It Could Happen Here Weekly 160

to an end. But for Kurdish and other minority communities, recent days have bought violent attacks, ethnic cleansing and occupation by Turkey's back Jahadis groups in an attempt to take advantage of the chaos by crushing the Rajava Revolution. Turkey and it's most openly committing war crimes against the regions autonomous communities. Many thousands have already been forced to be

displaced and thousands more are in danger. To make matters worth this remains largely absent from the mainstream media reporting on Syria. If you'd like to share your solidarity with the people of northern and Eastern Syria, please call on Congress to take urgent action by passing the emergency legislation to stop the violence, hold Turkey accountable, and commit US sport to the Syrian Democratic forces and the diverse communities under their protection. If you want to take action today,

you can go to defend Rajaba dot org. That's d E F E N d R oja va dot org. If you are able to the most effective action we can take right now is to call a couple of representatives, one representative and one Senator.

find those on Defendbrajaba dot org. If you'd like to donate financially instead, especially to this humanitarian aid effort for the tens of thousands of people who have been displaced by the SNA's advances, you can donate to two organizations that I would suggest to. First would be Heavier Sre the Curtis Red Crescent. That's h E YVA s O R dot com and you want to go slash e n If you want to see their website in English, you can donate there. The other one will be the

Free Burma Rangers who are currently working in Raka. I was talking to my friend Habat who works with them. You can donate to them at www dot free Free Burma b U r m A Rangers dot com. We will put all of this in the show notes, although if you're driving you have to write them down. Those are the concrete ways that we can help right now and what is unfolding as a very terrible situation in No Syria. Thanks, I hope you do an episode.

years since Trump's been out of office. So let's just start all the way back to the beginning for background on mister Patel here. Okay, So, Cash Pattel was born in New York, but after graduating law school in two thousand and five, he worked as a public defender in Florida for nine years before becoming a federal prosecutor in the National Security Division of the DOJ. He didn't really

want to be a public defender. It's that he really couldn't get any other jobs because he wasn't like that's skilled. So he ended up just working as a public defender, even though it wasn't really what he wanted to do out of law. But once he got to the DOJ, he worked as a terrorism prosecutor. According to a DoD profile, Patel quote led investigations spanning multiple theaters of conflict and oversaw the successful prosecution of criminals aligned with al Qaeda, ISIS,

and other terroot groups unquote. Patel also worked with quote counter terrorism units to conduct collaborative global targeting operations against high value terrorism targets unquote.

Patel actually was not even part of the trial team, was only a junior staff member at the DOJ at the time, and he was removed from this case for clashing with the US Attorney's office. But this incident kind of marks the start of a few unfortunate events in his career that really started to kind of turn Patel

against the justice system. To the New York Times, in twenty sixteen, Patel was thrown out of a courtroom for wearing quote rumpled khakis, boat shoes and a too small borrowed jacket unquote.

him excel in his own career. But in twenty eighteen, Patel got his really first like big break, with Republican Representative Devin and Nunez hiring Patel to be the House Intelligence Committee's lead investigator to disrupt the Special Council investigation into Russian interference in the twenty sixteen election. Trump was impressed enough with Patel's work under Nunez that he gave Patel a job on the National Security Council and later served as chief of staff to Acting Secretary of Defense

Christopher Miller. Trump mused about having Patel as deputy director of the FBI or director of the CIA in late twenty twenty after the election, but this led to harsh resistance from within his own administration, with ag Bill Barr saying that Patel would only become FBI director quote over my dead body, unquote. So I don't know if we'll have any updates on that, yeah say. But instead, back in twenty twenty, Trump just put Patel on the Pentagon transition team.

Trump basically tasked Patel was doing dirty work and awarded him with promotions for following orders. Patel advised on the Ukraine impeachment, spread conspiracy theories that Ukraine, not Russia, meddled in the twenty sixteen election, created a list of intelligence agency officials to fire in February of twenty twenty, and helped manage the now dismissed a classified documents case against Trump.

The former deputy national advisor to Trump, Charles Kupperman, said in an interview quote Trump wanted to make Cash a political executioner to root out and fire individuals on the White House staff who weren't being as loyal as he

thought they should be unquote. So that's kind of a good look at him as a person, and like what Cash's rule is like specifically for Trump and with the possibility of the justice system becoming just more and more of like a tool to target Trump's political rivals, Cash is the exact guy that you would pick, especially for a job that has like an investigative focus like the FBI. But Cash isn't always good at his job necessarily.

As the State Department was working to communicate with officials in Nigeria to clear airspace for the operation, Patel, who was not part of this operation, just called the Pentagon saying that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had gotten approval from Nigeria and the airspace was deconflicted, so as the Seals were about to land in Nigeria, defense officials couldn't verify that the flight actually had clearance, leaving the aircraft to circle over the target for hours as they scrambled

to get approval from Nigeria. According to former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Patel was never in communication with Mike Pompeo about this mission, and Defense officials concluded that Patel quote made the approval story up. Unquote. Cool guy, this is wild. You almost caught Sealed Team six like shot out of the air because you made up a story about having flight clearance.

And though he has criticized the wide footprint of the FBI and its surveillance operations though really only the ones targeted against Trump and his campaign, Cash's ideal FBI would not in fact have like a more limited presence out in the world, saying that after closing the Hoover Building, quote, then I'd take the seven thousand employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals.

Go be cops, your cops, go be cops unquote. So this is what you give like a seven year old the keys to the FBI, And this is this is this is the kind of stuff he's talking about. Yeah, it's like I'm going to send all these administrative employees out into the world to chase down criminals.

But last year, Patel published a book titled Government Gangsters, the Deep State, The Truth and the Battle for Our Democracy, where he also proposed relocating the FBI headquarters out of Washington, d C. To quote prevent institutional capture and curb FBI leadership from engaging in political gamesmanship unquote, though the bulk of this book also details like why we must root out politicians, journalists, big tech, and quote unquote members of

the unelected bureaucracy that operate the deep state, so you know, like the FBI engaging in a little bit of political gamesmanship is okay. In the appendix of this book, it contains the names of sixty alleged members of the deep state, most of them either like former Trump cabinet people who like turned on Trump or just like current Biden adamin people. It's all pretty silly, but it's not like he actually plans to take out political prosecutions away from like the

FBI's operational structure. Like, come on, buddy, this is like your entire plan. In an interview with Steve Bannon last year, Patel reiterated the goal of targeted prosecutions against political enemies, saying, quote, we will go out and the conspirators, not just in the government, but in the media. Yes, we're going to come after people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We're going to come after you unquote.

a loop. I like didn't really like process that like concept of like how just broken the reality structure will be with something like so like clear, yep, that's his FBI plans.

So this is this, this is the section where we're going to really get into Patel's super super heavy q ties, which is kind of like a throwback.

in popular Q and on influencers. In February twenty twenty two, Patel posted a photo of a beer pint and the arm of someone wearing a flannel shirt, with text saying he was quote having a beer with Q right now unquote. Ptel continued to frequently interact with the Q account, make Q and on related posts, and do reoccurring appearances on Q and on linked podcasts, most notably the X twenty two Report, The Matrix Xxx Grove Show, and Red Pill

seventy eight. It's been a while since I've listened to these types of shows, and it was it was like a huge throwback, ah man, and they're like all chugging along and now they're like chugging along better than ever, which is, you know, not ideal for me on these shows. Cash has praised the Q and on fandom researchers, saying both he and the President have been impressed. It's all like very pandering, but it really works for these people I've seen.

