky because it's full of ash.

If you think too hard about what's running into your eyes as you stand outside smoking until your pack is empty, you go eat a twenty four box of tim Bits or six Big Max, or you stop for one beer on the way home and only leave when they push you out the door. Jordy was outside. I gave him a cigarette, even though he doesn't smoke either, and he said, it doesn't seem to be getting cleaner. Wasn't it supposed to get cleaner? He grew up in Detroit, though he

was already over here when it burned last year. Maybe it's safer. The ham is worse. I thought the ham was supposed to go away. When they send in the cleanup cruise. We watched the warm, ash colored water run down the gutters until it was ankle deep. This city is a wetland, and there isn't far for water to go,

so it ends up in people's basements. All that ashy, bony water running through foundations and drains, A constant trickle in the background, sort of like the faint pop you might hear while you're on the phone with a guy from Montreal wants to talk to your manager. Does it feel Jordy said, and lit another cigarette. What Jordy? I hate how often he doesn't finish his sentences. Does it feel like it's happening more now? The sort of thing. I dropped my smoke into the rain water and I shrugged.

Then I said I wish I knew what to tell you, which wasn't a real answer, and I used my tech support voice when I said it, because I didn't want to have that conversation. On my first break after the earthquake, I smoked and watched the rain and videos on my phone. Someone live streaming the moment it hit bored talk about food or weather, than a strange look on their face,

their eyes dart upward. Then the phone falls overhead footage from helicopters of downtown Vancouver, all those green towers swaying and falling, and the bridge swinging until the cable snap like rubber bands, the worst in recorded history, worse probably than the last mega thrust in seventeen hundred. I just kept thinking of that woman and the sort of quiet

shock in her voice, her Oh is that? And then nothing, And I was standing out in the rain, still warm, when it occurred to me that I might have heard her last words. I kept thinking about the texture of the silence after the call dropped, and what had happened the moment after that, if that had been the worst of it, the shock of the whole world rumbling, or if it had been worse for her after that or right now or tomorrow. I only had ten minutes because

call volume was increasing, My throat started to tickle. In the world just suddenly out of nowhere started to look glassy. The light thick from the ceiling squares, and my skin prickled when I ran my hands over my arms, which were covered with goose bumps. The floor was nearly empty except for Gjority running around super rising and not taking calls, and the cue was packed. My first call was round way north along the coast, Prince Rupert, a woman calling

about a password reset. I want Mark, she said, he helped me before. Can I talk to Mark? While I was documenting, I thought, fuck it, I'm gonna tell Misty what the old woman told me while we were waiting for the password reset email about how when you're that far north you don't notice time passing, and you feel good in an unimaginable way in summer, luminous and hopeful, and how in winter all you want to do is die and drink yourself into a coma, so you know,

it balances out. After that, I reopened three zero. An elderly woman I wrote on a phone trying to print invoices for locally produced sea salt, looks over at the rack of glass jars in which she keeps her stock because she hears a rattle, then another. Then she says, oh, is that and nothing else, because at that moment, the force of rashimas lit the Cascadius abduction zone on which Vancouver Island rest. It's like a cork in a bottle. Centuries of continental tension released. I type that, then I

hit send. Then I added a secondary note on her file. At PST A nine point eight hit the Cascadia subduction zone, and Misty was right there on chad Hive, not telling me it was inappropriate. She wrote, rest their souls. And I was comforted by those temporary words, which surprised me. My grandparents were in MINDA now in the nine earthquake, you got anyone there? No? I heard the hum from Detroit.

It was somehow a relief to know that. Across the world, Misty was in a similar room among people evaluating documentation for apps and I s p s and accounting software, people saying that must be frustrating. Let's see if I can help. Something occurred to me. Do you hear anything about tsunamis no word so far? Do you have your phone so you can get the alerts they let us know we're so bad. I'm taking calls so I won't

be fixing your dog until tomorrow. I wondered if Kirsty would let us know or if she would dither about it, until all we could do was climbed to the top floor of the building and watch a way consume what was left of Detroit before it swamped us to five more calls, and I refilled my water bottle, the one with the slogan on it, fueling small Business with the tools to succeed that some now lost Western Morgan contract

brought in. And I was looking at my skin reflected in the sink, which was the color of those pale, lumpy smokers you see outside the entrance, the color of a raw filet o fish. I felt adrenalized, like a moment before it'd been terrified, but I could not remember how or why. I wondered what it was doing to me inside all those cells now remade into virus factories, turning to goog and mah and sloughing off while the virus proliferated through my system, and I left traces of

it on everything I touched. The water ran over the top of the bottle clear. So far, the ash hasn't worked its way in through the city's water system, or maybe it has, and it is invisible like the micro plastics in the lake so you're gonna judge it was Jordy, We're gonna do it next week. I was thinking, that's at a time limit, like five minutes, you and me and Kirsty judge it. I'll grab a fifty for the Jimmy's card too, man, I said. Georgie just stared at me.

You're getting sick. You know what you need to do. He went on about ekenesia and flu effects, and I thought about the tsunami that was or was not traveling across the Pacific, or just hammer your system with antioxidants to take a double dose of night quell. Without thinking, I pulled my phone out of my pocket. You know you can't have that anywhere on the floor. I was already googling Pacific Tsunami Alert and it was rolling rainbows and I stared at it so hard that it seemed

to take over the whole world. And then I shivered. But Jordy was still talking, don't make me write you up. I don't want to deal with it, okay, I said. It's about privacy for our users. They need to know that they can trust our integrity, our word, and our system. The poster on the far side of the break room, said integrity ward and system. I saw that the alert had been issued for Japan. That's when he took my phone. You fucked the dog. I have to write you up.

I don't want to write you up Japan. In six hours, eight pm, i'd still be on. Then, while very far away, a wave crested on the sea coast, filling the river basins and the car parks. I know you don't have to surrender your phone, even if they can require you to leave it at home. I know they're not supposed to lock you in either, or let you smoke within three ms of the door, even when the ashes falling.

They're not supposed to pay you in points. You can then exchange for grocery store gift cards, which you need because the new minimum wage wasn't even covering rent. But I needed a job. The next call I got was farther south, closer to the epicenter. The first thing I did was asked about the earthquake. Oh, we felt it, and there's a tsunami warning. But we're far enough inland it shouldn't be tsunami warning. So when I go try to log in tsunami, I keep getting the same error.