And so what I try to do, is what I try to do with anything q or otherwise, is you can't ignore that group of people that has such a strong dominant following unquote in the interview, Petel also said of Q and on there's a lot of good to a lot of it, and he agreed with the co host who said Q has been so right on so many things, saying, quote, I agree with you. He shall get credit for all the things he has accomplished because

it's hard to establish a movement. Let's call it that, because that's what it is.

support in preparation for them to take power back. And that's what he did like a lot in twenty twenty two. Most of those podcasts were leading up to the midterms as well, so it is part of this general political strategy to engage with these like much more niche kind of smaller QAnon shows, which not only does like you know, grow their audience over time as well, it does help their audience grow, it also just establishes like a completely

siloed media ecosystem away from mainstream news like that. That is part of what they're doing, right. That's why Trump made truth Social is to create more of these reality tunnels, more of these like information silos. Now, Patel kept busy in between twenty twenty and twenty twenty four with a variety of kind of griff ventures. I'm going to quote from the New York Times here.

and to talk with me about that. Another guy who's always angry about Syria and also has been to Syria, James, And you know, just as a note, I think a lot of the people podcasting about this right now are talking about a place they've never been, although James and I have not been to EdLib. So you know, it's true. We're going to be fairly focused on our experiences in the Kurdish regions, but at least we're not just bullshitting about a place that we've read about on the internet.

Their Russian backers more or less abandoned them, focused on getting their stuff and their people, those who survived out of the country, and as a result, there is no more a SAD regime. Right A SAD fled the country at some point. It was initially speculated that a Sad had fled on an aircraft on Saturday night as rebels

were entering Damascus. That seems to be untrue, or perhaps it was true, but the speculation that aircraft had crashed or have been shut down, certainly it does not seem to SAD now seems to be.

I think that obviously that's pointless and pure ut but I want to address I guess this kind of really disappointing response I've seen from a lot of people on the left that oh, yeah, well either I mean you have the like the grey zone tendency, right that the sab was great actually in the protection of human rights in the region, and the like the Syria was socialism in Karna, which is obviously nonsense, right, Like, this is a person who, as we have seen in the last week,

whose regime prisons were holding thousands of people, killed tens of thousands of people, tortured people to death in some cases in Sednaia prison, which is a big prison in Damascus, certainly a Damascus i should.

few weeks heartbreaking. And anybody who's prepared to apologize for that or prepared to say that that was good, I think you really need to question if there's someone who's aligned with you. But in addition to that tendency, there's one that sort of holds that in Syria, like what

will come next is worse? Right, what will come next to or we don't know, of course, we don't know what will come next, None of us can see the future, but what will come next will make a sad look like it was a preferable option, And like, I feel that we need to address that because I think it's one of the long legacies of authoritarian socialist how do I say this, like the authoritarian socialist media project.

of the fighting. Like these guys are Turkish backed, you know, yeah, yeah, the extent that that even matters, right, Like the that like this is not the CIA did not orchestrate all of this. The guys the CIA were really trying to back in Syria basically all died.

from Assyria as a democratic project. Support is the SDF as a partner force in the fight against ISIS, and that's been very clear when they have failed to defend the anes against genocidal violence, ethnic cleansing in a free and right what we're seeing again now in the Talifat area. I'll use that terminology because if you want to look it up on Google Maps, that's easier to find the violence that we've seen repeatedly from the Turkish back Syrian

National Army or Turkish free Syrian Armies are sometimes called. Right, the United States hasn't defended the people of the ans against and it won't because that's not what it's there to do. And as much as we would like it too, I don't think that as in the nature of the US mission in Syria, and I don't think it's in the nature of the US as a state to support a project which is seeking to build democracy without the state. It's not in the nature of the state.

maintained an aerial presence, was a light ground footprint. We shouldn't expect the US to show up for the people who showed.

country that had a plan was Israel. And what Israel's plan was was to invade Syria in the Golan Heights right, to increase their area of control, and then to bomb almost all of the aircraft. And perhaps I don't know it also includes air defense systems, but from what the IDF is saying today, they have bombed all of the Syrian Air Forces aircraft that had fallen into rebel hands. This includes ammunition for the aircraft. It includes the ammunition

dump at Comishlow Airport. About half an hour before Robert and I started recording here on Monday, I saw a video from a friend in Kamishlow of the ammunition dump at the airport, which have previously belonged to the regime now belongs to the A and E s exploding after it had been hit by an IDFs. Right. So what they're trying to do, I guess, is deny any of those weapons to people who they perceive as a threat

to their interests. Yep, and like there's been I don't know if you're seeing this also row it by a lot of like Israeli accounts being like, oh we stand with the curd Israel and the Kurds are won. And first of all, I want to warn you. I want to warn you that we have an advertising breakcoming. Robert is what I want to warn you about.

trend on too because it's a multi ethnic project. Right, like the areas that we'll talk about in a minute where the SDF is being attacked those areas, the largest component of the SDF is is Arab, yeah, forces right, and that that is the case in the SDF as a whole. Actually, the majority of the SDF is now Arab, not not Kurdish. I would be very skeptic of the expertise of anyone who refers to things in these monolithic absolutes, right, the Sunnis, the Shias, yeah, the alah Whites, the Kurds.

There are a lot of different groups in Syria, and those groups are comprised of individuals, and those individuals shockingly have different and distinct goals and experiences and desires.

things in those terms. And I would be skeptical, to return to what we were talking about earlier, Robert, of people who tell you that, like we should expect the one I see most is Syria to turn into Lebanon, right, And like you and I have been talking about this before we recorded, but that's not a useful example in my mind of what we're likely to see in Syria, right, And the reason for that is that like in Lebanon, yes, there was a there was like a US Air.

They're extremely different, right. The Salvation Government under HDS is people have been arrested for playing music at their own weddings. It is, it is neither democratic nor particularly liberatory. And then we have the an S, which I would argue is the only democracy in the Middle East. Yeah, certainly, the only democracy where people of different ethnicities and genders matter the same amount.

just get your news from telegram. Like I would also caution people who are perhaps new to this, who who are finding these telegram channels, to take everything you read on there with a pinch of salt. You'll see a lot of disinformation there. One of the BBC had an expert on and he was like, Oh, every time we see people pulling down statues of dictators, I'm a bit concerned, and like, I have to think about how to express this. It seems to me deeply as lamophobic or bigoted or racist.

I don't quite know the white term to say. Oh, the people of this country and the places in the last ten twenty years where we've seen people pulling down statues of dictators have largely been in the Middle East right to say that, oh, these people are incapable of self governance, these people are incapable of living in peace with one another, But like they're not. We've seen that in Rajava, and I don't think that the right response now is to respond with skepticism to like the Syrian

people's ability to live in peace. They've been at war for fifteen years, fourteen years, thirteen thirteen years, thirteen and a half years. But I think that there is not an appetite for more killing and more dying, certainly from what I've seen and what I've heard.

it doesn't point to sort of wild sectarian violence. We don't have the situation we had in Iraq, right, Right, we have a US occupation which sits inside its basis and it only leaves c biglely to kill people. Right from the perspective of the people living in Iraq, that that's what the US occupation looked like for the most part. Right, it's guys in big military vehicles who kill civilians by mistake.

Damascus today. That's very concerning.

If you see people in the streets, you see people tearing down statues of dictators, you see people celebrating the end of a regime that oppressed them for decades, and you immediately go to, oh, this is bad, Like why do you even bother? If we don't believe that people can govern themselves, if we don't believe that the people in the street are normally the people who are right, and if we don't believe that the downfall of tyrannical regimes is.

We like to read about them, and you and I both take a great interest in history, and I think we'd be unwise to not look at this and learn from it, especially with HTS who massively professionalized since the ceasefire in twenty twenty. I think professionalists is probably the

right word. Like that command, the technology, that the way they operated looked a lot more like a modern military than it did, you know, the militias, like I'm sure you and I both remember the early Syrian of a war for people who are a bit younger than us. Like some of the most incredible improvised weapons that I've seen.

In particular, I think it was very interesting that they captured armored vehicles and and they were able to combine armor and infantry very effectively, which is not easy to

do right, that has eluded even some professional militaries. They also very effectively used drones, both drones to drop bombs and drones to adjust their artillery and mortifier, which I think is something that again like that modern militaries do, but it's not easy to do right, And it's not like HDS could do massive exercises in the lead up to this operation, like they seem to have professionalized very quickly.

Another area that they were you can see that they've learned a lot from the conflicts in Ukraine and perhaps in Miammar too, was their use of FPV drones, a first person in view drone. How do you describe it. It's like your eyes are on the front of the drone. Is that a good description, Robert, Yeah, it's like you're flying.

which they used incredibly effectively. They had these massive first person view drones that were almost like a sort of Ersat's cruise missile, and it was I think one of those that penetrated some kind of command headquarters in Aleppo in the early days of the battle there, killed several important offices and commanders and helped to then spread that panic which they rode all the way to Damascus. Right, So,

like this use of drones was extremely consequential. The other thing that they used in which we've seen the SDF use a lot, is these pulse art thermal optics. So a thermal optic sees heat, right, I guess would be the easiest way to describe it. And it maps heat in a visual fashion for the user, and in this case, they put them on their rifles and they're able to

see other people. At our friend Carl, who we had on last week week before maybe Carl made a really good video about thermal versus night vision on his Arrange TV channel. I'll link it in the notes because I think it's worth people checking out. They're not familiar with this technology at all. The optics he used were not

the optics they're using, but these thermal optics. You've seen them a lot with the SDF, especially in a freen like they'll do these night missions, right, and when you look at the recording from the thermal optic, it it looks like people are glowing because they are the hottest things in that area, and it makes it very easy to target people. And HDS us these a lot when they were attacking a LAPPA, right, these thermal optics that they mounted on their rifles, and they allowed them to

pretty much. The United States used to talk about owning the night right. Yes, it had night vision where no one else does. Night Vision's proliferated a long way now, and that means that some of the ways that they used to use night vision they can't anymore. Like, for instance, they used to send out lasers that were any visible

and the night vision to aim weapons. If your adversary has night vision as well, you've now created a giant line that goes right back to you if you're using a laser aiming device, So.

communications were solid. You know, you can tell from their appearance that a lot of these guys are professionalized. They were almost indistinguishable from US troops. Like I think you and I had both responded to this tweet about some YouTube guy was shocked that people were wearing helmets and body armor, which that has been the esthetic of violence, at least in places where the US has operated for I know, half a decade. Would you say, like the sort of US Special Forces?

dresses that way. Everybody looks very similar. Yeah, now because it's just the most kind of I mean, number one, there's a lot of that gear lying around and it's cheap. And number two like it works, it's a load out that works.

incredible professionalism or incredible professionism. I'm overstating it, but this dramatic change in the appearance and conduct of these rebels, particularly HTS, occurred over about three or four years from the cease fire in twenty twenty to this offensive in twenty twenty four, and I think it gives us an insight into the way that war is changing, right, that access to information is easier than it ever has been, and access to a lot of these technologies has proliferated

massively because we've seen in Myanmar, right, drones proliferate people three D print little night vision goggles in Memba. Spoke to Milk about it about a year and a half ago. People remember Milk from our Meanma series about three D printing little night vision goggles that use the camera from you know those security cameras, Yeah, that can kind of see at night. They use those and then a tiny

LCD screen. Of course, drones are everywhere now, right, things like plate carriers even you see rebels in Meanma wearing them, buying them from Ali Express. Like all of the technology, all of the tactics are also much easier to find on the internet. You know, Robert and I have both spoken to people who go said they go on YouTube to learn about like military tactics and small arms even and you know, how to use different weapons systems when

they capture them. I think it's a real change in the way that conflict is conducted, and it's one that we will probably continue to see as like, you know, the world isn't getting any more peaceful, Nope, and waste a lot of you know, Russia and Iran took a massive l in Syria. That doesn't mean that they're not gone as sort of global actors. We will continue to see,

particularly Russia obviously fighting in Ukraine. And I think it's worth looking at what happened in Syria so that we can understand what we're going to see in other parts of the world.

have to some extent been built in Syria. Both like this is where we get a lot of the fuel behind the right wing surge that has been occurring over the last few years, started because of the refugee crisis, you know, but also a lot of the tactics and weapons shit that like Israel is doing right now in Gaza, like Cereal, was the lab to a significant extent for

how authoritarian regimes would crack down. And it was also the impetus behind a lot of the most significant things that have been happening over the last decade and change.

eye on it. And I just want to end by saying that like the democratic project in Rojava is under a great deal of threat, Yes, currently more than it has been for perhaps a decade.

You find them on all different kinds of social media. They have a toolkit for supporting JAVA right now, I would urge you if you care about that project, if you care about building democracy without the state, care about building a place where women and men are equal. And the revolution was led by women, it's not a revolution that include women, it's revolution by women for women. I would encourage you to do what you can to support them.

an interesting character. People have had a lot to say about him, and so I went through his online footprint, everything I can find on his social media, and I wrote an article for my substack, shatter Zone, and I'm going to be reading that in a slightly amended form for you now as today's episode. I've spent much of the last ten years reading manifestos and being a fly on the wall in different little online boltholes where extremists

plan and seek to incite mass shootings. When Luigi Mangione, the suspected shooter of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, was arrested at a McDonald's, it didn't take long for digital sleuths to put together a comprehensive record of his online activity.

I will tell you now that nothing he read or posted explains why he gunned down an insurance executive better than this single image in the background of his Twitter profile and the images, of course, of an X ray showing four screws in someone's lower base spine, apparently due to a lumbar spinal fusion surgery. The day after I wrote this article, The New York Times published a piece

after finding Luigi's read it. The piece by Mike Baker, Mike Isaac, and my old boss at Bellancat, Eric Tohller, confirms that he had a spinal fusion surgery, that he had dealt with back pain for years, which had been minor and then gotten much worse after a surfing injury, and had grown even worse after slipping on a piece of paper caused persistent problems, including pain when he sat down, twitching leg muscles, and numbness in his growing in bladder.

According to The New York Times, he had that spinal fusion surgery, which he had been deeply frightened of ahead of time, but which resolved those symptoms, and then he continued to have other symptoms, probably unrelated to the back pain. It's unclear if the back pain came back, but what is clear is that he wrote constantly online about pain and about his struggles with various other health issues, including a persistent brain fog that he seemed unable to get

care for. His friend R Jay, who lived with him at an intentional community for digital workers in Honolulu starting in twenty twenty two, confirms that Luigi suffered an injury shortly after taking a basic surfing class after moving there. This laid him up in bed for about a week, unable to move. His friends had to seek the special

bed to help him with the pain. In general, we have ample confirmation that he was someone who dealt with a series of escalating health issues that changed him from an extremely active, physically fit young man into somebody who felt like they were no longer able to do or enjoy the things they had previously been able to do and enjoy. Now this is most of what we know about the health history of Luigi Mangione as of December tenth.

Now when I record this twenty twenty four. As I write this, a purported manifesto is making the rounds online which discusses health issues his mother faced. It's still unclear if that manifesto is real. kN Klippenstein has finally gotten access to what he claims is the draft of the manifesto that the shooter had on him when he was arrested by the police. I don't know if that's a manifesto or something he wrote while nervous, because he largely addresses the cops in it and tells them you know

what to expect when searching him. But again, at the moment, this purported manifesto that was also posted on substack, very unclear as to whether or not that's real. So for this today, we're going to stick with what we can verify, and what we can verify is that Luigi Mangione suffered from chronic back pain. He had five different books in his Goodreads that he read about dealing with back pain and healing from back pain, as well as other chronic

health issues. If he is the shooter, then we can confirm he also chose to act out by targeting and insurance CEO. The New York Times has stated that he was arrested with a two hundred and sixty two word manifesto which has since been leaked, and in that manifesto, he describes the executives who run insurance companies as parasites who quote continue to abuse our country for I mince profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it. In addition to all this, we know

that Luigi came from a wealthy family. His grandfather made millions running a series of country clubs, nursing homes and office buildings and hospitals. One of his cousins is a Republican state legislator. It is unclear if Luigi had any access to the family money, but he was clearly financially comfortable enough to move to Hawaii and pay to join an intentional community. He had engineering degrees and a promising early employment history. This is a man who had options.