It says, my accounts frozen. What does that mean? I need to do some invoices, And yeah, I just got the text like half an hour ago. Landfall is like an hour. The account was frozen due to misspayments. So I pointed that out and the guy insisted no. He set up an automated transfer, and he kept me on the line while he chatted with the banks tech support on another line to sort out the direct deposit, and

then I reactivated his account. All this time, the tsunami traveling towards the coast or the shallower bottom would raise the waves height by narrowing its length. Because the last time I'd been outside, I'd looked at a gift on Wikipedia that demonstrated how tsunami's crest as they traveled through shallow waters. The last thing he said wasn't thanks, it was there. It is. The tide's going way out. I

hope everyone's out of downtown. Then he was gone, and I can imagine it, the water running away from the shore like a huge exhalation, and then collecting into a rising wave that would destroy them all the tsunami warning I wrote in chat hive, hoping Misty was there. Kirsty responded instantly, that is not appropriate chat hive for important work stuff. We haven't heard anything, but we were swamps, so who knows what's going on outside. Chat Hi channel

will only be used for appropriate business related business. Maybe you should get out chat hi channel will only be used for appropriate business related business. I've been there for sixteen hours, and I couldn't remember the last time I slept a full night at home when I hadn't been buzzed on cold pills and exhaustion and the sound of

call of duty from the living room. That week when I did sleep, I kept saying, this is Mark from Magnicore, or this is Mark from wherever I am right now, and heard explosions and the way voices carry over for the river from Detroit, the screams and the crowds and the gunshots. Or maybe I was never actually asleep. Maybe I was just off my head. I shouldn't have washed

the pills down with beer. But there's that thing that happens when you stop in for a beer after work, and the inertia of the whole thing, the job, the shitty beer, and the fact that a person brings you food even if you can't afford it it sticks you

to your seat. It was bad last summer when we couldn't afford to run the A C. But the bar on the way home could and it was full of familiar guys, broke and lonely and trying to avoid looking at what was left of the Detroit skyline, or the gray green clouds boiling to the north, and the hail and the lightning storms every afternoon like clockwork. The summers are definitely hotter, and the mosquitoes are definitely worse. And the last summer I noticed that the birds don't sing anymore,

all their whistles and like video game lasers. I stepped outside for another cigarette and realized the door had been locked. And I don't have a fall because I don't rate a fob. Jordy was there too, setting up his stupid Western Morgan idol piles a bright pink and green and blue post it not it's all over his desk. I need to go out. The doors are locked for the night. I need to go out. We lost another girl from online. You'll have to take over social media if we lose

anyone else. Take your break here. I just kind of stared at him, and my skin prickled, like all the suit of a phedron I had taken had rushed to the surface and was blasting every single nerve ending in my body. I need to go outside. You can't, like you physically can't. I kind of stood there, and I'm ashamed to say I wanted to cry, like a little kid who isn't allowed to use the bathroom, who just wants to sit with his dad but keeps getting dragged

away by unfamiliar relatives. The kind of crying you see on the bus at rush hour when some little kid coming back from the mall loses it and lies in the aisle wailing, cramming road salt in his mouth, and you just think you and me both. I didn't actually cry. I hate myself because I just said begging, can I please have my phone back? Please? Jordy looked at me like I was an idiot him in the middle of all the post it notes that read congratulations and You're

a winner and Western Morgan idol. I didn't say anything. I left at first. I just sat in the lunch room, shivering and nauseated, staring at the plastic solo cup left over from the barbecues they used to give before the ash. There will be worst moments in my life, no doubt, more pain, more sadness, But I can't imagine anything so wide rangeing in its desolation as that moment. The only thing I could focus on was telling miss Ty to get her phone back and watch the horizon and be

ready to escape. A girl from online staggered through, sweating and pale, and I knew that Jordy would be there in a minute to ask for another eight hours overnight answering stranger's questions so perfectly that they treat me like a shitty customer service AI built to serve. There aren't a lot of choices in life, are there. You can choose to have kids or not, to leave your hometown or not, or to stay in a terrible job you are for some reason, very good at. But other than that,

what is there? Just a lot of compliance and non compliance. This moment didn't feel like a choice. I said to the girl, we need to get out of here, and she nodded. Then we headed down to the lobby. The doors were locked and no one caring a key was in the building, and the girl just looked bad. But when I went to the fire escape she still said no, no, we're not supposed to. We need to get out. They'll

fire us. And I could hear of the fear in her voice, and I wondered how badly she needed this job, that she was here in the middle of the night, so sick she could hardly stand. Tell them I did it, I said, and hit the bar, only it didn't move because the fire escape was locked too. The next thing I did was stupid, but I don't know what else I could have done. I walked back to the lobby and picked up a garbage can and began slamming it

into the glass door behind me. She was coughing and coughing and said maybe stop, stop, but so faintly I could ignore it. Then we were out, and she was staggering towards the emergency room on wilette and I was alone in the rain water the same temperature as my blood. Then I went looking for a pay phone, because the only way to sort this out was to call in, but I couldn't remember which of Western Morgan's departments Misty

was assigned to. So when I finally found the city's last pay phone in the bus depot, I called them all. All the sad voices of men and women here and on the other side of the world. Welcome to Caiphus Business Systems. Jane speaking, Can I help you? Welcome to Tesla Mobility. Can I help you? Welcome to Roscommon Account Services. Welcome to Lighthouse Mobility. I'm looking for Misty, she helped

me before. I'm sure I can help you. What's your user number, Misty, Misty knows, I said, my voice, queer less and elderly. Put on Misty. I could hear the exhaustion in his silence than the compliance. One moment, I'll transfer you. Hey, Misty, I said, Misty, Misty, you need to get to high ground. What who is this? Just promise, kay, there's no tsunami warning. It's on its way. It's passing

Japan and Hawaii. It hit the Allusians California. I hope she didn't mistake me for what I felt like right then, a crazy old man, mad with loneliness, longing to hear a voice in the void, even if it was only to harangue them for the weakness of their service and the terrible nature of their product. Mark another six hours to landfall. I know you'll still be on shift. Promise. I waited for her to disconnect, which was okay because

at least I told her then. I think maybe she said thank you, Mark, or maybe it was just the noise in my head. I held the line another moment that hung up. I felt okay because I got through, because I wasn't in a cubicle anymore, because I could walk home and enjoy the silence before call of duty, marathons in the living room, enjoy the ashy rain falling across my slowly cooking skin. I walked home, Misty. I

walked home, hoping. Misty said thank you Mark. It felt like I was slipping through a gap in the world between noises, kind of silent passage, the way kids slip along the abandoned rail easements in town below grade, the

corridors of grass and rats and squirrels and birds. Between the noise of the phones and call of duty, between heartbeats, between crusting waves, The silence you hang on too for just a moment when someone hangs up before you go on to the next call, because there is temporarily a respect from the tyranny of the queue. The silence after a bullet connects or a wave hits on the other

side of the world. I just hope harder and harder and harder that Misty would insist they unlocked the doors and break the windows, and they would escape before the wave arrived to wash the rest of us away. I don't know how to add a clapping sound effect without it just sounding horrible in the audio. Airhorns, you know what, danial Um already straight seconds of air horns or or or not? Um. I think the air horns are good. I was beautiful. Yeah, that was wonderful. It's really incredible,

Thank you so much, and particularly relevant now. Yeah yeah unfortunately, yeah yeah, it with what happened Yeah, yeah, that is extra extra thou the whole time, what happened in the past week. Yeah yeah, that is a It sucks hm. If people want to find more of your work, or if there's anything you'd like to plug, now is the time, okay. UM. I have a website. It's called where is here dot c a UM, and I have jeez links to a bunch of my different short stories there. I have a

novella coming out next year. A few years ago I post relished a novel. Um. But if you're interested in the climate change stuff, there's probably one I'd recommend called um an Important Failure that was in Clark's World. It's available to read online. It's been translated into Polish. It's in a couple of different collections. Um And, if I'm allowed to brag, which it won the the the Sturgeon Award last year, which is a science fiction award handed

out by UM, an academic organization in the US. So, and it's about it's about climate change. It's all set on Vancouver Island, in Vancouver. I've heard you. I've heard you also have stories about ghosts. Yes, I have a genre I'm trying to establish that I call obstetrical horror that I started writing when I was pregnant. Yeah, giving birth is just such body horror. So ghosts, childbirth, all that stuff. Yeah, I read a lot about ghosts as well.