He could have been almost anything he wanted to be, and the thing that he ultimately chose to do with his life after suffering a debilitating series of health issues was to shoot the CEO of United Healthcare, Luigi Mangione. Radicalized by pain. It's a well known fact that most terrorists tend to be radicalized in communities. Much of my career was spent watching eight chan turn from an imageboard dedicated into gamer gate into a machine for generating white

nationalists mass shooters. These people often appeared as lone wolves to the untrained eye, but they were radicalized intentionally in and by a community. Much will be made in the

coming days and months about Luigi's online footprints. I will go into some detail about where he spent his time and how we should characterize it, but I want to be clear at the outset that his intellectual diet does not seem to be what made him choose to take action, although it may have influenced the specific kind of action he took. Luigi followed a lot of accounts on Twitter that are wildly popular with young men, like Joe Rogan.

He listened to Jordan Peterson and Tucker Carlson and agreed with them on certain things, but he also had cogent criticisms of their arguments and presentation. Here's what he said about Jordan Peterson on May fourteenth. This is why Jordan Peterson always bothers me. Overcomplicates everything he says aloud, wasting

everyone's mental bandwidth and having to decipher it. The best teachers are the best communicators, clear, succinct, simple language, which does kind of gel with the fact that he wrote three words on the bullets he used to shoot that Ceo. Luigi also expressed frustration with wokeness and expressed opinions common on the libertarian tech influenced right, like a belief in the social benefits of Christianity, without expressing popular religious beliefs himself.

I've found one post where he talks about how nature abhors a vacuum and shares an article about how Christianity's decline has unleashed terrible new gods. Some of his posts took the form of memes typical to online discourse of this type, but I've also read an essay that he wrote when he was fifteen years old, discussing how Christianity persevere over paganism in ancient Rome and that essay exhibits a long standing interest in this topic and a capacity

to treat it with nuance. His paper is very well written, particularly for a fifteen year old, and while his conclusions are highly arguable, it's not the work of someone hopelessly brainwashed by culture war bullshit. Luigi liked to think and read and come to his own conclusions. He was interested in AI, in cryptocurrency, in life extension, and in a constellation of tech bro adjacent attitudes and philosophies often described

as the Gray Tribe. I found one post where he talks about a senior speech he gave on the Future quote topics ranging from conscious artificial intelligence to human immortality. The term gray tribe was coined by an influential rationalist blogger and psychiatrist named Scott Alexander Siskin. He used it to refer to an intersection of nerd culture with Silicon Valley influenced ideology descending from the online rationalist movement. This

community existed outside of traditional right left eye ideology. Now I've not found any evidence that Luigi was a specific fan of Scott, but he expressed appreciation for several figures associated with this big tent movement, including Peter Teel. If we describe Scott as representing the more liberal flank of the Gray Tribe, Luigi seemed to be drawn to folks

closer to the right wing side of things. The worst person to use this terminology would probably be Teal associate Bilaji Shrinivasan, who has used Gray Tribe framework to describe his ideal big tech takeover of San Francisco and purging of progressives. However, I must stress that Luigi Mangione never expressed any support for this end of the ideology that

I can find. He was a young man of libertarian inclinations who worked in big tech and had ties to San Francisco, but he was also clearly someone still making his mind up about the world. As information about him has come out, I have seen people on the left who initially saw his axis heroic lament that he was a bigoted tech bro. Scott Alexander has been credibly described as a eugenic supporter, as have many other people adjacent to the strains of rationalism and big tech ideology in

which Mangione dabbled. Luigia's Twitter account does indeed include weird posts from his time in Japan, where he theorizes on how to solve falling birth rates by banning pocket pussies

and video game cafes. At other points, he complains about Japanese citizens acting like quote unquote NPC's but race science and eugenics don't seem to have been a focus for him, and I would caution anyone against being overly reductive about a twenty six year old beliefs based purely on a handful of posts that bear no relation to his actions in the world. The evidence that we have of his online footprints suggests someone who was not unmoved by certain

arguments rooted in social justice. He expressed admiration for a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse five about criminalization of poverty in the United States. Quote America is the wealthiest nation in the world, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Ken Hubbard, it ain't no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be. It is, in fact

a crime for an American to be poor. Even though America is a nation of the poor, every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more esteemable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. Neluigi is certainly not the idealized leftist icons some had hoped, but he doesn't easily fit into any

other box. We've got. His interest in gray tribe adjacent thinkers and self help books written by productivity hackers like Tim Ferriss is incredibly common among young men. Much has been made of the four st Hour Review. He gave industrial society and its future the manifesto of Ted Kazinski, But as with the rest of his media diet, he did not view Ted through the simple lens of hero worship. Here's what he wrote quote, he was a violent individual,

rightfully imprisoned, who maimed innocent people. While these actions tend to be characterized as those of a crazy Luddite, however they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme

political revolutionary. I know those words his condemnation of Kazinsky maiming innocent people are not just words, because we have seen the attack he allegedly chose to carry out, not a series of bombings that killed and maimed innocent people with no real power in our society, but a surgical strike against a man at the very top of the system he hated, and one that caused no collateral damage.

He was capable of appreciating some of Kazinsky's conclusions, but ultimately the quote he chose to highlight in his review came not from the manifesto, but from a Reddit post made by a guy with the user name boss Potatoess, who otherwise mostly commented on the Grateful Dead. This post praises Kazinsky for having the balls to realize that peaceful protest has gotten us absolutely nowhere, and complains economic protest

isn't possible in the current system. As a result, violence against those who lead us to such destruction is justified as self defense. Quote. These companies don't care about you, or your kids or your grandkids. They have zero qualms about burning down the planet for a buck, so why should we have an equalms about burning them down to survive. This is not the kind of radicalization pathway our media

is good at discussing or analyzing. The things Luigi read and the people he interacted with online absolutely influenced what he did and how but Boss Potatoess is not some nazi on eight Chan trying to provoke a shooting spree for the lulls. He's a random dude angry about the things seventy percent or more of the country is angry about, and he's expressing a lack of faith in a peaceful

way forward. If you read this post in its entirety as Luigi did, you can't miss the pain there, anxiety and horror at the inevitability of climate change and the looming knowledge that everything good and green on this earth is being fed into the bloody maw of an industry concerned only with maximizing profit. In more ways than one, Luigi Mangione was radicalized by pain. I know many people

who suffer with chronic pain and ongoing medical issues. I will tell you that it is not uncommon, in dark moments, after fruitless, hours long calls about dropped medications or receiving surprise bills, for them to joke about what they'd like to do to the executives who run these companies. These are jokes made in moments of despair and pain. No one I know would ever act on them, because they

all have lives. People to care for into whom they are responsible, they would never really do anything because the consequences to their own loved ones would be so severe. In the months before the shooting, Luigi had cut off all contact with his family. He admitted this in court. His parents eventually filed a missing's persons report in November of this year, and we have evidence that friends tried to contact him on his family's behalf via social media.

As was first noted by a Twitter account, Luigi Mangione expressed interest in the works of Paul Scalis, a tech lawyer, writer, and prominent poster who writes about the Lindie effect, a concept that boils down to this the only effective joke of things is time. Scalus is popular among the set of people Magngione found himself drawn towards and writes about the wisdom of ideas from antiquity. It's not hard to grasp what a man with an academic interest in ancient

realm might see in him. On December fourth, twenty twenty four, Paul made this post. Look, if you don't have any kids and you want of these guys just floating around the big cities. You got your education, but you never really used it. To make money. You got a dead end back office job and a future of just working somewhere until you're seventy five and then dying, Go ahead and do something. It's been suggested that this may have influenced Luigi, and I think the timeline makes it clear

that cannot be the case. Luigia cut off contact with his family in most of his friends months before this. The evidence suggests that he had planned this attack for quite some time. He arrived in New York City on November twenty fourth, on a bus bound from Atlanta, where he did not reside. So I don't think this post represents a piece of his radicalization journey. Nor was Scalus

advocating for people to kill CEOs. But the situation in mindset Scallus described does speak to a lot of young men like Luigi, young and educated, but without intense responsibilities or much hope for the future. This subset of society has always overproduced terrorists, revolutionaries, and of course, mass shooters.