You can find, like I say, a lot of that stuff on my website and links to anything that's available for free online. So yeah, where is here? Dot c A And I'm on Twitter a um at Canadianist, but I don't really use it that much. So I am excited for the combination of climate change fiction with horror fiction.

Um And. By excited, it's like half half actually excited, half dreading because a lot of it's gonna probably be horrible in terms of people being like, you know, what's scary climates change, and you're like, okay, but yeah, but oh sorry, go on. I don't know, but I think there definitely is a good way to combine the the essential elements of both of those things to something that actually is really impactful that plays on human fears and emotions and how we can get over those fears and

move towards something useful. Yeah, and it's also that horror going back for well however long you want to, we've been telling stories has given us a series of structures to kind of process that. UM. And I think that's really valuable that their patterns we can use to work through. And I mean writing climate change fiction. For me, I just finished another novella UM that's specifically about like near

future stuff and about the wildfires a lot um. But you know, having a story to tell about it as a way of processing all the research I was doing, UM was really valuable. It's it's super useful. Yeah, and just um, I mean, you can call it therapeutic if you want, but I don't think it's that. I think it's organizing information in your head that is just simply too large for you to actually grasp. I mean I can't actually grasp this stuff, but no you can't. It's

it's too bad. Yeah, exactly, exactly trying to mean, Yeah, horror does that probably better than almost any other genre. Yeah, I mean look what it horror does with adolescent anxieties or um, you know, all sorts of different the fear of dying, the fear of aging, if your illness, and

stuff like that. So yeah, I think we have structures in place with horror fiction, um, and with sort of science fiction horror that kind of are gonna let us start to process things that are otherwise just too intellectual

or not intellectual. But to abstract it's too it's too Yeah, abstractors I think is the right term, because I mean, like, I guess my fear of that is that, like climate change, fiction is just gonna resort to like the disaster story and it has very like glamorized weird versions of like apocalypses and disasters and like collapse and very like big ways that impact everything around you, when in actuality, the effects that they have are very localized and small and

are still horrifying, but the way that they're framed is always frustrating in films, and you look at like, you know, a typical like you know, like apocalypse themed movie, I think is I'm afraid that the bigger you know, if you turn turn talking about like big movies, how it's going to frame in that way instead of these more kind of personal stories of like the horror of being trapped inside a warehouse as a tornado comes and you're not allowed to leave, which is a way more horrifying

than oh, look, all of New York City is crumbling because of this pseudami, which is so big and like possible, I guess, but like that's so big you can't feel that. And what's more like gonna happen is people getting trapped in buildings and not being allowed to leave. And that's that's that's like, that's actual horner. Yeah. And it's intimate too, write like it's not it's not in distant idea, it's intimate.

It's the particular consequence of something for a community, for an individual, for relationships, And if I can go on on this um there's an entire genre of apocalyptic fiction that kind of comes out of the early Cold War, and they're always these weirdly cozy apocalypse is where one white guy survives and in the new world he builds

this kind of feudal fantasy. So I've actually this one filled The Last Babylon, where a character says, of these two spinster ladies that were miserable before the nuclear war. After the nuclear war, they're really happy because their lives have meaning now. And it's this, it's those are the

apocalyptic stories that we've had. We need a new kind of story, a new kind of horror that I think, um that does exactly what you're talking about, that doesn't default to that weird heroism and one surviving kind of thing. There's a wonderful Corey doctor short story that that I think pivots off that idea nicely. Um in his his book, Uh,

What is Unauthorized Toast? I think Bread an Authorized Bread is one of the stories in it, but the book is has a different it's a collection of his short stories. But there's um a post apocalyptic story that kind of follows a bunch of tech bros trying to do the traditional like survive the the apocalypse makes everything, you know better for me. I get to be a cool warlord thing and it's it's good. It doesn't end well for them.

Um yeah, I I think the I think the thing that is important to do is like focus on the horror of the little things, like the little things on

like a global scale. Like, like, the thing that is so frightening about climate change is that all of these the terrible things it's bringing are going to hit the same way mass shootings do, where it is a calamity for a community and people fifty miles away try to pretend it didn't happen and get to doing like their their daily stuff, Like that's what's that's what's so scary about it. It's not like you said, it's not the

buildings in New York collapsing from a tidal wave. It's the birds stop singing and you still have to go to work. I'm I'm I'm writing a script right now for probably the show about how climate change is hard to think about because because how how big it is.

And one of like the models that I'm trying to draw a comparison from is like it's almost like climate changes is like a type is like a type of Cathulhu in terms of the way it affects you, but you'll probably get by it's it can affect your neighbors, and you can watch it and you can watch it have other people, But like, it doesn't mean that your life is going to end this way because it's so

it's so big and uncaring. It can attack so many places at once, but you don't know how like how big this effects are and how and what what what what the scale of them will be on your local area. So it's like this, it's this thing that is way more existential than anything else because it it does not it does not care, it has it has no morality. It's it's not it's not out to get you specifically. It's this weird, this weird thing that's just getting imposed

upon us now. And that type of horror in fiction, I think is something that at least I want to explore in my next few years of writing. And I'm excited to read other people's work who kind of covered that similar side of horror and combining with like climate change and the small ways it's going to start affecting us in places around the world. I think, um that what you said and isn't isn't there someone you talks about the Catholic scene, I don't know. Yeah, that's Donna Harroway,

Donna Harroway, that's it. Yeah. Um. But but also just how weak some of our previous narratives like you can't you can't bring in you new Judeo Christian apocalypse is to this kind of thing because we can't. There's not you can't. We can't have that kind of moralizing in it um that we need. And that's honestly, Catholo is really handy for that cosmic horror because it forces you to, as you say, face something on an existential level, um, that how you feel and who you are and your

individual experience does not matter. So it's like a lot of people, like you know us, we're watching what's happening in Kansas right now, and like I'm not in Kansas. I don't know anyone in Kansas. I'm looking at this calamity and it's so distant from me, but yet it's also very close. And that's a weird feeling to deal with. UM. And I can see, oh yeah, corporations are contributing to this specifically like climate change as in general, but like

Amazon trapping people inside inside inside these warehouses. It's like, I can there's way used to fight extensions of this, but you can't fight it. You can only fight its extensions. And that's and yeah, it's it's it's a super it's a super interesting thing that I'm gonna I think, Yeah, we are going to see you know this, this idea get dealt with more and more as these things start happening more and more. Um, and yeah, I mean climate change,

cosmic corps, maybe maybe the way to go. Yeah, yeah, I think that's I think that's a good line to end on, or at least a good thought to end on. Well, thank you so much, Rebecca for coming on and sharing your story. Would you mind plugging your website one last time since we extra like fifteen minutes? No, no, no, no, that's that's that's good. People may not have noted it last time before the conversation. We should give them another chance. Okay,

So the website is where is here? Dot c A. It's O w h E R I s H E r E dot c A. Excellent. All right, Well, thank you very much, Rebecca. Um, until next time, everybody lose your mind with the cosmic horror, something something, anything, any kind of cosmic harror that consus you to to your your mind to scramble and you to begin worshiping in the dark corners of the world. Any anything that does that is good. So well, thank you so much for having me. It's an absolute pleasure, very very happy to

have you. It could happen here to welcome the Evans Robert podcast. End of the World and beginning of news. Yeah. I think we did it right. Evans, Evans Robert. Who's here with us? That would be killed Joy, Margaret and Victorman Sophie. I like this m keeping Victim Comma Sophie, kill Joy Comma Margaret, Um Margaret common as I could also attorney's general you kill Joy's Margaret. One of my hobbies is anytime I pluralize something, attorneys generally it Um, Margaret.

How are you? How are you doing on this beautiful December day. I'm good. I just got my booster shot and the negative effects haven't kicked in yet. That's good. Um. How does it feel to have, like as your internet sped up now that I have a boost? Yeah, I'm making the same fight that everybody makes because it's easier than thinking about the fact that, oh, Macron looks like it's going to be a real, real, right mare, and the world's never going to go back to you know,

it's not going back to normal. I miss It's it's being able to walk into a bar and not worry that I was going to catch a new variant of a plague. Yeah, yeah, that's a yeah. Yeah, how are you doing with the plague? I live completely alone and isolated, so which I you know, I'm not sure this is how I would have built my life if I hadn't done it during a plague. Yeah, I mean, well, I

dream about interacting with humans. Yeah, just like hugging a person that that you don't know all that well and it not being like involving both of you risking your life. It's like a blood pact. Yes, we're going, Doug, and if we wind up in how we'll scream at Satan together. Um, come hug. You have written another story. I mean you wrote this a while ago, as you did with the

last one. But we're doing We decided we one of the things we wanted to do to close this year out was a little bit more fiction, because fiction I think plays an underappreciated role in revolutionary practice in kind of every aspect of being someone who envisions the different world. Um so we we've always I mean, it could happen here. From the beginning, there was always a strong kind of um uh focus on fiction. Um and I'm really happy to be presenting another one of your stories today. Thanks.

You want to introduced this piece, sure. This piece is called The Free Yorks of Cascadia. It was first published in Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is the name of a magazine. And this one was also really important to me because Fantasy and Science Fiction F and s F was one of the magazines that my my dad had a subscription to. Yeah, they go this a while. Yeah, this was a very um uh and it was a very important piece for me that it got published there. Yeah,

that's awesome. Um well, let's uh, let's let's let's take a take a hop in a publicly funded bus and roll down to Storytown. Speaking of taking one's life in one's hands. The story is called The Free Orcs of Cascadia. You all know the first part of the story, the song ended in blood. It was two years ago in the summer. Rick Green, the singer of Goblin Forest crooned in his osbornesque voice to fifteen thousand Goblin metal fans.

A short man wearing green body paint and brown leather stepped out from backstage, drew a sword and cut the singer down from behind. The last lyrics, Green Ever sang where take me back, take me back, take me back to the Misty Mountains. The man with the sword, of course, was Golf and Bull, the rhythm guitarist for Crumpatool. The been an act. He and his bandmates escaped in the

ensuing chaos and remain at large to this day. Neither band has released a song or played a show Since the rest of Goblin Forest decided to call it quits. Without Green and crimp Atool, no one knew what happened to Crimpatool. Fans deserted the genre in droves, and overnight Goblin Medal went from stadium rock fad to a niche interest of the obscure Canadian orc cults were originated. It was no longer hip to be Green. If Golf and Bull had been trying to take the Goblin Medal throne,

as it were, he failed spectacularly. Rumors have flown about motives and locations, but there have been no arrests and no public statement from the band. All we've had to work with were rumors until now. Earlier this month, Orc folk act uls Ereth listed Golf and Bull as the harpist in their liner notes of the single The Gray Fog of a Ruined Forest. Lsyth was as obscure as Crimpatool was infamous. The band had never done an interview, not even a photos shoot. Like everyone else these days

in countercultural music, their videos featured only masked performers. I've been casually obsessed with post civilization culture ever since the Communicate from the Junkyard Rats of the Rust Belt, and I've been covering music of pretty much every secessionist movement and subculture I could sink my teeth into since after I saw those liner notes, I put out feelers to friends and friends of friends, and I waited, and last week I was invited to go to an Orc village

hidden away in the burned forests of Cascadia. I was invited to be the first person to tell Golf and Bull's story hell Fire Harriet Exclusive. Usually I post full interviews for everyone, but reserve my travel diary for the patrons of my blog. This time, though, I'm foregoing that this story is too important, so I've interspersed to the two below. All I knew before I went with what

everyone else knew. Three years ago, a bunch of metal heads and hippies and burners and nerds all decided to dress up like orcs and goblins, and some of them took it too far and decided to distance themselves from the rest of society. They got really famous one summer, then that fame died in a single bloody act, and who knows what kind of weird ship they're up to. Now, Before you get worried, no, I will never offer a platform to a fascist. Fascist. Fascism, as it turns out,

is the furthest thing from golf and Ball's mind. What he's into is a lot weirder than that. Still, it's sort of lucky that I survived to write this story. So you killed a guy, Yeah, I killed a guy. We stared in silence at one another for a while. He wore rawhide and fur, and not much of either. He wasn't painted up, but his skin was sort of natural olive. His lower teeth were filed down to fangs like any serious works. There was still something unassuming about

him that I have a hard time describing. You're waiting for me to tell you about it, aren't you. The interview was not off to a good start. Are you worried about how your words will sound in court? I killed Rick Green on stage with a sword in front of thousands of witnesses. Talking to the media isn't going to make anything worse for me at this point, and I don't respect the authority of the US government to hold me accountable for my actions. I will not go

to court. So why do you do it? The old world is dying My world, the Free Orcs of Cascadia. We're not going to replace the old world, but we will be part of its replacement. In order to do that, we have to take ourselves seriously. An element of that struggle is the struggle to create meaning, to create a new sacred. I killed Rick Green because he was defiling something meant to be sacred. How so we share an aesthetic, but he didn't understand what it meant to be an orc.