The United States has a mass shooter culture over the last several decades since Columbine, we have grown used to the idea that people who are angry and no longer care if they live or die will sometimes choose to go down killing strangers. In most cases, these shootings are totally random, the victims chosen with no concern beyond maximum body count and maximum attention. More recently, especially since twenty nineteen,

mass shootings have become increasingly politicized. Different extremists, mostly right wing, have used them to put theory into praxis and earned

free pr for their causes. Most people abhor these actions, but we have grown used to the idea that other people will use such acts as a way to spread messages that might otherwise getting gnat It is not coincidental that the white genocide conspiracy theories from Brenton Terrence christ Church Manifesto are now mainstream talking points and conservative politics. Luigimanngione grew up with all of this. He would have come to the same conclusions about the role shootings play

in our society as any other reasonably aware person. What he did, was, of course, not a mass shooting, but the assassination, his actions afterwards, and his possession of a manifesto were all clearly plotted out by someone who knew the social script for how this kind of thing goes in the USA. In the wake of this shooting. Every media organization commenting on it has had to grapple with

the waves of public enthusiasm for Luigi's actions. Right wing media figures condemning the left for celebrating this assassination have been criticized by their own readers and listeners. Insurance companies have pulled down lists of their executives from the Internet. This is because they too, understand the shooter culture of the United States. Like everyone else, they know that any mass shooting that meets with massive media coverage and in

nas trist will spawn copycats. The assassination Luigi is believed to have carried out was new and exciting. It demanded the public's attention in a way that most mass shootings don't. At almost the same time, the United Healthcare CEO was gunned down, a gunman walked into a religious school near Oreville, California, and shot two young children before killing himself. This shooting drew almost no national attention. It was entirely drowned out

by the execution of an insurance industry ceo. The armed and disaffected young men who are most drawn to this sort of thing will not miss this fact. I believe Luigi Mangione was radicalized by pain. The shooters who follow him will all have their own reasons for what they do for their own journeys to that violent end, but ultimately they'll do what they do because Luigi proved it's what gets attention.

be a bit different. Is going to start out somewhat similar in that I am going to lay out a brief explanation of the sort of material causes of the inflation cycle and talk a bit about inflation theories, which is what we've been largely doing on this show for

a while. And then I am going to explain why none of that shit mattered, why none of what was actually causing inflation mattered a single bit, because ultimately our experience of inflation and more importantly, of price in general, is based on a sense of justice, or as the academics call it, a moral economy, and not on anything that's sort of going on. So let's begin with what is going on with inflation.

on what is going on. As both me and my friends at the magazine Strange Matters have pointed out, former Federal Reserve Governor Daniel Tarulo said quote, the substantive point is that we do not at present have a theory of inflation dynamics that work sufficiently well to be of use for the business of real time monetary policy making. So again, this is a guy who used to be a Federal Reserve governor who has admitted that they have no idea what the fuck is going on within inflation.

Looking at the extent to which people don't know what's going on to inflation and how the various theories simply don't work is a large part of Steve Mann's notes towards the theory of inflation, which is a Strange Matter's article that a lot of this will be pulled from. And we've had Ze on the talk about this before. So there are a lot of theories about inflation, and none of them work very well. Inflation on a fundamental

level is just prices going up. People have this tendency to think about inflation in terms of the value of money going down, but on a pure level, all inflation says is that prices go up. Now, the most common theory of inflation is inflation is based on there being

too much money in the economy. And the thing about those theories is that they don't work outside of like a very few specific examples of hyperinflation that loom large over our understanding of what inflation is, even though they have absolutely quantitatively and theoretically, they have absolutely nothing to do with the inflation that we've seen over the past four years. So instead of talking about that Shaite anymore, Man and the Strange Matter's crew developed what they call

the supply chain theory of inflation. So I'm going to read the quote from Notes Towards the Theory of Inflation. As economist JW. And Mason recently remarked, on his website. Inflation is just an increase in prices. So for every theory of price setting, there's a corresponding theory of inflation. If inflation theory is downstream of price setting, this is still a quote from that article, but not the JW.

Maansing quote. If inflation is downstream of price theory, then no account of inflation can begin with the macro economy at all, since prices are set at the micro level. Rather, you need to look at particular industrial sectors, their supply chains, and ultimately the pricing decisions of their firms. Only then are the true causes of inflation, both the internal failures of the industrial system and external shocks to it which

can cause price rises revealed. Man's price theory is fairly simple, right. It flows from the basic observation that prices are set by guys in offices, not by something you know abstract as like market forces and supply and demand. In economic terms, what this argument amounts to is the argument that corporations are price makers and not price takers. Right, there's a bunch of guys they sit in offices and develop a

strategy of but what prices are going to be? And that's you know, how they're set, and what matters to the people who develop prices are things like goodwill, which is to say, not pissing off their customers by raising prices, and things like their balance sheets which reflect, you know, their incomes and costs. Price in this model is just

cost plus markup. And we know this is how prices are actually set because, as Man points out, people have gone through and done surveys of pricing managers and ask them how they set prices and the answer is costless workup. So what would cause these guys in offices to increase their prices, Well, these are companies that are all part of a global supply chain, a very very broad global

supply chain, and a very complicated global supply chain. This means that if the cost of the stuff they buy from other suppliers on the chain in order to produce what they're selling, if those prices go up, because there is, to use a purely hypothetical example, a giant global pandemic, those costs increases eventually had to be passed down to the people paying the products, so that the corporation can maintain its balance sheets and maintain its sort of price

plus markup as something that you know, covers their costs.

accounts of inflation, so called greedflation. Now, as we've said, price is cost plus markup, and you can raise prices because of cost, but you can also do this because you want to increase your markup. And this is something

that happened during the inflation search. Companies realized that consumers were willing to accept higher prices without the usual good will hit because they thought the prices were going up because inflation was happening, and because they were willing to accept the higher prices and not you know, try to shop somewhere else, corporations went, fuck it, let's just keep jacking the prices up, and this really really pissed people off.

It still does, and this is something that was true across the entire political spectrum.

moral economy. And when we come back from a different kind of economy, which is to say, this ad break, we are going to examine what the moral economy is, how it differs from our sort of regular economy, where it came from, and why it's relevant to our situation now. And we are so back, all right, let's talk about the moral economy. The moral economy is a concept developed by the British historian E. P. Thompson in the early

nineteen seventies. Thompson was attempting to explain the previous century and a half of bread riots by what he termed the English crowd by applying anthropological principles to their actions. I'm just going to read from Thompson's The Moral Economy of the English Crowd here. It is, of course true that riots were triggered off by soaring prices, by malpractice among dealers, or by hunger. But these grievances operated within a popular consensus as to what we're legitimate and what

we're illegitimate practices in marketing, milling, baking, et cetera. This, in its turn, was grounded upon a consistent traditional view of social norms and obligations of the proper economic function of several parties within the community, which, when taken together, can be said to constitute the moral economy of the poor. In outrage to these moral assumptions, quite as much as

actual deprivation was the usual occasion for direct action. Now, the moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century is about a very specific period in British history, which is to say, the seventeen hundreds, and about how

people thought bread should be sold. Peasants and the new urban workers had very specific ideas about bread, about how bread should be produced, about who should be allowed to sell it, about where and when they should be allowed to sell it, about how it should be sold, how.

impose additional costs and burdens on them. And they also believed that elites have a kind of moral duty to the masses based on the norms and traditions of their society. And when they welch on that deal in a way that makes people's lives worse, people get extremely pissed off. These peasants, and you know, urban workers particularly hated price increases, and they hated price increases so much that this frequently turned into riots. But the actual contents of these riots

are very interesting. Instead of simply seizing all of the grain, they do something else entirely. Here's Thompson again.