You killed him because he was a poser. I guess you could put it like that. So the lesson here is, don't be a poser. Don't be a poser. You heard it here first. Kids, don't be opposer, or golf and ball will literally murder you. They picked me up in the parking lot of girl This re outlet in northeast Portland. That's a mundane detail, I suppose, but perhaps the single most remarkable thing about my trip was the ever present contrast between mandanity and the bizarre. I bought a case

of coconut water while we waited. Works might like coconut water. Who doesn't like coconut water? They showed up in a mid teens Honda Civic Sedan, and I've been hoping for something out of Mad Max. The two women who got out, one cis one trans, both white, were dressed in clean gray tank tops and leggings like half the women who live in Portland. To be honest, I only noticed them in the parking lot at all because the trans woman

was cute. Hell Fire this this woman asked. She was tall and severe, with the fierce but almost trustworthy look of a loan shark, or, as it turned out, an Orchis enforcer. That's me, I said, Fenrik. This this woman offered her name, but no handshake. Fist bump or hug. I nodded. Norinda, the trans woman said, like a lot of trans women these days, she didn't bother to feminize her voice. Her name sounded familiar, but I couldn't place it.

How is this going to work? I asked. We're going to drive around back where no one can see us. Fenric said, We're going to take your phone and laptop and any electronics and put them in a fara day in the car. Then we're going to put you in the trunk and drive out to the forest. Will provide you with a recorder and notebook when we arrive. You'll get your stuff back when we leave. I nodded, I'd pretty much expected this. Do you need to use the bathroom?

Nor Into asked, have any medical conditions we should know about? No, and no, I said, either of you want a coconut water? Goblin Forests sang in English, but Crimptool's lyrics were all in Tolkien's Black Speech. Dark speech. Are lyrics were in dark Speech. Tolkien referred to the language as black speech. Token meant well, but he was about the most influential unconsciously racist author of the twentieth century. All his villains

were either Green or Middle Eastern. When you engage with the work of historical authors, especially when you make derivative works a century later, you have to adapt to one's own social context. Calling the language black speech today is at best wildly misleading. Its name is a translation anyway, It's possible that dark speech is just as accurate. Besides, Token didn't write the language. He only wrote like sixteen

words or something. We wrote the rest. Most of us prefer to translate the name of it as dark speech, since where murderers PC, my status as a person who has ended the life of another person carries no implications about my personal ethics other than that I clearly believe there are circumstances under which it's okay to kill someone. Imagine being at the Renaissance Fair when the apocalypse hits and you're stuck trying to recreate society, surrounded by swords

and minstrels and these and thous. You know how that sounds like either heaven or held, depending on who you are and also who you're stuck there with. That was my first impression of the village of Graymorrow. The fires out west have burned forest after forest and small town after small town. And no one tries to deny that pretty much every bioregion on the planet is going through

transformation right now. It's in the worst spots, these dead ecologies, that the post civilization movement has found its roots, like wild flowers growing up between paving stones or rat's hiding in the walls. I guess, depending on who you ask, Gray Morrow sits in the scorched graveyard of a Douglas Fir forest, halfway up a mountain, occupying the remains of an evacuated town. Slab foundations are all that remain of

the original structures. A seasonal creek runs through what was recently a river bed at the edge of the village, and long abandoned train tracks skirt the ridge above town. Even armed with all of that information, you'd still have at least seventy or eighty possible spots to search. Satellite imagery would help, of course, I can't imagine that the Big Six texts or the U. S Government don't know

where Gray Morrow is. The residents of Gray Morrow in general, and Golf and Bole in particular, had an awful lot to lose by letting me write this report. Nourenda let me out of the trunk, and she smiled when she saw me. Her bottom teeth were filed. That should have been unnerving, but I've always been a sucker for face tattoos or anything that really shows someone is going for broke. Fenric just stared at me severe. Being severe was pretty much her thing, as far as I could tell. She

took a sip from her coconut water. Three other cars filled a makeshift parking lot. The village itself was surrounded by a wall built from black and logs, set upright and buried in the ruins of the road. My escorts had changed clothes and route. Fenric looked like a bandit out of Skyrim, complete with iron pauldron on one shoulder and a hand axe strapped to her belt. I won't

lie it was a good look. I'm no fashion reporter, but I figured half the magazines in New York would love to get someone out here and take pictures of orcs like her. Nornda wore a simple, modest dress of undyed wool. Imagine a Viking kindergarten teacher who also wears a rather large dagger horizontally on her belt at the small of her back. My crushing on her intensified. She handed me a spiral notebook and an old fashioned digital recorder,

and we walked into the village. A lot of people say that you killed Rick Green because you're jealous of Goblin Forest's success. That the orci Is Code insisted that if you wanted the throne, you had to kill the reigning monarch. Golf and Bull stopped fidgeting and stared directly at me, his dark brown eyes boring into me. That's bullshit. I'm sorry, it's like three layers deep of bullshit. He was still staring at me. I was starting to regret

this line of questioning. Okay, to start, there are pretty much two ways to interpret the Orcis Code of Honor. It's not written down anywhere, but there's some strong central themes, like an interdependence between individual sovereignty and collective identity. We value strength, but the idea is that everyone develops their own strengths, whatever they may be, for the benefit of all. One should be as self reliant as one is able to be, both for one's own sake and again for

the community's sake. I cared deeply about this. That same basic idea, though, can be interpreted two different ways. So there's a split in the arc community. Damn right, there's a split. The free Orcs are matriarchal and the or Seene are patriarchal. Golfin Bill produced a cigarette from god knows where, considering how little he was wearing, and lit it with a lighter from the same mysterious origin. It wasn't tobacco, it wasn't weed. Maybe mugwart. The matriarchal way

of interpreting those tenants is roughly anarchist. It's anti authoritarian, an anti nationalist. At the very least. We respect the wisdom of elders, children and women self identifying women. But the hierarchy is anything but rigid, and the guidelines are anything but laws. Most importantly, our sense of community or tribe is fluid. Gray Morrow is a free Orc village. Go fifteen miles southeast and you'll find a larger village lonely mountain there or seen. The patriarchal way of interpreting

Orchish tenants is roughly fascistic. Authority is absolute. Rank within the hierarchy effects every aspect of one's own life. It's not racialized, but it's nationalistic. There are very specific considerations of who is isn't a part of any given social grouping, and definitions of strength tend to skew toward boring ship like physical size and power. So you tell any doubters that you weren't trying to claim the goblin throne because your faction of Orcs doesn't work that way. No orci

Is culture works that way. Even those fascistic ships don't work that way. Among the or Seen. If you kill your superior, people aren't going to just suddenly start kissing your ass. They will literally flee you and turn your skin into a battle flag. You advance and rank by demonstrating your capacity to lead. This isn't some fucking Hollywood bullshit.

Evil is a lot more banal than that. I didn't have the heart or maybe the courage to tell him that to me too, pretty much, any outsider Hollywood bullshit is exactly what the whole place looked like. When you say battle flag, what do you mean? Who do they do? Battle with? Us? The free Orcs? Are you at war for the very soul of our culture? How did that start? When I cut down Rick Green, the Mountain King? You killed him because he was the leader of a rival faction.

Then not because he was a poser. They weren't a rival faction until I killed him, but sure he was a poser though all fascists opposers. Did you go on tour with Goblin Forest specifically to murder him? Yeah? Probably? What do you mean probably? That's a very specific question about a very specific intention. I mean, I guess I had been thinking about killing him for a while. It was premeditated, and it wasn't you know, No, I don't know, because I've never killed anyone. So it's like I've known

Rick Green almost five years. He and I and maybe thirty other people. We started this whole thing, Goblin Metal of the Orcs, all of that. Rick Green has always been a fucking bastard. I figured I'd probably kill him one day for being kind of a Nazi or whatever. Then we go on tour together and I tell myself, Hey, if this goes badly, I can always just kill him on stage. You've got to understand Orcus culture wasn't even a year old at that point. We weren't split into

the Free Orcs and the oar Seene yet. There were only maybe five villages total. We were just starting to explore what it meant to be ourselves, what kind of culture we could build. Then, while we were on tour, I hear he's got himself crowned the mountain king. And this isn't a game. I don't know how to get that through to you or your readers. This is our life. It's one thing to put on a silly hat and pretend to tell people what to do in some larp somewhere.

But Rick Green had gotten himself corornated for real dictator over actual people. So I killed him. The Free York split off the oar seen closed ranks, and we've been at war ever since. Am I safe here? He didn't answer me at least he didn't stare me down again. He just looked off into the distance, maybe towards lonely mountain. I've been to LARPs before, where when you show up,

they make you put on garb. That is to say, they make you wear period appropriate clothes, or whatever weird interpretation of period appropriate that particular group of Larbers had come up with. As I met the denizens of the village, they all came out to the parking lot to introduce themselves. I realized they didn't insist on anything like that because they weren't LARPing. Pretty much every one of them was dressed like either a Viking reenactor or fantasy game villain,

but it wasn't an act. About thirty adults and eight kids lived there, running the age gamut from six months to seventy eight years. They told me their names and pronouns. About a third told me she a third he in the third day. Many of them were white or past as such, but a significant minority were black. Nourenda told me later their Orc villages with substantially higher proportions of people of color. That might be true, but I got the impression she said it to convince herself or me

that the free Orcs aren't a specifically white phenomenon. No One, no one decent, likes looking around their community or scene and seeing only white faces smiling back. After everyone introduced themselves, immediately forgot all their names. There are only so many fantasy names like Lazarre and Demolin that you can hear before they all just sound the same. Nourenda and Fenrik flanked me as we walked through a gate in the wall into village. It's strange to say village in America.

We don't really have villages here, but in some ways Graymorrow isn't the United States. And to be certain, it was a village, maybe ten or fifteen houses crowded together along either side of a single potholed street. Two architectural styles reigned, junkyard shacks built out of railroad cars in regular cars, and traditional American log cabins, many of them were adorned with solar panels. At the end of the street, near the black Palisade, the beginnings of a stone tower

stood fifteen feet high. I wasn't sure if I was impressed or not. On one hand, the village couldn't have been around longer than three or four years, and they had already done so much. On the other hand, it was filthy. Everyone was filthy. I'm kind of obsessed with the post civilization movement, so I wish I could tell you everyone looked well fed and happy. They didn't people looked proud, and they didn't look miserable. But there was an intensity in everyone's eyes you simply could not mistake

for happiness. A trash pile needed attending near the front gate, and some of the animal hides stretched tanning had begun to rot. Everything looked like it was about to fall apart, both physically and metaphorically. What now, I asked, when we reached the central square, a stone cobbled chunk of what had been once an intersection, now decorated with poorly tended gardens and rustic benches of dubious quality. You're here to interview golfen Ball or you're not, Fendrick asked, I am

golf Ball doesn't live here. I waited for her to elaborate. Golfing Bull lives in the forest with the rest of his band. He's on his way. You'll meet him a bit outside of town. I'll take you to him when he gets there. Someone near the gates shouted, and both of my escorts flinched bodily and turned to look. It was just a kid chasing another kid with a wooden sword. Fenrick and Narindo were on edge. Something was about to happen. Tell me about your new band, Ulcerreth. What does the

name mean? Alsrith is the dark speech word for the phase of the moon on the last night before the new moon, the last sliver of light. Ulsareth is a whole le day, a day of self reflection. Our band's music attempts to capture that spirit of self reflection. On Alcareth, we listen to our naysayer and think about ourselves and our community your naysayer. Free Orchish villages don't have leaders, We have naysayers. Two years ago we tried rotating leadership.

It was ineffectual. We didn't need leaders. We stuck with it anyway, because we felt like we had to, because those were the rules we had come up with. Then one person said, basically, this is bullshit. We don't need someone to tell us what to do. We need someone to tell us what to stop doing. We need someone to tell us what we're doing wrong. Every new moon,

every village picks a new naysayer. That person spends the month picking up heart group structures, observing what's happening, being critical. On Alsaret, we fast and listen to the naysayer. They don't offer solutions necessarily, but instead bring our problems to light. Does that work surprisingly well, except about a third of the naysayers end up leaving after their month. Some go to other villages, some good to live in the forest, like Narinda Alsyreth singer did, but most leave the woods.

As we put it, most go back to civilization. That's why Noriinda's name sound of familiar when she didn't she introduced herself. To be honest, I saw your name list in the liner notes and didn't pay much attention to the rest. That's an argument for me to take my name off our next release. If there is one, why did you put it there in the first place, Why did you agree to this interview? And what do you mean if there is one? I told you we're at war. Yeah,

we're losing that war. He took a deep breath, trying to keep himself calm. He didn't strike me as a man who was afraid to cry, but he was clearly trying to keep his composure. There's no way that Gray Morrow would have let you talk to me here if any of us thought that Gray Morrow had a future. There's no way I would have talked to you at all if I thought I was going to be alive to see another alterra. Why are you losing? Why are

you going to die? It's not a question of military efficacy, or of bravery or strength or any of that ship. It's just a question of numbers or seen society. As a military society, every member fights as far as we can tell, they've got fiftundred warriors. We've got five hundred, so use guerrilla tactics. Golf and bull shook his head. Striking Rick Green down from behind was a cowardly action. I can justify it almost by the fact that Green had declared himself my monarch. But the or Seen warriors

are my peers. They would not stalk me in the night. I will not stalk them. That sounds, I know how it sounds. So this interview I want to be remembered. I want the free Orcs of Cascadia to be remembered. I put my name on the liner notes so that someone like you, an anti fascist music blogger, would talk to me. I leveraged my own infamy to draw attention to what we're doing, what we've done. I fucking hate

the tragic utopian trope. What like seriously like fuck you? Okay, I know I'm here as a journalist, but I'm not gonna write your fucking obituary. I don't think I've ever turned on an interview subject like that before. I get it.

Hopeless causes are beautiful, but as I understand it, the whole goddamn point of holding onto your honor more firmly than your life is because the world is a better place for everyone if more people did that, right, Okay, the world isn't a goddamn better place if you let your subculture. And I'm sorry, I know it's very serious and I'm not trying to downplay it, but that's what this is, A musical subculture be taken over by fucking Nazis. And I respect that you're going to fight them for it.