of grain. So, if you follow this here, right, what's happening in these British bread riots is that the revolt isn't just about their you know, being a price to grain. It's that people have a very very specific moral understanding of what the price of grain should be, and they take direct actions that are designed to set the price of grain to the level they thought it should rest at. And this kind of action is extremely common sort of across Europe in this entire time period. Right, it's also

a hallmark of the French Revolution. You can see in this right, in this sort of rage of a price in the sense of justice, the outlines of our current moral economy. You have, you know, staggering outrage's price inclerease is seen as on jests, which is reflation or just inflation in general, because people are just mad about the concept of the price going up, paired with rage at the elites, which manifests the sort of hatred of Joe Biden the Democrats for being the people who presided over

these price increases. We also have our own rage about price gouging in immediate market terms. And this is something that the most annoying libertarians and the defenders of the market love to point out. There's nothing actually wrong by market economics about say Martin Skrelly jacking the price of medicine up until you can't afford it anymore, or you know, other things that we find extremely terrible, like people jacking the price of water when people need water, like bottled

water dreat hurricanes. We are all outraged, So why do we feel morally strong about it? And that is the moral economy. Maybe this is something that you know, these these reactions, right, the emotional reactions we have to this, the sense of injustice that we feel, are almost entirely outside of the realm of what you would call traditional economics, right, And that's because we're functioning on something that is, in some senses older than that kind of economics. But there's

something else going on here at a fundamental level. And what's important about you know, price and the reaction to inflation is that it's an outrage based on a sense of justice.

lose it. But it also means, right, the fact that the sense of outrage is not necessarily directly tied to the exploitation level. It means that rich people could be bad about inflation even though they're completely fine, because these people also still have this sort of sense of justice about what prices should be. Now, it's also worth noting here that it is possible to have high inflation rates and have everyone be fine. In fact, we have discussed

scenarios like that on this show. In my episodes about the rise of Lulah of the current president of Brazil, we discussed how military dictatorship in Brazil produced an economy that was you know, you had twenty percent on year inflation, right, but also you had forty percent yearly wage increases, and so everyone was like kind of fine with it because the amount of money you were making was going up every year, So nobody really cared about even things like

the military dictatorship itself. There was not an enormous amount of opposition to it. But then Brazil's trade unions figured out the government had been lying about inflation numbers, and this started off a series of protests that you know, would send Lula like into his blame his political career, and eventually this is one of the sort of dominoes that leads to knocking down the military dictatorship. And that's because you know, the level of exploitations people were living

ut or hadn't changed. But the deal that they had made, right, the sort of deal with the military government of like, we won't do anything, our wages will continue to go up, and inflation will continue to work at a certain level such that we're still getting paid. That deal was violated, and that sense of injustice was powerful enough to really kickstart in extremely powerful Brazilian labor movements and kickstart at

the fall of a dictatorship. Now, one of Thompson's arguments was that the success of Adam Smith and his Cohort, and Smith is moving around and making his arguments about what the free market is in the period where we're dealing with all of these sort of grand crises. His argument is that the success of Smith was moving economics out of the domain of morality where it was born. Economics was originally an aspect of moral philosophy, right, it was part of that discipline. But you know, Smith and

as people move it out. And this is why liberal economists find the anger about inflation so incomprehensible. They see it in purely statistical terms and go like, look, the economy is great. Why is everyone mad? And you know, I could get into hear a bunch of arguments about

whether or not this is actually true. I mean, I'm going to return to by sort of classic argument about like, well, yeah, okay, even if you believe all of the economic indicators are great versas people like I'm trans for me, the economy is it has an unemployment rate of like nineteen thirty six US great depression. So you know, there are a lot of people for whom the economic outlook is not good.

People for whom you know, even the wage increases that they got in this period still leave them in sort of hideous and crippling poverty. And none of that shit matters because the statistics that these people are trying to use to try to get everyone to calm down are

not operating in the inside of the moral economy. They're operating outside of it because they're from a tradition that is specifically about not working inside the moral economy, and the people that're interacting with are in the world economy.

of price itself. But first, do you know what guarantees low price? Actually, I probably shouldn't say the word guarantee, That is probably staggeringly illegible. You know what probably has low prices. It's the products and services that support this podcast.

I am also about to misuse. And I am going to do this to make a different point. So I agree with Bickler and needs in that price is the unit that orders capitalist society. But what I'm interested in is price is what's called a social hieroglyphic. Now, social hieroglyphic is a term that's a one off term that Marx used wants to talk about how price like mystifies at hure value.

bird from their the butcher's share. Let's take a walk around the old bizarre, where every little thing has trafficed far. Every pair of pants and grain of rice contains this poorer story in its price, a story of the power people wield, a story about factories and fields, a story of which you'll never have to be aware, just as

long as the butcher gets his share. Price, this single number is how we understand the world, and it causes us to treat price and thus inflation, as a matter of morality and not economic rationality, because price is the way that our society causes us to interact with people. It's the way we interact with objects. It is the thing that structures the way we all behave and understand the world. But price has another function. It is the

gatekeeper of capitalist society. Because price and a man with a gun is what's standing between you and the ability to live your life. Outrage of the moral economics of price increases are similar, but not identical, to the impulses behind looting. Everything that you ever need and have been unable to get is when you walk into a grocery store, just sitting there right in front of you, but between you and it is a number and a man with a gun, and the man with a gun fucking hates you.

So the moment you're free, you just take it. Price in the entire economic system behind it is organized very specifically, so you don't do this. E. P. Thompson argued that the moral economy was pre political. The movements that it produced could be extremely well organized, but they fundamentally were not the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. In twenty twenty, we for a brief moment saw the outlines of that movement. The uprising was crushed in its place.

We saw the emergence of pre political concerns about price.

sold things for those prices going up. The product of it was Trump, right, and there's I think a reason why these sort of pre economic explanations are preferred to the answers and you know, to the actions that people saw in twenty twenty four years later. Portland, one of the centers of the uprising, now has almost every grocery store the exit of it is armed guards with guns. And these guards are there to maintain the price system. They're there because for a very brief moment, people started

thinking something dangerous. They started thinking, what if this didn't have a price?

that has cleaner, simple answers. Now, the most common answer you get is just join an org. And the problem is that most of the people who you were hearing this from are already in an org. And want you to join their org.

to you later. The important thing about organizations is they have a lot of people. Yeah, And the thing that makes organizing work is people. It's not organizations. It's not even necessarily ideological labels. It's there being a bunch of people who you can use and who want to do things. Yeah, but something I realized that the more I had these conversations, right, you know, I'm having it with friends, I'm having them

with strangers, I'm having them with other organizers. And the more I had these conversations, the more I realize something sort of startling you. The person listening to this almost certainly already knows how to organize, but you don't know that that's called organizing. Yeah, that's a very good point. I have encountered some of the most stunning or I mean organizing that like I can't discuss the specifics of, but like some of the best organizing I've ever encountered.

I have ran into you in the last three weeks some people who don't think that they're organizers and started talking to me about their stuff. I was like, what, Like, people are winning victories that like the like hardcore committed organizers haven't been able to do in like thirty years. Yeah, and it's just by random people who don't think they know how to do anything.

lot of other people. Clearly wasn't just us, right, but we were able to process tenths of thousands of dollars and feed thousands of people.

do this. It is it is largely the same skill sets, and all of the skill sets that make people good organizers are skill sets that you have to develop to you know, work a job right.

to do the interpersonal relationship stuff. It's just that you don't think about that as organizing, even though that's that's.

concerned with Liuvede gatherings or any of those things. Like, if you start doing that, you will find other people who want to do it too, Like so many of my friends I organize with are people. Like when we had the end of Title forty two and people were in between the fences that a lot of the people who I organize with now or who helped people with now,

I didn't know. I just showed up with a giant sider generator that I happened to have and some stuff that we had to whip around a CAOL zone for and like people who care about the same things as you are generally cool and it's a good way to make friends, and then you can go on from there.

a very very it's a cool organization. You can just like found a food out Bobs chapter. They have like a couple of principles, or you can just do your own thing. And I'm pretty sure it's still like the largest anarchist project in the world. Yeah, because all it takes is you and like three other people and you just go feed people. But the thing is from doing that, right, if there's other things that you're concerned about, people will bring you their problems and you can help them doing it.