That's cool. But if you consider buying some guns, maybe a few drones. They'll come in here with spears, right, and you'll fight them off with other spears. It's man, there are fucking Nazis everywhere. If you don't give a shit about going to jail or dying, then fucking shoot the Nazis. We're trying to kill you. You You don't understand,

You're fucking right, I don't, if I'm being honest. Most of the time I was waiting, I spent flirting with Norenda and avoiding talking to Fenrich Horenda asked me to keep our conversation off the wreck heard. We didn't talk about Gray Morrow or the orc thing much anyway. Everything I learned about the village and its culture, I learned by observation. Only an elderly man came by and offered us cold tea and wooden mugs steeped BlackBerry leaves sweetened

with juice from the berries. He said, no caffeine, no other particularly strong medicinal effects. The three of us took cups from his bladder, and he continued down the street passing out drinks. No one else approached us. I watched people go about their lives, though the tension in the air was thick. I saw a few people look at cell phones and spent a not inconsiderable amount of time trying to decide if that was hypocritical and or bad

ops SEC. Eventually I gave up because frankly, it wasn't my business, and one of the most interesting things about all the post civilization groups is all the bits and pieces they choose to carry over from mainstream culture. Finally, after an hour, Fenric stood up come with me. I followed her to the other side of town and through a smaller gait. On the other side, a box truck that had seen better days sat on a road that had to We skirted around the truck and up into

the black forest. The scorched hills looked more like meadows than forests, with green grass and undergrowth broken only by black spikes of burned trees. We followed the path this way and that, and soon I was lost. Soon after fog set in, I was further through the looking glass than I had realized. I imagined us lost a mile from a town full of people who gave a double meaning to the word stranger, and probably at least an

hour's drive from civilization. My guard hadn't shown me much in the way of kindness, and I was on my way to meet someone I knew to be a murderer. It's the kind of shift I live for. If I'm being honest, I love my stupid, fucking weird job in the stupid fucking weird world we live in. Thank you, my readers, for making that possible for me. Be sure to check out my Patreon page if this is the

first thing you've read by me. Lots of members only content over there, including a few snippets of orc song from Narinda. The only thing I saw in the distance was a single black spire, thicker than the dead snags around me. As we approached it came into focus as a boulder jutting up into the sky like an angry finger. Sitting at the base of it was a short man with a sword across his lap, golfing bull. I'll leave you to to it, Fenrick said. She left me alone

with an armed murderer. I sat down across from him, took out the notebook and recorder, and asked him questions. All right, convince me we can't fight them dishonorably, because you can't protect an idea by defiling that idea. We don't want them to destroy our way of life, but we don't want to destroy our way of life ourselves either. The basic problem with your scene is that they're interpreting your code of honor to mean might makes right. Yeah. Yes.

By facing them an open battle and nobly dying or whatever your goddamn planet is, you're just letting them make m right. You're letting their superior numbers dictate what your cultures to look like. It's like majority voting, but even dumber because more people die. I expected him to double down on his position. Most men would. What do you suggest instead, Fuck? I don't know. Don't be here when attack, go somewhere else. Stay on the move, build your strength.

Oh ship, That's what Rick Green was doing, wasn't it. Huh Goblin Forest singing in English, a stupid name like Rick Green. All that ship was designed to make Goblin metal more palatable to the masses, to get fans, to get recruits for his stupid, fucking fashy goals. Yep, do that. I mean, don't become fascists or change your name or make your music worse. Everyone knows Goblin Forest and have shipped on Crimpot School. Just don't be obscure for the

sake of being obscure. Fucking advertise you have a decent thing going here. People are abandoning mainstream society left and right, no political pun intended. Make it easier for them to get here. Make it so that when you fight the fashion your epics swords and spears Viking deathmatch, you win better Yet, make it so they don't even want to funk with you because they know they'll lose. I don't know whether that would work, Yeah, but dying doesn't work either.

The Eark way of life isn't meant to be some revolution. It's not meant to supply it the mainstream. It will never appeal to the mainstream, not without losing its soul. Would you live like this? Would you want to? You're right, I'm obsessed with you weird subcultures, but I wouldn't want to live like you. We both stared at each other in silence. It wasn't an uncomfortable silence. We're both just thinking, okay, scrap that. You're never going to get big numbers. You

don't need big numbers. You don't want big numbers. You don't need recruits, you need allies. What would that look like? God, damn dude, all orchishmn note, actually listen to women's ideas. I'm used to guys just talking over me or shutting down completely. If I get mad free orci ish men, I would hope know how to listen. Guns break the spell and the spill you're casting here. It's powerful, it's good. So no guns. Other people have guns, though, Let those

people stand guard or make their arm presence. Note outside or seen camps, other people have access to, say, dock scene, how many recruits are the or scene going to get? If every time some want to be forced Nazi dude joins someone to as his mother what they're about for access to the media. How many recruits are going to join if everyone knows the or sene or poser is putting out substandard water and down goblin metal just to try and lure an impressionable military aged men to fight

their holy war. You'll write those stories. I'm not gonna write you any propaganda, but sure I'll tell the truth. How do we get allies? But at another single, maybe a full length? The gray Fog of a Ruined Forest was the best ship of hurtin years. You're redefining folk music, just like you redefined metal without ship like that, and I'll cover it. Talk to more press, maybe someone other

than you. Not everyone's going to be sympathetic to what you did, even if that fucking guy was a fucking tree Nazi hunting horn cut through the fog and through our conversation, and my subject's face fell into despair for a half second before determination took over. What's that? Interviews over and I thought there would be more time another day. At least we have to get you out of here. Turns out Fenrik had taken us on a purposefully circatuitous

route into the woods. It wasn't a quarter of a mile straight downhill before golf and Bull and I reached the box truck at the back entrance to Graymorrow, Norinda and Fenric stood there talking with a kid, maybe fifteen, who was out of breath. She was dressed in scraps of fur and leather and cloth, like you might imagine a medieval beggar. It wasn't until I noticed all the twigs and sticks and moss tangled up in the fabrics I recognized it as camouflage. I saw about thirty the scout,

for that's what she was said about. Fenrick asked, exactly thirty ten with pikes, ten with tower, shields and swords, five archers, two scouts to command, one non combatant. I'd guess a surgeon, but I couldn't promise how far away I asked. Fenrick glared at me for interrupting. Five miles Norenda said probably three and a half by now downhill. We have time to get you out with the children and the elders. The scout had just run five miles uphill because she was too stubborn to use a walkie

talkie or a cell phone. We should evacuate everyone. Golfen Bull said what Fenrick asked. We've got walls and almost even numbers. Fuck them, this is our home. I wanted to shout at her. I wanted to shake her, to tell her this wasn't a fucking game, that it wasn't the twelfth century, and that killing people or dying over some squatted chunk of nowhere was somewhere between stupid and reprehensible.

It didn't, though I'm a good journalist, This isn't the place for us to debate this, Nerenda said, and all four of them walked through the gate and left me standing by the truck. That was why the gardens were untended, and with the trash was piled up and the hides were left to rot. They were expecting this. They'd lost their will to pretend like their lives were going to

continue to progress forward. I'm not the first to suggest that nihilism is the dominant effect of society today, with climate change destroying communities and bioregions all over the map, with the economic crisis deepening and the wealth gap widening, I think all of us are guilty of forgetting to tend our gardens. All of us have a hard time figuring out why it matters whether or not we deal with our trash. All of us have proverbial or literal Nazis marching on us. The Nazis the free orcs A

Cascady are dealing with are the literal variety. Some cosplain fascist was about to stick a sword between Norinda's ribs by ale rose in my throat. I don't know. I believe in love at first sight or any of that ship, but I just couldn't handle the idea. I fucking hate honor. I will never be an orc. I got lost running through solutions to the problem of hypothetical arrows and swords

that were going to interfere with Nourinda's continued existence. Most of those solutions involved AsSalt rifles, which I didn't have access to. Cars, though were available. What's thirty warriors of medieval armor versus one station wagon driven by an angry woman with a lead foot. I put the odds in my favor. I wasn't going to do it, though. Instead I waited to evacuate. I don't think that speaks well

of me. Individually and in groups, people came out through the gate and loaded bags and baskets onto the back of the truck. Noarinda returned with a simple backpack sewn from raw hide. Most of her belongings were probably wherever she engulf Am Bull and the rest of Alstreth lived.

She handed me my phone. I didn't have service. I wondered whether or not she engulfing Bullward dating It wasn't relevant to the present moment exactly, but my mind always is a way of thinking about bullshit to avoid thinking about impending doom. Another important effect of our generation distract ourselves with disaster with petty things like love and jealousy. I don't know what you said to Golf and Bullner

and said, but whatever it was worked. He just convinced everyone to evacuate everyone, I asked, shocked, everyone except him and Fenrik and Gorn. Which one's Gorn, the man who brought us tea? Do you remember him? He's old as ship, though, I said, because I have no fucking manners or common sense. Yeah, he's old as ship. He's a linguist by training. His main hobby is writing morbid poetry and dark speech, and when he can't figure out how to say something, he

just makes up new words. He developed about a third of the language. Did all that ship before orc culture was even around he's also a widower three times over. He doesn't give a shit about dying. His last chat book was called Soon I will return to the earth. Oh, Gorn is going to die today. Golf and Bull and Fenric they're going to hold the wall as long as they can and then fall back to the woods. And you, I asked, I'm driving us out of here to another village.

Then I'll take you home after that. I don't know, girl, I don't know. If I signed up for this, I might leave the woods go back to being a vet tech. I just nodded. I was too biased to offer objective life advice. Oh, and Golf and Bull said to give you this, he said, it's in case he dies. He says, you're right. You shouldn't have to write his obituary. So we wrote his own. She handed me a piece of paper. I piled into the back of the box truck with forty other people, many of them in tears, many of

them in shock, and we drove away from Graymorrow. None of the three free Orc survived the battle. Gorn died and paled on a spear while holding the gate. Fedric was killed by an arrow that struck her in the back. Of the neck as she and golfing Bull ran golf and Bull Fenric's lover turned and stood his ground over her body. I didn't know any of that yet. I

found out when Norinda found out two days later. Maybe all three of them would have survived if I hadn't interfered and they'd all fought with equal numbers, Maybe more of them would have died. Maybe I can forgive myself. Maybe there's nothing to forgive. In the back of the truck, by the light coming in through a crack in the steel wall, I read golf and Bull's note all my life. I didn't give a shit about anything. I liked weed and metal in whatever counterculture trend was big in a

given year, but my heart wasn't in it. I just went through the motions until I became an orc, saying I'm an orc and meaning it. Isn't like a trans man saying he's a man and meaning it. Gender is a social construct that goes back as far as I understand, to the beginning of humanity. There has always been gender, and there have always been people who transgress the roles assigned to them at birth. An orc is a social

construct that we just fucking made up. I mean, I guess the Orc is an archetype too, but it's a fantasy archetype. We know what to make believe. Make believe. Eve is what gave my life meaning. I promise you that for me. The day we decided we were works was the first day that the sun shone benevolence upon the world. It was the first day that color radiated from everything I saw. It was the first day that the rain on my roof tapped out codes of meaning.

It was the first day of my life, my real life, my first Also, I fell in love with the world. Everyone finds meaning in different ways. I found meaning by believing in some ship we made up and letting that be real. I was born Jason Sanchez. I died gulfing bull. I'm not sorry. That was great that I mean, not my narration, the story. The story, not my narration. H the second way finished. We all just got that little smirk on our face, like that was delightful. Yeah, Margret,

you're the best. Yeah, I mean, if I were going to be an Orc, there would be rifles but its own problems. Yeah, this is absolutely this is like a really good example of what I mean that when I write utopian fiction or like fiction about other societies. I'm not saying, hey, everyone go do this, or like this is what people should do. No, I mean I liked that.

I like I like that I've had that experience in other cultures, you know, places like slab City and different kind of encampments and whatnot that I've spent a lot of time and as a journalist where it's like I'm fascinated by and I respect aspects of this, but like, I also think some of these things are that you're doing or dumb or I don't understand why you do it, or this isn't like you know, but you don't your

notes don't matter. You know, that's not your job, although actually having an impact in that way is is kind of Yeah, I don't know. Somebody go somebody go make an work village. Yeah, yeah, I'll go out there, I'll report on it. We'll go. It'll be fine. Don't take the banda all sort of though I already stole that. There's a number of dope band names in here. All right, people should make orc folk. I'd be really excited to hear make orc folk abandon civilization to live as fantasy. Creatures, um,

fight fascists, all that good stuff. Yeah, Margaret, is there anything you'd like to plug? Well? I do have a new book out, or a reprint of an older book called A Country Ghost that is a more directly utopian book. It's out from a K Press, came out last month, and um, I think that's it. That's the main thing. Oh, you can support me on Patreon, although it's no longer supporting me on Patreon. It's supporting a publishing thing that I'm starting back up with people called Strangers and a

Tangled Wilderness. And it will publish fiction and memoir and like the kind of like more culture side of radical politics and less the like theory and stuff. What's the patreon Patreon dot com slash Strangers in the Tangled Wilderness because why would I pick short names for things? Don't do that? Yeah, and we have we have a live show coming up right, Robert, uh that doesn't sound like us. It's a virtual live show of for Behind the Bastards

put our Friend prop that's on Thursday February. Allegedly moment House dot com slash Behind the Bastards. I can't confirm or deny that. Okay, you're getting a lawyer on here before you can. Sure, Yeah, let's get Moira on the horn and where come on the horn and tell us if we're actually doing this thing? That? Yeah? Are we also? Are we alive? That's another question? How I texture that most days? Um? All right, well, thank you Margaret, and thank you all for tuning in in the first year.

Of the rest of the next year. Ya 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.