And this is a very good way to get into other kinds of organizing because suddenly, once you start building these relationships. Everything sort of cycles and cycles, and you know, you get involved in more and more things. Yeah, and that's kind of a that's kind of a late stage thing that we're sort of jumping to a bit. But I want to go back to the beginnings of how so, how do you get a group of people together to

do a thing? And the answer is you kind of already know how to because you presumably at some point in your life have like organized a group of friends to go do something, right, Like I've gotten a group of people together to go accomplish a task.

with each other, and that's organizing. That's so much organizing is literally just hey, like I have like a broken part of my car. I know someone who's like a car mechanic, right, and you put them in touch, and you have successfully organized people, and you have built relationships, and you have made all of the sort of social web that creates organizing.

do this thing to solve it. And maybe and maybe that's you know, it's literally something as simple as feeding people. Maybe that's you know, I want to start. I want to start doing tenants organizing. I want to start because my rent is too high, right, people are getting evicted. I want to start doing like immigration defense.

of balanced teams, right. You want people who have overlapping strengths so you don't just have only one person who can do a thing. And part of the way the successful organization works over time, and I mean just how successful organizing works is that eventually you are trying to organize yourself out of a job. Which is to say, you want your organization to function such that if you're not able to do it, you know, or just you're gone or you cycle onto a next thing, or you know,

any any number of things that can happen. You want the organization to still be able to keep working without you, and you want you want you're trying to get people to be able to replace you as the person who's like organizing the thing, right, Yeah, And at this point we can start talking about the kinds of skills that people need for organizing, and a lot of people and this is unbelievably common when I talk to people, and like especially women and especially like a lot of non

binary people and trans people particularly have this is that people don't believe that they have any skills and then you talk to them for five seconds and they're like, well, I'm good at carrying heavy objects, right, I'm good with kids, which is a huge one. We'll get to you in a second, right, Or like, I don't know, I have a car. That's a huge skill. There are so many different skills that are so useful for so many things.

I'm just gonna go over lots of things that are actually really useful to get to get people a sense of like the kinds of things that there are. There are massive roles for so one of the most important ones and this is something you can you deliberately look for. You know, this is this is one of the things you do at the beginning of any union organizing campaign. Someone who's good at talking to other people and making friends. That is a staggeringly useful person because again, most most

organizing is just talking to people and building relationships. And you know, one of the things you do when you're when you're doing your sort of they call it power mapping. But when when you when you're figuring out how you're going to organize a workplace, is you find the person who everyone likes and talks to and respects, and you

talk to that person. Yeah, because that person can you know, can sort of like organize people down the chain because they have they have their relationships already, and also they're good they'll be good at, you know, talking to new people and and spreading your organization that way, and so, like, you know, if you're just someone who's social or and this is also very useful if you have a friend who is very social, because I know a lot of us are oporary social, but you probably have a friend

that you're thinking of right now who is very good at conversations. That is charming and is good at making friendships. That person unbelievably useful, incredibly useful and compelling skill. Yeah, there are also things like research people who are good at and I think people are much better at research than they think to take like a tat a's organizing example. Right, one of the common things you have to do is find out stuff about a landlords, right, Yeah, and there's

the higher difficulty version of that, which isn't that hard. Also, I want to mention this, but like going to a courthouse and finding records about who owns property companies.

is out there, largely on the internet, about us. A lot of people put a lot of information on the Internet. And it's very easy. And I would imagine that if you're under fifty and maybe if you're over fifty two, like you just know how to do this because it's what you do anyway you want to find out about someone.

And especially if you are a person who goes on dates with people who you haven't met before and haven't been introduced to by a mutual friend but you meet on the internet, you probably already do this to keep yourself safe.

happens all the time. It can be very very useful for bosses and union campaigns. Unions have like teams of researchers usually to like do this kind of stuff. But the thing is also and this is something I don't think people understand. Those guys, like the people they're hiring to be researchers are just you, but they got a job being a researcher for a union. Like they have

the same skills as you. They know how to like Google stuff, and they know how to look through people's like dating profiles and like look through their their facebooks and Instagrams, and like a big one, a big one that that the rich people especially do not think about is like cash app and venmo oh venop because yeah, yeah, because because people's peoples trying. People just leave public transactions out there like that. That's how they got what's his name,

the congressional Gates. Can I legally call him the congressional pedophile? I guess they call him the accused pedophile.

that you can figure out how to do this. That's also a huge skill finding people who are willing to learn things and willing to learn new skills is a huge benefit to organizers because you know this, this gives you, like, this gives you a flexible person, right, it gives it gives you someone you can like flex into into any of a bunch of roles that you need. And also can you know, pick up skills to learn things. Having a car and being able to drive.

have to get to the place to get the card. Right, The problems you can solve by being able to drive someone five miles are enormous, especially in the US, where everything is designed around everyone owning a motor car at all times yep.

light and replace the bulb in it. Yes, Like we're entering a time when people with darker, people with TPS, people who are undocumented, people are on temporary migration statuses are going to be definitely afraid of any interaction with law enforcement. If you can change the bulb on someone's tail light or their turn signal indicators of us in the UK, then you can meaningfully protect that person in a really important way.

yeah is aggeringly useful. And another one that I think people don't understand that they really have, but like being able to set up a meeting and like having a thing that lets you be like, okay, here's when everyone is free. Like you probably have to do this for your job or just for you know, trying to get your friends to go even just like be on a call together or like go have food or like just

do anything. That is what literally, genuinely one of the most important skills you can possibly have as an organizer is the ability to just sort of like go talk to people and be like, hey, can you show up to this thing here? Yeah, and that is that is so much of just what organizing is. Can you be here at this time? And then trying to figure out a time.

loves them. It helps, It helps me enormously. It's awesome.

of my friends could do that. And one of my friends was making clothes for another friend for like a renaissance fair, and it was a nice thing I've seen someone do for someone else in a very long time. It really made her like, yeah, feel like nice and cared for. And like you might think that like this is just a weird little thing that you like to do with your sewing machine, but you can meaningfully really make someone feel cared for using that.

enjoying being around each other. That's that's that's a kind of person who's very valuable, and it's something that you can look for, you know. And if that's not you, like you can there's something you can you know, find in your friends. You can find in this sort of the people around you.

tell people that there's a thing happening. Yea, and yeah, you know, and this is also something you know later on you might be making a social media presence, but just having good artists and having good graphic design people is enormously useful for this kind of stuff. Yeah, and along this line, these things like making music, and there's

a bunch of different ways this can go. This can be an immediate thing where you know, like you have people on a picket line, right and everyone's singing songs and this is great. We love this also, and this is another thing that you can be thinking about in terms of what skills you have and what things you can create benefit shows. This has been a huge part of a lot of how some of the Union stuff up here has been getting funded is by just having

like punk benefit shows. And if that's the thing that you can do, well, you know people in bands, you know people who make music, you know people who just make stuff who are willing to contribut to the cause, that's great.

and like we were sitting around with these. We had some Seek guys, had some Weiga folks come from China, and then some Kourdish people and they were all explaying their different music and it was so nice like that, taking people out of a shitty situation for a moment with music. Again, like don't underestimate how important that it don't feel like if you have that skill, it's not a useful one.

And things like music, things like art, I mean things like pulling pranks.

a string instrument. It's a string instrument, is what it is. And like that made everyone so happy. We had such a nice evening. Everyone was able to like get through it's a relatively difficult thing. Like, you know, it sucks that people are being killed and just for driving around are existing and they're bombing all this citly infrastructure and

the power keeps going out and all these things. Right, like, but there's a reason that those people have kept ood around after fifteen thirteen years of war, and it's because it is important, and so don't overlook that.

And you know, on sort of this note, one of the things that you know, as you've assembled your group of people, right, one of the things that that that's important to be able to sort of have a grasp on is that you can't just do organizing by having it only be the capital, the serious thing, the captialty organizing thing all the time. Your organization will not hold together.

There has to be actual like bonds formed between you and the people you're organizing with and the people you're trying to help.

won't hang together. Like yeah, so many of my happiest organizing memories, like again going down James Memory Lane, I guess I have a memory of like Christmas Eve last year twenty twenty three, me and my friends have been out. I know some of them listen because some of them have come across from different states to help us at Christmas Holidays, which is nice. And it was cold, and we had been feeding people all day, and then we'd heard some people in another location that we'd gone to find.

And then we got to the end of the day and like, rather than just going home, I had a bunch of we had some MRIs left the refugee emory

sort of vegan. Lots of us are vegan, so we were like, we're not going to find any other vegan food in the middle of nowhere out here, So we'll set around eating the little vegan MREs and like just talking and like sharing some some thoughts and things we experience over the last months of doing this, And like, it's those moments that make your organizing groups so much stronger.

and that's all organizing is. It's finding ways to You have a thing to do, and you go talk to people and you ask if they want to help you do it. Yeah, and the stronger your relationships are, the more lucky that is to happen. And that's why it's very important to do things like you know, just like

having potlucks, like bringing snacks and beatings. Oh yeah, and like you know, even if you're doing a potluck, it's good to you know, you do like one capital capital T organizing thing, right, you get like a little bit of work done, but mostly everyone's just sort of relaxing and eating chili or whatever.

It's just like you can show up food that you have made. You have instantly made this whole thing more successful.

ties like the way we organize without the state. The reason I believe that that is the way we should organize and the way we will continue to organize in a way that we can make the state irrelevant is because we understand each other as people and care about each other as people, and then we approach our organizing holistically, right with everyone in it knowing this person is good at this, but they're struggling with this right now, and I care about them, so I'm not going to make

them do that right now. That is how we can build sustainable communities in a way that state cannot and in a way that capitalism cannot. Right because fucking hurts rent a car doesn't care or know about its employees in a way that we who organize with people and care and love one another do, and like that where our organizations will always be stronger than those created by capitalism of the state.

a really difficult thing. If you just I don't know, you go give food to someone and suddenly you've done that and it's happened. So there are things that are important to like basic organizing stuff. Knowing how to book rooms from like churches, from libraries, from whatever, meeting spaces, and also knowing how to book rooms in places that like accommodate disabilities is a huge thing because a lot of people book meetings in places are a wheelchair accessible

and it's a fucking fiasco. And you can avoid that very easily, but you have to put a little tiny bit of work into it.

people can contact you in tandem with the email. Something that's very helpful that I think younger people tend not to think about is getting Google Voice. Yes, when Google Voice lets you set up a voicemail account so people can call you and leave phone messages. I mean everyone should just do this because this is the way that a lot of older people communicate.

you have everyone bring their kids. You have like a little space, you bring them like coloring stuff, you bring them toys, you bring them games, and you just sort of watch everyone for a while. And as an organizing thing. Again, if you're good with kids, that's very useful, staggeringly useful organizing skill.

And like it's also very nice for people. Like a lot of my friends also brought their children down to the border, especially last year when we had because there were children there anyway, right, Yeah, some of my friends who bring their children down and their kids would play with the other kids, and like it doesn't matter that some of the kids are Kurdish and some of the kids are from China and some of them are from Columbia or whatever. Like, they'll get along just fine. When

they're four or five years old, they don't care. They just want to kick a ball or see a Teddy Bear or something. Yeah, I think it's really good for your children to you know, you're bringing them into a world which is cruel and at times unequal, and like your kids seeing that, like we can make a difference and we can do this. I think it's one of the best educations you can give your children.

meeting one oh one, Okay. A very common way to organize meetings that people use all over the world and it's very effective is you have two things. You have an agenda and you have a stack. And those are like the technical terms for them. The agenda I mean is an agenda, right, you know what an agenda is. You put the things that you need to do on it.

And another thing that's very helpful with these is you know you're going to be operating at our time constraints because people don't have forty five hours.

list and people get the say things. And again you know how to do this. This is not like a complicated thing. But again I have watched people who collectively have like more PhDs than like I earn money in a week, Like who know, I can not be.

get and make sure make sure everyone's involved. And also another important part of this, and this is again something you'll know from your stupid work meetings, is you have to get people like me to shut up.

just three people who talk all the time. Yeah, and you know, and so the idea of the progressive stack, right is you're trying to find the most marginalized people in degrees, people who are least likely to speak, and

you're trying to get them in first. And sometimes this is literally just like, hey, someone hasn't been talking in a meeting this whole time, and you can like ask them what they think about something or asked if they have anything to say, and a lot of times they will, but they just don't feel confident enough to say it.

And this is this is a very very important skill for a facilitator or just even you could just do this in a meeting too, right, Like you can be the person who goes like, hey, do you have this this person have anything to contribute? And that is an enormous thing. Sometimes it can be you know, sometimes it can be a little bit awkward, but it's a very important thing because you're just losing out on people who

have really really valuable ideas and contributions and plans. And if you just let the same three people give speeches, you can't get to the stuff that's actually useful.

actions and think politically about their actions. Yeah, and that's something that's very useful. You also have to make sure that you're not forming a book club. Like book clubs are fine, but you need to make sure you're organizing group. If you try to do a thing, has it just become a book club? But that that's you know that that was something that was very useful to us. And

you know, we started making a plan. And our plan was, okay, we made a bunch of flyers and then we went out and I did this, and I walked around through a bunch of streets and put them a light post or whatever. And then we put them like we hung them up in the buildings of tenants, you know, because you can just like walk up the stairs right and you need to put them on the walls. And you know, we had this flyer, this firehead information. This flyer said, okay,

we're starting a tenant's union. If you have tenant, if you have issues with your landlord, or you want to talk about tenants stuff like, come here. At this time, we had an email you can send us stuff. We had a phone number that you could call ye you know, and so okay, and so parallel to this, we like, I forget if it was a church or if it was some building, some set center or something. We booked

a room. We were kind of lucky in that we had like local press people nice who we sort of knew and This is another useful like if knowing a journalist can be a very useful skill, because one way to get a project off the ground, if you're trying to get to a bunch of people, is by finding a journalist who is willing to cover it, because you know, we're we're finding founding like the first tenants union in this place, right yeah, And you know, so we had

media coverage and we got kind of screwed when this event eventually came together because there was like three feet of snow that night. But people still came, like people still came in the blizzard, Like a lot of people showed up for this.

their jobs by portraying the old Tenets organizers. Right. That's the other thing is you know, another thing that happens in projects is you'll you'll sometimes you'll just you just pick up someone who's you know, has been doing this since like the sixties. Yeah, and it rules because they have a wealth of experience and they want to they want to do stuff.

what we talked about. But like that, you know, but like you all of those things, right, all of those steps from the start of you get five of your friends to go eat dinner and you talk about what you want to do through someone makes a flyer in like Microsoft or whatever you make it in like PowerPoint, and that's publisher what's what's what's the one I'm blinking, I haven't used it in so long, the one you make greeting cards in a program and I've forgotten it

is you see this to make Christmas cars. But like, you know, okay, so we made a flyer and we walked around and put the flyers up and we made it. We made an email, you know, we got a space together, we figured out what we wanted to do, and then we did it. Yeah, and you know, and there's a bunch of organizing from there, right, But like we had started a thing, and you can do every single one

of those steps. And if you can't personally do one of those steps, you can think of a person who you know, who you can bring in to help you do these things. Because organizing you already fucking know how to do it. Yeah, you just have to go out there and do it.